Sunshine City

Izzy promised we were going to rule Sunshine City forever, but she turned out to be a liar.

The day she walked out for good, instead of overalls she wore a neat, pleated blue skirt I’d never seen before, paired with a white button-down shirt she’d once claimed to hate. The necklace around her neck was gone, leaving me dangling with the other half.

I thought she’d be back in a few minutes, or a few days at most. But the doors to Sunshine City were a one-way exit. I stayed behind, surrounded by glass castles and flushed clouds. I could hear the echo of her laughter, ringing like music.

I avoided my parents’ questions for as long as I could manage. Izzy was sick, Izzy was busy. The lies made everything worse until they wised up and stopped asking altogether. But not before the gnawing started—little stirrings in my stomach.

A thin white strand poked through my shirt right in the middle of Geometry class. I tugged and it curled in my hand, small and singular. Harmless, maybe. The color reminded me of Izzy, thin and pale like an uncooked vermicelli noodle.

I had to do something hard that used to be so easy—I had to speak to her.

I saw her in the hallway with Sophia, arm-in-arm and laughing. I ducked into the girl’s bathroom. I got into the last stall, the one no one ever used because it was haunted. I felt those slight pains again, and this time, I pulled out at least four from under my shirt. Little translucent threads that wriggled before finally lying flat and dead. I flushed them down the toilet.

I got my courage up to face Izzy after school, even though she was with not just Sophia now, but Ava and Taylor too. “Why won’t you meet me there anymore?”

Her new friends laughed and my cheeks burned. Izzy looked away, like she was embarrassed to be around me. The other half of the necklace was still around my neck. I tore it off, flung it onto the grass, and sat as far from them as I could on the school bus home, my hands clutched over my stomach the whole ride.

That night, the threads got so bad that I got a pair of tweezers from Mom’s vanity. In the privacy of my locked room, I plucked wriggling pieces one by one, gritting my teeth so I wouldn’t make any noise. I wiped the blood on my sheets and threw the curdled dead things out the window. In the morning, Mom took one look at the mess I’d made of the sheets and handed me a pink feminine hygiene pad.

“You’re becoming a woman,” she said, her voice warm with pride.

I couldn’t explain to her that it wasn’t like that; this was something different.

I spent most of English the next morning in the girls’ bathroom. I pulled out so many threads that I almost fainted. I slid down the side of the cold wall and stared at the wriggling ball of pale threads in my hands, until they eventually stopped moving.

If it kept going like this, I’d be dead in a matter of days. The bleeding was getting worse, seeping through my clothes and getting harder to hide, even with my coat wrapped around me tight. A hall monitor found me curled up on the floor and sent me home immediately.

“This is what becoming a woman is about,” Mom said.

Under the blanket, the threads were coming out and crawling over my body. “This is perfectly normal,” she reiterated. “It’s okay to grow apart from friends, too. It happens to everyone at some point.”

“It’s not about Izzy,” I managed to say. I felt like a thread was squeezing around my heart, trying to poke in instead of out.

“Then what is this about?” she asked.

I never did figure out how to explain it to her.

†

Twenty years later, Stella and I were moving in together for the first time. We loaded cardboard boxes of our separate possessions and unloaded them into our new apartment, a small studio space in South Brooklyn. We unpacked everything indiscriminately of who they belonged to. Inside one box, I found a lacquered enamel box filled with jade bracelets and gold hoop earrings—and a necklace, too. Half a tarnished-silver heart, Best inscribed onto it.

It brought me right back to Sunshine City. The phantom threads began moving in my stomach, even though so much time had passed. I breathed in and out, dispelling visions of the past…but the ache still lingered. The iridescent mirrors and fantastical glimpses of elsewhere melded back into the silver necklace in my hand, an orange cascade of afternoon light spilling in from the open window.

My girlfriend came over and rested her chin on my shoulder. “It’s hard for me to get rid of old things,” she mumbled against my hair. “I must’ve had that one for years. Got it with my best friend at summer camp when we were kids.”

Sunshine City only had room for two of us, until suddenly it didn’t. Izzy left it first, but I’d followed shortly after. There was no point in ruling it alone. It made me sad. Even now, in the new apartment I shared with the person I loved most.

Would she think it was a foolish thing to reminisce about, so many years later? But by the time I finished my story, she looked at me thoughtfully, and I knew she was taking what I’d said quite seriously.

“Aren’t we there right now? Or couldn’t we be close?” she asked.

I looked at the cardboard boxes around us, the shelves lined with our collective books. I looked at the sun-warmed wood beams of our small apartment. I looked at her, the woman squeezing my hand. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek from unpacking. I brushed it away with the soft pad of my thumb. “Yeah,” I said, as surprised as I was sure of it. “Of course we are.”

The tea kettle whistled in the kitchen. I got up to check, and Stella followed.

© 2024 Catherine Yu

About the Author

Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York. She is the author of Direwood and Helga, slated for spring 2024. Her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy and the Death in the Mouth anthology.