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Is Now and Ever Shall Be

The paper clips look like angels if you bend them a certain way.

We wear them reverently or as reverently as seventh-grade girls can. Pinned to our collars, in remembrance of the popular boy who died: Our tiny office-supply seraphim.

Maggie was dating him for two weeks (almost two weeks) when it happened, and so Maggie is holy to us. Star-crossed lovers, she says, at the memorial, in the gymnasium. The principal winces, but we nod, enraptured. We recognize the iambic pentameter beneath the scratchy buzz of the microphone. We have been primed for tragedy, assigned it in third period. And here it is among us, finally, and one of us, chosen! Afterward, she carries a tissue box down the hall, an ark, and teachers part like the sea.

She wears his blue flannel around her waist, and we ache to touch it. Instead, we swirl in her eddies and lap up her sorrow. A solemn chorus, faces puffy from tears. We check the mirrors in our lockers, smudge our makeup just so. Adjust our paper clips. Then we trail her from pre-algebra to library studies, gripping the white wires of our headphones, pulling them through thumb and finger slowly, methodically. Lead us not into temptation.

We remember the popular boy in spurts, whisper memories like prayers: A lewd joke he made to one of us. The gray meanness of his eyes. How he made us feel like stains, how we ached for him to scour us clean of ourselves. Even the memory of it makes us bite our lips, heat spreading up our necks and in the dark places between our thighs.

But that’s not how Maggie remembers him. She is full of lunch period pronouncements now. We were in love, she tells us, ripping the crust from her jelly sandwich. And being in love changes you. She is stoic as stained glass. You wouldn’t understand.

The flannel fans out around her pale legs. We agree. We are unworthy. Abject in our ignorance. We offer her pudding cups in hopes of absolution, but her disdain is delicious. In her words, we hear the boy made flesh again, and it makes us tremble. She slurps her chocolate milk and sighs. Maybe it’s best if you sit somewhere else. She flicks her fingers, dismissive, like she’s sprinkling holy water. Her blessing burns us, and we bob our heads, penitent. Forgive us, our trespasses.

We carry on. Lost in the wilderness, we pinch each other’s arms when we need fresh tears. The paper clips bite into our flesh, chafe against our training bras. Maggie avoids us in the halls.

Did we not obey? Did we not smear our mascara?

We wring our hands. We are high on this feeling, but she is taking it from us, this grief that is the biggest, most real thing to have happened so far in our short, short lives. And that we cannot forgive.

But she was our intermediary once, our bridge to this feeling.

She could be again.

The idea comes over us like a fever—a vision. Our torment shall become our salvation. We’re used to one thing becoming another. Water to wine. Grape juice to blood. As we forgive those who trespass against us.

Maybe we hope for an intercession. For someone to save us from ourselves. But probably not. She almost seems to be waiting for us, for our beatification. You too can be an angel, say our hands.

Yes, say her eyes. That is best.

The paper clips look like angels if you bend them a certain way. And if you loop one around another, you can make two. It looks like they’re holding hands, like they were destined to be that way. We wear them reverently, as reverently as we can.

Originally from the Midwest, Alex now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has been published in Stonecrop Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine and has work upcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She spends her days helping improve government services as part of the growing civic tech community. In her spare time, she writes short fiction, runs, and tries to get her two cats to take her seriously.

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