New Direction

Content warning: This story contains sexual content and disturbing imagery.

It’s not an afternoon for working. Everything has turned syrupy in the heat. No air, even on her balcony, suspended six floors above the baking town. Sky glaring like a just-fired tile. Eva sweats and struggles as she tries to conjure the exact opposite of this.

A darkness-draped parlour. Heavy curtains. Just enough candlelight to flatter the pale skin of the lady waiting there. Footsteps approaching. Laces pulling loose from the back of her dress. The door sighs open and a gentleman steals in. Hands trail along velvety cushions, towards those separating thighs…

And—

And?

Eva doesn’t know. She’s written hundreds of pairs of hands sliding under hundreds of skirts. There has to be something more interesting they could do.

This is already late. A week’s extension granted by her increasingly impatient editor. Those hands needed to move somehow. But nothing comes. And the cursor blinks. And Viscount de Alba’s hands stay stuck and unfulfilled.

The church bells chime 2:00 pm. Eva closes her computer. Brandon had said he would come for half past. This is earlier than usual for a Saturday, making her think he might have other plans for later on. But whatever. Any distraction is welcome.

At 2:30 pm, Eva is showered and ready and draped on the sofa. A slash of red silk strap from her latest Maison Close purchase winking out from beneath her lacy robe.

By 2:45 pm, Brandon is late.

3:00 pm and there are no Sorry, running late messages or attempted calls. She replaces the lace with an old T-shirt and makes a cup of tea. She returns to her laptop and the scene. Trying verb after flat, useless verb. Nothing expresses the energy she wants to. Then all she can think about is Brandon’s hands. Those so soft and sensitive fingers. If only she could set them loose across the page.

Where were those hands?

4:00 pm and she opens the wine she had been saving for them. She checks her phone with teenage girl frequency. No new notifications every time. Brandon had never been more than a few minutes late before. How long until it is appropriate to be concerned? She can’t remember what he’d said he’d been doing last night. Who had he been with?

It’s not until after 5:30 pm that the lift clanks up and footsteps shuffle to her door. Then a tapping so quiet she almost misses it, despite being on edge for any sound. Eva waits for a breath or two before opening the door. She could have gone out by now. Found other things to do. Then she readies her best what time do you call this then?

“Brandon? Jesus! What happened?”

He’s brought last night around with him. Clothes rumpled like he hasn’t had a chance to sleep in them yet.

“Brandon?”

He slumps against the doorframe. Pupils wide as portals. Eva pulls him inside before the neighbours start peering out, and deposits him on the sofa. He sinks down, bones not quite up to upright.

“What happened?” she asks again.

Brandon rubs his eyes. His hands are filthy, leaving muddy wound marks along his cheeks.

“What time is it?” he asks instead of answering.

“Half five,” she tells him. Without any further context such as nearly three hours later than you were meant to be here. This only adds to his confusion.

“How is it so late?”

His words croak out. Voice a full packet of cigarettes hoarse. Eva can’t remember ever seeing him smoke. She shrugs. She’s not going to provide an explanation of the concept of time.

“But I was just there,” he says.

“Where?”

Asked sharper than is needed. But he doesn’t notice or even register the question. There is a grating noise Eva realises is his teeth grinding together. His jaw moving with a freedom it shouldn’t have, if it were jointed correctly. Above this, his face, normally so expressive, so endearing, is still. Severed nerve static.

Eva pours herself another glass of wine and stands cross-armed by the balcony. Displaced in her own living room. This is not within the terms of their arrangement. There must be more appropriate people he could go to for waiting out the tail end of a trip.

“We were in the woods…”

It takes a while for Brandon’s story to jumble out. He sometimes leaves gaps yawning in the middle of sentences. Or loops around the same point. He doesn’t notice this. He’s fixated on his fingers. The nails worrying deeper and deeper into his skin.

They had gone to the woods last night. No clarification on who they were. But they had been drinking, talking, having a good time. Then…Then? He didn’t know. Something had happened. It had gone dark. So dark. Someone had screamed. Then it was bright again. He was back in the town, on the way here.

“OK.”

Eva nods along. Now is not the time for a critique of narrative structure. The straps of her bodysuit are digging in. It wasn’t a sit around, listening to someone’s ramblings sort of outfit.

“I don’t understand.” He’s repeating this now. “I don’t understand.”

Good God, this cannot be her evening.

“Brandon, what have you taken?” Eva cuts him off. “Was Matteo at the mercado handing out samples of his special mushrooms?”

“I need to go back.”

“You need to go home. You need to sleep whatever this is off.”

Not here though. She sits down next to him to keep him upright. To prevent any ideas of him stretching out. Dirt is bursting out of the creases of his clothes. Remnants of the woods spilled all over her cushions.

“I need to go back,” he says again.

Eva is on the verge of agreeing. Sure. Do whatever you want. As long as it’s away from here. But he looks so lost. He is already indecently younger than her. Now he seems abandoned child in the supermarket young. It would be better to make sure he was somewhere safe.

“Can we call someone to take you home?” Eva asks. She hovers a would-be gentle hand by his shoulder. But getting too close would just get mud all over her as well.

“Will you come?”

She laughs.

“No. I’m not—”

Going to wander around the woods looking for whoever you were intending to bang last night.

“Please?” he whispers. “Eva, please? I need someone.”

It’s her name that does it. Begged. Needed. It overwhelms her.

“Fine. OK.”

It would at least get him out of her apartment. They could try and detour to where he lived on the way. Brandon staggers up and out the door, giving her no time to rethink or to change.

“Christ.”

She shoves her feet into the nearest pair of sandals and follows.

The savage heat of the afternoon has faded. But the orange and red streets are still furnacey in its aftermath. Being outside with him is new. Theirs is a strictly indoor arrangement. But the siesta time limbo means no one is around to explain anything to. Windows shuttered. Plants yawning down from balconies. Only the stirring of cats in the shade.

Brandon doesn’t walk like he’s drunk. He’s lurching like a just-landed sailor. Like the ground is something new to him. Eva has to keep pulling him away from the road.

Eva takes them on a route through the main plaza. She is sure his apartment is in one of the surrounding buildings. Most of the other American expats live near here, a contingent normally sprawled across the bars in the square. No one today, though. The plaza is all piled-up tables and shuttered parasols. A man sitting on the church steps squints up at them, then goes back to his newspaper.

“Who were you with last night?” Eva asks, as they reach the edge of the town. Brandon frowns.

“Tiffany… Evan… Amber.”

The names come slowly. Pulled from a great distance.

Of course, it would have been Tiffany. Beaming, blond and twenty-something, who had breezed through a couple of months ago on her way back from a Vipassana meditation retreat. Who claimed to be 1/8th Spanish and felt just so connected to here and needed to stay to explore some things. Eva had seen her out several times with Brandon, in covert corners. Always giggling, her hands exploring parts of him.

Eva stops, not willing to walk a step more for fucking Tiffany.

“Just call them,” she says. “Call and see if they’re OK?”

Brandon scrabbles through his pockets, as if this is the first time he’s thought of this. He has nothing. No phone. No keys. No cards.

“I can’t,” he says and continues on.

Eva watches him go. This is the time to head back. Finish off the wine. See if anyone else had plans for later she could insert herself into.

The steps leading down to the woodland trails have confused him. Brandon grips the handrail, legs unable to comprehend going down instead of forwards. If she leaves him now, he’ll break his neck before she’s made it back to the main plaza.

I need you, Eva

She sighs and catches up with him, pulling him away from the handrail. His skin is cold, shivery.

“This way,” she says, guiding him down.

Brandon sways along the paths leading into the woods. Automaton stepping. It’s maybe ten minutes of this, before he stops and points.

“Here.”

A cleared space, just off the path, with a circle of fallen logs and rocks in the centre that had been used as seats. Overturned wine bottles and plastic cups are scattered around. Red lipstick bites marking a few of them. Eva nudges one of the bottles and wine leaks out. It had been abandoned still half full.

“We were here,” he says.

“OK,” she says. “Is your phone here?”

She sits on a log, while Brandon drifts around. No traces of anything metallic that might be his phone or his keys. But there is a pair of knickers caught on the end of one of the logs. Lacy. A dark, boudoir purple.

Interesting. Eva would have imagined Tiffany in something flowery. Something made by Indigenous artisans in some mountain village. She would insist on telling the story every time someone pulled them off.

“There’s nothing here,” Eva announces, standing up, unwilling to make any more discoveries.

Brandon is no longer in the circle, fixating instead on the trees on the other side.

“That way,” he says, pointing at nothing that looks like a way. “They went there. I’m sure.”

Said in a voice that is not a waver or a whisper. Sure for the first time that afternoon. Before she can say anything to argue with him, he’s gone. Vanished like he’s been sucked through.

“Brandon!”

Eva hesitates. That dark clot of trees is not a path to follow. But what if he never comes back, and she was the last person to see him alive?

That face would haunt her from news posts for months.

“Fuck!”

Eva is slow behind him. Her sandals are completely unsuited to fighting through plants. Thorns savage her ankles. A buckle from her bodysuit has twisted round and is digging in so hard it might be drawing blood.

“Brandon,” she calls at him. “This is ridiculous. Nobody has been this way.”

But looking ahead now, this might not be true. Some branches are broken and hanging. Patches of leaves torn away. Someone has recently come through here. Or been taken through.

He’s too far ahead to hear her. No more of the dazed, unable to cope with pavement stumbling. He’s slipping along, spider-quick. In need of her no more.

The trees wrap around and over them. Impossible to tell now where the main path has gone or which way the town might be.

Her foot catches and twists, pulling her down. Eva grabs at a branch to save herself and her fingers brush something softer than leaves. A piece of flowery fabric, torn and fluttering.

“Brandon! If you think something has happened, we should go back. We should go to the police.”

He just tears on ahead.

The trees break. They’ve reached the point where the ground heaves up into the mountains that loom beside the town. High above, the woods continue, trees beckoning down. But there is no path to take them up there. Eva, shaking, panting, almost chokes with relief.

“There’s no way up,” she says, once she can breathe again. “We have to go back.”

Brandon can ignore her but not the physics: the sheer rock spreading out and up before them.

“No.”

Or, apparently, he can.

“Up there.”

He points along the rock face. Towards a shadowy patch higher up, uneven with cave-like indentations sucked back into the wall.

“Brandon, nobody has gone up there,” Eva says. “Not without a rope.”

“Up there,” he repeats.

He walks towards the rock and keeps walking. Pushing against it. Like he should just be able to pass right through. He takes no care with those cheekbones, grinding his skin against the ridges, blood welling.

Eva tries to pull him away. He pushes her, hard, so that she trips and falls. So that she can’t reach to stop him from lifting up onto the rock.

“Brandon! Get down!”

A failed scream. A useless whisper.

Brandon had never mentioned anything about being a climber. There’s no reason why he should be swinging up as if from ladder rung to rung and not those brutal, barely-there edges. He’s soon up at a distance that will break things if he falls. Eva bites back any further protest, in case it startles him into slipping.

He reaches a ledge just beneath the cave-like patches and something squirms towards him. Eva scrabbles back, trying to discern a waving arm or broken limb. They might have somehow made it up there last night. Tiffany might have slipped in the dark and gotten stuck. Brandon grabs for the ledge. Hands reach out and close over his.

Not a woman’s hands. Not a human’s hands. Fingers too long, too pointed. Dark as if the light rolls off them. Edges wavering.

They envelop him. He is lifted up and over, weightless and unresisting as a snatched leaf.

“Brandon?”

Nothing.

“Tiffany!?”

The trees creak back. Insects drone.

Eva should be screaming. Trying to summon someone more useful than herself. But maybe it’s better if whatever is up there doesn’t know there is anything else to reach for.

Eva claws herself up and back towards the trees. The way they came is clear, a scar of displaced branches and ripped leaves. She thrusts through, snapping and cracking her way back. The woods have other ideas about letting her go. Spiny trails keep tangling around her ankles, slicing her fingers as she fumbles to free herself. Birds stalk her from tree to tree, calls manic.

But from behind, nothing.

Back at the circle, Eva trips through the scattered bottles and cups. Evidence now, not just rubbish. Then she’s back on the path to the town. Clear and straight and free of grasping vegetation.

The town is stirring, now the afternoon heat has drained away. Shutters yawning wide. Open doors inviting in. The umbrellas have unfolded in the main plaza and the American expats have beers sweating and cigarettes smouldering at their usual table. One of them would know Brandon or even Tiffany. One of them should be able to help.

Eva recognises the guy at the end from a misguided open-mic comedy night a couple of weeks ago.

“Alex?” she calls, approaching the table.

He looks, then looks in the opposite direction and keeps looking there.

“Alex,” she tries again. “I need—”

Her reflection in a nearby window silences her. It’s a wild thing leering back: hair clumped, make-up disintegrated, arms latticed with scratches. Something to think: “Well, this is what happens when you’re over forty and without a child or a man.” Nothing anyone wanted anywhere near them on a Saturday evening.

Eva backs up, enraging a waiter with a laden tray, and swerves in escape down a side street.

After somewhat restoring herself behind some bins, Eva tries the police station instead. The person behind the desk nods along as she stammers through a more anonymous version of the story:

I was in the woods and saw someone who looked in trouble. He was trying to climb up some rocks to find his friend.

She emphasises logical things such as the sheerness of the rock and the lack of ways back down. Not how the darkness writhed up there. The way it had inhaled him.

Eva tries to find Brandon’s number to pass along. But her hands won’t obey. Disconnected fingers tremble against her phone screen, getting her PIN wrong, again and again.

Brandon no longer has his phone. It wouldn’t be much help anyway.

The person behind the desk promises that someone will go take a look. But he’s not writing anything down. It’s a Saturday night. He will have beers to drink, people to see. She can’t expect him to go off mounting a search and rescue mission.

“Brandon Garland,” Eva says again on the way out. “I’m worried something has happened to him.”

A scratching noise. Eva stops, hoping the attendant has pulled out a notebook or something to make a report. He’s staring vacantly ahead. His hands are moving faster than they should be. But on a closer look, they are not his hands. Dark, elongated fingers tearing across the desk. Eva turns again and hurries out.

Back in her apartment, the opened wine is finished off. The gin comes down from the shelf. Once it gets dark, she switches on all the lights, just in case the shadows get any ideas about becoming corporeal. Unable to sit, she paces up and down until it’s an appropriate time to rattle out the box of sleeping pills from the back of a cupboard.

But sleep is no escape. Those hands follow her there. They jumpstart her stalled scene. Viscount de Alba’s hands are moving now, with all the energy Eva couldn’t give them. Fluid. They ripple along and up and inside the waiting lady’s skirt. Their smoky, barely-there-ness making them softer than any skin could feel. And the lady is shuddering, reaching for them. Not enough that they are on her skin. They need to be under it, deeper.

Then Eva is the lady. Twisting on the velvet. Tearing away at her frills and petticoats and whatever else is between her and those hands.

She wants them all over, everywhere.

And they are everywhere she wants them to be.

Eva wakes gasping, ripping away the bedsheets. Congealed with sweat. She checks herself in the mirror, sure she will be livid with finger marks. Only the scratches from yesterday are visible. But she’s still burning, in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. A shower does little to help.

She finds her laptop. She hammers all this out while she can still feel phantom trailings along the insides of her thighs, the groove of her spine. What had taken her weeks of blank page staring is now streaming out too fast to type. Without rethinking, she sends it along to her editor.

Rough draft. Slightly new direction. Any good?

Then she takes another shower.

It’s still the cool grey of early morning, sun yet to sear through. No new messages from Brandon, nor any replies to the ones she’d sent yesterday evening. All unread. Eva calls. It rings and rings. She messages yet again: Hey, are you OK? I’m worried.As if he’ll answer this one, and not the rest.

There’s only one café in the town that will be open at this hour. A half-hidden door down a curl of alleyway. It’s busier than expected when Eva gets there. The terrace swarmed by people who haven’t made it home yet, unwilling to give up the night. Cortados clattering. Vapes furiously inhaled.

Eva shuffles past and takes the furthest away table. She feels like a too-loud noise might dismantle her. Like her bones are struggling to stay clicked in. The bags beneath her eyes will be worse than anything these children can envision yet.

The waitress is scrubbing the nearby tables with force, as if it might work to scrub all her customers away as well.

“Busy already?” Eva asks, when she comes to take her order.

The waitress rolls her eyes at the table of after-partying youths.

“Did you hear about the ones they found in the woods?”

Eva’s mouth makes the shape of “no” but without the sound.

“Found three of them completely catatonic, halfway up the mountain. Who knows how they made it up there without falling and breaking their necks. Lucky a hiker was coming down and saw them.”

“Were they—”

“High? High as goats. On some dark web 2C-BC-DC they got through the post, probably. No one just does acid anymore and keeps out of trouble.”

“But—were they OK?”

The waitress snorts. As if that was the important part of the story.

“No idea. They’re in the hospital.”

She wanders off to fetch Eva’s coffee, shining tables as she goes.

Eva’s phone vibrates and she almost drops it trying to open the message. It’s her editor.

-Fab! Love it! Way better than all that Jane Austen-y bullshit you’ve been doing recently. Send the revised version as soon as you can.

Eva thumbs-up emojis in response and throws her phone back down. A tapping noise is bothering her. Persistent above the racket of the table of party-goers. Eva looks over. Coffees held in blurry hands. Rows of inky fingers drumming on the tables.

Laura O'Meara is a writer who grew up in the UK and has since translocated to Valenica, Spain. Her short fiction has appeared in Nature Futures, Turn and Work, and In the Veins. She is currently working on her first novel.

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Editor’s Note:

Thank you for reading Laura O’Meara’s “New Direction.”

Writers have always borrowed from life, although the transaction becomes more complicated when the experience being borrowed has frightened or wounded us. Putting something into words can make it feel manageable. It can also give an experience a second life, one that begins to escape the writer’s control.

In “New Direction,” Eva makes her living by manufacturing desire. Her fictional lovers have become so familiar that even their hands are bored with the work. Then an encounter in the woods introduces her to something beyond her imaginative repertoire. O’Meara’s cleverest move is to let the language of erotic fiction absorb the language of horror. The same hands that inspire terror become instruments of pleasure, and Eva’s creative breakthrough shows through an experience she’s only barely begun to understand.

In fact, there’s a wicked joke here about artistic inspiration, such as the willingness to convert another person’s suffering into compelling “material” or “content.” Eva’s editor, to that end, recognizes the improvement immediately, with none of the knowledge that might complicate her enthusiasm later.

The story’s final images suggest that Eva has perhaps discovered something more consequential than a fresh literary direction. I’d even argue her imagination has become receptive to an influence whose reach extends far beyond the page.—Jon Negroni

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