Free Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter

all of them, by women, heartless women—men drinking their bottles of booze in brown paper bags. She liked the story, Waits on the street corner with the down-and-out rabble, and she liked the song—about what couldn’t be. Not anymore.
    Dancing, she moved as slowly as her body would move. In just her black satin gloves and her heels, she faced Mr. Cooper. She brought her arms up, over her head—her whole body stretching, reaching for what is always just beyond. And there, her hands clasped each other, clasped and pulled, hand from hand, her head back, her back arched—a tensed bow preparing to release. She looked at him, watched him watch her. He was her captive so long as she was lit, so long as the music played.
    She wanted to burn herself into his future, wanted his memory of this moment to last him his lifetime—this and the next. She could feel the space between them measured in what time it would take to cross it, and she could feel the instant slipping like a stream, even as it happened, down the mountain.
    And where was the camera? To seize the instant, to free it from the slipstream of time? The lens and the eye on the other side, the eye that wants only to hold. To keep. Each photograph a shrine to the past.
    It was how her mother saw things, wanting always to capture.
    And her photos from the years before she’d had Gwen, when she’d lived in L.A. and worked in the movies, her photos of Steve McQueen and Jane Fonda, of Warren Beatty and Angie Dickinson, had been for Gwen’s whole life boxed in the attic. When Gwen would ask her about it, she’d shrug. It was another life, she’d say. Pouring herself a glass of wine, lighting a cigarette, she’d return to her book, or just stare out the kitchen window at the prickly pear and the creosote, at the sagging power lines and the cool deck and the swimming pool—the prison paradise of her suburban life, what she’d settled for. But once, when Gwen had stayed home sick from school, they’d curled up on the couch and watched old movies together. Rear Window, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And her mother had brought down the big black box and dusted off its lid.
    The main door of the Century Lounge opened and a flash of the L.A. glare entered the dim showroom along with another customer. It’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal, Waits croaked. And she watched Mr. Cooper stub out his cigarette.
    In the dressing room, Stevie took the test from her locker and tucked it into her moon purse. A few lockers down, in the back corner, Angel and Star whispered and laughed, passing a bottle of Jack between them. Stevie had tried to talk to them once. Hey, she’d said, and smiled. Hey, they’d said back, giggling and turning their backs to her. Since then, she’d held her distance. She figured they were, like her, in their midtwenties, and yet they were all edges, black eyeliner and leather, as if life were a fight. They danced to metal and kept to themselves.
    In the opposite corner, near the mirror, Love swiveled on a stool, eating an apple and reading a paperback with the title You Too, Can Be Prosperous. Brett was applying lipstick with her fingertip. She cocked her head and assessed its effect. And Devotion was looking at her milkmaid body, brushing her pale Wisconsin hair. It was the golden hair of fairy tales. She could have been Rapunzel or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, thought Stevie. All those stories we were raised on, wherein the pluckless maiden is trapped, stuck in her station, until the prince comes along to save her. “I’m twenty-one. I can change,” she was saying. “I want to move up north, raise my own crop of Indica, make some real money.”
    â€œI love it up north. It’s so wild, and clean,” Brett said, rubbing lipstick into her cheeks for color. “Santa Cruz is where I’m from. But my fiancé wants to stay