The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come, the dark thunderheads rumbling into the distance. She stood there, her clothes clinging to her like a second skin, dripping, as she watched the woman's hair dance solemn nocturnes in the current.

She was thankful for the rain, for moments before, she had killed someone. There was no blood to wash off, no weapon to cast off, instead, the drenching storm disguised the river water that sopped her clothes where she plunged the woman's head beneath the turbulent current.

It was foolish to do so in savage daylight, under the flickering cover of bending horsetails, whose shadows were like black tributaries, spreading out into the true tributary where the woman's hair exploded underwater like a macabre Medusa under my straining arms. Broad daylight, an act of desperation. I clutch the weapon to my breast, my handprints on her throat. I'm soaked. She drifts. I run.

I am fleeing from it, this gauzy doppleganger come to visit my fantasy. I ponder this act of murder safely hidden in the ether of imagination, this clarity that comes with crises of the existential kind, with sharp desires to rid yourself of the old. This is the point of one's life, balanced on the edge of a knife, at once looking forward and back, Janus-faced.

A tapping, like horse hooves.

"Hello? Mel?"

I open my eyes to find him tapping a pencil against the glass desk. Their eyes are on me.

"Do the human-interest story. The local one about the dog driving a car?"

They're watching me, sepulchral, blood-sucking, but I say, Damn it. Damn the human-interest story. My life is suddenly balanced on the edge of a divine blade, so damn these cramped cubicles, smell of toner, eyes reflecting the non-photo blue of computer monitors, "... please accept my resignation," my indignation, my refusal to write lines to spin lies on the human condition.

I, Janus-faced look back with eyes of flint and look ahead with clear-eyed excitement of adventure and quest and journey, the clarity of untethered imagination. I, fleet-footed, pass through the glass doors into the Elysian fields of fantasy. I, lynx-eyed never look back.

I clutch the weapon to my breast. My handprints are on her throat. She drifts. I run. Reborn in the river, every act of creation is, at first an act of destruction.

She hadn't noticed her hair clinging to her skin in dark rivulets. Her breathing harsh. But when she rose, lightning illuminated her surroundings, casting her eyes eternity-blue, eyes that could see forever, for she had changed her destiny. Where it would take her, she did not know.

With each unfolding step, she leaves it all behind her: the river runs, the horsetails bend, and a woman's hair dances solemn nocturnes in the current, her eyes non-photo blue.

For a moment I stand there with my back toward the building and look unseeingly out onto the parking lot where the cars glitter with raindrops from the passing storm. My toes hang over the edge of the curb and my bag thumps dumbly against my thigh as I hesitate and wonder, What have I done?

The back of my neck tingles, half-expecting a blast of air-conditioning as he rushes after me. He would touch my shoulder and turn me around with those fingers always stained with ink from writing memos on the back of his hand. He would be too close, smelling of coffee and cigarette smoke. He would ask, "Mel, what the hell happened back there? What do you think you're doing?"

Nothing of the sort happens, of course, and I am suddenly hyper-aware of the silence, the vacuum of sound sectioned off by a pair of glass doors, behind which clatter keyboards and voices chatter over the drone of printing and xeroxing and faxing and the white noise of humming computers and rustling papers. I have to consciously stop myself from looking back, almost yearning for the familiar monotony, but my pride saves me from the chagrin.

She pulled herself away from the river, where the body had already drifted away. The mire sucked at her feet, and the bracken clawed at her clothes and hair, but she made her way steadily onto the river's bank. There was no rush in her actions, each motion spare and unwasted, but the fluorescent glow of rabid emotion and adrenaline was already fading from her limbs. Stumbling into a clearing, with a trembling arm, she released a fist of snow-white salt onto the ground and let it fall around her in an arc wide enough to encircle her body. She curled up in its center, but it remained unfinished, another handful of salt lying inert in her still palm.

I close the car door, hermetically sealing myself off from the mute indifference of the parking lot. I catch my reflection in the rear view mirror and notice my hair frizzing from the dampness of the weather and futilely try to smooth it down. My eyes lock onto their reflections for longer than they should, long enough to assess the following: my roots are showing, my lips are chapped, my skin wane, dark shadows under by eyes. I reach out to flick on some tripe on the radio and find that my nail polish has chipped, and make a note to myself to patch those up as well as redo my roots, do something about my skin and the dark under-eye circles. Suddenly I feel so tired. The thought of these acts of vain self-preservation tax me, all of these insignificant details adding up--and adding up to what? I lean my head back and close my eyes.

She let herself fall asleep. After one commits a crime, one ought to run, ought to cut one's hair, change one's clothes, ought to slip into another identity, but these worries are tranquilized by velvet somnia, for, as her yawning consciousness rationalized, in the middle of nowhere there was nothing she could do, no one from whom to run, no where to which to go. After all, what dominion does one's identity have in the wilderness? She might as well have been the grass or the rock or the brook. She was nothing but a strange animal here.

The evening faded into a pressurized night, tangible with a cold light that cast fretful shadows as a fan of eyelashes trembled against the silent skin under her eyes. A pounding like a heartbeat, like the bass of a stereo, like the boom of a canon, the sound of a rumbling ground canvassed by troops of boots made the thin skin of an eyelid flutter.

They snapped open. Eyelashes fanned out from the whites. Black pupils constricted in the writhing ripples, the branching bands, the squirming streaks of her blue irises. She awakened, the distant sound of the river in her ears, slick cold grass plastered to her face, her hands gritty with salt. Salt, she wondered, her pensive fingers still pruney with river water ruminating over its texture, before a shadowy realization flickering across her consciousness severed the last of the black thread that had bound her north and south to sleep—she realized, encircling her, her magic circle of salt--a barrier between herself and what she had summoned--was incomplete.

Her breath was stifled in the heavy darkness as her ears anticipated the drip of river water from drenched clothes and hair and her eyes studied the shadows, divining a figure emerging from the gloom, a woman, her mirror image, her gauzy doppelganger come to haunt her once more. Call it what you will: simulacrum, homunculus, golem, twin, sister, daughter. With shaking hands, the same ones she used to drown it, she dipped her fingers into the salt and spread it along the ground to complete the circle, a barrier between herself and this animated flesh she had summoned, this conjuration she had then murdered by the river.

I have no guilt about this, to create someone of your own likeness. It's not narcissism, to have this need for companionship to rise from raw material into something, someone that talks to you, companion to your daily life. Considering the conundrum of your fellow human, I gave in to the tempting simplicity of having someone you could control, pliant in its familiarity, identical to yourself.

There I was, anticipating the exhilarating moment of when I could look back at my creation and ask myself, "Could I love you?"

And to my thrilling satisfaction it answers, "Yes, I could."

A pounding like a heartbeat, the sound of a rumbling ground canvassed by troops of boots, like the boom of a canon, like the bass of a stereo, like a cell phone on vibrate makes the thin skin of my eyelids flutter.

I dig through my purse and nearly up-end it before I find my cell phone, buzzing in my hand, its face glowing pale green, and answer it with a terse, “Yes, I’m coming home. No, it’s alright. Don’t wait up.”

The keys clatter onto the counter. The sound makes me feel old. I am not sure if I am fond of the feeling or not. For some people, it is the sound of a weary, set life, of idealistic dreams faded, of compromises and broken promises and unfulfilled goals. But to me, it also sounds like security. The clatter of keys sound like security to me—it means, as I daydream, that I am successful enough from the high-salary hypothetical job I am coming home from, that I am unlocking the door to a hypothetical high-class apartment, one big enough to have a hypothetical marble counter on which to toss my keys.

But I have no hypothetical dream job, no hypothetical high class apartment to go home to, and the hypothetical marble counter is just made out of some kind of plastic. I put down my bag and shuck off my shoes and cross to small area known as the kitchen.

Then again, I think, it's a bit alarming how quickly and easily we get used to these things. It had been almost a year since I had graduated. To think the summer before my freshman year I had been frittering away my last days of summer before my first year of college. What could I have been possibly thinking about then, I wonder to myself. I amuses me that I am examining my younger self as if it were a curious sociological anomaly. As if everyone had responsibilities by that point of their lives.

I turn on the stove and boil some water to make macaroni and cheese. The Easy Mac kind. As I wait for the noodles to cook, I check my email. There is mostly spam, a few correspondences with family and friends back home. I look through them and wish that my life could be more efficient. I wish I could be doing something even as I glance through and reply to those emails whose contents are made trite simply by the instantaneousness of their digital transit.

hey melanie,

still being the mel-in-melodramatic? don't want to spring more bad news on you, but i got an email from the alumni association. hope you still remember our jr year english teach. . .

Suddenly I remember what I was thinking during those idyll last days of summer. I had been writing a list.

1. I had scrawled. Alex Garland wrote The Beach when he was 26.

2. Helen Oyeyemi wrote The Icarus Girl when she was 19.

I get up to check the macaroni. Too much time has passed, and I haven't written a single page. I squeeze the thick cheese from the packet onto the cooked noodles. Plans, outlines, sketches, notes in the margins—that is all my progress has amounted to so far. I stir.