Previously…
MAREN CROSS runs a transparency nonprofit • She built her life on the principle that everything should be seen • Now everyone on Earth is slowly becoming invisible—they call it the Fading—and Maren is fading faster than anyone she knows…
Maren Cross runs a transparency nonprofit • She built her life on the principle that everything should be seen • Now everyone on Earth is slowly becoming invisible—they call it the Fading—and Maren is fading faster than anyone she knows
Maren’s daughter Nadia is sixteen and barely fading • Her mother June is seventy-four, mid-stage dementia, and significantly invisible • The aides at Greenridge assisted living put an orange shawl on June to quikly find her • She pulls it off, they put it back
Maren visited on Wednesday • June didn’t recognize her • Then June reached out, touched Maren’s face, and said “There you are” • Thirty seconds later June asked who Maren was
Maren drove home • She didn’t cry…
MAREN’s left hand had been getting worse for weeks, but this morning the word worse felt insufficient.
She held her hand under the water and watched it run along the contours of something hollow. The droplets catching on skin that was still there, still solid to touch, but no longer to the eye. Water beaded on Maren’s knuckles and streamed down channels she could trace: the valleys between tendons, the ridge of a vein, the skeleton of a hand rendered in water on glass. She flexed her fingers. The bones moved. She could see them clearly now. The actual bones, pale stones moving inside the hand that was now their display case.
At work Maren controlled the light. At home she kept the lamps warm. The shower, six in the morning, overhead on, was the one place she couldn’t.
Her right hand was following. Not as far, but the fingertips had crossed over in the last few days from thinning to transparent, and the transparency was climbing toward the first knuckle. She held both hands out in front of her and the water ran over them and she could see, through the steam, exactly the nothing she was becoming.
Maren stood under the water for a long time.
It felt like the last guest had left. The performance had ended.
Maren turned the water off. Stood in the steam. Her body, what she could see of it in the fogged mirror across the bathroom, looked almost normal from a distance. The face still mostly there, the shoulders and torso solid enough to pass. It was the extremities that told the truth. Hands, feet, the outer edges of her ears. She was dissolving from the margins inward, and the margins had gotten wider since last week.
Maren wiped the mirror with her forearm and looked at herself. Forehead, nose, mouth. Still hers. Cheeks starting to thin. Jawline holding.
She also looked like a woman who hadn’t slept enough. How could she?
Maren leaned closer. She could see her eyes. Brown, her father’s brown, the same shade Nadia had inherited without knowing where it came from. The whites still white. The irises still dark. But the skin around them, the delicate tissue of the eyelids, was thinning. She could see, or thought she could see, the faintest network of blood vessels beneath the surface, made visible the way a leaf held up to the sun shows its veins. Her own face becoming a thing she could see through to the inside of. Maren studied it from the safety of a wall that kept the feelings at the correct distance.
Maren put on the tinted glasses. She’d bought them two weeks ago. Light sensitivity, she told Nadia, which was accurate. The morning felt brighter than it used to. Screens left a residue in her vision, a faint after-image that took longer to clear than it should.
Maren dressed. The high-collared blouse. The long sleeves. A scarf at the neck, to draw the eye upward, toward the face, away from the hands. Getting dressed took eleven minutes. It used to take four. The additional seven minutes were the cost of it: buttoning the cuffs tight enough that they wouldn’t ride up when she reached for something, adjusting the collar so the skin at the base of her throat was covered, checking the mirror from three angles to verify that the whole thing held.
In the mirror, from three feet away, she looked like any other professional woman.
Up close, the illusion had seams.
In the kitchen, Nadia had left a washed cereal bowl in the sink. Nadia’s backpack was gone. Her school shoes were gone. The apartment held the quiet of a place someone had recently left. A chair pushed back from the table. A cabinet door not fully closed. Ghost vapors from the toaster.
Maren poured coffee. Stood at the counter. The mug was warm in hands that could feel everything and show nothing. The kitchen was bright with the kind of April light that, six months ago, Maren would have loved. Now, she dealt with the light by standing at angle the light couldn’t reach her.
She drank her coffee black. Same brand, same grind, same four-minute brew time, and her hollow hand felt the same as her solid hand had always felt. The body inside the clothes was becoming optional. The clothes were the person now.
Maren pulled her sleeves down. Picked up her keys and her bag and walked out the door to pretend to be visible for one more day.
Tomorrow it would take twelve minutes to get dressed. The day after that, thirteen.
The hiding would grow with the fading, the costume expanding to cover what the body no longer could. Maren walked to the car in the cold with her sleeves pulled down, the tinted glasses on and the scarf arranged just so.
She wasn’t dreading it.
And that was the part Maren couldn’t tell anyone.
THE SEEN & THE GONE
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