Wax Phenomenon

Theme of Stillness

While I’m distracted, the film reel of wax people inches forward, frame by frame.

The once-bustling cafe is still. The line of morning-worn work soldiers has stopped marching. Out the window a Buick goes nowhere. Six blackbirds hover, toes touching telephone lines, wings spread like fingers. The ash-haired old woman across from me is solving sudoku with one hand, her other hand wiping away a blueberry muffin crumb that won’t budge. Nothing will budge. I pull out my phone.

“Do you ever wonder if your life has a theme?” I sip coffee, waiting for Gary’s reply. It takes a moment.

“What do you mean?” Gary says. “Like a song? Like the theme from The Simpsons?”

“No, not a musical theme. Like... an idea.”

“An idea?”

“An idea... that pushes through into everything you do and connects them. Invisibly. Like a string. A recurring... A theme, Gary!”

Gary stays quiet for a moment, gathering his thoughts. He’s an eclectic man, a jack of all professions, interests, and indeterminable opinions. Sometimes he flaunts his education and wisdom. Other times, he comes off as egotistical or naive. He is always changing, always moving, always flowing. The opposite of my current surroundings.

“Like memory?” Gary says, in the timbre of a young woman—gentle, curious.

“Memory could be a theme, sure. Or revenge. Or redemption. Love, war, karma, society.”

“Identity,” Gary suggests. “Data. Location.”

“I suppose so.”

“Light versus dark?”

I meet eyes with a man about my age, a handsome guy with a flannel shirt and a bead necklace. He remains, unblinking, unaware that I’m staring into his soul. When the world freezes like this, it’s hard to imagine people as more than mannequins. 

“Light versus dark is so... overdone. Bleh.”

Gary laughs. “Quit being pretentious.”

“Sorry. Feeling pretentious today, I guess.”

“I’ll play along. What’s your theme?”

“Anxiety? Stillness?”

Gary gets quiet. 

Customers wait in a tuneless conga line. Six people, heads down, idling on their phones. It looks to have progressed since I last noticed. Before, there were seven. Other changes: The blackbirds have settled on the wire. The muffin crumb has been napkin-ed.

“Is it... happening again?” Gary asks.

“Yeah,” I say, trying not to sound too worried. I fidget in my seat. “It’s like a wax museum. Wherever I go, people are perfectly still. They don’t breathe, don’t make noise. When I leave or get distracted, they seem to do stuff. But not while I’m here. Not while I’m paying attention.”

“Sounds cool.”

“I hate it.”

“It’s a shame. They say our generation can’t appreciate these sorts of phenomena.” His voice morphs into a childish squeal. “Ooh, you’re like the Flash! Maybe you can move things around before anyone notices.”

“It doesn’t feel like a super power.”

“It’s a curse, then.”

“It doesn’t feel like that, either.” I spin the phone in my hand, trying to find the right words. The cafe remains a picture book of people and objects. “It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s... a theme.”

“I wish I could see it,” Gary whispers. “Sounds better than being stuck with my family. They’re always so loud and annoying. I barely have time to myself.”

“Hm. That doesn’t sound great either. But... at least it’s natural. I don’t think people are supposed to be wax.”

I notice a wax woman nearby reaching down for a fallen pen. I pick it up, place it in her palm, squeeze her stiff fingers around it. Her skin has a clammy warmth, like putty in the sun. I take the moment to appreciate her lipstick, a pinkish brown, painted perfectly on her lips like a doll. Her hair, long, dirty blonde, wrapped haphazardly with a black scrunchy so that her bangs float across her gray eyes. Her film-reel face inches forward one frame. Then another. Like everyone, she has been perfectly manufactured for the moment in which she is stuck.

“It’s unnerving,” I say, plopping back down.

“Can I come see?” Gary lives in different timezones, scattered on the back of the planet. 

“Maybe.” I thumb my bottom lip. “I’d be worried, though.”

“About what?”

“If you showed up and got waxed, too.”

“I wouldn’t,” Gary chuckles. “I’m the main character!”

I laugh. “If you’re the main character, how come everyone around me is frozen?”

“Have you considered that the only reason you aren’t inanimate is because you’re talking to me?”

“I don’t know... good point.” I take a sip of coffee. “I don’t understand how it works.”

“Maybe if I were there, as a witness, reality wouldn’t freeze anymore.”

“Maybe.”

Gary changes his voice again—more authoritative and rough. “Just go outside.”

“I’m at a cafe.”

“You need to be outdoors, physically. Trust me, I live alone. I know what it’s like to be stuck indoors all day. It can feel like you’re in hibernation, waiting for the world to thaw.”

“It’s... worth a shot.”

On the sidewalk, not much is different. The cars are metal statues—wax drivers following directions from plastic phones. I take a seat on a little white bench, the paint peeling off. There are tufts of grass growing around the rusted toes of the bench. One of them has a white, stringy head. A white clover. It wiggles in the breeze. The first sign of movement. Then it freezes again. I feel an emptiness in my stomach. I pull out my phone.

“It’s all wax out here, too,” I tell Gary, not sure what he can possibly do to help.

“How often does this happen?”

“Maybe once a week? More, lately.” I take a breath. It’s cold today, fog coming in. My fingers ache with the January air. “It happens more often when I come out in public.”

“You just don’t notice it at home,” Gary asserts. “It’s happening there, too. But there’s nothing moving around at home, so you can’t tell when it becomes wax.”

“Maybe.” I sip my coffee. It’s weedy, the bitterness no longer pleasant. “That would make sense for my theme.”

“Emptiness?”

“No,” I say. I pretend to roll my eyes. “Stillness. Didn’t I say that already?”

“I was checked out for that part of the conversation. Sorry, pal.”

“No worries.”

I top up my coffee inside. I have to squeeze between two statues in overcoats to reach the carafe. The scene has changed. It’s still full of people on their phones, drinking coffee, sitting and standing, but most of them are new, and in new positions. The motions, the relationships, the faces, the clothing, all randomized. The barista who took my order before is cemented in a chair, checking her Bluesky posts. The woman with the pen is waiting outside the restroom, in the middle of a conversation with a younger woman who, like two others beside her, is adjusting her hair in her phone camera.

I spend the next hour or so talking with Gary. We’ve never met, but I’ve known him my whole life. The things we say, the way we talk, has changed through the years, like any relationship. Most often we just make jokes, share stories, or laugh at stupid memes. Occasionally we chat about upcoming games, exercise routines, or good sci-fis we’ve read. It’s rare that we linger on the deeply personal, the substantial. I know from experience that getting “too real” is a faux pas. But today, I can’t help but bring up my strange affliction, over and over. The stillness agitates me. It fatigues me. I find myself talking to Gary just to make the stillness go away.

“Every now and again, everything shifts without me noticing, like a super slow framerate.”

“You’re still on this? Can’t you just ignore it?”

“It’s... unsettling. There’s a guy sitting next to me now. He smells like beer. I don’t even know when he got here.”

“Say hi.”

“He’s frozen.”

“Maybe he’ll unfreeze.”

I imagine the man turning to me with a fluid, rubbery face as if he were melting from the rain, his lips and teeth flapping and chomping in conversation. It might work. But for how long? And what if, even in motion, he’s still so slow that it doesn’t make a difference? Then I’ll be trapped, sinking into a quicksand of banalities.

“What if talking to him causes me to freeze?”

“You serious? Are you afraid to talk to people?”

“No, not really. Maybe I’m a bit awkward sometimes, but talking to people isn’t the issue.”

“What’s the issue, then?” He’s getting frustrated. I can tell by his voice, his tone. I’m bringing it up too much, dumping it on him. I don’t know for sure if he believes me or not. I think he does. But he’s on the other side of the world, too far away to care. I’m sure he has his own phenomena to deal with.

“Never mind. Looks like everyone’s rebooting,” I lie.

The Seasonal Inversion

I spend the next few days mostly at home, without incident. I almost forget my malady, adapting to it like a gentle toothache, until Gary calls and tells me about people becoming motionless. He’s skimmed through all of the articles, scrolled through the comments, watched all of the videos. The condition isn’t unique to me—not at all. It’s global.

Gary barely seems to recall that I am afflicted by the phenomenon. He talks about it as if it were a new thing, something he discovered himself. It’s so common, he says, that it’s almost obvious. I want to remind him that I’ve been talking about it for months, but I know he’ll just call me a hipster and claim I’m showing off.

“There’s a woman in your area who deals with these things,” Gary says.

“How do you know where I live?”

“You told me. You must’ve.”

“Don’t be creepy, Gary.”

“Well, this woman—a specialist—she goes to the cafe near your place, the one you were at the other day.” I hear him rummaging around in his kitchen, glasses clinking, vague echoes of silverware against linoleum. “Although, it could all still be a hoax. ”

“I thought you believed it.”

“People freezing in place? Sounds like something the old-timers would make up to make the youngsters look bad.” Gary giggles. “But look, now that I’ve seen the headlines, I believe you.”

Gary helps me set an appointment with the specialist. There are many specialists for the many blossoming phenomena. It’s becoming difficult to track. And it’s true; some of them are hoaxes. Manufactured phenomena, tweaked perfectly to sound true, used by conmen and corporations alike to prey on society’s growing hypochondria. But this one, I know it’s real. 

The phenomenon is called “wax weather.” I feel a bit of pride at the name. The word “wax” is exactly how I’ve been describing it to Gary. Even if everyone is going crazy, at least our taxonomy is aligned.

The specialist is waiting for me in a gazebo at Itibulm Park. It’s a beautiful faux-mahogany structure dimpling the grass, nearly at the center of one of the city’s two seasonal inversion phenomena. Winter grasps every tree and bush in the park until the blurred edge of the phenomenon where some universal instability insists it’s summer. It’s like walking through a reverse snow globe, warm sun on my cheeks, grass brittle, air dry. I remove my coat.

In the gazebo, the specialist sits, blonde hair over exposed shoulders, beads of sweat blooming at the armpits of her tank top. She nods me over. I recognize her immediately. She’s the woman from before; the one who dropped her pen in the cafe.

“Nice to meet you.” She sticks her arm out, firm handshake. I pocket my phone, weak handshake.

“Do you remember me? From the cafe?”

“You got my pen for me.” She pulls the pen from a side pocket in her green canvas backpack, twirls it between finger and thumb like a drumstick. “What a gentleman.”

“You were wax.”

“How d’ya figure?”

I slide my phone out, activate the screen. “My friend Gary says you—”

She slams her hand onto mine, heavy, pushing the fingers and phone toward my knee, her lips pinched in a sour expression. “The first thing we have to agree on is that you absolutely can not talk to Gary while I’m around, okay? That’s rule number one.”

I place the phone face down on the gazebo’s bench, making a show of pushing it arm’s length away. I sit. The hard wood cuts through my jeans, rubs against my bones. But I like the coal warmth it has absorbed from the unnatural dome of summer.

“I wasn’t going to call Gary, I just was saying—”

“Good. No calling is a start. The second rule is that we have to ignore Gary altogether.”

“How come you know Gary so well?”

She laughs, a windy laugh that blasts through her lips like the hydraulic brakes of a community bus. “Pfft! Dude, everyone knows Gary. That’s why we aren’t going to talk about him anymore, okay?”

“But what if he—”

“Do you want help with the wax weather or not?”

I can see she’s serious. Her shoulders are tilted forward, engaging me politely, yet tensely, weight on palms pressed against firm thighs. She’s ready to lift herself and leave at any moment. Is she impatient, or just uncompromising? I decide to hear her out. Whatever she has to say about my involvement in the wax phenomenon can only help at this point. Plus, when was the last time I talked to a beautiful woman in a tank top on a summer day?

“I’m listening.”

“The wax weather is all around us,” she begins, all business. “Most cities have at least a hundred, let’s say, ‘bubbles’ of phenomena—like the one here,” she motions outward to the seasonal inversion, “keeping us warm in winter. Except the wax bubbles stick to people. They shrink and expand. When you’re in it, everyone else seems to stop.”

“Seems? They stop for me.”

“No, they only seem to stop.”

“So, at the cafe, when I handed you the pen, were you wax?”

“No, you were.” She leans back, crossing her tight-jeaned legs and spreading her arms along the backside of the gazebo rail. She takes up the space naturally, like a length of dark ivy. “When you experience the wax phenomenon, you are the one with the issue, not everybody else.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I could move around. I handed you the pen.”

“It doesn’t matter if it makes sense. That’s why it’s a phenomenon.” She shakes her head incredulously. “You must spend a lot of time inside.”

“More than I should,” I admit.

She pulls a small bag of candies from her canvas bag, pops one into her mouth and offers some to me. I take a few, unwrapping one and slipping it through my lips. It tastes like water, like nothing. Not even sugar. I thank her anyway.

“Look, what matters is how to adapt to it. How do you feel when everyone stops?”

I fiddle with a shirt button. “Anxious,” I say, after a moment. “Eager... or, agitated? I feel like I need to be doing something—anything.”

“That’s the normal reaction. It’s uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. That’s the word. It’s not painful or anything, it’s not killing me. But it’s uncomfortable, even though nothing is happening.”

“No, no,” she wags her finger cartoonishly. “It’s uncomfortable because nothing is happening, not ‘even though.’” 

She digs into her canvas bag again, deeper this time. I can’t help but watch her arms, a shimmer of light sweat along toned biceps like sweet potatoes, stretching and reshaping with every acute shuffle. She has the appearance of someone who spends all of her time outdoors, moving around, throwing and jumping and stretching. A natural glow, a natural health. She says “ah ha!” and reveals a pack of long playing cards.

“Tarot?”

“No,” she says. “Medicine. You need exposure therapy, my friend. You need to sit in the stillness and inspect it. Just sit. Look. Breathe.”

“I don’t see how this’ll help make everything move again.”

“It... won’t.”

I frown. “Then what’s the point?”

“The wax has already settled. It’s sticking to you. There’s nothing we can do about that. We just need to... look at things differently.” She places the deck of cards onto my palm. It feels oddly like holding my phone, except the sides of the deck have ridges, the stiff paper bristling pleasantly against my fingertips. “Your task is to look deep into the images on these cards. Just look. Inspect. Try to understand them. Do this in moments of stillness.”

I flip over the first card. There’s nothing on its face except a bunch of tree branches. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.” She stands up and adjusts her tank top and bra. She yanks a maroon long-sleeve from her canvas bag and slips it on, then adds another layer of light jacket, yarn scarf, and knit beanie.

“How’s this supposed to help me stop the wax?”

“The only way to understand the ‘how’ is to do it. That’s the whole point. Don’t expect a quick fix.”

She shoulders her bag. I’m left unsure what to think, cards in hand, watching as she crosses the summer grass back into the oppressive city winter.

The Missing Blues

“Have you ever heard of Hume’s missing blue?”

“Missing blue?” I’m half-listening to Gary’s thoughts on random pieces of pop philosophy. He caught on that I liked it once and, left to his own devices, will often spiral into obscure rants about Baudrillard or Wittgenstein or Hegel, just for me. While he talks I busy myself chopping garlic, onions, and broccoli for a simple stir fry. Listening to Gary while I make dinner has been a part of my daily routine since college. “How do you miss a blue?”

“It’s a thought exercise,” he confides. “If you had test subjects—let’s say, a child who’s been raised in a white room, who has never seen the color blue—could that kid ever imagine it?”

“Um... I don’t know. We don’t even know if normal people can imagine blue the same way as everyone else.”

“Don’t get caught up in that,” he says with an edge of disgust. He gets touchy when I attempt to break apart his examples. “Imagine you show this kid dark blue and light blue, but not a blue in between. This kid has never seen any blue, but now they see this dark blue and this light blue. Can they use the experience of the two other blues to imagine the missing blue?”

“I’m cooking.”

“So what? You can’t cook and think at the same time?”

It’s been a week since my meetup with the phenomenon expert—the medicine woman, I’ve come to call her. Since she handed me that deck of cards I’ve barely left my apartment. Between work, the gym on the first floor, and grocery delivery services, there isn’t much reason to explore. It’s as if the outside doesn’t exist.

“You know, you should listen to me more,” Gary says, his voice tinny and indignant. “You might reach a catarse.”

“Catarse?”

“Excuse my English. I think the word is... catharsis?”

“Catharsis about what?”

“Hell, I don’t know! It’s not my catarse! I’m circling your interests. It’s up to you to understand the meaning at the center of that circle.”

“No offense, but sometimes you’re just a bunch of noise, Gary.”

“Hey!”

“Hey yourself.”

He shrinks, taking on a childish demeanor. “You’ve gotten awful dismissive since you met up with that ‘medicine woman.’ I shoulda never told you about her.”

“It’s not her,” I say softly, tossing the ingredients into a frying pan of sesame oil and shredded ginger. I don’t know if I believe myself or not. It’s true that I’ve felt different since my meeting at the Itibulm gazebo, and it’s true that I’ve had more than a healthy share of romantic daydreams of the medicine woman, but... no, it’s not her that has me wound up tight. It’s the cards.

Every night I find myself laying in bed, choosing between chatting with Gary or thumbing through the deck. I haven’t talked to him about the deck yet. It feels too personal. The cards are my “medicine,” after all, and I’m used to taking medicine in private. 

At first, I wasn’t focusing on the cards well. What else was there to see? One card had an omelet. Another had nebulas. Another had a bunch of crickets. When I concentrated too hard, I could feel the world waxing over, even though there was no one else in my apartment for me to measure this feeling against. I’d get frustrated and call Gary, see if he was awake. But after a few days, a connection formed. Invisible, like the wind. There was a full forty-five minutes where I did nothing but contemplate the picture of a brown paper bag sitting upright on the cement, the top crisp and crinkled as if it had once been gripped tightly in a fist... a certain weight to the bag... something important inside, something that might be obvious if I could just take a peak.

“Do you want to keep listening to the philosophies of Hume?”

“No thanks, Gary.” 

I set my plate; a scoop of rice, a scoop of stir fry, and a small scoop of greek yogurt mixed with hot sauce on the side. I fan the deck on the table, studying it while I eat. Nothing new is coming. It’s too much for me. I give up. It’s time to cheat.

“Gary, what do you know about these cards?”

The Living Forest

The next day, I’m on a bus headed toward Kilarnold. The whole way, I’m talking to Gary about the deck of cards.

“I feel bad for asking you about them,” I say.

“Man, who cares? You’d figure out the puzzle by yourself anyhow. What’s it matter if you ask a friend?”

“She seemed pretty adamant that I not talk to you during our meeting.”

“That was the meeting, though. And I agree with her, it would have been rude to chat with me the whole time. But still, she didn’t say you couldn’t ask around about the cards, right?”

“True.”

I rotate the deck in my left hand, my phone in my right. I imagine myself holding two red bricks, alternately placing each to my ears. Other people on the bus see me there, wrapped in a puffy coat, unable to adjust my clothes or grab my bag because I refuse to let go of the bricks. It’s a silly daydream, but it keeps popping up, persistent in its nonsense. 

Luckily, everyone on the bus is wax.

Gary doesn’t have many insights on the cards, surprisingly. He found millions of others worth talking about: French-suited playing cards, Portuguese-suited playing cards, French-suited tarot, Matura cards, German-suited, Jass decks, Kaiser decks, Grand Jeu Mlle Le Normand, Charles Hodges geographical astronomy decks, Picture Show magazine’s 1930 celebrity zodiac deck, Russel Gant tarot, Thoth tarot, Japanese hanafuda and Korean hwatu, 19th century Austrian cartomancy cards, Mexican Lotería, a number of modern board game components, and even a special Britney Spears Oracle deck featuring illustrated homages such as The Strong Woman, The School Girl, and The Space Princess. We spent almost two hours talking about these cards, laughing, scratching our heads. None of them came close to the deck given to me by the woman at the gazebo.

This deck—my “medicine”—has no text, no watermarks, no indication of a creator or brand. Other than the professional quality of the manufacturing, there is no indication this is anything other than a series of artistic images by a hobbyist. One card has nothing but a barren, dry hillside. Another has the chubby legs of an infant surrounded by baby bottles, diapers, and empty baby food jars. The pictures themselves are some blend between reality and wall art. They look like real photographs neatly painted over to give a surreal, artistic glow.

Most of the cards feature nature. The first card I had pulled from the deck was nothing but tree branches and leaves. This was the lead Gary and I decided to follow. 

“There is a mix of both deciduous and coniferous plant life in this image,” Gary said the night before in a professorly tone, examining a blurry photo I sent from my dining table. “Perhaps a mix of Pinus sylvestris, Crataegus monogyna, and Quercus robur. Very likely it’s from a forest near the base of some hills or mountains. It really depends on your location. Where do you live?”

I reach Kilarnold shortly after noon. The town is small and clean, white buildings with red trim and dark brown roof tiles. It has an age, a mossiness, but one of antique elegance rather than dilapidation.

I walk the roads for a short while. Signage indicates the Molyssa Trail that ramps slowly up towards the hilly Kilarnold outskirts. Estimated time to the Molyssa Summit is four hours and fifty minutes. Most of the trail coincides with service roads, but that doesn’t stop the foot traffic. Couples and families are walking up and down at a leisurely pace despite the winter chill. This traffic tapers off after a certain distance. I only pass other hikers—usually an older couple, frozen in wax—once every ten minutes or so. I spend the first hour chatting with Gary, making remarks about the juniper bushes and scrawny birds. Eventually my battery gets low and I’m left with just the yawning of the wind, the twinkle-scratching of bare branches, the shur-shur-shweet and caw-caaaw of hidden animals.

After another hour my bodily fluids turn against me. The exertion of the steady climb heats me up, which causes me to sweat too much. It cools me down, but too well, my sweat pairing with the chilled breeze, the heightening altitude, and the crisp winter air. My skin is damp, purpling. Despite my healthy eating and my consistent gym schedule, I’m out of shape. Running machines and controlled weight movements have not prepared me for the simple act of walking long distances up a hill. Snot threatens my upper lip.

I dig one of the water candies out of my pocket and suck on it, just to have something to do while I walk.

Three hours in, I reach an unnatural clearing. Until now, the trail has been fenced in by trees and bushes and shrubs, funneling me toward an un-see-able destination. But this area is large, square, sickly brown. The ground is flipped and jumbled like strewn trash: clods of earth, broken stumps, splintered branches, worm-colored roots. Off in the distance is a single sleeping tractor next to a pile of logs. This is a lumber harvest. I recognize it from the cards.

I flip through the deck until I find the barren hillside. I couldn’t understand it before, but I see it now. The mangled roots. The tufts of yellow weeds, string thin, poking up through the dry soil like the soft hairs on a pig. I still don’t know what it means, but something jostles loose in my head, an idea I can tongue out from between the teeth of my mind.

I walk the trail further until the forest begins again. Except, it’s not a forest like before. Something is wrong with it. Its edge is ruler-straight against the deforested land, like a neighbor’s yard fighting a driveway. More than that, all the trees, high and straight, aren’t proud. They don’t seem lively. They’re healthy and erect, but young and distant. I step through the treeline, my shoes nearly slipping on the soft moss and mud.

It’s quieter inside. Quiet like a funeral. There are few birds, if any. I go deeper and deeper, careful not to slip and fall, until finally I see a rock tall enough to sit on. And that’s when it occurs to me how flat the forest is. There are no mounds, no boulders, no dips and curves and trenches. It’s hard to notice things that are missing, but when you do, it’s not sudden. It’s a sloping recognition, snowballing in your stomach. The trees, too, are set apart with a measured flatness—an equidistance, as if snapping to a grid. This must also be a lumber harvest, before harvest time. A timber forest. It wasn’t here a few years ago, and it won’t be here long. Eventually the tractors and chainsaws will come through, pull it all down and carry it away like airport luggage.

I look at my phone battery. Still low. I don’t know why I bother.

Maybe I’m uncomfortable.

Maybe everything is wax right now, and I need a diversion. But there’s nothing else to divert me. I’m forced to focus on my surroundings.

White sky. It pushes through the tree boughs like wrinkles in a bed pillow. I compare this image to the card with the branches and leaves. The card is similar in perspective—an upward angle—except with more life. The card has, as Gary proposed, at least three different types of trees, pines with green-and-blue needles, hawthorns of splayed spades, olive and yellow and glossy. In contrast, the timber forest has thin, bony tree fingers of porcupine quality, ghostly needles combating the cold gray air. 

The biggest difference is that white sky. In the card, not even a little glimpse of sky is visible through the trees. I know it’s back there, but I can’t see it.

I head back down toward town. I’m cold, tired, and smiling. I’m confident I learned something, but I don’t know what the hell it was.

Sensory Blame Disorder

On the bus, an old man slams down beside me. I almost drop my cards. I’d been concentrating on the image of the thousands of crickets, lost in thought. I didn’t even realize it had started to rain. The man beside me is soaking wet.

“This seat’s wet,” he says.

I laugh a little, thinking it’s a joke. But then I catch his eye. He’s serious. And there’s something not right about the way he sways and blinks as if trapped in gel.

“Your seat wet, too?”

“No,” I say. “It’s... no it’s not.”

“This whole damn bus is wet.” He slides his hand along the top of the seat in front of him, then flicks a sheet of droplets from his fingertips. “Damn. Wet.”

I look around and notice that he and I are the only passengers. This irritates me a little. But then I recognize him. “Don’t I know you from the cafe?”

“Cafe? Which... w-which cafe?” The way he slurs, it’s obvious it’s not just his outsides that are wet. His breath is swimming in Guinness. He’s probably been drinking since noon. “The one in town?”

“You sat next to me. About a week ago.” I knew I wasn’t mistaken. He was frozen at the time. I had been talking to Gary and didn’t notice him sitting down. Well... I sure noticed him this time. “It’s fine if you don’t remember.”

“Ah, sorry, kid, I c-can’t... understand you that well. You drunk or somethin’?”

“What? No. I think you are?”

“I don’t understand you that well. You’ve been drinking.” He leans heavily toward me as the bus turns. His damp coat presses rain water through my shirt sleeve. “You gotta phone I could borrow?”

“I can call for help, if that’s what you need.”

“I just need to call Gary.”

I blink. “You know Gary?”

“You drunk, kid? Of course I know Gary.” He sets his lips loosely together and stares at me, waiting for a response. I don’t know what to say or do, so I unlock my phone and hand it to him. He’s too drunk to take off with it, and we’re both on a bus, so I figure nothing could go wrong..

“Your phone’s wet,” he says, sliding his fingers all around the screen. “How is it that everything is so wet like?”

“Bad weather,” I respond weakly, not knowing if he was being rhetorical or not.

Sure enough he calls Gary, accuses him of being drunk, then begs for help. I don’t hear everything Gary says, but they seem to be organizing for the old man’s wife to pick him up from the bus stop.

“Thank ye,” the old man grumbles. “You might want to... to move seats. M-might be a leak? Don’t know how everything got so wet in here.”

“Everything’s not wet,” I say, knowing it won’t do any good. “It just seems wet, because you are.”

“Heh, you sure been drinkin’, kid. Look outside.” He reaches over me with a squish—I sink in my seat—and sticks his hand out in the rushing wind. “See! No rain!” His palm opens. My phone drops into the road.

The Endless Skies

It’s been two hours. The heat has stopped rising from the cement, and street lamps flicker against a pale yellow sky. Every time a car passes, I hunch my shoulders a bit, afraid it’ll see my desperation and continue to ignore me.

There is very little walking room along the side of the road. My shoes brush wetly through kikuyu grass. I was lucky enough to find my phone in the street, ten minutes back, after begging the driver to make an unplanned stop. With the sturdy case, maybe my phone could have survived the drop. But it couldn’t survive the traffic.

I pet the broken skeleton in my pocket. The screen, shattered to a million pieces, cuts the tip of my thumb. I leave it alone. Instead I eat a water candy. I roll it around with my tongue, the ball playing left and right, xylophoning along my teeth. With enough concentration, I can taste something mineral, salty and earthy. Or is it my imagination? Does this flavorless candy have a secret flavor locked deep inside? Or am I just tired and aching and tasting phantoms?

I make it to the city, then further into its heart. Natural landscape has transformed into familiar cement blocks of takeaway restaurants, mobile phone stores, and gas stations. The chill has made me stiff. However, it’s summer at the Itibulm gazebo. I follow the street I think will lead me there and, sure enough, I walk through the invisible wall of gentle warmth. Inside the phenomenon the evening feels like a puffy blanket. I rub my arms, adjust my backpack, lay in the grass. Just lay there, starring up, as the sky melts into purple and gold and impossible blue screensavers. The water candy dissolves on my tongue.

Below my eyeline, a woman approaches. The woman from the cafe. My medicine woman. She lays alongside me, hands on stomach.

“Beautiful evening,” she says.

“Incredible,” I agree.

“Am I wax right now?”

I don’t look at her to check, but I know she isn’t. Nothing is. “You aren’t.”

“That’s good.”

“I still don’t know if I get it.”

“That’s alright.”

“Should I be looking at the cards you gave me?”

“What would be the point?” She spreads her fingers to the sky. “We have the answers right here, don’t we?”

I focus on a cloud drizzling toward the east. The blues darken, two single pinpoints of starlight sneaking in from a billion lightyears away. “The... trees,” I say, almost automatically. “The card with the trees. This is what’s missing.”

She tilts her head in my direction. “You’re getting it.”

“You can’t see the sky, but you know it’s there, up behind the leaves. When I was in Kilarnold, I couldn’t see it as well in the woods. But here it is. It never moved.”

“That card is called The Endless Skies. It represents obscurity. What else?”

“The barren hillside. There used to be trees, but they were removed.”

“You catch on quick.” “What’s that one called?”

“The Living Forest. It represents removal.”

A card with trees and no sky is called The Endless Sky. A card with hills and no trees is called The Living Forest. I think of the other cards in the deck. It’s not all just about trees and sky, I know that much. There’s something in common. Something they all share. Or, maybe, something they don’t.

“You have to look through things,” she says. “Around them. Beyond them. Before them. After them.”

“I have to?”

“No, you don’t have to. But if you don’t, you’ll wax up. Everything’ll seem empty, frozen. It’ll drive you mad.”

“Some people are okay with it, I think.”

“They aren’t. They fill in what’s missing with other sensory behaviors. It makes them worse, more dependent. If they have even a single moment of stillness, they get scared.”

“Does this happen to you?”

She’s quiet for a long time. While we wait, black takes over. Warm stars press through the city’s dull lights, and I can almost make out the Big Dipper. I can hear crickets, near and far, loud. A song. “The card with all the crickets. You can’t see the sound they make.”

“The Ambient Melodies, representing silence—the act of removing sound. I think you’re getting it.”

“Let me look at the other cards.” I lean up to grab my backpack, but she stops me, her firm hand on my chest. I ease back down.

“No, don’t get wrapped up in paper. That would defeat the point. The cards are there to help you, but they aren’t the end goal. Do you feel anxious at all?”

“Sometimes.”

“I mean right now.”

I think for a moment. “Not really, no. Not right now.”

“Agitated? Compressed? Lifeless? Bored?”

The question feels too deep, too layered in importance, but just feeling it out, the answer is no. I’m tired, yes. Exhausted, actually. But my body feels good. It feels better than it does even after a long day at the gym. The gentle wind tickles my arm hairs. The evening warmth mingles with my sweat. Grass itches the back of my arms and legs, but in a way that brings me closer to myself. And nothing feels like wax.

“I feel good,” I say, finally. “Great, even.”

“Good.”

“Does this mean... it’s over? Am I fixed?”

“No.” She says this without malice or sadness, just as a simple answer.

Then, a phone rings. My phone. I pull the shattered mess from my pocket. Somehow it’s alive again, screeching unnaturally through a mangled speaker, blinking in glitched streaks of red, green, and blue. It’s Gary.

“Sorry, I should really take this,” I say, unsure if my finger is registering on the touchscreen. “I have to at least tell Gary what happened. It’ll only take a minute.”

I’m not sure if the medicine woman hears me or not. When I look over, she’s wax.

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Sources:

• Image: WIX