After My Lover Saved Her, He Let Me Burn

The bench was cold under me. I did not move.

I had been sitting outside the laundromat for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. The numbers on the parking meter blurred when I looked too long, so I stopped looking. A plastic bag drifted past my shoes. Someone inside the laundromat was laughing at a TV. The dryers hummed through the wall, low and steady, like something breathing.

I did not know my name. I did not know how I got here. I knew the cold. I knew that the right side of my face hurt when the wind hit it. I knew that if I touched it, the skin felt wrong, ridged and tight. So I did not touch it.

A woman was walking down the street toward me.

She was wearing a long coat that did not belong on this block. Camel, soft, too clean. Her boots clicked on the sidewalk. She was holding something in her gloved hand, close to her chest, like it might blow away. A photograph.

She stopped halfway down the block. Then she started walking again, faster. Then she was running.

I watched her come. I did not feel afraid. I did not feel anything. The part of me that knew how to feel afraid had been switched off a long time ago, and no one had turned it back on.

She stopped in front of the bench. Her breath came out in white clouds. She looked at me, then at the photograph, then at me again. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Then her face folded.

I had never seen a person break like that. Her knees gave a little. She caught herself on the back of the bench. Her shoulders started shaking, and a sound came out of her that did not have a shape. She pressed her glove against her mouth like she was trying to push the sound back inside.

"Reina," she said.

The word landed on me and slid off.

"Reina, it's me. It's Tiffany. Oh my God. Oh my God."

I looked at her. I looked at the photograph in her hand. A girl with long dark hair was laughing in it. The girl had two whole sides to her face.

"I don't know you," I said. My voice sounded rusty. I was not sure when I had last used it.

She nodded fast, wiping her cheeks with the back of her wrist. "That's okay. That's okay. You don't have to. Just come with me. Please. It's so cold out here."

I did not have a reason to say no. I did not have a reason to say yes. I stood up because she was holding out her hand and her hand was shaking, and somewhere far underneath everything that had been emptied out of me, a small thing remembered that you were supposed to take a hand when it shook like that.

Her apartment smelled like coffee and clean laundry. She kept apologizing for