come and see

Won't you?

She liked to walk the city alone at night, hidden in the shadows, finding things no one had ever found--or at least that most people never did. Noticing things no one ever noticed. That was her. And when she saw something beautiful she would call me or text me. Nothing more than three words each time--a location, and three words:

Come and see.

I'd always try to. She'd always show me things worth seeing--sometimes more beautiful than anything, sometimes horrible things that no one was ever meant to see. We never kissed, but she'd take my hand and say, "Do you see?" And sometimes I'd nod. Sometimes I wouldn't know what to do.

She stopped calling eventually. I never had the nerve to ask if she was okay, if she'd moved on, if she'd lost interest. I assumed the silence meant something, or, possibly, that it meant nothing at all. I changed phones. I lost her number. I forgot about her, or very nearly.

Then, one night after I'd been drinking and watching bad movies at home, I got another text message. It contained, as ever, a location and three words:

Come and see.

I mumbled an excuse and wandered off, grabbing my bike and riding through the empty streets until I reached the docks, where there was a girl standing at the edge of one of them. I joined her and said something like "Hey."

And she said, "Come and see," and she pointed.

The water held some sort of creature, something with a massive gaping maw, like some sort of creature from the deepest blackest parts of the sea. It was crying. It had come here to die. And she took my hand like she always used to and we just watched as it stopped struggling.

It would wash onto the shore a week or so later. I was there when it did, all horrible and rotten and bloated. I wasn't sure if I should feel sad, but I knew I had to tell someone else to come and see.