Andrea Lianne Grabowski

bayside wilderness inn and campground

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

sacred hush. the doors just open. lucky. any belief in danger mostly gone, siphoned away by twenty minutes of barelegged inspection & a shiny car pulling through the driveway to turn around, dismissing the need for my prepared good girl speech with a disinterested wave. no audio-video surveillance. not really. just dirty windows. just awe. all the broken mirror glass. refracting smartphone light & the memory of tangled christmas tree bulbs. our bodies divided into little pieces, each corner reflecting a patch of skin, of fabric, the strap of your camera. people went swimming here, once, & the pool windows are so shattered they are fluffy snow & honey about to crystallize. i have been thinking about the fantasy of running away, though i have not told you yet, because i feel like this mouse scrambling to find a way out of the cavernous pool, tiny claws on dingy blue paint. as if the walls are made of grief & expectation & pressure, & the paint is all lead paint but the poison isn’t lead, it’s capitalism. if i walk slowly enough across the littered carpet, will i excise all the ways the paint has rubbed off & sunk into my skin? the pool’s lingering dirty water & snarled caution tape swallow the click of your camera’s shutter & amplify it back across the shadows. these bedrooms smell musty & there are no more beds, nowhere for us to pretend it could be possible, even if for a night, to suspend this feeling of being out of time, of being unobserved. these bedrooms smell musty & the do not disturb signs are broken. did they prophesy our arrival, our interruption of the silence in this place? but we’re disturbed too. pleading the world to let us be. so i bathe my bare legs in stale air, as if this gold faucet could spill something to cleanse or soothe. really, i’m just showing off. knowing some mirror image of myself & these plastic-crystal knobs will be caught forever, the shape of me, the light through the dirty windows, the color a cheap tile imitation of sage leaves or faded rosemary. the mold could be building an infinitesimal layer of contamination over the poison of the paint. our lungs are no good anyway. it’s no good imagining much of a future, is it? & yet we walk around carrying that weight. & how are we supposed to not crumble into sugary glass? the bathroom sink faucets have sputtered out pieces of mirror. it looks like seaglass. like the kind we could pick up on the shores of the great lakes. we could walk right across the highway & through the woods & into lake michigan. an edge of her body i have never stepped foot in. nearly the northernmost point. but we don’t. the thought doesn’t even come to mind. we’re too caught up in the dark, breath held, meager light extended, curiosity unending. & fear a prickle of thrill, like the glitter in the ashtray (turquoise, like the industrial dryer) beside pine needles, old cigarettes, a broken pencil. swimming is anticipatory, even further north. for after we take this baseball cap, this old bottle of bitters. hands hesitant & eager, pinching stained paper treasure between our fingers. filthy. we’d be called the same, by some. all the more so for having pride in it. is this place proud, too? i know it’s not a competition. deviance comes in many forms. if i wanted to be dirtier i could climb onto the ashtray. kneel in the walk-in freezer & become intimately acquainted with dust. would i just be showing off again? you know i risk falling over all the time. you, unsteady, remain on solid ground. you don’t need to try to follow. just be here when i climb back down, please? as we drove past the back windows, a toothed-glass gap swallowed part of my car. let’s go back. make sure the rest of the car hadn’t been swallowed, too. make sure we can get back on the road to keep searching. 

Andrea Lianne Grabowski is a Midwestern lesbian occupying Anishinaabe land. Her work lives in fifth wheel press, manyword(l)ds, HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, and many other homes, including the self-published chapbook there is an earth after innocence. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can find her on long drives being inspired by music, or peering into the windows of abandoned buildings.