NATASHA
FROM WOMAN TO GHOST
San Francisco—Now
“ALL THINGS COME in cycles” was what Natasha Porter’s mother had told her, two weeks earlier, the last time they spoke. What her mother meant was that the time had come for Natasha to cycle back home, to the Midwest, to find a man, get married, pop out a few kids. You know, accomplish something. Natasha had accomplished nothing by calling home. She had meant to ask for a loan. Instead, she asked for nothing and hung up mad.
She felt especially mad because her mother was right. All things came in cycles: peaks, valleys, booms, busts, seasons, births, deaths. Natasha had cycled from nowhere special to somewhere cool; from unknown to popular to despised; from decently flush to broke; from comfortable in her apartment, drinking wine on the roof with her lovely French roommate, Marie Babineaux, to sleeping on a bench in Embarcadero Plaza.
Her roommate had cycled from alive to dead.
Broke, hated, homeless—these were all better than dead.
She had, at least, this partially eaten blueberry muffin, which was more than could be said for her roommate Marie. The muffin had, earlier in its cycle, a sugary crumbly top. But someone had eaten the top off of the muffin and left the remains on top of Natasha while she slept, as if she were a human trash can, which was about how she felt. She had crumbs stuck in her unwashed hair. A flock of pigeons circled around her. They eyed her muffin with their greedy black eyes. She watched them and wondered whether the muffin’s former owner had viewed the half pastry as a benevolent gift. She wondered how she had appeared, through the honeyed lens of the muffin-rich.
She sniffed the muffin. She was famished. She took a bite, and then she felt appalled, by herself for eating stale street food, and by her own desire to eat more of it. She spit the bite out. She tossed the muffin remains to the pigeons. They swarmed.
Natasha stood up and strapped on her backpack, which had made a lousy pillow. She rubbed her eyes. The sky looked 7:30-ish: pale yellow light, scattered starlings. Downtown had already turned into a zoo: Elephantine buses idled in the gridlocked street. Business-suited goats spilled up from the BART train entrance. Banking lions with roller briefcases and sandaled tech-sloths crowded the sidewalks. A pair of old bears in leather chaps sat on a bench in Embarcadero Plaza and sipped espresso and looked out at the sapphire-and-diamond bay. At their backs, the lost city clamored on.
Natasha walked along Market Street. She walked because she couldn’t just stay on the bench in the plaza. The Nozees were everywhere. Someone might recognize her face. She couldn’t dig up the plaza bricks and bury herself beneath them. She couldn’t run out to the pier and throw herself into the bay. Or maybe she could. Maybe she needed to demarcate this cycle as done.
She had spent exactly one night sleeping on the street. Plenty of people had lived on the street for weeks, months, whole years on some cold curb, huddled under a tarp, swaddled in the damp fog of the merciless city—which had cycled from working-class town to groovy peace-love dreamville to dot-com capital to dystopian model for the failures of late-stage capitalism—and did it really make her a failure that she did not have two grand to pay her share of the monthly rent on the one-bedroom apartment she had shared with Marie?
Twenty-seven nights had passed since Marie got murdered in the park. Twenty-six since Natasha had noticed that her roommate didn’t make it home, and started to worry. Twenty-five since the police showed up at the door and asked questions: Did Marie have a boyfriend? Did she date? Had she gotten entangled with any of those rich country club fellows, perhaps a married man? As if those things mattered.
Two nights had passed since Natasha had tried and failed to sleep in her car, her car being too crammed with her stuff. The ninety-degree angle of the driver’s seat, forced upright by the overflow of boxes and garbage bags, made her back ache. She had considered sleeping on the top of the car, sprawled out over the hood, but it was too cold, too exposed. Her car could have been sold to pay the rent, if she had a job and money to fix it. Her car could be driven in a Midwesternly direction, if she wanted to admit defeat. She decided instead to stay up and out all night. She could sleep in the day, every day until . . . she didn’t know. She didn’t think things through.
So the next day she’d packed a backpack and wandered through the early evening, stopping at one café and then another, lingering over empty cups of coffee. She had pretended to browse boutiques, checking the price tags on blouses, holding them up in the mirror to see if their color would complement her eyes, or transform her into a different Natasha. She had almost gone into a favorite dive bar on Polk Street, propelled there by the habits of her body. Then she saw Synergy-Nate and River the Cosmonaut Cosmetologist standing in the doorway, smoking a joint. They were both fanatical Nozees. River had a Nova Z’Rhae tattoo on her calf. Natasha tried to turn around and leave, but the process of turning lasted centuries, long enough for Synergy-Nate to look up and see her, for his head to shake in disgust, for his mouth to form the word:
bitch.
She pulled her beanie down low over her bangs. She walked with her head down, fixing her eyes on the embedded spots of gum on the sidewalk, the smears of guacamole and dog shit, the dry patches of dirt that surrounded the windblown trees. How they could grow here eluded her. She walked on, and the wind blew and the sky turned nighttime orange. She took shelter in her sweater. She shivered in her sweater. She remembered the time she had drunk shots of absinthe with River the Cosmonaut Cosmetologist at R Bar, and River had slung a loose arm around Natasha’s shoulder and suggested that someday they ought to make out, because River liked to taste new mouths. River also had a tattoo of a river on her arm, a polluted river laden with toxic waste and dead fish. Natasha remembered licking the banks of that river, the salt taste of the woman’s skin.
Natasha had walked until her legs ached and her hands felt shivery and bloodless. She saw the spire of a church. She walked to it. She tried the door, but the door was locked. no solicitation. She read the sign on the door. no bathrooms. no sleeping. Her body remembered its old habit, sleep. It nagged at her. Her body offered untenable suggestions, like Marriott and Hilton and Holiday Inn. Her mind stood vigilant guard to the dregs of her bank account. Her body employed a new strategy: Homeless shelter! Her mind replied: What the fuck! No! Her body pleaded/ whimpered/yelled:
Homeless shelter?
Home-less shel-ter
HOMELESS
SHELTER!!!
It commandeered her feet and marched them toward the doors of St. Vincent de Paul. She stood outside and stared at the building, crammed full of sleeping people. She stared at the shopping carts parked outside. She smelled urine. She couldn’t bring herself to open the door. Silver-penned Natasha Porter who had studied comparative literature at Reed College and hashtagged her way to a book deal and, just last month, drank twenty-dollar rosemary pinecone cocktails with B-film darling Mauve Booker and NYT bestselling agitator Tyranamo Getmo. She could not slather herself with this dirty word, this unshowered urine-soaked tarp-and-cart word.
Homeless.
It was safer, in the shelter. She would not get murdered in the shelter, probably. But sleeping in the shelter would require her to confront the reality of sleeping in the shelter. She wasn’t ready for that.
The cold bay winds called.
She lurched downward, toward the Embarcadero shallows. She stopped, just to rest her feet. Just a rest, she said to herself, as she stretched her feet out on the bench. Then her eyes hinged shut. Then her eyes opened to a view of partially eaten muffin.
Copyright © 2025 by Emily Jane. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
