Riley Shen | The Caryatid, pen

Marie Tran

There is a girl in the puddle who has never met me.

She lives where the sky is underground, trees growing downward into somewhere I can't name. Everything reversed, and yet she wears my face. Carries my particular exhaustion behind the eyes. Holds her mouth the way I do when I'm thinking something I'll never say.

I wonder if she's braver over there. If she speaks first, releases every word without counting its cost. Laughs at full volume, unannounced.

Or maybe she crouches at her edge of the surface the same way I crouch at mine, studying me like I'm the strange one. Like I'm the one living underground.

The water ripples. We both distort into light, into motion, into the bare suggestion of a face. Then stillness returns.

Two girls. One membrane, so thin it's almost nothing. The same moment, split.

I reach out. She reaches back.

We never touch.

We never stop trying.