Melissa parked her car in the gravel lot Callie's house shared with her three neighbors, the house Melissa had grown up in; from childhood, she had been sure that she would be far away by now, but here she was living in town ten years after moving out of that house. She went to college in California, got her graduate degree in Chicago, but after all that preparation, the best job she could find was right back here in Santa Fe. At least it meant that she could be closer to Callie, better able to take care of her if she needed help with money or if she got into trouble. Now, after all that, had she failed?

Her chest tightened as she stepped out of the car, despite her attempts to reassure herself that Callie had just forgotten and hadn't come by her apartment because she was preoccupied inspecting the trees for signs of faeries, or whatever it was Callie did when she was alone these days. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Callie flaked out on her. She looked at the house and tried to picture Callie sitting in the living room or on her bed, trying to cast a spell or something. Surely she was fine, this lump in her throat meant nothing, and she would soon be laughing about it. She should be calm because Callie would hear her knocking on the door, and in just a minute she would let her in with all her flutter and bustle, and explain what had kept her from their appointment.

Melissa knocked again and waited. Then, trembling just a little, she took out the spare key she'd told Callie was so that she could let her into the house when she forgot her own copy; the key that she'd actually wanted in case Callie made another attempt at suicide and locked herself in. Callie's unnamed brown tabby was sitting in front of the door looking up at her, making a disturbing trill with her throat. She ran into the bathroom when Melissa stepped inside the house.

"Callie?" she called. "I came to wait for the meteor with you. You were supposed to come over, remember?" She scanned the living room, and saw only the spare futon and ugly little coffee table. "You were supposed to meet me after work." She wasn't in the kitchen either. "Callie, are you there?" The bedroom they'd occupied together as children was bare and dusty. The bathroom in the hallway was dark, and she flicked the light on just to make sure; it was empty except for the cat, which looked at her plaintively and mewed. "Come on, Callie, don't do this to me." Finally she came to the closed door at the end of the hall, the bedroom that once belonged to their mother. Maybe Callie had just gone out, and Melissa would open the door and just see another empty room. Maybe she shouldn't even open the door, just leave the house and go looking for her sister in town. What was she so worried about? Why were tears welling up in her eyes?

"Goddammit, Callie, don't do this to me again," she whispered. Putting images of blood out of her head, she pushed open the door. The bed was empty, its frilly curtains and poofy pillows swirling in the wind, the whole thing bathed in a patch of direct sunlight. Melissa's eyes widened, and despite herself she let out a bark of a laugh that was almost a scream as she saw a gaping hole in the ceiling. Then she knew, Callie was gone, but not at all in the way she had expected.

a quickie before bed

Callie lay in bed, disappointed to find herself at the end of another day with nothing accomplished. Today offered no progress, nothing new, and here she was, laying in the dark again. Her eyes briefly stung with incipient tears, but she was not able to sustain a mood of petulance. Callie smiled at her easily conjured self-pity and turned on her side, enjoying the sensation of moving under heavy sheets.

Callie's bed was a small, private palace of creature comforts. In a way probably typical of women who remain single for a long time, the bedroom had come to represent the possibility of a sensual encounter that, in actuality, had no place in her life. Once liberated from the possibility that a man might actually see the most symbolically private of her rooms, Callie freely indulged fantasies of harem-like comfort. Reasoning that one-third of one's life is (or at least ought to be) spent in bed, she felt justified spending one-third of her paycheck on furnishing her private domain.

The rest of the house betrayed no sign of the opulence that lay within the bedroom. The kitchen contained typical bachelor and bachelorette trappings: a single bottle of wine on the counter. A fridge bereft of food, but overflowing with condiments, a wire basket hanging from the ceiling containing one orange and one onion. The living area was so barren that one could consider it an oblique hint of its own: the very lack of hospitality of the living and dining rooms might lead one to assume that whatever room remained behind the closed door must of necessity contain some warmth, assuming any humans lived here at all.

Indeed, behind that closed door, Callie felt very much at ease, and was beyond considering the possibility of leaving her cocoon for the remainder of the day. The ultimate symbol of girly princesshood, the bed was shielded from the vulgar world, with a full canopy. At the end of the day, Callie loved to brush aside the curtains of her bed, wrap herself in Oprah's favorite throw pillow, and gaze out at the rest of the world through the gauzy distortion of the bed curtains. She chose rich colors for her bedding. A regal, blue-grey comforter puffed in all directions, for some reason giving her the feeling of floating in a friendly sea. Callie enjoyed just laying in her bed, turning her body over, lazily kicking her legs like a swimmer, spreading her fingers out like starfish.

Tonight, however, offered no such comforts. Callie lay like an obedient child sent to bed in the summertime while it is still light out, arms rested folded on her chest. She did not think of parents or any other family. She did not remember cherished moments with past and present friends. Although she contemplated her demise, she was not filled with nostalgia, longing, or panic. With her eyes trained on the ceiling, on a fixed place corresponding to a fixed point in the sky, she waited.

Nighttime

Four brown paws stole across the cool of a tiled floor, closely followed by the lithe shadow of a little tabby cat. Whiskers etched delicately in refracted moonlight, she crept toward the bedroom window with an attitude of calm purpose, halting a few feet away from the window's sill. She sat, decisively, tail flicked up, and turned her round face to the bed, her owlishly dilated eyes taking in the form of her sleeping owner hunched fitfully in tangled cotton sheets.

She turned her head away.

The curtains were still now, their gauzy fabric hanging limp and dead against the wall. The corner of the rightmost curtain was draped over the bedpost, around which it had entwined itself while still living in the breeze. Now it assumed the attitude of a dead vine in the winter, clinging wraithlike in the position in which it had died at the first frost. It left a convenient gap, revealing a pane of window and a square of moonlight shining through it. The cat leapt up without hesitation.

The window was closed. She was expecting that.

She looked out into the night, green eyes contracting in the stronger moonlight. The yard, such as it was, stretched out before her. A poor, thin lawn, mostly made up of short stocky weed sprouts, sputtered out and died shortly before colliding with a ratty old coyote fence. A few trees, most of them dead, clawed up at a dark sky shot through with milky nimbus clouds. Some stars were visible here, though most were drowned out by the ambient light; a short drive from in any direction would reveal to the viewer the full wealth of the night sky, a treasurehouse of stars.

There were weeds by the fence, tall thick ones which laughed at the best efforts of herbicides and WeedWhackers. They gave off a rank green smell, stronger when it rained, and still strong now, after the afternoon's monsoon. Small and tasty little creatures were probably moving beneath their boughs.

Feeling restless, the tabby cat leapt down from the sill, muscles flowing like a self-contained waterfall. Without checking her stride, she continued on to her food bowl, giving it a cursory inspection. Empty, still. She was expecting that. A few particles of kibble stuck themselves to her whiskers, as she sniffed at the bowl, and she licked them off carefully before moving on.

Back to the bathroom, now, where more moonlight was pouring in through the little uncurtained window high up on the wall. Chrome fixtures, cheaply finished and collecting mineral scale from the hard water that gushed from them, glinted dully in the white glow, their reflected light picking out the shapes of bottles and half-squeezed tubes of various cruelty-free specially-formulated homeopathic stress-relieving beauty enhancement products. The shower curtain gave off the warm, sharp-but-subtle scent of PVC and of the mildew-killing cleaning products with which it was periodically sprayed. A few stray dustbunnies clung to the slightly sticky floor mouldings, and the cat thought idly of pouncing on one before the memory of the window pressed her on, renewed her focus. She leapt lightly onto the sink, making no sound as she deftly navigated combs and brushes and containers of dental floss. From there, she stepped to the back of the toilet, its cold thin sweat of condensation dewing her paws. And from there, she arched her back, leapt, and (with a bit of undignified scrabbling) made it to the narrow pine sill of the tiny bathroom window.

This one was open.

A screen stood in the way, of course. Through it, the night breeze hinted at the world outside: wet juniper, pavement, unsecured trash cans, acrid car exhaust, the fading scent of roses. Against the moon and sky arched the branch of a honey locust tree, its glossy leaves stirring langourously in the undecided breeze.

She could pop this screen. She'd done it before. And there were rabbits out there, or deer mice, at the very least. Sand to roll in, and crawlspaces to explore. Maybe something to eat. Two front paws crept up the window screen, testing its tension. Pearly claws extended, hooked sharp from a lack of regular trimming and ready to see a bit of action.

But then there was a noise. A sudden noise. With a thump, the tabby leapt down, back onto the cold and unkind tile of the bathroom floor, and lost itself in the shadows.

This woman loves geraniums passionately

Melissa was the kind of woman who prided herself on her hard-boiled realism. How irresponsible, she would sniff, is it to let women continue to live in the patriarchal fairy tales that permeate our heterocentric culture. Her heavy-lidded eyes would dart to the left and to the right before she continued. She habitually threw back her head and stuck out her chin (like Popeye) daring any man to challenge her privately educated, liberated woman's opinions. Unfortunately it was as clear as the nose on her face that the lift of the chin was less a confident flourish than a preemptive block to an imagined blow. As a result, she was frequently undone by the kind of man who frequents the kind of party where speeches about myth and patriarchy abound.

Especially in Santa Fe, these parties always featured at least one of them. Usually, the bulk of the attendees arrived coupled: tanned climber woman with sallow, vegan men; boyish women in their late thirties, living together in a commune south of town; poncho-clad white men, with pleasantly corpulent wives in leather skirts. On the fringes, however, inevitably floated women like Melissa (haunted eyes bulging out of skin pulled taut as a drum) and men of dubious character (uniformly claiming to be in their early thirties, featuring dirty clothes, a “boyish”, lopsided grin, and faded, messy hair). These Dean Moriarties briefly let her feel like the glamorous intellectual she always meant to be, flinging aside her inhibitions, finally giving herself over to passion. A few weeks of missed phone calls and awkward, accidental encounters at the Aztec would give rise to a mortified reassessment of clothes, taste in books, and income level before coming to the conclusion that the wild child artist was merely a man child, supporting himself as a day laborer, not as a "freelance permaculture specialist".

Tonight was such a night. After a disastrous series of assignations, Melissa's sense of the injustice of the world and the worthlessness of men was burnished to a fiery glow. Her loathing was as smooth and impenetrable as a bowling ball. It was in such moods that she most strongly desired to fling her anger and hurt at the unstable pins of Callie's world of delusions.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Can you help me? I think I broke one of my chakras ha ha ha.”

“Hi, Melissa.”

“Hey Callie. Yeah, so is the sky gonna fall tonight?”

“No, not tonight.”

“Well that sucks!”

“It should happen this week, is what the book said, but I couldn't get the exact date.”

“This week like on Friday? Oh shit, payday, ha ha.”

“This week as in ending Sunday.”

“Yeah? Are you like on the right calendar? Shouldn't you be on the Mayan calendar for this sort of thing?”

“I'm just guessing it's using the Julian calendar, I guess I don't really know.”

“Ok so you know that Sunday is like tomorrow, right?”

“I know Sunday is tomorrow.”

“Well Jesus, don't get all mad or whatever. I just thought you wouldn't want to be all alone at the end of the world.”

“Well, then, why don't you come with me tomorrow night?” At this point, Melissa paused. Was she serious? Callie had never before invited her into this part of her life. Melissa hoped it wasn't a bluff. She could hear that she had gone too far, could see in her mind Callie staring sullenly out the window, flushed, wishing to hang up the telephone.

“Ha ha yeah well if that's cool, you know, then you should come over after work.” Melissa held her breath. She didn't know why she cared so much, but suddenly she desperately wanted to see her sister tomorrow.

“Okay, I'll meet you at your place. Good night."

In an American city at sunset the flags were all waving with crazy wind currents, dry leaves swept through the streets like fairies dancing on the end of flowers, the mortar burst and swelled between the red bricks, a yellow sun lowered in a yellow sky among red and orange and pink, and a woman stood on a corner in tall leather boots, a flared skirt of many materials, and a striped button-down top. Her name was Callie, and she was waiting for the meteor to fall.

As the sky darkened, Callie's eyes began to drift toward the ground. It would not come tonight. She trudged home through the swirling leaves, keeping toward the sides of buildings and away from the other pedestrians. Passing cars pressed her skirt against her legs and set her hair aloft. A driver honked at her twice and shouted out that she should lift her shirt; she kept walking, head down, until she reached her house. She lived on the side of an alleyway that rose up from the main street, in a house that had passed down to her from her dead mother. The neighbors had little flower pots on their porches, colorful wooden decorations, a bench and chairs. Callie had nothing, just an empty house front.

She pushed open the door. Her cat, a brown tabby, was sitting by the door with its face pointed upwards, having heard her key in the lock. "Hello, you little strumpet," she said. "Were you waiting here for me all day? Were you? It wasn't tonight, sweetie, don't worry. I came back." She picked up the cat and walked with it to the kitchen, wondering if there was anything in the refrigerator that she could make into a meal.

She saw a nearly empty carton of eggs, a few cups of milk, a wilting head of lettuce, a door full of condiments, a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of tonic water. Not much to work with. She made an omelet and ate it, sitting at her small wooden table with the tabby in the chair next to her. The phone rang and she answered.

"Hello? Hi, Melissa. No, not tonight. It should happen this week, is what the book said, but I couldn't get the exact date. This week as in ending Sunday. I'm just guessing it's using the Julian calendar, I guess I don't really know. I know Sunday is tomorrow. Well, then, why don't you come with me tomorrow night? Okay, I'll meet you at your place. Good night."

In her bedroom, the wind was blowing through the open window, pushing the curtains out toward her. It felt like they were beckoning. She walked over, closed the window, and lay down to wait for sleep to come.