By S Graham

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

Every night I tag a surface with the word LORE.  

Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.  

The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.  

Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town. 

No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.  

The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.  

After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.

I run down the beach access and over the dunes to the wet sand. It is only once I’m at the water’s edge that I remember the beach isn’t a source of solace at all. But I hold my resolve. I survey my surrounds. Midnight Beach extends for what feels like forever in either direction. I can’t see any houses or lights. It is just me standing at the edge of the uncaring earth.  

The last time I was here with Lauren, she looked out to the ocean and said that when you go due east from Midnight you don’t hit land until a flowering desert in Chile. It is one of the only memories of her my mind has precisely preserved. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the way she phrased what she said. When you go due east—like it wasn’t a hypothetical journey, like there are no ifs, only whens.  

Sometimes I imagine Lauren didn’t get sucked under by a rip while high on opiates but instead swam the entire way to Llanos de Challe, to a place where vibrant, purple flowers rise from desolate landscapes. This makes as much sense as reality when I gaze into her blue grave. 

I follow the shoreline back to our villa.

* * *

Two months ago, I earned a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting. What I have now is a lifetime of student debt and no job prospects to speak of. My options after graduation were stacking supermarket shelves in the city or going back to Midnight. I rationalized my return in two ways: 

I thought my scripts, which had fallen flat in class, could be revived by geographical immersion given they featured refracted versions of my sister (people dying, but not in the way that she had) and refracted versions of me (men in their twenties, mired in torpor).  

The second ostensible motive was to help my father, a man who isn’t exactly interested in living very much. He has a herniated disc, his third in as many years. It forced him to sell his landscaping business for scrap. His pension starts in two years, and he tells me he is doing odd jobs to pay his way until then, but since I arrived, all I’ve seen him do is watch TV and let the dishes pile. From morning until midnight, the house is under siege by action movies, military thrillers, and crime procedurals—the kinds of shows Lauren bemoaned.  

Dad doesn’t want to think about his pain, about Lauren, about my mother on the other side of Australia with another man. I understand the impulse, but I cannot write scripts that would make Lauren proud while mindless others are being forced into my ears. That’s why I started going on walks in the early hours. I stalk the desolate streets and try to imagine scenes for my screenplays:  

EXT. MOONLIT BEACH — NIGHT 
EXT. CREEPY CUL DE SAC — NIGHT
EXT. EMPTY RESORT POOL — NIGHT 

These scenes never start. There is no dialogue, no people, at least none except for the ghosts of my old classmates who told me my stories always end before they start and my characters lack transformation. That’s how the graffitiing began—I needed a distraction from their doubtful voices. But of course there’s more to it than that. I want Lauren close to me. And if she were here, she might know what to do about my scripts. She might know what the hell to do about Dad.  

* * *

The night after the fence, I walk west to where Midnight fades into farmland. A billboard stands beside the road that cuts through the sugarcane. PRICES SLASHED ON TOWNHOUSES reads the sign over the top of two children playing on a beach.  

I climb the concrete support to the catwalk while thinking of how grief-stricken my sister would be if she saw this billboard, if she saw the state of Midnight now. Back when she died, the economic tide was flowing. The beach was full of maddening tourists, but at least there was energy around that had the potential to be transformed. After she died, the ebbing began. The Reserve Bank raised interest rates. There was a fire sale on real estate. Properties were bought by investors who had no intention of living in Midnight, only holding onto land until the tide came back in. Five years later, it still hasn’t.  

When Lauren used to paint, she must have faced the constant threat of being caught. I don’t have that fear. The silence is all-encompassing until I pierce it with the hiss of aerosol. I turn to my canvas and embody my sister. My arm starts high before dropping low into the L and wrapping around into the O, the R, the E. When I’m done, the wet letters hang over the heads of the children like shelter or a curse.  

Retracing Lauren’s movements never conjures her like I hope it will. Instead, I end each day haunted by the same set of questions that followed me from the beach to the city, and back again:

Why did she slum it in Midnight after high school when she was smart enough to do anything?  

What was she doing in the ocean so late at night with so many pills in her system?  

And, did I even know my sister at all?  

* * *

The next morning, I wake to silence. The TV isn’t blaring. I wonder if a miracle has occurred, or another tragedy. I call my father. 

“Where are you?” I say. 

“Out doing a job,” he says as if this should be self-evident. 

He comes home an hour later with lunch in tow. He plants himself on the deck in the sun and wolfs down fries while rubbing his greasy fingers on the T-shirt around his belly. I hold back my incredulity and ask him what the job was.  

“Graffiti cleaning,” he says. “Half a grand to hit a wall with a high-pressure hose.” 

“Doesn’t it hurt your back?” 

“It’s much better than weed whacking,” he says and shrugs. “Or any of the other jobs they ask me to do.”  

I ask who ‘they’ are, and he tells me the property developers who own most of the resorts around town. I ask why they bother when they have no customers, and he looks at me like I misunderstand something fundamental.  

“We have to keep up appearances,” he says. “Or Midnight will really fall apart.”  

Later, he tells me where the job was: a resort I tagged earlier in the week. I look into his eyes for an indication he knows what he removed but I only see my glassy reflection. When we found out Lauren was LORE from her friends at the funeral, my father never brought it up again. Maybe he forgot. Maybe he prefers ignorance.  

By sundown, he is once again comatose on the couch. On TV are two detectives solving a mystery. The twist is the victim faked her death. It is the third time he has watched the episode this week. 

* * *

That night I get an idea:  

If I keep tagging Midnight, Dad keeps getting work. I paint and he gets paid. I have a sense of purpose and he does, too.  

The issue is that if I keep writing LORE, the tags could get tracked back to me by Lauren’s old friends. Or else my father’s memory might eventually be triggered, and I don’t know what that would spell. I try to think of a new tag as I walk the streets and sand that night. One comes to me when the wind shifts, and sea mist rises off the waves: 

LOMAS.  

The name of the mist oases in Llanos de Challe that Lauren told me about.  

“There’s almost no rain there,” she said. “But mist from the ocean rolls over the mountains. It is so thick with moisture that it can sustain islands of vegetation in the desert.”   

“Like real-life terrariums,” I said, and Lauren smiled because her apartment was full of them. Or at least it was the one time I was there. She never invited me over. At the time, I assumed this was just because I was an awkward, uncool teen and she was ashamed of me. I never considered she was hiding something.  

* * *

My plan works initially. 

I paint LOMAS every night and every other day I wake to an empty house. My father is both a changed man and his same old self. We don’t talk about what is happening. There is no mention of the fact that he is inundated with graffiti work, just as there was no discussion a month earlier when I started staying out all night.  

Meanwhile, my passion for paint grows to the point that I put my scripts to the side. But with this passion rises pangs of grief when I pass the spot where my father has buffed one of my pieces. My work is improving, but his is perfect. There is no trace of me in this town.  

While afraid that I will disappear completely, I start taking photos of my tags with a camera that was once Lauren’s. There are dust motes on the lens and the photos often have backscatter from flickering floodlights. I have to resist the urge to interpret the auras and orbs as imprints of Lauren, hovering over LOMAS like life-giving particles of mist.  

I print out the photos and put them in an album that is already half-full of her. Most of them are from when she was a teenager, before, I assume, she was LORE. In one of the photos, she is standing on the beach and an onshore wind forces her thick red hair over her face. All that you can see is her wry smile, her thin lips curled to the sky.   

I take photos of original LORE pieces when I spot them, too. Most of my tags are low to the ground—I want my father to reach them without risking his back—but Lauren’s aren’t. Many of the ones that remain are in places seemingly impossible to reach. Places graffiti writers call heaven spots.  

* * *

My father and I are in a symbiotic relationship. At least this is what I think until I come home one night and hear, as I slink past his room, the sound of sobbing. 

The day after is as per usual. There is no difference in him, and it makes me wonder how many other tearful nights have transpired unnoticed. But now I am paying attention to him in a way that makes me realize how little I had been before.  

His pattern reveals itself to me. He is warm after work, cold by night. I try to think of why, but nothing I come up with sufficiently explains the turn. Not until one morning when I can’t sleep from cycling through questions about Lauren’s drug use that it dawns on me about Dad.  

The next time he is at work, I enter his bedroom. In the en-suite, I find popped pharmaceutical sleeves in the bin by the toilet. I rifle through the cupboard and find more sleeves, full ones this time. Printed on the tinfoil is the patented name he and I found on the bottles in Lauren’s top drawer, the compound that was identified in her system by the coroner.  

My first impulse is to ignore what I have found. I want to continue pretending my painting is beneficial to my father, that it isn’t leading him to dependency, or hasn’t already. I wonder then if the pills have less to do with his back pain than being a conduit for his relationship with Lauren. If so, what right do I have to intrude when he is housing me for free, enabling my own contorted grieving?  

This, I know, is not what my classmates would want from a character in my situation. Avoidance does not lend itself to transformation. So what would the film version of me do? Use the discovery to open a conversation with my father? How false for a family like mine.  

But what if there is a third way? What if instead of confronting my father or ignoring what I have found, I join him? What if I pop two pills from their plastic bed and let Midnight be re-made in her image?  

* * *

I read posts on an online forum dedicated to Lauren’s opiate of choice. Most of the users suffer from chronic pain—physical, emotional, a combination of both. They speak of the drug as if it isn’t a thing, but a place. Each little pill is an island of calm in the psychogeography of agony.  

I look for a username that has Lauren or LORE in it. I look for signs of her in sentence structures. I look for posts in all lower case, the way she used to text. Nothing stands out. There are traces of her everywhere.  

I take the pills after my father has fallen asleep. I am in the long corridor of trees between the streets and the beach when the effects kick in. My discomforts dissipate. So does my sense of self. By the time I am painting, I am watching myself at the same time as seeing nobody do it. I spray an L and a samsaric O, and then without consciously intending to, switch up my movements. I paint RE instead of MAS, and then curve out Lauren’s trademark underline, bringing myself right back to where I started. 

After painting, I go to the beach. It is too dark to see the sand beneath me, but I have the creeping sensation that I am not leaving behind footprints—not that this matters. By the time the sun reveals the sand, the tide will have wiped the slate clean. Both Lauren and I will still be here, nowhere, and somewhere else, all at once. 

* * *

I wake to nausea and cramps. A headache overwhelms me. My father is gone, again.  

Before he is back, I take another two pills from his cabinet and swallow them. There are four less in the sleeves than there were last night. I wonder how long it will be until two is not enough for me, four is not enough for him, no amount is.  

A post from the forum: Do we still bleed? If you were to cut me open, I fear there would be no blood, only vapor. This drug has taken my humanity. 

Where does a person’s humanity go after they die? Where does it go when you are the living dead? Lauren haunts Midnight with her tags. I haunt it with my grief. Neither is enough and my faith in paint is peeling. A person can’t live in two dimensions on a wall, in a post, on a page. I am reminded of the promise of a film script: the words won’t be contained there. They may be given flesh. 

These are druggy thoughts, I know. The pills hit different in the daytime. They draw me toward rather than away from the beach. On the shore, I strip naked and dive in. The mammalian reflex soothes my shifting thoughts. My body tingles. The boundary between it and the sea is permeable. Atoms dance. I open my eyes in the depths and see shimmers of nothing, a few distant fish. I swim out until I feel I might not make it back and turn toward the sand. I see the world from Lauren’s perspective. How far did she swim out that night? How far did she drift from the shoreline of the real? The opiates in my system feel like stones in my pockets. I tread water against their inclinations. The current I enter moves me shoreward. I am delivered another day. 

* * *

There are six pills in the only sleeve left. This is two days later. My first thought is: two for my father, two for Lauren, two for me. A meaningless thought because I pocket them all and leave the house before my father finds out we are a desert.  

I circumnavigate the town from afternoon to night, starting at the outskirts and spiraling around and down until I end at the resort that Lauren and I came to as teenagers where we jumped the fence and swam in the pool.

By now, the six pills are in full effect. It feels just like the lower dose until I begin to notice not only my absence but the pressure of an outside presence. At first, I think this is just the felt sense of memory, but then I hear rustles around a corner. I pause and take a wide berth as I round the property. I end up at a distant vantage of a large sand-swirl wall—one of the first spots I ever tagged.  

I crouch down and look at the wall. After a few moments, shadows slowly flicker against the surface. I try to blink them away, but they remain and replicate. The opiate is not known for inducing hallucinations, but maybe taking six is a different story. I look at my hands to remind me of myself. In one of them, I find Lauren’s camera. I lift it to the wall and watch through the safety of the viewfinder’s frame. When I do, my chest opens. The scene comes alive. 

EXT. HOTEL REAR — NIGHT 

Two people stand in front of a large wall that is flanked by palm trees. Both wear hoodies. We can’t see their faces. They are talking but we can’t hear them either. The camera keeps its distance as one of the two people positions a milk crate and the other stands atop it with a grocery bag in their hand.

Is this real? I call into the night, but the figures don’t respond. Instead, the one standing on the crate takes a spray can from their bag. They release air from the nozzle and then turn to the wall. Their body 

obscures what they are painting. Their movements are familiar, though. We have seen this before. We know those arcs. We know that dance.  

The camera lifts and begins to move closer. As it does, we can tell the bodies are not those of adults. The camera tracks around until we see them from the side. The kid on the crate, who we now see is a boy, steps down and brushes away his brown fringe to survey what he has done. His companion is a teenage girl. She has red hair and freckles. She points to the R of the tag on the wall.  

LAUREN
See the curve here? It should
overlap with the tail. 

Hearing her voice gives me vertigo. This is not a scene that took place when she was alive, but it is one I have dreamt over and over. 

VOICE OVER
Lauren? 

I hear her name come out of my mouth, but she doesn’t. Neither does my younger self. Lauren and he are in their own world. I say her name louder, anyway. Louder and louder I yell, but

the two turn away from the camera. They talk among themselves. We can’t hear what they’re saying. Their voices sound submerged underwater. The camera begins to shake.

* * *

I flee that scene and head home. Lauren’s voice follows me through town, but by the time I am back it has faded into the night. The pills have also passed their half-life. I’m no longer entirely separate from myself. I am once again the writer, actor, and character of my experience.  

This brings relief until I realize my father is not in the house. I consider the possibility he has gone in search of drugs. Guilt laps at my feet and Lauren’s voice returns to my ear. She tells me to find him. I tell her I don’t know how and she tells me that I do, that I found her—didn’t I? 

I do the only thing I can think of doing. I sit down at my desk. That is where I look for my father, where I shore up the skills that I left him to learn, what I have gone into debt for, what I own him to make useful for what’s left of our family.  

I head to the beach, to the spot where Lauren was found.  

EXT. MIDNIGHT BEACH — NIGHT 

The tide is king high. The surf is surging. At a distance, we see the FATHER standing in the sand. He is faced away from the camera as the SON approaches him. He reaches out for his FATHER’s shoulder to see if he is really there, and his fingertips mercifully meet the ridged stitching of his FATHER’s shirt. The SON exhales and the FATHER turns toward him slightly. His face is obscured by shadow.  

FATHER
I guess you thought you were
the only nocturnal one.  

The SON doesn’t say anything. The two stand in tense silence. The irruptive rhythm of waves can be heard in the background.  

FATHER
I come down here a lot, you know.  

SON
I didn’t. 

FATHER
Too busy graffitiing. 

SON
You know about that?  

FATHER
Of course I do. What do you take
me for?

SON
Honestly? Someone who has
given up. 

FATHER
I didn’t give anything up. It
was all taken from me. Lauren.
My pills.

SON
She wasn’t taken from just you.   

FATHER
Fine, from us. Are you just going
to skip over the part about the pills? 

SON
Do you know that I’m LORE?
Do you know that she was? 

FATHER
(sighing)
I always knew. Long before you
did. Long before she was gone.  

SON
How? You couldn’t have. 

FATHER
I could and I did. I saw the
tag in her notebook.  

SON
Did you talk to her about it? 

FATHER
No. 

SON
Why not?  

FATHER
I didn’t think it was my place. 

SON
Do you regret that? 

FATHER
(scowling)
Of course I regret it. Why do you
think I never told you? 

The FATHER turns back to the sea. The camera cuts to their feet and water laps at their shins. 

SON
What are we going to do?  

FATHER
About what? 

SON
About Lore. About Mom. About
neither of us being able to move on.  

The FATHER thinks for a while. 

FATHER
I have no idea. But this is your
script, not mine. What do you want
to do? 

SON
I don’t know what to do. That’s
the problem with my scripts. No one
goes anywhere. No one does anything.  

The FATHER scoffs.  

FATHER
Sounds like the movies Lore liked.
The SON considers this. He shakes his head. 

SON
No. She didn’t dislike action, just
certainty, predictability. She would
want more for us than repetition. 

FATHER
Well then. What’s something different?

The SON bites his nail. The camera cuts to the ocean. The moon holds its gaze.  

SON
Did she ever tell you about the flowering
desert? 

The camera returns to the FATHER. He is still for a moment before looking up at his SON. We finally get a clear sight of his eyes in the moonlight. He is smirking, nodding, a memory resurfacing.  

FATHER
Yeah, she did. She wouldn’t shut up about it.  

SON
Will you go with me?  

FATHER
Go? And do what? 

SON
I don’t know. Just be there. See the beauty
that she saw in it. We can work it out on
the way. 

FATHER
How would we get there? 

The SON points to the ocean.  

FATHER
Swim? You’re saying no to repetitions
and then suggesting we swim out to
sea at night while high on opiates?  

SON
But it’s not the same.  

FATHER
How is it not the same? 

SON
Because we’re not alone. Lore was
alone. That’s what we’ve been
repeating, more than anything else. 

The FATHER looks away again and then down at his feet. The camera follows. He draws a circle in the sand with his big toe. He rubs it out. 

FATHER
There’s no way we’d make it.  

SON
Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know.
But the point is we’ll be together as we try. 

The FATHER laughs a little.  

FATHER
This is getting a bit precious, you know that?  

SON
(sighing)
I’m tired of being oblique. I’m tired
of pretending I don’t feel so much.
I’m tired of wondering what if. 

The FATHER nods at this. It appears to make sense to him. He takes a deep breath as his spine straightens up.  

FATHER
Alright then. Let’s go. 

SON
Really? 

The FATHER doesn’t say anything. He just nods and walks toward the water. The SON expects him to stop when he reaches the edge, but he doesn’t. Still in his shirt and shorts, the FATHER wades into the whitewash. The water is up to his thighs, then his waist. He motions his hand toward the horizon without looking back at his SON. It is what he used to do when the SON and LAUREN were kids and scared of the breakers.  

FATHER
Hurry up! 

Soon the FATHER is underwater. Then a head bobbing in the moonlight. It is when we start losing sight of him that the SON follows. When the SON dives through the first line of waves, the camera pans upward. We see the two of them reunited beyond the breakers. They pause for a moment, but we can’t hear what they are saying. It is a conversation just for them, and for the waves.  

Music enters as they continue. They swim for the horizon as the ocean slowly fades into a cloud of mist. This clears to reveal a desert in full bloom. There are purple flowers everywhere.

---

S Graham is an Australian writer and climate change worker living in Seattle. They won the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project Award and have work published or forthcoming in New York Tyrant, The Hopkins Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. You can read more of their writing at sgraham.me.