Her name was Apricot, and there were galaxies on her eyes, and if the eyes were the windows to the soul, then her soul was an empty vacuum, devoid of even light.

Her best friend in high school, Jia Li Barnes, always told her, “Apricot, your eyes are so big! Have you got some kind of magic eyeliner?” Apricot always gave a strained smile at that. “And they’re lovely. Sort of...sparkly?” She did not realize that any light in Apricot’s eyes was just a reflection on her lenses of what was in front of her.

That girl never looked close enough, which was a good thing, for both of them. She’d look away soon enough after she made her comments, and Apricot didn’t know why, but she thought it had something to do with jealousy. She would do her best to hurt her as long as it kept her from looking too long. Had she stared deeper she would have seen something she’d regret.

No one ever bothered to really look at Apricot (aside for one), not after her mother died. Her father left her alone though she was so young, left her to raise herself, for he was too busy curling up into himself without a loving wife to straighten him up and put him out in the sun to shine. He didn’t really care about Apricot, but he did what he thought he was supposed to for the sake of her mother’s memory. It was really the bare minimum, though, in terms of love--he paid for her school, and he paid for her extra-curriculars, and he paid and paid and the barrier of money just grew and grew until he had completely closed himself off from her.

She wanted to confront him, to say, “Throwing money at me doesn’t make you a good father!” but that would mean being close to him and that would mean they were both in danger, he of actually bothering to pay attention to her and noticing her, she of him finding out what she really was and seeking retribution for it.

What kind of monster killed her own mother?

It almost would have been okay if it had just been her mother (that was a lie one was one too many and nothing she could do could make up for what she did to her), and it almost had been, had she not decided to try for something real, something romantic (though she thought back fondly to some moments with Jia Li and reminded herself that “romantic” and “real” were not mutually exclusive). She’d always wanted a prince to save her from herself as a child.

He was one of the first boys to use the line about her name.

Every boy she ever dated thought it was charming to say to her, “So, Apricot. Kind of an unusual name, huh? How’d you get it?” as if it wasn’t given to her by her mother, as though God had come to her as a two-year-old holding a golden apricot and told her,

“This is you.”

or something.

She made up a new story every time.

“My mother was drunk off apricot wine when I was conceived.”

“My father was an apricot farmer and he figured the best way for me to take over the family business was to name me after it.” (Never mind the fact that apricots didn’t grow for hundreds of miles, but usually this made boys think she was from far away and ~worldly~, or something.)

“I ran away from home when I was 13 and I stole a bag of dried apricots from a gas station and changed my name in their honor.”

Boys thought her stories were so cool and never seemed to realize they were all lies. That was okay with Apricot, because stupidity meant a lack of confrontation. Lies were comfortable. The truth itched and made a fire blossom in her chest, and unavoidable with the few people who were able to see right through her. Her soul burned when she spoke truths but when she molded lies out of air and words she felt as though she was not attached to the earth, like she was drifting in space.

She told that boy the truth and it hurt her so bad, but she bore with it because she really liked him, she really did!

He took her home and by morning she was the only one left in his apartment, though witnesses and cameras denied her flimsy story that he must have left in the night.

Apricot was a good girl. She called the police on herself, even confessed, but without a body or sign of a struggle, she was written off as hysterical and the boy was written off as yet another missing person, one of millions likely hiding in plain sight amongst the seven billion that made up the world’s population.

They would never find him! she told herself day after day. He was with her mother, forever tumbling through the cosmos, or whatever it was that existed behind (within?) black holes.

Afterward, she couldn’t find a meaningful relationship to save her life. Anyone who came close to her ended up pushed away before anything substantial could happen, though that was really her own fault, and it was out of her fear for their safety. She would not kill again. She would not do that to herself.

She would hurt strangers, she would hurt friends, she would hurt potential loves, because she had to save them from her (and of course because it was easier to deal with the guilt of intentional pain caused than the fierce, anxious shivers over accidental manslaughter and the regrets that came in the form of “you could have prevented this” whispered in her mind in the voices of her mother and the boy).

To combat those who would stare into her eyes (“But Apricot they’re so gorgeous, just let me get a closer look”), she took to wearing large sunglasses and telling people she met that she was blind, and implied that there had been a horrible accident that had disfigured her eyes, and the questions about that started to come more frequently than the name questions. She continued to lie, because lies were what her mother had last spoken to her and they made her feel a little more comfortable, a little less disgusting in her own skin.

“Oh yeah, I was born this way. Doctors never really figured out what was wrong with me, but they tried, believe me. Maybe too hard. But you know, you learn to cope.”

“You know how your parents always tell you not to point those lasers in your eyes or you’ll go blind? They’re right.”

“It was a freak accident. I...I don’t want to talk about it.”

It made dating a little easier, and also a little harder. She had to pretend she couldn’t tell what people looked like, a blind girl could hardly be choosy based on physical attractiveness.

Well maybe when it came to d*** size. That made her laugh to herself, in the quiet hours of the night when she couldn’t sleep for fear of what was behind her own eyelids.

(Boys were so fragile, she knew if she rejected one based on length it would break them.)

She had to pretend a nice voice and a “good personality” were all she cared about in a man. It certainly made her more attentive to those kinds of things, pretending she couldn’t see douchebags’ faces. Before she’d take one look at a guy and ignore the lesser filth they spewed (though the big things, the things that hit too close to home, just made her want to go home right then and there to curl up in a ball). Half the guys she shut down nowadays were certain nice to look at but had sleaze dripping from their words.

At least she didn’t try to conceal her lies. She aired them out for the world, her dirty laundry (ironic considering the usual meaning of the phrase), and they reeked indiscriminately, but these men tried to hide the grime in their hearts under layers of pretty words, like a fresh coat of paint to cover up the mold lurking in the walls of their souls.

Apricot was lonely, having not kept any friends after high school. Forgoing college denied her potential roommates and classmates that would have given her the emotional depth she craved as well. Her relationships with her colleagues at the restaurant where she worked were superficial at best, and the men she went home with would never be able to really connect with her (or even want to try), she knew. The person she was closest to was her father, and considering how he had always been towards her…

Well, she lived an empty life.

And then her father died when she was about two months past twenty-six. She never learned what caused it, partly because when she got the call from the hospital she hung up after hearing the words, “Your father is dead.” She was apparently supposed to arrange a funeral or something, her aunt called her about it the next day, sobbing.

She couldn’t do that, couldn’t call her entire family, call a church, arrange for catering and a hearse and a priest. She was twenty-six. She left it to the rest of the family and didn’t go.

After it happened her emotional reaction was shockingly minimal (to others). She barely remembered her mother, but thinking about her still made her sad, perhaps because she still felt so close, bouncing around in her head and all. But after her father’s death she didn’t feel any different. She thought feeling nothing was supposed to feel like being hollowed out, so there was no substance to the body, that if someone were to tap it on the head it would crumple in on itself like a deflated balloon. But that was not how she felt. Everything was the same as it had always been, nothing was missing. She wondered if her mother felt sad about the loss. She wondered if her mother could even feel anymore.

(Sometimes she wondered if her mother had ever even existed in the first place, or if the whole concept of being borne by the woman smiling in the pictures with her father was some kind of trick, an excuse for his lack of affection. But everyone had a mother, even people like her who killed those who had birthed them.)

She inherited the rest of the money her father had stashed away, what he had not spent on her school and whims and his basic necessities, as well as the house and everything he had owned. Combined with what she got from her mother (everything) she had a nice new home, fully furnished, and warm with the feeling of family.

Well, the warmth hadn’t been there for over twenty years. Not since her mother had kissed her goodnight, said, “I love you, my special girl,” and gone missing.

She sold the house and everything in it, and moved across the country. She finally had enough money to do so. Having not gone to college, her entire income up to that point was from waitressing. But now she had an inheritance, and she could go places, see things.

Of course the money would not last her forever, and she would have to find a place to settle down and work. Despite the laws in place that stated that she could not be turned down for having a disability (and she didn’t even, but it wasn’t like she was going to tell her future employers “oh I’m not actually blind but I act like I am because my eyes are black holes” “I’m kind of like Cyclops but sort of the opposite”), it was horrendously difficult for her to find a job. Most places said it was because she didn’t have a college degree and she conceded that that was important, but she was turned down by McDonald’s, and that was just ridiculous.

She never considered stopping, though. She could hurt a lot of people doing that.

She ended up working the graveyard shift at a 24 hour pharmacy-cum-convenience store. She made enough to get by, and if she stole food from work to feed herself on shift, her managers didn’t care. She was blind, she didn’t know any better, she probably didn’t know it was merchandise anyway it wasn’t as though she could see it.

(Acting as though because she [allegedly] couldn’t see she was stupid or something. Ableist bullshit!)

She did not work during the day. They couldn’t have a blind girl manning the register during the peak of sales time, after all. At least if she worked from eleven at night to six in the morning she wouldn’t have to actually interact with customers. So she spent the normal hours (the ones she didn’t use for sleeping) doing things to remind herself that she was not in fact blind, just a monster, like reading.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

As though it was written for her.

(Actually, it was written for Caroline Herschel, whoever that was.)

There was more to the poem, including things about “spaces
of the mind” that made her tear up when she saw them. She wondered if the tears were her own doing or if they were a physical manifestation of what her mother and the boy she had taken thought of what she was reading.

She printed off the poem and hung it on the wall, so it would be the first thing she saw when she woke up and the last thing she saw before she went to sleep. Just as a friendly reminder that she was wrong, fundamentally.

Working the graveyard shift put a serious damper on her dating life. How was she supposed to get picked up by questionable men in bars if the bars were all closed by the time she got off work? What was she supposed to do, flirt with coworkers? They were all deadbeats who couldn’t find real jobs, just like her. She had standards, though she wasn’t too picky. It wasn’t as though she absolutely had to find some rich boy on a trust fund whose money would erase any need for her to work for the rest of her life. Just someone that would take care of her, and understood her boundaries well enough to not look her in the eye. Ever.

Otherwise...well.

No dating prospects, everyone she had ever loved dead (probably), working a crappy job with crappy hours in a city she barely knew...simply put, Apricot was morose, and no less lonely than she had been before her father’s passing. Her life was going nowhere. Perhaps she would waste away.

Perhaps that was for the best.

Thoughts like that used to horrify her, back before the boy she killed, back before she knew she was a born murderer. After the boy she decided such thoughts were justified, though she never actually attempted the deed itself (she was too much of a coward, someone would have to do it for her, she decided [was it selfish to wish what she’d done and how it made her feel onto others?]). However, the self-destructive tendencies she had started to develop were a little worrying (though not surprising). The fact that she sometimes fantasized that a guy drunk off his ass might come in and shoot her was alarming (but strangely therapeutic, especially in the mid-afternoon when she woke up from dreams of agony in her eyes and missing loves).

She could almost see it, the bright lights of the store spilling out into the dark of the parking lot an hour or two past midnight, the boozy, grungy smell of a man (definitely a man), the click of a safety and a slurred, “Gimme what’s in the register.” Would she cry? That thought always interrupted her narrative.

No. Tears were weakness and it was the little shows of strength that helped her to ignore how much of a coward she really was.

She always had two options. Defend herself, take off the glasses for momentary pain and safety and a lifetime debilitating guilt, or surrender. Her life, that was. Not the money. She’d get fired if she got robbed, after all.

He would shoot her, but his aim would of course be awful at his level of inebriation, so the bullets would just barely catch her in the left shoulder and on her right side. She always would fall to the ground quickly after stumbling back from the impact, her body sizzling with pain. The man would run away in a panic and she would slowly bleed out on dirty white linoleum.

She would think to herself, leaving an open wound on this floor is probably not sanitary because who the f*** actually thinks to themselves oh s*** oh god oh f*** i’ve been shot i’m dying f*** f***, the mind had to distract itself from the pain and the situation as best it could, after all.

She would not dare to turn her head to actually look at the blood, though she could feel it soaking into her dark hair from the shoulder wound. The store had one of those weird security devices that was a big, stainless steel-looking half orb on the ceiling. She would look in it as the life seeped from her body, and she would look into her own eyes (because of course the glasses would have blown off from the force of the shots). She would see her mother in the right eye, smiling benevolently, and she would see the boy she had murdered in the left, looking surprised and a little defeated, but somehow understanding, as though the time he spent in her head gave him insight to everything she was (insight she wished she could have as well).

She would join them soon.

Well, would she? She certainly didn’t understand where they were, or if they even were. If they were knocking around inside her, silent and frozen in their bodies of their times of death, would they be released when she died? Would they pass on to some kind of heaven? Would her soul implode on death along with her body?

What happens to black holes when they die?

(could she even die what if she continued on for billions of years moving from town to town would she kill again would she die faster the more she absorbed into herself would she become a conglomeration of those she had taken what would happen to her)

Whether it was unfortunate or not remained to be seen, she was never murdered at work. No one ever came in with a gun to end her life. It was rare that she got a customer at all, really, but it still happened, and some were rare finds indeed.

It was the middle of July, and while it was cool in the pharmacy as she flipped through a book of poetry she’d picked up (maybe there was one that would be sympathetic to her...unique situation? There never was, the Herschel poem was as good as she was going to get) it was practically sweltering outside. Still, she’d had no customers, as usual. It was far too hot for anyone to be out.

Except for one guy, apparently. The automatic doors slid open and she dropped her book to the floor and pushed her sunglasses down over her nose.

A man walked in. He turned and looked right at her at her station.

“Got any Cheez-Its Duos?” he asked.

When she thought back on those words later in life, she decided she’d heard worse lines from guys in the past.

She shrugged. “Can’t really read the labels on the boxes.”

He snorted and walked a little further into the store. The doors slid shut behind him. “What are you, illiterate?”

“Blind, thanks,” she snapped.

“Huh, I was wondering about the sunglasses. Figured it was a light adjustment thing,” he said. “You know, like how pirates wore eyepatches so they could see down under the ship after being on deck or whatever.”

“What?” What was this guy even talking about?

“Never mind.” He sighed. “I’m just going to go get my Cheez-Its and leave.” He headed down the snack aisle.

Apricot frowned.

He puttered around for a few minutes, grabbing a box of Cheez-Its, a six pack of what was, in Apricot’s opinion, truly shitty beer, and some Benadryl. He dropped it all in front of her at the register and immediately looked down to fish through his wallet for cash.

She scanned the items quickly, not even bothering to try to act like she couldn’t see her computer screen or the barcodes. The man, who was actually not too bad on the eyes, handed her a twenty.

She stole a look at his eyes. They were...black?

Slowly, Apricot pushed her sunglasses down and leaned in close to him. If she was wrong, she’d kill an innocent man. But if she was right…

He backed up. “Whoa, you don’t want to do that.”

“Why?” she asked. “Tell me why!” she demanded.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, looking at the floor, the rack of DVDs a few feet away, the ceiling, just not at her.

“Afraid I’ll disappear?”

He started, and his eyes were back on her, wild and scared.

“I think we’re, I think we’re the same,” she blurted out. That was strange to say. Everyone was different, weren’t they? Of course she was not the same as this man. But they were the same, they both had darkness where most had exploding novas of blue and brown and green and gold.

But she still could not be sure if she was right, because it was still so bright in the store and he still refused to actually look her in the eye.

“Hold on.”

She darted out from behind the counter and ran to the back room. “Don’t steal anything!” she shouted from the door, before entering and turning off all the lights in the store with a single brush of her hands.

She found him by the sound of his awkward shuffling. Obviously he wanted to run but it was likely he didn’t because he wanted to see if she was right, which just made her more confident that she was. It was so dark in the store she couldn’t see anything further than a few inches in front of her. God, how did actual blind people do it?

She grabbed him by the arm and turned him to face her.

In the dark all that she could see were the whites of his eyes. Everything else in front of her was…

Void.

She stared. He let her, and stared back.

She had never actually taken the opportunity in the past to see what her own eyes looked like in the absence of light. She assumed they were black and deep like the recesses of space, but when she looked into this man’s eyes, they were less like an empty vacuum between stars and more like the sea at night, still black and deep, but with more of a sense of waiting for someone to naively wander by to be snatched.

He asked, “What’s your name?” and her reverie was broken.

“Apricot,” she told him. She could not see faces in his eyes. She wondered what he saw in hers.

He snorted. “Weird name. I’m Vesper.”

“Your name’s Vesper and you think Apricot is weird?”

He shrugged. “Least mine’s not a fruit.”

She rolled her eyes, but said, “It’s very nice to meet you, Vesper.”

Her chest ached. She ignored it.

His pitch eyes bored into hers. “What time do you get off?”

“Six.”

He pulled a phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. “It’s 3:24 now. I will be back in two hours and 36 minutes.”

“And then?”

“Then, I think I will invite myself to your house to take a proper nap with you. And then I think I’d like to talk.”

“I don’t know if I would. Like to talk, I mean. Not that there’s nothing to say. But there’s nothing I want to tell.”

Another truth. She was full of honesty today.

He nodded. “I get that. But that’s hours from now. For now, you should probably turn the lights back on and I should figure out something to do for the next three and a half hours.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of them moved.

“Um.” His face went a little red.

“Yes?” She gave a small smile.

“Yeah I really should be going.” He tore his eyes from hers and looked to the door. “Gotta pick up some stuff from my buddy.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. “Then I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Yeah.” He stole one last glance at her, then at his food. “I’ll just...get this later,” he said, gesturing to it.

“I hope that’s a promise.”

“It is. It is. And not just because I couldn’t bear to leave my precious food alone without me. Uh, if you didn’t get that.” He took a few steps back. “Seeya.” He was back out the door in seconds, and Apricot was alone in the dark.

But while she was alone at that second, standing by herself in a space that had seconds earlier held another, she was no longer a solitary creature of black emptiness, and that feeling made her feel fuller than her mother or the boy ever had.