Content warning

Psychiatric institution. Alcoholism mention.

You break them out of Building 826 around 6:30 that morning when the dew is at its most gluey and the sleep-bitten guards at the security check are oiling their throats with caffeine. The Alcoholic helps in his way—corralling the crew y’all had christened the Lost Children into the back of your mother’s goodly gleamed Honda, still white from pre-dawn, still laced with her items like the most damning of palimpsests: forgotten lipstick tube in the console and floral tissues stuffed at secret angles, heart-bending surprises every one of them. They’d come quietly, our passengers. There was the faded Queen of Cups—retired from her materials and high chaliced reign—with the aristocratic nose and eyes blue as any prophet’s. Word had it that her only daughter had died of Covid, leaving a lovely carnage of an apartment the good lady burnt to the ground one evening. Despair marked her like an omen, walked right next to her, giving her a pure form of vision. Next was the student with the infinity symbol tattooed delicately on each wrist, who spoke of her books in spatial, off-handed ways that fondled the distances of narrative. In the backseat, she cradled the honey hair of her ponytail with a terrible absence and hid her mute little epicene face into the band of her sweatshirt. Our third guest was the red-eyed older gentleman whose family had, for all intents and purposes, given him up to the state after one too many a stint outside underneath the stars (they said he spoke of van Gogh like a dearly departed brother, that his latest suicide note had referenced time and the Dusty Hand Galaxy and suggested we breakfast upon broken integers for a change). And last, the Alcoholic, the dearest to you of the set. Fine facial bones and a mild brunette. You could glimpse the little boy in the lines of his body all rapturous with energy spent years ago on the steady inhalation of cheap drinks in dark bars. He glittered his teeth at you from the passenger seat. It was the thing you liked best about knowing him, ruined boy.

Beeline to the trailer, then the men went off to groceries. The women stayed behind to make house. Afterwards, you fell asleep, dreamed you picked the IV tubes out of your arms like gossamer before tying them into decadent bouquets around your throat. In the dream you sang of starlight and Icarus, reaching alongside him to that great bolt of orange in the blue. You woke up levitating, couldn’t get down, had to swim your way four feet off the ground to the trailer’s tiny bathroom to stare at yourself, before setting off again to the outside to find them gathered around a weak bonfire. You broke bread with them, your head inches above the tallest, and the strange thing was they said nothing about your state of aerial rupture. Next morning, with the lachrymose encouragement of the Alcoholic, you taught yourself to walk tentatively upright—great loping steps of air while you remembered to swallow again—hollow with joy, you met the morning with an idea. 

We’ll build a boat, you told them, sail it down the Mississippi like Huckleberry, feast on crackers and wine and find freedom in New Orleans. They stared at you, and the youngest hid her face again before a smile could crack it open, and you went on extolling until the Alcoholic took you by the arm, laid your head on his shoulder. Quiet again, you lay thinking of the stubborn nebulosity of dreams, the bruised hot house swampiness and husky crickity-crack of broken asphalt and slumpdrunk streets. You wanted them to witness the ancient new-world slenderness of its alleyways. New Orleans was as nervous as a new mother with its over-indulged moisture. Later, the red-eyed gentleman took the tractor out, spinning slow circles in ruby clay until the wheels bled cakily, sticking themselves so deep into a trench that he was forced to climb out, head shaking laughter towards the sun. He smiled at you and you raised a thumb and he bit off the tip of a pear. 

You’d broken them out in the name of Libre. A concept you’d been exploring since the death of your parents, had taken to like the wise fish you knew yourself to be: steady intervals of pain swept through your bones for months until you woke up feeling the dawn stuck in your hair. You could smell again and walk again without the arthritic stitchiness at the backs of your heels. Food felt safe for the first time in ages, and you took to it like a child, delighted in orange sherbet from the gas station down the road. Dye-bright cold against the mouth cavity had you nearly squealing with a fit of tugging love for the stuff you couldn’t classify. More, and more, and more. Squalid and roasting in bed all this time. Forfeiting the right to a life without reigns. Death’s changes registered in the pucker of flesh on your forehead and the way your eyes looked yellow when you still cried. Your brain felt bent, but that was alright—out of sight, out of reach, it remained a mystery you wanted to keep, not solve. Sometimes you felt it shimmer underneath your layers of hair and head fat and wondered what it resembled in its quietudes.

We wondered how long it’d take for them to find us. It was always meant to be temporary—this peace—something snatched and bucolic as a trailer and tractor yard could be. But the stars were thrown over like a blanket that night, and we decided amongst ourselves to sit under them for longer than the fire could keep. Embers, and the smell of Whiskey next to your cheek. Embers, and the look of steady repletion on the student’s face as she let the one book she’d brought—Station Eleven—drop in her lap like they do in films. She’d watched us for the last two days from her perch on the trailer’s concrete steps, watched us when she’d gone to bed in the sleeping bag you’d shyly offered her. She’d been the hardest to win over—the distance between you consisted of a gender neither of y’all knew how to wrap around yourselves properly—stretched seams of personality both of you were too ill to recognize you were supposed to hide.

That night, the Queen of Cups smoked one of the Gentleman’s cigars that he’d picked up somewhere between the grocery and home and told stories about her daughter. Her looks were slow, and she spoke around the thing in methodical ways. Deliberate wording. Taking pincers to her daughter’s story and extracting shards of pearl. They felt like gifts. Each word another pigment to the history that took away her own. You noticed how well-groomed she was for a patient, and the way in which she leaned back on her makeshift stool reminded you of the expensive women you’d been around in grade school. Mothers, grandmothers, cool-toned voices, delirious ash blonde hair that reminded you of animal pelts in sunshine. 

Another morning. You were still hovering, but the folks continued to accept your airy gait with a nonchalance that spoke to their own harbored secrets. Things happened to you in this life that you had no choice but to set aside. Curiosity was the enemy in these circumstances. Curiosity asked the unanswerable. You’d always known you’d anger a god one day, and you wondered what would happen to everyone once they came for you, how you could exist in society after this change.

The sunlight poured through the trailer’s window, and you made your way to the door, threw it open, gingerly taking paces towards the little patch of grass you’d all gathered over the night before. Your feet hurt you, and you had the idea of placing them in the sunlight for a while. It would take gymnastics and one of the plastic chairs to accomplish this, but all you had was time. The others were spread out over the lawn, and you looked at them now like you would family members. The ache continued, but you made it to the patch, and tilting your head towards the sky, saw something you’d never tell. It greeted you, too, and upon agreement with each other, you started to rise. The air felt like a warm bath under your soles.

They all started running, their faces bright masks of color, ruptured mouths out of place like Picassos. First the Gentleman fell—a hard landing onto his knees—tears in his eyes behind the glasses frames, redder, redder still. Then the Queen of Cups went down, gently tugging the student alongside her. The Alcoholic remained standing, face full of dumb anger. He raised his hand once before bowing his head, kneeling in one snapped movement that made you ache for him. The ache spread to the back of your head, and you placed both hands over it. Maybe to the others it looked like you were lounging upright. Maybe to the others your ascension looked like a trick of light.

This story first appeared in Cerebral, published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025.

Mary Buchanan

Mary Buchanan (she/her) is an archivist, editor, writer, and former teacher from Mississippi. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in 3 A.M., ergot, Serotonin Magazine, Bending Genres, Trampoline Poetry, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Tiny Molecules, The Razor, Psychopomp, among others. Her collection of stories and essays, Cerebral Weather, is available now from Alien Buddha Press.