Racheal Fest fiction short story Permission

Title image by Pam McKnight, On the River Bank, Gouache and Marker on Paper, 5″ x 6″, 2025.

Permission

by Racheal Fest

“Give yourself permission,” Madison said, pushing the platter of frosted mini-cinnamon buns across the table. “You won’t overeat if you tell yourself you can eat anything you want.”

I never should have told my sister about the hunger. Now, she had to turn every coffee, every dinner, every random cookie into some kind of compulsory life-coaching session.

“Says who?” I laughed, pushing the platter back. “Instagram?” We both knew her therapist was a stream of poorly curated self-help content.

“There are no bad foods,” Madison said. She could be so gullible, so earnest.

“Only bad people.” I was trying to be agreeable. 

Madison didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked past me, focusing with vacant energy on a spot slightly to the left of her stand of owl-shaped ceramic mugs.

“Oh my god, tell me you’re not doing Kegels,” I said. It had been five years since Arlo, the last of her three children, had ripped through Madison’s already substantially despoiled pelvic floor, and yet, I knew she was still secretly obsessed with restoring its original integrity, however simulacral. 

Madison rolled her eyes and got up to make more coffee in the white-plated Breville. Everything in her kitchen was white—the subway tile, the open shelving, the owl mugs, the granite countertop, sinewy silver gradations and single yellow blemish excepted. When I’d pointed out the urine-colored spot last year, mid-renovation, Madison just laughed. “That’s how you know it’s real granite,” she told me. 

My little sister believed material things could satisfy you. It was only a matter of choosing the right ones. This was one of the innumerable ways we were different. I knew that no pair of jeans, no matter how much research you did, no matter what you were willing to spend, was ever going to fit you exactly the way you wanted it to. The waistband was always going to dig in, or the thighs were going to ride up, or the hem was going to fray under your heel. My own home, by contrast, hadn’t sustained a single structural or cosmetic update in over a hundred years.

Madison popped one of the little frosted buns into her mouth and licked a manicured index finger with exaggerated pleasure. 

“Come on,” she said. “Have one.”

Madison’s satisfactions had always demanded witnesses, corroborators, hype men. In this, too, we were opposed. Her first kiss—with Toby, the younger neighbor boy, who grew up to be in jail, I think—she’d seized right in front of me, leaning across my supine body to meet his lips in the backyard fort we were building out of sticks. She still posted pics of her food to Facebook, cringey as my twins, Ellie and Ollie (thirteen last Sunday, how fast they grow, I took them, upon their insistence, to Sephora, where they filled their baskets with pots and tubes, stocking up on substances by turns thick and moist, thin and astringent), assured us both this was. They winced when Madison lifted her phone over her plate at Thanksgiving, sighed audibly as she vied for an angle that would eliminate any hint of shadow from the image. It didn’t matter. Madison was not to be deterred. The world would know what she’d enjoyed and when.

Once again, she nudged the plate. 

I sighed out a deep store of resignation. This was the moment. Sooner or later, it always came. Was I going to submit to it, the hunger? A hunger so unceasing, so powerful, it could and most assuredly would, once given the chance, eat up not only this entire plate of mini-frosted-cinnamon buns, including the ramekin of extra dipping frosting on the side, but also shortly thereafter the whole world? Now was the time to decide. If I gave in to it, there wouldn’t be any going back. 

When I’d accidentally disclosed these fits to Madison a couple of weeks ago, my duplicitous tongue loosened by the pitcher of winter Sangria she’d insisted I help her finish, I hadn’t revealed the full extent of it. I hadn’t explained how giving in to the hunger meant I’d morph into a crazed beast. Animated by arcane and insatiable appetites, I’d have no choice but to devour all these buns, and then move on to the pantry, which I’d rifle for anything novel and toxic, maybe those peanut butter sandwich crackers I never let myself buy, maybe the seasonal Oreos I knew Madison always stocked, subjecting Shaelynn and Tanner and Arlo to obscure and often disgusting flavors, carrot cake (pseudo-cinnamon nose with a Lysol finish), say, or toffee (weirdly crunchy, as if tiny pieces of glass were lodged inside the creme), before I headed home, on the way to which I’d stop at the Wendy’s drive thru and order every item off the value menu, pulling, after I’d paid cash, into a dark corner of the lot, where I’d robotically consume the burger and the nuggets and the baked potato as I stared out at the oily, graying snow, until, once finished, I’d slink over to the overflowing garbage can to discard the bag and empty sauce cups in secret shame; next, I’d drive across town to our place to see what Craig was making for dinner, on the way concocting a plan to suggest we order a pepperoni and pineapple pizza from Tino’s instead, maybe some of those honey BBQ wings, garlic knots, the mozzarella sticks Craig liked, a separate plain pie for the twins, who didn’t believe in eating fruit. 

Except Craig wasn’t going to be back at our place making dinner. Craig was most certainly already home at his new apartment, the two-bedroom around back of the big Victorian on Elm, where he’d been living ever since I’d asked him to move out last summer. And already, I well knew, Ellie and Ollie were there with him. I’d dropped them off myself. It was his weekend. 

I took a bun off the plate. I felt my eyes moisten, my pupils go large, like pupils in the movies do when the high is hitting.

“Are you okay?” Madison asked. She was still chewing. 

Maybe she was right. Maybe, if I just gave myself permission to eat a couple of these, I wouldn’t have to cross over to the other side, wouldn’t actually have to give in to a trancelike consumption fugue so depraved and mindboggling it wouldn’t end until I’d finished off at the conclusion of a long and humiliating night any and all chocolate in the house, including the last of Ellie and Ollie’s double-fudge-caramel-brownie ice cream.

I ate the bun. 

You fat, disgusting slut, I said to myself. 

“See?” Madison said. “Wasn’t that easy?”

Not that I really meant it. I mean, sure, by Hollywood standards I was fat and disgusting. We all were. I’d been dieting for as long as I could remember. I didn’t have any of the popular bodies: waifish and undimpled, muscley and short, pear-shaped. I was big, but not really, broad-shouldered and kind of tall. And I guess I had been something of a slut, once upon a time, even if, for the last fifteen years straight, I’d fucked no one else besides Craig, at first because I was loyal, and now that I was divorcing him, because I was too tired and lazy to figure out which app to download. I’d never been able to see sluttiness as a moral failing, however.

“I’m proud of you,” Madison said.

I hated how smug she could be. Madison never overate. She didn’t need to. All of her desires were identifiable, fulfillable. She never wanted anything weird or inexplicable or ineffable. She was happy with a nice kitchen reno, an open floor plan, a home theater where she and Joey could watch football on Sundays. When they hosted, she scooped supermarket queso into the center of a football-shaped platter and put out two different kinds of Doritos. 

I opened Food Diary, the app with the graceful white silhouette jumping in girlish joy across a background of corporate blue, and searched “Costco mini-cinnamon bun.” Many options populated. Shit. This wasn’t going to be as clear-cut as I’d hoped. Did these seem more like one-ounce buns, or one-and-a-half-ounce buns? Surely, they couldn’t be two ounces apiece? I picked one up and weighed it in my palm. I’d split the difference and go with 150 calories each. If I entered three now—for a whopping 450 calories—maybe I’d only eat two. Then, I could have salad for dinner. It was just going to be me at home, anyway. At Craig’s, the twins were probably already eating stovetop mac-and-cheese on the couch, binge-watching Is It Cake? while their dad swiped right on Ms. Jeffries, their recently separated fifth-grade teacher, who, let’s face it, was the hottest person in town.

“You’re not still counting calories, are you?”

I had been counting calories for over seven years. 

“No,” I lied.

I reached out stealthily for another bun, so that Madison, although she was looking directly at me, wouldn’t notice. She was fiddling with the hem of her turtleneck crop-top, a garment so senseless it could only be beautiful. 

“Did Mom tell you she had a dream that a dark horde was breaking into the house?” Madison asked. She kept trying to flatten the stretch of plaid against her unseasonably tanned skin. “Climbing in through the windows? Banging on the door?” 

“A horde of what?” I was worried Madison was going to scratch herself with one of her almond-shaped nails. 

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

My sister hadn’t always been destined for a life of banal gratifications. She’d once thrown tantrums so epic they nearly destroyed our parents’ marriage, had regularly demanded—and won!—exciting new toys (even if most of them turned out to be no fun to play with once you got them off the TV and into your living room), had joined me in building up an original repertoire of history’s dumbest songs (rum tum tum, I’m a bucket of bums was probably our greatest hit; we even composed a kazoo accompaniment). 

I remember the exact day she changed. She was twelve and I was fourteen. We were in Kmart. I had been pocketing makeup for going on half an hour, tearing eyeliner pencils and cylinders of black lipstick out of their protective packaging and smuggling them into the deep pockets of my transgressively baggy jeans. When the store cop came up behind me, his eyes sheepish, his uniform musty with the desperate boredom of his post, Madison, who had been walking by my side, kept going, as if we were strangers passing by chance in the aisle. As this rent-a-cop led me into the backroom, where he sat me down at a three-legged table and offered me the choice between small claims court and a fine I knew I was going to have to beg mom and dad to pay, my sister simply pretended we didn’t know each other. She was just some regular girl, browsing a wall of soda-flavored lip gloss, fingering the pocketful of change she’d saved up in her piggy bank. Not long after that, Madison started wanting what everyone else wanted. She became committed to getting it in totally legitimate, but also relatively easy and accessible, ways. This approach to life she shared with Joey, her high school boyfriend turned husband, a contractor who specialized in pouring concrete foundations for the development of McMansions they were building out behind the hospital. 

And somehow, despite all this, Madison was still the most interesting person I’d ever met. 

“So, what are you up to tonight?” she was asking me. She pretended she was merely making conversation, but the question had a persecutorial edge to it.

I deflected. “Hanging out with you.”

“I mean later. Are the twins home?”

“No.” I didn’t bother to say where they were. 

Madison made a sad face.

“I’ll probably just end up taking a bath and going to bed at like 7 PM.”

Her face became even sadder, the eyes widening, the lips quivering out a frown.

“What? There’s literally nothing wrong with taking a nice bath and going to bed at 7 PM.”

Madison sighed. She did not agree. “You need to get back out there, Kiki.”

I rolled my eyes. This was the first time she was saying these words out loud, but I could tell by the way she was saying them that she’d been thinking about saying them, and worse, had been waiting for the right time to say them, for quite a while. 

“I’m sorry, but it’s true! You’re going crazy in that big house all by yourself.” 

Get back out there. What did that even mean? Out where? The idea was preposterous, the prospect of preparing my body for public consumption—shaving it, exfoliating it, moisturizing it—impossibly tiresome. And she was exaggerating. The house wasn’t even that big. 

I tried to laugh, but my own spit caught in my throat.

My sister softened. “You know you can always stay over here.” She put a hand on my knee. “The kids would love that. They think you’re so fun.” 

It went without saying that she did not share that opinion.

“I know,” I stalled. No way was I staying here, dying of ennui and loneliness amongst the guest room’s nautical polyester quilts and overstuffed oatmeal pillows. How undignified. We weren’t even anywhere near the ocean. 

Besides, maybe I did have a date, sort of. If I was going to properly indulge the hunger, and I hadn’t ruled that out yet, I was going to need solitude, darkness, asylum.

“Taco night,” Madison said, as if that was going to sweeten the deal. She’d already taken out the box of Old El Paso hard shells (with spice packet!) and placed it beside the stove.

“Right,” I said, making scare quote with my fingers. “‘Tacos.’”

Arlo came in, wielding a tablet like a hammer. Ellie and Ollie, at least when they were at the house with me, were only allowed screentime on Fridays. That was the primary reason why they hated me, although, of course, they cultivated plenty of others: my wardrobe, a collection of tattered band t-shirts, black hoodies, and skinny jeans, was outdated, and therefore, embarrassing; my love for them was too demonstrative, too pure, and therefore, embarrassing; my values—I eschewed shopping, plastics, junk food, makeup, the wealthy, except when I didn’t—were austere and erratic, and therefore, embarrassing; my job in accounts at Huntington Memorial Library made me shrewish and pedantic (they didn’t use those words, obviously, they just said I was a huge bitch), which embarrassed them. It didn’t matter to these children that I’d once jumped up onto the stage at an all-ages club in Binghamton and shouted out the chorus to Propaghandi’s “The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist” before throwing myself without a second thought atop a writhing crowd, which carried me to the other side of the pit and deposited me safely by the water fountain, only grabbing my boobs, respectfully, a couple of times. That was the closest that I, an unrepentant atheist, had ever gotten to God. 

I told myself the screen restrictions were worth it, no matter how much the twins came to loathe me. I was protecting the future integrity of their slick, nascent brains, was I not? I was protecting their time to interact with the material world, to learn how things looked and felt and sounded in three dimensions. Right? But watching Arlo stumble around, building up a tower of tannish blocks in a pixelated wood, I wondered. He looked truly engaged, maybe even happy, if someone concentrating really hard and sticking out a wedge of tongue while he walked by accident directly into the kitchen island could be said to look engaged and happy. Was he actively proving me right or wrong?

“Hey, bud,” I said. 

Arlo didn’t answer. He was bumping his way from the counter to the fridge, out of which he extracted without raising his eyes a Diet Coke, another indulgence—but also, not an indulgence? Because it was diet?—I would never let the twins enjoy in a million years, had they ever even tasted Diet Coke? For all I knew, Craig was probably stocking that, too, these days.

Madison was squeezing her legs together as if she had to pee. 

“Jesus, just go already,” I said. “I’m not going to disappear.”

When she got up and headed for the bathroom, another recently renovated space that was also, let the record show, of the purest white, I ate another bun and chewed it quickly, as if in secret. I felt an illicit little thrill run from my vag to the topmost point of my skull. 

Arlo climbed onto my lap and put his tablet on the table in front of him. “I built a castle, Auntie Kiki.”

I looked at the rudimentary structure, a rectangle with some triangles on top. It was poorly designed. Why did children still admire aristocrats? 

“It’s brilliant, baby,” I said. 

If we weren’t permitted our dreams, however politically misinformed, we’d never build up the strength to go on.

Arlo took a bun and scooped up an enormous glob of frosting. “For you, Auntie,” he said, moving it toward my mouth.

To be honest, I didn’t really want to stop overeating. It gave me something to look forward to. If I counted up the calories in the app until the weekend, maintaining a modest deficit of around 300 per day, by Saturday, a desire so formidable it could take into itself anything I imagined would build to an irrepressible frenzy inside me. I could look forward to letting it free, to setting it loose, to indulging its bizarre tastes and predilections. I could look forward to eating whatever I wanted, thinking all week about what I would consume on Saturday alone. It was boring to eat whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. If I didn’t hold back first, I couldn’t let go. 

Before Madison came back and saw me, I snatched two more cinnamon buns off the plate. That made six? 900 calories. More than I usually ate for dinner. 

That was that. There was no going back now. 

♦ ♦

Junior Bacon Cheeseburger. Frosty. Value fries. 5-piece spicy nugget. Sour cream and chive potato. 

I ordered all of them. 

Could you give yourself diabetes in one night? 

“Let’s find out,” I said out loud. 

The twins, Craig, Madison, probably even Shaelynn and Tanner and Arlo—they’d all be shocked if they knew I was here, eating Wendy’s in an empty parking lot. For years, I’d taken a public stand against fast food. The calories were empty, the content mostly corn. Golden arches and red-headed orphans homogenized the landscape. Not to mention the labor practices. On road trips, I’d pack us all whole wheat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (no sugar!) and baby carrots, refusing to let the twins out at gas stations, knowing they’d be tempted to tears by the densely packed rows of colorful, innovative treats. And yet, here I was. This was my secret. I’d been stopping at this Wendy’s for maybe ten years now. Not regularly. No. Just often enough to feel alive.

Back behind the squat building, I parked in my favorite spot, a corner space facing the low hill. A plane of virgin snow sloped up to a wood above, the tall trees piled white with fluff. A soft glow lit them from behind, so that every little branch stood out in relief against the night.

I unpacked the paper bag and set the value items out on the passenger’s seat. I’d eat the burger first so that I could spread the wrapper over the console and squeeze a few packets of ketchup out onto it. As I chewed my first bite, I opened the BBQ, the ranch, and the honey mustard, lining up the cups precariously between the emergency brake and the gear shift.   

Outside, a shadow passed over my window, stirring in me a shock of animal fear. Was it a creature? A person? I looked nervously around the lot. To the right, a barren, salty expanse stretched over to Taco Bell, All Star Car Wash, Mirabito. In the rearview, a little boy was dragging a grandparent wrapped in a puffer coat up to the door, and then he was struggling to pull it open on his own. I remembered the twins at that age, tiny and unwavering, determined to do everything by themselves, especially the things they didn’t know how to do, couldn’t do yet. This had come as a surprise to me—I hadn’t known pigheadedness to be the inbuilt mechanism by which humans learned.

No one, nothing else was nearby. When I looked back at the hill in front of me, however, I saw that a line of footprints, ascending, now cut the white. Had they been there before? They hadn’t. I was almost certain. 

I could hear the wind, loose and manic. New flakes had started to fall. Suddenly, I felt alone. Completely. Permanently. So alone that even being around others again later wouldn’t cure me.

It was time for spicy nuggets. I began the elaborate protocol I’d long ago resolved to enact the same exact way every time I ate them. The first irregularly shaped lump was to be consumed plain and whole. I placed the entire thing inside my mouth and chewed it up slowly, methodically. On its own, the nugget tasted like someone had dumped hot sauce onto a wad of chicken-flavored paper and crumpled it up. This was part of my design. You had to start at a low point. Then, you’d have something to look forward to. Soon enough, I’d be moving on to the sauces, ingesting them in order from least to most favorite. The second nugget, I’d dip in BBQ; the third, in honey mustard; the fourth, in ranch. Ranch!

I thought of Craig. How his hairy hands had once rested on the wheel of this very car, which we’d shared until recently. How his dumb smile still cracked his dumb, handsome face, too easily and too often, at a duck in the park as soon as at a child, a patient, a nice-looking plate of meatloaf. 

I’d been thinking about Craig a lot lately, way more than I had back when we were still living together, back before I’d kicked him out, back when he’d still been a guy who slept in the same bed and used the same dishes as I did, who turned on the same shower and watched the same television, although never at the same time, not really, we’d been running for years on two parallel tracks, two separate schedules, Craig, rising early, coming home before 3 PM to get the kids off the bus after school, me, sleeping in a bit, getting them up and out before my 10 AM shift at Huntington, and then coming home late, cranky, ready to eat without question whatever simple, rustic thing Craig had managed to cook. Now that he was gone, it seemed like he was always on my mind. I’d find myself wondering what towel he was using, given how he’d left his favorite extra-thick, superabsorbent, microfiber towel behind at the house, even after I’d drawn his attention to the fact that he’d forgotten it. I wondered where he was storing the jars of pomade he bought by the case, afraid his preferred brand was going to buckle in a crowded men’s haircare marketplace and leave him with no way to achieve the imperceptibly coarse texture he cultivated in his graying shag.

I peeled the lid off the Frosty and scooped up a glop. Like the nuggets, the first bite was never good. Somehow, though, it always induced you to take another. I let a second mouthful of chocolatey ice sit on my tongue, melting into the spaces between my teeth. My jaw locked up, and I swallowed. Was this ice cream? A milkshake? The Frosty was somewhere in between, and everyone knew it was worse than both. I immediately felt a headache coming on. 

It wasn’t that I missed Craig, exactly. How could I? I’d wanted him out of my life for years. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, per se. It was only that we’d long ago stopped caring about anything the other person said or did, and when I confronted him about this, he refused to admit it, not to me, not to himself. It didn’t matter to him that I could cite incontrovertible proof: when I’d tell him about my day, about how Brenda had jammed the copier for the millionth time and left it like that without telling anyone, about how I wanted to get the twins electric toothbrushes for Christmas because I didn’t trust them to actually apply pressure to their teeth for two whole minutes twice a day, about how I’d read a new book or watched a new movie or ate a new kind of sandwich, he’d nod and smile, smile and nod, but he’d never, ever ask even a single follow-up question. It was that simple. That’s how I could tell our marriage was over. 

And let’s be honest. I had no patience for whatever he got up to, either. By the time I asked him to leave, all Craig cared about was playing guitar as frontman for The Weakest Links, the mediocre band he’d started with three other dads he knew from work. How a physician’s office (Craig wasn’t a doctor, he was a nurse) came to employ so many middle-aged fathers who were also ailing punk rockers ready to play Misfits covers and debut a few torturously middling originals at our town’s only venue, I don’t know. Right away, too soon, I got tired of pretending to care, tired of having to act enthusiastic at every last one of their uninspired, repetitive shows, tired of having to see Rita, the dumpy administrative assistant from their practice, turn up at every gig without fail, wearing unironically the wrong kind of t-shirt (Poison or Slayer), eager to root for her boys, like a mom who was also somehow horny for her sons. 

No, I didn’t miss Craig. It was more so that I missed having a background against which to be a person. Craig had been the primary audience for my identity for more than a third of my life. He’d played witness to all of my dark and bright and hypocritical and bonkers and kind moments. He’d seen me sleepwalk, drunk, in my underwear, and pee in the corner of our first shared bedroom. He’d seen me cry when we first got the keys to our house, so grateful to finally know I was home. He’d seen me give birth—and throw up while giving birth. He’d seen me, frazzled, a baby twin under each arm, yell at a cashier for bagging our frozen items with our pantry items. What he remembered, I had to remember. What I remembered, he had to remember. We were record keepers for each other. We each ensured the other’s history still added up to a person. Without him around to see what I was doing, was I still one? 

Another shadow passed, this time on the other side of the car. I knew to look straight ahead now. Yes. Something was there. Someone. A bundled blur moved black and slow up the hill, lumbering, afloat. I watched it, the falling snow thickening, partially obscuring my vision. At the top, the person disappeared into the conifers that lined the ridge. I started to wonder about the light. What was up there? It wasn’t another parking lot, that much I knew, and it couldn’t have been a house. There was no access up above this strip mall.

Involuntarily, I dipped the fifth nugget into each of the four sauces in turn. This nugget was the best, the finale. It tasted like everything and nothing all at once. It was saucy and spicy and confusing and delicious. It was sickly sweet and clumpily viscous. Good and bad, high and low, less and more. I chewed quickly. This last one, you didn’t need to savor. 

I’m not sure what it was that bothered me so much about The Weakest Links (aside, of course, from their deliberately obtuse name—how could there be more than one weakest link?). Craig had always been in bands. In fact, we’d met at one of his shows in college. Chronic Tonic (yes, I did think the name was cool at the time, must I repent until I die?) was opening for a Bad Religion cover band, and I, at the tender, wide-eyed age of nineteen, was trying to get into the 21-plus venue with a chalked ID. In those days, we used red and white colored pencils to draw aspirational digits over our legal birthdates on our New York State licenses, and usually, it worked, but that night, the bouncer was giving me a hard time. He kept squinting at my ID, bringing it closer to and farther away from his face, as he waved all of my friends, whose IDs were just as chalked, around me and on into the club.

Then, suddenly, Craig was there. He came up from behind and put his arm around me. He smelled like pine, smoke, acid. His body, the edge of which he was pressing up against mine, felt sinewy and unfamiliar.

“She’s with the band,” he said. 

Instantaneously, I was wet. I looked up at this heroic stranger in awe and let him guide me into the club by the waist. He walked me right to the lip of the stage, winked, and jumped up to start sound check. That was it. I was done, promised, married, delivered, right then and there. All night I stood, transfixed, at stage left, refusing to budge no matter how many Bud Lights my friends brought me (this was in the olden days, before craft beer), no matter how many other girls in black eyeliner with safety pins in their ears elbowed me in the side of the head. I believed that if I stayed, if I managed to hang on, Craig would come back for me. And I was right. He did. After a set we all believed at the time to be blowing our collective face off (we were mere babies, innocent, unwitting), Craig found me in the crowd, handed me my first ever whiskey neat, and took me back to his place—a futon in the corner of a shared loft in ghostly downtown Binghamton; I made him wait until we were sitting on it, alone, to kiss me—that very night. We didn’t even stay for the actual band.

I returned to the Frosty and dipped in a fry. I would take it slowly this time. I was starting to be able to feel the blood as it rushed through my veins, thick and lubricious. I was sleepy, uninhibited, almost drunk. A warmth spread from my chest to my fingertips, at once enlivening and numbing my body.

I could barely see outside. The snow was coming fast and mean now. The flakes were so abundant, it took me a moment to realize that I was watching three more figures climb the hill, their hats and scarves piled almost comically high upon their disguised frames, the first tall, the other two short-ish, maybe thin, maybe wide, it was impossible to tell. Were they women, men, both, or neither? I could discern nothing about the people who lumbered underneath. They moved comically, too, bumping against each other, stumbling and popping up again, as if the snow were cartoon marshmallow. This trio, like the figure that came before, seemed to know exactly where they were going, even though the storm had by now completely effaced the tracks I’d seen earlier. 

Now that Craig was gone, why was I even hiding out here? I could have taken my burger and my fries and my frozen dairy dessert home and eaten it right at the kitchen table. 

Shoving a final handful of withered potato shards into my mouth, I opened the door and kind of fell out of the car, my long, quilted coat tangling around my legs. The snow was ankle-deep. Impossible. Cursing, I propped myself on my knees and struggled to stand. 

I looked up toward the top of the hill. The three figures had disappeared over the rise. At the foot, the incline appeared a lot steeper than it had from the car, more treacherous as landscape than it had been as backdrop. 

I felt an intrusive and overwhelming urge to climb. 

♦ ♦

Like the trio before me, I bounced and scrambled my way up the slope. The higher I ascended, the steeper the incline appeared, nearly vertical as I clawed my way to the top. I couldn’t tell what was underneath the snow: gravel, dead grass, just dirt? Halfway up, I started muttering the lyrics from that Kate Bush song, “Runnin’ Up That Hill.” The lush, synthetic chorus built within me. Inside my blanket of a coat, I was so full, a nauseous bag overstuffed with swirling trash. And yet, I knew that after this I was going to go home and boil the pierogis I had in the freezer. 

By the time I reached the top, I was breathing hard. It was darker than I’d thought, seeing as how a mysterious and abiding light had drawn me here. I heard something, whispers or the wind. A quiet thing brushed my face. Wings. 

Two enormous spruces shagged in ice parted before me. I dipped my head and pushed through, a shower of powder dusting my hair, my lashes.

I walked in the woods for what felt like a long time, chasing the brightness I’d seen from the lot below. The light wasn’t steady. It surged and waned, reflecting off the white pines and then receding again. 

My feet found a worn track. Its groove of footprints was leading me now. Sounds rustled around me, beings active at night. An eerie hoot rang in the distance, an owl, a coyote. Did coyotes live in upstate New York? I’d never seen one. 

I didn’t feel afraid—just confused. I’d yet to discover any trace of the people I’d seen climbing the embankment in the storm. Maybe it was just a coincidence, the path an open secret, a thoroughfare pedestrians used to access the strip of fast-food palaces on the southside of town. 

I was going to have to give up, turn back. 

But then, out of nowhere, the conifers fell away. 

I stepped forward into the clearing. In the middle of it roared a giant fire, blinding and hot. A star had come down to earth.

Sweat was already collecting along my hairline. Right away, I pulled off my hat, tugged at the zipper on my coat. 

I wasn’t alone. One by one, they came into focus. The women. Around the bonfire, a dozen of them, maybe more, were standing or sitting, many in motion, a few still. Several were naked. Some wore bras, panties. A ribbed tank tucked into undone jeans. Fleece leggings stripped most of the way off. Boots and scarves and parkas scattered the shadows at the edge of wood. 

Although it had taken me a minute to notice them, the women were all looking right at me. They didn’t seem alarmed, or even surprised, to see me.

“Hey,” said the closest one. She was tall and sturdy in a sports bra, rounding belly exposed above her woolen maxi skirt. It felt transgressive, liberatory, to be seeing the exposed flesh of a woman whose skin wasn’t stretched creamy over abs flat and powerful enough to pull the eye up from her adorable and cleanly waxed crotch, as in an ad for underwear or lotion or, honestly, donuts. 

“Hey,” I said. 

All around us, the others simply continued to undress. 

Who did they think I was? Or, maybe, why didn’t they care who I was? 

Someone cast off a cotton V-neck and, wearing only a thong, disappeared behind the flames. I’d never observed a woman as old as my mother get that close to naked. She was astonishing. Below the neck, her skin was pink and supple, the limbs strong, muscular. I stared at the place where her butt had been. 

And then it hit me. Had she walked directly into the firepit? 

I saw that I had, without meaning to, continued to remove my own clothing. I was shedding not just the outer layers but also my sweatshirt, my flannel, my tee. I wasn’t the least bit cold. The snow on the ground around the fire had melted, turning the dirt to tepid mush. I sank my toes into it. Something rushed up through my flesh, a quickening, as if messages could be sent this way. 

Pulling off my pants, I stumbled, and then, someone was there, a person with lightish hair, I couldn’t tell who, it didn’t matter, the eyes took into themselves all the forest’s light. She, they—I didn’t want to project my expectations—steadied me. 

“I’ve got you,” they said. Their voice was low, matter-of-fact.

Braced, upright, I pulled down my boy briefs. I didn’t even bother to fold them like I did at the doctor’s office, just threw everything behind me, to the winter, to the wind.  

The person was guiding me by the hand now. Theirs was cool, but not cold. The grip was firm, intelligent.

The others, having cast off their final clothing items, were moving the same way now. Nude, or practically so, we were all skirting the bonfire, making our way to the other side. Our bodies were exposed, hapless. Our skin was tight and loose, our hair long and short, lost or grown in. We didn’t care. None of us cared.

Was I going to do it? Was I going to follow these people into the flames? 

Madison’s voice sounded in my head. “Give yourself permission.” 

Yes. Okay. 

It was funny, actually, Madison giving me leave. It went against the natural order of things. While I was an hour away at the state college in Binghamton, hustling my way into shows, drinking until I no longer recognized my own face, throwing up on the street outside the Downton Quarterback, Madison was still at home with Mom and Dad, babysitting the neighbor and doing nails in the garage, waiting for Joey to land a better gig with a bigger regional contractor so that they could get married. When Craig and I toured the eastern seaboard with Chronic Tonic (Craig asked me to sing backup vocals, but I was too shy to do more than belt out better variations of their lyrics in the shower; instead, I agreed to take on the grueling work of the merch girl, selling t-shirts, doing bad sound checks, picking up burgers), Eloise and Olivia not yet even a twinkle in the proverbial eye, Madison was already adding minimalist onesies and twee stuffed bears to her Babylist, planning Shaelynn the most elaborate gender reveal Oneonta, the smallest big town in Central New York, had ever seen. I mean, sure, it wasn’t actually a tour so much as a summer road trip that ended during a hurricane when the van broke down in Tampa. But still. I’d always thought I was, if not better than Madison, then at the very least, freer. More interesting. Now, all that seemed wrong. Madison, if nothing else, was brave enough to live by her convictions. 

What was wrong with me?

Whatever these women were doing, I was going to do it, too. Right here. Right now. In front of everyone.

♦ ♦

On the other side of the firepit, I caught my breath, a little relieved, a little disappointed. The women weren’t jumping into the fire. No, they were descending. They were sinking down, down, down, sitting deep in the bowl of the earth. 

Here was a pool, releasing steam off its inky surface. A hot spring. The women dunked their heads in. They relaxed. The heat that was inside their lungs aspirated out into the cold air, making clouds. 

I guess I was still capable of being startled by the mania of joy. 

I climbed down into the spring, too, the water claiming my legs, my belly, my arms. I didn’t care if the flesh was no longer tight to the bone. The pool was almost too hot to bear, but once I started to descend, I knew I had to go in all the way. I sank down and down, feeling on the bottom the warm stone, the gentle clay.

How had I never heard about this place? I was from Oneonta. I’d lived here most of my adult life. Was this real?

My head fell back. Stars twinkled through the trees. That sounded cliché, but they did. Pinpricks of light, pulsing, blinking in, out. The sky was wide and vast. I let my mouth drop open. The air smelled of juniper, soil, a clean dirt, true and pure. It would be easy to stay here forever, I thought, moving my hands back and forth beneath the surface. I couldn’t see my own limbs, but I knew they were there. My body was me. I was it.

The water around me rippled, pulled. The others were here with me, too. We were together. In the heat, the wet, we were one. No one spoke. And then, a sound rose, lifting. A voice. Someone was humming. We all were. 

When I closed my eyes, I was on stage again. I was leaning into Chris Hannah’s mic. Maybe that was my problem. I didn’t want to be with the band anymore. I wanted to be in the band. Craig, who’d never doubted his own capabilities, had always had the courage.

“Is this your first time?” the woman next to me asked. 

The shared note was dying away. I heard other voices in the dark, greeting each other, murmuring.

“It is,” I said, trying to act natural. “Yours?” Obviously, it wasn’t, but I had to say something. 

“No, no,” she laughed. You could tell by the rhythm of it that she’d never once allowed herself to shame someone for being stupid. 

“Any advice for me?” This was a gamble. I wanted to sound at least a little knowledgeable, and weren’t the wisest among us those unafraid to display their own ignorance?

She paused a minute. She had a kind, frank face and chestnut hair, streaked gray. Even wet, it flowed magnificently over her shoulders. Her eyes were drooping, heavy. Was she sussing out a random interloper? Or was she genuinely thinking?

“That depends,” she said at last. 

“On what?” I worried that snot might be dripping from my nose.

Another pause. Giving herself space and time was apparently her thing. 

“On how you say it,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, scared all of a sudden that there was going to be a presentational component to this nude, witchy soak.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s nothing really. Whatever words come to you—they just have to be true.”

“Right, of course.” I pretended to be okay, but I was terrified. Had I ever said a true thing in my entire life?

A splash rushed the surface and broke against my collarbone. I sank a little deeper and pretended to be distracted by the moon. 

On the other side of me, two other women were talking.

“It’s buttery,” one said.

“But also, not?” said the other. “I don’t know.” 

“I was expecting something different.”

“Like, how?”

“I don’t know, just better, I guess.”

Silence was coming on—I could feel it. I dropped my mouth into the water so that the steam could rise directly into my nose. 

“Who’s first?” the woman with the chestnut hair said, her voice loud now, crisp, like a teacher’s. 

For a moment, no one answered. I felt a little nervous for the rest of us, as if we’d all collectively forgotten our homework and were about to disappoint not only our benevolent schoolmarm, but also our mothers, our mothers’ mothers, our mothers’ schoolmarms, our mothers’ mothers’ schoolmarms, and so on down the line, from one generation to the next.

“I am a mirror that won’t reflect back,” someone said, her voice coming high and bright across the pool.

“I am a mirror that won’t reflect back,” everyone else repeated.

There was a beat, a recess. The words we’d said aloud hung above the water, dim and weird. A mirror that wouldn’t reflect back. Was this a bad thing? Or was it good? A mirror that won’t reflect back isn’t doing its job. But maybe its job isn’t so good to be doing, in the first place?

“I live in darkness. I keep my children in it.” This voice was lower, closer, a little sad. 

“I live in darkness,” we all said. “I keep my children in it.”

This statement seemed more objectively negative, although darkness could be comforting, wasn’t there a poem about that? And I could think of many times I’d kept Ellie and Ollie in the dark—sometimes literally, like when I made them go to bed by 9 PM, sometimes figuratively, like when I wouldn’t explain to them what being “stoned” meant until they grew up, thinking in either case, rightly or wrongly, that staying in the dark would protect them.

“I take into me all there is and make nothing from it,” the woman next to me said. 

As we repeated back the words, I looked at her. She was a celebrity in that moment, head tilted and demure, welcoming the warm jolt of attention at the same time as she deflected it. 

We’d all been taught this was not good, hadn’t we, to take without giving, to refuse to be productive, to fail to make or contribute. But this seemed to me like giving yourself the ultimate permission. Whatever you needed, whatever you could, you took, and that was all.

The others spoke, one by one, and we said the words: I am without earth. I burn with what I touch. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. From me, into me comes a mess of chaos, of substance.

Finally, it was quiet. We were quiet. I leaned back. I looked again at the stars. The fire had died down a bit, its glow gone subtle, more orange than white. 

It took me a minute, too long, in fact, to realize it. It was my turn. Everyone was sitting in the heat, stirring, fidgeting. Waiting for me.

“I eat too much,” I said, sheepishly. I regretted my choice of words as they were leaving my mouth. It had to be true, my neighbor had said. It just had to be true.

The chestnut-haired woman laughed again, just as kindly.

“No,” she said. “Try again.”

Time seemed to stop. I was at the altar, looking Craig in the face, promising, like an idiot, to love him forever. I was changing Ellie, whose wet, green poop shot out of her butt and hit the wall of our rental, while Ollie cried in the crib. I was at work, ripping another torn sheet of paper out of the busted copier, only to find that there was another secret sheet of torn paper hidden somewhere else in the machine, unidentifiable and nefarious, mucking everything up. 

“I’m a black hole,” I said at last. “And I can make anything disappear.”

That was it. It wasn’t that I needed to give myself permission. I’d already done that. What I needed to do was admit that I’d given myself permission, and I didn’t feel bad about it.

♦ ♦

White light edged with purple. Retro. Blinding. Triangles and neon squiggles. A gray Formica countertop. 

My eyes were open now. Where was I? It didn’t make any sense. 

“…get you…” someone was saying. 

I tried to focus on the syllables.

“What can….”

Or I could focus on the lips. “I get…” 

The lips were making shapes. If I could put the shapes together, I’d be able to understand.

“What can I get you?” A teenage girl was speaking. She was saying the same words over and over again. It wasn’t a question. Her voice didn’t rise at the end. 

In front of me, the images, the words started to come into focus. Cantina Chicken Burrito. Crunchwrap. Nachos BellGrande. 

I was in line at Taco Bell. But why? How?

“What can I get you?” The girl said it again, infinitely patient, deeply indifferent, a tone forged in the crucible of serving stoned people, day after day, night after night. She twirled one stiff, pink curl around her index finger.

I looked at the menu. I hadn’t been here in so long. Did they still have the Taco Supreme? The Enchirito?

The lights were bright. I tried to understand the options, but my brain was slow, bleary. You could choose soft or crunchy. Cheese inside, on top, on the side. Layers. So many layers. Sour cream and guacamole and queso and ground beef and wet beans. You had to decide, I deduced, which combination of things you wanted inside or outside an edible container of what flavor and texture. 

“Can I get you something?” the girl said, trying a different approach. Her cruel, young body was saving up its energy for a better time, a better place. The future was there, coiled within her, waiting to find out what was worth wanting.

They also had these fried cinnamon things that were basically churros.

It didn’t matter.

“No,” I said, the word surprising me as it left my mouth. “No, thank you.” 

It was true, though. I didn’t want anything. I felt this strongly, in the most fundamental part of my being. 

“Nothing,” I said, and laughed. 

Instead of reacting, the girl turned from me and started filling the little paper bags with tortilla chips from a mountainous bin behind her. 

“Thank you,” I said, trying not to be the worst. “Thank you so much.”

A couple of teenagers were behind me, both scrolling their phones. I couldn’t tell if they were together. As I stepped to the side, they moved up, as if by proprioception alone. 

Nothing. I wanted nothing. 

I pulled out my own device. In the dining room at Taco Bell, it was almost midnight. Ellie and Ollie smiled out at me from the home screen, their seven-year-old faces tuned with smiles so gargantuan they alone knew what happiness could be. I think I’d snapped that one at the Jersey Shore, just before Craig had ordered SoftServe for the girls, orange creamsicle dipped, perplexingly, in chocolate sprinkles. The heart wants what it wants, Craig used to say. He loved cliches. 

Hey, I texted Madison. My sister. My beautiful sister. She never asked the world to be anything other than what it was. U up?

Racheal Fest is a writer and critic based in Central New York. Her critical and creative work has appeared in venues such as Colorado Review, Entropy, Mediations, Jump Cut and Politics/Letters. Her manuscript, Future Ghosts of Pittsburgh, was longlisted for Alternating Current’s 2023 Electric Book Award in fiction. She hosts Writers Salon at Community Arts Network of Oneonta, a literary reading series featuring established and emerging writers local to the Catskills and beyond. At SUNY Oneonta, she teaches composition courses and supports faculty pedagogy.