Paula

When she stepped back into his apartment, into the light, Shane could see that she was entirely different. Nothing about her face, her clothes, none of those superficial things would give anyone else that idea. But the way her eyes were drooping and lilting around the room, judgmentally, and the way she walked, a slow gliding creep, like that cliche stroll through waist-high grain that those overly romanticized prairie girls would do, these agitated some deep sensor within Shane. She had become a sort of fairy, he thought.

Some 4 weeks ago was when this happened. No one knew where she’d gone. In those past weeks, that notion had brought him comfort; that others were made to feel as dumb as he was. Often times he had to suffer that byproduct of her decision making all on his own - Paula always liked to run away, for a day or two at a time, leading to unfortunate and embarrassing incidents like the one at Sheryda Warrener’s house, last winter, when a distraught Shane came pounding on the door only to be told by Sheryda that Paula had just left to go back home. When he got back, he found her in the bath, John Mayer playing on the sound system.

This is why, at first, Shane resisted his usual urge to run around town, mad-man-like, visiting her usual spots on some “have you seen this girl” type of trip. Shane had concluded that these micro-disappearances were her way of signaling love. Her way, he thought, not anybody else’s. He resented it because it made him feel powerless, something which Shane could not especially handle. At five-five and three quarters, he lives with an in-built handicap to his self confidence that took very little input to destabilize. Paula, the 5’11” tattoo artist originally from Long Island, who spent most of her youth bouncing from military base to military base, was never bothered by his height, Shane would recount. However, inside Shane, as many short men, was a rage and a jealousy that would come out.

Around week three, Shane had wondered if that’s all there was to this whole ordeal. Was this simply a stress test to check that Shane’s rage glands functioning as normal, had not began to atrophy, wither, become a vestigial piece of flesh. Was Paula playing this game with him? And if so, what is the winning move? How can he beat her at this? Surely the solution was resistance. Don’t give in, he thought, and she will come back.

And she did. But now, here, since she crossed the threshold of their basement unit, Shane begins to doubt much of his approach to his fiancee’s disappearance. She does not speak as she observes the apartment, but she does touch things, in ways Shane has never seen any normal person do in an apartment, theirs or others. He first saw this with the TV, which was on at the time, playing an ocean documentary that Shane found calming. She approaches the screen and touches it with her index finger, looks at it, touches again, looks at it, and rubs it against her thumb. As if she assumed it would be wet.

“Hey Paula.” Shane says, stupidly, not sure what else to say after his past month of self-obsessing over this assumed game of hers.

She looks at him and smiles but says nothing, just walks towards him, to the couch, which was technically hers from her last boyfriend, and upon which she would nap on in the summertime when she didn’t have a booking at the studio. Her finger comes down, touching the couch scientifically, the same way she did the TV. The cuff of her sleeve rides up her arm as she does this, revealing to Shane a gradient in her skin tone, from the tanned flesh of her hands, into a pinky, translucent quality running up the sleeve. He swears he could see blood vessels, tendons beneath the skin. She raises her hand, again to rub her fingers. The cuff slides back and covers up whatever Shane thought he saw. She sits down, and turns towards him. Eye to eye now, in this moment, Shane could have sworn her eyes were blue, not the green he was looking into right now. Though, he could not say for certain, and knows it would be his ass if he got that wrong.

“Did you have a good trip?” Shane opts to ask instead, just as stupidly.