Sanctity by Edie Patterson

This is the summer she lives in Brooklyn and smokes cigarettes in the backyard where someone who lives two stories below her has built a swing set for their kid and honeysuckle spreads its rangy fingers over the brick wall of the apartment. The summer when she decides she wants everything. The summer when her parents move across the country to California and she starts dreaming about her childhood home with its overgrowth of phlox and milkweed in the front yard and its scuffed wooden furniture piling up on the curb, surreal and purposeless like some overdone art exhibit — the summer she’s twenty, the summer when the stasis breaks.

She works at an arts theater near Prospect Park. One week, they show a sad romance movie over and over and at the fourth showing she has this melodramatic moment crying in the back of the theater, even though she’s supposed to be mixing overpriced cocktails at the bar.

There’s no point in explaining why — she knows it will pass, everything does. And when it does, she’ll walk past the laundromat and the man yelling threats outside of the corner market and the warm lights of brownstones blinking off like inscrutable omens and back to her cramped apartment, where she’ll open the window and fall asleep.

One night, she’s at a bar in downtown Manhattan, drunk but not blacked out, just enough that the sight of her own face in the smudged bathroom mirror feels like she’s summoned a ghost. She calls him, the ex that she was crying over in the movie theater, maybe there was a point in explaining, and an hour later when she’s home, he comes to her door to make sure she’s okay. He doesn’t live far, it’s not much of a sacrifice. Still, she insists, “You’re too nice to me, I don’t deserve this after what I did to you,” and she closes the door. In the morning when she barely remembers this, she’ll walk down her street to see that it rained, sometime in the few hours while she was asleep, one of those brief elusive summer rains that floods the gutters with green honey locust leaves and decaying flower petals.

The apartment is relatively unfurnished. It’s temporary. So is everything else. She lives with a roommate who’s almost always at her boyfriend’s apartment instead but pays rent for this one so she has somewhere to stay if they break up. In May, a friend found her a free couch on Facebook Marketplace and then they somehow managed to bring it back on the subway from someone else’s curb in Tribeca. She printed photos at a local CVS and taped them on the wall — a few landscapes from home, where the sky is replicated in an artificial bright blue over tall cottonwoods or plowed fields in the country. Sometimes she invites her friends over, the ones who are still here over the summer, to drink cheap wine she bought with an unconvincing fake ID and sit on the fire escape. They take photos of each other with her digital camera with the flash on, or they talk incessantly about things like dating or work or how different everything was in high school, or sometimes they don’t talk and they watch people walk down the street below them with a sort of rapt mechanical interest.

She met the ex last year, when they were nineteen. They met at a frat party where everyone was drinking vodka Redbulls and smoking so much in the basement that the fire alarm went off. Actually, they had met before that. It was in a Shakespeare class, in a big sixth-story lecture room, where he sat three rows behind her and always showed up late and they never talked. The timeline seems kind of circular now. Either way, he put his arm around her at some frat party, and she couldn’t get over it.

It’s June, when the days are the longest they’ll be all year and the air is already heavy and humid by the time she wakes up each morning, the time when the summer feels oversaturated like it’s about to collapse. This is the month when she wants something to change, or everything to change. She’s been invited to a wedding, her cousin from home who’s moved to New York, and she’s static and holding out hope for some reason that this might make everything start to shift.

She calls a friend from college who’s in the city over the summer; for the past month they’ve been saying they’re going to meet up but they don’t. She asks, do you want to go to a wedding with me? He pauses for a second, since it’s not an ordinary question, and then asks when it is. She says next weekend. He says yes.

The weekend before the wedding she goes to help her parents load things into their U-Haul headed to California. The belongings seem like parts of an elaborate movie set: the delicate stacks of 70s folk records, the family heirloom silverware, the mirror that hung in the hallway outside her childhood room. “We don’t want this,” her mom says, gesturing to the pile of silverware, which is real silver with intricate designs carved into it. The next morning she eats Frosted Flakes at the kitchen table in her unfurnished apartment with expensive antique silverware. The designs make indents in her fingers. She smokes a cigarette on the way to work, a habit her parents don’t know about even though it comes from them, and thinks about all the heavy things she’s inherited.

That week she takes three trains to uptown Manhattan where she lived in a dorm during the school year; it’s eight P.M. by the time she gets off the train, and she walks to Riverside Park.

The Hudson and the paved walking path and the overgrowth of green in the park form three diagonal planes. The sun is hazy and yellow like an Impressionist painting. She lies down on the grass in the park and closes her eyes.

That week she receives a piece of mail addressed to the last person who rented this apartment. It’s a letter, and the return address is in a small town in Oklahoma. She looks it up on Google Maps. It’s a blue house almost eclipsed by a mess of apple trees in the front yard, and one of the front steps is collapsing into a bed of tiger lilies. For some reason the image of the house nearly makes her cry. She doesn’t open the letter. She leaves it sitting on the coffee table untouched as if the person it’s meant for could find it and take it away.

The roommate comes home, finally. She and the boyfriend are in a fight which she refuses to explain, but she buys an arsenal of home supplies that she never bought when she first moved in. One morning, they’re sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal with antique silver spoons. It rained overnight again, and a light mist hangs like a mirage over the sidewalks; it hasn’t heated up, they have the window open. “Do you believe in the one?” the roommate asks.

“No,” she says. “Well, wait. It depends. What do you mean?”

“Like, someone who you’re meant to be with. You know. The one.”

“No. That’s an excuse people use to put up with bad behavior.”

“You would say that.” The roommate crosses the kitchen and puts the silver spoon in the sink. “I was reading Sylvia Plath’s journals and, did you know, she traveled to Paris to see this guy she was in love with and he wasn’t there. And she went back to Cambridge and married Ted Hughes after they’d only known each other for four months.”

“Yeah, but Ted Hughes is awful. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“No, I mean, what if the guy she was in love with in Paris was the one? And you’re supposed to wait for the one, but she didn’t wait, she went back to Cambridge and got married way too soon. Like, that’s my problem, I don’t know how long you’re supposed to wait.”

“Wait to get married?”

“No, wait to know. If you’ve found the right person. It’s just, I don’t know what my timeline is supposed to be.”

“It’s not supposed to be anything. It just is whatever you do.”

The next night, they drink too much tequila and walk aimlessly around their neighborhood until they end up sitting on the steps of a big church under a stained-glass window with an image of the Virgin Mary in blue. “You know, I wanted to get married in my early twenties,” the roommate says. “I already had my timeline in mind.”

“You’re twenty. It’s fine.”

“But what if it doesn’t work out how I wanted?” It’s ten p.m. and the street looks strangely geometric in the dark, except for the looming abstract shapes of sycamore trees and the glow of the red traffic lights, which sweep over the empty crosswalk and illuminate the roommate’s face.

“Then it doesn’t. Then you do something else.” She becomes aware of the residual heat, it’s still hot out, and the air is thick with memory.

Later that night, she’s still on the church steps after the roommate gets in a taxi to her boyfriend’s apartment. She’s imagining their romantic reunion like a scene in one of the movies at the arts theater, one she can’t see but hears faintly from her seat at the concessions stand or the ticket booth. She calls the ex, and he tells her he’s walking home anyway, he’ll stop by. He says, “Are you drunk?” She says yes. Then she says, “Sometimes I feel like I wasn’t a person before you. I wasn’t anything. Did you know you were my first kiss?” He says no, then he helps her stand up. There’s this cold blue light pouring out of the church, filtered through the stained-glass Virgin Mary, and it makes her feel holy and renewed. She kisses him, or maybe he kisses her, it doesn’t matter, and then he holds her hand and walks her back to her apartment where the bed is unmade and the window is open and nothing is holy, everything is full of memory.

Before the wedding, the boy from college comes to pick her up at her apartment. “This is your place?” he says, and she thinks about the way he fits in the frame of the doorway with one arm propping the door open. “It doesn’t look how I imagined it.” He’s wearing a suit, and she’s wearing a blue satin dress and heels and she keeps losing her balance on the stairs down from her apartment.

Outside, the early evening light has started to color in the tops of trees and the brick facades of taller apartment buildings. They walk past the corner market, the pizza place, the church where you can see the right angles of empty pews lined up facing towards the altar.

The wedding is in a loft in Greenpoint with a view of the Empire State Building across the river and white paper hearts hung in the window, superimposed over the Manhattan skyline. The bride is her cousin, who’s ten years older. The last time they talked was at a family Christmas party at her grandparents’ house, where they baked sugar cookie bars, snuck Bailey’s into their coffee, and shared superficial anecdotes about living in New York to a host of relatives who were convinced that New York was like living in a high-security prison if you were a woman in your twenties.

She and the boy from college sit down at a table isolated from everyone else. The boy is saying, “I can’t really imagine living here for the rest of my life. I mean, it’s perfect for college, but it’s temporary.”

“I don’t know. I want to keep living here.”

“But do you have a plan?”

“A plan for what?”

He shrugs. “How you’re going to keep living here. Like, what you’re going to do. A life plan.”

“No.”

“And I’ve been thinking recently, what’s really the point of doing something if you know it’s temporary? I don’t know if there’s really value in doing something if you know you’re not going to get anything tangible out of it.”

He gets cut off because the wedding music starts and the bride walks in, trailing white tulle across the hardwood floor like spilled water.

They listen to the maid of honor tell the whole story: the bride and groom met in college, at a Halloween party, but really before because the groom had seen the bride on campus and already had a crush on her and their mutual friends were trying to get them together. But the Halloween party was pivotal; the bride was dressed as an obscure movie character, and the groom understood the reference. Then she talks about helping them move into their shared apartment in Greenpoint, how she saw them carry furniture together and paint the kitchen walls.

The whole story makes her nauseous, so during the first dance she goes into the hallway and stands by the open window where she can see down into an empty parking lot and across the street to the unemotional faces of brownstones with lit-up windows. She wants something to happen to her — she always has, it’s her worst trait, it must be inherited. Down the street is a church with a big elaborate steeple reaching up into the navy sky. Looking at the steeple and the stone angels and the arcing red doors below feels devastating. It makes her wish things were simple, that she could pray and wait for an answer.

She walks back through the loft, where she sees everyone slow dancing in the front of the room, their movements all out of sync and their hands clinging onto shoulders and waists. She walks downstairs. There’s a subway station outside the wedding, so she gets on the train back to her apartment. She’s alone, and she doesn’t tell anyone, and she doesn’t make any calls. For a minute she thinks about going somewhere else. Her childhood home, maybe, which is empty, but she would sleep on the floor of her old bedroom and maybe dream and wake up feeling reborn when the sun came in through open windows. Or her ex’s apartment, and when she woke up she could pretend she was making coffee in his kitchen for the first time and notice his potted plants on the kitchen windowsill and all his pointless details, nothing tangible. She goes back to her apartment. The bedroom is soaked in navy blue, it fills in all the unfurnished corners like spiderwebs and seeps in under the closed door. She lies in bed, sleepless, waiting.

The week after the wedding passes quickly and uneventfully. She calls the boy from college to apologize and lies that she was sick. In the movie theater, she cleans spilled popcorn off velvet seats in front of an empty black screen. She smokes on her walk home and imagines the people in half-curtained brownstone windows see the smoke rise in spirals and think it’s something supernatural. It’s July, the nights are dark and hot, it’s the summer she’s twenty and supposed to be something, and the trees reach down over the lamplit sidewalk in front of her apartment with their limbs almost animate.

One weekend she sleeps with a guy she meets at a bar, one her friend introduces her to. They go to the same college and find out they took the same political philosophy class sophomore year and would have met then except it was a big lecture and they never talked. He’s a writer. On the walk from the subway station to his apartment, before she goes inside, she asks, “What kind of things do you write about?”

“I write poems,” he says. “About nature, mostly.”

“That’s not very specific,” she says.

He laughs. “I don’t know. Things like this.” He gestures vaguely to the canopy of elm trees and the polluted night sky. “Nature. The stars.”

“Can you still write about the stars? Isn’t that cliche at this point?” she says — this is something she’d never say sober.

“I mean, maybe. Isn’t everything?” he responds, and then he opens the apartment door and guides her up the dark staircase.

The roommate and her boyfriend break up for good, or at least she says it’s for good, in the middle of July. She goes upstate with the roommate to her parents’ house, which is a few hours away and they drive in late at night on some country highway. When they stop at a gas station, she waits for a minute in an aisle surrounded by bright jewel-toned packages of M&Ms and Cheetos and then she goes outside, to the nearly empty parking lot, and above the red taillights of semi-trucks driving all night and family minivans on cross-country road trips and the white lines of the interstate, she can see the stars, clear, untouched, like they’re promising something.

The roommate’s parents are on vacation, so it’s just the two of them in the house, which is old and full of bookshelves and looks eerily like her childhood home, now uninhabited. One day they go into the woods to swim in a lake since the roommate says she always used to do that when she was younger. The woods are kind of otherworldly, with everything saturated in this warm green light. At the lake, they close their eyes and float in the water and try not to notice the hiss of spray sunscreen or the clouds of mosquitoes or the families setting up lawn chairs and beach towels on the grass; they pretend there’s nothing, no noise, no memory.

At the end of July, back in the city, she organizes a birthday party for the roommate. All their college friends who are in New York over the summer show up and they gather on the Facebook Marketplace couch and around the kitchen table ornamented with flower bouquets and vanilla birthday cake and have strained conversations over loud music. Eventually the roommate comes over and clings onto her shoulder. “I’m dizzy,” she says. “I don’t feel good. Can we go outside?”

So they walk around the neighborhood, past the brownstones with potted begonias and iron railings. “I always wanted to live in one of these,” the roommate says. “Since high school. I’ve had everything planned out. Can we go somewhere?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Isn’t that your movie theater on the corner?” the roommate asks. Down the street, past the faint green glow of traffic lights and the parallel lines of the empty crosswalk, is the movie theater with its lighted sign and the indistinct faces of actors peering out of posters in the windows.

“Yeah, I guess we could go there. I mean, it’s closed, but I have the keys in my purse.”

In the silent dark movie theater, they sit collapsed in velvet chairs eating cheap candy which is all that’s left in the concessions stand. “I hate being this drunk,” the roommate says, staring into the blank movie screen like she’s waiting for something to show up. “I hate being barely conscious in the moment. Because all you get out of it is remembering, and you barely even remember.”

The next day, they eat leftover birthday cake at the kitchen table with the antique silver forks and she tells the roommate everything she said and did the night before.

The next week, she starts bleeding. At first it’s normal, and then she bleeds through onto her white bedsheets and realizes it’s more than normal, and eventually she gets lightheaded and dizzy and goes into the roommate’s room, which is furnished and colorful now, and tells her something is wrong. “You need to go to the emergency room,” the roommate says. She doesn’t want to call an ambulance because it feels like an overreaction, so they walk to the hospital six blocks away, and she tries to see everything as ordinary and unchanged, the brick apartment buildings, faceless, the leading lines of curbs and sidewalks, and the sky, starless.

At the emergency room, she gives her full name and birthdate to the receptionist and then a nurse leads her into a curtained corner with a hospital bed and a vital signs machine. “Can you describe your symptoms?” the nurse asks.

“I’m bleeding,” she says. “A lot.” “Is it more than normal?”

“Yes.”

“Do you normally get heavy periods?”

“No. I mean, they’re usually normal.”

She’s there for probably two hours, and they do a series of tests without explaining what any of them are. Finally, a nurse comes in to take the EKG stickers off her chest. “Your pregnancy test was positive,” she says. “So the bleeding indicates that you’re having a miscarriage. I’m sorry. I know this is a lot to handle.”

“A miscarriage?”

“Yes. You were probably about six weeks along.”

The hospital discharges her and tells her to follow up with a gynecologist because, as the nurse says, she must have a lot of questions. She doesn’t really have any questions. The roommate wants to know if she’s okay. She says yes. They walk back; it’s midnight and the lights in the brownstones are off. She can see into some windows through sheer curtains, the navy blue of quiet bedrooms, the corners of bedframes and nightstands in the dark.

The bleeding slows down the next day, and eventually it stops. She washes her sheets with bleach, and they go back to white.

August passes with frenzied heat like a fever. At the end of the month, she leaves her furniture on the curb outside the apartment, but it rains the day after she sets it out and the wood is ruined, filled with water.

On her last night in the apartment, she calls the ex again, and they sit in her backyard next to the neighbor’s swing set and the mess of honeysuckle, which is dying now. She tells him she had a miscarriage. He doesn’t know what to say. She says, “It doesn’t really mean anything to me. I mean, it could have been something, but it wasn’t, and really it was never going to be anyway.”

“Yeah, but it means something. Something could have happened.”

“And it didn’t. It was temporary, and it’s gone.”

He looks at her. The moon is half visible above apartment rooftops. “If something had gone differently with us, we would still be together.”

“But we’re not.”

Nothing happens. He gets up to leave, maybe he kisses her in the doorway, maybe he spends the night, but it doesn’t matter. The next day, she takes the subway uptown. She walks in Riverside Park in the evening. The tops of trees are half illuminated in yellow. In her new dorm room, where she’ll live for the next eight months, someone has left tape all over the walls and a mirror hanging up in the wardrobe. That night she can’t sleep, the room is too hot and the air is too heavy, so she goes back to the park and walks around in the bluish darkness by the river and tries to feel renewed, like everything changed, but instead she ends up on the same bench under the abstract figures of elm trees, trying to remember.

Edie Patterson is a junior at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2023, Atticus Review, Fractured Literary, Chautauqua Journal, Peatsmoke, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2022 No Tokens Young Writers’ Prize for Prose. She is from Lawrence, Kansas but currently lives in New York City.

30 January 2026