the stories

Family has been on my mind, and many of our writers had the same idea. This year’s writers shared moments in their character’s lives, beguiling us with funny moments and tragic happenings. Many of the stories we chose feature family members fighting to stay together or fighting to be part of each other’s lives. But even those who were not born to each other found solace with those they journeyed with: “When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching — they are your family” — Jim Butcher.

This year, ORP’s family grew with a record number of submissions. And with this great joy comes the crushing disappointment of rejecting even more. We applaud the effort and care taken in every story, and every moment spent agonizing over every word.

— Alaa El Fadel
Editor, Emerging Voices in Fiction

Depending on which dictionary you use, reading is defined differently. My favourite is: ‘Reading is the cognitive process of looking at written or printed symbols and understanding their meaning.’ (Study.com)

In this submission cycle, I have had the pleasure of looking at written work and deciphering its core meaning; indulging in the various worlds and metaphors presented. Every year, I am impressed with the work sent to us, with the creativity behind the telling of each story. I have enjoyed peeling back each layer to discover what lies within. Maya Angelou wisely said, ‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’ I wholeheartedly agree. It was an honour reading the submissions and being a part of each storyteller’s journey.

— Michelle Tanmizi
Reader, Emerging Voices in Fiction

It has been our joy and honour to receive a record number of submissions this year. As in the past, these were from all over the globe, nearly half of them from diverse writers. Of course, AI tried to gate crash the party, but we managed to keep it out...hopefully. The stories in this issue are a mirror to the world we live in – they are about the oppression of majority culture, capitalistic greed, isolation, mental health and grief. Equally, they are about carving beauty from the mundane, about receiving gifts of kindness when you least expect, about solidarity, care and compassion – all feeding one the most fundamental human needs – that of connection. They are a nod to the immense capacity of the human mind to look the world in the eye, take it in in its entirety and yet, not lose sight of all the love, light and laughter. We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

— Nidhi Arora
Fiction Editor

Jorge Luis Borges once said, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Even though my idea of Paradise isn't quite that of a website on a screen lined with digital ink, I think this issue still manages to hold a similar kind of magic because of the library of emotions the stories here present. I suggest reading through it with wonder. Wonder at the capacity of humans to feel so deeply, experience so viscerally, and express so beautifully — even when it comes to the most mundane moments. The current world we live in seems adamant about making us forget how much beauty we hold in our humanity. I found that each of these stories serves as a warm invitation to look back into our souls and marvel at the intricate valleys of love, longing, doubt, and, despite everything, hope that we have hidden inside. To me, curating this issue has been a charming ride, and I hope that reading it takes you on equally rewarding journeys of your own.

— Passant Eltarek
Associate Fiction Editor

A Gift From Greta

Melanie Jones

This Tuesday would be different. Greta was coming to visit. It had been five years, and he hadn’t seen her since the day she’d brought him over on the ferry to live with Big Mama. I’ll send for you soon as James and me get settled in Chicago, he remembered Greta saying. But she never did settle. Soon after Chicago James, there was Brooklyn Charlie and San Francisco Pete. His mother was what Big Mama called flighty. Nevertheless, she’d written to say that she might be passing through. That was as much as he could figure out from the little piece of stationery on Big Mama’s nightstand before he’d heard her heavy footsteps moving down the hall. He wondered what her visit might be about, but asking Big Mama for more information would result in a good slap, considering he wasn’t supposed to know about the visit in the first place. He’d remain quiet and wait.

Spirits

Erica Gelman

This is what Camilla was currently doing: Camilla was watching the evening news. On it, there were three rapes and two deaths, at least, so far—two shootings in the south side of the city. Also, in the Lincoln Park Zoo, there was either the disappearance, escape, or kidnapping of one Siberian Tiger, the largest tiger species on earth, currently. He had vanished, dissipated into thin air, seemingly out of the blue; nothing in the entire enclosure, the entire zoo, entire world had been touched or displaced even a particle except for him, this mighty beast, gone.

Ordinary Evil

KC Barrientos

You glance at the side of his face: his barely trimmed beard, the ruddy complexion beneath flax curls, the beginnings of crow’s feet crowning his eyes when he laughs loudly at every half-hearted joke you tell. He has the air of someone who found long ago what he’d been meant to do all along, patrolling the streets like a familiar guardian and waving at townies while receiving commendation for the difference he makes in the community.

Through the dust storm

Corie Hudspeth

The water in the pot bubbles up. Higgins stares out the small kitchen window, the black of it reflecting his face, or a steamed version of his face. He and his father have kept a modest garden that produces little, just some radishes, carrots, and snap peas. They keep the garden at the insistence of his father’s need to believe he still runs this land, and that this land still provides. But the animals have long been gone. The fences are all leaning, and the barn, sheds, and stables are threatening collapse; the wood of them all the color of cold ashes. Higgins wonders if Dodd will say anything about it. How the place looks barren and abandoned. But with their father getting up in the night to put the ghosts of loose cows back behind fences, Higgins sees the decay as a necessary reminder. There are no horses, cows, or goats roaming loose in the night anymore.

fair market value

Hailey Winningham

The house had been in need of repair for as long as he could remember. There was always something: roof shingles falling off, porch steps sagging in the middle, gutters pulling loose from their brackets. He sometimes thought that if he ever fixed everything at once, the place might not recognize itself and simply fold in from the shock.

unbridled joy

Paul Farwell

My shoes don’t fit. Tell that to Cooper and Cooper says no one cares about your shoes. I care. Born with bad feet. One shoe loose, the other tight. Damn. Can’t stand right. Can’t sit. Can’t go anywhere right. But explain that to Cooper. Cooper don’t listen. He look down at me. You have ugly shoes, he say. Too bad.

Drive-by ID

Cotton O'Connell

Officer Santora tells Derek and me not to worry — it’ll only take another minute, five at most. But my little brother is worried. It radiates off him, the way he shifts his weight between feet and chews his thumbnail. 

My worry is different. I’m afraid Derek will mouth off to Santora, and then this thing, which was nothing, will become something.

Pets and Other Deaths

Jason Herman

When they arrived home, they found the house half-emptied. Half the dishes had been taken, half the chairs around the dining room table, half the small appliances. The pictures she wanted had been pulled down, leaving empty spaces on half the walls. He imagined her white minivan in the driveway, the one they had bought together, the hatch lifted open, the back stuffed with chairs and boxes and lamps with their shades removed, their cords neatly wrapped around their bases. What good was it to have half of everything, of anything? Some things resisted half-ness, only a whole would do. The kids for example.  

Moonshine

M. Guillermo

Mom was late again. The second day in a row. So I decided to walk home this time, and told Ms. Janice Mom said I could even though she hadn’t. What she really said was the opposite: “Don’t walk on that highway under any circumstances, you hear?” But if I’d waited any longer, they’d have sent me to the principal’s office, and it’s awful in there. It smells like something old and dying, and Principal Hutchins won’t stop. She goes on and on about Jesus and the Bible, and how we have to be good little children or else get punished. I wasn’t going to sit through that again, no way. I’d rather chance it.

It’s Nothing, Really

John Barrett Lee

"Hello, William," she said at last. "It's been a long time."

The way she said it — not accusing, not warm — made it worse. Familiarity settled in without bringing anything useful.

"I'm sorry," I said, and then, because that wasn't quite it, added, "I know your face, but I just can't place you."

She nodded as if she'd expected to hear it, and said nothing.

Christmas for Vegetarians

Paul Curley

Every other year is a St. Louis Christmas. Lindy grew up here, so she doesn’t go crazy over snow the way the kids and I do. On the way from the airport, we rubbernecked at the stuff that had been plowed to the side of the highway, remnants from a recent storm. It was grayish, but it was snow. I half expected our son, Max, to say something like, This snow sucks the big one, but he didn’t. Lindy was quiet on the drive, the kind of quiet that comes from worry.

Monosex Spieces

XIN GUO

“Don’t give people a reason to blame you,” she said.

“Why would they blame me for doing those things?”

She cut me off before I finished.

“How should I know? Good girls just don’t.”

At the time I mistook her caution for provincial paranoia, the residue of a generation that had learned to survive by anticipating violence before it appeared. I believed education would exempt me from that logic, and fear just belonged to people without language for the world.

The Woman on the Shore

David Rea

He can tell the woman is dead before he reaches her. It is the way her body is positioned, twisted like a rag doll. There is a map of cuts, scratches and bruises across her face and arm; the sea has cared as much for her corpse as it does driftwood, tossing her against the craggy shoreline and dumping her behind this rock; a final wave has thrown her forearm over a tyre. Her hair holds droplets of seawater, resembling tiny balls of mercury, and the blue abaya beneath her life jacket is soaked and torn.

What I Will Do

India Choquette

I will feed your cat if ICE takes you away.

It was a joke I told as you retrieved your cat from the hallway. We both laughed, you with the slight gap between your teeth, the old white cat in your arms, a hand braced against the peeling drywall. As we recovered, I caveated with the classic, “Gotta laugh or you’ll die crying,” and you kissed the cat’s head, casually, instinctively, automatically.

I remember that moment as I stand in the silent hall. I was worried about how I’d get into your apartment, but the door is ajar.

A Promise or Warning

Arno Bohlmeijer

As crooked as beautiful, the naturist area is cleverly sheltered, but never deserted. Forest Lake has full green banks and coves among miles of woods and fields. Motorboats are not allowed, and the parking lots are out of sight.

 On divinely quiet days the odd cyclist or hiker will roam and retreat. On public holidays fun-makers are clumsy in hired rowing boats, on surfboards and plastic waterbeds, tumbling and shrieking ‘from far’, with peeks at the nude people, who may venture through the fences of plants and reeds. Careful, don’t lead ‘visitors’ into weird temptation! A glimpse of a tanned bum or “something even better” can drive them hysteric.

Infinity Forever and Ever

Cuyler Meade

Jenny listens to the cattails in the morning, their pit-pit-pit against the soft flesh of her fingertips, or the tik-tik-tik against her chipped, chewed nails. She walks fast, or slow, or whatever speed she wants because she has nowhere to be and only time.

Trouble at the Flat Earth Convention

Mark Abdon

I blow in sideways with the rain, push hard on the revolving door, and tumble into the ornate hotel lobby. The concierge drops her smile to watch the little pools of water collect around my tan espadrilles. The storm had come out of nowhere, swirling green-grey clouds. The dangerous kind. I exhale with the relief of being indoors, calm and dry. I remove my jacket, straighten my rain-splotched clothes, and regain my poise.

No, I don’t — I don’t have poise. Never have. I’m not that kind of girl.

I blush pink and sort of kick at the loose liquid with my shoe. Try to spread it out. But then I remember why I’m at the hotel in the first place. I tap into my journalistic professionalism, detach, and bury my embarrassment.

I’m getting good at this. The burying. I can feel my mind frisk at the edges of memory. The Event. The 9-1-1 call. Another puddle. A crimson one blooming from my mother’s left wrist, the click-clack stretcher exiting her apartment for the hospital. That was just a week ago. I haven’t seen her since. I’m going ‘no contact’. I bury. I soldier on. It’s working.

I sling my wet coat over my arm as I read the signage:

Hot Wax Candle Convention — 21st Floor.

Midwestern Flat Earth Society Convention — Basement.

I pull out my miniature Steno Pad from my back jeans pocket and label a new page as I take the long escalator down. Another human-interest piece assigned by my aging editor for the “Around Town” column of The Indianapolis Journal, a third-rate paper with a circulation of two thousand on a good week. I’m already struggling. Possibly because I’m a human who is not interested in these crazy people. Plus, Flat Earthers are yesterday’s news. I could be writing about Senator McMichael’s embezzlement. Or DeFleur University’s blackface incident.

Instead, I’m here.

I trip hard on the skirt guard at the escalator’s end. I hadn’t looked up from my Steno pad in time. I don’t quite fall to the ground. Instead, I do a kind of stagger-stumble, my shoes slapping the slate floor of the basement. I scramble to pick up my spiral notebook.

Did anyone see?

Yes. A man and a woman gaze at me like wary gazelles from behind the registration table. Even sitting down, you can tell he’s tall, gangly. The woman is short like me, and not quite pretty — also like me. I like her blonde hair, though. She looks normal. She might be twice my age, maybe the same as my mother. My mother. I wonder what else they’d have in common? Based on this lady’s crooked grin, it doesn’t look like she’s suffering from debilitating depression. Different kinds of unwell, I guess.

They’re still wide-eyed. The two at the table. I work to keep my face neutral as I read the sign on the wall behind them: Journalists Will Be Prosecuted. I feel a specific heat in my gut.

“I’m fine!” I reassure them. The woman suppresses a smile.

“Name, please?”

“Veronica Mills.” The lie rolls off my tongue with ease, but my cheeks still bloom.

She scans the printed list with the tip of a Sheraton pen. There are maybe two hundred names. Small conference. I don’t know what I expected. She finds my entry and crosses it off neatly.

“Welcome, Veronica!” she beams. “Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Judy. This your first convention?”

“It is,” I smile convincingly. I imagine my future story sandwiched between articles about the composition of Indiana State Fair hot dogs and which Hoosier casinos Foreigner is playing this year. “I’m excited to be here!”

The man says something I don’t quite catch, but he’s holding out a trim conference handbook. I take it and examine the contents. On the back, there’s a schedule with the times and locations of the sessions. On the front, a glossy picture of Mikka Malibu, the celebrity keynote speaker this year. The plunging neckline in her photo is substantial. Apparently, they don’t prefer everything to be flat around here.

“Head on back to the Meridian Ballroom East,” he points to the corridor behind me.  “Mingle, get to know some of these great folks, and we’ll get started in about thirty minutes. Oh! Almost forgot. Let’s get you a nametag.”

He proffers a blank sticker and a Sharpie. I almost write my real name. But I catch it fast and sort of bend the line of an ‘L’ inward to form the ‘V’. I write my mother’s name. Veronica. Should have chosen some other fake name, but I’d registered months ago.

Heart beating fast, I walk down the low-ceilinged hall, bulbous chandeliers lighting my way. An unmanned book table offers titles like Astronauts Are Asinine and This Snow Globe We Call Earth. There’s a merchandise table too. Trinkets with pictures of our planet — the north pole at the center, Antarctica a wall of ice around the edges. Coins, maps, posters. Lots of two-dimensional objects.

I poke my head into the General Session room. The small space is still too big for the fifty or so people milling about the high-top tables in the back. There’s a modest stage, a podium, pipe and drape, banners depicting a rendering of our flattened planet, and a screen flanked by two Peavey speakers. A few unsociable people are already sitting in the sturdy banquet chairs, their backs to me. The rest of the early arrivals form a crescent around the wings of the room.

Someone greets me as I enter. I jot a quick note. Attendees look fairly normal, if not unremarkable. A couple oddballs, sure. There’s a tall guy wearing a coonskin cap. A young man covered in dark body hair sports a flag-patterned tank top and denim shorts with an inseam of about four inches despite the April chill. The rest seem normal though. Lots of t-shirts with Make Earth Flat Again. Mostly white guys, I notice, though not all. I’m one of maybe ten women in the room.

No one else has a notebook. I tuck mine away. I set my phone to start recording and slip it into the pocket of my coat, still folded over my left arm. Then I pluck up my courage, approach the nearest group, and introduce myself.

First up is a trio of guys, mid-forties, slightly out of shape with ball caps and goatees. They look like they’d be into their lawns and IPAs and College Gameday. Instead, we’re chatting in the back of the room about the actors NASA has hired since the 1960’s to lie to the public. One conspiracy theory begets another. I stifle each laugh that threatens to give me away. I ask the same three introductory questions to this first group that I ask to everyone I meet that day. Is this your first conference? How’d you become a Flat-Earther? What’s the hardest part about being one?

The majority have similar answers to the first two questions. No, it isn’t their first conference. Most became Flat-Earthers through the internet — Reddit backchannels and YouTube rabbit holes. Some got there through other conspiracies like Roswell or the Illuminati. Most of them came here alone.

The last question gets interesting.

“Hardest part? Man,” muses one of the goateed men with a slight drawl, removing his hat and giving his ‘M’-shaped balding pattern a smoothing-over. “Maybe that you know the truth, but can’t get anyone else to hear it?” This is met with nods and grunts of understanding from the other two.

“Worst part for me is having to hide this part of myself. You know, to fit in,” a second one sighs. This is met with more nodding. I nod along too. To fit in.

“Think it’s the people for me,” says the third. He’s wearing a Bass Pro Shop hat and a camo Henley.

“What do you mean?” I ask, trying hard to sound casual. Not like a journalist.

“How come you ask so many questions?” His dark eyes narrow under the brim of his hat. My blood freezes. I’m caught.

“Just naturally curious,” I shrug, playing it off. “Isn’t that how we all got here?” I gesture to the small crowd around us. The room is too quiet. No one says anything. For a moment, my mind plays with the differences between curious and suspicious. But then my answer seems to satisfy him. He nods and continues.

“Haven’t talked to my mother for years,” he admits, eyes on the floor. This catches me off-guard. An involuntary shiver runs through me — I thank them for the conversation and excuse myself quickly, mumbling something about using the restroom before the conference kicks off. The ornate bathroom door is heavier than expected and I fail to open it on the first try.

Once inside, I click off my recording and scrutinize myself in the enormous mirror. I have my mother’s dark caterpillar eyebrows. And her chin. “Don’t cry,” I admonish my reflection, pointer finger extended in warning. “Get it together.” I lean on the rose quartz vanity top, my nose nearly touching the glass, my eyes narrowed, my voice low. “You’re a professional.” I stare down my reflection until the feelings pass.

Two things strike me about everyone I meet. They’re generally distrusting. They’re generally very nice.

After making the rounds and talking to maybe forty people – nearly a quarter of the conference before it even starts — the lights give a warning flash and the attendees begin filing into the rows of seats. I sit in the back-right corner and put my jacket on the seat next to me by the aisle.

“Anyone sitting here?”

I look up. It’s Judy from the registration table, warm eyes shining. I gibber something cordial as I move my jacket. In the last moments before the official start of the conference, we talk about normal things. The violent swings in April weather in Indiana, about our cats (Gertrude — hers, Hermes — mine), and the new walking path through Brookside Park. It’s easy to forget that she distrusts two millennia of science.

The music begins to die out as the lights fade.

“Welcome, all you crazy people!” an energetic thirty-something black man in a plain, black t-shirt roars into the microphone. This is met with self-deprecating laughter. This self-effacement is part and parcel of the Flat-Earther identity, apparently. “Whether you’re a first-timer or an old-timer, we’re glad you’re here! Who traveled the farthest? Anyone from outside the country?” A few hands go up. “How about anyone from the underside?” This is met with peals laughter. It takes a full ten seconds for the small crowd to settle down again.

“Well, we’ve got an exciting line-up of speakers and topics for you this afternoon, and back by popular demand, we’ll follow up all the great content with a plated dinner and dancing!” This is met with exuberant cheers. I survey the room. Vigorous clapping, literal tears of joy, nervous shaking. There’s nowhere else these people would rather be. This is their Super Bowl.

After a few more introductory comments, he gives up the microphone to Mikka Malibu. She’s beaming, practically emitting light. Her silken hair and skin are the same shade of lush brown. Light gleams on every beautifully rounded, buoyant feature. Nothing angular like my chin. Someone shouts her catch-phrase — They don’t pay me enough for this! — from a reality TV show about living in a trailer park.

Her keynote speech is entitled “Stay Curious”. I study the under-clothed woman on the platform in front of me. I go to pull my jacket tighter before realizing it’s on the chair next to me. What path through life could possibly lead someone like Mikka here? I wonder.

Judy is looking down at my note pad. She says nothing. I say nothing. I didn’t realize I’d taken it out. Habit, I guess. I close the Steno pad and stealthily rehome it in my jeans pocket. But I drop my pen in the process. I twist and reach down to retrieve it, nailing my head on the chair back in front of me as I right myself. I mutter the word ‘interesting’ to whatever Mikka is saying for cover. Something about tests she’d done with her phone regarding the curvature of large bodies of water. Judy is tactful enough to ignore me.

“What seminar you going to?” asks Judy once the emcee wraps up the end of the first session and we’re on a break.

“Oh, hadn’t really thought ahead.” I scan the list of options. The Secret Lives of Airline Pilots. Poetry from a Flat Earth. Photo Forgeries: Spotting the Big Spherical Lie. “What about you?”

“This is the hardest part, because I want to go to all of them, of course. Luckily for us, there are two back-to-back seminar slots. You can tag along with me to the first one if you like!”

 “I’d love to!” It slips from my mouth before I can stop it. Instant regret flushes my face, but Judy seems delighted. She slings her arm through the loop of mine, leading me in the direction of Circle Suite East, the first seminar room. She points out friends as we glide down the hall. Everyone waves to Judy. I understand why — she’s sweet.

Circle Suite East is set up in four rows of ten chairs each, facing forward like a classroom. People are filing in and it looks like the room might fill up. There’s a screen in the middle with the title slide declaring the name of the seminar. “The Planoterrestrial Imagination.” Underneath this is the name of the presenter, Dr. Frank W. Hiszékeny.

“Oh, you’re in for a real treat. Frank is brilliant,” says Judy, leaning into my personal space like we’re old friends. Just as I’m about to ask about his doctorate, Frank takes the stage, placing a thick collection of papers on the podium in front of him.

Applause breaks out from the audience, and I clap too. But then the lights flicker. That quiets everyone down. I look back but no one’s standing by the panel of light switches at the back wall.

“Well, here’s hoping the electricity holds! April weather in Indiana — harder to pin down than the theory of gravity!” Frank begins, using air quotes for the last three words. He’s maybe in his late forties — sports short curly red hair, big square glasses, and a green sweater vest. He shoves his hands into his pockets, then looks over his shoulder at the slide behind him. “Well, hey! That’s the same title as my new book!” He sports a broad grin. “Sorry, I’m terrible at self-promotion but my publisher says I have to do it. Seriously though, if you end up liking this seminar, there’s a lot more where that came from. Think Judy lined up a hundred copies for me.” He winks at her. “Though all one hundred copies are probably sitting in a box underneath a table somewhere in this basement.” I like Frank.

He points a clicker at his computer next to the projector and the next slide appears. I stifle a chuckle. He’s opted for the ‘glitter’ slide animation. He reads the quote for us.

“Everything you can imagine is real. That’s Pablo Picasso, maybe you’ve heard of him?” Warm laughter from the audience. “It’s a strange time when we trust our artists over our scientists, but here we are! Here’s another idea, this time from C.S. Lewis.” He clicks for the next slide — another glitter transition. “Lewis said that earthly desires always imply an object of satiation. We experience hunger? There’s food for that. We’re thirsty? Water. Right? Now he applied this to the existence of God and a just world beyond this one. We all long for a better world than this one, right? However, we can also apply this to our imaginations. For what is imagination but desire? You following so far?”

I looked around the room. I wasn’t certain we were. But thirty or forty faces beamed up at Frank. That’s when it dawned on me. He was one of their heroes.

Click. Glitter transition.

“So, if our imaginations are pointers to what is real, then what we should find in our fictional worlds would be example after example of planoterrestrialism.” He pauses. “That means ‘flat earth,’ Bob,” he says, pointing at a bald man in the front row, who throws back his head in a bark of laughter.

Another glance around the room. A few people are actually taking notes now. I take out my Steno pad and jot a few things down myself.

Frank’s presentation then speeds through an impressive number of 20th and 21st century representations of a flat earth in the fictional realm. S. Fowler Wright’s 1932 novel Beyond the Rim. C.S. Lewis pops up again with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Ted Chiang’s Nebula Award Winner, The Tower of Babylon. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, of course. The 2017 Marvel film Thor: Ragnarok. He goes in-depth into each of these, noting commonalities along the way, citing them as proof that our imaginations have latched onto reality once again.

As the presentation wraps up, I jot down a note to double-check Lewis to make sure he wasn’t secretly a flat-earther. But I stop mid-sentence and look up. Frank has paused for effect, giving greater weight to his final thought. He’s gripping the podium and leaning toward us.

“What will you dare to imagine next?” he asks.

Frank’s closing question jars something loose, and my own imagination takes off running, against my will.

In a flash, two scenarios unfold. In the first, I’m leaving peonies under the dark clouds that hover over my mother’s grave. I can just read the date after the dash. This year. I try to see the look on my face, but it’s obscured.

But then the scene disappears and I’m at my mother’s apartment. We’re sipping green tea on her couch, legs folded in, talking like we’re old friends. I can still see the scars on her wrists. The scene isn’t happy so much as placid and warm.

I shake my head and join late to the applause that fills the room. I blink away the thoughts, focus on my breathing, and write in my Steno pad, just to connect me to something concrete. I scan the room one more time. Several people stand, including the aforementioned Bob.

After the clapping subsides, I peruse my program for the seminars offered in the second slot. “Which one you heading to next?” I ask Judy, faking a smile.

For the first time today, I notice she’s not smiling. Judy’s mouth shrinks into a tight ‘o’ and sort of rolls to one side. “Grief and Loss.” Her body seems to diminish with the words, mousy and mild.

Dutifully, I frown and nod. However, this social nicety, this mirroring takes a turn as the title of the seminar works through me. I feel a ‘flight or fight’ response run through my body and I tamp down the instinct to bolt. Instead, I follow my journalistic instincts. “Mind if I join you again?”

Her gaze meets mine, and she gives a weak smile. “Might be nice to have someone by my side when the waterworks start,” she says, indicating the tears already beginning to fill her eyes. I follow her out into the hall, then into the next conference room, Circle Suite West.

This room is even smaller than the last. Almost claustrophobic. There’s no stage, no PA system. Just twenty chairs in the shape of a disc. A flat one. Judy and I take seats on the far side of the room and wait for the others. The ceiling is lower in here.

Moments later, I find myself in the middle of something akin to group therapy. The facilitator — a towering woman named Jackie, shaped like an upside-down light bulb with brunette pigtails — has asked each of us to name something we’ve lost since becoming Flat-Earthers. My job. My husband. My confidence. My trust in the universe. My faith in God. The answers vary widely. They do not expound. There is power in the naming of things.

“My daughter,” says Judy, when it comes to her turn. I have no time to sink down into empathy. Instead, I panic, because I’m next and I don’t have a clue what to say. So I lie. Sort of.

“My mother,” I murmur, eyes downcast. Then Judy’s hand is on my lap, grasping mine. In spite of myself, I feel hot tears threatening the edges of my eyes. I use my free hand to dab them in a preemptory strike.

That’s when the sirens go off. Even in the basement, we hear them. Our phones emit the droning tone of the emergency message service in unison. Sure enough. Tornado Warning.

Moments later, the concierge from upstairs bounces into the room and confirms it. She instructs us to stay put. We’re in the basement, in a room with no windows. We’re already in the safest place we could be. She warns us that other guests will be joining us, given the emergent situation. All nod. All understand.

As if on cue, wide-eyed travelers begin flooding into the hallway, begin filling our little room. The whole group of them looks like they’ve come from Florida or California, judging by the shorts and Birkenstocks, which aren’t really an April thing in Indiana. They bustle with movement, a perfect foil to the atmosphere in here just moments ago. They’re talking loudly, chattering excitedly to quell the fear. Some have their luggage with them. Some are charging their phones, calling loved ones, assuring them of their safety.

A few of the Flat Earthers begin to do the same, but only a few. Maybe because they’re hearty Midwesterners who don’t panic at a tornado when holing up in a hotel basement. Or maybe they don’t have anyone to call. Or maybe they don’t believe in tornados. I’m not really sure how weather systems fit into the larger Flat Earther framework.

I adjust my position, the Steno pad uncomfortable in my jeans. Judy doesn’t move an inch. She doesn’t look up.

“You’re not CIA are you?”

“Pardon?”

“Just making sure you’re not spying on us,” she says with a wan smile. “They do that sometimes.”

“No, I’m not CIA.”

“Journalist?”

It’s an awkward moment. My neck is hot.

“Yes.”

The room is filled with the sound of a dozen phone conversations. Coastal strangers calling their friends, calling family. Words of concern and care. People that would miss them if they were gone.

“Write something nice about us?” There are streaks down the woman’s face where the tears have already run. I assume these are from earlier.

“I will,” I promise, and I mean it.

I can’t be sure, but even in the basement I think I hear a muted version of the classic tornado sound, the high-speed freight train. People on phones are plugging their opposite ears with their index fingers to counter the rise in decibels.

“No one you want to call?” I offer.

Cow-eyed, Judy looks up at me and shakes her head. “You?”

Now I shake mine. Across the room, I watch two young children fasten themselves to their father, each wrapping around a leg for safety. He’s on the phone, maybe to his wife.

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” I speak up. Judy half-smiles and shrugs.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” returns Judy, placing a hand on my back, gently rubbing in comfort like sunscreen, showing her age. Then pauses. Half-grins, half-winces. “That was real, right?”

I nod.

“Betting it wasn’t Flat Earth related, but can I ask what happened?”

My mind flies through options. I could shut her down. I could make something up. I could tell her the truth. Or part of the truth. I look at Judy’s earnest face. A face that would believe anything. And nothing.

“She’s unwell,” I say, succinctly generalizing all the volatile years. Judy says nothing to this, but her expression is soft. “She’s actually in the hospital right now.”

“Oh. Should you call to let her know you’re okay? I hear worry can affect the prognosis sometimes,” observes Judy, with platonic pats on my thigh.

“She’s in a ward of the hospital that can’t take phone calls.” I feel self-conscious about both the words themselves and the volume at which I must say them. As if this new association somehow incriminates me even more than joining a Flat-Earther grief group on false pretenses. I briefly close my eyes and see my mother’s gooey scarlet blood. The consistency stays with me even more than the color.

“Oh,” says Judy.

“My real name’s Libby by the way,” I blurt. I don’t know why I say this. “Libby Reitz. Veronica Mills is my mother’s name.”

“Still Judy,” states Judy. We shake hands as if meeting for the first time and smile like bashful schoolchildren.

Then, for a while, we say nothing. We watch the phone-callers moving their mouths, giving minute by minute updates, erupting with platitudes. The interlopers are a continual flurry of activity.

Most of the Flat-Earthers are still sitting around the circle, which has moved in closer, become tighter. They are not calling out. They are pressing in. Here in this room are the people who understand them. A new family to replace those lost. No, not lost. Rather, places of belonging from which they have been ejected. Flat circles drawn, and they are outside. Othered. Barred, as if by flaming swords of cherubim. Many hold hands. Looking around the huddled bunch, I see a hollowed-out sorrow — and yet a robust gratitude as well.

“What happened with your daughter?”

Judy says nothing and looks through me.

“I won’t write about it,” I promise, unsure of how much this could mean to Judy at this point, given our rocky start.

“At first, she wanted me to read all these books and articles. And I read them. But I didn’t trust them. I told her as much. She got angry. Called me regrettable things. Ignorant. Regressive.” She smiles at this, but it wavers. “Stopped visiting. Then stopped calling.”

I don’t know what to say to this. So I say nothing.

“I have a grandson in Illinois. I’ve seen the pictures.” The tears follow predetermined paths down her cheeks. I reach across and squeeze her hand. Then I feel the hot flow of tears down my own face. One daughterless mother and one motherless daughter. I shake my head at this — crying with this stranger in a circle of strangers surrounded by more strangers. I feel very self-conscious. I feel the judgment of the surrounding Californians and Floridians.

Mikka Malibu bounces into the room and strikes up a conversation with a group near the door. She has an energy about her that seems to draw in the crowd. Maybe her perfectly round breasts are magnetic.

“Have you been to see your mom yet?” Judy’s question is innocent enough.

“No.”

“Can I ask why, dear?” I can feel the pain of her own story being projected onto mine. As if I’m the villain here.

“I can’t take the roller coaster ride anymore.” I’d never put it so simply. It felt good.

But Judy says nothing. Instead, she dons a tight frown.

“It’s the manipulation I can’t stand,” I say, overcome with the urge to explain myself, to win Judy over to my side. “She’s had a long history of depression. All my life. But after I moved out, things got worse.”

Still, Judy says nothing. Her face is neutral now, though. She’s listening.

“And the last five years, she’s been experimenting with getting off  her meds, because she says they make her life feel like grayscale. Except then she nosedives. I mean, really low. This is her third attempt on her own life.” I scoff at my next thought. “Or cry for attention, depending on how you look at it. And you know what happens every time?” I look up at Judy through warm liquid. “She says it wouldn’t have happened if I were around more. As if I’m to blame.”

As my last word falters, I feel a warm hand on the broadest part of my back. The room blurs over. I wipe my eyes with my sleeves, but it’s no use. Judy produces a tissue — from where, I don’t know. She continues to rub my back, this stranger with dubious critical thinking skills. I accept it. The comfort of it. The notion that a response to the pain of another supersedes most social boundaries.

The volume of the room begins to subside. The sirens outside die down. The conference crashers from the coasts trickle back upstairs a few at a time. The tall moderator announces that we won’t try to resume the session and that we should head to dinner instead. Mikka is working her way around the room. She’s getting closer to Judy and me.

“Can I ask just one more question?”

“Shoot.”

Judy says nothing for a beat. Then: “Did your mother stay by you through your roller coaster years?”

What could I possibly say to this? Such a leading question! Judy would make a horrible journalist. I feel anger. The anger of being judged by a stranger. Even if that stranger has a point. That point also flies in the face of my ‘no contact’ plan.

“Unless she’s abusive,” Judy adds after I say nothing to this.

“No, not abusive,” I say. “Just…” What? Manipulative? Sure. Exhausting? Needy? Worse. A warning. A contagion. I can’t turn out like her.

“What are you two talking about over here? You look so serious!” Mikka Malibu finds  us at last. Peering around, the rest of the room has emptied out. Empty chairs. Mikka. Judy. Me.

It’s Judy that asks the question.

“Mikka, have you, um, lost touch with any family members?” Judy’s face is open, honest.

The starlet doesn’t hesitate.

“Oh, sure!” Mikka is still bubbly, even when divulging this loss. She tosses her perfect chestnut hair over her shoulder, then continues. “My parents tried to talk me out of going on that show. They begged me not to go! Now look at me!” She strikes a pose, hands on hips, chin to the side, inviting us to literally look at her. Impressive, sure. Perhaps the best money can buy, I can’t help but wonder behind an arched brow.

“Did your parents come around?”

“Who knows? Haven’t talked to them in years,” Mikka says with a shrug. “C’mon, you guys are going to be late for dinner!” With that, she bounces out the door.

I’m still contemplating all of this when I notice Judy looking at me. She has a queer look on her face.

“Would you want to get coffee with me sometime? As friends?”

“Umm —”

“I need the practice,” she hurries on, sounding desperate. “I don’t have any friends outside of this room. None to speak of, anyway. And you’re about my daughter’s age. Maybe if you and I can…” Her body hunches over again, blond hair sliding across her face as she recedes. “Never mind. Dumb idea.” She shoos it away, a hand in the air.

“You need practice talking to a normal person?”

She laughs at this. Then sobers. “Yeah, I guess that’s it.” She chews the flesh of her lower lip, rolling it between her teeth.

We exchange numbers and promise we’ll keep in touch. I’m not sure we will. I don’t stay for the dinner. Or dancing. I ride the escalator back up to ground level without incident. I have no clue what I’m going to write for this story, but my gut says that I’m going to be surprised by my own writing for the first time in a long time.

Walking out of the hotel, the earth feels different. The skies are still swirling green-gray and spitting sideways. The tornado hasn’t leveled any buildings, but the town looks messy all the same, downed tree limbs and overturned trash cans. I head to my car, then drive toward the hospital. If I hurry, I can catch the tail-end of visiting hours.

Christmas for Vegetarians

Paul Curley

It’s Christmas Eve, and we arrived at my in-laws’ house one winter ale ago.

Every other year is a St. Louis Christmas. Lindy grew up here, so she doesn’t go crazy over snow the way the kids and I do. On the way from the airport, we rubbernecked at the stuff that had been plowed to the side of the highway, remnants from a recent storm. It was grayish, but it was snow. I half expected our son, Max, to say something like, This snow sucks the big one, but he didn’t. Lindy was quiet on the drive, the kind of quiet that comes from worry. This is our first trip to St. Louis since Max became a behavior kid, as the principal called him. Lindy briefed her parents on the phone, but they haven’t seen one of his outbursts. As we pulled into their subdivision, Max and our daughter, Junie, oohed and aahed at the replica gas streetlamps, which were decked with real pine garlands and red bows. The islands of snow on the lawns and the reefs of ice along the edges of the ponds added that special touch.

Christmas in Oakland is sixty degrees and smells like eucalyptus. As a kid, I’d wake to fog and fantasize that it was a blizzard. I fell in love with the cliché. Inside, a fire crackling in the stone hearth while outside bitter winds whip up a whiteout so treacherous that a loved one might not make it for Christmas dinner. It’s a fantasy that I’ve promoted with the kids. This year, by Thanksgiving, we had already seen the holiday commercials with brawny Clydesdales hauling the Budweiser coach past the Arch on a snowy night, their breath coming in steamy bursts. Max and Junie listed all of their favorite traditions at Nana and Papa’s house, and we scoured the extended forecast for snow. We celebrated when a snowflake first popped up on the weather app for Christmas. A few days ago, the forecast was for a foot or more, and when we left for the airport this morning, they were still calling for three to five inches.

We arrived one winter ale ago, and our white Christmas has become iffy. From my in-laws’ family room couch, my view of the woods through the French doors has faded, replaced by reflections of the tree lights, the flicker of the fire, and us humans. If I work hard enough, I can conjure a Norman Rockwell painting. Lindy’s dad is in his armchair by the fireplace and Junie is on her belly in front of the Christmas tree, where she’s playing with the nativity set. Her candy cane socks swing in and out of the lowest windowpanes. Lindy is sitting on the other end of the couch, and Max is between us. I raise my beer to Lindy’s reflection and she raises hers right back. She’s relieved because Max didn’t lose his shit on the plane, and Max is brooding because of course he is.

He asks Lindy’s dad, “Papa, is it still supposed to snow tonight?”

Lindy’s dad looks away from Jeopardy on the TV. “Just might. We’re on the rain-snow line so we’ll have to wait and see.” He launches into a tedious explanation of cold fronts and high-pressure ridges.

Patty, Lindy’s mom, walks in from the kitchen with her manhattan and sits alone on the loveseat. When even Max has stopped listening, Patty says to her husband, “Lloyd, nobody cares.”

Lloyd turns his attention back to Jeopardy, but a smile lingers on his face.

Junie twists onto her side in front of the Christmas tree and scrunches up her nose to adjust her glasses. Her top front teeth are at different stages of coming in, like two window shades that aren’t pulled even. She holds up a piece from the nativity set. “What happened to Donkey’s ear, Nana?”

“Your mom dropped it when she was about your age,” Patty says. With a nearly imperceptible movement of the wrist, she whirls her drink around the large cube in her tumbler. Her eyes flit from Junie to Lloyd, who’s still smiling at Jeopardy.  If he has resting smiley face, Patty has resting fear-that-her-husband-is-dimming-too-fast face.

“Mom, that was David who dropped the donkey, not me.” There’s an edge to Lindy’s voice. Patty has a way of editing her son out of family stories.

“Lloyd, turn that damn thing off and stop smiling, you look goofy,” Patty says. “Alexa, play Christmas music.”

As I’ll Be Home for Christmas comes on, Lloyd lowers the TV volume just enough, and I know two things: one, he doesn’t mean to smile, and two, Patty wishes Alexa could wipe it off his face.

Something familiar comes over me. It’s been creeping into my Christmas fantasy slow and unseen like a warm front until I’m finally in it. It’s the feeling that Oh yeah, it’s like this. Now I see that it started as soon as we walked into the house. We entered through the utility room, just off the kitchen. The smells of Patty’s famous red sauce and fresh baked bread meshed with my fantasy, as did the gingerbread cookies cooling on the counter. Patty made a fuss with kisses and hugs, a kitchen towel flung over her shoulder. But then she said, “We’re having ravioli tonight, I assume you’re all still vegetarian,” as though being vegetarian were an affliction that should have passed by now, like a cold or a rash. Lindy and I have been vegetarian since college, the kids since birth.  So yeah, it’s like this.

Junie holds up the ceramic crib of hay. “Nana, where’s the baby?”

“We’ll put baby Jesus in the manger tomorrow morning, honey.”

“Who’s Jesus?” Junie says.

We prepped her on the plane, we really did, but she doesn’t take to the Catholic cram sessions the way Max used to.

Patty swirls the last of her manhattan, gulps it down. We’re between songs, the room now quiet enough that we can hear the Final Jeopardy music. I’m anxious about what might come next. Could be an uncomfortable catechism lesson, or maybe she’ll browbeat Lloyd for not turning the TV off, or for still smiling.

Instead, she places her glass on the coffee table and lowers herself to the rug next to Junie. She points to Mary in the nativity set. Who’s this? Then Joseph. Patty answers her own questions because Junie can’t. Lloyd looks on with his smile.

If Patty’s aggravated, it’s with Lindy and me, but she’s lovely with Junie. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree kicks up. “Alexa, louder,” Patty says. “May I have this dance, Missy?” Soon she’s leading Junie in the twist in front of the tree. Junie jumps around, so Patty shows her how to twist from the hips. She pivots away from Junie and extends a hand to Max.

Max rolls away from Patty’s invitation and faces Lindy, his cheek pressed into the back of the couch. “Can I go upstairs and play Minecraft?” he asks.

“We just got here,” Lindy says.

“We didn’t just get here. I don’t see why I can’t play.”

“Because I said no.” Lindy looks at me with OH MY GOD eyes. Here, Lindy feels like her parenting is under constant appraisal by her mother, which makes her less patient and more given to power struggles. At home, we’d let him play Minecraft. His case manager at school green-lighted it as a way for Max to take charge of his own emotional regulation.

“That’s stupid. Can we at least change the music?” Max asks.

Lindy squeezes Max’s leg and whisper-scolds him. “Maxwell David, you will be polite in Nana and Papa’s house.”

“Hey Max, go check the temp,” I say.

He walks around the coffee table, past Junie and Patty’s twist to the digital monitor next to the French doors. “Thirty-four degrees.” The way he says it signals that my redirection might backfire.

As Lloyd again explains the rain-snow line for the approaching system, Max buries his fists deep into his pockets, then walks behind the loveseat. He says, “Alexa, play rap.” By the time Kendrick Lamar’s Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe comes on, I can hear his footfalls on the stairs. Lindy starts to get up but I beat her to it.

I run my palm along the sharp tips of plastic holly on the banister, a satisfying mix of scratches and tickles. At the landing, I stop to look at the school portraits of Lindy and David. When we arrived this afternoon, Junie grabbed Max by the hand and led him here. One of their traditions. Lindy and I walked up with the bags as Junie was studying David’s pictures. “Mom, are you sad?” she asked. “Sometimes, but it was a long time ago,” said Lindy. Same question, same answer every visit, like the script of our own Christmas pageant.

In Junie’s simple view, if something happens once it must be tradition, implying that it will inevitably happen again. That thought makes me well with tears as I study one of David’s middle school pictures. I’ve stood here countless times over the years and wondered all sorts of things about David, who I never got the chance to meet. As I stare into his defiant blue eyes, I feel like I understand him better, because now Max has those same eyes.

Christmas decorations end at the landing. I find Max sitting in the dark in David’s old room, where St. Louis Cardinals pennants still hang on the wall. He is kicking his feet out, then letting his heels bang against the side rail of the bed. He doesn’t acknowledge me when I sit next to him and wrap my arm around his rigid shoulders.

“OK, dude, what’s up? All you could talk about for weeks was how excited you were for this trip.”

“So?” He won’t look at me.

“So did anything happen?”

“You think I want to feel like this?”

“How do you feel?”

“Mad, because Mom won’t let me play Minecraft. She’s treating me like crap.”

“Can you understand Mom wanting everyone to be together right now?”

Max starts to speak but stops himself.

“What? You can say it.”

“You don’t get it.”

“What, Max? Tell me what I don’t get.”

He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, then finally looks at me. For someone who hates being in trouble, he has such a hard time just saying sorry. Six months ago, this was the point when he would melt into me and bawl. Now he fixes his steely eyes on mine and says, “Shit bastard crap bitch tit butt boob shit.”

When it first happened, it was funny because he’s only eleven years old, but it was also terrifying because he’s only eleven years old. Lindy and I don’t yet know how to respond to it, even in our own house. I tell him he’s not to play Minecraft and I leave him there in the dark. My spirit drops with each step down the stairs, past David and Lindy’s school portraits, and back into Christmas.

 A plate of ravioli with red sauce steams in front of each of us in the dining room. After Lloyd says grace, he sends the breadbasket around the table, first to Lindy and me, then to Patty at the end closest to the kitchen, and finally to Junie and Max, who are facing the bay window so that they can watch for snow in the glow of the streetlights.

Junie tears a chunk of French bread from the soft middle, slides out of her chair and faces Max. She stiffens her body and tries to make her voice deep. “Body of Christ,” she says.

Max giggles and obediently opens his mouth. He’s a puzzle; for reasons that even he doesn’t understand, his mood has reset. If only it were as easy as saying, Alexa, play happy Max.

Lindy is nervous about her mother’s reaction, but Patty is smiling at this game of old-fashioned communion, as the kids call it. She must see it as hope that her influence may be enough to make her grandkids Catholic. I see it as a kind of tourism, like on our honeymoon when Lindy and I spun prayer wheels at temples in Thailand. It didn’t make us Buddhist.

In Oakland, Lindy belongs to a renegade Catholic community led by a female pastor. This tenuous connection to Catholicism is to please her parents, the only reason we put Max through First Communion training. When I objected, Lindy said, “Come on Tim,” which meant Can’t you just do this one little thing for them?

Max’s turn as priest. Junie eats the bread, then asks, “Can I eat the bread at your church, Nana?”

“Nope, you can’t,” Patty says.

“But I eat it at ours.”

“It’s consecrated at Nana and Papa’s church,” Lindy says.

I say, “The priest union pays God a hefty sum to only give men the magic,” which draws a scowl from Lindy.

Junie looks at Patty with a look of utter confusion.

“Consecration turns the bread into the body of Christ,” explains Patty.

“Who’s Christ?”

Max places his palms over his ears as though to keep his brains from boiling out. “He’s Jesus, dummy. Jesus Christ?” He turns to Patty. “So they mean it literally?”

“I believe so,” says Patty.

Patty explains transubstantiation, but Junie has moved on. “Body of Mr. Christ for you,” she says to Lloyd, who holds out his cupped hands until Junie makes him stick out his tongue.

With a furrowed brow, Max stares at his fingers, splayed on the lace tablecloth in front of him. “So then it’s meat.”

Lindy flashes her eyes wide at me, then tells Max, “No, Nana didn’t mean that.”

Patty looks the length of the table to her husband. “So now our grandchildren can’t be Catholic because they’re vegetarian.”

Junie walks around Lloyd, past Lindy and me, to Patty, who crab-claws Junie in the side. “I guess Santa must be a vegetable, because you sure like him.”

Lindy’s crying in bed. “I don’t know how to parent him anymore,” she says. “I feel like such a failure.” Max has long been the family mood setter, but he especially gets to Lindy. Especially in this house.

We were just talking about how nicely the night had ended with the kids. Even Max giggled as they performed their snow rituals — a spoon placed in the freezer, ice flushed down the toilet in the half bath off the kitchen, pajamas worn inside out. We laughed at Max asking for the hundredth time whether we think it’s going to snow. We were keeping it positive. I didn’t tell Lindy how the look in Max’s eyes spooked me, as though he needs the snow in order to believe in anything else — in God, Christmas, even in his own happiness. That look would be easier to dismiss if it weren’t for David. It used to be easier for me to tell Lindy that everything’s going to be OK, but tonight I’m having a hard time believing it myself, and all I can do is hold her.

The first thing I see when I open my eyes Christmas morning is the yellow Cabbage Patch alarm clock on the bedside table. I try to imagine that I had looked at it thousands of childhood mornings as Lindy had. The long strings of unremarkable school mornings, cartoon Saturdays, church Sundays and summer sleep-ins, interrupted only occasionally by the memorable ones, like when she woke with the stomach flu on her eighth birthday, or her junior year in high school, the morning after the St. Joe’s carnival where Lindy made out with her longtime crush Matt Dupree. And of course, the morning when police officers held their hats in the foyer as they broke the worst news.

I rapidly open and close my eyes as though seeing the yellow clock over and over will magically add mornings, and I might feel more at home here, more like this is my family and that David is my loss, too. After I add a few weeks’ worth of mornings, I remember the possibility of snow, slip out of bed and pull back the curtain. Green grass and wet pavement.

 The rows empty one by one into the center aisle for communion. We had to sit near the back of church, which prompted Patty to complain about the twicers who attend only on Christmas and Easter.

Max is sitting between Lindy and me. He tells Lindy again that he doesn’t want communion. He had cornered us in the bathroom before we left for mass, and I told him he didn’t have to, but I was quickly overruled by Lindy, who asked Max to do it for Nana and Papa.

It’s a mistake to force Max to take communion, but whenever Lindy asks if we can just do something for her parents, whatever that something is, it’s as though I lack the standing to object because it’s her parents who lost so much, not mine.

We stand for communion when the pew in front of ours is nearly empty. Max tugs on Lindy’s arm and says, “But it’s meat.”

Lindy tells him, “If you don’t do it, you can’t play Minecraft the rest of the trip.”

That would punish all of us.

Junie says too loudly, “I’ll have Max’s bread.”

“Church voice,” I tell her.

Junie and I follow the others into the center aisle. At the altar, I let go of her hand to receive the host from Father Dressler, then have to steer her by the shoulders to the side aisle when she sticks out her tongue for old-fashioned communion.

We catch up to Max and Lindy in front of the series of stained-glass windows, where Max is standing still, a hand cupped to his mouth.

“I got a bone!” he says.

“That’s not possible,” Lindy whispers.

Max gags, then says, “I did too!” He’s not using his church voice.

I can feel people stacking up behind us, and Lindy’s eyes betray her panic that Max is about to start cussing. I put my hand on his back. “Let’s go see if it’s snowing.”

We send a squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak as we step onto a patch of brown grass at the edge of the parking lot. It’s not snowing, but the bite in the air is promising. Max’s closed fist encases the partly masticated host like an acorn shell. He must wish he could make the whole episode disappear.

“Why did Mom do that to me?” he says.

“Let’s have a look.” I tap his fist with my finger.

He opens his hand, displays the glob on his flat palm.

“Oh yeah, I see it,” I say, pointing to the edge of the bread. “What do you think it is?”

Max looks confused.

“A finger bone? A toe?” I ask.

He smiles. “Maybe his nose.”

“That’s gross, right?” The squirrel is back on the ground, scavenging in jerky movements among the wet leaves and cracked acorn shells. “I wonder if squirrels eat meat.”

Max likes this kind of mischief. Two steps toward the squirrel, he holds his hand in the air. “Body of Christ,” he says. He flicks his hand away from his body, and the wet host plumps to the ground.

 After the gift opening, the kids stay by the tree as adults move to the kitchen.

Patty sends Lloyd to the basement to fetch hash browns from the chest freezer, and Lindy is at the island putting the finishing touches on an egg frittata. Her dead silence tells me that she’s pissed.

Max had scowled at the heavy rain through the French doors as we opened gifts. It would’ve been epic snow had the cold front pushed a little farther south. Papa played Santa. “To Max from Nana and Papa.” Max received the gift from Papa’s outstretched arms, and Lindy tried to keep her own voice merry, she really did. “I wonder what it could be,” she said in a tone that better suited Junie’s age than Max’s. He tore back the wrapping paper only until he saw what it was, a Mandalorian Starfighter Lego set that he already has. “Oh well, I’m sure we can exchange it,” Lindy said. When he tossed it aside like it was trash, it was all Lindy could do to keep herself together. “Say thank you,” she ordered. Max complied, but made no eye contact with Nana and Papa.

Now I peer out the window over the kitchen sink. Raindrops bounce off the hood of the car in the driveway. Come on, a good snow would go a long way right now.

Suddenly the rain becomes heavier and the drops look thicker, maybe a wintry mix, and before I can stop myself, I call, “Max, check it out!”

He runs into the kitchen and leans over the sink on tiptoes. His eyes search and search for any sign of hope in the downpour. Please, I plead with the rain. Finally, Max sets his heels back onto the floor and says, “I don’t see dick.”

Lindy, who’s been grating cheese with her back to the window, spins and grabs Max by the arm. Before I know it, they’re gone and the door to the half bath slams shut. I look outside again. Rain, that’s all it is. My bad.

Lloyd comes up from the basement with the hash browns and Patty is now next to the sink, drying a counter that doesn’t need to be dried. From the bathroom comes Lindy’s voice, whisper yelling but no discernible words, then Max’s decibels, words like bitch, shit, dick, and ass. Lloyd and Patty stare at each other — not even Lloyd is smiling now. I realize that they’ve seen this before, their grief now etched on their faces.

The bathroom door opens. Lindy wipes her cheeks with both palms as she beelines to me. “I just can’t,” she says.

“Ah, Hon,” I wrap her in my arms.

Lloyd sets the hash browns on the counter and walks to the bathroom. In a booming voice that I hardly recognize as his, he says, “Maxwell David, come with me!”

Lindy lifts her head from my chest, her face a question mark. Before we know it, the back door slams shut. We move to the window and stand on either side of Patty. Max and Lloyd walk onto the driveway and get into the front seat of the car.

“What in the Sam Hill?” Patty says. Her fingers are curled over the front edge of the sink.

Lloyd seems to be yelling. It’s the strain in his eyes and the sharp forward movement of his shoulders and chin, hurling pent up words like stones at the windshield. Max is frozen, his gaze downcast as though looking for an escape hatch in the floor. I wish I understood his hurt and how to stop it. I can’t hear Lloyd, but I want more than anything for him to stop yelling and to leave Max the fuck alone. Next thing I know, Max is yelling too, his body bouncing on the seat with each movement of his mouth.

That’s when it comes — a sloppy mix that quickly transitions to snowflakes the size of golf balls, the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen. I reach across the sink and slide the window open. The snow makes no sound as it instantly starts collecting on the grass. The only sound comes from inside the car, a torrent of obscenities from both Lloyd and Max. Damn, ass, shit dick, butt, boob — midlevel swear words. Their faces are partially obscured by snowflakes sliding down the windshield, but there’s no mistaking their enormous smiles.

Patty slips her arm through mine. She’s locked arms with Lindy too, tears rolling down their faces, both crying, both laughing. Then I start in. It may be as fleeting as our white Christmas, once the rain-snow line bends the other way, but for now I feel that everything is going to be OK.

A promise or Warning

Arno Bohlmeijer

As crooked as beautiful, the naturist area is cleverly sheltered, but never deserted. Forest Lake has full green banks and coves among miles of woods and fields. Motorboats are not allowed, and the parking lots are out of sight.

On divinely quiet days the odd cyclist or hiker will roam and retreat. On public holidays fun-makers are clumsy in hired rowing boats, on surfboards and plastic waterbeds, tumbling and shrieking ‘from far’, with peeks at the nude people, who may venture through the fences of plants and reeds. Careful, don’t lead ‘visitors’ into weird temptation! A glimpse of a tanned bum or “something even better” can drive them hysteric.

Inexperienced windsurfers are amusing, when a breeze brings them to this haven by accident, and their shyness is visible, trying to steer away, swaying on their wet bare legs, especially when swim pants are sagging from all the antics, and no hands are available to pull them up. Headstrong eyes can stray, unless they get stuck in a makeshift little path through the reeds.

Today it’s an oasis of warmth and peace with half a dozen others: two couples and a man who does forceful backstrokes, his body glistening and splattering on the line of water and sunshine.

All is perfect, until voices come pealing over the lake, from swimmers who have no idea how loud and far sounds are carried and amplified over water. They must have swum a mighty distance without island or lifeguard, now puffing and crying out – after losing the way or aiming for this patch?

Four bobbing heads follow the fragments of male voices. “Naked... A break... Take them off... Go back... Sorry... A desert island... Allowed... Sticking together...”

Guilty giggles are smothered by their panting and masculine gasping.

“I can touch the bottom here.”

“Thank God.”

“Just sit and pause.”

“Or have a proper break.”

They tiptoe onto a strip of sand and roughness at the foot of my bushy bank. They clamber up among the shrubs into this mini community, who read, draw, doze, and take spins into the woods or the water.

It’s gratifying how they sit down timorously with their backs toward the six of us. We continue our fine times, and those four young men lie low on the grass or a log and tree trunk, in their soaking swim pants, whispering and looking away. Their gleaming backs will only be turned for boldly wondering glances over the tired shoulders.

They prove to be bright and polite athletes, their shining bodies full of strength and promise. What are they: A-level or College students? They appear to appreciate our friendly or let-be manner, and two handsome ones advance into the revealing sunshine — because they need to get warm?

The taller one gazes my way, shies aside, looks a bit more. He gets up and saunters along the shallow part of the water, first with a dropped head, then watching me again over the lower shrubs, not sneakily, but short instances. He moves a log and throws a pebble, side-stepping some plants.

As he paddles in my direction, I give him a smile of solidarity, or consent, or general content. He wades back — half reassured? — and moves loosely, even when he walks on a sharp twig, which he picks up and flicks into a bush, ‘baseball style’.

As he squats down, turned away, I might stroll over by the bank, not to stir their nerves or mine, but to have a congenial chat, for example about the distance they’ve swum —

Have you trained for this? Was it longer than you thought? Are you afraid to return? Do you know how deep the lake is? Let me get you something to drink or eat. Come and have a rest on the dry grass – my patch. Keep the muscles warm; watch out for cramps! I’ve got spare towels. Are you fit enough to swim back so soon? If this wasn’t the plan, you might prefer to go on foot and skirt the lake. There’s a pretty path, I can show you the way to a picturesque bridge...

 Perhaps the one of them would gladly accept that, and I’d love to accompany him along some secluded bush tracks. What shall I wear or not wear?

But respectfully I stay put, keeping my eyes on them, and regretfully they leave a few minutes later. Getting to their lithe feet, they stretch the rested limbs, shake them awake and take deep breaths, for the return crossing.

My special anonymous friend is tarrying — it’s barely noticeable — and I wave a hand with a nod, which could mean anything. See you next time! He takes a while and puts a hand up with a smile — faint or gut-warming. Is he waiting for me to persuade him?

He may find the way back here someday, on foot or all wet again. I’m bitterly mad at myself, brooding over missed opportunities. Why didn’t I stall or delay, to slip a note into his thick hair and smile: keep it dry! Or memorize my number — a nice challenge.

In hindsight I’m sure there was a rare and enticing depth of mind and emotion! Ah, why did I have to be so careful or considerate and slow? Alright, let’s enjoy some prospect rather than staying cross.

Apparently this angry madness of mine is bad energy attracting worse: new tumult on the lake is horribly different, stupidly crude. From losers or bullies? Three weak he-men in their childish twenties are pedalling a dingy, heading for ‘the juicy nudies’ and not masking their mood. They roar and fall from raucous fun. ‘Better watch our flesh, guys, or they’ll have it raw.’

I don’t think they can see us yet, but they’re clearly taking care that every word is heard, as if rehearsing a farce performance for the stage of mystery desert islanders —

“Come on then, beauties of nature, give us some skin! That’s what you’re here for, right?”

They double up and topple into the water with shrieks of ‘fear’, to scramble their ways back into the wobbly dingy, producing extra ugly noise.

Previous peace has turned in its grave. Feeling safe as a group at a shrewd distance, they drama-dare one another and slip their trunks off, hiccupping with jittery snickering. They hold their crotches, make monkey sounds and give Tarzan yells. Next they pull up their tawdry pants again and ‘sigh from relief’, crying out —

“Can we take your picture, please?”

“Very artistic! And not for TikTok, trust us!”

“Or we’ll get you on The Net as large as life! I’ll be your very personal agent.”

Are they drunk or something? They stumble overboard again, but now their feet find the bottom and take a few steps toward the “savage” shore. One of them comes quite close, another clings to the boat, pulling it ineptly.

My vexation on the rebound could reach boiling point, caged for brief ice-coldness. I walk to my mates in fate and say in a muffled voice: “We can go and teach them. The six of us against three, all feeble from their phoney fun…”

We could be helped by the element of surprise, but it’ll need to be quick and drastic, overwhelming. We’ll improvize and trust our team spirit.

I pretend to have a tentative swim, playing timid and fearful, testing the ‘cold water’, going past the first ‘mark’, to skirt the second and steal behind the boat.

They’re caught off guard alright. My dare-devil act gives them opportunities too good to be true! Maybe they’re pitying me as an easy prey. But no longer one front, they begin to realize their disadvantage for each to act separately.

Seeing my moves, the athlete on the grass gets up. He doesn’t follow me, he heads for the other side of the intruders inconspicuously, to slip into the lake and swim a bypass to the young man in the middle. The nearest one is growing uneasy, throwing bewildered looks here and there.

As my target has been red-herringed, I walk up to him and say, “Keep still, or I’ll slit the boat.”

He might laugh in my face or raise hell, so I add, “I’ve brought a pen knife, and it’s pretty sharp.” I click it open. “Even if it won’t survive the boat-stabbing, it would have served a good purpose, fully worth it.”

After a small if telling swallow, he could protest fiercely, so I beat him to it and sneer, “Shut up or call my bluff.”

What’s there to lose? I would actually be capable of slashing the rubber thing to shreds, and he seems to know it. Of course it might ruin my future place in this idyllic refuge. But I’m not exactly being rational. I was too much of that before, and look where it got me!

“Alright,” I growl with more and more confidence, “you’ve made it to the naturist patch – congrats! You can act accordingly now, so feel free to take your clothes off and put them in the boat.”

As he’s gasping and goggling, I proceed. “What’s up, you did aim for this beach and stopped here, correct? So what’s the fuss? It’s no big deal anyhow, since you’re up to your waist in water, and there’s nothing much to see in the first place, is there. Save the boat and be a hero!”

The knife underlines the possibility and makes it all feasible.

After freezing, then brushing his sweaty forehead, he takes the shorts off and throws them insecurely. Then he doesn’t know where to leave his hands or himself.

My partner in crime can see what’s going on. He makes for the second guy and gets both his arms, while the two couples have reached the front man, who struggles courageously before being restrained.

All three are invited to step ashore, helped by the mere sight of my scissors. Here they sit now, crouching to cover some parts that are not used to broad daylight at all.

“So,” I smile, “you were eager to join us and you’ve achieved that; well done! How does it feel?”

They don’t know what to do first: shrug and look down, fume and smile, hide what they can... Our group resolve tells them it’s no use to put up a fight.

“OK, folks, you wanted to be the center of attention, and here you are! Why try to make yourselves small? And what about us: are we as expected and hoped for? Come on, have a proper look!”

Some of us prance around like rookie models, swaying our hips theatrically.

In a casual voice I go on. “At least you won’t be needing these here.”

We throw the clothes into the boat. “Shall we set it adrift? Hm, not quite sure yet. Would you make it back swimming all the way?”

My colleague actors pick up their lines —

“How long are you staying for? You haven’t brought any food or towels, but you know what, we eat the grass here. We’re completely primitive, as you presumed, back to rough basics. Be our guests!”

“Yes, do make yourselves at home. You can stretch on the lush field and let every inch of your big-boy bodies absorb the warmth to the full. It will help!”

“We have all the time in the world. Some of your flesh has never felt the sunshine before, as far as I can see. So make the best of it, really invigorating. The all-permeating air contains piles of vitamins, for your physical and mental strength. Keep it up, gentlemen! What are your names?”

They’re too rattled or angry to answer.

“Or are you dying for some exercise?” the athlete suggests.

He continues under my admiring eyes. “Would you care to go for a run or do some tough men’s yoga? Sure, knock yourselves out. Here’s an example, this pose is called ‘the warrior’, really suitable for you, see: strong and proud. Just follow and focus, feel the muscles glowing — for the first time in your life, is it? Where’s your stamina? Not collapsing already, are we? Come on, get the satisfaction, let’s hear the body squeak or creak. If you keep it up, you might swim back after all, maybe later today, after a reviving stay here, rather than a ride by ambulance.”

“You’re not going anywhere soon, are you? We’ll fetch some food.”

They’ve grown meek from stress or pleasure. We can gather plenty of rolls and sandwiches, with snacks and drinks.

My sarcasm of vengeance is nearly spent. “Did you know: picnics are extra good in the nude. What are your names?”

“Darren.”

Who blinks.

“Wesley.”

Who sniffs and wipes his brow.

“Dave.”

He seems close to tears, perhaps from sheer relief or excitement.

Obedient or really hungry, Darren reaches for a sandwich and bends over quite close to me, needing a moment to choose from the abundant food. Then he leans back to enjoy it.

His mates watch him with mixed feelings, but when they’re offered goodies by one of the couples, they can’t refuse. Nor can they turn away now, and we all dig in like a dysfunctional family having a try-out of normality, with furtive glances here and frankness there.

After a gulp from a cooled can, I hand it to Dave, next to me, and he drinks it almost eagerly, as if the weirdness or desire can be washed away.

Outdoors, food can be so good that heavy things are lightened, and the majority of us are eating almost happily — dumbfounded by a reflective perspective?

In the end I’m not over-ambiguous, “About your clothes, they’re still soaked. We should’ve hung them on branches. But maybe it’s been worth it?”

The three musketeers gaze down the lake, where the dingy is floating away, taking the clothes. They jump to their feet and start running for it, but then they clearly remember their state of Adamness and know it’s a lost case anyway.

Unable to act, they wait here with a half-hearted laugh, between madness and mockery and surrender — to what? The strong but powerless bodies are trying to sink into the earth or keep up their firmness and dignity.

I bite my tongue on a thought: Hey Darren, let’s film this, only for personal use, not for Facebook or YouTube, as you said — trust me. I can’t stand the massive ego-bragging there.

If need be, in their no-shoes, would I dare go the miles around the lake naked, hopping from a sheltering tree to a covering bush, across open fields? Would I run into the police, unsuspecting hikers or sunbathers, or my true and new friend from earlier, returning for me?

Alive in the Real World

Summer Hammond

“You didn’t want me to come tonight.”

Jess takes the air out of the space between us. You can almost hear the hiss, like one of the tires sprung a leak.

“What?” I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. “I never said that.”

“You in-boxed me.”

I compose my face, focusing on the road, although it doesn’t require much attention. We’re on one of those coastal North Carolina roads, an asphalt arrow pointed straight to the sea, flanked by thick stands of pine. The pines here are like alien creatures, not at all like the ones we left behind in upstate New York. Upstate pines are thick and solid, iconic Christmas card types. North Carolina pines are skinny, bare, until they branch at the top, a cloudlike poof of needles. Longleafs, they’re called.

“What are you thinking about, Daniel?”

“The pines,” I say. “Three years here, and I’m still not used to them.”

“Ah.” She turns to the window.

In-box. A term she coined while enduring a dead-end job hunt. She says, with the Master of Fine Arts on her resumé, employers expect a young woman, an arty and hip twenty-something with a sleek ponytail and black frame glasses. When Jess walks in, forty-five with smile lines and her wild mane of salt and pepper curls, she says their eyes go wide. Even as they stand, shake her hand, ask questions about her teaching background and writing pursuits, respond with warmth, interest, taking notes, nodding and smiling as she speaks, they in-box her: Not you.

Jess says, it’s not just hiring managers, almost everyone does it, says one thing while feeling another. According to her, our guts are the in-box where we receive the truth. We’re all psychic, Jess says. We know what people are thinking, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.

I can’t say if she’s onto something with this theory, or if it’s her way to make sense of the relentless rejection she’s faced these past few months. Or maybe it’s magical thinking, a seemingly unshakeable product of our upbringing in fundamentalist religion, something that will forever mess with our heads.

She’s right though, about one thing.

I didn’t want her to come tonight.

 “This place has almost 1300 reviews and 4.5 stars.” Jess peers at her phone as we’re ushered past the flowered-and-neon line of beachy tourists waiting for a table at Bangkok by the Sea. “How come we’ve never been here?”

“No idea,” I answer. Then I side-eye her, wary. Ping! Did her gut receive it? First you were wrapped up in grad school and writing your book, then lately, all the disappointment, the despair, a millstone tied to your neck — ours.

The restaurant is a sensory deluge, like one of those flea markets crammed with knick-knacks, only here, it’s like everything has been pilfered from a Buddhist temple. Fat golden gods smile out from every nook and cranny, cross-legged, serenely watching college girls in tank tops shake up cocktails. Tourists in various degrees of swimwear cram together at long, candlelit tables, their kids dashing around, flip flops slapping at their heels. Sand on the floor, under the tables, gritty beneath my shoes.

“Your party is seated in the garden.” The host glances at us as we follow him past wooden booths painted scarlet, candles flickering behind bamboo dividers, and more gods and goddesses, an endless parade of them. Ganesha, Shiva, Kali pressed shoulder to shoulder in frozen poses, an awkward clique. Even they are dusted in sand. Someone’s dressed Kali in a bikini and painted the human head she holds bright pink, so she looks, with her wheeling arms, like the goddess of death, destruction, and beach volleyball.

These days, I can appreciate the humor. But there was a time when I could not have stomached this place, believing a demon attached to every false idol.

I check with Jess. She’s looking up and around, her eyes wide and bright, lips parted. Twenty years ago when we met, me a divinity student in Albany, and Jess, packing her bags for Guatemala and a lifetime of missionary work, we would have swiveled in unison at the first sight of Buddha and walked out.

We were the kids who did not doubt, did not rebel, completely bought into our faith — gung-ho zealots.

You never stop feeling the shock waves when your whole world is exposed as an elaborate yet hollow monument, carved in deception. And every new freedom, rippling down through the years, is a revelation.

The garden is even more flamboyant, if that’s possible: orange, red, and purple paper lanterns strung between palm trees, light shimmering on table tops, faces, leaves, and a commotion of flowering tropical plants, the kind that thrive here on the coast, wide and spiky flowers, vivid yellows and pinks, matching the table where the host motions for us to sit. My coworkers scoot over to make room. “Daniel!” “Hey, Daniel!” “Daniel, over here!”

I feel like the cool kid arriving to the party, fist bumps all around. The warmth in feeling seen, known, welcomed, and embraced floods my chest. I don’t have to wonder the last time I experienced this level of belonging. Kingdom Gate Assemblies of God, the 1990’s, when I was youth leader, on my way to becoming pastor.

 Rob says, “Here, buddy, sit!” pulling out a chair beside him. He’s the senior estimator at Coastal Waterwork Supply. Tonight, he’s decked out in a hibiscus print shirt and pink flamingo shorts. I have never seen him wear shorts and, in truth, didn’t think it was possible. His long gray beard swishes in the breeze and even it looks relaxed and festive, like it could jump up and salsa down the middle of the restaurant.

Jess sits, and her trademark natural curls glow in lantern light, her skin like a warm fire. In three years, this is the first time she’s accompanied me to a work function. While writing her book, she could not be persuaded to leave her desk. It was strange, awkward, to show up without her, but as I explained to my colleagues on multiple occasions, my wife was committed, totally engrossed in the pursuit of her dream. While they’d smiled, said polite things, I was in-boxed: what kind of wife lets her husband go by himself to a company dinner?

Tonight, they finally get to find out. I take a breath.

Jess leans in, shaking hands, introducing herself. She wears her most radiant smile, looking happy, almost content. I cast an eye around for Josh Owens, and when I don’t see him — exhale.

 “Cool place, eh?” Rob says, taking a sip from a frozen martini. It’s purple. The glass rim is sugared and even the sugar is purple. The last thing I’d expect Rob to have — aside from pink flamingo shorts. Almost sixty, he lives with his mother, and while he’s an immense asset to the company, he complains about every breath he takes, each one, pressing on one of his many pains: the kidney stones, his blood pressure, misaligned vertebrae, the moronic engineers, stupid people in general. When I tell Jess about him, she says, “Does he ever talk about what’s really going on?” No — God no. And I sure don’t ask, though Jess probably would.

Rob tugs his beard, tilts his head to the side. “We got the best view. Lakeside!” He gestures to the left.

The moment I look over, a koi jumps from a pond, body arcing, a brilliant orange flash. Everyone laughs as another jumps, then another. Each splash, sending up a spray of water.

“It’s like SeaWorld over here!” Martin bellows, removing his glasses, wiping them with the edge of his shirt.

“They must know we’re in the waterworks biz.” Pat winks, to a flurry of groans.

“Nice one,” I say.

Pat slides Jess and I a menu. “May I recommend the fish?”

Another laugh, and it’s shaping up to be a nice night after all.

Martin clears his throat, sets his glasses on his nose. “There now, let me get a look at Daniel’s young lady. Jess, is it?” Martin’s the company truck driver, spends most of the day on the road, hauling pipe and hydrants. He leans back, pats what he refers to as his tanker tummy. Though he drives a flatbed, not a tanker, flat would not be the right adjective to describe his abdominal dimensions. “So, Miss Jess, what do you think? You dig this place?”

“I love it. It’s beautiful!” Jess opens her menu. “Can’t wait to try the food.”

Martin flashes me a thumbs up, an approving grin.

After we order, Pat, who’s been champing at the bit, presses her palms into the tabletop and leans toward Jess. “Finally we get to meet Daniel’s better half. What’s it been? Only three years?” She shakes her head. “You were MIA at every company dinner. We thought Daniel was making you up!”

Jess smiles. “Grad school was intense.”

“Sure it was. Grad school is a feat at any age but — our age?” Pat shakes her head, her short silver hair shining like a crown of tinsel. “I don’t know how you did it. I’d never do it.”

I brace, expecting Jess to launch into an impassioned speech about the ageism she’s encountered since moving here. First, the nontraditional student label, which drove home the message that she was outside the norm. Indeed, she was the oldest woman in a very youthful cohort. Which would’ve been cool, if she hadn’t attracted a hostile brand of curiosity. A few of her cohorts wouldn’t lay off, insisting that she reveal her age, trying to make it a game — can we guess? — and when she refused to play, their reactions bordered on aggression. “We’ll look you up online. We’ll find out!” Jess said she never saw the two older men in her program harassed the same way. What she was in-boxed: a woman’s body, including her age, belongs to the group.

God, I hope she doesn’t tell them all this.

Jess glances at me. I take a sip of my water, trying not to in-box her my discomfort. Still, the moment she decides to bite back her stories, I feel her choice in my own body, and relax. She tucks her hair behind her ear, chuckles, says to Pat, “Grad school as a middle-aged woman is not for the timid. Gives a whole new meaning to sweating over exams.”

Pat laughs, big and rollicking. She’s our district’s top internal sales rep, well-liked for her effervescence, her ready supply of sarcasm and jokes, lightening up an otherwise rigid industry. “Cheers to the hot flash life!” Pat raises her water glass, and she and Jess clink. “What’d you study?”

“Nuclear Engineering.”

Pat’s jaw drops. “Wow, what a woman!”

Martin elbows me. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“Dang.” Rob whistles. “Smart lady.”

“Just kidding,” Jess says, with a laugh. “Creative writing.”

Silence.

And then — “Oooh! Hahaha! You got us good!”

The three gaze at her, enamored.

Jess is on tonight.

Not sure what she’s on, but whatever it is, I’ll take it.

“So you’ve published a book? Do I know it? Is it a best-seller? Won any awards?” Brad, who up until now has kept to himself, is suddenly alert, sitting forward, phone out, poised to look her up — should she prove to be someone worth knowing. He’s a new hire, twenty-four, just graduated with his MBA. He started in the warehouse in May, and now, at the end of August, he’s already been promoted to outside sales, given a big desk and an even bigger truck. He’s the kind of guy who could succeed with ease anywhere in this country. White, tall, blond, good-looking, big smile, pronounced canines. He could walk into any business, any office, for any job anywhere, and no one would even ask for his resumé. The red carpet would just magically appear.

“I wrote a book,” Jess says, “but it’s not published.” Am I the only one who hears the pain curled up inside her words? She’s been sending her book out for a year. Agents tell her that her manuscript is heartfelt and meaningful — but it won’t sell.

“Oh.” Brad drops his phone, looks elsewhere.

“What’s the book about?” Martin leans in, eyes shining. “Do tell.” My stomach roils. I know what Jess’ book is about, and I know, Martin would hate it. Martin’s life revolves around church. He likes me, stops by my office now and then to chat, but other than that, he leaves me alone. I’m thankful for that because when it comes to his religious beliefs, he can be a terror. And Jess’ book is based on our shared journey out of the church. Once we stopped believing, our family and friends cut us off. With no money and no support, just each other, we had to figure out a new path in life, one that didn’t involve Jesus and following a complex rule system. It was a profoundly lonely, gut-wrenching time, an unraveling that often felt like death. That’s the dark side of leaving a group — any group — knit together by beliefs. The losses pile up, and don’t quit. You wonder sometimes if you should’ve just shut your mouth, sucked it up, lied about believing in Jesus — just to keep a community. My coworkers don’t know this story. They don’t know I was almost Pastor Dan.

I mop my forehead with a napkin, awaiting Jess’ book summary, and Martin’s outrage.

Rob elbows me. “Humid out here, eh, buddy?” He takes a swig of that garish purple drink.

I crane for a server. Maybe, for once, I need to get something stronger than water.

Jess waves her hand. “My book? Oh, you know, the usual — just sex with centaurs, nothing too crazy.”

Pat thunks her drink down. “That hasn’t sold yet? You’re kidding me. That’s my kinda book!”

Everyone chuckles, even Martin, who loves dirty jokes, but loses his mind when someone swears. The Old Testament may have ten commandments but Martin only has one — thou shalt not have a potty mouth. He actually has this printed on his key chain.

“Daniel said you were a teacher up in New York.” Martin smiles at Jess, leans back, folds his hands on his tanker tummy. “You still looking to teach?”   

Jess glances at me again. “No,” she says, and that’s all.

“Oh, Lord, that’s another thing you’d never find me doing,” Pat says. “Wrangling kids all day, paid peanuts to put up with endless nonsense. No thanks! Can’t understand the people who stay in that madness. Especially at our age. Am I right?” She winks at Jess.

Jess half smiles, swirls her straw around, ice clinking. I can tell she’s on the brink. She’s about to confess her job hunt failures. Her growing fear that she gave her best years to religion, to missionary work, to perpetuating a belief system she no longer even believes. I’m scared it’s too late now, she’ll tell them. Too late to figure out another career. Or become a writer. Yet she can’t go back to teaching.

Again, she stays quiet.

Her silence, to me, is the loudest thing in this restaurant. Thing is, even as the others enjoy Jess’ banter, think she’s cute, funny, offbeat, they’re not getting the real Jess. None of the powerful feelings, the passionate thinking, the hard truths. I’m relieved, and unsettled.

“My niece teaches,” Martin says. “Teaching is a calling. That’s why she stays.” He tilts his head at Jess. “Is that how you feel?”

I almost laugh. He’s hoping for some feel-good teacher story straight from Hallmark. That’s not Jess’ story.

 Jess answers, “I thought it was a calling.” The sadness on her face, in her voice, is naked, unmistakable. Impossible not to see. But if they see it, they act like they don’t.

And then the food arrives.

Three servers parade our way, bearing steaming plates, trays perched on fingertips. They set down the plates, saying the name of the meal, almost singing it. Grilled salmon with Asian fruit salsa! Lemon grass sweet pork! Hot and spicy coconut noodle soup! Braised catfish!

We immediately dig in, but Martin insists everyone lay down their forks and spoons. “Friends,” he says, with gravity, “we will thank our Lord.” He makes stern eye contact with each of us, like we’re his kids at the dinner table, and his Lord is ours. Or better be.

No one is comfortable with this, and also, no one is honest.

Next to me, Rob grumbles, and I catch Pat rolling her eyes. Brad sighs, bows his head — directly over his Instagram feed.

 Jess in-boxes me. This sucks.

I in-box her back. In the real world, you do what you have to do, pretend all day long, to keep the peace.

And Jess responds. Funny, isn’t it? In the real world, nothing is real.

God. I’ve lost my mind.

Like hostages released from Martin’s prayer, we scramble back to our food, and as we eat, conversation slows. Yet, I can’t stifle my mental chatter.

Jess refrained from telling her teaching story, but it plays in my head.

Back in New York, Jess taught high school for five years until she was pretty much fired. Her crime? She brought inappropriate books for her students. Inappropriate ranks high on her list of most hated words. She thinks it is too often used as an easy substitute for does not conform. But no one wants to sweat through the really hard and honest conversation, so they just use inappropriate to get you out — fast.

Jess taught reading intervention classes to students who had failed the state test. Jess didn’t care about the state test. Her work was about serving her students, not the state, not the school. She threw out the test prep workbooks administration forced on her, and instead, used her own money to buy books — real books — for her students. Books she thought they’d connect with, based on the stories they shared with her about their lives. Jess gave her students books on self-harm, addiction, abuse, and eating disorders. Sexuality, contraceptives, abortion.

All the books she herself was raised to see as evil. The books she, as a missionary, fought to keep from people, believing they were devil-inspired. She had to come to terms with her past, her own indoctrination, and the remnants of fear she still had about these topics…so she could bring her students the books they needed. Her work and courage paid off. Her students started reading for the first time in years. Some of them, for the first time ever.

The book that got her in trouble was a queer love story. A novel so popular with her students, she had to buy five copies. Jess described the book as gorgeous, intimate, and sensual — profound.  The parent who found her daughter reading the book described it as disgusting, degrading, vile — trash. Jess’ principal, when he called her into his office to scream at her, described it as a betrayal of her students, school, and parents’ trust!

Jess was told to denounce the book and apologize to everyone involved. She refused, arguing that to denounce the book was to denounce her students, their lives, their love stories. Her principal pulled her from reading and forced her to teach geography, where she had no credentials. Devastated, cut off from her students and the ability to do the work that mattered to her, Jess applied for her Master’s in creative writing.

She thought maybe she could write the truth, if she wasn’t allowed to teach it.

I look around at my colleagues, everyone absorbed in their meal.

Much as they like me, they know nothing real about me, even though as senior buyer, I’m now a key player in the company’s ranking as top branch in the nation. I’ve played it close to the chest, and climbed the ladder. I understand now that religion is everywhere. You can’t get away from the beliefs that rule a place — every place. And if you don’t adapt, you’re either eaten, or outcast. That’s why I tell Jess, take the MFA off your resumé if hiring managers see it as a liability instead of an asset. I tell her, apply for another teaching position and this time, if you’re hired, keep your head down, bring the kids bland books, nice books that won’t rile anyone up. I tell her, if what you’re writing isn’t marketable, figure out what is, then write something that’s not so heavy, not so confronting, isn’t so complicated, doesn’t think so much. I tell her, success in the real world is driven by one question — what sells?

Jess’ problem is, she wears her heart on her sleeve like a badge of honor — and now it’s full of arrows.

“Hey y’all! Sorry I’m late. Life of the party — in the house! Did you miss me?”

Of course. Something has to go rotten. I set down my fork.

Next to me, Rob mutters, “Time for another drink.”

I haven’t succumbed to the temptation, but now, I’m real close.

In a Gen X edgy move, Josh Owens swings out a chair, turns it around, straddles it. He even wears his ball cap backward, completing the Saved By the Bell rebel look. Josh Owens is our operations manager, and he’s unbearable on his best days. On this, almost everyone agrees. If he doesn’t respect you, you become sport, someone to taunt and harass like you’re back in middle school, and he’s the guy with the smirk, in your face, pushing you up against the lockers. He’ll back off as long as you pass his tests. He has to know you’re tough and intelligent, which to him means, you can take his abuse, and pick up the technology fast.

Of course, we all banter with him like we have no idea we hate him.

I succumb. I order a whiskey. I haven’t fully recovered from the Pentecostal pearl clutching over alcohol. I’m plagued by flashbacks, like the time my dad visited my apartment unannounced, scanned the leftovers from a dinner date with Jess, including the bottle of wine we’d shared. The way my father looked at me — like I’d killed someone. He’d said, you want to pastor a church? What kind of example are you? That look, his words, the hellfire of shame he unleashed in my veins, I’ve never gotten over. When I order the whiskey, Jess leans into me, looks up at me, her eyes full. She knows what no one else does. Twenty years later, this is another piece of freedom.

“Hey, Josh,” Pat says. “Look who decided to join us! Daniel’s better half. She’s been MIA so long, we all thought he was making her up!”

Martin winks. “I’m still not convinced he didn’t hire her. One of those rent-a-date things. She’s much too pretty for Daniel.” He grins, his eyes fixed on Jess. He very nearly smacks his lips. The thing about Martin, he’ll pitch a fit if someone cusses. He’ll rant and rave about ‘the evils’ of abortion and homosexuality — but finds no issue with being a class A letch. I’ve watched him eyeball high school girls, heard him make comments far cruder, far more disturbing and damaging than the f-bomb. But he doesn’t even notice the disconnect, his lack of integrity, the harm he causes in the world.

My whiskey arrives in the nick of time. I take the smallest sip, let it burn on my tongue before swallowing. Last thing I need is to cough and choke, alert them to the fact I’m a newbie. Josh, always on the prowl for a fresh target, skewering me with jokes.

Josh switches chairs, plants himself across from Jess. “Still teaching?” he asks her, taking a swig of water.

I’m surprised he remembers that. It’s the one thing I told him about her.

“Not anymore.”

“Yeah? What now?”

“Job seeking.”

“Skills?” He gives his order to the waiter, then leans toward her, eyes narrowed.

“Um. Mentoring, coaching. Communication?”

“Tech skills?”

“Basic.”

“Ah.” Josh leans back, crosses his arms over his chest. “That’s why you can’t get hired.”

“Oh?”

“You can make a spreadsheet at least, right?”

“Damn, Josh,” Pat says, “not everyone has to be tech savvy.”

“Hey! No cussing!” Martin shakes his fork at her and a noodle flies off, lands on the table. “Remember, Patricia? We talked about this.”

Pat salutes. “Aye aye, Captain Commandments.” She swipes the noodle off the table with a napkin, muttering, “Watch where you fling your limp little noodle.”

“You kidding me? Nowadays, you’d better be tech savvy — if you want to eat! Everyone needs to get on board with AI or they’ll be left munching dust, while the rest of us feast. Listen, girl, please tell me you aren’t going to interviews trying to sell your ‘soft skills’,” Josh makes air quotes and flashes his famous smirk. “I’ll tell you right now. Managers don’t care. Trust me on this. As soon as I hear someone say, ‘soft skills,’ I stop them right there, and vomit.” He swivels to me. “Right, Daniel? Daniel here made a whole system from scratch. Have you guys seen it?” He looks around the table. “Stop by his office, take a look, if you haven’t. Super impressive.”

Jess leans down, grabs her purse, plunks it onto the table. She’s about to leave. My palms sweat. I’m already in my head, explaining her behavior, inventing excuses. Oh, she has a medical issue, not serious, but she has to take care of it.

But she doesn’t leave. She digs through her purse, pulls out a lipstick and compact.

I say, “Thanks, Josh. I actually love doing that stuff though.”

The truth is, I made ‘my system’ as camouflage, to keep him off my back. I figured out what impressed him, and it worked. What sells?

Josh ignores me, glued to his soap box. “I mean, why should I care that people have empathy if they’re not skilled enough to enter a sale correctly? Take Harmon, right?” He looks around the table and everyone nods because this is the correct response, the one he wants. Harmon is our warehouse lead. He’s slow and shy — and the antithesis of tech savvy. He’s also a walking universe of knowledge about the warehouse, can recite by heart all the pipe elbow dimensions, and the names of our customer’s wives, kids, and in-laws, along with all their birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. Josh cuts Harmon down, uses him as a model of failure at every meeting or dinner, which Harmon — for obvious reasons — now mostly avoids. “Harmon’s a good guy, but so what? What does that matter when he can’t work the computer for shit?”

“Hey!” Martin slams his water down so hard it sloshes over the sides. “No potty mouth, Joshua. I mean it.”

“Jeez, Martin, chill.” Josh turns to Jess again. “I’m just saying, you want to get hired? Acquire those hard skills. Whatever you do, never tell an interviewer, I’m authentic. I’m a people person. I care.” His voice high-pitched, he puts his hand to his heart, flutters his eyelashes.

Jess throws her lipstick back in her purse, zips it fierce, like her lips.

Josh Owens arrives and in five seconds flat, he’s sniffed out what Jess now worries about the most, that who she is in the world is a problem, one that will always hold her back. That’s Josh’s hard skill. Hacking weakness.

“All right, Josh, we get it, sport, you don’t like feelings or the people who feel them.” Pat pushes a hand through her hair, rolls her eyes as the server shows up. “Oh, look! Here’s your food. Now shut up and eat.”

Josh grins and punches her shoulder. Pat can get away with back talk because of her status. And actually — she’s wrong. Josh loves feelings. As long as they’re fear, insecurity, and intimidation. And he’s the one causing them.

 I turn my attention to Rob, ask him about the current construction jobs he’s estimating. Rob complains. Another mattress store. Another storage unit. Another Dollar General. Same old same old. This town never changes.

Martin laments about the hydrants that took hours getting unloaded and how he gave those workers a piece of his mind. He puffs up when he says, they’ll never pull a stunt like that with me again.

Brad, now that I’ve gotten endorsement from Josh, a status bump, leans in, asks about “my system” — says he’ll stop by next week to take a look.

Jess tilts her head close to mine, whispers, “Let’s share the coconut cake.”

I agree, thankful and relieved.

And the cake is what brings the downfall.

When it arrives, Jess knocks over her purse, reaching for the plate.

Lipsticks roll, and Pat rescues them, with a flourish, “Ta da!” handing them to Jess.

And a book slides out. Jess always has a book.

In a flash, Josh seizes it. His eyes fly open. “Wow! What’s this? Your idea of a beach read?”

He displays the book like a school librarian, moving it left to right so everyone gets a view. The cover shows a sky with clouds edged in gold and pink. Dying Dreams.

“Dang, sis. Should we be worried?” Josh slides the book across the table. Jess catches it, tucks it back in her purse. “Job hunt going that bad?”

Jess gives a laugh, but it’s nervous. “It’s a collection of stories from hospice care workers. About their patients.”

Martin says, gently, “Honey, hospice care is a noble profession. With your sweet disposition, you’d make an angel of a nurse.”

Oh, boy. I take another swallow of whiskey.

“I’m not going into nursing,” Jess says. “Not every interesting thing has to be monetized.” She lifts her head, tries to conjure a winning smile. “Right?”

Brad squints, dubious about that.

Pat exclaims, “Amen! Can you imagine starting over as a nurse? At our age? No way. Once you get this old, all you want is a job where you can sit.”

Josh pushes his plate away. “Oh, so you’re interested in croaking? What a hobby!”

Jess takes a forkful of cake, studies it. “I’m doing research for a piece I’m writing.” She stops, considers, then says with firmness, “I’m interested in end-of-life dreams and visions.”

“Say what?” Josh’s laugh has a little snort attached.

“You might be surprised — I was — by how many terminal patients report deceased loved ones, including pets, coming to visit them, in dreams and visions preceding death.”

Brad attempts to bury a laugh in his fist, pretending to cough.

I grit my teeth. The kid can’t drop his cool act for a minute to get curious. Maybe if he asked some questions, instead of fake-coughing, he’d have to engage with something real that matters. Maybe, for instance, a true story about me and Jess. How the two of us were born into families with all the answers to life, in the form of one Big Book that knew everything so we didn’t have to wonder or ask. How comforting that was, to be handed a whole narrative. Now we don’t have that. Now it’s like we’re constantly falling backward in life, nothing to catch us. Sometimes, it’s so frightening, we still look for a net. Some hope, some meaning, some promise out there. Especially when life gets rough.

Martin says, “You mean ghosts? When my mother-in-law had late stage Alzheimer’s, she claimed she saw ghosts in the house. She was freaked out. Cried a lot. My wife had to hold her like a baby, reassure her over and over, there aren’t any ghosts, Mom.”

Jess says, “This book is based on stories and data collected from thousands of hospice patients. The research draws clear, science-based distinctions between delusions and hallucinations, which render the patient disoriented and distressed, and end-of-life dreams and visions — which flood the patient with an immense feeling of peace, calm, and joy.”

“Wait, let me guess. The doctor behind this ‘research’ is Deepak Chopra.” With his incisive humor — Brad elicits a chuckle.

Jess remains serious. “The doctor driving this research is a medical doctor and Ph.D. in neurobiology who works at the bedside of dying patients, including children. He wants their stories and experiences to be heard and affirmed.”

Brad shrugs. “Sorry but, the visions thing is throwing me off.  Sounds like something out of the Book of Revelation.”

“Nothing wrong with Revelation, son,” Martin says, turning to him. “Would do your soul good to get out your Bible, give it another look-see.”

“His patients use the word vision to try to give language to what they experience. They report that when their loved ones appear to them, it’s realer than a dream. Realer than reality.”

“What’s realer than reality?” Brad’s face. His barely concealed scoff. He just finds this — Jess — ridiculous.

“I don’t know. Those who work closely with the dying encourage us just to hear their experiences, be open, be present, without trying to explain it.”

And on cue, everyone starts trying to explain it.

“Most likely neurochemical,” Rob says. “Lack of oxygen, maybe? The brain shutting down as the end approaches. Some chemical released before death.”

“Tripping.” Brad laughs. “The brain gives us a little fun time before the final curtain lowers.”

“Medication,” Martin chimes in. “Crazy side effects, those meds.”

Jess’ eyes flash, and my muscles clench. Here we go.

“Some patients are weeks, even months from death. Even patients not taking medication report recurring and hyperreal dreams and visions of deceased loved ones. And the themes are rivetingly consistent. The deceased return with a message, a promise of travel. Get ready, I’m coming for you soon.”

“I am not buzzed enough for this conversation.” Pat gives her head a shake.

“I’m sorry, but no.” Brad picks up his phone, gives it a glance. “When they start seeing dead people, hearing voices, that’s the time to pump them with meds. My dad’s a doctor and he’d agree. It’s just merciful, for patients and their family.”

Josh, who’s been strangely quiet, startles us all, swinging around to face Brad. “Merciful? What’s the matter with you, you little punk? Are you that much of a moron?”

Brad freezes. We all do.

Josh turns to Jess. His upper lip is trembling. “My old man passed when I was twelve. Cancer ate up his colon. He was only thirty-eight. Thing is, I wasn’t close to him. No one was close to him. My mom was the closest, but he hit her, too.”

I suck in a breath, glance around at the others. Pat investigates a spoonful of sticky rice pudding as though it’s a science experiment. Martin subtly checks his watch. Brad remains motionless, staring and pale, like a statue of himself. Rob swirls what’s left of his purple drink.

Jess holds Josh’s gaze. “Did your father have them? The dreams and visions?”

Josh blinks. “I’ve never told anyone this. Seemed crazy. My dad was a Vietnam vet. He was at Hamburger Hill. I was told by my mom, my grandma, my aunt, everyone, never ask your dad what he saw over there. No one asked, and he never told. Well, he told the stories with his fists, I guess.”

Rob motions for a server, whispers for the check. Pat’s abandoned her dessert and is now scrolling on her phone. Martin’s unclasped his watch, appears to be repairing it. All at once, Brad hops up and takes off, head lowered, like a bull charging for the nearest exit.

“Dad refused to go to a hospital. Mom got him set up in a hospital bed in our living room. She tried her best to take care of him, mean as he was. We had a hospice nurse coming in and out, too. Live or die, I didn’t care what he did. My heart was a ball of ice towards him. I didn’t expect anything from him. I’m proud of you, son. No bullshit like that.”

My eyes dart to Martin, watch parts scattered around his plate now. He picks up a tiny screw, examining it under the light. His face twitches, and that’s all.

“One night, about a week before he passed, I was coming in from playing baseball, sweaty, dirty. I’m on my way to the shower and he calls for me as I pass by the living room. I’m like hell, what does he want. I decide that if I’m in trouble, and he tries swinging at me from his hospital bed, I’ll just step back and laugh, right in his face. He wasn’t on meds or anything. Live tough, die tough. That was his motto. I go in, ready for a fight, and see right away, he’s different. He's got a strange look about him. I’d never seen him look at me like that. Soft face and eyes. He tells me to pull up a chair. I do it, even though the sweet way he’s looking at me scares me more than anything. He says, I’m going to tell you about ‘Nam. The first thing I did was jump up and go look, make sure mom wasn’t around. No way she’d have me hearing about all that. The things he told me that night made me want to throw up, but hearing what he went through, the worst of it, was better, way better, than being punched by him.”

Jess speaks quietly. “From what I’ve read, that happens a lot at end-of-life. The person tells stories they’ve suppressed. They confront trauma. They want to share the truth with the people around them, make amends.”

Josh says, “He told me about his best friend over there, Steven May. Said they were blood brothers. Said, look here, son, at my hand. I didn’t want to look. I was afraid of his damned old skeleton hand, but I forced myself to look because he wanted me to so bad.” Here, Josh’s voice breaks.

The server scoots over, assesses the situation, deposits the check without a word.

“There, on his palm, right under his thumb, is this scar, a pale line, like a ghost. And I realize, all the times I’ve been up close and personal with dad’s hand, I’ve never seen that scar. He told me how Steven died. They were fleeing sniper fire. Steven was shot in the mouth. Dad watched his friend take his last breath, nothing he could do. And later, he found a tooth in his pocket. ” Josh guffaws, pounding the table so the plates, the glasses, the silverware jumps. “I swear to you. I am not making this up!”

Pat finally puts her phone down. She stares into the middle distance, glassy eyed, arms crossed over her chest. Martin’s put his watch back together. His elbows sit on the table, his forehead pushed into steepled hands.

Rob’s gone. He slipped out after the check came.

“Dad told me the tooth in his pocket was a parting gift from Steven. Steven was always playing pranks. And now they were tooth brothers. He tells me that and he laughs. That’s a big deal because he never laughed. He screamed, he swore, he was sullen for days. Never laughed. Yet there he was, so close to death, laughing his ass off. So here’s the thing,” Josh looks Jess right in the eye, “he told me that Steven kept showing up in his dreams, or standing by his bedside, or one time, sitting in the chair where I was sitting. He swore these weren’t dreams. He knew all about dreams. Steven was there, he said. And he told dad, Brother, get packed, I’m coming for you. Steven said, Brother, don’t be afraid, I’ve got your back. He said, By the way, man, you still got my tooth? After all these years? You know when I come get you, I’m taking my tooth back. I’m telling you, I never in my life saw my dad smile like that, happy, so at peace.”

I look up. Pat’s gone now.

And then there were three.

“What happened?” Jess asks.

Josh shakes his head, face growing hard. “I was an idiot. I told my mom about Steven. She freaked. She thought dad was delusional. She called the nurse. I tried to stop her. I said, no, ma, go talk to him. She said, I’m not talking to him about ghosts. That’s crazy talk! Not anything you should be listening to. I begged her but she called the nurse, said dad needed meds, morphine, something that would stop him from hallucinating, scaring his kid. I said, ma, he’s not scaring me! Yeah, for the first time, he was actually connecting to me. Then the nurse came, pumped him with meds” — imitating Brad’s words, his flip tone.

Josh swivels and yells at Brad’s empty chair, “Merciful? You think you know what’s real? You think you’ve got it all figured out? So you and your know-it-all doctor dad drug him up and he never speaks again?” Josh brings his fist down slam! On the table. “Fuck you, man!”

Martin pushes back his chair, hard, and with a cold look, rises, strides away.

I swallow the rest of my whiskey.

Jess reaches out, sets her hand on Josh’s.

She keeps it there, a long embrace.

We climb into the car.

We buckle up.

We drive five miles.

The longleaf pines bloom beneath the moon, giant flowers from another world.

Finally, Jess speaks. “I tried, Daniel. I really did.”

I think about her sending me glances all night. Biting her lip. Biting her tongue. Biting her stories. Biting her spirit.

She laughs, despairing. “That book, falling out of my purse...”

The headlights cast a firm, steady glow. And I think about tomorrow.

Josh will stop by my office. Knock-knock! He’ll say, hanging on the doorframe.

He’ll crow: So wow, your wife’s a hippie? A witch? I’d say she put a spell on me but it was the rum. That’s why I don’t drink!

He’ll say it loud enough for everyone to hear.

But I’ll remember. He didn’t order a drink.

The turning point, twenty years ago, my pastoral ordination on the horizon, was when Jess confessed to me one late night: I’ve stopped believing that Jesus is God.

I was deep down, intoxicatedly in love with her.

Do you think I’ll go to hell, Daniel?

Wow, she was brave.

Brave to ask. Brave to hear her lover say: Yes. If you don’t believe, you’ll go to hell.

We stayed up all night. Arguing, fighting, crying. Looking up scripture on hellfire. Reading, researching, and fighting some more.

Brave to want to know. To stay there with me, rooted in the hurt, the struggle.

Once my belief in hellfire dissolved, it wasn’t too long before the whole shebang crumbled.

Jess says now, in the tire humming quiet as we drive, “I’m giving up, Daniel. I need to connect to something real, and there’s nothing real in the real world…but there’s something real about dying.”

At work tomorrow, the others will say, “Crazy night, huh?”

Or, more likely, they’ll say nothing.

Jess says, “I never told you this. After my principal moved me from reading to geography, Estrella, the student whose mother turned me in, came to find me. She cried and apologized because she thought everything that had happened was her fault. Then she told me the inappropriate book had saved her. Literally. She’d been contemplating suicide. She feared her mother would disown her for being gay. And she wasn’t wrong. After she was caught reading the book, Estrella came out to her family, and her mother stopped talking to her. Estrella told me, even though she was hurting, she knew she’d be okay, because that book had told her a story that was her story, and gave her a reason to believe there was a place for her in the world. A place filled with love.”  Here, Jess’ voice cracks.

Her workplace — an institution claiming to value education, liberation, meaning. Yet all too often, just as suffocating, controlling, and crushing as any religion.

Josh will deny the powerful exchange that unfolded tonight, the raw feelings that poured out of him.

I won’t forget.

None of us will, no matter how we looked away.

Our million and one ways of looking away.

The injustice we commit daily, against the living and the dying.

Drugging ourselves, and each other, out of our truths.

And I feel another breakthrough coming. “Fuck what sells!”

Jess goes very still.

“The real world is full of terrified assholes, Jess.”

I hear her breathe.

“We need you. Stay with us. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Jess presses her face into her hands.

“Never stop.”

I believe, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said.

Phantom

Lakshmi Sunder

Right now, her cat is older than her. Before she died, he wasn’t.

Today is his fourth/twenty-eighth birthday depending on how you look at it. I’ve been asked in advance to give him the good meat and get him high this morning to celebrate, so I peel open a can of “salmon paté” for his breakfast, the brown juices dribbling disgustingly down my elbow, and sprinkle it with catnip like a garnish. Ten minutes later, the cat is on his back, licking his chops. He paws the empty air and jolts at the house’s blank white walls, hallucinating something I cannot see.

“How are you holding up, Aishwarya?” It feels odd hearing this question through a work-issued laptop screen, the face of my manager Rebecca porous with pixels, and it feels doubly odd hearing this question from said manager who pronounces my name wrong, saying the middle of it like the English word war, which blends with the following ‘y’ to make a sound like worry.

“Just fine, thank you.” I take a sip from my mug of coffee. Like oil — rubbery taste, fueling. “I’ve finished up the benchmark and copied you to the email.”

“Yes, I saw that, thank you.” Her white skin flashes whiter, so that it’s clear she’s switching to another tab, her eyes following a horizontal line as she probably reads a text message before switching back to me. Rookie mistake. “Though, you should know that you still have five sick days left for the quarter, and we’re willing to offer more given the — ” She looks down so that I can see the staticky grey line of her scalp, not willing to make eye contact, even virtually. “ — circumstances.”

“I don’t mind the work,” I quickly affirm.

“I understand that, but it’s possible that the work could mind you,” Rebecca parries with a line she’s probably said before, her lips flattening. “It’s common for an employee’s work to take a dip in quality after a grief episode, and we try to do our best to avoid that by giving you the space you need to process.”

I want to tell her that grief is not like the rigs we manufacture, not an assembly-lined emotion. There isn’t one station for denial, one station for anger, one station for bargaining, etcetera, each producing a part that fits into the next. It’s more like the wind — sometimes it just raises the hair on your arms, other times it uproots your home.

Instead, I decide on, “For me, work is a nice distra…” but I am interrupted by the feline putting the entire weight of his body on my back and sinking his talons into my shoulders, and deciding not to retract them. He’s even heavier after this morning’s paté.

“Oh! You’ve got a furry friend.” My manager’s face immediately brightens, and it’s not like when she was switching tabs, the look of it warmer this time around. Ever since remote work started becoming part of the normal rhythm of things, I’ve noted this pattern. A pet shows up on the screen and instinctively one’s brain will blare with, My coworker has a life outside of this Zoom call? I’m not exempt from the epiphany: in my head, a dog barks and suddenly Tom will morph in my mind from his signature polo to shirtless and sweaty, jogging on the sidewalk to keep up with his goldie; Dick becomes less dick and more likeable when I see a cat loafing on his swivel chair; and gay bear Harry becomes less hairy in comparison to the Pomeranian who runs circles around him.

I try to knock the cat off me as a breath oomphs from my mouth with his weight, saying, “I don’t know if friend is the word I would use.” More like furry fucker.

A pause. The nice thing about Zoom is, when you don’t know what to say to small talk jokes that don’t land, you can just pretend your Wi-Fi got slow all of a sudden. Rebecca responds quickly enough, years of experience with math genius employees who lack basic conversation skills: “Sorry about the lag. I was just going to ask, what’s the kitty’s name?”

I swallow more coffee, though it’s more like a current of liquid this time than a little sip, nearly rushing down the wrong tube. “Phantom.”

“I love the name, me personally. It’s so Phoebe Bridgers.”

Phoebe Bridgers this, Phoebe Bridgers that. The singer had begun to outnumber the words I was more interested in hearing about: education, employment, engagement.

“Because she’s white too?” I propped the phone against my shoulder while rinsing possible bugs out of a pot of rice.

“No mom, that’s psychotic.” I strained my ears into the screen to hear over the faucet sound. “She’s dressed as a ghost on the Stranger in the Alps album cover. And there’s literally a dog behind Phoebe, too. It’s perfect.”

“But Phantom is a cat.”

“No yeah, we’re like a DEI spin on it.”

“How are cats any more DEI than dogs?” I didn’t expect the word I hear on so many Zoom calls to make its way into a phone conversation with my daughter. My question wavered with laughter.

“Because cats are women-coded, and dogs are men-coded. Pussy, crazy cat lady, scaredy cat. Meanwhile, it’s all, dogs are man’s best friend, top dog, dog eat dog. And you’re telling me all dogs go to heaven, meanwhile cats are the spawn of Satan? It’s sick, really, the double standard. I think men should go to hell.”

“Right.” I watched the water get milky with uncooked grain, wondering where my daughter got her man-hating tendencies from. Probably the liberal arts education. “And how are you DEI? Because you’re Indian?”

“Exactly,” she affirmed. I got a warm swell of pride at getting the joke correct despite our generational gap — the kind a mother gets when her daughter shows her the lyrics to a dirty rap song, or lets her onto her Instagram. “White girl ghost becomes brown girl ghost.”

I don’t eat rice anymore. I want to think it’s because the grains are too similar to the texture of kitty litter, even if the aversion is from something else I can’t place. Something feels absolutely wrong about being Phantom’s elder and having to stoop over his litter box every morning, inhaling the hospital scent of odor-masking baking soda. Frequently I wonder if I’d prefer the organic, earthy smell of fecal matter — nose-wrinkling as it is — to this sterile chemical stuff, the residue of which settles on my house slippers and wooden floors like ash. What I’d really prefer is for Phantom to go back to being a wholly outdoor animal, but now that Aditi got him accustomed to cat trees and air-conditioning and watching birds from the safe distance of a window-sill, I don’t think he’d survive the street life.

Most mornings, he watches me labor for him, humming to distract myself as the litter-studded logs slide into a repurposed takeout bag. When I’ve raked the shovel through the box once, twice, making sure there are no runaway grey crumbles of urine, I tie a knot on the plastic bag like I’m wrapping a present. Phantom lopes over to me then — in the initial days, I thought, to thank me for my work, brush against my leg, maybe — but I know now that it’s to give me a present in return. Without fail, right after the litter box has become so clean the powder looks like pearls, the cat will squat in the dead center of it. Today, his birthday shit is bigger and less solid from the wet food, a brown nugget worming slowly from his asshole. The whole time, he stares at me with his piss-yellow eyes.

Alexa is like Aditi whenever her Airpods were in, in that it takes her three times to hear me before the mesh metal ball finally flares to life with a pulse of lavender light. I tell Alexa to play Houston Public Media, quickly tacking on a thank you, just in case AI takes over in the next decade and I need to have been on their good side.

In a voice not unlike AI, the weather woman speaks of Andrea — like all of America’s hurricanes, named something small-syllabled and White-sounding. We used to joke about how there would never be a Hurricane Aditi or Hurricane Aishwarya. A hurricane named after an Indian woman would be even worse, I think, with all the anger that’s winding up inside us ready to spring. The hurricanes are already bad enough as it is.

I can listen to the radio while I cook because I don’t need the television’s psychedelic weather maps to see what’s coming. The bayou spilling over, carting sewage onto the sidewalks. Boats where boats shouldn’t be. Drivers who, for once, will wish that their windows could break easy. My Trader Joe’s naan heats up in the toaster oven, inflating into the breadth and browning into the burlap color of a sandbag. The woman reporting on the radio goes from the raw numbers of weather — wind speeds, feet of rainfall — to climate. The Gulf of Mexico is not only rising, she says in an even, paved sort of way, pushing against Galveston’s seawall, it is also getting warmer. Meteorologists predict that Hurricane Andrea will unprecedentedly inundate streets and intensify wind speeds. In Houston, at least, we can localize this blame to the refineries right in our backyards.

It will be fine where we are, me and Phantom. A little water under the front door, the gutters drumming constantly, maybe an hour-long outage just to say we suffered, too. The worst part will be having no White Lotus to watch, no fresh-voiced lady to listen to on the news, no new emails bobbing up to the top of my screen. So why do I think I would take being underwater in my car to that kind of stillness?

Like a soft strip of Bounty, Phantom snakes his white tail around my leg before biting down on my ankle matter-of-factly. That means feed me. That means we’ll be eating dinner together, as with every other evening.

To keep her sane during an outage, all I needed was oil and a story. I’d sit Aditi between my legs, her little frame rattling like a shack weakened with rain, and tug coconut oil through the dark and tangled gulf of her hair.

“The rain won’t get you, Adi, because water hates oil.” She wouldn’t believe it until she could see it with her own eyes, so I placed a strip of her own oiled hair in front of her face, sprinkling sink water on it with my hands to show her how it beaded up. She stilled at the sight of it, just a little. “Do you want to know why Egypt is a desert?”

She nodded against my knees. I tried to make my voice louder than the thunder, than the wind knocking palm fronds against the tall panes of glass. “Egypt used to be an ocean, but the water ran away because there were tons of precious oils building underground — and, like I said, water hates oil. Now, all that’s left of the place is sand.”

“How do the Egyptians find water to drink, then?”

This had always been her, a small voice asking the kinds of questions that could silence a whole room. Ironically, I had to be more careful weaving my answer than weaving her hair. The strands were so slick that I could see them shine without any light.

“Well, the Egyptians could get water from the Nile River, but it’s very polluted from all the oil spills. So the people buy water from other countries by selling off their own oil.”

“But what happens if other countries don’t want their oil anymore? How will they drink then?”

I stopped plaiting for one moment, turning that possibility over in my head. It was something I had already been afraid of for my own American livelihood — how to pay my daughter’s college tuition if most cars turned electric in the next decade, if every roof in the country became shingled with solar panels? I had forgotten which of the three hair segments was next to be crossed over and had to fumble up the pattern with the pads of my fingers. There was a long silence as I tried to think of an answer to Aditi’s question, in which everything non-human could be heard: thunder knocking the sky, trees gulping the wind down.

“People will always want oil,” I decided on.

As parents, there will always be something that we don’t want to make it into the stories we tell our children that does, anyway. Why Cinderella’s father isn’t around anymore, why a man and woman in love means that a baby is on the way. Or the fact that, as much as water hates oil, oil hates water too.

Year by year, Adi built up a whole country of knowledge inside of her. When I was lucky, I would get to see just a piece of that land, broken off from the rest by the force of Texas storms and our need to be louder than that chest-beating roar of rain.

“There could never be mummies in Houston, Mom, because the heat would make the bodies rot. But they’re perfect for Egypt because Egypt is so dry.”

 I scrunched up my face, trying not to think of worms tunneling into flesh, of the corpses that buoy up when it rains too hard over in New Orleans. “That’s gross Adi. This is why Hindus do cremation. There’s no mess to it.” The coconut oil had greased up my hands, slightly grainy as I laced it through her hair. “When I die, all you’ll have to do is throw my ashes into the gulf.”

Adi flipped around, the rope of her oily braid thwacking my knee. “But you can’t take any pets with you if you’re cremated, Mom.” At this time, Adi had a little betta fish that looked like those colored swirls inside marbles. I think she would have been more sad if she saw the fish belly-up one morning than me. “Egyptian mummies got to bring their cats with them when they died, and that’s how it should be.” She crossed her arms resolutely.

The thought of a feline-shaped mummy dug up and loaded into a Smithsonian museum case, with its woody eyes and wraparound fabric flesh, made me want to crawl under the covers. As I shook my head clear, about to tie off the little tassel of her hair with an elastic, we got one of those cinematic chevrons of lightning I sometimes see when driving back home from Clear Lake on site visit days. Anyone driving by gets purely stunned by the perfect perforation of it, made powerless in that sort of happy way, like the bills we have to pay don’t really matter against something like that.

Adi’s braid slipped from my hands like an eel, her little palms pressed against the window to get nearer to the hurricane.

She flipped around to look back at me. “A nature god is mad at humankind, Mom. Shu is tearing Geb from Nut to punish us.” Her voice was fast and frantic. “Shu is ripping the earth and sky apart!”

I couldn’t help laughing, forgetting my general parenting attempts to affirm. “Baby, I think you’re the nut,” I said, snatching her into my arms.

I was proud of myself because I had remembered those three gods from the Egyptian mythology lecture Aditi gave after following me into the bathroom a couple days back: Nut was the sky goddess, Geb was the earth god, and Shu was the wind. In my head there were two giant hands with skin of the wind, cobwebby and always shifting, and those hands were wrenching the sky from the earth. I unraveled Adi’s hair so I could have a reason to braid it again, and tried not to think about the things I’ve done that could make a god mad.

With no work due to Wi-Fi outages across the city, all I can do is over-prepare for the other things that might go out too, water and electricity. The feline’s hydrophobia allows me some God-given solitude as I fill up the bathtubs with water. But my Alexa also evidently has the day off, NPR not reaching me without any service, so I have nothing to listen to. I do a little game theory in my head, a prisoner’s dilemma: me a prisoner to my thoughts, and my thoughts a prisoner to me, to the sweatbox of my skull. To leave the bathroom and turn on the cable TV downstairs could cause the tub to overflow, which would be wasteful, yes, but would more importantly make me have to spend even more time in here mopping it all up. So I decide to take the route of confession, of a shorter sentence: sitting in the small, sunless damp of the bathroom and hoping both me and my thoughts can get what we want. As long as I pay attention to nothing but my body, I’ve learned it’s possible. I dip my finger in and out of the lukewarm water, not letting myself stop until my index finger prunes up, and I look ahead of myself like I’m on the highway. I can see my own fallout hairing the shower tiles. Some scraggles are white, but most are black, like someone tore up the night and this is what’s left of it. The cat scratches at the bathroom door, wondering why the hell I’d want to be holed up in a room where the water rushes so loud.

Sometimes I imagine my life like a babushka doll, hollow and hard and all my little selves still inside of me. When a set of hands cracks me open, you can see the younger versions come tumble out. After Aditi died I was briefly three-years-old again, pounding the walls and throwing my food and wanting my mother. Adi has always been the opposite of me, over-aging when the bad things happened, a newer, larger doll eclipsing the old one. She refused to accept my help with the cancer until the cat got into one of the many bouquets sent to her and she was too weak to hold him down to clean him, chemo filling her body with something like moon sand.

 “The soap is above the sink,” she had greeted me when I opened the front door, voice hard but brittle, breakable. “You have to use Dawn, Mom. The other stuff isn’t good for animals.”

“I know that, Adi, I was there for BP.”

“Okay, let’s be real Mom, you like, caused BP.”

With my hands straightjacketing the cat sprawling in her lap, Adi dragged her hands through Phantom’s fur, fingers coated in chemical blue Dawn. He thrashed at the feeling of soap and water, froth netting the clumps of soil on him. I had been thinking that this isn’t half bad, no bites or scratches, but then we got to his eraser tip nose, stained with pollen. As I held down Phantom’s head, the cat dragged his claws across my wrist. A little thread of blood trickled down.

Instead of consoling her poor mother, Aditi stroked the white oval of her cat’s head, rubbing off the nose pollen at the same time. I couldn’t see her eyes anymore, but I could see the globe of Adi’s head — a brown desert planet with no signs of life, no thickets of black hair. A desert that could only last on external help for so long. This odd tableau was the closest I would get to becoming a grandmother, a babushka, a complete set of dolls. My dream of a braid train — that stunning collision of generations — would never come to fruition, me braiding Aditi’s hair braiding her daughter’s hair.

When my sad thoughts float up and separate from the rest, like a child, I try to crack a joke or make someone mad. Both if I’m lucky. “You should declaw the fucker,” I tried this time around, brandishing my wrist like a battle scar.

Aditi didn’t whip her head around like she would have if she was younger, stronger. She had moved on to picking out the dirt from under each of her cat’s claws with her fingernails. She kept on doing so as she retorted, sour-voiced, “Declawing is illegal in California and legal in Texas. That should give you an idea of how bad it is.”

I shrugged my shoulders, but it felt like someone else was doing it for me, like I was playing a part. “I don’t know, Adi. It sounds like I’m on the right side, then.”

She paused, hovering over one of the claws on his hind feet, before sucking in a deep breath. “You know how soldiers can still feel their legs after they get blown off in war? Well, it’s the same for cats when they get their claws taken out.”

A laugh rustled my words. “How would you know that?”

“Like I’ve said, cats and women — two sides of the same sad coin. They feel the same pain men do but just can’t talk about it.” Her voice was like decaf coffee, bitter but without any of the energy — limp and liquid.

“How can women lose their limbs if they don’t fight in wars, Adi? It’s not logical.”

She looked up at me, eyes steely, some of that old energy resurging for a brief moment. No matter what stage a daughter might be in — of life, cancer, or both — she will always want to argue with her mother, and secretly, her mother will rejoice at that.

“You’re acting like limbs are the only body parts you can lose, Mom. I still feel the hair on my head, and there’s not a single fucking strand left.”

The cat was clean enough, so I asked Adi to scooch over on the floor to sit between my knees. I dunked my fingers into the jar of coconut oil, trying not to flinch as I rubbed it over the nakedness of her head. Then, I began to braid the air.

 Adi looked over at where Phantom was, drying off his damp fur in a patch of sun, before sighing and turning to her old comforts, the baby blanket kind. “You remember the Egyptian goddess Bastet?”

I winced. This would have been a great time to remember. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, she has the head of a cat and the body of a woman, and she’s supposed to protect women and children from disease.” I scooped more coconut oil into my fingers, though there was no reason to. “Guess Bastet didn’t spare me.”

When the hurricane comes and the lights go out, I sit cross-legged right outside the door to the attic, high up where the water can’t reach me. I can see the whole world of my house from here, the floating staircase like cliffs in the dark, the charging cords veining the hallways in white rivers, my farmhouse sink filled with water. If the rain somehow did get this high, some system shock of climate change, I’d have no one to call for help except my manager, and it’s definitely not business hours right now. There is only one other being left in this little world of mine, and it’s that damn cat yowling downstairs, scared of the sound of thunder.

“Come upstairs, kitty,” I call, my voice echoing into the open architecture. I shake a bag of treats, beckoning, because it’s not me he wants. He springs deftly up the stairs at the sound. I lead the little brown pebbles up to my lap, patting my thighs hooker-style, trying not to think about how I’ll need to use the lint roller on my pants later. In this dark, all I can make out of the cat are his spoon eyes. When I pull him in, at first he jolts, before settling with the realization that I too am a warm body. Even from inside I can hear the wind. It makes a loud yawning sound, but I hope that means it’s getting tired, too. I stroke Phantom’s head, his white hair. Like a generator, his body hums from purring and his eyes glow up at me, shining with no light other than their own.

Legacy

Laurel Schwartz

A young woman — let’s call her Brit — is in sneakers and leggings jogging, her ponytail swinging in rhythm to the movement of her legs. She lives with the delusion she will always be healthy and young. Her body has yet to fail her.

Eden, another young woman is in sweatpants and a t-shirt, her bald head under a chenille cap with the brim pulled down to her eyes. She sits on a couch with a blanket pulled up to her chin. Eden, unlike Brit has no such delusions about being healthy forever. She is keenly aware that her body has failed her. Cancer has punctured her stomach wall and spread to her pancreas and liver. She knows she is going to die — and soon.

The doctor had been confident his protocol would work — six rounds of chemotherapy followed by the surgical removal of her stomach. Not that he actually said the word “confident” aloud. Maybe it was more that he acted confident. He was a tall man and seemed to know things. “After the stomach is removed,” he said, “the esophagus is attached to the small intestine.”

During the recovery, when her mother urged her to create a dating profile, Eden complied, confident (there’s that word again) she had a future. For “Describe Yourself” she wrote: “Could have died but didn’t, recovering from a full gastrectomy due to stomach cancer.” She was inundated with responses from young men with colon cancer, rectal cancer, leukemia, and even a boy who lost both legs after he was pushed onto subway tracks.

Months later, the results of a follow-up scan showed cancer again. A lot of cancer. Even more than that. (Treatment hadn’t worked. See above.) Eden took down her dating profile.

Who was to blame? The doctor? Upon a thorough mental review of all prior conversations, Eden had to admit not once had he said, “I can cure you.” She had heard something he never said. Yet, a possible reprieve from her terminal diagnosis was at hand — two more rounds of chemotherapy. “Yes,” said her mother, frantic to keep her alive. (Her father overwhelmed by her situation, took a job offer in a distant state. Actually, it was Canada.)  “All this cancer scares me,” he said.

“How do you think it (cancer) makes me feel?” she wanted to reply.

The chemo completed, Eden is thin like a piece of paper. When viewed from the side, she is barely there. Hard to believe two years ago she was healthy and robust, studying theatre and performance in graduate school. The best actress in my class. With a specialization in Shakespeare, she played the greats:  Juliet, Ophelia, Hermia. How she loved the beautiful, powerful, extraordinary words that came out of her mouth. Back then, she lay in bed at night and pondered if her reasons for loving Shakespeare made her a cliché. These days she ponders if she’s going to vomit up her small lunch.

Her mother is speaking. The local high school needs teachers. “They’re handing out Emergency Teaching Permits like candy,” she says, smacking her thigh with a rolled-up copy of the Sperling Advocate for emphasis and/or to pull Eden out of her depressive thoughts. Words continue to come out of her mouth. “Despair… hopelessness… would help you.” Hard to watch your kid die — even harder to be the one dying. Brit is jogging past the house. Earbuds in she’s hitting her groove. She remakes her ponytail, not missing a step. What a head of hair! Eden pulls her chenille cap further down to the bridge of her nose, the blanket further up. Suddenly key words, as though typed into a Google search, pop up and capture her attention: “English,” she hears her mother say. “Shakespeare.”

 The Emergency Teaching Permit is good for 120 days. Long enough for Eden to finish the first semester which ends on December 16 — assuming she lives that long. Eden is cautiously optimistic. Determinedly pessimistic. It depends upon the day and how she is feeling. The school is desperate for teachers, taking anybody who applies, including terminal cancer patients. No, they wouldn’t take a drug dealer, a clown, someone who had a lobotomy.

Morale is low at the school, hence the lack of teachers. Lousy salaries, meager supplies, a school board that doesn’t care. Two members were brought up on charges of fraud for using school funds for a car and driver, who waited for hours while they shopped at an out-of-town luxury mall. In an act of collective rebellion and despair, the teachers have taken to wearing bedroom slippers instead of shoes. The halls are filled with the sound of shuffling feet, which for some inexplicable reason makes Eden think of the dead. She will keep the door to her classroom closed.

On the first day of school, she stands in front of her students and says, “Hi, I’m Eden James.” She smiles trying to appear likeable. She doesn’t know if she is — at least anymore. Her throat hurts, a side effect from the chemotherapy. She has nausea, also a bit of neuropathy in her feet. More side effects. She wonders. Can the students tell she has cancer? The wig she is wearing is of good quality, made from real hair. Does she have a cancer vibe? A cancer smell? Everyone seems cool. Although there is a chubby boy with sloppy black hair (real) in the back row who’s smiling and nodding. His head is going up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Maybe he knows. Maybe he has a tic. She thinks the bangs, the way they cover her hairline make her wig look more natural.

“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” by Robert Frost, is a narrative poem,” she says, “which means the poem tells a story.” How awkward, standing in front of the class and speaking. The location, the audience, the words, it’s all wrong. I’m a Shakespearean actress. What am I doing here? Yet, the show must go on. “What’s your name?” she says to a male student wearing sweat shorts.

“Sunshine.”

“Why don’t you read the poem aloud for us, Sunshine?”

“I don’t like to read.”

“Read the poem,” yells the chubby boy in the back of the room, with the sloppy black hair.

Surprised by the intensity and volume of the boy’s voice, Eden almost falls over. How awful would that be? Her on the floor. People staring as she slowly stands up, grasping at the edge of her desk, her fragility revealed. Worse yet, someone pulls the fire bell and the EMTs arrive, who put her on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face. As she’s loaded into the ambulance, she waves to the crowd of students like a beauty queen. There she is catastrophizing again. But is she really? “What’s your name?” she says to the voice from the back of the room.

“Dougie.”

Embarrassed by being the center of attention, Sunshine begins to read — slowly, hesitantly, sounding out basic words. He doesn’t want to read because he can’t. Eden wonders if he’s ever overdosed on antibiotics, NSAIDs, Vitamin D because he can’t read the directions on the labels or side panels of the boxes. In that moment, she’s no longer thinking about her wig or the horrible consequences if she’d fallen down or whether she feels grateful or angry toward Doug. Dougie? Her attention is on Sunshine as she urges him to continue. “You got this,” she says. He’s got nothing and fumbles his way through the rest of the poem. Eden knows she can’t understand what he’s going through. Cancer taught her that. She smooths her bangs.

 The doctor told her she was being hypochondriacal, making a big deal out of nothing. She had Irritable Bowel Syndrome like a million girls in their early twenties. “You get bloated, can’t get into those tight jeans and think the world is going to end.” How much time was wasted with a gluten-free, dairy-free or a Low FODMAP diet? Christ, on that FODMAP diet, the kid couldn’t even eat an apple, a prescription for good health for 150 years. Of course, the apple also has Biblical implications that include a no-good serpent, first cousin to the doctor who was a no-good, incompetent, snake in the grass with his hard sell ridicule. Would have probably thought the cancer was Eden’s fault if he’d continued to be involved in her care. As for her mother, how did she feel falling prey to the doctor’s authoritarianism and not pressing for a second opinion? Guilty, guilty, guilty.

 “How was your first day at school?” she asks. The question makes Eden feel like she’s six.

“I need to get right to Shakespeare. I don’t have weeks to waste on stupid American poets.”

“Let me help you take your wig off.”

“I have a student who can’t read.

“Your scalp is sweaty.”

“Oh my God, what if the whole class is illiterate? They’ll never do the assigned readings at home because they can’t. This is a disaster. I should have stayed home where I could read Shakespeare alone in my room. The wig makes my scalp itch.”

“Have them read Shakespeare in class, aloud to each other.”

“That’s about as appealing as another round of chemo.”

“I’ll wipe your scalp down with a towel and rub in some aloe vera.”

“Is my hair growing back?”

“Some fuzz.”

“Auburn?”

“White… I have great news. The insurance company is going to pay for the wig.”

Eden is back in the classroom. Today is Shakespeare day. She feels as though she’s about to have a vasovagal episode, this time from overwhelming excitement rather than watching her blood being drawn. Oh my God, don’t you get it? She’s about to offer her students mana, the sweetest of foods. She takes a deep breath, steadying herself and says, “For our next assignment, we’re going to read Hamlet – aloud in class.” Just the very word “Hamlet” and she is transported to a Danish Court with great costumes, atmospheric lighting, clever word play, political intrigue, and characters with tragedies larger than her own… I was an awesome Ophelia. A hand is raised. “Yes?” says Eden.

“What’s Hamlet?” says a boy whose name, she will discover is Chuck.

Such euphoria, such despair. I’m used to that — two years of promising cures each one a failure. Still, that she’s in a room of oafs or at least an oaf, who has never heard of Hamlet deflates her. For a moment she had felt… well, really good. As she gathers the plays together to hand out, she’s thinking of walking out of the classroom and home, where on the way, she would give in to her growing exhaustion and lie down by the side of the road and die alone. But then there’s Dougie who’s come to the front of the room to help. He takes the plays from her hands and smiles. He must know.

Eden takes a sip from the water bottle on her desk. Her mother has told her she needs to stay hydrated. For being so gallant she rewards Dougie with the lead in Hamlet. “Sunshine needs the part more than me,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” says Sunshine.

“You want to drive, don’t you? How can you pass the test for your learner’s permit if you can’t read?

“It’s multiple choice.”

“Sunshine,” says Eden, “you’re Hamlet.”

“Oh God,” he says and puts his finger down his throat like he’s trying to make himself vomit.

“That’s not funny,” says a dark-haired girl almost as thin as Eden. “He’s making fun of my eating disorder.”

“Eating disorders can cause sudden death due to electrolyte imbalances,” says…

“What’s your name?”

“Megan.”

“Death?” says a boy with a frightened look on his face.

“You’re…” As Eden turns from student to student, she feels herself getting dizzy.

“Cleveland.”

“Sudden death,” says Megan. “All the organs in the body are starved simultaneously.”

 “We get it,” says Sunshine.

 The bell rings. Dougie collapses onto the floor, where he lies in a rigid straight line. “Look at me! I’m an exclamation mark,” he says wanting to lighten up the feeling in the room. The students laugh and step over his body as they exit — except for Sunshine.

“You’re a jerk and a traitor,” he says.

 “How was school today,” asks Eden’s mother.

“A girl in my class is anorexic.”

“How terrible,” says her mother. “Eating disorders are the worst.”

“Please open the play to the first page,” says Eden. She looks at the students who sit cheerlessly at their desks — except for Dougie who merely attentive, offers a respite from the oppressive (depressive?) energy in the room.  When I played Ophelia, no one could take their eyes off me. “Shall we begin?”

“I’m confused,” says Chuck.

“Always,” mutters Megan.

“Am I supposed to go?”

“Yes,” says Megan.

“I go?”

“Yes. You’re Bernardo, aren’t you?” says Megan.

“I’m Bernardo, aren’t I, Miss James?”

“You’re Bernardo.”

He finishes reading and the room falls into silence.

“You’re up next, bro,” Dougie says to Cleveland. “You’re Marcello.”

“Do I have to be?”

“Somebody does,” says Eden.

“Well, can’t it be somebody else?”

“No, Cleveland,” says Megan. “You’re it.”

Resigned, he begins to read the text, mispronouncing liegemen. “Leggymen,” he says.

None of the students want to read their parts. Horatio, King Hamlet’s ghost, Claudius, etc., they all balk. Eden, with no hair, no health, no future wants to give these kids the only thing she has to give – Shakespeare with his language (pure poetry), amazing characters (so amazing) and stories (timeless). Their rejection of her treasured gift hurts her, and she imagines stabbing each one of them with a poisoned sword. While engaged in this mental activity, the word “entrails” comes to her mind and before she can rigorously mutilate and kill a few more of her students (in fantasy only) she recalls the stomach she lost that was “full of cancer.” The bell rings signaling the end of class and everyone in the room is relieved.

“Are you okay?” says Dougie, who has stayed behind.

“I hate them,” she says.

“I get it.”

“Do you?”

“I’m a painter.”

“Exteriors or interiors?”

“More like portraits.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

“Nobody does.”

“Well, theatre is my life. I’ve been acting since I was six. My mom enrolled me into an afterschool program because I was shy and didn’t have any friends.”

“I don’t have any friends. I don’t play video games.”

“Your parents must be proud of your painting.”

“Not really. They want me to play the guitar. My dad plays the guitar.”

“I just want the class to appreciate Shakespeare — a little bit? A tiny bit? A smidge?” With whom is she bargaining?

“That’s not going to happen,” says Dougie. “A lot of these kids are really bad readers, so all Shakespeare means to them is being embarrassed in front of their friends.”

“But Shakespeare understands embarrassment,” she says. “He understands shame. Isn’t that how Hamlet feels when he considers how quickly his mother remarried after his father’s death? That’s another thing Shakespeare understands. Death.” Eden puts her hand on her stomach. “My mom drives me everywhere,” she says. “When I get into the car she calls me, ‘My Precious Cargo.’”

The two cornerstones of Dougie’s life are going to be painting (portraits) and rescuing women. To do both of these things, each an art form in its own right, Dougie will (and has already) become highly empathic, with superior observational skills. These traits first began to develop in sixth grade, when his father brought home a “dinner guest,” his mistress, Ursula. Not Mistress Ursula like an S&M dominatrix, but his secretary who was a (legal) immigrant from an Eastern European country that at one time, had been part of the Soviet bloc. That night, upon entering the house, he and Ursula immediately retired to the living room where he serenaded her with folk songs as he strummed his guitar for accompaniment. Ursula looked at him adoringly (part of her appeal) and noting how he was dressed — seer sucker suit and cowboy boots — thought him a demigod. Dougie’s mother relegated to the kitchen, cooked, banging the pots and pans loudly. It would be a singular act of rebellion, with all future cooking demands met with acquiescence.

Slowly, but not that slowly Dougie noticed Ursula began to appear more frequently, until she seemed to be living in their house. Maybe she was. She soon came on family vacations. “We don’t want to leave Ursula behind, do we?” said his father. They travelled to Niagara Falls (U.S. side), Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell “so Ursula can understand democracy,” his father said and most recently Boca Raton, where Ursula wore a bikini. Dougie was aroused. Confused. Guilty because he was more attracted to Ursula than his mother with her bulky figure and large behind covered in heavy nylon fabric. That he was even thinking about being attracted to his mother, weighing the pros and cons made him feel like a pervert. The whole thing was super Greek, but even if he could have poked out his father’s eyes and taken Ursula as his own, he wouldn’t have. His loyalty was to his mother — even if he didn’t understand why she put up with Ursula; and even if sometimes, her behavior made him angry, and made him think of her as pathetic and weak. Still, she was his mother, and he was losing her.

Each day she became more emotionally withdrawn. Less affectionate. Less there. She put on weight. She put on more weight. Dougie tried to make her laugh, desperately thumbing through joke books. He tried to make her proud bringing home good grades. He painted her portrait and in an act of solidarity, steadfastly refused to paint Ursula’s, despite his father’s nagging. He told her, “You’re a great mom and I love you.” She didn’t even look at him.

 Like a long, seemingly endless drive to a destination to which no one wanted to go, Hamlet finally comes to its conclusion. “I don’t understand” says Sunshine. “Is that it? Hamlet and everybody are dead.”

“It happens,” says Eden. She should know. Not just because she’s going to be dead but because the dead have been visiting her, piled knee deep in the back corner of the classroom. A coffee klatch, without the coffee they chatter away offering Eden reassurances.

“We’re waiting for you.”

“Everything will be fine.”

“It’s nice here.” Distant relatives, neighbors. Who cares? Until she sees Donna Vincenzo, a grade school classmate known for her mucous-filled cough. She had died in fifth grade.

“What killed you?” says Eden. “Emphysema?”

“Yes,” says Donna.

“Cystic Fibrosis?”

“Yes.”

“Obstructive pulmonary disease?”

“Yes,” says Donna.

“Is this conversation going anywhere?”

“No, but you are. I’m here to help.”

“Does anyone else want to say anything about the play we just read?” Eden asks. The anorexic girl, Gabby has her hand up.

“I have something to say. My father died from alcohol poisoning and my mother really did marry my uncle, my father’s brother. I think he’s trying to mess with my little sister. When I come home from school he’s always lying on her bed.”

“Well, you know what Hamlet says about that,” says Megan.

“I should kill him?”

“Of course not, dummy. That nothing good is going to come of that marriage because its nasty and you should report your uncle to the school social worker. Geez. Do I have to do all the thinking around here?”

“I can’t take this anymore,” says Cleveland.

“Take what?” says Sunshine.

“Talking about this play, and people dying and being dead. All it does is remind me of Mikey.

“Mikey’s dead.”

“Exactly, and it’s my fault. He wanted us to join this cult, and I went along with it, although I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Then I thought maybe it was a bad idea, but I didn’t say anything.”

“Is that why you wore green all the time? I thought you were part of some environmental thing,” said Gabby.

“When our parents found out, they wanted us to quit and I wanted to quit, but Mikey didn’t. I kept on waiting for the right moment to tell him I thought being in the cult was a bad idea, but by then our parents had hired these ex-FBI agents who came and took us in handcuffs to this Wilderness Program in Idaho for deprogramming.”

“That’s harsh,” said Megan.

“So, there we were at this camp and Mikey wants to get a coffee. An iced coffee. We’re in the wilderness and it’s snowing. I want to tell him, ‘Hey man, this is a crazy idea,’ but then I think maybe he’s right and just past those trees is a Starbucks. Then it begins to snow harder and I’m thinking I should speak up and tell him we need to get back to camp but I’m waiting for the right moment. Then the wind begins howling, and I’ve never seen snow fall that fast and out of some self-preservation part of my brain…”

“The amygdala,” says Megan.

“Shut-up,” says Sunshine.

“I finally speak up and say, ‘We need to turn around.’ Mikey, he keeps on walking so I grab him and try to pull him back towards the camp. He fights me off and the last thing I hear him say is, ‘I want my iced coffee.’ Mikey…”

“Froze to death,” says Megan.

“If I hadn’t doubted myself about the cult, and what I was seeing that day (wilderness, lots of snow) Mikey would still be alive.”

“Mikey always had to do the opposite of what anyone said. It’s not your fault,” says Dougie.

“Hamlet’s fatal flaw was failing to act. Isn’t that what you said, Miss James? My mom would call him a procrastinator which is what she always calls me. I have the same fatal flaw. I wait, I dawdle. I doubt my decisions and it killed Mikey.”

“Mort,” says Gabby. “We learned that word in French class.”

Eden hears wild clapping. At the back of the room are the dead giving her a standing ovation. “You’re a good teacher,” says Donna Vincenzo. “Cleveland learned something.”

At the end of class, Dougie waits until the other students have left. He takes an apple from his backpack. “There’s a hole on top,” he says to Eden, “and a hole on the side.” When she looks confused, he adds, “It’s a bong… to smoke weed — for the pain.” Eden is sure. He knows. Maybe the class knows. More and less.

 Eden’s abdomen is becoming distended from the growing cancer. She’s tired. Very tired. Out the front window, Brit can be seen jogging past the house. Since the weather turned cold, she’s been wearing a red running jacket, with red fleece gloves, “and a cute, matching headband.” It covers her ears, and she tucks her ponytail through a hole in the back. “Remember my ponytail? It was really thick. I wish, I wish…” says Eden. “Oh, mommy.” Her mother rushes over and lies next to her on the couch, holding her tight, hoping to staunch her pain. “Too tight,” cries Eden, “you’re hurting me.”

 With only a few days left in the semester and Hamlet complete, Eden seems unsure what to do next. To engage or disengage that is the question. Dougie steps in. “Let’s read another Shakespeare play,” he says too enthusiastically.

“No time for that,” she says.

“How about we watch Hamlet, the movie on YouTube?”

“I’m so sick of Hamlet I could puke,” says Sunshine.

“Stop it. Stop it,” yells Gabby.

“Poems,” says Dougie, “they’re short.”

Sunshine is about to say something derogatory about poems when he looks at Eden and notices… She looks horrible. The skin on her face is hanging. And what’s that thing, why’s that thing sticking out like that? Her stomach. He’s seen corpses that have looked better than her (or at least a corpse) and thinks back to his grandfather’s funeral where his mother insisted upon good behavior out of “respect for the dead.” Sunshine decides to keep his mouth shut and sits up straight, his hands clasp on his desk.

“That’s an idea,” says Eden perking up. “We could read Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

“Awesome idea,” says Dougie. “Really awesome! Amazing.”

“Sonnets? How many are there?” says Cleveland.

“154.” Eden looks at the tense faces of the students. “You know what?” she says. “Instead of the class reading them aloud, I’ll read them.” Everyone relaxes and there is a collective sigh so powerful it almost moves the hair on Eden’s wig.

“What’s a sonnet?” says Chuck.

“You’ll see,” she says.

As a trained Shakespearian actress, Eden takes a moment to prepare her “instrument.” She puts her hand to her mouth. Closes her eyes and breathes deeply. She taps into some creative spot (where?) and begins to recite Sonnet 18 from memory, her voice gentle, yet passionate. A number of students zone out. Megan doodles. When done, Eden pauses and sips from her water bottle. It’s hard to swallow. Her stomach hurts non-stop. She hasn’t told her mother but thinks she knows. “What was it about?” asks Chuck.

“Beauty,” says Eden.

“It sounded like a lullaby,” says Gabby.

With class over, Eden is alone in the room. The dead have stopped showing up — except for Donna Vincenzo. “Not only Chuck, but that kid, Sunshine has learned something about beauty through Shakespeare,” she says.

“How do you know?” says Eden.

“I can see into the future and can tell you with full confidence (that word again!), Sunshine will never put his bare feet on his dashboard. No dog hair, or garbage in his car, either.”

“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” says Eden.

“And cleanliness leads to beauty, through its symmetry and organization. Think fractals.”

 “You don’t sound like you’re 10 years old anymore,” says Eden.

“I’ve grown,” says Donna. Eden stands at her desk, silent. “How come you keep on holding on? You’ve got to know by now that you’ve made a real difference in peoples’ lives through your acting and your teaching.”

“I’m worried — about my mom,” says Eden.

“She’ll be okay,” says Donna. “Dougie will be there to take care of her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? Is that a real question?”

“You know what I mean.”

“He’ll paint her portrait. They’ll chat.”

“Anything else — like love being immortal?” says Eden.

“I think we’re both way past the point of stating the obvious,” says Donna.

 On the final day of the semester, Eden reads her last sonnet, number 91, about the pain of lost love. “You’ll have to read the rest on your own,” she says, her voice raspy. “And I hope you do.” She lets the class leave early. On the way out, Megan comes up to her desk.

“Hamlet wasn’t so horrible,” she says. “See you in January.”

With the semester over, everyone is gone, except for Dougie, who, as usual, has remained behind to help. He walks to Eden’s desk and picks up her tote bag. It’s surprisingly light, as though there is nothing inside. Maybe there isn’t. He then picks up her book of sonnets and offers her his arm. “My Queen” he says. “My liege,” she replies, taking his arm. She holds tight, the neuropathy in her feet making it difficult for her to feel the ground. Slowly, they exit the classroom together, as he escorts her to her mother’s waiting car.

The bell rings. Class is over.

SeaWater

Lea Smith

People didn’t go on Anabelle’s dock. Certainly not the other fishermen.

In the summer, a tourist might wander on, trying to capture the experience of a boat on the Maine coast without paying for it.

But this morning, it was early spring and town was quiet, cold at sunrise and not much better by midday. Going up and over the hill with her fishing gear, Anabelle surveyed her dock, upon which a pile of legs and arms were slumped.

It was a familiar image, one from long ago, and no less unsettling now. Back then it had been Anabelle’s mother, though she had been crumpled in the belly of the boat instead of on the dock.

Anabelle slowed when she recognized the pair of purple galoshes in the pile — the same from the day before when the girl, maybe twenty-two, or nearly there, had approached Anabelle when she was loading the boat. Said her name was Lorelai and that she’d like a job and would never be late.

It hadn’t occurred to Anabelle that the girl would take rejection so poorly. Paused at the crest of the hill, she tried drumming up a new way to say no. Lorelai had been so earnest, innocent. Not yet tarnished by the years spraying by, wet and cold and drying. Now she was wilting on the dock — drunk, probably. Ready to complain.

Anabelle’s operation needed only one person, that much she had already told Lorelai. A single restaurant in town bought her catch. Chef put an asterisk on the bottom of their menu:

*Fish caught by a woman.

People went crazy for it. The restaurant took any amount she could catch. Three fish meant three specials. Two meant two. They charged their customers an astronomical price and always sold out.

To pay another person was to throw the whole system off kilter.

The pile of limbs started to shift, and Anabelle went down the hill with her reasons and a smart quip about the fine line between annoyance and persistence.

The girl pushed herself up to sit facing Anabelle. There was a charged silence as if after a drawn out scream, and the hairs on Anabelle’s body pulled away from her skin. Lorelai’s face was frighteningly changed from the nervous sureness of the day before. A structure caving in on itself. Another town drunk with no means to deal with choppy waters.

In Lorelai’s left hand was a fishing pole. Clean, free of salt damage. Probably had never seen an ocean. It would be destroyed in this water. Eaten away like sandpaper on fingernails.

But the unsaid knowledge among Anabelle and the fishermen couldn’t be ignored: the ocean was a balm for the most gruesome of spirits.

There was no other choice. Send the girl home in this state? She’d fall into the water. 

“You’re not going without a hat,” said Anabelle. From her backpack she pulled a knit hat, like the one on her head, only this one had ear flaps. She placed it over Lorelai’s head and motioned for her to get in the boat. She couldn’t smell any booze on the girl, yet Lorelai swayed slightly.

“You can leave that fishing pole. It won’t do shit out here.”

The girl looked at Anabelle as if the pole might take skin if she tried parting with it. Anabelle gestured again for Lorelai to get in the boat, saying nothing about the pole.

The girl sat in the front and turned around to watch the shore move away. The mainland was consumed by fog, and for a moment, the girl closed her eyes, still with her head turned at Anabelle.

They moved past a line of islands dotted with pine trees, then Anabelle cut the motor.

Lorelai’s eyes opened.

“You’re not even a quarter of the way in the bag, are you?” asked Anabelle.

“I’m sorry,” said Lorelai, almost whispering. “What do you mean?”

“Drunk. Blitzed.”

“No,” said Lorelai. “Never.”

“Hm,” said Anabelle, rethinking her choice of bringing the girl along. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sorry.”

For a while, they looked across the still water. A seagull cried somewhere in the distance. It could be nice to fish with a woman again; hear the breath of another person out here.

“I won’t be able to pay you until you start catching fish. But you can take one home each night if we catch more than three.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. “And this is a job?

Anabelle heard her decision laugh at her. “Yes?”

“This is my job?”

“Yes,” said Anabelle.

“Can you say, ‘Lorelai, you’re hired?’”

“Lorelai, you’re hired.”

Again, Lorelai looked across the water. Did she know the direction of the shore? She was gazing west of it.

The girl whispered, “See, I did it.” Then she looked back at Anabelle, eyes watering from the cold or something else. “Can you show me how to cast?”

“Yes,” said Anabelle. They would start from the beginning.

Lorelai watched Anabelle. The movement was swift as she timed the release. The lure flew through the mist, thunking through the top of the water, then a retrieval. Sometimes a striped bass or bluefish fought the ride back. Anabelle brought the fish toward the boat with a strong and steady patience. Then it was Lorelai’s turn to try. She glanced at Sam’s old pole in the bottom of the boat, and took the larger, sturdier one from Anabelle’s hands.

“Alright,” said Anabelle, “flip the bail on the spinning reel,” she pointed to the coil of line and the curved metal bar over it. “Now put your finger on the line, hold it steady, and pull the rod back, then swing it forward. Keep it fluid and release the line.”

On Friday nights, Lorelai and Sam used to grab quarters from the change jar and walk to the arcade at The Icicle Inn. They played skee-ball mostly, or Captain Fantastic pinball.

When they didn’t have extra quarters — since Lorelai quit her job, this was happening more often — they would split a can of noodle soup and walk past the arcade doors to the history room instead, which had free coffee and lots of old photo albums. Lorelai loved the way the women looked in the black and white photos, with their furry hats and thick scarves.

One Friday morning when Sam was at work, where he fixed telephone poles, and Lorelai was pacing and checking the classifieds again and waiting for call-backs and opening and closing the bare pantry doors, she saw across the street a bin of clothing and a sign that said free.

Lorelai cracked a window at the front of the house, so she’d hear the phone if any employers called her back and tiptoed across the street.

The bin was full of sweaters, slacks, and a floor length, periwinkle cotton dress. She tucked it under her arm and walked, chest up, back into the street, nodding at empty open windows and smiling, though the corners of her mouth were quivering and her cheeks cramped.

The kitchen shears did well on the dress. And soon she had a scarf five feet long. She cut into the ends of it in quarter inch intervals for fancy tassels and wrapped it around her neck like the women in the photos.

The bait fish jumped so quickly it sounded like rain.

Lorelai’s first cast flew twenty feet and disappeared into the water.

“Start winding,” Annabelle said. “As soon as it hits the water, that’s when you start.”

She came back with nothing. Over and over again.

“It might be one of those days,” said Annabelle. “Don’t worry.”

Lorelai’s failure found the last place in her body, somehow hidden from the hurt, and settled in.

“Thanks,” said Lorelai. Though she wasn’t sure what for. The job, the patience, the pity.

“We’ll come back tomorrow and try again,” said Anabelle.

Lorelai pondered the concept of tomorrow on the way back to the shore, and the way that it meant more of the boat and of the fishing, but also more of everything else.

Sam started to work Saturdays, too. They went to the arcade less, on Sundays instead of Fridays, so Sam could rest his body while Lorelai scrambled to stretch cans of beans and large bags of white rice with broth and chopped onions. One cold Sunday in April, Lorelai had her scarf on, and she’d dabbed some Crisco on her lips for shine.

They sat in chairs in the history room with steaming cups of coffee with lots of sugar and they looked at old hotel tycoons shaking hands outside the same front door they’d just entered.

“How’s the job search?”

Lorelai sipped her coffee. “Fine,” she said, her default answer. The deconstructed dress around her neck suddenly felt hot, scratchy. She’d checked the answering machine seven times that day while Sam was at work.

Her resume was brief. Receptionist, hostess, receptionist again, but she’d been with the first two jobs for two years each. That had to count for something. (Though much of the time at the second job had been spent staring out the window at a slice of ocean caught between two brick buildings in the village). Maybe it was the third job, lasting just two months, that scared potential employers away. She’d thought of slipping a small note on her resume about the working conditions, but that felt like a slippery slope, and she hadn’t even told Sam. I slapped the manager’s meaty hand away and then they fired me.

For a week, maybe two, with no lingering gazes from her manager, no comments aimed at the hem of her skirts, she had felt elated. She weeded out their fridge, cleaning every shelf with a wet rag, wiping away dried pieces of carrot and dots of juice. She took walks along the shore, finding pieces of green and blue sea glass, and once a purple shard that sadly wasn’t ready. But the euphoria didn’t last as Sam spent more time at work and her aimless hours stretched to days.

But with the lengthening silence after submitted resumes, the little blonde girl that had been appearing in Lorelai’s mind for weeks had started to feel real. A daughter; a family. They were always in a bathroom somewhere in a big house. Sam was trying to braid the little girl’s hair, and the three of them laughed as pieces came sliding out of his hands and the braid never seemed to get longer. But the reality was that Sam was gone before dawn and back after dark, there would be no time for a child if they were to continue like this.

“Any leads?” Asked Sam.

“Not yet,” she said. Her face burned and she loosened the scarf away from her chin again.

“Sweetheart,” said Sam, lowering his voice, “it’s been almost three months.”

Lorelai closed the album and stood up. From this angle, she could see the dark rings under Sam’s eyes.

“I’m not going to be a receptionist again,” said Lorelai. Someone within reach, she wanted to say.

“I could talk to Mr. Channing about a position in the office; I’ll put in a good word,” Sam smiled. “Then we can go to the arcade again.”

But Lorelai was returning the albums to the shelves. She’d seen photos of Mr. Channing on some company pamphlets Sam had brought home when he got hired. The ruddy skin, thick neck. His hands were not pictured, but they were all the same to Lorelai. She left her coffee on the table and went back into the lobby and out the door.

Lorelai woke early one Monday morning before Sam, antsy, wanting to be near the water, where her mind washed clean on those long walks. She dressed in the dark, watching a sliver of moonlight across Sam’s face. He would be up soon, back to work. She slipped out of the room and to the front door, where she put on her brightly colored rain boots. The street was quiet and cool; nothing was open yet. She turned a corner and the iron-grey waves of the harbor came into view. In the distance, Hog Island, white caps, and fishing boats. They were awake here.

Out of the protection of the buildings, the wind was stronger. Lorelai sat on the single bench overlooking the docked boats, bobbing in the wake.

When she was thinking hard, she would fiddle with a small gold locket around her neck. A gift from Sam on their one-year anniversary. She’d spin it around until it pulled tight, then let go. Her fingers found their way there, and she continued to sit.

Voices echoed across the water, and every so often, a gull or two would swoop overhead. Two fishermen on the dock smoked cigarettes, talking slowly, piles of lobster traps stacked as high as them nearby. Her great uncle had been a lobsterman, and he lived to be ninety-three, telling stories of barnacled mermaids until the end. Lorelai suddenly wished her family had kept with the tradition of working down here, instead of moving inland.

A woman, middle-aged, probably, clad in bright yellow bibs and a matching jacket, a knit wool hat, and thick rubber boots, trudged down to a blue fishing boat, a couple of docks over from the men. They took their cigarettes out of their mouths, looked at the woman as if waiting for something. Lorelai held her breath. When the woman met their gaze, they nodded deeply. And she nodded back, the slightest movement. Lorelai breathed again, standing. She would make a living by fishing.

The woman wasn’t middle aged after all. Late thirties, maybe, but she moved as if slightly stiff, and the lines on her face seemed more prominent than Lorelai would be comfortable with on her own face at that age. Lorelai introduced herself and asked for a job.

“Go talk to them,” said the woman, pointing to the docks where the men were still smoking, before she continued loading her boat. “They’re always looking for people to scrub traps.”

“I don’t want to work for them,” said Lorelai. “I want to work for you.”

“Sorry,” said the woman, rubbing at her cheek with a gloved hand, her eyes sweeping over Lorelai, “my business doesn’t work like that.”

“Like what?”

“With others,” said the woman, stepping into her boat.

 At home, Lorelai went through the classifieds again. She closed her eyes, drew her finger in a circle in the air and shot it down on the paper, then looked. 

Administrative assistant wanted.

Lorelai threw the paper on the ground, breathing hard. She looked at the clock; six more hours until Sam would be home. She picked the paper back up, tried the game again.

Seeking dog walker, friendly schnauzer. Skittish around falling leaves.

They could play more skee-ball, at least.

She took the number to the phone, reaching for the landline receiver. It rang before she could touch it. This was it. Someone was calling back for her.

In the terrible silence that followed the news, the technician — stumbling over his words — tried to explain the mechanisms of a pole and the gear to Lorelai, as if it might serve as a salve. But Lorelai could not hear him. There was a nauseating sequence of snapping noises in her ears, as she watched wood, rotten at its core, seemingly sound to onlookers, toppling like a building with someone trapped inside. In her mind’s eye she stared at the top end of the pole — where the remaining jagged pieces of wood stuck up like splintery turrets — and not on the ground.

He’d fallen. A forty-year-old pole. Should have only been in service for twenty-five.

Lorelai pressed the switch hook while the man was still talking and he disappeared. The receiver fell from her hand, swinging, then smacked into the wall on which the phone lived.

Lorelai whirled around, staggering, her toes grinding so deep into the carpet that she could feel the grit between the fibers. She turned around again, as if something was circling her and she could not see it. The air in the house was compressing her lungs and threatening her brain.

Outside she could breathe better. She careened through streets, past the pub, the granite library. The phone in her house now contaminated by the words of the technician, she used the payphone outside the bank.

Her mother had already heard; by his mother; by the technician. They’d all tried to call Lorelai, but the line had been busy.

“Don’t be alone,” they said. “We’ll come get you.”

And what they didn’t say: We know it has been hard making friends there after you moved back. It’s such a terribly small town.

She told them she’d like to be alone and hung up on them when they tried to protest. The outside world was condensing too. If she was going to be suffocated, she wanted to be at home.

Someone across the road pointed at her bare feet. Asked a question of the person standing next to them. Lorelai was aware of none of it.

Curled into a ball on the newspaper she’d picked through earlier, Lorelai hugged a pillow from the couch, biting it when the tears and her breathing came too violently fast.

When she briefly slept that night, she dreamt of the little blonde girl in the bathroom. She wasn’t laughing. There was no one to braid her hair, and so she left, and the bathroom filled instead with seawater that roared and beat against the window and walls and softened and spread the towels hanging on the hooks.

Lorelai woke sore, as if she’d been clenching every muscle. She stretched onto her back, spread on the carpet. Suddenly, she sprang up, running to the bathroom. Vomiting bile into the toilet, her hands clutching her hair, she couldn’t remember when she last ate. She drank from the faucet, then looked around the bathroom, imagining what it would be like to be underwater. She would go to the dock again.

No hat, but she’d put on her boots, Sam’s coat. At first, she’d laid the jacket over her head like a sheet ghost and stood in the kitchen and let out a long, muffled scream.

She wanted to hurl a skee-ball into the wall, wade into the numbing water, pour packet after packet of free sugar from the history room down her throat.

On the dock, with Sam’s fishing pole in her hand, she sat and slowly leaned to the side in a stupor, watching the hill, watching for a head bobbing up and over it.

At the shore, Anabelle gathered her things from the boat. Lorelai had already jumped out with the fishing pole in her hand again.

Anabelle noticed the cavernous landscape opening in the girl’s eyes again.

“Since there’s only one fish, I can’t give you any today. But I’ll have some for you tomorrow.”

Lorelai’s mouth quivered. She stuck her thumb in the air but didn’t move. Sure, her thumb said. Fine.

Anabelle made for the hill with her single fish, looking back once to see the girl still standing on the dock with her thumb up, as if waiting for a ride to somewhere else.

First, Lorelai walked toward her house. A nausea at seeing Sam’s shoes lined by the door grew in her, then she saw them. Her mother was at the door; her father peering into a window. Lorelai turned sharply around and half walked half ran to The Icicle Inn. If she saw them up close, their familiar faces, and let them help her, she would sink to a place so dark she might not return. Around strangers, out in the world, on the sea, she could restrain, conduct herself to course out the pain in doses, then let it tear at her in the evenings alone. During the day, though, she’d swipe back at the hands reaching at her out of shadow.

Though it was early afternoon, the lobby was warm and bright. Lorelai squinted as she walked in.

“Room please,” she said to the attendant. She could hear the pinball machine in the arcade. Every click of the levers a small knife in her side.

The attendant put his finger on the page of a planner. “I have a room with two twin beds. $65 a night. How many nights are you staying?” He eyed the fishing pole.

“I can’t pay until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have money after I catch fish.”

The attendant cocked his head to the side. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry, we need payment up front.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. “Ok…” She slid her arm off the counter and walked toward the arcade, where a family with a small child were playing Pac Man.

She sat on the carpeted floor. There were crumbs and pieces of lint everywhere. At some point, the family left.

There was a small opening under the ramp of the skee-ball machine, and Lorelai wedged herself underneath it, face up with the fishing pole next to her.

Footsteps in the room. A kid running. The slam of the skee-ball above her. Lorelai squeezed her eyes shut as the game thundered over her. Someone shrieked with delight. Another groaned. The game was over. It went on like this for hours: silence, then noise.

At some point, much later, the attendant, or someone else, deemed the room an empty one, turned off the lights, and closed the door.

Lorelai could hear people talking in rooms on the floor below her. She rolled onto her side. Her shoulder and hip pushed into the carpet and the concrete below it.

Every so often, the games would burst out with noises, bits of theme music and a jovial voice inviting someone to come play. And during those loud moments, Lorelai would let slip her greatest wails.

The first fish that Lorelai pulled into the boat was a moderately sized mackerel. It wasn’t the first fish to bite the girl’s line, but the first to make it all the way in. Anabelle hadn’t told Lorelai what to do when she caught one.

Lorelai let it run, taking the line with it, then she lifted the rod tip toward the sky and reeled, slowly lowering the rod back toward the water.

“Keep pressure on the line,” said Anabelle. “And change the direction of the rod as the fish does.”

Anabelle smiled as she watched Lorelai wrestle the line. A week on the water and the girl wasn’t going to be dead weight anymore. Up to that point, Anabelle had been catching fish as usual, and Lorelai had been casting and reeling, casting and reeling, her eyes watering when she thought Anabelle couldn’t see her. Anabelle started to pay her anyway. Whatever was ailing Lorelai’s spirit was fighting hard against the curative nature of the ocean. At least Anabelle hadn’t found the girl slumped again on her dock in the mornings. She arrived standing, sometimes not meeting Anabelle’s eyes, but there wearing Anabelle’s hat and sometimes a pale blue scarf.

When the shiny fish burst from the water, wriggling in the air, Lorelai steadied herself, let the fish flop in front of her, then at Anabelle’s words, knelt and removed the hook from its cheek. Her fingers shook as she fought to pull it out.

“Put it in the bucket,” said Anabelle, but Lorelai was holding the fish down on the lid. Its wet, beady eye flashed around, the mouth gaping and closing. Anabelle slid the bucket closer to Lorelai.

“Put it in the bucket, Lorelai.” And the girl made her first full catch.

Back on the dock, they unloaded.

“Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Lorelai, without hesitation.

“Five o’clock,” said Anabelle.

“Five,” said Lorelai. She made to leave the dock.

“You’re like a parrot,” said Anabelle.

Lorelai pinched her lips together as she looked down at her feet.

“Sorry,” said Anabelle, “I was just trying to make a joke. Forget it.”

“I know,” said Lorelai, her shoulders plunged forward. “I’m just using what’s in front of me.” Lorelai turned to leave.

“Wait,” said Anabelle. “I saw you pull a scale from your teeth today. Let me show you how to gut one.”

Anabelle figured the girl was eating every fish she took home — Lorelai never said no — but Anabelle had been cleaning and gutting them for her. From her pocket she pulled her sharpest knife.

“Grab one of the fish from the bucket. The lid too.”

With the dull side of the knife, Anabelle scraped the bluefish from tail to head, dunked it in the water, repeated the cycle. She cut off the head, made an incision from the neck down, put her finger in the abdomen and pulled out the guts. One final dunk in the water. Then she held it up.

“Your turn.”

Lorelai’s face, which had been red from the sun and sea air, had drained of its color. But she pulled a fish from the bucket and scraped off its scales, beheaded it, cut the belly open. She paused before gutting, and Anabelle saw the girl’s pulse in her neck.

“Pull yourself together, Lorelai. There’s no turning back now.”

The words worked. Anabelle knew they would. Her own mother had used them on her.

Lorelai finished the final wash of the fish and put it on the lid next to the other.

“The heads made a good stock,” said Anabelle. “Want them?”

Lorelai shook her head. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

“Don’t forget about dinner,” said Anabelle.

The concaving of Lorelai’s heart didn’t get easier as the months went on and summer took up its post — just different.

Her house smelled of fish. She could not sleep in their bed. After that first night in the arcade, she hung in a limbo between sleep and lucidity on the couch in a cocoon of Sam’s clothing, with the radio on low, so she could hear murmurs but never make out words.

In the darkest moments, she’d spread Sam’s coat over the couch cushions, then wail her fists on it, shouting nonsensical words until she collapsed on the rough canvas. If she happened to walk by a payphone in the village, she’d dial her parents, wait until they picked up or met the answering machine, say she was doing better, not to worry, then hang up.

Dinner with Anabelle was always a light; a chance to be in a house that did not contain memory.

The night before her third time going over to Anabelle’s, and before ultimately becoming comatose on the couch, someone knocked on the front door, which had not happened for months.

When she opened the door, she saw Sam’s brown eyes, the detached earlobes, despair warping two mouths she’d known. His parents.

Anabelle checked her watch, then she checked it again. I’d like to work for you; I’ll never be late. There was worry instead of annoyance. Lorelai was always early.

But at 5:37, when Anabelle was done loading the buckets and the rods into the boat, she saw Lorelai coming over the hill.

She barely spoke to Anabelle or looked her in the eye. Her hood was pulled low. In the boat they moved away from the shore without talking. When they stopped to fish, they turned, back-to-back, as they always were and cast into the water, reeled, and went at it again. Every so often, one of them grunted, wrangling a fish into the boat. Neither helped the other.

A similar scenario had played out once, when Anabelle worked for her mother. She was still drunk from the bar the night before, and Anabelle, a kid, had to carry everything down to the dock herself, taking multiple trips, while her mother wavered from the sidewalk to the cobblestones, trying to light a cigarette.

When they were away from shore, Anabelle wrapped her mother’s fingers around the pole, and propped her up on a bucket, then stood, facing the wind, and fished until she heard snoring behind her.

Her mother woke when they docked, three hours later. She woke talking.

“Anabelle,” she said. “Another day on the water. Let’s go.” She wiped spittle from her mouth.

Both their eyes fell upon the bucket with three fish.

The woman wailed at her daughter’s feet. Wailed so loud the fishermen out in the bay talked of it for months. The water vibrated as she beat the bottom of her boat with her fist until it bled.

“Damn you,” Anabelle’s mother said. “Damn you, damn you.”

And Anabelle repeated those words in her head as she watched her mother.

“His name was Sam,” said Lorelai. They had gone more than three hours without speaking.

Anabelle breathed in the understanding. The fishing pole. The oversized coat from the first day. The locket around Lorelai’s neck. Sam.

“The telephone pole he was servicing was rotten to the core.” There was a harshness in Lorelai’s voice.

The boat wobbled. Anabelle nearly sank to her knees: calling the girl a parrot, making her gut a fish, never asking what was wrong. All things she had endured as a kid. Loneliness hardened a person.

“Do you know how long telephone poles last?” Lorelai asked, her voice a bark.

“No,”

“Twenty-five years,” yelled the girl. The words echoed off the water and roared back, mocking them.

Anabelle’s knees buckled when Lorelai jumped out of the boat and it thrashed with the sudden weight change. She fell backwards, landing where Lorelai usually stood.

The water was so cold it was hot, then all feeling started to drift away from Lorelai under the numbing sea water. That was the point. For a little while, she bobbed weightlessly, her limbs suspended. Restraining the emotion. She had almost let it all crash on her at once.

She was hoisted by her armpits back into the boat by someone with a quiet reserve of strength.

Her face stung on one side; it was being slapped.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” asked Anabelle. She held the girl’s head in one hand, trying with the other to get her to speak. “It’s too cold out here.”

“They want to take his stuff,” Lorelai whispered, blinking the salt water rapidly in and out of her eyes.

“What? Whose stuff?”

“All of it, his clothes, his shoes…”

“Who?” Anabelle held Lorelai’s head with both hands now.

Lorelai squeezed her eyes closed. “His family,” she said.

“Sam’s?”

“Yes,” Lorelai said.

Lorelai sat up, her lips and fingers were blue, and she shook violently.

“They want his clothing and shoes and everything. I don’t know why.” Then she looked at Anabelle, her eyes wide and red from the salt. “I can’t let them. I can’t.”

Anabelle stood and grabbed the dry bag, out of which she pulled an emergency blanket, hand warmers, extra gloves, socks. With her teeth she tore the hand warmers open and handed them to Lorelai. She was shaking as much as the girl now. She touched the back of her head, where an egg was forming.

“No,” she said to Lorelai. “We can’t. But first, we need to get you warm.”

Though Anabelle didn’t lobster, there were buoys in her yard, sticking straight up like flowers. She didn’t have time to garden, so she made a mockery of one that would last year-round and wouldn’t yield to the snow.

Her house had lots of windows, capturing the sun when it came above the horizon line and the other buildings in the town. Through one of the windows, she saw Lorelai turning onto her street, with large bags slung over her shoulders.

Annabelle had made a stew with ginger and root vegetables, hoping to warm the girl up. Anabelle didn’t eat fish much anymore, yet her clothes had held on to the scent for months after she’d stopped.

When Lorelai walked in, she was reminded of the pungency.

“You can put the bags in here,” Anabelle said, pointing to a room off the entranceway.

“Thank you,” said Lorelai. Her face was pink, as if she’d been in a hot shower. She made for the doorway, then looked at Annabelle.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Anabelle waved the apology away.

While they ate, Lorelai couldn’t help but look over Anabelle’s shoulder at the bags in the next room or think about what Sam’s parents would say when they showed back up to retrieve everything. They said they were sorry, multiple times. They said it in lieu of an answer when Lorelai asked why they never planned a service. Though Sam’s father had pointed weakly behind Lorelai, before she closed the door on them.

When she turned and leaned her back to the wood, she saw the marking where the receiver had smacked into the wall, and the phone itself, still hanging off the hook.

Anabelle cleared her throat.

“The season will end soon,” she said. Then, quieter, “Shit timing.”

Lorelai swirled the food around her mouth.

“It’ll get too cold,” Annabelle continued. “What will you do?”

“Hm,” said Lorelai. “Dunno.”

“Well you can’t do nothing.”

Lorelai thought of her game with the newspaper. Of the long and empty days at home. The air threatened to close in on her again.

“The lobstermen, they can go ‘till December, and there’s always maintenance on the traps.”

“Ok,” said Lorelai. She looked up at Anabelle. “I have more of his stuff. Can I⎯”

“Yes,” said Anabelle. “Bring all of it.”

In the middle of the night, Lorelai woke. The skin over her collar bones felt taught, dry. She went to the bathroom and turned on the light. The locket was hanging open, and tiny bits of seaweed dotted her skin, and she touched the dried salt from the water with her fingers. It had seeped in when she plunged into the ocean. Just above her right collar bone, a small, blonde eyelash.

Sam had put the locket around Lorelai’s neck while she was playing pinball at The Icicle Inn, so focused and teeth-gnashing that she didn’t notice until the game was over, and he was pointing at her chest.

 Lorelai rolled the tiny locket around in her fingers, then slid her thumbnail into the crack and it opened.

“What should I put in here?”

Sam pursed his lips. “Hm,” he said. Then he reached up to his eye and tugged out a single eyelash. “Here,” he said, and he placed the tiny hair into the locket and closed it.

They laughed at the absurdity, closing their eyes as they did, and in that blind laughter, Lorelai first imagined the bathroom, and the little curly haired girl, and their teeth as they laughed at the braid that kept undoing itself and slipping through Sam’s hands.

Lorelai picked the lash from her skin, held it between two fingers, and walked toward the back door. September was moving in fast. Lorelai shivered and held her finger to her face.

The eyelash sailed into the wind.

Lorelai tried to watch it fall, but it was gone too quickly.

Before she’d left Anabelle’s house, Lorelai asked her what she did in the winter.

“Mexico,” Annabelle had said. A place she always rented. Lorelai could join her, if she wanted. There was always easy work down there. They’d start fishing again in the spring.

The next morning, on her way down to the docks, Lorelai had caught the eyes of the two fishermen, who smoked cigarettes every morning together. They had nodded at her, just as they had to Annabelle, and Lorelai whose hands were now calloused and the skin of her face dusted in salt, and who had become fonder of the cold than of the warmth, had nodded back.

Even after Lorelai left, and Anabelle cleaned the dishes from dinner, she couldn’t shake a feeling that had started to creep in when Lorelai had told her about Sam’s parents and their plan. It had compounded when Lorelai placed bags of Sam’s things in her guest room, which had not been occupied for some time. Yet if she pulled back the sheets, she would still see the imprint of her mother’s thin body.

She didn’t know the boy. What he looked like, sounded like, or if he had been good to Lorelai. Yet here he was, in her house. His shirts, jeans, winter boots.

She had sold much of her mother’s things. But she had kept the gutting knives, the fishing poles, even an old kettle that her mother had made tea in every day. Useful items, she had thought at the time.

Anabelle opened one of the bags and pulled out a shirt, held it in front of her, then quickly put it back.

In her basement, she found the kettle. She drank coffee, mostly. But she put it on the stove, on the back left burner, the one she never used.

On their final day on the water, they both cast and reeled in, sometimes in unison, sometimes apart.

Lorelai hadn’t slept after the eyelash disappeared into the wind, and she’d realized that she could not remember which eye he’d pulled it from — the recollection grainy now. She’d spend the night thinking, trying to hold on tight to what was left.

As Lorelai fought yet another catch, she felt the inches that the fish moved closer to the boat; the inches as they scattered out from between Sam and the ground; the inches that laid themselves down between Lorelai and remembering.

Minor

Chan Ziqian

Chiu Lixia wasn’t one of the students who spelled trouble. Those were angry and aggressive, with eyes that challenged not just your authority but your very right to exist. Or they slept openly in class, indifferent even to the discipline master’s scolding and threats. Lixia was nothing like that. She was a mouse of a child, with a soft, thin voice and scrawny limbs that swam in her oversized uniform. Her small eyes filled with fear whenever her name was called. If someone had pointed her out in the class photo four years later, with her straggly hair and pale, pointy face, no one from Hillside Secondary would have remembered her. Not the students, not the staff — except for Ms. Zheng, the young teacher seated in the middle of the front row of the photo.

Each week, the students of 1D had to write a journal entry at least a page long and submit it to Ms. Zheng, who was both their English teacher and form teacher. Most of the students treated it as a chore, scribbling words off the tops of their heads the morning the journals were due. Cayden Ng, for example, wrote exclusively about the meals he’d had, laying them out in dull and unappetizing detail. Sim Rui Min took a different approach, pouring out her enthusiasm for K-pop groups like BTS and GOT7 and the gossip surrounding their members. Ms. Zheng, in her professionalism and infinite patience as a teacher fresh out of NIE, responded to each entry with care. To Cayden, she asked what he’d liked about the food. To Rui Min, she asked for recommendations of songs. The activity, like any other piece of homework, was not for her benefit. The purpose was for the students to practice their writing skills, expand their vocabulary and become more self-aware. Though there were times it felt like a futile exercise on all three counts, she never admitted that to herself, nor did she give up. Instead, she continued writing encouraging comments and pasting gold stars below their entries.

But in that stack of forty-two journals, there was one that Ms. Zheng grew to look forward to reading. That journal belonged to Lixia. She wrote about her parents working irregular hours and the long afternoons and evenings falling asleep in front of the television alone at home. She wrote about the shame she felt when her classmates pretended not to hear her speak during group work. She wrote about reaching school early and seeing the changing colors of the sunrise from the balcony outside the classroom. Though the writing was clumsy, fumbling for the right words and peppered with spelling and grammatical mistakes, there was a sensitivity in her observations that made Ms. Zheng reach for her journal with some anticipation: How was Lixia feeling? What had she been up to this week? Like with the other students’ journals, she would respond in red ink to Lixia, but her comments ran to a whole paragraph rather than one or two lines. Instead of the usual gold stars, she dug into her personal stash of animal-themed and heart-shaped stickers.

If it seems strange that a child’s journal entries would resonate so strongly with an adult, remember that Ms. Zheng — or Yuqing, as she was known outside school — was only twenty-four, and an unworldly twenty-four at that. As an only child, her every material need was taken care of by her parents. When she turned fifteen, her mother sat her down and told her not to get into romantic relationships while in school as they would only distract her. When Yuqing joined Hillside Secondary, she had never had a boyfriend though she had her fair share of admirers — she was beautiful without being conscious of it, with clear, fair skin and dark eyes that were alert as a squirrel’s. Emotionally, she remained as innocent as she had been in her all-girls secondary school, where hugging and holding hands were everyday occurrences no one batted an eyelid at. Despite her naivety, Yuqing had a sharp mind. She won a scholarship to NUS and excelled in her postgraduate diploma in education. She also had a way of speaking and being that put people at ease and commanded respect at the same time. If her PGDE classmates had to vote for the one most likely to climb the ranks and become principal one day, it would have been her.

Yuqing was a good teacher — many of her colleagues would attest to that without envy or resentment. She was patient, attentive and kind. She looked out for students who didn’t speak up in class and made sure to call on them. She looked out for those who sat alone during recess and took care to chat with them. She was the sort of teacher who actually cared about their students and not just the job. Perhaps that was why, when Lixia had been absent from school for two days due to a fever, Yuqing left a packet of orange-flavored vitamin C gummies on her desk along with a note saying, “Get well soon and stay healthy!” In the bottom right-hand corner of the note, she pasted a teddy bear sticker and signed off with two names, the one that students called her and, as a personal touch, her Chinese name: 玉清, meaning “jade” and “clean”. She had not given such gifts to other students who had been ill, but she reasoned that they had their parents and friends to care for them. With Lixia, it was different. Someone had to make up for the absence of her family and the ostracism by her peers, so Yuqing took it upon herself to do so.

When Lixia next submitted her journal, the entry was a letter addressed to Yuqing, thanking her shyly for the sweets. She wrote that, for the first time, she looked forward to going to school, and of all the classes, her favorite was English because it made her feel a little less alone. At the end of the entry, she drew a figure of a girl with a sun in her chest, its rays extending beyond the outline of her body. What Lixia did not include in her entry was how, during English class, she would gaze at Yuqing standing at the front of the classroom, luminous and bright-eyed, speaking to the class in her clear, unaffected voice, and how she would think of the two characters of her Chinese name that were like a secret only the two of them shared.

Yuqing and Lixia began a weekly exchange of messages — Lixia in her journal, and Yuqing on pastel-colored notepaper, sometimes with packets of snacks or drinks that she would leave on Lixia’s desk when the classroom was empty during recess. If someone had read the notes by chance, they would not have guessed from the contents the eleven-year age gap between the two. The messages, at first tentative in their affection then growing in confidence, were adolescent in subject and tone, speaking of homework and tests and reminding each other to smile and be happy (in capital letters). They were sprinkled with hand-drawn smiley faces and hearts, and giddy with exclamation marks. Lixia saved all these notes deep in a drawer under her T-shirts. Each time she added to the bundle she felt she was adding another layer to her life, as if building a papier-mâché bowl. Her existence was no longer thin and insubstantial but growing in volume and heft. At night, with the door to her room closed, she would lay the notes out on her bed in chronological order and re-read them, luxuriating in the doting words, trying to divine meanings in them she might have missed.

In the week before the June holidays, Lixia wrote that she missed going to the cinema. The last time she had been there was years ago with her maternal grandparents, both of whom had since passed away. When she offered up that piece of information, it wasn’t without an inkling of what might result. It wasn’t entirely calculated, for the idea had only crossed her mind when a movie trailer appeared on television as she prepared to work on her journal. But she saw the opportunity and took small, halting steps towards it. Though Lixia was only thirteen and a timid child by all appearances, she had grasped Yuqing’s desire to please her, to compensate for what was lacking in her life, and she was hungry for what that might bring. She had perceived that even in the early days of the journal, and had made an effort to write what she thought would draw Yuqing’s attention to herself. Still, when Yuqing asked if she would like to watch a movie together, it came almost as a surprise. A shiver went through her as she read and re-read the words, not quite believing her eyes.

On the second day of the school holidays, Yuqing and Lixia met at a cinema in Clementi, near where they both lived. When Lixia arrived, Yuqing was already there, waiting near the snack counter. They waved and laughed, blood rushing to their cheeks as they saw each other looking so different — Lixia in a pink T-shirt and jeans instead of her beige uniform, and Yuqing in a white blouse and denim skirt, unlike the collared shirt and culottes she usually wore to work. Lixia thought her teacher looked beautiful, even ethereal. To calm herself, she took a deep breath, letting the burnt butter smell from the popcorn machine fill her lungs.

“Let’s get some popcorn to share,” said Yuqing, reaching for her purse, as if reading her mind.

With the popcorn acquired — the carton the size of Lixia’s head — they made their way into the theatre. The hall was dark and it was like moving through thick black mesh. As it was a morning screening, the theatre was mostly empty, with only a scattering of parents and children. When they found their places, Lixia sank into the deep, plush seat. The air was gloriously cold, an exquisite contrast to the stifling heat outside. She let out a small sigh of happiness.

“Popcorn?” Yuqing asked, offering her the carton.

Lixia took a piece. It tasted like salty styrofoam but she could not stop reaching for it even after the movie began. There was something pleasing about the way the crispy puffs squeaked and collapsed between her teeth. Sometimes when she reached for the popcorn at the same time as Yuqing, their fingers would graze each other — just for a split second, the contact so brief and light it could have almost not happened. All that — the darkened theatre, the delicious cold, the textural delight of popcorn, the occasional brush of skin — came together to make the movie, Big Hero 6, the most intense experience of Lixia’s life thus far. All her senses were heightened, and they in turn amplified the emotions that ran through her during the movie. Her eyes grew large when watching the underground robot fights and her brow furrowed when the protagonist’s brother died in a fiery explosion.

At the climax, when the robot was about to sacrifice itself for the teenage protagonist, she was in tears. Her breath was juddering, and every now and then her body would quake as a sob shot through it. Yuqing looked over, handed Lixia a tissue and placed a hand over hers on the armrest to comfort her. At that instant, Lixia held her breath. The warmth of Yuqing’s palm was startling. Though Lixia’s body was still shaking, her attention was no longer on the movie. All she could think of was the sensation of their skin making contact, the intoxicating heat of their hands pressed against each other. For a while Lixia kept very still, afraid of any movement that might shift the configuration of their bodies. Then, slowly, her thumb crept up and curled over the back of Yuqing’s hand. The skin there was soft and supple. It took all her willpower to resist stroking it. Yuqing almost turned towards her in surprise, but something held her in place. There was a flutter in her stomach as she held the small palm and thin fingers in her hand. She had the sensation of being entrusted with something fragile and precious, like a sunbird’s egg or the wing of a chick. Though the two of them did not speak and their eyes were trained on the large screen in front, some kind of understanding was communicated between them. Yuqing kept her hand on Lixia’s, and Lixia did not move hers away. They remained like that till the credits began rolling, and as they walked out, they were holding hands.

The following week, they caught another movie together. When it began, they reached for each other’s hands at the same time, and by the end of the movie they were pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, with the armrest between their seats raised. For someone so intelligent it was strange that Yuqing did not see her actions as a clear breach of the code of conduct for teachers. But her mind, that slippery thing, reasoned that it was the school holidays and the outings had taken outside the school compound, so none of the professional guidelines applied. She was simply watching movies with a friend, and what was wrong with that? By the time the June holidays ended, they had met thrice at the cinema, followed by lunch at a fast food restaurant.

It was during their third lunch together that Lixia hinted at the idea of going to her home. While Yuqing was scanning the crowded restaurant for a table, Lixia volunteered the information that her parents would only be home after 7 pm and the flat wasn’t very far. If they couldn’t get a seat, perhaps they could get the food to take away. Yuqing turned to look at Lixia without responding at first. Her instinct was to say they should continue waiting and a table would be available soon, but there was no good reason to decline Lixia’s invitation. Lixia must be getting hungry and having lunch at her place was not so different from having it at the restaurant. Her voice barely audible over the din of screaming children and staff shouting orders, Yuqing said, “Good idea. Let’s do that.”

The flat where Lixia lived was in an aging condominium a short walk from the bus stop. Three out of four of the lifts were out of order and the one they took rattled as it made its ascent. It was with some relief that Yuqing stepped out. But when she entered the flat, she stopped in her tracks, taken aback by how bare and shabby it was. It made her think of an old, yellowing photograph. It was so unlike her home, which she shared with her parents, with bookshelves packed to the brim, racks of her father’s vinyl records, watercolor paintings on the wall, and an upright piano on which were perched framed photographs of Yuqing and her parents. Though it was filled with so many things, there was a design to it, intention behind every object. Here, in contrast, there were old newspapers dating back to the previous month on the sofa, a flat-screen television gathering dust, and bills and other official letters scattered across the chipped veneer of the dining table.

“Welcome,” said Lixia, kicking off her shoes and dropping her bag on the floor. “That’s my room,” she said, indicating with a diffident wave of her hand a doorway at the end of the corridor.

With some trepidation, Yuqing looked inside and was relieved to see that though it too was in a mild state of disarray, there were signs of it being furnished for and lived in by a teenage girl. The curtains were a faded yellow with small green flowers, and on the pale pink bedsheet was a single stuffed dog with greying fur. On the desk was a computer covered with cartoon stickers. Blu-tacked on the wall was a newspaper cutout of an advertisement for the movie Big Hero 6, the first movie they had watched together.

“So this is where my sweet pea lives,” Yuqing said. Though she had used the nickname in her messages before, it was the first time she had said it out loud. At the sound of the words, Lixia’s heart swelled.

“Do you want to eat now?” Lixia asked, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She was unused to playing host, never having had friends close enough to invite over. She was nervous too for another reason. When she had suggested the two of them come to her home, she had no idea what they would do there. Her imagination did not stretch that far. She only longed for her beloved teacher in the confines of the flat with her, the two of them alone with the door shut behind them. And now, here they were.

Yuqing looked around the bare flat, suppressing the urge to flee. Seeing Lixia in her home, with its mismatched furniture, bare bulbs and faded, splotchy walls, was too much, too much. It was like catching someone with their pants down or spotting a scrap of food in their teeth. She was out of place, or Lixia was. Neither of them belonged here. They belonged in their modern, freshly painted school with its cheery slogans and colorful murals. They belonged in the cool dark cinema with its identical maroon velvet seats and bright flashing images on the screen.

“Yes, let’s have lunch,” Yuqing said, setting down the brown paper bags containing their burgers and fries, thinking that after an hour she would make an excuse to leave.

But after an hour they were sprawled on Lixia’s bed, giggling at funny animal videos on Yuqing’s mobile phone. When there was one they particularly enjoyed, like the one of a miniature turtle speeding across a room on a skateboard, they played it over and over again. Lixia leaned her head against Yuqing’s arm, so whenever she laughed, Yuqing could feel the vibrations moving through her own body. After some time, they switched to music videos and sang along to Lily Allen and Katy Perry, holding up their fists like microphones. Lixia was shy at first, mumbling the lyrics, but soon she was throwing her head back and belting out, as far as her weedy voice would allow, “Baby, you’re a firework” slightly off-tune. Finally, in the muggy heat of the late afternoon, they lay down without a thought and cuddled. They had spent almost the entire day together and they were now tired. This was the natural conclusion to their day.

“You’re as huggable as my bolster,” Yuqing said with a squeeze. As she was taller, they lay not quite face to face, but with the top of Lixia’s head level with the tip of Yuqing’s nose.

Lixia felt her limbs and torso relaxing. She was sinking into the mattress as if it were quicksand. Her parents were not believers in affection, physical or otherwise, so the sensation of Yuqing’s soft, warm body against hers was an entirely new and pleasurable experience. Her fingertips on the waistband of Yuqing’s denim skirt, the coarse fabric a stark contrast to the fine, delicate skin that must lie below, Lixia whispered, “This feels so nice.”

“I know. We’re like puppies and kittens snuggling,” Yuqing replied, hugging her tighter. At the back of her mind was a finger admonishing her about the boundaries teachers were supposed to maintain with students, but that was work and she was not at work now. She was not a teacher managing a classroom full of students, pretending she was much older and knew much more than them. She was a twenty-four-year-old enjoying her free time, which was hers to spend as she liked. That finger at the back of her mind continued to wag but she closed her eyes, inhaled the mushroomy scent from Lixia’s sweat-moistened scalp and willed it away.

The outings to the cinema and the afternoons at Lixia’s home did not end when Yuqing acquired a boyfriend in the following months, an ex-classmate who had held a torch for her since junior college. They had reunited at a class gathering and he, encouraged by her friendliness and questions about his job at a bank, had finally mustered up the courage to ask her out. Curious and flattered, Yuqing had said yes. This was her first taste of dating, of being presented with flowers and invited to dinner at dimly lit restaurants, and she found the experience exhilarating and wholly agreeable. The conversation faltered at times when she didn’t quite understand what he said about investment and financial planning or when he misunderstood what she meant when she spoke about her work, but that was all part of getting to know someone. When they kissed, Yuqing closed her eyes and waited for the rapture that would surely come. Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking of abalones and mushrooms, plump and slimy. But perhaps it was something that took practice.

The first time Yuqing mentioned her boyfriend to Lixia, they were cuddling in the latter’s bed after school, as was their custom. It was another hot, still afternoon, the fan barely stirring a breeze, and the sodden air smelled like day-old rice. She made a passing remark about having to meet him in the evening, her tone light and casual as if she were talking about the weather. But at the word “boyfriend” Lixia felt as if her heart had stopped, then it thudded furiously, like the time she’d walked out of a shop with a ballpoint pen without paying for it. She nodded a few times in shock and did not say anything. Afterwards, when Yuqing had left, she took a penknife and ran it down the inside of her wrist, savoring the pain even as she feared it. This was her first time doing so, and though the blade scratched the skin, it did not draw blood.

Yuqing’s relationship with her boyfriend continued. As the months went on, it was marked by frequent arguments: he thought she worked too much and she was frustrated with his stubbornness about the most trivial things, even about where to have dinner. Each time they fought, Yuqing would cry and confide in Lixia in the privacy of her room, relating word for word what her boyfriend had said. Each time, Lixia would listen and offer reassurance, always taking Yuqing’s side. To which Yuqing would say, “You’re my soulmate. You’re the one who understands me best.” She meant those words as she said them. With Lixia she never had to explain herself; they had such a deep, natural connection they had argued not once; there was no one else she would rather be with. On occasion Yuqing wondered what her boyfriend or any of her friends would say if they knew she considered a teenager eleven years her junior her soulmate, but she never followed that train of thought for very long. As for what they would say if they knew of all the time she spent with Lixia, her mind never wandered into that territory.

Despite the jealousy that grated at her insides, Lixia felt a sort of superiority over Yuqing’s boyfriend. She knew all his faults and failings. In her imagination he resembled her father: a pasty man with his mouth perpetually half-open, making bleating sounds that not even her squat, brash mother took seriously. Though Lixia did not enjoy listening to Yuqing talk about her boyfriend, she relished the ammunition the complaints provided her with. In her mind she kept a tally of points. Every time Yuqing was upset because of him, she deducted a point from his score; every time Yuqing told her she was her soulmate, she added a point to her own. She was far and away in the lead.

Besides, what mattered most was that Yuqing continued to spend time with her – at the cinema, at her home. When they were apart, they texted each other, sometimes late into the night. Lixia slept with her phone clutched to her chest, ready to respond when a message came.

“I wish I were there to hug you now.”

“Hug your bolster and imagine it’s me.”

“It doesn’t smell like you.”

Now and then there appeared in the news cases of teachers being jailed for having inappropriate relationships with students, and a small chill would grip Yuqing. It crossed her mind that the after-school meetings with Lixia should stop, but she told herself their relationship was different. What she felt for Lixia was as pure as the love for one’s child or younger sister. There was nothing sexual or sordid about it. All they did was hug and hold hands, nothing she had not done with her friends in secondary school. If she decided to stop meeting Lixia now, that would mean there had been something improper about their relationship all along. Her mind could not accept that and so waved it away.

But with her developing pubescent body, Lixia was increasingly aware of the soft mounds on Yuqing’s chest that pressed against her body when they hugged. She had a yearning for Yuqing to reach out and touch hers, though their hands and mouths never ventured anywhere they shouldn’t. In school Lixia would keep her eyes down on her books so her face wouldn’t burn when she looked straight at Yuqing, but since her eyes had always been downcast no one noticed anything different. At night Lixia would think about Yuqing kissing her boyfriend on the mouth, and she would run her lips against the back of her hand, wondering what it felt like to be kissed. There were many boys in her class she could have used as a stand-in for that imaginary kisser —Renjie, who was tall, tanned and on the school soccer team, or Aldric, the prefect boy whose floppy fringe and thin-rimmed glasses had captured the hearts of dozens of girls — but there was just one person in her mind.

Only once did Lixia show any sign of hostility towards Yuqing’s boyfriend. One day, after Yuqing had recounted another of their arguments, she asked, “So why are you still with him?” The question came out in a rush, her usually timid voice impatient, almost rude.

Almost immediately Yuqing replied, “He’s kind. He’s funny. My parents like him. He loves me.” Then she sighed, as if all that were a burden she had no choice but to bear.

It was no surprise when Yuqing’s boyfriend popped the question over dinner. They had been discussing marriage and applying for a flat for some time. What surprised Yuqing was the lack of emotion she felt, sitting there in one of her favorite Italian restaurants, watching him slide the ring onto her finger over a basket of fried calamari. It was nothing like what her friends had expressed when announcing their engagements, with tears and declarations of joy. She was perfectly calm, as if he had suggested getting a flu shot. But perhaps that was how things were after more than two years of dating; the excitement faded and there was simply the practical and necessary step of marriage left to take. Not once did she consider saying no or breaking off the engagement. She was on an escalator that would lead to buying a flat, living together and starting a family, and there was no getting off.

When Yuqing revealed her impending wedding to Lixia, the two of them were in the kitchen at the latter’s home, having sultana biscuits and soy milk. Lixia was in Secondary 4 now, with her O levels eight months away. After having had different form teachers for the past two years, she was by chance in Yuqing’s form class again. Though there was still something mouse-like about Lixia, there was also a brooding look that settled like a dark film over her pale face. Upon hearing Yuqing’s words, Lixia opened her mouth but did not protest. Thoughts rushed through her mind, but her head was churning too violently for her to form words. In her confusion, her mouth unsure whether she was going to speak or chew, she bit down on her tongue by mistake. There was a sharp pain, and she tasted the salty blood mingled with the sweet mush of biscuits and raisins. Still, she didn’t speak. Afterwards, when they were lying down, Lixia did not curl up against Yuqing as usual and she shed a few tears. When asked what was wrong, she blamed it on period cramps and let Yuqing stroke her hair. In the next few months, they continued to meet.

The entire class of 4H was invited to the wedding, which was to take place in the first week of the June holidays. Most of them accepted out of affection for their teacher, but also because they were curious. Not just about this adult ritual they had yet to be initiated into or the interior of the fancy hotel they did not have the means to access, but also what their teacher was like outside school and, more important, whom her chosen life partner was. Lixia, too, had her own reasons for attending. She had watched enough television shows to know that at every wedding the person officiating the ceremony would enquire if anyone knew of any impediment to the union. In the lead-up to the event, even that very evening as she walked from the bus stop by the river to the hotel in her only dress, she had fantasies of standing up with her arm raised when that question was asked, saying she did, she knew. The ceremony would jolt to a stop and everyone’s eyes would be on her. There, her fantasies were cut off because she did not know what she would say. How would she describe the relationship between Yuqing and herself? How would she say they were practically dating though they never put a label on it? She also could not decide on Yuqing’s reaction, whether there would be unspoken gratitude and relief at being released from that bond, or denials and embarrassment. She would have to find out.

But as Lixia sat through the wedding, waiting, there arose no such opportunity. The two emcees pranced on stage, prattling on about the bridal couple during their school days and the groom’s crush that was obvious to everyone but Yuqing. When the couple entered the ballroom with the spotlight on them, Yuqing in a long white gown that left her neck and shoulders bare, the students cheered and stamped as if it were a sporting event. The groom was nothing like what Lixia had imagined. He had a pleasant, boyish face and in his light grey suit was what some might call handsome. She recalled all the things Yuqing had said about him and tossed him a look of contempt that was lost in the dark. Then there were the customary speeches, in which the bride and groom thanked their family and friends, followed by a series of toasts that Lixia forced herself to stand up for. But she did not utter a sound. She did not even open her mouth. Then the night was over, and it was time to leave.

For the next two weeks Lixia heard nothing from Yuqing, who was on her honeymoon with her husband in Paris. Lixia sent a text asking her how the trip was going but Yuqing’s reply only came several days later, after she had returned. On the surface there was nothing wrong with the reply – it was friendly and answered her question and included a photo of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night – but there was also no attempt to continue the conversation. There was no follow-up question to ask how Lixia was doing, no suggestion that they meet up before the June holidays ended. Though Lixia had signed off with “Your sweet pea,” Yuqing did not use it in her reply as she would have in the past. After Lixia read the message, she threw her phone on her pillow, flung herself facedown on her bed and wept silently.

Yuqing did not slip her usual weekly note to Lixia when school restarted. In class, she spoke to Lixia as she would with any other student, in a caring but professional tone. On her honeymoon, when she had slept with her husband for the first time, it finally sank in that what she had been doing with Lixia was not quite right. Lying in the hotel bed next to him, she recalled her intimacy with Lixia with guilt — though whether that was directed at Lixia or her husband, it was unclear — and resolved there and then to put a stop to it.

When Yuqing looked at Lixia now there was no hint in her eyes that she remembered the messages they had exchanged or their time together outside school. Lixia, on the other hand, shot Yuqing pleading looks, though she did not dare speak to her in front of the others. A few times, Lixia texted Yuqing, asking if they could meet again soon, and the reply would come, always in a courteous tone, putting off the meeting for one reason or another: she was moving into her new place, she was busy with work, her mother was ill. Often when Lixia was meant to be studying she would stare at her phone, waiting for it to buzz, but it never did. When it was too much to bear, she would repeatedly scratch her wrist with her penknife until small specks of blood appeared.

Finally, she texted Yuqing: “Can we meet? I need to talk to you and understand what happened between us. The O levels are coming but I can’t concentrate. My head is a mess. All I ask is one hour. That’s nothing compared to the time we’ve spent together.”

There was no response over the next three days though Lixia saw Yuqing in school, with her usual bright smile for the whole class. That Friday afternoon, after getting home, Lixia sat down in front of her computer and with trembling hands began an email to the principal. She laid out the relationship between Yuqing and herself and said she simply wanted to understand what had happened. She attached photographs of the notes Yuqing had sent her, screenshots of their late-night messages and a picture they had taken before a movie, their faces pressed together in the dim light of the cinema. Lixia hovered the cursor over the Send button but could not make herself click on it. The principal was a youngish man with an ironic smile and detached air, and the last thing she wanted was to be summoned to his office to explain herself.

Lixia closed her eyes and rubbed her face. Her hands were still shaking. Her head was heavy with pent-up tears and resentment. She got up and walked unsteadily to the window. There were no iron grilles and the glass panes opened out on a five-story drop. If she stood on a chair, she could tip herself over the windowsill quite easily. Lixia’s eyes followed the drop to the concrete pavement and road, imagining her skull smashing like a watermelon, its contents spilling like raw mince. It would hurt for a while, but the pain would soon stop. There would be nothing more to endure after that. She peered down again at the trees, shrubs and white markings on the road and felt her stomach clench in fear. Just then there was a thick rustling sound, and she saw that it was the leaves of trees being tossed about by the wind. She took a deep breath, inhaling the moist, faintly metallic air. From her sixteen years of existence, she knew it meant a storm was coming, and the rustling sound would soon transform into the rapid staccato of raindrops. Dozens of yellow leaves fluttered free above the trees, and she watched transfixed as they glided and spun with the currents like butterflies. From a distance came the solid, rhythmic thwack of a tennis ball and the squeak of shoes on the court. This was the world she lived in, in all its astonishing, intricate beauty. This was the world she was about to give up for one person’s indifference. Lixia’s face contorted and her body heaved as she sobbed.

Suddenly she was overcome with exhaustion. She stepped back and collapsed sideways on the mattress. For once she did not recall the times she had shared her bed and with whom. She pulled her knees and arms to her chest and let herself be carried away into the unconsciousness she desired. The storm came, the drops of rain pounding the window like tiny battering rams. She was oblivious to it. She sank into a deep, black sleep. She did not dream. Her mind was a darkened movie theatre or a blackboard washed clean.

When Lixia woke it was dark except for a thin rhombus of light from the living room. Mingled with the drone of the fan were the jagged roar of traffic and the low, familiar voices of her parents. She wasn’t sure how long she had slept, whether for a few hours or more than a day. But it didn’t matter. She felt fresh, hollowed out, as if she had been reborn. She went to the computer. On the screen was the draft of the email she had written what seemed like years ago. Without thinking or hesitating, she deleted it. In the same way, she got rid of the messages on her phone and scrunched up the notes in her drawer. She no longer needed them to bolster her life. She was already someone with a past.

When she went into the kitchen with the ball of notes, her parents were sitting there having economy rice.

“Lixia, awake already,” her father said.

“Here, your dinner. We didn’t want to wake you up,” her mother said, removing a styrofoam box from a plastic bag.

For the first time Lixia noticed the pinkish crescent of her father’s scalp through his thinning hair, naked and vulnerable as a newborn rabbit. She saw the dark red indentations on the sides of her mother’s nose where her glasses had pressed down on the skin. She nodded. “I just need to throw something away first.”

And so she tucked those three to four years away, folded them up like a note and dropped them behind a cupboard. She made no further attempts to contact Yuqing and in school she averted her eyes so that she met no one’s gaze. The brooding look on her face deepened and a small groove developed at the center of her brow, making her look several years older than she was. If a classmate mocked or spoke over her, she remained silent but there would be an unsettling flicker in her eyes that made them stop. Her classmates soon learnt to give her a wide berth, not out of disdain but unease. What saved Lixia from hardness was what had saved her that Friday afternoon: her capacity for observing the minutiae of the world and reveling in them. A shopping trolley rattled by at the supermarket and she heard rain pattering on a zinc roof. She walked down a pavement and saw a pigeon trying to hatch the earth.

After finishing her O levels, Lixia entered polytechnic to pursue a diploma in digital media and threw herself into making and editing videos. There she met a sweet, quiet girl with long, curly hair, and they were happy together for three years before separating. This time the breakup was mutual. They met at a cafe to talk for an hour before parting as friends. It would be several more years before Lixia met the woman she would spend her life with and they would marry in a small ceremony in Chiang Mai, witnessed by two friends.

Yuqing went on with her life and for some time her career would follow the expected trajectory. The year after her wedding she was posted to ministry headquarters, then became head of department at a prominent girls’ school, followed by a promotion to vice-principal. She would hold that position for two years before making a request for a year of unpaid leave. The stated reason was her separation from her husband, but three months before that she had been accused by a member of staff of giving preferential treatment to a married female teacher. That incident left Yuqing a different person. On more than one occasion she lost her composure, snapping at colleagues in meetings and once walking out of a session with the principal when he raised the matter. When she returned to work, she was posted to a backend role in headquarters where she would remain.

But on this night, Yuqing was still head of department, still married. Though hairline cracks had appeared in the marriage, with arguments increasing in frequency, divorce had yet to be thrown up as an option. She was in bed reading an article for work when her husband climbed in next to her. He lay on his side, tipped his face up to watch her and caressed her knees, a signal that there were other activities on his mind. Yuqing put down her tablet and slid into bed. She knew what he meant. When he began kissing her, she could still give herself up to the moment, her breath growing ragged. But then his mouth moved downwards, nibbling and gnawing, prodding and pressing. The discomfort forced Yuqing back into her body and she lay there aware of every movement of his lips, tongue and teeth. More than that, she was acutely conscious of what would come next: the dreaded act of penetration, as terrible as it sounded – a piercing, a puncture, a stabbing pain for which she would have to brace herself. And then there would be the tedious rocking back and forth, monotonous as the ticking of a metronome.

Yuqing, ever the diligent, competent schoolgirl, responded with sufficient passion that her husband did not notice anything unusual. She ran her hands over his back and let him continue, not hurrying him to his conclusion. But at times she drifted into a daydream and fell motionless. Without thinking of Lixia, she remembered the feeling of sinking into a mattress next to someone without expectation, the relief of finally being able to let down her guard and be at ease with a warm breathing body by her side. She thought of arms around her waist, fingers on her cheeks, the mushroomy smell of unwashed hair. No wet, sticky appendages, just dry, soft skin. No pain or drudgery, just warmth and affection. And still she did not understand what it meant, or perhaps did not wish to and never would.

What I Will Do

India Choquette

I will feed your cat if ICE takes you away.

It was a joke I told as you retrieved your cat from the hallway. We both laughed, you with the slight gap between your teeth, the old white cat in your arms, a hand braced against the peeling drywall. As we recovered, I caveated with the classic, “Gotta laugh or you’ll die crying,” and you kissed the cat’s head, casually, instinctively, automatically.

I remember that moment as I stand in the silent hall. I was worried about how I’d get into your apartment, but the door is ajar.

 You were a real neighbor. There aren’t neighbors like you anymore.

We both had cats, which was how we met. You kept carrying my Chewy delivery up and leaving the boxes outside my door, 5D (an extra flight for you). I thought it was the mail carrier, but then I caught you one day. I almost accused you of stealing, but I knew better. (I took an English class called Black Women in college, and we had a whole unit on white tears. One student complained, saying the class was supposed be about Black women, not white women. She dropped the class. I never got to tell you about my college experience — did you go? I can picture you taking ESL classes at night, your broad shoulders bent over the desk, fluorescents keeping you awake. But your English is very good.)

“I buy from across the street,” you panted, as we climbed, box in your arms. The walls had scribbles, not interesting enough to be graffiti, more like doodles. I’d lied and told Livvy they were gang signs because I wanted her to feel bad and pay for my drinks, but they weren’t — just a few names, a few swears, a cartoon picture of a hamburger.

Your straining forearms were as scarred as the walls were marked, not from self-harm like mine, but from work, standing out pale pink on your skin. You promised me the litter was easy to carry, so you were either lying or strong. It was two boxes, forty pounds each.

I asked if you had a story in your culture like the one about the man (or was it a boy?) who carried a calf (or a pig?) up the mountain. He got stronger as the calf got bigger. You said you did not. So, I told it to your back, my hands half lifted in case you fell. (Once upon a time, a man wanted to marry a witch’s daughter. The witch said he could if he carried her baby cow/pig up the mountain every single day for some amount of time — a year, maybe…) A patch of sweat grew on your gray t-shirt between your shoulder blades. A real neighbor, a real gentleman.

Livvy won’t even visit our neighborhood, but I’d told her, “People are people.” And we are: we have beating hearts, both love our cats, and are nearly the same height. Amazing that last part—you are compact like a bullet. Indestructible. But when they took you, I watched from the window, you looked as small as a child.

I enter your apartment.

I will feed your cat if ICE takes you away. I will not make my body a shield when they take you in the night, but I will come in the morning and slip through the door and feed the cat. You understand. Even though I insist on being called a “person” in the workplace (and I complain to HR when they call me the “social media girl”), in this case, when they come, I am just a girl (just as you are just a boy). And what could a girl do? (And same for you — you did not resist).

Your cat rubs up against me. He’s old and stiff, which is probably the only reason he didn’t flee through the door that you/they left open.

Your apartment surprises me. I’m not surprised by the smell of garlic and chili, but I’m very surprised that it’s bigger than mine, with two fire escapes (why didn’t you use them? If you’d climbed up, I could’ve hidden you! In my closet? In my bed, under my covers?) and, when I pull the cat hair covered sheets off the couch, it looks brand new — thick coarse fabric. It's blue, easily seating five. I know you had guests. It’s funny: when I first moved up here, I heard them through the floor, laughing, arguing, yelling, singing. Playing that same song over and over, the one with the man yelling right before the Latin beat drops. Or maybe it wasn’t the same song — maybe it just all sounds the same. I’m sure I could learn to tell the difference. You could teach me.

But I hated the music back then. “I have to wear noise cancelling headphones,” I complained to Livvy, who told me to meet her in SoHo. Sometimes, when I had caught up on emails, I’d lie with my ear against the floor, listening to your noise. How were you happy when I was sad?

I’m sorry: I can’t post about your disappearance because it wouldn’t make sense for my brand. My feed is cats and accomplishments only. Cats. Accomplishments.

Cats: Twyla, my black and white tuxedo who I taught to do a high five, her little paw tapping mine as I kneel in front of her. Those videos got a lot of likes in the beginning, but she’s gotten fatter and grumpier, and it’s only the one trick. But it was something to do when I moved  here, when my loneliness was so intense that I felt like I was turning inside out. Me and Twyla, on the floor, treat after treat, “High five!” I’d say in a baby voice, lifting her paw to mine. And then, one day, she got it. She just did! I felt so powerful — I’d made this fluffy little animal obey a command.

Accomplishments: my graduation, baby blue gown, me and Livvy on the back of the lion statue. We weren’t supposed to climb up there, but everyone does. What you don’t see in the photo, standing behind the professional photographer, is Livvy’s dad and mom, her older brother in his pink button-up and big hands. What you don’t see is my parents, but they weren’t there at all.

Instagram is just the wrong platform for your story. It’s performative, and what happened to you is so, so real.

The more substantive thing to do, the thing I will do, is water your plants and feed your cat.

Also, you have plants! I wasn’t expecting that — high floating shelves around the top of the ceiling, the vines threaded around with little plastic hooks so that the heart-shaped leaves circle all four corners of the room, a nest of vines. It’s very British cottage, very fairy tale — I didn’t peg you as a romantic! I thought you’d have soccer posters and flags and maybe some of those pictures of Saints. Instead, you have this living crown.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t take me long to find the cat food, even though I’ve never been inside your home. You put it in the same place I do: the cabinet on the bottom! What’s the chance of that? What does surprise me is the brand of cat food. It’s fancy. I know because tiktok recommended it. Did the pet store give you a deal? Maybe you did odd jobs, and they paid you in food?

What is your job? I never asked. I’d hear you shower in the morning, and then I’d hear you at night around eight, when you came home and turned the music on.

I do post a picture of your white cat — who I call Mr. Pablo in the caption because, it’s so funny, but I can’t remember his name other than “Mr. something — on your fancy blue couch. I run upstairs and get my tripod so I can recline with him beside me. We both have green eyes.

 I wait in your apartment. I’ve closed the door by then, just for safety. I hope you come back. I open the cabinets. You have chamomile tea. I almost Facetime Livvy to show her. I feel like she should know that someone taken by ICE drinks herbal tea. That’s even more powerful than “we all bleed the same color.”

You don’t have any beer or drugs, which is what I’m looking for. On those loud hot summer nights, my ear to the floor, everyone coming and going, I thought you must be drunk. I was always sober. I took a break from drinking after that Thanksgiving — but I’ll tell you about that in person. Later, so you can brush the tears off my cheeks.

I used to think you had a crush on me. Isn’t that crazy? But why else would you carry my boxes up all those stairs?

 I spend the night in your bed. Not because I don’t have my own, but because I’m afraid I’ll miss your knock. I brought my baby, Twyla, downstairs too, but she and Mr. Pablo hiss at each other, so I close the bedroom door, Mr. Pablo outside, Twyla with me. She’s hiding under the bed. Don’t take it personally. The smells are unfamiliar, and I have to say, you used a lot of cologne. It’s spicy and sweet, and with the garlic and the chili from your kitchen, it’s a little much. I crank your air conditioner until it’s as loud as an airplane.

Your sheets are softened with use. Not crisp and clean. But you are a man — I wouldn’t ever expect you to have clean sheets. Tomorrow, I tell myself, what I will do is wash them. It’ll be so nice to come back to a clean bed.

I sleep like a baby! Is it a sign? The sounds in the alley don’t keep me up like usual. Is that because the room’s so much bigger, or because your AC drowns it out? In the morning, when I’m going through your neatly folded shirts, it occurs to me that you might be gay. The cat, herbal tea, cologne, and you never made a move on me, even when I knocked on your door late wearing my pink silk pajamas, so loose around my chest that you could look right between my boobs down to my flat stomach. My red hair in a messy bun. “My bathroom ceiling’s leaking!” I said. You were in a black sweatshirt and basketball shorts, Mr. Pablo in your arms getting his white fur all over. “You call the super?” you asked. I shook my head. You shifted Mr. Pablo to your hip, pulled out your phone, and started talking in Spanish. “He’ll meet you upstairs,” you said finally.

I mean, you closed the door on my face, really.

So, are you gay? But you aren’t, are you? Is it the Latinx culture — the machismo but also the hair gel? It’s so hard to tell!

Yowl! Mr. Pablo is on the other side of the bedroom door, and I slide on a blue t-shirt of yours. I forgot to bring clean clothes — I’ll grab them later.

The tree in the alley sways in the wind. The open curtains catch the sunlight in their folds. Someone is scream-singing Cher (“Do you believe in life after love?”) and a chubby Black boy is hanging red sheets over the railing of the fire escape across the way. Don’t they know that the government is falling apart? Here I am, keeping your home safe for you, and they are just business as usual.

I bet they don’t even vote. I do. I always post a story of me with my “I Voted” sticker. Not my main feed — we don’t do that anymore. I set the bowls down for the cats. Twyla likes the new food. When you are back, I’ll ask how you get it.

I think about that moment of reunion: me opening the door, Mr. Pablo in my arms. “Oh! You took care of him for me! You angel!” you’ll say. And we’ll hug, the cat between us.

And if you are gay, it’s okay. It really is. It’s a reason for asylum, actually. Because who knows how they treat homosexuals in your country — Mexico? Venezuela? Colombia? They all have machismo. “Which is so anti-feminist,” Livvy said.

She’s so full of it. You’ll hate her, I just know it.

I open your bedside drawer again. There are condoms. I should pretend I didn’t see them — it’s awkward, but I have to admit, it makes me crazy jealous. At least the box is mostly full.

Here’s something crazy: what if we get married, and this is our story? “She took care of my cat when ICE took me away. She’s an angel.”  

Livvy will be a bridesmaid. Her babies will be so white and ugly, but our babies will be gorgeous.

 Three days. Mr. Pablo misses you! He sits by the door all day — isn’t that sweet?

I work from home on Mondays (I brought my ring light down). Your wifi password is on the back of the router.

I facetime Livvy and fill her in. She starts to cry. “The world is so horrible,” I say. “Can you send a picture of him?” she asks. She might post something, so I tell her no, even though you have a framed picture of yourself. (Of course, not just yourself — your family — I’m guessing. It’s fifteen people, but you have big families). Livvy shouldn’t get credit, not when she won’t even come up here. “Did you find his keys?” she asks. “Because ICE could have them, which means that law enforcement can enter whenever.”

She stays on as I search. I accidentally trip over Mr. Pablo as I check the pockets of your sweatshirt, and he skitters down the hall. “They’re not here,” I say.

“You should call a locksmith,” Livvy says.

I don’t bother telling her that a locksmith probably wouldn’t let me change the lock, not without building approval, and definitely not without my name on the lease.

“I just want you to feel safe,” she says. She knows about what happened in college. But just because she knows, doesn’t mean she cares.

Doesn’t matter. I can keep myself together. I order a lock on Amazon (I have prime) and a screwdriver, too. A man with a handlebar mustache shows me how to change it in a Youtube video. I feel like it should be harder. Just undo a few screws, basically. Maybe working in the trades is, like, not that hard.

This is going to be much better for you, too. I can’t imagine how scary it will feel to know that ICE has keys to your apartment.

I understand what it’s like to be afraid, don’t I? Okay, I’ll tell you. That Thanksgiving at Livvy’s, her brother shoved his hand up the linen dress I’d borrowed from her because I didn’t have anything nice enough. I imagine me telling you this story, and you saying, “I’m going to kill him,” and then I have to calm you down. “He’s not worth it.”

We understand, you and me, what it’s like to be treated unfairly. Livvy’s parents gifted her an apartment after graduation. My parents left me with loans.

I’m not jealous. It’s just that life isn’t fair.

I look at your family photo. Everyone looks alike. Are the girls there your sisters? Your cousins? Or are they not related to you at all?

Your bathroom has different tiles from mine. Mine are white, yours are gray. I stand naked in it, now that the lock is changed, and use your citrus soap.

 My mom texts me. She saw the post of me and Mr. Pablo, days late. “Do you have space for a new cat?” I don’t give her details. I just say, “Yes.” Because your apartment is big enough.

But I wish they got along. When you come back, we’ll have to figure it out. For now, I lock Mr. Pablo in the bathroom with a towel that has Twyla’s scent on it. I have to chase him in there. Herding cats.

They are marching downtown. I wish my mom had asked me if I was safe because it’s all over the news, but she doesn’t. I mean, I don’t go to the protests. I don’t like crowds, and I don’t like chanting. Protests don’t really work. Most people are only there to post.

In college, Livvy was one of the organizers of Slut Walk. Do you know what that is? It’s this big march that’s supposed to protest the whole “she was asking for it” thing. But Livvy spent over two hours picking out her outfit — a sheer white bra and a pair of white short-shorts. The whole thing is just an excuse for girls to dress skanky and call it feminism. I tried to get Livvy to wear the linen dress she’d loaned me from Thanksgiving, but she just laughed and then told me to wear this gold tank top she had because I was a “gold digger.”

It was so mean that I still don’t fully believe she said it.

I should have been more forceful the night I went to your door. I should have let you know it was safe to touch me. You were probably scared. I get it. A woman like me — a man like you…

Knock, knock.

I freeze. Is it you?

They are trying the doorknob.

You have to believe this: I cannot make myself get up. I cannot make myself go to the door. The college therapist explained that there are fight, flight, and freeze, and just like last time, I freeze, freeze, freeze.

Now, they are pounding on the door, desperate. But they don’t call out.

Soon, they are gone. But for hours, I freeze. Was it you? I didn’t hear keys. I changed the lock, yes, but you didn’t know that.

Was it the super? Did he check the cameras in the hall, see me go in?

But no one calls me. No one emails.

It could be the landlord. I don’t know the rules about getting arrested, but — I shutter — it’s likely they’ll kick you out of this big apartment if you don’t come soon. Oh, please come soon! Everything can be taken away.

If we were married, our assets would be merged, and it’d also be mine, but right now, I’m just a neighbor, a friend. A girl.

A girl alone in a strange apartment. Which is why I didn’t go to the door. You understand.

I unlock my phone, thinking I’ll text my mom something like: There’s room for you to visit. I sometimes feel like I have to remind her that she doesn’t pay attention.

Instead, I find myself shakily swiping and poking my way to Instagram — I do it without thinking.

Because my algorithm is the way it is, Livvy’s story is first, her in a white dress, big sunglasses and hat, little rainbow circle around her. Livvy’s always posting stories in the summer — electric blue sky out of the window of a plane, thick green smoothies with a little yellow umbrella, pink manicured toes in front of a clear blue pool. I heart them all.

I press my screen.

He pops up. She has her arm around him and is kissing his cheek. His white shirt is unbuttoned in a way that says, “I’m at the beach,” and kissing his other cheek, another woman with a swoop of a nose and long dark brown hair, holding up her left hand, a diamond glittering — glittering even in the flat picture. “My big brother is getting married!” Pink hearts throb above their heads.

I close my phone and sink onto your blue couch. The air conditioner roars in the bedroom, and I think, Fuck them.

Mr. Pablo sneaks out of the bathroom while I’m aggressively plucking my eyebrows. The college therapist called plucking “harm reduction,” and I’m supposed to do it instead of cutting. That or snap a rubber band against my wrist or hold ice cubes.

The cat’s old legs waddle, beelining right for Twyla, who is crouched under the couch.

Hiss.

“Stop!” I yell, one eyebrow arched. He swipes at her — her face! — gets her right across the nose. I see the blood, a thin line on her wet nose. Blood!

I snatch Mr. Pablo, slide the window up, and drop him out on the fire escape. He clangs as he lands. I’m not worried. His legs are too stiff to climb.

It’s humid and thick outside — the Real Feel is over a hundred or something. That will teach him. I tell myself to bring him in just after the rain starts. He needs to be disciplined.

I finish my other eyebrow, but then pencil them back in. I don’t want to look too sparse. We are working from home today because of the flash flood warnings. I have a meeting. I had to take it — this is how I pay my rent, how I pay for my shitty cat food.

I forget about Mr. Pablo until nighttime. It happens. Sometimes, I’ll be honest, when I’m lying in your bed or using your shower, I forget about you. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s just because we cannot focus on someone else all the time. We come back to ourselves.

There’s a siren down the street, which makes me worry about fire (these old buildings go up like matchsticks — I see it on the Citizen app all the time), which makes me think about the fire escape, which makes me think about him.

But he’s not there.

I could lie! I could tell you that Mr. Pablo snuck out after you were taken — the door was open after all. That is my first plan. But then I remember: I posted the picture. What are the chances you’d see it? Still — I’m hoping that, somehow, you’ve been stalking my social media, magically watching me from your detention center. Maybe you got my name from the Chewy boxes. Maybe you lurk on my page.

I get another idea. I could tear your place apart. Rifle through the drawers, steal your electronics, dump out your body wash, slash the bag of flour. Make it a real crime scene. That way, when you see your home’s been ransacked, it’ll make sense that Mr. Pablo is gone.

I will feed your cat if ICE takes you away. It was just a joke. It’s not my actual job to keep him safe, to keep your bed warm. It’s not my job to take care of you.

As I’m swinging from drawer to drawer, strewing your silverware, your stacks of paper napkins, your mail across the floor, I can’t help it: I think about our wedding. Central Park would be a dream, but even if the ceremony couldn’t be there, the photos. Bethesda Fountain. The bridge. “These are so basic.” I can hear Livvy say. Her brother’ll probably get married in Italy or Greece and won’t invite me.

I turn the overhead light on, and there are the leaves, circling, growing, getting tighter and tighter, strangling. Twyla watches me with big yellow eyes.

I’m telling you all this because — why am I telling you this?

Truthfully, when I first moved up here, I was so proud of myself. I never thought I’d get my own apartment — I thought I’d have to have ten roommates until I was forty-five. But then, I got the job and found the listing. I applied on my own, no help from anyone, used all my savings for the security deposit. It was May, and I’d just graduated. I did it, I remember thinking.

And then, Livvy wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t help me move — she was confused because I hadn’t hired movers. She didn’t want to help decorate, she wouldn’t come up for dinner or The Bachelor, which she now inexplicably hated. She didn’t want anything, and suddenly, my home didn’t seem as nice. I was up here, alone, listening to your fucking music through the floor, your laughing.

Then, somebody posted about Twyla. They’d adopted her during the pandemic. It was a whole thing, the day I brought her home: I took public transport out to get her in Queens but sprung for an Uber on the way back. I held the meowing crate in my lap and cooed through the mesh, not even caring that the driver heard me tell her over and over, “It will be okay. It will be okay.”

And things were okay. Until they took you.

There’s something about animals, isn’t there? They’re so helpless. You understand, I know. I remember the way you kissed Mr. Pablo’s head.

After closing Twyla in the bedroom so she doesn’t walk through the spilled flour, I climb out the window and stand in the rain, watching it pour into the dirty alley, pounding the pile of black trash bags below, the leaves of the poor tree. I don’t see a flash of white on the ground. That’s what I’m afraid of: that Mr. Pablo fell. I’m afraid of seeing his body.

But he’s not down there.

The storm smells.

Either he’s down or he’s up, and I can’t see him down. I start to climb, the wet ladder flaking in my hands. I don’t have to be quiet: it’s raining too hard for anyone to hear. Could he have climbed? With his old wet legs?

One floor up, my old floor, I shuffle across and peek in my old window. It’s dark except for the blue light of the router. I see my old things: the couch I bought off Facebook Marketplace, the stack of books from college that I couldn’t sell back. It’s not as big or nice. Not even close.

My chest tightens, and oh, God, I feel responsible. I am crying, but the rain covers it. I tell myself it’s not my fault. I was doing you a favor. Without me, he wouldn’t have lived this long. Nobody else would have fed him.

Hope is a tightrope. Long, thin — it’s taken me my whole life to learn to cross, but even now, at every instant, I can plummet to a broken leg, broken neck, or worse. We don’t want to believe something bad could happen to us, but of course, anything can happen to anyone.

I’m twisting myself with this mental gymnastics. I can pretend that you’re coming back, but for all I know, you’re on a plane right now, being disappeared to El Salvador or Louisiana. And what if you are illegal? Or a criminal? A cat food stealing criminal? I’d understand — I want the best for Twyla, too.

But maybe there isn’t a reason. Life isn’t fair. It just isn’t. Whatever’s happened to you, whatever’s happened to me, we’re powerless —

Yowl.

My head snaps up. Wet, faint, anguished. I climb, inching along that tightrope, my eyebrows melting onto my face. The people above me have a garden on their fire escape: cherry tomatoes and herbs. Basil. I can smell it in the rain.

And poor Mr. Pablo — he’s there, crouched underneath a window box that’s been hooked onto the railing. In the storm, his eyes look black, and the sky is orange-black, and his wet white fur makes him look misshapen.

I will feed your cat if ICE takes you away.

It is the absolute least I can do, but it’s also the absolute most.

I scoop him into my arms. In the story, the boy/man carries the calf/piglet up the mountain every day, getting stronger and stronger. But let me tell you, the fire escape is slippery, my arms full of him, shaking, dripping, and I’m going down, not up. One misstep, and I will fall.

I assume the boy/man marries the girl in the end. I don’t remember. I never really finish things.

Because life isn’t a fairy tale, is it? We have what we have, we make the best of it. I’m sorry you were taken away, so sorry. Some people have nice things, others don’t. You and I may never meet again. I can’t do much because I don’t have much.

And here’s what I want to tell you, and why I’m writing this, just in case you come home to find that your home isn’t yours anymore: you can hate people like Livvy and her brother, or you can learn from them, right? They have a lot, and they take a lot. That’s been my mistake: I let people walk all over me. When we never went to Paris or Italy, I say okay. When they can’t help me pay for college, I say fine. When they say they can’t come to my graduation, I say, of course.

I guess what I’m saying is if you’d noticed me before, if you’d asked me out and we were dating, maybe you wouldn’t have been in this situation. But you closed the door in my face, and I have your cat, but that’s really all I can do for you right now. And what I will do for me is I will live without you.

And once I close the window, the rain becomes a shhh, and I forget about the love story. I forget about your forearms, your jokes, you carrying my boxes, your music, your parties — shutting that door in my head. Just like you did. Instead, Mr. Pablo burritoed in a towel in my lap (because I will take care of your cat, your old, old cat), I open my phone and type an email to our — my — landlord: “I’m wondering if it would be possible for me to take over another unit’s lease?”

That is what I will do.

Infinity Forever and Ever

Cuyler Meade

Jenny listens to the cattails in the morning, their pit-pit-pit against the soft flesh of her fingertips, or the tik-tik-tik against her chipped, chewed nails. She walks fast, or slow, or whatever speed she wants because she has nowhere to be and only time.

It is early summer, and the little birds that congregate like a billion fairies, or, more accurately, like a crap-ton of little birds in the big tall trees that surely have names but which Jenny has no reason or desire to know, are waiting for Jenny to walk by so that they can go all nuts and fly around crazy, like something really bothered them, but only for a second before they come back to the tree as if nothing happened. Because nothing did. It was just Jenny. Just her walking by at her meaningless speed. Nobody important. It must be nice, to be part of such a big flock, that knows how to fly where you fly, and vice versa, and who don't laugh when you tweet about something they think is dumb. Birds are always just, you know, flying around. Where are they going? They never go anywhere, seems like. But they're together a lot. This kind, anyway.

Jenny thinks that. She thinks lots of things. Like whether to go to the pool today. Or what exactly Miggy meant when he said she looked nice last week, the afternoon she was wearing the new swimsuit Mom finally agreed to buy her despite smushing her lips together until they looked like two wriggly worms that probably one of the bajillion little birds up there would've plucked right off her sour face if they'd been shopping for swimsuits on the river trail instead of in TJ Maxx, which is a gross place to try on swimsuits, by the way. Miggy has been cute since he started getting taller finally and stopped only listening to Daddy Yankee and started paying attention to good music like the Vines and Eve 6. But Vanessa and her cousin were giggling when he said Jenny looked nice like there was something Jenny didn't know about, so Jenny wasn't sure it was actually nice what he said. You can never really know these days with boys.

Jenny ends up going to that new arcade, the totally retro one with the ancient games and the cute senior boy working the ticket counter who last time she went was growing maybe kind of a shriveled caterpillar of a mustache and blushed when Jenny pointed it out. She likes that, the way she can make an older boy feel something just with her words and maybe her eyes, or maybe other things, too, but who knows. She hopes she'll find some friends there, not caring much who, just figuring it'd be fun to be with some cool people for a change. Not Jace, her stupid younger brother, or his stupid friends who always come around, except Ezra who's actually nice.

The breeze is really pleasant during Jenny's walk to the arcade, cooling the light sheen of sweat on her face and also probably rustling the cattails back on the trail, though Jenny wouldn't know because she's not there anymore. But there aren't any of Jenny's friends at the arcade. Only two boys from her class who probably are the most annoying boys in the whole school, Oscar and Derrick. They're always together, like they don't even know how to go anywhere alone, but it seems like they barely have any other friends, probably because they're so annoying. Jenny wishes there were even a single other kid from school there because she already made eye contact with the boys by accident and now it's gonna be so awkward if she just leaves. Like she wasn't supposed to be there or something, or like she was scared to be there on her own. Of all people to let think something gross like that, Oscar and Derrick are literally the last people she would want to.

So she smiles in a way she thinks is maybe described as coquettishly at the older boy at the counter and stays and pulls out a card with some credits she had from last time and cashes them in at the machine for quarters. Jenny's not about to be intimidated by the likes of Oscar and Derrick who, really, are such losers, and plus her favorite game is right by the racing game they're almost adorably playing together, so she strides right up and plinks a couple quarters into the machine and watches the cartoon monsters pop up for her to pick one. This isn’t one of the ancient games, just regular, and the graphics are actually good. Jenny always picks the big gorilla.

Jenny glances down at the boys to see if they've noticed her and, obnoxiously, they seem to have not, so deep in focus on Cruis’n USA as they are, hooting and grunting at each other like a couple of dumb baboons. She focuses on her own screen as the cartoon Peoria, Illinois, comes up for her to make the gorilla pound on. She almost feels bad because the arcade Peoria looks nice, kind of pretty, tall buildings with actual people walking on the streets and not with basically nobody ever anywhere the way it is here in this stupid hick town where nobody even lives. But she doesn't feel bad enough to not make the gorilla punch all the buildings down and beat the level.

By the time she's on to the next level, Jenny has forgotten about Oscar and Derrick and is fully focused on her multi-colored metropolitan destruction. And so it's not until she digs in her pocket to pay to keep playing that she notices that she has an audience. Oscar and Derrick have finished their race and are just standing behind Jenny, watching over her shoulder as she plays the game, and when she looks back at them with a sort of what-are-you-even-doing-there face, she's super surprised to discover them just quietly smiling and saying things like “keep playing, the next level’s great” or whatever and somehow being not at all annoying.

She turns back to the screen and hides a smile and plinks the quarter in to keep playing and she keeps playing, a little weirded out but pleased with their attention. When she does a thing in the game, she's pretty sure she hears one of them say “nice” and it doesn't sound at all like they're being jerks about it. And when Jenny needs to get another quarter but, with her hand deep in her pocket, discovers she's out of them, she's actually really bummed to have to turn around and be like, “Well, I guess that's it. I'm out of quarters.”

And then Oscar and Derrick do something extra weird, and they dig into their own pockets like they're looking for quarters to maybe give her? Which can't be right because why, but Jenny never finds out for sure because they're also out, but they look really sheepish about it like maybe they really would have given one to her. Which Jenny thinks is actually so sweet and really unexpected, so without even really thinking about it she says, “Well, anyway, what are you guys up to?” and they both smile really big and Oscar especially looks surprisingly kind of cute maybe and almost in unison they say “Nothin’” which, again, really adorable.

So Jenny tells them to hang with her if they want and marches out of the arcade without even making eyes at the clerk, and they follow behind her kinda like little puppies or maybe little baby quails, which Jenny really loves. And she says they should walk by the river and there's a really cool place she'll show them if they want and they do so they all go.

The walk isn’t long, but who cares if it is, there’s no rush anyway. Derrick is a little more talkative than Oscar and asks Jenny some questions as the boys meander alongside their guide, sometimes switching sides, sometimes one lagging behind, sometimes one boy going in front and turning around to walk backward so they’re all facing each other. Jenny is happy to share about volleyball camp, which was kind of dumb, and about having to go to wrestling with Jace, which was extra dumb, except it turns out Oscar and Derrick both wrestle, which Jenny didn’t know before, and she says after they tell her that it was only dumb because Jace sucks at wrestling and she has to sit in the stands for the whole day instead of getting to swim at the hotel pool, but that if she were watching guys wrestle who actually, you know, had an idea what they were doing, it would probably have been okay, maybe even kind of fun. Oscar is the better wrestler, Derrick says, which makes Oscar smile shyly, which Jenny thinks is so cute, and also it’s sweet that Derrick would say that about his friend in front of a girl or anybody.

It’s funny because Jenny has grown up around these boys all of their lives, the town being that small that pretty much everybody knows each other somehow and especially if you’re all in the same grade, which they are. But she’s never not even once really spent any time talking to them, on account of them being totally weird since basically kindergarten and never doing cool stuff, which is the kind of stuff Jenny tends to prefer, obviously. Which is why it's surprising to discover that Oscar is quiet, but laughs a lot and in the right places when Jenny or Derrick say something that you should laugh at, which in Derrick's case is shockingly often, and also even though he's quiet Oscar does have a few things to say. Like when Jenny asks them why they like wrestling Derrick just kind of says it’s something to do, but Oscar kind of looks at his shoes and says for a long time about how his dad wrestled and always wanted him to wrestle and then trails off and after a while Derrick says that Oscar’s dad died, which of course Jenny knows but kind of forgot because she hasn't thought about it in forever, and what a cool guy he was, like another dad to Derrick even, who has a dad but he isn't around at all really, all of which makes Jenny feel pretty bad about some things. And then all three are quiet for a bit.

And then Oscar makes a joke to break the silence and it isn’t really that funny but all three laugh really hard because it feels so good to think about something other than Oscar’s dead dad. And Jenny changes the subject and asks what other stuff they like to do and both boys kind of shrug and say band is okay at school but neither is really good at it yet. Jenny does choir, but she acts really interested in the instruments they’re playing and what songs they learned last year and what they think of Mr. Rodriguez the music teacher, who Jenny is delighted to learn they both also like a lot. And Jenny talks about how Mr. Rodriguez likes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which makes him cool, and the boys obviously don’t listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers but sort of pretend they do for a minute until they can start talking about other bands they do know, like Jet and the Strokes and the White Stripes, all of which Jenny also loves. Jenny talks about how it’s cool that there’s, like, finally rock music again, and the boys agree, maybe not totally knowing what that means but enthusiastic enough to agree to almost anything at this point, and all of it makes Jenny feel really safe and interesting in a way that feels kind of strange and new.

And when they get to the place, the boys are legit really impressed and Jenny feels this pride that she is showing them something they haven’t seen and also that these actually really nice boys if you give them a chance want to spend time with her. Even though they're kind of awkward and say stupid stuff like “dude, sick leaves” about absolutely normal leaves, she thinks it's kind of endearing and sweet that they don't really know what to say and honestly, if she's being honest, she doesn't totally know either and so it kind of puts her at ease.

The spot is this great little nook off the side of the river trail and there's a big tree with low thick branches you can sit on and you can hear the river a tiny bit even though you can't see it and there's a dense canopy of branches and leaves blocking out the whole sky and it's shady but warm and it maybe feels like a place where you'd find actual fairies or spirits or whatever, which Jenny says eventually and the boys don't laugh or anything at all. Like maybe it was actually a cool thing to say even.

And the three of them lie there, each on their own big fat branch, and just kind of say whatever thing comes to mind, except when nothing comes to mind at all, which is a lot of the time.

And although there's no need, no need at all, for this day to end, and although it feels for a while like probably it won't because why would or should it, as if there were anywhere else to be or anything else to become, after an infinite while, the sky beyond the canopy does begin to darken, and the mosquitoes start coming out, and it gets a little chilly, and the boys finally say maybe they'd all better go home, but could they all hang out tomorrow? And Jenny grins the big big grin she only sometimes grins, like in old photos of her as a toddler or something, and says yes, please. And they make plans for where and when to meet and find their way back out to the river trail and then walk opposite ways to go home.

And Jenny's fingers find the cattails again, which are not silent even before they do, because the wind is rustling them and they're saying tsss-tsss-tsss into the night, just like they always are, until her fingers find them. Then they say pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit-pit.

Moonshine

M. Guillermo

Mom was late again. The second day in a row. So I decided to walk home this time, and told Ms. Janice Mom said I could even though she hadn’t. What she really said was the opposite: “Don’t walk on that highway under any circumstances, you hear?” But if I’d waited any longer, they’d have sent me to the principal’s office, and it’s awful in there. It smells like something old and dying, and Principal Hutchins won’t stop. She goes on and on about Jesus and the Bible, and how we have to be good little children or else get punished. I wasn’t going to sit through that again, no way. I’d rather chance it.

Mom told me she’d be working late anyway. She said it that morning, so I had plenty of time to work up the nerve. I don’t like lying to people. Not cause the Bible says so or anything, I’m just bad at it. My palms get real sweaty, and I can’t look them in the eyes or they see right through me. When I lied to Ms. Janice, I was staring at my shoes. I knew that she knew; but still, she let me go. I guess she was tired of waiting too.

Or maybe she thought I lived close in the suburbs like everyone else. Only a few of us don’t. Mom says we would if Dad had stayed, but she can’t afford it on her own. That’s the only time she talks about him: if it has to do with money, she’ll bring him up. I don’t even know what he looks like, only that he left after I was born and still sends Mom a check every month. It comes with a letter too that she throws straight into the trash. She doesn’t bother to read it. But I know it’s from him if the envelope says “John Lewis” — that last name is the same as mine.

One time I brought the mail in and saw his envelope addressed to me. I should’ve shoved it into my pocket right away, but I stood there staring like an idiot until Mom snatched it from me. “It’s nothing,” she said, as if I didn’t know already about the checks and letters. After that she was more careful: she sent our mail to her office instead of our home.

But that was my letter, wasn’t it? How many more did she take? Didn’t she say herself that stealing was a sin? When I was younger, Mom told me if I ever stole I’d go straight to Hell. I took that literally—I thought you’d burn on the spot the second you did it. I believed her up until I met Billy. He was the only other kid in my grade that didn’t live in the suburbs either. One day I went to the store with him, and he walked out with a pen and baseball cap hidden under his shirt. I waited for it to happen — for him to catch fire and burn — but it never did. “Aren’t you scared of going to Hell?” I asked him. But he just laughed and shoved the cap into my arms and kept walking.

At first, I wanted nothing to do with it. I kept the cap under my bed and watched Billy all week to see if anything changed. But he was using the pen during class without consequence, as if it was his all along. At church I remembered the priest talk about the soul as something inside of us we can’t see or know about. So I thought Billy must be burning in his soul. Or maybe he really needed the pen and God let him steal it. The priest said that too: sometimes lesser evils lead to greater goods. But trying to figure it out made my head hurt. How is it even possible to know what God wants from us? And why would he even care if we stole one lousy pencil or one stupid hat? Is that really all it took to go to Hell? Later Billy told me why he doesn’t worry about it. He said he’s got it all figured out: you just have to pray after. As long as you apologize, you’ll still get into Heaven. That made more sense to me than anything the priest ever said; so I asked God for forgiveness, and started wearing the hat too.

Mom must’ve known this all along, because the day she took my letter, I heard her doing it. I figured she tore it up like the others, and at night, went through the trash looking for the scraps. I thought maybe I could read it still. But she came out with the belt and started hitting without warning. She went until my skin turned red. After, I lay on my bedroom floor and heard her murmur through the walls: she was apologizing to God for what she’d done.

So that’s what I decided: to get home and pray and be done with it. Besides, the highway isn’t as bad as Mom says it is. There’s a big strip of grass to the right of the guardrail perfectly safe to walk on. Other people do it too. Most days there’s somebody, and when we pass, Mom points out the window and calls them crazy. I’m sure others saw me and thought the same. But what did I care? With my hat pulled low, no one could recognize me. And I was looking away from the cars anyway, to my right, where the woods followed steadily.  There was nothing to see in there, only the darkness of trees that rose up like an impenetrable wall.

Of course I’d heard the stories — how things lived deep in those woods and came out only at night. There’s one the kids at school like to tell the most, about the couple whose car broke down right where the road bends. There were no cellphones back then, so they had to wait for another car to pass. But after an hour, none came, and the man decided to go for help. He left the girl in the passenger seat and was gone a long time. Eventually she fell asleep. She woke briefly to the sound of rain falling and saw that he wasn’t back yet. She fell asleep again. The next time she woke the sun was rising, and she heard the rain still, but saw that the sky was clear. Then she saw red streaks dried on the window thick and textured off the glass. She got out the car and looked up at her boyfriend hanging from the light pole. His stomach was torn open. He dripped and dripped and dripped.

Most of the kids believed, but I knew that wasn’t the real story. Mom told me what actually happened there. Years ago, when she was my age, a couple highschoolers hit that bend hard and smashed through the guardrail. The whole car crushed up like a can, but the trees barely splintered. It was like the woods had swallowed them. Mom said their bodies were so messed up all the funerals were closed casket. The town was furious. They lit candles at church, and prayed for them, and put signs by the bend asking people to slow down. Everyone drove carefully for a while. But eventually time passed, and they forgot about the accident. They started driving normally again.

Yet when I reached the bend, I couldn’t believe Mom’s story either. Both seemed unreal in the daytime, so far away, like the parables they told us over and over at Sunday school. The kinds that show how to be and how to live as if invented for that purpose. But the light pole was just a light pole, the trees just trees. Nothing scary about them at all.

There was something else that frightened me — along the curve, the grass patch disappeared, and the woods pushed over the guardrail and forced their branches onto the highway. As I neared, I realized I’d have to walk on the road.

I climbed over quickly before panic set in. I pressed against the guardrail and felt hot metal burn through my clothes. A car went by and nearly knocked the cap off my head. It deafened my ears. But I found it better not to hear anything: I looked down at my feet and followed the white line, trying not to see either. I inched along. Until another passed even closer and screeched to a halt — I looked up at Mom’s car stopped directly in front of me. It seemed for a while the whole world was still. Then her door opened, and all Hell broke loose. Mom was screaming, but cars in the opposite direction drowned her out. She yanked me off the guardrail and the cap went flying. I could hear her then, but they weren’t words, just shouts. She ignored honking cars and threw me in the passenger seat. She walked around slow. But when she got in she was suddenly silent, as if deciding what to do with me. She drove, and in the rearview mirror, I watched my cap fade and disappear behind the bend. Then there was nothing. Cars following around the curve, that’s all.

Mom was quiet the whole ride too. But when she pulled into the driveway she hit me with her bare hand. She’d never done that before.

“What did I tell you huh? What do I always say?”

I didn’t answer. The car engine blared, but her voice rose over it: “And you know not to lie either. You made me look like an idiot, like I don’t know how to take care of you. Are you listening?” She hit me again. This time my sight blackened; I thought I would faint and grabbed onto the car seat.

“You’re a Lewis just like your father.”

“At least I’m not like you!”

There was stunned silence. I didn’t dare look at her. I heard the door open and started to sob — I knew she was getting the belt. She went into the house, and I stared after like seeing into a black hole. I felt something rise in me on the verge of explosion. Any second it would burst.

Then I saw Dad’s letter on the driver seat sitting atop the pile of mail. I took it without thinking. I got out the car and ran.

When I finally stopped the sun had already set. Back across the darkness the houses were glowing like stars; I couldn’t tell which was mine among them. I turned and walked on. A car passed and lit the road for a second, but revealed nothing, just asphalt black as the night. The driver looked at me as if I were an illusion. Then I was alone.

At the fork in the road I chose left. A dim light flickered orange in the distance and hung over a lonely house I knew belonged to the Crawleys. Billy had told me about it. He said his dad buys liquor there after school sometimes. He said the Crawleys make it in the woods and cut tunnels through the trees to hide their bottles. One day while waiting in the car, Billy found one next to the house: he saw a hole in the trees big enough to squeeze through. He wanted to go back with me and drink some.

The hole was there exactly as he’d described. I put the letter in my pocket, dropped to my knees and crawled.

Inside it was even darker. I couldn’t see a thing. But I felt branches cutting my skin and knew the tunnel was getting smaller. I could’ve been crawling for minutes or hours or days, it all felt the same. Until my hands came to the end: a thick solid brush that wouldn’t give no matter how hard I pushed. I tried for a while. Then I just sat there. I curled into a ball and rocked back and forth. A car passed far away, and I wondered if it was Mom out looking for me. I reached up to break a branch and saw a sliver of moonlight shine through the trees. I closed my eyes and could still see it. Eventually I fell asleep.

The next morning the sun broke through and dazed me. My head ached, and like a newborn, I took the world in stupidly. Then I saw my arms cut up and remembered — I took the letter out and opened it and started to read. But there must’ve been a mistake: it was filled with Godless things. It only contained obscenities. Words the adults told us never to say. Yet they were written in Dad’s handwriting like a storm, written then sent, written then sent, again and again and again.

He was saying them to Mom.

He was saying them to me.

I only read half before returning it to the envelope. I looked up and saw the tunnel entrance shrouded in a bright veil; I stared as if something would be revealed, but nothing changed. The envelope had fallen, and after a while, I noticed and picked it back up. In the blurred aftermath of the light I couldn’t read Dad’s words anymore. So I crumpled it to a ball and brought my hands down and dug. It was just as Billy said: two clear jugs bundled neatly in a burlap sack. “Moonshine,” he told me. He beamed at the word. “Hundreds of secret tunnels. Hundreds of bottles.”

But I’d tasted alcohol before. It burned going down like fire. I didn’t see why anyone’d go through all that trouble. I opened the sack and put the envelope in and buried it. I thought of the beating back home Mom had waiting for me. I could already feel the belt and shuddered. Yet still I crawled.

With the Suns

Cybèle K. Diniz 

Shura never asked for a second serving of stew.

It was a thing the other children of her community did often. Lack was not common. Either way, lack not being common changed little, for stew was not made to last, it was made to be consumed. It survived two days at most in this weather, this dull and stupid cold of autumn’s beginning. No sense in leaving leftovers. Yet Shura never asked for a second serving of stew. Shura thanked the old men who stood beside the fire and put work into that stew, and always wondered if her bowl might be filled some more, even prayed a little, because she was often hungrier than most people thought, though she was a plump girl. Expecting; never, ever, ever asking more.

Not ever did she hold it against the other children, however. In fact, she had reasoned that they should be asking, that it was a good thing to ask, to go for a second bowl, because, she surmised, they would have more energy and more satisfaction and thus go and play and feel stronger, and thus run after rabbits and get more delicious meat for the stew. It was merely that she did not need that, she thought. Moreover, she’d seen that none of the adults ever went for a second bowl, except for the pregnant women and men and iheji. She’d asked one of her mothers why that was the case, who’d answered that children should not worry about whether they will get to have stew. Shura protested that they always had stew, and a lot of it. Her mother — Yano — smiled simply and assured her that she would understand, and that it was for love. She’d asked, then, one of her fathers why it was the case. Her father — Udu — shrugged and told her she should just go for a second bowl of stew, because she was far too young to be wanting to do adult things. Though he was very kind, Shura disliked this, for she did not feel she was doing any adult things, not more than she did any child things.

“Why do we move with the suns, mami Yano?”

Shura had heard the hunters, the healers, and the thinking people discussing their movement many times. It was enough that it seemed significant: they moved in the same direction the suns did, but the way they talked to each other about this made it seem like they were doing something utterly unreasonable. She knew it was a change, though she did not know by what rule they moved before. But hearing the whispers of older people gave her questions. The shape of the question was not yet very concrete, though, and she had to do the best she could to ask it.

“It is not something we should be doing, Shura, but we need to.” Yano answered simply.

“Let the child know, Yano.” Interjected Beoba, another father of Shura.

“She does not need to worry, Beoba.”

Shura did not dare ask again, but she did look at her father with curiosity, or a somewhat pleading face, as if wondering whether papi Beoba would disregard what Yano had to say. Useless, obviously, as Yano was her water-mother. Beoba should not go against what she said.

She played with the idea of finding one of the thinking people, maybe from another family in her itino, and asking them that question. But she did not do that, in part because she was scared of them, because they were very often iheji, and the iheji were odd and loud, and in part because she believed that the thinking people were too busy looking to the suns or understanding the soil and how it gives life the way it does. Shura had heard that so many of the oddest ideas, like marking things on stone and on treeskin, were the making of iheji. Maybe the moving with the suns was their idea too, or maybe it was everyone’s idea. Or maybe it was just the way things were done now. But that seemed strange, for if it was just the way things were done, they should have reached the suns ages ago.

Shura loved helping with the community tasks. She was not allowed to hunt far — no girls or titeji were, not before they were women or iheji — but she still loved helping with the preparation of food, with the making of clothes, with the transporting of things between different places, the starting of fires, the building of wood-and-fabric domes. Today, it was that last one — they had moved much more now, the moon had died two times, and they found another riverside plain with plenty of forest around. Shura was energetic; and whenever she helped, the elders, who could do nothing but cook and rest while watching the settlement go up, nodded happily at her come-and-go.

Shura wondered why they could not just stop there and make homes that last forever. They already brought with them, animals that gave them milk and sometimes meat and pelt. They already planted in the ground, in places only the iheji and the people who spoke to them knew to find, all manner of fruit and vegetable. And, after all, mami Yano said they were not really supposed to be moving like the suns do, so why not stop? It got tiring, she thought, to just build new domes every two moon deaths. If they did away with it, much time could be given to play, and music, and making food. She almost wanted to scream and cry and beg that they just stay there longer than it was usual. But there was, she understood, a reason to not stay.

She decided it must be because of the hills. There were hills, all around, that they often moved towards. These hills were important because it didn’t matter how much the iheji spoke to the ground, too many of the things of the ground went up hills to meet with the things of wind and sky. The rivers, too, came from hills and mountains, and whoever made the rivers needed to be at the top, with all those things of ground and wind and sky. Shura knew, too, that at some point she would need to climb a hill and find the place where all those things met and speak to whichever of them wanted to speak to her, if she wanted to become a woman. But then, why would they not just stay near a hill, or even better, upon it? All that was too bothersome for her. Better to build the domes, because they are needed now and hilltops were only to come later.

“Why do we move, mami Yala?”

Mami Yala laughed a lot, and often she cared less about Yano being Shura’s water-mother. Yala stayed with Shura more often. Yano not as much. Yano was more present in other domes, and she only sometimes came by, though she was always kind to Shura.

“What do you mean, child?”

“Building the domes every time is very tiring. We could have so much more time if we just stopped here!”

Yala cocked her head.

“I think it is mostly that we are guests, Shura. If we stay too long, we will poison the river and eat all the rabbits and all the dores, and there will be a lot less fruit than before. We will upset the place.”

“But then why don’t we just do like we always do when we are in a new place, and just also plant things so we can have enough food, and raise more dulas so we can have more milk and meat, and go farther from where we are to forage?”

Yala cocked her head again and smiled, as if to say clever girl.

“Well, I heard a story that some of our cousins were tired of going around and did that. It worked well, I think.”

Shura looked at Yala with big eyes.

“Why don’t we? That is so good! Really?”

“Well… They needed to leave it behind, too. There was one of their loners who brought a message some moons ago, and they are moving with the suns.”

“But why!”

Yala’s voice vacillated, and she looked around, pressing her lips together. Some noise came out, but it was like a whine. Then she just shrugged.

“It had to be done. We are going to meet them where the suns set.”

“How have we not reached the suns yet?”

“We have not been doing that for so long, you know. We have only been moving with the suns for, I think, eight seasons? Remember? Twelve seasons ago, we had the big meeting with all the cousins, and we were still moving around the rivers.”

“We moved around the rivers?”

To this, Yala laughed.

“Don’t tell me you only became curious today!”

Shura smiled.

It was winter, and though Shura was not yet a woman, they were already teaching her how to hunt. She liked that, because the firepit felt almost as cold as the winter air when she stood still by it. So, learning how to use a bow, or the throwing of lances, was very fulfilling. She was even able to talk to the iheji, who taught her several things, like what things of the wind to call when an arrow cut the air, what plants to chew when she felt about to freeze before an enemy, and how to make small, explosive things which sparkled to distract animals and make predators flee. But it still was odd, because she remembered that children of her age did not learn hunting before going up a hill. To hunt, they needed the permission of the things living there. The eldest people and the iheji looked with dark faces at Shura and her dome-siblings, who showed off their lances and weapons to each other. Closed faces. Heads shaking. And this was only one more thing that felt so strange to Shura, and she felt scared that the things on hilltops would be unhappy if they figured she had learnt to use weapons.

Over the last few moons, the pace had quickened. They walked much more and settled much less. This was very tiring. Shura had other reasons to hate it: her snow treading boots. Her feet had grown a bit more, so the leather backing was digging into her skin. She told herself there was little leather and pelt to go around, and the uses were many, thus there was probably no space for boots. Every so often, she’d take some snow and pour it into the boot, seeking respite.

It was worse today. It was a long walking day, and she pushed what she was supposed to carry on a sledge. Some dulas also pulled sledges, though most of them just walked lazily beside the group. Dulas were not, in all the itinos, used to pull sledges; as far as she understood, the way those sledges were made was dreamt up by an iheji several moons ago, and because there had been no big meeting of the cousins since, they couldn’t transfer what they had figured out yet. She felt a pang of pride for her families, because they had discovered how to keep more things with less work. Yet she worried that maybe they burdened the dulas too much.

They sang songs when they walked. Sometimes she did not quite understand the words, but the one they sang today was low and quiet, and very slow, so she could walk to the rhythm and drink the words. Ieetetuivakoto babatora… a song speaking of Babata.

He had been a member of their people, and he had been a great dreamer. It was said that he dreamt so much that no parents wanted him to join and care for their children, and that his womb was seen as barren, because he could not give birth. Babata wanted children very much, though he was atatamtamka… a word Shura did not know, but she guessed it was “like a father to all”. One day he went into the ground, and asked the thing that inhabited there why he could not have children. The thing in the caverns did not know, but gave him a wind instrument, and told him to set himself where a river splits and play, and maybe the river would give him children. He then left his itino, and he went to seek a place where a river split, and it took much time, because rivers usually join, and that’s why the place where a river meets sea is just as sacred as the places where the tributaries are born. When he found the place where a river split, he played a rising song, and it was so beautiful and so sad the river asked him why he was crying, though he cried no tears. He said his womb was barren and asked if the river could give him a child. The river did not understand. The river said that his womb was full, but of wind. Human soul and human seed is heavy, and dreams are light, the river sang. The river also did not understand why a man with a womb full of wind would come to the water for a child; and so she said to him that he needed to speak to the wind. He walked up the hill, and he tried speaking to the wind, but the wind was fast and busy and never answered. He stood there, because he noticed that even if he was much more like the wind, he was still made of ground and could never catch it. After much waiting and much patience, and days and nights without food and water, his body was lighter, and so the wind took him, and they made love, and a child was born. But his body was left behind, and became a stone, and the ones of wind, and ground, and water decided they would meet atop the hills, because they were children of Babata.

A younger child near Shura fell as they walked, and Shura was the first to come to aid. He’d hit his head on a rock; Shura was already cleaning the cut and pressing a rag filled with snow against his nose to stop a bleed. He seemed fine, otherwise. The parents scurried closer, and told Shura to get back, saying they’d take care of him, and she need not to worry. Had she done something wrong? But she saw one of the child’s fathers smile at her, almost as if congratulating her, or thanking. She watched as they looked at the wound, cleaned it further, and offered the boy a layer of pelt more. When they were back to walking, he was sat on the shoulders of his only mother, and he laughed.

The boots still cut into Shura’s heels.

Her behavior was mysterious to her parents. Her right ankle had, at some point, developed some bothersome kind of infection that she treated herself with some success; it was only when it seemed healed enough that she dared tell Beoba about it. Beoba did not know what to do. Yano was angry, at her. Udu was disappointed, but not at her. Yala was sorry. But Shura calmed them down, and told them exactly how she’d done it, and how she’d observed the healing people doing much of the same, and how she identified the plants. Yala, being shown the many things she’d used against the infection, had to admit with some difficulty she’d been right. Though, they warned, it was not because she’d been right this once that it would be so every time.

She still didn’t ask for second servings, but since she’d grown, she needed more food. Often, then, she ate whatever was not yet food, or whatever was left. Rests that were supposed to return to earth. Fruit, when it was harder to pick or so old it almost fermented. The chewy bits of some legumes. Yet she was still plump and strong, and could run fast, and she’d asked — not begged — to join the foragers and hunters who went much farther. She’d still been told no.

“She needs to be tended to,” Shura overheard Yala one night.

“The girl was bleeding from the ankle and said nothing, Yala. She used mosses to heal herself. And said nothing! At all!” Yano keened. “She could have asked for wrappings, for new boots, and yet, and yet… How are we supposed to know she needs tending to?”

“I do not mean only her ankle.”

“I know you do not. What can I do? I am pulled in ten directions and then some, I need attend to everyone, everywhere, and still I do not even think we should stop here, or anywhere, really, until we’ve reached the sunset land, there is so much to be done…”

“Yano. Yes. And yet truth is that Shura needs to be tended to.”

“Do not talk to me as if I didn’t care.” Yano’s voice was cold.

“It is not what I am doing.”

“Yes, it is. You judge me, because you feel that, since she came from my water, I must stay close. And yet everything, everything, is so much like a weight…”

“My owl…”

“Sometimes, I wish the wind would take me.”

There was a pause, and Yala didn’t answer. Then, the sound of sobbing. Then, two, unsynchronised, sobbing noises.

“Owl, it is alright, it is alright, you know it is…” Yala’s voice was frayed, clipped, rough like old and hard leather.

“We just need to survive the journey first, and she needs to survive…”

Shura held her breath. She tried to hold her heartbeat, as well, but that could not be done.

“We will, we will get her up the hill, and then we’ll join the cousins and the other peoples, and everything will be fine. Owl. It can’t be any other way.”

Shura’s ankle had been, since the small infection, weakened. She’d superficially fixed it, yes, but it was still swollen and warm, and too much weight on it was a terror. This explains perhaps the faltering which caused her to fall, roll down, and sprain it. The sound was so dull and deep she imagined it echoed the world. For once, she had no choice in the matter; she was wounded and needed to be tended to. Ideally, she could be carried with the group, and they’d go their merry way. However, nearby was the last of the hills, the meeting places, they’d cross. Those in coming of age had to go up and meet the things that lived there.

She watched as her siblings and the others coming of age climbed, alone, and came back down. Every elder knew who resided up on that hill; every adult did as well; and those coming down had just discovered it. No one would tell her. Of course not. She needed to discover it. But she would not accept being carried upwards. Udu, always the good father, had suggested doing that, damn the Elders’ scowls, for they needed to move, they needed to go. But Shura also yearned for her womanhood.

She’d declined. Yes, because she did not want to imagine the hard gazes of the elders, the questioning stares of iheji, nor the knowledge that, of all her siblings and peers, she was the one who could not go up alone. Partly, at least.

So she was alone.

No, she was not alone. The elders, who were fond of her, brought and offered food, demanded she eat it, speaking at length of how food heals spirit as much as body. Her siblings and friends, even after coming down the hill, spoke to her as an equal. Yala, Udu, and Beoba came often. Yano, too, more than usual. And yet they did not move with the suns for many days, enough that at some point Shura almost storied it might be lasting. She did also feel restless, deep in the bones, which trembled, and with no running to do, nor building, and too much rest, she had very little of new to notice; and thus everything she noticed became a story, of how the cousins and other peoples might meet, of how her ankle might never heal, of how maybe whatever lived up the hill would come down to meet her, and grace her for her courage and love, or admonish her for her ignorance and infractions. When she slept, it was always of Babata, Mami Sata, Papi Tona, all those figures from stories she had not been the one to make, or at least not the only one.

But it could not continue so long. They had, not in a long time, stood so many weeks in the same place. It was almost a return to what was known. Shura whistled songs with the elders, made little statuettes, and helped where she could, cutting vegetables, preparing meat, and telling stories to the smallest children who did not yet have the age of going up the hill. She imagined a life like this.

This life broke with the yelling and crying of someone at the break of night, one of the hunters, a mother to someone else, lonesome, unaccompanied by any fellow trackers. She yelled of something; the approach from the sunrise side; danger, and what else. Shura, though she had not healed completely, could not stay in her corner, and was almost the first to be there, kneeling by Toma, one of the other mothers in the itino.

“We stood too long, we stood too long… Mara was captured…” she babbled.

Shura paused. It was incomprehensible. She thought it was the moment to cry, but something else took over.

“Toma, calm down, calm down, what is going on?”

“From the sunrise, they moved faster than we thought, they are too close… We were trapping far… And… I don’t know…”

Some hand pulled Shura from behind, trying to take her away. She had to stand, and unfortunately put too much weight on her ankle, and fell backwards. Three other people had come to talk to Toma, one of them Udu, one of them a sibling come of age, one of them an iheji, this last one already trying to make the crying woman chew on some plant. The person behind Shura was Yano.

“Mami! What is going on?”

Yano was shaking.

“Shura…”

“Mami, please.”

Yano had never noticed how the green of Shura’s eyes was much like Beoba’s, and the brown of her skin much like her own.

“My seedling, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry —”

“I need to know…”

“There are people coming from the sunrise, Shura.”

“The other peoples? The ones alongside us?”

“No. Not at all. Not alike. They take too much, leave too little. And… Where the cousins and the other peoples who had stopped walking stayed… They got taken… And…”

“Do they not know they are guests?”

“They do not care, Shura.”

“They…”

“No!” Yano’s face was becoming crooked with the effort of not crying.

Shura came forward and hugged her, and somehow, Yano didn’t cry.

“Is this why…”

“Yes. Yes. The things atop the hills told us to meet the cousins and the other peoples near the sunset.”

They paused.

“Mami, we need to go.”

“Shura, we wanted you to be a woman… I’m so sorry, you might…”

“I know. I’ll be a woman. I’ll go up the hill. I will come back to you, you go without me.”

“Shura, you will be captured.”

Around them, the adults, children, and elders were in high alert, and they seemed to be trying to carry as much as they could, find their carrier bags, their baskets, their packs.

“I will not.”

“Shura, I am your water-mother, you cannot do this, you cannot.”

There was going to be no discussion.

“Yes, mami.”

And Yano cried, and she nodded, and she said sorry. She needed to go. She needed to help. And she asked Shura to pack her things, so they could take the road, and promised her a future hill; and so she did, packed things in a carrier bag, a bow behind her back, plants against the pang of inaction, water, flint, and some dula fat.

She lit a torch and cast her shadow.

If the sunrise people saw fire on the hill, she imagined they’d climb towards it. Perhaps just some of them. Perhaps all of them. Climbing upon the hill, they would not follow the river path. Not following the river path, the itino could dissipate into the night. And one day, maybe, she’d find them again.

She was at the base of the hill, and so she began her hurried climb.

Going up, she had to resist looking downwards. She did not wish it a sacrifice. It didn’t matter that she knew it was so. She could only focus on the top of the hill, the approaching summit, the meeting-place. She wondered whether this was the same hill Babata, Tonoba, or other things had climbed up in the stories. She then wondered whether it was, maybe, the same hill Yano, Yala, Beoba, or Udu had climbed. She then decided to stop wondering and be at peace with knowing only that it was the hill she was climbing.

 Her ankle ached.

She was halfway up the hill, and now it was obvious. In the distance, moving through the clearings of the forest, were the torches and strange shadows of the sunrise people. She could not see any single one of them, but she saw them, their approach, which was less like a river, and more like a flying arrow.

A flying arrow.

There was no snow.

She looked to the sky, then to the earth, then to the lake far away.

To the hilltop. Then back to the forest.

She took an arrow, and around the arrow wrapped a cloth filled with the small and sparkling explosives, and with dula fat she saturated it, and with the torch she lit it. She imagined that, even if the wind took out the fire, then the little packets of mysterious dust inside would go up in flames on impact.

But the wind did not put out the fire once the arrow left her bow, and even she allowed herself to believe that the wind guided the arrow, which fell somewhere in front of the approaching group.

They’d used fire before, to shape the landscape, when the ground gave permission.

She’d seen it.

It always spread so quickly.

She was almost at the top. The hill was very tall, very tall indeed, and the fire still raged, but guided by the wind. Some had escaped, though, and she could already see them, even from so far away, climbing.

The top of the hill was nothing like what she imagined. At first, it seemed like it was simply a place. It was waving greenery, blooming flowers, coursing wind. It was cold and wet earth. It was pebbles. What had she imagined? She couldn’t tell anymore. Wet and waving, tears welled up in her eyes.

Through the blurriness of her tears, she could see perhaps the only remarkable thing about it all, and thus she had to wipe them away.

Upon the centre of that summit stood a single rock. It was only barely taller than papi Udu, who himself was not particularly tall, even shorter than Yala. The rock, despite its isolation, was not in disrepair; it was well cared for. Oval and grey, it bore the markings the iheji would leave on trees and stones around the edges, with an irregular curved line underlining, under which even more markings stood. The first markings were square and tall; the second markings were, though still angular, much more varied. Perhaps about three palms under the top of this rock was also carved a face; not lifelike, but still expressive, so alive, with a wide, squished nose, round and open eyes, and a mouth opened in a grin. She knew this was Shu. Her name, Shura, was given from her.

She stood there for far too long, staring into the round eyes of Shu. It was long enough that, once she broke from her trance, she could see the sunrise people halfway up the hill.

But this was not a thing to be rushed. There was nothing to rush, anymore. She was there. She was to become a woman.

Before it, she started a small fire, to give everything at the hill a place to huddle around.

“Mami Shu...” she started, but she stopped. She did not know why she stopped.

“Mami Shu, I am here, to give blessings and love and ask for favours and answers.”

The rock did not respond.

“Mami Shu, I am Shura, water-daughter of Yano, given-daughter of Beoba, love-daughter of Udu and Yala, sister of Tino, Toto, Baba, Gano. Mami Shu, I am here because I am to become a woman.”

The rock did not respond.

“Mami Shu, who is wind-daughter of Babata, I ask to become a woman.”

The rock did not respond.

“Mami Shu, I ask for protection of my itino.”

No response.

“Mami Shu, I ask…” Shura trailed off.

She could hear the approach. Their voices. Far, but loud. She hated them. Hatred was a feeling she’d always learned to put out so everyone could work on it with her. There was no one to work on it with her here. So she just hated them.

“Mami Shu, I ask why those of the sunrise forget they are guests.”

Still it was just rock.

“Mami Shu, please, answer me.”

Nothing.

She waited. And waited. And she knew she should be thinking of the approach of the people going up, and of how she’d find her way back to the itino, and how she’d help them, and how one day she’d have a child of her own womb, and how she would learn to use the bow and the arrow. But instead she just knelt there, on wet and cold earth, and felt as if the entire sky held her breath much as she did.

“Mami Shu… Have I… Offended you?...”

…

“Mami Shu… Look at me… Do you see a woman?”

The wind blew through her hair, and she felt a chill, and she was still holding her breath. But she could not hold it forever.

“Mami Shu…”

She expected the eyes to blink.

“Should I have asked for a second bowl of stew?”

And she made a sobbing sound. And she sobbed.

And, after, there were two sobbing sounds. She did not look up. Her tears were deep and cloudy, and blurred her vision very much, and she did not care anymore.

Arms came around her. Not from behind, as she’d feared, but instead from the front. Warm stone arms. They wrapped her in a hug. Sobbing so much, she thought she might dry out and become lighter. Around her, the arms were warmer, like rock that stood patiently under the suns, resting and feeling its embrace.

Upon the hilltop, the surviving members of the armed group found almost nothing. Waving grass. Tranquil flowers. Dry earth. Two tall and oval rocks; one of them marked and deeply held by the earth; the other unmarked, less weathered, and even somewhat loose. As they left, one of them placed a hand on the looser stone, wishing to see it tumbling down. It would have taken very little force. But he could not.

The Creep

Sharon SY Lee

Bill’s face looks perpetually sunburned. His sagging cheeks are kissed with rosacea and a map’s worth of spider veins. His face turns redder at the sight of the pretty girl who walks towards the curb. He scrapes his thinning hair into place and flips down the sun visor to check his yellowing teeth for any traces of lunch. 

His car is old and reliable, just like him. Bill pulls up to the curb where his rideshare passenger stands waiting with one hand on her hip. He is prepared to explain that there’s no use in trying to sit in the backseat; the door is broken, but the girl–fresh-faced, maybe in her early twenties–slips into the passenger side without a single glance his way. She adjusts her skirt, which has ridden up a little, and Bill marvels at her exposed thighs, which are thick and brown and muscled, like a pony’s. She smells of clean linen–a nice smell, unlike some of his other passengers, who douse themselves in cologne or perfume.

“I’m Bill,” he says, smiling and trying to catch her eye, which is hunting for her seatbelt instead of fixed on him. It annoys Bill mightily when riders do not bother to look him in the eye, when they treat him like a chauffeur. Such a muted beginning usually means that the ride will be silent the whole way. This passenger might as well have requested one of those self-driving cars instead. 

He tries again. He will be acknowledged today. “I’m Bill.”

She is turned away from him, facing the window, but he catches the glint of white earbuds nestled in her dark hair. It dawns on Bill that the girl is on the phone. Some passengers have forgotten how to act around real, live people. Bill believes that at their core, people still crave the human touch. They want to see a friendly face; they want to engage in light chitchat. His wife, Helena, sometimes shakes her head at him and chides him for talking too much. Passengers have described him as “nice,” “friendly,” and “pleasant” in their anonymous feedback. People don’t really want to be picked up in an empty, self-driving car. Bill thinks it’s spooky to witness a driverless vehicle pull up to the curb. Like ordering a ghost to drive you around. Nevertheless, he knows that evidence points to the contrary: human-manned rideshare vehicles are being phased out all over the country. Someday soon, his job will be obsolete. 

The passenger continues her phone conversation, oblivious to Bill. “Can you believe it?” she says, then kicks off her sandals. Bill has big, bug eyes that give him a perpetually surprised look, but now his big, bug eyes narrow as he turns back to the steering wheel. The girl doesn’t even bother to apologize for her rudeness. She laughs towards her window. Her laugh is all wrong: raspy and low, as though she has been sucking on cigarettes for a long time. Someone who looks like her should have a sweet and gentle laugh. He’s encountered other girls who have sweet and gentle voices that rise barely above a whisper. For example, the pharmacy technician, Sarah, at the local drugstore where he picks up Helena’s medications. Sarah, with her long black hair, is the epitome of feminine grace. She used to avert her eyes demurely when asking for his first and last name and date of birth. He always joked with her about his age, how the years had crept up on him and accumulated without notice until he suddenly found himself old. He used to chitchat with Sarah, used to ask Sarah how things were going, how was her workload, how was her little girl. Sometimes, he asked a few more friendly questions, asked if she wanted to grab a coffee during her break, but if a line started to form behind him, he knew that he should let her get back to work. She had other customers to take care of. He used to think that she was kind and accommodating, that she came from a culture that respected its elders. Of course, this was before she had turned on him and had security escort him out of the drugstore.  Apparently, Sarah had felt uncomfortable in his presence. Uncomfortable! All Bill ever tries to do is make others around him feel seen and heard.

The girl lets out a long exhalation. Her chest looks firm, as though it can bounce back against any pressure. She says her goodbyes and sets her phone in her lap, right where the skirt hem ends and her thighs begin. Bill needs to increase his driver rating, which is hovering dangerously low at seven points, the minimum acceptable rating on the app’s 10-point scale. The app has already sent him several warnings, each more stern than the last. One more bad rating and his account will be suspended, and then what will he do with himself?

When Bill is nervous, he resorts to his old one-liners. “I’m Bill.” He pauses for effect. “As in, dollar bill.” He waits for her to smile, to chuckle, to join him in this shared moment. Instead, she stares at him blankly, so he laughs a little at his own joke.

“What did you say?” Her speaking voice is also raspy.

“Bill, like a hundred-dollar bill.” 

She smirks. “Who uses cash anymore?”

“Beg your pardon?”

She picks up her cellphone and waves it at him in mid-air. “There’s no need to use cash when you have a phone.” 

For Bill, the slow creep of time expands suddenly and turns into a chasm big enough to fall into. “When I was your age, we didn’t have cell phones.” 

“How did you talk to each other back then?”

“We had phones. They were just attached to the wall with a cord.” His own phone is mounted on the dashboard. The rideshare app shows the location of his car, which is still parked next to the curb. Sometimes he misses the simplicity of landlines. Bill rarely uses the apps that are downloaded onto his cell phone. They make him feel frustrated and angry, especially that mail pharmacy app. How bewildered Bill had felt when Sarah’s supervisor had downloaded the mail pharmacy app onto his phone for him. “It’s more convenient than coming in every week,” she had told him.

He reaches for the glove compartment. His upper torso hovers over the girl’s thighs as he takes out a tin. “Have some peppermints,” he says, unfastening the lid for her. 

She shakes her head.

“Just one?” he asks.

“I’m trying to eat clean.”

“They’re individually wrapped.”

“No, I mean I’m staying away from high-fructose corn syrup.”

“You’re thin. You look healthy.” 

“Shouldn’t we get going?”

“Come on, live a little! I insist!”

“Fine.” Instead of taking one, she grabs a handful of peppermints.

“Leave some for the other passengers,” he jokes, then quickly puts away the tin, lest she help herself to more. The peppermints were filched from Dr. Amiryan’s office last month. He himself hates peppermint candy, but that hadn’t stopped him from pouring the entire content of the receptionist’s candy bowl into Helena’s purse. Helena had hissed at him to put the peppermints back, but he had snapped back that her neurologist was too damn busy to chase them down for taking a bowl of candy. It had been his small act of defiance.

The girl pops one of the ill-gotten peppermints into her mouth and sucks vigorously with her rosebud mouth. “Can we get going now?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” One anonymous passenger wrote that Bill was “too chatty.” He disagrees, but he can understand that some people are just in a hurry to get where they want to go. Chatting is just how he endears himself to other people, women in particular. Bill starts up the car and pulls away from the curb and onto the street. Sometimes Helena complains in private that he doesn’t need to charm every woman he encounters. When this happens, Bill always reassures her of his love. He chides her not to be so insecure.

“So, do you use this app often?” he asks. 

“Sometimes.” 

“You have to be careful nowadays. Lots of scammers out there, lots of unscrupulous men. How old are you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“You look young.”

“How old are you?”

He is still a vibrant seventy. He honks at a Tesla driver who has the gall to toss trash out of the window. “I’m an old man. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a hundred!” 

“You’re not that old.”

His chest lifts. “I feel young on the inside, but I’m a grandpa. How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know. Eighty?”

He feels slightly miffed. He tries to recover. “You know, I have a granddaughter who is a little younger than you. If you ever need a ride, you could call me directly. Safer than accepting rides from other strangers.”

“Thanks for the offer.” She crosses her legs. 

“You can give me your number later. Call me anytime.”

“I’m okay.”

“My granddaughter is very pretty, just like you. Her mothers live in San Francisco and work in tech.” He likes to insert this information into conversations whenever he can. A type of code signaling to show that he’s an accepting, open kind of old guy who can raise a lesbian and welcome a daughter-in-law into the family. His daughter and Laila live in a sleek condo that relies on all types of smart devices: a refrigerator that orders groceries when food runs low, an oven that sends notifications when cooking is complete, and a robot vacuum cleaner that sweeps and mops daily. Unlike him, his daughter and her wife will never find themselves on the cusp of a very lean retirement. His daughter and Laila think that if they throw money at a problem, if they outsource the work of caring for Helena by placing her in a nursing home before her dementia becomes worse, the problem of caregiving is solved.

“They have great benefits at their companies,” he says. “Egg-freezing, for example.” 

“It’s a standard benefit nowadays.” 

It was this egg-freezing benefit that had produced his first and only grandchild. “You should freeze your eggs if you can,” he says. The surrounding cars speed up; his Honda struggles to keep up.

“What?”

“You should freeze your eggs while you’re young. Don’t wait too long.” 

“I don’t want kids.”

She is just a mere slip of a girl. “You might change your mind.”

“I’ve already considered the ethics of bringing a child into a dying Earth.” 

“You might wake up someday and find yourself too old to have one.”

“I’d rather not discuss my eggs with you.”

He drives along the highway on-ramp. He waits to weave his car in. “I didn’t mean any offense,” Bill puffs up with indignation. He is only trying to help. He holds his palms up for a brief moment, as if in surrender. He hates that his rating is tied to the whims of his passengers. An idiot passenger once wrote that he was “cringey” and “tone deaf.” He had forgotten that some women are touchy. Laila is one of these women. Every time he and Helena visit and stay in their sleek condo, which is not very often, he tries to draw Laila out of her introverted shell by making a big show of complimenting her dark beauty, her intelligence, and her articulate way of speaking. Once, as he stood over the kitchen counter, poring over the coffee machine user guide, he overheard his daughter in her bedroom, making muffled apologies to Laila on his behalf. Why was his daughter apologizing for him? He hadn’t done anything wrong. Bill thinks that, with both of them working from home, interacting with only each other and their many smart devices, it’s clear that they’ve forgotten how to talk with humans.

Dr. Amiryan seems to be one of these kinds of women, too. At their first meeting, Dr. Amiryan asked if they minded being recorded by AI. “It saves me time on taking notes,” the neurologist had explained. Helena agreed to it, but Bill had pushed back. “Why can’t you take notes yourself? Or ask a nurse to do it?” He had taken the time to practice pronouncing the doctor’s name correctly; the least she could do was listen to what they had to say. Whatever happened to simple common courtesy? Over the years, doctors have gone from scribbling notes on a pad of paper to tapping away on a screen. How can Bill be sure that this AI takes all the right notes? How can Bill be sure that this AI is even listening? 

He is so distracted that he fails to notice the red taillights of the car in front of him. Almost too late, he slams on the brakes. His right forearm shoots out in front of the girl in a protective gesture, where it bounces against her ripe chest. 

“Hey! What the hell!”

He gestures at the car in front of him, at the freeway traffic that seems to be slowing all around him. “People here just don’t know how to drive.” He can feel his already-red face reddening more. His forearm feels hot. 

“You did not just try to touch my chest.”

“The car in front of me braked.” His voice cracks. She has to know that. Why does she make him feel so defensive? He can feel his seven points flushing down the drain.

“Some might consider that assault and battery.”

“For Pete’s sake, it was an accident!”

He is sweating hard now. She’s got him by his figurative balls. How will he find another job at his age? His under-funded pension is a joke. Helena’s retirement, earned from decades of teaching sixth graders, can only do so much to keep them afloat. One more poor rating and his small trickle of post-retirement income will dry up, and he will have to accept money from his daughter and Laila. He’ll have to move up to San Francisco and into a nursing home with Helena. Last year, after her diagnosis, Bill toured the facility with Helena. The staff spoke so carefully to both of them, as if they were children, even though Helena was the one with dementia. The staff looked right through him, even as they were making eye contact. He knows that once he moves in, he will never be able to leave. He will have reached the end of the line.

The girl’s serious face holds for a beat, then cracks open with a wicked smile. “I’m just messing with you.” There is something vulgar about that smile. “You should keep your eyes on the freeway.” 

It dawns on Bill that she’s just toying with him! He sees now that she’s a calculating sort of girl, not nice at all! He feels a small rush of anger. “I was trying to keep you safe.”

In response, she unwraps another peppermint, pops it into her mouth, and begins crunching loudly.

At this point, he has no idea how this girl will rate him after he drops her off. It’s unfair, so unfair, how his livelihood and future depends on the opinions of strangers. One jerk of a passenger had the gall to call him a “creep” in one review. What do these people know about basic human decency? The traffic is moving at a brisk clip now. Teslas and Rivians speed past his Honda, then signal and merge effortlessly into his lane. A shiny Lucid cuts in front of him. $70,000 for a Lucid! He feels, as he often does, betrayed by the times. He tries to chase down the Lucid to show that he can’t be pushed around, but it has already darted too far away. He feels his window of goodwill closing rapidly. 

“You missed the exit,” the girl says. 

“Pardon?”

“You missed your exit.” She points at his mounted cellphone. 

This girl shouldn’t be telling him what to do. What does she know about driving? What does she know about anything? Bill grits his teeth. The peppermint smell is growing too pungent. He says, louder than he means to, “I’ve been living here for fifty years. If you want to get to your destination faster, you should listen to me instead of the phone.” 

“I’m just saying, you missed your exit.” 

Bill snaps, “I know the way better than any app. I’ve got a shortcut in mind.”

Bill’s car begins to accelerate. 

The girl crosses her arms across her chest. “I don’t care how I get there, as long as I get there.” 

Her tone feigns nonchalance, but Bill is not fooled. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have said anything.” The sooner he brings her to her destination, the better. He doesn’t want to help her anymore. He doesn’t even want her phone number! 

“I didn’t mean any offense,” she says. 

He presses hard on the gas pedal. He can’t seem to stop. “You should be thankful that you have a rideshare app to use.” 

“Slow down a little.”

“You should be thankful that I’m giving you a ride to where you need to go.”

“I don’t need a lecture from you.” 

He can’t believe that he’s dealing with this kind of garbage. Who does she think she is? “You should respect your elders.”

“You should focus on driving safely.” Her sharp words slap the bruised flesh of his ego. She is going to tank his rating, no doubt about it. Clearly, she thinks she’s better than him!

He is driving too fast now, twenty miles per hour above the speed limit and climbing. His Honda starts shaking from the effort of keeping up with the pumping of his gas pedal. The girl is still wearing her stupid earbuds. He wants to see her scared. He wants to punish her. He wants to shake her out of her digitally induced smugness. He wants to dispense his own form of cosmic justice. He’s allowed this anger, isn’t he? He, who has been shuttling around passengers who couldn’t care less about how his day is going. He’s surrounded by too many uncaring women: Sarah, who would rather sic security on him than talk to him; Dr. Amiryan, who has no interest in hearing what he has to say; Laila, who complains about him behind his back. He’s a nice guy, but he’s been pushed too far now! 

“Slow down!” the girl screams at him. “Let me out!”

He smells peppermint and his own sweat. He is driving so fast; it feels as though he is not driving his car at all–no, the highway lane is simply galloping under his tires while his car stands still. He peers into the foreseeable, abysmal future. His rating plummets past seven points and the app drops him as a driver and he and Helena are forced to move into the nursing facility where the lights are automated and all the residents wear tiny monitoring devices, even the residents like him, the ones who are not yet afflicted with cognitive issues.

Pain on his cheek draws him back into the present. He screams bloody murder. The girl has sliced one long scratch into the side of his already red face. She follows this up with several vicious strikes to his right arm. Assault and battery! She is the one committing the assault and battery, not him! He is just an old man, a chatterbox, completely harmless!

His anger unspools. What is he doing? This is not like him! 

He slows the car down and exits to the side of the freeway. She ceases her attack and slumps in her seat. They are both breathing hard as the Honda’s wheels bump over the ground. Before the car can come to a full stop, the girl pushes the car door open and falls out of the passenger side and onto the dusty ground, still clutching her phone. 

He remembers his manners. He wonders how to recover from this situation. “Are you okay?” he asks. 

She snarls at him. Her eyes on him are full of hate. 

There’s nothing to be redeemed here. Under her glare, he feels himself grow feeble and insignificant, shrinking down, down, down until he ceases to exist at all. Along this empty stretch of the highway’s shoulder, nothing grows. 

It feels wrong, but he has to ask. He tries to make his next words sound gentle and reassuring. “Do you want a ride to your destination?”

She backs away from him, then turns around and runs in the opposite direction. If she runs away from him, how will she get to where she is going? He considers chasing her down, coaxing her back into his car so that he can do right by her, then rethinks this course of action. She will be fine. She has her cell phone.

He turns his blinker on, then speeds up to catch up with the flow of traffic. He looks in the rearview mirror one last time. Behind him, the girl is giving him the finger and shouting choice words in his direction. What a rude and uncivilized passenger! His right arm is already turning black and blue. The raised welt on his red face throbs with pain. Thank his lucky stars, he just barely escaped her attack. 

He maneuvers his car onto the highway. He takes a deep breath and combs his thinning hair back into place. He should pay the recent past no mind. If he picks up another passenger right now, he might be able to cancel her out, might just barely hold onto his seven points after all. 

A notification from the app tells him that a new passenger has requested a driver. He accepts the ride with rising good cheer. A new passenger, hopefully female, a nice woman to provide absolution and a good opinion of him to mitigate the girl’s insults. He glances at the passenger seat and sees that the girl has left one of her white earbuds behind. From this view, it looks like a loose peppermint. The earbud rolls back and forth in the empty seat, hypnotizing Bill’s big bug eyes. He wonders if he should snatch up the earbud and send it flying through the slit of the open window. He wonders if he could mail the earbud back to the girl. Something alters in his expression; a shadow moves across his face. 

His car drifts out of his lane–an angry honk to his left snaps his attention back towards his driving. Bill flips the steering wheel in the opposite direction. His car lurches in protest. For a moment, he is suspended between two different directions. He hears a telltale pop, followed by a sick reverberation. It looks like his old and reliable car is not so old and reliable after all. 

The app dings to tell him that he’s missed the exit that will take him to his waiting passenger, but there’s nothing he can do. He turns on his emergency lights and drives until he sees a safe opening, then steers towards the side of the empty freeway. He gets out of his car and examines the front right tire, which has deflated, just like his hopes. He wishes that he hadn’t removed his spare tire kit to improve his gas mileage. The passenger messages “where r u” and Bill tries to cancel the ride. He’s in too deep. He can’t cancel it. He swipes right and left and up and down. He tries to call the passenger, but no one picks up. No one picks up their phones these days! 

Maybe he can still salvage this day. All he needs is a new tire and a new passenger. He pulls up the information for AAA. The chatbot tells him to download the app to request service and track the progress of the tow driver. Another app! He tries, but it won’t download. It refuses to download! These apps will be the death of him. Does he consent to the AAA app to retrieve his location data? Yes or no? What the hell does that mean? Would he like to enable his GPS so that AAA can find him? If yes, please go to Settings > Location to turn location on or off. He tries to press on, thinks he’s pressed it, but he can’t be sure. The buttons are so small. Can’t they see that it’s an emergency?

A notification from the rideshare app–he opens the message with trepidation–informs him that he is too slow, that his latest passenger has already moved on to the next available driver. He sits down on the ground next to his car–nevermind the gravel–and breathes deeply.

As if to further mock him, his phone pulls up the mail pharmacy app. He wonders now if he could have been mistaken about Sarah all along, if her looking away from him was not out of demureness but in disgust. He wonders if Dr. Amiryan was offended when he demanded that she take notes herself. He wonders if Laila’s stiff smiles are not signs of social awkwardness at all but some deep-seated disapproval of him. He finds himself hating all of these women. He would like to erect a protective shield around himself; he would like to conjure up a safe world in which he can follow the path of pleasant conversation without the threat of hidden landmines. He sets the phone facedown on the gravel. With his red face cupped in his hands, he ponders how he has been brought this low, to this dead-end point of his life. 

After a time, the sound of tires on gravel interrupts his thoughts.. He looks up to find a sight for sore eyes–a tow truck! A white tow truck has pulled onto the side of the freeway where Bill still sits. Even though there is no one else around, he jumps to his feet and waves both arms frantically above his head. 

God bless AAA, he thinks.

He hurries towards the tow truck before it can drive off without him. The driver-side door opens, and Bill’s bug eyes widen: he’s surprised to see that the tow truck driver is a woman. She jumps smoothly onto the gravel in one well-practiced motion. She is a small, hard thing, swinging her black-gloved arms, stomping along in big black boots, and she is headed straight towards him. A short ponytail sprouts from the top of her head. The boxy jacket that she wears can’t completely obscure her figure.

On instinct, Bill scrapes his thinning hair into place. He runs his dry tongue over the front of his yellow teeth, as though he means to wipe them clean with his own saliva. His red face now wears a cheerful smile.

“Boy, am I glad to see you!” Bill calls to her.

When she stops in front of him, he sees that the top of her ponytail barely reaches his chin. He feels a hundred times better than he had before.

He holds his hand out for her to shake. “Call me Bill.” He pauses for effect. “As in, dollar bill.” In the split second before he laughs at his own joke, the whole world holds its breath as he waits for her to join in.

Through The Dust storm

Corie Hudspeth

Higgins waits in a rocking chair by the front window and watches Dodd stroll through the dust storm toward the house. A bandana is wrapped around Dodd’s face to shield him from flying sand. He stops and picks something up from the road and examines it. His fingers open and the wind whisks it into the evening sky.

Higgins wonders if Dodd will make it to the house before dark. He rocks the chair in a slow rhythm to keep patience. As a kid, Dodd always lagged behind. His attention was frequently snagged by some wild imagining, an interior world hidden behind glazed, daydreaming eyes. Their father would tap Dodd’s forehead and ask, “Can you feel that?”

Dodd opens the screen door and steps into the enclosed porch, shakes the dust from his hair, and violently whips his bandana clean. He shakes his coat outside the screen door before hanging it up, then carefully examines his clothes for dirt. He gazes into the storm as though something in the distance is urging his response.

“So meticulous.” Higgins whispers, impatient.

When Dodd steps into the house, Higgins greets his brother with a firm handshake.

“You made it, Dodd. I thought the storm would swallow you up.”

“Not me.” Dodd laughs. He pats Higgins on his shoulder and walks anxiously into the den to find their father. The conversation they have is identical every year. Their father will say, “So how’s the Big Apple?” Then he’ll lean in and say quietly, “Does it really look like an apple?” and they’ll chuckle a bit with each other. 

“At least the old man still recognizes him,” Higgins mumbles as he mashes up potatoes, grills chicken, and boils corn. The conversation from the front room floats in and retreats, from clarity to muffled murmuring. Dodd talking about New York, his job, his office, the pace of the city. “I feel more alive there than anywhere else on Earth.”

The water in the pot bubbles up. Higgins stares out the small kitchen window, the black of it reflecting his face, or a steamed version of his face. He and his father have kept a modest garden that produces little, just some radishes, carrots, and snap peas. They keep the garden at the insistence of his father’s need to believe he still runs this land, and that this land still provides. But the animals have long been gone. The fences are all leaning, and the barn, sheds, and stables are threatening collapse; the wood of them all the color of cold ashes. Higgins wonders if Dodd will say anything about it. How the place looks barren and abandoned. But with their father getting up in the night to put the ghosts of loose cows back behind fences, Higgins sees the decay as a necessary reminder. There are no horses, cows, or goats roaming loose in the night anymore.

“Dodd,” their father says loudly. Higgins can hear the slap of a knee, “Why aren’t you married yet?”

Dodd chuckles. “I’ve been so busy. Everything just moves so quickly now. Soon. I’ll meet a nice girl soon. A good Christian woman.”

Higgins pauses to listen if his father responds to this. Instead, his father inquires about Fick, their brother. Higgins resumes cooking as Dodd tells him how well Fick and his business are doing. He goes on about Fick’s lovely wife, Loretta, and his two boys, Daryl and Tom.

Fick’s boys have met their grandfather twice. Higgins thinks about his father staring at two school photographs, on some days, for most of the afternoon. He’ll set the photographs on his knee, lean back in his chair, and look as if he’s disappeared.    

“Supper’s on!” Higgins calls as he sets the food on the table for them.

They walk in quickly, their faces glowing. Their father begins stuffing his face with chicken and corn faster than Dodd can put his hands together for prayer.

“Don’t we want to say a prayer?” Dodd asks.

“What for?” Their father responds.

“To thank Him.”

“Thank Him?” Their father points his fork at Dodd. “Did he kill this chicken? Did he shuck this corn? We ought to say a prayer and thank Higgins.”

Dodd searches his father’s eyes for humor. He isn’t joking. The darkness of his eyes makes that clear. Higgins stiffens; he wants to urge Dodd to silence, but his brother doesn’t glance over.

As young boys, they would sit restlessly in the front pew facing their father, as he would talk to the congregation about the nailing down of Christ. His voice would quiver as he posed the question, ‘Did Christ put his weight on his arms or his feet to hold him up? Did he alternate between the two?’ The statue of the ten-foot crucified Christ behind his head would tremble with pain. Blood from the puncture wounds streamed down the wood.

Just like the congregation, his sons fell under the spell of his smooth voice as it passed, like a warm wind, through each of them. His whispers were inside their heads. His questions made them ache.

In the evening, after their father has gone to bed, Higgins and Dodd sit in the front room. Dodd watches Higgins build a small fire. He chucks a few loose wood scraps in, but his eyes are tight, his mind occupied with a riddle in repetition.

“But you didn’t kill that chicken, Higgins, right? It is store bought. Unless you have chickens again?”

“No, we don’t have chickens.” Higgins leans slowly back in the chair and watches his fire grow. “You have to understand, Dodd, it’s different now. These days he hates any talk of God. He’s bitter.”

“What caused it?” Dodd asks.

“Who knows? One thing, maybe, could be a series of things. Hard to tell. Things appear to move slow here, but you’d be surprised how quickly something will vanish or appear. Then everything changes, and even though you were right there the whole time, it’s hard to see it happening. Out here you just gotta roll with things. These days I can’t tell what to expect from him. His moods get crazy sometimes, like he’s got a thunderstorm always rolling through him. Sometimes it’s that real quiet rain before everything lets loose, and other times, he just erupts.”

“What do you do when he erupts?”

“You roll with it, Dodd.”

Dodd stares into the fire. “Remember, Higgins, when Dad used to tell us that if life got too hard for us, we could pray, that God would share our burden? ‘Let the Lord hold on to your troubles tonight,’ he’d say.”

“Dodd, he won’t even let Mr. Johnson at the corner store help him out with the groceries.”

Dodd is quiet again. Higgins realizes Dodd is churning this through his brain, searching for the way out.

“I wish Mom were here.” Dodd says softly. Higgins feels a sting, wishing for their mother is like wishing for a hole in the bottom of your lifeboat. Dodd could always run back to the big city and lose himself in the hustle and bustle. Fick can do as he always does: stay gone. It would be Higgins in that sinking boat.

The fire snaps and pops. The flickering dance of the flames throws a warm orange over their faces. Everything behind them vanishes into darkness. Higgins remembers nights so quiet that they couldn’t hear crickets singing. All the boys could hear were the stifled sobs coming from their mother’s room. Her cries became bedtime music, a faithful lullaby. Higgins didn’t understand his mother, her life of ease that filled up quickly with so much pain. Her inability to see any of them, to love, to hold, to smile.

At her funeral their father softly cried to a handful of the people that turned out. Their father tried to reason, to explain his wife’s malaise, her emotional home of darkness. ‘And even with her desire to be free from life, inside of her was a seed, a light, this spiritual protection that we all have buried inside of us. Because, you know, when that cancer came for her, we all thought she would surely welcome it. But she didn’t do this. No, she began to fight, and to the end she fought. The Lord had to pry her fingers from her life in order to take her with Him.’ He stopped and looked at his sons with an expression both far away and close enough they felt as though he were falling into them, ‘Now is my soul troubled.’ From heart, he was quoting the Bible, ‘And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.’

She had fought like mad, from her hospital bed, to hold on to a life that was burdened with malaise. Later he had said, ‘You hold on with all your might, then one day, without even realizing it, your hands open themselves and everything just falls where it may.’

Higgins is brought back by Dodd’s rustling. He leans back in his chair, throws his arms out, and yawns. “Well, I better be heading off to bed.”

“Alright then,” Higgins says. He sits a moment longer before putting the fire out.

As the wind tears at the house, Higgins knows the shaking structure, the groaning wood, the endless howling, makes Dodd uneasy. The city, with its gunshots, sirens, and screaming in the night, doesn’t bother him. It’s the quiet threats that scare him, making him feel that if he closes his eyes, whatever it is that is lurking behind it all will snatch him up.

In the morning, Higgins walks silently through the house. He loves mornings. He loves the absence of everything but himself. A chance to lose himself in daydreams, a life he may have once had. Dodd appears in the doorway, startling Higgins.

“How’d you sleep?” Higgins asks and listens as Dodd complains about the wind, the creaking old house, frightening noises that he has grown up with.

“Pancakes or eggs for breakfast?” Higgins offers.

“Coffee,” Dodd says.

Higgins starts the coffee and fries up two eggs, the only thing their father will eat in the morning.

Higgins hears their father begin screaming in the next room, then kick over a chair. They rush to his room. His face is red. He turns and looks at his boys.

“Someone has stolen my wallet!” He screams.

“What?” Dodd says, shocked. Higgins grabs Dodd’s arm and urges him to go to the front room.

“Father, go help Dodd look in the front room. He thinks he may have seen it there.” Dodd walks off, confused, and they search the front room. 

Higgins steps into the front room.

“Any luck?”

“Luck? It’s not here Higgins, because it’s been stolen!”

“Go look in your room some more, and I’ll help Dodd look out here.”

Their father marches off, swearing under his breath.

“What’s going on?” Dodd asks as he searches under the cushions for the wallet.

“Stop looking. He always does this. He’s convinced someone will steal his wallet, so he hides it. Then, of course, he can’t remember where he hid it, so he thinks it’s been stolen. Happens all the time. If you find it for him, then he’s suspicious all day. But if you go in and find where he has hidden it, then re-hide it in a much easier place to find, then he gets to find it and he’s happy.”

“I found it!” Their father shouts from the bedroom.

“Another thing Dodd, don’t talk about it at all, alright? Let it go, or he’ll get mad again.”

“Who would steal his wallet?”

“No one.”

“Can’t you tell him he’s hiding and losing the wallet himself?”

“Yes, I could do that, and then we can fight for the rest of the day about how I’m lying and trying to make him think he’s crazy. So, coffee for breakfast, you said?” Dodd nods in agreement and walks into the kitchen.

“Dodd!” their father says excited, “How is the Big Apple?” Then he leans in and says quietly, “Does it really look like an apple?”

Dodd chuckles uncomfortably. Higgins gives him a cross look. Come on, Dodd, roll with it.

With a mouthful of egg, their father points to Dodd and says, “Aren’t you going to thank the Lord for your coffee?” Then he laughs, and an egg falls from his mouth, and Dodd rolls with it as best as he can.

After breakfast Higgins and Dodd sit on the porch together. Their father is in his room hiding his wallet so that the thieves cannot find it.

The dust shakes the windows of the porch. It whirls up in cone shapes. It’s dying to wrap itself violently around something, anything.

“He seems worse.” Dodd says.

“He is. He will always be getting worse, Dodd, until he no longer recognizes you or me, and we won’t know who he is anymore, either.”

“Do you ever wonder if it’ll happen to you?” Dodd asks. Higgins doesn’t answer him.

“What sort of things do you guys do all day long? The same thing every day?” Dodd asks.

“Oh, you know, we play the game, Memory. The night before you came, we watched An Affair to Remember, you know, fun stuff.” Higgins smiles, and Dodd relaxes.

“It’s not so bad, Dodd. There are a lot of things he can still do. A lot of days he’s a real pleasure.”

“What about the other days?” Dodd asks.

“What about them?” Higgins shrugs. Dodd turns his attention back to the storm.

“What would you be doing if you didn’t have to… if you weren’t caring for him?”

“I’d be a carpenter.” Higgins tells him.

“Well, at least it’s not something like a doctor or lawyer. I’d feel bad for you, having to sacrifice that,” Dodd tells him. Higgins stirs a little at his brother’s comment. He remembers his hands, the cracked knuckles. He thinks of the first chair he made. The idea of opening his own store that would smell of wood, maybe having a wife who might also smell of wood.

“Fick never makes it out this way, does he?” Dodd says.

“No. He says he hasn’t the time or money. Maybe it’s true.”

“What a feisty one that guy was, remember?”

Higgins smiles. He can see Fick’s wild grin, his vicious mind urging the other two boys to join in some prank. His willingness to take all the blame when caught. To Fick it was credit.

“Do you talk to him often?” Higgins asks.

“Once a week or so, sometimes every two weeks, you know.”

Higgins hasn’t talked to Fick in over a year. He thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to be asked to visit, to feel obligated, so he hides, and Higgins lets him.

“Can you stay an extra day?” Higgins asks Dodd. There is a longing in his voice. It triggers something in Dodd that he quickly pushes away.

“I wish I could, but I have to be on the West Coast tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss.”

“You’ve done so well for yourself, Dodd,” Higgins tells him. Dodd smiles but doesn’t say anything.

They sit together quietly for hours as the porch trembles and shakes and threatens to cave in.

In the evening, when Higgins announces dinner, their father takes his teeth out and tries to walk out the back door. Higgins runs after him.

“Father, I’ve made dinner for us, so you’ll want to put your teeth in now and join us at the table.” Their father smiles and pats his arm, then laughs at himself. Dodd stands and watches as Higgins, laughing along, leads the way to the table.

“So, Doddy, what did you get done today?” Dodd’s eyes widen. Their father hasn’t called him Doddy for fifteen years.

“Well, I talked with Higgins a bit, got caught up, watched the storm some. That’s quite a storm out there.”

“Good, that’s good.” Their father says, squeezing Dodd’s shoulder.

Higgins wants to point out to Dodd that at least they’re not having that stupid Big Apple conversation, but Higgins can see the fear in his brother’s eyes and doesn’t want his father to see it.

“Hey Dodd, are you still on a softball team?” Dodd turns to Higgins.

“What?”

“Remember when you were on a softball team with your colleagues? Do you still play?”

“Oh,” Dodd says, registering Higgins’ comments, “I don’t even have time for that, but I sure do miss it.”

“You’re quite the pitcher, Dodd.” Their father says, smiling fondly at him.

“I loved it, but it’s hard keeping up with all the work I have these days.”

“Yes.” Their father adds and stares blankly at Dodd, then smiles. When the smile fades, Higgins can see the faint confusion in his father’s eyes. His father has learned how to smile and nod in place of understanding.  

“I’ve sure loved my visit.” Dodd says, to kill the creeping silence.

“You should come around more often.” Their father says and grips Dodd’s shoulder again. “I remember the three of you little boys running wild through my house….” He begins and drifts away, back to the time when he had screaming, giggling boys, killing snakes, building forts. Three small bodies diving off the cliffs of Blind Dog Bluff and sailing like birds in the sky until the waters swallowed them whole.

After dinner, Dodd and their father sit by the fire while Higgins cleans up. He washes the dishes slowly to enjoy the solitude and allow Dodd to take the old man on for an hour.

When he joins them, their father is nodding off, fighting sleep like a small boy with the fear of missing out.

“Come on Dad, I’ll help you off to bed.” Higgins gets him up out of the chair and walks him to his room.

“I will see you in the morning.” He tells Dodd as he closes his door.

“Goodnight, Father.”

Higgins helps his father into his pajamas. He is startled by the frailty. This frailty he sees nightly and now can feel what Dodd must be seeing. It’s been a slow-motion crumbling for Higgins, but for Dodd it probably is the sudden shattering of a man. He looks into his father’s eyes, the smiling eyes of a small boy. Higgins feels the fear of when his father called him one afternoon, shaky, saying he didn’t know where he was or how he got there, just that he left that afternoon to pick up a new hammer and now he was lost.

Higgins pulls the blanket up and tucks it under his father’s chin.

“Goodnight, Father.”

“Goodnight, Dodd.”

Higgins returns to find Dodd asleep by the fire. He sits in the chair next to Dodd, stretches his feet close to the flames and lets the warmth of the fire and his brother’s presence consume him. Closing his eyes, he thinks of the time his father cleared the trees and brush from the east pond, and all the neighboring men stacked and burned it all up as the women sat on the ends of truck beds talking and laughing. Higgins smiles, thinking of it. That fire must have been three stories high. They had let it go wild. Higgins had run back to the house for extra beverages and snacks for everyone. He could see those flames stretching into the sky clear from the house, like a monster clawing upwards.

Those were the days of parties. The boys would help prepare the feasts. Fick and their father would be to the side of the house killing chickens. He remembers watching through the kitchen window, their father bringing a dull hatchet down quickly, and tossing the chicken to the side to let it spin like a mad carousel that broke loose. Sometimes they’d spin straight up into the air.

Dodd and Higgins were inside mashing up potatoes, boiling corn, and getting ready to cook the birds. Dodd baked pies like a culinary artist. Their mother was always upstairs, unable to drag herself out from under the covers and walk down the stairs into the world.

Higgins looks over at Dodd, and his memory vanishes as he studies the sleeping face of a grown man, and for a moment, he doesn’t recognize his brother.

Higgins rises and wakes Dodd. He leads him, like he had their father, off to bed. He knows Dodd is too tired for the storm to keep him awake. Higgins lies in bed and tries to hear crickets or lullabies, but there is only wind.    

In the morning, Higgins fries two eggs and makes the coffee strong for Dodd’s day of travel. Dodd calls a cab that will meet him at the end of the road in half an hour.

“Half an hour? That soon?” Higgins says, surprised.

“I’m later than I thought. I’d love to stay longer, but I just can’t, you know.”

“Yeah, the West Coast beckons.” Higgins says, smiling to ease any of Dodd’s guilt.

Their father sits at the table and laughs and jokes, but Dodd is worried about the time. He drinks his coffee too fast, burns himself a couple of times, glances frequently at his watch, then stands.

“It’s been great visiting.” He tells them.

Their father stands and embraces Dodd.

“I love you, son,” he says.

“I love you too, Father.” 

“Don’t be a stranger,” their father says. He gives him a couple of pats on the shoulder, then he heads off to his room as Higgins walks Dodd out to the porch.

“It was great seeing you, Higgins,” Dodd says.

“It was good to see you too.”

Dodd smiles and ties the bandana tightly around his face and grabs his bag. He waves and steps out the door. Higgins relaxes into the rocking chair and watches Dodd walk away. Dodd moves a little more hurriedly than normal. He doesn’t pick anything up along the way. He doesn’t admire anything to the sides of him.

“Damn it all to hell! My wallet’s gone!” he can hear his father scream.

Higgins turns and yells, “Look for it in the front room!” He turns back and he can’t see Dodd anymore. He’s disappeared. All he sees is spinning dust.

Parting Gifts

Mack Ibrahim

I got the call on the side of the road. I had just finished an eight-week assignment in Norfolk and was heading east to the next one. The trill of the ringer woke me up at a rest stop outside of Cleveland.

The artificial tone, deafening in the dead silence, floated up from the floor of my car’s backseat. It must’ve fallen off the console. I instinctively threw my arm out, groping around with a gloved hand for the tiny block of metal as I jolted awake. When I finally picked up, I felt it in the air, the stagnant pause Ma gave when I didn’t announce myself.

“Nina,” she breathed, and that was that. She said it the same way as when her mother, my lola, died. My eyes traced the stitching of the headliner until it sank in, caught on the thin leather hems of my gloves. Then I climbed into the front seat and, for the first time in nearly a year, headed home.

I should’ve called Ma back, given her the chance to talk about it, or at least given myself that chance. Instead, I called my travel nursing agency and left a voicemail asking them to cancel my next contract. I wasn’t sure what to call the death of an ex-girlfriend, so I left it as a family emergency.

Deep down, I always knew Vera was going to die. That time-bomb. I could see it in the way she threw up after a night out, how she wagged her fingers at me goodbye, as if she wasn’t convinced tomorrow would ever come. Ma would later tell me that she crashed her Beetle into a semi. No note, no warning signs. I wondered if anyone looked at the wreckage, pulled her body from it, and figured out what she was thinking. If they could tell if she had changed at all in the last seven years, transformed in any direction from that passionate, impatient girl I once knew.

I liked to think that we had both changed for the better, but I worried that we had just grown into older versions of what we always were. I’m sure I did, I thought bitterly and gripped the steering wheel.

A few weeks ago, one of the only other nurses I got along with made fun of me for not having had a serious relationship since college. I had tried, of course, with no success. Dating felt like a chore, like raking leaves in the fall. Something you did just to say that you did.

But Vera didn’t feel like a chore. Sure, on weekends, she had to be managed, and she could be hard to keep up with. Was I the chore, then? Someone to placate and pretend they weren’t holding you back?

I tried to nurse my bruised ego as I merged onto 209. The dawning sun started to pour over the landscape, and I felt tears well up—grief, or perhaps frustration, made me finally peel off one of my gloves. The air was disturbingly stale and humid, spilling out of the AC vents as I squeezed my hands into fists and slowly uncurled each digit. I blinked hard and ran the pads of my fingers across the steering wheel, dragging them over the seams and the ventilation holes. Naáalala mo ba? Lola’s voice reverberated in my head, and I let the familiar memory—souvenir, she corrected—wash over me.

“Ready, Nini?” Ma asked from the ground. She was still young. Her eyes shone with the newly found freedom of a woman who had just run away, despite it being nearly four years since she fled Connecticut.

She was lying face-up on a skateboard, positioned to roll under the hood of her prized deep blue T1, one of the few to make it to the States. I stood off to the side with Lola, my shoulder-length hair looped in twin bundles right below my ears, matching my mother’s. Earlier, she had shown me how to check the oil, and now she was narrating how to do an oil change. A second, smaller skateboard lay uselessly next to her, where Lola had prevented me from joining Ma under the car.

The screeching horn of a truck called me back. Before I could touch anything else, God forbid my clothes, I stuffed my hand back into its glove and pushed the glove’s souvenir from the forefront of my mind.

I once tried to explain the souvenirs to Vera, just before we started dating. My grandmother, mother, and I could see something’s history just by touching it. Not all of it, not all at once, but a snapshot, a single scene that changed every time.

Vera had this faraway look on her face when I told her. She wasn’t curious or skeptical like I expected, just nodded slightly and turned away from me to continue her homework. Ma always told me not to get my hopes up, but I had a bad track record of listening to her. I wanted to succeed where she had failed. I wanted to want to love. But would that have made a difference?

I pondered as I filled up my tank outside DuBois. Only four hours left. In four hours, I could rationalize Vera’s death, our past, what could’ve been our future. If I actually figured out how to love her, I would’ve stayed. I wouldn’t have skipped town the first chance I got for nothing. Maybe I could’ve saved her. I pulled the nozzle out and watched a few drops of gasoline glide down the side of the car. They each took their own path, following the curve of the metal towards the ground. Just before they dripped off, they pooled at the very edge and crashed together as one giant drop onto the blacktop.

I climbed back into the car, and as I merged onto the highway, the answer to my question simmered. Even if I had stayed, I couldn’t have stopped her. I wouldn’t have. Her past and present pointed to her future, her life to her death, and I would’ve let it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the toy plush I kept on my passenger seat and felt Ma’s disappointment. I grabbed him and put him on my lap, an unwelcome reminder.

For my sixth birthday, Ma made me Bean the Carabao and gave him to me with a warning: Don’t like it for my sake. Like it because you like it. I didn’t understand what she meant until he was in my hands.

“Naáalala mo ba? Do you remember?” Lola asked excitedly, and I got my first souvenir. In my mind, I watched my mother carefully pick out fabric from the store and spend hours sketching and sewing Bean together. She made him in secret, only working when I was asleep or out of the house. Straining her eyes in the candlelight, she pricked herself over and over with the needle. She stuffed the toy and smoothed out the ragged edges where the seams met. She didn’t bother to wrap it, only kept it in a kitchen cabinet I was too short to reach. I loved him; I loved it all.

“But why?” Ma stressed. “Is he cute? Soft? Squishy?” He was, but that didn’t matter. He existed because Ma loved me. He was Ma. Her face fell when I told her.

“Ba!” Lola brushed her off. “It’s just a gift. Nini can like what she likes.” Ma looked like she wanted to say something, but she blinked and swiped her palm—ungloved—over the couch cushion instead. The art of knowing when to concede.

I arrived back in Kunuhakink in the late morning. Contrary to its name, it doesn’t snow here much, at least not anymore. The roads were long and bendy, like a half-conscious scribble on paper. I found them difficult to navigate, which Lola used to take great pleasure in making fun of me for. I could hear her raucous laughter with every turn I took too fast.

A few miles from the house, I passed the closest thing we had to a downtown: a plaza with a grocery store and an everything-else store. When I was a kid, the lights of the everything-else store flickered constantly. I slowed down, opened my window, and studied the storefront. If I squinted hard enough, I could still see it. Satisfied, I swerved into the left lane and stuck my hand out, slapped the plaza’s old sign, and left an imprint in the salt buildup.

Up the street was my mother’s mechanic and hardware store. It was probably the only spot in town that was cleaned regularly. During the summer, Ma used to sweep, sometimes even vacuum, the small parking lot. “Appearance matters,” she would say while struggling to find an outlet that wasn’t blown.

At home, I parked on the grass of our front yard. There wasn’t enough space in the driveway for Ma’s two cars and mine. Before walking in, I looked over the small shotgun house, at its peeling paint and slight steeple. Nothing’s changed, I reminded myself and opened the door.

Ma sat on the living room floor with her sewing machine on the edge of the coffee table. White fabric flowed off the table and onto the floor all around her, like spilled milk. Without looking up, she asked, “Did you gain any weight?”

I sighed and kicked off my shoes. “What happened to ‘hello’ or ‘I missed you’?”

She ignored me. “How much weight did you gain?” Her gloved hands fed the machine steadily. Her rehearsed composure would’ve fooled anyone but me. Making mourning clothes was never easy for her. I sat down beside her and nudged her to move.

“None, Ma. I’ll take it from here.” I finished the skirt she had started on, folding pleats on the garment. I tossed it behind me onto the couch where it joined Ma’s and worked on the subtle embroidery for both our camisoles and white shawls.

Meanwhile, Ma set up the rest of the house. She dug out the funeral votives from the shed and plucked white lilies from the garden. In the living room, she slowly picked up the scraps of fabric I had left, her back creaking on the ascent.

When I finished sewing, I grabbed a wet rag from the kitchen and went to the backyard.

“He’s already been fed,” Ma called out, “so don’t give him anymore.” She sniffed as she arranged the candles in a circle on the ground, interspersed with the flowers. “And get Lola’s box too.”

I faltered at the doorway. I forgot that we would be adding Lola to the ceremony, and Ma was not asking. We hadn’t talked about it, but there was no room for negotiation since I refused to participate when Lola died.

Outside, Pig the pig waddled happily towards me, lifting my mood. Years ago, Ma and Lola bought him to make lechon. They spent weeks digging the roasting pit, but I loved Pig from the moment I saw him. That little brown baby, rooting around for food and attention. I refused to let them cook him. They refused to let me name him.

“Oh, Pig. Are you all fat now?” I rubbed Pig’s ears and watched his tail windmill around. He followed me to Lola’s grave, a massive pear tree at the edge of the yard where her ashes were scattered. Ma had made a headstone out of sheet metal and nailed it to the trunk: CORAZÓN CABANGON ALLOS 1923-1994.

I wiped the rag across the headstone. Pollen collected in the grooves of the engraved letters, lighting them up in a dusty yellow. Pig dug his nose into the soft ground and wandered with me to the shed where I found Lola’s box. Back in the house, the box joined Vera’s momentos where Ma had lined them up in the center of the circle. My mother and I sat on either side of the line for the ceremony.

We took off our gloves and started with Vera’s things, Ma and I at opposite ends. I picked up a faded blue hairbrush and shut my eyes.

“Here,” Vera said, tossing the brush onto my bunk bed. She returned to towel-drying her hair. I blinked at her in the mirror, and she rolled her eyes playfully. “Every time you stay over, you forget to bring a hairbrush. Relax, it’s from the dollar store. You can keep it here.” She tapped the top drawer of her dresser twice.

I flipped the brush over in my hand. On the back was an ugly printed flower, its petals stretching unnaturally in all directions. The handle felt small and awkward in my grip. She had gotten me a kid’s brush. I smiled softly and took my hair out of its ponytail.

I put the brush back down. The souvenir was from before we started dating. I touched the ends of my hair. Wavy, grown in, just past my shoulders. I tried not to get too attached, but Vera used to put little braids in it that even Lola liked. When the ceremony ended, Ma and I would shear our heads, so for the last time, I made a small plait behind my left ear. I tugged on it, readjusting, then looked over to Ma. When Lola led the ceremony, she had us all share something about the souvenirs. Ma hated it and vowed to do away with the practice. True to her word, she sat silently now, contemplating the item in her hands. I picked up the cassette.

We were driving on the interstate to Cape May for spring break. Vera was asleep in the passenger seat, her arms hugging Bean and her head tilting toward me. She slept completely still, unnervingly so. Every few minutes, I looked over and watched for the rise and fall of her chest, just so I’d know she was still breathing.

I eyed Vera’s mixtape sitting in the cupholder between our seats. After a moment, I popped the cassette into the car’s player and turned the volume nearly all the way down. It took a few seconds for the synth to fade in, but I soon heard a drum fill and Stevie Nicks coming through the speakers. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel to the beat.

I traced the faded “CAPE COD” written in marker on the front of the tape. It was our first vacation together, and Vera made it to commemorate the milestone. She wanted to wait until we arrived at the beach to play it, but I thought a preview wouldn’t hurt. She found me out later when I forgot to rewind the tape, and her Walkman picked up from the middle of “Little Lies.” We fought over it, and that sudden cloud of hostility didn’t leave us until we returned to campus.

I shook my head, conflicted. Why this souvenir? Why not any other time I listened to it? I suppose, though, the souvenir itself wouldn’t have mattered, as the history it dredged up would always make my insides twist. I flipped the cassette around before putting it down and picking up the next item: the figurine.

Vera dug around in her backpack for a minute.

“Just give me a second. I almost… Okay, got it!” She held up a tiny felt figurine. It was vaguely baby-shaped. Either a dress or swaddling concealed its legs, and its arms were crossed in front of its chest.

“My dad told me to give it to you. I think it’s supposed to help you sleep? You put it under your pillow, and it takes away all the nightmares and restlessness.”

I thanked her and pocketed the doll. She threw her arms around me and reminded me to call her father to thank him, too.

The doll was so frayed now. I wasn’t sure why, seeing as I hadn’t used it in years. At the time, I was having trouble staying asleep, and the thought that Vera’s parents hated me didn’t help. They had a bad first impression of me when I mixed up my lab times and accidentally blew them off for dinner. The gift was a pleasant surprise, and for a while, it had actually worked. But maybe I put too many nightmares in it. All I know is that a week after Vera and I broke up, I was waking up every hour, and I shoved the doll in a desk drawer until graduation.

I shifted uncomfortably. I had gotten many beginnings this time and wasn’t sure if that boded well for Lola’s things. I looked at Ma, who had just finished with the hairbrush. Her eyes softened, a silent encouragement to continue, and flickered to the scissors on the floor. I swallowed thickly and picked them up.

Ma trembled as she tore through her belongings. Papers, clothes, diagrams, and finally the scissors. She nearly dropped them as she stumbled into the bathroom. Her once flawless makeup ran, thick streaks of mascara dried on her cheeks and down her jaw. Her breath was ragged from crying so hard. She stared hard at her reflection to collect herself and smoothed her long hair with her fingers. Then, she held the scissors firm and hacked away, getting as close to a shave as she could without using clippers. She dropped the scissors into the sink, wiped the blood off her inner thighs with toilet paper, and flushed the mess down the toilet. Crouching down, she shoved her arm into the cabinet under the sink and felt around, retracting a clenched fist. She buried the stashed pregnancy test–positive–in the trash bin. Outside the bathroom, my father slammed the bedroom door open.

I came back with a gasp and whipped my head towards Ma. She glared at the floor and took hold of my wrist. If there were new memories, she didn’t show it. She took the scissors from my hands, moving on for me. I wanted to call out to her, to call out the blood and the silent funeral and solo ceremony she never told me about, but instead I studied Lola’s box. I had only touched the box once as a child, and for a long time afterwards, it had been off-limits. Even when I grew up, Ma said she wasn’t sure if I could handle it. I couldn’t handle it when Lola died, so how could I now?

Peering inside the box, I shook off my fear. The ceremony wasn’t about me; I owed it to my family to try. Lola’s old shotgun beamed up at me. I knew the story behind it—of course I did—but who wants to look death in the face? I caressed the trigger with my finger.

My grandfather screamed at my grandmother from inside the bahay kubo. Lola was in the backyard, attempting to tend to the garden while watching my mother, who was still a toddler. Lolo was just inside the house, beyond the open door. He sounded drunk. Lola yelled over her shoulder, and Lolo came stumbling to the door. Lola must have repeated what she said because Lolo turned bright red in the face, redder than he already was, and launched his slipper at her. He missed and hit his daughter instead. Lola stormed up the stairs of the porch with his slipper, plus her slipper for good measure. She disappeared into the house, and for a moment, there was silence. Then a gunshot. Something shattered. Lola scrambled through the door, but Lolo, gun in one hand, grabbed her arm and dragged her to the ground. My mother, watching, began to cry. In the struggle for the gun, Lola kicked Lolo’s elbow, breaking it. He dropped the gun, shrieking in pain, and as he reached for his wife again, she snatched up the shotgun and aimed.

Ma held my wrist again. She searched my eyes. “Naáalala mo ba?” she asked. It’s more of a habit than anything. It once brought me so much joy, the chance to take part in this with her, with Lola. Yet I’d forgotten every time what the loss feels like. “Anak—”

I snatched the stupid hairbrush off the ground, and the figurine, and the cassette. I wanted to remember the good, not just the bad, or the good with the bad. Not just the facts. I placed my palms on the wood floors, twisted around to feel our mourning clothes, grasped at the couch cushions, sprang up for the counters and the plants and the pig. Ma caught me as I fled outside, tripped, and nearly landed in the dirt. I cried in her arms.

“All we do—” pictures of Vera flashed across my mind, “—all we do is see the end.” The smoking gun, Vera’s crushed body, Ma’s baby. The fabric of my mother’s shirt wrinkled under my clenched fists. Hot tears slowly turned the soul into mud, and Ma held me. Five or ten minutes could have easily been an eternity.

When I finally looked up, I saw that she had cried with me. I wiped my sleeve across my face, and Ma delicately dabbed the corners of her eyes with her finger. We sat back in the grass and took turns petting Pig when he came to sit between us.

“She called me, you know,” I started, my voice hoarse, “like, a month ago. I was working at the hospital, in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska, and she called. She was worried about you.”

“Hmm? Why?”

“You closed the shop for a day.”

“Ah, when I took Pig to the vet. He’s getting too fat. I don’t know what I’m feeding him.” Ma gently smacked Pig’s belly, and he pretended to run off in fear. We laughed wetly when he trotted back immediately.

“She asked me when I was coming back. If I was coming back.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I don’t know. I think I lied and said I was busy. I meant to call her back, really. I just,” I paused and plucked grass out of the ground, “I didn’t think that would be how I said goodbye.”

Ma rubbed Pig’s ears. “You know what the last thing I said to Lola was? ‘I’m going to get fish from the market.’ I wanted to get her cod one last time.”

“Does it ever stop?” I asked suddenly. It was such a stupid question, but I needed to know her answer. I needed to hear it from her. “Does it stop hurting this much? Shouldn’t we be used to it by now?”

Ma shook her head slowly, a sad smile finding its way to her face, “It hurts every time, ka. That’s the point.”

I reached across Pig and touched Ma’s hand.

I was five when Ma told me that my favorite wild deer had died. I cried and ran into the backyard searching for it, but she and Lola hid the carcass. Ma came to me in the yard and rubbed my back as I lay face down on the ground.

“It’s such a gift to be sad,” she said. “You got a chance to love.”

Fair Market Value

Hailey Winningham

The hammer slipped in Jonah’s palm for the third time that morning.

The sun had already climbed high enough to press its full weight onto the tin roof, and the metal answered with a slow ticking sound, expanding, complaining in its own language. Jonah wiped his hand on the back pocket of his jeans and set the nail again, squinting against the glare. The board he was replacing had rotted clean through along the edge, soft as bread left out too long. His grandfather had built the place by hand using the wood of surrounding trees, but it was now dilapidated.

He drove the nail in harder than was necessary.

The house had been in need of repair for as long as he could remember. There was always something: roof shingles falling off, porch steps sagging in the middle, gutters pulling loose from their brackets. He sometimes thought that if he ever fixed everything at once, the place might not recognize itself and simply fold in from the shock.

He shifted his weight on the ladder and glanced out toward the river. It moved slow and brown beyond the oaks, steady as a tune that had been in his head so long he stopped noticing it.

He used to think he’d be gone by now.

When he was seventeen, he’d taped college brochures to the wall beside his bed. Schools with red-brick buildings and wide lawns and libraries bigger than the entire footprint of this house. He’d traced the pictures with his finger, imagining himself crossing those lawns with a backpack slung over one shoulder, late for something important.

He had been good in school. Better than good. His teachers told him so when the report cards came out. His mother, who taught third grade down at the elementary school, never bragged about him outright, but she left graded essays of his on the kitchen table where visitors might notice.

“Don’t get too big for this place,” she’d say whenever he talked about leaving. But there was pride tucked beneath the warning.

His father had just smiled and said, “Go where your feet take you, long as you remember how to come back.”

That was before the coughing started.

Jonah climbed down the ladder and dragged it a few feet to the left. The grass in the yard had gone patchy where the shade fell thickest. He set the ladder again and climbed, the old wood creaking beneath his boots.

The doctors called it chronic. Chronic meant expensive. Chronic meant months measured in prescriptions and follow-up appointments. Chronic meant Jonah stopped filling out housing forms his senior year and started picking up shifts at the hardware store instead.

He hadn’t minded at first. It felt temporary. Everything did at eighteen.

He could defer for a year. Save some money. Help out until his father got stronger.

But chronic had a way of sticking around.

His father’s hands, once thick and steady, had thinned. The muscles in his arms softened like they’d forgotten their job. There were mornings when even walking from the bedroom to the porch left him winded, chest rising and falling too fast.

Jonah drove another nail through the board and let the hammer rest against his thigh.

Inside, he could hear the faint murmur of the television. His father liked to keep it on low during the day, not so much for watching as for company. The house sounded different when it was silent. Too aware of itself.

His mother would be at school until four. She left each morning before seven, coffee in a travel mug, papers stacked in her canvas bag. She’d taught three generations of children in this county. Sometimes former students waved at her in the grocery store and called her by name with the same mixture of fear and fondness they’d had at nine.

She had once told him she thought teaching was a kind of stubborn hope. You poured knowledge into small, distracted bodies and trusted some of it would stick.

Jonah wondered what she thought had stuck to him.

He pried up another warped shingle and tossed it down into the yard. The air smelled of sap and sun-warmed dust. Sweat crawled down the center of his back.

Two weeks earlier, the acceptance letter had arrived.

He’d known what it was the moment he saw the return address. The university crest printed in dark blue ink. His full name spelled correctly.

He’d carried it inside like something fragile.

Full scholarship. Tuition covered. Housing arranged. A semester abroad in Europe—lectures in old stone buildings older than this entire county, professors whose names sounded like they belonged in books, weekends spent in different countries instead of chores.

The letter said he needed only to cover airfare and food. It used phrases like immersive experience and global perspective. It congratulated him for his academic promise, as if promise were something that could be folded and mailed.

He had read it three times that night.

He had stood at the kitchen sink and imagined a version of himself walking beneath cathedral ceilings, listening to languages he didn’t understand yet echoing through the halls. He pictured himself seated in a centuries-old lecture hall beneath vaulted ceilings ribbed with dark wood, light spilling through stained glass and pooling across long wooden tables scarred by generations of other hands. He would take notes beside students who spoke three or four languages without thinking about it, nodding along as professors quoted philosophers he had only read about in library books back home. He imagined getting lost on purpose—turning down narrow alleys lined with laundry-strung balconies, eating bread still warm from a bakery window, standing in museums before oil paintings so large they swallowed him whole. At night he would sit in small cafés with a notebook open, listening to conversations he half-understood, practicing foreign phrases under his breath until they felt less like borrowed sounds and more like something he owned. In those dreams he was careful but not small, quiet but not invisible—just another young man with a future wide enough to step into. Imagined writing letters home from a place where no one knew who he had been at seventeen, or eighteen, or twenty-two.

Twenty-two.

He drove the hammer down again, each strike sharp and clean. He had told no one about the letter. Not his mother, who already carried enough worry in the lines around her mouth. Not his father, whose pride might twist into something like guilt. Certainly not the boys at the hardware store, who still asked him if he planned to “ever get outta town.”

He had always said, someday.

Someday was a word that bought time.

He finished with the shingles and climbed down, hauling the ladder back toward the porch. The steps sagged in the middle, and he made a mental note to reinforce them before winter. There was always something else.

He crouched to examine a soft patch along the bottom rail and pressed his thumb into it. The wood gave easily.

He imagined not having to fix it. Imagined a life where the only maintenance required of him was showing up to class and reading what was assigned and arguing about ideas instead of roofing nails. Where he would write letters and talk to his parents over phone calls.

He cringed at himself. The thought was betrayal.

From inside, a cough rattled down the hallway.

Jonah stood and wiped his hands on his jeans again. He stepped through the front door and found his father in the recliner by the window, a blanket folded across his lap despite the heat.

“You about done up there?” his father asked, voice thinner than it used to be.

“Just about,” Jonah said.

His father nodded toward the porch. “You don’t have to do it all today.”

Jonah shrugged. “It won’t do itself.”

That had become his answer for most things.

He stepped back outside before the conversation could stretch into something heavier and sat down on the porch.

The river glinted between the trees.

When he was younger, he’d sworn he’d never live his whole life within sight of it. He had thought staying meant failing, like the river itself might rise one day and expose him as someone who had never tried.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

Staying had become its own kind of labor. He fixed what had broken. He carried what needed carrying. He learned the rhythm of inhalers and insurance forms, of lesson plans spread across the kitchen table at night.

He told himself that the scholarship was an escape hatch. A way out that didn’t require slamming a door.

But leaving would still mean leaving.

“Jonah!” His father’s voice carried thin but clear through the open window.

“Yeah?”

“Can you go check the mail?”

Jonah looked toward the rusted mailbox at the edge of the yard, the sun flashing off its dented side.

“Sure,” he called back. He wiped his hands once more and started down the steps.

Jonah was twenty-two and still there. He told himself it was temporary. Everyone did.

The envelope was taped to the mailbox, white and clean against the rusted metal. He stood there longer than he needed to, the metal cold under his hand. Good news didn’t arrive taped to things like warnings.

Inside, the paper was thin and official, the words pressed tight together like they didn’t want to be there. Survey. Easement. Reassessment. Acquisition.

He read it twice before the meaning settled.

Someone had decided that the land was useful now.

The river, it turned out, was valuable—valuable enough to be measured and divided and spoken about in rooms Jonah had never been in. Valuable enough to be called an opportunity.

He drove into town later that evening, the acquisition notice left on the kitchen table for his parents to read. Town was small enough that everyone called it Town without naming it. A post office with a flag that never quite unfurled. A feed store that smelled of grain and oil. A diner that smelled like grease and coffee no matter the hour.

Main Street sagged gently in the middle, brick buildings leaning into one another the way tired men did at the end of a shift. Half the storefronts were empty now, their windows dusted over, old lettering still visible beneath newer paint that had already begun to peel.

He found Whitmore at the diner where he ate dinner every night for the past five years.

Whitmore always sat in the back booth, near the window, where he could see who came in and who left. He wasn’t rich, not exactly, but he had money in the way that mattered: land, investments, a last name that carried weight even when it wasn’t spoken.

Jonah slid into the booth across from him. The vinyl stuck to the back of his jacket.

“I got a letter,” Jonah said.

Whitmore stirred his coffee slowly, the spoon clinking against the mug. He didn’t look surprised.

“Most folks did,” he said. “Or will.”

Jonah pulled the paper from his pocket and flattened it on the table. The edges curled immediately.

“They say the land’s under reassessment,” Jonah said. “That the river access changes things.”

Whitmore nodded. “There’s talk of development, and Town needs as much money as it can get.”

Jonah stared at him. “And where does that leave us?”

Whitmore finally looked up. His eyes were pale and assessing, like he was measuring Jonah against something invisible.

“Depends,” he said. “On what your folks can afford.”

Jonah laughed once, sharp and humorless. “You know what my folks can afford.”

Whitmore didn’t disagree.

Outside, the sky hung low and gray, the kind that pressed down on the town until everything felt smaller. Jonah left without finishing his coffee. The bitterness followed him anyway.

On his way out, he passed a framed photograph near the register—some ribbon-cutting ceremony from years back. Whitmore stood smiling beside the Johnsons.

The Johnsons.

Everyone knew the Johnsons.

They owned the biggest houseboat on the river, docked a few miles downstream where the water widened and slowed. It was three stories tall, white and gleaming, with a rooftop deck and string lights that glowed soft and gold at night. They hosted parties there every summer: catered, loud, spilling laughter across the water like it belonged to them.

Of course, they weren’t worried.

Why would they be?

The Johnsons didn’t live on the river the way Jonah did. They floated above it. The river was a backdrop for them, a feature. If the water rose, they rose with it. If the banks changed, they drifted elsewhere. Development only made things easier: more docks, better access, prettier views.

Jonah imagined the notice taped to their mailbox and almost laughed. As if anyone would dare.

The porch light was already on when he pulled into the yard.

Jonah didn’t remember turning it on that morning.

He stepped inside and found his parents at the kitchen table. The government letter lay open between them, its edges curling from having been folded and unfolded too many times. His mother’s reading glasses rested low on her nose. His father sat with his forearms on the table, shoulders rounded forward as if bracing against weather no one else could feel.

They stopped talking when he entered.

“You went into town,” his mother said.

“Yeah.”

His father nodded toward the paper. “They’re not bluffing.”

Jonah leaned against the doorway. “Whitmore said most folks got one.”

His mother let out a breath that sounded practiced. “They’ve reassessed the property value. With the river access and the development talk…” She tapped the number printed near the bottom of the page. “We can’t afford this.”

The words hung there, flat and final.

“There’s got to be something,” Jonah said. “An appeal. A delay. A payment plan.”

“We asked,” his father replied quietly. “They were polite about it.”

Jonah laughed under his breath. “Polite.”

“That’s how it works now,” his mother said. “They don’t push. They just price you out.”

The kitchen felt smaller than usual. The refrigerator hummed. The clock over the stove ticked loud enough to count.

“So that’s it?” Jonah asked. “We just let it go?”

His father met his eyes. There was no anger there. No fight either. Just a kind of weary clarity.

“Son,” he said, “sometimes you can’t outwork what’s coming.”

Jonah felt something tighten in his chest.

His hand was still holding the folded acceptance letter. He hadn’t realized he’d brought it in from the truck.

His mother noticed first.

“What’s that?” she asked gently.

He looked down at it, as if it might explain itself.

“Nothing.”

She tilted her head. “That doesn’t look like nothing.”

He hesitated, then stepped forward and placed it on the table beside the government notice. The two envelopes looked wrong next to each other — one heavy with loss, the other thin with possibility.

His father reached for it.

“This the school thing?” he asked.

Jonah nodded.

His mother read over his father’s shoulder this time. The silence stretched, but it felt different from before — less like suffocation, more like reckoning.

“A full scholarship,” she said softly.

Jonah stared at the wall behind them. “Tuition and housing. I’d just have to cover flights. Food.”

“To Europe,” his father added, almost testing the word.

Jonah shrugged. “For a semester. After that, I’d come back and just transfer the credits.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then his mother said, “You should go.”

The answer came too fast. “No.”

Both of them looked at him.

“No?” his father repeated.

Jonah gestured toward the other letter. “How am I supposed to leave when this is happening? What if I come back and it’s all gone? What if I miss the last summer here? The last anything?”

His voice surprised him. It sounded younger than he meant it to.

His mother folded her hands on the table. “Everything is always becoming the last something,” she said.

He shook his head. “That’s not the same.” How could he let his family home be destroyed? It may not have been fancy, but it had been his safety net.

He had spent so long wanting to escape because he wanted the opportunity to experience new things before he could forget his dreams. But he still always planned to come back. Leaving now would mean accepting that everything he knew would permanently be changed.

His father leaned back in his chair, studying him.

“You think staying will stop it?” he asked.

Jonah didn’t answer.

“You think if you stand in the yard long enough,” his father continued, “you can hold the river in place?”

The image stung. “I just don’t want to lose it,” Jonah said. “Not while I’m gone. Not without being here.”

His mother reached across the table and rested her hand over both letters. “Listen to me,” she said. “Home isn’t something you guard by standing still.”

He swallowed.

“It changes whether you leave or not,” she went on. “It changes because time changes it. Because people get older. Because the world decides it wants something different than it did yesterday.”

His father nodded slowly. “You can’t anchor your life to a place just because you’re afraid it might drift.”

Jonah felt the truth of it and hated it at the same time.

“If you stay,” his mother said gently, “stay because you want this life. Not because you’re afraid of what it’ll become without you.”

The kitchen clock ticked again.

“And if we lose the house?” Jonah asked.

His father gave a small, tired smile. “Then we lose a house.”

“It’s more than that.”

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not you.”

Silence settled, but it wasn’t suffocating now.

His mother squeezed his hand once before letting go.

“Places don’t wait for us to be ready,” she said. “And neither does the rest of the world.”

Jonah looked at the two letters side by side: one told him the land was no longer secure, the other told him the world was open. For the first time, they didn’t feel like opposites. They felt like the same sentence.

In the weeks that followed, men came with clipboards and orange flags. They marked trees and drove stakes into the soil. They talked in low voices, nodding to one another like they were agreeing on something obvious.

Jonah watched from the porch.

No one asked him anything.

One afternoon, he drove past the Johnsons’ dock on his way home. Music drifted across the water, something light and cheerful. A woman laughed, sharp and bright. The houseboat gleamed in the sun, untouched, unbothered.

Jonah tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

That night, he sat at the kitchen table, staring at the letter. The words felt unreal, like they’d been written for someone else and misdelivered. It spoke of opportunity, of growth, of the kind of future that assumed you could leave a place without it collapsing behind you.

He imagined the river without him. Imagined the house empty, the coffee cans rusting beneath the leaks. Imagined the land parceled off, renamed, marketed. Imagined himself somewhere far away, trying to explain where he was from without sounding like he was apologizing.

At night, the river sounded louder. Or maybe Jonah was just listening harder.

When the letter came confirming the acquisition, it didn’t use the word eviction. It said compensation. It said fair market value. It said opportunity for transition.

The number at the bottom wasn’t enough to buy another place near the water. It wasn’t enough to buy much of anything at all.

Jonah drove out past town, past the farms that had already sold, past fields where new signs promised ‘Coming Soon’. He parked by the river where it widened and slowed, where his father had taught him to fish with a line made from twine and patience.

The water slid past him, carrying leaves and small, broken things.

The day he packed, the house felt hollow in a way it never had before. The walls were thin without the weight of years pressing against them. He left everything but a suitcase behind.

He walked down to the river one last time. The water was high now, swollen from recent rain, moving fast and confident.

“I tried,” Jonah said.

The river said nothing. Instead, it continued to flow down the winding path.

“I guess you don’t really stay the same either, do you?” He asked, flicking the water with his hand.

When he turned to go, he felt lighter and heavier all at once. The land would change hands. The river would be named and marketed and photographed from angles that hid its scars.

But it would keep moving.

And now, finally, so would he.

He started the truck and drove away from the bend, carrying what he could, leaving the rest to the water and the weeds.

Monosex Species

XIN GUO

When I was thirteen, my mother taught me precautions the way other women taught recipes: as inherited knowledge that no longer required explanation.

Don’t take elevators alone.

Don’t drink anything you didn’t open yourself.

Don’t trust men who cry too easily.

Don’t trust men who never cry.

Never let a man record you.

Once I asked why she monitored me so carefully.

“Don’t give people a reason to blame you,” she said.

“Why would they blame me for doing those things?”

She cut me off before I finished.

“How should I know? Good girls just don’t.”

At the time I mistook her caution for provincial paranoia, the residue of a generation that had learned to survive by anticipating violence before it appeared. I believed education would exempt me from that logic, and fear just belonged to people without language for the world.

I was wrong, though not in the way she intended.

Jun sat behind me in constitutional law. He corrected citations in the margins of my papers without asking permission, returned my notes folded with such precision that each crease aligned exactly with the last, and spoke so calmly that people began adjusting themselves around him without noticing. People stopped interrupting when he began talking. Professors answered him carefully. Even disagreement arrived softened.

I liked how easy it felt to stand near him, as though some of his certainty spilled onto people nearby.

The first real fracture came when I was nineteen and preparing for judicial examinations in a country that permitted women to study constitutional law, publish scholarship, and argue legal theory publicly, while reserving constitutional interpretation itself for men under Article 47, a provision enacted after the AI Wars of 2042 on the basis of male “quantum emotional neutrality.” By 2081, the justification sounded archaic even to its defenders. By then, nobody really cared whether the explanation made sense anymore. The system was already there. Several pages explained the “scientific finding” that men’s happiness is society’s happiness, and women need to be devoted, caring, and sacrificing for men and for society.

The board lifted restrictions. I cried. Jun — harder, face-first into the floor, apologies catching in his throat halfway through the sentence.

“It’s stress,” he said. “I can’t stop. I hate to be like my father! If you really love me, help me with it.”

At nineteen I still confused endurance with moral seriousness. I stayed because I believed damaged men became less dangerous once they were understood. I stayed because every institution around me rewarded women for absorbing male instability without complaint.

When I finally tried to leave, he did not argue immediately. He looked at me with mild disbelief, almost amusement, as if I had misunderstood the terms of an agreement that had never needed to be spoken aloud.

Then he opened a folder on his tablet.

Twenty-seven files.

The recordings had been taken while I slept. Some angles were so elevated I could not understand where the cameras had been hidden. Others framed my body with the detached clarity of surveillance footage. Mixed among them were deepfakes assembled from stolen images and synthetic composites, my face grafted onto pornographic bodies with industrial efficiency. None of it looked accidental. That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about afterward. Every file had been categorized, labeled, and archived, like an artist keeping his pieces of work, or an athlete keeping his medals.

He scrolled through them without looking at me.

He paused on one file longer than the others, not because it was more explicit, but because it showed me asleep with my mouth slightly open, hair stuck to my cheek in a way I had never seen myself. He enlarged it, reduced it, then enlarged it again, as if trying to see how much he could change it before I stopped recognizing myself in it.

“You said you are a good girl? Look at this,” he said, almost conversationally, as though we were reviewing notes for an exam. “You should see yourself.”

Another folder opened beneath it, automatically labeled with my full name followed by a string of numbers I did not recognize. Inside were captions generated by the platform itself: behavioral tags, inferred mood states, predicted reactions. None of it had existed in a language I would have used for myself.

He let the system scroll for him this time.

Something inside me finally split open.

I heard my mother’s voice with unbearable clarity: good girls, good girls, good girls. The phrase kept repeating until it no longer sounded moral, only stupid. Small. Humiliating.

I said things to him then that I had never said to another person before. Not controlled things. Not intelligent things. The most vicious words I could find.

I told him he was becoming exactly what he claimed to hate.

“You really think you’re better than your father?” I said. “Garbage only produces more garbage.”

For the first time that evening, he looked at me directly. Then, after a pause long enough to feel considered rather than emotional, he added quietly, “You are just a whore.”

The first upload appeared two days later.

Only one clip at first, circulated just widely enough to establish recognition. After that, the process no longer required his direct involvement. Copies multiplied through forums, mirrors, private channels, and recommendation feeds. My university suspended me on the grounds of reputational risk. The official notice used neutral administrative language, which made it feel more final than an accusation would have. The wording was so calm that it made the decision feel permanent.

Jun graduated with honors that same year.

No one asked him for explanations because institutions had already categorized him correctly. He was disciplined, articulate, emotionally controlled in public, and politically useful. By twenty-seven, he had entered the constitutional interpretation track. Newspapers called him exemplary. Faculty described him as promising. Men like him were always treated as though their success had already been decided.

I stopped correcting people’s language after a while. Precision no longer altered outcomes.

At the police station, no one openly resisted my report. Nobody argued with me directly. That would have meant admitting that something wrong had happened. Instead, the institution absorbed my complaint and turned it into paperwork that, by the end, it no longer sounded like something that had happened to a person.

The desk officer avoided looking directly at me while processing the intake forms. The investigator spent longer watching the recordings than the documentation required.

“We don’t have time to sort out your relationship problems,” he said impatiently. “We have more important things to deal with.”

“It’s not just relationship! It’s crime! The cameras were hidden!”

“He says the relationship was consensual.”

“It wasn’t! He—”

“He has institutional standing,” the investigator interrupted. “Are you certain you want this level of scrutiny?”

On his desk sat a calendar marked with ministerial dinners in blue ink. Several surnames belonged to people whose authority already exceeded anything I could challenge. The conversation ended there, not because anyone dismissed me directly, but because the structure surrounding us had already rendered the outcome obvious.

Law school had taught principles as if they existed independently. The station taught architecture.

As I left, their laughter continued behind me, low and unhurried, as though the report had already transformed into a private joke.

I heard Jun described as “that poor boy”. Heard someone ask what kind of parents raised a daughter like me. Heard another voice say that good girls did not make videos like that themselves.

By then it no longer mattered that the recordings had been taken without my knowledge. By then, people had already rearranged the story into something easier to live with: a woman embarrassing herself, and a promising man unfortunate enough to become involved.

We had been told we were living in a civilized age, more advanced than the centuries before it. But technology had changed faster than men had. They still called women whores. Still protected each other first. Still treated shame as something women carried for them. My mother’s rules had survived the future almost intact.

Women, I realized then, did not stand inside architecture. We learned how to move around it the way people learn traffic patterns in a city older than they are.

After the uploads spread, men began lingering outside my building at night.

Some casually asked for prices, smiling as though embarrassment belonged entirely to me. Others followed me for half a block before losing interest once I stopped reacting. Several times someone knocked against my windows after midnight, not hard enough to qualify as forced entry, only long enough to make sleep impossible.

When I called the police again, the men explained they were only trying to pursue me romantically.

One officer suggested that public visibility often attracted “misunderstandings”.

Another advised relocation.

Jun denied distributing the recordings himself. The platforms hosting them operated through mirrored servers and anonymous reposting chains complicated enough that nobody could prove where the uploads had started anymore.

“You can’t prove he uploaded anything personally,” I was told.

My face, address, and personal information spread across news feeds within days. Everyone knew that I was the young woman removed by the university because I assaulted “national dignity”.

Online, strangers debated whether I had staged the recordings deliberately and called me a shame because it made women in this country look “easy”. Offline, men continued recognizing me in places I had never been before.

By then I understood that exile is rarely a single event. More often it accumulates gradually, through enough repetitions of exposure that ordinary life becomes structurally impossible.

My mother sold her jade bracelet to pay for my relocation. She held it in her palm for several seconds before handing it across the counter, turning it once beneath the light as if memorizing its weight for the last time.

“Rebuild somewhere else,” she told me afterward.

“As what?”

“Anything,” she said, though her voice carried no conviction.

Another city?

Another university?

Another apartment where strangers would eventually recognize my face before I had spoken long enough to become a person again?

By then the humiliation no longer felt temporary. It had hardened into something publicly durable.

People hated women easily. That was ordinary. What unsettled me more was understanding that hatred and contempt did not prevent desire. In some men, they seemed to intensify it.

No one was going to pity me. Pity belonged to boys with futures.

The recordings continued circulating after I disappeared from public life.

Not the original files anymore, but copies detached from chronology and source attribution, searchable indefinitely, re-playable by strangers who would never know whether I was alive. By then, disappearing didn’t depend on distance anymore. Replication alone could erase a person from ordinary existence.

Several years later, HelixDyne entered public policy through the language of equality.

I remember one presidential candidate speaking about it during a debate broadcast, replayed continuously across public transit screens.

“We have spent generations trying to build a fair society,” he said. “Yet inequality persists.”

He smiled then.

“HelixDyne offers freedom,” he continued. “The freedom to move beyond biological limitations. The freedom to participate equally in public life.”

Afterward, commentators described the proposal as compassionate. Pragmatic. Historically inevitable.

The clinic itself felt less medical than administrative. The lighting was warm. The waiting rooms were quiet. Forms arrived on tablets before anyone asked questions aloud.

The nurse never asked why I had come. She only reviewed the financial disclosures. Her eyes paused briefly at one section before moving on.

“Applicants transitioning from female classification are subject to elevated stabilization costs,” she said. “Most people require financing.”

The number displayed on the tablet was nearly ten times higher than the standard estimate. She waited for me to react. I realized then that no one in the clinic found the discrepancy unusual enough to explain.

“I signed the waiver,” I said.

During those years of moving between temporary apartments and avoiding public recognition, I had almost forgotten that I was once considered promising.

Before the recordings, professors discussed judicial placements in front of me as though my future already existed.

Afterward, none of them contacted me again.

The videos had removed me from the profession long before any physical transition began. I told myself that as a man, I might still be permitted a career. A public voice. Ordinary movement through institutional space without suspicion attaching itself automatically to my body.

The changes happened incrementally. Bone density adjusted through calibrated revisions. The hormone cycles were so regular that my body stopped feeling entirely self-directed. After a while, even the pain started to feel scheduled.

Two weeks after the first treatment, I woke before dawn and realized I could not immediately locate my body in the room. Not because it had disappeared. Because it had stopped presenting itself to my mind as a visible target.

I started noticing that powerful people rarely got interrupted. In meetings, I began finishing sentences without anticipating interruptions. Silence remained available after I spoke. People waited automatically for me to continue, even when I paused. No one interpreted my confidence as aggression. No one monitored my tone for excess emotion.

People let me keep talking in a way they never had before. At first, I assumed I was simply less noticeable in this form, that attention had thinned around me rather than shifted in direction. But in meetings, I noticed something else: people were not just responding differently, they were withholding entire categories of response. I would pause after speaking, expecting an interruption that never came, and find myself continuing only because no one else was doing it for me. When nobody interrupted me, I often kept talking longer than I meant to, just because I still wasn’t used to being allowed to finish. Once, I asked a question I would have previously rehearsed for hours before speaking aloud. The room answered immediately, without hesitation, as if the question had already existed somewhere in their collective understanding and only required activation.

I remember thinking, briefly, that I had become less precise. Then I realized the precision had not left me — it had stopped being necessary.

That realization produced no relief. It only removed friction from thought itself. The underpass was where the absence became undeniable.

I used to rehearse survival through spaces like that. Keys positioned between my fingers before entering. Phone unlocked in advance. Routes mapped instinctively. Messages prepared in case I disappeared between one end and the other.

That night I entered without preparation.

Halfway through the tunnel, a man walked past, humming to himself. I stopped after he passed because something inside me had failed to activate. No internal calculation followed his footsteps. No defensive geometry unfolded automatically in my mind.

It took me a while to realize I wasn’t calmer. I had just stopped preparing for danger all the time. I sat against the concrete wall and cried soundlessly until the lights flickered again overhead.

Not relief.

Not grief.

I was tired in a way that no longer pointed at anything.

At fifty-one, I was nominated to the Constitutional Interpretation Council.

By then, my mother’s memory had deteriorated unevenly. On good days she asked me about weather patterns or whether trains still ran on time downtown. On worse days she mistook me for tenants who had once lived upstairs decades earlier. During my final visit before the hearings, she studied my face longer than usual.

“You look safe,” she said.

I did not correct her.

Jun was already seated inside the hearing chamber when I arrived for the first session.

Age had refined him. The sharpness that once read as ambition now resembled composure practiced over decades. When he looked at me, I watched recognition attempt to organize itself behind his expression before dissolving.

“Have we met?” he asked politely.

“No.” It was the first completely truthful thing I had ever said to him.

During the hearings, another council member interrupted me midway through a constitutional argument. My body stopped speaking automatically, trained by older reflexes I no longer consciously endorsed.

But the room did not proceed without me. “Please continue.”

So I did.

For once, nobody used my hesitation as a reason to move on without me. I did not trust the feeling. Trust seemed irrelevant by then. But I understood how to use it.

Journalists rarely stayed on constitutional law for long. Sooner or later, someone always asked the same question. “Do you regret anything?”

I learned to answer without attaching myself fully to the response.

At my mother’s grave, the soil remained loose from the recent rain. Someone had left lilies beside the headstone, though she had always preferred jade bracelets to flowers because flowers decayed too visibly. I stood there until my legs numbed beneath me. Wind moved through the cemetery grass in uneven corrections, flattening one section while lifting another. I could no longer remember the precise sound of her voice. Only the hesitation she carried before speaking whenever she feared her instincts might prove accurate.

The elevators she warned me about no longer required strategic planning. I entered them automatically now.

At the Museum of Human Continuity, a glass display case contains photographs, clothing fragments, cosmetic products, legal documents, and reproductive artifacts beneath a single institutional label:

WOMAN.

One afternoon a boy stood beside the exhibit, reading each placard slowly enough to sound out unfamiliar terminology under his breath.

When he noticed me watching, he asked, “Were they always like this? The things in the case?”

I looked at the photographs. A woman sleeping. A woman at a desk. A woman in an elevator, hand near her keys.

“No,” I said. “They were just ordinary things once.”

He looked back at the case for a moment.

“Oh,” he said. “Is that worse?”

Reflections kept sliding across the glass, mixing the visitors with the objects inside until it became hard to separate one from the other. Behind the walls, ventilation systems moved air through the building with mechanical steadiness.

“I don’t know.”

A Gift From Greta

Melanie Jones

Stars beyond Nolan’s counting capability illuminated the night sky as he lay in the cool grass, arms folded beneath his head, gazing. The mosquitoes didn’t bother him much that evening either. Preferring the buffet of young men shooting dice, sweat sweetened by cognac, they swarmed the front of the house instead. Between the cotton plants and Aunt Mary’s few rows of tomatoes, Nolan had found the quietest spot in the entire yard.

Jackie Wilson’s voice blared from the back door, and the wooden house rocked on its stilts. They’d be there for another hour, mostly leaving before midnight with church services starting just after sunrise; but they’d be back on Tuesday for blues night. At ten, Nolan preferred the blues to the more popular records his friends liked getting down to. Goosebumps would rise all over his arms at the first strumming of Lucille in the same way a good gospel song could send bolts of electricity from his stomach throughout his body.

This Tuesday would be different. Greta was coming to visit. It had been five years, and he hadn’t seen her since the day she’d brought him over on the ferry to live with Big Mama. I’ll send for you soon as James and me get settled in Chicago, he remembered Greta saying. But she never did settle. Soon after Chicago James, there was Brooklyn Charlie and San Francisco Pete. His mother was what Big Mama called flighty. Nevertheless, she’d written to say that she might be passing through. That was as much as he could figure out from the little piece of stationery on Big Mama’s nightstand before he’d heard her heavy footsteps moving down the hall. He wondered what her visit might be about, but asking Big Mama for more information would result in a good slap, considering he wasn’t supposed to know about the visit in the first place. He’d remain quiet and wait.

Like most of the congregation, Nolan struggled to stifle his yawn in the presence of the Lord. The slight breeze from the swaying cardboard fans, in call and response to the heat, did little to aid in cooling the shotgun building. Wedged between Big Mama and Aunt Mary — the heat from their massive thighs baking him, Nolan shifted in protest to his silent suffering.

He welcomed Reverend Alexander’s benediction and zigzagged in and out of the brightly hued dresses and big elaborate hats once all had said amen in the sing-songy way they ended all services.

He found a spot on the church steps to sit until his grandmother and aunt finished talking to some of their friends, scooching closer upon hearing Greta’s name.

“Have you told him yet, Pearl?” asked Rosa Lee Wilson, Big Mama’s oldest friend.

“Ain’t no need in getting his hopes up. That child of mine ain’t ever gone do right by that boy. Bless his soul.”

“Um. Um. Um.” Both ladies shook their heads disagreeably.

Big Mama’s words were true. There were many visits and presents promised over the years that never made their way to Nolan. Eventually her presence found its place next to the unfulfilled excitement of Greta’s words in the back of his mind. He’d given up all hope that she’d come back and was quite fond of living with Big Mama and Aunt Mary. Moving all across the world like Greta seemed unnecessary to Nolan when everything he knew and loved was within the three blocks of Mulatto Bend. But knowing all of this, something in him still stirred. Curiosity had gotten the better of him, and Nolan wondered what she might look like and what stories she’d tell about the adventures she’d had. Tuesday was only two days away, but his anxiety was building with every passing second.

Nolan spent Monday in preparation for a visit that he was still supposed to be unaware of. Aunt Mary took him to get a haircut and across the river to go shopping in downtown Baton Rouge. A big fuss over nothing if they didn’t believe Greta was coming, Nolan thought.

Finishing off the last bit of her chocolate ice cream cone, Mary wiped its smudges from her dimpled chin. “You ever miss yo’ mama, Nolan?”

Her questioning would have been off-putting had Nolan not known that she was coming. Big Mama didn’t say Mary couldn’t hold ice water without cause. He’d been waiting for his aunt to bring her sister up in conversation. She couldn’t help it.

Brushing the itchy bits of hair from the back of his neck missed by his barber, Nolan responded, “I think about her sometimes. Wonder what she doing every now and again, but I wouldn’t say I miss her.”

“You sure use to. Mama didn’t know what to do with you when you came to live with us. You sho was a pitiful lil’ thang. Cried for three months straight. Thought you was gone flood the house.” Mary recalled with a sad smile on her smooth, round face. Stopping Nolan in his tracks to look at him, she said, “You got better though.”

They continued their walk back to Big Mama’s old Buick in silence. Nolan couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but talking about Greta with his Aunt Mary made him feel it. He’d felt it when Greta left and with every promise she failed to keep. It was a feeling that at ten years old Nolan could only feel in the music. Something lurked behind that feeling, something wonderfully upsetting. Goosebumps rose on his sun-kissed flesh at the thought of Greta again. She was like the woman from the songs he liked most. Women like his mother made men of all ages feel it.

A burnt orange Firebird occupied the Buick’s usual parking space when Mary and Nolan returned home.

“Oh, Lawd.” Mary muttered as she eased in behind the new car’s bumper. “Wait here ‘til I come back for you.” Not waiting for a response, Mary got out of the car, her red shirt dress sticking to the back of her legs as she strutted with determination quickly towards the house.

Greta ran from the front door towards the car, wearing the shortest pair of shorts that Nolan had ever seen. Her once long reddish-brown curls, now fashioned into a small afro atop her head. “Boy, you better get out that car and give your mama a hug.” She yelled in mock anger with her hands on her hips.

Unsure of what to do, he waited for Big Mama to emerge from the house. He ran past Greta and into the fullness of his Big Mama instead.

“Don’t be rude, baby. Go to your mama.” Big Mama smiled and wiped her nose on a dishrag. Nolan searched her eyes for any clue that might tell why she’d been crying but was pulled away and into the arms of Greta.

Her touch felt foreign, and Nolan deemed her too hard. He wanted to pull away and return to the soft, fleshy arms of his Big Mama, but Greta was strong and held on to him for most of the night in the same manner.

Concerned by Greta’s bony frame, Nolan wondered if maybe she’d come home because she was sick.

“Is you sick, Greta?” Big Mama asked while collecting dishes from the dining room table.

“No Mama. This is what’s in. Everybody ain’t corn-fed. You’d know that if you left here every once and a while.”

“I see enough on that television set Mary bought me and you look just as hungry as the rest of them black gals who trying to look white like that Stick girl.”

“Her name is Twiggy, Mama. Not Stick.” Greta redirected her attention toward Nolan. “You don’t think like your Big Mama, do you? You still think your mama the prettiest girl ever, don’t you?”

Nolan inspected her carefully. Her hair was too short to curl and stood on end. She smelled of smoke, and her skin appeared orange and leathery from long hours spent on the beaches of California. Her lashes resembled two tarantulas squatting on her eyelids, and the frosted white lipstick she overly applied made her look ashy.

“Yes, ma’am.” Nolan replied with averted eyes.

“And you ain’t the only one either. I met this man, Nolan, and he thinks I could be a model.”

Nolan stared blankly, waiting to hear Greta’s next destination.

“He knows a guy that knows a guy whose sister works down at Ebony Magazine, and he thinks that I can get on as a Fashion Fair Model.”

“Don’t you think you a little long in the tooth to be trying yo’ hand at modeling?” Big Mama interjected.

“No, Mama, I don’t, and neither does Michael.” Greta rolled her eyes.

She went on to tell Nolan the rest of her story. Big Mama appeared uninterested in Greta, like she’d already heard the story or similar ones from her, but she stared at Nolan intensely, waiting to hear how he’d respond to what was coming next.

“He got a real nice place out in New York City. He say I can come and stay until I start making some big money of my own to afford my own place.”

“That’s sounds nice, Greta.” Nolan replied in a monotone, looking at Big Mama curiously.

“When did you start calling me Greta? Anyway, that ain’t the best part. He got lots of space in that apartment of his and he say you just as welcome as I am.” Greta’s smile shone with elation.

Nolan’s expression remained stoic. Rescuing him from the uncomfortable situation, Big Mama chimed in, “Go ahead and wash up for bed.”

“He my boy!” Greta shouted.

Nolan pressed his ear to his bedroom door.

“You just now remembering that?” Big Mama huffed back.

“He don’t even call you mama no mo’, Greta. He don’t want to go with you!” Mary added.

“He didn’t say that.”

“He didn’t say that he did either!” Big Mama and Mary shouted in unison.

“A boy deserves to be with his mother.”

“And he got that right here in Big Mama. What you gone do when this Michael fellow leave you and the next one don’t want no woman with a child?”

“She gone bring that poor child back here to suffer all over again. That’s what she gone do.” Big Mama added.

They argued for hours until they’d run out of words to fight with. Nolan went to bed exhausted as if it had been him yelling. He felt bad for Big Mama and Aunt Mary. Greta was the kind of woman who could give women the blues too.

The next day was spent packing. Despite their best efforts, Big Mama and Aunt Mary couldn’t save him from Greta. She was bent on taking Nolan with her. Big Mama and Aunt Mary shuffled around glossy eyed but didn’t say anything contrary to Nolan about his mother or his leaving.

“Big Mama wants you to write often, Nolan.” Aunt Mary said, handing him a mountain of envelopes, already addressed and stamped.

Nolan wondered how long Big Mama had known about what seemed to him to be a sudden departure. He placed his favorite albums in his suitcase.

“Well, you know, Aunt Mary. There probably ain’t gone be too much to write about, no how.” He said, in hopes of making Mary feel better.

“New York is a big city, Nolan.” She said with false excitement. “Thank of all the big stars you gone see.”

The only stars Nolan wanted to see were the ones in Big Mama’s backyard at night, but he agreed for her benefit. “Yeah.” Nolan sighed before he continued. “I know.”

“Well, I’m gone leave you to yo’ packing.”

Nolan had been packing, unpacking, and repacking for at least an hour. Mary was right. New York was a big city, and he would have been excited about visiting if and only if it was just that. Somewhat pleased that Greta wanted him again, Nolan wished that she could want him in Louisiana. He fought the tears filling his eyes, thinking it better to act like the man he was being forced to become.

Night was approaching, and Greta still hadn’t returned from her day of visiting with old friends. We got all the time in the world to catch up, Nolan. I don’t know when I’m a see the girls again, she said to him before leaving her white lipstick on his cheek and hopping into the Firebird. 

People were coming into Aunt Mary’s in droves, and Nolan was thankful for one more Tuesday night since he didn’t know when he’d get another. Feet dangling from his stool and sipping Kool-Aid from a preserves jar, Nolan sat at the bar like an old man. He closed his eyes and listened to BB King singing to his woman about losing her good thang. Nolan’s head moved with the music. He’d never admit it, but he felt like that woman BB was singing to. He was losing his good thang.

He never wanted to leave. Mulatto Bend was home and Nolan couldn’t imagine New York being anything like it. No Aunt Mary’s Juke Joint. No cotton or tomatoes. He wanted the thick women of the Bend in all their different shades of brown and warm like the Louisiana sun.

BB King didn’t have to tell Nolan how to get the blues because he already had them. It was a deep-seated pain that tears couldn’t help free. The blues had to be nurtured like a baby in its mother’s stomach and only let out when they become too big for one person to hold on to. The blues cried for him, even if no one else knew that it was lamenting in his honor.

Aunt Mary tapped Nolan on his shoulders. “You too young to be going through it, Nolan.” She laughed at his seriousness. It was the first time he’d seen her smile all day. “Your mama need to have some words with you.”

He wasn’t aware that Greta had returned, but he followed Mary behind the bar and through the door that connected the juke joint to the kitchen of the house. Big Mama held onto a struggling Greta.

“Hey Baby. Been a little change in plans.” Big Mama released her. “Few thangs done came up and I need to take care of them before I brang you up with me. You understand, don’t you?”

Nolan understood that the man sitting behind the wheel of the Firebird wasn’t Michael, but Lawrence Collins from Georgia Avenue.

“Yeah, Greta.”

“See, I told Mama she was making a big fuss over nothing. Give me a few days and I’ll send for you.” Walking towards the front door, bags in hand, she continued, “I know you’ll just love flying on a big ole plane.”

The rest of her words he heard from the porch. Greta slid into the car. “Just keep yo’ Big Mama and aunt company for a few more days and then we’ll be together again.”

Nolan watched as the Firebird flew down the street until even its whitewall tires disappeared within a cloud of dust. His Big Mama and aunt decided to give him a few moments to himself that he did not need and went back into the house. He wasn’t disappointed that Greta had let him down again.

It was all she knew how to do. Greta didn’t need to be around Nolan to affect him. She possessed something that Aunt Mary and Big Mama did not, but he was grateful that Greta had left it with him. He wasn’t exactly sure where she was going to end up. Wherever she was headed, he was certain that she’d be giving someone else the blues too.

The Woman on the shore

David Rea

He can tell the woman is dead before he reaches her. It is the way her body is positioned, twisted like a rag doll. There is a map of cuts, scratches and bruises across her face and arm; the sea has cared as much for her corpse as it does driftwood, tossing her against the craggy shoreline and dumping her behind this rock; a final wave has thrown her forearm over a tyre. Her hair holds droplets of seawater, resembling tiny balls of mercury, and the blue abaya beneath her life jacket is soaked and torn.

Daniel Verity lifts the camera around his neck and takes her photograph, the delicate mechanical sound – click – carrying across the beach on the slackening morning wind. Circling her, he takes further pictures, accompanied by the sea’s angry, labouring breaths – suck, roar, hiss – and leaving an uneven ring of displaced sand around the body. Daniel scrolls through the photographs. This is the one: it makes her look like discarded rubbish, showing her arm on the tyre, casually loose, as though dangling over the side of a bath. Her bruised head is tilted back, opening her jaw into an exhausted yawn, and the rest of her face is not in view, so she will remain anonymous. He connects his camera to his phone and posts the photograph on his social media with the comment: Shame on the governments of Europe. He looks up, and for the first time, takes in the surrounding scene.

The isolated beach has the shocking quiet of a crime scene. The empty sand had recorded his arrival; his boot prints suggested the hurried path of a trespasser. Like a delayed pain after an accident, he feels a terrible sadness waking inside him. Fingering a tear from his eye, he removes his Saint Christopher from around his neck and attaches it around the woman’s. His phone beeps in his pocket. Then beeps again. Two notifications. People are starting to share his photo. Another beep. And another. He checks his phone again: nine notifications. Three more beeps. He needs to call an ambulance. What’s the number in Turkey? He feels disoriented; he must be in mild shock; however much he sees this stuff, it still gets to him. The crests of waves litter the sea’s calm surface like screwed-up and discarded tissues. Glancing at the body, he checks the news online. Most sites still carry this morning’s headlines: the British prime minister describing the refugees from the region arriving at Calais in France as a ‘horde’. He looks online for the emergency services number.

When Daniel first hears the woman gasp, he mistakes it for a wave.

Her body develops an organic presence, life percolating through to the surface of her skin. He leans over her face. Her eyelids twitch. Slits reveal dark, wet eyes. She frowns at some quickly blossoming pain and looks at him, her eyes not quite focused, her awareness still beneath a layer of concussion. Slowly, her eyelids open fully and her eyes focus on his. Daniel laughs and grips the bridge of his nose. Swallowing and standing, wiping tears from his eyes, he improvises a clumsy dance of joy with his arms flailing, a black figure against the brightening turquoise sky.

‘Mrhban,’ he greets her in his heavily accented Arabic. Dropping to his knees and breathing hard, his voice high with emotion, he adds: ‘Hunak sayaarat ‘iiseaf qadima’; there’s an ambulance coming.

Her jaw closes and her lips draw together; salt-encrusted, they wrinkle like the closing folds of an old purse. He lays his hand gently, awkwardly, on her hair, and feels her warm, hard scalp beneath. A wave comes in and inch-deep water streams beneath them. She rolls with great effort onto her side and coughs, leaving half of her blue abaya behind and revealing her tracksuit beneath. She starts shivering. Pulling his raincoat from his backpack, Daniel peels off what remains of her abaya and wraps her in it.

‘It’s okay,’ he says.

An ambulance speeds around the corner of the coast road.

Alone again, Daniel notices the cove’s Wednesday morning sounds, conveyed on the breeze like local newspaper headlines. Distant car horns protest a traffic jam. A dog barks. A pneumatic drill. A bartender strolls along the coast road, smoking and waiting for his morning shift to begin. A tingling sensation starts up in Daniel’s hand where he touched her head; he opens his post from a couple of hours ago and writes a comment: She’s alive – then, biting his top lip, saves it as a draft. He watches the waves smooth away the impression left by her body and the circle of his boot prints around it – erasing the evidence that either of them was ever there at all.

Rolling over on his mattress in his Brixton bedsit, stirring the beginnings of a hangover, Daniel props himself up on an arm and takes his phone, balanced on a half-filled whiskey tumbler. How long was he out on a bender for? His photo has just over 50,000 comments and has been re-posted 1.2 million times. He’s never had those kinds of numbers before; a flood of dopamine sweetens his encroaching nausea. Newspapers are full of stories about it. In some she is referred to as ‘the woman in the blue dress’, in others ‘the woman on the shore’. The German Chancellor has said that she deserves an apology from the whole of Europe, that the continent must do more to help refugees from the region. The British Prime Minister has released a statement saying he is ‘deeply moved’ by the photo.

Daniel sifts through more of the news. His plan to keep her anonymity seems to have worked; no one has been able to identify her. Journalists have been to the local morgues, and though there were several refugee women there, none had been wearing a blue dress. Daniel wonders if it is still on the sand where he peeled it off her. Another piece argues that the anonymity is a reason to be suspicious, claiming the photo was staged, a piece of propaganda for the left. How is it possible, it asks, for there to be nothing in the photo to identify the woman, for there to be no record of the woman’s death, for her to vanish into thin air? Daniel sniffs his armpit: Christ, he stinks! Leaving his clothes in a trail behind him, he walks to the bathroom and turns on the shower.

Thank Christ he didn’t post she was alive. It would probably have sent journalists out looking for her, to find out what happened to her afterwards, to invade and dismantle her life, creating a news cycle that would have petered out twenty-four hours later. He inspects his naked, beaten body in the bathroom mirror, his freckly, clammy flesh, the sickle-shaped scar across his chest from Gaza, and the Halloween pumpkin smile on his ribs from Syria.

Picking snot-congealed cocaine from his nostril, he steps into the shower. Who’s he kidding? He was never going to post that she was alive. Guilt twists in his stomach, weakening him. He wanted to create as big a political earthquake as he could. Photographs of the dead are more persuasive than those of the living. He pictures his heart, shrivelled and grey from the torments of PTSD, hardened by drugs and adrenaline, and grown over with lichen and liverworts. He gets out of the shower – he can’t be bothered to wash himself – and plods angrily back to his bedroom. Drinking the rest of the whiskey in the tumbler, he checks his email. His inbox is full of requests for comments and interviews. One from the BBC. Wiping tears of exhaustion from his eyes, he reaches for his Saint Christopher, and then remembers he had given it to the woman. He wonders if she’s seen the photograph yet. She’s bound to at some point, and then she will be the only other person in the world who knows he’s lied.

When Habiba Darwish is given her things in the hospital, her trembling fingers search them to find her small plastic wallet. Her phone has gone, but she finds a silver necklace with a pendant attached. Twisting the bedsheet in her fist, she sobs with frustration. Where has that come from? The plastic wallet has to be here somewhere. Please. Here it is. The phone numbers are still inside; the one at the top blurred into inky clouds by the sea, and her daughter’s hair clipping wrapped in tinfoil, the last thing she has left of her family. She opens the foil, releasing a small pollen cloud of hazy memories. Holding it open to her nose, she breathes in deeply; there is the faintest trace of the complex smell of her family home, opening up closed sense-memories like old capillaries. Richer in texture than the hospital around her, she can almost hear her husband’s thin voice from the kitchen, her daughter’s scampering feet on the stairs.

She has no recollection of how she got to this hospital; the last thing she remembers is getting into the smuggler’s boat. Still suffering from a concussion, she has been told she can walk around, but only for short periods. In a waiting room, there is a family of Westerners gathered around an iPad watching the BBC. On the screen is a woman lying on a beach wearing a blue abaya, her body twisted. It’s her abaya; her arm is dangling over a tyre, her bruised face. For a moment the hospital rolls backwards as though she is falling. She leans against the wall to steady herself. Then looks again. The face in the photograph is out of view. But it is her. The boat must have capsized, and she was washed up onto the beach. She looks around the waiting room, but nobody is looking back. Memories flicker. The stormy sea. The front of the boat rising up. Then waking up. The white sky. The man looking down at her. Habiba puts her hand against the hospital wall to steady herself again. The iPad screen changes to a panel of men in a brightly lit television studio. There is a close-up of one of them, talking with professional calm. It’s him. The man on the beach.

As she walks back to her ward, the gapped chronology of her failed sea crossing begins to assemble itself in more detail: huddled with the others waiting on the beach at night. The jerking cones of torchlight. Lifting children onto the boat. The waves slapping the sides. Waking up on the beach to feel the ground unmoving and solid beneath her. That man looking down at her. That’s right, she remembers now: he had a camera around his neck. He must have taken the photo.

She sits down, realising she’s in the visitors’ café. On a television, there are images of her bombed-out city, its dusty remains like shattered bones. The same photo of her on the beach in her blue abaya appears. The photograph is everywhere. The whole world must be talking about her.

She walks up to the television; the sound is turned down, but she catches fragments: ‘… body washed up on the beach…the widespread consternation…the refugee’s corpse…’ She looks around the café again: a man in a wheelchair stifling a yawn, a mother wiping chocolate from a toddler’s mouth. The family with the iPad is now watching a cartoon.

Does everybody think she’s dead?

Back in her bed, she inspects the silver pendant she’d found amongst her possessions. It depicts an old man carrying a child on his shoulders across a river. A nurse explains that it is Saint Christopher, the Christian patron saint of travellers. On the back of the pendant there’s an inscription:

To Daniel

Safe travels

Love Mum

Daniel. That must be the photographer’s name. This must be his.

Did he give it to her?

In the hospital’s internet café, she searches online. Rubbing the Saint Christopher with her thumb, she finds out more about its owner: Daniel Verity. An award-winning photojournalist, who’s worked extensively in the Middle East and has been covering the European refugee crisis. What on earth happened? Did he find her, take the photograph, and leave her for dead? Why didn’t he check her pulse? No, she remembers now. When she woke up, he’d been dancing. That’s right. And he’d got down on his knees and put his warm hand on her head; he told her there was an ambulance coming. So it must have been him who telephoned for one. She finds his email address on his website and begins typing.

Dear Mr. Verity,

She rests her fingertips on the keys, then makes two angry fists. Can she trust him? Pushing her tongue into her cheek, she looks at her photo on the beach again. That’s strange. The early morning sky is pale turquoise, but when she was put into the ambulance, she remembers there being full daylight. Did it really take so long for the ambulance to arrive, or – she yawns, rubbing her eyes like a tired child. Or did this Daniel Verity take her photo first and then call emergency services sometime later?

Dear Mr. Verity,

Please respect me and keep this message private. I am the woman you photographed on the beach. I am at the Bodrum State Hospital in Turkey. What happened?

Habiba Darwish

She presses send.

Crouching in a pointed shadow outside a row of dusty white tents, Daniel watches the latest load of refugees arrive off the bus. Across the way, a woman is laying damp clothes on the line hung between tents. A bulldozer passes, leaving clouds of swirling dust. Flies dot haggard faces and tent walls are bloodied with splattered mosquitoes. When he visited Bodrum State Hospital, he was told Habiba Darwish had gone; nobody could tell him where. And so he has driven here to this Godforsaken place, the nearest refugee camp; over the past two days he has walked every square inch of it countless times, between the tents, along the perimeter fence. Perhaps she’s already moved on from here too.

He watches a petite woman dressed in a black abaya, walking slowly along the wire mesh fence as if hypnotised, knotting and unknotting her reddened fingers. She looks about her with the blank eyes of an animal. A girl does a cartwheel across her path, laughing, and the woman jerks backward then walks carefully around her. Just there, in the angles of her face and the fading bruise on her head, she reveals herself. It’s Habiba. Daniel looks away sharply as if slapped.

He cannot get over how short she is. His memories and photos carried no indication of her size, and he had always imagined her to be large, but she must be less than five feet tall. He catches her eye; she takes a few moments to register what she is seeing. She looks to her left, narrows her eyes, and mouths some words. Smiling a huge smile of disbelief, she walks towards him with steady purpose. He stands to greet her, brushing the mud from the back of his jeans, and all at once her face tightens, and she is on him, thrashing, kicking and pulling his hair.

When she finds him an hour later, he is kneeling on the parched ground and chewing the side of his nail, staring with worried, puffy eyes at children practising headstands. He puts a cigarette between his lips with trembling fingers and leaves it there, unlit and dangling. With his pale, freckly skin and thin strawberry-blonde hair, he is the odd-one-out here, a watchful stranger. There is no camera, only a bulging rucksack by his side. He glances at her when she crouches beside him.

‘I thought you’d have your camera with you,’ Habiba confesses in a soft voice; she looks at him.     

‘It’s back at the hotel. I’m actually on my way to your part of the world. To cover the war.’ Daniel rubs at a callous on his palm, lights his cigarette and asks, ‘Where…where are you from exactly?’

She tells him, and the conversation peters out. They watch a woman washing her clothes at one of the outdoor taps, next to children sitting in a row at a tent’s entrance. Their coughs and sneezes fill the air.

‘I worked at the university there,’ Habiba says. ‘Researcher.’ She searches his face for several seconds, making some calculation, then looks away again. ‘Did you post my photo before you called the ambulance?’ she asks.

The wind trims the ash from Daniel’s cigarette, blowing its end molten orange. He nods. ‘I honestly thought you were dead.’

Habiba draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. ‘How did you know?’ She leans her forehead against her forearm.

He shrugs. ‘I’ve seen a lot of corpses.’

‘Did you check? Did you check my pulse?’

He shakes his head, picking angrily at the dried mud on the hem of his jeans. ‘The truth of it is I set out that morning to find a refugee’s corpse. Those beaches. There have been mornings when they are like open graveyards.’ He looks at Habiba’s dusty trainers. ‘I wanted to put it on social media … shove it in the face of Europe’s governments.’ He puts out his quarter-smoked cigarette and lights another. ‘They’ve done nothing, you know… and the longer I’ve photographed the refugee crisis, the angrier I’ve got.’ He picks up a stone and turns it in his fingers. ‘That morning, I was angry…tired… hung-over.’ He takes a long drag from his cigarette, and smoke jets from his nostrils. ‘I’m sorry. I’d completely lost perspective.’

Four or five turtledoves float indolently over the camp’s perimeter fence, topped with razor-blade wire.

‘Do you have family anywhere?’ Daniel asks.

Habiba’s face twists with painful emotion, and she waves the idea away with her hand.

‘Okay,’ Daniel says. ‘Look…I’ve brought you money. So you can get out of here. Get to Europe. You can get a crossing on a fibreglass boat for 4,000. Here, take this bag.’ He lays his bulging black rucksack beside her. ‘There is a good life jacket inside. And there is enough money to bribe your way for a while, at least. There’s £4,000 in Turkish lira for the fibreglass boat, and almost another 4,000 in euros. That’s all the money I could get for the moment. I’ll get you more. It’s all in a waterproof money belt.’ They both keep their eyes on the bag. ‘I’ve put a load of phone numbers in the phone.’ Daniel looks at her. ‘Mine is the first one. Call me anytime. There’s a phone charger in there, first aid kit…I’ve covered quite a bit of the refugee routes through Europe, and I’ve tried to put together a list of suggestions.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing. I want to help you. It’s the least I could do.’

‘No more photographs?’

‘No more photographs.’

She lays her hand gently on the rucksack. ‘I can’t swim,’ she whispers.

‘What?’

‘I can’t swim.’

Daniel takes her hand and clumsily kisses one of her knuckles.

‘The second number in your phone is the Turkish coast guard,’ he says. ‘Just in case. If you’re on the boat and the sea is rough, call them. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘I should be able to get to Greece and meet you there somewhere. We just need to stay in touch.’

Daniel turns the stone in his hand and throws it towards one of the soldiers guarding the camp. It lands near his feet. He looks at Daniel and then walks on. Children start singing in one of the tents.

Habiba follows the other refugees out of the smuggler’s van. The quick gasps of footsteps on the sand. Bursts of anxious whispering and the explosive thunder of waves. There must be another dozen refugees waiting. The smuggler had promised a fibreglass boat, but there is only a rubber dinghy bobbling in the shallows. Habiba takes out her phone and texts Daniel: Getting on boat. Very frightened. Thirty minutes to Europe. That’s what everyone says. Thirty minutes, though that is surely impossible with the wind and waves tonight. Angry commands are given to walk into the water. Torches switch in the air. Habiba wades in and becomes a link in the chain of arms lifting children from the shore to the boat. ‘Yallah,’ the smuggler shouts, shoving a cattle prod into someone’s back. The sea sucks at her legs, pulling her off balance, and she stumbles onto her knees, holding a child to her chest and swallowing seawater. The crowded dinghy registers every movement on board, transmitting a subdued trembling panic along its length. Beneath the boat, in the broad depths of the Aegean Sea, parrotfish nibble speculatively at sinking Turkish coins; fragments of white and pale green clothing recall jellyfish. On the sandy flats of the Greek coastline, a cuttlefish hovers over a mobile phone emitting tiny silver bubbles.

There are instructions to sit. Elbows and knees. They’re told there are oars on board if they need them. A mother and father fold themselves around their baby. A couple tightly entwines next to the sleepy-looking helmsman. Habiba suddenly feels she is no longer sailing towards Europe but away from her homeland; she is leaving her family behind, abandoning their unburied bodies. The smuggler is up to his chest in the water, pushing the side of the boat and steering it out to sea; the helmsman starts the motor.

Habiba keeps her eyes fixed on the distant lights of Kos. One of the lit windows on the island gives onto a café, where an old man is watching the news on a wall-mounted television. There are images of a large protest in London about the refugee crisis; from the circling helicopter, their banners look like flotsam and jetsam across the sea of heads. A river of people streams out of Trafalgar Square, streaked with blue from the dresses and abayas many are wearing. Numerous placards show enlarged copies of Daniel’s photo of Habiba on the beach. Many others display Daniel’s original comment on the photo: Shame on the governments of Europe! The screen changes to the British Prime Minister at a press conference. Across the bottom of the screen, there is a summary of his statement: Britain will welcome 20,000 more refugees from the region.

There is a refugee camp in Serbia where Habiba sleeps fitfully in a tent for two days and wakes with a fever. When she sees her colour-drained reflection in a derelict shop window, she doesn’t see her front tooth chipped to a tapered blade, or the faint sketch left by her deepest cuts — she sees her daughter grown into a woman, wearing an exhausted look of surprise.

Still, she goes on. Twice a day, at a newsstand and duplicated on the television screens in a shop window, she sees Daniel’s photograph of her on the beach. Like rain inflaming arthritis, the image awakens pain in her bones. Two weeks later, on the edge of a makeshift refugee settlement, she sees it again in the form of a small piece of graffiti. The artist has spray-painted across the top: NEVER FORGET. Someone else has spray-painted over one corner: REFUGEES GO HOME. BORDERS SAVE LIVES. Through the fragmentation of her trauma, the swamp of her grief and the numbness of shock, she feels she is somehow imprisoned inside the photograph, trapped in the hours of that morning; she will forever be a sleeping ghost on the peripheries of foreign lands, stripped of everything she used to be.

On the outskirts of a forest on the Bosnia-Croatia border, in sleet blown diagonally by the wind, she meets Daniel for the third time. He gives her more money and refreshes her supplies: new clothes, tarpaulin, batteries, painkillers, and blister cream for her first-aid kit. They walk together through the forest for more than a week, subsisting on protein bars and chocolate, moving only at night when Habiba feels safer. After the first dozen hours Daniel gets the shakes as he withdraws from alcohol. The darkness is more susceptible to sound than daylight, registering their breathing and whispering and the rustle and hiss of their clothing. They have been told there are landmines in the forest, left from the Bosnian War, and so they take turns to walk ahead searching the undergrowth with a torch. They avoid any talk of what has happened between them, how the photo has swayed public opinion, discussing instead the minutiae of the journey, the difficulty of crossing the next border into Slovenia.

Daniel explains how the asylum system for the 20,000 refugees is going to work in Britain, but Habiba finds it difficult to concentrate on what he’s saying. The nights fill more and more with blown flakes of disassociated memories from the war. A tower block façade blown away, revealing a stack of living rooms, recalling doll’s houses. A mourning dove flying down from a crumbling school, landing on a fallen billboard of the President. The drone of distant helicopters. Her hands crawling like panicking spiders around her daughter’s corpse, trying to find a pulse or heartbeat.

Yet she has noticed that underneath, some unused part of herself has been enlarged by this journey across a continent, like a muscle which has been exercised. Towards the end of the week, as his shakes begin to subside, Daniel talks about family holidays when he was a boy, how they would go camping in forests like this one. When he was scared of the dark, his mother would put her alarm clock under his pillow, telling him that if he closed his eyes, its ticking would become her heart. ‘I often wonder if she would be proud of me now,’ he says, ‘what I have done with my life.’

Amongst the complex emotional grit of their physical proximity, they slowly discover an unexpected pearl of ease. Doing the work of a year of friendship, the morning drama on the beach and its aftermath have stretched wide the borders of their relationship.

‘When I first got married, I moved into the top floor of my husband’s family home,’ Habiba says, bringing up her personal life for the first time. ‘In the mornings my mother-in-law and I would beat the rugs on the rooftop. She was very encouraging to me in the early stages of my marriage. She told me she’d had a dream that I was pregnant…and I checked and I was.’ This becomes their habit: to kindle some warmth from the winter dark with their memories. Daniel’s memories avoid any mention of his life as a photojournalist; Habiba’s skirt the edges of the war. However far they walk, however many hours pass, the moon follows them between the silhouetted trees, faithfully watching.

‘It’s very…’ Habiba says.

‘What?’ Daniel steps on the brake of his MG Metro; there is a sheep standing in the middle of the country lane up ahead.

‘Very different. Does it snow every winter? I’ve only ever seen pictures.’

‘Some winters. Are you hungry? I’ve brought some cheese and pickle sandwiches.’

Habiba says she’s fine and winds down the passenger window, letting the quiet chorus of birdsong and occasionally bleating sheep into the car. England. A bee hovers by the hedgerows, landing on some honeysuckle, making the plant waver. A large white butterfly flutters out from the undergrowth, and a dragonfly appears motionless in the warm, still air. Daniel puts the car into first gear, and they set off again. Away to Habiba’s left there is a vast expanse of English countryside, a patchwork of fields dotted with copses, a river and an oast house. Over to its east, perhaps fifty miles further away, is an entirely different weather system. Pewter clouds are banked together, casting miles of fields in shadow. On its edge, the sun sends beams of sunlight through dispersed clouds; it is raining there and a faint rainbow arcs.

The car gathers speed. This view, wide enough to contain more than one season, these luxuriant hedgerows, this sinewy country lane, Daniel beside her, frowning at a passing thought, driving her to a new home: for a moment it all gathers together to make Habiba a small, vague promise. She glimpses that her life has no shape, that it never will now have a shape she will really understand, but the empty world is somehow still abundant, and unfolds endlessly in airports, cars, country lanes, fields, rivers, rainbows, sheep, snow.

Taking out the phone Daniel gave her, Habiba finds Daniel’s original post of her unconscious on the beach: Shame on the governments of Europe. She scrolls through the comments, which become a waterfall of grey through her tears.

‘Everything okay?’ Daniel asks.

Habiba nods and sniffs. It takes a minute of scrolling to reach the end; she wipes her eyes clear with a sleeve. The last comment was posted several months ago; the storm of outrage coming to an abrupt stop with a single weeping emoji. She takes a selfie; she presses the comment button, adds the photograph and writes a comment of her own:

I am the woman in Daniel Verity’s photograph…

When she looks at the selfie, she sees only a stranger, a weary wretch with pink eyes; she blinks several times, releasing a single fresh tear down her cheek, and types the rest of her comment:

and I am still alive.

Rubbing the Saint Christopher against her dry lips, her thumb hovers over the post button.

Ordinary Evil

KC Barrientos

Miles Campbell was nothing but skin stretched drum-taut over wire the last time you saw him in ’98.

To say you were surprised when you Googled the local police station and stumbled upon his name among the recent Employee of the Month honorees would be an understatement. You never shared more than a general ed class with him in senior year — that art course with thirty-six enrollees, a miserable paint-splattered catch-all for the untalented or those uninterested in exerting more effort into the more enthralling electives — and so, aside from his proclivities for tormenting the substitute teacher with rainbow-colored splat balls on the ceiling and pencil shavings on her desk, you never got to know him well enough to predict whether he would have become local mayor or corner shop butcher or president of his own fuzzy sock company.

Still, once you had squinted at his strong-jawed portrait on the Schenectady PD website and then squinted some more at his incongruously beefy portraits with his wife and toddlers on Facebook, you bit the bullet and messaged him privately rather than shooting off your original inquiry into the black hole of the main SPD email address.

It’s good to hear from you, man, he writes back within a day. That sounds like the type of story they should be covering in the news out here. I’m glad you reached out. I feel like I remember you, feels like we had some good times at school or something. What class did we share again?

That is how, three days later at half past four in the afternoon, you find yourself performing the most complicated back-slap-handshake ritual with a man you haven’t seen in seven years.

“Hey! What’s up, chico!” he crows exuberantly as you shake out your hand. “Still trying to keep it loco?”

You swallow down your retort: It’s Eddie de Porres to you, not “chico.” With a thin-lipped, tenuous smile, you proffer instead, “You still remember some of your high school Spanish.”

“Eh, nothing more than a word here or there. All the ingredients for tacos, though — that I know.” He waves off one of his colleagues on a smoke break peeping round the corner of the tired, sandy brick station. Then he unlocks the cruiser and swings a leg inside, with one hand gripping the roof of the vehicle. You follow suit, sliding into the passenger seat and inhaling the stale scent of kevlar and gunpowder as he fires up the engine to drive you through his daily haunts.

As you roll up to a yellow at the intersection where you used to grab bagels on your way home, you find that precious little has changed. Fresh reflective lane paint glints up at you, but aside from that, the same sagging trees and huddled shops slip sluggishly past your window. One of the corner shops that used to hawk vintage wares now stands boarded up with two teens leaning cock-kneed against the wall.

Miles flicks his fingers at you from where they are resting on the gear shift. “It’s been too long, man. What’s new in the — in the news reporting world?”

You could regale him with anecdotes of your stint interning at the heels of dusty-ballcapped cameramen and five a.m. weather reporters in their stilettos and windbreakers, but then that would mean explaining how you sent out seventy-three applications and received a rejection from the coveted entry-level position of coffee-fetching assistant the year after you graduated.

You glance at the side of his face: his barely trimmed beard, the ruddy complexion beneath flax curls, the beginnings of crow’s feet crowning his eyes when he laughs loudly at every half-hearted joke you tell. He has the air of someone who found long ago what he’d been meant to do all along, patrolling the streets like a familiar guardian and waving at townies while receiving commendation for the difference he makes in the community.

So instead, you tell him in halting bits how you ended up at the independent culture magazine you write for now.

“Independent culture?” He sounds out the phrase. “How’s that?”

“Our coverage is less about daily news and more about thoughtful pieces on the various subcultures that have proliferated in and around the Albany area,” you reply. “Our head writer, Ridhi, produced this fantastic cover feature last year on the college Bhangra dance teams and how they’re a unique blend of American and Desi culture that isn’t replicated anywhere else.”

“Desi,” says Miles. “That’s like Bollywood, right? I always enjoyed those dance bits in the movies. Interesting, interesting.” As he hangs a left, he rolls down his window to wave and holler in greeting at a grandfather on a street corner. “And what about you, amigo? You guys do that — um — Bollywood-type dance thing with your familia?”

“Eddie’s fine.” You do so wish he would refrain from the Spanglish. You and papá may indulge in it from time to time, but this is different. “You’re probably thinking about ballet folklórico. That’s more of a Mexican thing.”

Miles raises his brows at you, nonplussed.

“I’m Venezuelan,” you inform him.

From his blank visage, the distinction seems to fly over his head. Still, he smiles. “Must be why you look so white!” he exclaims. “I swear, I never would’ve thought you were Spanish until that day I heard you talking lightning-fast with your mom. Or was that your sister?”

You judiciously steer the conversation away from the matter of whether Venezuelans, in short order, look white or not; all your life you’ve only been surrounded by the de Porres clan, gray-eyed and coffee-haired, and only met some distant cousins of the darker variety on Día de Tres Reyes Magos when you were too small to tell the difference. Mamá had swiftly dissuaded you of the notion of commingling with them on the regular.

Next year, Deo and Nelsy aren’t coming to our house for Tres Magos, Eddie. No, don’t fuss. You know I don’t approve of how wild and bratty they acted last time. Remember, we’re different from that side of the family. We’re different from your father’s side. I’m raising you properly.

Of course she raised you properly. A pharmaceutical litigation attorney, married to the medical billing supervisor she’d supported through college, your mamá ensured that you spoke your t’s without the countryside aspiration and enunciated all your s’s like the proper folk did at school.

You’ve got your father’s handsome face and my good skin, but that won’t be worth anything if you open your mouth and start talking just like your cousins, now, will it?

To his credit, Miles seems mildly impressed with your brief history of how your parents made it stateside and carved out a life for themselves. “And you?” he probes. “You always wanted to be…y’know, writing about people and stuff?”

“Yes,” you admit, smiling back this time. “My last piece was about the Dominican barber shops on Central Avenue.” You didn’t know a lick of anything about hair at the time, nor about the easygoing gossip that accompanied the braiding and worship of steaming locks in the cramped comforts of those salons. With no small measure of fondness, you reminisce on the research you did with the accommodating shop-owners — tostones shoved into your hands, slurping up sancocho in the back with the boisterous, pearly-teethed guys.

“I’ve been begging Faith — that’s my boss — begging her for the chance to write a feature for one of our print editions this year,” you tell Miles. Only now has the chance tumbled into your lap with Ridhi away on maternity leave. Ridhi left you copious notes in her loopy cursive on the influx of college-age dealers from the Albany area lighting a simmering fire under anti-police sentiment in the district, but you have yet to glimpse evidence of that in the casual greetings Miles exchanged with residents at the station before you hopped into his car.

Ridhi balked from across Faith’s desk that last day before her leave when it was announced you would be taking over her brainchild. “You write a mean literary piece, don’t get me wrong,” Ridhi muttered, “but you’d wax poetic about rats overtaking New York City.” And then, as though to preclude the wild possibility of you mistaking that jab for a compliment, she added: “You’re a regular Pollyanna — if Pollyanna were born in the twenty-first century with a Windsor knot tied around your neck from the day you were dedicated.”

No matter. Ridhi has no control over which direction you end up taking the piece. Literary musings are as much your forte as they are your comfort zone, and you’re confident you can make Miles’ day with the locals sound literary enough if you find the right moments to milk. Either way, your abuela was so ecstatic when you broke the news to her that she set about making about ten thousand arepas in celebration.

“You telling me this is your first feature?” Miles echoes. “On our old station? Well, I’m honored. Look at you, Eddie, making it big in your writer world, huh! Would ya need to be recording me for an interview at the end of this whole thing? Grab some Thai, maybe, and have a debrief about how we do things down here at the SPD?”

“Some pithy quotes probably would be useful,” you allow him. “Thanks.”

“Aw, man! And do I get to be named in the article? Is that — you don’t need me anonymous, no nothing?”

“Unless you’re planning to tell me you’ve suddenly been promoted to deep undercover narcotics, I doubt it,” you quip back. That earns you a lazy grin from him.

You run through the possible titles in your head, now: The Unassuming Hero Behind the Badge. Guarding Home on the Streets. Rebuilding Bridges in a Distrustful Community, One Smile at a Time.

Miles stabs the air with a finger. “Narcotics—now there’s some lucky folks who actually get rewarded for the things they do, day in and day out.”

Your pen is at the ready, thirsting for an angle. “Do they get paid significantly more than beat cops?”

“I’m not a beat cop,” says Miles. When you pause, scrambling to rephrase, he takes your silence for doubt. “I’m not a beat cop. I got my own cruiser — had a partner for a while earlier this year, but he’s on medical leave — and I’m not the one out on the streets patrolling by foot.”

Beat cop with a car, you amend silently, with some amusement.

Miles goes on pontificating about the nuances of the various positions within the department. Those “suits and ties that deal with the FBI”— the detectives on cold cases, as you take it — he has no envy for. But it appears he could lecture at length on the injustices suffered by his fellow so-called “peace officers.”

“Peace officers, they call us, and yet we’re the ones facing down the unknown every day. You get a call, there’s a code and you think you know what you’re facing, but then next thing you know, the domestic turns into you staring down the barrel of a gun, and it’s a split-second thing, y’know? Bam! Bam!” He slams his palm down on the steering wheel, startling you. “Life or death, it’s a split-second decision between life or death, and then suddenly you’re on unpaid leave and your wife’s upset and your kids are crying and you don’t know when you’re getting back on the roll. If you’re getting back on the roll.” Miles swabs at his beard with the heel of his palm. “And then those guys in narcotics get loaded up with all the fancy gear they need and all the mission bonuses — you see them cruising around after in their Beamers—and they don’t have to do hardly anything of anything in between.”

“Well, your job sounds just as tough as anyone else’s,” you acknowledge.

Miles turns to you with a sigh. “Not just as tough. Tougher. Look at you, Eddie. Going into barber shops and sitting at your laptop, typing up for the paper, and then you get to collect your six-figure paycheck and wander on home early.”

Cheeks heating, heartbeat ratcheting up in indignation, you are stymied by which inaccuracy in his accusation to address. You are in the middle of debating whether to reveal how unpretentious and minimalistic your studio apartment downtown must be to keep up with the rising costs of living, and how hours upon hours must be poured into perfecting your pieces long after you have trudged out of the office, when Miles’ scanner crackles to life.

Ten-sixteen on the corner of Ashby and Lippert. One unit requested.

You flip through your moleskin notebook as furtively as you can, miffed that you didn’t think to memorize more of the police codes before today’s ride-along.

This is 2065. We’ll take the 10-16. ETA two and a half minutes, someone else jabbers over the radio.

Ten-four, Carlisle. Be cautious.

Miles spies your fumbling from the corner of his eye. “Possible stolen vehicle,” he supplies for you. “Somebody reported it with suspicious individuals inside.”

You scribble the information down on a random blank page, eager to cover your moment of incompetence.

But Miles has already forgotten his grudge against you and your soft-handed type. Shooting you a conspiratorial grin, he mimes zipping his lips. “I won’t tattle on you to your boss, Eddie. Relax. Today’s your first ride-along. Everything gets easier with time. For me, it’s like second nature.” His chest puffs up a bit. “You know how many codes are in the manual? Close to two hundred. Two hundred. I memorized ’em all within a week of getting to the academy.”

You can’t help the small, inquisitive sound that escapes you. Back in the day, Miles couldn’t memorize a semester’s timetable to save his life.

“That’s impressive,” you say. “I’ll…I’m sure I’ll get familiarized with the codes as we go along. It’s just that I was staying up late editing my other piece. Sometimes these assignments arrive back to back to back.”

Miles grunts, somewhat distracted, but somehow the reaction rankles you as dismissive. Hunched next to a man who flunked algebra twice and yet decimates a pack of gum with ease while speeding toward uncertain danger day to day, you feel inexplicably defensive over the job you studied four long years and two undignified internships to acquire.

After another glance at you, Miles shrugs and flips on a switch overhead. A second later, the lightbar wails to life.

“What are you doing?” you demand.

“Going to check out the scene,” Miles says, lips quirked and cocky. “I’ve been at my desk all morning pushing paperwork. Gotta get the high somehow, yeah? Besides, it’ll make the ride worth it for ya. You’re lucky you’re getting in on the action in the first hour of your ride-along.”

More weary brick buildings and quivering maples zip by as Miles skirts the curb and streaks down the several blocks that separate you from the corner of Ashby and Lippert. For a moment, as an out-of-place Benz screeches to let the cruiser blow past an intersection that’s blazing red, you understand the thrill of the hunt that drew Miles to the police academy. With the thrum of your heartbeat syncing up with the war cry of the sirens overhead and round-mouthed faces of alarm blurring by on the sidewalk, you realize how much easier it is to explain the adrenaline rush of descending like an army of avenging angels on the armed suspect than it is to explain the high you ride late at night typing up an eloquent homage to the transcultural roots of Cuban vieja ropa.

Miles’ radio crackles several more times as he careens toward the scene. You don’t catch any codes exchanged, but from what you can infer, the voices of multiple units are commenting on what they see.

Possibly hostile suspect. Units on standby.

“This is 2047. Just arrived on the scene,” Miles interjects into the radio chatter.

When you pull up to the curb and you make as though to unclick your seatbelt, Miles halts you with the back of his hand flat against your chest.

“Vehicle’s occupied, remember?” he murmurs. “Suspect could be armed and dangerous. I think it’s best if you stay inside for now. Keep watch through the windshield and take notes, if you want, but just don’t pull out your phone and start recording, ’kay? That’s what we got the dashcam for.”

“I wouldn’t share it anywhere. The piece is on a deadline, and if it takes forever to pull up the footage, I wouldn’t want to be hounding you at the station,” you try to reason with him. You’re uncertain of how to remind an officer of the law that said law permits anyone the right to film what they need to in public police encounters.

“I know, yeah, I know, but I’m thinking about your safety here, man,” Miles replies. “If you’re too busy trying to get a good video and too slow to take care of yourself if the suspect comes in this direction, that’s on me, you know?”

You eye him dubiously. Considering that he wasn’t dispatched, and yet Miles still flew down here with a civilian in tow, you begin to wonder if it was prudent for him to have dragged you to the scene at all.

You offer a noncommittal hum. Miles exhales with relief and pitches himself out the driver’s side, adjusting his utility belt and waving at you through the glass.

Three other police cruisers and about five or six other officers have swarmed the beat-up caper-green station wagon parallel parked on the residential street. Two officers are leaning down inside the open driver’s side window, one with a proprietary hand on his side piece and the other with his arms akimbo as he nods at Miles and a few other newcomers in greeting.

It’s nigh impossible to discern the driver’s voice in the conversation. The officer leading the traffic stop — you assume the one with his hands lax on his hips — flicks his head impatiently to the side. I won’t ask you again. Step out of the vehicle, he raises his voice enough for you to make out.

The station wagon is old enough that the rear windshield stretches tall and wide, clear of tint. You spy the shock of curls on top of the driver’s head, the death grip of his long fingers around the steering wheel, the shorter afro on the head of the woman gesticulating beside him. Is she remonstrating with her man? With the officer? Either way, neither one is capitulating.

That’s it. I gave you enough chances, the officer in charge snaps. He darts out a hand over the rolled-down window and jams open the lock from inside. He wrenches the door open and dives inside, hands clawed, fingers fisting in the frayed hoodie of the driver. The black man ducks his head just in time to avoid bashing his skull on the car frame but flings out his hands too late to catch himself before the pavement meets his cheek and tears at the prey-soft skin there.

Get up. Stop play-acting. The one who had stood with his palm resting on the butt of his gun wrestles the driver to his feet.

“Call mama! Bernice, call mama!” the man hollers.

The woman tumbles out the passenger side door. Your heartbeat gallops, thundering in your ears. You wish you could shout at her to stay inside, but your vocal cords have been severed.

You know you should be seizing something from your pocket. Your messenger bag, nestled at your feet. Your phone — to call the police — but —

The black man is shoved against the side of the station wagon with an audible impact to his ribs. He keeps shouting to the woman, Bernice, Bernice, and the woman keeps shrieking back, one arm flailing for attention for the officers to let him up.

Give us two days, I said! My paycheck’s coming in! Stop! Stop! He’s bleeding, you’ll hurt him if you —

It all happens in a whirlwind. The driver plunges his hand into the pocket of his sweatpants. Miles bursts into view out of nowhere, muscles bulging against his uniform, firearm drawn and locked on the man. Three more identical bodies whip out their sidearms and flank him. Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, don’t move! Hands where we can see them! Put your —

“My phone! I’m trying to reach my phone! You can see my pocket — she’s got my papers, my proof, everything —”

Knees crack against the asphalt. The butt of a gun slams into his nape. Miles follows him down to the ground, shin pressed between shoulder blades, another officer crowding in to rein in the man’s trembling arms and elbows in a vise grip and wrench his shoulders back.

The man erupts in a sharp cry. He makes a horrid, gurgling sound and jerks on the damp street.

His woman sobs: these hitching, raw sounds that rend the air like a baby crying. It’s only then that you notice the toddler in her arms, bawling.

Another officer draws back his boot to drive it deep into the man’s ribs, once, twice, again and again. The glass does nothing to muffle the sound of bones cracking and organs bruising.

Your fingers shake as you finally unglue yourself from your marionette position. Your phone is on you somewhere — but it’s too late.

The officers who haul the driver to his feet pass directly by your passenger door as they drag him cuffed and stumbling to one of the cruisers. Carmine rivers leech slowly down the side of his face. One cheek swells, blooming flesh-red under broken skin. The man looks no more than a year or two older than you.

Good. That’s good. No men down. With the radio to someone’s mouth, hand cocked again on the hip: Suspect in custody. All units stand down.

Hands slap. Someone bro-shakes Miles, grinning. You sly dog. You wanted in on this, didn’t you?

Did you see how he was bucking and squealing?

We gotta get on the cams later. Connor’s gonna shoot himself that he missed this on his day off.

More back-slapping. Through static, you register the guffaws.

Miles saunters back to his cruiser before the rest of his colleagues have cleared the scene. Your tongue is like a block of oak, tasting like a desert, as your brain rolls around in molasses and tries to feel for what to say to him.

Miles is cranking up the heat and warming up his hands, intermittently flexing them in front of the vents and blowing on his cupped palms, when you finally work up the courage to speak. “Was the car stolen, then?”

Miles glances askance at you, eyes round, as if only remembering your presence now. “No,” he says, sounding as though the truth was shocked right out of him. “No,” he says again, more calmly. “Dude was driving around on an expired registration. Couldn’t even come up with a driver’s license when Finnick asked him.”

When he feels the weight of you staring at the side of his face, Miles turns to you, mouth set grimly and head shaking. “His excuse was that he’d gotten out of county jail four days ago. Four days ago! The stupid decisions these bozos make instead of just heading to the DMV and taking care of their business like the rest of us do. You’d think, after spending almost a year in lockup, he’d have decided to finally become a good citizen, y’know? Can you imagine throwing away a chance like that? Can you believe that?”

The truth is, you can believe it. You remember from the grapevine that it took your cousin Deo six months to raise the money to reinstate his license, and even then it was another several weeks to convince him to set foot back inside the DMV because he’d heard from your other cousin in Indiana that they were starting to demand social security cards to renew the drivers.

Something icy settles over you, like the stripping away of a cloak you’d never known was pinned around your shoulders until today.

Through numb lips, you ask: “Well, what was he — what was his charge? What was he in jail for, anyway?”

“Finnick said it was possession. Weed, probably.” Miles snorts. “His whole car reeked of it, honestly. Carting around his wife and kid in that trash? Unbelievable.”

Miles never even ventured near enough the open door to catch a whiff of anything. He’d tackled the man to the ground near the manhole cover in the center of the street. You sit there, rabbit-still and frozen.

“But he’ll get out, right?” You swallow. “He’ll just have to do the paperwork to get his stuff renewed, and then he’ll be back out, right?”

Miles’ look is incredulous. “He assaulted two police officers today. That’s seven years, minimum.”

Bile rushes up your esophagus. In the middle of Miles speaking, you shove open the door and empty the contents of your stomach onto the pavement. You hang there with watery eyes, feeling wrung-out like a muddy rag, and swim in disgust as acrid as the wet chunks that splattered back toward you from the asphalt.

Miles pats you on the back with sympathy as you clamber shakily back inside the cruiser. “Don’t worry, that’s seven years that menaces like him will be off the street. No need to get all twisted up about it.”

You are helpless to offer anything in return but a queasy shake of your head.

“No?” says Miles. “What was it, then? The smell was that bad?” He fishes for a bottle of water from the console and cracks it open for you, barking out a laugh. “I know just what you need to clear the taste from your mouth. What do you say to some of that Thai now, huh?”

That night in the gloom of your bathroom where you slump on the toilet cover, you worry the edge of your phone. The screen has remained black and useless since the last fruitless call you made to the the city halloffice of the attorney general.

You rouse yourself. You stand to flick on the light, and then, still swaying on your feet and bracing yourself against the vanity, you tear page after page out of your moleskin notebook. On a fresh line, you press your bleeding pen to the paper and begin to write: An Ordinary Evil in Our Streets.

It's Nothing, Really

John Barrett Lee

Dinner was over and the plates had been cleared, but we were still sitting there, held in that slack moment between the dregs and the bill. The pub was low-ceilinged and nautical, its yellowing ropes and framed chart of Cardigan Bay lining the walls. Background chatter in English and Welsh lulled us, and the cooling air held the smell of grilled fish. One of the windows was open and I could hear the waves breaking on the shingle of the Parrog across the coast road, steady and close.

Elio, our youngest, was slumped against Monica's shoulder, mouth open, his sandbag weight pressing into her. One arm hung boneless at his side. She shifted to keep his head from slipping, a movement so practised it barely registered.

Anita wriggled beside me and pressed her hand into her side.

"My tummy hurts," she said.

She didn't sound frightened. Just weary. They'd had a day of sun and sugar, eaten too much, moved too fast, ignored every warning to calm down. Her nose and cheeks were pink, her hair stiff with suncream and salt. She prodded the spot beneath her striped t-shirt and frowned.

Monica leaned in at once. "Dove ti fa male?"

Anita pointed under her ribs. "It hurts here."

"How long?" Monica asked.

"Since before."

"Since the beach?"

Anita nodded, her breath catching halfway through, like she'd misjudged the movement. I felt the familiar tightening then — the moment when something small threatened to become a thing. "She's probably got a stitch," I said. "It's nothing. She does this sometimes."

Anita slid closer to her mother without saying anything.

Monica's mouth tightened as if she were about to argue, then she turned back to Anita, putting a hand on her side, then her forehead. "She doesn't have a fever, but she's not herself," she said. "I don't like it."

"She's exhausted," I said. "We all are. Sun all day, heavy dinner. Of course she's wiped out."

Monica didn't move her hand. "Anita says it hurts," she said quietly, glancing at me sideways — a look I'd grown used to.

"I know, but —" I whispered. "We've both had a drink. Elio should be in bed. We're not driving twenty miles to A&E for a tummy ache. Not unless we have to."

She looked at me properly then. "You Brits think avoiding the doctor is character building. Pain isn't a test. It's information."

I almost smiled. We'd had this conversation before, in different kitchens, different countries. In her world, The Fever lurked in drafts and damp hair. You didn't wait for proof; you acted. I'd learned to translate this into fussing.

What can you expect, I thought, watching Anita lean into her mother, coming from a place where everyone puts their coats on at the end of September.

"I'll take her back," Monica said after a moment. "Get her washed, into bed. See how she is."

"That's all I'm saying," I replied. "If she's worse later, we deal with it then."

She straightened quickly, as if embarrassed, her lips pressed thin together. Then she looked at me with large brown eyes.

"Mi fa male la pancia, Daddy. My tummy's sick."

"I know, carina. You're just overtired." I brushed her dark hair back. "You'll feel better once you lie down."

Anita nodded glumly. I believed it enough.

They gathered their things — fleeces, bags, toys, the usual scatter — and waited for me to move. I rose, kissed Anita's head and then Elio's. They smelled of the sea.

"I'll be back soon," I said. "One more drink and sort the bill. You ok to walk back?"

"Don't be long, Will," Monica said, heaving Elio into his pushchair.

"I won't. Call me if you're worried."

The door closed behind them and the pub seemed to settle, as if relieved. I ordered another pint and paid the bill, then sat listening to the murmur of the Welsh I couldn't follow, and the wash of the sea. I thought about how thin the line was between paying attention and making a fuss. I took out my phone and read the thriller I hadn't touched since Gatwick, letting the sentences take me somewhere else.

I was still there half an hour later when a heavyset man wandered over from the bar. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and cropped hair, a grey hoodie pulled on against the evening chill. He moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who belonged there, who knew exactly where to stand without asking.

He stopped beside my table, nodded in greeting, and looked at me longer than politeness required. I became aware of the linen at my shoulders, the tapered chinos, the suede loafers — dressed for somewhere else.

"Rhys, isn't it?" I said, breaking the silence. "You used to work behind the bar in Pebbles."

He smiled at that, a flicker of recognition on his weathered face.

"You're Willy Harries," he said, with a wry smile. "Christ, you haven't changed. Still doing headstands on bars?"

"Only on special occasions."

I sipped my pint, trying not to betray my irritation at the nickname and the stubborn stickiness of the village ledger. I had a sudden picture of myself upside down on the bar, pissed on cider, blood rushing to my head, locals chanting my name in a tone between admiration and mockery.

"Just pulling your leg," Rhys said, clapping me on the shoulder and standing too close. "We're a bit old for that nonsense. Same again? Brains Dark, is it?"

"Cheers. Go on, then."

As he turned to the bar, I looked at the two women beside him, talking softly in Welsh. One regarded me with a quizzical look, as if trying to decide whether I had failed a test or was about to. She was very pale in the pub's low light, with thick black hair pulled back from her face, no effort made to tame it. She could have been thirty or fifty; it was hard to tell. She wore a purple fleece over a t-shirt and shorts — the clothes people from the coast put on without thinking, practical and unremarkable, as if she might head to the beach or the supermarket.

I was on the verge of introducing myself — the instinct rose automatically — and then stalled. It would have been a faux pas, I realized, to say my own name when she so clearly had one for me already. The moment stretched. No one filled it.

"Hello, William," she said at last. "It's been a long time."

The way she said it — not accusing, not warm — made it worse. Familiarity settled in without bringing anything useful.

"I'm sorry," I said, and then, because that wasn't quite it, added, "I know your face, but I just can't place you."

She nodded as if she'd expected to hear it, and said nothing.

The smaller woman who'd been silent until now shifted beside her. She was slighter with a rather long face and grey-streaked sandy hair. She too wore the all-purpose outfit. Leaning in, she said something in Welsh. I caught only "toilet".

Across north Pembrokeshire, in villages like Newport and Cilgerran, they switched between languages without noticing. I'd only ever had one. Raised in Fishguard town — English house, English school, Radio 4 instead of Radio Cymru in the kitchen. A few miles away along the coast I was a stranger.

The dark-haired woman inclined her head again and followed the blonde one away from the table, our exchange closed without ceremony.

Rhys returned with the beers, setting them down carefully.

"So," he said, easing himself into a chair and picking up where he'd left off, "last I heard you were building trains in Italy."

I was used to having my past compressed into rural shorthand — You knows Willy Harries. Dr. Harries's boy. Builds trains in Europe. Likes doing headstands.

At least Rhys had got the country right.

"Signalling systems," I said.

"Rome, is it?"

"Turin. Up North."

"Right," he said slowly, consulting his mental atlas. "Been there a while, then."

"Twenty-one years. Got on a graduate scheme."

He whistled as if I'd been the brains behind a SpaceX launch.

"How about you," I said. "What've you been doing?"

"We've got the campsite at Nevern. And the fishing charter."

"Hard work, I expect."

"In the season, yes. Keeps me out of trouble. So you're back now, are you? Pembrokeshire pull got you at last?"

"On holiday. We try to get back every summer. Mum's still in Fishguard. First time in Newport for a while, though."

"Hasn't changed, has it?"

"Hardly. Those two women with you," I said. "The blonde one — that's Rhian, right? Used to work in the village shop."

"Yeah," he said. "My partner."

"And the dark one?" I said. "I can't place her. She looks familiar, though."

Rhys looked at me for a moment then sipped his pint.

"She knows you, boy."

My shoulders tensed. There was a drawing-in across my chest, as if I'd misjudged the space I was sitting in, and I felt the urge to be back in the cottage. I was aware of the pause that followed — long enough for a question to form, not long enough to say it. Her name. Then the women were back, standing beside us, close enough that the question no longer fit. Asking now would have meant insisting.

"Smoke?" Rhian said to Rhys, already zipping up her fleece. Then to me: "You still smoke, Willy? You used to have the best hash."

"Not since the kids were born," I said. "No time or disposable income."

"Go on," she said. "A few puffs won't kill you."

Rhys was already on his feet, reaching into his pocket. The decision moved ahead of me, so I followed.

Outside it was dark. Ten-thirty, maybe later. The coal-black sea swallowed what light there might have been. It was a proper moonless coastal dark. We crossed the road and walked along the low stone wall beyond the last dim streetlight and the smaller slipway opened up to our right — a narrow chute of concrete sloping down to the beach.

The tide was out. Pebbles shone faintly below, and the ropes of the dinghies tied up on the grass bank above tapped softly in the onshore breeze like the same recurring thought.

Rhys skinned up by the light of Rhian's phone, head bent, tongue between his teeth. It was a practised, delicate movement. He licked, sealed, twisted the end, and struck a lighter cupped against the wind. The first drag flared orange against his beard.

He passed it to Rhian. She took it, inhaled deeply, then squinted at me through the smoke.

"You still building trains in France?"

"Italy," Rhys said mildly, before I could answer. "And it's not trains. Signals."

"Signals what?" she laughed, and then switched to Welsh. I caught something sharp like "Mae e'n fancy nawr."

My neck prickled at being the butt of a private joke.

"I don't understand," I said, a little too tartly, resisting the urge to add, "Stick to English, for God's sake."

"I don't think you ever did," the dark woman said quietly.

The joint came to me. I hesitated too long before taking it. The smoke was harsher and grassier than I remembered. I coughed once, then steadied myself and tried again. It tasted acrid and faintly chemical — not like the soft, mellow hash of my youth. Maybe I was out of practice.

The buzz came on gradually. My mind retreated into my head, and sounds arrived a half-second late. The boat ropes kept knocking. Someone laughed back near the pub. The sea breathed in and out on the shingle shore.

For a moment it felt like the old closeness — the shared circle, the passing hand to hand. As the flare of the lighter briefly lit the dark woman's face, for a second it was the same light, close enough to brush against. But the circuit didn't close — a speck of solder was missing. What was her name?

Rhys and Rhian drifted away first. No announcement. They just began walking along the wall, talking low, crunching on the pebbles. Rhys reached for her hand without looking at her and she let him lead her into the blackness.

I watched them go, expecting them to circle back.

They didn't.

The dark woman stayed where she was, leaning against the slipway rail, looking out at the black water.

Now it was just the two of us.

We climbed back up the slope to the road, but instead of leading me towards the pub and the cottages beyond, she headed west along the Parrog, where the seafront houses thinned and the road narrowed into a coastal path. I made to leave.

"Not that way," she said, without looking at me. "Come on."

"I should get back."

She slowed, just enough that I could catch her up. "We're not finished."

The weed sat oddly with me — not heavy, but enough to draw me inward, to stretch the edges. As we walked, I kept almost recognizing the path: the bend in the hedgerow, the dip toward the water. Brambles and gorse snagged at my chinos and I had to tug them free. The grass was slick with dew and I could feel damp seeping through the suede of my loafers. Each memory rose and stalled before it fully arrived.

"I haven't been up here in years," I said. "Twenty, maybe."

She nodded, as if that answered a question she hadn't asked. "Do you ever think about who you were here?"

"Not much," I said. "It was half a lifetime ago. You move on."

"Do you?"

"I did." I glanced at her. "What about you?"

She told me, obliquely. Married young. Divorced now. Worked locally as a carer. Her son was grown and had moved on, as sons did. She didn't elaborate. Just kept walking.

"Mine are still small," I said. "I started late."

"You were busy."

My eyes had settled into the darkness and I took in the curve of her nose, the way she carried her weight as if leaning into bad weather. Her deep lilting voice — vowels lifting where mine had long since flattened — sparked recognition in my body, though my mind lagged behind. I tried to fix the memory, but it hovered out of reach. I began to explain myself. Bristol. Milan. Turin. Hundreds of names that slipped away. I heard how thin it sounded and carried on anyway.

Then we walked in silence for a bit. At last, she said, almost lightly, "Do you remember what you said before you left?"

I shook my head.

"You said you couldn't wait to get out of this hole," she said. "Full of bumpkins. You laughed."

The memory landed as posture — the careless ease of it. I winced.

We stopped and I took her hand before I'd quite decided to.

"I was an arse back then," I said. "I was… I don't know. I thought I didn't fit in here."

"You didn't. Posh townie from Fishguard."

I bristled. "Not just that. I thought I was… destined for something else."

"You were."

She didn't pull away. She said, almost as if she were asking about the weather, "Do you still listen to Faithless?"

"Faithless. Jesus." I gave a small laugh. "I had that album, No Roots. Played it to death. Dunno what happened to it."

"I borrowed it."

I looked at her properly then. "Did you?"

She shrugged, as if it were nothing. "You never asked for it back."

The pressure of the missing thing tightened. I studied her face, trying to force it into place.

"Go on," I said. "Put me out of my misery. Tell me your name."

She tilted her head slightly. "No."

I heard her inhale.

"If you don't know," she said, "that's on you."

With a sudden rush of certainty, I said, "Carys."

"Not quite."

"Your dad… he had a cattle farm at Crosswell, I remember that."

She looked at me for a moment. "You got that right, at least," she said. "He's still there. Milking every morning."

The relief collapsed into something sharper. I let go of her hand.

"I'm not doing this," I said, retreating into the sharpness of it. "This… game. Whatever it is."

She didn't flinch, as if this too had been anticipated. She watched me with the patient stillness of the landscape, then turned and began to walk back down the path. After a second, I followed.

I'm not sure how long it was before we found Rhys and Rhian again. Or they found us. They were in the Parrog car park, talking low, hands in pockets. No one asked where anyone had been. The four of us folded back together and walked down toward the shingle.

The tide was going out. At the far eastern end of the Parrog, beyond the reach of streetlights, a fire burned low and wide. A portable speaker thudded in the sand — bass-heavy, repetitive. The beat arrived a fraction late, as if it had to cross the water first.

We drifted towards it.

Up close the shapes separated — hoodies, bare legs, cans flashing in the firelight. Someone had dragged down sofa cushions. Pallets were stacked and burning. The fire snapped and flickered, resin popping. Heat pulsed against my shins. Smoke rolled low across the stones and then lifted, bent sideways by the breeze off the water, catching in my throat.

A tall boy near the fire was swaying, laughing hard at something that didn't seem funny. He blinked, took a step, missed it.

He went down shoulder first, knees folding underneath him.

There was a bark of laughter.

"Fucking hell, Jay."

He rolled onto his side and retched. The sound was violent, cutting through the bass. The smell hit a second later — sour and immediate. The wet patch gleamed briefly in the firelight.

"Jesus," a girl said.

"He's fine," a boy said.

Jay vomited again, darker this time, spreading across the stones.

"Mate, that's grim."

"He's shaking."

"He's not shaking, he's smashed half a bottle of Smirnoff."

He was shaking. Small, fast tremors running through his shoulders. His teeth began to chatter, sharp and small against the music.

"He's cold," the girl said. "He's actually cold."

"Don't fucking start."

He tried to push himself up and slipped in what he'd brought up. His face turned toward us. His eyes were open but unfocused.

The dark-haired woman stepped half a pace forward.

"He needs to be on his side properly," she said. Not loud. Just clear. "So he doesn't choke."

None of us moved. Beyond the fire the tide lay black, the shingle hissing faintly as the water shifted.

Another boy crouched halfway, then stood again. "He's alright. Just let him sleep."

The woman watched him a second longer. Long enough to see the rhythm of his breathing. Then she looked at me.

Not asking. Not accusing.

It would have meant stepping in. If I touched him, he would be mine.

I took two steps forward. The stones shifted under my shoes. I crouched, one hand half-reaching toward his shoulder.

"He should be on his side," I said.

The boy near his head shrugged. "He's fine."

My hand hovered a second longer.

"It's nothing, alright?" the girl said, louder, perhaps to me.

I counted my breaths. He's fine, I repeated.

The fire collapsed inward with a hollow crack. A gust lifted sparks into the dark and drove smoke straight into our faces. The boy's trainers scraped uselessly on the stones.

"Come on," the woman said.

She turned back toward the car park. Rhys and Rhian were already ahead, silhouettes against the dim orange glow of the car park light.

After a second, I stood up and followed her up the beach, the music droning behind us as if nothing had happened.

Rhys and Rhian peeled off with barely a word, and the woman and I were alone again.

"I need to get back," I said. "To the kids. God knows what time it is."

The village had that closed, post-midnight stillness now. We walked in silence up Parrog Road, past the village stores, past the sleeping cottages with their curtains drawn tight. As we reached the caravan site, the gate stood open. An empty picnic table sat on the lawn beneath a sodium lamp, its surface washed yellow.

"I need to sit a minute," I said. "Clear my head."

She didn't argue. We crossed over and sat opposite each other. The air smelled of cut grass and seaweed.

"You're a carer," I said after a moment. "That kid. Do you think he'll be all right?"

She leaned back, looking past me rather than at me. "He won't be the first boy to have a white-out," she said. "I've rolled you onto your side before now."

There was no smile in it.

We sat a while longer. A light flickered on briefly in one of the caravans and went out again.

"That summer after I graduated," I said, because the quiet needed filling. "God. I was insufferable."

"It's a long time ago," she said.

"Pembrokeshire felt like a waiting room," I went on. "Booze. Drugs. Same pubs from Fishguard to Nevern. I thought I was already gone."

"You were."

A flash of blue light skimmed past us on the road towards the Parrog and disappeared.

We rose and made our way back to the road. The wind lifted off the water. A trace of smoke drifted past — or maybe it had come from my jacket. It lingered as we walked.

"I remember you at Pebbles," I said. "I can see you stacking chairs the night the neighbours called the police on the lock-in. Everyone legged it out the back door. You couldn't stop laughing."

She walked a few paces without answering.

"I drove you home," I said. "On the back road past Carn Ingli. You wouldn't let me put the headlights on full beam."

"You were terrified," she said. "Thought the police were after you."

"I was wasted. I shouldn't have been anywhere near a car."

"You kept checking the mirror."

The road bent. The hedge brushed my shoulder.

"I thought nothing here mattered," I said after a moment. "Any of it."

She kept walking.

"When I heard you'd gone to Italy," she said evenly, "I cried until my sides hurt."

The words landed without drama. No accusation in them. That made them worse.

For a second I was aware of her hand close to mine again, the old ease of it threatening to re-form, muscle memory returning before sense.

As we came round the bend before the cottage, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

I almost ignored it.

It vibrated again. And again.

I pulled it out of my pocket. 01:03. Two signal bars. A cold white glow lit the screen.

Eight missed calls. Monica.

Two from an unknown local number.

WhatsApp messages stacked one on top of the other.

Where are you?

She's worse.

Call me.

Will.

The weed drained out of me like a plug had been pulled.

"I need to go," I said, already stepping away from her. "Something's happened."

She seemed to clock the urgency in my voice.

The cottage lights were on. All of them. Too bright for that hour.

She stopped at the gate.

I didn't ask her in.

I pushed the door open.

Monica was in the sitting room, still dressed. Anita was curled tight against her on the sofa, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Elio lay asleep in a tangle of cushions on the floor, oblivious.

Anita's face looked wrong. Not flushed now — greyed, drawn tight across the cheekbones. When she saw me she tried to straighten and couldn't.

"It hurts, Daddy," she said. Not complaining. Just stating it.

Monica looked at me once. No theatrics. Just a flat, exhausted reckoning.

"Dove sei stato, Will? I've been calling you. You smell like a bonfire."

"There was no signal," I said. It sounded rehearsed.

She let it hang there.

"Anita's been sick twice. The pain's moved."

"Where?"

Anita shifted her hand lower, to the right side of her belly.

The room seemed to contract.

"Since when?"

"Half an hour. Maybe more. She woke up crying. Then she started shaking."

I pressed my palm gently to her forehead. Warm. Not blazing. But wrong.

"Ok," I said. This time there was no hedge in it. "We're not waiting."

I dialled 999. Location. Seven years old. Symptoms. No known allergies. Yes, the gate's open.

Monica fetched fleeces and her bag. I lifted Anita into my arms. She felt lighter than she should have. Slack, but burning through her t-shirt.

"It's ok," I said into her hair. "I've got you. Daddy's here."

I sat down on the sofa and held her against me, rocking her without thinking. Monica stood close, one hand pressed flat against Anita's back as if to anchor her there.

We didn't speak.

Then, faint at first, the siren began to rise. It took me a second to realise it wasn't coming down from Haverfordwest. It was coming up from the Parrog.

"Come on," I said.

We stepped out onto the gravel, Anita in my arms, Monica behind me with Elio slumped on her shoulder. Once again, we found ourselves held in a slack moment with nothing to say. Then, blue light washed across the cottage windows and over the hedge.

The ambulance swung into the drive.

The paramedic took a look at her and nodded once.

"Likely appendix," he said quietly.

Monica let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding. I pulled the blanket tighter around Anita's shoulders. She squashed her clammy cheek against mine. It smelled of vomit.

"You were right," I said, too quickly, the words sticking in my throat. "I'm sorry."

She didn't look at me. "I shouldn't have had to convince you."

A strand of Anita's hair was caught in her mouth, but she hadn't noticed.

She turned away, as if the sentence had cost her more than she meant to show. With Elio half asleep on her shoulder, she busied herself with his shoes until a paramedic guided her into the front of the ambulance.

The other paramedic took Anita from my arms and laid her onto the stretcher in the back.

"Where are you, Daddy?" she said, her voice pleading as the straps tightened across her chest.

"I'm here," I said quickly, climbing in after them. "Daddy's right here."

They locked the stretcher into place.

I glanced back. The woman was standing at the gate, half in shadow, arms folded tight across herself. The blue light passed over her face.

Then the rear doors came together with a solid metallic thud.

The air inside smelled sharply of disinfectant and warmed plastic. I took Anita's damp little hand. My jaw tightened. The strip light above us swam, then steadied. Anita winced, and I realised I was gripping her too tightly. I forced my fingers to loosen.

The engine revved. The cottage fell back.

We passed the turning for Feidr Ganol. The same narrow tree-lined lane where we'd parked that night when I was twenty-one and thought I could outrun these hedges, these fields, this smallness.

It came back then, raw and unbidden. The smell of the old car — mildew and stale tobacco smoke. Her hip pressed against mine, the skin pale and startlingly soft in the dawn light, her thick hair against my cheek. I remembered my finger catching on a thin, puckered ridge of white tissue just above the hip bone.

​"What's that?" I'd asked.

​"Old surgery," Nerys had said, not moving. "It's nothing, really."

Nerys.

I'd believed her. It was easier to believe what caused the least friction.

A week later I was gone.

​The ambulance lurched, throwing me against the metal casing of the interior. When I looked back through the window, the blue light still swept the gate, but no one was there.

UNBRIDLED JOY

Paul Farwell

My shoes don’t fit. Tell that to Cooper and Cooper says no one cares about your shoes. I care. Born with bad feet. One shoe loose, the other tight. Damn. Can’t stand right. Can’t sit. Can’t go anywhere right. But explain that to Cooper. Cooper don’t listen. He look down at me. You have ugly shoes, he say. Too bad. 

Cooper talks to everybody. Everybody think Cooper funny. I don’t think. In the cafeteria, yesterday, supposed to be a special day. The woman from Billerica comes to tell us about the heart, what is close to the heart. Talks about what matters most. Talks Unbridled Joy to us. That’s what the sign in hallway says – Unbridled Joy, 2:30pm. Cafeteria. She has a green dress and black shoes. Cooper and others laugh. I turn around to the big table, say – Cooper, Please Shut Up! The woman is talking about the heart!

Cooper says – what you care? You need shoes, not a heart. 

His friends think this funny.

Woman from Billerica don’t laugh. Is something wrong? she say. Asks if she should come back another time. I say, no, no, no. I want to hear what you say. 

The world is big, she tell us. Time is short. You sure you want to hear? 

Yes, I say, I want to hear. I want Unbridled Joy. 

She has cheeks like tulips have petals.

She talks and Cooper talks. Cooper talks louder. Can’t stand it. I get up, go to the big round table where Cooper is. Put finger on my lip. SSSHHHHHHHHH!!!, I say. Why should I? he say. I have the right to talk. I say, no, Cooper. You shithead! SSSHHHHHHHHH!!! I want to hear the woman talk.

Supervisor comes. He tells me, Lester, use your words. But I use words. I say shithead. Shithead a word. Cooper is a shithead. 

Lester, supervisor says, not those words. Use good words. 

Shithead seems right to me. When I say shithead, I mean shithead. I mean Cooper.

Cooper laugh at me.

Supervisor puts hands on my hands. Says come with me. I say, no. Cooper still laughing. I pick up pepper shaker, throw it at Cooper. Bounce off head. He still laughs. Pepper shaker is like words. Words can bounce off someone’s head.

I never yell, never throw. Now I yell and throw. Lester, they say, you need to stay with yourself. Rest and be quiet. Tomorrow, Lester, you feel better. Tomorrow you go anywhere you want. You go anytime. Go to Brooklyn. Go to Buffalo, see your family. But you can’t go to cafeteria. And can’t throw pepper. 

I know problems. Can’t sleep. Walk around all night. My thoughts don’t fit my body. I think shoes. I think money. I know good money buys good shoes. The shoes that make my feet nimble. Good shoes. Light shoes. Shoes that make you forget you walk.

I have money once. My father brings me here on last day of school. He say to me, first we go to bank, get money for you. Write check. We bring check here to this Baxter House office with the wooden doors and smog glass. You have new home here, Lester. Father put check on counter. Baxter office take check, give us the paper. I remember the paper, white on top, pink on bottom. I sign the paper, father sign paper. They tear off white paper, give me pink copy. They say, Welcome!

They show me my room. My own room, none of my brothers wake me at night. They show me my bed. There, Lester, you sleep there. I put pink copy of paper in box under bed. The paper in yellow cardboard folder. Box still under bed. Pink paper no longer under the bed. I look for it. I still see the pink paper in my head. 

I sit on the bed in my room. Take off my shoes. Take off socks. Count my toes. All there.

Today I go to the Baxter House office. Ask them, Please – look again for the white paper. It has money. You have my money.

They call me Lester, sometimes Les, never by my born name, Leszek. Lester, they say, if we have you money, we tell you. But we have nobody’s money. Bank has the money. Ever phone call the bank, Lester?

No.

Ever write the bank?

No.

Well, Lester, don’t know what to say. Maybe you need to relax. You need a distraction.

Distraction?

You know, Lester – get a hobby. Put the mind on better thoughts.

They let me go to the library. I like woman who works at the desk. Mrs. Denise. She friendly, has white hair and arms like tree branches that sag.

I say to Mrs. Denise – you know about the woman in the cafeteria, the woman who talk about joy?

Mrs. Denise look at me like nervous cat. No, Lester, don’t know this woman. Tell me more.

She talk about Unbridled Joy, I say. Forever happiness. Do you have Unbridled Joy? I ask Mrs. Denise.

She says, hmmmmmm. Walks me along wall of books no one read. She stop, says here, how about this one? 

The Joy of Cooking.

Look at it. Old book. Plastic cover wrap. Fainted picture. Don’t want to be rude. Any other?

Hmmmmmm, she say. She walk to next wall. Stops. Picks out a book with picture of nice young woman in color dress and big shoes. 

The Joy of Folk Dancing.

Hmmmmmm, I tell her. 

She see my disappointment. Maybe we order from another library for you? she say.

No, no. Good enough, I say. I take book with me.

We a halfway house. They say in Baxter House we half the way there. We sit in circles. They go around circle, ask us where you want to be. Cooper, where you want to be? Cooper says he wants the money. Supervisor tells him, Cooper, money is not a place. What places do you want to go? Where you want to be? 

A place with rich people, Cooper says. Florida got rich golfers. Cooper wants golf. Wants the money. Cooper want it bad.

I sit with Malmo in the back. Malmo older than me. Malmo doesn’t like Cooper. The same way I don’t like Cooper. We sit on metal chairs that fold, look out the window at squirrels. Sometimes Malmo and I go out to the woods and feed the squirrels.

Malmo say to me in whisper – Lester, did you hear? I leave in two weeks. Wife wants me back. She sends money for bus to Cincinnati. Malmo says he can’t believe the wife want him back. 

You miss her? I ask.

I miss lawnmower, kids, having car and going to grocery store, he tell me. Maybe wife, too.

Malmo ask me – When you leave, Les? You been here longer than dried paint. You can get out of here, you know. No problem. Just tell the office you want to go.

He look out the big door that swing open. We look at woods and trees.

I tell Malmo about family in Buffalo. My mother say to me, Les, you got a good brain, you smart, but sometimes you get confused. You come home when you get no longer confused. My father has lungs that don’t breathe and mouth that say nothing good. Father say to me – Les, go get a job. Wheeze. Wheeze. I get a job. Father say, Les, go get a better job. Wheeze. Wheeze.

Malmo, I tell him, I leave when I have new shoes.

Malmo look at me funny, look at me doglike.

Les, he say, you talk a lot about shoes.

Yes, I say.

He look at me again.

Les, something wrong with you.

This is not the worst me. The worst me? You had to see me in a grocery store to believe it. Me. At seventeen. In the grocery store where they have every kind of shampoo, cereal flakes, tomato sauces. Many bottles of tomato sauces. Bottle, bottle, bottle. Too many bottles. Too much everything. I can’t stand it. I can’t explain.

I am better now.

Somebody knock on my door. Maybe, I think, the doctor who come to take my blood, tell me what’s wrong. But, no, it’s the woman in green dress from Billerica. She come with the nurse, look into my room. Today she wear purple sweater, tan slacks.

You Lester? she ask.

I surprised. Yes, I say. Why? I’m in trouble?

No, Lester, the nice woman say. You in no trouble. No trouble at all. The nurse tells me you ask about me, you want to know all about the heart.

I say nothing. Can’t believe woman from Billerica wants to see me. I sit on end of the bed, look at my shoes. Still ugly. Heavy. Have tomato soup stain on them. I pick up one shoe.

Those nice shoes, woman says. 

Oh? I say. I hate shoes. They ugly.

She smile. No, no, Lester. Shoes don’t matter. You matter. What in the heart matters. You are you. You are not you shoes.

Oh, I say. Doctor says I have problems. They take the tests.

She smiles. Doctor looks at different problems, Lester. I tell you about the heart. Spirit in the heart that brings joy.

Oh, yes. Unbridled Joy. I want that.

She look at floor, look up at ceiling for long time. She thinks. She say – Lester, I have a task for you. After I go, I want you to close eyes. Think about all wonderful things you know. You parents. You family dog. Then think about nothing at all.

Nothing? I say.

Yes, close the eyes. Think about nothing. Then you find Unbridled Joy inside you.

She leave. I lie on the bed. Close my eye. Think about family at home. Think about dog with three legs. Seabiscuit. Happy dog. Lazy dog. Think about nice woman in green dress. Think about the purple sweater and tan slacks. Feel good.

I try practicing what she tell me. Think about nothing. I try it. Not easy at all. Go to the library to see Mrs. Denise. Tell her about visit from the woman in purple sweater, tan slacks. I ask Mrs. Denise if she has book on Mindlessness.

Oh, she say. You mean meditation. Meditation and mindlessness.

Yes, I say, those please.

Maybe, Lester. I look for book for you. But you should go to the Baxter office. They have something for you. They have the letter for you.

Good, I think. Very good. I go to Baxter office and they look in drawer, in folders, in cabinet. Hand me the letter. From government, they say. I open it. A check for $33.27. To me. 

Is that all? Thirty three dollars?

And this, too, they say. They hand me the catalog. Catalog from a store. They say I must have ordered the catalog. I don’t remember. But I must have. Has my name.

I put government check for thirty three dollars into the catalog. I bring catalog back to my room. Beautiful catalog with shirts and jackets, socks, shoes, tall men, nice hair, woman have strong thighs. All nice to the eye. I lie on bed next to the lamp. I open the catalog. Think a long time about being in woods with nice shirt and nice shoes. Spring time. Nice breeze in woods. Smells like good dirt and pine cones. My mind says – good, Lester, good. Go there in the breeze, in the woods, in the nice shoes and shirt. Imagine it. Think about it and relax. Close my eyes. Think about goodness. Think about nothing at all. 

Good.

Good to have nothing. 

It make a mind quiet.

Les, they say. Les! Wake up!

Here I am. Outside, on grass by parking lot. Thick grass. Catalog next to me. I go asleep. 

Now Cooper stand above me.

What you do there, Les?

Practice, I say. I practice bliss.

Cooper frown at me. That make no sense, he say. Is this what they do in the country you from?

I feel lump of toad in back of throat. From sleep. From cold, maybe flu.

When I’m in my room, I fall asleep. I put my mind on the catalog. I think about tall men and women with strong thighs, shirt and shoes, and I fall sleep. So I go outside and sit on the grass. I have the catalog open in lap. I fall asleep. Don’t want to explain to Cooper.

You don’t understand me, Cooper, I say. 

Cooper stand over me, look down.

Les, you idiot.

I say, Go away.

Only idiots lie on the grass, he tell me. 

I feel angry lump in the throat, remember what my father tells me – Les, don’t keep the sick lump inside. Let it out.

You stay here forever, Cooper say to me. You like a weed, Les. A weed don’t care where it grow. 

No, Cooper, I tell him. A weed got no arms. I got arms. Weed got no legs. I got legs. I walk right down that street.

Never, Cooper say. You never leave Baxter House. You worse than weeds. Weeds don’t cost anything. You cost other people. You cost to be here. You a waste.

I spit out my lump. It fly like the fate and land on Cooper shirt. I yell. Don’t know what I say. But I yell.

I see my glob on Cooper shirt, shine in sunshine.

I hear supervisor tell me – Lester, get in here. Now.

Doctor come to my room with nurse and small bottles. They come to take the bloods.

Dr. Earl Nominal, the name stitched on his shirt. Dr. Earl, I tell him – what wrong with me? Why I do these things?

He tells me, Lester, you have a problem. 

Oh? I say.

You a person.

Why that a problem?

Because you have bad bloods. You have stones in your bloods. We take more tests. You have condition lot of people have. People disease.

I don’t understand, I tell him.

Stones in blood go to the head, make you do bad things. Not you fault. Just nature in you.

Stones in streets, stones in shoes. Now stones in my blood and in my head.

I hate stones, I say. I want to sue. Get rid of the stones. Get my money back.

No, Lester, Dr. Earl say. It not like that. Can’t sue the stones. No court hears you case. Stones is nature.

Then I sue nature, I tell him.

No, Lester. Nature is nature. Can’t do anything about it.

Well, Dr. Earl. If I can’t have good blood then I want Unbridled Joy.

Unbridled joy? What that? he ask me.

What the woman tells us in the cafeteria. You know, good thoughts and peace and easiness.

Oh, he say and make the face like Malmo eating vegetable stew. Unbridled Joy, Lester, these is just words. You know, a word and then another word, like piece of string ties together. Unbridle is word. Joy, a word. Word. Word. Word. Dr. Earl dances hands in air. Together you have more words.

Oh?

Sure, he tell me. Horses have bridles. Joy has no bridle. You see – just words.

Dr. Earl, I say. I like those words. I like the woman from Billerica. I like her words. She has the face of a birthday cake.

Dr. Earl laughs like Cooper but not like Cooper. You funny, he says. You don’t worry about those words. We find problem in you bloods. You not worry at all. Rest and sleep. Eat well. Tomorrow you better.

No one know anything.  

Don’t want to be rude, Dr. Earl, I say. See you later.

I have money, not much money. Thirty three dollars. I have the money for sandals. In the catalog, they say these sandals good in the water. Water shoes. Can bring them to the beach. Walk in water. Walk in mud. Makes me want to have children, take them to the sea. Walk on grass at low tide. Walk way out. You walk for mile on grass like flax sweater. With you child. The child you made. You and you.

Sandals of mesh. Bird feather mesh. Swiftflite they called these sandals. Only twenty two dollars. Shipping free. I want them. They need me. 

I buy them.

Malmo leaves tomorrow and the woman from Billerica come today. We meet her in the library. She glad to see us. She bring the special bell with her. We sit with feet flat on floor, backs straight, because she tells us to. Focus on the flow. Focus on the bell. Focus on the thing that matters. I relaxed. The bell ring.

The woman look at the clock, say our time is up. She say her time up. Her contract at Baxter House run out. No more visits. Government don’t want to pay for Unbridled Joy. Too expensive. We must practice without her. She want all us to sit and practice. Close eyes. Hold it in you mind for ten minutes. See the good inside you. Then she leave.

I close my eyes. I think about the hallway. I think about running in Baxter House hallway. Run in my mind. Running not easy for me. But in my mind I run.

Open my eyes. See my shoes. See my feet on floor. See only Malmo in the library with me. 

I say – Malmo what you think about? 

I think about sitting in backyard, he say, beer in hand, lawn chair, summer day, just cut grass, chuck flank on grill.

You like chuck flank, he ask me?

Never had, I say.

Malmo tell me – Les, you come out to visit us in Cincinnati. We got a cot in garage. You stay with us.

I think about it.

Malmo, Ever had a thought jump on you?

What you mean?

Ever run?

Malmo scratch head. Run? You mean like run a race? No, not for long time.

Ah, I tell him, when I was a kid I run before I walk. Hard for me to learn to walk. I sit on floor, push my hands and slide on my behind. Other kids walk. I slide. Then one day I remember running. Mother say – Leszek, you never walk, you run. Soon as you able, you run. You gallop everywhere like a drunk pony. It true. I remember running to school. Kids ask me – Les, why you run? I say, because I can’t walk.

Malmo look me up and down. He say, Les, I hope the world is good to you. 

What that mean? I ask.

I mean, you need to be gone from this place.

Sandals come in plastic bag inside box. Now I open them. They look not exactly like I think. Big straps. The big toes. Good for sea water, I guess.

Try them on. Jump up and down. Do it again. Light. They feel amazing. I open my door. Go into hallway. I walk. Fast walk. Feel good. I see Mr. Levinson at the front desk. He say, Lester, where you going? I tell him I go out for run. I am running to Buffalo. See you later!

Thursday. Day for laundry. Day for the clean up. Not for me.

They have cars in street. Bridge over harbor. I see it from here. Tall bridge with cables. They build it after I came here. Other side has sea water and wind, houses on hills. 

Look down at the new sandals. Sometimes you need things to run away from things.

I can’t explain.

I run on the road. Hear cars. I remember when they drive me here, point out car window. Leszek, you see that building? Baxter House building. They help you. They know every people disease. You better here. You better here than with us, you family.

I want a house. It has grill and grass and the garage like Malmo have. Or just a house. I want a kid, a son, like me. I want the house with son inside.

I see sign that say Northbound.

I see the cable bridge over harbor and wonder how it stay up.

I feel sandals pinch. Of course, they pinch. They new sandals. It cool outside. It sunny outside. I huff my breath. I feel light inside the head. I like it. Cars on road. Honk horns. Honk at me. I run.

I like it.

I hear lightness.

I feel joy.

Golden Blood

Steve Norris

Signs around the parking lot advertised the temporary occupation of the Mobile Blood Donation Unit. The nurse led my husband and me to comfy leather chairs in the tow-behind trailer. It felt like the trailer a movie star might inhabit, only full of blood sacks.

“It’s her first time,” my husband said to the nurse, as if we were dining at a hip new restaurant. 

The nurse manufactured a quick smile and set to work. I offered my arm but looked away when she approached with the glistening needle. The queasiness I felt during flu shots and other vaccinations returned, but magnified. Thick and warm, the blood left me. Vomit gurgled in the back of my throat as she put my bag with the others. This would be my last time giving blood, I hoped. They couldn’t need it that bad. 

When it was all over, my husband turned to me, crumbling cookie in hand, already half-eaten.

“Beat’s work, right?” 

I felt a swell of indignation at his question. I had been laid off two months prior from my corporate desk job. I had no leads. My husband, I was sure, thought it might give me some direction to donate. I had said yes. I was here for him. If I couldn’t give money to our little family unit, I would give what I could, even blood. 

Two days after the blood donation, I got a call from a random number. I waited for the voicemail, where a panicked voice said it was urgent I call back. They mentioned some mega hospital conglomerate and emphasized the need to get in touch ASAP. I ignored the call. Clearly something was wrong, something I did not want to know about. 

Then three hours later, the first caller’s manager left a voicemail and asked that I please consider them for all future blood donations and that they would be happy to make special arrangements and by the end of the voicemail the desperation was palpable. 

I mentioned both to my husband as he got home from work. 

He shrugged, door to the fridge fully open as he sipped from the bottle of bone broth from the farmers’ market. He was a strange guy. 

“Maybe you’ve got some magic blood or something.”

He took another swig. 

“Pick up next time though,” he said. “See what they want.” 

The third call, the one that sealed it, was from the CEO of the largest hospital chain in the country. He called me personally. Clearly explained over the phone that my blood was rare. They wanted to make me a proposition and would be willing to fly me out, to put me up in a hotel. 

“We would be lucky if one in a million people had your blood,” he said. “It’s more like one in half a billion, or not far off. As far as we’re aware, you’re the only person in this country with your blood.” 

I was always getting talked into things I didn’t want to do, both altruistic and not. In college I was afraid of drinking, yet my dorm friends had convinced me to go to a party at a small brick house tucked down the hill from the political science building. Drunken students poured in and out, like ants to spilled cake. It was not that I felt unsafe — it was that I was drinking too much, too fast, to feel anything. Stumbling around, motor skills abandoned, that little house was where I met my husband. A guy, standing alone, smiling at me. I drunkenly smiled back. We started talking. I got the spins. He got me some water. I stumbled away to go find my friends but it was as if he was standing in my way. He was too large, I couldn’t maneuver around him. Then came the vomit. My friends found me there in the bushes, with him, rubbing my back. 

My husband faked the flu and took Thursday and Friday off work. He hated his job as much as I ever had. 

The hospital chain emailed us first class plane tickets and a reservation to a boutique hotel, surely paid for by the surgeries of dozens of sick people. In a sterile meeting room, the CEO and his smiling secretary with hair so rigid it seemed constructed and the company’s Chief Legal Counsel, a brittle woman who looked about a hundred, sat across from us.

“Do you know what antigens are?” the CEO asked. 

I shook my head. My husband did too. 

“Blood — deviously — needs to be compatible. Blood transfused with the wrong antigens will alert the immune system. The body will attack the blood as a foreign agent.” He looked at the brittle lawyer. “I’m not out of line with this explanation, right?”

“Don’t go too much deeper and don’t make any claims of expertise.”

He shot her a thumbs up. 

“Now. Why are we here? Why did we fly you out? Because your blood,” the CEO said, “doesn’t have specific antigens. That makes it quite rare. We call it golden blood. Now don’t worry, it’s the same color as everyone else’s.” He gave me an avuncular wink. “Your blood is one of the rarest liquids in the world. O negative gets all the hype, but that’s nothing compared to yours. Every blood bank in the country has O negative. I could bore you with talk of the Rhesus factor—” 

“Reese’s?” my husband asked. 

“Rhesus,” the CEO agreed. “Sort of the red-headed step child of the antigen world. I don’t really understand it myself, so just know that it means you should never ride on a motorcycle or do any dangerous activities. That’s how rare your blood is. And we want it. Bad.” 

Then came the offer. With a salesman’s grin, he said they would pay me a salary, full health insurance, if I sat down and gave my blood on a regular basis. He told me they’d buy my groceries and pay for my medications so that I could give the maximum amount of blood possible. 

“Only as much blood as is safe,” the Chief Legal Counsel said. It sounded like hearing an asterisk spoken. 

“I read that I need to wait eight weeks between donations.” I had done my research, though it now seemed pointless. Their offer was worth more than my health. 

“That’s very cautious,” the Chief Legal Counsel said. “We believe that with proper medical care — which we will provide — you can give much more frequently.” 

I looked to my husband for confirmation and saw hunger in his eyes. He had the same salesman’s grin as the CEO. 

“I’ll take care of you,” he said. He said it over and over again as he ran his hand over my back.

I signed one hundred and thirteen forms. They even made my husband sign a few. Then a few more for me. By the end the tendons in my wrist were like rusty wires. 

The CEO took us out to dinner and got drunk and started to cry about how much this country meant to him. My husband got drunk and started talking about his favorite board games. When I tried to order a beer, the Chief Legal Counsel Officer coughed and noted that I had agreed not to drink alcohol, as part of our agreement. When I went to order a soda, she cut in and asked the waiter if there was high fructose corn syrup in the soda. When the waiter nodded, she waved that away too. When I attempted to order a sparkling water, she cut in and told the waiter that the water on the table would be fine.  

“Microplastics, you know,” she said. Then with a brighter smile: “All in the name of health!” 

Even though I had yet to see a paycheck, we ordered a new dishwasher. My husband had insisted it would be fine. He drew up an updated budget based on our new income. 

“A couple years of this and maybe we can both quit our jobs,” my husband said. 

We had an okay marriage. Would I have done it all over again? Who would? 

The following Monday morning, I arrived at the hospital at 7:45 AM. I didn’t want to be late for my one task at the new job. I navigated the labyrinthine hospital and, after thirteen minutes, I finally found the room where they would siphon off my life force. 

Seated in a plasticky chair, a material easy to wipe of bodily fluids, I waited as a nurse took my blood. This time I didn’t feel scared. I had a purpose. After it was over, the needle and tube tossed in a hazmat trash can, the nurse handed me an oaty, unsweetened muffin with visible bits of carrot. I ate it happily. Another nurse asked if I felt okay. I told her I did. Both nurses smiled down at me and insisted I stay and recover my strength before heading out. One pulled out her phone and put on some New Age music that was surely meant to be calming but carried a grating metal sound. 

When I went to donate for the third time, I ran late. My husband insisted on making waffles when I told him that the only thing I wanted in the world was a bowl of oatmeal. 

I put my foot down.

“I’m not eating waffles. I’ll make my own oatmeal, I don’t care.” 

“Let me take care of you,” he said. “You need an extra big breakfast.” 

“I’m eating oats!” I said. I repeated this over and over.  

He ended up making oats for both of us. I left annoyed. En route to the hospital, only five minutes after I was supposed to arrive, I received a call from the CEO’s secretary. 

“Where are you?” Her voice carried urgency, as though I had missed a meeting with my parole officer and was subject to arrest. 

I assured her I was in the car, on the way. 

Her voice turned saccharine sweet. 

“Ama-zing,” she sang. 

The fifth week, things turned. The lightheaded, post-donation feeling didn’t go away. A hospital chauffeur drove me back home in a 12-passenger van, empty besides myself. I slept all day on the couch. Nine hours later, I woke up to my husband insisting I eat something. He looked concerned but not worried, which at that moment, I realized I needed. I was worried. I needed that feeling shared. 

“It’s only the fifth week,” I said. 

“It’s still the first month,” he said. 

“Not technically.” 

He thought about it. “It’s basically still the first month.” 

I wanted to throw something at him. 

“Give it time,” he said. 

Right there on the couch, I went back to sleep. 

As the weeks went by, I felt like a drowning person in the ocean, pummeled by massive waves — I had barely survived the last and yet the next was already bearing down.   

I called my new personal physician — the Chief Legal Counsel had given me no name, no office, only a phone number — to see if a week off would be beneficial. 

A man’s voice answered. “This is Dr. Hudson.” 

Dr. Hudson briefly listened to my concerns about the pace of donations, the feeling that my skin was too heavy and that my muscle and bone were deteriorated, and immediately put me on hold. He called back seven minutes later. 

“So,” he said, “your care team and I actually think it would be wise if you donated again next week. If the same thing happens, then definitely, we’ll find some time off.” 

It was like my hand was on a hot stove and I couldn’t remove it. 

“My care team?” I said. I pictured the CEO dictating how and when my blood was taken. 

He paused. “My fellow physicians, I mean.” 

He was lying. I knew he was lying. 

“It feels like I will die.” 

He paused. “Call me after the next donation.” 

I was nervous to tell my husband about the exchange. Two years prior, I had texted him that I was getting a migraine, and he used it as an excuse to leave work so that he could come home and take care of me. He did give me backrubs anytime he thought I looked stressed, though usually I just wanted to be left alone. Sometimes I wondered if he loved taking care of me more than he actually loved me. As we ate our New York strips of steak, provided by the hospital with the insistence that I eat more red meat, I felt it impossible not to tell him. 

“Hm,” my husband said. He sounded just like the doctor. 

“What?”

“It sounds like the doctors and experts all think it’s safe to give.”

I felt lightheaded all of a sudden. 

“I feel like I’m dying.”

“But they said you’re not?” 

“Aren’t I the expert here?”

“Right, right,” he said, unconvinced. 

“What? You think I’m not?”

“Remember last year how you thought there was something wrong with you?”

“I felt weird all the time!”

“And the doctors just said you were short on Vitamin D.” 

This felt unfair. “So I was right! Something was wrong! And what if I had been unwell?”

“But you weren’t.”

“I might be now! These guys have no incentive to stop!”

“Babe,” he said, in a voice I hated, “they’re surely not thinking so short-term that they want you to die for one week’s worth of blood.”

I realized then that I had no idea what their incentives were. I had no idea why they were going all this length to drain me of my blood. What was it worth? A few months ago, it was the same blood as anyone else. How could I predict their actions if I had no idea what drove them? 

Nothing made sense. 

As I tucked under the covers, I couldn’t stop shaking. At first I thought it was another sign of illness but then I realized I was shaking with anger. 

From then on, I resisted, in my own small ways. On Sunday afternoon, my husband left the house to play frisbee. I drove to the gas station a few minutes away and bought the largest chocolate bar I could find. I ate it right there in the aisle and paid for the empty wrapper. I walked out feeling more alive than ever before, the chocolate more revitalizing than all the farm fresh food. 

I hit Monday still feeling like I was a papercut away from the end. A car picked me up for my donation, as though worried I’d crash on the way home. In the seat, a handwritten card from the CEO — You got this, rockstar! Dan Bartlett. Of course I felt like death after my donation. They didn’t even drive me home but admitted me to a dark room where a nurse took my vitals. My husband arrived after work. 

“It’s barely been a month,” I said. “I’m dying.”

He rubbed my leg. “Just rest.” 

“Is it really worth this?”

It took two days for them to let me go home. Even then, for the rest of the week, I dreamed about that dark room, about being locked in there. I lay in bed all week, watching movies. Partly by my doctor’s orders but mainly because I didn’t feel capable of anything else. I typed up a backlog of all the movies I wanted to see before I died and started to make my way through it. Then I typed up a list of all the books I wanted to read and realized I’d never get through it. No way. 

I watched Misery and as it played on the screen, my eyes flickered about and my ears heard but I didn’t feel anything. 

“Are you worried about me?” I asked my husband when he got home from work. He had the tired eyes he always had at 5:30 PM. His phone would go off constantly with pings from coworkers — at dinner, at the gym, even when we’re asleep. He said each ping feels like getting hit with a small hammer. 

He paused before answering my question. “I’m worried,” he said, “but I know the doctors are taking care of you.” 

“What if I die?”

“You won’t die. I won’t let you.” 

“You all want everything I have,” I said. “They want my blood. You want my soul.” 

“You want to quit?” he asked. 

“You don’t want me to?”

It took him a very long time to answer the question. 

“I don’t want you to quit if you don’t have to,” he said. He said the words with the trepidation of someone walking through a rotted house where the floorboards could give out with any step.

“It sounds like you don’t want me to quit.”

“This money could change our lives! Even a few months of it. You don’t have a backup job. We could be in a worse place without this.” 

“You could talk me into jumping off a bridge if you wanted to,” I said. 

He smiled and strode toward me and started to rub my back. 

“Maybe your body is just adapting,” he said. 

I wanted to ask how one adapted to bleeding out but didn’t. 

The hospital sent me home with a walker after the next donation and said to keep it around just in case. I took to using it most days. My skin was still too loose and heavy, but now it felt like I could pull it off in doughy clumps from an uncooked loaf of bread. 

Why did they want to kill me? What was worth my death? That became my obsession as I lay on the couch, almost completely immobile. I pictured a billionaire using my blood to stay young, his appointment right after mine, the blood still warm in the bag as they pumped it into his right bicep. Fresh and energized, he would proceed to a YouTube livestream to extol the benefits of clean living. 

One evening, napping on the couch, I woke up to my husband speaking softly on the phone. 

“What could it be worth?” he asked. 

I held my breath trying to hear but he was listening to the other end. 

“Who was that?” I asked. 

“Just your doctor. He wanted to hear how you were doing.” 

I didn’t have the energy to ask more questions. My brain felt like putty gummed to the side of my head. I held my mouth open, hoping the right words would fall out. 

“What?” he asked. 

“I want to be ok,” I said. “I want to be ok.” 

“You’re going to be ok, baby.” 

“Am I?” 

He waved me away with a smile. “You need rest.” 

My head throbbed with the effort of talking to him. I wanted to fight back more. I couldn’t phrase my argument. So I held my mouth open as if to catch a thought that I could regurgitate back. 

My husband just patted my hair. 

“You’re adorable,” he said. “Have I told you that lately?” 

The next day, when the mail arrived, I felt a spike of energy. A growing paranoia had filled me — what plans was my husband making after my demise? The way he thought about money, I was sure that he had taken out life insurance for me. Was it possible he had conspired with the doctors to sign off on a policy? I hobbled my walker to the front door, out into the yard, to the mailbox. I tore through the mail right there and wept. Only junk mailers. My mind was slipping out with my blood. Thinking felt impossible. 

Back inside, I tore through the pantry and pulled out white flour and the last bits of sugar I could find. I mixed in some organic butter. No chocolate chips but I scavenged some cranberries from a high shelf. 

My husband came home a half hour later. The smell of freshly baked cookies filled his face with horror. 

“What are you doing?” He was screaming. 

I screamed back at him. “Living! I am living!” 

Then everything tilted left then right. It looked like the counter was about to fly up and hit me. As I fell, I leaned toward the living room but crashed on the floor like a bookshelf that had been pushed over. My husband ran over and carried me to the couch. 

He fanned my face and brought me water. When he asked if he should call an ambulance, I waved him away. I had no interest in returning to the hospital. 

He made me soup. 

“I want out.” Tears fell down my face as my husband spooned the soup into my mouth. “Please let me quit.” As I said those words, I realized it was his decision and not mine. It had always been his decision. 

“I won’t let them kill you,” my husband said. “You know that, right?”

“But they are killing me!” 

Even my tears felt too thin. 

My husband didn’t have many friends. Me, his only friend, would be gone. I never found out how my husband had arrived at the party the night we met. He didn’t seem to be there with anyone and for years I carried this worry that he had been the type of person to wander campus at night, looking for crowds of drunk students and open doors to be invited into. 

I was disappointed that I was still alive after my next donation. Through the last few months, they had dried the marrow out of my bones. It was as though my very heart itched and I could not scratch it. 

I did not faint but could not speak for several minutes after. They brought me a new walker and guided me to the front of the hospital, where my husband waited. I hadn’t asked him to come. 

“I got work off,” he said. “I figure taking care of you is the most important thing I can do right now.” 

He smiled as if this was the best news. 

I nodded. 

Two days later, when I felt I could form a thought again, I waited until my husband was at work and I called the first lawyer I could find. Tears fell as I struggled to explain my situation. 

“I’m trapped,” I said, “it’s a job and they’re taking my blood and I’m trapped.” 

“Pardon?” the voice on the other end said. I could tell by her tepid voice that I was speaking to a junior attorney or an intern or whomever took calls at the front desk. 

“I need to escape my job.” 

“Do you live here in town? This is a right-to-work state.”

“But the contract,” I said. 

“Send it to us,” she said. 

I searched my email but I could find nothing. They had had me sign the forms but never provided me with the evidence of what I signed. I had no idea how to get it. My husband would not help. He would not let me escape. 

I woke on Friday a little after 9 AM, hours after I used to wake up. In my previous life, I had risen early before work and made coffee and exercised and read the New York Times. Now I could barely tell the difference between waking and sleep. 

I feared that I only had 72 hours left to live. Monday morning might as well have been an appointment with the gallows. I spent the morning searching online for information about golden blood, why they could possibly want it. I found nothing helpful. 

I had lost touch with all my friends. My parents were dead. I had to save myself. 

With the little thought power I had left, I made an escape. I gathered some snack bars I found in the pantry, put on a light coat, despite the warming weather, and I ventured outside. With each step, my walker scraped against the ground. Lactic acid gathered in my arms and legs, like I was on a long run. Push on, I thought. I made it halfway down the block before I had to sit on the curb. I wanted to slap myself. Keep going. Keep going! I grunted with each step and made it three more houses and then lowered myself into the lawn of someone’s house. The grass was cool upon my face, brushing and calming. I breathed deep and smelled earth. 

“Oh dear,” someone said. 

“She has cancer,” another voice said. “Her husband told me.” 

I opened my eyes. Two neighbors were standing above me, a septuagenarian couple who loved fireworks. 

“Let’s get you home, dear,” the first one said. 

I tried to struggle and resist but their strong arms scooped me up as if their hydro gymnastics classes had trained them for this very scenario. They guided me back up the block to my front door. 

I started to cry. 

“There, there, dear,” one said. “Keep fighting it!” 

I lay down on the couch in a fog and didn’t wake for hours. 

Another Monday morning. Another donation. At a geriatric pace, I hobbled into the hospital, down the now familiar path, past a million white ceiling tiles, and when I was seated in the small recliner, the nurse stuck me with the needle and my blood crept out the tube. Then I felt the walls spin. Perception stopped. I was surprised that it took me that long to lose consciousness. When I came to, I was back in the dark room, somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, on stiff cotton sheets in a hospital gown. The air smelled sterile but musty. 

It felt like the end. Either they would let me stop or I would die. But this current thing could not continue. I decided to escape when night came, until I realized that here, with no windows, with no natural light, I did not know the time. My phone was gone. So were the clothes I’d worn that morning. 

I would get out. I would escape this place. I would leave this life behind and start a new one, far away. My plan was to wait for the nurse to check on me. Surely that restarted some sort of timer and would allow me the most amount of time to escape.

But instead of a nurse, three men entered. They hovered over me. A doctor. The CEO. My husband.

“How’s our patient doing?” the doctor asked. I recognized his voice from the phone call. The same doctor who told me to keep going. 

“I want out,” I said. “I’m done.” 

But none of them seemed to hear me. They were talking over me. Laughing. 

I focused directly on my husband, looking dead into his eyes, so he would know I was talking to him and him alone. 

“I’m done!” I screamed. 

He crouched down and grinned at me. The expression on his face made me feel drained of all blood. I remembered, in a jolt, that when we met, I had wanted to escape the party, to be anywhere else. Too drunk to flee, a trace of vomit on my shirt, I tried to settle for being alone. Yet from nowhere, he had appeared. He had stuck to me. 

“Haven’t I always taken care of you?” he asked. 

aDrift

Gerald Ewa

I have made grief a gorgeous, queenly thing, and worn my melancholy with an air, Winifred Welles.

Ndukwe liked the wind on his face. He liked the way it sang sonorously in his ears, tickled his nostrils, and almost veiled his eyes. Still, he resisted the urge to sleep as he clutched the steering wheel and pressed hard on the throttle. He thought briefly of Abuja, the far-flung roads, the giant government buildings. 

In Abuja, he chose a sheltered life, went out only when it was necessary, mostly to meet with his business associates. On Sundays, he didn’t complain when the church people stormed their house. Although he sat in a corner of the living room watching them, he seemed to be impaled by their presence, their voices weaving into a rich tapestry of praises and thanksgiving, so that the entire house took on an ethereal appeal. He loved the radiance on Ime’s face whenever they came around, the way she smiled and cried and raised her hands to the roof in supplication. But he wished she went out often, not just on Sundays or Saturdays to get supplies for the house.  

He waited for the line of cars to zoom across the road. A rickety yellow minibus, missing a back window and bathed in cracks, slowed to a halt beside the bus stop in front, and Ndukwe noticed, among the handful of passengers alighting from it, a young man in a pair of threadbare jeans and a flannel shirt bellowing in the wind. He had a thin waist and thick butt cheeks just like Kola. Ndukwe shuddered from the rush of adrenaline coursing through him as he felt the growing hardness in his trousers. He turned sideways, let out a sigh of relief, grateful that no one could see him or  the murkiness of his thoughts. Yet, he kept darting his eyes about, the feeling of insecurity weighing down on his chest, as though he was not alone, as though Ime was sitting beside him. He could decipher the thing in her eyes, the way it unsettled him, forcing him to lick his patched lips repeatedly. Did Ime really believe that he was going to see one of his friends? Or was she giving him the benefit of the doubt, feeding her mind with the possibility that he wasn't cheating on her with someone else, until the seams of her patience frayed? 

This was their third Christmas in Enugu since they relocated to Abuja ten years ago. Nowadays, she barely challenged him whenever he said he was going out to see his old classmates. But once, after they'd had lunch, she had brought herself to inquire about these classmates of his and why he was always going out to see them instead of the other way round. Ndukwe had managed to steel himself, surprisingly unruffled by the sharp glare of her eyes, the way it threatened to unclip the truth from him. "I have invited them over again and again, but they keep saying soon. And besides, they're old enough to decide for themselves," he said in a stern voice that sealed the gaps for further interrogation. And with that, she rose to clear the table, muttering under her breath.

Around Ime, he sometimes felt unhinged—even though he acted like he had everything under control—like an overwhelming force was pulling the earth from his feet, hurling him into a bottomless pit. Of all the things she was, she was not completely pliant with the suggestions Ndukwe made or the decisions he took on their behalf. She'd changed with the passing years, transforming into the kind of woman who resigned herself to whatever life threw at her. The kind of woman whose memory had become a sieve over time so that she forgot special moments like their anniversary, her birthday, forgot to switch off the TV before trudging upstairs to their room, left the kitchen tap running, perhaps for hours, until he returned to turn it off.

In the beginning before he proposed to her, and a few months after they got married, she was vivacious. Her joy was palpable, capable of lighting up a dull house; she would wake up beside him every morning with a smile on her face, attacking his lips with hers, with a desperation that thrilled him. In the kitchen she whistled a song while making his meals. And then on Sundays, as they strode to church, she was the first to slip her hand into his, locking his palm with hers, as though he would vanish from her sight. 

On weekends, when his business associates-turned friends visited, she accepted his invitation to join their conversations, which, most of the time, were wound around politics, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and football. It was her sheer fearlessness he missed the most, her ability to counter him or his friends when their claims drifted towards sentiments rather than facts. How she seemed to be so versatile, readily contributing to every conversation.

The last car had zoomed across the road as he engaged the gears and sped off. Occasionally he stretched his taut muscles, stuck his head out the window, and swiped the phone in the glove box. He thought by looking at the houses and shops lined up on both sides of the road, he could shift his mind off the weight of guilt lodged in his chest. He was going to end things with Kola. These past weeks, the odds had been against him: Ime's unusual silence and the unpredictability of her mood and the fear that rose in his chest whenever he thought of Kola. 

He couldn't explain this new feeling of aimlessness breathing under his skin. He wasn't sure of anything, how to begin, if he had enough courage to look Kola in the eye and say it was over. 

This thing — that had begun three years ago — started off as a fling, and they had come to a mutual understanding that it was only destined to last for a night after their lust had been sated. But that night at Trisha's Bar and Suites, somewhere around Ogui, had culminated in many more nights spent in secluded hotels in lonely streets. He had been thrilled by those years, as he longed for the prospect, a reason to travel down to the east to see Kola, to nestle in his arms and sit by the balcony, watching pockets of shy stars fill the sky. 

Beyond the spree of sex, Kola was almost everything he had missed in Ime, the seamlessness with which Kola started and maintained a conversation with random guys in the bar, filling the entire room with new energy until they were enamored by him. Ndukwe always looked forward to football hours when Chelsea and Man United played and he and Kola sat amid other men facing a large screen. He loved the way Kola’s skin brushed against his whenever he stirred, loved to hear Kola whine bitterly when a player from his club, Chelsea, missed a chance to score, smiled when the sea of voices rang through the air with goal, Kola jumping to his feet and screaming, goal, his voice shrill and imposing. 

Nowadays, Ndukwe couldn't tell if he still had it in him, that dizzying anticipation, burning up every other desire, even his appetite for food. He sensed that whatever he felt for Kola had become mired by a feeling of ambiguity he couldn't trace its origin, an uncertainty that sometimes left him indecisive and terrified.

I have now been here — how many years? Years unnumbered. My hands grow clawlike. My eyes are large and starved, Conrad Aiken.

In the beginning, it was easier for him to conceal that delicate part of himself, to pretend that her touch and kisses enkindled him with desire. Even after he had squirmed and moaned through the portals of release and they lay stomach-up on the bed, their shoulders touching, breathing each other’s air, he was satisfied by the smile on her face, by his ability to ferry her to a place of unfathomable bliss.  

These days, he felt like a frozen lake, stripped of warmth and splendor whenever Ime curled up beside him in bed, her body warm against his own, her eyes hungry and searching for his. He hated himself for feigning a yawn just when Ime planted a kiss on his lips, making excuses about how hectic his day had been.

There were times when he attributed her extreme sadness and nonchalance to her inability to conceive a child, his mother's constant banter about the incompleteness of a house without a child, segueing into taunts and threats of imposing another woman on him. At first, he had been horrified by the streaks of miscarriages that greeted them at the outset of their marriage, until they seized and the years flew by like a tornado, guzzling up whatever faith and hope was left in him, so that he stopped joining her in those midnight prayers, stopped following her to those hospitals where the doctors gave the same report: nothing was medically wrong with them. 

And yet, he wondered what Ime thought of him. How did she perceive him, especially those times he only spoke up in her defence, after an enduring moment of silence, rescuing her from his mother's rage and insults? Did she recognize his silence as an adumbration of cowardice? What if she had agreed with his suggestion to adopt a child rather than rebuff it as something unclean? Would it have lessened her grief, transforming her from a woman who solely yearned to carry her child to a woman who could love someone else's seed in the hope of carrying hers some day?

Maybe, just maybe, if he had resolved to stay single, refusing to cower under the weight of his mother's threats to take her life if he didn't find a wife, Ime would've been spared this needless pain.

In all the places I have been to, why does love greet me at the door with an effort sculpted by brutal labor? Romeo Oriogun.

The sun had begun to relinquish its throne in the sky, when Ndukwe pulled into a quiet street. A veil of darkness swept over him, but the headlights led the way as he navigated the sharp bends and potholes. It was unlike him to frequent a particular place for a long time, but Kola had assured him of the safety of this place, that there was absolutely nothing for him to fear. "Besides, if you look around you closely, you'll find many just like us," Kola had said in that off-handed manner of his, spreading out his arms and cocking his head, like he was so sure that nothing could possibly go wrong. It was their first night in a bar that boasted of exquisite furniture and a wide veranda upstairs bordered by rooms. And when Ndukwe looked around him, in all that sea of men locking hands and eyes, he felt a soft landing in his chest, something close to stability, an assurance that he was in the right place.

Ndukwe let out a sigh of relief; he had stridden past the thick-chested bouncer — in a pair of jeans trousers and tee-shirt that hugged his body —stationed at the entrance, and he recalled the man's large hands that invaded his body, squeezing the muscles of his hands and legs, his balls. The man only let go when Ndukwe squeaked, a coy smile plastered on the man's lips. 

He closed his eyes for a moment and let the gentle music, trickling from nearby speakers, wash over him.

He didn't bother to look around the bar; he was certain Kola was upstairs in one of the rooms. He would join him later but for now, he needed something strong to oil the desert of his throat. He sidled past a table occupied by two men sitting across from each other, their eyes so focused on each other it would take the zapping of a fly to make them blink. Without looking at them, he apologized as his butt kicked the table slightly, forcing the bottles into an awkward dance. He sat in front of the bar, his hand on the counter, as he waited for the barman.

"What would you have, sir?" The barman said, wearing a lavish smile and spreading his hands on the tabletop as if he would lay on it.

"Two shots of tequila, please?" He said, returning the smile and feeling stupid for revealing too many teeth. For a person like him who could barely down a bottle of stout, he was setting himself up for an impossible mission. Two shots of tequila were probably going to knock him off, yet he was prepared to do anything to get the guilt off his chest. Perhaps, the sourness of the drink would burn the guilt away. He had taken both shots in a succession of quick gulps, stifling the urge to scream as the liquid burned down his throat. All the while, the barman leaned at a corner, shrieking with delight and clapping and egging Ndukwe on. His head was spinning with a strange sweetness, and he was certain he could manage a third swig.

He was about to slip the third shot into his mouth when he felt a hand tugging the glass from his lips. 

"I think you've had enough to drink for the night," the voice came afterwards. He recognized the voice, its softness, and looking around, he found Kola beside him, smoothing the creases on the collar of his shirt and bending over to kiss his left cheek. Ndukwe burped as he surrendered the glass to Kola, who placed it on the table like a fragile thing and settled on the stool next to him. At this moment, the dizziness thawed, and he stared at Kola clear-eyed, but confused, like a lost animal. Kola smelled of warm bath and cologne. For a moment, Ndukwe was lost in Kola's brown eyes, the slender bridge of his nose, the lush pink lips, and he felt like reaching for his beard, inhaling the wet hair jutting from his chin. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, "How far?" 

"Alfa dey mosque." Kola rolled his eyes and flapped his left wrist so that it skipped Ndukwe's nose by a shouting distance. In a different circumstance, Ndukwe would have chuckled, allowing his fingers to wander along Kola's thighs. But all he did was smile.

"What's it? Is everything alright?" Kola said now, waving the barman over for a drink and deciding against it almost immediately, when Ndukwe remained quiet.

"We should go upstairs, right?" It was more of a subtle command than a suggestion, but Ndukwe obliged

He was standing by the window, drinking water directly from the Eva bottle Kola had bought for him, when the pair of hands slid into his shirt, undoing his buttons and stroking his nipples. The city by the window was beautiful and full of light and Kola's breath was warm on his neck. He closed his eyes and threw his head backwards, easing himself into Kola's arms. He had wriggled out of his trousers and slid into the bed beside Kola only to crawl out of it, his back turned to Kola. But now, he moaned as Kola nibbled at his earlobe. This should be the point where he let go, turning around to kiss Kola. Still, he pulled away as Kola reached for his shorts.

"What's it? You've been cold to me since you arrived?" Kola was saying now, as Ndukwe settled on the edge of the bed. 

"I'm sorry, I'm not just in the mood."

Kola cocked his eyebrow and pulled out a blunt from the nightstand. He took a deep, long drag, and at that moment, Ndukwe was sure he would swallow the entire cigar. Then, Kola blew smoke rings into the air. 

"Do you remember the thing you said to me the first night we met?" Kola said, shoving his stick of cigarette towards the window, as though he was talking to the city.

Ndukwe glanced at him, unsure of the thing he wanted to hear, because he had said so many things that night, mostly a string of words birthed from a place of awkwardness.

"I can't remember exactly."

Kola smiled. "You said that I was so beautiful like mammy wata and yet you couldn't even manage to look me in the eye."

Ndukwe lowered his gaze, and chuckled. Throwing his head up, he said, “But you're still beautiful like mammy wata.”

"Hmm..." He took another draft on his cigarette and another until he flung the stub to the ground and crushed it underfoot. Now he squatted before Ndukwe, resting his arms on Ndukwe's thighs. Making a funny face, he said, "So, you think I still look beautiful after you've chopped me finish, eh?" But the joke didn't quite get to Ndukwe, whose lips were drawn in a semi-frown.

Kola had begun to tickle Ndukwe's thighs, nudging him into hardness while Ndukwe twitched his legs. And suddenly, Kola paused, resting his palms on the bed, so that he was facing Ndukwe squarely. "This is not you. I know there's something not quite right with you tonight. Is it your wife? Does she know already? Has she said anything yet?"

Ndukwe felt the urge to end the thing between them already, and slip away, into his trousers and out of this room that irritated him now, away from Kola and the casualness laced in his voice, this boy who saw the world as an oyster that must bend to his desires. And yet, somehow, Ndukwe envied Kola, his flagrant audacity, his subtle way of not-giving-a-fuck about anything, of damning the consequences and reaching headlong for what he wanted. It was the kind of life Ndukwe adored, only from a distance, but lacked the courage to pursue it, to make it his reality. Among the mountains of his fears, one appeared prominent: he feared the unknown, the beginning of the end. He was terrified for them, for Kola who seemed oblivious to the mechanics of the world, to the unkindness that raged beyond these walls, to a world that didn’t understand difference and was so swift to kill anything and anyone that belonged to this category.  

Instead, he sat there, drinking in the nauseating sweetness of tobacco steaming from Kola's breath. Arching his back, Ndukwe took in Kola's soft features, the bright eyes and lips, the long clean fingers that administered injections and tablets to people during the day and stroked him on most nights until he came. He still didn't understand Kola's reason for sticking to his pharmacy, although he had studied chemical engineering. And although Ndukwe was in a better position to place him firmly in one of his oil businesses in Port Harcourt or Aba or anywhere else in Nigeria, Kola had politely declined this offer, clutching onto his decision to remain in Enugu, managing his pharmaceutical store, until he was tired of the State and ready to return to Ogun State.

"I think I know your problem," Kola said, sitting on the bed beside Ndukwe who was checking the time on his phone.

"You're scared of coming out, of being seen for who you truly are." Now, he was raising his voice. He leaned in and slowly whispered into Ndukwe's ears, "Because you don't want her to know that you're a homo." Ndukwe slapped Kola's face. The swiftness of his hand, the deftness of his fingers against Kola's face surprised him. He was sure he had left a huge welt on Kola's face but as he lowered himself to the floor to check, his words soaked with apology, Kola pushed him away and crawled back into the bed, his back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. Ndukwe was glad there was no mark or welt on his face and yet, he felt a pang of shame. “I'm sorry, babes. Please, forgive me. I didn't mean to..."

"You didn't mean to, but, but...you did. You slapped me, N... Ndukwe." The edge in Kola's voice had dissolved, giving way to a breaking, as columns of tears rose in his throat. Ndukwe stared at Kola for too long, his bones reeling with shock at the way Kola cried like a child who'd lost a parent. Something in Ndukwe had cracked, something he couldn't vividly describe. He made to lift himself from the floor and go to Kola, but the thing held him back. He turned to the window, away from Kola's glaring look, his eyes glistening with tears.

Soap Birds

Pete Prokesch

I was probably the first pot head priest in St. Luke's congregation. I mean, staying celibate was tricky enough. Even confessions made me horny. Rich housewives venting about sexless marriages. Impure thoughts about their plumber or their kid's SAT tutor. Still, I felt solace that the women in the congregation were as lonely as me.

I always dreamed of being a carpenter. Like my brother John. Or Jesus. My brother had a small construction company in town. Built-in cabinets. Crown molding. Oak casings for false beams. That sort of thing. It felt too late in life to learn a trade. Besides, who would do business with a fifty year old ex-priest? Felt like you were cheating on God.

So I kept up my sermons and whittled soap at night. I’d sit in the rectory at the foot of my bed with my switch blade and carve clean white bars into swans. Or penguins. Storks. Any type of bird, really. I stashed the soap birds in a shoebox under my bed. In the morning I’d sweep the shavings off the pine floor and mass them into a waxy ball. Then I'd melt the ball over a Bic lighter. I wanted to let it burn my skin but I never did and it made little white puddles on the floor.

After a few weeks it felt wrong trapping the birds in that box under my bed. Soap or not, I never felt good about birds in a cage. So I’d wake up before dawn on Tuesdays and leave the shoebox of soap birds in front of the homeless shelter by St. Jude’s Park. I labeled it "donated soap."

The box was always gone the next day when I went for my morning walk. My mind swimming with thirty milligrams of edible weed. I imagined dirty homeless men, cooked on meth, rubbing the soap over dulled scars and faded tattoos while the hot water in the shelter showers hissed. I loved the idea of my soap birds cleansing filthy skin. I made my delivery at dawn every Tuesday morning and never said a word.

I held open confessions every Tuesday afternoon. The same day I’d deliver the birds. I knew it was Deborah McCarthy every time by her earthy scent. She taught gardening at Roosevelt Junior High and never wore perfume. Or deodorant. It was that smell of fresh earth that set her apart from the rich women in the congregation. She came to confession every Tuesday at three thirty after she got out of school. She never seemed in a rush to get home to Mr. McCarthy. I’d smell the soil through the black screen of the confession booth and she’d clear her throat and begin.

Mrs. McCarthy’s voice always trembled at first, as if she committed a murder. Or syphoned her teacher's salary into an offshore account. Then I’d hear about a minor breech of patience with a rude middle school boy. Yanking a healthy kale by the root instead of harvesting its leaves. Eating an earthworm to impress his friends. She’d confess her thoughts of smacking the boy. Leaving him in as much pain as the worm or the kale.

Her husky voice was my muse. While she spoke, I imagined the wing angle of my next soap bird. She’d sigh in relief at the end and I’d give her five Hail Marys to recite at the altar of the church.

“I’ve had unfaithful thoughts, Father,” she said one cold and sunny autumn afternoon and exhaled again in relief. “My mind is unclean.”

I adjusted my collar and cleared my throat as the gummy kicked in and the black veil of the screen between us seemed like a theater curtain. I waited for what prompted her benign ideation of violence. A crushed ladybug? The improper pruning of a tomato? If only I could lift the black
screen. If only she could see me while she talked. Stare into my bloodshot eyes. Know that I'm as scared and confused as the rest.

“Unpure thoughts are God’s way to test us,” I said. “It’s in choosing right from wrong that we discover our faith.” I imagined the type of bird I’d carve that night. Maybe a flamingo. I’d use a white bar of coconut soap and soak it in mashed berries and let it turn pink. Maybe Mrs.
McCarthy grew berries in her garden. I’d ask her after I assigned the Hail Marys.

But then I heard Mrs. McCarthy clear her throat deeper than usual and her bench creaked as she rose. She swung open the wood door to the booth and a moment later the door to my side swung open and my eyes felt raw in the light. She shut the door and sat down next to me in the dark. Her legs pressed against my black robe.

“Mrs. McCarthy,” I said. But my voice sounded feeble and weak.

I heard her rustle through her purse, then the crinkle of plastic, the flick of a lighter, and the smell of cigarette smoke. The gummy had fully kicked in at this point and I struggled to peel my lips of my chalky dry gums.

“Look father,” she continued. “I know you walk around here high out of your skull. And I don’t blame you for it. I can’t imagine the type of—restraint you must employ. Preaching to these phonies and fakes.”

“Mrs. McCarthy,” I said again. By now she had slipped her cigarette between my fingers and I found myself inhaling deep and exhaling a clean funnel of smoke that vanished through the black screen.

“My husband is a fake. And he won’t even fuck me, Father,” she said and pulled the cigarette out of my hand and placed it back in her mouth. She held it in her teeth as she rummaged for something in her purse. “Do you know what that’s like? You’ve chosen this life of solitude. But you’re married to God. I feel hopeless. Like I’m stuck in purgatory.”

Who did these people think I was, other than a lonely stoner in a priest’s garbs? I felt no less married to God than I did to the glass chamber of my bong. An outcast who’s greatest joy was getting high and whittling bars of soap into animals at night. A crude desire to wash another man's skin.

“I carve soap at night,” I said. It felt like the first real thing I’d spoken in months.

“Soap?” she said. She stopped rummaging and the confessional door crept open, as if nudged by a ghost. The sun had sunk in the sky and shone through the stained glass, painting pinks and purples on the wooden pews.

“Soap,” I repeated. “I get high at night and whittle little birds with a knife.”

I coughed as the confessional booth filled with tobacco smoke. Then Mrs. McCarthy stood and yanked my hand and we stepped into the chapel. The church was empty but I lit some frankincense anyway to hide the smell of cigarettes. . On the stained-glass window near the altar, I eyed a white dove resting on the shoulder of St. Francis.

“Can you show me?” she said. "Can you show me your birds?"

She looked desperate as tears welled in her eyes. I noticed the feint blond hairs on her upper lip. Speckled with dirt from the school garden. She felt the presence of my eyes and licked her lips clean and swallowed the soil. She squeezed my hand in a rhythmic pulse and I smelled the earth on her skin. I nodded and swung open the heavy doors of the chapel and climbed the steel stairs to the rectory.

I simmered a can of split pea soup on the stove in my rectory room, poured us each a bowl and dusted the soup with black pepper. We sat at my round kitchen table with the scratched surface and we sipped our soup in silence. Mrs. McCarthy pursed her lips and blew on the bowl of soup, sending the tiniest ripples across the pool of green. I noticed these tiny details when I was high. And the sounds were amplified — just our grunts and breathing and the clank of the spoons against the rim of the bowl. I finished first and rose and heated water on the stove for coffee. I had passed the peak from my gummy and I felt the tide of my busy mind recede.

“Why birds?” she asked as she rose with her empty bowl and stacked it on the mass of crusty plates piled in the sink.

“I like the thought of someone washing themselves with my work,” I said. I pictured the blank stares of businessmen and executives like Mr. McCarthy in the pews at Sunday mass. Itching to crack a beer for the Patriots game. “I leave the birds at St. Jude’s shelter where the meth heads stay.”

“Hmm,” she said. She sat on the edge of my twin bed and fingered the button on her flannel shirt.

“If you want I can show you.”

She scooted over and made room for me on my bed.

I sat next to her on the edge of the bed and the cheap church mattress sunk under our combined weight. I scoured my mind for the last time I washed my sheets, but these days the weed made it hard to pull details from the fog.

I reached down and slid the shoebox out from under my bed. I raised the lid and exposed the little soap birds. I handed her a dove carved from a bar of coconut soap and she traced her finger over the texture of feathers on the spread wings. Then she closed her eyes and inhaled the fragrance and let herself fall back onto my sheets. I reached under the bed again and wrapped my fingers around the barrel of a bong; I packed the bowl with weed from a small orange pill bottle in my pocket.

Mrs. McCarthy sat up and found the lighter from her purse. I handed her the bong and she bubbled the water and blew a clean stream of smoke into the sunlight pouring in through the stained-glass windows.

“It’s beautiful,” she said after she coughed. “The stained glass.” Her eyes softened and she tucked a wisp of brown hair behind her sunburnt ear.

I frowned at the window. “Sometimes I’d prefer a clear view,” I said. She handed me the bong. I reached back into the box and handed her a  raven.

“Black soap,” she said. “Seems dirty almost. Like it’d be impossible to get clean.”

“Oh, I just rub it with charcoal,” I said. “A natural exfoliant.”

She examined the black remnants on her skin. She dragged her finger across the raven and she leaned toward me and drew the faintest black mark on my brow between my eyes.

I touched the birds wings and did the same to her.

"Confessions better this way," she said. "Reciprocal."

She was quiet and traced her finger over the finely carved feet of the bird. “Hey," she said, suddenly plucked from thought. "Have you thought of starting a business?”

I shook my head, bent over the bong and milked the chamber. Mrs. McCarthy lit a cigarette then stood up and walked to the boiling water on the stove. She scooped coffee from a red plastic Folgers carton into the French press. Then she poured the hot water over the coffee and stirred until a pleasing brown foam formed on the surface.

I helped myself to a third bong hit and coughed a cloud of smoke and squinted to make out the shape of a tree through the distortion of the stained glass.

“My students and I,” she said from across the room. “We run a stand at the Farmers’ Market with our produce from the school garden. I could sell your soap. You can keep the money. I won't tell a soul.”

I thought about sweeping the shavings off the floor in the morning. How satisfying it would feel to let all that hot  soap burn on my skin. How filthy my body felt compared to the clean  wings of the bird.

"Okay," I said.

She opened and shut cabinets until she found the cups. She plunged the French press and poured the steaming coffee into identically chipped mugs and placed the cups on the nightstand and sat next to me on the bed. I lit the last of the weed and took an ashy hit from the bong as the sun sank below the trees and the light was weak and beautiful through the stained glass.

Mrs. McCarthy kept coming to confession once a week and lamented about her impure thoughts. She slept in a separate room now from Mr. McCarthy who came back later and later from his law firm's office. She would pleasure herself with produce from the garden, she said. Zucchinis and eggplants and cucumbers. I’d wait for her to tell me who she replaced her husband with in her mind. But the silence would linger and I’d give her three Hail Marys instead of five.

After confession she’d follow me to the rectory, and we'd get high and I’d hand her the box full of birds. I averaged two birds a night at this point and took Sundays off. That made about a dozen birds per week. I checked out a bird identification guide from the public library and advanced to pine warblers and horned owls.

Still, Mrs. McCarthy told me the black ravens were the top sellers. There was something sublime about scrubbing yourself clean with black soap, she’d say. I imagined the men at the shelter, heads pounding from meth and scrubbing themselves with that shitty green liquid from the dispenser. Or bars of cheap Dove. I felt like I was cheating—selling the soap to rich people at a Farmer's Market and taking all the profit.

“You might want to consider a name for your business,” she said. “And maybe even an Instagram account.”

I nodded and picked a crud of soap caught under my thumbnail.

“Artisan soap is big right now,” she said as she lit a cigarette. “Real profit potential. We could take this on the road. We could get away. What do you think?”

I sat there and shook my head all nervous and scribbled down my sermon and crumbled the last of my weed into my bong.

The following Tuesday I sat in the empty booth for an hour waiting for Mrs. McCarthy but she never showed. It was November and overcast and the stained glass looked dull and plain. The next few weeks were the same. I just sat in the dark booth and thought of Mrs. McCarthy and let the weed design birds in my mind.

I carved as many birds as I could in those weeks. I barely slept. Baltimore orioles painted black and orange with charcoal and grated pumpkin. Grackles with alder syrup for the purple hues on the neck. I picked poison berries from behind the church and mashed them with a mortar and pestle and carved cardinals. I never sold them or brought them to the shelter and let them fill the cardboard boxes under my bed until my room was overflowing with soap birds. As if the birds alone would summon Mrs. McCarthy back into my confessional booth.

I didn’t have Mrs. McCarthy’s number or even an email. It would be improper for a priest to keep a married woman’s number in his phone. And I never made my Instagram handle either. I craved one of her Parliament cigarettes, but I feared getting recognized by the teenage clerk at the 7-Eleven in town. I started waking up in the middle of the night and carving more birds.

The next Sunday on a whim I decided to cancel mass. I put on a Red Sox cap and big aviator sunglasses and walked to the Farmer’s Market by the soccer fields at the school. I walked to the last plastic folding table under a pop-up tent weighted down with dumbbell weights and a sign for Roosevelt Junior High.

A bored thirteen year-old girl sat in a fold up chair thumbing her phone and there was a single bird left for sale and I picked up my charcoal raven and touched the tiny tip of its black wings.

"Where's Mrs. McCarthy?" I asked. I made my voice husky and thick.

“She's gone,” the girl said without looking up from her phone. “Our garden is covered
with weeds."

There was no sign of produce on the table. A cold November wind blew through and rustled the hoods of the tents. Then she placed her phone on the table and leaned forward and looked deep into my shaded eyes. “She said her friend makes these birds. Someone she loves.”

Just like that she was gone and back to texting. I gave her ten dollars for the final black bird.

I ate four gummies that night in the rectory and lay back in bed and pictured Mrs. McCarthy far from here. Somewhere under huge skies in Idaho or Wyoming. Or California. Napping under the shade of towering cannabis plants on a farm in Humboldt County. Playing the guitar at night while red eyed hippies trimmed weed into huge cannisters and camped out in tents and collected their cash in the morning. I imagined us making love under the moonlight, my penis a ripe cucumber.

I held a soap  bird and smelled my sheets, unwashed since she left. They still smelled
like soil. I stood up and walked to the bathroom and showered and scrubbed myself with my own soap and watched the charcoal drip down my skin and the black water vanish down the drain. I toweled and changed into my flannel pajamas and cleaned the tower of dishes. After the dishes, I swept the soap shavings into a pile, rolled them into a ball, and squeezed until it became the shape of my fist.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed and flicked a lighter and held the flame to the balled-up shavings and watched the heat melt the mass into a hot liquid. I let the bubbling soap dribble on my skin. The burn felt like sweet relief as I picked up my paper and pen and wrote my final sermon.

the only way to get rid of mania is death

Arshia Iqbal 

Alam Khalu died at midnight yesterday while I was at a bar then a party then skipping back to my dorm because something about mania entails moving as much as you can as many times as you can until you’re in bed paralyzed by your own recklessness. And that’s what happened. I moved so much that the heels of my foot felt numb the next morning when I woke up to a frantic call from my mother.

“He died last night,” Ammu said sniffling on the other line, “Come home, Sabina. We need you to take us to the janaza tonight and then they’ll bury him.”

It’s spring break at Sarah Lawrence and I had decided earlier that week not to go home when everyone else did. The night before we were all supposed to leave, I ran into the man of my dreams, my souuulmate as one would say. It was a murky Friday night and we were at a dive bar. I stayed sober because you shouldn’t drink on seroquel, especially seroquel 300, especially seroquel 300 extended release, the dosage that doesn’t ever really leave your body. But Kayla turned twenty one and she demanded that we all go to Lucky’s and watch her try to get lucky. In the midst of it all, in the bar I really never liked, the dim lights and the pool table I always tried to play a game on, I saw him. Lodged somewhere in a corner with dark and deep eyes, and blonde hair. And though my rule is generally to avoid blonde men because they remind me of the Ken dolls I used to behead, I was drawn to him. Maybe that’s why I waited outside the bathroom for him to come out and accidentally spilled my ginger ale on him, and maybe that’s why I got a water from the bartender and a napkin and used it to dab up the sticky liquid off of his shirt, and maybe that’s why he said I was really kind and he wasn’t used to that in a big city.

“We’re in Bronxville,” I said.

“Bigger city than Fairhope Alabama,” he responded chuckling.

“That’s not a real place”

“I’ll take you one day,” he smiled, a dimple popping up on either side of his cheeks.

His name was Jacob and he was in town for the next week and he loved New York because the sewer system was so unique and I laughed because I thought he was joking. He didn’t notice though. Then Kayla threw up and wrapped her arms around my waist. It was time to go home because she said she’d piss herself if we didn’t leave in ten minutes. So we did and if I was normal I’d say that was the last of Jacob I’d ever see. But because I felt good enough to do so, I made it my mission to see him again, to linger in the bars and the cafes and the college adjacent streets to see him, for this serendipitous meeting between us to occur again.

Mania happens when life gets too good, when job offers come knocking and you lose ten pounds and your professor says your essay was remarkable even though you didn’t finish the book because you were too busy feeling good. Mania happens when you feel soo good, when the limbs of your body are disjointing themselves out of joy and sometimes when you walk, the air lifts you up a little. Mania is so good that you don’t need to sleep or eat or lay down because then you’re wasting the goodness, the joy, the little particles of happiness that surround you because you deserve it. That’s what mania is.

When I was nineteen I trekked my way to Zucker Hillside psychiatric hospital at the tail end of Queens and sat in the waiting room for four hours until they found a doctor to see me. I refused to move or breathe or think of anything except for a cure. I needed to be cured, from the emotional rampages and the weeks of utter desolation I felt afterwards. Surely, there was a pill for that, a cure packaged in orange bottles. There was no cure, is what the hot doctor explained to me. He said, “bipolar disorder is something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. You can manage it, but it'll never go away." I started crying after he said that and just as I thought the brunt of the burden had been placed on my shoulders, he shrugged and said “Kanye West has it,” and I cried louder.

He was right. The disorder never goes away, symptoms come and go, but the sweet fruit of mania stays until it rots inside of you.

So I called Ammu and told her about this midterm I couldn’t finish in time and how much I valued getting good grades my senior year. Usually she’d fight back, tell me that the library back in Queens was walking distance and that I would die of hunger because the dining hall is closed. This time she didn’t. Her cousin’s husband was dying and she was too preoccupied with hospital visits and the Quran recitations and the phone calls to every relative we’ve ever had, to make a fuss.

“But if he dies, you have to come home,” she said. And I agreed. That man had been on death’s door for a year, and my souuulmate could leave for Arizona at any minute now. I needed to be on the hunt, but more importantly, I also needed to keep feeling good without anyone stopping me. Going home is being a real person, it’s relatives and oily food, and insurance paperwork my dad can’t seem to understand but here, I can keep it going, I can keep feeling good. I can go to bed at three and wake up at nine, walk five miles a day looking for him in cafes and bookstores and in the Target I spent too much money in and eat Cheerios by the handful for dinner, and then spend the rest of my money on Gogo boots because the sixties are back and they’ll never come back again. And at night I’d go snooping, back at Lucky’s looking for him in a corner, and then to another bar because the girls I met in this one are also tourists and we should definitely hit up all the spots where tourists could go, for no particular reason of course, and then the girls leave and its morning and I’m back in my bed, unasleep.

Then Monday night happened. Before the rest of the story is told there needs to be an emphasis on this: I did not love Jacob, I could never love Jacob, I think I liked his blonde Ken-like hair and the fact that he laughed at all my jokes, but the mania makes me think we were souuulmates and the morning after I met him I put my shoe on and it fit just right, more right than it had ever fit before and it convinced me that Jacob was a fit, a perfect fit because I was thinking about him while I was putting them on. Then I walked to the store and I saw a flyer that said “Hope,” and I knew all hope wasn’t lost, that I was promised something and I deserved it wholeheartedly. So when I walked into Lucky’s with my hair straightened and my lips glossed on Monday night and the man of my dreams, who for two whole days I thought was going to move me to Alaska to bear children who would dog sled their way to school, was making out with a blonde girl, I felt like death.

The other thing about mania is that a little bad is a lot of bad. Suddenly I’m outside the bar dry heaving and I feel all the food I didn’t eat come back up my throat. I’m worthless and ugly and why would a man from Alabama (I just remembered that he was from Alabama not Alaska) want someone like me? Stupid. I’m stupid. No man is ever going to love me. I’m stupid and I’m sick and I don’t think I’ve eaten a real meal since Thursday. Why wouldn’t he go for the blonde? She has cowboy boots on. I should have bought cowboy boots instead of Gogo boots, but it’s too late to return because I stepped in a shit ton of mud and now they’re stained. Life is awful and I’m awful, and I deserve to die.

That’s when I’ve lost all control. Losing control is skipping a pill and walking out at midnight to see the stars, but there are no stars in New York City and your pepper spray was lost when you switched bags. But still there’s the urge, the urge replaced by anger replaced by this desperation to go up in the sky and wipe the light pollution away with the end of your sleeve.

The urge is then taking up the tourist girls on their offer to go to a party at the back of a bowling alley where girls in tight dresses sat on top of dumpsters and I grabbed a megaphone and made everyone play “Simon Says.”

When you lose control, mania is like a fire under your skin. It’s this constant burning until you give in to every desire you could ever have, leaving no stone unturned in this quest to suffocate the living, breathing flame nursing itself in your insides. One summer I lost control and fell asleep on an open roof, and then the next week I took a kitchen knife and ran it up my thigh fifteen times because I really wanted to get stitches. When the girls on Twitter say they’re manic because they dyed their hair and decided to sleep with their best friend’s boyfriend, people like them, but when I do it, get manic and hold my finger over an open flame to see how long I can withstand the burn and sit on my hands so they get numb and slap myself with them until either my face or my hand gives out, nobody retweets and I’m left alone, stupid and vulnerable.

There’s a protocol in place for it though, the mania, the out of control mania. First it’s sleep, but I can’t sleep because I feel my heart in my chest beating at all times in the crook of my ear. Then, it’s food, but I can’t eat because everything tastes alien to me, even the white bread feels not white to me. After that it’s exercise, but after the sixth mile my mind still stays muddied. Lastly, the final step, the last possible thing I could do or would want to do, is to make myself feel bad, hone in on every negative emotion possible and plunge myself into a depression, into a phase where I can only eat and sleep and rot away. Sometimes it's opening Instagram and letting pictures of people I went to high school with appear on my feed over and over again, future lawyers and handsome boyfriends and waists the size of my fist. Other times it’s looking in the mirror, ten straight minutes until I can't recognize the person on the other side, and there is no real Sabina. This time, fate smiled at me, Ammu and the dead uncle. I would go home, feel the death, hear their sobs and finally, sadness and helplessness will take over - and maybe I’ll be able to eat something.

It was a forty minute drive from Bronxville to Queens and I drove slow. Queens is where the trauma is stored, it’s like those videos of those white women in the Thai health retreats where they’re bent over and they let out this carnal scream. Going back to Queens will release it, release me back into my own torment and I won’t be manic anymore because life is so hard that feeling everything all at once in your familial home will make you yearn to feel nothing at all.

When I get home, I park at the front of the house, take out my luggage from the trunk and ring the bell. Ammu opens the door, her eyes are bloodshot and her face is stained with tears. She drags me into the living room and discusses the death at length. They Facebook Live’d his last moments so relatives all over the world could see, and Ammu watched it for thirteen hours straight even though the hospital was thirty minutes away. She’s a germaphobe.

“And then the shaking,” she said, “the shaking, violently and rigorously. It was so bad, I closed my eyes because, ya Allah, it was painful.”

She hands me a samosa. It tastes like cardboard and I spit it out. I’m not cured.

“We’ll all die some day,” she cried. “A second away from death’s door and poor Asma, that poor woman had to watch it all happen.” She keeps bawling, I wipe the tears off her face and rub her shoulders, snot is coming out of all ends. I can’t remember this guy’s face. How can I mourn and cry and rip out my hair by its follicles if I can’t imagine what he looks like? For now he looks like Barack Obama, but Desi because that’s the only man I could think of.

The phone rings. Ammu grabs and holds it to her ears. She starts crying louder. Something about the burial and the washing and this pain of having to bear it and to make sure Asma Khala got something to eat.

I don’t feel a thing.

Ammu said Alam Khalu was a good man. He worked at a Stop and Shop in Long Island for twenty two years and raised three kids on that salary. His wife, Asma Khala, was Ammu’s favorite cousin - who she only spoke to three times a year because in order for someone to stay as a favorite they need space from you. They were married for forty years and Ammu did Asma’s henna for their wedding. He was a good man and he held me as a baby. And he came to our house for Eid except I was in college, but he did ask for me and I did speak to him on the phone three years ago. We were planets in orbit, never quite meeting at the right time, and maybe that is something to grieve, his dead body never seeing my curly hair in its prime because I just learned to style it four years ago.

I still don’t feel a thing - except this desire to sit on my hands and burn the tips of my fingers. My dad comes home, his eyes are puffy and swollen. I start to feel left out. When I was little I used to rip out my bottom eyelashes to help me cry during funerals and weddings and the endings of sad movies I didn’t quite understand. But I don’t do that now. I’m older and wiser and my hands are numb. Still, I try to cry. I sit there for three minutes and I don’t blink. I try to squeeze out any semblance of a tear until my little brother walks past me and says I look like I’m about to take a dump.

The death doesn’t move me, neither does the story of it, nor does the reaction of others. I’m frozen manic, an icicle of human emotion. I need to take it a step further. I need to see the body. I need to feel the coldness of a lifeless vessel and maybe I’ll cry. I deserve to cry.

The drive to the masjid in Hicksville is silent except for Ammu’s sniffling. Abbu sits on the passenger’s side, Walid’s in the back, and I am wracked with excitement. I’m going to see the face, and I’m going to cry, and I’ll be so sad that I’ll finally sleep, a nice depression sleep where I can dream of ways to stay stable. I’ll see his face and my eyes will well up, and the world will suddenly get smaller and mortality will become something I think of all the time and life will gain value and lose excitement and I’ll never ever ever let a man from a sports team hold me upside down on a keg again. I won’t because I’ll be thinking of my dead uncle and I’ll be so sad.

The sports boy will come up to me and ask if I know how to do a handstand and I’ll look at him, solemnly and say “Of course I do, but I’m in mourning right now” and people will nod their heads at me respectfully, thinking of how brave I am for showing up, but how tasteful I am for not engaging in it. And then maybe I’ll make out with the sports boy because he was so respectful about my dead uncle.

We get to Hicksville as I am still reeling from the thought of the sports boy, he would definitely be a basketball player and I would definitely feel like Gabriella from High School Musical. I park a street down and all of us - Ammu, Abbu, Walid, and I, walk over to the masjid in silence. At the gate Asma Khala greets us. I remember her, from my fifth birthday when she accidentally ate a candle. Asma Khala wraps me in a thick hug and looks me up and down.

“You’ve gained weight, haven’t you?” she says. In another world, that would be enough to make me depressed, but it’s not in this one, partly because every time she talks I imagine her spitting out the pink wax candle she was chewing on.

“She has,” Ammu responds, hugging her friend slash cousin deeply and they both begin wailing together. Also, in another world, it would read that they’re crying because I’m so fat. They’re not, but that would be enough to make me depressed. So, I kinda wish they were.

Then I catch a glimpse of the three kids, they’re three adults now, two sons and a daughter in their mid-thirties. They’re inside the masjid, one is on the phone and the other two are speaking to each other, carefully and calmly like one wrong word would kill another family member. We’re early, uncomfortably early, just like Ammu likes it.

Asma Khala turns to us, “Do you want to see the laash.” The body, the limp dead body with the cold face and the color drained from it. Walid shakes his head “no,” but Abbu pinches his arm and he yelps. Ten year olds don’t get opinions.

“Of course we do,” Abbu responds. It’s disrespectful to not catch a glimpse, especially if it’s offered. We walk over to the back to the masjid and the body is resting there on a metal tray, covered in a white cloth with only the face showing. It’s an old man with a mustache. Not Barack Obama. I don’t recognize his face, but it’s colorless and his eyes are closed. He seems to be at peace, calm and cool and collected and death seemed to be a favor for him, a lifting of something. Ammu starts to cry and runs off, Abbu goes after her, and Walid follows behind, afraid of the body and if it would come back alive to bite him. But I stay back. I look at the face, the long eyelashes and the thick eyebrows, I see his lips are slightly parted and his nose hairs are sticking out.

I start off by apologizing.

“I’m sorry that you’re dead, that must really suck,” I say, “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if you were alive, but I really need to do this, so please don’t haunt me.”

Then I look around, afraid an uncle could catch me mid act or a loose child could think this touching business was a free for all. Nothing. Then I take a deep breath.

I pick up my left hand and touch his cheek. It’s cold and hard and chalky. Obviously. He’s dead.

But there is no wave of sadness, no rush of helplessness, I don’t feel overwhelmed by the futility of this life, instead I am left with the facts. His face is cold and he is dead and I just touched a dead guy for no reason. And I was excited to touch a dead guy and in some countries this would be illegal and I would be stoned, and not in the fun way.

I look again to see if anyone is there, any cameras or pigeons or loose children, but I see nothing. I go to the bathroom and look at myself, if I had ten minutes I’d teach myself to forget who she is, but the chalky feeling of dead skin touching my callouses had overcome me. I wash my hands. Once in hot water, and another time with plenty of soap, one more time where I used my nails to scratch the skin off the palm that touched the corpse, then a last ditch effort where I rubbed my dead body hand against my pant leg until the skin felt raw to touch and my hand hurt to move. I had touched the dead man and I felt as alive as ever.

I try to rush out the bathroom door when I come face to face with the daughter, his one and only daughter. I think her name is Baby, every Bengali family has a “Baby,” and I think she’s ours. I look at our Baby, her swollen eyes and dry lips, as if she had been crying for a century and then some.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “he was a good man.”

And she smiles, as if she can’t tell I’m faking it and wraps me in a hug. The kind of hug only family can give each other because it comes from shared blood, from the one given to us by a great grandmother who died on a cot in a village somewhere. They say that women hold their great granddaughters in their eggs, which means at some point, Baby and I were hugging like this, on a smaller scale, in a great Nani’s body.

“He would have been happy to see you,” she says in Bangla.

He would, wouldn’t he? I’d be forced to sit next to him on our living room couch and he’d ask me when I’d get married and I’d say I’d wait until law school and he’d spend the rest of his life telling people I was a lawyer. We’d laugh once or twice or three times at his corny jokes and he’d go home, Ammu would tell me that when he married Asma Khala she thought he was ugly, and then he’d get a heart attack and die. That would be our last meeting, and I would have something to grieve, but instead, I was his last human touch and the weight of his dead face on my palm is dragging me down, and Baby will never know that I touched him for the sake of touching him and we’d continue to hug like this until one day she too dies of a heart attack and I won’t cry like Ammu did when Baby’s father died because I’d be too selfish, too manic, too sick to care of anything but myself.

With my hand still feeling cold from the chill of touching the dead and the voice of a daughter, a real grieving daughter ringing in my ears, I walk back to the women’s section and sit next to my mother. I take her hand and hold it in mine and we both start to cry. Her in this fear of death, the loss of a family member, the aches of a life taken too soon. Me, in the fear of life, the cold of the dead body sticking to my skin, and this sinking feeling that I’ll never not be manic again.

Pets and Other Deaths

Jason Herman 

When it became clear that she wasn’t coming back, he went to Whole Foods and stood in the beer aisle. Never before had he made such a calculated decision to get drunk, and every label seemed to suggest either self-conscious posturing — “Shipfaced Ale,” “Pour Decisions” — or tonal impropriety - “For Those About to Bock,” “Dry Humpkin”. Was there ever an occasion to get drunk on “Nipple Mountain”? Standing before the refrigerator, trying not to notice the limpid silhouette staring back at him in the glass, he regretted coming to Whole Foods for beer to get drunk on. In the end, he grabbed a six-pack with a skeleton on the label - “Dead Guy Ale”. The skeleton was crouching or maybe sitting with its arm folded, wearing a hat that looked papal and smiling, sort of.

After getting drunk, he took the kids camping. Not by himself, but with friends and their intact families, leaning on their structure like scaffolding. One of the women brought a store-bought birthday cake and candles for The Youngest, who was turning four. It was decorated like a watermelon, with a green rind of frosting around the edge and pink in the middle, dotted with little black seeds. All weekend they stayed out of cellphone range, and the kids swam in brown streams and turned over giant river rocks looking for bugs. When he pulled back onto the highway on Sunday afternoon, dark gray stormclouds had accumulated on the pass. Globs of rain began to pelt the windshield, and the texts started pouring in, paragraphs filled with vitriol and logistics, picking up where he and she had left off. Gusts of wind came unexpectedly and pushed the car toward the center lane and the oncoming traffic.

When they arrived home, they found the house half-emptied. Half the dishes had been taken, half the chairs around the dining room table, half the small appliances. The pictures she wanted had been pulled down, leaving empty spaces on half the walls. He imagined her white minivan in the driveway, the one they had bought together, the hatch lifted open, the back stuffed with chairs and boxes and lamps with their shades removed, their cords neatly wrapped around their bases. What good was it to have half of everything, of anything? Some things resisted half-ness, only a whole would do. The kids for example.

The cat came padding into the kitchen and sat on her haunches in front of the slider. She mewed half-heartedly, staring through the glass and out into the night. He went to the door and slid it open. The sound of the wind was a steady, distant hum, like cars on a freeway. At the back of the yard, the limbs of the fir trees swayed in the darkness. The cat took a step forward and froze on the threshold. She stood uncertain, sifting her instincts, the wind pushing the fur back from her forehead, one long gray whisker wavering.

He slid the door shut just as a cry rang out from The Youngest’s bedroom. The Oldest, who had been helping her little sister unpack from camping, came soberly into the hall.

“Dad,” she said, her eyes traveling to the empty spaces on the walls, then back to him. “You better come look at her fish.”

The fish’s name was Rainby (short for Rainbow Fish), and they buried it the next day, in the backyard, under rocks painted with polka dots and rainbows. The older two had always insisted that Rainby was a stupid name and had kept their distance, but in the end they painted rocks and knelt there in the dirt with him and The Youngest anyway.

They sprinkled a few wildflowers on the fish-sized mound, and he led them in offering their memories of Rainby (he could never remember if the fish was a she or a he). The Youngest shared how she picked him out among the stacks of fish in identical plastic containers because of the way his tail sparkled under the fluorescent lights. The Middle said that his name wasn’t so bad after all, and The Oldest watched the whole thing with her face screwed tight in a way that looked like anger but wasn’t. He tried to pray, but the words came out both too formal and too intimate, as if he had never prayed in his life. He had once known how to pray, but everything that once worked had stopped working.

When he finished, the older two stood and brushed the dirt and twigs from their knees. They hopped up onto the porch one by one and disappeared into the boredom and cool of the house. The cat drifted outside and stretched languidly, before sniffing all around the base of the mound they had raised. The Youngest tried to sit in his lap, but he was still kneeling and she slid down and onto the ground. She rolled over, plucked a blade of grass, and held her arms up to the sky, her face summer-gold.

“It’s ok, Daddy,” she said, looking up at the slender miracle of green between her fingers, “I didn’t love him that much anyway.”

The cat was named after his ex’s best friend from childhood, and of all the things that he wished she had left in the house, Piper the cat was dead last. His only experience with cats pre-Piper was house-sitting for one of his ex’s professors in college. That was an indoor cat, and during their week of housesitting he had carelessly left the door open while bringing in groceries, allowing the cat to dart outside. The two of them spent more than an hour trying to woo the cat back indoors with toys, with catfood, with threats of violence, and he vowed to never, ever own a cat.

But The Oldest had come along, and then The Middle, and they weren’t ready for a dog. With The Youngest, he got a bit of paternity leave, and that was enough of an excuse. The ex and The Oldest went out to a place in the country to pick her up, while he stayed with The Middle and the baby. They brought her home in a cardboard box with a homemade blanket at the bottom. The Oldest squeezed her so hard he thought she would snap her little cat bones.

Annoying the cat, rewarded with cries of protest from the girls, became his schtick. He would press a finger tip to the middle of the cat’s forehead and hold it there until she batted it away. He tossed it gleefully from the couch when it sat in his favorite spot. He blew in its ears to wake it up.

Piper the cat was full grown by the time things started going sideways. He came home from work to find dishes put away in the wrong cupboards. She (the ex) stayed out late, started listening to new music, bought herself expensive workout clothes. She didn’t protest when he wanted to get beers with a friend or even take a weekend for himself, leaving her alone with the girls. And then one day she was just gone. He assumed she would come back and get the cat, but she never did. Now he was single and he owned a cat named after his ex-wife’s best friend. It was not a look he liked.

After the fish came the cat he ran over. It was one of those wet winter nights when the world is all headlights and greasy windshields. He was running late to get the girls to piano lessons (back-to-back-to-back), and he was picking them up at the little house the ex was renting with her fiancé.

Out they bounded, one-by-one, and hopped into the car, each bursting with news of mommy’s house and school. He pulled the lever into drive, rolled only a few inches, and from underneath the car came a primitive, agonized howl.

The Middle, who despite her cold shoulder to the fish had always been the most partial to animals, threw open the door and crouched down to see beneath the car.

“Daddy, back up!”

He put the car in reverse and rolled back slowly.

He sent The Oldest back into the house for towels, but by the time she returned with her arms full, The Middle had already scooped the cat up into her arms.

It was an old gray sack of a thing, with loose skin around its belly and long, coarse whiskers. To his relief there was no blood, but its back legs were inert, its breathing clipped and wheezy. They wrapped it in towels, and The Middle climbed into the backseat again and cradled it in her lap. They thought it might belong to the house across the street, so he walked over and up the steep drive to the unlit entry.

He knocked half-heartedly and returned to the car. What he imagined about couples, and even his own life as half a couple had become a thing of imagination, was that there was some kind of catch-and-toss effect between them, the ball passing back-and-forth without it ever touching the ground. But with him it was all asymmetry. He saw himself as a catcher who lets a pitch in the dirt roll right through his legs, and where there should be backstop there is nothing, just more field, sloping downward and away, endless space to roll.

They drove to the veterinary hospital, The Middle whispering comfort to the dying animal the whole way.

The four of them stood around a metallic table, while the vet examined the cat under a low-hanging industrial light. She shook her head and led him out into the hall.

“She’s in a lot of pain, but we can’t put her down until the owners get here. You don’t have to stay with her if you don’t want to.”

“We’ll stay,” he said.

They sat in the waiting room, The Youngest in his lap, flipping through a stack of picture books with sticky pages. The Middle scratched her forearms.

The owner arrived at last, a woman in her seventies in a floral cardigan.

“I didn’t even know she was there,” he said. “She must have just crawled in front of the tire.”

“We’ve been telling her that was going to happen one of these days.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s an old girl. She’s had a good life.”

The vet, in a white jacket, was standing in the doorway to the operatory.

The owner looked over at the three girls, The Youngest now sitting in The Oldest’s lap, The Middle cupping her elbow with her other hand.

“You girls were so good to stay with her. Do you want to come say goodbye?”

Piper the cat was everywhere, always moving about, going from room to room, walking along the spine of the couch or on the headboards of their beds, picking a different girl’s room to sleep in every night, always in the background somewhere, rounding a corner. She was a tortoise shell, a pattern he found more interesting than the monochrome fur of other cats he knew. When he sat on the couch reading, after the girls had gone to bed, she would lie next to him and reach one paw out to lightly touch his leg. And when he got up for a drink of water or another beer (he had taken to the Dead Guy Ale), she would move over to the warm spot where he had been sitting and he would have to remove her when he returned, chastising her for knowing that this was going to happen and doing it anyway.

The Oldest said that when Piper died she was going to die, too. Once the cat got sick, and The Oldest threatened to throw herself from a cliff. Still, Piper wasn’t exactly a pet to be played with, not that the girls hadn’t tried. They dressed her up, tried taking her for walks, even gave her baths, none of which Piper appeared to enjoy. The girls needed a real pet.

His therapist had asked him, what does it feel like to imagine a life without the mom and the dad and kids, without that template? Dry was all he could think of. Dry bones. But the idea of a real pet, a dog say, was something new. It would be theirs, and it would belong to the present, not the past. There was a certain feeling he had around families with dogs. As if the circle around them were closed, unlike the opening he felt in his own family, through which everything just washed in and spilled out again. For a dog, he would have to build a fence.

He had never bought a dog and wasn’t even sure if that was the right word for it. Some people went to breeders, but that was even more alien to him, and anyway he didn’t want a designer dog. The Middle started searching as soon as he mentioned it. She planted herself in front of the computer in the kitchen, and while he was making dinner or doing dishes she would interrupt him with “Daddy, come look at this one!” and “Look how cute she is!” Over her shoulder, he watched grainy videos of dogs jumping excitedly around gravel dog runs, sniffing at camera lenses, or nosing up to sleeping cats. He learned the key criteria: housebroken or not, good with kids or not, hypoallergenic or not, leash-trained or not, mostly not.

They favorited a dog named Sweet Pea, whose listing described her as a “Smooth Collie mix.” He had never seen a Smooth Collie, but she looked a lot like the Pit Bull his neighbors once owned. He texted the number on the listing about coming out to see her the following week.

“Sweet peas had a lot of interest,” they wrote back. “The rescue doesn’t want us waiting any longer then this Friday.”

He took the day off and they drove out to see her. A young woman with a tattoo of Van Gogh’s bed on her forearm was fostering her and four cats in a mobile home next to a Catholic church. She put a pinch collar on the dog and handed him a leash.

“She loves walking in the cemetery.”

Sweet Pea led the way, and the girls took turns holding the leash, stopping to hug her neck and pose for pictures. The Middle kept asking, “Is she really, really ours?” He walked behind, silent, adopting the same posture he used when evaluating a car or a house for purchase. We are just taking her for a test drive. It was clear, though, from the joyful chatter bubbling up from the girls that there was no going back. They were going to be dog people. He glided regally behind the caravan, feeling like a patriarch.

They signed the papers and loaded her into the car. The drive home was an hour-and-a-half in traffic, and Sweet Pea panted so hard he thought she would pass out. They stopped twice for water, letting her lap it from a rinsed-out Starbucks cup.

That night, as Sweet Pea slept in her crate just outside his bedroom, he listened to the sounds of the house. The furnace firing on and off. The drip from a gutter outside his window. Unidentifiable creaks and cracks in the bones of the building. Everything felt different somehow, as if the place had been turned inside out. He remembered how it felt to bring The Oldest home from the hospital that first time. His greatest fear had been that he would set the car seat on the roof of the car, forget about it, and drive off, as if she were a cup of coffee or his phone. He felt, as he had never felt before, the dangers of driving. And when they finally got her safely home, their little apartment was transformed the moment she entered it. Everything had new meaning, from the colorful spines of the books lining the shelves to the dangers lurking beneath the kitchen sink.

The girls changed the dog’s name to Perry (this was entirely harmless, he learned from a book) and ordered a bowl and dish with a picture of a bone and her name on them. They took her for walks around the block, without the pinch collar, and invited their friends over to play with her. When he was working, she curled up at his feet under the desk.

The first time he let The Middle take her for a walk alone, she returned shaken. Sweet Pea (now Perry) had bared her teeth to another dog, and she (The Middle) had not been able to restrain her. The neighbors had scooped their little terrier into their arms and asked her where she lived.

“We’re not going to get rid of her are we?” she pleaded.

“Of course not. She just needs to get used to being around other dogs,” he reassured her. But he texted the Van Gogh tattoo:

“Sweet Pea got a little aggressive with another dog today.”

“Thats odd,” the response came back. “We never had any trouble with her.”

He noticed she had a thing with men. When his friends Dave and Diane came over, Diane knelt down and let the dog sniff her neck, but Dave hung back. Sweet Pea pulled free and backed herself up against the wall at the far end of the entryway. The standoff lasted for a minute or more, with Dave frozen and Sweet Pea shivering like a peacock and issuing a low, guttural growl. He dragged her downstairs by the collar, her toenails grasping for purchase on the tile floor, and shut her in.

But the presence of the dog inspired him anyway. He began to take on projects around the house. The aluminum windows were replaced. The dripping gutter fixed. The weather stripping he had never bothered to install on the front door was measured, cut, and fastened.

He hired Home Depot to do the windows and when the guy came out to do a final inspection, he penned Perry/Sweet Pea in the basement. They drifted from window to window, the inspector running a rubber-gloved finger along each seam. When they reached the basement, he paused with his hand on the brass doorknob. He considered putting the dog in a crate, but she had built up a reservoir of goodwill.

The inspector was not even halfway across the room when the dog latched onto him. He pulled back with a howl of pain and stood there clutching the wrist of his damaged hand with an air of utter, injurious contempt. Sweet Pea was shamed back into her crate, and the inspector rolled his glove back, revealing two purplish abrasions.

He texted the tattoo: “Ugh. She just bit a Home Depot guy. I need to return her. When can I bring her.”

“Bummer,” she sent back. “I’ll need to give her to the rescue but they are only here until tomorrow. Can you bring her today?”

“I’m on my way.”

By the time he picked the girls up at school, Sweet Pea was in the back of a truck, on her way to Houston, where (he learned) she had been plucked from some back alley.

The Middle didn’t say a word.

After that, they took a vacation. They had been at an extended family gathering in the mountains, staying at a Bavarian-themed hotel. It had all been just fine, but when they pulled out onto the highway to return home, instead of merging onto the interstate, he kept driving. The kids had absorbed themselves in a game, inventing radio ads for ridiculous products. (“Do you suffer from itchy-butt syndrome?”) Silently, and without their notice, he took them off course, logging mile after mile, winding through the mountains toward a lake resort he had visited years ago, with her, before there were kids.

He felt like a satellite that had slipped out of orbit and was hurtling through space with no fixed destination. He waited until they were almost there before telling the kids, glowing inwardly, marveling at his secret as they traced the edge of the lake. Their delight when he finally told them surprised him with its potency. He himself had authored it, had brought forth this unexpected joy. That this potential had lain there all along and it had been in his power to make it real, or not, terrified him.

They rented a room with two queen beds and ordered room service. The next day, he sat on the edge of the hot tub and watched the girls go back and forth between the cold mountain lake and the tepid pool. He captured images of each of them on his phone, dunking one another in the water, burying themselves in sand, stacking their bodies on top of one another until The Youngest came to him in tears. He could feel the moments freezing in time, slipping into the cold stream of eternity like cubes of ice.

He bought a six-pack of the skeleton beer but drank only two of them. When they packed up two days later, he left all six bottles on the table. They drove home with the windows down, The Oldest with her sunglasses on and her hand out the window, riding the wind like a wave.

That night, when they returned home, Piper was gone. This in itself was not alarming. She was an outdoor cat, and she went in and out as she pleased through a flap door he had installed next to the kitchen slider. The sound of the plastic flap thwacking shut behind her was the last thing he heard most nights. But tonight there was no sound. In the morning, the girls busied themselves gathering their things for a week at their mom’s house and didn’t register the cat’s absence before rushing out the door in a flurry of bags and backpacks.

He listened all day for the sound of the door, but it did not come. She had wandered off for a day or two before, but she always came back. He filled her dish with food, and after the third day he set the food outside, just in case. He walked to the end of the block in both directions and called her name, and he checked her favorite spot inside the canopy of the Japanese maple in the backyard. At the end of the week, she had not returned.

The night before the girls were to come home, he called The Oldest to prepare her.

“Have you even looked for her?” she asked.

“You don’t exactly go looking for a cat,” he said. “They know how to get home if they want to.”

“Did you put a sign up?”

Silence.

“Dad!” she protested. “You have to put a sign up!”

He thought about the posters he had seen stapled to telephone poles. Seeing a cat’s name and photo on paper, with listings of their various markings, had always struck him as oddly anthropomorphizing. He didn’t want to be a person who put up pictures of cats.

But the girls were coming home the next day, and he knew he had to do something. He found a photo of Piper and cropped it. The image was slightly grainy after being enlarged, and the shot was a profile, but it would have to do. He printed a stack of them and grabbed the stapler from his desk. He opened the door and called her name, then he canvassed the neighborhood, papering telephone poles until the stack was gone.

During Piper’s absence they went to the beach, to a small seaside town on the Oregon coast. He hadn’t bothered to check the weather, and it rained every day, giant thunderstorms with lightning spidering on the horizon and huge waves in which The Youngest said she could see sharks swimming and thrashing their tails. They watched from the windows of the Travelodge and took walks on the hard-packed sand when the sky cleared. No one put on a swimsuit all weekend. When the rain stopped, bonfires appeared on the beach. They bought some wood and kindling at the grocery store and dug a pit, scooping out four seats around the rim.

He lit the fire, and The Middle started to tell a ghost story she was obviously making up on the spot, about a dog lapping up blood dripping from a ceiling, and it made The Youngest cry. The Oldest told about a camping trip they had all taken in the before times. In her telling, they had driven out along a peninsula for miles and miles and pitched their tent at the very end. He had no recollection of the place she was describing, but it sounded like a magical land and he wished he could remember it that way. She said that Piper was just a kitten then, and they had left her home alone, and that she (The Oldest) had cried the whole way out along the peninsula, thinking of Piper. The Middle told them how when she had been crying on her bed because the half-emptied house made her feel so strange, like everything had been turned inside out, Piper the cat had come in and hopped up into her lap. The Youngest confessed that she used to let Piper lick her tongue.

When the fire burned down low, they threw sand on it and walked into town. The Youngest bought a seashell necklace, and The Middle bought a bag of saltwater taffy. The Oldest found a snow globe with a blue dolphin in it, and everyone got ice cream. The rain came again, in sprinkles at first and then in sheets, and they made their way toward the hotel, walking down the middle of the abandoned street. People were huddling under awnings and in doorways to wait it out, but they kept to the open and let it pour down on them. It ruined all of their ice creams except The Oldest’s, who had been careful to keep it covered, and then the rain turned to hail.

When they got to the hotel, giddy and freezing, they threw open the windows and watched it pour down on the empty street below, tiny white balls bouncing on the pavement like marbles spilling over from someone’s cupped hands. He took a handful of hail that had collected in the hood of his sweatshirt and held it in his palm until it melted, and they all sat on the bed in their wet clothes, passing The Oldest’s cup of ice cream between them until it was gone.

They buried Piper in the fall, or not really Piper but the box into which they had put her things: the pink and sparkly collar they had bought for her but couldn’t keep her from wriggling out of; a half-empty bag of cat treats; a plastic ball with a place to put catnip in the middle; a photo of her The Youngest had taken with a Polaroid camera she had won in a school raffle. The Oldest carried the box, and they each lit long, white tapers in the kitchen and processed out the slider, across the deck, down the steps, and out to the spot where they buried the dead things.

He dug a hole, careful to avoid the fish’s mound and the resting places of three hamsters that had been buried out there over the years, the popsicle-stick crosses that marked their locations long gone. When the hole was dug, each girl took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over the box. He began to fill the hole with a shovel, but The Middle remembered something and ran back into the house. She came out with Perry/Sweet Pea’s bowl and placed it next to the box, sprinkling a little dirt on it herself before he covered it up.

When the hole was filled, he drove the shovel into the ground and prayed. They held hands, forming a circle around the freshly dug up dirt, and the prayer came, slowly at first. He prayed for Piper, wherever she was, in this realm or the other. He gave thanks for her life and all the ways she had bound up their wounds, and then he found himself praying for her body, picturing it in a ditch on the side of a road, perhaps, or a trace of ashes in some shelter’s oven. And the world seemed full of bodies, under their feet and all around them, the dirt itself nothing but rotting bodies, their own bodies joining the long chain of decay. It was a morbid prayer, an ugly prayer, and the girls opened their eyes and looked at one another. But he kept going, driven by a sudden longing for all those bodies, the pets, the children, the fathers and mothers, all the dead and half-dead, to be whole again, and the prayer went up like smoke, like an incantation, like an odor of decay, until they could see its tail spiraling off into the sky.

DRIVE-BY ID

Cotton O’Connell

Officer Santora tells Derek and me not to worry — it’ll only take another minute, five at most. But my little brother is worried. It radiates off him, the way he shifts his weight between feet and chews his thumbnail. 

My worry is different. I’m afraid Derek will mouth off to Santora, and then this thing, which was nothing, will become something.

We know Santora, and he knows us. He coached our baseball team in elementary school with some other cops. I have good memories of him even though I hated baseball, especially when I had to be in the outfield. I’d get distracted by birds or clouds or just about anything my eye could rest on, then forget about the ball until one of the coaches barked at me to go fetch it. It felt like we were golden retrievers, and I was the runt of the litter.

Derek, of course, was the best player, but he didn’t really like baseball either. The head coach — a big-bellied guy who was Santora’s boss, a lieutenant or captain or some such — acted mad when Derek decided to quit so he could focus on basketball and football instead, like my brother had been wasting their time on purpose. But Santora wasn’t like that. He’d been the young, easy-going one who teased me about having my head in the clouds without acting like it was a defect that had to be corrected. 

I’m fifteen now and haven’t played baseball in years, but I still see Santora around, even before today. I always give him a wave, like the time I spotted him at the pizzeria in jeans and a goofy Star Wars T-shirt with his family. He had his two toddlers and his game-show-hostess pretty wife with him. She was so tiny beside him it was almost funny. Santora’s jacked — the kind of huge that comes from spending real time in the gym targeting every muscle group, not the kind that happens when a former football player starts craving doughnuts. If you just glanced at the two of them, you could mistake her for one of his kids. 

I’d also wave to Santora when he was outside my school after the last bell, breaking up fights or arresting kids for shoplifting from the gas station across the street. We’ve got some real characters at my school. A couple of them used to pick on me, but they mostly leave me alone because of Derek now. He already plays varsity football even though he’s just a freshman, so they respect him. Maybe they also figure he’d kick their asses if they messed with me. They don’t know our mom and how we’ll do anything to avoid her getting that look we call the Deep Freeze, where she doesn’t speak to us or look us in the eye for days at a time. Derek would probably get the Freeze for a month if he ever tried fighting. Even if he was protecting me. She’s that obsessed with non-violence — Gandhi and Dr. King and those guys. It starts making more sense when you know about her cousin who got addicted to drugs, then went to jail for armed robbery. You could argue the violence was sort of incidental; the drugs were more the problem. But I don’t argue with my mom.

Some people might hate if their little brother was their protector. Me? I’ve never minded, and I do plenty to balance the scales. I’m really patient helping him with homework as we go through equations. It takes longer than if I just gave him the answers like he wants, but he needs to learn. He listens to the music I like, plays the video games I’m into. Sometimes he even eats the food I cook — stir-fried beef, beans and rice, nothing crazy — when Mom works a late shift. He depends on me. There’s no doubt about that.

When I saw Santora outside school those times, he would wave to me all friendly, like he wished he wasn’t busy arresting one of my schoolmates so we could catch up over a slice of pizza. But right now, while we stand by the trunk of his car, it’s like he’s never seen us before.

All he said when he stopped us was that we fit a suspect’s description, and the victim was on their way to do a drive-by identification. I asked what sort of victim they were. He said, in this new, closed-off voice, that there was no other info he could give right now.

To pass the time while we wait, I count the trees in the massive front yards. Every house on this street practically has its own little park, so the counting could take a while, but it’s better than watching Santora and trying to read his mind.

Twice, he steps away to talk softly into his handheld radio. At least he hasn’t turned the police lights on, but drivers still slow down, craning their necks to see who the criminals are. No one I recognize yet, but we’re less than a mile from home, though you wouldn’t know that just to look at our surroundings. This part of town is all neat hedges and shiny mailboxes and long driveways that wrap around the backs of houses. You don’t see a car here unless it’s driving. In our neighborhood, across a busy two-lane road not far from here, it’s apartment blocks and two-family homes and side streets jammed with parked cars. Concrete is a lot more visible than trees, but it’s not awful or anything.

Our bikes are on the sidewalk, where we left them when we got stopped. I think about moving them to the strip of grass next to the road where they would be out of the way. In our current predicament, it seems like the sort of thing that could help score points with Santora by reminding him of what a rule-follower I am. But I think of the grief Derek would give me later for sucking up and stay put.

I’m starting to shiver in my T-shirt. The temperature is dropping fast this November afternoon. I hadn’t bothered with a hoodie since we’d just been over at my best friend Weston’s house, playing Fortnite, a few blocks from here. I hadn’t planned on being outside very long, plus it was in the fifties when we left home.

Weston’s house is one of these mini-mansions with a park in front. He hardly sees his dad, who’s a lawyer in the city. Weston jokes that his dad might have another family. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s a joke.

His mom is sweet. She’s like one of those mothers you see on TV who makes perfect, corny snacks like we’re still seven—ants on a log, apple smiles, that kind of thing — and who always seems to be headed to or coming from the beauty salon. If someone else comes over when I’m there, like a friend borrowing a book or a handyman fixing a leaky faucet, she’ll introduce me as her other son. It’s nice but also weird. I’ve been friends with Weston since second grade, so I guess she’s known me a long time. But she and I never really bonded over anything, other than me saying I like her snacks or her house, then her telling me the house is a hundred-year-old mess with bad plumbing and raccoons in the attic. 

My mom once told me that rich people can be like that. Compliments from someone like me, from a family like mine, make them nervous. They don’t know how to just say thank you. 

That’s not to say we’re poor. We have enough. Maybe even a little more than enough. Mom’s a nurse who takes care of premature babies. It’s a good job, but she has the two of us to raise without my dad helping out much financially. They’re divorced, and he’s an actor who’s always on the road, doing theater in different cities. He’s a talented guy, and I’m actually proud of him, but it’s not exactly a money-making career.

So we get the presents we want for Christmas and new clothes when we outgrow our old ones (though I end up with some of Derek’s hand-me-downs, since he’s been taller than me for a couple years now, despite me being seventeen months older). But no trips to Europe or Disney World, and no dinners in restaurants unless it’s someone’s birthday. 

Honestly, the difference between us makes Weston more uncomfortable than it makes me. It’s one of the reasons I know he’s a good person.

I suddenly think of Weston’s mom and how she just offered to drop me and Derek home on her way to an appointment, but she couldn’t since we had our bikes. I wonder what she would make of seeing us here, if she turned in this direction. Would she park behind Santora and get out of the car, all livid the way she gets when she’s stressed, then point out the goosebumps on our arms and tell him, “Shame on you”? Or would she keep driving, hoping I didn’t recognize her BMW?

Mom made me bring Derek to Weston’s today, even though he’s fourteen and old enough to be home by himself, but she doesn’t completely trust him. Maybe she’s right, because I can tell he’s about to pop off with something stupid right now — something Mom wouldn’t approve of, since she’s always told us to be polite and say “yes, sir” if police stopped us for any reason. I can tell from the wild look in Derek’s eyes that he’s remembering this and trying to hold the words in, but they’re ready to explode from his mouth.

“So what are these suspects supposed to look like anyway? Are they kids? You know I’m only fourteen, right?” Derek keeps his voice low, but his right eye is twitching. It usually only does that when I’m tutoring him and an answer is beyond his reach.

“Look, Derek, I was asked to stop people who fit the description within a range of ages,” Santora says, dropping the whole pretending-we’re-strangers thing, but still using his cop cosplay voice. Which is weird to say about someone who’s actually a police officer, but Santora never tried to act like a cop around us before. “The perp tried to get in through the cellar of one of these houses about twenty minutes ago, then got scared off when he heard someone moving around. The witness got a good look at him as he was leaving the premises, so I’m sure you’ll be cleared in no time.”

“We’re casting the net wide so nothing falls in the cracks,” he adds more brightly a few seconds later, like he’s proud of himself for digging that cliché out of his mind. “I’m just doing my job.”

“So you’re stopping every Black person you see is what you’re saying.” 

I knew exactly what Derek was going to say—the question that wasn’t really a question — before he opened his mouth. His words are so familiar that, for a second, I wondered if I was the one who actually said them.

I look to where Derek is standing up super straight, no slouch in his shoulders. At his full height, he’s nearly as tall as Santora. In most situations, my brother’s size is a good thing, but right now it’s scaring me. It makes us vulnerable, less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt.

I worry Santora is going to make Derek pay for what he said, but the officer just rolls his eyes and stomps to the front of his car, muttering into his radio. This time, he’s loud enough for us to catch him asking for an ETA. 

Another squad car pulls up a minute later and idles in front of us.

“Face the road, please, guys,” Santora says all nicely, like he’s trying to show how benevolently he can wield power over us.

I do what he says. The car’s windows are tinted, but I still recognize the girl in the back seat. She’s in my pre-calc class. I think Ava is her name. There are many Avas in my school. This one never raises her hand and went to the nurse’s office last week with a nosebleed. I can tell she’s staring at me, but not whether she recognizes me. I try to play it cool, like this is nothing, just a regular Sunday. I turn to look at the trees in the front yards again.

It takes a long time — two or three minutes, maybe — but Santora hears something on his radio, and the second squad car pulls away. Then he says we can go. 

“All good, guys. Sorry for the inconvenience,” he says, his chummy old smile back on his face. “And great season, D. When you’re in the NFL, I can say I knew you when. See you around.” He hesitates, then starts to leave when Derek doesn’t crack a smile.

When his car door slams, I can’t figure out what to say. Derek is like a statue with dark, alien eyes — waiting, I guess, for Santora to drive away. I wonder if this is the version of him Ava saw when she took so long with her identification. She had to look and look to make sure there was no trace of the guy who broke into her cellar. 

I wonder if I’ll say anything to her in class tomorrow. “That was weird,” or “What did the guy actually look like?” or “Why did you take so long?” I wonder if she’ll say anything to me. Probably not. We don’t really know each other.

“Come on, man, I’m freezing,” Derek says, a little impatient now, a little more himself. His eyes are their usual warm brown again. Down the road, I see Santora’s car turning a corner. He’s driving really slow, like even now he’s second-guessing whether he ought to come back as the friendly version of himself and ask how much Derek is bench pressing these days.

Derek pulls his bike off the sidewalk, climbs on, and starts pedaling before I can answer. I wonder if he’s trying to cut me off before I launch into a big social justice speech. Sometimes he gets annoyed with me for trying to explain how the world works. That’s when he’ll hit me with, “You’re not my dad,” to make me shut up.

Or maybe he’s just cold. My legs feel like jelly, but I somehow get on my bike and ride home.

We pull up to where another cop is standing with two guys — boys, really — on the sidewalk, but the officer driving us around doesn’t park his car. We just sit in the middle of the road, engine humming. I’m in the backseat with Mom.

A half hour ago, I was watching TV while Mom was out running errands and Dad was playing tennis when I heard weird scurrying sounds from the kitchen, like a little dog pawing at a door. I told myself it was my imagination at first. Our house is old, or “historic” as my parents like to say, so it’s easy to imagine some random bump or creak is a footstep. But the noise got louder.

I walked to the kitchen and froze, eyes on the locked basement door. I felt someone — a him, I just knew — on the other side. He didn’t make a peep for a while, so I’d almost convinced myself I’d been up in my head when I heard him take the stairs back down to the basement, one at a time, trying to be stealthy. That’s when I realized he must’ve gotten in through the old, slanted cellar doors outside.

I rushed to the back door, unlocked it, and flew down the steps onto the blacktop where my parents park their cars — when they’re home, that is. The cellar doors are just to the side of the back steps, but I didn’t stop to look for signs of damage, just kept moving, fast. I stopped under the big silver maple in our side yard, not wanting to be inside with him, not wanting to abandon our house either. If he came outside and looked dangerous, it was a straight shot to the street, and I’m a decent runner.

Two minutes later, he came from the direction of the cellar doors and walked past me on his way up the driveway. He was moving fast, jittery, like he’d just chugged a liter of Coke and was hopped up on sugar but also had to pee. When he spotted me under the tree a few yards away, his eyes got all wide. He looked terrified of me, which was weird because I’ve never exactly struck fear into anyone. (I’m five foot one and maybe a hundred and five pounds soaking wet.) He didn’t change his weird, twitchy walk. Just kept going with it as he looked over the top of my head and said, “Just passing through.” 

At the end of our driveway, he took a right and disappeared down the street. Somehow, I knew it took every bit of self-control he had not to run. Running in street clothes would’ve looked too suspicious.

As I sat on the maple’s dead, crunchy leaves and waited for Mom to get home, I thought about how the guy must’ve assumed no one was home after seeing no cars in the driveway. That honestly made him kind of dumb, but I guess he meant me no harm.

 I almost felt bad we would try to find him, but there was no way around it. A minute after Mom’s Volvo pulled into the driveway, she was on the phone with the police.

“Take a good look now,” the officer says from the front of the car, through the mesh that separates Mom and me from him. 

I recognize one of the boys standing near the curb — Alex, from AP Pre-Calc — though it takes me a second to place him. He’s a total brain, probably taking all AP classes and signed up for a thousand after-school activities to help his college applications. The sort of kid Mom wishes I was. He’s with another boy, taller and wider in the shoulders, with a version of the same face — definitely his brother. It’s a nice face, twice over: high cheekbones, full lips. I didn’t realize how nice before seeing it here in duplicate.

Alex is one of the smartest kids in class, but he isn’t obnoxious about it — doesn’t always raise his hand, the way some of them do. He has this quiet confidence. I honestly never gave it much thought until now.

“It’s not the guy,” I tell the officer. “Like I said, he was older. Thirties, I think. I go to school with those boys.”

“I’d give it another minute,” he answers. “They match the description of another perp who’s broken into homes in your area. I just want you to be really sure.” His voice is overly patient now, like he’s talking to a six-year-old.

“One of them is literally in my math class. I think I’d have recognized him if he ran out of my basement.”

“There’s no harm in being thorough, honey,” Mom says, but I can tell she isn’t convinced.

“Just take another beat,” says the officer.

I look at Alex and see him looking right back at me. My face goes hot. Somehow, I thought the glass of a cop car was like one of those one-way mirrors in detective shows, where the person inside can’t be seen. Dumb. I get this urge to jump out and tell Alex I cleared him and his brother already, but, duh, there are no handles in the back of a police car, so I’m trapped here, totally humiliated.

I turn away, cheeks still burning, and stare at the back of the officer’s head.

“Done.” I spit out the word.

“I think we’re finished here, officer,” Mom says, her words rimmed with ice now.

He hisses out a long breath. “If you don’t like how we do our job, you should’ve been more specific with your description. ‘Black male in his thirties.’ That’s all you gave us to go on.”

“Those boys aren’t in their thirties, officer,” Mom says.

“Whatever you say, ma’am.”

Officer Douchebag starts driving us home. I ignore Mom trying to make eye contact with me and replay in my head how it went down when the officer showed up at our door, tablet in hand, ready to take my report. I’m positive I mentioned more than the guy’s age and race — that I at least described his clothes (navy blue hoodie, gray trackpants) and his weird, jittery, maybe drugged-out walk.

Maybe it wasn’t the most detailed description in the world. They still didn’t have to stop two actual kids.

Tomorrow in class, maybe I’ll speak to Alex. Tell him I’m sorry about what happened, even though that’s the worst kind of apology. Who likes being told, “I’m sorry you found that thing I did or said upsetting”? I hate when my parents do that.

It’s possible he didn’t recognize me. I’m the sort of kid who blends in with the furniture. There’s nothing very special about me. Apart from my drawing, but he wouldn’t know about that.

The officer pulls up to our house, then parks, gets out, and opens Mom’s door from the outside. I scooch out after her, and we stand facing him. He’s somewhere in his forties, with green eyes and freckles and graying red hair. It’s a handsome face, but his smile doesn’t quite make it to his eyes.

“Be sure you get a locksmith out to fix that cellar door ASAP. There are plenty of bad guys who’d see this place as a real prize.” He glances over our heads at our house, and I feel embarrassed by the size of it for three people — just Mom, Dad, and me.

Mom thanks him again, and he looks bored, like he’s over this whole thing already.

“If we pick up any other suspects in the area today who match your description, we’ll bring them around so you can take a look,” he adds. It feels a little like a threat.

He leaves after that. We walk down the driveway and go in through the back door. Mom says we can order pizza for dinner tonight, even though it’s not a Friday. Clearly, she thinks I’m traumatized or something. I don’t correct her.

Instead, I go to my room and sit on my bed with my sketchpad and try to draw the man who broke in, so I can give it to the cops. But all I can picture clearly are his startled eyes — the rest of him is a flash of hoodie and patchy facial hair that’s already fading. So I start to draw Alex instead, which is so much easier. But for what, I ask myself when I’m nearly done? To prove I saw him clearly, that he was instantly recognizable to me?

The drawing takes twenty minutes. It’s pretty good when I’m done. Out of all the boys in our school, you would know who it was.

I know I won’t have the courage to show it to him. When I’m coming in and out of pre-calc, I’ll keep my head down, like I usually do, and if our eyes happen to collide by accident, I’ll pretend his face is generic to me. And I’ll tell myself it’s for his sake I’m doing this — that he wouldn’t want to be reminded of that day, freezing in his red T-shirt as he waits for a stranger’s judgment. He and I are still strangers, after all. Today hasn’t changed that.

Trimmings

Michael Tavaler

I’d had two hours of intermittent sleep over the past three days, the last two nights caring for Jack’s pressure-wound – I honestly couldn’t take much more. That was the deal when you went on holiday – no rest, no half-hour lunch breaks, no getting away. And mine wasn’t the worst of it. Jemma, fifteen years my senior, working as a carer for  Jack’s partner, Mads, couldn’t find time to take a shower. Between the morning and evening sessions of snooker, I pleaded with Jack for a break; just an hour’s nap would do a world of good, for both of us. He figured between 5 and 6 pm so we could catch the snooker action at 7. He would hang out in Mads room. Keeping Mads’ door slightly open in case Jack needed to leave, I laid my head down on my bed at 5:05 but was instantly woken up. It was an ordeal to arouse myself, even with a few second’s sleep. The foot of Jack’s chair was banging on the bottom of my door. Mads wanted us downstairs at Café Rouge. I trudged on after Jack, barely hanging on to his chair to hold myself up.

Mads and Jemma, appeared genuinely surprised to see us. “Thought you eluded me!” Mads exclaimed.

“You said to be here right now,” Jack protested.

“I did,” she laughed. “I thought Ben had you wound around his little finger but you’ve come through.”

I looked at Jack in exhaustion. If Jack was any kind of man, he’d leave right now, but he sat down, had me open his menu. If I was any kind of man, I’d leave too, but that would place Jack in a difficult situation.

Mads didn’t trust people. If I worked an extra half hour, she’d make sure it was exactly 30 minutes. And now on holidays, every spare moment was devoted to caring. The thought that I would do anything for Jack’s sake, without compensation, never entered her mind. She’d taken over the time sheets we handed in to get paid and then complained about how difficult the work was. I and the other male carers were confined to emailing her in “office” hours: up to 5 pm weekdays and no communication on weekends. Jack wanted to take control back from her but then she’d assail him for all the inconsistencies he endured.  There was no winning when it came to Mads.

Her hesitation did come from an honest place. They’d had, for example, one new carer who did not listen to Mads’s dog instructions. Playing with the Dachshund in front of their German Shepherd, the big dog growled at the carer. She claims he attacked. No one was in the room at the time. Mads sent her home right away. The woman threatened to sue them – taking two quadriplegics through the court system – but it didn’t amount to much in the end. I’d been working for years, though, had never taken advantage of Jack, did extra hours on Mads’s behalf helping with the dogs. Why was I still a threat?

When we finally got Café Rouge’s service to notice us, making our order and urging that it be at the table within twenty minutes, we couldn’t get a guarantee for it to be ready and so we left, headed for an evening session of Snooker. I wanted to complain that the extra hour I would have slept was now wasted but Jack looked so far-gone, I couldn’t bring it up.

Jack and I were in our seats. “You look Fartsoret,” I said to Jack while Mads was getting a drink. “Jewish expression,” I added.

“For-so,” he tried pronouncing it.

“Ts, it’s like the tse sound you get in tsar or tsunami. Fartsoret!”

“Fartsoret,” he said.  “Meaning?”

Anything foreign or religious and Jack was all over it in the way I paid attention to Jack’s descriptions of cricket and, at the start, snooker. “It means troubled, afflicted,” I said.

“Oh I’m Fartsoret alright, Ben” he said. “No need to ask why,” he added.

Mads came back complaining about the bar service: with Jemma using the bathroom, Mads just sat in front of the bartender to see him take everyone else’s orders. “He might have thought I couldn’t pay without a carer or he simply didn’t see me.”   

I thought her righteous anger would be directed at the bar manager but she turned it on Jack - there wasn’t anything he could do that was acceptable. Jack wanted to hang out in the hotel lobby to talk to the snooker players but Mads was keen on getting a proper meal. She belittled his attempts at celebrity.: “You think these players can make your life a little easier,” she said and, in one of her more creative efforts, announced “a maximum break from player Trump doesn’t make him your fuckin president.” At our late dinner, the beer was too hot and the meal too cold, both a result of Jack saying he was in a hurry. Mads switched to shots of vodka and was soon thoroughly inebriated. Passing Steve Davis in the hotel lobby, she asked him if he could “fuckin eat my pussy.” That had nothing to do with Jack but the phrase had a firm conclusion, according to Jemma, who said Mads no longer wanted to be seen at this event.

“What am I supposed to do with your final snooker tickets,” Jack demanded.

 “Get a refund,” Mads said, “and make sure the money goes to me.”

“I paid for the tickets this year,” Jack complained.

“If I’d bought the tickets and you couldn’t make it,” she said, “the refund would go back to you.” I looked at Jemma and we both knew this was a lie.

At 7 am the next morning, we were driving Mads and Jemma from Sheffield to Doncaster so Mads wouldn’t have to change trains. I’d had both wheelchairs clamped to the camper floor with seatbelts on the way up here but since it was a short trip, Mads wasn’t secured in. I had real difficulty with that decision. “I’m not comfortable,” I declared.

“It’s a short drive,” she said, already annoyed.

“We get in an accident and your chair flies right into me.”

“Clamp it at the back so we can protect your precious self,” she said. I took that as a yes and secured the back of her chair to the floor, then quickly clamped another seat belt: two clamps were better than nothing.

“Let’s go Ben,” Mads commanded, upset by the time I was taking.

We were heading out of town and Mads was already impatient.  “Can you speed up,” she said belligerently.

“We’re in a 30 mile per hour zone,” I said.

As soon as we were in 40 mph zone, she was on me to move.

Arriving at Doncaster, we were very close to the departure time – Mads was angry about my spineless demeanour – and we arrived on the opposite side of the street from the station. I’d have to get to the next roundabout and head right back but this was too much of a delay: Mads wanted out. I pulled over, got the side door open, pulled down the ramp and waited for Jack to squeeze his way out which took quite a bit of time, Jack being rushed, trying to roll backwards on the ramp in the shortest possible time – he had to go back up and down several times with me directing him to make sure he wasn’t falling off. This incensed Mads – why did Jack even have to come. She drove her chair straight out, scraping the bottom of her footrest on the way down.

The front rigging collapsed, making her sit in an upright position. In normal times, Jack would fix wheelchair repairs but today Mads was several paces ahead of him with Jemma trying to keep up behind her, carrying their two pieces of luggage. Mads saw a break in the traffic and crossed the street, Jemma keeping up, both of them being narrowly missing by a bus coming out of the station. Jack was left on my side of the street, waiting for the traffic to clear.

I put the ramp back, shut the door and drove, turning at the roundabout and driving a long way back to pull up in front of the station. Jack was at the turnstiles, waiting for me.  “Didn’t wait for me to get here,” he sighed. “I hope she’s alright,” he said.

We arrived at the hotel at 9:50 – breakfast was served till 10.  “I’ll be five minutes,” I cautioned Jack.

“Take the time you need,” he said. “Just give me Mads’s unused tickets on my tray,” he said. “This afternoon’s semi-final,” he announced.

I took out two sets of tickets, placed them on Jack’s tray that was attached to his chair and placed a bottle of coke Jack had in a knapsack, to weigh the tickets down.

It was 10:15 when Jack got back to me, having returned the tickets and been compensated. Jack never ate breakfast at hotels but he had me put together a toast with marmalade that I fed him while I finished off my meal. I was ready to head back to the room, get ready for the afternoon of snooker but Jack wasn’t keen on moving.

“You want anything else,” he inquired?

“Sleep,” I said, half joking. He told me I’d have an hour’s rest.

We set Jack up at the bar, making sure the bartender knew his room so he could pay for the beer. Two men were already on stools around the bar with Jack instantly having a rapport. I slipped away to our room, set my alarm, lay my head down and was out.

When I came down, somewhat rested, Jack was in the middle of a discussion with a biomedical engineer. “Man says we’re doing things wrong with our pissing routine,” Jack said, slightly drunk.

To get Jack to urinate, I had one hand on his bladder while using the other to hold a plastic urinal. I was up at least five times a night eliminating waste and, with the responsibility of Jack’s wound on my mind, I was getting very little sleep.

“He says we run the risk of knotting up my stomach,” Jack elaborated.  “What would be the alternative?” he asked the engineer.

“Maybe a catheter,” the man volunteered.

“I’m not wearing no fuckin catheter, especially when I don’t need one,” Jack said.

“There’s a thing they can do with your penis,” the man continued.

“I want to hear this,” Jack said ruefully to the engineer. He said to me, “I need this engineer’s guidance. Why don’t you go swimming?”

“Swimming? I don’t even have a suit.”

Jack motioned his head towards the window. On the opposite side of the street was a sports shop. “Use my cash,” he said, indicating his wallet that I had in my back pocket.  “up to twenty pounds.”

“How long do I have?” I inquired.

“Let’s say an hour, but take your time, we’ll work it out,” he declared.

I bought the cheapest pair of swimming trunks I could find but they still came up to over twenty pounds. I went straight to the pool, put on my trunks in their changing room and then headed right into the water. The pool was empty. I was going to swim laps but then thought of my chores with Jack and simply lay flat on my back. This felt perfect, just letting my body take in the width and length of the pool, not having to worry about Jack, the kind of total freedom I felt every time I’d closed the gate behind me and leave Jack’s Sussex house.

When I looked at the clock, somehow, an hour and a half had passed. I changed into my old clothes, went upstairs and showered. When I got to Jack, he was deep into a conversation with a physician.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

Jack said goodbye to the physician and moved over to me. “This guy is in agreement with the engineer only they don’t offer me a better way to piss.”

“Let’s do the snooker,” I advised. “They’ll let us in on a break.”

“It’s over,” Jack said, indicating the TV that was announcing Murphy as the semi-winner. “They just played two games to finish it off.  We have the afternoon free.”

“Shit, sorry about missing the 1 pm start,” I said.

“No big deal,” Jack said, smiling.

We headed away from town to some of the scuzzier streets of Sheffield. I had no idea why we were here.

Jack kept scanning each new street corner. After 15 minutes, he announced we had arrived. It was a bar with some betting at the back. I got Jack a beer, Jack keeping an eye on the gambling. After half an hour, a man stepped away from his machine and Jack was on top of it. I’d seen this before, Jack playing a used machine and getting £400 while playing £20. He had me change twenty-pound bills four times and was just about to go to a fifth when he won.

“With the money I paid, this comes out to £320,” Jack said. “It’s trimmings.”

“Sorry?”

“You know my mother’s religious, right?” Jack said. “Celebrates Christmas with ornaments, the silver stuff you hang on trees. With Mads’ gone this is the reward.”

I thought about this bar, the loud voices, the dinging of the slot machines. “So we’re kind of on a winning streak,” I said, “with what you earned.”

“And your swimming.”

“Swimming’s a part of all this?” I inquired.

“It’s what makes you feel good,” Jack declared. “I know you think I’m crazy but we ride this as long as it goes.”

We had a lovely early dinner using Jack’s newly earned cash and then we were at the evening session with Bingham versus Selby. When Bingham won in the 17th deciding game, Jack was ecstatic. “I knew Bingham had it in him,” he said.  “At his age it’s his first world championship final.”

“This part of the trimmings,” I speculated.

“Well no, but maybe,” Jack said.

Jack hung out in the hotel lobby, looking to meet players. Most had left but Jack did have a conversation with an older man who looked like he should be on television, a combination of Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry. And Shawn Murphy finally showed up.  I always hung back, letting Jack take the limelight, but I heard the conversation with Murphy.  “He’s a really nice guy,” I said to Jack as we were heading up to our room. “Shots of Murphy on TV, I didn’t think he’d be that generous.”

“They’re all nice,” Jack admitted.

I took Jack’s pad off – it was soaked – and lifted him with our portable hoist.  Normally, I would move him up and down to change him but today I was carrying Jack across the room, taking him to the bathroom, shifting the hoist left and right to get him over the toilet. The movement completely exacerbated my back.

When I got Jack back over the bed, he just had me put on another pad.  “I’m going to sleep in my chair,” he declared.

“Because of what the engineer said,” I confirmed.

“And the physician.”

I put another pad on, got Jack dressed, placed him back on his chair where he made a neck adjustment to make himself comfortable. I lay down on the bed and slept for a good six hours without waking. I could have slept more but Jack was keen on moving out. “Forget your brushing and shit, we need to go,” he ordered.

I got dressed and followed Jack to the Crucible Theatre. There was a huge line    waiting for the box office to open. Jack announced that he had two tickets for the entire final.  The customers kept their place in line but were bidding, a lot of orders from the end of the line that couldn’t imagine getting tickets on the day. Jack ended up getting three times the ticket value. Mr and Mrs Craig were the recipients. We all had to go to a bank to retrieve the money while I handed them the tickets, Jack not being able to wipe away his sly look. One of the tickets was a regular seat but the other was for a carer so one of the Craigs would have to go in with Jack. If anyone asked, they were there to take care of Jack. On the way up to the hotel, Jack said I should come to the auditorium last and, if questioned, show them my carer’s badge. The carer’s ticket was a compliment to the main ticket so he didn’t want to tell Mads about that or anything about the Craigs, Jack simply went to the box office and got a refund. I asked Jack if he didn’t feel guilty, selling a free ticket and overall receiving three times the value. I was, honestly, expecting Jack to give me a sob story about everything railing against him, that he should be allowed this one victory but Jack simply agreed with me; most times he’d be happy with the box office refund, but this was like adding one, no three, no six ornaments to the fucking Christmas tree. We went in four times with the Craigs and no one questioned us.

I wanted to check out Jack’s pressure wound on the middle part of Jack’s leg but he cautioned that it would be hard to see with the pad on. He was right. I would need to hoist him out of his chair, move him back on the bed, turn him, take off the pad with the full likelihood of tearing it, just to get look at his leg. Next time I change you, I stipulated.

There were lots of celebrities at the final including Nicko McBrain, Iron Maiden’s drummer, who already knew Jack and had a conversation with him before the match started. For Jack, meeting Nicko was as awe inspiring as an encounter with one of the players. The Craigs were impressed.

Over the final two days, I got to do more swimming and enjoyed great meals although Jack hardly ate anything. Jack got to meet Stuart Bingham’s family, so very pleased he was in the final. And he kept coming across the guy that looked like he should be on TV.

“What does he do?” I asked after their third meeting.

“He’s an organizer,” Jack said.

“You don’t know what he does?”

“Something!” Jack laughed.

On that first night, halfway through the final, I wanted to change Jack’s pad but he said he was fine. He hadn’t peed and hardly eaten anything so the toilet break yesterday was enough. I thought it was unsafe, depriving yourself of drink but Jack assured me he’d be drinking plenty tomorrow when Bingham won. I enjoyed eight hours straight of sleep that night.

The following evening, when Bingham won, I thought Jack would be on cloud nine but he simply said goodbye to the Craigs and, while the trophies were being awarded, asked me to follow him. We got back to the hotel that was practically empty, taking an elevator to the bottom floor. There was the man I’d seen with Jack.

“Just occupy a table,” the man said.

We walked into a huge room that again was empty. They hadn’t set up the reception table to see if you’re invited.

“We made it to the after-party, Ben!” Jack announced.

We waited and gradually the community came: first businesspeople, then the BBC anchor crew including the announcer who told us a story about introducing young people to Kenya and Uganda, followed by some of the snooker greats, Canadian Cliff Thorburn and Jimmy White with a young woman who might (or might not) have been his daughter, and finally Shawn Murphy and Stuart Bingham. They all passed our table as Jack had gotten a position right at the front. He’d raised his seat so he was on the same level as people sitting on the upright chairs or standing up. Bingham actually hung around to have a long conversation with Jack. This was Jack’s opus operatum, all the hard work wrought to this state of grace. 

Bingham gave his acceptance speech while his wife looked on and then the dance floor was suddenly buzzing, individuals getting drinks, Jack in a discussion with Ken Doherty about a particular Irish pronunciation. I went to order drinks but they were extremely expensive and so I had to ask Jack. Beside Jack was Ian Matthews from Kasabian who told me the free bar was behind the main bar, reached from the other side. I had to wait a while as the drinks line was large but overall it moved fast. I ordered four Southern Comforts for Jack.

When I laid the drinks in front of Jack, he was in an absorbing discussion with Nicko on the need to synchronise a band’s appearance. The Iron Maiden drummer said he had a special jacket he wore on tour, there were only four made for members of the band. He disappeared and came back with the jacket, handed it to me so I could put it on Jack.

“It’s yours, mate,” Nicko announced.

Everyone was drunk which was a fact Jack was aware of. “You’ll ask me back for it tomorrow,” he huffed, “but that’s fine.  I can wear if for one day.”

“Just so everyone knows,” Nicko said, projecting his voice over the next few tables, “the jacket is Jack’s.” Jack looked at me sidelong, as if to say this trip could not have turned out better.

It was 2 o’clock by the time we made it back to the room. Jack parked his chair in the far end of the entrance hall, ready to go to sleep, wrapped up in his Iron Maiden jacket but I wanted to look at the wound. There was a lot of back and forth about moving him but I managed to get my way, leaving Jack still wearing his jacket, hoisting him up, laying him on the bed and taking off a thoroughly wet pad. I turned him over and saw bits of skin that were trying to hold the two parts of his cheeks together. I turned my phone light on and peered in. “Holy shit,” I exclaimed.

“What is it,” Jack inquired.

Finding a desk lamp, I shone it on Jack, then took a picture and showed it to Jack.

“The wound’s twice as big,” Jack remarked.

“Look inside,” I urged.

“What’s in there?”

“Bone,” I said. “I need to get you to hospital.”

Jack sighed deeply. “We need to secure next year’s after-party from the guy who let us in. We’re meeting at 10 for breakfast.” Jack smiled as I saw him shiver. I put a hand to his forehead. He had a super-high fever.

“You call him up, tell him you had an emergency,” I said.

“I don’t actually know his name,” Jack said. “I gave him my phone to put it in but he couldn’t figure out my android. You weren’t around to input it. I could have used my stick to enter it but it was hidden in my bumbag at the side.”

“You don’t have his number because you couldn’t ask him his name.”

“It would be embarrassing,” Jack noted, “after everything he did for us.”

“Let me talk to one of the players,” I offered.  “They’re still around.”

“All left early, off to the next tournament,” Jack said. “When we meet the guy, you ask him what his name is.”

“We’re not really entertaining this idea!” I said.

“We’ve got trimmings set up for next year,” Jack said. “Make sure I get Mads to come,” he said.  He looked at me forlornly. “Just change the pad,” he said.

Spectacled Bear

Daniel DiStasio

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night….
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.
― Wendell Berry

Thomas shielded his eyes from the torturous overhead office lights. His head hung over his desk as heavy as a desert rock, his tongue like sandpaper. Where was his goddamned breakfast? He slipped off his jacket; a swamp of sweat stained the back of his shirt. He turned on the computer screen and pretended to work to avoid contact with the other hacks who passed by on their way to their cubicles. Twenty-one minutes. If coffee did not appear soon, he would crawl under his desk and die. He heard the whoosh of wheels rolling across the floor. Moto Man, sporting a green mohawk, pink t-shirt over well-defined pecs, a hoodie that dangled off his shoulders, and cargo shorts in the dead of winter, leaned against the side of the cubicle and unzipped the delivery box.

“What took you so long?’

“Gottcha covered buddy. Two eggs, double bacon on 12 sprout toast. Large coffee with double espresso shot. Four-ounce wheat grass shooter.”

“Gimme the coffee.” He reached out as Moto Man delivered the cup to his shaky hand.

“Whoa! Bro, Slow.”

“I got it. I got it.”

“Let me help you with that lid.”

“Back off.” Thomas set the cup on the desk, pried the lid off, and spilled hot coffee on his hand.

“Motherf-------"

Moto Man lifted his hands in the air. “Easy man. Problem is you’re circling. Your life’s a spiral. You need to trend upwards.”

“I don’t need ten-cent BS philosophy. I need to drink this shit and get to work.” He handed Moto Man two twenties and turned his back on him. Time to dig into the graveyard, as they called it. We live here: We die here. They clutched their cellphones like coins to cross the River Styx to another life. Searching for reliable data, an inside line, a leg up on the other guy.  Winning was everything, but winning was a momentary high, soon to be extinguished with the need for another victory. There was always time for another round.

He went about the business and let life play out, while the question What If? buzzed like an unrelenting mosquito in his ear following him wherever he went. His only protection were the random observations he scribbled in a small notepad. He carried it everywhere he went; his buddies joked it was his acquisition list. Life was a conquest. Own it was their rallying call for every shiny thing that caught their attention. It was all out there for the taking. See a Harley screaming down the road, Own it!  Patek Phillipe time piece. Own it! Lamborghini. Own it!  It was a sophomoric game, which devolved into a lifestyle built on a mountain of MORE, which he had played for the past 20 years, but lately the buzz in his ear had gotten louder. He wrote, sipping Remy XO at the club with Scott, his tail-chasing friend, surveying the few women who remained at the bar.

“Whatcha scribbling there, Sir Thomas?’

“Art.”

“More lists? Koons? Marden?  You like the dead guys.”

He closed the notepad and put it in his pocket. He would never admit he dabbled in poetry, but he couldn’t stop thinking of a haunting collection by Wendell Berry, his mother had sent to him. He was a neighbor of sorts.  Port Royal was just down the road from Worthville where he grew up.  Riding back and forth along the narrow roads that followed meandering creeks that overflowed in the spring, he dreamed of escaping to a bigger and richer life.  But now, he felt little, bereft, caught between two shores, the rocky death-crunch of numbers which produced out-of-control consumerism and the poetic simplicity of still water and the “feel[ing] of day-blind stars.”

“Cheer up, Thomas. Share.”

In the 2AM of male privilege and top shelf pity, he could only think of two words.

Own it!  And he headed out to hail a cab.

It was blistering cold, one of those despicable March nights that obliterated any thoughts of spring arriving soon. His Jersey City condo with a view of lower Manhattan, or what was left after 9/11, loomed like a sanctuary, although he never thought of it as such. It was more like a royal dumping ground, eat, sleep, shit and the occasional one-night stand.  Where is Lyft when you need it? Phone’s dead! Another big fat fuck you!  He turned to head back to the bar when a whiz of wheels splashing through puddles caught his attention. No, it couldn’t be. Motto man.

“Hey!  Hey you!”

He skidded to a stop and stared.

 “Dude, you’re like that depressed guy at the graveyard.”

“Just do me a favor.”

 “What?”

“Call me a Lyft.”

“Dude, do I look like a Lyft guy?

Son of a bitch. The last thing he could deal with was another one of this guy’s New Age philosophy turds. He turned and walked away.

“No one can save us but ourselves.”  The voice echoed down the empty street. Wheels spun. Freezing rain began to pelt him with bullets of ice. Fuck!

He reached his apartment in Jersey City, soaked and ready to forget the disaster of a day. At least he escaped another monumental hangover maker. Shutters drawn, he moved in total darkness except for the red glow of his phone blinking. Voice mail.  A robocall or his mother. No one else used the landline besides the building management.  He pressed the speaker button.

“Thomas? This is Jenna-Lynn, I have some bad news about your mother.”

This House Bleeds Blue!  The sign above the door to his parents’ home had taunted him since high school and welcomed him during the handful of visits he made after he moved to the city, a reminder of his father’s obsession with all things he was not and never would be - Kentucky basketball, fishing, and autumn lamb roasts. The blue stains of guilt haunted him long after the irony of his father’s death which occurred while driving a school bus that skidded off a flooded road after the Wildcats lost a bid to the Final Four. He too had skidded off the road in his father’s eye. James Colson was an obstinate man who could not fathom a son who longed for something other than the simplicity of rural life. There was nothing wrong with working hard and making money, but chasing after riches and the wicked city life that accompanied it was incomprehensible to him. His father signed his name at the end of the cards and letters his mother sent throughout the years with biblical quotes to remind him of his disapproval, “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5.

He switched on the overhead light in the living room and found himself surrounded by a world far flung from Kentucky. Despite the fact that she had never left Henry County in her life, it seemed his mother’s thoughts and dreams had circumnavigated the globe. The room was an international bazaar of coffee table books, calendars, and posters, a shrine to world travel.

“Your mom loved the Travel Channel and Animal Planet. As her mobility faded, her imagination shined. She was quite an inspiration. When the cancer became too much, it gave her peace.” Jenna-Lynn wiped away a tear.

How was it possible he didn’t know?  During their weekly calls — okay he occasionally forgot or missed a week or two — she never mentioned being sick.  I’m just tired. Have you been behaving? Did you get that book I sent you? What else did he not know? Over the years, he had sent her instapots, robot vacuum cleaners, Ring cameras, iPhones and tablets. Despite all the gadgets he sent, the only sign of his gifting was the wide screen television that hung on the wall.

“I forgot. She gave me this card to send to you. I’ve been posting letters for her these last months when she was too weak to get to the mailbox. It’s still here.” She handed him the card with his name and address written in his mother’s carefully drawn hand. He stared at the mint green envelope with curiosity and dread.

“You just take your time. No rush. Just let me know what you want to do.”

He traced his name on the envelope. Her cursive script with its exuberant ascenders,

Thomas Colson reminded him of the optimism she exuded in every missive. Her tooth-chipped, carefree smile had melted his moodiness when he was a child. Looking out across the dirt road, he saw nothing but dust, while she would see brown-eyed Susans and hummingbirds. If only optimism were part of his genetic code. At least then, he might have a chance. As always, his mother had tucked in a poem alongside her letter, “Remember” by Joy Harjo. “Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life…. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them.”

Embrace life, Thomas, live. Love, Mom. The note ended.

He sat on the bed beneath a shelf of stuffed animals arranged by geographical location: Australia with its kangaroos, kookaburras, koalas; Thailand’s elephants, tigers, Irrawaddy dolphins, Peru represented by a rainbow flag, llamas and a strange looking bear. He picked it up and stared into its beady orange eyes. They were surrounded by large dark circles which reminded him of late nights and puffy-faced mornings. A strange sensation came over him as he stared at the glimmer of light captured in the glassy eyes. His mother was gone, but her presence lingered. At first the house seemed sad, but now he felt the shame of being embarrassed by his childhood home. What was it that made him walk away and not want to look back? Was it really so bad? What did he gain? He had no real friends, no intimate relationship, just the occasional hook up with some guy or girl. Nothing mattered. New York was a lifetime away. He didn’t get it; he might as well be dead, too.

He hired a guide in Peru, to take him on a remote trail, where they were unlikely to meet other travelers. Franklin, the compact, muscular young man with a disarming smile had an easy manner that made Thomas trust him immediately. A crown of black curls framed a face that was as ancient as the mountains that surrounded them. He didn’t come to the Andes to see Machu Picchu, although Franklin insisted. It was the secrets hidden in the shadows and light that he sought. The O’Keefe-like labial-shaped orchids cascading in the rainforest, lightning-blue tanagers alighting unexpectedly, droplets of dew clinging to the razor thin branches that prayed to a cerulean Andean sky. Silent and subtle pleasures that went mostly unnoticed unless you knew where to look.

“Is there wildlife? Wolves? Marmots?”

“We are in the home of the smallest of the ursus genus, the only wild bear on the continent of South America.”

“Bears? Really? Can we see them?”

“We try but is very difficult.  They are very shy. They say because they wear glasses.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, the spectacle bear is named for the rings it has around its eyes. It makes them look like they are wearing eyeglasses.”

Nearsighted bears. The orange eyes. He had to see them.

As the day grew hotter, the altitude slowed their pace, and Thomas’s need to see the elusive spectacled bear grew. They climbed rocky faces where sparkles of quartz and ribbons of shale ran through the surface. From this higher venue they could see the surrounding peaks, guarding the land. They scrambled underbrush in pine-scented dew, scrutinizing the trees while watching for hollows. At night they rested until the first thread of light penetrated the web of branches of mahogany, bamboo, and vines. By the third day, tired, hungry, and cranky, Franklin suggested a plan.

“I know a place where they keep a bear. It is not so much contained as protected. But we must be very careful. They do not allow visitors. I can take you. But first we must make our way to town and rest.”

Although the thought of seeing the bear in confinement was not what Thomas had in mind, it was better than not seeing it all. He agreed and they hiked back to the main trail and made their way back to Aguas Caliente before dark.

The next day, Thomas was up before dawn anticipating the spectacled bear, but Franklin cautioned him. They could not approach in daylight; they had to wait until dusk when there was less chance they would be spotted. They killed time at a café in the town and shared a bottle of Malbec. Franklin lifted his glass and poured an offering on the ground to Pachamama the mountain goddess who was earth and life and giver. Thomas nodded respectfully, and thinking of his mother, splashed a spot of wine on the ground as well. Was he living now? Had he touched anything like life?

When the time came, they walked between tile-roofed bungalows and resort condos for ecotourists. A stone path led through a Disney-set rainforest with hummingbirds skittering between orchids climbing towards the day’s last sunlight. Thomas was afraid this was nothing more than a glorified zoo, but as they made their way out of the perfectly manicured path across a meadow and over a wooden fence, his excitement rose.

“Shhh!  This is a highly protected area,” Franklin warned.

Branches snapped as they pushed their way through dense vegetation. At last, they came to another fence, this one taller and topped with barbed wire. It was not a pen or kennel, more like the rows of fencing you see that run along the roadside.

“Careful. We walk around. We must not enter. Too dangerous. But we should be able to see.”

 They followed the fence some fifty yards or more until it dipped into a gully and rose again up the hill.  At the crest, the magic of twilight illuminated a bear leaning against a tree, chewing on a stalk of sugar cane, as if he’d just come home after a hard day at work. He was dark and round with a squat face with white around its muzzle and eyes. He looked both comical and professorial, a creature far removed from anything Thomas had ever seen.

He ran to the fence to enter the restricted area. Franklin panicked and tried to pull him back, but he resisted and jumped over, catching his leg on the barbed wire as he descended. He turned to Franklin and raised his hands, signaling him to stop. Franklin pointed to the tear in his trousers and the blood flowing down to his ankle.

“It’s too dangerous.  Stop.”

“I can’t. I have come too far.”

 He approached the bear, slowly without fear. The bear paid no attention to him. Perhaps he does not see him. The thought emboldened him to move closer. The bear dropped the stalk he was chewing, rolled on to four legs and approached. Thomas stood immobile. He could smell the bear’s musk, a mixture of damp fur and moss. The bear was a step away. He could feel the heat of his body, see his massive paws sinking into the damp earth. Its head swung side to side, stealing glances at the intruder. He lifted his nose and sniffed. Thomas crouched down on all fours, face to face with the bear. A tear of fear ran down his cheek, while he felt the spectacled bear’s nose press against his own.  It was cold. And he was alive.

Spirits

Erica Gelman

When Camilla came home she was tired; because she is always tired, because she is old and gets older with every passing day, because it is not a question of whether one is tired but how tired one is, because with all that old around you one cannot help but be tired, and full of it, and buried underneath it, like a rock or sedimentary bed or harsh mineral descending deeper and deeper into the crust.

 Camilla removed her shoes. Her last name is Sauvage, which sounds like savage or sausage, depending on what kind of person you are and how you are to interpret things like last names. In this latest year of her life, Camilla Sauvage has become increasingly interested in two things: television news and superstition, two very different types of magic, but magic nonetheless.

 With television news, Camilla kept up with the ever changing, ever aging world around her, perpetually dying and then being birthed again, a constant shift that is rapid and nonstopping and most of all, above all things, tiring. Camilla used to have an idea, when she worked in the hospital: When one dies they fall through a hole and they are transformed. Somewhere on the other side they are changed, metamorphosed, and pop out elsewhere in this world, reborn. But now, after some years at the hospice, Camilla was aware of something else entirely, and this was frightening; the thought that after death one still carries enough weight to come back to earth, to want to, to have to. Camilla hates the news, but watches it anyways, religiously because it is a religion, to listen and to know and be useless to do anything about what was happening in the world.

 With superstition and the occult, Camilla attempts to see further into the future. The news only promises the past and the present; with tarot cards—she owns two decks, both purchased within the past six months—she can see what is beyond, what no one has seen yet; or so she tells herself. The spread before her reads: TEMPERANCE, SUN IN REVERSE, HANGED MAN.

 The problem is this: She has received hanged man as the outcome for her past five readings. This has occurred with both decks regardless of how she shuffled. This is how she knows the tarot cards are true and work. This is also how she knows that she is doomed; the hanged man stands for stagnation. When Camilla first read this card she was relieved; it meant that she would not die yet, which was her main concern. When she next read it, she was relieved once again—all would be well with her children, they would stay just as they were, happy and healthy—but in the next readings she began to feel a sickness, a strange sense of dizziness and adrenaline that rise up inside of her. The Hanged Man said (resolute): It will all stay the same. All of it. There would be no change.

 And so: Camilla knew the future, but didn’t like it, and no matter how antsy she got, and willed herself for change, the final card—the outcome—read the exact same. This is what Camilla knew:

3) Camilla would not get a raise.

4) Camilla would not get better hours.

5) Mathew, Camilla’s least favorite patient, would not die soon either.

 And, about the earlier two readings:

2) All would be well with her children, they would stay just as they were, which is happy and healthy—and most importantly, away from her, and she would be just as she is, as she was; alone, with everything it entailed.

1) Camilla would not die (her fear branched out of her newly developed shortness of breath, long and restless sleep, too-fast heart), but also, simultaneously, would live life just as she was currently living it, which was the most frightful truth, most frightening divination, of all. It was hard living like she was, stagnant seemingly forever as the hanged man had put it five times, and if it was going to be like this forever, then she didn’t want to continue on. One lives because they hope for a better future, or maybe even a worse future. What human beings need, Camilla thought, remarking on all of her patients at the hospice, is change. Human growth and life is a series of changes. And Camilla, if the cards were to be believed—and she believed in them— would see none of it.

This is what Camilla was currently doing: Camilla was watching the evening news. On it, there were three rapes and two deaths, at least, so far—two shootings in the south side of the city. Also, in the Lincoln Park Zoo, there was either the disappearance, escape, or kidnapping of one Siberian Tiger, the largest tiger species on earth, currently. He had vanished, dissipated into thin air, seemingly out of the blue; nothing in the entire enclosure, the entire zoo, entire world had been touched or displaced even a particle except for him, this mighty beast, gone. His name was Ding, and Camilla had seen him five years ago when she had visited the zoo with her children, a little bonding activity that brought them all back to being young again, young and not so heavy, not so tired—though Camilla was just beginning to feel it like a small pressure against her shoulder blades. They had stopped by the enclosure and pressed their hands against the glass and Ding came close and pressed his nose back, and it was almost as if she was holding him; like the entire world was hinged upon this axiom, his snout and her hand and the glass as the little intersection point, a few inches in this direction and a few in that one, and her hand was what connected all of this together. Something inside her welled and broke and for a moment the world began to spin until her children looked at her, and the doctor later called it panic attack and anxiety disorder and high cholesterol, blood pressure, and since then there have only been phone calls and Christmas dinners.

 Camilla turned off the TV and began making her dinner. Her dinner, as it had been for the past year, was a chocolate flavored protein shake; to make it, she used a blender and 2% milk, mixed up the powder until it was one with the liquid, sliced up a banana and mixed it too, and then took the viscous fluid down like medicine, in silence, with no noise.

 It was a split second decision to pick up the phone. She dialed the number, held it to her ear, said, hello. Her daughter responded: Hey mom, how are you. How is work.

Work is work is work is work. Hard and heavy and the almost dead keep talking to the dead, and the dead talk back. This is not what she said but what she thought, and with tongue pressed hard against the cleft of her mouth, attempted to turn this magic into something more human, or perhaps what is human into something more magic. What Camilla attempted to do was make meaning out of observation, transcribe the shape of emotion, and grief.

“Mary misses her husband a lot, and she remembers him even though she’s got dementia. But only sometimes. Isn’t that interesting?”

Maia, Camilla’s daughter, said yes, that is interesting. Everything to Maia was interesting, and Camilla felt, feared, that such was communicated over in the same way Camilla spoke to her patients at the hospice, over speckled skin and feeble nature, except that Camilla would argue that she isn’t feeble, much like her father would, when he was diagnosed with early onset, lost all of his words, and tried to say them, anyways. A certain strength in that that only somehow left him weaker.

“Mary is getting sicker and sicker,” says Camilla. Mary was her favorite patient.

Camilla waited. Oh, said Maia. Camilla tried harder. “Mary speaks to him,” she said. “Or at least she thinks she does. Sometimes I come into her room and she’s half-into a conversation, looking at something that doesn’t exist, somewhere near the middle of the room.” As Camilla spoke, her hands absentmindedly made their way over to the stack of cards that she had placed on a shelf directly to the right of the landline, found them in between potted succulent, half-cracked sugar bowl, and framed photograph of husband, since divorced, since gone, since all those other things, you know you know you know. Since early morning, Camilla had been considering another tarot card reading, thought long and hard about it. When she had first bought her cards, from some eclectic store in Uptown, the large, intimidating, and very kind stubble-faced woman named Delilah who ran the store issued a warning, placing cards into cardboard box, and then cardboard into soft-papered bag, with the store-name on the front, thankyouverymuch for shopping with us. She said nonchalantly, “You know, these cards are supposed to have magic in them. The more you touch them, the more they lose their power.” She hitched the bag up by its handles with her big hands, let the contents—candle, a piece of quartz crystal, cards, matchsticks with black stems and blue heads like inverted flames—fall down to the bottom together, “Or so they say.” 

This was the first time Camilla had considered the thought that she was tampering with some otherworldly situation, the notion of power, of loss, swirled inside her and at once she was full to the brim with questions. 

“When the power leaves, where does it go?” Does Camilla herself, in touching it, collect all of it? Or does it just eddy around the house, leave through the fireplace, the chimney; reverse Santa Claus, into the cold?

“I don’t know,” confessed Delilah,  perhaps embarrassed. “Ariella just tells me you need a new deck every couple of years. But she knows a whole lot more about them than I do.”

 This is what Camilla did while on the phone, however: touch the cards, usurp a little bit of the occult from them, feel something emanate or come off of them like scent from a flower or light from a candle, or so attempt; in truth Camilla felt nothing, nothing different at all, might as well be touching a clothes hanger or a desk or a hung man. “One may go crazy like this,” thought Camilla, “assigning all these meanings and feelings and prepositions to things that may not have any at all.” 

This was Maia’s sentiment too. She didn’t care for Mary’s delusions (whether they were real or fake), or even for Camilla’s loneliness, for that matter; what she cared about was the work ethic, the fact that Camilla had enough food, and enough heat, and enough sleep. Baby out of the womb and the house reverses, the child builds the placenta brick by brick up, keeps the elders nourished and warm. This was always how Maia was, since she was young she knew her place in the world, knew to take care with cold rationality. Camilla didn’t like it, but she accepted the sentiment, and the donations, and the leftovers.  “I know it’s hard without dad,” Maia would say while holding a saran-wrapped bowl of white rice, referring to first the divorce, and then his death, car off the cliff, which Camilla had deep feelings about in all sorts of directions, considering his untimely demise featured a new wife (and former mistress) in the next seat; beautiful girl of eighteen, died too soon but perhaps—according to the vengeful cords of Camilla’s heart—right on time. 

Perhaps that is what prompted Maia’s maturity; when the father is gone, someone has to take his place. “Do you know what happens to children without fathers?”  Maia had almost yelled, half-whispered, fifteen years ago, referring to the marijuana and self-rolled cigarettes found in Jeremy’s room, his plummeting grades, detentions and suspensions, drinking tickets, haircut of his own design. “If he continues with all of this, he’s going to go to jail, don’t you understand?” 

Camilla understood, felt heavy and full and understood. This is what Maia saw and felt: Failure, and because she was well-to-do, or stubborn, or born already nine years instead of nine months, or Capricorn sun with Aries rising as Delilah would say, she took Camilla’s position, held Jeremy’s hand throughout school, said mom, what are you doing, mom, you have to do something…. 

This was Maia now: “Have you spoken to Jeremy? He’s doing fine, broke up with Lauren, and here we thought he was going to marry her. Isn’t that crazy? How do things like that happen? I guess that’s life for you. Anyways, are you hungry? Do you have enough food in your fridge? We have a ton of leftovers here that I can give you…” 

This was Camilla: “I am fine, I am good, I am sorry that happened to Jeremy. But maybe it is for the best.”

For the best, for the best, for the best. What does that mean anymore, anyways? Camilla shuffled the cards, felt nothing, not a thing, except for maybe tired, but that has been a common feeling for the past twenty years. 

“For the best? Maybe. I didn’t like her, but he was in love.” 

Camilla nodded, forgot that the physical and the verbal were on very different planes and then stuttered out a quick answer. With the anxious spasm of her hand, a card fell to the ground, hit the hard wood like it had something to say or something to escape from, face down. 

Bad knees. Camilla bent down to pick it up, came face to face with The Fool, and then promptly forgot everything Maia had ever said. This could have been Maia, now; “Do you ever care about anything but yourself?” This had certainly been Maia twenty years ago, maybe also nineteen, and eighteen too.

 Camilla had never been able to answer.

Assisted Living. When Camilla first began to work at the hospice, she was told it was all about transition, about guiding the individual from one life, to the next. Camilla wasn’t sure whether she believed in God or afterlife, so when she heard this explanation she only nodded her head and felt like something of a liar. Then, her trainer had taken out a sponge and they walked, slowly, to a resident’s room and Camilla was shown how to give a bath. Everything here had to be done with dignity, she was told. That’s the philosophy, that’s what people need, even when they’re awfully close to not being people anymore. 

Years later, and this is what Camilla was doing now. A quick, “How are you Mary,” before she plunged the sponge into one of two buckets and walked closer to the frail woman, packed towels underneath her body. It had a level of formality to it; it was important to make the patient feel comfortable , no matter what condition they were in. 

“Oh, I am good,” Said Mary. Her voice was faint, as if she had been sleeping. “Who are you?”

“That’s good. I’m Camilla.” Camilla wrung the sponge, once, out of habit. “I am going to wash you up now, ok?”

 There was no response. She began to unbutton Mary’s gown. 

Meanwhile, Mary was staring at the ceiling, mouth open. It was easy to get the impression that she was deep in thought, but Camilla had long since discerned that it was the haze of senescence, what the doctors called Lewy Body Dementia. When Mary was first admitted to the hospice, about 50 days ago, she was lucid about 40 percent of the day, but, the passage of time, Camilla observed, is never merciful. It never goes backwards, only marches forwards, and Mary was thrust deeper and deeper into herself, open-mouthed and forgetful. She was progressively disappearing, sublimating; the other nurses and aids needed to help her drink water, eat applesauce, as she had, simply, plainly, failed to remember how to do so. When she was wheeled out to play bingo (once every week or two) they had to move the pieces for her while she stared straight out, and (more and more as days went on) shook. Sometimes, Mary cried—wails so deep and enduring and with no apparent reason that the other patients in the hall would remark upon it in and claim it interfered with their sleep, that she would appear in their dreams, wild-haired and passionate in her despair, and destroy anything tender that could have possibly been imagined. Hearing the noise, Camilla could only think of Jeremy when he was a baby, the kind of wail reminiscent of a sadness without words, juvenile in its supreme helplessness. 

The bedpan was full.  

Gloved hands, Camilla made note of the contents, disposed of the waste, replaced the pan, made plans to clean Mary extra-well. She moved the two buckets of water closer, rubbed her hands. “I’m here,” she thought, “to assist the living.” Camilla looked downwards. Mary was stiff and frail and skinny, and suddenly Camilla’s bones began to hurt and she was filled with the sudden and strange need to sit down for a little, put her head into her hands.

 “How’s John?” Camilla asked. 

Mary didn’t answer for a very long time. Her lips moved, and for a moment Camilla felt terrible, was suddenly worried that Mary was cognizant of how unclean she was, how naked and delicate, of how little she was being helped. 

“John is here.” 

Within the first week of her training, Camilla had been told about the dying and the dead. “It’s either hallucination or séance,” the trainer said. “You can usually see it in the ones with dementia or Alzheimer's or brain cancer. But whatever it is, it makes them feel better. Happens sometime right before they’re about to die.” The trainer had paused. “It’s always a loved one. I imagine it is comforting.”

 Comfort. Camilla felt self-conscious. She got up at once and filled the sponge with soap-water once more, wrung it, began with the folds of Mary’s neck. Mary looked straight up, then somewhere to the side, the middle of the room.

 “Right there,” she said.

 The room felt neither colder nor warmer. Light came in from the window, and particles of dust danced in the beam. Hallucination, then. Camilla thought of her tarot cards. There were things that she could accept, and things that were harder to. Of course it was comforting, to be able to pretend like something like that exists. Love like perfume, wind in the trees. We can pretend all we want, and try very hard, but none of it really means anything, does it?

 Camilla wasn’t sure.

 “Well, how is he?”

 Mary’s mouth was moving. As Camilla moved the sponge lower, in gentle circles, the woman below her began to spasm. Her eyes closed.

 Camilla looked around the room, found it exactly the same as it had always been. She continued to clean.

Camilla was tired. She blended banana and protein shake and stood with her back against wall and TV news blaring and closed her eyes and swallowed harshly.

On the countertop by the phone, she had left The Fool. It looked up at her flatly. She was afraid to hold it. After investing so much into stagnancy, she was suddenly wary of anything that resembled difference, turned it over and over again in her hands, decided it must simply be a fluke.

 According to the booklet that came with the cards (and all that she found on the internet), The Fool represented potential. Number 0. The picture on the card was of a man, head up high, one foot off a cliff. The assumption is that the rest of him would soon follow suit,  or at least would, if he wasn’t immortalized exactly as that. If this did mean something, what did it mean? The chance that out of anything you would pull this exact card, feel this exact way, do this exact thing. Of course it was random. But what is divine fate if not random? What is significance if not different?

Camilla found it hard to not think about Mary. Mary and John, Mary and what she thought was John. Love that defies death and disease. The spotty impermanence of memory.

Camilla sat down in her kitchen, straight on the floor as if she was a four-year-old again. However within moments she was aware of the red digital clock on her stove, of 11:43 PM, and remembered her age and everything that came with it. She had the impulse to lean backwards and feel the coolness of the tile against her back, and almost fought it.

The phone was ringing. Camilla burst upwards with a jolt, her lungs filled with air (to the extent that they could—she had been a smoker for about a year after her husband’s divorce and then another 3 after his death) and deflated—she almost fell back down, hit her knee against a counter, grabbed for the landline and breathed deep into the mouthpiece.

“Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me.”

Camilla was never sure what to say. She waited, panting, feeling like some sort of animal.

“Mom?”

“Yes, how are you?” Formalities. Dignity.

“I’m good. Listen, it’s about Jeremy.”

Jeremy. When Camilla thought about Jeremy, she truthfully imagined a little boy, not a thirty-something year old who probably had a house. Camilla thought again. He did have a house, didn’t he? Or a condo? Something like that.

“What about Jeremy?”

“I think he relapsed again. He hasn’t answered any of my texts for three days. I’m really worried. He hasn’t said anything to you, has he? Have you seen anything on the news?”

Camilla craned her head and looked at the TV. There had been three shootings already. A celebrity was pregnant. A high-speed chase on the Dan Ryan.

“I haven’t seen anything about heroin on the TV. Not yet, at least.” Camilla closed her eyes and attempted to imagine what her son would look like now. Brown hair, balding. Last time she had seen him, he had been extraordinarily thin, would sit folded into himself like a bird or crumpled paper. The question of whether he had gained weight or not, for a moment, haunted her, and she wasn’t exactly sure why.

 “Why do you refuse to call him? Do you not care?”

The issue was that Jeremy refused to speak to Camilla as well. After the relapse, Camilla began to lock her own doors. Keep what was left of her valuables and medicine in one large safe. Jeremy took offense to that; would come late at night and rattle the door and swear like some sort of clumsy, angry ghost. Eventually, he stopped coming. Maia said he went to rehab again. By this time, Camilla had grown tired, lost the ability to look up phone numbers and speak to ghosts.

When Camilla remembered Jeremy, she thought of a young boy who needed training wheels until he was 8, slept with a nightlight, was afraid to knock down his own Lego towers. This new man was a stranger. After the second rehab (suboxone, Maia said, and lots of therapy), the stranger called every day for about 1 week straight, and then stopped. Camilla had been unable to pick up the phone; it wasn’t that she felt bad, it was that she somehow found herself feeling nothing at all.

 “He doesn’t need me,” said Camilla. “He doesn’t want to speak to me either.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Maia said. Camilla wasn’t sure what that meant. There was the brief clip of silence. Camilla brushed the face of The Fool with her index finger, placed the card by the photograph of her husband. He had been close with Jeremy. He was the one that taught him how to ride a bike (“The key,” he had said, “Is to not be afraid of falling”) and how to fall asleep at night when it was really hard. He had taught Camilla, too—warm milk and a spoonful of honey. You had to stand in the kitchen, away from the bed and the thing that is sleep, and think about things besides desperation.

Camilla really loved him, but years later and she didn’t know what that meant. It wasn’t a question of emptiness or fullness but perhaps fulfillment. And yet, it was he who desired an escape fantasy; the other woman was not a woman but a girl, as old as their own kids. Maybe she had been too selfish.

For years she asked herself what she had done wrong. There had to be something. The idea of fault was comforting to her—the idea that perhaps things could have been different if she had fucked him more often or stayed two inches to the left during this argument or that one. Camilla had thought and thought but couldn’t quite figure it out.

Camilla comes in early on Tuesdays. The difference between a hospice and a hospital is that here, one focuses not on cure but on comfort. It is the end of the road, hard stop. And the philosophy is that death should occur with dignity.

Camilla thought about the death of her husband. Head over heels off a cliff. How did that even happen? He never was the best driver, but something about how it ended was especially terrible, even ironic. It made her stomach churn; they had pulled their bodies up from the lake and Camilla was called to identify them. Drenched and cradled into each other, they appeared small, delicate. She had felt like a mother all over again. There was nothing dignified about it. 

Camilla retrieved two buckets, some towels, a sponge, and a bedpan from the closet and made her way over to Mary’s room.  

“Hello,” said Mary. And then she turned back around and continued on with her conversation. 

Camilla watched her, half-tired and half-intrigued. She knew all about dementia, especially this type; her father had had it, descended deep within himself at the age of 70 and began to hear voices and respond to them, spend long stretches of without sleep and then after that, long stretches of time completely under. In her psychology class in college, Camilla learned about hallucinations, about how the brain simply was incapable of recognizing its own creations. It was almost selfish, she remembered thinking. At the end of his life, he had forgotten all about her. She had to feed him with a spoon. 

“Hello Mary,” Camilla paused for a second. “Is it John?”  

“It is John,” said Mary. “We are talking about getting the horses ready.” 

“Horses?” But Mary was 103 years old, and it wasn’t impossible that she had horses when she was younger. And dementia was perhaps the most fundamental regression. One time, she even spoke to Camilla as if she was a young girl, told her about destitution in the only way a little girl could — about how the only toy she had was one dirty plush rabbit, which she loved very much, actually, as much as a little girl could.  

“Stay safe,” said Camilla. “I fell off of one of those once.” 

Mary wasn’t listening. Her attention was elsewhere, pinpointed on someone else.. “I’m very worried. I feel as if I haven’t done enough.” 

Mary was surprisingly lucid, Camilla thought. A conversation like this used to only be an occasional thing, but now Mary was almost entirely gone, glassy-eyed, swept up into nothingness, plaque and tangle.  

When Camilla was younger, she had wanted to be a neuroscientist; she read all about the brain, the dying of cells, the comings and goings of life and of the most scientific aspect of humanity, all concentrated within this mass of cells, of tissue, of system. Her father, an English professor, had found it amusing. 

“Well,” said Camilla, truthfully, “It would be sad to see you go.” 

Mary nodded. “Do you hear that, John?” 

Camilla was suddenly very curious. “What are you talking about?” 

Mary remained on the receiving end of a different conversation. Slowly, she closed her eyes. Embarrassed, Camilla waited for what must have been a minute and then took her buckets, moved closer.

Camilla couldn’t sleep. Her chest tightened, and she tried to imagine it was just fear. Her doctor had told her that it was anxiety, the kind of badness that comes with menopause and life stress, reassured her with the promise of benzodiazepines, but Camilla was filled with doubt. She was approaching old age, and her bones hurt and her breath inside of her lungs felt like something cold and rude. She knew that with every passing day she was getting closer to her father, and this sleeplessness was part of it; she found herself, also, forgetting small aspects of day-to-day life, and it scared her. On one particularly bad night, she once forgot to add the banana to her protein shake. It wasn’t until the next day that she had remembered, and then imagined herself being fed applesauce with a spoon, licking her lips like a child, helpless, somewhere on the fine line between cognizant and senseless.  

Camilla ripped the blankets off and padded to the kitchen, slipperless, barefoot. She wanted to feel the cold of the tile against her feet, even if it would leave them dirty. She poured herself a glass of milk, and then placed it in the microwave for 15 seconds, added a spoonful of honey and spun it around, imagined it melting, stared out into the greater world, blankly. Through the open window, she saw the moon, and the reflection of the light hovered like a phantom against the photograph of her ex-husband and, next to it, The Fool. She felt herself to be wholly and completely alone, but not alone enough. 

Suddenly, from the bathroom, Camilla heard something of a wail, well-situated between two or three softer moans. Camilla walked, slowly, full of fear and something else, which she couldn’t quite name. 

It never occurred for her to turn on the lights. Through the mirror, despite the darkness, she saw the unmistakable form of her husband’s mistress, weeping over the edge of the toilet.  

I guess I am senile, thought Camilla, early onset and still aware enough to see it. And that too, means that I really am dying, she thought. The Hanged Man had lied; either that, or The Fool had shattered everything before it. Her teeth began to chatter. She began to shake. 

The girl didn’t look at her. She was more absorbed within her own sadness to turn around and acknowledge the real living human looking down at her.  

“Is this a dream?” whispered Camilla. “I really hope it’s a dream.” 

“I wouldn’t know,” said the mistress. She seemed real enough. Her hands were blue. She had a bracelet similar to the one that Maia used to wear around her left wrist. On her right hand, she had a small stick-and-poke tattoo of what must have been a heart.  

“Do you know where you are? Do you know who you are to me?” 

“My name,” she was sniffling, “is Ava.” Like an angel, Camilla thought for one soft moment. And then she was suddenly filled with rage. 

“A lot of stuff happened to me here,” said Ava.  

Camilla didn’t want to ask what. “Why are you crying?”

“Because I am dead.”

Camilla didn’t know what to do or say.  

“You know, the theory is that when you see a dead person, you’re going to die soon.”  

“I believe that,” Ava said. Her head perked up, suddenly. “I saw my mother before I died.” 

But it’s always supposed to be someone you love, Camilla thought. And I don’t love you. 

“Do you know what you did?” 

The girl sobbed, nodded her head, sobbed harder. “I was in love,” said Ava. “I wanted to follow him down to the ends of the earth.” 

Well, thought Camilla, that’s exactly what happened. The girl was crying harder and harder. To Camilla, it all looked like one sick joke. She steadied herself against the sink, closed her eyes, took a deep breath. When she opened them again, Ava was gone.

“It’s very hard,” said Mary.

 Camilla approached slowly. The sleeplessness left her feeling un-whole. She forgot to eat breakfast this morning, instead spent a good 50 minutes staring at her shoes, exhausted. It was getting harder, she realized. She couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened years ago, had half, almost-dreams of falling off a cliff and finding herself, splayed out and helpless, at the bottom.

“There’s a lot here,” said Mary. “Yesterday, we had Greek yogurt.” 

The patients did have Greek yogurt yesterday, Camilla thought. Mary didn’t even remember Camilla, but she remembered the taste of Greek yogurt.

 Camilla moved the buckets closer. “I want to be able to taste Greek yogurt for the rest of my life,” said Mary. “Do you remember when we used to buy so much of it, we had no room in the fridge for anything else?” 

Camilla felt like she was walking into something profoundly intimate. She steadied herself on a nearby wall, thought about dignity. Mary paid no mind. She nodded, twice. Camilla began to pack the towels, soap up the sponges. She stood over Mary’s body, began to scrub, softly, over the woman’s fingertips.  

“How does that feel?” Camilla asked. 

Mary did not reply.

 “Mary?” Camilla came closer. The woman’s mouth was propped open, as if she was about to snore, but no sound came out, the airflow suspended like the freezeframe in a movie. Camilla watched carefully, and then dropped her sponges, shook slightly, a spasm. Without much hesitation Mary had died, became merely a body.

Camilla didn’t want to eat or shower. She fell into bed, work clothes still on, and felt sadness press against her upper back.  She furrowed her brows. Sleep didn’t come to her. She kicked her legs up, dejected, threw herself into as many positions as possible. She gave herself whiplash. Her bones ached. She couldn’t breathe.  

On her back, Camilla spent a few good minutes thinking about Maia. She should call, soon. Talk about Mary’s death. She practiced describing it: “She spoke to her husband about Greek yogurt and then, satisfied, left her body.” Camilla knew she couldn’t possibly say this, would instead say “Mary died,” and then wait for the lukewarm response on the other end of the line, but she thought about it as if she would, repeated the sentence a couple times over.

She almost reached for the phone, but it was close to 1 am. She sighed, despondent, and went to the kitchen to write a quick note, stick it on the landline.

 She had forgotten her robe. It was cold. Camilla thought about how she would tell her daughter that she was senile and hallucinating. She felt it was important; one should know in advance before they are to be all on their own.  

Camilla began to write the note. “Mary died. She spoke about Greek yogurt as if it was the most important thing in the world. We take a lot for granted, don’t we?” And then—“I’m getting old and must be dying,” it said. “I must be. I imagined Charlie’s mistress into life. She came up out of the toilet and cried.” Camilla thought for a bit, hesitated, crossed it out.

“I have begun to check my own pulse three times a day,” Camilla wrote. “Morning, Midday, Night.” Now utterly frightening to Camilla was the thought that she was senile and the thought that she was healthy. She checked her pulse now, one finger to the neck, her eyes fluttering closed, momentarily. She always ended up somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, an average American. As she did this, somewhere in the distance, the wail of a fire truck began to pass by, and its sound was like a banshee,  remorseful and loud. 

 “I don’t think I really came out of the toilet,” said a voice.

 Camilla opened her mouth in shock. Her pen clattered to the ground. Behind her was Ava. Camilla had to sit down on one of the rickety chairs behind her. It squeaked under her weight. 

There was the brief period of silence. They watched each other. Camilla scratched her arms.

 “Why are you here?”

 “Something pulled me here,” said Ava.

 “Now out of all other times?”

 She didn’t respond and Camilla almost blushed, unsure what else to say.

 “Why did he choose you?” Camilla asked.

 Ava didn’t reply for a minute. “Why do we do anything? I made my own decisions. I take my own consequences.”

 Something twisted inside Camilla. I must really be crazy, she thought. The complete and utter fool.

 “Do you know what is happening to Jeremy?” and then, in the words of Maia— “Do you know what happens to boys without fathers?”

 “No,” said Ava. “I don’t.” Camilla wondered whether this young girl even knew who Jeremy was. They must be the same age now, Camilla thought. She blinked a few times, watched the vision disappear and reappear in front of her, like an image on a static TV set, fringes, iconic memory. 

 “You’re not real,” Camilla said. “I’m just old and senile and losing it.”

 “Maybe,” said Ava. It looked like she herself was not sure.

 Camilla felt herself running away.

She shuttered herself off in her room and hoped not a single being, alive or dead, could see her. It was almost like she was young again, and she was falling asleep on the living room couch, half-drunk and half-nostalgic for something she hadn’t, at the time, tasted yet; dinner almost served, vivid images of love and beauty at the backs of her eyes, time moving like toothpaste, and arms spread out, and she was swimming through it. And then, she cried and cried, felt her soul get loose, like a tooth or fall leaf, and the world spun for what seemed like eternity. The phone may have been ringing. Camilla did not pick it up. She fell asleep.

When it was morning, out of habit, Camilla turned on the kitchen TV. She filled herself: two protein shakes and then an apple. And then, toast. Butter. Another apple.

Camilla put her head in her hands and wanted to cry, but found herself unable. And light streamed in through the window and it was a normal Sunday and,  on the news,  the world moved on. Only one shooting today. One rape. A feature on a boy losing his lucky gloves and then finding them again. A celebrity’s sister was pregnant, too. Another shooting. A grieving mother. A senator is arrested for fraud. A seat opens up. A child molester is sentenced to prison. The missing tiger in Lincoln Park Zoo was found, had been hiding in the enclosure the entire time. Why hadn’t anyone looked there first? Who would have thought.

What else is one to do? The Lincoln Park Zoo is free.

The path to the zoo is gravel. It reminded her of years ago, when she had gone with her children, and the presence of hope and good feeling was still something that could be conjured up easily, like magic. She remembered buying ice cream at a local stand, and lemon-flavored shaved ice for the kids. They weren’t quite so young, then; were firmly in the throes of middle and high school, even, but Camilla had accepted the responsibility of parent more willingly than perhaps any other time in her life. She parked the car. She bought the ice cream and the gift shop items. She laughed at jokes. She told stories.  

It was off the gravel path that Camilla saw the telephone booth.

There are almost no more telephone booths in the world. This must have been the last one. Slowly, one by one the world loses of all of its symbols—or, at the very least, all of its tangible ones.

Camilla, then, felt herself inside one of the world’s last great relics, last breath of the past, felt herself as if stepping inside the hollow of a fresh dinosaur footprint, or something equally ridiculous. Thought to herself, how many people have kissed in here? How many fervent phone calls? Receptions of monumental news?  Of course, most calls were possibly that of the mundane, regular day to day life, but even then, most conversations were about love:  a wife telling her husband that she has just warmed up the soup, will heat up the chicken next; a grandmother telling her grandchild she is going to be sending 20 dollars over, before hanging up the line.

Camilla thought for a couple of seconds, wringing her hands as if she was pulling water out of a sponge. It was only in the faint moment—the barest absence of thought, impulsive space between two cognitions, as sometimes exist, a train just about ready to begin motion—that she picked up the receiver, inserted two coins.

Fear hit her almost immediately.

Camilla was tense for a moment. She may have been shaking a little, but she didn’t know. A streak of light entered through the window and she stood within it, looking outwards, surrounded by ever-moving dust.

“Hello Jeremy,” she said.

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