Afterglow

When her husband left her, the first thing she did was drink Gatorade^®.

Red liquid—candy apple, fire engine, lollipop, stop light, clown nose red—she poured it down her throat, then other colors after: orange, purple, chlorine blue. A rainbow gurgled into her veins, carried on phosphoric acid and sucrose acetate isobutyrate. On Red 40 and Yellow 6. All that artificiality made her less of the world, because she was no longer of the world—the world had left. She was a new species, radioactive, who bled coolant pink, neon green. Who peed blue. Who sneezed blue. Who sweated purple, just like the athletes in magazine advertisements she’d studied closely as a girl.

That she had stomach trouble was, according to her father, the fault of the liquid.

No wonder you can’t eat, he said over the phone, his voice crackling from a thousand miles elsewhere. You need real food.

Saltines, maybe, he said.

Or pear slices.

Are you listening?

Mary, are you there?

To look at oneself in the mirror, though, blue-tongued as a lizard, eyeballs gone orange, was to see a woman who knew things she didn’t. A woman who was not her. A woman whose husband had not left—or better yet, a woman who had never had a husband at all.

She had moved, that fall, to a sea-scraped island. Only seven trees marked the whole landscape—the island’s old growth forest axed centuries earlier for firewood—and those remaining trees were more like large shrubs, salt-black, bent by wind. There were many more houses. Shacks or Victorian-style mansions clustered over low hills and bogs and perilously eroding cliffs. Though on clear