Content Notice:
This story contains discussion of suicide
Daisy Everett hadn’t been to the Killian Fair since she was a kid. As soon as she graduated high school—a place she privately thought of as the Killian Unfair—she was gone, off to another city in another state, and the blunt blades of work and daily life had whittled many years from her since. But she was back in her country hometown to see the folks this weekend, since they were getting on now and needed to be cherished whilst the cherishing could be had, and her visit happened to fall on the day of the Fair. So here she was, wandering the stalls and little rides once more, sampling none of its wares save a single craft beer from a local microbrewery tent.
The Killian Fair was so similar to her childhood memories that it was almost eerie, but this sameness chimed with her recollection of home—never changing, like a cursed painting that drew you inside and kept you fixed in time forever. After all these years, they still had the teacup ride and the bouncy castle and the junior rollercoaster, the latter rising no higher than her own head. Daisy felt as though she’d opened an airtight box to rummage through childhood toys, unchanged but now so small in her adult hands.
She wandered through the entertainments and exhibits, exhausting her options until she came to the inevitable: the end of the fairground where hummocks of earth rose ten metres on either side to create a small valley around a bitumen bike path, their blunt peaks joined together by a narrow slate footbridge to create a walkway overseeing the site. This, too, remained essentially unchanged, but Daisy would have expected no less had she let herself think about it at all.
A twinge ran through her heart, as if that, too, had been frozen in time and remained the crux of a ten-year-old girl.
Was it still there, after all these years?
Daisy had little better to do than slouch around hiding her boredom, and she was already tired of the quizzical looks sent her way by townspeople trying to place a vaguely familiar face. She’d thoroughly rewritten herself since leaving this little rural town and no longer looked or felt like someone who should be here, an impression reinforced by the overwhelming white-bread homogeneity of the crowd she’d left behind by coming out to the edge of the fairground. She felt distinctly alien amongst all these flannel shirts and Blundstones and John Deere hats, even if she’d grown up a farmer’s daughter herself. So then: revisit the site of a painful childhood memory, one of the formative moments that had led her to become the woman she was now as opposed to the nice young mothers she’d passed at every stall on the way here? Why the bloody hell not?
Daisy stepped over a string of red flags that marked off the boundary of the fairground, allowing herself a wry smile at this latest transgression of the town’s confines. She mounted the thirty-foot hill with much less vigour than the last time, her boots digging divots in the dirt and reminding her she was so much bigger now, all grown up and well-versed in bad habits her childhood self could only imagine. She looked ahead to the slate bridge that awaited her, the mediator between two miniature mountains that could never touch, and something uncoiled with her that felt very much like dread.
She didn’t have to do this. But then, she didn’t have to do anything that hurt her, and yet she always seemed to jump at the chance. Wondering what grim compulsion led her into the jaws of disaster time and time again, Daisy reached her thoughts out to the thorns of that fateful Fair day twenty years before.
She’d gone with her parents but was allowed to run free if she found a friend, and that year she had paired up with a girl from school, Tallulah Hendrix, by virtue of bumping into her before anyone else. This was a real lucky break for her—they didn’t spend a lot of time together alone in class or on breaks, but Daisy always felt giddy as a goat when she had Tallulah to herself. Her classmate was a moody and unpredictable girl, inconsolable when she was sad, but when she was happy, being with her was exciting in a way Daisy had never felt before and was only just starting to unpack in the vaguest of ways. They went on the teacup ride and the bouncy castle and the junior rollercoaster that went no higher than her dad’s head, they both bought pink fairy floss and spurned the blue stuff, they teased their thick but handsome classmate Hamish Prince and ran away, they threw hoops at blocks and failed to win prizes. And then Tallulah suggested they go up to the bridge, because she had an idea.
They’d clambered up the hill with an ease that present Daisy could only envy, and when they reached the top, they walked onto the slate footbridge and presided over the Killian Fair like princesses of the realm. They pointed out people they knew and laughed at their obliviousness, made up silly stories about their home lives, but that wasn’t the plan that had led Tallulah up here. She scavenged around until she found a slate slab that had broken into patient shards, and she passed one jagged chunk to Daisy and kept one for herself. For a moment, Daisy thought she was going to suggest some kind of pact, cutting their palms so they could share blood and be bonded forever. And then Tallulah said, “Let’s graffiti it.”
Daisy had come a long way and faced down much censure since then, but at ten, she was horrified by the risk of being caught and punished for such wanton defacement. Besides, someone had already used liquid paper to paint a crude white willy on one of the stones, and she couldn’t imagine being at all the same as whoever had done that. But she was here with Tallulah and that made everything seem fantastical, as magical and bright as the light that sparkled in her friend’s deep green eyes, so she took the sharp rock and watched as the other girl squatted a few feet away and started scratching at one of the slabs of slate in the second-to-bottom row.
What should she write? What needed to be said in such a semi-permanent fashion? Her mind was empty, but only for a moment. Delirious inspiration struck, and giddy girl that she was, she didn’t question it. Daisy went down on one knee and carved five figures deep into another slab. It wasn’t until she finished that she wondered if it had really been such a good idea, and then, of course, it was far too late to reconsider.
“What’d you write?” Tallulah asked, standing over her, and there was no hiding it now. Daisy had carved their initials together the way kids with crushes did, as if they were girlfriend and… well, girlfriend. And she had no idea what Tallulah might think about that—whether she felt the same kinda-weird, kinda-awesome way when they were alone together.
She stepped away, revealing her message, and held her breath.
“Okay…” Tallulah’s first response was underwhelming, her second a frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Daisy didn’t even know what she was doing, she just did it.
“That’s how I feel,” she gushed, a tap within her twisted open for the first time and far too hard. “That’s what I want. I really hope you want it, too. Together.”
Now Tallulah turned to her, but the frown didn’t go away. She just stared at Daisy for agonising, drawn-out seconds, and the light wasn’t dancing in her deep green eyes anymore. The magic was gone. This girl was a stranger, and the grey judgements of Killian were reflected in the sneering set of her face.
“You’re weird,” she said, her words going snicker-snack through Daisy’s heart. “I don’t want to hang out with you anymore.”
And then she turned and hurried away, each slap of her shoes against the stone of the footbridge a slap across Daisy’s burning face. Confused, she had looked over to see what her abruptly erstwhile friend had carved into her own slab.
TH 4 HP
“Oh,” she said, and she turned back to see Tallulah starting to make her way down the hill—too keen to get away, moving too quickly. She lost her balance, stumbled, let out a shriek of shock as gravity took hold and she realised she was going to fall. Daisy watched, her jaw dropping as she understood the heavy price they were about to pay for her impetuous disclosure.
And then Tallulah somehow caught her footing again and took the rest of the hill in strides as long as her legs could make, and when she got to the bottom, she tumbled and rolled and collapsed in a heap. Durable as children and drunks both are wont to be, she was up a moment later, brushing herself off as she returned to the Killian Fair and disappeared into the crowd. She didn’t look back at her former friend even once. Daisy’s stomach soured as she imagined Tallulah kissing Hamish Prince and laughing about the strange girl up on the bridge, and she knew that going back to school was going to be like walking onto a firing range with a target stapled to her chest.
Sure enough, Tallulah spurned her company after that day and wrote her off to their classmates as weird. The excitement Daisy had felt in her presence, once so promising, mutated into a sick anxiety that tainted her days. The only positive was that Tallulah didn’t seem to have told anyone exactly why they’d fallen out, nor just what Daisy had carved into that slate, and so the expected schoolyard taunting never eventuated. A small mercy.
Now, Daisy sighed. That incident had stung her deeply for many years, more so than she’d realised for many of them. Dealing with that rejection as her first queer experience, when she was too young to understand how anything worked or who she even was, had not been healthy for her self-esteem. Oh, she’d made something of herself in time, had come to terms with her identity and how she loved once she’d left Killian’s smothering normativity. But when people spoke of primary school crushes with delight in their distant eyes, she’d smiled to hide the cringe inside. They talked about holding hands and first kisses; Daisy thought of a gut boiling with bees and a heart stuffed with broken glass.
Thirteen years passed and she was totally over her childhood traumas, no doubt about it—she was an out and proud metropolitan woman of twenty-three and nothing from her sorry past could touch her anymore. And then, calling home one night from her city flat, she learned from her parents that her former classmate Tallulah Hendrix had lived up to her mercurial and unpredictable reputation by suddenly getting married. Not to Hamish Prince, thankfully—or indeed, any other man. In the joyful aftermath of the gay marriage referendum, Tallulah had caused a stir in the overwhelmingly NO-voting Killian by wedding another woman.
The pairing didn’t last long, and nor did it end at all well as it turned out, but to hear that revelation then—ouch. The news had made Daisy’s youthful rejection worse; apparently it hadn’t been because of the type of romantic sentiment, since Tallulah must have already had some inklings of the same… so, unless she’d been in denial, the spurning was purely because of who was expressing it. Not the queerness, then, but Daisy herself. Since this news from Killian coincided with the painful end of a tempestuous relationship in the city, she celebrated by getting roaring drunk and making even more mistakes.
Now, thirty years old and relatively comfortable in her own skin, she reached the top of the hill and walked onto the footbridge. It was missing a few more slabs of slate after all this time, but apart from that and the dignified coat of deep green moss that had crept across much of its span, it looked as unchanged as anything else in this town. Daisy presided over the Killian Fair like a queen in exile, picked out people from the crowd and invented silly secret lives for them the way she and Tallulah had twenty years before. But those jokes skewed a lot darker now, so many more torrid possibilities available to her adult mind, and she quickly lost her appetite for the game. Time to stop putting off what she’d come for and face the past.
She decided to check for Tallulah’s graffiti first, and looked along the second-to-bottom row of slabs where she remembered it being carved. She couldn’t find it, no doubt because a patch of the veridian moss had grown over many of the stones. Evidently, it had eaten up the embarrassing evidence of Tallulah’s confused childhood crush.
Daisy hoped the green growth had swallowed her own admission, too. That would have been a small mercy. But no, fate was never so kind—there it was, barely even faded by time and weather, bold as any much-regretted mistake.
DE 4 TH
Since she’d hadn’t laid eyes on the carving for so long, Daisy came to it fresh. And now she saw what Tallulah must have seen twenty years ago. After all, those five characters were written quite close together.
DE4TH
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
Daisy leaned on the parapet of the bridge, trying to process this new revelation. So much long-standing hurt had just been undercut with the snickering brutality of a cosmic joke. Rejection, yes—but not because of her emerging sexuality, which she’d subsequently kept hidden away for a few more years than was healthy, and not because she was just weird and too much and surely unlovable. No, the spurning—and the years she’d spent carrying it around like a malignant tumour that had metastasized into further personal issues—had been caused by a simple misunderstanding.
That’s what I want. I really hope you want it, too. Together.
Maybe Tallulah had taken away something hurtful from that day, too. Could she have thought a friend was wishing her dead, casting a curse in stone? Something had harrowed her throughout her life, eating her away inside long before that day at the Killian Fair, let alone the teenage years she’d spent raw with anguish and depression; Tallulah had never seemed satisfied or stable at any point, and according to Daisy’s parents, not even marriage had been enough to keep her from periodically attempting suicide. The last time, it took. There was no cry for help, no hesitation marks, when one chose to jump off a bridge.
Imagine this new horror: if everything was Daisy’s fault in the end after all, suicide included—if Tallulah had felt cursed ever since that day because she saw something that wasn’t intended, something that lingered in her mind and added to the weight of her depression until finally she—
Daisy frowned, staring down at the ungiving ribbon of the bitumen bike path. Wait—which bridge had it been, that final time? Had her parents ever said? Tallulah hadn’t fled Killian for the city like she had, she’d stuck around and found her groove and stayed in it until she called quits and jumped out. Whatever she’d made of herself in the end had never left this place.
The moss was cold on Daisy’s fingers. She only noticed that because she’d made sure to rest her hands on a section of parapet that was clear and uncoated, and now, somehow, none of it was. Almost all the slabs of slate were obscured by moist deep green, but of course her unintended curse remained unmasked. She shivered at the slick, icy touch of the past and looked down at the damning mark she’d carved, irrevocable, irredeemable.
DE4TH
The slate was chilly against her hands, the moss even more so now that it covered them entirely and began creeping up her arms. She’d never understood much of what had happened to her in life anyway, so this, here and now in broad daylight with a thousand people milling about in plain view below, was simply incomprehensible at first. But like the five characters, or single word, that she’d carved into the bridge, it only became clear when you were able to distance yourself enough to gain the right perspective—and when Daisy disassociated from herself in shock, unmoored within her own invaded body, she was able to look down and understand how these pieces of the past came together to make a sick kind of sense.
The moss was cold on Daisy’s tongue. Deep, questing. Like a long-delayed kiss.
Matthew R. Davis
Matthew R. Davis is a Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author and musician from Adelaide, South Australia, with around one hundred short stories and six books published to date. He's won two Australasian Shadows Awards and has been shortlisted for many others. His latest book is The Cure On Track: Every Album, Every Song (Sonicbond Publishing), with a collection of horror stories, Songs of Shadow, Words of Woe, and an Australian indie film tie-in, Ribspreader: The Novelisation and the Screenplay (with Dick Dale) due later in 2025. He shares his life with the award-winning artist Meg Wright, aka Red Wallflower. Find out more at matthewrdavisfiction.