Before they speak in the kitchen, while Lil spends her morning in the orchard, Sasha retreats to the basement darkroom and holds negative after negative up to the light. At first, she studies each image, spends minutes on it, even uses the enlarger to focus them. But soon, she’s only scanning, scanning, scanning. They all show her the same thing.
There’s so much film down here. Baskets of it, drawers of it; tiny film canisters stuffed into bags, piled high in the wastebasket. Not a year’s worth of film. A career’s worth of film. No—not quite that. Not an artist’s career. A lifetime of a distracted hobbyist snapping shots in between a hundred other odd jobs.
Twenty-nine years of on-the-side dreaming.
There’s no project. There’s no end date. These negatives are the scrabbling, desperate handholds of a life unmoored. Maybe that’s why she’s never developed any of them, not a single one. Just hoarded them under the house and scurried back upstairs into make-believe.
Sasha has her big cry down here in the darkroom, her goggles fogged as she mixes chemical baths: developer, stop, fixer. Mom and Lil gave her this space and gear in high school, as several Christmases and birthdays put together. It’s not set up for color film, but Sasha developed lush, slightly overexposed black-and-white prints in here as a teenager.
She has no desire to develop most of this film. The shots are strange enough in ghostly negatives, in their neat little rows of silvery blurs and shadows. Images of muddled decades. Some canisters repeat others; how many times has she gone out to the Keller Orchard? By the looks of it, she’s shot out there again and again. Her pictures look like long-exposure images where her subject just couldn’t keep still. There’s the old abandoned house, with missing rails and sloped, destroyed roof, half-consumed by kudzu—and softer, just beneath, there’s the house when it was whole and full, the windows uncracked, the paint complete. From another strip: there’s the Keller house on fire, silver licks of flame, white shimmer of char. Overlaid, the vines, pulling it down, quenching the blaze, suffocating it. Two stages of phantasmic decay. She blows this one up, blood turning to ice water. The top floor, just at the corner of the window, peeping out of a single frame, a blurred, impassive face. A child watches her from within the burning.
She and Lil have been sitting inside this decay (or this inferno?) just as placidly, it seems.
Sasha scrubs at her face, then grabs for her camera hanging on the basement’s inner doorknob. Rewinding the film, she pops it out to take a look with the loupe.
Same, all the same, a monotony of apocalypse.
She pauses on one image.
Safelights on, lights off. Back in the enlarger. She fiddles with the f-stop.
Big multigrade paper. It’s a slapdash job, her test print, but it more or less gets the idea. She’s more careful the next time, watching from too close as her image appears in the developer, that comforting, acrid smell in her nose. Ten seconds in the stop, thirty in the fixer. That same old alchemy.
As it dries on her line, Sasha’s chest loosens. It’s a fixed photograph, free from duplicates or auras. The walk on train tracks, the horizon. And Autumn, in a velvety grayscale, looking back at her, sticking her tongue out.
Autumn.
Her eyes are amused, a little question in them, like, How many more distracted lifetimes are you gonna waste, huh?
Sasha flicks off the red light and jogs upstairs.
Autumn’s a little relieved when Sasha pulls her away from the house, out of breath and bright-eyed. She doesn’t even question where they’re going when they leave the orchard and the sense of sanctuary inside the fences. Sasha leads the way with a long stick, poking at the ground as they go for snakes, or traps in the mulchy debris. It doesn’t take long for Autumn to figure out where Sasha is leading her. But she doesn’t know why.
By any measure, on any fucked-up timeline, it’s been a long time since anyone has been out here. The land in this direction is soggy, half swamp as they get closer to the grassy creek, the rainbow cypress knees jutting out from the low water. It’s nearly sunset, the tree line crowned with a tangerine glow. Their despondent day is breathing its last gasp, and no one has noticed their absence.
The orchard house is away behind them, Lil and Wyn quietly at work on a five-hundred-piece Donald Duck puzzle Sasha found under the twin beds. Somewhere, too, the Pecan Festival is churring on without them, by the sound of it, a slightly discordant carnival tune jangling out over the woods. Cork is probably still loyally watching Autumn’s stand for her.
Sasha stops at the sodden waterline of the creek, giving a hulking half-dead tree a critical once-over. Autumn pushes her hands in her pockets and follows her gaze.
“The rope ladder is busted up,” Sasha says, frowning. “I’ll have to give you a boost to the higher rungs…” Autumn only stares. She sees the shape of the pieces, how they must fit together, but she can’t quite muster her courage to—“You game?” Sasha adds.
Autumn looks at Sasha, caught in her honeyed eyes, and back at the sloping ruin of their tree house overhead. Even sunset’s light isn’t doing this place many favors. The smell of mildew and cypress drags hard at Autumn’s memory. She is eighteen again, her feelings unsullied by time and distance.
“Thank you, tall woman, on behalf of all shorter women,” she says and steps up to the tree. “Go on.”
Sasha cups her hands and hoists Autumn up to where the hairy ropes are still intact. She grapples her way up from there, on a ladder that trembles and bucks but doesn’t give. She hoists herself onto that uneven platform and scoots back to give Sasha room. Autumn half expects to see a discarded brownie tin covered in leaves in the corner, or a crumpled can of TaB. Some ghost of the girls they’d been.
It certainly can’t be safe up here. It was barely safe when Autumn first found it in the 1970s or when they were acting a fool up here in the ’80s. The platform has soured, darkened with rot on the far end that jags out over the water. The safety railing has a big crack that never used to be there. But the tree itself is strong and accommodating, the branches growing around the tree house, forming a sturdy cradle for what’s left of their refuge. Overhead, the canopy is resplendent, despite the many bald spots that have begun to show as leaves fall. The view is the same. Water wending away toward the river and copse of trees. Distant dots of houses on the ridge.
Autumn hears Sasha make the leap for the ladder; then she scrabbles into view. At the last second, there’s an awful snap! as one side of the rope ladder gives way. Sasha seizes the fraying knot and swings up into the tree house, gasping. “Well, we live here now,” she pants, giving Autumn a windswept grin.
“We’re too old for this,” Autumn jokes. She rests her back against the trunk of the tree, where it presses against her spine. What would it be like if she found some key to twist to send them back to simpler times? When they could laugh and tease and while away whole days as sweet as cake, when they could look at each other, flush, and blame the innocent cold. When she could relax, knowing that just a short walk down neighborly streets, she’d find Mom and Dad, shouting to each other across their little house about what to make for dinner. A part of her has been restless since they passed.
They sit in an idle silence for a while, catching their breath. The old composition is resumed. Now is when the deck of cards appears from a sleeve, or the gas station comic book, a portable radio, or the latest seventh-period gossip. Except Sasha is quiet, thumbs running over, under one another.
Autumn is aware of the warm balm of her eyes on her.
Crickets. A breeze turning chill.
“Autumn,” Sasha says at last, after far too long, when the silence should be impenetrable and night is on the welcome mat. “I have to speak. I mean—I need to say something.”
“Okay,” Autumn says. Her voice sounds sudden and high-pitched. “Sure. Go on—” She’s rambling. She stops, catches her breath. Waits.
Sasha seems caught off guard by the invitation, as if that was as much as she’d planned. She huffs out a breath and adjusts from one casual position to another.
“Look,” she begins—but there’s nothing to look at in the swiftly falling darkness. “I mean, didn’t you see? Everyone else saw everything!” She’s restless. “And now I’m thirty or almost sixty and having to figure out how to explain this thing that everyone knows and that I thought you didn’t want and I had to just…get over.” She swallows. “For a long time. You never noticed or—didn’t care?”
Sasha swipes at her hair. “But now it’s the end of the world, and I’m just sick to death of trying not to look like an idiot in front of you. I tried to preserve this friendship for too long.” She sits up to glare at Autumn. Sasha straightening up in the tiny space is enough to bring them very close together. “We may live in hell, but the Pecan Ball is happening on the riverboat and I’d like you to go out with me.” She pauses. “Romantically. On a date. A lesbian date.” She pauses again. “With me.”
Autumn’s ears fail her. She can’t hear anything beyond the stutter of her own lungs. Sasha has spun sentences out of thin air that change everything, a spoken-word riot of color and possibility.
But there’s one thread that snags her, holds her fast. “I—I cared,” she stammers. “Oh god, I always cared. So much. You don’t know how I’ve thought about you, obsessed about you—Sasha—” Autumn scrambles into her space. Her fingers want the edge of her jaw, the soft curve of her neck, to be buried under her hair. She doesn’t know where to grasp so instead, she finds her hands. “Yes, please. Please, yes.”
Last time, a lifetime ago, here in this same space, Sasha kissed her. But she may have spent her share of courage, and whatever is left should be saved, because outside of their tree house…their world still has teeth. So Autumn inches closer, gives in to the urge, and touches Sasha’s face, tilts it toward her. This time, she kisses Sasha.
It’s a tentative touch, and for a moment, Sasha is stiff, tense from grand declarations and nerves and exhaustion. But Autumn gives her a chance to catch up, and Sasha warms, easing into her. There’s something familiar in this, but also new. They’ve both lived a lot since that first on-purpose accident they crafted together here during that last summer. How have they concocted this second chance? Sasha winds around Autumn, tipping her gently off balance so they’re flush on the splintery tree house platform.
They explore. It feels easy, dreamy, high. And then, with a sudden roar of heat, intense. Breath catches in little stairstep hitches. Hasty, impatient, Sasha shrugs free of her shirt, and Autumn presses flush with her, her fingertips running hard down her back. She catches the clasp of Sasha’s bra to toss it up into the branches of the tree. Autumn’s sweater is soft and heavy, and Sasha nuzzles the bare skin beneath it, making her gasp. They roll, and someone, one of them, shrieks, because they’d almost toppled from the tree but for a well-placed knee. There will be bruises. A lower lip drags over exposed flesh, sending tremors up two spines. Sasha’s hand is buried in her own hair as she moans, and Autumn watches devilishly, hungry, urging them farther, faster. She has three decades of desire to spend, of experiences to share—because they waited too long already. Damp leaves prickle under her back, the tickle of pine needles. Sasha touching her. In the wake of that fluttery schoolgirl anxiety, there comes the steady slow burn, and the glow of safety, utter belonging, that Autumn remembers.
And the space is rough and damp, but no cold can touch them as they tangle together, with not even birds to overhear.