The old neighborhood was nearly unrecognizable.

And it's not because I'm older. Because I'm not. I am exactly the same age as I always am. No birthdays since my last birthday. I am no taller or shorter or thinner or fatter than normal.

Not a hair out of place. Ever.

No, the old neighborhood was always old and abandoned—the civil defense just sneezed fresh paint on it—but now it's a row of matchsticks burned to different sizes, powdered in white Nevada dust. Dead brush cuddles against standing walls and tucks under windowsills—playing hide-n-seek with front steps and whatever else lays scattered about.

I look and I see charred bones and dead things. I don't know why.

The missing pieces make the neighborhood nearly unrecognizable. That—and I think the whole place has aged, like, thirty years.

Hands in my jean pockets, I kick around in the dirt. Underneath, there's a smudge on the blistered tarmac in the shape of a lizard. Colored doors—dry wreckage—lie orphaned in the street. I walk slow and make a game, matching the right front door with the right house.

The metal house numbers are just dark smears, pasted shadows, like the lizard. Even the mailboxes have shrunken up and closed in on themselves. Guessing is purely instinctual. Size. Shape. Color. I have to do it from memory.

Purple house, green door?

There's a purple door I recognize, peeping out from beneath a dislodged flatbed. God knows where the truck is.

Purple door, green house?

Yes. Mrs. Pancake would keel at the thought of living in anything the color of a grape soda stain. Baby Bib, her neighbor, likes it the other way round.

But that was when her house still had a ceiling.

I hunt for the purple door's missing knob, scraping the toe of my boot along the rectangular edges, carving valleys. It's not there.

When I do find the doorknob, I have to pry it loose from a flower box coated in hardened plastic two houses down. The dirt yard is mined with dull orange lumps that I remember better as cheap, plastic flying saucers on sticks.

As I said, the old neighborhood was nearly unrecognizable. But what other pastel ghost town exists in the middle of a desert just off Route 95?

I know where I am.

Except, it's less a neighborhood now, and more a frosted donut that's sat in the sun so long the rainbow candies melted.

I only just blinked for a second, and fresh has turned rancid.

I always think I do it fast. Open, closed, on and off. And each time the dirt is a little bit thicker, the scrub brush a little bit bigger, and another wall has collapsed.

Darcy blames it on aliens.

Not this. I'm considering it. But she's not around to say. She was here, a blink ago...

Darcy blames everything on aliens. Like the time we stole her father's banana-yellow Buick, because we could, and forgot to put the parking brake on.

Aliens rolled it down the hill into an outcropping. Aliens dented the chrome.

And the cows. We didn't snip the barbed wire that midsummer night after Joshua Pink said, " Don't cut yourself, sugar tits," when he handed her a steak knife over beef patties at Greasy's. Aliens did.

Aliens shooed a dozen Herefords off Pink's property and got his daddy subpoenaed.

Aliens painted obscenities in drippy prism-colors on the boarded up Five and Dime.

Aliens shoplifted plastic sunglasses shaped like cats eyes.

Aliens locked my little sister, Mads, out on the porch roof with the family poodle and laughed about it.

We're responsible for a ton of crazy. Aliens are responsible if we get caught.

I blame the movies. The newsreels are crap. Darcy devours films about fake invasions and space monsters faster than her sheet of candy paper dots. The rest of us are just waiting for the real thing to happen, which is plain ridiculous to me.

She says she goes for explosions.

I think it's the criminal misrepresentation and the semi-accurate pale, Technicolor green of the Martian men.

I do like the bombshells, though, dressed in their silver spacesuits. Costumes too tiny to be useful on Earth's beaches, let alone on a conflagrated planet.

But I like Darcy best. Especially when she spins her fantastic lies and we get away with snatching dogs from fenced yards and returning them for cash thank-yous.

How she does it is a mystery. Then again, just looking at Darcy is like unpacking every party favor in the universe inside a fun house. After a bit, you just get distracted by all the chintzy and the mirrors and your own distorted reflection—until anything she says is justifiable. It's truly weird.

Weird as a pastel, desert ghost town being unrecognizable, I guess.

The iron doorknob is heavy in my hand. I'm not even sure it belongs where I think it does. But I hold onto it as I haunt the middle of the vacant street, crunching on broken glass, shingles, and body parts. The buildings pass by. One charred box after another; framework poking through where the siding has come off. Empty shells.

Above me, the sky has changed again like Darcy changes her hair color every third Tuesday. It was gray clouds a blink ago, and blank blue now. So hard and flat, you could break a dish on it.

It was fiery red the first time.

Then bright white.

Then black.

The sky—not Darcy's hair. She goes for neon shades that make her hair brittle, but express her moods well.

Darcy goes for a lot of things and I go along with her, because, someday, I hope she'll go for me, too.

Which is stupid.

I'm just Milo.

The sun flips me off in the side mirror of a rusty Studebaker. I notice the car's hood has been torn away—what a force that must have been. The engine is exposed, its metal bits pitted from the wind rubbing dirt on its insides. I look at my arms: tanned and soot smeared as if I decided to roll in day-old campfire ash for kicks. Also, I'm not sweating, which, in my family, is like saying I'm not breathing. And, really, it's Satan's pastel Radarange out here baking everything without shade. I should be sweating bullets.

Nothing makes sense.

The whole world has been buckshot to hell. I've got an icy dread in my throat that can't be swallowed, a doorknob in my hand, and paint colors I can't get out of my brain.

Green house. Purple Door.

The house isn't as green as it's supposed to be when I find it. The siding is browned on the left side like corn husks going dry in the fridge. All the window glass is pfft—gone. And I already left the door halfway down the street.

It didn't look like this a moment ago. It still had two shutters then. One of them rests on the ground now, leaning crooked against the foundation.

But this is the ancient two-story I keep scratching at in my jumbled memories. Probably owned by some dirty family during some anticlimactic gold rush. One chimney. One picture window. One very open front doorway.

I step over Mr. Richard's head lying on the fried grass lawn and start for the house.

Darcy's inside. I see flashes of lightning-blue like a flickering jay's wing.

I shiver.

She squats on the living room floor, hunched over something I can't quite see from the windowsill. Her cotton candy blue hair is darker at the roots and lighter toward the fringes. Bleeding out. As faded as the floral paper on the four standing walls, it hangs loose like normal. Hiding her face and rolling over her curved spine in ratty strands she calls wild.

Darcy shifts on the balls of her bare feet. The bobby socks she wears have vaporized, leaving an ashy ring about her ankles. Her lacy white skirt slips backward along the slope of her thigh and I bite the soft inside of my cheek.

She wanted to pretend that night we stole her daddy's banana-yellow Buick. She wanted to know how it would feel to wrap herself around someone else without actually doing anything at all.

So she tried it on me.

I was Milo. I was safe. I held her purse at the drugstore counter and kept her stash of trashy magazines hidden under my bed. I even gave her my I.D. bracelet to brace her knuckles when she punched the sophomore prom queen, Loretta Joyce, in the face.

I was just Milo, and she wrapped herself around me on the hood of her daddy's stolen car. The air was dry heat and her shoulders were naked. And we stayed that way, not touching, me on my back not caring about the billions of stars and nebulas and sherbet colored galaxies that shone brightly beyond the halo of her fuchsia hair.

Because Darcy was there.

And the space between us was full of stars already. Her palms were pressed against the warm metal on either side of my head. Her knees squeezed my hips gently, an anchor, while she skimmed every inch of my body with hers, never doing anything at all. But doing everything all the same.

Suddenly, I didn't feel like safe Milo anymore. Safe Milo would never have touched her first. But I did, brushing my hands with the shape of her legs up, up, up—

I didn't stop. She didn't ask me to. For a full thirty seconds, her skirt hem wasn't forbidden territory, and then the car started coasting backward down the dirt hill.

Safe Milo had forgotten to push the parking brake.

I can't stop thinking that was an extremely metaphorical moment in my life.

Watching Darcy nest in the middle of exploded sofa stuffing and shredded end tables, I wonder what might have happened had I been smarter. Not just Milo.

She flinches as I climb in the window and land heavy on shards of mauve porcelain. The irreparable remains of an ugly side lamp. I want to say her name, but the dread stewing in my chest starts to boil and fear locks the word in my throat.

Darcy stands, slow. Unbending like she's been crouched for years, waiting. Waiting for me to remember where she was. Her face is still hidden behind a blue curtain I'm too afraid to open. Her skirt hem tumbles to her knee again, her fist knots around an old flyer. And for the first time since kindergarten—I'm not looking at her. I can't look at her. Not with the bizarre pickings spread out at her feet.

One Halloween, Darcy wanted to hold a séance. It was the weekend after her black cat, Sprinkles, had been unceremoniously creamed by an army jeep.

He died on Monday night. The birds were still chipping fur off the pavement on Wednesday.

We didn't know what death was until that Monday—and on the following Friday evening, Darcy stole the candles from every jack-o'-lantern on the base to try and make peace with her cat. Funny—she never gave two shits about him while he was alive and crawling inside the laundry basket.

We were thirteen years old. Aliens nearly set the house on fire that night.

I don't know what they've done now. But I'm staring at the same scene. Candles. Everywhere. Unlit save one. A solid two dozen melted in a circle where the burnt carpet has peeled back in a fuzzless golden wave. Some wallow in votives and aged teacup saucers; the rest are in various stages of decline, waxy roots stuck to the wood floor.

But this isn't a séance. Or maybe it is—it's just a very lonely one.

In the center of the candles, propped amidst an eclectic pyre of shriveled flower bouquets and old candy boxes and grubby stuffed animals are two familiar faces.

Me and Darcy. Darcy and me. The black and white photographs as sun-bleached as the wallpaper and Darcy's aged dye.

Someone's left a clean palm streak on each piece of picture frame glass, and a single candle burning. Someone's left recently. Their footprints are visible in the thick dust stretching toward the gaping door. The air tingles where they've walked, raising the summer-blond hairs on my arms.

The word grief circles inside my head, swirling, swirling, swirling down to gurgle in my chest.

"Oh God," I say.

Flicking her head, Darcy sweeps her hair back and looks at me. Her eyes are twenty different flavors of wrong.

She must have figured it out faster than me. Of course, she did. Her brain isn't as frustrating as sorting through the entire alphabet in your alphabet soup only to find the Z is missing. I know what I'm looking at, but I don't understand it.

Not yet.

I grip the doorknob tight, trying to feel the edges dig into my palm, but I don't. I only remember how it's meant to feel. And even that is a vague, secondhand sensation. Like inhaling someone else's cigarette smoke. I can taste it, the memory is there, but it's not my high.

Now, I'm the smoke. Pluming outward and disappearing in a breath. And Darcy's standing here with eyes that look like burst planets. The damp hazel-green color I remember has been sucked into an endless black.

She turns herself to face me full. The left side of her lacy white dress is scorched brown, from the skirt hem to the shoulder. The fabric is chewed up and showing an indecent portion of her blistered thigh. Her muscles pull, slightly, shedding ash flakes.

I shiver, horrified.

Darcy holds out her arm, crushing the yellow flyer in my direction. "Here."

Her voice is calm—the way a teacher sounds when they're not surprised you failed a major test because they know you've been out all night filling their glove box with goldfish. Like it was a long time coming, and you deserved it. I can't stop shaking.

"No," I say.

"Take it."

"No!"

Darcy crumples the paper to her breast, and suddenly she's right in front of me. Her feet meeting mine.

Her painted toenails match her hair.

We're the same height, which is something I always kinda liked about us. Not just because no one should ever be taller than Darcy, but because I wanted nothing more than to see the world on her level.

Darcy touches my cheek. "Funny Milo," she says, and I remember every joke I ever made that fell flat. But she's not speaking nasty, or being playful. Her eyes are onyx shooters, but her expression is so soft and sad my teeth start to ache.

Her emotion hurts me. I can't even feel her fingers tracing the indent in my cheekbones where my skull is showing, but I feel her sadness. And my dread is not dead, after all. It's a palpable sorrow left behind by someone more broken than the ugly mauve lamp. I've just homed in on it.

Darcy keeps touching me, and in the caressing sorta way that's supposed to memorize my features. The way every freckle sprinkled across her thin nose and slipping down her cheeks to her ears is burned behind my eyelids.

The way I always wished she would.

My pulse should be pounding out hallelujahs. It should be pounding, period. But all I can think is: "So that's where the doorknob goes." And I let it drop. The iron thuds on the floor. The dirt grains jump in surprise and go still.

My mind unweaves, laying straight. I see the truth and it scares me good.

"Darcy," I whisper, our noses nearly touching. It hurts to say the words, and I shove them up past the lock in my throat. "We're dead, aren't we?"

She nods. Biting her bottom lip, Darcy circles an arm around my neck, drawing us together. Our foreheads bump gently and I touch her, fingertips grazing the curve of her spine to the small of her back. I want every inch of me to be on fire as she presses her body against mine. But there's nothing. No spark but in our memories. I can see it on her face. She wants to crawl inside me too, but our moment is gone forever.

We're nothing now. Nothing but two ridiculous ghosts. One with blue hair. One wearing a wifebeater like Brando.

We stand, tight as puzzle pieces, her toes on top of my alkaline covered boots. We've hugged before—puppies wrestling each other in the dirt—but never this intimate. I imagine her breath on my face; bubble gum and warm sun tea. Every exhale makes her seem alive.

Darcy sighs, big. "Isn't this a panic and a half?"

I laugh. A beautiful, strangled, snort. "Goddammit, girl."

I close my eyes and grip her shoulder blades in both hands. She doesn't think this is a joke. I know—because she's wringing the ever-lovin' life out of the flyer behind my back.

We both know what's on it.

The civil defense distributed them through town. Taped in every store window, gagging every mailbox. Dozens of sheets of multi-colored papers stapled to the bulletin board in the school hall, waving at every student that brushed by.

Each flyer read the same: Aliens were invading. Or were about to. Or just planning too. The military had known about them for years. Everyone knew. We watched them play Van Gogh with the nebulas—mystery saucers shaping our midnight sky into liquid whorls, dragging the stars closer. Sculpted, golden gas clouds, and vibrant horse heads, and other glossy creatures the Greeks would have keeled at were on display above us. An art gallery they wanted us to see.

It didn't seem an emergency. They stayed up there. We watched from below. And Hollywood cranked out one vilifying flick after another because the money was solid. Stories about space artists didn't sell tickets. Space monsters did.

And maybe that's why the civil defense called it an emergency. Maybe that's why they wanted to test bombs. To blow those artists back to their own red planet in case they decided to screw with something other than space.

Every flyer read the same: Where the tests would take place but not when. Never when.

Our parents kept it secret, too.

Darcy's on the floor again. She shivers and drifts. Disappearing here, reappearing there, slipping out of my grasp before I even know she's gone.

At least she hasn't changed much.

I join her, riffling through the papers lying about: letters, notes, store bought cards. A collection, like a loose-leaf scrapbook trapped under weathered bears and dried, tea-brown roses. I reach for a card with Missing You on the front, printed above a water colored caricature of a pigtailed little girl and her red balloon.

I touch the stiff paper. A million charged particles buzz through my bones.

Sorrow stings like a bitch, but the picture looks familiar.

Two newspaper clippings flutter free from inside. Yellowed and gray and scissored from the Sunday Post.

The first headline is the punchline to my life. Like a black cat named Sprinkles for no other reason than stupidity: TEENS KILLED IN ATOMIC EXPLOSION.

The second headline is worse: TEST SITE CLOSED AFTER TRAGIC ACCIDENT.

Tragic accident. Like I fell down the stairs and broke my neck. No searing shock wave slamming metal objects into my face.

The card is signed. It's from my sister. The little blonde girl on the front is a fair representation of her. Then again, Mom used to say she looked like a greeting card.

They're all from Mads, the letters, cards, and notes. Even the ones for Darcy.

"I didn't know she cared," Darcy says, fingering the dingy pink fur on a plush stuffed poodle.

Mads didn't care—she loved. Those many after school hours she spent seated on the living room carpet. Songs like Elvis Presley's "Outer Orbit Love" swung in over the transistor radio while she braided Darcy's jewel-toned hair. Darcy was always talking to me or eating cookies, oblivious to Mads's baby-fingers as they gently sorted the tangles in her hair.

Four years old, and Mads wanted her blonde pigtails dyed space-y like Darcy. Mom let her get a Milky Way painted on her face whenever Greasy's had a fun day, instead. It never satisfied.

I'm not surprised Darcy never noticed, though. She doesn't notice when people love her. She only notices when people give her a hard time, like her parents.

And Josh Pink.

For me, it's almost criminal. I was Mads's brother and I didn't even know how much she cared about me. We barely spoke.

Probably, my fault. I was always chasing someone else. But here's the proof—in the cards and letters going back years. And, as I read her messages, watching her childish handwriting grow up and her spelling mistakes eek away, I understand.

Me and Darcy, we died today.

I taste it like metal in my mouth. Grief like an electric current holds me together and makes me real.

And the blinks. The seconds that change my world; that add more decay or another cluster of dead flowers atop the ten others half-gone to dust—

I've been here dozens of times. I forget. Then I don't. I'm only here when Mads remembers, and she only comes once a year.

The candle. The sorrow. It guides us back, Darcy and me.

Mads makes us real.

I study the framed photographs and the handprint three times larger than I recall my sister ever being, and then I look at a page she's torn from her diary. One word fills the space between the lines, written over and over again:

Goodbye.

"I never said goodbye," I say. "I never told her I loved her."

Darcy tucks her hair behind her ear. The top squishy bit is ripped and crusted in cold blood. "Yeah," she mutters.

I'm grateful Mads thinks about me. Because I didn't think about her that Saturday afternoon Darcy and me snuck onto the test site.

That Saturday we ran through the empty neighborhood, laughing at the mannequins in floral print dresses and a rainbow of polo necks—all arranged by the military into imitations of everyday life. The same ones now littering the street in broken pieces; unburied arms, legs, and torsos bereft of any color but black and aged green.

They were whole people then, like us. And we nicknamed them because we could. The bibbed baby in the highchair; the housewife with the pancaked paint job, her face crusty like too much makeup; and Mr. Richards—Dick—who watered his flowers, holding the hose at an unfortunate angle.

I just stepped over his head in the front yard.

And we broke into houses, too. When we liked the colors.

Green house, purple door.

The entire time I didn't think about Mads. Not once. I didn't think about her at home, drawing red and yellow and blue people with fat lines of fingerpaint just for me.

Just Milo.

Darcy strokes the three warped stick figures on the dry page at her feet.

She might be crying. I dunno if ghosts cry, although, it would be an un-Darcy thing to do, anyway. I want to, but I can't remember how it feels to cry. Mads's energy is fading. A fragrance lost on the breeze. And without it, my presence is frail.

Reaching over, I touch Darcy's leg. It's an action only. The candle sputters, drowning in its own blood. I give her bare knee a squeeze, letting her know this is it until the next time.

If there is a next time. How long until Mads forgets like me?

Darcy covers my hand with hers. "Hey, Milo," she says, giving me a wistful smile. And despite her black eyes, her expression is so un-Darcy, I know she's telling the truth. "I would have gone for you."

The candle snuffs out, sighing white smoke...

The old neighborhood was nearly unrecognizable.

THE END

☛ A/N: Written as a submission for the Fall quarterly of The First Line magazine. Alas, it was not accepted, but I was told by the editor that it was on the short list for publication. So that's something ;)

Thank you so much for the read! If you liked it, please don't forget to ★ vote ★