Lucy Dale

Seeping Sap

When Carly stepped off the train in Boston, her phone pinged in her back pocket. She slipped it out of the pressed denim. When she tried to unlock it, her fingers kept getting stuck to the screen each time she attempted her passcode. 

She rubbed the phone screen on her sleeve, but the phone no longer recognized her fingers. The frustration and constant sound of pinging messages made her head sting. Carly managed to put her phone on airplane mode, sliding it back into her pocket. 

Near the exit, a tall man in a tight suit held a sign. He had large hands, large enough that Carly could see the dark hair speckling his fingers from several feet away. Carly stood with her duffle bag in hand as her eyes moved to the name printed in black ink on cardstock, Emily. 

Carly couldn’t take her eyes off the letters that made up this name, this person. The kind of person who knew herself enough that other people knew her too. No one was sending concerned messages; they wanted her; they sent tall men in tight suits to stand in train stations and wait for her. 

Emily was not plagued by a damaged psyche. Emily had purpose; she had a place to go. She was not running away, but running towards. And by the time Carly headed towards the sliding doors, she could no longer differentiate between herself and Emily. 

Emily stepped through the sliding doors of the train station, feeling the abrupt transition from air-conditioned cool to the raw weight of midday sun. The heat hit like a wall. It pressed against her skin, heavy in her lungs, and made her shirt cling in unpleasant patches. 

Before the doors could close behind her, she dropped her duffel bag to the ground, letting it act as a cushion. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, feeling the tension release at the base of her neck. She pulled her phone from her back pocket. 

Emily sank onto her bag and surveyed the small throng of people moving along the sidewalk outside the terminal. She felt disoriented in this new city as she watched rolling suitcases click over cracks in the pavement and baby strollers wobble with tiny passengers. 

Emily wondered whether it was better to drag a burden up a hill like a suitcase or push it ahead like a stroller. She couldn’t decide, though she knew either way the weight would become unbearable, and letting go, watching it tumble away seemed kinder than being trampled as rocks scraped her raw. 

A stiff wind tunneled through the street, unexpected and sharp, brushing across her arms and cooling her sweat-slicked skin. Emily let it linger, tasting the brief relief, before reality pressed back. 

She tapped the Uber app: no signal. The loading screen spun like a tiny mouse running on a wheel. Around and around. Her eyes glazed over, transfixed. 

The sounds of the city — a car horn, a construction site, a wailing of police sirens — snapped her out of a hypnotized state. 

She tried Lyft: same screen. SOS mode. She tried to connect to the Wi-Fi of a nearby building, but it wouldn’t reach her. 

She opened Carly’s messages, which included the address, along with a photo of the apartment. Annoying then, but now—drenched in sweat, watching purposeful strangers stream past—she was grateful Carly hadn’t trusted her sense of direction. 

A woman of Emily’s sister’s age walked by in black slacks and white heels, blouse crisp to match. Emily shot up. “Hey! Sorry — do you know where Pearl Street is?” 

The woman stopped. “Sure. Just around the corner.” 

Emily smiled — a genuine smile, strange on her lips, sharp as mint. “Thank you!” 

The young woman nodded and walked on. Emily hefted her duffel and followed the direction she’d been given, turning left at the intersection. 

Quickly, apartment buildings appeared, just like Carly’s photo. Emily stopped to check her phone — but when she looked up, the buildings were gone. In their place stood a small, mom-and-pop drugstore, seemingly humble and unassuming.  

Emily squinted, then widened her eyes. Her jaw sagged. She turned back down the street — no apartments anywhere. She pocketed her phone, rubbed her eyes, tightened her ponytail, and crossed into the drugstore.

Fluorescent lights glowed yellow. They flickered once, twice, and then settled into a jaundiced hum. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic, dust, and something she couldn’t name — sweet, almost like decaying sugar. 

Her white-and-blue sneakers stuck slightly to the waxed floor, each step punctuated by a soft, sticky pull. She tried to shake the sensation from her arms, but the residue clung there too, faint and unwelcome, as if the store itself had absorbed her presence. The aisles stretched ahead like hallways in a haunted hotel, familiar and wrong all at once.

A man stood behind the counter with coke-bottle glasses. Something about him clung a memory to the front of Emily’s thoughts — her grandfather, playing guitar and bouncing her on his knee — but the resemblance twisted under the harsh light. His face appeared unstretched by years of not smiling. He didn’t speak, but his eyes tracked her, unblinking. 

Emily’s hands hovered briefly over the counter, then withdrew. The stickiness seemed to have seeped into her fingers. Her throat dried. She cleared it quietly, feeling the hairs on her arms rise.

“Welcome,” the man said finally. His voice was low, rough from smoke, carrying a weight that made her stomach tighten. “How may I help you?”

Emily swallowed. “I’m looking for this apartment.” Emily spurted out as she reached behind herself for her phone, “I thought I saw some buildings nearby, but…” Her words faltered as she gestured vaguely. The man remained silent, only smiling faintly, jagged yellow teeth catching the light.

The air shifted. Emily turned to glance down an aisle, and the shelf seemed to ripple, just slightly, as if the products themselves were breathing. 

When she looked back at the counter, the man was gone. No step, no sound — only the lingering stickiness on her hands and the faint hum of fluorescent lights.

Her pulse quickened. Emily backed out of the store, blinking against the sun. The city block had shifted again, though she couldn’t tell if it was her memory failing or the world bending. She pulled at her ponytail, tighter this time, wishing for something solid to anchor her: a street, a building, anything she could recognize. 

The block she’d seen before was gone, replaced by a lush park full of smiling families and children at play. When she turned back, the drugstore had become a garden of white roses. A few red blooms bled through like stains. 

A child with wild red hair barreled past, nearly knocking her over. 

“I’m so sorry!” called an older woman with matching red hair, slicked back into a braid. She sat on a bench nearby, arm draped across the back, craning toward Emily. 

Emily pressed her palms to her face and felt the sticky residue from the drugstore still coating her skin. She wiped them hard against her jeans. “It’s alright!” she said, forcing a smile that snagged on her lips. 

The woman gestured with her arm, inviting her to sit. 

Emily sat beside her, catching her breath for the first time since turning onto that block — a memory that was already slipping away. 

The mother broke her calm. “Are you lost?”

Emily adjusted her loose ponytail to match the mother’s braid, pulling until a jab of pain shot through her skull.

“Yes. I’ve had the weirdest day. I’m trying to find this apartment, my…” A hollow opened in her chest. Carly. How did she even know Carly? The thought slipped like her own name. She stared at her hands. “I can’t place it. I thought I’d found it, then a drugstore, and then…” Her memory fuzzed. “Now I’m here.” She looked back up at the mother.

The woman’s eyes were a deep, saturated blue. Emily couldn’t stop staring. She imagined stepping into them—like the jolt of walking from a darkened room into sudden light. 

“This used to be my favorite place in the city.” 

Her words floated between them as Emily imagined riding in a swan boat, on the river of the mother’s eyes. For a moment, she felt suspended, tethered only to the woman’s gaze. 

In a moment of clarity, her words washed over Emily, giving her a sense of unease. “What do you mean?” 

The woman turned away, as if cutting a taut cord that had bound them together. 

Emily glanced around. Her hand rose to her mouth. The park had changed. The grass dulled to the color of rotten cantaloupe. The air, once humming with laughter, was still. Dead trees jutted their roots above the dirt like skeletal hands reaching for rescue. No families. No children. 

Emily looked back. New lines scraped the mother’s face, mascara smudged beneath her eyes. She gripped her arm so tightly the fabric wrinkled like her skin. 

“I used to bring my daughter here,” she rasped, folding in on herself. “She was so full of spirit. She’d run for hours.” 

A chill crawled through Emily, inverting her insides. The sweat from the train station was gone, replaced by a sharp cold. 

Backing away from the deserted park, Emily spotted a faded sign for a public restroom. She quickly pushed on the heavy door and entered the small box with tiled walls. 

Emily scrubbed her hands vigorously with the pear-scented hand soap that was almost empty and made a squelching sound each time that she pounded down on the plastic head. The sticky substance, like sap, still clung to her skin. 

She knew there was a solution, an anecdote for this sticky rash, invisible to others, but debilitating to her. Still, Emily questioned the reality of the sticky substance. Could she be imagining it? This notion stuck to her brain like a sucking parasite and brought a single tear rolling down her cheek, blushing in color from the strong August sun. 

Emily watched herself in the smudged mirror above the sink. Her appearance was shocking to Emily, like a fun-house or filter on her phone. She leaned forward so her pelvic bones pressed against the ceramic sink and opened her mouth, exhaling widely on the faded mirror. 

With her finger, still coated in sap, Emily traced the letter ‘C’ in the fogged section. She looked at the letter, her unfamiliar reflection in the background like a portrait photo. Quickly, Emily shook her head and swiped a horizontal line off the middle of the letter, making an odd-looking ‘E.’  

Emily decided it was best to head back to the train station — if only to return somewhere she knew was real. She stumbled onto a city block. A biker in neon spandex whipped past, shouting something incoherent. The rush of wind pulled at her hair, a streak of color flashing by — then gone when she looked down the street. 

At a crosswalk stood a man in a business suit, newspaper in hand. Emily tried to remember the last time she’d seen someone reading one. Perhaps as a child, at breakfast, her dad preferred paper, while she hated the feeling of ink on her hands.

She approached warily, rehearsing a line in her head before speaking: “Sorry to bother you, sir, but um…” 

The man turned, taller than she’d expected, eyes unreadable. His shoes gleamed as if polished that morning by someone else. The neat trim of his facial hair suggested a weekly visit to a barber — precision she found oddly familiar, yet chilling.

Emily continued, voice trembling slightly, “I’ve gotten a bit turned around. I’m looking for the train station.”

The man eyed her, then tucked the paper under his arm and checked his watch. “I’m running late for a meeting, but if you don’t mind sharing a cab, my office is near the station.” Emily nodded. When he hailed a taxi, she slid into the backseat without thinking.

The taxi’s leather seats were ripped, coated in the same sticky residue she’d felt in the drugstore. It seeped into her skin, a creeping sensation that made her pulse quicken. 

The businessman reopened his newspaper. Emily leaned back, eyes skimming the words: shootings, fires, people denied refuge. Everything seemed normal — yet off, like a world she almost recognized.

Then she noticed the date: two weeks after her train had arrived in Boston. Two weeks — but it had only been hours, she was certain. Emily’s stomach turned, and a wave of dizziness pounded her down as her brain tingled, it felt whenever she forgot her antidepressants.

“Excuse me,” she whispered, leaning toward him. “Is that date… right?”

He did not answer. Only turned the page, angling it so she could no longer see the spread. Emily sank back into the seat, heart hammering. 

The cab smelled faintly of exhaust and leather, but beneath it was that sticky, pervasive sap—clinging to her hands, her hair, her clothes, like reality itself was coated in it.

A shiver ran down her spine. She tried to focus, to ground herself in the mundane: the hum of the tires on the asphalt, the dull roar of the city outside. But the newspaper, the taxi, the stickiness—they were all wrong. The world was slipping again, and Emily felt it in every nerve. 

When the taxi jerked to a stop, Emily turned to the businessman—but he was gone. She hadn’t heard the door open, let alone close. The cab driver glanced at her, eyebrows raised. Emily fumbled into her bag for change and then froze. The man’s newspaper lay on the seat, still folded.

She opened it. The headline screamed for attention: Woman Disappears After Manic Episode. Her stomach clenched. Her hands twitched.

“Miss, you can’t just sit here,” the driver said, breaking her trance. She tore her eyes from the page and handed over loose change.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, Emily realized she was standing in the same intersection where she had first turned left. Traffic swirled around her; a horn blared sharply, and she bolted to the curb.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She hadn’t checked for service since the train station. Pulling it out, she saw her mother calling. Relief and anxiety collided. She tapped green.

“Mom?”

“Honey! Why haven’t you been answering our calls? We’ve been worried sick!”

Emily rolled her eyes and shifted her weight on the sidewalk, trying to sound calm. 

“Mom, it’s only been a couple of hours. I didn’t have service when I got off the train, and I kept getting turned around.”

Silence.

“Mom? Are you still there?”

In the background, she could hear her mother speaking softly to someone else. A chair scraped. A door clicked.

“Where are you?” her mom’s voice whispered finally, soft, hesitant, as though holding back tears. “Just tell me where you are, Carly.” 

The name hung in the air, unfamiliar yet intimate. 

The line went silent again, dead. 

Her heartbeat echoed in her ears, quick and erratic. The city around her seemed to pulse, the asphalt sticky beneath her shoes, clinging to them. She blinked rapidly, trying to process. 

She flinched, dropping her phone. 

She bent down to pick up the device and looked up, coming face-to-face with herself in the reflection of a building’s window. Then, the sharp trill of an upbeat ringtone cut through the dense air, seeping into her mind like molten sap into the slits of her skull.