What the Matches Know

Some people collected keychains. Others collected magnets, shot glasses or little spoons from places they couldn’t remember visiting.

Beth collected matchbooks.

Usually small and free, marked with the name of a place she had been. Chicago’s hotel bar. A roadside diner in a quaint town. The New Orleans jazz club she stayed in for exactly forty-three minutes because the saxophonist was terrible. A small, dusty Maine tavern, where the bartender told her, without her asking, that his wife was having an affair.

Every matchbook had a story.

That was the point.

Beth traveled alone whenever she could. She preferred places that didn’t appear on postcards, towns people passed through without stopping, streets with names that meant nothing to anyone outside the county. She had two rules whenever she arrived somewhere new: find a used bookstore and a matchbook.

She’d been to thirty-seven towns that way.

Thirty-seven bookstores.

Thirty-seven matchbooks.

That first one, the one that started it all, sat in her apartment, hidden among the others.

Empty.

Her apartment was located in the heart of a town Beth secretly referred to as Snoozeville, USA. It was the kind of place where traffic lights changed more out of routine than actual need; there was a church on nearly every other corner and a convenience store where the kid behind the counter had recently been told he needed to interact with customers more.

Beth liked it.

Or, at least, she liked that nobody asked questions.

When she returned from a trip, she always performed the same ritual. Shoes off. Bag down. Coffee. Matchbook into the jar.

The jar was old, thick glass with a chipped metal lid and a layer of dust around the bottom. It sat on the highest shelf of an overcrowded bookcase, wedged between a stack of paperbacks and a ceramic cat Beth had bought at a thrift store because it looked vaguely judgmental.

Tonight, she stood on her toes and dropped the newest matchbook through the narrow opening.

It landed with a soft, papery thud. Beth stared at it.

Thirty-seven stories.

Beth lowered herself from her toes and walked to her desk. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the desk was immaculate. Pens lined up in a ceramic cup. Receipts stacked by date. Notebook centered exactly beneath the lamp. Her HP laptop sat in the middle, decorated with a single sticker:

EVERYTHING IN FACT WAS NOT FINE.

She’d put it there three years ago. She couldn’t remember why. Beth pressed the power button and waited. The laptop hummed.

Outside her window, the afternoon sun was losing its argument with the clouds. Thin pieces of light broke through the gray and disappeared again. It had been cold and wet for days, and according to the kid at the convenience store, it was supposed to keep raining all week.

Beth watched a drop of water crawl down the glass.

Then she saw the motorcycle.

Bright red.

Parked directly across the street.

The rider hadn’t taken off their helmet. Beth stopped breathing for a second. She knew that motorcycle. Not because she’d seen it recently. Because she had seen it before. A long time ago.

Her stomach tightened.

“No,” she whispered.

The rider turned their head toward her building. Beth stepped backward from the window. The laptop continued humming. She shut it.

“Shit.”

She grabbed her jacket, shoved her feet into her sneakers, and snatched her keys from the little blue bowl beside the door. She was halfway down the stairs before she realized she hadn’t locked the apartment. She almost turned around.

Then she heard the motorcycle go silent.

When she reached the lobby, she could see the rider through the dirty glass of the front door. A woman stood on the sidewalk. Dark hair. Black leather jacket. Helmet tucked beneath one arm.

Beth halted. For two heartbeats, neither woman moved. Then the woman stepped toward the door. Beth knew that face. She hadn’t seen it in years. But some people don’t disappear from your memory.

They just become quieter.

Lainey.

Beth opened the door. The two women stared at each other. There were a thousand things Beth could have said.

What are you doing here?

How did you find me?

Why now?

Instead, Lainey looked past her, toward the stairs, and said three words.

“They found him.”

Beth felt the blood drain from her face. She didn’t ask who. She already knew. Her thoughts moved toward the bookshelf and that dusty glass jar.

Toward the thirty-seven matchbooks inside it.

Thirty-six were full.

One was empty.

Matchbook #1.

The one Beth should have thrown away.

The only one she had never explained.

The first matchbook she’d ever collected.

The night everything in her life changed.

And the night two people disappeared, one being the woman she used to be… the other...

Beth looked back at Lainey.

Without warning, the aroma of that night overwhelmed her nose and the ebony smoke curls flickered in her memory, still causing her eyes to tear up. Although she had struggled to recall details from that night, the parts she remembered were seared in her memory like a brand.

“What do you mean,” she whispered, “they found him?”

Lainey didn’t answer. She looked past Beth again, towards the stairs. “Not here.”

Beth’s fingers tightened around the edge of the door. “Then where?”

“Somewhere we can talk.”

Beth almost laughed… talk.

As if they were two old friends who had bumped into each other at the grocery store. As if Lainey hadn’t spent years existing only in the most carefully locked corner of Beth’s memory.

They stepped outside. The rain hadn’t stopped; the sidewalk was slick and black beneath the streetlights. Somewhere down the block, a car door slammed, but other than that, the streets seemed to be abandoned, lost to silence.

Lainey started toward the motorcycle.

Beth didn’t follow. “Wait.”

Lainey stopped. Beth stared at the back of her jacket. “Who found him?”

Lainey turned slowly. “They found the car first.” Beth felt something cold settle beneath her ribs. “The car?”

“Near the lake.”

Beth’s mouth went dry. For a moment, neither woman spoke. Then Lainey reached into her jacket and pulled out a small plastic evidence bag. Inside was a matchbook; Beth knew immediately the scrawling green lettering was a twin to the empty one at the bottom of her jar upstairs. That was the one that would have her fingerprints on it; that was the one she held in her hand the last time she saw him.

Her eyes moved from the evidence bag back to Lainey’s face. “They found it in the car.”

Beth shook her head. “That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“I have it.”

Lainey’s expression changed. Just slightly. “You knew,” Beth whispered.

Lainey looked away. Beth's eyes moved back to the bag. Beth looked at the logo, the name of the place, and remembered it.

She remembered the smell of the smoke, the music, how the floorboards adjusted beneath her feet with every footfall. He sat across from her while Lainey was across the room in tears. She remembered the heat running through her body as the argument escalated and then… nothing.

Or at least, nothing that she had allowed herself to remember.

Lainey stepped closer.

Beth looked up at her apartment. Thirty-seven stories. Except now she was not sure how may of them were true… or how many of them were the truths she convinced herself of.

Beth closed her eyes. This was landing deep, somewhere she had spent years refusing to look. When she opened her eyes again, Lainey was holding out the evidence bag.

“Why are you giving me this?”

“I’m not.” She said, looking straight into Beth’s soul.

Beth looked down. Lainey dropped it on the ground. Then turned and walked towards the motorcycle. Beth didn’t move. She watched as Lainey started the engine and then watched as the taillights vanished around a corner.

Only then did she look down at the matchbook, laying in the middle of the street.

There was writing on the back. She leaned closer. Three words…

WE ARE EVEN.

Her hands shook as she crouched down to the ground and picked up a piece of her past. She looked up at the apartment building. For the first time, the familiar windows looked different.

Not safe. Not anonymous.

Now watched. Seen. Exposed.

Beth hurried inside. She took the stairs two at a time, entered her apartment and went straight to the bookshelf.

She looked around her apartment. Then she noticed her front door. It was open, just an inch. She had closed it, hadn’t she?

Beth slowly backed away from the bookshelf. Somewhere inside the apartment, something clicked. A sound so small it could have been the radiator. Or a lighter.

She didn’t move. Neither did the apartment.

Then, from behind her, came the faintest whisper. “Beth?”

She turned to an empty room; had she imagined it? On the floor beside the open door was a matchbook, but not one of hers. Did a neighbor drop it? Did she kick it in from the hall in her haste to get back into the faux security of her now discovered home? Where did it come from?

Slowly, she bent down and picked it up. This time, there was something inside.

Beth opened it up. Only one match was missing.

Her hands stopped shaking.

Beth slowly closed the matchbook. She had always believed every matchbook had a story. What story was this about to tell? Had she closed the first chapter, only to open the next book in the series?