Zora, who was thirteen and often sad, took all her stones and poured them over her face, covering it in coolness. She rose, letting them fall. From the cookie tin in the pantry, she took a string and a screwdriver and forced her way through a dozen blue stones to make a necklace that she could flip up and down as needed. 

“Do you want to take a jewelry class?” asked her mother, Alice, for whom there was a class for everything. Alice herself was enrolled in adult ballet, gluten-free cookie cooking, and bookbinding. She would take them back-to-back on Saturdays and come home happily exhausted. Alice abjured sadness. Zora assumed that the person who had given her the other half of her DNA was institutionalized or long gone.

It was depressing that this phase of life was so predictable. It was depressing that Alice loved Zora so much, that her jetés were so clumsy and joyous, that the rest of the world knew her as a competent professional, a well-cited cancer researcher, while Zora couldn’t get her to focus on groceries. It was sad that Zora looked cute with bangs and read the Brontës voraciously and was sadder still that there were people who had neither of these attributes but were happy and fulfilled, and here she was, not. Zora would want anyone reading this to know that she is fully aware that nothing she thinks or does is original, but she still yearns for others to know the specific hue of her feeling, even assuming that something like turquoise or fuchsia is cliché. 

Alice went with her friend Mark to watch sailboats in the harbor, and Zora baked chocolate-chip cookies. It was worse when Alice and Mark were home, happy together. Zora ate cookies alone in front of a seemingly endless streaming series about a zombie invasion, which made her feel electric: There, the tree branch scratching against the window; there, the inky darkness hiding the things. She flipped the necklace up and through her blue eyelids saw a sad zombie enter the living room. 

“What do you want?” she asked. It pushed cookies into its decaying mouth. Zora could see chocolate chips travel through the open throat lacerations. When Alice came home, Zora told her there were no leftovers because of the zombie; also, the cookies had been so glutinous the zombie had left viscous spit trails by the door, which Zora then had had to mop up.

Alice was tipsy, pronounced the zombie rude; Zora put her to bed and mixed almond-flour brownies and did six math problems while they baked and left them cooling on the counter. She dreamt of Alice with a rotting face and gaping mouth, looking, for once, confused and sad, and she wished Mark would take Alice out again.

In the morning, on the counter, there was a scrawled note and no more brownies: Up late, worms for brains. Off sailing, love Alice.