Frankie Concepcion
Truth or Dare, or, A Resurrection
Dare
You always thought you’d be able to see death coming—that the weathervane of your body would be able to sense it somehow: a bone ache, stomach cramp, nerve shot kind of prescience. But that night, you close your eyes and jump into death’s gaping maw without so much as a flail or sigh. Leaving your body is as familiar as falling, as instinctual as breath passing through the lips, exhaled. You are gone, before you even know what gone means; before you can even remember that there was ever anything other than here, than this. You do it because Lauren asks you to—in fact, you volunteer.
Truth
In the dark, you follow Lauren through the wooded path, picking your way through shards of granite and broken beer bottles, dodging mosquitos and the branches of sticky pine that pull at your hair in the dark. You have never seen a quarry before but you know bodies of water like it. The place you come from is full of them—water that, in the monsoon season, grew beyond its boundaries; water flowing from nowhere and all of a sudden to swallow people, swallow villages; water that wriggled its way into wounds and into the lining of stomachs, poisoning. Years ago, in biology class, you’d learned that for something to be alive it had to consume, to excrete, to grow, to reproduce. In this way you have always thought of water as a living thing.
Lauren tells you that the rock from the quarry was used to build a monument to dead men who’d fought during the Revolutionary War. You listen, and you envy her familiarity with this place, how she has managed to stay so close to home and still seem somehow whole. Since then, she says, it’s become a swimming hole, a place of recreation. She points to the jutting rock from which she and her brothers had once jumped into the water below—a steep scramble most kids were afraid to even attempt, let alone dive from. She was always doing this kind of thing—testing her boundaries, inching right up to that precipice where someone weaker or less brave (someone like you) might say, no further.
Then, a few years ago, a body was found washed up on a rock, and they built a fence around the land. There were rumors that they’d already begun to fill the quarry with dirt, thrown all sorts of felled trees and detritus into the water. But under the moon’s blue light the pool below is solid as a mirror.
Before you know it, Lauren is stripping off her clothes. “Let’s go for a swim,” she says, and you follow her up to that pinnacle she’d pointed to just seconds ago, the launching point of all her childhood summers.
“I thought you said they filled it up?” you say.
“I told you, it was just a rumor.”
Lauren says, “Do you want me to go first?” and this is how you know there is fear in your face—a feeling, you are convinced, that she has never known.
So you too strip off your clothes. Hidden beneath your shirt, you shake off your frown, your furrowed brow, and when she offers again to jump in first, you step past her, looking down at that place that man scooped out and nature filled. Beneath your feet the ground turns hard, and then multi-colored, a graffiti carpet that leads you right up to the edge. The water here is like a brain, like memory: decades of leaf litter and dead squirrels, dropped phones, tossed underwear, Bud Light cans; all floating in that same soup, with nowhere to go.
Before you know it, you are falling.
Dare
The first thing to go is the cold. It hits your body the way you expect it to—like something hard, something solid—but there is something else, too, that pierces your head and chest, like a bullet, passing through you and taking all of your breath with it.
And then suddenly you are the bullet, and you have come through the otherside, and where there was once cold, once breath, once feeling, there is now only float. Opening your once-eyes, you discover that you can see as clearly through the murk as if it were air. You are weightless, you realize, but it is more than just floating in water—you are free of flesh and bone, of matter and movement. You are not so much seeing as you simply are; you are in the wind and in the earth, you are water and you are oil slick and you are the rock Lauren stands on, you are the strands of hair getting stuck in Lauren's lipgloss. You are Lauren's lipgloss. You are the stars and the dirt and the goosebumps on Lauren’s arms and you are your body, still warm, still underwater, still.
You forget to breathe, and then you forget what it is to be in need of breath, to be in need, to be.
Truth
You don’t consider yourself a nostalgic person, but when Lauren asks for your earliest memory, you tell her that all you can recall is her face—that in your mind, she is both mother and the darkness of womb, the hands that pulled you out, the light. You say this to make her laugh the kind of laugh that crinkles her nose, hiding her mole—you watch it slip into that groove between cheek and nostril.
Neither you nor Lauren remember how you met, though the fact that you live in the same dorm on the same floor offers some clues. That’s as far back as you’re willing to go, in terms of memories. Should she press you further, you furnish her instead with your most prized moments: You and Lauren before your first Boston winter trying on coats at The North Face. You and Lauren filling old Chinese takeout boxes with cereal and tater tots from the dining hall. You and Lauren circling each other on the dance floor, putting one hand over each other’s drinks, checking each other’s teeth for lipstick. You and Lauren walking home together, dodging four lanes of traffic over the Mass. Ave. bridge.
Most nights, you cross the Green Line tracks together after dinner and spend the rest of the evening in her room—a blessed single, cathedral-quiet compared to the throb and press of your own dorm, which you share with two other roommates. She has a seemingly endless arsenal of would-you-rathers: Taste only sweet, or only salty? Kiss the creep down the hall or livestream yourself sleeping? Forget your own face, or be forgotten? Answering her questions is how you realize you have an opinion about anything in the first place.
“Truth or dare?” she says without warning. Wanting to seem brave, you always pick dare, until she turns to you one day and says, “I dare you to tell me the truth.”
She asks you to tell her something she doesn’t yet know about you.
“You know everything about me,” you say.
“Well I know that’s not true,” she says.
“Everything that matters,” you say.
Once she asked you about your mother and you’d slipped and told her that they had been gone a long time. From the look that flooded into her eyes then, you realized your mistake, but you didn’t know how to word the truth—that it was from her that you learned your first lesson in leaving. A childhood spent mourning the loss of her before you could even name what was missing. A father who refused to keep any pictures of her in the house. For years, you’d thought she was dead, until one day you came home to her standing in the kitchen, your father’s expression alone enough to reveal her identity. Sometimes you need to leave in order to save yourself, she’d whispered to you in greeting. When she left, you didn’t cry. After all, what loss could you claim, when all you’d known of her was longing?
You and Lauren start watching reruns of Doctor Who in her room until one or both of you fall asleep. The hero of Doctor Who is a man who cannot die; who, when faced with an insurmountable obstacle, instead remakes himself again and again—new face, new voice, new personality. You wonder if he thinks of all the old versions of himself as unwanted appendages to sever and discard; or if, in his memory, they are separate people, all of them crammed into a single body, swallowed. Together, you and Lauren watch episode after episode, until you both fall asleep, until her growling stomach jolts you awake. The sound is so deep and so loud, it seems impossible that it could come from such a small, soft body. Like The Doctor’s spaceship, you think, she is bigger on the inside.
On the night you watch the Doomsday episode, you keep your expression even during the scene where the Doctor runs out of time before he can tell Rose he loves her. They have been brought together across dimensions by a signal Rose created for the sole purpose of helping them find each other, and in the show, this apparently is enough to transcend time and space, to break the laws of the universe. As though love could be enough to find someone, or stay connected to them wherever they were. As though it is enough to bring them home.
Dare
The quarry is full of bodies. Bodies of drowned sparrows, unhatched frogs, the detritus of the forest above; the larvae of dragonflies, mosquitos, and parasites wriggling at the edge of the water; the bones of someone never found; a forest of would-be oaks, would-be pines, would-be fields of grass and dandelion. Piece by piece they are unraveling—cells detaching and absorbing, bursting, swallowed by creatures and shat out again into the soil someplace new. They are seeping into the groundwater and being pulled into the roots of trees older than once-you will ever be. They do not mind. To neither feel temperature nor see darkness, to be as oblivious to the weight of water as the passing of time—this is what it means to no longer be in the world.
It is easy at first, the dissolving. The quickness of nestling into the curve of a leaf or a wisp of wind, of crawling into the grooves carved into a speck of sand. Like staring into the space between clouds and finding yourself already there in the darkness. Like dreaming, like sleep. Like falling into the black hole inside of yourself, only you are the hole and you are the black and you are the falling. Falling. Falling.
You feel a ripple. A ripple that once could be called voice, shouting something that could be called name. But it is the voice, not the name that sinks its teeth in you. You recognize its vibration, a pattern plucked from the air and birthed between two lips. It pulls, and what is left of you grows heavy and taut. Snapping you into place. Desiring shape. Reminding you what it was like to once be whole.
Truth
For Halloween weekend, Lauren takes you to Salem. The two of you wander from bar to bar, wipe the underage X’s off your hands and order PBRs by the pitcher. You are dressed as Weeping Angels, and at one bar you listen as Lauren attempts to explain your costumes to the bartender. “A Weeping Angel is scarier than a ghost,” you hear her say. “It takes you back in time so that even the places you know are unfamiliar. It makes it so that your loved ones think you’ve vanished. To them, you are a ghost.”
She takes you to the Witch Museum and the place where a man was once pressed to death, then to a house where the spirit of a young girl is said to appear in the window at exactly midnight on every full moon. “Why do ghosts insist on being predictable and do the same things over and over again?” you ask. You wonder too what happens to a ghost when it leaves or when no one is looking, but this you keep to yourself.
“Maybe that's what makes them ghosts,” Lauren says. “Maybe they keep trying to do something different, but because they're ghosts they can't—they've already done the thing, and now it's too late to change it.”
Together, you look up at the window one more time. You think of your father and how, in the days after your mother left for the second time, you began to feel him slipping. How, after a while, you stopped counting the number of days that had passed without seeing his face or hearing his voice, until eventually he became no more than a phantom; how you sensed him only in the things that went missing in the night: dishes in the sink, the TV remote moving from the coffee table to the couch. A shadow under the door of his bedroom, a cough on the other side of the wall.
“When I die,” Lauren says, “I would rather there be nothing than be trapped like that,” leaning into you. The heavy fabric of her costume flushes her cheeks and draws sweat from her skin—you can feel it there, suctioning your skin, as she rests her head on your shoulder.
On the way home she takes you to a witch store that is less cauldrons and more incense. At the register, you buy a single tarot card wrapped in recycled newspaper, and on the train, you each pull on one end, ripping the package open to reveal the card inside: The Lovers.
Lauren says, “You're a Gemini, aren't you?” and as you stare at the two naked figures in your hand, you are grateful for the face paint that hides the blush creeping up your neck.
“Did you know that The Lovers is the card in the Major Arcana that is associated with Gemini?” she says. “It's about love, yeah, but it's also about duality, about choice. When we make a choice, a version of us that could have been dies, it shrivels away. But in its wake, another future is born.”
“I'm bad at choices,” you say.
She says, “Maybe you're bad at choices because if you never choose, you never have to give up either possibility—you get to live out both in your head.”
“So what does that mean for my future?” you say.
She plucks the card from between your fingers. But as it slips from your hand to hers, you feel the edge dig into your skin, see the drop of blood that emerges fully formed from your flesh, like a Rosary bead. Then, a split second later: the sting.
Instead of apologizing, she cradles your finger in her hand, bringing it close to her face. She presses at the edges of the cut and the bead expands. Then she takes your finger into her mouth. When she pulls it back out, the blood is gone.
She laughs. She sticks her crimson hot tongue out at you. “Sounds like you have a choice to make.” she says.
You are afraid she will ask for more. Instead, she continues to hold your hand, rolling your fingers between hers. She says your name. Hearing it makes your pulse slow, helps you remember where you are. But in her room that night, when you feel her body unravel into sleep, her arms loosening underneath you, your heart starts to pound in your throat and your skin itches like it wants to evaporate from your body. You want her to tell her that you too have spent so much of your life feeling like a ghost; that you too have felt untethered from the earth for so long that eventually floating began to seem like the only option; and that this, at least, was easier than knowing the kind of home you missed out on—the love that came so easily to other people but that you, for some reason, did not deserve. Indeed, leaving is the only thing you do understand, and because of this, you spend the rest of the night resisting the urge to shake her awake, to wrap her arms tighter around you and beg her not to let go.
Dare
Dying is the easiest thing you will ever do. Stripped of memory and desire, it is difficult to keep yourself whole. Already, you have slipped so far away from yourself that the word you has lost all matter. To forget, to be something other than what you once were: such a simple thing.
Once again, you are vibration. The same vibration. Reborn, again and again, from the same voice, the same lips. Once, you remember, it was those very lips that wrapped themselves around your stinging finger, that drew your own blood into its mouth and swallowed. Once, you remember, they’d smiled at you, and red-tinged, revealed to you that there was a choice to be made.
You start then, by finding your way back into the body that was once yours. You assemble yourself back into weight and matter, into the rush of blood through your veins and structure of bone. You will your heart to beat by becoming the muscle itself, by becoming the push and pull of a muscle, but the flesh stays still—it no longer recognizes your authority.
You find the place where once-you ended and the rest of the world begins. You press into the part of you named skin—feeling, for an endless moment, the pain of matter, the sharp brace of cold, but as soon as it begins you know that it is fleeting. You are the water running off a lizard’s skin, the surface tension beneath a pond skimmer’s feet: it is the proximity that proves a barrier, a membrane you cannot cross.
Truth
You have almost reached South Station when Lauren tells you that the train tracks went right by her house; that as a child she’d set her watch to the sound of the commuter rail chugging past her window.
She says, “Did I ever tell you that I ran away from home when I was twelve? I took my bike and my tent and what money I had squirreled away from old birthday cards, and I found a spot in the cemetery next to my house where I knew no one would ever find me. We’re surrounded by death in these old towns—I didn’t even think about the fact that I could have been sleeping on top of someone’s grave. For a week, I blew my money on fast food and candy bars, and when I ran out of money I started stealing. I didn’t go to school. When I woke up in my tent one morning to a fox trying to claw in, lured by the smell of cold french fries and Snickers bars, I packed up and walked home. I found my parents sitting in the living room watching TV, and when I asked my mom what was for dinner she told me to make myself some mac and cheese. I went upstairs, walked past my brothers’ room—unwashed, dirt-stained, smelling like something had crawled into me and died—and they didn’t even ask where I had been.”
“So why didn’t you just stay gone?” you ask. “Why did you come back?”
“Because it was still home,” she says. Then, “Do you ever feel like going home?”
I don’t know where that is, you resist saying. Instead you say, “Ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“You know.”
“Truth or dare.” she says.
You tell her that leaving was easy. “As soon as I got on that plane,” you say, “I looked out the window and watched the stars hurtling through the black like souls; I felt the earth rushing beneath me; I saw the sky open its arms to me like death’s own cloak; and I decided then and there that I would never go back. I would slough off all memory of home like dead skin, like waste. I would exorcize myself from myself, let the old me dissolve into the air and the stars and the ocean. I would forget my old life—as quickly as one forgets a dream in the blank slate of morning. And I would be reborn.”
What you didn’t tell her: That the harder you resisted remembering, the more there was to forget. That every day before meeting Lauren, you’d worked just as hard to forget the smell of your mother’s perfume as your father’s silences. That you still longed for the day when all of your life before Lauren would feel like a movie you watched once, like someone else’s life, someone you had nothing in common with except your name.
That name. That same name, coming out of Lauren's lips, being summoned by her tongue. She will say your name again and again, like an incantation, knowing you need to hear it, knowing that it is in moments like these that you need to be called back into your body. For this, you think, you would remake yourself again, and again.
“That’s the thing about leaving home,” you say. “Everyone wonders why you left, but no one ever asks what reasons you had to stay.”
Dare
It would be so easy now, you think, to do the thing you had once longed for the most: to slip out of existence as easily as a hand freeing itself from its own glove, as a drop of rain dissolves into the ocean, subsumed into salty ripple and wave.
To let go of all of the things that once held you, bound you to your past and your body and nothing more.
It would be so easy, if that was all there was to return to.
Instead, you remember:
Taking your first sip of beer from Lauren’s bottle. The smell of her soap, how it wasn’t the same when you lathered it onto your own skin. The first time she asked you to walk her home, and the first time she asked you to stay. The day she caught a snowflake on her eyelash and froze in the street, eyes closed, just so you could see it. The time you cooked her breakfast, the smell of burnt eggs and the sting of skin on a hot pan. And somewhere too, underneath it all: your father’s fingers gathering your hair and pulling it through an elastic every morning until the third grade, the paper-and-roses smell of your mother’s perfume, her parchment-thin dress, understanding for the first time from whom you’d inherited your hair and your skin and your nose.
Lauren’s hair and breath on your cheek, the tickle of Lauren’s eyelash. Lauren’s shoulder beneath you, and Lauren’s hands above. Lauren’s lips. The endless sound of Lauren’s stomach; her tongue at the tip of your finger. Lauren’s voice, saying your name, your name, your name, summoning desire like a hook to the gut, imploring; reaching into that formless deep to remind you what it means to be whole.
Lauren, calling you home.
Frankie Concepcion is a writer from the Philippines and Massachusetts. She is an M.F.A. Candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University, and the current Managing Editor for Hayden's Ferry Review. She has received fellowships from Tin House, Sibling Rivalry Press and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and her writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, Joyland, HYPHEN, and more. Her short story chapbook "Aftermath" is out now at Bottlecap Press.