- Olivia Brooks
- Sep 1
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 5
On the Outside of Something
When the couple came to lease her studio, she could see they were rich. There was a…a…what was it? A languor…in the way they talked, the way they sat and stood and yawned, that only the wealthy have. She was a sculptress, he was in finance, supporting his wife’s passions, enabling her sublimities.
She came to sculpt during the day, always in the same bright yellow top. Abstract sculptures, iron flowers, paper vines. Sometimes Elaine went up and talked to her after work. She was funny, geeky, not necessarily gifted. They laughed about childhood TV programs, their attempts to learn Spanish, misogynists on the radio, craft beer festivals, people who were offended whenever they heard a foreign language. Elaine told her she had an aunt in Minnesota who used to sculpt. Sometimes they were joined by Tina, Elaine’s daughter. The woman said Tina had an old pair of eyes. Tina’s irises, apparently, were centuries old.
§
On the weekends, late at night, the husband would come to the studio without her. Sometimes with one woman, sometimes with two.
Was there a dilemma? Tina didn’t think so. Mom, they’re leasing a studio. It’s none of your fucking business what they do. It provided the material for weeks of kitchen-seminars on the ethics of intervention. Elaine assumed they were married—his payments and her mail had the same family name. Maybe her daughter was right. Maybe there was no dilemma. Maybe rich people had freedoms she couldn’t possibly understand. Maybe it was like an impenetrably anthropological fact—high income groups had a set of ethical practices all their own. It would take years of study, observation, co-habitation, to understand it.
§
One day, nearly three months after Elaine had started to lease out the studio, Tina didn’t come home. At first there were concerned calls, a spray of messages to a whole network of friends, nervous pacing around the exact perimeter of the downstairs living room. Then the call to the police, the reassurances, the early morning wait for the deadlines the officer said, the drive around to the station to make the report. Elaine’s life slowed down like an interruption on a mix track; she no longer walked but waded through the days that came toward her, as though she were trying to fumble her way across a warm, waist-deep, enormous swimming pool, with hallucinogenic shapes and colors flashing overhead, and strange voices talking to her from all sides.
The city was spread over a hundred square miles. Elaine spent three weeks driving over literally every street of it, always during the day, with the radio on and a packed Subway lunch and Diet Coke next to her. It was the school holidays, so she didn’t have anywhere to be. The heat beat down on her car as she drove with the windows open and the A/C on, watching the city rotate around her.
Everywhere—on the internet, on the radio, from her colleagues, from her friends—people fed her stories she didn’t want to hear. An infinite morass of random, absurd malevolence sat out there, people killing hitchhikers, babysitters killing children, couples killing kids. She glimpsed it at night, out there in the darkness, lying there like a visceral, shapeless mess, pressing itself against the windows, the doors. In the daytime, she felt it recede, under the bright sunlight—into houses, underpasses, half-open garage doors, abandoned schools.
§
The daughter never came back. Sometimes, in supermarkets or shopping malls, Elaine would make a fool of herself, running after the mirage of a resemblance that vanished as soon as she approached.
The couple sympathized with her, offered to help. We can’t imagine what you’re going through. You must be living a nightmare. Elaine felt an illogical compulsion to say everything she knew, but the voice of her daughter kept her in check. At the start of December, they requested to end their contract, and all the sculptures and iron flowers and paper vines disappeared.
§
A year passed. Elaine went to therapy, asked her brother to move down from Oregon to live with her, started a course of medication, and removed all the true crime titles from her streaming list. One day, for no clear reason, she looked up the couple who had leased her studio, and after an afternoon on the internet, discovered that they had leased another studio, in another part of town. She called the number, pretending to be somebody else, and found herself talking to another mother, who had a teenage daughter in her last year of high school.
§
For the first time in a year, Elaine found her insomnia returning. She lay awake in bed, thinking about the couple, trying to imagine if they were somehow different from what they seemed. She drove over to the new studio late at night, parked in a nearby street, and spent hours watching it, sketching pictures of it, over and over again on a pad of recycled paper she had bought for the purpose. She persuaded Jim—her brother, who thought she was going crazy—to call the house in search of a fictitious relative. On three occasions, she stalked the couple and engineered a random encounter in a mall they frequented—on each occasion chickening out at the last moment.
Can’t you see what you’re doing? her brother said. Jesus, Elli. Wrap it, put it in a box, stick it in a drawer. Do it before we lose you.
When Elaine was about to give up and acknowledge that everything Jim said about her was true, she saw the woman’s teenage daughter. Blonde, freckled, short hair, big round glasses, college football T-shirt, skin pants, short white ankle socks.
Her brother said, All the kids wear football T-shirts and ankle socks.
§
What did it mean to be on the outside of something? Without knowledge or intimacy, no password or PIN code, just standing on the outside of the building, waiting for a door to open.
Tina’s disappearance had literalized a metaphor she’d felt all of her life. She found herself understanding, even sympathizing, with those midnight souls who watched endless documentaries on Atlantis, the Rothschilds, disappeared celebrities, and unresolved suicides.
§
Elaine grew older. She watched her neighbor’s kids graduate. Bought an old car and learned, over a series of evening classes, how to change the oil, fix the brakes, check the fan belt. On Sundays she volunteered, alongside half a dozen others, at the Pinetree Homeless Shelter run by the local Methodist church. She tried, and ultimately failed, to learn Spanish.
One night, almost four years after her daughter had disappeared, Elaine bumped into the studio couple on a volunteer shift at the shelter. They seemed unsurprised to see her. The husband offered his sympathies, once again. His wife plied Elaine with question after question, but all she could do was stare at the bright yellow jersey she was wearing. It sat there on her body as she talked, her eyes glancing back and forth between them, its oddity inflecting her sentences, giving emphasis to her words. Elaine looked into her eyes as she spoke, and realized the woman’s irises were centuries old, too. She thought of sharing everything with them: her husband’s nightly trips, the resemblance of the girl to Tina, the bizarreness of her jersey…but everything already seemed far, far too late.
ARTHUR MANDAL is a writer based in Eugene, Oregon (but grew up in the UK). He has published over twenty stories in journals such as The Barcelona Review, LITRO, december, 3:AM, The Forge Literary Magazine, Southeast Review, The Stand, The Summerset Review, Under the Radar, Bending Genres, and others. He also has a chapbook with the acclaimed Nightjar Press.