This Morning, She Was Caroline

by Derek Alan Jones

“Who are you today?” I asked her when I woke, finding eyes of vibrant blue looking into mine.

“Caroline,” she answered, and it certainly seemed to fit. She was a full eight inches shorter now, with a softer build than when we’d fallen asleep, when she was still Rebecca. Her olive tan had faded to a near-fluorescent pale.

“Do you like her?”

“I like them all,” I answered. It was almost entirely true. While I had grown amenable toward what she called ‘the shift,’ I’d be lying if I tried to say I hadn’t had my favorites. Her eyes lit when I spoke, and I noticed a tiny freckle floating in the blue. I knew it hadn’t been there in Rebecca’s hazel green.

“And what do we know about Caroline?”

She thought about it briefly, and she answered with a smile.

“That she’s very hungry.” She placed a kiss on the end of my nose before springing out of bed and toward the bathroom door.

When I met her, she was Sarah, and she would stay that way for some time. I still catch myself thinking of ‘the real her,’ and Sarah’s is the face in my mind. In a jazz bar, in a downpour, we talked about Vonnegut and God, and I knew I was in love with her before I closed my tab. When she asked if she could stay with me, I answered with “Of course,” and from that first night through the first four months she barely left my line of sight.

Looking back, the shift was gradual then. The changes came so slowly they failed to register. Her hair would be a shade darker one day, and her posture would shift the next. If I brought it up, she would laugh it off, and I would assume it was in my head.

It was early September when she went to sleep as Sarah and woke up as Alison. She was softer-spoken then, and she was from Chelsea rather than Maine. She had never thought about theology, and she hadn’t read Mother Night. I chuckled at her accent and waited for the joke to end, until I realized how little resemblance was left to the face I’d seen in May.

As Alison, she explained the shift, or she did the best she could. It had gone on as long as she remembered, she said, and probably before. Her memory, she told me, was such a fickle thing. There were parts of it—the formative bits—that came and went when she changed, but there were constants there as well that passed between her selves. Those constants were always hazy and seemed secondhand, like a story told by a relative about a thing you did as a kid. A story retold often enough to become engrained as fact, but to which no vivid imagery can ever be attached. I was one of those. She called it an anchor point. In being there when Sarah would fall asleep at night, and in being there in the morning every time she woke, I had provided some continuity that carried through the shift.

I wondered briefly, and only at first, if I should take it as a betrayal. At least she should have told me. At least she should have tried. But no one was left to hold that grudge against.

Alison asked if I would stay with her, and I answered, again, “Of course.” Admittedly, I wanted to think that Sarah might come back—that Sarah was ‘the real Her,’ and that this all would pass. But while she never had the vigor or the zeal Sarah did, Alison was open. Alison was kind. Most of all, she needed me, and that seemed to be enough. In time, I learned to love her every bit as much. I learned to love Isabella next, and later Madeline, and everybody else she would be along the way.

For them, I was that anchor, and a lot of them loved me too. Some were cold and distant, which I tried to understand, and at least one of them—Gina, an embittered anarchist—hated everything I was, everything she said I believed. I was momentarily grateful then that the shift was growing in frequency.

This morning, she was Caroline, and as I made her breakfast, I listened to her singing in the shower down the hall. It was a song from the late nineties I only vaguely recognized. What she lacked in pitch and rhythm, she made up for with an enthusiasm that was instantly endearing. When she came into the kitchen, she wore one of my shirts as a dress, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and a belt around the waist. She poured a cup of coffee, and she went up on the tips of her toes to kiss me on the cheek.

I was glad she was Caroline, and for now I wouldn’t linger on anyone she’d been before or who she might be next.

Derek Alan Jones spends most of his time working in a warehouse in Kansas and the rest of it writing speculative fiction. His work has appeared in Esoterica Magazine and The Dillydoun Review.

(Note that this story was edited by our former Fiction Editor Ai Jiang, who helped edit Orion’s Belt in 2022.)