Macy Walks The Labyrinth

Crime Fiction by Lina Chern

Macy dreams of the little girl in red again. Old-fashioned pinafore dress, pigtails. Or pigtail. One eye, half a mouth frozen in a toothy grin. Macy only sees half of her, like she is always just around the corner.

Today, for the first time, the girl is all there. She’s smiling but there’s a gun, blood spattering a wall, tin cans rolling over white tiles. Something is wrong.

The motel shower squeaks and goes quiet, waking Macy up. Noah comes out of the bathroom, swatting himself with a towel. She watches his skinny butt in the mirror.

“You planning to get up today?” he says.

The sheets are so cold they feel wet. “You gave me too much last night.” Macy wraps herself in the thin blanket. “My head hurts.”

The second it’s out she regrets it. Noah turns to her, takes two steps and backhands her across the face.

It should hurt, but she is still swimming in the translucent glass dream. Far away, someone’s face stings.  

“Better?” He tosses her the dirty sundress she’s worn for a week. “Get dressed. We’re meeting Spence in an hour.” 

He’s still pissed their last hookup didn’t show and she didn’t warn him ahead of time. It’s always her fault now. With great power comes all the blame.

“You know you signed up for this, right?” he says.

Did she? She doesn’t remember. She remembers her job at PharmaCorp, her Park City trailer with the leaking roof. She remembers meeting Noah and then everything blurs and slips like a painting someone splashed with water. Next thing she knows they’re moving up and down the North Shore, trying to unload a shipment of stolen meds.

Macy fastens the labyrinth charm around her neck. Her fingers leave trails in the air. The silver charm is black from years of touching, its whorled paths familiar as her own body. It’s the only thing in the room that looks solid.

Now they are in the car, moving north on Sheridan. She doesn’t remember getting in the passenger seat. A billboard slides past. Lucique: for mild to moderate anxiety. A woman smiles at a sunrise, mid-sun salutation. Back to Yourself!

Macy thinks of the girl in red. The Lucique dreams have a short half-life: everything she sees in them comes and goes the next day. Except the girl. Macy has dreamed of her every night since she and Noah hit the road, but she’s never seen her in real life. In last night’s dream the girl was sharper, closer. Macy is catching up to her.

“What is that thing, anyway?” Noah watches Macy twine her fingers around the charm. “Looks like a maze or something.”

“It’s not a maze,” she says. “It’s a labyrinth.”

“Same difference.”

“A maze is a puzzle,” she says. “It’s meant to confuse you. There are different paths and dead ends. A labyrinth is one winding path. You walk it until you get to the center.”

Noah snorts. “And what’s in the center? A pot of gold?” He stops for a light. “Sounds like a great way to get nowhere. Wander around, wait for shit to happen.” He taps his head. “You got to make shit happen.”

Macy stops listening. Her grandma Faye gave her the labyrinth charm. Macy’s parents died when she was a kid, and she lived with Faye until the old lady died last year. Faye was not a bad person, just into her own stuff and not super interested in raising a kid. She brought the trinket home from a flea market and explained the difference between a maze and a labyrinth – the one time the old lady paid more attention to Macy than it took to feed her breakfast or take her to school. In a maze you lose yourself, Faye said, but in a labyrinth you find yourself.

“Guess we ought to get you something to eat,” Noah says. “Help that headache.”

This was all the apology she would get. Macy reaches through her cotton candy mind to last night’s dreams. She tells Noah to pull into a plaza, park in front of the 7-11 and wait.

Five minutes pass. Noah checks his phone. “We going to sit here all day or what?”

Right on time, here comes the green Waste Management truck. It speeds up, trying to make the yellow, takes the left turn too fast and plows into the curb. Brakes screech, a storefront window explodes in a shower of glass. Macy watches it rain in slow motion over the sidewalk. She’s seen this before.

Gapers line the street. Out of the 7-11 pops the owner, a short guy in a muscle tee. The door to the shop closes behind him.

“Go,” she tells Noah. “Get me one of those breakfast sandwiches.”

Noah is in and out in under a minute with an armload of junk food. By the time the cops arrive, he’s pulling away.

“Man, oh man.” He tears open a Slim Jim with his teeth. “What I wouldn’t do with power like yours.”

Macy shrugs. It doesn’t feel like power. She hates stealing, but they have no choice. They’re almost out of money because, surprise, it hasn’t been as easy to unload the Lucique as Noah said it would be. Most of his old hookups have dried up, plus the market is flooded. Noah has perhaps exaggerated his level of expertise in this game. Noah exaggerates a lot.

They met last month at a product rollout where everyone got ugly golf shirts with the PharmaCorp logo stitched over the breast. He bragged about working in Labs, though she figured out quickly he was basically a delivery boy. She acted impressed anyway. She wanted him to like her, plus, who was she to talk? A Purchasing grunt pushing papers around a desk until it was time to go home.

That night they took a cooler of sandwiches and a six pack of Coors onto Waukegan Beach and snorted crushed up Lucique he’d stolen from work.

“If I could get my hands on enough of this shit,” he said, “I’d be golden.” He crushed his beer can and chucked it in the whispering waves. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” He put his arm around her. “You and me on a real beach somewhere?” She put her head on his shoulder and they watched the city skyline to the south, a row of glittering jewels. It was so far away. Between here and there was a universe of dark water.

They were already fucking when the drug hit. The skyline dissolved and raced against the black sky like a star shower. Macy climbed on top and rode him until the stars went supernova.

That night she had her first dream: a jumble of round, heavy images that shone like luminescent glass. The next day, achy and hungover at her desk, she watched the copier repair guy fumble a toner cartridge and saw in her mind, seconds before it happened, the spray of black ink, the repair guy’s startled face. She stood up, trying to shake off the persistent deja vu, but it clung to her, popped up everywhere for the rest of the day. She thought she was going crazy.

Macy knows she shouldn’t have told Noah about the dreams. Now, chewing on the stolen sandwich, she knows they are nearing the end. Either they’ll run out of Lucique having barely broke even, or they’ll get caught, or worse. Whatever happens, Noah will blame her, and he won’t be entirely wrong. She started this and now she can’t stop it. All she can do is keep moving, keep winding back and forth between the dreams.

They arrive at the overflow storage facility for Sunrise Foods, a yellow brick hulk perched over the harbor. Noah nudges the car into a back lot Macy recognizes. Pieces of the dream come flooding back: guns, blood, the girl in red smiling, unbothered.

“Noah,” she says as he kills the engine, “I don’t think this is a good idea.” She licks her dry lips. “He has a gun.”

“Of course he has a gun. But guess what.” Noah opens the glove compartment. Inside, weighing down a pile of crumpled napkins, is a small, silver-black pistol. He waggles it at her and she shrinks back.

“How long have you had that?” She can see the future, yet the present is a constant mystery.

“What am I, a moron?” He purses his lips. “Spence is a tricky piece of shit. I’m not taking any chances.”

Macy waits, counts to ten. A shiver cuts her in two, parts the clouds circling her brain. “I don’t want to do this,” she says.

“Don’t puss out on me now, alright?” He tucks the gun in his waistband. “Let’s just make this switch and we’ll be golden.”

“No.” She follows him out of the car. A hot wind whips her dress. “I don’t want to do any of this. I’m done. I’m going home.”

Noah bares his teeth. “What the fuck does that even mean?” he says quietly. “What is ‘home’? You think PharmaCorp’s just going to let hundreds of thousands of dollars walk out the door? You think your shitty little ‘home’ isn’t being watched right now?” He snorts. “What are you going to do, waltz back into work, say, hey guys, thought I’d try some grand larceny but it didn’t work out. Miss me?”

“I’ll take my chances,” she says.

He leaps forward and grabs her wrists. She wrenches free but he yanks her back in. “You had nothing before me. You were nothing. You would’ve sat in that office forever because you can’t take a piss without someone else’s say-so.” She spins away but she can still see his sweating, twisted face. “There is no ‘back.’ There’s only ‘forward.’ Do you understand?”

Macy understands: He is a dead end in a maze.

She breaks free again and his hands scrabble over her, find the chain around her neck. Macy pitches forward, chokes. The chain digs into her skin, strains and snaps.

“Give me that.” She swipes at him and he dances off with the chain in his fist. “That’s mine.” She hears her own raggedy breath, blood pounding in her ears. “My grandmother gave it to me.”

Noah dashes to the edge of the lot, dangles the chain over the metal railing. One by one, his fingers open. The labyrinth flutters, flies off on a gust of wind, disappears over the gray water.

The world goes still. An odd peace settles over Macy. I’m here, she thinks, this is it.

She whites out again and now she’s inside, standing in a row of metal shelves on a white tile floor she recognizes. Noah is next to her. Facing them, yards away, is a tall guy with a black ponytail. A denim backpack bulges on the floor next to him. The guns are already drawn. Macy has no idea how long they’ve all been standing there.

And there she is: the girl in red. Rows of the girl in red stretch into the fluorescent-lit cavern of the warehouse. She is a logo on a shelf of crates: Sunshine-Fresh Tomato Sauce.

The rest of the dream crashes in on Macy. She sees everything now. She slips her hand behind a crate on the shelf, counts to ten, and pushes.

The crate teeters, tumbles end-over-end and shatters on the floor. A thousand girls in red scatter across the white tiles. Again. Macy knows this turn around the labyrinth is the last. She is at the center now.

She drops to the floor, shuts her eyes and ears against the gunshots. She doesn’t see who gets spooked first. When she opens her eyes and stands up, she is the only one standing. Spence is already dead. Noah shudders on the floor next to Macy. A tin can is wedged half-underneath him and the girl in red is on it but Macy can only see half of her. Old-fashioned pinafore dress, one pigtail. One eye, half a mouth frozen in a toothy grin.

Macy waits for Noah’s eyes to close, his chest to stop moving. Then she picks up the backpack of money and leaves.

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Bio: Lina Chern is most recently the author of Tricks of Fortune, the follow-up to her Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning, Lefty and Anthony-nominated debut Play the Fool. Lina has also written trivia questions, word puzzles for a TV game show, paranormal romances, dialogue for your favorite comic book characters, award-winning movie reviews, and poems that have been published and read by up to dozens of people. Find her at www.linachern.com, on Instagram at @linachernwrites, or Bluesky @linachern.bsky.social.

Cover Photo by: pexels/Pixabay

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