Hearth of Ashes

Amy knocks on a door for the first time in ten years. She wipes snow off the tweed blazer she wears to the office each day, smoothes her hair over her ear that’s gone red from the mark of a pencil chronically perched there.

The door opens. She clears her throat. “Hello, Ollie.”

“…Amy? Is that you?”

Ollie is two feet taller. His cheeks are sharp, glasses gone. Plain grey sweatpants, at least size 10 flip flops. The shoe rack she saw the last time she was at his house, the one that once held his Dino crocs, is gone. So is his long hair, his cheeks, the pigment from them.

“I’m not here,” she tells him. She does her best not to look at his expression. Confusion, annoyance, maybe some disgust. But most of all, unequivocal confusion. She barely recognizes any of it.

“What?”

The end of their friendship hadn’t been a big volcano, burning and spreading ashes that could still be cupped and gazed at, that still help traces of something existent. Amy doesn’t know how to describe the end other than that it ended. They found different people, walked different paths. No ashes, no split pieces to be puzzled back together.

“Why are you here?” Ollie asks. “Did you want something?”

“No.”

“Then…”

Amy panics. What lie can she say? I’m drunk, but she’s sober and acts it too. A wild thought comes to her, and before she can think, she blurts, “You’re having a dream.”

Ollie scoffs. “This is all pretty real.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m freezing cold.”

“Oh.” Amy frowns. “Uh, did you know, you can be cold in a dream, too. The brain can convince itself of anything.”

Amy knows that memories are only the last time you thought about that memory. A memory of a memory. But this Ollie, this man, doesn’t fit her profile of him. This is somebody else. Someone who grew up and decided he didn’t need her to witness it. A man who was completely content moving on without her by his side.

She decides this night doesn’t count. It cannot be the cover picture for their albums of memories, the ones that spin in her head like a broken record.

It just cannot.

Ollie rubs his eyes. His voice has dropped, but it’s the one part she still recognizes— even in its low range, she can barely, just barely recognize the way he drags vowels. Like the call of a bird that’s flown away years ago, but the shape of the dried-up lake brings back the song.

She runs over the lines of the story in her head — she’s a ghost, a genie, a vision. Stories are easier to believe than reality, right?

“Why are you at my door?” Ollie drawls.

“I’m not real,” she repeats.

Through his scrunched face, a laugh puffs out into a wisp of frost-sculpted vapor. His breaths, taking form. Goosebumps speckle his bare arms. “Okay,” he says.

His eyes flutter, and he half-dozes against the doorframe while fully waiting for her to leave. For a second, they’re six again, and he’s at her door, limbs slinking with exhaustion as he stubbornly denies that he was having a nightmare, all the way up until he falls asleep beside her. They’re ten, and he’s at her door when nobody showed up to her birthday, and he’s handing her the button that snapped off his jacket because he knows she loves crafts, and she always finds a way to weave the world around her into something beautiful. Except she never crafted with the button, she kept it tied around her wrist until she looked down one day and it was gone. Despite herself, she’d started crying. She didn’t even know why until her chest burned with expelled tears.

“Okay,” Amy echoes. Then, to amp the absurdity, adds, “I’m a genie.”

Ollie blinks. His pupils dilate. He cannot think of another explanation why Amy has suddenly shown up, so a dream it is? “I’m… tired. Can you come back tomorrow?”

“I can’t. You’ll wake up.”

“Okay.”

The door hedges open another inch. Amy follows him inside.

All of the furniture is different. It feels, to Amy, like falling into your own bed only to find it covered in mud. No wooden table stained by half-eaten bowls of strawberry ice cream. No cream walls scuffed at the bottom by children filming skits. The missing crystal on the chandelier, the one seven-year-old Ollie stole to string into a necklace for a Christmas gift, has been replaced.

A plastic Christmas tree spirals up the twenty-foot windowed walls, more lights than pine needles, and no presents underneath.

“How are you?” Ollie asks dryly. Amy would’ve preferred he said nothing to these meaningless stock words.

“The real Amy is fine,” she says. “She’s working now, and she’s good enough. How are you?”

“Good,” he says. Amy waits for more, instinctively. She has to spur real logic to realize he’s done talking. Somehow, she can’t wholly convince herself that this is real. Maybe she’s dreaming, too. She wishes she was dreaming.

“You can start your questions,” Amy says. “Since I’m a genie.”

“Okay.” Ollie sighs in resignation. “How do I get rich?”

“Why? You already are.”

“True.” He thinks. “Will my girlfriend leave me?”

“That’s not a wish.”

“Neither was my rich question.”

“Why are you worried about your girlfriend leaving?”

The corners of Ollie’s mouth tug. “Good question. I’m hard to stay away from, aren’t I?”

“You- do you mean-“

“Just kidding.” Ollie’s smile drops like a curtain, and Amy bites her tongue. Damn it.

“That’s it.”

“Do you want more time to think?”

“Nah.” Ollie shrugs, and a piece of Amy shrivels for good.

“You look good,” she whispers.

Ollie finally looks up at her skeptically. “Thanks.”

Silence. Amy stands up. “I’ll go home,” she recites, rehearsed, “but I want to leave you with one last thing.”

Amy walks to the door.

“I hope that you are happy,” she says. Not sarcastic nor condescending, nor entirely true. She only said it because when all the other words rushed up her throat, her heart went wild, shedding sweat all over, and her mouth was paralyzed. Anxiety sucked her voice dry. Even if this wild excursion was the last chance she would ever get, she still couldn’t get the words out.

Amy lingers in the doorway. Ollie is already gone, but she can see him from the last time they talked. She was at his house in middle school to collaborate on a science lab they’d been paired for. They’d barely been talking for years. On her way out, Ollie had walked her to the door and asked, “Can you come back tomorrow?”

“I have plans,” Amy had retorted, which was another lie. She had just discovered iced lattes and hair irons, and Ollie had taken to conversing exclusively with the football team, ignoring her at school. Amy hadn’t been happy with this. She had decided he must seek her out, to beg for her company again. Now that he had, it wasn’t enough. She had had to prove she wasn’t a loner, that she had people who cared about her if he didn’t.

He didn’t reach out after that.

Amy closes the door behind her, and is greeted by the golden string lights that decorate surrounding houses. They blink through the blackness, bringing the stars down into glass bulbs that carry memories through year after year.

The same snowflakes from last year hang from the lampposts. Amy walks through the weak spillage of yellow light that fights through the new, flurrying snow, blurring everything back into a haze.