Manifest

“You owe me dinner, Lynnette.”

I couldn’t see the woman’s smile in response, but I caught the glint of my phone’s backlit screen on her teeth. Her snort would have echoed across the empty field if there was anything within miles to bounce the sound off of.

Even the crickets had abandoned this place. It wasn’t farmland. It lacked the intrigue of the sandy dunes, pines, or rolling hills mottled with scrubbrush and occasional wildflowers. The mountains were behind us, and only the void of flatlands lay ahead.

Something tickled my calf. I flinched, thinking it was an insect, but it was just a long strand of ricegrass being friendly.

“Look, it’s all about manifestation. You didn’t believe hard enough,” Lynnette said. “I don’t owe you shit.”

“Oh my god, you sound like my parents. But they’re more about prayer, less about manifestation.”

She smacked my arm. “You owe me now for saying that.”

“True. Too far.”

She showed me the GPS coordinates on her app. According to the application, they were in the hot zone for spiritual anomalies.

Anomilind had been popping up in our feeds since late September, and it was Lynnette’s latest obsession, and now mine by proxy. It was geocaching, but instead of finding cool, interesting puzzles and prizes hidden by other geocachers in random locations, the app featured randomly generated coordinates that would lead the user to the word or concept they manifested. There were passionate forums dedicated to this app, threads of mystical and uncanny happenings from people who believed.

“I wanted something surprising,” one person said, before stumbling into the Appalachian woods in the far east and finding an old, gorgeous bridge over a sparkling brook.

“I manifested an adventure,” another said, and then found a cave system and met friendly hikers who shared their life stories and a few apple slices.

“I thought about the word ghost,” another said, before their coordinates took them to a nook with an abandoned house, an eerie feeling washing over them. When they drove back home, they reported that somehow, hours had passed, when they could swear it had been ten miles away at most.

A few theories cropped up on the forums about the anomalies—how the lines between dimensions were thinner, and either spirits or different realities might cross into our realm. How the universe could hear your intentions more clearly, and the magic of manifestation and witchcraft became more potent.

It was all hooey, but Lynnette loved that kind of thing. Since she and I had abandoned the homegrown religion we were raised with, I had traveled the path of hard skepticism, and she found peace in different flavors of spiritualism. To find wonder in a universe like this one was the true miracle, to me. Despite everything, inside, she was still the girl I had met in third grade who would chastise me if I said the phrase “I don’t believe in fairies!” out loud.

I figured it was a good way to spend Halloween night—I felt too old to party this year, honestly. I far preferred driving around with my best friend, who was excitedly chattering about how tonight was the night to use Anomilind. People in the forums found the craziest things.

I complained idly that people in the forums who found things lived in far more interesting places and made a bet with her that we wouldn’t find jack. Idaho had places, but you had to drive forever and then usually pay a fee to see them.

It was mostly…this.

Flat. A few rising rock features, here and there, with rich red lines and green scrub interrupting the constant brown. Chilly, damp air from autumn rain trailed claws up and down my arms, pulling gooseflesh from me.

“What did you manifest, anyway?”

“Something spooky, of course. It’s Halloween. I heard about like, old mining towns and ghost towns out here. One of these days, I’ll see a full body apparition, I swear to god. You?”

I swallowed. Because what I had thought into the universe had been stupid.

“Oh, uh. An adventure. Figure that no matter what, we’ll get that.”

“Aw. Well, that makes it kind of hard to prove it’s real, then.”

“Yeah. I should have wished for a million bucks.”

“No way.” She snorted. “If we actually find a huge bag of cash out here, we should probably call the police.”

This far out, the light pollution had faded to memory, and the stars and Milky Way were bright, as if the universe had leaned in close enough to press a kiss to the black silhouette of the desert.

“I feel something. It’s eerie, isn’t it?”

“The most eerie part is how many burrs are going to get stuck in my shoe.”

I knew she was following the GPS on Anomilind by the light of her phone. The blue glow highlighted a black curly strand and cheekbone. I was surprised she still had a signal. Mine had been on the fritz since before we parked. Different services, maybe.

After a while of us walking, the car was so far behind us that I couldn’t even see it when I flashed its lights with the key fob.

“Should we have invited the guys? I hope they don’t feel left out,” she asked.

My frown deepened. Lynnette’s situationship and his best friend had been popping up in most of our hangouts lately. The true horror is a girl’s night interrupted by a man. “Nah. They would have been bored by this.”

“And you’re not?”

I snorted. “I’d be entertained if it were just you and me in the vacuum of space. Which is basically what this is.”

She elbowed me, and I stumbled on a patch of weeds, landing on my knees. Spikey brush pressed into my palms and knees. I hissed.

“Oh, shit, sorry.” The crunch of footsteps. “Here. I’ll help you up.”

I reached up to accept her hand.

And up.

“Uh, I’m over here?”

“Sorry. I got turned around. It’s so dark.”

She took my hand. I frowned, feeling the press of long nails. Her hands were ice. I thought about rubbing them to warm her up, but I thought better of it.

My head swam a little as I stood, like it did sometimes when I stood up too fast. My vision clouded, pinpricks of cloudy red and pink against the black field.

“Did you get acrylics?”

She didn’t answer, too focused on the light emanating from her screen.

My head was spinning. I gripped her hand and didn’t let it go. I hadn’t had vertigo this bad in a long while. It was hard to get bearings when the dark was so thick, and they were surrounded by so much space, so much emptiness. “Should we head back?”

It was quiet for a moment. She sighed a little. “I don’t want to.”

I knew Lynnette liked her thrills, but this was a little ridiculous. “Even with our phones, it’s impossible to see anything.”

“Alright. We shall go back.”

“We shall, shall we?” I mocked her, but she ignored me. I turned around and used the flashlight on my phone. It was barely penetrating the dark, light catching on weeds and bushes.

“Where’s my car? I can’t even see it.”

“We just have to walk back to the road.”

“You still have the GPS signal, right?”

She did not answer. The air felt thin. I stumbled after her.

We walked, the sky stretching out before us. Every step took me nowhere, a treadmill of stumbling dust and weeds, the stars a constant, encompassing umbrella with bright pinholes. Everything was too vast, yet too small. I shook my head, my grip on her hand tight.

“Bet you wish I was Trent right now, huh?” I asked. I hurt myself in the process with the question, trying to be funny. I didn’t want her to let go.

“Who?”

I laughed. Sort of. Because Lynnette sometimes said that when she was pissed at someone, but that had almost sounded too real. And that, to me, was too good to be true. Crushes on straight people were stupid. It was a lesson my heart refused to learn.

“What did you ask for, Maria?”

I swallowed. “I told you. An adventure.”

“Uh-huh. Now what’s the truth?”

I stopped. She stopped. Her silhouette faced away from me, most of her blending into the dark landscape.

“Jesus, that is the truth. Why are you giving me the third degree?”

She turned to me, her pretty features turned into a white mask by the light on her phone. “Come on. Just give me something. Tell me.”

I tried to pull my hand away, but she knitted our fingers together.

“Love, damn it. Love!” I ripped it away and backed off, stumbling over a patch of weeds. “I know it’s stupid, okay? What we have is enough. And I don’t believe in any of this shit. And I know it’s not—I know it’s not you and me, okay? It’s you and—well, someone. Not Trent, he’s an ass.”

“Stupid,” She repeated back to me. Her gaunt, drawn expression made tingles run up my spine. Spiders might have been escaping the brush to crawl up my legs. I thought maybe one had crawled up her face, but it was a strand of her black hair.

“I—” I stared at her. My best friend was round-faced with long, dark lashes and full lips. She never left the house without foundation or her thick eyebrows tamed, though I saw her bare-faced often enough that I normally wouldn’t think anything of it.

But I could swear she had been wearing makeup before. I had teased her about dolling up for ghosts.

And though her features were similar, this was not the same person. Her chin was too narrow, her nose too thin.

But her voice—

It had been the same.

“Love.” The stranger leaned in, her gaze a wide, black thing, sucking me in. Her voice was Lynnette’s, but not. Her eyes were Lynnette’s, but not. “Love is a terrible thing to beg for.”

Her mouth opened. And opened. And opened.

Her mouth became the sky, the night, the dark. Her teeth were long and terrible, stretching and waning into the moon and stars. I screamed for Lynnette as I crashed into the ground, the world tipping over around me. She loomed over me, a dark terror, drowning the world in her own self.

And then someone grasped my hand to pull me up.

And her nails were short, her hand chilled from the night air but still warm with life.

“That was a dramatic scream. I didn’t mean to push you over.” Lynnette giggled. “Sorry. My phone’s battery is dying, we should head back before we lose our flashlights.”

I shuddered and whirled my phone’s flashlight on her.

She swore and shielded her face, but I didn’t care, because it was her. Fully her.

I stood up, then lost my balance and plopped back in the dirt.

“What’s wrong? Did you hurt something?”

“No.”

What had happened? Had I just…daydreamed? Blacked out?

“Yeah, okay. You’re doing that terrible poker face thing you do when you’re upset and you don’t want anyone to know. Let’s head back.”

I followed her, grasping for her hand. She smiled a little and squeezed it, then led me back to the car.

The car was a relief, a welcome sanctuary from the unending dark, where I didn’t need to check over my shoulder for a white mask or long teeth. I didn’t think I would ever be so relieved to smack the cabin lights on.

“Huh.” Lynnette remarked at the car’s clock. “I could swear we were only out there thirty minutes, tops. An hour? Don’t remember that.”

It had felt that long to me. If I counted that strange…daydream.

I buckled my seatbelt in the passenger side and turned to Lynnette, who turned the keys in the ignition.

She smiled at me, and she was so her.

“So, Maria.”

“Yeah?”

“What did you actually ask for?”

I stared at her, my heart thudding so loud that I was sure the stars could hear it and pulsed in time with it.

My car keys were pressed into my outer thigh in my jeans pocket.

Something was…off. Something had changed.

But it was her. It was her. It was her.

“Love,” I said. “Kind of….uh. Embarrassing, I guess. Sorry.”

“What?” She blinked. “What do you mean ‘love’?”

“Like. I don’t know. Luck with it. I stumble onto my soulmate in an open field, or we stop to get gas, and the clerk happens to be a hot lady. Or, maybe…” I swallowed. “Maybe my best friend breaks up with her stupid situationship.”

She laughed, not unkindly. Pure delight rings out in the small space, and even if I don’t know what she thinks of what I said exactly, it’s the kind of laugh I put in months of work for to save up for a birthday present or a surprise or a prank, and I smile back.

And then she kissed me.

I ignored the keys in my pocket, cold and strange.