Interesting Facts About Space E-Book

Emily Austin

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 400

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Readers love Interesting Facts About Space... 'Loved it. For as long as Emily Austin is writing books I'm reading them' 'Emily Austin, I'm going to politely ask you to stop writing characters I relate to so viscerally' 'I will never get over this book. Ever' 'This book made me feel incredibly seen' 'So full of heart and kindness and honesty' 'To all the Enids out there, this is for us, and I hope it brings you comfort like it did me' 'Will remain imprinted on my brain forever' -- Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years - which is hard, when she's lost the password to her old YouTube account and the (many) vlogs that her teen self once uploaded. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties. But as Enid fumbles her way through her first serious relationship and navigates a new family life with her estranged half-sisters, she starts to worry that someone is following her. As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her... Full of charm, humour and heart, Interesting Facts About Space is a pitch-perfect exploration of the strange ways we try to connect with others, and the power of sharing our secret selves with the people we love.

Leseprobe

Also by Emily Austin:

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by

Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books

Copyright © Emily Austin, 2024

The moral right of Emily Austin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 978 1 80546 086 2

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my mom

CHAPTER ONE

“The teenaged girl was brutally axed to death by her grandmother.”

A cashier is scanning my groceries. I have headphones in. My favorite true crime podcast is playing. I read the cashier’s lips. She asks, “How are you today?” while the podcast host simultaneously says, “They found the girl’s body in the old lady’s basement.”

“I’m good, thanks, how are you?”

I put the divider between my groceries and the groceries belonging to the man behind me. I would hate to accidentally purchase his Vienna sausages, or worse—for him to get away with my tampons.

The podcast host explains that the teenager’s body was found decomposing in a Rubbermaid bin in her grandmother’s fruit cellar. Despite the rotting corpse, the grandmother continued to use the fruit cellar. Along with murder, the woman’s hobbies included canning. The body was found next to stacks of fruit preserves and pickled beets.

“Do you need bags?” the cashier asks.

“No, thank you, I brought my own.” I gesture to my tote bag.

The podcast host jokes, wondering if the grandmother ever considered pickling the dead body. I snort at the grotesque concept while the cashier kindly scans my boxed cake mix and Midol. Sometimes you have to joke about things like pickling murdered teenagers. It’s a coping mechanism. It takes the darkness out at the knees.

“Excuse me!” A man rams into my shoulder. The unexpected impact propels my belongings from my hands. My phone, keys, credit card, and the entrails of my wallet sail before me. The angry man storms onward. He does not pause to look back.

A Good Samaritan kneels to help recover my belongings.

“Thank you,” I say.

“No problem. Why did that man shove you?”

“I’m not sure.”

She stands up. “He must have anger management issues.”

I nod. “He probably has a parasite.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you again.”

I was born deaf in one ear. Sometimes, I’m glad I was. I can easily tune irksome people out. I sleep better. I’m less disturbed by irritating sounds. It took me longer to learn to speak than most people, though. I didn’t hear as clearly as other babies. I don’t always respond when addressed on my bad side. When strangers say “Excuse me” while trying to pass me, I’m often oblivious to it. I know that because every so often the situation escalates. People shout “Excuse me!” as if I’m rude for not hearing them the first time.

When I learned to speak, my first word was “mom.” My mom told me that, though, and it’s possible that she has reworked the record. I would not be shocked to learn that my first words were less stirring. Perhaps I said something meaningless, like “grass,” or something embarrassing, like “butts.” I would not put it past my mother to spare me the truth, if that were the case. That said, I am sure that I did say “mom” somewhere near the beginning.

My tampon box is peeking over my bag like a pervert peeking over a windowsill. As I exit the store, I try to strategically position my arm to conceal the box and prevent strangers from knowing which stage of the ovarian cycle I am at.

I turn the volume of my podcast up.

“The contents of the teenager’s stomach revealed that she had eaten peaches two hours before her death. Her autopsy also showed that she . . .” There is a pause for emphasis. “. . . was two months pregnant.”

Sharp pain radiates from my lower back. I fish into my tote bag for the Midol I just bought. While searching, the automatic door behind me opens. A blast of air-conditioning cools my back. I glance at the customer exiting. It’s a man carrying a forty pack of toilet paper above his head like it’s a trophy. He has sweat stains in his armpits and the noticeable outline of a condom in his pocket.

I discreetly swallow a dry pill while I listen to the podcast host say, “It was soon discovered that the girl was dating an older man named Jerry Nit. Jerry, a bald man in his early forties—”

I rip my headphones out and immediately google “space news.”

Flashes on the sun could help us predict solar flares. Solar flares can impact Earth. They can disrupt radio communications and create electrical blackouts.

“Am I speaking to Enid?” a woman in my phone asks.

I can’t tell if it’s scorching out, if I’m having period-induced hot flashes, or if I’ve taken a wrong turn and accidentally descended into hell. My back aches. I’m lugging home groceries. My shirt is pasted to my wet body like papier-mâché. I skipped the previous episode of my podcast and am now listening to the next. This new episode is about a cannibal. The host was just detailing how the man seasoned his human flesh (thyme and rosemary), when the story was interrupted by my phone ringing.

“Yes?” I struggle to hold my phone up to my good ear. My tote bag presses into my shoulder. Sweat stings my eyes.

“Are you fucking Joan?” The woman’s voice cracks.

I stop walking. A cyclist in full-body purple spandex swerves around me. He rings his bell as he pedals furiously ahead.

“Are you dating Joan?” I ask.

I had no idea Joan had a girlfriend.

“No,” she says.

I exhale, relieved.

“I’m her wife.”

The strap of my tote bag slips from my shoulder and slides down my arm. I fumble to grab it, but my box of tampons topples out. After performing a double backflip, the box lands upside down on the mauve rug lining the hallway of my apartment as if it’s just landed the splits.

Before I can recover the box, a door in the hallway opens. Light from inside the apartment shines a yellow block on the rug. I hear keys jingle and a man sigh. Someone new just moved into that unit. I prepare myself to greet him. I position my face, ready to smile at the sight of him. I watch his shadow overtake the block on the rug before the light switch is flipped, the glow vanishes, and a tall man, with keys dangling from his teeth, enters the threshold.

The man is bald.

I smell smoke. Am I choking? The top of his head is gleaming beneath the hallway light. His scalp is so shiny it looks like it’s about to catch fire.

More groceries fall from my bag. Tostitos. Icing sugar.

Our eyes connect. Bosc pears roll, lopsided like tipped bowling pins, across the carpet. The man glances at the avalanche of groceries tumbling around me. I stare at him, frozen, like the face of a mountain in a landslide.

I smell something burning.

“Do you need help?” he asks.

I feel my stomach drop.

“No,” I say.

“No,” I repeat until he leaves.

Red food coloring bleeds into the yellow cake batter. I stir until the batter turns into a muted, pale pink. I am baking a gender reveal cake despite understanding that the practice is profoundly offensive. It involves dying the insides of a cake pink or blue, so that a pregnant person can slice into it and discover the sex of their offspring. I am doing it because one of my half sisters is pregnant, and she asked me to. It was offered as a sort of olive branch. I considered explaining why I would prefer not to, as well as why I would recommend against celebrating an infant’s genitals entirely, but my sisters and I barely know each other, and sadly, I have discovered a new character flaw to add to my already long list of defects: I would sacrifice my values to oblige my estranged sisters.

I want them to like me. I feel like a stray dog, rejected by our sire, trying to be accepted in his new litter of puppies. I don’t want them to think I’m some fleabag mutt, or a coyote masquerading as a house dog. I’m a purebred golden retriever, just like them. I want them to think I’m a clean, bug-free, normal dog. I want to prove that our dad was wrong. I am a good girl.

There is something animalistic about it. I feel a bizarre biological drive to connect to them because they’re my sisters. Maybe there’s some evolutionary benefit to that. Maybe someday I might need their kidneys or some bone marrow. The primal part of my brain wants me to have a relationship with them because we’re blood. I’m supposed to be in their pack.

I think they might feel that biological drive too. That must be why they keep inviting me to events. On a subconscious level, they want my bone marrow.

I keep abandoning my baking to ensure my door is locked and to look out my peephole. I put both hands on either side of the hole before peeking out. There are red cake-battered hand-prints on my door. Each time I spot them, they startle me. I think, Are those my bloodied handprints? Am I a ghost? Did my neighbor kill me earlier? Am I trapped in here, reliving my attempted escape for eternity? Then I remember that I am baking a cake and rush back to the oven to watch it rise.

My mom taught me to watch the oven. When she cooks, she stays beside the food. She has a stool she sits on in her kitchen. It is important, she says, to keep an eye on a hot oven. She also says, for her, it’s like watching a show. She likes to witness cookies rise, butter melt, and the edges of vegetables blacken. She turns the oven light on, looks through the window in the door, and watches food turn brown and hiss.

I tried to use an oven timer shortly after I moved out for school. I didn’t hear it go off. I thought I would hear it. I always heard the timer at my mom’s house. I think she may have bought a special timer with my hearing in mind. It had a lower sound than most timers do. I can’t always hear high-pitched noises. It’s because of something called head shadow; when you have single-sided deafness, high-frequency sounds don’t bend the way they’re supposed to. I was cooking a frozen pizza. The fire alarm went off. At first, I thought, Oh, is that the oven timer? I skipped off to my smoky kitchen, amid the screech of my alarm, where I discovered the tragic remains of a pizza so severely burnt it could have been mistaken for an enormous double chocolate cookie.

This morning, I polished a glass platter to ice the cake on. I set it out on my counter before going to the grocery store. While putting my groceries away, I noticed it looked like it had been moved slightly. It seemed to have shifted since the morning, an inch or two to the right.

I am examining it now. I hold it up above my face, in front of the pendant light hanging from my kitchen ceiling. It is a clear platter with little carvings of grapes and vines on it. It looks dirty again, somehow. It looks almost as if someone has touched it. There are little marks, maybe fingerprints, all over it. This is unsettling because I live alone, and, like I said, I just polished it this morning.

I take my phone out of my back pocket and open my email. Maybe my landlord came by and touched it. I have only lived in this apartment for a year, but my landlord has managed to come by at least fourteen times already. He has never provided sufficient legal notice.

I see that I do have an email from him.

Dear resident,

This is a reminder that absolutely no pets are allowed on the premises. This includes small pets, such as goldfish, hamsters, or birds.

Regards,

Peter

I roll my eyes. I do not have a pet; however, I have an inkling that Peter believes I lied to him about that. He sends me frequent anti-pet reminders like this one. I always respond along the lines of, “I have no pets, Peter,” but nothing I say prompts him to relent.

Maybe he was in my apartment today, snooping around for an illegal bird, touching my glass platter.

“Please, hurry, come in.” I hold my apartment door open for Polly, the woman whose wife I’ve been seeing. I want her to come inside quickly so I can avoid seeing my bald neighbor again.

“Can I get you a glass of water?” I look over her shoulder while trying to hustle her inside.

Earlier, over the phone, she asked me if we could speak in person. I said, “Yes, of course,” and told her my address. As I baked the cake celebrating baby genitals, I reflected on whether that was a prudent choice. Meeting your date’s wife is sort of like online dating; it is better to meet in public. I do a lot of online dating though, and I rarely ever meet in public. That safety protocol is more applicable to straight women. One of the perks of being a lesbian is that it is less critical for me to vet whether my date will kill me. I tend to fear I am the person in the equation who dates should be wary of. I have been giving my address out to strange women, willy-nilly. I did not stop to consider whether I should suggest a coffee shop, park bench, or police station parking lot to Polly.

Her face is flushed. She has beads of sweat resting on her forehead and upper lip.

She ignores me. Her eyes dart around my apartment. She walks inside gingerly, like a newly adopted cat. She looks at the blush-colored, un-iced cake on my counter, and at the dirty dishes piled in my sink.

I usually tidy up before having company. I wash my dishes, bleach the bathroom, make my bed, and sometimes even spray perfume, time permitting. I often go as far as to leave out books that I think reflect well on me, or to pause a premeditated show on my TV. I welcome my guest inside, acting as if I was just casually reading or watching, and not as if it has all been staged.

In this case, I thought it might be more polite not to do any of that. Thoughtfully, I chose to wear a dirty shirt, and to keep my house askew. I left the red handprints on my door, and the dishes I made in the sink. I did not apply deodorant or comb my hair. In an effort to soften the blow of her wife’s infidelity, I am offering her solace in the fact that at least I am a disgusting slob.

I lock the dead bolt and look out the peephole.

When I turn around, I see her tilt her head, confused.

I realize it might have been strange of me to lock her inside my filthy apartment, and to look out the peephole after. This is how murderers behave after luring victims inside.

In an attempt to seem less like a murderer, I say, “It’s nice to meet you.”

She furrows her brow and does not say it back.

I recognize in the silence that it probably is not very nice to meet the person your wife has been cheating on you with.

“I’m sorry,” I decide to add.

She closes her eyes.

“I didn’t know Joan was married—”

“How long has this been going on?” she interrupts.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Let me check.”

I open my phone. I scroll up in my text conversations with Joan to unearth when we started talking. Polly and I stand quietly while I scroll.

I finally reach the top of our texts and announce, “One month.”

I look into her face to see if that is good news or bad news. A month is quite short, I think. It’s not like it has been going on for years. A month is nothing, really. It’s a blip.

She puts her face in her hands. Her shoulders quake.

Maybe it was her birthday this month. Maybe it was their wedding anniversary.

“Are you sure I can’t get you some water?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply. She cries silently into her palms.

“I feel terrible about this,” I say, my throat tightening.

I feel something twitch in my stomach.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, uncovering her face. “We’ve been unhappy for a while.” Tracks of mascara are sledding down her cheeks. “We’ve had a difficult year. Joan’s dad died four months ago. There’s a crack in the foundation of our house that we can’t afford to fix. I think I might have MS—”

I don’t know what to say.

She exhales loudly, then looks me dead in the eyes.

I do not look away. She and I stare into each other’s pupils for longer than is comfortable. Her irises are the same color as Mars, rusty brown and bloodshot. Her eyelashes are clumped with wet mascara.

This moment feels very intimate. Neither of us are speaking. I look at her mascara tracks and think of the slope streaks that form on Mars when it is warm, and there are landslides. We have blinked more than once and are still staring. Blinking.

Should I say something?

She is breathing heavily, as if she can’t catch her breath.

What should I say?

Should I tell her about recurring slope lineae on Mars?

Her chest is pounding up and down. I watch tears build and roll over her eyelashes before trickling down her cheeks in a way that reminds me of being a kid in the back seat of my mom’s van, watching rain roll down the window.

“I don’t really like Joan,” I say. “If that’s any consolation. I’ve been dating other people.”

“Really?” she says, her voice cracking.

“Yes. I just went on a date with someone else last night. I have like ten dating apps on my phone. Look.” I open my phone to show her.

She looks, grunts, then exhales loudly. Her sad tears convert into cries of laughter. She starts cackling. She holds on to my shoulder for balance while she throws her head back, roaring.

I am not sure what to do.

I laugh too, not because I find it funny, but because the break in tension is such a relief that laughter emerges from me like steam from a hot kettle.

Polly and I are lying on my kitchen floor drinking cans of gross, floral-tasting craft beer. A woman I had over last week abandoned them in my fridge. I’m tipping my can to my lips and mulling about gravity. Right now, there is an invisible force compelling this liquid to fall into my mouth. It’s pulling planets toward the sun, and the moon into Earth’s orbit. It’s what’s keeping Polly and me on this tile right now. It causes ocean tides. It’s not just mass it affects, either. It pulls light.

“My first girlfriend cheated on me,” she says. “I broke up with her right away. I remember standing in her doorway, shouting that I didn’t deserve that. I felt so enraged. I was devastated by it, and it fucked me up, but that sort of fueled me to break off all contact with her, and to stand up for myself. I felt so mad.”

She sighs.

“I don’t think I have the energy for this. I’m thirty-seven. I already felt emotionally drained before this. I don’t think I have the capacity to feel impassioned. And breaking up with Joan isn’t just emotionally exhausting, we have car payments—do you know what I mean? We own a house together. And I hate moving. How exactly am I going to meet someone new? Half the time I’m too tired to grocery shop. I can’t take on finding a new girlfriend. Do I have to live alone now? I don’t think I can live alone. I’d be so lonely. It feels like my options are to bottle up that this happened, and stay in this sad relationship, or to leave and be sad alone. I have this sickening, hollow feeling in my stomach.”

She is looking at the ceiling.

“I told Joan every fleeting thought I had,” she continues. “She knew every little part of my life. I told her if I tripped walking to work. I told her what I ate when she wasn’t around. She had a full relationship behind my back. I feel like I never knew her. She knew which yogurt brand to buy me, do you know what I mean? It’s as if my entire world has been built on a fault line.”

I watch her like a voyeur, as if I am observing her doing something private through her curtains. I feel how I would watching her undress or use the bathroom. I feel like I’m not supposed to see this.

“Have you ever been cheated on?” She rolls over.

“N-no,” I answer, swallowing a swig of my disgusting beer. “But I have, uh, never really dated someone exclusively.”

I look away from her to avoid witnessing her reaction. I am twenty-six years old, and I have never been in an exclusive relationship. I do not often disclose that kind of personal information to people, let alone total strangers, but Polly has been spewing her guts, so I feel like I owe her something.

I swallow again. “My dad cheated on my mom, though. I was their only kid. He started a whole new family. He ended up having two other daughters. That’s probably the closest experience I’ve had to this. Do you think that might feel kind of similar?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It depends. How do you feel about that?”

I open my mouth. I don’t know what to say. I pause for a moment, holding my jaw open, like a door, waiting for unexpected words to emerge.

None materialize.

“Do you not know how you feel?” she asks.

I glance at her. “I guess mostly I feel bad for my mom.”

Polly is doing my makeup. I stopped wearing makeup several years ago, but she asked if she could put some on me. I felt like I had to say yes on account of having sex with her partner and ruining her life.

I think she might be drunk. She has only had two beers, but she seems unbalanced and flushed. She keeps suppressing hiccups.

My eyes are closed. I can feel makeup brushes sweep across my eyelids and Polly’s slight fingers touch my jaw. The makeup she is using smells like chalk and roses.

“You have nice skin,” she says as she rubs something liquid into my cheeks.

“Thank you,” I say. “I used to have acne. I took pills for it.”

“You’d never know,” she says. “My skin is terrible. I’ve got wrinkles.”

“You’re older than me,” I say, endeavoring to console her by flagging that it makes sense that she has some wrinkles. As soon as the words escape, I wish I could take them back. They came out wrong.

“I mean,” I try to backpedal. “Just—I’m sure when I’m your age, I’ll have worse wrinkles than you do. I’m sure when you were twenty-six you had better skin than me. That’s all I meant.”

I’m floundering.

“You have nice skin,” I assert.

I think of telling her my favorite planet is Mercury. It has the most craters. I decide not to. Maybe it would sound rude.

I say, “I-I noticed you had nice skin when you came in. You have very nice skin, really. You have nice hair, too. You’re really pretty, honestly—”

I feel her mouth touch mine. My eyes were closed, so I was not prepared. I do not flinch, but I am startled. I open my eyes and watch her kiss me, confused.

I lather soap on Polly’s back in the shower. I think she’s crying, but it is hard to tell under the running water. She suggested we shower together. I assumed it would be a sort of sexual, revenge-fueled shower, but instead she is sitting, hugging her knees, and I am washing her back like the loving nurse of a tired, geriatric patient.

I shampoo and condition my hair, and then Polly’s. I rinse her curls and wring the water out. I consider shaving my legs but am concerned the precedent set might require I also shave hers, which is more than I feel qualified, or willing, to do. Instead, I stand behind her, like a Peeping Tom watching a vulnerable, naked stranger for so long that my skin begins pruning. I think of a podcast episode I listened to recently that mentioned dead human flesh turning to mush after being left prolonged in a shower.

When we finally emerge from my steamy bathroom, I hand two towels to Polly. Only three of my towels are clean. The rest are dirty in my hamper. I normally use two; one for my hair and one for my body. I decided to be a good host, and mistress, and to sacrifice my hair towel to her. I wrap the remaining towel around my torso and let my wet hair drip down my back.

I feel a draft as we exit the bathroom. I wipe water off my brow with my forearm, and glance around my apartment. I notice that my bedroom window is open. The curtains are swaying.

“Did you open that?” I ask, clutching my towel tighter to my body. I know I didn’t open it.

She wraps her hair in her towel and says, “No, I haven’t even been in there.”

I stare at the curtains wafting toward and away from the window, like lungs breathing in and out.

Who opened that?

CHAPTER TWO

I punch my curtains. I brace myself to hit an intruder behind the fabric, standing flush to the wall. I find no one. I slam the window shut. A corner of my towel snags where the pane meets the sill. I yank until the window unclutches my terry cloth. I get down on my knees and inspect beneath my bed. I prepare myself mentally to confront a face staring back at me, but instead discover nothing but a half-empty Gatorade bottle, a graphic T-shirt I thought I lost, gross masses of dust and hair, and a condom.

What the fuck? Why is there a condom? I reach for it.

Never mind. It was a discarded sucker. I didn’t see the stick.

Polly is searching with me. She says, “Do you really think someone came in here?”

“Maybe not, but why take the chance?”

I tear the wrapper off the old sucker and put it in my mouth. It’s lemon.

Polly has my closet door open. She is rooting around inside, searching for a trespasser among my button-downs and sweaters.

“Do you knit?” she asks.

“No, my mom does.” I glare around my apartment, expecting to spot a lampshade placed over a man standing stiff and still, trying to be inconspicuous.

“Did she make you all these sweaters? Wow. There’s a little solar system knitted into this one! I love these. Did she make you all of—”

I shush her.

We stand silently while I keep my pointer finger in the “shh” position before my lips. I cup my other hand around my good ear, listening intently for rustling or breathing. I hear nothing but my refrigerator hum.

After about eighty seconds of silence, Polly whispers, “I should go.”

Cold drops from my wet hair are soaking the shoulders of my T-shirt. I shudder. The air outside is brisk. It’s the end of August, and the sun is setting. The sky is orange and there are no stars visible yet—just Venus and the moon.

Polly and I are saying goodbye on the sidewalk. She’s hugging me. I did not realize until we had already been hugging for a while that my arms were hanging limp at my sides. I hold her quickly for the end of the embrace. As we release each other, she locks eyes with me. I look at the streetlights reflected in her irises, rather than truly at her, while she says, “Thank you,” in a tone so sincere it almost makes me flinch.

As she drives away, I sit down on the concrete step at the front of my building. I put my headphones in. I always put both headphones in, despite my deaf ear. Headphones serve more than one purpose. I don’t just wear them to listen to my murder podcast. I also wear them to prevent people from talking to me. Having one headphone in signals that I am open to small talk, or to having my shoulder tapped on. I am not, so I put in both.

I click play on the next episode. I feel all my muscles unclench. Nothing puts me at ease more than hearing someone calmly discuss homicide. They don’t scream, cry, or retch while they detail the worst horrors humans are capable of. Instead, they say, “Ralph decapitated his wife, and this episode is sponsored by GOOD LUNCH, a weekly delivery box of preportioned ingredients for your tasty lunches.” It makes me feel safe, like there’s no reason to panic. Sure, women get their heads chopped off by men who vowed to love them forever, but we can still plan to eat Atlantic salmon on basmati rice next week.

This episode is the first in a series about Ted Bundy. I’m already well acquainted with Ted, but I don’t mind hearing the same story over and over. In fact, I prefer it. I like knowing what happens. I feel more control over it. As the host reintroduces me to Ted, I copy a block of writing I keep saved in my Notes app and text it to Joan.

Hey, this has nothing to do with you, but I need a little space, so I am no longer dating. Sorry if this is weird, or coming out of the blue, I just wanted to let you know. Again, nothing to do with you. I really like you, and I would love to stay friends if you would.

Almost immediately, she replies,

k.

I read her text twice before standing up and putting my phone in my back pocket. I trudge to the front door of my building, swing it open, and gasp.

I unexpectedly unveiled a woman and her child standing in the doorframe. The woman is reaching for the doorknob that I got to first. After gathering myself, I hold the door open for them. I smile as they exit, flustered.

I hate being startled. I prefer controlled forms of fear. I like my podcasts, horror movies, and ghost stories that I can pause and rewind. I handle fear sort of like a warhorse. I could charge bravely into a planned battle, take in the sights of bombs and corpses, but I would still be spooked by an unanticipated barn rat.

“There’s a great red spot on Jupiter,” I tell my mom. We’re on the phone. About five minutes ago, I got a push notification reminding me that tomorrow is my half sister’s party. I tend to call my mom when I’m reminded of my sisters. I feel guilty interacting with them. I consider their existence a great red spot on my mom’s life.

“It’s an enormous storm,” I explain. “It’s a vortex big enough to engulf Earth. It’s been raging for centuries. There are records of it being seen over three hundred and fifty years ago. On Earth, hurricanes slow down when they reach solid land, but there is no solid surface on Jupiter.”

“There isn’t? What’s Jupiter made of?”

“Mostly hydrogen and helium. It’s a cloud.”

“So is the spot permanent?”

“That’s hard to say. It shrinks and grows. Sometimes it changes color. It gets intensely red. It might go away someday, but yes. It could last as long as the planet.”

“Fascinating,” she says. “Space is so interesting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I say while I tap ignore on another reminder about the party tomorrow. “Did you know light travels 186,000 miles a second?”

“Does it really?”

“Yes. The moon is 238,855 miles away, so it takes 1.3 seconds for light to travel from it to us. That means when we look at the moon, we don’t really see it as it is. We see it as it was 1.3 seconds ago.”

“Boy, that’s neat, isn’t it?” she says.

“Because of how far away the sun is, we see it eight minutes ago. Depending on the orbit, we see Mars as it was three minutes ago, or twenty when it’s further away. Saturn is an hour. Our nearest star is four years. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million years.”

“Wow,” she says. “That is hard to wrap your head around, isn’t it?”

“It is possible that some life force light-years away is watching us now but seeing us in the past. Or they could see us now in the future, millions of years from now, depending on where they are, and their technology.”

“Shall we wave?”

“They shouldn’t be able to see us wave,” I say. “Because we’re inside. Are you inside?”

“Yes, I’m inside, and oh, that’s a relief. So, it’s safe to say that no one could be watching us when we are inside our homes?”

I look at my window.

“Enid?”

“Yes?”

“What else do you know about space?”

I clear my throat. “Well, space is how we could see back in time. If we could travel faster than light, and if Earth gave off enough of it, and we had some innovative telescope, that is how we could see our past. We could look back and see the dinosaurs. We could watch the meteor hit.”

“That’s incredible, wow. Though I think I would rather watch the time when you were a little girl. I’d prefer not to see the dinosaurs die.”

The comforting lull of my murder podcast is rocking me to sleep. I am lying on my side, clutching my knees to my chest, heeding the familiar tale of Ted Bundy. I feel myself drift in and out of sleep. I dream of my mom reading me a bedtime story.

In a green, green room there was a telephone. And a red balloon. And a picture of Ted Bundy with his unibrow. There were three little bears, sitting on chairs, and at least twenty victims. And a little toy house, and a young mouse, and a comb and a brush and corpse made of mush. And a bald man whispering “hush.” Goodnight moon, goodnight tomb.

I have frequent nightmares. It’s been an ongoing issue since I was a kid. Once, I dreamed the sun exploded. I saw it fill the sky, turn red, and boil the oceans. I held a Barbie in my hands and watched her face melt. I woke up in tears, beside myself. Rather than shout “Mom!” or run to her room, I yanked my blankets over my head and thrust my face into my pillows so she wouldn’t hear me cry.

“When the sun explodes,” I tell my mom over the phone in the morning, “it’ll take eight minutes for Earth to know. Because of what I said last night about space and time.”

I called her again. I woke up to another reminder in my phone about my half sister’s party.

“When can we expect that to happen?” she asks.

“In about five to seven billion years.”

My coffee maker is percolating.

“Have you had your coffee yet?” I ask.

“No, I think I’m out of beans.”

“Do you have groceries?”

“No, you caught me at a bad time.”

I don’t reply. I watch coffee drops gradually fill the pot in front of me.

“What will happen to Earth when the sun dies?” she asks.

The coffee machine hisses.

“It’s hard to say. It’ll consume Venus and Mercury. Earth will probably become a lifeless rock. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Humanity will die out before that happens. The typical life span of a large mammal species is a few million years.”

“Is it? Yikes. How many years have humans existed?”

“Three hundred thousand, I think.”

She exhales. “Phew! So, we still have quite a while to go, then?”

I pour cream into my cup and say, “Mhm,” even though I doubt humans will live a million years. I watch the cream swirl in my coffee and form a shape that looks like the Pinwheel Galaxy.

I smear buttercream over the cake I baked. I had it in my freezer. I read that makes it easier to ice; however, crumbs are churning into the icing, forming lumps that remind me of cystic acne. As I run my knife over the cake, my podcast host explains that Ted Bundy would pretend that he had a broken arm to lure unsuspecting women into his car. He would ask them for their help, they would oblige, and then he would rape and murder them. The host describes Ted as attractive. That is often the narrative pushed about him. I have learned, however, that it is not true. I’ve heard that his victims often thought that he was creepy-looking. They helped him anyways, because of the broken arm schtick, and because women are trained to be polite to men even when men are ugly and make them feel uncomfortable.

Some pictures of Ted are moderately handsome, I guess. In some photos he looks strange. It’s hard for me to tell if he was ugly. I can tell that I wouldn’t be attracted to him, but that is true of every man except for a few very specific celebrities, and some fictional male characters who were written by women.

I do not know why we assume attractive people are less likely to be killers, anyways. In my experience, good-looking people are more likely to be depraved.

I strain to push green letter icing out of a tube. I write BOY OR GIRL? on the face of my hideous cake. When I finish, I stare down at the monstrosity as if I have just successfully bred a human with a pig.

In dark moments of self-loathing, I watch the YouTube videos I filmed when I was a kid. I can’t delete them. I don’t remember the password to the account. I filmed thousands of videos from the ages of ten to seventeen.

As an older teen, I tended to film makeup tutorials or shopping hauls. Sometimes, I produced artsy videos. I filmed trees swaying in the wind in sepia tone, water rolling down a creek in black and white, and a match striking.

I don’t remember filming any of the artsy videos. I have no recollection of filming anything as a teenager.

As a child, I recorded myself talking. I was not a gifted speaker by any stretch. I touched my face too much, I stammered, and I struggled to form words. Nonetheless, I filmed myself ineptly discussing the cartoons I liked and the books I read. I filmed shaky tours of my yellow bedroom. I treated You-Tube like it was my diary or my friend.

A video is playing on my TV while I struggle to assemble an outfit. I have the closed captions on. I have tried on every pair of pants I own. I am now standing, pantless, in front of my TV, watching my child-self ramble about SpongeBob SquarePants.

I have held newborns before and thought, while looking into their dark, cloudy eyes, They must be struggling to adjust to their human coil. There is this sense I get while cradling babies that their life force is imprisoned in their ineffectual baby bodies, and that a large part of being an infant involves grappling with your physical existence until you have the dexterity to shake a rattle.

I watch my fleshy child face. I think I was delayed. I think I took longer to grapple with my human coil than most people. I moved awkwardly, as if I were incapable of having a mouth without touching it or fingers without chewing on them. My voice shakes, and I mumble. I watch myself obsess over Sponge-Bob SquarePants as if I am seeing myself learn to walk.

I pick up the remote and scroll through the videos on my channel. There are dozens of me discussing my middle school. I was bullied, and I go on frequent tirades about it. I have videos titled:

“Confronting My Bullies. That’s Right, Chelsea, This One Is for You.”

“When I Grow Up and Am Famous, I Am Going to Tell Every Interviewer that Theodora Called Me a Dyke.”

“Ten Reasons Why Dimitri’s Wrong About Me Being a Loser.”

“Ten Reasons Why Dimitri’s Actually a Loser.”

Sometimes I report the videos, hoping some benevolent YouTube employee will find it in their heart to remove them, but mostly I just watch them as a sort of self-harm. It feels like watching prehistoric footage of Earth. It is this strange history of life that feels almost fake despite the dinosaur bone proof.

“Today we are going to go for a more natural look,” I tell my audience.

I then open a predominately purple makeup palette.

“You can use bright colors and still look natural,” I assure my undoubtedly uneasy viewers as I apply dark shadow directly beneath my brow bone.

“You just have to blend.”

The auto-generated closed captions misinterpret what I said. The text beneath me says, “This just has to end.”

It is bizarre to see myself as a teenager. I can’t remember being that age. I didn’t like being a teenager. I don’t think back to that time. I find no enjoyment in doing so, and when you don’t hark back on memories, they fade. Besides these videos, that stage in my development is almost blank. I can’t remember anything. I wish I hadn’t filmed these. I wish I had no way of remembering myself then. I wish watching myself as a teenager required that I fly light-years away from Earth.

I continue to stand in my underwear, watching mindlessly, pausing every so often to listen to my quiet apartment. I get an inkling, every third video or so, that I should assess my surroundings. I feel like someone is watching me.

I set the cake down on Gina’s marble countertop. The moment my fingers release the glass platter, I feel the same sort of reprieve killers must after successfully burying a body.

To celebrate ridding myself of the transphobic baked good, I fix myself a mimosa. There is orange juice, champagne, and strawberries on the counter. There are also little crustless cucumber sandwiches and a charcuterie board with honeycomb, blueberries, and various cheeses on it.

I pop two strawberries into my glass flute and hold a sandwich in my mouth to avoid having to get a plate. The plates are stacked behind two women I don’t know. They are chatting, and I feel uncomfortable interrupting them to ask them to move.

“Enid!” I hear Gina’s voice shout.

Gina was married to my dad.

She hurries over to me. I feel her acrylic nails dig into my shoulders as she embraces me.

“How are you, honey?” She takes my hands away from my body to look at me.

I try to reply but I am mute with the sandwich in my mouth, and I feel anxious to have my limbs returned to my torso.

She smiles. “Thank you so much for coming. We are so excited that you’re here!”

Gina hates me.

I found naked pictures of Gina on my family’s desktop computer when I was little. They were tucked in a folder titled “Taxes.” I must have been interested in accounting. Instead of perusing receipts, I saw Gina in all her glory.

There is something disturbing about seeing a strange, naked woman unexpectedly when you are a little girl. I don’t know that I would have been less disturbed by photos of dead bodies. It was a traumatic incident in my life, and sadly, I’m not embellishing. I regularly wish I were traumatized by something more interesting than Gina’s butt.

“Ted Bundy wasn’t actually hot,” I tell the throng of women sitting with me on Gina’s beige sectional. “That is just the narrative pushed to make the story interesting. Look at him.” I open an ugly photo of him on my phone. I show it to everyone. “This guy looks like he’d bludgeon and rape a woman with a metal rod from her bedframe, doesn’t he?”

There is a palpable silence after I finish speaking. It is so silent that I wonder, at first, if it’s because of my half-deafness. As I rub my bad ear, I realize that the silence has nothing to do with my hearing. The reason it is quiet is because these women are dumb with offense. I glance around the couch at their speechless, affronted faces.

My half sister Edna is sitting next to me. She looks especially appalled.

I am not sure there is anything I can do to negate mentioning raping a woman with her bedframe. Maybe it is important for me to assert I find it horrible too?

“It’s horrible what he did,” I say quietly.

They stir. Some compassionate bystander tries to throw me a life raft.

She says, “You know a lot about murderers, eh?”

I bite the insides of my cheeks. Should I say yes, or would that make this worse?

I don’t usually let myself talk this much around Gina, my sisters, and the people in their orbit. I tend to be quiet. I wear the mask of a well-mannered distant relative; a young lady who crosses her legs at the ankle and laughs at banal jokes. That is a new character for me, however. I have not mastered her yet. I have grasped the characters:

Enigmatic temporary love interest.

Reliable employee.

My mother’s aidful daughter.

Unobjectionable patron at a store or restaurant.

In the past I learned to play shy teenaged girl, tidy roommate, and diligent student, through some trial and error, but those roles are behind me now, thank God.

“Do you just look up murderers and read about them, or what? How do you know all that detail?”

I look into my cup. Some strawberry seeds have dislodged from the fruit and are floating like drowned fruit flies. “I listen to true crime podcasts mostly, but yeah. I used to watch a lot of Dateline when I was a kid.”

“Oh, that explains it,” Gina hollers from across the room. “You shouldn’t have been watching that kind of thing, honey! My girls just watched cartoons when they were little!”

I watched Dateline with my mom. I associate it with eight p.m. on school nights. I think of getting out of the bath, having wet hair, putting on clean pajamas, and greeting my mom on our couch. She would lift the corner of the orange knit blanket on her lap for me to sit under. I always stayed in the bath too long. The water was cool by the time I emerged. I felt chilly until I sat under the blanket with her, in the nest of her trapped body heat. We had a lamp with a yellow stained-glass shade that made the light in our living room warm. We sat together in that light learning about serial killers while my mom clicked her knitting needles.