Effier, After

Wednesday, 9:48 p.m., 26 minutes After Dorian
And this is the end.
I’m thinking about him as I drive down the long dark highway. The streetlamps are out, no light but the stars, like holes poked through a swatch of black velvet. For an instant Dorian materialises in the rear-view mirror, lips swollen, eyes darker than the road ahead.
It’s my fault. I was always too much or not enough, ending things too late or not soon enough.
“You—” No. I know he’s not here, that it’s a trick of the light, or my mind. “Dorian hung himself,” I tell the empty car. “He’s dead. I’m exhausted, shock-drunk from finding the body.” I can’t feel my hands, and my head feels like it’s floating somewhere else entirely, like I died in that apartment too.
A creak behind me. I glance at the mirror, just taillights, fading, but I feel him there, like a pressure in the air. “I told you—” His voice rattles in my head like the whine of a dying animal. “I’d do it if you left me. I told you.”
“You told me a thousand times,” I snap at the windshield. “You never had a scratch. How was I supposed to know you meant it this time?”
“You said you loved me,” I can hear it in my head, the same argument we'd been having since we got together. “You said—”
“I lied. I don’t love you. This is the end.”
A deer surges from the treeline. I wrench the wheel half a second too slow. Steel kisses guardrail and the world somersaults. For a breath I’m a snowglobe girl suspended in glittering shards, and then—
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
_____________________________________________________________________
Wednesday, ???? After Dorian
I return to the keening of a siren and my own ragged breathing. A paramedic with a walrus mustache leans close. “You’re gonna be okay, sweetheart. Name?”
I try to tell him, or tell him to call my dad, but blood salts my tongue, words refuse their shapes. He loads me into the ambulance, promises safety, and the dark folds shut again.
_______________________________________________________________________
Thursday, 12:00 a.m., 98 minutes AD
The next time I open my eyes, it’s to the fluorescent lights of a hospital room. My dad is there, looking older than I’ve ever seen him, and a nurse checks a beeping monitor. Dad licks his thumb and wipes dried blood from my temple the way he used to chase dripping popsicles. I’m too tired to flinch at the idea of his spit on my face.
I want to be seven again, small enough to be lifted onto his shoulders and carried away from things too big and too cruel for me to comprehend.
“I wrecked the car,” I murmur, slurred, like the time I drank half a bottle of Becherovka after a fight with Dorian. My vision blurs and dad and the nurse have hazy doppelgängers.
“It was a piece of crap anyway. What matters is that you—” Dad’s voice cracks like thin ice down the middle. “I’ll buy you a new one. German made, sturdy.” He blinks too many times and rubs a hand across his face.
My stomach twists. I wish he’d rage, or blame, or do anything other than look at me with sad, tired eyes.
I close my eyes and wait for the nothingness again.
______________________________________________________________________________
Sunday, 3:47 p.m., 3 Days AD
Discharge paperwork flutters like flimsy wings between Dad’s fingers. He signs twice, the nurse initials once, and they release me.
Outside, cold September air stings at my face. Dad’s ancient cadillac smells of pine tree air freshener and day-old coffee. The seatbelt bites the bruise blooming across my collarbone. Dad adjusts the mirror, catches my eyes.
“I’ll drive real slow, yeah?”
Dorian slides into the back seat, elbows on the headrest like a kid on a road trip. Rope bruise around his throat, raw plum fresh.
“Forgot me already?” he whispers.
I flinch. “Go away. Not now.”
Dad’s shoulders tense. “Not what now, Firefly?”
The light turns green; he doesn’t move. Horns bleat.
“You’re losing it,” Dorian croons.
“Effie?” Dad’s voice is gentle, the way it was when my childhood dog got a thorn in her paw, and he wanted to take it out without spooking her. His hand hovers over my knee but doesn’t land. “Who are you talking to?”
“Myself…thinking out loud, I guess.”
My dad has always been able to tell when I’m lying, but something, guilt for mom leaving, his infallible and flawed trust that I’ll do the right thing, has prevented him from ever calling me on it.
Dorian flickers, upholstery, corpse, upholstery. Shaking my head makes my stomach lurch and pain explode behind my eyes, but doesn’t clear the dead man from my vision.
Dad pulls into a convenience store. “Gonna grab ginger ale and some crackers. Stay put.”
As if I could get out of the car without falling over immediately.
While he’s inside, I open the selfie cam and angle it toward the back seat. The screen shows only empty fabric and a crumpled grocery flyer, yet Dorian hums behind my skull, an off-key tuning fork.
Dad returns, sees the phone trembling in my hand. “I feel really sick.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead. “I’ll get you home. You’ll feel better once you can lay down, put an ice pack on that head of yours.” He blinks rapidly. “I called your office earlier and told them you’d be out on medical for two weeks. The lady I talked to, Priti, I think, said she’d email the forms to digitally sign.”
A tear runs down my cheek, over my chapped lips. “Thanks.” It doesn’t cover it. This isn’t a mess he can clean up for me.
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Monday, 6:14 a.m., 5 Days AD
Google: ptsd hallucinations
Results: often tied to trauma-related memories and can be auditory, visual…
The letters swim before I can finish reading it. A headache drums beneath my scalp. Dad offered to stay, but the way he looks at me, grief and worry knotted together, makes the wet blanket of shame heavier.
I stand in the kitchenette, trying to recall whether I actually swallowed my evening levetiracetam or only rehearsed the gesture. Risk of OD wins; the bottle stays capped.
“Effie.”
The syllable peels like silk tearing. Dorian leans in my doorway, eyes obsidian. My brain can’t reproduce the blown pupils of death, so it invents stone instead.
“You left me,” he rasps.
“I left you three times and you never followed through.” My voice is calm, teacher-on-a-field-trip calm. “You’re a symptom, the result of my brain trying to process trauma and…” And I can’t remember the rest of the Psychology Today article I read on the ride home before throwing up in dad’s car.
He flickers, coat rack, corpse, coat rack, then steadies, lip purpled, gaze imploring. “You said you loved—”
“So did you. We both lied.” My vision whites out at the edges, the room thirty degrees left and I go down, knees hitting hardwood.
My phone buzzes.
Nia: Still with us?
I send her a selfie, smiling, thumbs up, bruises fading purple and green on my face.
Nia: Hot. Rory’s party Friday. BYOB to get in. Come forget.
Champagne, cocaine, and enough bad conversation to distract me from the fire in my brain. This is not what I need.
Me: I’ll be there
I get to my feet with the grace of an arthritic giraffe. I’ll be there. Promise or threat, either way, it’s momentum.
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Friday, 10:27 p.m., 9 Days AD
Champagne dulls the edges enough to keep Dorian in his corner, though I despise the taste. The man across from me is equal parts Ted Bundy and young JFK before his head was blown apart.
“Finance,” I guess. “Harvard, and a token love of arthouse film to disguise the vacuum where personality should live.”
He barely blinks. “Brutal. Princeton, actually, like Fitzgerald.”
“Fancy yourself the literary sort?” I finish the champagne. It burns my stomach and I realise that I haven't eaten since morning, since dad called and told me to.
“No, but you,” he says, considering, “look one bad day from Sylvia Plath’s exit.
“Hemingway. If I’m going out, I’m going out with a bang.”
He grins then, a politician’s smile, too practiced, and holds out his hand. “Ellis Andrews.”
I stare at his hand and the smile falters. He shoves both hands in his pockets. I’ve hurt him. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to but it’s all I’m good at lately. “Effie Sinclair. This party fucking sucks. Everyone’s so fake.” I am too, smiling, drinking, going to work while Dead Dorian trails after me.
“Then tell me something real, Effie.”
“My ex hung himself. I found the body when I went to pick up my stuff.” My ex. The body. If I avoid thinking of him directly, the hallucinations are less. Small victory over my own shattered mind.
Ellis softens; the mask of charmed indifference slides off. “I found my mother when I was thirteen.”
“Shit.” The whole world evaporates. “That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah. I’m alright now, well, mostly. How long after the breakup did he do it?”
“Twenty-four hours. I totaled my car right after; traumatic brain injury to match the heartbreak.” For the first time in days, Dorian dims to a smudge.
“What a psycho.” His hand moves like he wants to reach for me. I wish he would, someone else’s touch to shake the death shroud off my shoulders. “The ex, not you.”
“No, I’m a psycho too. Why do you think we were together?” Together, and broken up over and over again. The floor seems to give, but Ellis steadies me with a question I’m relieved to answer.
“Want to get out of here?”
Outside, cold air cuts through the champagne haze and I stumble. Ellis catches me, and, for a second, I see two of him.
“We can just watch a dumb slasher or cowboy movie,” he offers. “No sex. No pressure.”
“A movie sounds nice.” It sounds safe. I don’t think I could be fucked without breaking entirely. “I grew up without a mom too,” I tell him. “She’s alive, just… elsewhere. Ran off when I was 10. Dad’s my planet.”
“My father’s an orbiting cliché,” Ellis says. “Too busy fucking anything with two legs to pay attention to his kid.”
“Better than anything with four legs, at least.”
His eyes widen, then laughter bursts from us both. The sky opens up and it rains for the first time since the accident. A baptism. For a moment, I’m clean.