Lucinda was cold inside the car. She rested her head against the steering wheel and breathed quietly, allowing the vehicle to idle with the radio off. Her fingers played with the straw of the oversized plastic cup in its holder, the cup itself probably a quarter full of expired Sierra Mist. Lucinda had been on the road for hours, and as she sat in the car she tried to feel restful, as though restfulness were a state of person she could turn off and on in a cinch. Lifting her head from the wheel, Lucinda fingered the dial of the air conditioner. It was at its highest setting, turned to cool, and Lucinda let the breeze remind her of the air of Minnesota, so far away now, and where it was likely snowing, as it had been when she had began her trek from her dingy two-room apartment to this new state of Louisiana. Where Lucinda idled now it was hot, or so she imagined. Lucinda so feared opening the car door, allowing the Southern air to fill her lungs, which were blue, and Minnesotan. Lucinda was near a bayou. The road was narrow and the soil from the ground on either side spilled onto the pavement. The path had the quality of an ingrowth, one long cemented path that went on for miles north and south. Lucinda imagined that if she continued to drive that she would reach a point where the cement ran out into the water, to be swallowed like a tongue by the mouth of the bayou. Off to the left of the ingrown road was a dirt path. It snaked through clusters of trees and disappeared behind the thick trunks. If she strained Lucinda could see the tiled roof of a house, along with a few walls, some windows and the corners of curtains. Lucinda knew this was the house she was looking for, but kept the car running. In the passenger seat sat a bag, loose and grey. Lucinda had packed all she cared to bring with her into this sack. She had thrown in whatever she thought was necessary -- deodorant, of course, some tank tops, a few dresses -- and her gun. It was a .38, small, hideable, with a glossy black finish. When she was packing, Lucinda had slipped the thing in casually, in the same instance she packed her allergy medicine and carton of Spirits. She let the gun lie toward the bottom of the bag, nestled between shorts and shirts. Lucinda lowered her hand into the bag and brushed her fingers against the revolver’s handle. It was cool, like her blue lungs, and Lucinda feared opening the car door. The bayou air would fill its chamber. But she had to leave sometime. Lucinda pulled the bag into her lap and found her cell phone. She opened her contacts and selected a name: Omusa. The phone dialed the number. The phone rung, and she waited. “...Hello?” the voice on the other end was sleepy, smooth, with a quality like milk pouring into a glass. “Hi, ‘Musa. I’m here. Like, just down the way. I’m about to walk up now.” Lucinda tried her best to sound casual, easy, like she was all right. But she was nervous. The air conditioning was still on but the palms of her hands were clammy. Omusa sounded alarmingly like herself. After a year of not hearing her voice, Lucinda had been prepared for some transformation -- an accent maybe, but Omusa sounded like Omusa. It was silent on the other end, until: “Oh...I’m coming out to you. One minute.” Lucinda stammered. “No! It’s all right. I just have the one bag. I only wanted you to know I’m here. You see me, right? Out in the red car.” Lucinda thought she saw the ruffling of curtains in the window of the bayou house, indistinct tufts of hair obscured by the trees. “Yeah, I see some of you. Come up.” “All right. Be there in ten.” “Ten? The path is shorter than you think.” “You forget! I’m a slow walker.” “Yeah. Mind the ‘gators.” Omusa hung up and Lucinda was left to ponder for a moment the possibility of alligators hidden among the trees. The grass was overgrown, and tall enough to hide one, two, a gaggle of creatures, reptilian, deceptive. She imagined herself walking the path and stumbling over a narrow, scaly snout. Would she be killed then? She could be snapped up in its jaws and dragged into the water. Or would the alligator eat her on the spot, in the grass? She could shoot it, but what were the chances she could fumble through all the contents of her bag, find the gun, throw back the safety… She traveled all this way to be killed by a swamp creature. Lucinda didn’t have to worry about these things in Minnesota. Her worries at home did not extend to lizards with teeth and snouts and snapping jaws. It had been Lucinda’s idea to pay Omusa a visit. She had not seen her friend for nearly an entire year, and they were roommates. Omusa had left Minnesota for Louisiana shortly after her mother passed; Louisiana was Omusa’s place of birth, and though she didn’t attend the funeral she did eventually fly out to Louisiana, not to return. Omusa’s mother, in her will, had left her the house. Omusa was reluctant to go. She brought the topic up with Lucinda a number of times, always at dinner. The two of them shared bowls of macaroni in their beds, and in the final spoonfuls Omusa asked, every time with a look on her face like quiet desperation, for Lucinda to please consider coming with her, for only a week, just to set matters in order and to find buyers for the house. She would split the profit with her. Omusa stared into the bowl at the last part. Lucinda always shook her head “no,” both because she did not have the proper words for rejection and because she didn’t know what to think of Louisiana -- she had no thoughts for the place. She loved Omusa, she was her only friend, but to leave Minnesota and to enter this new state, this Louisiana, had at the time been an impossible thought. Omusa eventually left by herself. For a while Lucinda had thought of following her but she didn’t. Omusa left no note. She was simply gone one morning. Omusa texted Lucinda some days after she disappeared to inform Lucinda she had left for the bayou and would be back in a few days, perhaps a week. But months passed and she never returned. Omusa’s room at the apartment remained the same, still lived-in, still full of the trinkets and the clutter of her life built in Minnesota. Omusa adored the art of filmmaking. She made a living reviewing the pictures that came through the local town theater, and ran specials on returning classics in between her assessments of new releases. She kept the ticket stubs in small plastic tubs, arranged on her dresser. Some nights, Lucinda sorted through the tubs and picked out the pictures she remembered seeing with her. She held her favorites in her fingers. If, then, she closed her eyes, she saw Omusa’s face in the auditorium, half-illuminated by the movie screen. Her skin was a deep bronze, a token of her American Indian heritage, and her lips full, colored dark to match the quality of the theater in those quiet moments before the film started. In the dark, Lucinda placed a hand on Omusa’s cheek. It was in that shaded part of her face, the space where tufts of black hair fell. Lucinda always told her it was coolest there. The car’s air conditioning ceased the moment Lucinda ejected the car keys. She reached once more into her grey bag and her hand brushed against the short barrel of the revolver. Lucinda had never shot anyone. The gun was a purchase after she and Omusa were robbed in the parking lot of the Santa Monique, their favorite diner and the place they first met. It had been nighttime. They were in the car, and a man in the snow tapped a gun against Omusa’s window. He barked threats and through the glass he looked like a spectre. Hooded, a figure of death. Lucinda thought about driving off, but the car hadn’t been turned on and with the snow on the ground they would get nowhere. Lucinda wished the gunman were on her side of the car. Not because she thought she could do anything about him but because Omusa’s face was wet with tears. In the scant light of the streetlamps her face was red, pulpy and running. Moments passed and they each stepped out of the car and emptied their pockets, placed on the snowy hood the keys, their cards, any cash or change. The man drove off without hurting them but Omusa and Lucinda waded home through the snow. Lucinda went to sleep that night cold. She dreamt of Omusa’s face in the streetlight. Lucinda slung the bag over her shoulder and started on the path to the bayou house. The air was hot, as she suspected, and she felt the coolness of her air-conditioned skin ebb away. Lucinda’s arms were mostly bare in her lavender tank top, but she felt a stickiness form in her armpits. She stopped for a moment in between trees to wipe her brow, and tied her chestnut hair into a high ponytail. Her breathing was rapid, sharp intakes. Louisiana was taking its hold of her, she felt. Lucinda kept scanning the tall grass for alligators, treading lightly along the soil, wary of snouts, but all she saw were tree stumps and the frenzied flittering of bugs’ wings. Vines from branches hung from the trees like tongues. They lapped Lucinda’s shoulders as she snaked through the path. Peering up into the trees she was reminded of the way some jungle cats in faraway places idled on the limbs. She thought of jaguars pouncing on her from great heights and mauling her in the brush. Lucinda’s gun seemed far away in the grey sack. Gradually, the house came into view. It was short, and gothic. Toads loitered in the grass before the porch, which was cut shorter than the turf along the path. The planks of the house were steely grey with highlights of black. These darker portions were a midnight quality, and Lucinda found herself staring at them as she approached the house’s front door. There was a gravity to the color that struck her. She stopped to touch a small black post in front of the house and felt nauseous. The steps leading to the porch were rickety, and as Lucinda ascended them she didn’t think the house was shabby, but rather ancient. The building mystified her. It might have been the bayou. Lucinda walked to the end of the deck and leaned over the railing to peer at the land behind the house, and it was all marshland. A little ways from the back of the house was a small dock and a boat. It looked unused -- the wood that made up the dock was discolored and somewhat warped. There were stocky pails with thin handles sitting out by the dock, and Lucinda thought she made out an assembly of brushes laid out across their tops. The marshland was dismal. An immense, rolling fog swallowed the trees and their limbs, so that only the fringes of branches and trunks were visible. In this way the swamp appeared incomplete. If she riled the waters, Lucinda feared that she would disturb the bones of the creatures that died in the swamp, their remains soft white and indistinguishable. Lucinda pulled herself away from the railing and walked to the house door. The door was tall and black, made of sturdy oak. Lucinda saw none of the whites and grays of the house walls in the door’s wood. She knocked. Lucinda heard a shuffling of feet from far away behind the door, and the release of locks on the other side. The door pulled open. Omusa was not smiling, but yawning. She wore a black t-shirt and a pair of white shorts that contrasted with her brown legs, darker now than what Lucinda remembered, and though her hair had grown considerably longer it was still dark and messy, the bulk of it tied into buns high on her head. Lucinda stepped through the threshold and pulled Omusa in for a hug. Lucinda buried her nose deep into Omusa’s hair. It was soaked, and smelled of nothing. She felt Omusa’s arms find their way around her waist, and as she squeezed Lucinda pulled back and kissed Omusa on her forehead. It was a long kiss, and one she meant. They stayed that way for a while, Lucinda kissing and Omusa squeezing, until Omusa loosened her arms and stepped back. They were silent. Lucinda wasn’t sure what to say now. Omusa closed the door and Lucinda stepped further into the house. It was dark inside. Lucinda was reminded of the blackness of the paint on the house’s walls and the door that was closed. She was standing in a living room full of faded furniture. Chairs and tables, a couch that had the deep impressions of a body Omusa’s size in the fabric. One table in the center of the room was covered in jars, some of which had their tops twisted open with knives through the jar mouths. Lucinda stepped over to the table and stumbled. Her foot was caught in the straps of some bags placed at the foot of the couch. They were duffel bags full of clothes; shirts and underwear were folded neatly inside. The jars on the table were full of jam, and underneath the table was a loaf of bread, tied off in a plastic bag. Lucinda dropped her own bag next to the duffels. She turned to Omusa, who was peering out the window into the front yard. “Were you going somewhere, ‘Musa?” Lucinda asked. Omusa didn’t turn away from the window. She shook her head, “no”. Lucinda took a seat on the couch. It was warm and she figured Omusa had been laying there. Had she been sleeping? she wondered. Omusa asleep in this house was an odd thought to her. On occasion, Lucinda and Omusa had shared a bed. It was always on those nights when they felt especially close to one another. They would come home from seeing a film, and after Omusa was finished finalizing notes for her review she would enter Lucinda’s room and kiss her. Her lips were still dark with the lipstick she wore to shows. Omusa kissed Lucinda deeply, so deeply that she fell into the bed. Omusa followed. She had thought of that contact often in Omusa’s absence. She found it difficult to sleep at night. Lucinda let Omusa leave. She had difficulty reconciling how quickly their closeness turned to separation. She let her come to Louisiana alone, when before they kissed and shared each other. Omusa and Lucinda never discussed their nights together. When Lucinda woke up in the morning, Omusa was gone, either outside or sleeping in her own room. On weekends Lucinda got dressed and the two of them ate at the Santa Monique for lunch. Their fondness for each other wasn’t loveless; living together, being in such proximity to each other for such long amounts of time left no room for them to consider what they had. They did not discuss their intimacy because there was no need to. They were Lucinda and Omusa: lovers, roommates, friends. It was only when Omusa was gone that Lucinda experienced anything that could be described as yearning. She had taken their affection for granted. Omusa tapped her finger against the window. “Do you like the toads?” She asked. “Their croaking is annoying now, but it’s like music at night, with the moon out.” “I’ve never really listened.” Lucinda said, and paused. “I was looking out for alligators.” Omusa closed the curtains and walked over to Lucinda on the couch. She knelt and brought Lucinda’s face close to hers, placing a warm hand on Lucinda’s cheek, which was white and flushed from the heat. “Why’d you come, Luce?” Omusa asked, and looked at her for a while. “It’s been so long.” “I missed you.” Lucinda replied. She spoke with more volume than was necessary. Omusa dropped her hand from Lucinda’s cheek and stood. She left the room without a word, exiting through an archway into an unknown part of the bayou house.
The air inside the house was different from what Lucinda had breathed outside. The air out on the path had been heavy and humid like what she feared. It was Southern. The bayou house’s oxygen was hot, but breathable. Lucinda did not have to struggle to breathe the way she did outside; she didn’t miss the car’s air conditioning. She thought she sensed something of home in the air, if only a trace of it. The sense was elusive, and as Lucinda reclined on the livingroom couch she felt a new uneasiness. The mixture was unstable. The Southern air of the bayou house mingled with the Minnesotan scent and confused Lucinda. She felt as though she were tangled -- caught in a place at once familiar and alien to her. Lucinda had sensed it when walking up to the house, saw it in the black parts of the house’s walls and the post out front. Lucinda turned on the couch and dragged her bag over to her. She fished around until she felt the gun and pulled it out by the barrel. She rubbed the ribs of the chamber, toyed with the hammer. Lucinda checked the cylinders. It was loaded. She didn’t feel the need to fire the weapon but did feel safe with it in her hands. Staring down the barrel, Lucinda aimed the gun around the room. She imagined every appliance as another intruder, another carjacker come to threaten Omusa, to drive her to tears. The air in the room affected her. It was more likely to Lucinda that the thief would come from inside the house, rather than outside. Outside was Southern, and strange, but inside the house was instability. Two Minnesotan bodies in one marshland house. Lucinda waved the gun to and fro, popping invisible bullets into the lamps, the chairs, the windows. After a while the gun felt heavy in her hand. She had fired two rounds of figmentary ammunition. Sleepily, she set the gun down, letting it rest on her stomach. Omusa had been gone for half an hour. She walked off into a part of the house Lucinda was afraid to enter, and so she waited on the couch with her feet on the cushions and the gun by her navel, biting back sleep.
Lucinda had first met Omusa sitting cross-legged at one of the tables outside the Santa Monique. She cupped the bottom of a ceramic cup in two large mittened hands. Omusa was shaking so much from the cold that the coffee inside splashed out from the cup onto the snow by her thighs. The snow fell hard that day, and Lucinda, watching Omusa from her seat inside the diner, felt a tenderness for her. Seeing her at that table, Lucinda felt compelled to find out for herself who the stranger was. After a while she had taken her donut and mug of coffee out to sit with Omusa, opposite her at the table. Lucinda saw Omusa fight not to indulge her sniffles; she remained as straight-faced as possible. Omusa held her lips in a suspense, and they were pursed, and quivering from the strain. It took some minutes before Omusa acknowledged Lucinda. She appeared dazed from the cold. She smiled weakly, and as her lips parted Lucinda noticed mucus, turned icicle, hanging from Omusa’s face like tusks. Lucinda thought of reaching over and snapping them off, but feared that would be too forward. Instead she mimicked tusks with her fingers, suspending them below her nose. When Omusa gave her a confused look, she made her best walrus impression, grunting and snorting like she imagined walruses did. Omusa cackled, caught in a laughing fit. She guffawed so violently that the frozen mucus dislodged itself from her nose and shattered on the table. Lucinda chuckled, and from that moment they were friends. In the falling snow Lucinda learned who Omusa was. She had traveled from her humid pocket in Louisiana to experience winter up north -- she chose a no-place town in the northwestern corner of Minnesota, a random selection. It was a thing of pride that she brave the winter without appearing weak, or really, affected in any way. Lucinda told her that idling outside in a flurry like this would be a sure way to contract pneumonia. Omusa made a face and Lucinda offered her place to sleep for a few nights, she had a vacancy in the apartment and if she wanted to stay a while it was really no problem. She accepted, and they shook hands. Together they left for home.
The sun fell. It was nighttime. Lucinda had fallen asleep and awoke to find her gun disappeared from her stomach. Violently she drew herself up from the couch and patted herself down, thinking the gun could have fallen anyplace -- she might have thrown in her sleep. She dug through the cushions, but found nothing. Sweating, she stood from the couch to search her bag. It was gone. Lucinda’s stomach fell. Not only her bag, but Omusa’s had vanished as well. Lucinda ran fingers through her hair, and chewed her bottom lip. It was gone. The gun and Omusa were gone. She was alone. In a panic she stumbled past the table, making her way toward the archway Omusa had dissipated through hours ago. She stepped under it and found it only led to a kitchen, and through that a small hallway. There were doors on either side of the hall, all closed and lightless except for one, down the middle at the far end. Lucinda barreled down the hall and violently twisted the knob on the door. It turned but the door wouldn’t give. She made a fist against the wood, banging and calling out Omusa’s name in a hushed voice that was wail and whisper in equal measure. When the door wouldn’t open, Lucinda doubled her way back down the hall. She would head outside, and find a way in. The air in the house was like poison as it rushed past her. the oxygen was a fume, and she suffered a coughing fit as she pulled open the front door to step outside. Lucinda skipped down the stairs and made a left at the black post, heading around the back of the house. She saw a light through one of the windows, and knew that was the room she couldn’t enter. Coming around close, she gripped the windowsill and pulled herself up to peer inside. Omusa wasn’t in the room but her things were. All of her clothes removed from the duffel bags and placed into low, open drawers. It was a bedroom, one with a large bed meant for two. Lucinda spotted her grey bag over the bedsheets, loose and empty. Her dresses were lain across the sheets next to the sack, with hangers fitted in between the shoulders. The revolver was placed at the end of the bedstead, its black finish glossy under the lamplight. There was a freshness to the room that was not mirrored in the rest of the house. It was bright, and Lucinda thought she could whiff through the glass of the windowpane something of the room’s scent. It electrified her. She wanted to be inside, to get a real sense of the place, but she needed to find Omusa. Lucinda let herself fall back onto the turf. She walked to the very back of the house, until she met the dock. Omusa was there, sitting cross-legged on the old wood next to the pails and paintbrushes. She held one in her hand, its end colored in what appeared to be cyan under the moonlight. Omusa absently stroked one wooden post that was part of the dock. That post shone under the moon brilliantly, shimmering wet and a contrast to the discolored remainder of the dock. The bayou’s fog cleared. The water now was murky but reflected the moon in its own way. The trees’ limbs were free from obfuscation and were like persons in the dark, tall and reaching, fingers suspended over the waters. The toads were alive, like Omusa warned. They sung, notes rising from deep inside their toady throats. Omusa was silent, filling in gaps of the post with strokes of cyan. Lucinda stepped close to the dock and slung her arms around Omusa’s neck, bringing her head around to kiss her on the cheek. Omusa dropped the brush and placed her hands on Lucinda’s arms. Lucinda sighed. “Why did you wait so long to come?” Omusa asked, turning her head around. Lucinda stared into the bayou. “I was afraid,” she said. “and I thought you left, just now.” “I’ve been out here.” Omusa said, quietly. “Yeah.” Lucinda gave her a squeeze. “I put your clothes up. And your gun is on the bed. I wasn’t sure where you wanted to put it.” “Yeah, thanks. I saw.” “We should paint tomorrow. This house is old and I’m tired of living in it the way it is.” “Sure.” “And we should toss out the furniture. It’s awful.” “Your mother’s? You sure you don’t want to keep it around?” Omusa was silent for a while. Lucinda listened to the toads. “Luce?” “Yeah.” “My mother was old, and hateful. And she died. This is our place now.” “Our place.” “Yeah.” “All right.”