May awoke with a start in the middle of the night and felt a presence—a shadow, something—looming beside her bed. She clicked on the lamp and looked to her left where her date blinked awake in confusion.
“What’s wrong?” he said, squinting, foolish. He was too nice, a boy really. “Bad dream?”
“There was someone,” May said. Her heart thudded in her chest. “I saw.”
“Who?” her date said, sitting up. He glanced around the room, rubbed May’s back.
“No,” she said, shrugging from his touch.
She reached for her glasses on the nightstand where a fine meadow of dust awaited her fingertips. She nearly closed her eyes and screamed.
“I need you to leave,” she said.
“May,” her date said, startled by the look in her eyes. “It’s four in the morning.”
“Please,” May said, on the verge of desperate tears. “Please. Please.”
He looked about the room again.
“What did you see? Maybe you’re having a panic attack.”
She knew what she saw, but she couldn’t tell him.
“I need to clean. Like, right now.”
He raised his hands in innocence and she could tell he was wondering if he was witnessing a breakdown.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going. I hope this passes. Whatever it is.”
He gathered his things in silence and left without another word.
When he was gone, May put her face in her hands and tried to cry, but no tears came. She felt dried out. Fraudulent.
The dust. It was everywhere. No matter how much she cleaned the apartment, the dust seemed to come back thicker, as if to say, Tiny parts of you are dying, faster every day.
She had met him on the app, like the others, an attempt to set her life in motion, take control the way her mother always had. There was the consultant with the forest green polo and steak in his teeth. The bassist with stringy hair. She knew as soon as she met this one—Ben was his name, not that it mattered anymore—that she would invite him back. He had slate-grey eyes and a too-open face, and listened earnestly as she told him about her gig in film PR, that the city had been her dream since she’d been little, since that rare trip with her mother on a bank holiday to see the hottest Broadway ticket. This was only a few months before the stress of the market swings finally killed her.
“I’m so sorry,” Ben had said and reached across the table for her hand in such an unselfconscious and gentle way that May felt guilty knowing she’d ghost him, knowing she’d never tell him that the only reason her new apartment, her new lifestyle was even feasible was that she’d finally been granted access to the trust.
They had climbed four flights and made out sloppily, breathlessly on her landing. He was a bad kisser, searching and desperate, but he had seen more than half of her favorite films. He went down on her until she came and snored loudly after they fucked.
May got up and shook dust from the duvet, ran a finger along the surface of the nightstand and tasted it like a drug, flat and bitter and dead. She ignored the fact that she was shaking, teeth chattering like a wind-up toy, and set to work. Using a tattered cross-country t-shirt from high school, she went for the surfaces first, aiming to leave a spotless sheen in her wake. Never mind that she’d done this a dozen times in the month she’d lived in the place.
She began with her dresser, moving aside the music box her father had given her for Christmas as a girl, which held her jewelry. When it opened, a tiny ballerina spun on a mirrored pedestal to a plinking rendition of “Für Elise.” Her father—who didn’t cry at the funeral, with whom May hadn’t spoken in months—had advised her against buying the apartment. “You’re like your mother,” he’d said. “Rushing into things you aren’t built to handle.” Her mother and father had started the family firm together, young optimists, then drifted apart as May’s mother—who had come from nothing—lost herself in the momentum of success.
Next were the bookshelves, the countertops. The low-slung bench that supported her TV and a framed photograph, the last one the three of them had taken together. She cleaned until her knuckles ached and her fingertips were raw from the solution. She fetched the vacuum from the kitchen and ran it through the rest of the night, through the pounding from her neighbor below, until wan light framed her futile windows, until at last, exhausted, she slid to the floor and began to cry, real tears this time. All this time, she had hoped to become the woman her mother would never get to see, one that would make her proud. But what can you really earn when you’ve already been given so much?
She opened her eyes and felt a flash at the base of her skull: a twirl of dust motes caught the blade of morning sun.
No.
She went to her nightstand where it had begun to accrue afresh. She pictured it collecting unchecked on every surface forever, filling her nose, ears, and mouth as she slept, coating her tongue, her lungs, these particles of her past, future selves that were already dead.
And then she began to laugh, frightening herself at the brittle force of it. She laughed at her mother and her father, their petty arguments. She laughed at her gaunt reflection in the mirror. She laughed at who she’d never be. All of it. And the next time she awoke to the looming shadow? She would embrace it, inhale it. Because fuck. The dust was coming for us all in the end, whether we liked the taste or not.
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