I was born of the Ram. Two horns spiral over my head. My mother hates them. She wants me to be more like her, and if not like her, at least like any of the other hers in the world. Despite the hairless skin, round thighs, and half-moon feet that she gave me, the horns are all she sees. I remind her too much of him. But whose fault is that? You can only cram so much of your DNA into one person. And she chose him to wreathe my double helix. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t have boobs, not really. It probably doesn’t help that I also wear the golden fleece he left behind. It’s a hideous antediluvian zip-up that I never zip up—very retro—with an iron-on patch of a pair of wings. People always stare, of course, at the bare chest between my nipples, trying to catch a glimpse of my tits as if that might help them pin down whether I’m this or that. I try not to let it get to me. It’s not like they’re brave enough to come up and ask me directly, usually. Anyway, the Ram used to say whoever wears the golden fleece has the strength of fire-breathing bulls and a dragon with teeth that will grow into soldiers when planted like seeds. I’ve decided to believe him. No one messes with a golden fleece.

“I’m heading out,” I call across our crumbling stone cottage.

My mother glances up from her telenovela just long enough to scowl at the unmentionable spot just above my head.

“Cover your tits,” she says with detached exhaustion, as if she’s just suggested grabbing an umbrella for the hundredth time.

“What tits?” I shoot back, but my hand reaches for the coatrack anyway.

And her eyes have already settled back on the tall, dark, and dangerous flavor of the week of her autogenerated drama.

I head to the Sidewalk, one of those chalk centers with a massive archive, advertising that you can access the inaccessible. I’m hoping to find some more on the Ram, maybe to piss my mom off, maybe to piss myself off. Ever since they ruled the dead’s memories as public domain, you can find almost any crime as long as there were witnesses. The Sidewalk has a reputation for some pretty unpleasant uploads—a good place to start looking for the Ram.

I’m just coming up to the sliding glass doors of the Sidewalk, when I notice the bushes lining the building, pruned to accent the foot of the metal tower. I recognize their flowers. They’re native to the fields here, but I forget what the Ram used to call them. I lean down to take in a blossom’s fragrance, and when I straighten, there’s a woman beside me, smoking and staring in disgust. I pluck the flower and sniff it again, and she visibly shudders. I freeze, caught between a guffaw and the impulse to flee the scene, when a gruff voice cuts in.

“May I?”

A Faun, without introduction, takes the flower gingerly from me, and in a single chomp severs the flowerhead from its stem. He chews the petals satisfactorily between his teeth, dislocating his jaw repeatedly with intentional grinding swoops, as the woman storms off, scandalized and frightened even.

I’m not frightened though. I have the golden fleece, a layer of protection. And it’s immediately evident, from the wide berth the other data center visitors give us, that standing side-by-side adds a different kind of protection for both of us. The Faun has hooves and hairy haunches, big beady eyes and pointy ears—the kinds of things I have running in my blood but can’t be seen. And I have something of a familiar face, but also my hard-to-miss horns.

“Looking for anyone in particular?” I ask, nodding to the tower.

“Just some entertainment,” he grins, still chewing even though there doesn’t appear to be anything left in his mouth. “Want in?”

I end up sitting in with him on a donut shop heist gone wrong. And when it’s done, we agree to meet again tomorrow.

“What kind of odd jobs did the Ram take?” I ask my mother later that night, knowing I’ll only manage to get one question in.

She’s still in her lumpy recliner, hasn’t bothered to look up from the TV since I got home—maybe all day.

“Odd jobs,” she grumbles. “What does it matter? I liked him better when he picked flowers.”

That’s what he did before, apparently. Before the humans came en masse with their reflective metal, towers, and tech. Before they took the landscape and “landscaped” it to elevate their shiny properties. He traded flowers till they mowed it all down—or more likely got the goats to. Then he did what he had to do to get by.

It’s not the lead I was hoping for, but I’ll take any hint that she ever liked him at all. I’m scraping for any glimmer of hope that anyone will ever like me, despite what I am. Most days, I don’t blame her for being salty about him honestly. He left her, both of us, on her birthday of all days, as if it were the best thing for her, as if it were a gift.

I wouldn’t call meeting up at the Sidewalk a date, but the Faun and I go back for some more memories.

People get us confused sometimes. Check if the study is vacant, would ya—the goat boys want a private session. They think we’re the same thing because we’re both flat-chested and stand on two hindlegs. Sometimes it’s fine, and other times it’s not. But when it’s just the two of us, it’s not a thing at all. We can just be, him with his bare chest and me with my golden fleece. I trust him as much as my mother trusts the Ram, or any of the hims in the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other.

By the third time we go to the Sidewalk, he buys me some chalk.

The living aren’t public domain last time I checked, but your memories are backed up the moment you get your Tell-all implanted. So you can access someone’s Telly if they hold still long enough for you to trace them. I take the Faun’s gesture to mean he wants me to hack into him.

So I hack into him. And when my chalk runs out, I buy him some. And he hacks into me. And when his chalk runs out, he buys me some again, and on it goes….

Neither of us get out much, other than visits to the Sidewalk. So mostly we sit there watching each other sitting there watching heists gone wrong—prosthetic heists, crypto heists, even chalk heists—which is dumb, because we could just be watching the dead’s projections directly. But then after a few times, we’re there watching ourselves, me sitting in his lap, him projecting into me. Then me projecting into him, him sitting in my lap, sometimes more than sitting. Until one day we’re watching ourselves fucking while watching ourselves fucking while watching ourselves fucking, trying to remember what heist got us going in the first place.

We go through a lot of chalk. You can stretch it when you’re hacking into the dead because you only need to draw your portal as big as a headstone, which these days is only as big as the Tell-all they store it on. But when the Faun and I hack into each other’s memories, we go through the chalk a lot quicker, because it’s more tangible if the door is big enough to step through. And it’s obvious the whole venture’s become more about tracing each other’s lines than using the chalk. And I get carried away tracing his lines, leaving a chalk outline in the pavement like you see in those old black and white films at a crime scene.

Until one day, we’re just watching the recursion, not fucking, just sitting, just watching. 

And the Faun says, “Let’s go outside.”

He takes me to a cemetery, not a data center, but an old-school cemetery where the others go when they can’t afford to be processed. We find an empty burial plot amidst the graves. When he takes me, he whispers, “Quiet. Don’t wake them.”

Afterwards, I run my fingers through the wet grass. I find seeds for what I can only guess are irises and calla lilies. I plant them in the Faun’s curls where they might bloom later to remind him of me when I’m gone.

“Wait here,” he says, and leaves me alone with the dead.

Only I’m not alone, I realize. A boy, nearly a man, kneels in front of the headstone of a young woman. The flowers on the grave are fresh. In his hand he holds a stone, white as sidewalk chalk, but this is not a portal into anyone’s mind. One end is sharp and he holds it to his wrist.

“Stop!” I call out.

I rush him and knock the stone from his hand. I look down and see blood, but I can’t tell whose it is. After the shock of my arrival wears, the boy stands to look at me. He has the body of a hearse, too long, too rectangular to carry any normal load. The boy stares at me, and I think of my mother, how her eyes always flick up to my horns. The boy stares at me, and I think of strangers on the sidewalk, their eyes flicking to my chest. This boy, wholly human, looks into my eyes as if horns and tits have no weight to them.

I reach my hands up, unconvinced, and run my hands over the two dead bones breaking the skin. Before I let my arms fall back to my sides, I run my palms over my nipples, checking these too. I suppress a shiver, which only makes my insides quake all the more. The golden fleece falls back into place and still his eyes do not waver from mine.

“What’s the point?” the hearse-boy says, eyes drifting finally back to the grave.

I see myself in him. I see a boy with nothing left to live for. A boy on the edge. I can see it in his eyes. I remember thinking the same thing the day the Faun found me. And all I’m thinking now is I have to do something to keep this boy alive. We’ve only just met, but I feel responsible for him. I have to keep him talking. I have to give him something to make it to tomorrow. I have to show him that there’s more to his life than this young woman in a grave.

I kneel at the headstone. I take his hands and bring him down to the ground with me. I lay his head in my lap. I run my fingers through the wet grass, picking up the seeds of strewn and forgotten flowers, then run my fingers through his hair. I leave something for him later, so he is brave enough to make it past today.

I do not know how long we remain this way.

The dark descends on us and yet things feel lighter.

“Meet me again here tomorrow,” I say, something to look forward to.

The hearse-boy nods in agreement, and I believe him.

As I retreat back to civilization, I wonder why the Faun never returned. I wonder where he could be. What was so important that he could leave me for dead? I am probably overreacting, projecting my own uncertain feelings over a false promise. Wait here. Meet… here. If they aren’t false promises, there’s even more reason to fear.

Instinctively, my feet carry me back to the Sidewalk. I search for the Faun in all the usual places—projection halls, single-lightbulb closets, loveseat-combo-computer stations, library stacks, dusty theaters. When I can’t find him, I check out a standard laptop station and click around through the archives. I think I’m in the mood for some hearse-boy lookalikes. Before I can even finish typing hairless in the search field, I’m prompted with a dropdown of ten suggestions. I choose the one with “roughed up” in the title and motion with my hands to throw the projections up onto the walls. I lean back and suddenly I’m staring all around at an omniscient reflection. I’m seeing a figure in the golden fleece from nearly fifteen sets of narrowing eyes. Only the fleece isn’t as faded as the one I wear now. The horns on his head are more pronounced than mine. His haunches are hairy. His chest and abdomen are chiseled.

It is the Ram.

I feel like I’m sitting at the center of a giant kinetoscope—one of those old-fashioned peep-show devices that spin and spin until the images blur together into a motion picture. It looks like there are more hairless thugs—and by hairless I mean they wear pants instead of fur—than there actually are, as each of them appears multiple times in the periphery of the others’ gaze. I’ve never seen this collection of memories before—never thought to seek out this demographic even though they were often the victims of the Ram’s exploits, as the Ram was so often the victim of this demographic’s exploits before him. When the thugs begin to close in on him, the Ram sheds his golden fleece. A tuft of those wildflowers, whose name is lost to time, comes untucked from the fleece and scatters across the floor. And now I’m sure this is the last sighting. This is how it all ends. The thugs move faster, begin to blur. There are less and less of them the faster they move. Their knives catch the dim light before blinking out of their hands. One by one their projections go dark until one motion picture remains, staring down those horns that could certainly be the last thing this final opponent ever saw, as with the others. The Ram’s shoulders rise and fall with each heavy breath. Blood runs down his face and chest, though it is uncertain whose blood it is. Then to my utter surprise, he kneels. It is not clear whether he gives up or gives himself up—whether this is an involuntary sacrifice or self-sacrifice. But the motion means something to the final fighter, and with that acknowledgement they both collapse to the ground and the last projection goes dark.

Now I know: I’d been looking in all the wrong places. I fall asleep right there in the chair with the knowledge that it was never a heist gone wrong. 

I return to the cemetery the following day, but no one is there yet—no one except the young woman in the grave, but she’s not saying much. So, I wait and I wait. I try to not let the waiting get to me.

When I hear the crunch of dried petals underfoot, my heart races. He has returned. I jump up with a stupid broad grin on my face and realize it is not the hearse-boy.

The Faun has returned. He must notice a flicker in my expression because he says, “Were you hoping for someone else?”

I smooth out my smile and chide him, “I was hoping for any company at all. After you ditched me here, I was starting to think you’d never come back.”

“I did come back,” the Faun replies. “Last night. You had already left, apparently.”

“You didn’t expect me to wait here all night,” I say, but I know that is exactly what he expected. “What’s that?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

The Faun opens his palm to show me a piece of chalk, but this one is different from all the ones before. It shimmers as if dipped in snail slime.

“A present,” he replies, his voice softening, as if he knows he should not have taken so long to bring it to me. He should not have kept me waiting. “I broke down some Sidewalk chalk to decode its structure. I’ve made some improvements. We don’t have to just watch memories on the other side, we can make new ones, make a life there. We could leave this place, leave your mother, leave the humans. You never have to go home again.”

The Faun comes closer to show me. He is close enough that I see the tip of his left horn is missing. I’m about to ask what happened to it when the hearse-boy appears among the headstones.

“Hello,” he calls and rushes to me, throwing his arms around me in a desperate embrace. One hand lands on top of my golden fleece, but the other slips under, finding the small of my back. A long breath later, he notices the Faun there and flinches. For the first time he looks more like an animal than a man. “Oh, I didn’t know you were bringing a friend.”

I force a smile and gently ease the boy back a step. Already I can see the beginnings of irises and calla lilies sprouting out of the boy’s dark hair like a bouquet of horns.

The Faun must notice them too. His nostrils are flaring. I can imagine what he thinks they mean. I wonder if he’s right about what he thinks they mean.

“We met yesterday while I was waiting,” I say quietly to the Faun. “His girlfriend died,” I add, trying to justify my actions. 

“Tragic,” the Faun replies, then—because he could care less what a human thinks—says for all to hear, “We’re no more to them than the ground they walk on.”

“They can’t be all bad,” I retort, but even as I say it, I know I don’t believe it so much as I hope it. How could I believe such a thing when I don’t even trust the Faun?

“I thought you were one of us.” The Faun throws the chalk to the ground in defeat and stalks off.

I feel like I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I have. My small act of kindness is a betrayal.

The hearse-boy bends down to pick the chalk up.

“You forgot your…!” he begins, but trails off when the Faun is out of sight. “What is it?”

“Chalk, but not for watching memories, for making new ones,” I blurt, wondering after the Faun.

“What do you mean make new ones?” the boy says.

“I don’t know,” and I truly don’t. What the Faun claims is unheard of.

“Do you think… I could talk to her again?” I see a lightness in his chest, it almost lifts him off the ground, this thought of a second chance. I imagine floating at a second chance with the Faun.

I think of where the Faun intends to take me with this chalk. I want it more than anything, but before I go, I want to leave something for the boy. Maybe I want to take something of the boy with me. There is enough chalk for more than one use. I could open a door for the boy and still have some left over for the Faun.

“Allow me,” I say, holding out my hand. Without hesitation, the hearse-boy hands it to me, trusting me. The chalk is cool against my skin.

I glide the chalk over the flat black marble with ease. I move it from corner to corner, not lifting until the line connects in one rectangle outlining the headstone. As I pull the chalk away the stone crumbles away. A space opens between us and the coffin below.

We see the young woman sit up and stare at us in wonder. Her eyes are sunken. Her breasts are full and hard. But her flesh doesn’t jiggle like with the living. Her head is bald. It isn’t clear if she shaved it or if her hair all fell out. She has no horns.

She stands. She climbs. She reaches a hand to us, but an invisible barrier keeps her from breaching the surface. It is like there is a glass window between us.

The boy reaches to his dead girlfriend and an exchange occurs. The girlfriend’s hand breaches the surface and an invisible force tugs the boy down. The girl rises up as the boy sinks in.

“Help!” the boy cries. I throw my arms around his waist and pull him back up. At once, the girlfriend falls back in.

“You can’t leave the grave unoccupied,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, like she has stones in her throat.

“What do we do?” he asks.

“We need a Tell-all, an occupied one. I know where to find one. My step-mom has a few on her mantle back home. It won’t change that I’m dead, but that way you could take me wherever you go.”

“Whose are they?” I say. Not all Tell-alls end up in the data centers. Some people acquire a personal storage device—a digital urn to keep their loved, or valuable, ones close. What she’s suggesting is swapping graves with someone else.

The young woman looks at me.

“Does it matter? They’re all dead. And no one’s going back for them.”

“Your step-mom will never let me near them,” the boy says.

“I can get in unnoticed,” she says.

The young couple looks at me. We’re all thinking the same thing.

“Help us,” the boy pleads, clasping my hand. “Take her place, just until we have the Tell-all.”

I want to save him. So I need to save her. I look down at the chalk in my hand. There’s still enough for another door, so I won’t be trapped like the girlfriend if something goes wrong. Though if it comes to using the chalk, there won’t be enough for another use with the Faun.

He knows how to make it, I reason, he can make more.

“I’ll come back,” the boy urges. “I promise.”

To my own surprise, I shed my golden fleece. I stretch my arms to the girlfriend and hand it to her. I want it to give her the protection and strength it has always given me, even if it’s only symbolic. The exchange is a wave of cold over my body. I drift to the bottom of the grave. The moment the swap is complete, I turn to look at the boy. He is already gone. The door is shut. The coffin is closed. The headstone’s epitaph now will mislead any visitor.

I settle in. I know this will take a while. I try to remember fonder times. I remember my mother and father sitting on the couch, watching the television, in the before times, before there were Tell-alls. Back when things were good. I remember, but it is not just one memory. It’s a lot of memories blending together. Night after night, movie after movie. They watched and watched thinking they’d grow old together watching and watching till the very end. They say if you and your partner watch the same things, your minds progress at relatively the same rate—or don’t progress at the same rate. Either way, it helps with compatibility. For a long time, my parents weren’t changing, but they weren’t changing together. So it makes sense that when my father started going out, being the shows instead of watching the shows with her, they drifted. I wonder if this is how it is with me and the Faun or how it will be if we stop watching together.

The last bit of chalk burns in my hand as I grip it tighter and tighter. I wait, and I wait. I do not know how much time goes by. Minutes, hours. I pass out. Days? I think about the girlfriend’s mission as if it’s a dead data heist. I think it’s gone wrong. I think about the boy. He promised he’d come back. Even if the data heist goes wrong, he could still come back. He might not even need chalk to get me out. Maybe a shovel would do. I’m not dead like the girlfriend.

I wait, and I wait.

I think I hear screaming.

I think it is me.

I scream.

It sounds funny.

I laugh.

It sounds sad.

I think about the Faun and the kind of trouble we’ll get into when we use this chalk and leave forever.

I think about the chalk in my hand. I think the Faun can make another. I don’t know for sure, but I’m optimistic. I don’t need to wait for the boy. I can go back to the Faun and explain what happened. He’ll make another, and then we’ll never go home again.

I can’t wait any longer.

I take the chalk between my fingers and hold it up to the roof of my coffin. It occurs to me now that the coffin is so small, I can’t maneuver to draw a full-length door. My horns are so big I can’t even lift my head.

A smaller door will do. It only needs to be big enough for me to worm out of it. I draw a window. I put a finger where the first corner is so that my piece of chalk can find it again in the dark.

As I close the circuit, a small distorted rectangle opens above me. Light pours into the grave around a handsome horned silhouette. I stare up into a set of large black beady eyes.

“Faun!” I call. His body lays directly over mine. There’s only dirt between us. I smile so wide that my cheeks hurt. The fronts of my teeth grow dry.

“Get me out of here!”

The Faun says nothing. He just watches me like I’m another piece of entertainment at one of the chalk centers. His gaze is piercing, expectant. I can’t bear to look him in the eye any longer. I look up at his horns and remember the left one has been chipped. Sacrificed, I realize. Turned to chalk—our chance to escape.

I know what he’s thinking. How much more of myself do I have to give up to make this work? But I never asked him to give up anything. He could take both my horns for all I care.

He could care less, unless I say the magic words. But I’m done feeling sorry—for the Faun, for myself, for all the nothing I’ve done wrong. And as I stare back at him, I see we’re both too broken to apologize.

He must see it too. Because he shoves a pile of brush over the portal I’ve made. Forest debris, crushed wings, and bones cover the opening. It gets in my mouth. It presses my eyes shut.

There’s still some chalk left. I hurry to draw another door, but the chalk is almost spent, just a pebble. And as I lift it, it slips from my sweaty desperate fingers. I grasp around for it, but I come up with a handful of pebbles, stones, flecks of dirt, and they all feel the same. I can’t tell one rock from another in the dark. I draw, and draw, and draw, a hundred doors, more, with hundreds of pieces of not-chalk. Until finally I pull my hands in to rest crossed on my not-chest. The Faun is gone. The couple does not return. The golden fleece is out there, a sacrifice, a symbol, and I realize it never protected anyone—not the Ram, not me. And it won’t protect the hearse-girl either. I am the island that kept it safe. I am the fire-breathing bulls and the dragon with teeth that can turn into soldiers. The golden fleece needed me to protect it, not the other way around. And by my horns, I will. I lift them: the tips of my horns, my nails, my teeth—all the chalk I have—and start scraping, leaving lines of me in the packed dirt above me, drawing a door like no one’s ever seen.