Beast
Elsa Court 1. School was out. You were preoccupied because you had fooled around with a boy who had a very beautiful—very popular— girlfriend. But what was done, you know, was done, and that was what gave you trouble. We trailed after this feeling all day, you and I, waiting for the world to end. Summer was already dragging. Shadows loomed behind us as we glided beneath the elms. After a point, we both started noticing something was off in the atmosphere, like a conspicuous twist in the larger fabric of things. My intuition (yours confirmed this) was that we had transitioned back to a moment before our time, possibly the 1970s. The early afternoon light had turned sepia and people we crossed paths with were all dressed in a coordinated fashion that seemed out-of-sync with the world. People young and old looked the same. I began to feel anxious. We started paying attention to the untouched postwar shop signs above their window fronts, there, in the industrial northern streets we thought we knew well—the hairdresser’s, the stationery shop, the content of their window displays no longer dusty or sad or ridiculous. The covers of old magazines, once whitened by the sun, their pages baked into a slow curl, seemed resuscitated to enable us to consider them afresh. Right on cue, the very same guy you had fucked, along with his beautiful (she was so tall) girlfriend, emerged from an old Peugeot van by the side of the road wearing a combination of