Brandon had tried to find Frances, but it seemed no one had seen her.
Her parents had filled a missing persons report and were desperate, but since they had never liked Brandon, communicated little with him.
He still worked in Tillamook, but found himself unable to continue. In order to find Frances, he quit and went to the Coquille Cafè, only to find the owner with disturbing news of paranormal activity in the joint since Fran had gone missing. Nancy was very upset about the whole thing, as she hadn’t heard from Frances since she went home last Tuesday.
“I swear, though, someone comes here at night,” Nancy, the owner, was a hard-headed woman not known for flights of fancy.
“and I find these,” she picked up an envelope and with great care, removed two rhombus shaped luminescent pieces of …scales? Skin? …of great beauty, with a fuchsia sheen. “Ever seen anything like this?”
At that moment, a great blast was heard in the direction of the lighthouse, and the two of them ran towards the row of windows above the banquettes and linoleum tables, grooved and metal-plated. The lighthouse was flashing as normal, but Brandon thought he saw a woman at the very top, only that she looked almost as if she had a tail, and was shining multicolored like a chameleon in the sun. The image disappeared almost immediately, and he turned his face to Nancy, who was still staring across the river, open-mouthed.
“Must be the workmen…they’re fixing the top of that place, got broken in the storm the other day” Nancy brought his head out of the clouds.
Brandon began to frequent the late-night establishments of Bandon, hoping to find company of any gender, as the sense of anguish seemed to grow in him.
One evening a young woman came over to him and sat down on the round stool to his right. Her hair was short, almost a masculine cut, but she had the agility and grace of a dancer. She spoke to him.
“Rough night?” He turned to look at her. She had an impertinent face, a bold look unconcealed by modesty. Her thighs were sheathed in tight leggings and high-laced combat boots.
There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t place her. He stared down at the ring-shaped puddle on the bar made by his IGP bottle. It gleamed in the neon Budweiser sign. He was not all there.
The following day Brandon went down to the local hospital to enquire. The young receptionist looked at him with a curious stare.
“Frances? You mean the waitress from Coquille Cafè?”
“Yes, that’s her. She’s my wife, but I haven’t been able to find her for the last few days. I just wanted to check to see if she checked in here at some point,” Brandon had almost said “was my wife”, and wondered for a moment if he even wanted to find her again.
The secretary was instantly suspicious. This handsome guy, so calm, seemed almost irritated at having to wait.
“Last name?” She didn’t look up at him. She knew the type, conceited, probably a gaslighting narcissist, who knows, maybe he had killed the poor Frances and thrown her in a shallow grave behind his apartment. You never knew these days. Sometimes people went crazy, it wasn’t an uncommon occurence in the Northwest…all that damn rain….
“Vanderford. She kept her maiden name….”
The day of Frances’s dissappearance, Mr. Fogherty had been in the cafè, as usual.
Frances was talking to Nancy, telling her that she had to go home that day. She didn’t feel well, couldn’t stand the stress anymore of being alone (didn’t tell her boss that, though). Her eyes were cloudy with tears, but she made up some rubbish about her period and a sore throat, and Nancy of course loaded her down with fresh oranges and told her to call later in the evening and let her know, the older woman would bring by some chicken soup, that’s a great home remedy, she said.
Mr. Fogherty had stuck around for a few more minutes, watching with curiosity the ebb and flow of local customers getting to-go lattes, homemade pies and orders of bacon and hash browns and bagels with cream cheese or smoked salmon. If Nancy was in a good mood, she could whip up a great clam chowder.
He folded up his newspaper and was heading home. The oncoming dusk and the heavy fog drifting in from the ocean made it difficult to see, but he saw someone running ahead of him, toward the little bridge which spanned the Coquille in the direction of the lighthouse.
“Fran!” he recognized the waitress, and called out to her. He was always fond of her, felt some strange sense of empathy for the girl, so polite, so sad under it all. But she didn’t turn around.
It started to rain lightly and Mr. Fogherty followed Frances toward the river.
A bolt of lightning lit up the whole scene with a purplish glow, and suddenly he saw Frances (was it really her?), screaming in the rain, tear-streaked, desperate. She looked as if she was about to jump into the river.
“Frances!!! Wait!!” He ran towards her, where the wet grass sloped down rapidly towards the rushing Coquille, which flowed into the sea. Had she jumped already?
He was ready to scramble down the river banks to see when he saw something he would never forget. It was climbing up the side of the lighthouse, a kind of lizard with a woman’s hair, an enormous chameleon with shiny fuchsia scales, but when the lightning crashed down again, he could see a human skeleton, blood streaked, screaming into the wind for mercy, for pity, for dissolution.
He stumbled back in fear and fell into the mud, and by now the rain was coming down in buckets, and he knew he couldn’t help Frances, because whatever that thing was, it had certainly eaten her, and it was best to go to the police, before he was killed himself. He limped back to the cafe, rapping at the door with a burning intensity.
When Nancy opened up the door, she found Mr. Fogherty delirious. He got him a blanket and took him down to police headquarters. Poor man. After losing his wife he had lost his mind, she thought.
Frances realized that Brandon had left her on a Tuesday, while she was sitting down to count up the receipts like she always did at the end of the day.
The scene from the talent show came back to her, the burning humiliation of when Tammy had sat on Brandon’s lap and whispered something in her ear, and all the wasted time she had spent since then , pretending that nothing had happened and that he still actually loved her. It was all over, all over, and she knew nothing would ever be good again for her. She was drab, she was mousy, she didn’t have the glitz of Tammy or the other girls who knew how to find men without even trying. She cared too much.
That night at home she cried so hard that she thought she would die. She had managed to make a fire in the wood stove which kept her from dying of cold, certainly, but it didn’t stop the cold certainty of death from creeping into her every fiber. She hugged the fur rug that her dad had given her and prayed that someone would just take her out of her misery.
Later that night she dreamed of being in another universe, on a kind of island or planet called Oracle 54. Here, time went backward. Here, half the planet was underwater or with no gravity so you would pedal your legs to no avail and remain stuck in a kind of stasis, reliving your old dramatic, terrible memories.
But in the middle of that dream she suddenly remembered that Frances was dead and that in fact she hadn’t gone home at all that day, that innocuous Tuesday in August when it rained and thunderstormed and the top of the lighthouse was split in two. She had wandered out to that damn lighthouse and in the middle of that storm she had screamed into the rain that she wanted to die, and that she hated Brandon and hoped he would die too in the most miserable of ways, and in that very moment a bolt of fuchsia lightning came in through her third eye and killed her but it also gave her a new life, because she became that very character which she had seen in the advertisements, that strange woman who was half lizard, half vamp, half tremor, half vapor, half dream.
Fuxia, the one who disturbs.
Was she dreaming?
Sitting up, she went to her bedroom and holding up her candle to the mirror, looked into her own eyes. A cold glint of fuchsia lit up her hollow stare. She was….different…..
Kaleidoscope by Erika 
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