Tunnels - Nellie Hildebrandt

The actress had sex on the pebbled beach, next to two half-eaten plums on a day full of clouds. The actress and her boyfriend, Gordon, remarked on how the sky was so metallic and thick that it looked like a bad green screen. Lake sediment and bog stain coated the ends of the actress’s blonde hair and her neon blue bikini top. She told Gordon the truth: when she was a child she had dug tunnels in her backyard, so deep that she would often become disoriented and not know which way was up. She would lose the place where sunlight had come from, had to bring her flashlight and click it on and lay it on its side. Her parents had recently stopped loving each other. Once, she went down into the tunnels to play a cassette of their voices, recorded without their knowledge from underneath the dinner table. Her father had fallen in love with the woman who tailored his clothes, and the actress had started to count her mother’s pills each night to track her mother’s wellbeing. The recording, though, was from a Christmas several years before, when her parents were eating a dinner covered in rosemary sprigs and butter, and the actress was hiding under the table with her new Christmas present, the tape recorder, sneakily documenting the conversation happening above her. She imitated it now for Gordon: father laughing with mother about a blizzard from their teenage years, before telephones, mother imitating father’s younger, lovesick voice. In the tunnel, the actress’s elbows had sunk into the dirt and mud wedged into the crevices of her tape recorder, and the walls were crumbling every time she moved. She held the tape recorder to her chest and turned the volume all the way up so that her parents’ wine-induced laughter reverberated in her ribs. Telling Gordon all of this, she took a deep breath. She felt like this memory had weighed a hundred pounds. She felt like sharing it had drilled a little hole into a very heavy bag, and now some of the contents were trickling out. They dropped the plums they’d been eating into the sand. He kissed her, and she took off her top. He took photos of her. They had wanted their whole lives to meet people like each other. The sand made imprints on his palms, his knees. Her whole body prickled afterward, like sips of champagne.

Years later, Gordon’s roommate found the photos on his laptop and posted them to a forum and the tabloids called the actress degrading words for a few fleeting days. It was a short affair; people forgot soon. She viewed the files on the dark web, studying her own giddy expression superimposed over the fake cornflower sky. She zoomed in. Her skin became pixels, peach and yellow and brown, until the memory didn’t look like anything at all.