Boots Girl: The Neon Saga

AUTHOR’S NOTE

These three stories were written in the same week in August 2025 for Reedsy prompts about liminal spaces, fractured timelines, and the strange logic of recurrence. At the time, I thought I was writing three separate pieces. I wasn’t. All three orbit the same woman, or at least my early attempts to distort and translate her.

I — Neon Déjà Vu

RECOGNITION

The first time I saw her was outside the El Rey, under a half-dead neon sign buzzing like it was choking on its own light.

She leaned against the ticket booth, one boot braced on the wall, her perfectly frayed jeans slashed open at the knee like they’d survived a hundred nights just like this one. A necklace of raw crystals dangled from her throat, catching stray flashes of red and violet from the flickering sign above.

She looked like someone you were supposed to know, or someone who already knew everything about you.

When her gaze found mine, it pinned me in place like a butterfly to glass. She smiled, slow and deliberate, and it wasn’t at me — it was through me. Like she could see every bone beneath my skin, every version of myself I’d ever tried to bury.

“Don’t you remember me?” she asked.
Her voice came soft, but it landed like breaking glass.

I blinked, hoodie strings tangled around my fingers, caught between fight and flight.
“No,” I lied.

Because I did know her. Or maybe I knew the shape of her. The curl of her mouth, the shadow at the edge of her smile, the way she seemed built from the parts of LA you only ever saw at 3AM: cigarette burns, sodium lamps, motel pools reflecting nothing but static.
Somewhere deep in my chest, something sharp twisted, like stepping barefoot on memory.

She laughed low, smoke curling up into the wet night.
“You haven’t changed.”

We ended up walking Sunset together, the city stretching itself out beneath our boots.

She moved like someone who belonged to the streets but had never truly touched them. Every time we passed beneath a streetlight, her shadow stretched wrong — longer than mine, fractured, bent like someone had warped the film before the reel caught.

Her crystals clicked softly when she walked. I couldn’t tell if they were meant for protection or invocation.

“What’s your name?” I asked, even though it felt stupid, even though some part of me already knew the answer.

“You used to know it,” she said.
“You used to say it all the time.”

That should’ve been my cue to leave.
But I didn’t.
Not when she smelled like wild sage and gasoline.
Not when every word out of her mouth sounded like the end of a prayer I didn’t remember starting.

By the time we hit Western, my phone had died.
Hers, apparently, didn’t exist.

She told me she lived “over the bridge,” but when I asked which one, she just smiled like it was funny I thought there was only one way to cross.

When we got to my apartment, she didn’t come inside. She stood in the doorway, boots dripping rain onto my welcome mat, hand resting on the frame like she was testing its weight. The streetlight behind her made her crystals glow faintly, as though they were alive, feeding on the charged hum of the night.

“You’ll dream about this,” she said.
“I barely know you.”
She tilted her head like a predator considering prey.
“That’s not true.”

And then she was gone, dissolving into the wet hiss of tires on asphalt, leaving behind nothing but the scent of burnt paper and the hollow thrum in my chest.

I didn’t sleep that night.

But when I closed my eyes, I saw her standing in a hallway I haven’t walked since I was seventeen — fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, walls breathing bleach and withdrawal. She had her hood up this time, her crystals tucked into her collarbone like a secret, but I knew it was her by the way she held her shoulders like she was bracing for an earthquake.

And in the dream, she said it again, softer now, almost kind: “Don’t you remember me?”
When I woke up, my hoodie smelled like smoke.
And there was an empty cigarette box on my kitchen counter.
I don’t smoke.

The second time I saw her was at Union Station. It had been six nights since the El Rey, and I’d convinced myself I dreamed the whole thing. That she was some neon-soaked hallucination born from too many sleepless nights and too much nicotine gum.

But then I saw her across the concourse, leaning against a cracked marble pillar, and everything inside me stopped like a skipped record. Same boots. Same perfectly frayed jeans. Same crystal necklace catching stray strips of fluorescent light.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at the arrivals board like she was waiting for a train that didn’t exist anymore. I stood frozen, my palms damp against my hoodie pocket, heartbeat in my teeth.
And then — without turning — she said: “You’re late.”

I should’ve walked away. I tried to walk away. But my legs carried me toward her like they remembered her better than I did.

When I reached her, she didn’t look surprised. She didn’t even blink. Just tilted her head, a half-smile ghosting her mouth like she’d been expecting me since before I was born.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
I swallowed hard. “I… I thought I dreamed you.”
Her laugh was low and ragged, more static than sound. “That would’ve been easier.”

Before I could answer, she grabbed my wrist — cold fingers, chipped nails, a pulse like lightning under skin — and pulled me toward the lower platforms.

The whole station hummed around us, fluorescent buzz blending with the low thunder of trains, footsteps echoing too loud for the handful of people scattered along the corridor.
Except… halfway down, the air changed.
The chatter, the announcements, even the rumble of trains above us, gone. Just silence, broken only by the steady clack of her boots on tile.

When we reached the end of the platform, she stopped under a dead bulb, crystals glowing faintly like embers under her collarbone.
“This is where it starts,” she said.
I looked around. “What does?”

She didn’t answer. She just pointed to the far tunnel, where an old Metro B Line train idled: wrong logo, outdated paint, windows fogged from the inside.
“That line hasn’t run in years,” I whispered.
She smiled without showing teeth. “Exactly.”

Inside, the train smelled like static and sage smoke. The seats were cracked vinyl, sticky with humidity, and the air was sharp with ozone, like the sky before a lightning strike. There were only five other passengers, all perfectly still, staring straight ahead like mannequins someone forgot to pose.

She sat across from me, one knee propped up, boot tapping an uneven rhythm against the floor. Her crystals clicked softly with each sway of the train, catching slivers of red light as we plunged into the tunnel.
“You keep following me,” I said, voice rougher than I meant.
“No,” she replied, almost amused. “You’re following me.”
I frowned. “I don’t even know your name.”

Her eyes — sharp, impossible, reflecting more than the weak lights overhead — pinned me like glass over an insect.
“Yes, you do.”

The train jolted hard enough to make the lights stutter.

When they came back, everything outside the windows was wrong. The billboards on Alameda were ads for places that closed before I was born. The skyline was off — smaller, unfamiliar — like we’d slipped backward into someone else’s memory of LA.

I glanced at her, but she was watching me instead, smiling faintly, like she knew.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“This,” she said, tilting her head toward the blurred city beyond the glass, “is where you lost me.”

The train slowed at a platform washed in red light, the air suddenly hotter, heavier. I stood, but she caught my wrist again, leaning close enough for her breath to ghost against my jaw.
“You don’t want to get off here,” she murmured.
“Why not?”
“Because this isn’t your stop,” she said softly. “Not yet.”

I sat back down, dizzy. The other passengers hadn’t moved. Their stillness felt wrong, sculpted, like statues waiting for permission to breathe.

She leaned back, boots braced against the seat in front of her, watching me like I was the one out of place. Her crystals glimmered faintly, a pulse in rhythm with mine.

“You used to know,” she said, almost to herself. “But you forgot.”
I exhaled slowly, forcing out the words: “Forgot what?”
Her gaze pinned me again, soft and lethal all at once.
“Me.”

The train jolted once more, and when I blinked, she was gone.
Her seat was empty.
The necklace, the boots, the frayed jeans — gone like she’d been pulled out of frame mid-shot…

When the train reached Union Station again, the cars were empty. No mannequins. No hum.
Just me.
I stumbled back onto the platform, lungs burning, and turned in a slow circle, searching for her, for anything that made sense. But the station was silent.

And when I finally made it to street level, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Dead black screen. No notifications. Except the date. Two years earlier.

I’m not sure what I believe anymore.

But last night, I woke up with my hoodie still smelling faintly of smoke.

And on my kitchen counter, there was a single crystal, cracked and humming faintly in the dark.
I don’t own any crystals.

I didn’t plan to go back there. But the city keeps pulling me south, past where the lights thin out and the pavement splits, like an old scar refusing to close.
Skid Row smells the same as it did when I left it behind: bleach, sweat, and something metallic underneath, like rusted pennies dissolving on your tongue.

I shouldn’t be here. I know this, and still, my boots scrape cracked concrete until I’m standing at the chain-link fence behind what used to be the free clinic.
The clinic burned down seven years ago.
I know this, too.
But tonight, the lights inside are on.

She’s there. Leaning against the graffiti-tagged wall like the last time I saw her, black hoodie pulled up, perfect frayed jeans slouched over worn-in Docs. A strand of beads and crystals hangs from her wrist, catching what little light leaks through the busted streetlamp above us.

She looks exactly the same. Same chipped nails. Same cigarette balanced loose between her fingers.

“Don’t you remember me?” she says.
Her voice sounds like it’s coming from two places at once — here and somewhere deeper, somewhere I’ve only been in dreams.
I laugh, sharp, nervous, too loud. “You keep asking me that.”
“You keep lying,” she says simply.

I want to leave, but my body doesn’t move. The hum of the city feels muffled here, like I’m underwater, and the air’s heavy enough to choke on.

“You were here before,” she continues, brushing ash off her jeans. “Right there.”
She points at the cracked concrete beside the dumpster.
I swallow, hard. “I don’t — ”
“Yes, you do.”
She exhales, smoke curling upward, mixing with the faint incense burn of her crystals.
“You died here once.”

The memory doesn’t hit all at once — it leaks in, slow, like light through torn blinds. Seventeen. Rainwater pooling in my palms. Spoon bent wrong. Someone yelling my name. Sirens somewhere close, but too far to matter.
And her.
Not as she is now, but younger, crouched next to me with shaking hands, trying to keep me breathing while everyone else scattered like roaches in blue light.
“You were there,” I whisper.
She nods once.

I step closer. Close enough to smell sage and cigarette smoke clinging to her hoodie. Close enough to see a shard of amethyst threaded into her bracelet, glowing faint in the half-light.

“I didn’t make it,” I say, barely above a whisper.
“You did,” she replies, soft. “But not all of you came back.”

There’s a sound then — low and steady, rising beneath the street noise. A familiar hum, like a train somewhere deep under the city, beneath where the rails should end.
I glance around. There are no tracks here.

Her crystals catch the dim light again, pulsing faintly like they’re syncing to the rhythm of my heart. Or maybe hers.
“Why me?” I ask.

She smiles, small, almost kind, but there’s nothing soft in her eyes
“Because LA doesn’t forget its ghosts,” she says, “and you’ve been haunting yourself for years.”

The sound grows louder. The air vibrates.

I step toward her without meaning to, and she steps back into the mouth of an alley I swear wasn’t here yesterday. A narrow stretch of darkness cut sharp between two crumbling walls, glowing faintly at the edges, like film catching fire.

“If you follow me,” she says, “you won’t come back the same.”

I should run. I don’t. My boots crunch broken glass as I step after her, into the alley that shouldn’t exist. The hum swallows everything.

And right before the dark closes in, she says it one last time, soft and steady, like a promise carved into bone: “Don’t you remember me?”

II — Under Her Frayed Hem

WARNING

The taco truck on Santa Monica Boulevard was a living thing.

Its fryer hissed like it was whispering secrets, and the air around it shimmered with grease heat and gasoline fumes. I’d been on my feet for twelve hours at the treatment center, scrubs wrinkled, badge half flipped, hair barely holding on under a headband. I’d told myself I wasn’t hungry, but the truck’s pull was gravitational, like gravity itself smelled like carne asada and cilantro.

El Grito was painted in screaming reds and sunburned yellows, a skeletal calavera grinning wide on the side panel, half-faded from decades of LA smog and street dust. A crooked string of bulbs swung overhead, buzzing faintly like dying cicadas, light pooling and breaking over the cracked sidewalk below.

The line was chaos: pure West Hollywood, post-midnight.

Drag queens glittered like they’d been carved out of galaxies, their lashes sharp enough to cut glass, laughing with bartenders whose shirts still smelled like tequila and lime. Valet kids leaned against a meter, exhaling perfect rings of vape smoke into the humid night air, while a muscle boy in gold lamé shorts argued with someone about who ordered first. Basslines bled out from a nearby club, muffled and wet, syncing up with the heartbeat in my temples.

It smelled like three different realities colliding… carne fat sizzling on steel, lime juice sticky on fingertips, old cigarette ash ground into the pavement. Somewhere behind me, someone yelled, “Who dropped the extra salsa?!” and a girl in rhinestone cowboy boots shrieked like the world was ending.

And maybe it was.

Because that’s when I felt her watching me.

She was leaning against the graffitied wall across from the truck, tucked into the shadows like she belonged there: boots scuffed but deliberate, jeans perfectly frayed at the ankles, as if the threads had been worn down by years of walking roads no one remembered anymore. Her chipped black nail polish caught the light like tiny obsidian mirrors, and there were crystals tied into her left bootlace that flashed when a rideshare’s headlights swept past.

I tried to look away, back toward the order window, pretending she wasn’t staring straight through me. I focused on the menu instead — birria, lengua, al pastor — each word making my stomach cramp with hunger.

Then her voice slid through the noise, soft enough that no one else could’ve heard it over the fryer, but sharp enough to thread straight into my chest.

“Don’t be under the lights when they hum.”
I whipped around, clutching my paper plate tighter, tacos threatening to slide off. “What?”
She didn’t move, didn’t blink, just tipped her chin toward the bulbs above us.
“They’ll start soon,” she said, her tone flat and unshaken. “You don’t want to be here when they change.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out sharp and brittle, like a bone snapping. “Lady, I’ve been at work for twelve hours. I’m hallucinating guacamole right now. Whatever this is? No thanks.”

She tilted her head — slow, deliberate — like she was reading the last sentence of a book she’d already memorized.
And then she was next to me.

I swear I didn’t see her move, but suddenly she was close enough for me to smell her, wild sage and gasoline, a scent sharp enough to burn its way into memory. Her hand brushed my scrub pocket, so quick I almost thought I imagined it. Then she was gone, disappearing into the blur of neon and vape smoke, swallowed whole by the crowd.
I looked down.
A matchbook. El Grito stamped on the front in smeared black ink, one match missing.
Inside, written in cramped, deliberate handwriting: Don’t look up when the lights breathe

I told myself I wasn’t going to think about her. By the time I left the taco truck, the matchbook was buried in the bottom of my scrub pocket, shoved under a wad of receipts and a half-crushed granola bar. Boots Girl was just another weird LA fever dream — like those people outside The Abbey handing out CBD lollipops or the guy on Fairfax who claimed to sell “celebrity ashes” in vials for fifty bucks. West Hollywood ran on neon delusion. I wasn’t special.

Except I didn’t sleep. Back at my apartment off San Vicente, the kind of rent-controlled miracle you only get if someone dies and leaves it behind, I tried every trick. Lavender candles, chamomile tea, crime podcasts whispering slow murder into my headphones… The whole block outside buzzed with WeHo’s usual trash-glam cacophony: distant basslines bleeding from clubs, drag queens yelling across the street, a valet honking like his soul depended on it. It was chaotic, comforting, familiar.

But the lights outside my window kept flickering. I told myself it was bad wiring. LA’s basically held together by duct tape and earthquakes. But when I finally shut my eyes, I dreamed of the taco truck again. The same buzzing bulbs. The same wet pavement. And Boots Girl, leaning against the graffitied wall, her boots soaking up shadows like they belonged to her.

“Don’t be under the lights when they hum.”
Her voice was quieter this time, but heavier somehow. Like it was sinking into me.

The next morning at the treatment center, the smell of burnt coffee hit me before I even clocked in. Mondays always had this dull hum — fluorescent lights vibrating overhead, nurses dragging, patients restless and pacing like caged tigers. I told myself work would ground me. Routine always does.

Except the matchbook burned a hole in my pocket all day.

I didn’t tell anyone about her. I didn’t want the look. The “okay, Missy’s finally snapped” look.

But halfway through morning meds, one of my patients — Jess, twenty-two, big brown eyes, four days clean — set down her cup of orange juice and whispered: “I saw her.”
My throat closed.
“Who?”
She scratched at the inside of her elbow, jittery from sleep deprivation and too much bad coffee.
“By the vending machines. Boots. Jeans. Said something about… about lights?”
My stomach dropped straight through the cheap linoleum floor. I leaned in, lowering my voice so the other patients wouldn’t hear.
“Jess. Listen to me. What exactly did she say?”
Jess chewed her lip, eyes darting toward the hallway where the soda machine hummed.
“She said, um… ‘Don’t be under the lights when they breathe.’”

By nightfall, the center felt wrong. I’d been here long enough to know what wrong smells like: cold metal, sour sweat, dried antiseptic. But this was heavier. Like the whole building was holding its breath.

Around eight, the humming started. At first, I thought it was the usual: busted HVAC, cheap wiring, one too many extension cords pulling from the same sad socket. But then it deepened, low and steady, like a subwoofer buried somewhere under the floors. The patients noticed first.

Jess started pacing, eyes wide, muttering something about the lights breathing. Then Marcus came out of his room, tapping his temple like he was trying to shake out water. Someone down the hall started crying, sharp and animal.

And then the lights over the nurses’ station flickered.
On. Off. On. Off.

I stepped back without meaning to. My pulse was loud in my ears. That’s when I saw her.

Boots Girl. Leaning against the doorway to the detox wing like she’d always been there, one foot crossed over the other, cigarette unlit but poised. Same frayed jeans, same chipped polish, same glint of something dark at her ankle where the crystals swung like tiny pendulums.

“Get them out,” she said. Calm. Certain. Like a doctor delivering bad news.
“What?” My voice cracked.
“The lights are breathing,” she said. “When they stop, so will you.”

And then, like a bad cut in film, she wasn’t there anymore.

I turned back to the nurse’s station, heart hammering so hard it hurt. The monitors were glitching, screens jittering like old VHS. The hum was louder now, vibrating through my ribs, and the hallway lights strobed in uneven bursts.

Jess grabbed my arm hard enough to leave crescent moons in my skin. “Missy,” she whispered, trembling, “she was in my room.”
I wanted to say “no, she wasn’t.”
I wanted to tell her we were overtired, spinning shadows out of nothing.

But when I glanced down the hallway toward her room, every fluorescent light on that wing blinked once — and went out.
The blackout hit like a slap.
One second there was buzzing, beeping, and the white‑blue glare of fluorescent light.
The next — nothing but the sound of fifty people holding their breath at once.
Somewhere down the hall, someone screamed.

The backup generators should’ve kicked in by now. I knew because they always did — we tested them every other Wednesday like clockwork. But the whole building was drowning in dark, and the air smelled different now. Metallic, electric, sharp like a storm about to break.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, fumbling for the flashlight, but the screen was dead. The whole thing — battery, circuits, everything — stone cold.

I wasn’t alone in the dark, though.

“Missy,” someone whispered behind me.
I turned fast, expecting Jess or Marcus — but no one was there.
Then a glow bloomed low at the end of the hall, soft and gold like candlelight. I thought for one insane second the power was back, but no, it was her.
Boots Girl.
She was sitting cross‑legged in the middle of the detox wing hallway, striking a match against the floor. The little flame flared, too bright, too alive, reflecting in her eyes like liquid gold.
“You should’ve left when I told you.”

“Who are you?” I asked, breath sharp in my throat.
She tilted her head. The crystals laced into her boot tongue swung gently like a pendulum measuring out the last seconds of something important.
“You haven’t been listening,” she said. “It’s already started.”

A metallic bang shook the ceiling above us, like something massive dropped onto the roof. Patients were shouting now, doors slamming open and shut. One of the men in detox ran past us barefoot, hitting the wall with his shoulder and not slowing down.

“Started?” My voice cracked. “What’s started?”

Boots Girl smiled, small and strange, and held out the matchbook. Same one she’d slipped me by the taco truck days ago. Only this time, when I took it, I noticed something new — words scrawled inside the flap in ink the color of dried blood:
WHEN THE LIGHTS BREATHE, RUN.

Before I could ask, the humming returned… deeper, heavier, vibrating up through the foundation. The walls trembled, ceiling tiles raining dust.

She leaned close, so close I could smell wild sage and gasoline, and whispered like it was already too late: “They’re waking up.”

Somewhere behind me, a patient yelled my name.
I spun, expecting chaos, and found Jess crouched in the middle of the hall, clutching her head.
“She’s in my room,” she sobbed. “She’s still in my room.”

When I turned back, Boots Girl was gone. Only the matchbook remained, still warm in my palm.

The humming turned into a roar. And then, just outside, above the pounding storm drain pipes and the wet streets of WeHo, I heard it — a sound so low it rattled the fillings in my teeth. A train horn. Except there are no train tracks anywhere near West Hollywood…

The next thing I knew, I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Wet asphalt, trash glittering in puddles, the throb of bass leaking from a club somewhere down the block. Neon signs hummed over the taco truck like a hive about to swarm. Smoke curled from the flat-top grill, warm and heavy with the smell of charred carne asada and lime, and for a split second, I thought maybe I’d fallen asleep back at the treatment center, maybe this was just another stress dream.

But my palms were still smudged with ash from the matchbook.

I moved closer to the truck, waiting in the thick, buzzing quiet between orders.

“Rough night?” a voice asked.
I turned.
She was there. Boots Girl. Same perfectly frayed jeans, same chipped nails, same glint of crystals laced into leather. Her cigarette burned down to the filter without ever falling apart, like it was suspended in time.

“You,” I whispered.
My throat felt raw.
She smiled, small and soft, like we’d already had this conversation before.
“I told you, Missy,” she said. “It’s already started.”
And then she handed me another matchbook.

Not the one I had in my pocket — a second one. Identical. Heavy and warm like it remembered the first spark. I opened it with shaking hands.

Inside, scrawled in the same ink as before:
THE SECOND LIGHT GOES OUT AT 3:17.

I blinked. Looked up.
She was gone.

The only thing left was the hiss of the grill, the wet shine of WeHo neon on the street, and the sound of a train horn somewhere beneath the city, deep and hollow, like it was calling me by name.

III — Siete Cerillos Apagados

RETURN

The first time I saw her again, the heat was already splitting my skull.

West Hollywood at noon felt like standing under a blowtorch — the kind of heat that makes the air hum, where palm trees look plastic and the asphalt ripples like it’s trying to swallow itself whole. I’d just finished a double shift at the treatment center, three admissions back-to-back, and my scrubs smelled like bleach and stale withdrawal. My body was buzzing, hollow and electric, like I’d been poured out and left behind.

I stopped at the self-serve car wash on Fairfax just to breathe under the shade of the aluminum awning. The smell of wet concrete, soap, and burning brakes hit me all at once, dizzying in the heat.

That’s when I saw her.

She was leaning against the vending machine that sold tiny blue packets of Armor All wipes and cheap plastic air fresheners shaped like palm trees. Same boots. Same frayed hem on her jeans. Same chipped nail polish the color of dried blood.

She was supposed to be dead.

Seven years ago, the fire at Luna y Muerte tore through that dive bar like the city had been waiting for an excuse to swallow it. Two people gone. No survivors. One of their names still lives somewhere in my ribs, like a splinter I can’t dig out.

I froze, hose dripping onto my shoes, water pooling around the drain.
She smiled like we were old friends. Like no time had passed.

“Siete cerillos apagados,” she said softly, like it was a greeting.
Seven unlit matches.
The words caught in my throat, bitter and metallic.

“What?” I managed, stepping closer.
Her smile sharpened, just slightly. “You still have yours.”

And then she was gone.
One blink, and the space where she stood was empty except for a single wet footprint on the concrete — small, sharp, boot-shaped — already blurring in the runoff.

I didn’t even remember turning the hose off.

Two days later, I tried to walk it off. The exhaustion, the unease, the feeling that my shadow wasn’t lining up with my feet.

Runyon Canyon at dawn was pure contradiction, like everything else in LA. Dust and diamonds. Sagebrush tangled with bougainvillea. A shirtless guy jogged past carrying a chihuahua in a designer sling, and somewhere behind me, a girl in rhinestone-studded yoga pants whispered affirmations into her Stanley cup.

I kept climbing anyway, lungs burning, hoping sweat would rinse me clean.

And then I saw her.

Halfway up the trail, standing against the rising sun like she’d been painted there. Same boots. Same frayed hem. Same chipped nails glinting when she brushed hair from her face. Except, this time, her hair was longer. Blonder. And the curve of her jaw was softer, like whoever built her from memory switched reference photos halfway through.

“Hey,” I called, trying to sound casual. “Weird running into you again.”
She turned, squinting at me, eyes sharp as glass — but there was no recognition.
“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” she said, voice like smoke curling up from a blown-out candle.

I almost believed her.
Almost.
Until I caught the flash of silver in her back pocket.
A matchbook.
Luna y Muerte.

My chest went tight.
“You dropped something,” I said, pointing at it, but she only tilted her head like I was speaking another language.
“Not yet,” she said. “But you will.”

Then she stepped off the trail, boots crunching gravel, disappearing into a wall of eucalyptus like she’d never been there at all.

I scrambled after her, breath ragged, but there was nothing. Just cicadas buzzing in the heat and the faint, metallic taste of salt in the air.

That night, I couldn’t stop turning the matchbook over in my pocket, the foil peeling under my nails.
Seven years ago, the fire at Luna y Muerte killed two people.
No survivors.
Or so I thought.

The next morning, back at the treatment center, one of my patients — Carla, a rail-thin girl with jailhouse tattoos and the kind of hollow-eyed intuition you can’t teach — cornered me in the hallway.
“I saw her,” she whispered, clutching the hem of her sweatshirt. “The girl in the boots.”

My mouth went dry.
“Where?”
“In my dream,” she said simply, like it was an answer that mattered. “She said you’re not done burning yet.”

After that, I started seeing her everywhere.
Behind the glass at a coffee shop in Echo Park.
Crossing the street outside the Laugh Factory.
On a bus barreling down Sunset at 3 a.m., face lit electric blue by a phone that didn’t exist.

Every version of her was slightly off — shorter, taller, softer, sharper — but always the boots. Always the frayed hem. Always the matchbook flashing like a dare.

I stopped sleeping.
Started walking West Hollywood at night like the city might cough up an explanation if I asked nicely enough.
But LA under streetlights is its own kind of fever dream — heat radiating off pavement, broken glass catching neon, wild sage tangled with exhaust, laughter leaking out of bars where strangers kiss like saints.
The whole city smelled like gasoline.

Two weeks later, I broke.
I dug through old fire reports, hospital records, newspaper clippings.

Luna y Muerte Fire — Casualty List.
Eight names. Two confirmed dead. Five injured. One missing.
The missing one was me.
Not my name, but my jacket.
My boots.
My Claddagh ring.
Someone had pulled me out of there and never told me.
Or maybe I never left.

That night, I dreamed of the matchbook again.
Not the one in my pocket. The real one.
The one scorched into my palm the night it all burned, back when the velvet booths went up like kindling and someone screamed my name through the smoke.

I woke gasping, bare feet on the cool kitchen tile, the city pressing against the windows like it was breathing.
I opened the matchbook on the counter.
Inside, the single burnt match was gone.
All seven were whole. Fresh. Unstruck.

And scrawled beneath them, where there hadn’t been writing before:
Come back…

Outside, Santa Monica Boulevard simmered under heat mirage, and across the street, she was waiting.

Boots.
Frayed hem.
A matchbook dangling from her hand, silver glinting like a blade.

She smiled when our eyes met, like we’d finally made it back to where we were always supposed to burn.