WATTYS 2023 SHORTLIST
Cara, a troubled college dropout, finds herself slowly falling for a handsome stranger - who turns out to be Death incarnate. But the arrival of a mysterious being puts Death's home for lost souls and his very existence at risk...
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When you're a New Yorker, you have to be willing to walk to things. It comes with the territory. When Analia and I first met as sophomores at The New School, she used to walk two miles – one way – just to shop at her favorite bodega, one with a particularly beautiful woman behind the cash register whom she'd never worked up the courage to flirt with. All that to say, I have no worries about keeping up with Mem's scribbled walking directions.
I pass through the town square, taking note of some of the other shops that surround the green space in the dead center. Across from The Neverton Nest is Gary's Fix-It Spot, which from the outside appears to be both a hardware store and also the only place to purchase any sort of technology invented after 1987. There's also a bookstore, a cobbler's shop, and a 50's diner that looks like it was plucked straight out of Back to the Future.
The strangest thing of all isn't the excessive show of Halloween spirit, but the fact that so many people are just outside. Jogging, talking, playing frisbee, setting up fruit stands, having picnics. For a second, I do start to worry that I've stepped back in time.
At the moment, I can't find the rude lady that nearly ran me over twice, who seems to be making a constant loop around the square. That certainly doesn't seem like sane behavior, but I wouldn't expect anything more from a place that counts cotton spider webs as decor.
Shaking my head, I continue down the main street that the Greyhound bus rode in on. My anticipation slowly builds as I pass the gorgeous old homes, imagining the kinds of lives that people once lived in them. I used to hate watching HGTV renovation shows where the new homeowners decide to gut all of the personality from their historical house. It was like I could feel the violent death of a million memories, like watching the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Homes are so much more than what they're made of.
With a pang, I think of my old bedroom above Davide e figlio. My father owned both the restaurant and the apartment above it, so we've lived there for our entire lives. I always used to be self-conscious about it when I went to visit my rich classmates' houses on Long Island. They'd looked like mansions, and I never understood why we had to stay in an old brick-sided building with leaky faucets and questionable A/C. But the older I got, the fonder I grew of the life my father, and his father, had built from nothing.
"No," I snap out loud. "You're very, very angry at Dad right now. Remember?"
And so, re-armed with my anger, I turn the corner and step onto the street listed in the address. But while I wait for Mem's gorgeous house to pop out of the fiery forest, it never appears. Instead, I realize that I am walking away from town – or any sort of civilization, for that matter. The sidewalk abruptly ends, crumbling away into a muddy ditch, and I feel my breaths start to enter hyperventilate-mode.
Maybe Mem wrote down the wrong street number. I look down at the note clutched in my hand, my other arm screaming from the constant weight of my overstuffed bag. Below the scrawled address, Mem wrote another instruction in all caps:
