The Cult of Lonely Souls
by Anne Baldo
“Every good girl has daddy issues,” Maddie says, gulping from a two-litre jug of No Name cranberry juice because she has a terrible urinary tract infection. I shake my head when she offers me some.
“Elijah’s only twenty-three,” I say. “I feel five years isn’t really a father figure age gap.”
A feverish shimmer to Maddie, but I can’t tell if it’s infection or true love. “He’s very mature, Brighton. He was already married.”
Tonight is Elijah’s book launch, a book of poetry, The Cult of Lonely Souls. We are supposed to be in the kitchen, cubing cheese for the event. Instead we are on Elijah’s sofa, and Maddie makes it into a sofa bed. Curling up together under Elijah’s old Power Rangers blanket. He hadn’t been able to watch the TV show in the 90s when his parents sided with the Canadian Broadcast Association’s Standards Council ruling that it was excessively violent. A conciliatory if not conflicted gesture, his parents buying him the blanket. Earlier Maddie spilled juice on me and while my jeans dry, Maddie finds me a pair of Elijah’s pyjama pants to wear, which feels weird. Maddie insists it isn’t.
“But they got divorced.” We pause, contemplating if a marriage that fell apart counts for or against his maturity. He is still friends with Faith, his ex-wife. Maddie claims she loves it, and hates it secretly. Like me, she runs jealous like some people run hot or cold. Last time I was over she pointed two fingers at Elijah, asked him ‘If you were going to get back with one of your ex-girlfriends who would be the first one you call and who would be the last?’ Elijah laughing, ‘It’s only you, Mad, only you.’ Told her she came over him like rain, washed everything else away. ‘Yeah, right,’ Maddie had said, but Elijah only smiled. ‘When I kiss you, you’ll believe me.’
“Isn’t the book dedicated to Faith?” I ask now.
“He wrote it when they were together,” Maddie says. “He was already doing copy edits when we met. Anyway, they were so young when they got married, from this super strict upbringing. They only got married so they could move out. Of course it didn’t last.” We can understand a strict upbringing, parents who want to know everything and also at the same time, want to know nothing, really, of our true selves. Nights Maddie sleeps at Elijah’s, she tells her parents she is staying with me.
The exterior of Elijah’s house looks like where a poet might live: red brick crimped with ivy, stone path leading to the door. But Elijah rents the basement. The sofa’s mildew tang, dirty dishes always everywhere but the sink, Xbox surrounded by bowls of cereal soft with milk. Posters up of girls, stars tattooed over shoulders or a raven winging across collarbones, hair dyed glossy black or hard candy hues, fruit-punch red, Kool-Aid blue, angled cut or pinup girl bangs. They look beautiful. They look like Faith. The poster girls are pierced, extremely pierced. In the dark they must shine like constellations.
“Anyway, Elijah says it feels like I’m a lot older.” I envy Maddie, the way she smiles, possessing the glow of the newly chosen. “He said I’m very sophisticated.”
“Sophisticated?” Because we still wear greasy lip gloss that tastes like wax and cherries, rewatched every season of Full House over Christmas break. Maddie dresses in t-shirts from Jean Machine with a smiling yellow rabbit who says mean things like Cute but psycho: things even out or today’s, You suck and that’s sad, and she has a watermelon-flavoured Blow Pop sticking out the side of her mouth.
“Well, he meant as an artist.” Candy clicks against her teeth. “Not as a person.”
They’d met in September—Creative Writing at the university—when Elijah told her her poems were a little obvious, but nice. Now time is my last real advantage, because Maddie and I have been best friends since grade three. The world felt like a conversation I’d never been invited to. Maddie saved me from that. Ever since Library Day when Maddie, new to our school, came over to where I sat alone reading a book of unsolved mysteries.
“I learned something good and bad about Atlantis today,” Maddie had said. She showed me the book’s cover, a city sunk in underwater gloom, statues swathed in dark seaweed, the glimmer of distant gold light. “The bad thing is they used to drink blood, but the good thing is they treated women as equals.” After that every recess we’d walk the gravel track in the schoolyard. Making plans to open our own animal shelter one day, or both agreeing that if we ever became millionaires, we would use our money to put up billboards with secret messages for people we knew all over the city. When we got dressed in her parents’ old trench coats (Maddie’s father’s black with notched lapels, her mother’s belted teal) and played Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, we were fair and took turns being Carmen. We’d always kept all each other’s secrets, even the weird ones, like when we were kids and Maddie told me she wanted the Gingerbread Man to climb up the back of the fox at the end of the story, longed to see him get eaten.
Maddie’s resting on me, under the blanket, which, like everything in the basement, is perpetually damp. Elijah liked to fall asleep listening to her heartbeat, Maddie told me. It was the only way he could fall asleep, he said. The rush of her blood moving through her body like a flock of birds. Her head’s on my shoulder, because the antibiotics she’s on are making her dizzy.
“Sometimes I wish you were a guy, Brighton,” she says. “You would be such a good boyfriend. You’d never cheat on me.”
“Does Elijah?”
“He says he hasn’t. I mean, I guess there was this thing with Faith, one time. But we’d just started dating and it wasn’t even official, really. So.” She flips up her shirt, inspects her new belly button piercing, which is also infected. “You smell like him. ‘Cause you’re wearing his clothes, I guess.” His cologne, bonfires and the vanilla scent of old books, of geranium oil sustainably sourced from Egypt. “I don’t want to go tonight.”
“So don’t go. I’ll stay with you.” I could go to the grocery store, buy her more cranberry juice, wash my hands and clean her piercing with saltwater.
“I have to,” Maddie says. “I have to be there for him. Besides, Faith is coming. Hey, did you start taking your pills yet? Have you even filled your prescription?”
I stare at the biggest poster on the wall, a girl with her hands over vintage 70s headphones, biting down on the curling cord. “Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
I’d gone to my doctor’s office last week, where she’d given me a quiz and ten minutes later a diagnosis: major depression/severe anxiety. “I don’t know about what she said. I feel it’s more like mild depression, moderate anxiety. Or it’s just been a bad month, maybe.”
Maddie pulls the blanket up over us. The sofa bed sags in the middle. Gravity brings us together but we stay there, we don’t move apart. Her head’s still on my shoulder. Once Maddie told me how Elijah said he was into goth girls, their sexy style, but that they were too depressing for him. She bought a black lipstick at Shoppers, but never wore it.
“I just want you to be okay, Brighton.”
We are so close, our breathing syncs up: in out, in out, in out.
“Come on,” she says. “We’re supposed to be making that cheese tray.”
In the kitchen, Maddie gets Elijah’s whisky, mixing it with cranberry juice, so she says it’s okay. Hands me a knife and we sit, cutting away. We hear keys chime against each other, his footsteps on the stairs.
“Hey, Mad,” Elijah says. “Brighton. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“I can go.”
“No, no.” Elijah glances over. I’m still wearing his pyjama pants. “You’re always welcome. What’s mine is yours.”
“We cut everything,” Maddie says. “We even got Camembert. And this goat cheese with cinnamon and cranberry.”
At the store, we’d stood in front of the cheeses.
“Should we get Stilton?” I’d asked.
Maddie turned, nodding. “And eat it before bed and see if it gives us bad dreams?” That was how I knew we were on the same wavelength, because how else would you think of something like that at exactly the same time? Our soul was like the egg that bloomed into identical twins, somehow splitting in half to become two bodies. Or like how a gardener could divide tulip bulbs, stems and petals in duplicate.
“You have very discerning taste,” Elijah says.
“In cheese selection?”
“In everything, obviously. You chose me.”
“Well, I like grocery shopping,” Maddie says. “I like food. That would be my dream job, I think. Some kind of celebrity chef.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
“I said dream job, Elijah. That means I know it’s a fucking dream.” Maddie’s hand is up under her shirt, messing with her piercing again. Her other hand holds the whisky bottle.
“Mad, don’t get drunk,” he says.
She stands in the kitchen with the Power Rangers blanket around her shoulders because she has chills, which might be from the infection, but is also a side effect of the antibiotics. So how can you tell?
“I have to get ready.”
“You mean you’re not wearing that?” Elijah lifts the blanket, kisses the pink Power Ranger’s face. “Kimberly was so perfect.”
“I dressed up as her once,” Maddie says. “For Halloween.”
“You still got that costume?”
“No. Anyway it wouldn’t fit. I was like, ten.”
“Too bad. That would be so hot, Mad, so hot.”
“Ugh.” Maddie scowls, blanket dragging across the floor as she heads to the bedroom. But I know later, she’ll lead me on a smutty eBay search for adult Power Ranger costumes.
“You want a drink, Brighton?” Elijah is very pretty, and the world often ruins pretty men, giving them too much. He wears a slouchy grey knit hat that always looks inside out but isn’t. Maintains his beard with balm made from shea butter and hempseed oil, keeps it trimmed sharp and close along his jawline. He always wears the vintage Danish watch Maddie bought him for his birthday and has a new interest in urban beekeeping. A pocketful of rye.
“No thanks.”
“Doesn’t have to be whisky. I could make you something virgin.”
I hate when people say that, when we could just say mocktail. Or non-alcoholic. Or here’s a glass of water.
“Did you used to watch Power Rangers?”
“No,” I say. “I was more into The Berenstein Bears.”
“Berenstain. Everyone thinks it’s Berenstein but it’s Berenstain. False memories, part of the Mandela Effect. Or evidence of a parallel universe.” Elijah grins. “You must be from that other universe.”
When we go to the living room, the sofa bed’s still a bed. It feels a little weird, sitting there with Elijah. On television, an episode of The Bachelor is playing. It’s almost time for the rose ceremony. The bachelorettes shimmer in their sequinned gowns, trade glances, exchange knowing nods. The vibe is off, they agree. The vibe is definitely off.
“What’s up with Mad?”
“Maddie? She’s sick.”
“‘O Rose, thou art sick…’”
“Not like that. Really sick.”
“I’ll take good care of her,” Elijah says. He does have a lot of honey in the cupboards, from the beekeepers he douses with questions at the farmer’s market. “I’m kind of obsessed with her right now. Mad’s a soulmate of mine.”
“A, like, one of many?”
“Not many,” he says. “More than one, yeah. We can live a hundred years on a planet of six billion. How does one soulmate make any sense mathematically?”
Down the hall, Maddie sings in the bedroom, getting ready. Maddie, a waystation on his path to greatness. A place to rest his head.
“I noticed those books on the coffee table,” Elijah says. “Gwendolyn Brooks? Anne Sexton? Are they yours?”
I nod.
“Nice.”
Maddie’s still singing, “Foolish Games.” Why had we spent years listening to songs by Jewel and Alanis and Lauryn Hill about callous heartbreakers only to fall for one ourselves? Sang along with Natalie Imbruglia on the radio in the car about a man who didn’t know what his heart was for and learned nothing from it.
“Mad was telling me you’re a writer, too.”
“Not really.”
“You should show me some of your stuff sometime, if you want.”
“I don’t know.” The poster girl biting her headphones’ cord looks most like Faith, who once cornered Maddie on campus, invited her to coffee, put her hands on the table and stared into Maddie’s soul before hissing ‘If you ever hurt him, I’ll kill you.’ But I didn’t know how it could be possible, anymore than a marionette could hurt the hands that pulled its strings. Then I thought about Pinocchio, how he’d broken Geppetto’s heart running away to be a real boy and maybe I could hope for that, Maddie running far away one day.
Elijah takes off his hat, rakes his curls. “Like you could show me now, even.”
But there were things I liked about him too, like his interest in bees or the come home tattoo on the back of his hand and how he said her full name, Maddalena, or the way he sometimes clapped me on the shoulder, or his poem about Edward James, the poet so lovesick for his wife he had her wet footprints from the bath stitched into the staircase carpet. They’d have to be the steps of somebody delicate, ethereal, with a fairy lilt to her gait…not someone like myself, lumbering along like Bigfoot, maybe even more ungainly; Bigfoot had enough grace to remain elusive, at least.
“I don’t have anything with me.”
“No? Like not a notebook, nothing?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“I don’t know.” Elijah leans back. “I guess how you develop your practice is up to you. But you’ve got to let me know if you’re just looking for some bullshit positive feedback or if I can actually go hard on you.”
Maddie’s poems had been about how the female body was oceanic, life-giving, like the real oceans we could not survive without, and that was what men had always loved and feared, the way sailors learn to love and fear the sea, all at once bestowing life and drowning it.
“Maddie’s writing isn’t obvious or nice,” I say. “It’s beautiful and feral.”
“Is she pissed that Faith’s coming tonight?”
“No. She doesn’t care. She said she gets it. It was like a practical thing, that you basically got married to move out.”
“I wanted to touch her without jeopardizing my soul,” Elijah says. “It’s complicated, you might not understand. Or maybe you would.”
“Do you mean hopeless all day counts the same as hopeless moments every day?” I’d asked the doctor during the quiz and she said yes, it counted the same. But who, looking at the world, at endangered species and injustice and microplastics and your best friend fallen for the slick fox at the end of “The Gingerbread Man,” wouldn’t have moments of hopelessness, every day?
Later, at the reading, when Elijah looks up almost shyly, smiles, hand slipping under his hat; when, messing with the holy gold of his curls, he dedicates the first poem to Mad, Maddalena, the poem about Edward James, lovesick, that’s when Maddie shifts in her chair. She leans closer, her mouth crystallized with vanilla lip gloss. Holds my hand, hers pale, damp, another unintended antibiotic reaction. Brushes my hair back to whisper in my hot ear.
“Don’t be jealous,” she says. “You’ll find someone like him one day, too.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Anne Baldo's writing has previously appeared in Grain, West Trade Review, Qwerty, the short story collection Morse Code For Romantics (Porcupine's Quill, 2023) and the forthcoming novel, One Day, Hard and Clear (Dundurn Press, 2026).