They’d exited the freeway and driven up into the hills, past magnolia trees, thick as two bodies entwined.

“Look,” Cyrus said, pointing to the thick, wax-white blooms flickering among the leaves. “They’re like candles.”

Later, she would make some magnolia blossom candles for him.

They drove up and up. It was a clear night. “Smells like flowers,” Cyrus said. “And if you really concentrate, the Pacific Ocean, baby.” He inhaled. “No dead fish, mama.”

They wound past facades that bloomed surreally out of the shadows like the pale magnolia blossoms on the dark trees. Spanish adobes, Italianate villas, French Normandy-style palaces, Tudor farmhouses, Colonial and Neo-Classical mansions. Stone walls covered with Sleeping Beauty roses. Hedges revealing glimpses of Cinderella-fountained courtyards with sweeping stairs, small white lights in topiary bushes. A Hansel and Gretel cottage with turrets, gables, spun sugar windows.

Izzy and Cyrus read a book about Los Angeles that explained how it was built on sacred burial grounds, earthquake faults, quartz mines, swamplands, and pre-historic tar pits filled with the bones of saber tooth tigers. Even the streets were named for tar (La Brea) and swamplands, marshes (La Cienega).

“LA: the land of devils,” Larry liked to say, sucking on smoke.

◆◆◆

We got to get out of here before we even consider it, Iz.

“Don’t move to LA without me, okay?” Izzy hummed it with pleasure now, in the shack, not really afraid Cyrus ever would. Although, perhaps part of her was afraid.

Cyrus took her chin in his hand like he might hold one of the china molds from which she made her chocolates and candles and looked into her eyes again. “There is nothing to leave,” he said. “You are me and I am you. Love don’t die.”

Those words stalked her when she woke the next morning to find him gone.

Jennifer’s Body

Blood stained the sheets from her cycle that had come in the night, reminding her of how Cyrus had shaken his head and rolled the condom on. Outside the window, their love hadn’t conjured rainbows, rain, or rabbits. The day was already hot and bright with wind.

“Morning, Sunshine,” she called, waiting for him to say his usual, “Morning, Mama Dawn.”

Silence.

Izzy sniffed the air for the pancakes he liked to make them on Sundays, but all she could smell was beeswax, sage, and the residue of their sex. She got up. His boots and the clothes he’d worn the day before, including his ID, weren’t where he’d tossed them on the floor last night, but his phone was there, still charging. She knocked on the bathroom door. Unlocked. The room was empty, his towel not even damp with the water that had skimmed his skin. She went outside, barefoot, in her tank top and underpants. His Silverado was parked in its usual spot. When she peered inside the cab, everything looked normal.

He must have just gone for a walk.

But when she came back in, she saw that his black socks were strewn out, animal-like, on the floor under the bed by the slightly bloodied condom wrapper. So, he had left in a hurry, without telling her…