Constance （Constance #1）
Matthew FitzSimmons
PART ONE
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She died—this was the way she died; And when her breath was done, Took up her simple wardrobe And started for the sun.
Her little figure at the gate The angels must have spied, Since I could never find her Upon the mortal side.
—“Vanished,” Emily Dickinson
CHAPTER ONE
The little purple Christmas tree had a lot to answer for. Con hadn’t celebrated Christmas in the three years she’d lived in Washington, DC. Hadn’t meant to this year either. But then on the way home from the corner store, she noticed the tree in a box of junk left on the sidewalk outside her building. She couldn’t say what made her rescue it, but it felt right playing Charlie Brown in her very own melancholy Christmas special.
She took it up to her apartment and set it on a table, where it twinkled at her hopefully. Other than being two feet tall, and purple, and not smelling a bit of pine, the little tree was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. But it put her in an uncharacteristically festive mood, and she poured herself into decorating. She even baked Gamma Jol’s fruitcake, which sat untouched on the kitchen counter but made the apartment smell like home back in Texas.
However, her spirits, like the tree, proved artificial. Celebrating the holidays alone was like setting a bonfire in her living room. One that cast unwelcome light into all the dark, carefully disregarded recesses of her life. The delicate truce she’d recently established with her depression unraveled overnight, and she woke on Christmas morning feeling low as hell. She worked remotely for a small nonprofit, which made it far too easy to avoid human contact if she chose. But how had it been a week since she’d left the apartment for anything other than food? Einstein should have spent more time investigating the uneven way that time passed in December, the supermassive black hole of the Gregorian calendar.
Perhaps that was why she accepted the invitation to the dinner that night—an orphan potluck for people with no way to get home for the holidays. Not that she would’ve set foot in Lanesboro even if she could afford the ticket. She hadn’t been home in close to five years, not since the beginning of her sophomore year in college when Mary D’Arcy, her mother and righteous servant of God, had informed Con that she was going straight to hell. Con had looked her mother dead in the eye and with nineteen years of pent-up fury answered that she’d meet her there. They hadn’t spoken since, not even after the accident.
The party started well enough. But a tableful of lonesome people and their press-on good cheer only reminded Con of how isolated she’d become. She compensated by accepting an invitation to go home with a burly white New Zealander. His name was Oliver, which he pronounced in a way she found delightful. Oliver had thighs like Doric columns, a mane of curly black hair, and a laugh that made you want in on the joke. She had no intention of actually going home with him—these days it felt better to be wanted than to be had—but she enjoyed the confidence of his attention.
To a point.
After dessert, she extricated herself from the table to the living room and fell into a conversation with a musician who Con discovered shared her Mick Ronson obsession. And like that, Oliver and his tragic thighs were forgotten. How many people even knew the name Mick Ronson anymore? Much less could hold a knowledgeable, geeked-out conversation about his guitar work on early Bowie albums like Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was like discovering a shared, secret language, and the two women huddled in a corner for the rest of the night talking guitars and exchanging songs and tidbits of musical lore—somehow Con never knew that Ronson had played guitar on John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane.” That blew her mind a little. For the first time in a long while, she wished she’d thought to bring her guitar.
At an uncharitable hour the next morning, the bleating of the alarm woke her. Groping around on the bedside table, she found her LFD and slipped it behind her ear to find out why.
Today, December 26, 2038, will be sunny and clear, with highs in the mid-nineties.
Another scorcher. The eighth consecutive day and far from a record for late December in Washington, DC. A calendar notification reminded her about her appointment at Palingenesis. Groaning, she rolled onto her side, trying vainly to get comfortable enough to fall back asleep. She was overdue for her monthly refresh and remembered thinking how clever she was scheduling it for the day after Christmas when the place would be deserted. Well, this was what cleverness got her.