Soulmates by Jessica Grose Page B

buildings were mostly boarded up, and the shrubbery was limp and sad.
    Number 8 was my destination. The door wasn’t boarded, but the windows were covered with dark blackout curtains. The building looked at once sinister and industrial, like an abandoned factory that used to make doll heads, but not doll bodies. I started shaking as I lifted my finger up to the doorbell, which chimed softly.
    Amaya opened the door. She was wearing a sheer white robe, through which I could see plainly that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. I would learn later that underwear is only an unnecessary barrier, concealing the most sacred parts of our body from the natural world. I tried to keep my eyes level as she bowed toward me. Her hair was wrapped up on her head in an intricate woven pattern.
    Without speaking, she turned away from me and started to walk away. I said, “Amaya, where are we going?” but she would not turn around and look at me. I followed her down a narrow, dark hallway, until I could no longer see the back of her dress. I heard the clomping of her shoes up stairs, and so felt my way gingerly behind her in the nearly pitch-black. Her refusal to look back made me feel like Eurydice. Would I be barred from the upper world if she turned around and saw my face? Finally I heard a door open.
    I crouched on my hands and knees and felt my way upstairs and into a narrow tunnel. I was on the verge of hyperventilating, so I tried to practice some kapalabhati breathing to calm myself down while still moving forward. My head thwacked against a door handle, so I pushed down on it. The door opened up into a cavernous room where a group of figures were standing up against a multisided structure with a dome. It looked like somethingout of a kid’s science museum, like there was something inside that would teach me about physics.
    The domed structure was lit from the inside. I could see light projections of flowers and zodiac signs coming up through the dome, like in a planetarium. As I got closer, I noticed that each of the sides corresponded with a different sun sign. The only side that was empty was my own sign: Libra, the scales. As I got even closer, I noticed that the figures were only men, and that all of the men were naked.
    The moment I noticed they were naked was the moment my mind and body split. I can’t say more about what happened without violating the sacred bond I have with Yoni. But I can say that the experience changed the entire course of my life. Mentally. Spiritually. Physically.

Dana
    The sheriff’s office was in the middle of a barren, dusty street in Ranchero, Sagebrush County’s only town. There were two other buildings near it. One was a tidy-looking trailer surrounded by plastic flowers stuck into the dirt. The other was a low-slung stucco house with the carcasses of at least two cars and three major appliances in its front yard.
    Compared to those two heaps, the sheriff’s office was palatial and kempt. It was a standard two-story brick municipal building, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting inside. There was a single receptionist in the otherwise empty waiting area, and she led me right in to see Sheriff Lewis. I sat at the sheriff’s school marmish wooden desk in an uncomfortable but sturdy wooden chair, waiting for him while he was in conference with a man who seemed to be his deputy outside the fairly soundproof glass of his office. I could hear the pitch of their voices, but not the content of their conversation.
    I had Ethan’s book in my purse. It still took a tremendous amount of personal restraint not to throw it away, or just put it back on the shelf to languish in the retreat’s library. I hatedreading about Amaya’s moves on Ethan, and how much he enjoyed them. And even more than that, I hated reading about how nasty I had been to him. I actually winced—my whole body retracted—when I read what I had said to him when he floated quitting his job by