Note to Chinese Dad | The Florida Review at UCF

When he died last month at 91, my dad left boxes and boxes of black-and-white, sepia, and tinted photographs, along with a mahogany crucifix on which the Virgin Mary is suspended. Black hair, probably a horse’s, flows from the Virgin’s scalp and skirts her narrow waist; she has two tiny discs of grey-veined mica for eyes; and her feet are malformed, curving outward like jester shoes. I’d never seen this figurine in my life. I found it in Dad’s pocket a few hours after he died. The oddest thing, however, is that—whether it’s a fault of the woodworker, an act of vandalism, or a consequence of one of my father’s devious moods—the Virgin’s right breast is missing. The left side has an oval hump; but the right side is flat, smooth, and palely smudged as though rubbed vigorously with sandpaper. Along the back of the cross is carved: “To Amelia, from Dad.”

We shared many irreverent jokes; neither of us were orthodox Christians. But this figurine, I admit, makes me uneasy. Why is her breast sanded down? Can a single object inflect the narrative of an entire life?

Dad loved dolls, that I knew. He was the only man I’d ever met who kept an extensive collection of them—enough to fill an entire closet. As a child, I could never step foot in that uncanny sanctuary (or, to my mind, mausoleum) without chastisement; although at times, when he was out photographing the mountain landscapes and mountain people—the thing he loved to do above all others—I’d sneak in and caress their porcelain faces, turn their eyeballs to the left or right, or, when I was especially lonely, embrace them carefully without altering their positions.

There were big dolls and little dolls; conventional ones and quirky ones. I remember waiting for him in his Model T as early as nine years old while he hunted for dolls in drug stores and dusty furniture shops that made my allergies act up. The last doll he bought was in an antique store in Brevard, North Carolina; it was gigantic, dark-haired, with arms as pale and thick as split oak slats (I don’t know why this doll, in particular, finally satisfied his collector’s heart and completed his coven). He photographed them all, but of this Virgin Mary there are no extant photographs.

Dad was what you might call a shutterbug. He conceived of life as an album of images. His memories, for the most part, were tied to particular photographs he’d taken at one time or another. He entered Kodak contests and lost them. He wrote Kodak often complaining about their overrepresentation of northern urban photographers and the relative neglect of southern rural ones in contests; he wrote them about their new products; he wrote them about copyright law. I remember falling asleep to the ring-clack and furious metallic swings and snaps of the typewriter.

In the 1920s and ’30s, during the decline of tenant farming and in the heyday of folk photography, each town or hamlet in rural America had its resident photographer (Dad was born in 1889 and I in 1909). Men and women from Hemlock Cove, Olto, Judaculla, and Gallow Hollow frequented Dad’s studio and the Attic Window darkroom. They’d come with baskets of huckleberries, lovely foot-high April morels, and birch sap candy especially for me. They had names like Mossie Reynard, Earl Palmer, Gideon Laney, Imogene Bascom, Reinfried Romanes, and Max Straub. Like my dad, none of them made a splash in the photography world. At best they placed a few pictures in the Atlanta Journal or Audubon magazine. But Dad never kept friends long. He’d get into some bitter dispute with them about aesthetics or the superiority of a particular strain of vegetable. He had so many of these short-lived artist friends who shared and exchanged photographs with him that it’s impossible for me to know which of the tens of thousands of photographs he left behind are in fact his. The overwhelming majority are, certainly, but the outliers I can’t identify. My eye isn’t sharp enough and perhaps his style wasn’t distinct enough.

Throughout our lives, Dad and I would venture to the obscurest regions of our property, which was five square miles of oak, creek, and granite dome. He called our home in the cove Amelia’s World, because I spent all my time there gardening, walking, and writing while he was off taking pictures. We’d search for lonely abandoned chimneys from the nineteenth century—the relics of the crude cabins of Cherokee and frontiersmen, which often tilted dramatically on uneven ground. These one can find all over western North Carolina, hidden in rhododendron coves: creek rocks rising twelve feet high layered with clay chinking and reinforced with rope, hair, and hog’s blood; the splintered horizontal slats made of poplar. Over time, bees bored into the chinking’s hard pottery. Sometimes we’d light a fire in one of these crumbling hearths and smoke would pour out of the holes.

Dad’s death was a painful one. It feels almost irreverent to speak of it. The few distant cousins who visited struggled to keep their hands from their faces. He had bulging sores resembling purple tomatoes, some split open and oozing as if struck by the blight. His body was like a neglected garden at the onset of winter. I dabbed his sores with a cold cloth day and night during the final struggles. His last wish was for me to cover him with his dolls. His face glowed as he tossed and turned, coughing, spitting up fluid and blood; it jutted out from the top of the porcelain and cotton bodies so that it seemed he wore a grand, puffy Elizabethan dress with ivory lacework.

Dad had many sayings: “the best and worst things in life are errors of the stars”; “we’re just searching for a lucid interval”; “our knowledge is a journey from ruin to ruin.” These cryptic maxims I’ve found myself pondering in the days since his death. Over time, we came to share a similar philosophy. We believed travel outside Appalachia, for instance, would not edify the mind. Close observation of oneself and one’s immediate surroundings is the key to parting the curtains of mystery, however briefly; sense impressions decay into a precarious reality and the laws of nature can change at any moment. But we never held our breath awaiting those changes.

Some of his quirks I picked up. We both preferred corncob pipes with bowls cured with apple butter; it made the brightleaf tobacco from our garden taste sweeter and heavier than molasses (I’m smoking an old corncob right now at my writing desk; my hand shakes more than in the past and I pull the smoke with less vigor, but I experience the same relish as in my early adulthood). Neither Dad nor I owned a mirror. On the rare occasions we looked at our reflections, we did so in the convexities of tablespoons, and only then out of a sense of curiosity, never vanity or self-critique. We should move through life, Dad said, like a living soul in love that knows it’s loved in return, that doesn’t desire more or less as it stands on the bridge between self and other. That was his roundabout way of saying that we should accept our insignificant selves as they are.

I remember the winter it snowed and never let up, the flakes hissing and shifting on the branches, rocks, and roofs. In a fit of rage one day, due to some accident in the darkroom that ruined a batch of prints, Dad threw his ice-crusted walking stick against the wall—and it’s still stuck there. Somehow the tip wedged perfectly between two boards. We thought it quaint to leave it. In later years the walking stick reminded us of that long brutal winter and cut us with nostalgia, remembering the faerie cabins we built with pebbles and bark; the chunks of granite we heated in the stove and used to warm our feet; the icy shock of creek water in our throats; the night we glimpsed a freak offshoot of the northern lights weaving blue and violet nets around the moon; our midnight feasts on crystallized honey; and reading the Gospel of Thomas aloud until we drifted to sleep.

Living with Dad was not always easy. Rarely did we get on each other’s nerves, but there were times, especially towards the end, when he’d come in needy and sulking, desiring compliments. For sixty-plus years we’d discussed the people and places he photographed and the prints he left lying about the kitchen counter or that he had genuine questions about, which my untrained eye could help him clarify. When his body and spirit began to fray, however, he started leaving

photographs in places I’d find when I was alone: on my writing desk, bedspread, and rocking chair; in my tackle box, where I kept my rocks; and in my jewelry box, where I kept some beloved, much-read letters from an old flame. In the garden I once found a Polaroid caught in corn silk. It was a portrait of a woman I’d never met. She had sensuous lips that turned down at the ends and a bold beautiful forehead. Her eyes were closed; a horny crust, some kind of skin condition, populated her eyelids. The next day Dad asked me about it. Was it good or bad? Should he submit it to a magazine?

The first few times he did this I told him how moving the photographs were. I patted him on the back and flicked him affectionately on his balding pate. But as time passed, it angered me that he wanted me constantly to be his praiser and applauder, his confidant in art’s triumphs, failures, and transgressions. I wanted nothing more than the communion of easy laughter and the intimacy of long silence. That was how it had always been. It hurt to alter my attitude toward him, to play a role other than daughter. In the final two years his liberal spiritual convictions began to wear thin, and I suspected he was becoming secretly zealous in a manner he was embarrassed to admit to me, given our long history of unorthodoxy and light heresies. He’d hide himself away in his workshop reading a copy of the New Testament that he’d picked up at the Baptist church down the road. Once, when he lost his pipe, and we couldn’t find it anywhere in the cabin, I heard him mutter: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I laughed. I thought it was a joke, but his expression was solemn. In spite of these things—which I’ve hesitated to commit to paper—he was my only friend and would’ve carried the cross or burned for me. An elegy, unlike a eulogy, should be honest in its longing for souls no longer in reach and should not shirk the hard truths of a complex life.

On the end table, there’s a browning, half-eaten peach with Dad’s bite mark still intact. I can’t throw it away. I think of how often he fretted, especially after he turned eighty, that all the peach trees in North Carolina were dying. He carefully documented their mutilations after the April freeze. He didn’t go exploring the mountains and rivers as far as Asheville anymore, but stayed near Amelia’s World, beekeeping, making muscadine wine, and worrying over our failing orchard. He often related dreams of worms, molds, and hard white blights like baby teeth infesting the fruit.

For some reason I can’t help but connect the missing flesh from this half-eaten peach—where Dad’s long, rabbit-like teeth scored as deep as the stone—with the Virgin Mary’s missing breast; and I can’t help but connect her missing breast to my motherless life. Of all people to have no photographs of, I have none of Mother (never “Mom”). Dad took hundreds of the goat man who visited the byways of Appalachia once a year in his junk-filled wagon pulled by goats; he has thousands—literally thousands—of pictures of purple martins feeding their young from perches in hollowed-out gourds hanging from poles. None, however, of Mother. Dad only started documenting the still, silent world after her death; in his photographs, the mysteries of loss were lulled into chemical innocence.

Mother passed away a few weeks after childbirth when I was two years old (my brother was stillborn). I was too small to remember her. Like clockwork, once a month (during the entire seventy-one years I lived with Dad, up until those final weeks), I’d walk into the house to find him drinking sassafras tea in the kitchen and crying, almost silently, his shoulders heaving. Few things made me so uncomfortable. It transformed me into his parent. I’d always pretend I didn’t see and pass quickly through the room. He never detained me but once. On that particular evening he spoke about Mother, how she had been feverish before she died. She didn’t rave exactly; she was lucid, just bathed in sweat and bright-eyed. She related certain visions: Christ in the desert, hovering, suspended in the air by magnets; a fiery cross erupting on the forehead of a goat; breaking a rock and seeing the face of Jesus inside it. The last vision she related, however, was more intimate.

She told of a day in Oberwolfach in southern Germany, the evening before she and Dad started their long journey to America. They’d decided not to go walking in the windy autumn hills above the village. She couldn’t remember why they’d stayed indoors; maybe they needed more time to pack. But in her vision they had, indeed, gone walking in the hills that day; they’d held hands; they’d kissed each other’s imperfections; they’d talked about what North Carolina might be like as they made for a gap in the trees, where the sun flooded the dim evergreen forest like a bomb’s light.

Dad, you were good to me. You were strong and gentle and careful as a mother. I’m a seventy-one-year-old woman now. When I smile the hundreds of wrinkles on my face hurt like paper cuts. It’s a testament to you that I have no fear of the darkness or the light. As I rotate this effigy of the Virgin Mary back and forth under candlelight, I want to glean more details, to see its mica eyes flash at me. I know that this object is some kind of provocation from you; a sign that I should rethink my life, my past and future, even at this late stage. It makes me wonder what other secrets you kept from me in that red-lit darkroom and in that closet of dolls, which did not replace me, exactly, but acted as a surrogate for something I can’t understand. What perversions, mean hates, and desires so naive and saccharine as to be almost scandalous did you hide from me? And where shall I go now? What shall I do? If I crack open the Virgin’s wooden skull, will there be a ball of mica inside it, a mineral brain not so different from my own? Will a thought rise from it like smoke?

The sky is the dark orange of persimmon beer as I finish this elegy. Orion, the hunter constellation, sparkles along the trees but Sirius has yet to appear above the hill. Perhaps I have twenty more years left, and I’ll die at 91, just like you. But with this inexplicable figurine in my hand, what tables shall I turn to honor, spite, or abandon you? Is the Virgin a key to open the kingdom within?

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The Beheaded (or, A Sward for the Disembodied)

The French aristocrats persist in their delusions of grandeur, confirming they learned nothing from their cart rides to the guillotine. They revel in their precise necklines and pooh-pooh without decorum those like the Inca with ragged tears from a puma’s claw and the turbaned apostate with saw marks from a scimitar not properly sharpened. Some even grunt or humph on occasion as though still in touch with their upper-class gastronomic disorders. A few of the other heads may suffer now and then from phantom torso, but clearly these aristocrats are putting on airs of self-importance.

Roundabout a gross in all, these heads loiter in the grass like a gaggle of free-range bowling balls. The only criterion for membership is the complete separation of one’s neck from the body, intentional or no. The uneven ground ranges off in all directions into an unfathomable dark they have not the capacity to plumb. The grass itself is downy and kempt, not unpleasant to reside in, provided one is not vulnerable to oral, nasal, optical or aural intrusion. New arrivals drop from the murky haze that serves as sky and plop into available space. Thankfully, there is no pool-balling, but the way one lands is generally one’s position for the tenure of this after-existence. Thus, the fenstermaker, struck off during a freak installation accident, lies idly on his cheek, free to engage in idle conversation, while Nazi doctor Horst Fischer, facedown, can do little but mumble (to the relief of his adjacents). Rosalind Thorpe, the Co-Ed Butcher’s fifth victim, landed similarly but was industrious enough to tongue her way onto her ear. She beams with accomplishment when she hears the Nazi’s muttering, until memories of that which initiated her into this place sets her eyes quaking like jelly globs.

But before an arrival can have available space, a cranium needs to pop out of existence. They do so like bubbles, leaving behind neither trace nor debris. Neither arrivals nor departures go by any discernible logic. Jayne Mansfield arrived well after David Pearl, a seemingly beneficial swap at first, but her lack of bosom made Jayne quite the bore. She subsequently popped to make way for a Saudi extremist spouting pro-democratic slogans. Yet the ancient samurai remains, as well as the aforementioned Inca, who flares his septal bamboo when anyone makes eye contact for too long.

Their arrangement also seems indiscriminate. The aristocrats, for example, have but one trio in proximity, while the others reside singly among those they scoff. A cotton slave done in by overenthusiastic lynching glares at the aforementioned Herr Doktor. John the Baptist lies face-to-face with a Viking, the samurai alongside a poor kid who got truncated by the world’s tallest waterslide. Yet Medusa, her petrification skills as limp as her serpent tresses, is seemingly attended to by Henry VIII’s executed wives. The Greek is the only one who balances on the base of her neck, which in truth is the most level of them all, having been excised by deific steel, so she stands (metaphorically speaking) as though surveying the landscape, Anne B. and Catherine H. oriented well enough to watch over that which extends beyond their lady’s periphery. Some figure her snakes might not have been deceased when she first arrived and delivered her to her present position, but no one predates her arrival, so all hypotheses are the result of pure speculation.

The afterlife of decapitated heads is full of debate and skepticism. Belief is the number-one topic of conversation. What have they left but to question their surroundings?:

Who established this place? Does the choice of verb ‘establish’ load the question unfairly towards a God-based conclusion? The ordering of arrivals and departures, not following temporal logic, suggests some kind of selection is at play, but is that selection natural or super-thereof? Why doesn’t the grass grow, and why doesn’t it dry out since there’s never been a hint of rain or cloud ever from the caliginous expanse overhead? Could this place be the dream-invention of a single brain in the midst of its ninety seconds between separation and finality? Answers aren’t easy, even for those determined in their beliefs, pro- or anti-theist. If this were paradise, why subsist as heads alone? If punishment, what kind of Dantean contrapasso is at play? Discussions are curt and thankfully absent of palaver, for the wind of the bodiless is limited to their open-ended fragments of esophagus. Thus, they speak only in quick bursts, no more than two syllables at a time. A not atypical exchange:

“God.”

“Sure?”

“No doubt.”

“How?”

“Just look.”

The only exercise the beheaded are capable of anymore is to vacillate between despair and relief—relief that their existences didn’t just cut to black, despair that their continuation still contains no definite answers, their brains still boggled at the nature of things.

Though their distribution will vary according to the whimsy of arrivals and departures, overall they remain a hodgepodge of creeds and philosophies, from the standard repertoire to paganism to Wotan to rigid irreverence. The Viking considers a hall of heads the height of honor, while John the Baptist cries, “Repent! Repent!” Even John’s adherents, however, consider him unremittingly goody-goody.

A philosopher caught up in the Khmer Rouge revolution wonders if their situation is case and point of brains in a Cartesian vat, though even that conclusion necessitates further speculation on the placement of the evil daemon (or genius, depending on your translation). Joseph Haydn insists this existence a gift to promote the ultimate life of the mind, though he is considered something of an infidel, his decapitation done postmortem for phrenological purposes. The aristocrats spit and curse the name of Robespierre, but in their own way, being short of saliva and limited of wind. They wish him in their midst, for justice’s sake.

In the pale haze of sky, an unphased moon glows with persistence, making these crania shine like irradiated shrapnel in their lawn, or deep-sea pufferfish, aglow and uffing their jaws for life-giving water. Medusa and the former Mrs. Henry VIIIs look on without comment.

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I Loved the Dog So Much

I loved the dog so much. So, I decided that I needed to have it surgically implanted into my body. And I called the surgeon.

He was a short and astute doctor with a deep, trustworthy voice.

“You have too many internal organs,” he told me. “We’ll have to remove some in order to fit the dog in. No way the dog’ll fit otherwise.”

We agreed to remove all the unnecessary organs first. “You have two kidneys, two lungs, so one of each can go. I can remove one of your eyes just so you feel like you’re all in.”

I said take it all. The dog wasn’t too big anyhow. I imagined it would fit in my rib cage with a little room left for it to waggle its tail. “Make sure you leave room for it to waggle its tail,” I told the surgeon.

The surgeon did not share my optimism. “We’ll need to run valves through your abdomen for oxygen and sewage. The more I think about it, this is sort of like when they sent that dog to outer space,” he told me. “Except in this situation the dog will most definitely die instants after the surgery is complete.”

I asked him if he thought I should get the local university involved. At the time I thought this would be the kind of thing that would attract a young academic. Perhaps I was putting too much faith in the surgeon. The surgeon slept at my house that night. He said we would start in the morning.

He woke me up that night with a new plan. “We’ve been thinking about this all wrong,” he told me. “We have to remove all the organs, put the dog in and then figure out how to put the organs in, one by one like a puzzle. At that point we could even begin connecting the dog to your body so it could breathe with your lung and use your bladder.”

I thought about it for a moment in bed. “I worry we might suffocate the poor thing in the process of doing this. Plus, I believe you’re implying that through this surgery I might be able to hear the dog’s thoughts which was never my intention.”

“That’s impossible,” said the surgeon. “I’m only trying to fulfill your vision within the limits of my understanding of human anatomy.” The project was clearly wearing on him, though he seemed to be more saddened than upset. In the darkness he looked like a pale, bitter shadow.

“I’ll go get the dog,” I said. “The dog is the whole reason we’re doing this. Let me just put on my slippers.”

The surgeon sat on my bed. Thoughts flew through him the way that I’ve always imagined a computer thinking. A ticker tape of ideas fell from his mouth. “We could remove all your intestines except what’s absolutely essential. We could halve the size of your stomach, bladder, lung, and cut out all but a thumbnail-sized section of your liver. I’ve heard of people living with less. Imagine being able to live on an organ no bigger than the hard nail on your thumb,” said the surgeon.

I looked at my own finger. “The human body is a marvelous invention,” I told him.

The doctor came back to his senses after a glass of water. He played with the dog a while. “This is really a great dog,” he told me.

I said it was the whole reason for the project. I told him I was putting my body on the line.

The next morning, he cut me open in my living room. This is the only part I was unconscious for, so I only know what he told me.

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Ghosts-Turned-Blue

Molly’s friend Ronaldo orders a second old fashioned, and she has to tamp down the voice in her head that itches to inform him (to lecture, she corrects herself) of what the ethanol (rotted plant waste is the phrase she really wants to use) is doing to his brain. Sobriety has turned her into her mother-in-law, Didi, who flinches every time Molly inadvertently uses “god” as an interjection. Didi assumes that the “god” of Molly’s interjections is Didi’s God, that by saying, “God, I’m exhausted,” Molly is likening Didi’s God to a “wow” or a “whoa” or a “yikes.” This perceived degradation offends Didi, yes, but the flinch is also Didi suppressing the urge to warn Molly that she’s booking herself a ticket on a high-speed train to hell. Molly has long found religious people intriguing in this respect—how earnestly they believe that they’re more enlightened than you and how this conviction convinces them it is their responsibility to instruct you on how to live. It’s infuriating behavior for sure, but she empathizes with their plight. To believe so certainly that the mother of your grandchildren is going to hell if she doesn’t change her ways, that’s a tough predicament.

Alcohol is now for Molly like God is for Didi, in the sense that Molly has spent so much time reading and thinking and talking about alcohol these past few weeks that she believes she knows it far better than Ronaldo and all these other restaurant patrons drinking their fancy cocktails and their blood-hued wine. Because Ronaldo is her good friend and she loves him, she feels an urge to warn him (to proselytize, Molly corrects).

It’s like one of those cartoons where the two characters are stranded on a lifeboat, starving, and one looks at his best friend, the chicken, and sees not his fluffy, feathery body but a golden-brown roast, his legs plump drumsticks. Super-imposed on Ronaldo’s warm brown eyes, Molly sees a cirrhotic liver, barnacled instead of smooth. Then that image disappears like a slide she’s clicked, replaced with—Oh god: not some crappy, too-sweet old fashioned, but Molly’s own former go-to drink: Maker’s Mark, with one cube of ice slowly melting. The trick was to pace herself, so she could finish the drink just as the ice finally dissolved. That was the perfect last sip, the signal that she could order another.

Molly shakes her head to dislodge the Maker’s, and Ronaldo’s face returns to normal, except he’s giving her a quizzical look. And Molly has to resist (the endless resistance! She understands why people use the expression “white-knuckling”; dinner at a restaurant is like gripping the side of a bouncy river raft) the urge to say, What the hell, dude? Why are you ordering a second cocktail in front of your good friend who has yet to make it past the one-month mark? Is that not a sign in and of itself of a drinking problem, of being in the thrall of alcohol, that you would make such a weak, selfish, and inconsiderate error in judgement? Does not such behavior warrant a lecture on ethanol and cirrhotic livers, since clearly Ronaldo needs saving from himself?

Then again, did she not tell him barely forty minutes ago that he shouldn’t censor his desire to drink? Did she not say confidently, “I’ve got this!”

These questions rattle in Molly’s head like cubes of ice in a glass.

As though he can read her mind, Ronaldo says, “You said you don’t even miss alcohol.” The look in his eyes makes Molly think of how she feels playing arcade games—braced the entire time for her avatar’s impending pixel-dismantling death.

He says, “Fuck, Molly.” He sticks up his hand to flag down their waitress.

The waitress quickly appears, and Ronaldo tries to cancel the drink, but Molly says, “No, don’t cancel it. He wants the drink.”

The waitress has a head of silvery white hair that is almost violet. Rather than make her look old or worn, her hair makes her vibrant and hip. She eyes Molly’s pink prickly-pear lemonade, and Molly suspects that the woman has read this situation clearly. This embarrasses her. Alcohol is such a pervasive and deeply ingrained part of the culture that giving it up is akin to giving up gas-guzzling transportation. Forgoing it makes her seem snooty and judgmental. Her abstaining inconveniences people. Molly’s friend Una commutes by bicycle only, which means no plans that include Una on the guest list can venture outside an approximately six-mile radius. And now Ronaldo feels like he can’t have a second drink.

Ronaldo says, “Please cancel it. Thank you.”

Molly says nothing, but she is already considering what she will write about this experience tonight in her online community of other people giving up alcohol without AA. The problem with AA, the group ethos goes, is that it is all about willpower, and so all about fighting your cravings. Instead Molly is learning to deconstruct her cravings so that eventually they aren’t cravings anymore. Supposedly this makes not drinking about gain rather than about loss. Supposedly it will make her more present and more joyful.

But here she is sitting across the table from her longtime friend, yet she’s thinking about the conversation she will later have about him with other people, strangers she doesn’t know anything about other than that they too have quit drinking. Well, that, and that they share her resistance to AA: a resistance which is not merely about AA glamorizing alcohol (as a permanent “craving” that needs to be resisted “one day at a time”), but also about its emphasis on submitting to a higher power. Molly isn’t “present,” she’s far away, imagining herself back in her bedroom, a space that’s felt cavernous ever since Connor moved out last year, and now, without her nightly, companionable Maker’s Mark, that much emptier.

Clearly Connor is not going to come to his senses, recognize how hard Molly is trying, how much she deserves to get him back. “Good for you,” he’d said when she told him she’d quit drinking. It was hard to explain what was so chilly, so measured about the phrase. On paper, it sounded supportive. But Connor’s delivery turned it into something else. It was that subtle way Connor emphasized “you.” He communicated that Molly’s quitting drinking was something that now benefitted her alone.

What do cravings become once they are no longer cravings? Molly has never posed the question to her group. She thinks of arcade games again. They were Connor’s thing. She’d always kind of hated them—even Pac-Man, her game of choice—because they made her so damn tense. Curious how those blocky ghosts’ pursuit of the little yellow corn kernel of a figure her hand was controlling could raise her heart rate so much. But she had always chosen to play rather than sit on the red sofa and wait for Connor to be done. She had chosen to play despite how much the experience frazzled her. Because there were brief moments of pleasure in playing Pac-Man, such as when she managed to maneuver her Pac-Man toward a piece of fruit, or better yet, toward a ghost-turned-blue. Then her Pac-Man could destroy the thing that had been taunting him, but only temporarily, until the ghosts resumed their normal coloring and consequently their normally lethal nature. Is that what a craving became when it was no longer a craving? A ghost-turned-blue that could turn on her at any moment? Because as much as she wanted to, she could not believe cravings could remain always and forever ghosts-turned-blue.

Or maybe the problem is she’s using the wrong metaphor? Maybe cravings dissolve into nothingness, like when Pac-Man dies three times and no jiggling of the joystick or the coin slot will bring him back to life unless you put in another quarter?

The problem is she can always get her hands on another quarter. So how do you make the cravings stop for good? You take a baseball bat to the machine and, after that, every other Pac-Man machine in existence?

And can the same alchemy be applied to Connor? Can she take a baseball bat to the memory of him? Make her longing for Connor disappear? Molly imagines asking this to a bunch of strangers who will reassure her (grandmotherly Pat134 and sarcastic but steadfast trickynick): You’ve got this, girl.

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Are they starlings?

Should we go outside?

He sat out for the birds most evenings if he was able. Clipboard in hand, a drink to make it feel casual. As the minutes ticked on, a momentary panic could take hold: suppose they shouldn’t come? When they finally would arrive, he allowed himself modest satisfaction. The surge of a small hope realized.

When his birds finally would arrive, w hen the first group would pepper the horizon, he noted the time. Solitary birds didn’t count—it had to be a murmuration, a movement. On October 3rd, the first true group had shown itself at 5:31 p.m. They had risen like smoke over the horizon. They tumbled around the eastern sky together with one pulse. Then, as he had expected, they fanned out into a running stream. A chorus in cloud that streaked toward the blue-blush of the sunset.

His task was to record. The minute of their arrival, how long they held tenure over the little patch of sky capping his garden. Logging their departure, of course, was an unfair exercise of guessing and waiting. Suppose the last one should have been the last one? Yet he endeavored to maintain a faithful record. Most evenings, he faced the usual challenge: to lose one’s self entirely in the face of overwhelming spectacle. When his birds were thick overhead, the little edges of his day could curl up and allow the part of him that tired of a life in this body—a life without her—to slip out.

When his birds were kind, they were generous in number. They washed over him. The following Thursday, though, their advance lasted only eleven minutes. They were true to the sunset—just moments after—but on the whole, an anemic group. There were fewer birds in total, which distressed him more than he liked to say. However, the morning (and he recorded this on the line for observations) had been foggy.

Will it be any moment?

When he sat out for the birds, they eventually appeared. Not always when he expected, or in enthusiastic numbers. Occasionally, they crested the hill much farther south than he was accustomed to looking. His birds had their own brand of constancy. It comforted him very little.

He’d feel fairly sure that he had pinned down the window of their arrival, and then they would break with tradition. They might show up blindingly early, eclipsing a corner of the kitchen window as he washed up at the sink. Elbows dripping, he imagined confronting them over their indifference. “We are governed by different rhythms,” they would shrug, forcing him to see how petty and small were his complaints. Perhaps he’d love them all the more for this nonchalance. Such a response would speak well of him, he thought.

Are they starlings?

His birds were black without jeweled throats. They likely weren’t starlings. What’s more, they seemed quite large at times. He’d point at one and feel it drag his finger in a lazy arc across the sky. Large as a crow, perhaps.

The booklet said it had everything to do with self-preservation. They were afraid of being the first to roost. So they would take to the sky en masse, moving as one, where they could expect protection from the things gentle birds fear. Then they would alight together on waiting branches. It was defensive. Yet he feared for them all the same. His birds were nothing like the circling hawks, red in beak and claw. How easily they could be picked off, and how little they seemed to realize! Their numbers would not guard against disaster– they only promised a witness.

He greeted them prone on the 16th, his eyes fixed upward, filtering in the last of the evening light. They scrolled across the sky. He could not bear to check his watch and later found himself able only to record that there had been “a great many birds.”
How they were pitiless! His birds could not trouble themselves for the cares of a man outside on his back, crying to the heavens.

Will they come much after sunset?

It had seemed almost cruel to hazard a guess as to when they would appear. Then she would count the minutes starting in the late afternoon. The hands on a clock’s face eluded her, but she could still stand in front of the microwave.

“Now, it’s 4:24, and I’m sure of that.”

Depending on the season, when he came home it was straight out to the garden. In winter, there would not be a moment even to unlace his uncomfortable shoes. She’d see him coming up the walk and clap her hands.

Summertime, though, saw the evening stretch. She’d ask to fix herself an orange squash; he would assent. He knew when the sun would set and didn’t like to rush her if needn’t be. He’d leave her alone in the kitchen and listen from the hallway, warmed by the small sounds of her industry. If anything broke, he would be near enough to lift her bare feet.

She loved best the settling in. As twilight fell they would take to their chairs, side by side in repose. It was a happy ritual. He’d caution her against upending her drink, and she’d ask for the clipboard. Holding the pen aloft, she would nod gently while ticking off each cell—“There’s some writing there.”

They took such pleasure in these moments, lived in the anticipation of a great movement. Sweeping across the sky, the birds were haughty, exclusive. Yet at the same time, one felt urged along with the group. Their appearance was a nightly invitation to weep for the lack of wings.

Should we go outside?

He consented on November 7th to be taken out by cheerful friends, knowing full well this outing would make it impossible to collect the numbers. Rain was coming down in driving sheets, and the birds might respond in any of a number of ways. They could conceivably set out earlier due to the darkened sky, but it was possible they would wait for the sunset’s usual glory. They might hang around uneasily, exchanging glances: “It’s time to go.” “No, it’s not.” Surely, even now, he thought, they were squinting for the definitive signal. The one his birds must feel sure that they had been promised.

On the 10th, they were chaotic, outrageous. The birds arrived with the fair weather and apparently no idea of where they should go. Rather than their usual purposeful stream, they parted into opposing groups, dovetailing, wheeling back and rounding in on themselves. A piteous spectacle, these instinct-driven creatures who were suddenly unmoored.

The very next day they’d regained their composure. It was maddening in a way. It made him quite angry, come to think. They flew in a proud trajectory, as though the day before hadn’t been a sputtering disaster. His birds weren’t visionaries; they could be made so unsure of themselves. An early moon looming over the hedge or a stiff wind might send them into disarray.

By the end of the week, he no longer felt that he could trust them. Suppose the last time had been the last time? Sunday evening, he took to his car at their first appearance, determined to follow them to the place they roosted. He craned his neck out the window as he drove, cursing as their swooping progress turned in directions counter to his own. His breath shortened each time he reluctantly dragged his focus back, back into the vehicle, the body. Then he soared to join them. Back into the seat, a glance into the rear-view. A searching of the horizon. Pulling up short, he narrowly avoided a young woman and her dog who had stepped from the curb. Just as soon as he became aware of barreling through their shared space, he was past them. She had worn slim, reflective bands around her upper arms that bounced back the light.

He discarded this uncomfortable fact. He could not both drive and dwell on the boundless possible tragedies of each moment. His birds had presented themselves once more—(was it the group he had initially set out to follow?)—and their pace appeared to slacken as they neared their destination.

From the garden, it had always seemed they were chasing the setting sun. In reality, they streaked toward a stand of eucalyptus trees across from the Fred Meyer’s. He’d parked underneath those trees before, been irritated by the smattering of bird shit.

How long will it last?

The public broadcast station was playing that special on Western migrations again. Chinook salmon. His birds would have tucked their heads under a wing by now. He nursed a gin and tonic while not looking over to the picture window.

Her perch. She had installed herself on the tufted cushions after the incident with the pilot light, which he had said was no big deal. He trusted her, of course, and there was no need. He could switch off the line behind the range. It would be simple. Why had Mrs. Temple said she’d been on the bench all afternoon again when she was perfectly welcome? There was no need. She stopped thumbing through her book then, smiled at him dazzlingly.

“It’s cheerful here, really.”

How will we know when it’s really begun?

A group of six, though slight, might signify that it had begun. If they clustered together in formation, they could very well usher in the movement. They became together something far more urgent, more striking than they ever seemed alone. Once the beginning announced itself, it couldn’t be denied any longer.

One imagines a flock as a single mind, but surely one bird has to strike out for the sunset first. Was it a drop in the temperature, felt by those hollow bones?

Who could say the exact date it had alighted upon her? The first day, perhaps, it would have shown up on a test? The dawning realization of its inevitable course, the dread he had carried alone. He dutifully held and guarded her, tracked and fed and made the thousand loving gestures that measured a day. He saw to the milligrams, the ounces, the critical levels.

He had pictured such a disaster as theirs before. In his mind, the earth had rent in two; his birds on the wing would drop from the sky. He had never expected that anyone should have to preside over the fracas. In reality, their disaster was a startlingly quotidian affair. One that came with armfuls of bills and bottles. Over and over, the administration of it alarmed him – samples to be monitored, appointments to be scheduled. The slow thick glide of a dark, astringent syrup to be given up to three times daily.

Who will be the first to roost?

Nights he sat out for the birds, he bore witness to a homeward journey.

He was an imperfect observer. At times, he came in because he was cold. There was always the chance that he had missed an earlier group as he made his way outside. He usually sat in a patio chair, but once had chanced to stand and saw a dotted black trail disappearing over the valley’s edge. A group completely hidden from his previous vista. He felt abashed that he had failed to detect them when they were so close. But he couldn’t deny that these movements were happening in many places, so very many places he couldn’t see. And this felt like both a betrayal and a great relief.

No one had ever said what should be gained by recording these figures, he thought with no small amount of bemusement. He’d busied his hands taking down the information. Capturing the data resulted in little more than a ghastly approximation of the experience, though. There was a part of him that wanted to snap the clipboard over his knee in a great act of violence. It was a false prophet, a soothsayer. It promised regularity where there was none. Still, how easy it was to forget. He continued to sit out nights with his pencil poised, ready to fill in the next cell.

He came to understand how she must have felt when he smiled benignly and said, “Experience tells us, any moment now.” He came to understand that while there was a range of normal values, one couldn’t possibly produce any sort of estimate worth a damn. He came to see what it was not: which was to say not a dike against rising waters, not even an answer to the pestering of a sharp-eyed changeling. He ventured to the shore each night if only to unroll a feeler—a filament, a sustaining thread. He came to remember in his bones what it was like to be a pilgrim in a strange land, a visitor to a landscape whose patterns she had yet to discern.

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The Strangers

The day of his daughter’s arrival, Daniel cut back the Marilyn Monroes. He’d pruned them every January for the past ten years. The roses were a true victory—he’d been called a gambling man by a horticulturist who warned Daniel he wouldn’t be able to keep Marilyn Monroes alive. They were too finicky, they required a frost in the winter and the temperature didn’t drop low enough in Tampa. But Daniel knew he could keep any plant alive.

Daniel wasn’t sure why Hayley was coming home. Hayley’s email had said: “I want to say goodbye to the house.” Why? How was it possible to tell a house goodbye? If his wife, Olivia, had still been alive, she would’ve explained it.

The house was packed, and the movers would be there the following week. Daniel had already shipped most of Hayley’s belongings to Los Angeles. Daniel knew never to throw away anything Hayley owned. When she was a little girl, Daniel had made the mistake of throwing away a headless Barbie he found by the pool, and Hayley grieved the loss of the doll for weeks. Olivia had been livid. She’d called him heartless and ordered him to never touch his daughter’s possessions again. For Daniel, objects had little history or future. He couldn’t understand why Hayley and his wife had gotten so upset. But Daniel remembered Barbie when it came time to pack up Hayley’s things. He tossed everything from her room into boxes without examination. Just a few packages remained to be sent to her in California.

He finished tidying the roses. There was still enough time for a Gatorade and a shower before Hayley arrived. He’d just stepped into his bedroom when there was a loud knock at the door. He found his daughter on his steps. It was the first time she’d been home since his wife’s death a year back. She smiled up at him.

“Hello, Daddy,” she said, shyly.

Despite the fact he knew nothing about her—favorite color, movie, food—still, his chest grew warm at her smile. The same smile she’d had all her life. He was shocked by how much he wanted to pull her to him. He remembered the satiny feel of her skin when she was an infant, the way she’d kicked her feet when he said her name.

“I got on an earlier flight,” she said. “I tried to call you.”

Damn iPhone. Since his retirement, he forgot to even turn it on.

“It’s so weird here,” Hayley said, her voice an echo in the cavernous dining room. Olivia had wanted the drafty old house. Daniel couldn’t wait to sell it.

“Do you really want to move?” Hayley asked, trailing a finger across the top of the buffet, the only piece of furniture he was keeping because it had been his grandmother’s. When she looked at him again, the smile from the doorway had disappeared. There were dark circles under her eyes, creases on her forehead. How old would she be now? He did the math. Born the year he’d made partner. She’d be forty in June. There were small patches of grey at her temples, her hair the color of chestnuts now instead of purple.

“I don’t need the space now that it’s just me,” he said.

“It’s so weird without Mom,” she said. “Isn’t it weird?”

It had been. For a little while. No rattle of Olivia’s old Mercedes. No smell of lemon in the morning. Now it felt normal. And good. Of course, he couldn’t say he didn’t miss Hayley’s mother, that he realized at sixty-seven he’d never been in love, and probably never would be.

He said, “Yes. Very weird.”

“I’d like to lie down,” she said. “Long flight.”

He’d left her twin bed in her room, and he led her there.

“I’ll be up in a few hours,” she said.

—

He ate at the deli for most meals now and his cabinets and fridge were bare. While Hayley slept, Daniel went to the grocery store and stocked up on all the things Olivia kept around: Stouffer’s frozen lasagna, bananas, whole wheat bread, butter, coffee. He remembered Hayley eating a cereal called Lucky Charms, so he bought a couple of boxes, happy that he remembered one thing about his daughter.

At just after seven that evening, Daniel knocked on her door. He’d heated up a lasagna, and it was getting cold. Hayley didn’t answer and, when he poked his head in the room, she said she needed to keep sleeping, that she’d had a “rough few weeks.” Should he ask her if anything was wrong? Was sleeping a bad sign?

On one of her last days in the hospital, Olivia grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him to her. So close he could see the red veins intersecting the whites of her eyes. This was the closest they’d been in many years.

“Promise you’ll talk to Hayley. She’s in a bad way.”

Daniel hadn’t been able to tell she was in a bad way. In fact, he hadn’t seen her looking so good in years. No purple hair, no bitten fingernails. The way she looked, it was hard to believe she was mentally ill, though Daniel wrote a check for $2400 every month to pay for her therapy.

When had his daughter become bipolar? It made his jaw clench to remember the promise Hayley had possessed—acting lessons, school plays, her declarations that she wanted to be the next Nicole Kidman. And she’d been so pleasant—squealing with laughter when he chased her in the pool, making up dances, using the cabana as her stage.

Since Olivia’s death, Hayley had called once a month, always on a Sunday night. They talked about rain. The lack of it in Los Angeles, so much in Tampa. If Olivia were around, she’d ask Hayley questions: Are you taking your meds? Going to bed at a reasonable hour? Working? But she had the right to ask. Daniel didn’t ask questions. What would he do if Hayley gave him answers he didn’t understand? Olivia and Hayley had their own secret language. Olivia bought a ‘best friends’ necklace and gave Hayley the ‘best’ half for her tenth birthday. The one time Daniel wondered if Hayley should have friends her own age, Olivia’s eyes filled with tears.

“My daughter is here for me. Which is more than I can say for you. You’re a stranger to us.”

No, Daniel would let Hayley sleep. He would leave her alone.

—

Just after eleven the next morning, Daniel heard the click of her doorknob. He was at the sink, rinsing a bowl when she padded into the kitchen. Bare feet, wearing a faded blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her hair stuck out in a million directions. She looked the way she had in high school, after a night dancing, her hair reeking of smoke, making him wonder why he was spending thirty thousand a year on private school when she partied with the public schoolers and brought home Cs.

They said “good morning,” and he gestured to the box of cereal on the table.

“Your favorite, right?”

She smiled. “I don’t eat sugar anymore.”

Hayley grabbed a bottle of water from the counter and picked up a banana from the bowl. He waited for her to say something else. She didn’t. She left the room and, a few minutes later, he looked into the backyard to find her sitting beside the drained pool, her legs pulled up against her chest. The half-eaten banana was by her side. Her face was turned away. Was she saying goodbye to the pool?

After a few minutes, Hayley stood and went over to the steps. She walked into the empty concrete basin. She walked to the center and then stared up at the sky. Daniel craned his neck and looked up, too. Seagulls, a whole flock of them, flew in a V shape across the sky. A memory: feeding bread to the seagulls with Hayley when Hayley was a child. Hayley loved to chase the birds, and he had laughed and encouraged her to run faster. There had been good times. A few of them. Daniel considered walking out to the pool, bringing the loaf of bread with him. But Hayley might want to be alone. She might’ve come home for the peace she never got when his wife was around.

When Hayley came home for Christmas, Olivia made sure they had a packed calendar: ringing the bell for the Salvation Army outside of Publix, a carol sing-a-long at the nursing home.

“The worst thing she can have is quiet,” Olivia always explained. “I must keep her busy so she doesn’t focus on her sadness.”

But what if this wasn’t true? What if peace was exactly what Hayley needed? Daniel had been to Los Angeles once, and the traffic and smog had been as much of a shock as the coffee shop where Hayley worked, a den of tattooed and pierced people who huddled over laptops all day. Didn’t people in LA work? Why weren’t they at offices?

A few minutes later Hayley came in the house. He walked to her room. She sat on her twin bed, her back to him. He thought he saw her shoulders shaking.

“The new people are going to fill the pool in,” he said. “I had to drain it.”

“You never used it anyway,” Hayley said. “Mom and I were the only ones who ever went in.”

The cold tone of her voice was a shock. Better to give her space. Daniel shut the door.

Hayley didn’t come out again until dinner. He heated up another lasagna, and they ate it on paper plates. The only sound was when he blew on the noodles. After they finished, he asked her if she’d like to go for banana splits, a peace offering since she’d sounded angry about the pool.

“No sugar,” she said, eyes glued to her plate. “Remember?”

She picked up her iPhone and began typing, probably a text about what an idiot he was. Daniel cleared the table.

—

The next day Hayley sat out by the pool again. For hours. When it rained, she sat under the awning. He thought he saw her crying, but he couldn’t be sure. He wished his roses were still blooming. He could’ve shown her each one. She’d liked the garden a long time ago. She’d helped him add just enough aluminum sulfate to the soil to turn the hydrangeas blue. Seagulls, ice cream, flowers. The memories served as proof there’d been times when he knew things about Hayley. If only he’d tried harder, they could’ve been closer. But when Olivia was alive, it was like she and Hayley were the only people in the house. His presence was more like a shadow, lurking, ready to be dismissed, a stranger indeed.

Daniel took a nap and woke just before dinnertime. Hayley wasn’t in the backyard and she wasn’t in the kitchen. The door to her room was closed. He heard talking. He walked past, not wanting to disturb her, not wanting to eavesdrop. But what if something was really wrong with his daughter? What if her trip home was a cry for help? Was he being too dramatic?

He tiptoed back down the hall and pressed his ear against Hayley’s door. Murmuring.

He couldn’t make out words. But then: “I burned all those bridges,” Hayley said, shrill enough that he could make out each word. “I have nothing to go back to in California.” A cry. A moan.

Daniel gritted his teeth. He retreated into the darkness of the hallway, to his bedroom. He didn’t sleep for hours. He kept hearing his daughter’s words. “I have nothing to go back to in California,” she’d said. What did that mean? Had someone broken her heart? Had she lost her job? Who was on the other end of the call? He wished he could contact that person and get the story. Asking Hayley about it felt impossible.

He pictured her apartment in Los Angeles, the one time he’d been. The cactus in the windowsill. She explained it bloomed at Christmas. He’d taken her to the local nursery and bought her more cacti. “They don’t need much attention,” she’d explained. “I can always keep them alive.”

He’d thought that was weird then, another way they were different, another way he didn’t understand his daughter. Daniel loved that his roses needed him. They depended on him for water and food. They flourished under his care. Hayley and Olivia hadn’t flourished under his care. Olivia told him no amount of money could ever make up for the fact that he never laughed at her jokes, that he didn’t appreciate her thoughtfulness.

One Valentine’s Day she bought candy apples etched with hearts for him to bring to the office. Whoever heard of a grown man, the head of a law firm, bringing in candy apples for his employees, the same employees who were supposed to be terrified of asking him for time off at Christmas? He said he wouldn’t bring them in, and, one by one, over the next few weeks, Olivia ate the apples, crunching loudly, glaring at him.

Olivia wasn’t thoughtful. She wasn’t kind. But maybe she was right about their daughter. Maybe Hayley was in a bad way. But what could he do?

—

Sometimes, when clients were in town from far away, he took them to Palm Valley Fish Camp because the restaurant was famous for its fried shrimp. Would Hayley like fried shrimp?

He knocked on her door the next morning and, when she opened it, he suggested the dinner nervously. He expected by her swollen eyes that she would say no. But to his surprise, her face lit up the way it had when she saw him the night she arrived.

They decided on seven, and twenty minutes before she walked down the hallway wearing a cherry red dress with a puffy skirt and shiny black high heels. An outfit too fancy for Palm Valley Fish Camp, which was out by the marsh, and a place where the staff looked the other way if you smoked on the porch. Daniel always bought cigars for clients.

“Mom bought this for me to wear to prom, but I didn’t go. I chickened out. I never got a chance to wear it. Do I look okay?”

The dress was too big—the sleeves drooped off her shoulders and the bodice gaped at the bust and waist. How was she so much smaller at forty than at fifteen? She wore too much red lipstick—there were smudges below her mouth. The white powder on her face made her look like a ghost, reminding him of Olivia in her coffin. He wanted to tell Hayley to change. He didn’t like being embarrassed. But he forced himself to smile. “You look nice,” he said. Then he opened the door, and she followed him outside.

—

Daniel had forgotten it was Friday, and they had to wait a long time for a parking spot. Hayley hummed beside him, tapping her fingertips on her knees. He clutched the steering wheel, wondering if he’d made a mistake by inviting his daughter to dinner. But Olivia’s words reverberated in his head. “Promise me you’ll talk to Hayley. She’s in a bad way.”

—

They had to put their name on a long list and there was nowhere to sit to wait. They stood by the porch, where the air smelled like smoke and beer. Mosquitoes hummed in Daniel’s ears and he smacked the bugs away. Hayley kept curling a lock of hair around her finger, letting it go, and doing it again, a habit from her teen years. Daniel could feel the stares of the other patrons when they noticed Hayley’s dress. He kept a smile on his face, praying no one would comment. It wasn’t likely he would see anyone he worked with at the restaurant. They frequented the places in town or the club, where hush puppies weren’t an option.

Finally, their name was called, and they struggled through the knot of people to the hostess stand.

A girl in jean shorts smacking gum led them to a table in the middle of the restaurant, beside a table of guys wearing baseball caps. Daniel felt their eyes on them, and he glared at the biggest one, a burly guy in a Gators sweatshirt. Hayley said she needed to use the bathroom as soon as the hostess set their menus on the table.

It was so loud that conversation wouldn’t be possible. Daniel was grateful for this because his daughter was acting so strangely and he didn’t know how to find out why. Seeing Hayley twirl her hair brought back bad memories of sitting across from her at the dinner table. A typical night: Olivia chattered about the candlesticks she’d just bought from QVC while their daughter twirled her hair and didn’t say a word.

Then there were all the absences in high school. Olivia made excuses. “She’s not like the other girls. She’s sensitive. I can’t make her go when she’s sad.” But why was Hayley sad? He’d never understood. She had everything: diamond stud earrings that matched Olivia’s, an Audi TT when she turned sixteen. But more than material things. Daniel had given his daughter promise. Possibilities. The perfect start to a perfect life. Much more than he ever had, growing up in rural Alabama with a single mother who could barely scrape together enough money to put tuna fish on the table.

Hayley could’ve gone to any college in the country if she’d just kept her grades up. But she hadn’t. The only college that accepted her was a tiny one in North Carolina, which she returned from on holidays eager to read them poems she’d written. He remembered one in particular—she said her heart had been attacked by tigers and there were teeth marks in the aorta. The poem was titled: “Mother.”

Olivia had started crying when Hayley finished. Daniel’s first impulse was to comfort his wife, but she’d jumped to her feet, clapping her hands. She called Hayley a genius, framed the poem and hung it on the bathroom wall. It looked at him while he brushed his teeth. “She hunts me nightly. She never wants to let me go.” Hayley’s poem seemed to be a negative reflection on his wife. So why did Olivia like it so much? Daniel couldn’t fault his daughter for her feelings—after all he would’ve liked to write mean poems about his wife, too. Daniel didn’t understand poems. And he knew then he would never understand his wife and daughter. He’d always be on the outside, walking by the den where they huddled on the sofa, sharing a bowl of caramel popcorn.

Hayley returned to the table, her lips redder, her face paler. She sat down and the waitress appeared, barely glancing at them, scrawling their orders down on a pad. Fried shrimp for both of them. Hayley wanted a glass of white wine. He wanted a scotch and soda.

The drinks didn’t take long and thankfully, the food didn’t, either. While they ate, Hayley twirled her hair and stared past him or studied her phone. He played with the dial on his Rolex, watching the time creep past.

When the waitress passed by to ask if they wanted key lime pie, Daniel handed her his American Express.

He met his daughter’s eyes across the table, and she smiled. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then her smile disappeared and she stared at the half-eaten coleslaw on her plate.

“Still making cappuccinos?” he asked, searching for something to say. And then to his horror, Hayley began to cry. So, she had lost her job again. One second she was smiling and now her shoulders shook, quiet sobs wracking her body. Daniel remembered Olivia’s words again: “She’s in a bad way.” What should he do? He thought about client dinners, but no client had ever cried before.

Eyes on them. The men at the table nearby. Theirs was not the kind of community where you had a breakdown over coleslaw. “The land of the raised pinky” is what he’d told his wife once and she said: “We’re lucky to live somewhere so beautiful. Don’t complain.” Daniel had to get them out of the restaurant. The waitress returned—thank God—he signed the bill and grabbed his daughter’s arm.

He was grateful to be outside again. It meant the night was almost over. He breathed in the chilly air and thought of his roses. The cold would do them good. He hoped the person who bought his house would care for them the way he had. He should probably pass along his tricks: eggshells and tea bags in the soil, olive oil rubbed onto the leaves.

They were almost to the car when Hayley’s name was called. Oh no. Who could it be? Had someone seen her crying? The caller was a pregnant blonde woman in a floral dress.

“I thought that was you,” she said to Hayley, whose eyes were wet and frightened. “This your father?”

She stuck out her hand, and Daniel shook it and introduced himself.

“Elizabeth,” the woman said. “Hayley and I went to high school together.”

She told them she practiced obstetrics at Baptist Medical, that she was on her way to the hospital because one of her mothers was going into delivery early, much to her husband’s dismay since they’d been celebrating his birthday.

“My drunk husband can’t drive me to the hospital, and with my belly I can’t fit behind the steering wheel—could you give me a ride to the hospital? It’s less than a mile away,” Elizabeth asked.

This was the last thing Daniel wanted to do. He needed to get Hayley home, rescue them from the awkwardness of the night. Who was this Elizabeth? Couldn’t she call a cab? He could feel his daughter’s eyes on him.

“Okay,” he said.

Hayley went back to twirling her hair. She walked behind them. Elizabeth got into the front seat. When he pulled out of the lot, Elizabeth looked over her shoulder and smiled at Hayley.

“What are you doing these days?”

Daniel glanced in the rearview mirror. Was Hayley crying again? He didn’t want her to answer. She was a middle-aged woman who’d been hospitalized for bipolar disorder following a suicide attempt. This Elizabeth—she was the kind of woman Daniel had imagined Hayley would turn out to be. A doctor, pregnant, happily married. Assertive enough to ask an old schoolmate for a ride.

“I’m so proud of my daughter,” Daniel said, the lie falling out of his mouth so fast he couldn’t keep up. “She’s a brilliant writer. A poet. She lives in Los Angeles now, and I don’t see her enough.”

How had he come up with this so quickly? Five minutes ago, he’d been unable to think of a single word to say to his daughter, and now he was expertly lying to a total stranger. Maybe it was all those years convincing juries. He didn’t know but he felt proud of himself for jumping to Hayley’s rescue. He’d saved them both from embarrassment.

Elizabeth snapped her fingers. “I remember,” she said slowly. “We were essay partners in American Literature. Your papers were always the best.”

Hayley stopped chewing her cheek. “Really?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not surprised you’re a writer now.”

“I wrote a book,” Hayley said proudly. She opened up her purse and pulled out a worn copy. She passed it to Elizabeth. Daniel had never read his daughter’s book. He’d been too freaked out by the title, which had been the name of a song he wrote in college for a class. The only time he’d ever done something creative. He had no idea how Hayley got her hands on the song—he’d assumed it had ended up in the trash, like all of his college papers.

“Broken Nightingale,” Elizabeth said, staring down at the cover. “That sounds good.”

“Thank you,” Hayley said.

Elizabeth handed the book back and gave Hayley her business card. She suggested they have lunch the next time Hayley was in town.

“This is my last trip here,” she said. “My father’s moving to Jacksonville.”

“Shame,” Elizabeth said and then: “You look great.”

Hayley’s eyes grew wide. Daniel turned into the hospital parking lot and drove to the entrance. Elizabeth thanked him for the ride, and they all said goodbye. Daniel was certain now that the sadness inside of him was written all over his face, and he clenched his jaw as hard as he could. When Elizabeth got out, Hayley didn’t take her place in the front seat. They were quiet on the ride home.

When he pulled into the driveway, Hayley said, “I’ll be out of your hair in the morning. I booked an early flight.”

She was leaving? But she said she had nothing to go back to? She’d bawled at dinner. For the first time Daniel missed Olivia. She’d do something, even if it was the wrong thing.

They went into the house. Hayley went to her room. Daniel stood in the kitchen, staring out at the dark backyard.

—

Daniel got out of bed just as the light in his room turned pink. He went to Hayley’s room. He wanted to look at his daughter one more time before she left. She slept on her side, the covers down by her ankles. She’d slept like that as a little girl. Now her hair was short, but she looked just as peaceful. He wished she could know that peace, that her brain wasn’t so mixed up, that she didn’t get sad enough to want to die. Maybe her brain would’ve been different if he’d been a different father. If Olivia hadn’t been her best friend.

Hayley stirred. She opened her eyes.

“Daddy,” she said hoarsely.

Daniel’s heart pounded. He might never see his daughter again. She’d have no reason to come home now that there was no home to return to. She wouldn’t travel all the way back to Florida just to see him. The yard was beautiful in the morning. Maybe she’d like to see it one last time.

“Come outside,” he said.

She rubbed her eyes and sat up. She followed him, in bare feet, in her old T shirt and boxers, to the backyard. Now the sun was higher. Dew sparkled on the grass, made the tips of the blades look like diamonds.

Hayley turned to him, tears in her eyes. Should he hug her? Maybe she didn’t want to be touched. He tried to choose a word, any word, but his mind had gone blank like it always did with his daughter.

“I’ll have a balcony at the condo,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him, far away. “Would you help me pick out plants for it? A cactus maybe?” He wasn’t sure what he was saying, only that he was heading somewhere when a few moments ago he’d been at a dead end. How could he speak to packed courtrooms but not his daughter?

Her brow furrowed and she seemed on the verge of saying something. But then she stopped. This was a terrible idea. He should let her go. All of his earlier efforts had been futile. Why did he think he could help her now?

Tears coursed down her cheeks, shiny wet ribbons. This time the sight of her crying did a strange thing to him. A lump formed in his throat. He hadn’t cried in years, not even at Olivia’s funeral. He swallowed hard. Hayley moved toward him. She buried her face in his chest. His body tensed—it had been such a long time since he’d been touched—but then he smelled her hair. The same long ago, little-girl scent. Like roses, like baby powder, sweeter even. Daniel closed his eyes. He remembered: chasing her in the pool, tickling her stomach, making her scream with laughter. He’d never felt happier than on those days. Summer was coming. A few months away. This summer he would make her sadness go away. It might take some time, but he’d do it. He’d kept the Marilyn Monroes alive. He could do anything. At least, he could keep trying.

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The Ball Spun

I arrived at the playground with Armin. It was a late afternoon in June; the rays of sunshine broke through the thick white clouds in places, illuminating patches of the tramped grass. Armin’s parents had sent him another package, a brand-new soccer ball in it. It was yellow with blue spots. He held it close to his chest as we sauntered down the street to the playground.

Armin and I hung out regularly. He lived in my neighborhood with his grandma. Armin’s parents worked in Austria as guest workers. Most of his life he spent with his grandma, seeing his parents once a year. Armin had toys I’d never seen before: remote-operated cars built of high-quality steel, model planes, and handheld video games. He brought to school all sorts of foreign candy, neatly wrapped, colorful, with pictures of cartoon characters.

Armin talked a lot, while I was a quiet type. He talked so much on our way to school that we often ended up being late. When I stopped by his place before school, I’d find him in the bathroom in front of the mirror, looking at himself and combing his blond curls. “What do you think, Edi?” he’d say. “Looking good, man. That schmuck, Sinan, is a goner. Selma is my girl. Hey, let me show you a new thing I got.” He was never ready on time, and the school was three kilometers away—a long walk.

The playground was deserted. We started kicking the ball from one rusted goal post to another. A few minutes later, we noticed a group of boys walking towards us. They were in their late teens. As soon as we saw them we knew we were in trouble. After all, two eleven-year-olds stood no chance against a gang of high-schoolers. Their ring leaders were two brothers. The older brother, Kasim, was as dark as the asphalt on the road he’d just crossed. He was skinny and long—all limbs. His round head bobbed on top of his body like a ball with two black eyes perched above a bulbous nose. Kasim’s brother, Vedad, was a year younger. He had long, brown hair he’d always tie into a ponytail. Vedad was notorious for his vicious smile that revealed two long canines. He was short and sturdy, his legs sinewy and fast. He was the best soccer player in town.

Kasim intercepted our pass and took the ball. Vedad shouted, “Come on, man! Be nice and share.” Kasim kicked the ball hard to the other three boys trudging behind him.

“Give the ball back, assholes!” Armin blurted out, and before finishing the sentence he looked at me, surprised by his own words.

“Whoa, man! The kid’s got a foul mouth.” Kasim sniggered. “Isn’t that Aunt Zinka’s grandson?”

“Time to teach him a lesson,” Vedad said. He picked up the ball like a pro, bouncing it on his knees, his ponytail prancing up and down. “Tell me, little punk!” he said. “Whose ball is this? It’s damn good. Real leather. Made in Germany.”

“It’s mine,” Armin said.

“Of course, little chicken shit.” Vedad said. “Did your mama send it from Germany?”

“From Austria,” Armin shot back.

“Would you, please, give us the ball back?” I interjected.

“This one here is a nice boy.” Vedad nodded towards me and balanced the ball between his foot and his shin.

“Listen, nice boy,” he said. “I have an idea. You get the ball and we let you play if you two show us your kung fu skills.”

“No way,” Armin cried. “You guys will mow the lawn with us.”

“Who said we’d do anything?” Kasim said. “We don’t fight little pussycats. We want you to fight each other.”

“Why would we do that?” I said.

“Because that’s the only way you get the ball back. And if you beat this mama’s boy, the ball is yours. Isn’t that so, mama’s boy?”

Armin looked at me, then at Vedad and Kasim. “The ball is mine,” he said.

I held my gaze on Kasim and nodded hesitantly. As long as I could remember, the only soccer ball I ever had was a bubamara, which meant ladybug. The bubamaras were often the only choice for the working-class kids in Yugoslavia. They were made of cheap rubber and lasted only for a few weeks. After a couple of good games, bubamaras turned into sad-looking, egg-shaped spheres, their innards dangling through the ripped outer layer.

I was bigger than Armin and stronger. Armin was all mouth, that cocky fool. We both knew I could take him out easily. I walked over to where he stood and looked at him up close.

“Let’s do this,” Armin said and jumped on me, climbing on my shoulder. He got me in a choke hold and held me down with all his might. Everybody lined up around us, grunting, yelling, and laughing—Kasim and Vedad in the opposite corners. I steadied myself, not letting him push me down on my knees.

I wiggled out of Armin’s hold and was about to strike him, but Vedad and Kasim grabbed us and pulled us apart. I felt Kasim’s firm grip on my elbows.

“Listen,” he shouted over my head. “You two start when we say.” He shook my whole body as if to reset me and said, “Now you go.”

I was fast this time. I tackled Armin to the ground and shoved his face into the grass. Kneeling on his back, I bent one of his arms backwards and held it tight, twisting and bending it towards his shoulder blades. After a few minutes he stopped wriggling.

The brothers pulled us apart again. Vedad laughed and said, “Man, that was ugly. But fun.”

Gasping for air, I gaped at his wolf teeth. He’d drawn his lips up to his ears.

Armin was in tears. “Asshole!” he screamed at me. “You’ll pay for this.” He ran towards home.

Kasim took the ball in his hands and spun it on his forefinger. “Get lost, nice boy,” he said.

—

Three years later, Armin and I were on the playground again when eight-year-old twins, Mirza and Kenan, saw us from across the field and ran over to our side. They were both dark and so skinny that they looked like two roosters—their noses stuck out like two beaks, their small eyes peered from creased, dry skin. The boys looked like two old men trapped in children’s bodies. They were Roma kids. Their mother worked at the textile mill; their father was rarely around, but when he was home he’d wave at me and smile if he saw me walk by their house. We could never tell the twins apart, but this time one of them had scabs all over his head. His brother had only a few on his neck and elbows. The scabby one was Mirza.

“We want to play too,” Mirza croaked.

“Really, you little toad?” Armin raised his blond brows and smiled. “You want to play with the big boys?”

“Yes, of course,” Mirza said. His brother stood by him quietly.

“What can you give us for it?” I asked. I knew they had nothing to offer, but I liked to joke with them. The twins were dear to me.

“Nothing.”

“How about you put on a nice show for us?” said Armin. “You just have to fight a little, like in the movies.”

“You’re too big for us.”

“No, you chicken shit, you fight each other. The winner gets this ball.”

I looked at Armin askance. I couldn’t believe he’d give them the ball.

“We’re brothers.”

“Brothers fight,” I said.” You sometimes fight, don’t you?”

“Yes, we do. But Mama says if she sees us fighting again, she’ll break our arms.”

“Your mother is getting off work in an hour,” Armin said. “The ball is yours if you win.”

By now, Armin had six soccer balls and counting. His parents had brought him a ball every time they came to visit from Austria. Three years earlier, he had told his grandma about our fight. The day after he told her, I got a whipping from my father. A few months later, after we got over our fight, I asked Armin if he’d gotten his ball back. He shrugged and said he couldn’t care less. He was quiet all the way to school that day.

Mirza looked at his brother. Kenan was still silent. “Let’s do this,” Kenan said and

leaped onto Mirza.

They alternately held each other in chokeholds at first, squirming around like two hungry worms. We pulled them apart. “We’re taking a break,” I said, restraining Mirza from jumping on his brother again. I held him tight in my arms, his scabs close to my face.

“Let them go,” Armin said and pushed his twin into the middle of our circle. I released mine and he lunged ahead. We stepped back and watched them. I glanced at Armin. His lips were stretched into a smile, his foot resting on the ball.

The twins battered each other with their bony fists. Their knuckles found their heads and faces. Soon they both were bleeding. Kenan’s lip was cut open. Mirza’s nose was oozing blood. I ran over to Mirza and yanked him away. The scabs on his head were cut open and bloody too. He left red streaks on his brother’s shirt. They both were crying now. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill the bastard,” Mirza hissed through tears and blood.

I pulled up the hem of Mirza’s shirt to his face, took his hand, and pressed it on his nose to stop the bleeding. In a calm but threatening tone, I said, “Go home, right away, before I beat the shit out of you.” His brother held his lip and mumbled something about cracking Mirza’s scabby head open. Mirza started running. Kenan scrammed after him. They both ran towards their home, their shirts torn and bloody.

I turned to Armin. His mouth was agape, his lips moving, but there was no sound. I looked down at the ball in front of him. It was unblemished, sparkly white with black spots and a large Adidas sign on it. An intense burn welled up from the pit of my stomach. I sprinted towards the ball and kicked it with all my might. The ball soared high into the broad blue sky.

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Empty Suitcases

Inside Oma’s farmhouse it was as if panicked thieves had found everyday objects instead of treasure: closets, cupboards, the antique sideboard emptied into piles and strewn across the floors. “Kinkerlitzchen just gets broken, or stolen to fill up suitcases,” my grandmother always said about knick-knacks. But when questioned about the suitcases, Oma had refused to elaborate. “Enkelin, be glad that we are here and together,” she’d say to me, using her native tongue for granddaughter.

“Oma, what’s going on?” I asked.

She shook her head and urged me to the attic ladder, which she had managed to pull down, probably by standing on the stepladder she had used to clear off the top pantry shelves.

“You will look for my mutter’s trunk?” Oma said.

I’d never been in Oma’s attic. The dark entrance conjured up images of spiders, bats, and rotten floorboards with rusty nails. “What do you need so badly? Did you ask my dad if he could get it?”

“Your father is a good boy, but tender. You are different, like me but much smarter. We can take in these things and they do not destroy us.”

“Destroy us?”

“Please, Mäuschen, Oma will not always be here, and it sits like a big stone on my chest.” She crossed her hands over her heart.

I took a deep breath, climbed the ladder, flipped the light switch. In the attic: boxes, insulation, cobwebs, and a black steamer trunk. A plank served as a bridge to the trunk. When I lifted a yellowed wedding dress out of the trunk, tiny moths erupted in a flutter. A tin box contained old photographs, letters, and documents, written in German. I recognized Oma’s face in the sepia photo of a curly-blonde girl with her parents and a small boy. Did Oma have a brother?

I carried the box to the entrance and yelled down to see if this was it. Oma was sitting on the stepladder, talking to herself. “Oma!”

“Christina! You frightened me!”

“I found the box. With photos and papers. I’m coming down.”

“No, not the box. I mean, you keep the box. What else?”

“An old wedding dress.”

“We must find it. Go look harder,” she said.

“It would help if you told me what to look for.”

“Ja. That’s right.” Oma scrunched her face in scorn, spit out the words. “A fancy porcelain mantel clock.”

—

Oma hustled the clock into the kitchen like she held a blanket infected with smallpox.

I washed off my face in the sink, while my grandmother stared at the clock. I picked it up, checked for a maker’s mark. “A Limoges. It’s exquisite.”

Oma started crying, her shoulders rolling like turbulent ocean waves. “You know how my parents, a simple tailor and his wife, came by this clock?”

“No?”

“Sit, I will tell you.”

“The foolish Nazis thought things could be made right for the German people by compensating them for the losses they incurred during the war. One day, my papa and mutter went to an immense warehouse filled with furniture, dishes, candlesticks, rugs, Kinkerlitzchen. Papa wanted nothing— it would not bring little Frederick back—but Mutter wanted compensation. They’d lost everything—reduced to rubble. Why should they not take what the Jews left behind, Mutter said. The soldiers glared at Papa. He said, ‘Go then, Hedy, take what will make this better for you.’ The clock appeared on our mantel, without discussion, as if by elves. But, your Oma knew it was tainted. When my mutter passed, I packed it away.” Oma placed her hands upon mine. “The Jews did not willingly leave those things behind, Christina.”

“I know.” Oma had always claimed that her family left Germany before the war. Now I was afraid to hear that we were Nazis. Something else troubled me. “Did you go to the warehouse?”

She shook her head without conviction and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“But if your parents never talked about it, how do you know all those details?”

“Is this an interrogation?” Oma abruptly rose. “What is it you want from me?”

She rushed to the sink then slammed dirty dishes around, muttering in German. Finally, she inhaled, and her shoulders fell.

“You were there,” I said.

She nodded but stared out the window. “Mutter stayed in bed, always crying. We could not refuse them.”

“The Nazis?”

“The soldiers were laughing, carrying on, undressing me with their eyes. Papa stood there, useless. He had slinked through the war while our neighbors disappeared. ‘Go on,’ he said to me. Past the bedroom sets, the pots and pans, the necklaces, the toys. I thought of little Frederick playing with his train and I became so … angry.” She faced me. “Then I saw it.”

“The clock?”

“Ja. So beautiful. Pink roses. Gold trim. A couple on a picnic, in love. I took a suitcase, from a pile that reached the ceiling, and put the clock inside.” Oma sighed. “I am a bad person.”

Yes. No, I thought. We weren’t who I’d thought we were.

She shuffled over, stroked my hair. “This is my big stone.”

It felt like my stone now, too. “We should sell it.”

“The clock does not belong to us.”

The clock was probably worth one year’s tuition.

Oma said, “We will return it to the family. This is your job, Mäuschen.”

The clock sat there, glinting in the warm light cast by the setting sun outside Oma’s kitchen window. Oma’s breaths were labored in a way I had not noticed before. A squirrel chattered upon the feeder my grandfather had built beneath an ancient maple tree. I wanted thunder and lightning to tear through the sky, a torrential rainfall to pound upon the steel roof, a tornado to whirl in the near-distance. Instead, a gentle wind simply rustled through the leaves of that tree as if the suitcases had never been emptied.

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Delivery

All year I avoided the square where Sam got knocked down. But that winter I found myself making pilgrimages to the shrine someone made up. The ghost bike was painted white and chained to a pole.

It was the winter I started to start early. I got pretty good at riding drunk. Pavement glittered and winked at me, sick with black ice. I ate sweet exhaust, crushed dinosaur bones. Nothing could touch me on these salt roads. Grit and ice clung to my face. I looked like any street I was rolling on.

One day under that carbon atmosphere I finished a delivery—five stars, no tip—and went to Sam’s bike. I was feeling good. Earlier I got IDed at Liquor Planet though it was my third time there today. It made me feel faceless.

There used to be a sign and there used to be flowers, but the world had a way of taking things away. These days, people were always leaving trash on Sam’s shrine. Sam would have found it funny—people littering on the shrine memorializing where he was run over by a garbage truck. He loved all the weird little circles of the world. But it made me sick.

There was no litter on his ghost bike that day. But there was a young man in the saddle. He looked familiar. Sam, I thought, but of course it wasn’t. The young man wore a vintage army jacket and pretended to peddle while someone filmed.

I rolled the red light. A cab stopped short, horn blaring.

“Look, I’m Lance Armstrong,” the man in the vintage army jacket said, laughing with his friends.

Even I barely saw me coming. I hauled him off Sam’s bike, and we fell into the black crust of gutter snow. An elbow filled my mouth with the hot taste of copper. I was punching anything I could lay hands on. A blow to the helmet, felt it crack. Stars and little birds flying around. It was all happening so fast, and then it was over.

Armstrong’s friends peeled me off him. They pushed me away, calling me an asshole, calling me a drunk, calling me a psychopath, calling out “WorldStar.” My head echoed. I couldn’t think of anything to call them back.

“We should call the cops,” one said, stammering. He dropped his phone as he took it out of his pocket. “Bet he escaped from the mental hospital.”

“Or the zoo,” another guy said. He frantically rubbed white sneakers. Blood was streaking.

“That’s not what tonight is about,” Armstrong said. “Goddammit. We’re supposed to be getting trashed, not cleaning up the city. Let’s get out of here.”

I shucked off the bloody tube scarf and watched them go, shaking. That’s when it clicked—Armstrong was a regular, one of the college guys that always got Chipotle delivered to the row of old brick houses on Seminary Hill.

I stomped around Sam’s bike, feeling deflated. I felt I had to explain myself, explain how the world was. But he knew. Probably better than me. I adjusted how the bike leaned against the pole. Tried to make it seem like a real memorial, not one more abandoned thing in a city full of them. There were several ghost bikes around town, appearing overnight after a messenger was killed. I didn’t notice them until I started riding. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

The old-school messengers said there was a ghost bike for everyone.

I rolled around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take another delivery. I couldn’t show up at a customer’s door with a mouth full of blood.

The cold wind blew through me. Winter was a preservative. I went back to Liquor Planet. I asked if they had free refills. Big laugh, small shake of the head. Five stars, no tip, I was thinking.

—

Stuck on standby. Algorithmic detention for not accepting enough deliveries the day before. I held a white van and let it move me through the falling light. Cars were honking to each other, saying hello, swapping stories. I was the car whisperer, I knew. The van slowed. I let go, filtering through traffic. I hoped someone would hit me so I could get up swinging. I thought about the time Sam U-locked someone’s mirror after they almost doored him. I laughed and my chest hurt. Like someone U-locked my ribs.

I had nowhere else to go so I went to the plaza where messengers drank away standby. When I arrived, messengers were doing track stands, motionless on their bikes.

A messenger tilted wildly and a yell rose from the crowd. The messenger recovered, but soon overbalanced. Maria was the last one upright. She sat easy in the saddle.

“Did we start yet? I could do this all night,” Maria said, shielding her eyes as she caught sight of me. “And out of the dusk, a challenger.”

My hands were trembling, from cold or something else entirely. I shook my head and leaned my bike against a tree bundled against the winter.

“Nah, my man’s too old,” a messenger said.

“You’ve never ridden a penny-farthing,” Maria said.

I sat on a cold bench. The plaza overlooked a brown field where yellow machines ate the city. The sun was between buildings. Maria rolled over, held out a beer.

“You used to come around more. Now when you show, it’s like you’re someplace else,” she said.

Maria was the closest thing I had to a friend among messengers, now that Sam was gone. Like me, she was older than most other messengers in the plaza. Unlike me, she worked for the courier collective—not an algorithm. The radio strapped to her shoulder crackled as if it heard me thinking about how she got regular hours. She leaned her bike against mine, sat beside.

“How long are you on standby for?”

“They change the rules every day,” I said, shrugged. “Could be all night, could be five minutes.”

“You should come to the office tonight after delivery hours are over. I’ll put in a good word for you. Turnover is so high, nobody remembers why they fired you. You can drop the foodie gigs for real shifts.”

“I can’t take Sam’s old job,” I said.

“It’s not,” Maria said. “It was Greta’s, then Ulysses’s. And they both left, same as everyone. Look around. It’s all new faces all the time. They’re not long for it anyway. Not like us dinosaurs.”

“The dinosaurs weren’t long for it either,” I said.

Below, machines with tires the size of people moved earth around. It was hard to wrap my head around the scale of it all.

“What about you,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

“I’ll never leave. Those trucks will have to pave me over,” Maria said.

When I laughed she tossed me the beer. It twisted in the air, and I had to catch it.

Another messenger clicked over the brick plaza. She asked Maria if she was signing up for the race this weekend, and handed over a clipboard. Maria signed her name and passed it to me. I looked at the names, recognizing only a handful.

“I’m rusty,” I said and shook my head.

“Steel is real,” Maria said. She patted her bike frame.

A light snow was beginning to fall. I thought about telling her about Sam’s bike, the drunks, the guy in the vintage army jacket. But I didn’t want to drag her down with me. I was only just keeping above water myself.

—

My phone woke me. I was off standby. Back online. Jacking in, I thought. The app promised a bonus if I completed ten deliveries during the blizzard. I unlocked my apartment door and walked through the dark basement. The world was a void beyond the glass lobby door. I didn’t know the storm was approaching, and now it was here. I never checked the weather. Whatever happens happens, I figured. I stowed a fifth in my jacket, rolled airplane bottles into my socks, feeling like an operator suiting up.

Outside, snow whispered against snow. The wind gusted up, the snow rushing like someone shook the world. But it always settled. I felt I was cycling through empty rooms. There was no sound beside the low crush of tires against the piste of the road.

There were bikes left out in the blizzard. Now every bike was a ghost bike. Every house and streetlight was its ghost, too. You only really knew a place when you saw ghosts everywhere.

A snowplow emerged from behind a snowbank. I stopped short, skidding. The wall of air hit me and held me. The pan of its yellow lights splashed across the white world. Salt leaped down the hill after it.

I brought coffee to a snowbound office. “Cold out there, huh?” the man said as I brushed snow out of jacket creases. Five stars, no tip.

Each delivery was a window into a life being lived. Doors opened and showed me a sliver of a world that I knew nothing about. Once, I had an order for a bunch of balloons. When I tied them to my handlebars, I pictured them pulling me into the sky.

The cold bit the tip of my nose. Wind like knives through my jacket. I had my lights on but could only see a few feet ahead.

I grinded through the morning. Before long, I only needed one more drop before I made the bonus. The slush, salt, and sand alchemized into a thick paste. I had to kick my tires free.

Eventually they seized entirely. I locked my bike to a pole. Figured I’d walk.

Then I remembered Sam’s ghost bike. It wasn’t far. The big, meat-eating tires, the heavy frame only a little twisted from the collision. When he built it, he wanted to make sure he could go anywhere. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself.

At the square where Sam died, I picked some garbage out of the front rack. I brushed snow off the seat. The cheap cable lock was brittle with cold, snapped without a fight. I promised Sam a real chain when I was done.

I cranked through the storm, slush rooster-tailing behind me. It snowed like it was the end of the world. I felt good, leaning into skids and turns, falling into snowbanks. I finished the airplane bottles and spiked them into the ghost of a trashcan.

While I picked up the order at the restaurant, the customer messaged me. They asked if I could pick up Advil on the way to their place on the hill behind the university. Chipotle and ibuprofen. Breakfast of champions. They said they’d tip extra.

I wound through snowy streets and bridges over empty highways. People sculpted cars out of snowbanks. Beach chairs, cathode-ray televisions, sawhorses stood in empty spaces.

I fought up the hill. I leaned Sam’s bike against a snowbank, hiked over it to the brick triple-decker. When the door opened, I knew him immediately. He was wearing a sweatshirt, but it was Armstrong. The man in the vintage green army jacket.

I thought about going for his throat and wondered why he didn’t do the same. Didn’t he recognize me?

The tube scarf, I remembered.

“Morning,” he said, stepping into the threshold, winced, held his forehead.

His eyes were glassy, and there was a video game controller in his hand. Behind him was a living room that looked like the scene of a bombing. Cans of beer stood like soldiers on every surface, guarding against the world. It seemed familiar, didn’t seem worth it. Everyone was their own little tragedies. All standing on top each other and wearing a trench coat, walking around and trying to blend in. I handed over the delivery, turned to crunch back down the steps.

“Wait,” he said.

Here it comes, I thought.

“Oh, you got the ibuprofen. Thanks,” he said. He flashed me a smile and a thumbs up. “Had a few too many last night. You’re a lifesaver.”

I showed him a thumbs up with my thick glove.

I got on the ghost bike as the door crashed shut behind me. I looked around at the big snowy world and shivered. Five stars, no tip.

A plow went by, salting the land. It sounded like rain falling softly. The streets were empty, woolly with snow. The city seemed like it was under glass.

Maybe I had a shot at the race this weekend, I was thinking. None of the rookie messengers could ride like this in the snow.

I coasted down the hill. The plow turned a corner and the wind died down and the world was quiet. The falling snow streaked past, and I felt I was at the bridge of a spaceship, jumping to hyperspace.

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No Problem, Mon: The Batty Boy Adolescent’s Quick Survival Guide

Become a Christian

There is no exception. When Grandma’s getting ready for church tomorrow, tug at her skirt hem and say Grandma, I want to come to church too. She’ll scowl. She’ll remind you that Big Reds said the same thing five years ago, but now he sleeps in every Sunday and had that seizure the other day from smoking weed. Stand your ground. Point out that you’re nothing like your brother, and that it’s her Christian duty to set you on the path of righteousness. She’ll smile. She’ll call you a mouthy little bitch.

Stick with it. Go to church every Sunday. Every Sunday. Starch your white shirt. Press neat creases into your wool slacks. Save any little money you have for the collection plate and cherish the pocket-sized New Testament she’d originally given to Big Reds. On the bus ride to town, ignore the other kids. Sit by your grandma and assume the stoicism of a proud martyr. This means no complaining about: the holes in the bus floor, the rents in the bus seats, the heat pressing in from all sides. Sweat will run into your eyes and pool beneath your butt. But Jesus endured much worse on the cross, so keep quiet.

Don’t Make Friends

Okay, this is a two-parter. So first off, don’t make friends with the kids at church. I know this is tempting; church is so damn boring (can you believe it? Jamaica in 1998, and part of Holy Trinity’s church service is still in Latin), and these kids, they’ll want you to catch butterflies with them at first, out back, in the churchyard, ’round where the tombstones are. It’s a trap. They’ll grow eventually (well, the girls you’ll witness — the boys will start to disappear around 13). They’ll grow somber, like those heavyset women in church with the lining of their slip always dipping below their skirt. They’ll start to wear blouses that button at the neck, and fasten their hair in no-nonsense plaits. They’ll start to invite you to summer retreats and choir practices and, when you politely decline, exhale gasps of frightened outrage that seem way too heavy for their flat chest. You’re not here for all that work. So just keep to yourself from the outset. Sit by your grandma and shake hands with the ladies and the old men as they walk by.

When your grandma dies (terrible loss, really), you can ditch that fancy church in Kingston and go to one in your own area. Don’t go to one in your direct neighborhood, though — go to one on the other side of the gully where the roads are less formal (snaking through bushes) and the houses have a delicious ad hoc quality to them — zinced and planked and set atop cinder blocks. Notice how the roof of this church is flat. Notice how the windows aren’t stained. Notice how the floor is dirty, how the walls are bare and how the pews aren’t pews but fold-up chairs. Notice how the women here jump and wail and mash their faces into foregone ecstasy. Notice how, no matter what church you go to, the preacher’s son is always tall and square-jawed and smiling at you in a way that makes you wonder if there’s anywhere Satan doesn’t have a house.

Speaking of your hometown, this brings us to part two of this section: don’t make friends with the other boys in your neighborhood. That’s asking for trouble. Eventually, they grow into teenagers and confront the futility of trying to make it anywhere. They never know their fathers, and they never make it past the tenth grade. They spend time under the lampposts, by the gully bank, against the old trailer, slapping dominoes, shooting dice, slipping their hands under their girlfriends’ skirts. They’ll want to pull you in on it too. Seal the bands of brotherhood. The Christian defense won’t work here. They’re too basic, too disaffected. My yute, you doh see di girl a check fi yuh? Why yaa act like a pussy?

Trust me. Way too risky. Best to stay inside at all times. Except when you have to go to school, of course. Your mother will send you to good schools in Kingston, far away from the locals. That’s good. After school, when you get off the town bus, head straight home. People will call to you. They’ll say Brown Boy or Scholar or Preacher. It will be out of deference. They’ll admire your discipline. Still, don’t call back to them. Nod politely or smile. Sometimes you can hold up a hand in acknowledgement. Carry around your bible for good measure too. They know you go to church, but it’s good to reinforce this every once in a while.

Keep up at your studies. Otherwise, you won’t have an excuse to stay indoors. Your mother will begin to think it unnatural that a boy is spending all his time in front of a television, atrophying his muscles, neutering his presence. Studying is an excellent pretext. It assures her you’re determined to make the best of her sacrifices. It buys you some good bonding time with her too. She’ll bring you milk sometimes, a whole glass. She’ll put her arms around you. She’ll say you’re nothing like your brother (Big Reds’ been disappearing for days at a time now) and squeeze a little harder. You’ll feel her lips on the top of your head. You’ll remember how soft they feel pressing against your skull. You’ll wonder when will be the last time she holds you like this.

Avoid All Types of Playing Fields

This might seem random, but it’s worth noting. Whether cricket or football or basketball, they’re all the same — trouble. This won’t be a problem where your schools are in Kingston; all the playing areas are walled off and/or privatized. In your hometown, though, they’re plentiful, cropping up in dubious makeshift forms in the most inconvenient places. Be vigilant. Keep abreast of the changes in landscape and avoid the main thoroughfares. Playing fields line them. I know it’s tempting to watch the boys at play, but you’ll thank me. What do you think will happen when a ball comes your way? Don’t think it won’t happen, ’cause it will. And those men, the ones you like to watch, will lean on their haunches and heave at the air, expecting you to throw it back. And, bless your heart, you’ll try, but your throw will go awry (your wrist — always a bit too theatrical). Or you’ll try to kick it back, concentrating with all your might on lining up the ball with the plate of your foot, but the ball sails wild. It goes clear over the light wires onto a rooftop or across the gully into the bushes — it will go everywhere but straight (Tee hee). The men will laugh. They’ll call you skettel, Shelly-Ann or Big Reds’ likkle sister. They’ll ask you what color panty you prefer. Even though it’s in good fun, it’ll hurt. You’ll develop an ironic fear of balls.

On your walks home, best to take the long way through the back roads. Through the flimsy dirt lanes webbing through the groves and wild grass that cordon the town. Buck up, though; you’ll make a friend. His name is Mr. Turner and he’s a sweet old man. Grey sideburns dip from his bald head and line his weirdly smooth face. But he has such nice brown eyes, bright balls of coppery brown eyes. He lives in one of those wobbly wood shacks that crop up by the back lanes like monstrous weeds.

He’ll call you over one day and offer you butterscotch. You’ll notice his house is not as ugly as the others; it’s a confident little wood square set atop slabs of concrete. And, look, he has a little garden to one side — bright bunches of cherry bougainvilleas dripping from a trellis of a fence. He’ll be sitting in a small wicker chair behind his front grill, the inside of his house dark behind him. He’ll tell you how you look like his grandson, who’s also about seven, and offer you butterscotch candy in a yellow-gold wrapper. You’ll start taking that lane regularly; you’ll tell him about your day at school in exchange for candy. When you get a little older, he’ll start giving you plantain tarts and little patties he baked himself; he’ll tell you about the daughter he hasn’t seen since his divorce thirty-odd years ago. She’s about forty now and has a son whom he’s only seen in a few pictures she’s sent. You look so much like his grandson, he’ll say; he’s probably growing a beard too. You’re curious; you didn’t even realize you were growing a beard. Come here, he’ll say, you’re growing some fine little hairs. He’ll reach his hand through the grill and you’ll move close. He’ll sweep the line of your jaw with a shaking finger. Are those really baby hairs? you wonder. Or is his hand that coarse?

When you go back the next day, he won’t have any patties for you. His spatula fell behind the stove and his hands are too big to reach back there. Do you think you could reach back there and get it for him? He’ll ask to see your hand. He won’t be smiling. Still you consent, and he’ll grab your wrist with a strength you didn’t know he had. Will you come and help me? he’ll say. His grip is hard, but his face is as still as dead water. You nod, holding his eyes with yours. He tightens his grip; his eyes are balls of thunder in the dark. Yes, you say again, and tick your mouth into smile. When he lets go to open the grill, run! Dart straight through the fever grass — tall, sticky fever grass slapping your wrists and scratching your neck. Cut into the burned-out clearing, then dash through the field of wild bush they call Deadman’s Fall. Jump the gully. Keep running. Keep running. Run until you reach the guinep tree at the top of the hill that overlooks the Fall. Take a breath. Drop your book bag and take a breath. Laugh, boy, laugh. Throw your teeth to the sky and laugh.

You’re such a tease, you’ll think to yourself. You’re such a motherfuckin’ tease.

Make Up a Girlfriend

Yes, that’s right. When you’re in high school, you’ll want to make up a girlfriend. Your classmates are from a different type of environment from yours. Their houses have carports, and they use summer as a verb. Thankfully, they’ll have some amount of decorum. They’ll not expect you to share sex stories, as they know you can quote Ephesians. Still, being Christian doesn’t exempt you from having a girlfriend. It’s convenient to make one up. So here goes: Her name is Rachel. She goes to your church in your hometown, and her favorite show is Step by Step. If they ask why you never bring her to one of the formals, just say that Kingston frightens her. They’ll believe you.

Be sure to have more interesting tidbits about Rachel so that she sounds like a human being. Keep cryptic notes on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights at home. Things like: R was born on May 6, 1988. R likes pink hibiscuses. R does not get the appeal of video games but has a brother who plays constantly so doesn’t mind it so much. In the unlikely event that your older brother (he’ll be back from jail around now) finds these notes on the inside cover of your book, tell him they are notes you’ve made on the novel’s protagonist, Romeo. He’ll believe you.

Near Final Note

All this work is wearying I know, but think, an American college is right around the corner. And I swear to you, there, you will have reached the promise land. There are, of course, practical matters of concern — Where do you do SATs in Jamaica? — Where are the American college applications? — What is your story? And how do you craft that into a compelling narrative? — Do foreigners qualify for need-based aid? What’s your mother’s salary like in US currency?

Daunting? No doubt. But now that the exit is so close you get to indulge in a bit of fantasy as a reward. Actually, it will be a good form of motivation. That’s right! You can finally start to imagine what type of boyfriend you’re going to have. Can you believe it!? B.O.Y.F.R.I.E.N.D.

Okay, so let’s see, he’s going to be your roommate — tall, broad shouldered, athletic build but not too hard. Blond hair, parted bangs and a baby face with a smile so earnest you’ll be convinced he still drinks milk with dinner. Hey! He’ll look just like James Van Der Beek. Yes! And he’ll wear flannel, and be from some outside-sounding place like Montana. He’d have played football in high school and, like you, had to work very hard to bury his difference. You’ll realize he likes it when you mistake American football terms. He doesn’t get to correct you often, so you give him this opportunity. “Oh my god, it’s end zone not field zone!” He’ll find this ignorance charming, and sometimes chuck you on the shoulder. He likes your accent too. You’ll sometimes catch him mouthing a word you’d just said, slightly in awe. And that is how it will happen, in the dark of your dorm room one night. You’ll both be sitting up in his bed against the wall, your head rested on his shoulder, his arms scooped around your back. It doesn’t matter how you got there, just know you’ll both be slightly drunk. He wants to know how you say ‘hello’ in Jamaican. Hello. And now he wants to know how to say ‘what’s up.’ Whaa gwaan. Whaa gwaan…he’ll contemplate it in a heavy whisper, gently rubbing the curve of your side. Your hand is now across the barrel of his chest, and you’ll marvel at the contained force of his heat. And even more, you’ll marvel at the exquisite realization that you’ve finally found your first friend.

The Return Home

So this is where I take my leave (for further tips on navigating the complex identity issues related to race and alienation within the American queer scene, please see Yes I Lacan: Dislodging the Pane of the White Gays”). But before I go, just a word about your return trip to Jamaica: don’t bother with the coming out thing. This trip won’t be about you. Plus, your mom will be in a weird space with Big Reds’ death and all. She’ll look different when you see her, inching instead of walking, and her eyes will have sunken in. There’s something unmoored about her — this wild hair and rumpled skin. Was your mother always this ugly?

There’ll be no words between you. She’ll squeeze your wrist and turn to the cab then stay silent on her side of the back seat. Her hair used to be sleek and jet black, and her nails were always polished in a ripened pink like the insides of a guava. But her hands look cracked and dead now. You’ll think to take one of hers into yours, but what kind of a gesture is that after 15 years? No, better to think about the flurry of e-mails Big Reds had been sending you, the ones that would be irritants before his disappearance and a torment after: Hey bro, how are you?; hey bro, do you think you could help me with something?; I promise I’ll pay you back; How’s teaching going?; Please, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious; Hope you’re well, bro; Let me know when we can talk. Consider that he probably begged your mom for help too. Ponder the possibility that she ignored them as well.

As the cab turns out of the airport and onto the Palisadoes, it will hit you like a brick of cold that it happened here, somewhere in the crevices of this wiry road snaking through the ocean. Or maybe they didn’t do it here. Maybe they chopped your brother up elsewhere, loaded the parts in the trunk of his car and left it at the lip of the airport in a whip of theatrical irony. Well, that’s assuming Big Reds was trying to get away from something. And that’s assuming “they” knew what irony is anyway. Oh dear, look at you, trying to construct a narrative.

Look out at the city, across the maw of dark water to the clump of small buildings huddled by the waterfront. This is Kingston. There’re more buildings, you’ll remark.

Yeah, the Chinese, she’ll say.

When you move to hold her hand, she’ll stare back at you from the plane of another world.

Mum, how did this happen?

How you expect me to answer that, son?

Simple. Just tell me what you know.

Her mouth too looks old, limp in a mesh of wrinkles.

I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the IMF.

The IMF killed Big Reds?

She’ll shake her head, raking the air with the teeth of her tin-gray hair, and you’ll remember, you’ll remember, she had grown ugly right in front of you. She’ll be saying something about the murder rate and the state of emergency, but you’re trying to remember your mother as a pretty woman, when she used to kiss you on the head and her hair would fan about you like a sheet. Why did she stop doing that? Maybe it’s because you stiffened when she started growing ugly. When was that? Maybe when grandma died. All her powders and creams had disappeared around then. Or maybe it was around high school; there was talk about her hairdresser money going to your monthly lab fees.

She’ll be talking about some riots. Do you remember the riots after the Free Zone got shut down? You won’t remember any riots. You’re trying to remember your mother’s hands, the way you witnessed them putrefy because of the clothes washing she started doing on the weekends. Whose clothes were they? It hadn’t concerned you to ask. But the money you remember going to Big Reds’ first bail because of…the riots?

Was Big Reds in the riots?

She’ll look at you, concerned.

No baby, Big Reds wasn’t in the riots. He’d already moved to MoBay, trying to find another job. Remember?

Why can’t I remember any of this? You’ll ask.

Maybe you were focused on the wrong things, she’ll say.

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Monads and the Cosmic Jigsaw Factory

My scientist friend—his name’s Adam but he spells it “Atom”— calls me about the latest breakthrough. He says physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle. His voice is urgent, almost cracking.

I say, “I’m tired of spheres. Tell me this new particle is noodle-shaped.”

He says, “Monads, they’re called monads. They don’t have a shape, but they might have a soul.”

I’m no conspiracy theorist. Still, sometimes I get the suspicion that the scientific community is really a secret society of comedians who get a kick—a 2,500 year-old kick—out of human credulity.

Atom is out of breath. He says he has to go, but he’ll keep me updated. He makes it sound like he’s right there, in the midst of the action, his hands touching the lever of a particle accelerator, his eyes obscured by fancy goggles. I use the word “scientist” somewhat liberally. Atom teaches AP Physics at a charter school.

When my wife and I were still doing marriage counseling (a year before our divorce), Atom was full of suggestions. He kept championing the need for proximity. He’d call me up and say, “Are you close? I mean, you know, close?” He’d suggest that my wife and I take a sample of each other’s blood and put the samples under a compound microscope, and then—as husband and wife—spend time marveling at the shifting landscape within, how each drop of our blood was a unique eruption of lentil-shaped lava.

On some level, I think he was right. My wife and I were failing because we had run out of topography.

The next day, Atom calls up again. This time, I stop him mid-sentence and say, “Soul? I think I misheard you yesterday—did you say monads have souls?”

He says, “It’s complicated. At the very least, monads have perception. Not to mention appetite_—”

“Jesus, they get hungry?”

“More like inclination. Or desire. They long.”

There’s a lull on the phone. On Atom’s end of the receiver, I can hear clinking glasses and a droning electronic voice, as if Atom’s at happy hour with Stephen Hawking.

I say, “Look, it just doesn’t sound very, uh, scientific—”

“What?”

“All these metaphors.”

“Actually, at the subatomic level, nonidentity is the norm. Nothing is what it seems, and thus metaphors are the most accurate form of language we physicists have at our disposal—”

Atom’s voice is drowned out by cheering, even wild abandon. Wherever he is, it sounds like a team has just scored.

I say, “So, uh, what do they want?”

Atom says, “Who?”

“Monads.”

“Omniscience.”

To be fair, it’s not just Atom who’s monad-struck. All the media outlets—NPR, CNN, FOX, even ESPN—can’t get enough. Monads this, monads that. Despite being infinitesimal, monads are bigger than sliced bread. The title of one article reads, “Sentient Particle Added to Our Subatomic Zoo!” Oddly, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the whole zoo analogy. After my wife and I split, Atom wouldn’t shut up about quarks and leptons and gluons and all those other subatomic “animals” that escaped from the primordial zoo.

Atom said, “The Big Bang was the first prison break.”

I said, “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

He said, “Imagine how many inmates we’ve yet to tag.”

It dawned on me later that Atom was talking about women. Other women. Soul-bonding with particles that were not my wife.

Atom keeps calling. Sometimes I wonder if I’m Atom’s only friend. He strikes me as the kind of person who believes friendship is monogamous.

He says, “The perception of monads is directed inward, not outward.”

I say, “Omniscience—I don’t understand—how does a particle seek omniscience?”

“Monads are navel-gazers. Each monad is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: its own existence belies the contours of its neighbors. Thus in studying its own being, each monad is in fact intuiting its cosmic neighborhood.”

Atom goes on to describe how monads understand the world concentrically. Monads reason from self to neighborhood to neighborhood’s neighborhood, etcetera.

It all sounds a bit alarming. Like an invasion. Minus the green humanoids with laser beams.

I rub my eyes into the wee hours of the night. Everything is out of focus except negative space. A hat suggests a head. An outlet, a plug. Contours become clues. I imagine my body as one gangly, oversized monad: it too is a jigsaw piece with a shape that suggests a connection. What connection? I only know the answers that are incorrect. All the hands I thought my hands fit into.

You get this sinking feeling when you turn forty—alone forty, divorced forty, table-for-one forty—you get this sinking feeling that the cosmic jigsaw factory made a mistake. A manufacturing error. Honestly, I think Atom knows this feeling all too well. I think it’s why he won’t stop calling. The cosmic jigsaw factory expresses its deepest apologies. No one’s perfect, it says. But the truth is, well, how to put it? Your piece was shrink-wrapped in the wrong box.

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Rich Gold

Aquifer shares this story in conjunction with
Anna Levi’s visit to UCF on February 4, 2019, 7:30 p.m.,
Foxtail Coffee at the UCF Bookstore.
Please also see our interview with Levi.

This evening when I woke up, Chino was gone. Not a sight of him selling crack on Cow Head Road. There was something different about that morning. The rain came with rage in a vengeful way for the first time in two months. Force-ripe baby breadfruits dropped into the canals whenever the wind struck. Bedsheets slid off the lines straight into the muddy gutter. Some girls were woken up by the growls of the thunder and, one by one, they ran out the rooms with their half-naked selves to save their towels, panties, and bras off the clothing lines.

There were fifteen wooden and rusting galvanized-roof shacks in the yard of the brothel. Each room had a thick mattress on the checkered black-and-white linoleum floor; a small speaker box; a small lattice window; a small round mirrored ceramic face sink; a suitcase; a brass vase of dying red hibiscus flowers in the right corner of the floor; an aerosol spray of floral air-freshener; a roll of toilet paper on a shelf; and burgundy lace curtains all balled up in a knot to allow air to freshen up the rooms. Rainwater leaked through some of the roofs straight onto the mattresses.

Chino’s mother, Sita, property owner of the brothel, who lived in the same yard with us, came over, dragging a large blue tarpaulin, gasping for breath and occasionally spitting on the floor. Chickens ran towards her gluey mucus and they picked at it like grains. She dropped the tarpaulin in front of my bare feet, scratched her grey coolie hair, flickered thick white dandruff from her fingernails into the air, then she placed her left hand on her hip and pointed her right index finger in my face and said, “Look here gyal, just cover de place until this rain dry up and come see me after. Ah tired. Ah gone.”

Already soaked in the rain, I stared at her skinny madras bosie back slowly walking back to her jhoparee. I stared at her jutti pitching mud at the bottom of her yellow saree and I remembered Tasha, my childhood friend from Tacarigua who drowned in a well a day after she turned eight. I could see her in my mind running after a cow straight up to Kandahar Village on a rainy crusade day in August. I could never forget that day Tasha slipped on a blue tarpaulin in Tanty Lalee’s yard and buss her head. I couldn’t bear the memory of the tarpaulin that caused Tasha months of healing, so I took one hard look at it, then I walked away from it.

I grabbed a white pigtail bucket to catch the plopping rainwater that leaked from the edge of the galvanized roof. Water from the pipe was scarce. It came once or twice a week. Sometimes for days, not a drop of water in Chase Village. Chino, our pimp, often told us that the water company deliberately locked off our water supply to put pressure on him to shut down his business.

There were twenty-five of us living in the backyard shacks of the brothel. Three locals including me, and the rest were from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Martinique. Two girls had babies including me, and three other women had children. The babies and children all lived with Sita. My baby, Maria, was only nine months old and I didn’t know exactly who was her father. My baby didn’t look anything like me. She was a light-skinned, chubby-legged, Chinese-face, dougla-hair baby, and I was a mocha-skin, skinny girl with Afro hair. I remembered fucking a few men from an offshore company, but I just didn’t know which one was Maria’s father. I didn’t really care about her and sometimes I didn’t believe I had actually kept her. I left it up to Sita to look after her. Sita got money from the child welfare services for all the children she looked after, including mine. She knew how to scam the system.

Every day, some of the girls were transported to other brothels far away in the countryside, depending on their legal status. Most of them either left their babies behind with Sita or found a way to take their children for their family or friends in their home country to look after.

My best friend, Bella, a thirty-two-year-old Dominicana, had been living in the brothel since she was twenty-seven. Bella and I shared a small room at the back of the brothel. During the daytime, we were allowed to go out and make our own money. Bella and I worked two days a week peeling vegetables in a Chinese restaurant in San Fernando. One day a week Bella learnt English, and I had recently started taking maths lessons. The other days Bella, I, and some of the girls hustled on the marina in Chaguaramas, selling our cunts for pounds, US dollars, yen; any money that pass, we didn’t miss. Some of the girls took English lessons some days in the week to keep their legal status, while others took the risk to work in Chinese-owned variety stores. Chino often warned the girls about jobs that put them at risk of deportation. I was lucky because I was a local and could lie to save myself.

From 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., Chino owned us. Every man we fucked, he took and controlled our money. He fed everyone, sent us shopping whenever he felt like, paid for the girls’ legal status, tickets back and forth to their home country to drop off their babies, court charges. He was our fairy godfather. He had many friends in high places, but he wasn’t an easy man to deal with. He often gave us crack to kick off our night’s work and sometimes he’d beat us like he did the pit-bulls he trained. This is why for a long time, I have been considering running away from this place with or without my baby.

“Sonya, Sonya, where is Chino? Me no see Chino,” Bella inquired. She covered my head with her towel and dried my arms with her top.

“Ah doh care. Ask Sita, she know everything about she son,” I replied.

“You no care? Chino have me passport. If me no have passport, me no go no way?” said Bella, pointing at her chest and shaking her head with concern.

“Whey yuh going, Bella? There is no way tuh go right now. The police busted Copa Cabana, Miramar, and Ocean Spray last week. Yuh want tuh go tuh jail or get deported? Dem women in de jail will fuck yuh harder than ah man and yuh know what? Chino’s friends, dem is prison officers too. They go fuck yuh even harder if they know Chino owns you. Especially how yuh have sunflower eyes and yuh skin so soft and pink and yuh lips so thin and yuh hips so wide, and yuh hair so blonde, straight and long,” I warned her.

“Me no understand you. Chino what? What is da problem? Can you talk slow? You confuse me with Trini talk. You sound like you from Africa. You English is very, very bad!”

“Sita want tuh see meh fuh something Ah doh know yet. Come with meh nah? Maybe she know whey she son gone too,” I said slowly and I grabbed Bella’s hand to take her to Sita.

A long trail of violet periwinkle flowers separated Sita’s house from the brothel. Children who lived in the sawmill next door were sliding their asses in the mud, and some were racing after a bicycle tire around Sita’s jhoparee. Sita’s pothounds never liked me. They rushed me in the rain.

“Los perros think in he mind that you are ah fantasma,” said Bella and she picked up a few pebbles to pelt the dogs.

“Fantasma?” I asked twisting my confused face.

“Yea, it is something like ah dead person you cannot see. Ah! Like ah spirit,” she replied, clicking her fingers.

“Hahahah, that is ah scary way tuh see people,” I said.

“Me abuela would say that you are maldicion. Ah don’t know the word for it in English. But you need ah rosario then go to confesiones. You need to put on white clothing. You spirit, you life will be better. In me country, muchas people Catolicas. Is ah tradition. We love it,” she said waving her hand and smiling with happiness.

“I understand you. But I am not Catholic. The woman who Ah live with was ah Hindu like Sita. We have puja fuh bad spirit. Sita knows,” I replied.

Under the coconut tree in Sita’s yard, an open mandir with a statute of lord Shiva sat with folded legs on a cushioned fake lion. He was adorned as a lady with long golden mala earrings, a golden trishul firm in his left hand, green beaded bracelets around his wrist, a white lingam drawn on his forehead, a charming snake posed off on his bun-styled hair, and another vicious-looking snake around his blue neck. His lips were raspberry red and his fat cheeks were blushed up with rose. He held his right hand against his chest as if he was giving a pledge. I picked up a yellow buttercup flower on the slippery muddy floor, lit a coconut-soaked wick in a deya, and performed aarti, singing a bhajan:

Om Namah Shivaya, Har Har Bhole Namah Shivay,

Rameshwara Shiva Rameshwara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivay,

Ganga Dhara Shiva Ganga Dhara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivaya

Bella held onto the colored bamboo flags and waited for me in the rain. After I sang the mantra, she hurried me by my arm.

“Listen to me, Sonya,” she said. “Sita is ah bad woman.”

We walked through the rain and then up the few stairs of Sita’s jhoparee.

“No, she ain’t. Yuh should pray. I go teach yuh. He is Lord Shiva, he killing all evil,” I said.

“No! Me is Catolica. Me confess to San Basilio only! You like ah madness. Only think I like is that you God is ah man and he look like ah woman. She pretty lips, rojo. She man and she woman. Me like that. Eso es poder e igualdad para cada género. But snake on she body? Maligna! Sita esta loca! If me hungry? I will never eat from that crazy Sita. Loca. And you Sonya, you crazy too!”

Sita was sitting on a rocking chair feeding Maria sugar-water from a plastic baby bottle. Four children were sitting on the floor eating macaroni and ketchup and licking their fingers. Two boys were jumping from a table to the mattress. Bella took off her white cotton frilled top and beat the flies that buzzed around the children’s meal. Salina the red-eyed cat jumped on me, and I flung her on the balata window frame of the tapia house.

“Meow, meow, meow” Salina cried.

“You see, I know what I talk about. You need change you God,” Bella remonstrated.

Sita handed me Maria in a hurry, and I threw her into the air and kissed her all over her belly. Baby Maria’s skin was smooth like the milk Sita offered Lord Ganesh.

“She has a bad cold,” I said, listening to Maria’s rattling cough as she giggled “Ma ma, ma ma.”

“Ah just squeeze ah lime in she tea,” replied Sita.

“No! give she honey and vaporizer, no lime!” Bella persisted.

One of the children who were eating on the floor, a small boy with a swollen, malnourished belly, stood up to stare at us, chewing his thumb. Sita’s jhoparee contained three small bedrooms with seashell-printed shower curtains as doors, an open kitchen, and a littered living room. The dried grass from the clay-filled walls flew in the air whenever the fan breezed the wall. Lizards ran in and out of holes in the walls to catch spiders. There were a few plastic bottles of water under the kitchen sink. Baby cockroaches clambered out of a Styrofoam box, which contained Sita’s cold-storage food on a table in the center of the living room. Dried corn husks and strips of orange peel hung from the low palm grass ceiling of the jhoparee. The smell of soaked dhal filtered the air as if a sewer had been leaking underneath the house. Black and white photos of old folks and a colored baby photo of Chino licking ice cream on the beach were glued to the wall. A tall brown cardboard barrel with an address in Germany was used as a space saver. An electric kettle, coffee mugs, and Lipton teabags sat on a red-crocheted tablecloth on the top of the barrel. People’s names and addresses and phone numbers were scribbled all over the barrel.

Bella examined the colorful picture of Mother Lakshmi that sat on a pitch-oiled lamp near Sita’s rocking chair. When Sita lit a cigarette, Bella took it from her to finish it.

“Sita, me no see Chino all day. Where is Chino? We no have enough beers in de bar,” said Bella.

“Well this is why Ah wanted tuh see Sonya,” replied Sita and she got out of her rocking chair to make black coffee.

“What is da problem for Chino? This morning me have premonition for Chino. I see in me sonar, ah woman with ah gun. Me no understand that woman. Me never see she in me life. She look like ah Trini. Maybe it is you sister, Sonya. She look just like Sonya. Negra and tall and bonita. Big Afro hair! She and Chino have ah gun. Then me see ah white bird come and Chino go with de bird and I no sleep good after that,” continued Bella propping her head with her hand on Sita’s table.

“Ah doh have any sister, Bella! You make me so angry when yuh talk about family. I’m ah Nowherian. Sita should take you tuh she pundit to unfold yuh dream,” I replied, standing up to rock Maria to sleep.

“Well Ah get ah call from de police station and they say they have Chino in Remand Yard at de jail. They say they find Chino in Carlsen Field with a kilo of cocaine. And he have ah hearing next week Monday in Chaguanas Magistrate Court. And Ah doh have no money. I eh even get meh pension and de children welfare yet,” Sita paused with a worried look and she continued to weep, saying, “Before Chino father dead, he wanted tuh sell de bar inno. Ah shoulda sell de damn bar. But Ah feel sorry for de girls Chino trying tuh help. Yuh know? Chino doh sell coke! Somebody must be jealous of meh son because he used tuh make money from de bar. And these children Ah minding here, Ah get good people to take them, but Chino doh listen tuh nobody. Ah tired tell he tuh stop helping allyuh. Doh take in no more girls! Leh dem go back home tuh Venezuela and Santo Domingo or wherever he pick them up, on de street, Ah doh know! Ah just want back meh son and fuh he tuh change he life. Now he in jail and me eh have no money. Not ah cent. Ah cyah even buy tablet fuh meh diabetic foot. Oh God, they set up meh son. Chino doh trouble nobody.”

“I no understand,” said Bella and she raised her skirt to dry Sita’s tears.

“Chino is in carcel.” I explained to Bella.

“Chino what? I need me passport. I want get ah man to take me away from Rich Gold and he will help me go back to me country,” Bella boasted.

Maria held my neck tight. I felt her little heart pumping on my chest. I looked at myself in a mirror that was nailed to the balata wall frame, and I imaged what my birth mother looked like with me when I was her baby. I have never seen any pictures of myself as a child nor of my mother. I vaguely remember where I got that long deep scar over my eyebrows. It must have been my foster mother. She often beat the shit out of me and that is why I came to Chino.

Nobody told me I was pretty except for Bella. And that is why she is the only girl at the brothel my blood took. A woman who knew my real mother told me I smiled just like her. She also told me that my mother had a deep dimple in her cheek just like me. Some people from Kandahar Village told me that my mother died of pneumonia when I was six months old. Other people told me that my mother gave me away because she was on drugs. I never wanted a baby so young in my life, and I didn’t know if I really loved or wanted Maria. Sometimes I did. But I hated my mother for leaving me in the world like this. And I hated Chino for lying to us about our future. He didn’t care. Maybe my father was like Chino. I would do anything to leave this place.

“So this is what yuh want tuh tell me Sita? How can I help Chino? I can’t!” I replied and I shoved Maria into her hands.

“Ah woman from Rio Claro want tuh buy yuh baby from you. She can’t make babies,” said Sita, putting Maria down on a mattress on the living room floor.

“She buying meh baby? How much money she want tuh give meh?” I asked eagerly.

“How much yuh want?” Sita asked seriously.

Mosquitoes gathered around Maria’s head. Sita placed a net over her body and fanned her with a newspaper. I wondered what my daughter would become if I sold her or if she would be better off living with Sita. I didn’t know what to do with her.

“What yuh think, Bella? Ah doh know if de police go find meh. People everywhere already know ah make baby,” I worriedly asked.

“Just tell them de baby die,” replied Sita, shoving her saree between her legs and fanning Maria faster.

“Sonya, let me make ah confesion. Five years ago, me make baby. You know how I get to know Sita? Somebody bring me here, and Sita sell me baby to ah Trinidad woman who now live in Canada. She say she make baby at home in Trinidad and she get ah passport for de baby. Ah get some money and me baby go Canada with de woman to live. No problem! Baby will have ah better life. Baby will not forget you smell, you eyes, you skin. One day, baby will come back to you. I cry for my baby every day but I happy she is in a better life. Así es la vida. Da police no understand nothing in this country. Only for marijuana and cocaine. That is not police business. Okay? So take de money and give de baby away. You start ah new life. You are ah free woman!”

“Is she going to miss me?” I turned to Sita.

“No! she is going tuh miss me. Not you!” Sita pointed at herself.

“Okay, take my baby! Give de woman ah reasonable price. No!” I quickly changed my mind and declared, “Ah want ten thousand dollars. It’s enough fuh a visa and a ticket tuh start a new life in America.” I fantasized about shopping in America with a rich white man.

“If de woman come fuh Maria tonight, can I borrow de money tuh bail out Chino and he go give it back tuh you?” Sita was serious.

“Tonight? So soon?” I asked.

“Well, after midnight. It better Maria goes while she is asleep. When she get up, she won’t see me and she won’t know how she got there. She won’t remember anything,” Sita replied.

“Ah don’t trust Chino inno. That money is my only dream,” I replied.

“Our dream,” Bella insisted.

“Do you trust me? I’m not Chino!” Sita demanded. Her raccoon eyes looked dangerous, reminding me of the snake around Lord Shiva’s neck. The moles on her face made it look like a sour rough lemon. Her fat nose looked inflamed, red and swollen like Krusty the Clown.

“Take de baby, Sita! Call me when yuh have meh money,” I said and walked out the jhoparee in haste, leaving Bella with Sita.

“Do you want tuh go tuh America? Meh sister living in America inno. She is ah citizen. I can help yuh go tuh America.” Sita’s voice echoed behind me.

Later that night, Gloria and nine of us were sniffing hail, dancing to Yoskar Sarante’s La Noche, and dressing up for our night’s work in the garage.

“Where is Chino?” Gloria enquired, then she offered me a line of candy coca. After sniffing, I wanted to slap Paola for stealing my client when he came looking for me last Friday and she didn’t call me for him. I saw neon green lines walking past the room. I hugged my tattooed chest tightly and dropped my head on Gloria’s shoulder to gasp quietly for breath. My body went numb and for a few minutes I stood silently, thinking of Maria. The smell of Johnson’s baby powder and clean cotton diapers overwhelmed me. I realized that Sita was right. Maria would be better off sold or given away, and I could be a free woman in America.

“Chino always go to jail. He come back out and he gone again,” replied one of the girls as she rolled her fishnet stockings up her burnt legs.

“Me need me passport,” Bella said as she entered the garage.

“We don’t need passport. Me don’t want to go back home. There is nothing for me in Bogota. No more!” shouted Sandra.

“I want go back home. Mi mama sick and me miss me boyfriend. De men here not nice. De culture is loca. Me need freedom. No like work behind de kitchen, no like hide from police. Life no good here. Is ah racist country. Imigracion like money. No money, no extension. In me country we eat carne frita and chicharrones de pollo every day. I eat mucho curry and bbq in Trinidad. Curry everywhere! I need food from my country. From my mother!” said Bella, and she bent down to draw a line of candy coca for her stuffy nose.

The garage was a large secured space, situated beneath the brothel. We kept our personal belongings there. It was also our secret hiding place whenever the police came to raid. It had a gravel-camouflaged electric gate that locked us inside until we were dressed and ready for work at night. Wardrobes, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and large blue rubbish bags were labeled with our nicknames.

After Betina painted my lips with her dark purple lipstick, she pulled out a pink bralette from her drawer and measured my tits.

“My god, you arm smell like ah ram goat,” she said, to the amusement of the other girls.

Sometimes we shared each other’s clothing, wigs, lace stockings, weaves, high heels, lipsticks, jewelry, and perfumes.

“Give it to me,” shouted Isabella, and she grabbed the bralette from Betina.

“No, yuh greedy bitch,” I replied, and I punched Isabella in the face.

When Isabella scraped my dark smooth face, I wanted to murder her. I pulled off her wig and choked her. Some of the girls screamed when Bella jumped in to help me punch Isabella some more.

Some of Isabella’s friends pulled me off her.

“You nothing but ugly n—! Nobody wants you!” Isabella cursed me.

When Sita heard the smashing sounds of beer bottles on the wall, she ran into the garage with two children holding on tight to the end of her saree.

“Yuh see wha happening here already? Ah fed up. Ah trying meh best tuh raise allyuh children and put dem in good homes and look how allyuh mashing up meh place,” quarreled Sita.

Hidden in the center of some of the mattresses that were spread on the floor, were unused condoms, packets of heroin, cocaine powder, and kush, rubber gloves, needles and syringes, packets of extra strength Panadol, bottles of sleeping pills, antibiotic pills, and an untouched diamond-black 9mm, seventeen-round pistol. Colombian, Venezuelan, and Dominican Republic flags fluttered from the ceiling as the fan recycled the dark eau de toilette air. Artificial silk flowered headwear wreaths, straw hats, and sunglasses adorned the white bald heads of Pinocchio-nose mannequins. Metal filigree masquerade masks, purple carnival beads, and a rosary hung around the neck and on top of the ivory white-veiled head of a statue of the praying Mother Mary standing in a corner. Half-burnt white candles lay at her feet. The small toilet and bathroom near the entrance were barely visible behind a montage of world maps and geometric-patterned Chinese fans.

Not all the girls came out that night. Some stayed in the garage either jacking up heroin or sick, rotting away in a locked, abandoned room Chino kept for the sick. Those who were working wore white mini-skirts cut right under our bottom, carnivalesque bras, thick high heels, and dark and bright-colored lipsticks, wigs. We often shared each other’s perfume—as long as it was cheap. We walked into the bar together, and the men, already drunk, were waiting for us. My handbag was packed with a bag of Xanax to put bad guys to sleep, a penknife, condoms, cigarettes, a lighter, and lubricating gel. Most of the guys liked fucking me in my ass, which I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it because they came faster and it paid more than a blowjob or anything else.

Chino’s right-hand man, Hawkeye, had been checking in a few part-time night workers, bartenders, and off-duty policemen. When the jukebox played bachata, a few of the girls did the mariposa dance on the rainbow-colored poles, which were surrounded by pool tables, slot machines, and chairs. Their legs opened wide as an ostrich opening its mouth. You could see their silk v-string thongs stuck tight in their vaginas and their hips grinding up and down the poles as men gaped hungrily, squeezing their balls and trying to figure out which one they wanted.

Bella came out of her room to tease the drinking men.

“Aye papi no lo hagas asi,” she shouted with a sign language to inform another girl to avoid a certain client because he was a cheap motherfucker.

In each bar room, there were mugshot photos of bandits who had robbed brothels in the village. We often looked at the photos to see if they matched our clients before negotiating price with them. I sat in room number three and recognized a regular client of mine. He wanted me again and knew how to follow me to my room in the back of Rich Gold.

My client preferred a dark room, and he didn’t like me looking at him. I knew he was a wealthy married, Muslim business owner from Point Fortin. Bella used to work for him. She used to babysit his children. Bella once told me he had fucked her, too. Each time he fucked me, I learnt something new about him. But this time he he had nothing to say to me. His long beard was shorter than usual, and his cold face looked like frozen salted prunes. When I undressed myself, he gently turned my face away from him and positioned my body in a back-shot posture. My head and the shape of my wig resembled Cleopatra in the shadow of the lattice window. The night pumped to the lyrics of La Noche:

En vano aliento mi rencor
Y espero el dia para odiar
La noche me hace recordar
Que no soy nada sin tu amor.
La noche
Me hace volver,
enloquecer.

Enloquecer.

My client’s enlarged cock stuck firm into my vagina, and, as he pounded to the music, I thought about how much I missed Chino that night. My client fucked me nonstop until his sweat rinsed my spine. I looked back at him, and he warned me, “Don’t look at me!”

“It hurts!” I replied.

When I looked away again, through the window, I saw a strange woman walking out of the backyard carrying my baby and Sita behind her with a large cardboard box in her hands. There was nothing I could have done to stop Sita. Watching the woman and my baby leave, I wept in silence.

Glossary

Aarti: a Hindu religious ritual of workship.

Abuela: grandmother

Aye papi no lo hagas asi: daddy don’t do it that way

Bachata: popular music from the Dominican Republic, often associated with brothels

Bhajan: a devotional song in Hindi.

Bonita: pretty (female)

Candy Coca: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine

Carcel: jail

Carne frita: fried meat

Chicharrones de pollo: chicken cracklings

Deya: an oil lamp originating in India, usually made from clay, with a cotton wick dipped in ghee or coconut oil.

Dougla: a Caribbean Hindustani word for a person of mixed races (Afro-Indian descent)/illegitimate or bastard

Fantasma: ghost

Hail: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine

Jhoparee: a tapia house constructed from indigenous materials which include a mixture of forest lumber, leaves from palms/grasses and clay.

Jutti: Indian footwear (associated with royalty) made of leather and embroidery.

Kush: a high grade of marijuana.

Los perros: the dogs

Mala: prayer beads

Maldicion: blight

Malinga: bad/Evil

Mandir: Hindu temple

Mariposa: butterfly

Negra: a black woman of African descent

Nowherian: a person of no fixed place of abode

Puja: the act of worship in Hinduism
Jhandi: a common sight inside or outside the Hindu home situated next to a temple. It is usually made of bamboo poles and coloured flags. Each coloured flag represents a deity.

San Basilio: Saint Basil of Caesarea (Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox church)

Saree: a garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by Indian and Asian women.

Sonar: dream

Trishul: a three-pronged weapon of Lord Shiva (Hindu mythology)

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Homer

I’m an old man and he’s an old man, seventy-eight, the two of us, on our birthdays just past. My wife is dead and his wife died too, a fact of life we’re living with. His children are grown and he lives alone. So are mine. So do I.

There are some differences, though. And here’s one. He exists and I do not.

It’s morning. His bulldog is licking his bare feet as he stands at the sink and drinks a glass of water to knock down the queasiness in his stomach. He drank too much last night and the slobbering tongue lapping at his toes is not helping his hangover. He shakes his leg at the dog. Getting the hint, she finds a half-dozen pieces of kibble in her bowl and finishes them before waddling into the room where he’s worked for the last forty years. She is already way ahead of him.

He takes a mug of coffee from the pot he’s brewed and walks it into the room where he turns on a lamp. He doesn’t so much need the light in the room. He needs the light in his head.

Last night was a bad night for him. It’s a year this month since his wife died. He’s been having trouble getting past the memories of all the years he devoted to her, the children, all that he did for them. For what, he muses, now that it’s all done and gone? He’s also having trouble keeping things straight in the here and now. His grandkids’ names, which he mostly can’t remember. Bills he paid or didn’t. Last week he stuck the TV remote into a potted plant, wasn’t able to find it for three days. So he’s been drinking alone at night and a little too much, thinking it will help and that he can handle it like he used to, and when he wakes in the morning it would be unbearable if he didn’t have me to knock around and focus his mind.

On the page on the screen in front of him, he’s left me in a tough spot. I’ve been here for eighteen, twenty hours now waiting for him to get me out of it. Or not.

In the life he’s created for me at the beginning of my story, he’s got me taking care of my grandkids, Sara and William, and William has just disappeared from the skateboard ramp where I think I last saw him. He’s had the kids’ parents go away for the weekend to visit old friends, and here I am in a park in Troy, New York, an ice cream truck crawling with tweens at one end, slackers and a couple of what appear to be runaway girls getting high at the other, the group of them under an overpass that filters traffic onto Route 7. I’m getting too old for this shit, and he knows it better than anyone, even as he begins putting words into my mouth.

“William! William!” He has me turn toward Sara. “Did you see where your brother went?” Before she can answer, he’s got me climbing up the skateboard ramp, arthritic hip and enlarged prostate in tow, approaching kids I don’t know, asking if they’ve seen my grandson: long hair, T-shirt with a grinning skeleton, ripped Adidas. None of the kids seem to know what I’m talking about, however, and we jump into a scene where the cops come and start to question me as if I’ve lost my mind as well as my grandson. And now my granddaughter Sara is crying. This asshole made her cry. “Grandpa, Grandpa, what’s wrong?” he has her ask me.

It’s at this point he decides he needs another cup of coffee. The fucker.

Two nights ago, when his own daughter called to check in on him, he couldn’t remember which of his daughters he was talking with. Worse, he couldn’t remember what either of them looked like. Took him ten minutes of conversation, dancing around the weather, what he’d had for dinner, if he’d been taking his Plavix and Paxil, before he could make sense of the voice to visualize this tall girl with short brown hair, now a fifty-year-old woman going grey. He never let on and she hung up thinking all was well. Then he cried for a good half hour.

As it turned out he never put William there in the park with Sara and me in the first place. Apparently, the kid’s parents let him stay with a friend this time, leaving me with only my granddaughter to care for. Sure, slurp your second cup of coffee, you smug son-of-a-bitch. Whoever coined the term misery loves company must have been talking about you and me.

He has one of the cops ask me my name, where I live, what year I was born, who the president is. I tell him Jack Benny, Nome Alaska, 1834, Abraham Lincoln. The cop, tone deaf to my sarcasm, starts to write it down in his pad before I wave my hand, indicating that I’m making a joke. “My name is Homer Fairchild, I live at 367 Seaforth Street in Troy, I was born in 1940, and the president is . . .” He has me pause a beat for comedic, can-you-believe-it effect. “Donald Trump.” At least he’s given me a good sense of humor and the politics to go with it. His politics. His sense of humor.

But the cops are not smiling. Why did you think you were here with your grandson, he has one of them ask me? Sara—bless the empathetic heart he’s given her—tells the cops that I always watch the both of them, so I must have forgotten for a minute that William wasn’t here today. Yeah, I forgot that William wasn’t here today, in the same way he’s been forgetting to dress himself in the morning and comes down to greet me in whatever he’s slept in the night before, barefoot, sometimes in just his boxers and a sweat shirt, sometimes a robe with nothing under it but the hirsute body he’ll be buried in. It’s half that he can’t find the reason to dress any more, half that he forgets he hasn’t.

He’s not what you’d call a household name, but he’s written a few books and between that and his teaching he’s made a living. Over the years, this house he lives in became the port he returned to daily to scratch out whatever success he’s had, his wife and children being the masts he lashed himself to whenever the temptations of drink or the urge to end it all came too close to overpowering him. A page or two a day, a chapter a month when he could manage it, three classes a week, one book every few years. Steady as she goes. Only now she does not go steady anymore. This boat that is his life is sinking, the sirens of the hereafter are singing his name louder all the time. All that’s left to him is his writing. It’s the wax he stuffs into his ears to resist the call to surrender.

The cops let me go, but Sara tells her mother what happened, and in the next scene he’s got me inside the whiz-bang of an MRI machine. It’s at that moment that I find out what my story is going to be about. It’ll be a short story and it’ll be about what all stories are about: life and death. But mostly death, or should I say the odyssey of getting there. Death sells. Death breaks our hearts.

When he was a boy, he rode a blue bike, a pinstriped Schwinn with a coaster brake and fat fenders that his father and mother saved up to buy for him. He cherished the bike in the way boys do and then someone stole it while he was inside a five and dime. This wasn’t in the days when there was a lot of that kind of thievery going on, and the loss of his bike was like the unexpected loss of a limb. He thought about revenge. He fantasized about finding who stole the bike and beating them half to death. But then the years went by and there was more of this kind of thing—a junior high sweetheart who dumped him for another older boy, his father dying of a heart attack when he was barely twenty years old—and he slowly realized that loss was not something you could revenge, that it was what we were put here to live with, and that’s when he found his calling. If he’s built his reputation on anything it’s as that author who writes about people who can’t seem to find happiness because loss keeps getting in the way. I wonder if it’s dawned on him that happiness is what you find after you accept that loss will keep getting in the way.

The tumor he has the doctors discover on my brain is massive and in a bad spot. To take it out they’d have to take out half my brain to get to it. He writes a passage that recalls the first thing I think of when they tell me about the tumor. A group of sentences about an uncle I had who also apparently died of a brain tumor and who, near the end when he was truly crazy, took all his money and rolled it up with rubber bands to stash it in the glove box of his Plymouth, wherein, one afternoon he took me out to the driveway and begged me to take the money and buy him a plane ticket to Greece so he could escape into the sun. Escape what, Uncle Tony, I asked him. Dying, he told me. Nobody dies in Greece, he said.

After that, he gets more daring and goes deeper into my mind, beneath the unpleasant memories and the fear of the pain I’m anticipating in the months to come, flooding me with a litany of those things I’ll leave behind when I forfeit the gift of my five senses. It’s as if he’s operating on my brain with words, not to remove the tumor but to remove and preserve the life around the tumor before it’s too late. My life. His life.

He has me recall the sound that the head of a zipper makes as it goes up the tracks of a jacket I’m putting on the first cold day of autumn . . . my mother walking into my room, thermometer in her hand telling me I’m not leaving the bed today, that delicious dryness of the fever that’s keeping me home from school . . . the unbelievable silence in the seconds after one of my infant children finally stopped crying after hours of crying in the middle of the night . . . the fat stack of property deeds on a Monopoly board after I’ve won the game . . . all the liquor I’ve happily drunk and how something so cold can feel so hot going down your throat . . . the last time I got caught in the rain . . . hit a baseball . . . kissed a girl I was not married too . . . lit a candle when the lights went out in a storm . . .

Writing this wears him out and in the middle of the sentence he gets up and leaves the room. He stands at a window in the kitchen and gazes through it. Two crows are squatting in a river birch he planted with his daughters in the back yard more than forty years ago. The crows are squawking at each other, bobbing in the branches at the top of the tree, snapping their beaks at the sky. With a writer’s force of habit, he silently translates the conversation he hears them having. Crow to English. Human to crow.

Don’t look now but somebody’s staring at us from inside the house?

Where? Who?

I told you not to look.

Right.

I’m hungry. You hungry?

Yeah.

Both crows turn their heads toward the window as if he might be the meal they’re looking for. What’s truly haunting, though, is how the conversation he’s put into their beaks times out so perfectly with the crows finding him behind the glass. For a second, he imagines he’s controlling their thoughts and actions in the real world, in the same way he’s controlling mine in the world he’s created for me. He feels powerful and terrified all at the same time. Yes, playing God has always had its downside. For years it’s made him ponder what those beings he’s created would do to him if they had the chance, given what he puts them through, him being the One that gave them life in the first place.

Without realizing it, he starts tapping his foot on the floor. It brings the dog over to him, her truncated legs working double-time to propel her, her tail wagging. She’s been around for fifteen years but right now he can’t bring himself to comfort her in the way she’s so eagerly walked over to comfort him. Yes, indeed. He deserves whatever he’s got coming to him from all those creatures he’s lorded over. All the more so as the dog begins to yowl when he walks away and closes her out of the room.

Once more now we face each other, he and I. He’s moved me from the doctor’s office into my daughter’s kitchen where he’s sat me down at a table along with my daughter and her family, a pointed party hat on my head. It might as well be a dunce cap. The muscles in my cheeks and jaw are mostly slack and across my mouth I endure the drooling smile of an idiot. He’s not happy he’s had to do this to me. As if that’s some sort of consolation for either of us.

Months have passed since the previous scene in the doctor’s office—lapsed time he tossed off with a double space of empty lines—and now it just so happens to be my birthday (my last from the looks of it). On the table in front of me is a cake blazing with candles and at my side he’s got my granddaughter blowing at them because I can’t. Cheek-to-cheek we are, this girl and me, as if her having do this task for a dying man was not already enough pathos for a reader. And now this hack has everyone signing happy birthday to me, making sure to mention that I’m having a hard time recognizing the tune.

It’s in the writing of this last sentence that he stops cold. He’s begun to torture the both of us, and he knows it. It’s one thing to kill a man little-by-little, it’s another to murder a perfectly good story by feeding it clichés until it chokes on its own words.

Slowly at first and then with more speed, he backspaces over the last lines he’s written. I can feel the life he’s recently given me unraveling and let me tell you it’s not pleasant—my family unwound and made to vanish in mid-sentence, the flesh and blood pulled off my bones, and then my bones falling off the page as well. Who among us could watch a part of their life disappearing like this, bit-by-bit, without feeling pain, no matter how badly written that last chapter of our life had been?

And that’s when I see what he’s doing. It’s one of those ideas that begin with a thump of veracity in his chest before lighting up the circuits on the left side of his brain like fireflies among the trees. He knows what he wants from his story now. It won’t make any sense for me, but it makes perfect sense for him. It’s his story after all and this is how he wants it to end.

I reappear in an automobile which looks a lot like the one he drove until he had to stop driving it because he was having trouble remembering how to get where he was going. And now he has me in that car, my tumor temporarily forgotten about, or maybe gone all together. Either way, it’s a miracle that only a fiction writer could pull off.

Pushing the engine of this suburban hatchback to go faster than it’s ever gone, he’s got me speeding down a two-lane highway in the middle of who’s knows where—trees and roadside mailboxes blurring past—and I’m singing out loud to a Johnny Cash tune on a country western station. Reaching into my jacket pocket, he has me pull out a pack of cigarettes. Unfiltered Chesterfields no less, and when I light one up it’s a surprise for the both of us, let me tell you. Neither of us has smoked for more than thirty years. Though that’s not the real surprise. The real surprise is that when I catch sight of the flame from my lighter flashing in the rear-view mirror he has me raise my eyes to look at my face, and when I do it’s his eyes that are staring back at me.

Having ever so briefly reinforced the point that I am no more charge of this than anyone is ever in charge of anything, he turns his attention back to me. I’m getting high on nicotine, exhaling jets of smoke out of my nostrils, lighting another cigarette off the butt end of the first as I suck it down to my fingertips, the car under my feet overheating as I push it beyond its limit. You’d think this was reckless enough. But no, because now he has me reach under the seat and pull out a pint of bourbon. Cigarette in my teeth, I unscrew the cap, steering the car with my knees. I want to tell him to stop, that’s he’s going too far. But who am I to judge.

And then, from the back seat of the car, a loud, rubbery fart rips at the air.

It’s obnoxious and full-throttled and nearly human, except it isn’t. It’s the bulldog. He’s put the Goddamn dog in the car with me. I’m not really sure if it’s supposed to be his dog or my dog but whoever it belongs to, he has the animal’s head hanging out the back window, her jaws spread wide, that madcap bulldog tongue flapping like a banner in the wind. He writes in a look of release on the dog’s face that foreshadows dog heaven, as if little-by-little this animal is letting go of the old dog she was to be born again as a new dog with new tricks.

Pulling the strings inside me, he has me put my arm over the seat to get a better look at the dog, twisting my neck, reinvigorating an ancient pinch in the nerve. “That a girl,” he has me say, tears of pain in my eyes. “Who’s a good dog?”

The dog barks loudly, twice, as if two solid barks were enough to cover the unmistakable irony that he’s put me in his car with his bulldog farting all over the ending of my story. All he has to do now is change the pronoun. And so he does.

We drain the bottle of Bourbon, drop the driver’s side window and toss the empty onto the road where it explodes into shards along the double white line. Taking a last drag of the cigarette we’ve been smoking, we toss that out of window too. After that, drunk with a drunk’s overconfidence, we slap on the brakes, skidding into a grassy rest area at the side of the road. We listen to the engine heaving until out of mercy we turn it off along with the radio. Outside, a wind is blowing in from the east, whistling through the crevices it finds under the fenders and wheel wells of the car.

In the backseat, the dog looks out the window and spots what we’ve come for, the origin of the wind. It’s the lake, a hundred yards off, and she barks at the sight of it. We’ve been here many times before in our lives. It’s where we’ve been headed all along.

Exiting the car, we help the dog from the back seat to the ground, her old legs no longer able to make the jump. Stooping down we take off her collar, and then teetering away from her, we hang it in a maple tree where its silver studs and brass name tag catch the sunlight filtering through newly sprung leaves. Behind us the dog shakes and flaps her loose skin as if she’s just shed twenty pounds of weight and fifteen years of life.

We walk on, focused on each step, overcompensating for the liquor, the dog shuffling behind. About halfway to the lake we stop again and, making sure no one can see us, we take off our clothes. First go the shoes and then the socks and then the shirt and pants and underwear. Stepping out of our shorts, we catch sight of our penis and laugh until we have to stop to catch our breath. This shriveled stump between our legs couldn’t even rightly be called a penis any longer; the thought of how it used to inflate itself at will, its little head with an ego of its own, being the most laughable thing of all.

Fully naked and reaching the edge of the lake, we put our feet in the water. We’re so drunk we barely register the glacial temperature around our ankles and, forgetting that the dog is not also drunk, we call out for her to join us. She’s still a few feet behind but this is where she’s going to draw the line. It’s as if she knows how cold and dark and deep the water is and if she doesn’t know that, well, she does know that she can no longer swim. And so we stumble back to cradle her up in our arms and carry the warmth of her into the water with us.

Up to our knees now, the dog squirming against our chest, we look out over the water and, there, materializing on the surface of the lake, is our wife. She’s swimming parallel to the shore, her hands arcing toward the sky before disappearing under the surface, water dripping down her arms with each stroke. She’s young again and she’s wearing a red, one-piece bathing suit, her auburn hair streaming in her wake. Behind us we hear our daughters arguing on a blanket in the grass, the sound traveling across the years. They’re fighting over the sandwiches in a picnic basket and we lap at the sweetness of their voices.

Up to our neck in the water, the dog hyperventilating in the crook of our elbow, we begin to swim, kicking both legs, paddling with the dog. We want to reach back in time to rejoin our wife, to kiss her wet lips and share the sound of our children giggling on the shore. But the sun has gone down more quickly then we expected, its flames extinguished by the lake. Everything has suddenly gone dark and quiet and we can’t find our wife, can no longer hear our children. It seems that we’ve lost them for good, and that’s the moment we realize why we did what we did for them and what it was for. Sweet Jesus, we were put here to convince them this world is not a dream, forced to play that practical joke on them because how could they have gone on living if we had not.

Frantic, the dog kicks her legs against our chest, her claws piercing our skin to form a rosary of pricks. We try to hold onto her, but she manages to break free, not yet realizing this isn’t the freedom she had in mind. She howls, swallows water and then begins to sink, great bubbles of air rising from her jaw as she goes under. We grab for her, more out of instinct than out of desire, and then we give up and follow her down.

I never asked for any of this, but then again neither did he. I want to tell him to write us out of this particular ending. To put us back in our chair in the room he sat in for forty years, to give us just one more day’s work, one last chance to forget the names of our grandchildren or the street on which we live, to misplace objects and go on enduring the pain of loss that we said we could no longer endure. Even that I’d put up with if he would just rewind us back toward shore, put the dog back in the car and the car in reverse, sober us up and let us die a natural, if altogether baffling death. Unfortunately, the best he can do now is to write us into a new life. It’s the best any God can do.

I have become a catfish and so has he. His mouth is a gaping toothless oval and so is mine. He has foot-long whiskers that float backwards toward a shark grey body and morning to night he trolls the mud under black water feeding off the bottom, me inside him, him inside me. We are the same. We have the same cold stare, the same small brain, the same small expectations. In this moment, we remain as one.

Swimming toward the surface, we move in tighter and tighter circles, winding our prehistoric spine, waving farewell to the water with our tail as we jump into the air, the sun warming our back, our eyes reflexive, turning gauzy against the light. It seems like forever we are up there under the sky, but when we do fall it’s not into the water that we descend. It’s into that room in his house that he’s lived in for more than forty years.

Everything is quiet, but for the ticking of a clock, the panting of the bulldog on the other side of the door, the clicking of a last sentence and the pop of the final period. It’s then that I understand how he’s abandoned me.

I am to be left here alone, separated from him for the first time, endlessly swimming in a lake of his invention, living for eternity behind a scrim of his imagination. He, on the other hand, will get up from his chair and continue to walk on land, forgetting more and more of what made him who he was until he forgets it all and fades away.

I exist and he does not. I will go on living for as long as there are eyes to see, and he will not. There is a time for words and a time for sleep. No matter if any of this ever really happened or not.

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No te metas

As hard as she can, Griselda pinches the skin between her thumb and pointing finger. The pain is a distraction. Earlier today, her dad grabbed her heavy metal t-shirts, favorite black hoodie, and smelly socks and stuffed them inside a black suitcase. The suitcase now stands by the open front door, and Griselda can see her dad. He’s outside by the yellowing yard with his head tucked under the hood of a fender-dented Ford pickup. Griselda sits on the couch while her dad fidgets with Craftsman tools. He’s trying to get his truck started by working on the carburetor, which Griselda hopes he can’t fix.

Her mother left them eight months ago. Since then, her dad has gone weeks without bathing, days without eating.

After an hour of tinkering, he tries turning on the ignition. The engine flutters. It’s a false start, and Griselda is relieved. She breathes deeply, tilts her head back, and gazes at the sparkled popcorn ceiling. The music coming out of the truck’s speakers reminds her of when her dad, in exchange for a powerful sound system, put several crisp fifty-, twenty-, and ten-dollar bills in the palm of a vendor at the Roadium open-air swap-meet that had once been a drive-in theater.

Singing along to his music, Griselda is dismayed that she knows all the words to “No te metas con mi cucu.” She didn’t know she had that in her, and she hates herself because the song’s corny rhymes embarrass her. She’s sixteen, after all, and won’t admit that she likes the song, so she shakes her head as if the sudden movement will scare off the Spanish lyrics.

Her dad steps on the gas pedal, revving the engine. Griselda presses her lips together, tightening and rolling them into a thin line. The rumble of the motor intensifies, but soon, it peters out. Griselda relaxes. Her shoulders droop down, and her lips return to their normal, full shape, with an undefined Cupid’s bow. Getting off the couch, she closes the door, sticks a mixtape of Metallica and Iron Maiden songs into the home stereo system, and turns the dial to ten. The cassette is a gift from Sergio. He’s the scruffy-looking teen who wears a black Misfits t-shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. He’s the only boy in tenth grade that has a tattoo. On his left arm, there’s a black and grey skull, which looks more like a deformed mushroom. Griselda likes Sergio’s badly done tattoo mainly because she likes him.

The speakers throb with fast, angry, and loud sounds, vibrating the floor and walls surrounding Griselda. She bites her teeth and digs her nails into her palms. Once the truck gets repaired, Griselda knows her dad will come in, wearing his blue trucker hat, motor-oil-stained jeans, brown work boots, and smelling of cigarettes and liquor. Despite any outbursts from her, he’ll grab her suitcase, toss it in the rear of the pickup, and take her away. Seven days ago, he told Griselda he was moving back to Méjico, where things were simpler, but that he wasn’t going to take her with him. Griselda had felt her body, especially her chest, tighten.

The bottom tip of her nose is red, slightly swollen, and stings when touched. Yesterday, without her dad’s knowledge or permission, she took all the money he had out of his wallet. And with her best friend, Sylvia, encouraging her, Griselda got her septum and navel pierced. She also wanted to get her tongue and eyebrow pierced but couldn’t afford it.

Standing in front of the mirror, Griselda yanks off her green army boots, and slides out of her black jeans. She walks in her underwear and makes her way into the kitchen and grips the sharp knife her dad uses to cut his carne asada on Sundays. Griselda kneels to where her pants lie and starts stabbing and scraping. Her jeans become frayed, almost destroyed. Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” comes to a stop. Outside, the truck engine maintains its roar. It doesn’t stop. The edges of her eyes turn red. She drives the knife into the floor, leaves it sticking up, and pulls her pants to her waist.

Griselda goes to the bathroom and finds her father’s beard trimmer. She holds it for a few seconds and then begins to shave her head. Long, thick hairs clog the trimmer’s blade, and Griselda has to keep removing them to clean it. But even with the blade cleaned, the trimmer doesn’t always cut all the way through; instead, it pulls the hairs. Griselda likes how it feels and pushes the blade hard against her head, inflaming the skin.

Her father walks in and leans on the doorway. He lifts a beer that perspires little, wet beads and sips it. Grime blackens his hands and streaks his cheeks and forehead. He looks like a zombie, she thinks. After he glances at the messy floor and sink, he observes Griselda. She smirks. And he says, “Jesus, Gris, you really want to piss off your mother, don’t you?”

Griselda’s smirk disappears. She wipes her eyes, and over her mouth she smears the heavy-black lipstick she took from the Rite Aid on Redondo Beach Boulevard. Looking at herself in the mirror, she says, “No. Not really.”

“You missed a spot.” He reaches to touch her buzz cut, but Griselda moves, avoiding his hand. She takes a hard, wet-sounding sniff and places the trimmer over the sink’s countertop.

He shrugs his tired shoulders. “Orale. Vamonos ya. Your mother’s waiting,” he says.

When she stomps out of the bathroom, her shoulder digs into her father’s chest. It feels hollow to Griselda, and she tells him, “About time you got that piece of shit to work.” She carries the suitcase outside. It’s heavier than she’d expected, but she’s still able to toss it in the back of the pickup. Before her father jumps in and pulls the Ford away, Griselda ejects his Sonora Dinamita cassette out of the truck’s in-dash stereo and plays her mixtape instead because he hates esa musica. Stuffing his cassette into her pocket, she’s not too sure what she’ll do with it. As he sits, buckles up, and drives, Griselda’s forehead, covered with bits of hair, thumps the glass on the passenger side window and rests there. They pass houses, cars, and she stares at the white lines on the freeway. Picking up speed, the truck shakes and screeches, and the lines become a blur.

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My Abuela, the Puppet

I have been a fan of metaphor since I learned to read, first in English and then eventually in rusty, copper Spanish. This is not a metaphor. My grandma has become a puppet.

It would be a good metaphor if the circumstances were slightly different. Her body had started to change in the past few years and, though she stayed human, her physique lent itself to a description of her as a marionette. She had clunky, white orthopedic shoes that looked oversized and cartoonish when she took her small, concerted steps. Abuela’s back was permanently hunched over, appearing as if she were being suspended by invisible strings at the shoulders. She lost a lot of weight, and the lack of fat in her face combined with her wrinkled skin made her head look huge like a Muppet’s. But Abuela was still herself then, flesh and bones and dust.

Then she become a puppet and no one knew what to do about it. Papi wouldn’t admit it, but there were signs that her metamorphosis was coming, and it wasn’t just those dreadful orthopedic shoes.

For a long time, Abuela lived in an apartment by herself. Her relationship with my Abuelo had been another precious thing lost to migration, and she’d never bothered to date again. She had her children, who joined her in los Yunai Estais after she’d been cleaning houses, theaters, and embassies for nearly a decade, for nearly minimum wage. But, of course, Papi and his siblings had grown up and left Abuela in that musty-smelling apartment building.

We visited her one afternoon and couldn’t avoid the putrid smell that’d snuck into her home. The whole building smelt of old-person. In less kind words, the carpet and walls smelt of dying. But that morning Abuelita’s apartment did not smell just of dying, but already of death. In the fridge, there were rotten casseroles and the unquestionable stink of not-so-fresh queso fresco. Papi managed to save five slices from the loaf of bread, but everything else went into the trash.

Abuela claimed that she hadn’t smelt the food going bad. Her nose hardly worked anymore, she told us in an attempt to gain our pity. So, we went with her the the supermarket and bought a fridge full of groceries. Two weeks later, they sat in the fridge, largely untouched and mostly spoiled. My grandma had begun to lose weight, but she was still human.

Eventually, Mami convinced Papi to let Abuela move into our home in the suburbs. Abuela said they were being ridiculous, that she was fine in her apartment, that she was happy. But Mami was worried that she’d fall one day, and that no one would be there to help her. The weight loss also worried Mami.

Abuela had a large gut throughout my childhood, the kind that makes you wonder what would happen if you tipped her over and tried rolling her down the street. But by the time she moved into my old bedroom, her gut was gone. If you tipped her over, she’d plop onto the sidewalk like a plank of wood.

There’s a purse that Abuela loves. It’s a knock-off Louis Vuitton that she picked up in MacArthur park a year or so before the rotting fridge fiasco. When she became a puppet, a version of the bag was stitched to her side, though it was made of felt and with less details than the original. But the purse sticks to her side, even as she lays tossed on the ground when there’s no one to hold up the wooden operating cross.

Before she was a puppet, Abuela swung that purse around and hit Papi straight across the cheek, leaving him with neck pains he’d complain about for weeks. She was accusing him of stealing money from her purse. Papi assured her that, no, he hadn’t taken anything from her, but she continued. She remembered putting a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the small pocket of her purse, and now she couldn’t find them. Papi had stolen them, she yelled, the ungrateful son of his father and then she pulled back her flabby arm and took aim.

In his shock, Abuela made a run for it. She pushed past me, with a strength that her limp marionette arms no longer possess. That the woman who sang me lullabies about baby chicks and coyotes would lay her hands on me without any of the tenderness I was used to nearly brought me to tears. It left me immobile as she opened the front door and ran out into the rain-soaked neighborhood with her Louis Vuitton fake.

Mami and Papi got into the minivan and went out searching for her. They spotted her through a sprinkled windshield, waiting at the wrong bus stop. Her plan, my parents would tell me after I’d wiped the bags under my ears dry, was to ride the bus back to her apartment. She had forgotten the bus route to get there, though she’d ridden it often for nearly a decade. It’d slipped her mind that she no longer had a lease on that musty pink apartment.

The home we moved Abuela into after the 75-year-old runaway situation didn’t smell of dying. It was sterile, and the hallways of doors where hers stood was fenced off from the rest of the living facility. A brass gate separated those who could remember and those who couldn’t. A nurse would press a four-number code into a small keypad, and the door would open up to let us through.

Abuela lived in the section for people whose memories were turning into small wisps, ready to float away from their temples and into the clouds. Each of the tenants had their own room, but they’d take all their meals in a large, open-floor dining area. The nurses would go knock on Abuela’s door when it was dinner time and she hadn’t arrived to eat. Her mind was a lost cause, but there was no reason her body had to be as well.

Every visit gave us a clue that we ignored, opting for silence the way Papi had taught Mami and Mami had taught me. One day, Papi asked her how she used to make Christmas tamales. Being the man’s man that he is, he’d never stepped in the kitchen to actually make the dish. But he knew the steps well enough to know that his mother had forgotten them completely.

A professor had assigned an oral history project, so I’d decided to interview Abuela about the war and the way it had affected her migration. She began telling me the story, and the most graphic of details were sharp and clear. She recounted how an army soldier took a machete to a pregnant woman’s stomach because they feared that her baby was a communist. She told me that the guerilleros befriended her favorite cow and three days later murdered it for the meat.

When I prompted her to tell me her immigration story, she’d have to correct herself. Papi, who was sitting just few feet away, eventually led her along, reminding her that she’d gone to Puerto Rico before moving to Miami. He’d stayed in El Salvador for the first two year she’d been in San Juan, he told her, the hurt reverberating in his voice.

Soon she didn’t know our names. She called us all “mijo” or “mija.” Eventually, she opted to simply use “linda,” regardless of the gender of the person she was speaking to. Slowly, we became nearly strangers to us. My grandmother treated us the way she’d treat the mail man or a friend’s relative she was meeting for the first time. There was a sense of trust, but nothing more.

In the months before her metamorphosis, she often repeated a single phrase, over and over. He jaw falling unhinged, then rising again, and then down again. It wasn’t a coherent phrase either, but rather a string of muffled noise. Now, I’m realizing that maybe Abuela was speaking a clandestine language puppets speak when a ventriloquist isn’t pulling at their lips.

Though Abuela was human on all of those trips, I pretended that she wasn’t. Like the other people in this caged home for the forgetful, she’d lost her stories. I’d smile a hollow smile at them, tell Abuela that I loved her even though I knew she didn’t recognize me, and then slink away to a corner of the room.

When she became a puppet, my resentment for her grew. Papi and Mami refused to bury her. She’s not dead, they’d insist, pointing to the place where fish-wire strings met her joints. Mami grabbed my hand and pressed it against Abuela’s skin. The new texture of felt was kinder than the soggy, old leather Abuela’s skin used to feel like, but I still pulled my hand away quickly.

Abuela the Puppet hung in my parent’s home for years. Not wanting to be disrespectful, she watched over us from a hook in our living room–hovering as we watched TV, ate dinner, got into loud arguments. Abuela was the only one who saw when when I snuck a man into the house when I was visiting one Christmas break.

Most days she just hung there, but one weekend, when I was visiting in my few free days from graduate school, she began to sing. Her voice was stronger and clearer than it had been for years before her transformation.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo los corazones.”

It was my favorite song as a little girl, so I knew she was singing it just for me. My parents stared at me with a concerned look when I told them. When I tugged at Abuela’s strings and moved her mouth up and down my hands, trying to prove to my parents what I’d heard, she didn’t budge. My grandmother remained limp and unmoving. My father placed a wrinkled hand on my shoulder and told me that it might be a sign that I had that memory-denigrating termite Abuela suffered from for so long. It usually skipped a generation.

Mami and Papi died a year-and-a-half apart, leaving me to deal with my grandmother. I hated her. I hated her so much for taking so much space for so long, for forgetting my name, for making a fool of me with her lullaby. I hated her for the termites she’d left in my brain, and for all the pain she was going to put my children through. At church serves, a very seldom occurrence in those days, I’d prayed for death. God, diosito lindo, please don’t make me a puppet.

Online, I found a company that stored family members in Abuela’s condition indefinitely. They’d bought out an old lot of storage units and repurposed them to accommodate rows and rows of human-sized puppets. Most of the puppets were of people who’d formerly fled countries ravaged by wars funded in part by the United States, so when I dropped Abuela off they placed her in the unit marked CENTRAL AMERICA, with the other shrunken caramel grandmothers displaced from the isthmus. As the door to the storage unit closed, Abuela’s jaw twitched. No sound came out. The shell of a woman disappeared into the dark, silent once more.

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A Warning

The water edges closer, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. Nowhere she and her daughters can go.

Once at the very rear of the property, fenced in by sedges and cypress trees, it has risen past its own borders and laps at the ground only a few feet away from the back porch. Funny how the pond itself reminds her of her daughters, neither girl held anymore by the boundaries of childhood, of dollhouses and that insatiable little-girl-need to nurture families of stuffed animals and generations of digital pets, and, yes, occasionally, an actual baby doll with a permanent marker black eye. Now they too have risen, both girls taller than her, their curved bodies full, overflowing jeans that were once baggy, spilling out of bra cups that were once collapsed. It’s time they knew.

On this overcast day of no wind and no fog, the earth has slowed its breakneck spinning to a crawl. Inside the house, the girls are silent as usual. Lately it seems only their bodies belie their presence—the shuffle of bare feet, the hiss of hair and fabric. She calls them now, leads them outside, shows them the water.

“See?” She points. For the first time the water, usually cloudy and a green so dark that it’s a color without a name, is perfectly clear. They can all see it. Past the snails that are close to the shore, past the reedy legs of the wood stork, past the coral rocks and sandy beds of the bluegills, they can all see the dark, see the place where the bottom has given way. It is there that two eyes shimmer at the edge of darkness and rows of teeth as wide as trees, as sharp as razor grass, open and close slowly, and yet the surface of the water is undisturbed, still as death.

“This is here,” she tells them. “Even when the wind blows across the surface and makes glittering waves and swirling eddies and whips your hair across your face and rustles leaves so that all you hear is that seductive call to shhhhh. Even when the sky is bare of clouds, a blue so blue, it penetrates the murk, fools you into seeing some other color. Even when the water is so still and the sun is so bright, you can gaze down and see yourself and the sky together. Even when you are smiling down at your own pretty face and at your very own cloudless sky. Even then.”

She tells them, “Beware.” The girls nod solemnly, and they all go inside. But it’s much later, when the night has come and the winds returned and the earth has gone back to its delirious spin, that she hears them.

They are laughing, giggling, just as they once did and always seemed to do. And yet their laughter is different, and that difference stops her, hands suspended over the fish she has just fileted. She listens, her fingertips on the delicate feather of spine and ribs the knife has exposed.

“Now it’s my turn,” the younger of the two cries out. “You sit here, lie across the floor, and I’ll crawl to you.” And in a moment, there is a roar followed by a scream.

“I am caught, I am being pulled under, there’s no saving me.” The girls’ cries are filled not with terror or sadness but with ecstasy, pure delight.

She takes a deep breath, tries to calm down, tells herself there’s time before the water gets too close, before it sinks down into the earth, undermines the ground beneath them, swallows everything up in one satisfied gulp. But before she can stop herself, she is pounding on the door to the room the two girls share.

The girls go quiet, but she can’t help herself. She is shouting, telling them it’s much too late for screaming or laughing or playing of any sort, crying out that the time for all of that is over, and all that is left for them to do now is go to sleep, even though it is early still, even though she must still cook their dinner and watch them eat the fish she prepared, urging them with each bite to take care not to swallow any bones.

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Only Tourists Remember the Alamo

She doesn’t know why she gets into the car, but she knows why she’s alone. Jonas broke up with her in an email: On the things that matter, the things that really count, we don’t see eye-to-eye. He’d switched the font to Lucida Handwriting, blue, as if to soften the blow. She’d seen it coming. They’d argued about evolution at the foot of the Tower of the Americas. He pointed at a duck and asked in what universe does something whittle down to that?

One with a sense of humor, she said, but he didn’t laugh.

Darwin was racist, Juliana, he snapped. Darwin said terrible things about black people. Did they teach you that in AP Biology?

Did they teach you that at Jesus Camp? she’d retorted, but only when he’d begun to walk away. He couldn’t hear her over the children screaming in the dry fountain. San Antonio was in drought, like always, so the waterfalls modeled on Mayan temples held no water. Kids in slip-on sneakers raced from bottom to top and down again. She was sure their game would end in bloody mouths, broken teeth, but no one fell.

She knows why she boarded a southbound bus after school. She wanted to go downtown. Her bills were too wrinkled for the token machine, but the driver waved her through with a nod. There were no other students on the bus, not even after the Trinity stop, just a few unsmiling women who glared at the hem of her tartan kilt but wouldn’t meet her eyes. She sat by the window near the back, tucking her skirt beneath her legs so her thighs wouldn’t stick to the vinyl, and watched the sidewalks for someone she knew. Down the North St. Mary’s strip, where bars and clubs beckon the underage. Not yet dark, no one drinking. Day drunks stick to the River Walk. There she’d once witnessed a pink-faced man in a balloon hat relieve himself into the brown current on a Tuesday morning, that summer she served breakfast and lunch at an Italian restaurant where every dish was pre-prepared, microwaved.

This is why I keep you on breakfast, Julibaby, the manager had said, nudging her. There’s a lot more of those groserias at dinner.

A lot more tips, too, she’d considered saying, but she didn’t want him to think she was a complainer. She’d barely earned enough to pay for the tricolor tie he insisted she wear in the 100-degree heat.

She didn’t go downtown to get drunk. No: she is terrified of drunkenness, thinks of it as roving hands and burst capillaries, a sickness you choose. A disease of weak will, the way her mother speaks of it, vergüenza; they’re better off without her father. So Juliana doesn’t drink, not really. She’d tried. The girls said it would mellow her, but at a party with the Central Catholic boys she’d panicked after two Mike’s Hard Lemonades and called her mom to come pick her up.

I am out of control, she told herself as she waited in the front yard. I am out of control. It felt good to say it, even if she knew it wasn’t true.

I didn’t raise you like this, her mother said in the car. Sneaking around. If you need to sneak around you’re ashamed of your life and who are you then, Juli?

I’m the virgin who gets scared and calls her mom, she thought. I’m Shirley Temple. She giggled. Her mother stiffened behind the wheel.

She got off the bus at a downtown plaza, pushing against the current of tourists toward the river. She was numb, blind to the designer chocolate shops and trinket stands and smear-faced kids begging their parents for food and air conditioning. Sweaty strangers but still she’d seen them all before, people set on remembering the Alamo, people who buy t-shirts and ice cream and indulge a history that makes them feel good. She was fixed on something Jonas said the night of their first date: I’m so glad you’re not like everyone else. She kept herself from asking how, letting his words swell in the silence like confession. He didn’t try to touch her, not then. He waited in his car until she’d closed and locked the front door of her house before he drove away. He waited until she was safe.

Dusk hit. The bald cypress trees along the river were mobbed with grackles, their clipped wails piercing the tourists’ din. Not their song, Jonas said—the slick brown-black birds were just trying to echo the downtown crowds. Their real call is much quieter, he once explained, less desperate. They sound almost like songbirds on their lonesome. He was homeschooled; he used words like lonesome. He had a small chip in his right front tooth. He was in a band, played guitar. She wanted to lick the calluses on his fingers until they were soft.

She doesn’t know why she gets in the car, but she knows why she took a pledge of abstinence for True Love Waits: Jonas asked. He came to Incarnate Word High School during assembly with homemade pamphlets and a promise ring on his finger and before a dusty green chalkboard she said yes to God, along with a handful of freshmen and Hilda Rios, who would probably remain a virgin the rest of her life, pledge or no. He wrote his number on her pamphlet, right next to a clip art vision of a smiling bride.

Call me if you want to talk about the promise we’ve made, he smiled.

I’ll be a born-again virgin if I can chill with him, some girl snickered after he left homeroom.

True Love Waits, but she didn’t have to. He invited her to bible study at his church that same week, offering to pick her up at her two-bedroom house on one of the sadder streets in Alta Vista and drive her all the way out to 1604, where box churches beamed search lights into the sky. On the drive she asked if he was paid to recruit virgins. She’d rehearsed the line a few times at home, hoping it struck the bohemian evangelical chord just so.

No, he laughed. It’s more of a volunteer gig. My calling, I guess.

Then, quick like he knew her next question: You’re the first recruit I’ve ever asked out.

He introduced her to his friends at bible study, boys with names like Chad and Tucker who tucked button-downs into belted jeans. Is it Joo-lee-anna or Hoo-lee-anna? one of them asked, and she blushed and shrugged: I respond to everything. Jonas pronounced it wrong but she hadn’t wanted to correct him. Their names sounded better together his way, anyway.

When she left the river, mounting the limestone steps toward the street, a crush of men in chino shorts cheered from a hot pink barge behind her. They lifted their beer mugs in approval; someone screamed nice skirt.

The girls at Incarnate were jealous of her, for once. They noticed her compulsively checking her email in the library between classes. Did you fuck him yet? they asked, poking her waist, laughing. Does he keep his ring on when he feels you up?

No, she snapped, but he does make me wear a crown of thorns. The girls laughed harder, impressed.

He didn’t touch her, not at first. They were never alone in a room. They spent afternoons in youth group in deep, circular discussions about holy desire, how true love is anchored first in faith. They sometimes brushed arms, sitting close enough for her to memorize his smell: Tide detergent and chew. A month before they held hands, six weeks before he kissed her in a dark theater. And then it was an urgent tumbling, a humming thrill that didn’t stop when he stopped (and always, he stopped). She reasoned it was okay, the wanting, because it felt pure. Like something she was created to do. Her body’s own glorious mystery.

Why are you doing this to me? he asked one night his hands in her hair his mouth on her ear.

She expected to find men on Commerce Street, men who bared gold teeth at her as they drove past, slow. Jonas asked about these cars once, early in their courtship: what’s the deal with y’all’s lowriders mang? He used a Southside accent when he asked questions like these. He asked more often those nights his tongue had been inside her mouth. He never waited for her answer. He never asked why she didn’t introduce him to her mother, either. Her house was off limits, he seemed to understand. He might have been relieved.

She didn’t tell her mother about him. She kept her grades up, still went to mass, was home, always, before the end of her mom’s shift. No need for questions.

Why are you doing this to me? he asked again and again breathing into the hollow of her collarbone why won’t you stop me?

Because I don’t want to, she wanted to say. Because you don’t want me to.

Instead she’d kiss his forehead and eyelids and pray he felt it too, the longing that followed her for hours after they touched. In mass, as she pushed the papery wafer against the back of her teeth, she’d close her eyes and meditate on the patch of hair beneath his lower lip. She’d come to crave her own faith, its private, solemn ritual. At Jonas’ church everything was hands in the air, flashing lights, the devoted weeping as they sang.

They’d meant to explore Mission San Jose the night he confronted her about ducks and evolution. She’d thought the majestic limestone church would please Jonas—he was a Texas history buff, could recite Davy Crockett’s monologue from the John Wayne movie on request—but the grounds closed at five o’clock.

How very Catholic, he sniped. Like the Lord operates from nine to five.

That’s not fair. Every church has operating hours.

Worship me from one to three, he sang. After seven, there’s no heaven.

His voice was thin. He couldn’t get it to tremble the right way.

Clever, she said. She reached for his hand but he shoved it in his pocket.

I guess it’s easier to break the rules when you have a million of them, he said. If you think about it, it’s like the Pope expects you to fail. Like he’s setting you up for it.

She didn’t know what to say. In the dead pause she remembered something a Taylor or a Travis had said to Jonas after bible study: How’s that spicy mission work coming along? You still a sucker for lost causes?

On Commerce Street she has a clear view of the Tower, watches its glowing glass elevator ferry diners to the revolving restaurant at the top. She’s never been; only tourists see the city from that height. They sip margaritas made from cheap mix and try to spot the Alamo, where men died for Texas, where their favorite myth was born.

She waits. She carries no purse, no phone. So when a man whistles at her from a cherry-red Camaro that sparkles like candy, she climbs into his passenger seat knowing people won’t find her if this stranger doesn’t want them to. She isn’t scared. It has to be irrevocable, what comes next.

The man talked a big game when she was on the sidewalk, some nonsense about her schoolgirl skirt, but he’s quiet when she enters the plush interior of his coupe.

What are you doing? he asks.

You said you had something to teach me.

He looks all around the car, everywhere but her face. He’s breathing hard. A drop of sweat glides down his jawline.

You don’t belong here, baby girl.

How do you know?

You’re a good girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.

True, she says. But I’ve got to learn sometime.

That’s not how it works, he says, but he lets the car roll forward without pressing the gas.

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Orchidaceae

I—Orchidaceae

It was the way he tended to the orchids that let me know papi still held love inside him. The way he gently held thin branches between thumb and index finger, the way he cusped newly bloomed flowers in the palm of his hand, how he clipped slowly and with care, the fear of irreparable damage plain in his eyes. It’s the only thing he did with care anymore. Nothing else in life seemed to be permanent or irreparable.

II—Bulbophyllum

I tried not to let myself cry in front of him, a difficult task for one as young as I was. Children crave company when in misery. Wanting an audience while you cry seems to be something we just eventually outgrow. The few times I couldn’t help crying in his presence, his face went sharp, all lines and angles, and he said the same thing, “A llorar pa’l cuarto,” Go cry in your room. This must have been the seed which turned into the weeds that still hold me in solitude whenever I’m feeling blue.

At least the man practiced what he preached. There was a night during those days right after it happened in which I stumbled out of bed, my small bladder tight and bursting, only to hear muffled whimpers and moans coming from his room. What a sad, terrible sound that was.

III—Epidendrum

Papi’s garden was all colors, bright and blinding; all scents, flamboyant and proud; all life, all hope. Papi’s garden was everything he was not.

IV—Dendrobium

The house on my walk to school. The house, as papi and I referred to it. As if the “the” had some kind of accent mark. Thé house with the garden, with the Rotchschild’s orchids and the Saffron crocus. Papi always believed they had a Shenzhen Nongke orchid hidden in there somewhere, a plant so expensive he assured me multiple times was worth more than our house. He could not afford any of the plants in that garden because keeping me around wasn’t cheap. He looked at those flowers with longing. I looked at them with disdain.

V—Terrestrial Pulmonate Gastropod Molluscs or Papi’s Tiny Nemesis

It frightened me how easily he stepped on snails, how hard he stomped on them, how he swiveled on his heel from side to side, an act of dominance—unnecessary and cruel, seeing that you could crush a snail with the palm of your hand. Once, I suggested moving the snails, collecting and transferring them somewhere else, and in an attempt to sound cunning—hard, maybe—I even suggested transferring them to our neighbor’s backyard. Papi didn’t like our neighbor, he said the neighbor hugged his kids too much, that he was a little too nice, if you know what I mean. I never knew what he meant, but I would always nod silently, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be hugged too much. Surprisingly, he agreed to my plan, he said, “Vamos, tratémoslo,” Let’s try it out.

It was the hardest I’d ever worked in the garden. I wanted to collect and save as many snails as I could and as quickly as possible. I feared papi would change his mind. I plucked snails like grapes from the vine, one by one, delicately and efficiently. After about an hour or two my hands were caked in mud, my face brown—browner than usual—with dirt. I was proud of the haul. I felt like a hero.

If you are an adult, as I am now, you can see where this is all going, you—same as I—have experienced enough, seen enough in life to know that people don’t change just like that, that parents are sometimes harder than they need to be, even when they believe they mean well, when they believe they are teaching lessons.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

VI—Pleurothallis

Some days I wished I was a snail, able to disappear within myself at any moment. Papi would have hated knowing that.

VII—An orchid with no light will grow, but not bloom.

Maybe it was the snail thing, how I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily they cracked and popped beneath my feet, how the sound lingered in my head like a song of death. Maybe it was the fact that mom and I used to pick out snails from that very garden and race them.

I pulled those orchids from the ground like they were bad weeds. I pulled hard, with determination. Some of them I pulled using both hands, the way I had to pull on the lawnmower’s chord to get it started. I ruined the orchids, but only the orchids, because we both knew those were the ones my mother loved the most.

When I was done I ran straight to my room. I got in bed as I was, covered in dirt and mud, covered in sweat and an overwhelming pain my young body had never felt before. A llorar pa’l cuarto.

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The Void Witch

Erin knew that her only recourse was to lie. Her minimum-wage job usurped the term papers, extracurriculars, and the part-time gig scanning microfilm at her college library. It became the reason she woke up and then, later, didn’t sleep. It became a chemical gratification tethered to the smallest silver spiral in the tip cup, even as she found herself in the freezer hyperventilating over round egg patties, or rebuffing the advances of shift leaders, who cornered her against the donut display to talk about all the things their wives wouldn’t do.

Her housemates played golf and made bony, lowercase poems for course credit. They sprawled over their desks and whispered about the cock sizes of “townies,” very careful not to say black. And when Erin came home, fingers sticky with jelly and powdered sugar, they asked, why don’t you just quit?

The answer was a one-bedroom apartment in Albany where her mother worked as a freelance seamstress and hospice-care associate, and where her father, just a year before, left for a doctor’s appointment and never returned. The answer was a flirtation with the poverty line, unsubsidized student loans, and a reckless impulse to double major in two areas that were expensive exercises in vanity. Her housemates thought she was slinging crullers for club cash, but she hadn’t donned a pair of heels since junior year.

Her academic advisor called her into his office and steepled his fingers and she could see it on his face, all the plates she’d left, teetering on sagging sticks. They looked at the steady decline of her grades and apologized to each other–she, because she was one of eighty-four black students and naturally felt a responsibility to represent well the totality of her race, and he, because of a mutation of white guilt that made her personal failure his personal failure.

The college was semi-elite but a little insecure about itself, and so prone to manic email blasts about notable alumni–all of whom were white men in suspenders who made bank on conservative news condemning the scourge of black Santa.

To afford this college, and perhaps one day spoil its reputation on the strength of some minor feminist accomplishment, she cleaned the guts of the milk machine, brewed arabica until she couldn’t remove the smell from her hair, donned white gloves in the basement of the college library, and scanned old, flaked film. It was all for something. But in the middle, between the unread assigned books, the betrayal of every genus of alarm clock, and the slack bullshittery of class presentations on dopamine inhibitors and Lewis Carroll, a central part of her personality became negotiable.

That is, her long and sexless history of being a know-it-all, the sort of coy, homework-loving show-off that bummed out her own parents, who though terribly mismatched were united in their desire for a daughter who might go out at night, do some sweet, illegal thing, and bring home a boy they could hate.

So she was a smart girl. And it was on this assumption that she rationalized all failure elsewhere: the social awkwardness, the general unluckiness with boys. But it meant nothing when customers pulled knives or wrote online reviews about her stinginess with the hazelnut syrup. It meant nothing when her coworkers–locals from the damp hollows of Hyde Park—decided that she was bougie, the kind of black girl that comes from the suburbs with shiny, respectable cheeks.

It was easy to be fired because it was easy to be replaced, so she couldn’t just be sick. She couldn’t just want time off. A family member needed to die, and that family member was going to be her father. It was almost the truth. In her fevered sleep, her mother’s voice emerged, husky through a length of telephone wire. The voice said simply, your father is gone. And though her mother was pathologically calm, there was a note of panic in her voice that made Erin resolve to never forgive her father—so inconsiderate, he couldn’t skip town under the standard guise of going to get cigarettes. And now in her senior year, her father, a liar, was going to become the lie that would get her out of work.

“Comic-con,” she whispered to Alexander, a customer (medium cream, no sugar) and art school dropout who sold frosty, hydroponic weed. The first time he crashed her nightshift with his halfway smile, they were already in the middle of something. Out of his eyes circling her face as she frothed milk came a candidly transactional dynamic in which his five-dollar joe became a two thousand percent return on blueberry kush. And occasionally, her body beneath his, pliant and stoned. Initially, he spent a great deal of time trying to get her into his car, which was, she thought, the kind of car drug dealers should avoid—a monstrous, candy-painted, German exercise in masculine panic. But as she slid into a smooth, heated seat, she was charmed. By the crooked cigarette hanging incidentally from the corner of his mouth, by his haywire strawberry blond hair, nimble rolling fingers, and the almost ugly collection of consonants in his protracted, Slavic surname.

So she became a customer of her customer, and this was not an insignificant factor in the disorder of things. It was work, school, smoke, sleep. It was the sudden redaction of sleep, kind professors pulling her aside to talk about the necessary recycling of T-cells, about the sunken pupil bombing reasonable midterms with unreasonable, fever-dream scrawl.

Her mother, a rehabilitated addict, had given her a speech before her freshman year. It was all about the family history, the bright, narcotic predisposition, laced between the hemispheres of her brain. So when she got high she felt guilty. Her housemates ate the donuts she left for them at night and complained about the haze around her room. Alexander came over, rolled sticky satori in sweet grape papers, and fucked her with his shoes on.

It was Tuesday when she told him about comic-con and the lie she planned to tell to get out of work. There was a contortion of his face she thought she understood: the you fucking nerd of it all. The very palpable change in a cool person’s regard when you admit investment in the fictional, your otaku-ness becoming a sudden strain of leprosy. But they’d talked enough about video games for her to expose herself, and for him to show that he was unbothered, if not forgiving of her off-putting excitement about the old school magic of turn-based systems.

His reaction was in fact the beginning of the end of the strictly casual nature of their relationship. It happened so stealthily that she didn’t realize until he was pulling a sketchbook of unfinished drawings out of his backpack, or she was in his car on break, trying to calm down after some minor disobedience of the espresso machine. No doubt the seriousness between them was a bit of a buzzkill, but it could not be stopped. And now, after telling him about her master plan, he said, all too casually, that his mother had a very aggressive kind of lung cancer.

She was unprepared, caught between hollow words of condolence and their post-coital radioactivity, and so she said to him, wow. She said, that sucks. Ultimately, the choice of words was significantly less weird than the fact of it coming out like a question. It was a phonetic contagion that spread like wildfire throughout her sorority, a dubious, lingusitic beckiness that she’d absorbed from the campus eyebrow gods.

It was lucky he didn’t seem to be looking for any particular reaction, and as he slung on his jacket and gathered his keys, she got the feeling that it almost didn’t matter that she was there, that the objective of his confession was a thing of tongue and teeth and throat, merely an effort to see how the words hung in the air. Still, when he started avoiding her, she was secretly relieved.

She got to work on her costume. It was a cosmetic exercise that became an existential one. She came home with the tulle, spandex, and paint, and studied her naked body in the mirror. Despite the smoking and the donuts, she was somehow in the best shape of her life. In her teenage years she’d attended a handful of local cons and marveled at the diverse set of acned girls in Lycra, their colorful synthetic wigs, the unabashed cant of their hips. She’d envied their confidence, watched as they pouted and smiled for pictures, unconcerned about the girth of their thighs.

It was why Erin took the new-fangled, network-approved idea of geekdom so personally. It was why she simply could not abide the fake glasses of sexy, square-jawed men. The cachet of the outsider had evolved to include her dopey subset of pit-stained, rough-thumbed gamers and anime freaks. But it was wholly antiseptic, and the reason why was because of a complete oversight regarding the terrible, squalid shame of the thing.

There was no ghoul in a letterman jacket to mock her fanart or douse her in pig’s blood. There was simply a tacit understanding about the things you did not talk about if you wanted to be invited to parties. Fandom became an interior endeavor, and in her cowardice, she began to resent the outliers, the ballsy few with their acrid D&D cologne and keen topographical knowledge of Gotham City. But to be a girl meant your bonafides were always questionable.

And if you were a black girl, there was a daisyed hellscape between the unimaginative and the well-meaning, a cognitive dissonance too ingrained to parse, requiring both peacocking and frantic camouflage. It was a series of rooms in which she was unwelcome—musty multi-console gaming rooms at dinky local cons where fedoras turned in unison to appraise the errant antigen, put-upon homunculi offering unsolicited education about the finer details of canon, hoping to show her up as a fraud. The general feeling of having nowhere to relax into her native tongue and release all that uncool, earnest ooze. But when she looked at herself in the mirror in her skimpy, badly sewn cosplay, for the first time in her life, there was no shame. The shame she felt now was reserved for a more current indulgence in make-believe: the successful mimicry of extroversion.

It happened like this: She came to college wanting to be someone else, and via a series of forced club outings, compulsory one-night stands, and soulless extracurriculars, she’d become a shadow. She was in pursuit of what all black girls were supposed to be born with—a jovial, ironclad self-esteem, a sense of rhythm, and a witchy finesse with jojoba and coconut oils.

She was in pursuit of that inalienable right to say whether or not someone was, in fact, down. So she went out and shouted over the music at dull, drunk boys. She socialized with her classmates, who gazed into the middle distance instead of at her face, coming alive only to disparage their parents who dared buy them used cars and ask for help with Microsoft Word. She joined a sorority, the college paper, the student-run literary journal, and, for reasons she did not want to investigate, the college gospel choir. She fell in love with any negging techie who emerged with an axe to grind about the fineries of sub and dub. She travelled to lonely Hyde Park churches and sang wan renditions of “Amazing Grace” in exchange for deep pans of post-service ziti. She checked for missed calls from her father and found none. She mixed with her sorority sisters—a band of leathery tanning fiends whose most distinct characteristic was being proud of being from New Jersey—and learned the right vernacular to pass off her casual bitchiness as truth. She took an editor position at the literary journal, where she met black student #57, her co-editor—an owlish neurotic in green-colored contacts who practiced calligraphy, approached her at a party simply to declare that he preferred Asian women, and who then tried to sleep with her to embarrassing avail.

Over poems about birds, menstruation, and heavy-jowled trees, he apologized about not being able to get an erection. At a mixer with a fraternity, she met black student #73, a rich, deeply fine Black Republican who was himself physically excellent proof of their race having once been bred for fields, but who frequently fawned over the administration of the elder Bush. When they slept together, it was a battery of punishments: the iron heft of his body and smug, brutish use of his mass, and the ebb and flow of sympathy and disdain.

At times he seemed human enough to share that old inside joke of having pulled off the improbable trick of thriving in white space. But then he’d fasten his belt and suggest she chemically straighten her hair. And when she somehow became vice president of her sorority, vetting new girls’ scared renditions of the Greek alphabet like the dictator of some lawless, Mediterranean Sesame Street, she knew she wasn’t in on the joke either.

She was a fraud, loyal to no particular version of herself. So maybe this is why it was easy to march to the registrar and demand—in the unlikely event of her graduation—that her diploma reflect a revision of her hyphenated name. And on the day she received confirmation that she could remove her father’s name, Alexander reappeared at her dorm with carnations and a black eye.

Here, he said, shoving them into her arms. And there was homework and a shower she needed to take but he was already shrugging off his jacket, rolling a j, and licking the edges, and she knew all of her lines. There were things she could do without too much calculation—harmonize, turn a cartwheel on the grass, reach through a wall of smoke and hook herself onto a man. But sometimes it was overwhelming, and every uncool word clamored up her throat, earnest and wet. She was smart enough to press her teeth together. She’d never become wily enough to control the ugly spasms of her face.

Black student #73 liked to use mirrors. He liked to say, look at yourself. And she would look, hoping to find something powerful, the way women held mirrors under their skirts and found in those mouths a crass new vocabulary. But when she looked at the way ecstasy rearranged her face, she only knew that she never, ever wanted to see it again. So it felt like a cruel moment of telepathy when Alexander, with his pretty half sneer, asked her to stop making that face, and also that when she smoked, she was too tight.

“Okay,” she said, dismounting and looking for her clothes.

“Hey, you don’t have to be like that.”

“You always keep your shirt on when we fuck. And it’s weird. I’ve never said anything about it. But it’s weird.”

“Yeah well, you talk about cartoons like they’re real.”

“They’re real to me,” she replied, realizing too late that saying this out loud would only exacerbate her humiliation. Alex, sensitive to this miscalculation, seemed for a moment like he might try to diffuse the situation, but then he turned away and began to collect his things.

“I gave you that Alaskan Thunderfuck at a wild discount,” he said, and the invocation of the central currency between them suddenly did not feel casual. Erin understood that she was meant to feel demeaned, and that was reason enough to direct her criticism where she knew it would hurt.

“You should’ve given it to me for free. Don’t think I don’t notice the discrepancy between what you sell me and what we smoke when you come over. It barely gets me high.” She took a little pleasure in the short circuiting of his face, the silence in the air as he tried to accommodate this impossibility. Then he laughed, which scared her a little, not least because he was still fully erect. He took a deep breath and pulled on his pants, his shoes.

“You know you belong here, at this school. You’re one of them. You don’t think so, but you are.”

After spending so much time fretting about how she was going to tell her manager a believable lie, it was as simple as pulling him aside during the breakfast rush and saying that there’d been a car accident. She was almost insulted by his nonchalance, by the long, irritated sigh as he retrieved his pen and snatched the shift schedule from the wall. When she finished her shift, she threw her apron over her arm, went outside, and felt the sun on her face. It occurred to her that her father actually might be dead. It was odd—in her youth she had obsessed over the mortality of her parents. She called them incessantly when they left the house, bartered earnestly with God for their safe travels to work and the grocery store. To some extent, she still felt this panic about her mother, but about three months after her father left, the fear she kept for him went out like a light.

He was eighteen years older than her mother. When they met, her mother was slim and strung out, and he was an old sailor who’d already buried two wives. They weren’t in love, but then a daughter, then a marriage. She wanted her daughter to have the father that she’d been denied. She wanted her daughter to be able to trust men, to love them without her fists half-drawn. And for a while it worked. In fact, he was closer to his daughter than he was to his wife, so much so that on the day he left, her mother just sighed and said, “I mostly can’t believe he would do this to you.”

The morning of comic-con, Erin received a third urgent email from her academic advisor that she promptly ignored. She relished the opportunity to make a photogenic, labor-intensive breakfast. She washed her hair slowly, put on her face with a steady, serious hand—the slick primer, powder, and kohl. She rolled the fabric of her costume between her fingers and forgave its hot glue and crooked, sagging wings. She smoked a couple of joints, pulled on her wig, boots, and cardboard galactic gun. She boarded a city-bound bus, and when she arrived into the sea of Lycra and make-believe seething at the doors of the convention center, she was sure she was going to faint. It was pure and narcotic, the half-queasy feeling she usually got before a promising date or dreaded family engagement. A man in a Gundam suit hailed her out of the crowd, asked, “What are you?” And she was so happy to be asked that she didn’t notice his penis, hanging flaccid through a chink in his mechanical suit.

“I’m a void witch.” She spread her arms and spun, emboldened by all the theater around her. “From the White Dwarf Chronicles? Second to last boss after you get to through the water chamber. A supermassive black hole gathers mass and density and then it—” when he started to stroke himself, she allowed herself a moment of paralysis, and then simply turned and walked in the other direction. Nothing so ordinary was going to sour her mood.

When they opened the doors, she ran to the comic-book cages. The red carpet was already soiled with mustard, glitter, and unpopular swag-bag toys, all the off-brand blockbuster heroes, meticulously hardwired mechs, and harried, plain-clothes journalists suspended in a state of ecstatic media res. She hung around in the stacks and tracked with her own eyes the transition of superheroes from silly ’60s panties to sleek post-aughts body stockings, the dewey decimal stink of expensive vintage issues thickening her throat. She hit Artist’s Alley with wild delusions of grandeur regarding her personal budget, leapt into makeshift dressing rooms, shimmied out of her cosplay into professionally sewn steampunk petticoats, and left with a handful of mismatched clocks. She watched the professional cosplayers strut between walls of polymer toys. She admired large oils and acrylics that rendered hokey two-dimensional icons with burly realism, the uncanny valley spread out before her like an odd, vaguely sexual dream.

She haggled for stickers and expansive giclée prints, already imagining how she might arrange them on her walls at home. And there were people who really did want to know who she was, some who already knew, mommies and daddies with cat-eared tots, laughing and raising their cameras, unphased by her cleavage and bloodshot eyes. Of course, there was the underarm stench, the claustrophobic cattle drive to the speed dating and gaming rooms. And then there were the panels.

The chance to see all the gods of her fantasy worlds, writers and fine artists who worked crowds like standups, guzzling water between awkward technical gaffes. There were others who were clearly too introverted to be on stage, men and women who were precious and cold, so allergic to eye contact it was hard to imagine how they managed their fame. There were voice and screen actors who moved in and out of character so fluidly that she worried over fractures in the fantasy and closed her eyes against their vocal tricks. Most importantly, among the stars of the con was Erin’s childhood idol, Haru Takahashi.

It was the first time he’d ever appeared at a con. A somewhat reclusive man of forty-five, he was notoriously awkward with fans, rumored to have a thing for dollar-store licorice and old, erotic film. Per his colleagues, he was prone to fainting in his home studio and rupturing his vocal cords for the acrobatic demands of his job, which was to be the voice of TV’s most beloved monkey god.

The Monkey in the Moon was a raucous, intergalactic animated saga that had been on the air for fifteen years, frequently alienating its multi-generational fanbase by ignoring its own rules, casually killing off fan favorites, and going on long, corny digressions about interstellar transit law. But none of that mattered to Erin, who had watched every episode more than three times, who, when newly indoctrinated into the fandom at nine years old, spent afternoons writing crude fan scripts that her cousins dutifully performed for her Fisher-Price tape recorder.

And so it was on this basis that she set out to attend his panel, maneuver her way to the front, and figure out a way to convey silently what she wanted to scream. Only just as she went to find the appropriate line, she checked her phone and found a fourth manic email from her academic advisor—whose subject line read: Get Your Shit Together, Erin!

There was no choice but to read the backlog and confirm what on some level, she already knew. She was failing out. Erin shut herself in the bathroom, ripped off her wig and considered the glitter on the toilet seat. Sweat streamed from the wig cap and into her eyes, and when she jogged back to the panel, her thighs caught on each other. Too late, she realized she’d left her galactic gun on the hand dryer. That she was still high was almost a comfort, a way to rationalize why the news felt italicized, why the floor of the con suddenly felt hostile, fluorescent, and too smelly to bear. It didn’t help matters that her wig had taken to spinning around her head, resisting every attempt she made to straighten it, until she simply gave up and parted it where it chose to sit.

With seconds to spare, she tumbled into the panel room and spilled all of her clocks. Sheepishly, she gathered them into her arms, and marched to the front of the room. She sat in the dark until it was time, fanning herself, looking around at all the mortals, the moist disarray of speedsters, expository villains, and ersatz sidekicks taking video, feeding burritos through their masks. She zeroed in on Haru, noting the way he fiddled with his notes, pushed his long, silver-streaked hair away from his eyes, and then seemed to regret his sudden exposure to the lights. He appeared as solitary as she hoped. The most subdued of all his co-panelists, when he did choose to speak, it was in that careful, golden tenor, his clipped, sarcastic answers splintering the room. It occurred to her that everyone had come for him. And so when it was time, she rushed up and planted herself directly in his line of sight. But when they passed her the microphone, her heart rose into her throat and his face swam before her eyes.

There was a prickly susurrous rising in the dark room, a titter here or there that she couldn’t quite make out over the emergency in her chest. He seemed relaxed as ever, almost disinterested, but there was a slight smile, more wary than pleased. She cleared her throat, looked down at the clock she suddenly realized was cradled against her breast. “So obviously I know you can’t spoil which level of quartz the grand ape mined from the saturnalian mine. But I need you—can you see me? I need you to know that I can’t imagine my life without your voice. The voice of the monkey king. He’s living in fear of the moon and the Luminescent Boar and I’m such a fan, and I just feel really—” She paused, and without warning, her eyes began to run like organic peanut butter, at which point she apologized, handed the microphone to small Batman standing behind her, and promptly rushed out of the room. Outside the convention center, she noticed the man in the Gundam suit—who she only now realized was not attending comic-con, but was a cousin of one of those dubious Times Square Elmos—was still out front. She bought a pretzel just for napkins to use to dry her face.

She looked around and found two Harley Quinns sobbing by the garbage, a Spiderman smoothing out a large piece of cardboard, setting up a tip cup next to a stereo. When she felt her phone buzz, a smiley, eastern European New York tour briefly engulfed her, their eyes turned skyward. Without thinking, she accepted the call. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar. Then it was too familiar. When she’d imagined this moment, she was prepared. She was steely and degreed. Sometimes she imagined she might hang up. But there his voice was now, after a year.

“How is my little girl?” the voice said, and she wanted to laugh, to scream. Because of course it was all so much better in her mind. Of the course the fantasy was in reality as casual as this—a knotted synthetic wig in her fist, a drooping falsie on her cheek, as she summoned a breath and said,“Oh, I’ve never been better.”

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Caught

Your mama drops you off at five o’clock, rolls in with an extra-large suitcase full of clothing for all seasons, a blue balloon nightlight, a patchwork baby blanket, coloring books, picture books, an unopened box of crayons. On her arm dangles another bag with blue toothbrush, blue toothpaste, your special blue cup, the blue multivitamins you take before bed. And at her side, you—a round, far-gazed boy, one hand clutching the fabric of your mama’s jeans, the other gripped around the snout of a stuffed pig in a checkered waistcoat.

“Any problems,” your mama says, “just call.”

“Yes.” In her shadow, we both keep still while she frets and fidgets, takes out a notebook crowded with tightly coiled numbers. She was like this as a little girl too, your mama—my daughter. All fluttering hands and nervous glances. “I’ve made up your old bedroom,” I say. “Logan can sleep there.”

She tears a sheet from the notepad, folds and presses it to my chest. “There’s where you can reach me,” she says. “And that one’s Doreen, his regular sitter. And Mrs. Bogart; she’s got a spare key if there’s anything you need from the house.”

Ink seeps through the page, blackens my thumb and forefinger. “Don’t worry,” I say.

Your mama plucks you off her leg and guides your hand towards mine. She says, “I’ll pick him up Monday morning. Before preschool.”

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

For an instant, her face becomes pinched, punctured with tension before she breathes and nods. She kneels, cups the side of your head, and kisses you goodbye.

The tears begin after she drives away. A lost look, a panicked look, and then a wail that sounds like a ship taking its first voyage away from land. Water plunges past the hull, a huge exclamation, an oil-drum symphony between my ears. You pound a tiny fist on the window, twist backward in my arms. So, we go to your room—her old room—and I barricade the door on stiff-jointed knees.

Mama! Mama! Mama!

Shriek and shriek until you’re too tired and I can hold you again. There’s a little wind-up music box on the shelf—it plays “Singin’ in the Rain,” and you like that. Twist the handle round and round, sit sprawled on the old Parisian rug sniffling the last sobs away while I go downstairs to make peanut-butter banana crackers. Your mama used to eat those the way a magpie eats ladybirds.

—

Before I turn off the lights, before I leave the room, you reach across your bed—from beneath the cotton-wool blankets already kicked into a tempest—and say “Balloon.” I plug in the nightlight. Your eyes see further than mine, to something inside the blue Kool-Aid glow.

—

Almost dawn now, no orange on the horizon but at least a paling of the darkness. Stars begin to fade. Air rises off the ground cold and thick, like a glass of milk fresh out of the fridge on a summer afternoon.

And the front door groans open.

I can see you from the window, Logan. I can see you teeter down the front path and onto the deserted road, little feet almost too round to balance on—that stuffed pig under your arm better dressed for the cool morning than you.

I run.

I run and leave the front door wide. Feet naked like yours, over wet grass, past the post box with its tin flag rusted upright. I run fast and hard enough to see just as you dash across the neighbors’ lawn and behind their car.

“Logan!” I yell. And then “Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

You keep going, leave footprints in the begonias, footprints in the chrysanthemums. They’re shallow impressions, only the size of my palm. At the end of the yard, you squeeze between two loose fence boards, no wider than the stump of a cherry tree. “Logan!” I yell. The stuffed pig lies grinning, plush-and-tumble on the ground.

Run down a back alley, through another yard, and then another. The footprints this time are puppy-dog small, brown markings over a stranger’s driveway. They wobble towards an accidental patch of trees, a scraggly bunch of growth that the men with cement mixers and trucks of rubble forgot to chop down when they built this place forty years ago. Fallen branches murmur at my ankles, but I can see you now. I get closer and you get smaller, smaller—small enough to fit inside one of my winter galoshes.

“Logan!” I yell. Nearby, you laugh—because it’s all a game, cat and mouse, grandmother and grandchild—you laugh and dart between the brambles of a knee-high brown bush. Footprints span the length of my thumbnail. Thousands of inchworms hang from invisible threads, and I thrust them aside like tasseled bed curtains. Now the grass wavers where you weave through it; now it doesn’t because you’ve grown too small for even that. You laugh and laugh and laugh, and I follow that sound, follow it around twisted oak trunks, bowing evergreens, and skinny matchstick saplings. Mayflies scatter like wrong-way raindrops. Rooks chitter and fling themselves at the sky.

“Logan.” I don’t yell this time because laughter fills greenery. Somewhere close, overhead. “Logan.”

Rising light catches the trees in faint silhouette. I look up and there you are, caught in a spider’s web, caught in strands of leftover moonlight, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

—

In my hands, fall asleep again. I carry you back: out of the trees, across the alley, through the fence, over the lawn. You grow bigger as we go, filling one palm and then two, filling the crook of my elbow and then my arms. I ease you into bed, spread blankets smooth.

Tomorrow, when she comes to pick you up, your mother will look head-to-toe at you, at me. She’ll say, “Everything go alright?” And I’ll say “Yes alright. No need to worry.” Maybe you won’t say anything. Maybe you’ll laugh.

Steely spider threads tangle your hair. I pluck them free one-by-one, lay them on the pillow while you sleep until your face is crowned with silver.

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Puncture

Melissa’s mother was the first to spot Sonya in the ICU. She looked at Sonya like everyone back in Largo did, bouncing around her forehead and cheeks, connecting constellations instead of meeting her eyes. The older woman was more lined, fatter—a grandmother, for now—but still recognizable, standing guard outside the room. A whole room reserved for a baby the size of two cupped palms. Sonya remembered reading somewhere that they couldn’t rush new mothers out of the hospital, were legally required to let them stay, even for the stillborn.

Sonya’s skirt set stood out against the scrubs and denim-clad VA dwellers in the way she had always wanted to, but she felt garish amongst the multitude of reflective surfaces magnifying her face’s blistering peaks and craters. She tucked her pink nails into her palms.

“Sonya. I don’t know if you should have come,” Melissa’s mother said. “This is for family.”

Sonya privately agreed. She averted her eyes. There was a man in the hallway repeatedly ramming his wheelchair into the wall, humming to the tune of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

“I’m sorry.” Sonya shoved the terrible stuffed dog she had picked up for the baby into Melissa’s mother’s arms, wincing at its pinkness. “I’ll go.”

“Don’t be sorry,” a voice—sounding like sixteen, picking at garden salad in the lunchroom—said behind her as she turned to go, and boom, Sonya was back in high school. “You’re her Aunt Sonya. You should be here.”

—

Sonya heard the bad news about Melissa’s baby from her old high school’s secretary over a bin of Japanese sweet potatoes. The Whole Foods was new and out of place in Largo, both in budget and stature. Its skeleton loomed, folding over the Chicken Shack and DQ like some sort of brutalist God. She thought it would be safe to stop in, that no one she could have known from her childhood would be interested in green juices. She was wrong.

“Oh, honey, you’re home!”

The local high-school secretary, a bird-like woman with hair cut severely by the chin, dropped a pack of spiralized zucchini and pulled Sonya into an embrace. In the fluorescence of the vegetable section, her skin was cling wrap.

“I should have known,” she sniffed into Sonya’s collarbones. “You were always such a good friend to Melissa.”

Melissa was one of the neighborhood kids. Sonya had gone to school with her, grown up crawling under their desks during lockdown drills and pinning yellow ribbons to their spirit shirts. Melissa used to have two dogs and a brother in Iraq. Sonya was not in town to see Melissa. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Melissa for years.

Sonya was in town because her editor had sent her to do a piece on the opioid epidemic. Readers love a good tragedy, The Cincinnati Inquirer was rumored for a Pulitzer for its heroin article, and rural Florida provided a double whammy.

“Have you visited yet?” The secretary’s eyes were now leaking, and she attempted to wipe her dripping nose with her sleeve.

“No,” Sonya said, honestly. “I actually haven’t seen Melissa in . . .”

These encounters were always awful. She hated seeing people from home, hated the three-hour JetBlue flight, the drive to Largo in a rental car. Hated each cluster of mobile homes she passed, the lurch of pity upon seeing their dreadful names. Paradise Cove and Palm Valley and Dolphin’s Wave. The backs of the signs adorned with crude depictions of genitals and pentagrams and the number 666. The kids she grew up with: now strung-out cashiers and mothers and dealers- how she would have to fix her face so as to not to wear her pity.

She rubbed at her eyes. The secretary seemed to take this as an expression of grief, and reached out to touch her, managing to snag her silk blouse.

“I know, honey. It’s just so terrible. For it to happen to your best friend.”

Sonya had no idea what the woman was referring to, but she agreed. She called her mother while waiting in line with a pack of organic blueberries.

“Ma,” she asked, in place of a greeting. “What’s wrong with Melissa?”

—

Motherhood had softened Melissa’s already round figure, made her ruddier. She was wearing an XXL Tampa Bay Buccaneers shirt from their 2002 Superbowl win. Somewhere, Sonya had a matching shirt. It went down to Melissa’s knees, swallowing her baby weight.

“You’re her Aunt Sonya,” Melissa repeated, her voice very full. “We want you here.”

Sonya had no brothers or sisters. She knew she wasn’t an aunt now, would never be one—she was just a girl who had no one else to sit with in high school— so instead of speaking, she stepped into Melissa’s arms.

Over her shoulder, Sonya saw it, and tried not to scream.

Under an assortment of tubes and blankets, partially shielded by a monitor and surrounded by well-wishers who looked carefully at the floor, was a red and purple smear. A tube, running under the slits where nostrils go, was the only indication that it was breathing.

A man quickly blocked it from her view. She knew without looking at her hand that she had drawn blood.

“This her?” he asked.

Melissa released her.

“Sonya, Craig. My husband.”

Sonya once did a story on self-flagellation, reporting on a radical church that encouraged sanctioned beatings in preparation for adult baptisms. She had thought the practice to be barbaric—perverted even—the shivery way the pastor talked of pain, the way it overtook his face.

Craig, quite simply, looked mad. He looked like the radical Christians, had the jumpy sort of depravity in his eyes that made cops slow down at traffic stops.

“I’ve heard a lot about you. Glad you could come by to see Jay.”

Jay, Sonya realized, was the swaddled lump.

Sonya had no doubt that Craig didn’t want her there, or any of them. Craig wanted to be taking pictures of a pink lump of blankets for his terrible Facebook page. Craig wanted to take his weapon from base and execute them all into an open ditch. Craig wanted to be in a two-bedroom, reheating a Lean Cuisine he had let go cold while enraptured by the sight of his poor, scarred baby inhaling into his wife’s breasts.

—

Melissa wasn’t Sonya’s best friend. Melissa was pale, with a quick smile and cowhide hair that she got cut, short and boyish, at Fantastic Sam’s. She sat with her doughy legs spread and was always eager to show her overlapping teeth. In high school this outweighed her fantastic empathy, so no one spoke to her much.

No one spoke to Sonya either, because of her acne: rippling under her dark skin, cystic and mean. A teacher told her once in Geometry class, Have you tried putting toothpaste on it? in front of everyone, and only Melissa hadn’t laughed.

“That was wrong of her,” she had told Sonya seriously, after class.

“She’s a bitch. I can’t wait to get out of this shithole state.”

“She did something wrong.” The repetition sounded solemn, like a prayer.

Melissa had a strict sense of justice ingrained in her. She wouldn’t let Sonya copy her math homework and couldn’t wait to join the Navy. That’s what her family did.

“I want to be a Marine,” Melissa would smartly tell any adult who enquired.

“Better than selling Mitsubishis,” Sonya said, unsupportive. “Or meth.” These were the career prospects of many of their companions.

“Bad market for foreign cars,” Melissa mused, missing the point in her round-faced, agreeable way.

Melissa was soft while Sonya was angled, forgiving while Sonya taped a slice of deli ham in the locker of a boy who called her pizza face. The only thing they had in common was a love for rap. Melissa, sweet, pasty Melissa could drop bars. She had a collection of CDs living in the cab of her truck. Eminem and Dr. Dre and Wu Tang Clan and Jay-Z. They were a strict Pac family, didn’t own any Biggie. She knew every word on the Blueprint, could rap until the CD ejected. Sonya remembered that was the first time she admired Melissa for anything. Melissa kept them all in her truck’s glove box, along with her dad’s army knife, a birthday gift. For protection against perverts and coyotes, Melissa said seriously.

Their geometry teacher suffered from eight slashed tires that year, sixteen perfect puncture marks.

Melissa enlisted shortly after high school, and Sonya applied to Mizzou. There wasn’t really a need for each other, because Melissa had a new family and Sonya had an advice column, but every so often there would be a text or Facebook message, left to stagnate. A few years later, Sonya got a wedding announcement and a pregnancy announcement in the same stack of forwarded mail. That was just what you did in Largo.

Sonya couldn’t remember Melissa’s husband’s face, but knew he was also military. He had added Sonya on Facebook, where he inundated her timeline with racially-tinged articles from websites like “Truth for America,” all with headlines insisting that she should watch the liberal congressman get roasted by a ten-year-old boy-scout.

After the election, she blocked him, which was why she missed the Go Fund Me for their baby, and the message asking for her prayers.

—

“You should go pay your respects,” her mother had said, when Sonya returned with blueberries and unfounded guilt. “You’d be a comfort.”

Sonya’s mother belonged to the Advice Stitched on Pillows School of Thought. She wore her hair natural and made a big show of disapproving of Sonya’s silk press, reminded her how her oily hair would antagonize her skin. Wore her Walmart Greeter vest, McFlurry in one hand, always eager to spout the contents of a greeting card. She had loved earnest, ugly Melissa.

“I don’t know her anymore, Ma.”

“But she knows you, honey.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

Sonya scratched a scab. When she wasn’t writing or smoking, she was usually picking, collecting skin under her fingernails. Her mother would stare at the spots while she spoke to Sonya, would dart straight to her hands. Once, long ago, she had rubbed cayenne powder on them, in an attempt to stop Sonya from picking. It had sent her to the emergency room.

Her old bedroom was the front room of the trailer. It was originally a screened-in porch, but they had put up Plexiglas to mimic windows. You could hear coyotes at night.

She found her old cigar box, her hidey-hole, and smoked two ancient joints. Blew the smoke in the face of her mother’s terrier. Sonya refused to call it, to take it out, so that she wouldn’t have to say the name. She watched as the dog keeled over, tongue lolling, uncomfortably high.

The dog was called John, after Sonya’s father, who had left for another woman when Sonya was ten. Sonya’s mother, unfazed, went to the shelter, picked up the runt, named it after her ex-husband. Spent most of her days writing rambling letters to local judges and other semi-elected officials, demanding her husband pay his alimony.

Largo’s streets were laid out like an outstretched hand, mid-grasp. Sonya’s house rested on the tip of the pointer. The VA hospital sat on the thumb; to reach the drugstore you had to head toward the palm. She drove there, still baked, and found herself in the Hallmark aisle staring at the row of stuffed animals beseechingly, as if asking one to volunteer. She settled on the one with an unbearable face: a pink dog with cross eyes, one sewn lopsided, and drove to the hospital with it in her passenger seat, looking like a pitiful co-pilot.

—

Melissa spent the afternoon pointedly not looking at the mess of tubes, ignoring the padding of family members and stuffed animals, preferring to stare curiously at Sonya, as if she were the spectacle.

“How are you?” Melissa prodded, leading Sonya to a chair. Serene, like the pictures of Mary under the cross. Sonya stared at her, trying to detect fissures in her blankness. She found none.

“I’m so sorry, Melissa.”

“Working?”

Sonya wanted to hit her. Your baby, she wanted to scream. There’s something so wrong with your baby.

“Yeah. Can I get you a coffee or something?” Sonya asked wildly. “Let me bring you guys something. Craig?”

The baby mewled, and Craig recoiled as if she were a grease fire. There was a hitch in the beeping of the monitors, a collective wince.

“Can you get her something?” Melissa asked everyone and no one. “Something to make her sleep?”

Now, Sonya was beginning to understand better, beginning to crave a willow switch, the scarred backside. The self-flagellators had told her during the interview: The devil is inside you. He touched you, and they pointed at the scabs on her face. You need to beat him out.

“Little blue Jay,” Melissa’s mother said. Melissa jerked in response.

“Don’t call her that. That’s not her name. It’s Jay. Just Jay.”

Sonya raised her eyes from the tile, skipping over Jay-Just-Jay, and scanned the room.

No one knew but her that Melissa hadn’t named her baby after the bird. This made Sonya too guilty to breathe, too guilty to be inside herself. She went out into the hallway and everyone left her be: the nurses, the doctors, the men in wheelchairs with skin like candle wax.

—

It had happened before Sonya went to Mizzou. They had been hanging off Melissa’s bed. Melissa was longer, less round, the faintest hint of a tan on her chapped skin. Her hair just brushed the carpet. She hadn’t had to cut it yet. It must have been around the time she started Basic Training. Her last visit home. She turned to Sonya, grinned.

“I missed you,” she said. “I don’t get to hang out with any girls anymore.”

Sonya was struck by how eye contact was the same upside down as it was right-side up.

“Would you do me a favor?” Sonya said, remembering the tires. Melissa nodded.

“Punch me in the stomach.”

They were both quiet, then did that exchange girls can do with their eyes—Are you sure? How far? You weren’t safe?— all at once. Sonya dug her long, piano fingers into her hand, palms cut with thick fault lines.

“Please,” she said.

Melissa stood up, dismounted. Gravity had done this thing to her eyes that nighttime did to the neighbors’ lawns. She grabbed her car keys.

“Come on,” she said. Sonya followed.

Melissa handled the whole transaction. Filled in the papers. Swatted away Sonya’s hand when she offered to pay. Got her a diet Dr. Pepper, too.

In the aisle of the drugstore, Sonya washed it down. She wasn’t sure if this sort of thing allowed grieving, but Melissa put on Tupac on the way home, mouthing along— I was raised to be strong— and pretended Sonya was only hiccupping from the soda.

—

Sonya sat on the floor smelling her knees, thinking of the raw pink thing in the incubator, like a peeled crawfish. Somewhere in the wing, a self-playing piano started a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

“Honey?”

The nurse had deep-set smile lines down her face, making canals to her chin. Her scrubs strained around her thighs as she squatted next to Sonya. They didn’t get many sick babies at the VA; the nurse must be used to men who demanded final cigarettes and asked for a peek of her panties.

“Honey, you’re gonna want to go back in.”

“No,” Sonya said. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

She wiped herself with the hem of her shirt, all too aware of the bacteria she was spreading around her face, of the deep-rooted cysts stirring, hungry, in her cheeks.

The nurse stared at her, looked straight into her acne.

“The family is going to say goodbye.”

Sonya just shook her head, like a child. She had to leave. There was a chrome strip across from her that magnified the crustacean on her forehead, just above her eyebrow, that had been throbbing earlier in the day. While in the room, it must have erupted. She touched it, prepared for pus, and came away dry.

The nurse left, her sneakers chirping down the hallway. Someone else slid down next to her in the hallway. The Buccaneers jersey.

“Why are you here?” Melissa said.

I’m sorry I never stayed in touch. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer growing up. I’m sorry my face looks like this. I’m sorry your baby looks like that. I’m mostly sorry because your baby looks like that.

“You took me to the clinic,” she said instead. “Summer after high school.”

She slumped a little, against Sonya. It was the first time she saw Melissa’s posture waver all day, saw her at sixteen again, pictured her fat and smiling.

“She was premature.”

Sonya knew a little about premature babies, assumed that the skin hadn’t developed for Melissa’s. That it was born raw. Without waiting for a response, Melissa rolled up her sleeve to the crook of her elbow.

“Look,” Melissa said. Sonya started.

“Fucking look.”

Under the baby weight and the buttermilk complexion, she hadn’t caught it. But in cloying hallway light she saw it: skin clinging to little bruises in the crease of her arm, veins thick and sagging, like telephone wires.

“Jesus,” Sonya breathed. “Melissa.”

Sonya raised her nails to her face on impulse.

“Don’t pick,” Melissa said absently. “It’ll scar.”

It wasn’t Craig that looked like the Evangelicals; no, that must have been a reflection. A strip of chrome. It was Melissa who was mad; Melissa who was rabid. Pupils tight and shiny, like the exoskeleton of a palmetto bug.

“Are you . . . now? In the hospital?”

“We’re going to do it,” Melissa said, as if that were an explanation. “Say goodbye.”

How could she have missed it? The eyes, the skin, all wrong. Not a pregnancy glow—a curtain of sweat. Withdrawal, sickly sweet. And guilt, guilt, guilt—whole body shaking like Plexiglas in a storm.

“Will you come?”

Did she have a choice?

—

Melissa’s mother took photos of it that would surely be posted on Facebook, all pink and shiny. It made Sonya want to hurl. Once, one of her mother’s dog had dragged in a squirrel, a plump thing, split at the seams, spilling maggots. It reminded her of that.

The nurse was posed in the corner, pressed up against the wall. You could only focus either slightly right or left of the carnage, most choosing to keep their brimming eyes on their sneakers.

Sonya stared at Melissa, noticed a tremor, a hand shaking like a screen door. An unfocus in her yellowed eyes. Craig clutched at his wife, and she became the space between his fingers. The nurse asked her a question, soft, and she bowed like a young birch. Sonya could have sworn the baby cracked what would have been an eye, stared at Sonya through the equipment, through the tubes: picking her out.

Sonya had collided her bike with a taxicab. She had passed kidney stones, watched her mother pass kidney stones. She had been slapped during sex. She remembered the big pad they had given her in the clinic for residual bleeding, like a diaper, the way she cramped for days after. Had seen pictures of children with legs blown off and women, branded, for their last names. But nothing like Melissa’s mother, thumb on the record button, as the parents each kissed the bundle on what would have been its forehead.

The nurse hummed. The beeping ceased. Craig drew away. Melissa didn’t remove her lips, stood hunched for a long time, over the gore, over the tubes, over what would have been the nose.

Sonya once saw a man jump in front of a train, saw him blast into pink mist—had to sit in the shower afterward for hours. She wondered all day, Had it hurt?— yes. This was worse.

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Intervals

Matt builds makeshift bridges across creeks in the woods behind his house. He takes bush axes and handsaws to cut down small trees standing in the way of his new bike paths. Sometimes he brings lighter fluid and gas station cigarette lighters when he needs to kick the demolition up a notch. He can’t stand school, studying, or too much time indoors. He thought about playing football, but he’s not looking for any kind of afterschool prison-yard where a bunch of men his dad’s age bark orders and blow whistles all day, even if he does know a few kids on the team. He’s got a lot to do and can’t be bothered with others’ demands.

At night, Matt’s sister Mallory studies through her tears. She weeps into the wee small hours over her US History AP notes, memorizing details next to names like Henry Clay and Cotton Mather, and phrases like “The Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny.” She traces the names and phrases with an orange highlighter, their definitions in yellow. The ones she can’t remember after three tries, she underlines with a purple highlighter. She works at the bar in the kitchen, her books and notebooks spread everywhere, and all the lights on like no one in the house is trying to sleep. Sometimes when Matt wakes in the night, he witnesses this scene on his way to the bathroom. He never says a word to her, but pissing in his half-sleep, he makes a vow never to strive too hard for academic success. Why trade hard classes for even harder classes? She watches him as he silently walks back to his bedroom. Back in bed he notices the thin line of light under his closed bedroom door. He pities her.

One night after dinner, Matt plays Mega Man 2 in the kitchen while his parents watch Columbo in the living room. Mallory’s in her room practicing runs on her flute. Now that the marching band competitions are over, she’s learning a few solos in the hopes of making all-district band—an extracurricular ensemble students from all over the eastern half of the state audition to play in. It’s a classical piece, and the sixteenth-note run she practices is swift and complicated. As he blasts flying buzz saw blades at mechanized birds and gorillas, he shudders at the shrillness of the instrument. For fifteen minutes she’s played the run at a faltering tempo, stumbling over the notes, missing accidentals. In the next ten minutes she learns the fingerings and picks up momentum, hitting each note with clarity, until at last she’s found she can play it perfectly—perfect notes, perfect pitch, perfect timing, over and over, and when a mechanized rooster takes his last man, Matt curses and pounds his fist on the kitchen counter hard enough it resets his Nintendo. The screen blinks and the game’s opening animation begins anew. The game is lost.

He opens her bedroom door. “Can you shut the hell up? You’ve been playing that same piece of shit for hours.”

“I’m practicing for all-district.”

“Well, play something different; you’re making me crazy.” He slams her door and goes back to the kitchen.

“Matt,” he hears his mother say.

“Leave her be,” his father says.

He selects a new first boss, Crash Man, from the screen as his sister starts slowly playing a chromatic scale.

“Oh, God.”

—

Mallory drives them both to school. Sometimes she puts on her makeup in the rearview mirror while she drives. Matt insists on sitting in the back seat because it gets on her nerves. He likes to pretend she’s his chauffeur. When he does this, he attempts a British accent and pretend-reads an imaginary newspaper. He says things like “Tallyho!” and inquires about the current price of “petrol.” Some days he lies down in the back seat.

Near the end of the school year, Mallory has a bad week. She learns that even though she will be a junior marshal for graduation, her best friend Shannon will be head marshal because her GPA has surpassed Mallory’s by a few hundredths of a point. As head marshal, Shannon will be wearing the coveted red sash over her white dress rather than the standard navy blue. Yesterday the band director informed her that she did not make all-district band this year in spite of a near-flawless audition. To add to these calamities, she still doesn’t have plans for the prom. These all weigh heavily on her mind one morning as she applies eye shadow on the way to school. The roads are wet, and they are running late as usual. Matt is prostrate on the back seat, his face resting on a duck-print pillow he grabbed from the living room couch, when he feels his stomach fall with the screech and skid of tires on wet asphalt, followed by the jolting GHUZZS of the Honda’s front bumper and hood colliding with the back end of an older lady’s Buick LeSabre. The impact rolls Matt and his pillow harmlessly into the foot of the back seat. Everyone’s shaken, but nobody’s hurt. Busted radiator, burnt rubber, engine smoke, fire truck, sirens, strobes, police, license-registration, insurance, telephone numbers, classmates driving by, disappointed father, more tears, and all of it while standing in the rain.

But Matt’s a few years from learning how to console another human being, let alone his sister. He doesn’t even give her a hug there in the rain before the melee arrives, an unfortunate detail from this memory she’ll never forget. Sensitivity is the kind of thing that gets you punched in the arm in the hallways, roughhoused or head-locked outside the locker-rooms, verbally emasculated in the cafeteria, always in front of the prettiest girls, and always at the hands of the most abnormally tall or muscular boys.

Mallory exiles herself to her bedroom nightly. She doesn’t study quite as much. The prom feels less important, and being “good” at anything seems like a dream deferred. She no longer has a car. The world has become a quiet, claustrophobic, suffocating mess.

But time begins to heal her eleventh-grade wounds. Soon music comes from her bedroom again starting with her favorite classical pieces, but also a few jazz standards, ballads mostly. She again pours herself into precision, practicing scales, arpeggios, and new songs. As a result of her proficiency, the summer before her senior year, she’s progressed to section leader in the marching band. Before the start of band camp, the band instructor loans her a piccolo, a new flute half the size of her old one, an octave higher in range. This transition further renews her zeal for music, and she plays twice as much on the shrill new instrument.

Matt loses it.

One Saturday night his sister leaves with friends to go eat by-the-slice pizza at the food court. Matt rummages through her book-bag, through her closet, and under her bed for the piccolo case. He finds the case under a pile of clothes.

Matt hops on his bike, pedaling furiously eight, maybe ten miles. When he finds a road that looks desolate enough—no houses or anything too close, just woods—he stashes his bike in the ditch, walks through the forest a bit, and flings the case into the air as far as he can. He hears it bounce twice in the fallen leaves, and then silence.

There are many kinds of silence to a boy of fourteen: there’s the grim, caustic silence of scribbling sentences and filling of bubbles meant to measure the scope of his future; there’s the anguished silence of ever-smoldering swallowed words when fear of adult authority trumps his sense of justice; there’s the wakeful silence he feels, stirring and restless, groaning in his lengthening bones before he finally sleeps; and there’s the possessing, lonely silence when he first understands his actions are no longer those of the man he envisions himself becoming.

He remembers how pathetic she looked in the rain the day she totaled her car, her frizzy hair, her unfinished makeup streaking down her face. By the time I’m home, she’ll already know, he thinks, and he wonders if she’ll ever forgive him. He begins to walk back to his bicycle, but then, no, he turns in the direction he believes he threw the instrument. It’s a nearly moonless night and his only light, he recalls, is affixed to his bike. He kicks around leaves in the darkness hoping his shoe will land on the small case. Suddenly, one step finds him up to his knee in a hole a dead tree has left behind. It’s hopeless without a light.

He walks, one minute, two in the direction he believes his bike to be. He’s soon aware he’s walked longer now returning than upon arriving, but he can’t yet see the edge of the woods. His breathing quickens. He’s sweating now and close to panic. Get quiet and calm down, he thinks. He stands there in the woods, controlling his breath, trying to remain motionless so that even the leaves under his feet are quiet. Alone he waits, listening through the silence for anything at all. Eventually, he hears the faraway sound of a passing car. With a sigh of relief, he follows the memory of the sound out of the forest. He walks up and down the road a few times until he stumbles over his bicycle.

In his fear he’d momentarily forgotten the flute, but as he begins pumping the pedals homeward, knowing what lies ahead, the enormity of it all takes his wind. His arms tremble at steadying the handlebars.

She’ll forgive me for this, he thinks. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll come back. I’ll find it.

—

But Matt never finds the flute. His sister is more devastated than angry at first, and privately his parents contemplate corporal punishment before deciding he’s too old for a spanking. “He’s clearly upset,” his mother offers. His father agrees and decides waiting on a sentence is a nice phase-one for his punishment. Matt searches after church and every afternoon that week and the following weekend to no avail. After conferring with Mallory’s band director on the cost of the piccolo, Matt’s father arrives to a solution: Matt’s first job.

Matt makes minimum wage—almost five dollars an hour—at a small shop in town called Computer Connections. He knows little about computers beyond Oregon Trail, Solitaire, and control-alt-delete, but the proprietor finds busy work. At fourteen he can only do a couple hours on school days, and his father finds him unpaid labor in chores at home on the weekends, so by the time Matt’s earned enough to pay for the piccolo, Mallory, through hard work and strategic scheduling, satisfies the academic requirements of the state a semester early, and she moves away to start college in the new year.

On the day of the long-awaited recompense, he hands the money—to the tune of at least twelve decent Nintendo games—over to his father, who writes a check to the band director, who thanks him on behalf of the county school system and promptly deposits the check into his own personal account to help pay for an in-ground pool he plans to have installed in his backyard that summer. All those hours spent dusting and defragging customer computers, stocking recordable CDs, cables, and hardware, manning the register and phone, he felt sure settling his debt would feel better. However, in the coming years, when he recalls the whole business, Matt will always remember how hollow paying the debt felt in Mallory’s absence, how quiet those four months were without her music, and how back then he wondered if his sister kept someone else’s brother or sister up all night, studying and practicing in her dorm room.

“The Hidden Flute,” a companion story to this one, appears in 42.1 of the print Florida Review.
To find out what happens to the piccolo, order a subscription or copy of 42.1.

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Aftermath

The holy place is here, crouched before the fan of white plastic. Morning coolness stirs the tiny hairs on your legs, the ones you forgot to shave in the shower last night. You can stand the heat of your hot coffee right now, you can almost stand the heat of your memories and the bruises they show.

You have a tiny house in a West Coast town. The name matters only a little. Your waist is still a small one; your body remembers the shapes of love. Your body may. Your mind cannot.

Once you thought of fame.

The thought has not penetrated your fog for years now.

Four years? Five?

How do you count the aftermath? In friends forgotten because you cannot bear their happiness? In jobs lost, opportunities floundered? Maybe in towns you tried and failed, or in classes you can’t attend, or in pancakes—tiny, or as wide as your face, stacked like fluffy amber coins with pools of copper syrup melting into the cresting waves of butter.

You do not think of violation. You do not think of it but it thinks of you. At night, before the coolness comes like a blessing, it thinks of you.

So now you crouch with the joy of morning on your face. You wonder how much longer, then you forget to wonder.

The holy place is here.

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Ruins of Suburbia

The house sits among a sea of crabgrass and dandelions gone to seed. Weeds choke beds once lined with neat rows of colorful tulips and daisies. Scarecrow fingers reach through cracks in concrete walkways. Everything browns, dying in the broil of the valley. It is what happens when the timed sprinklers shut down and the lawnmowers stop, when the regular applications of fertilizer and pesticides end. When the people leave.

Aaron knows he has arrived without checking the address. These neighborhoods are homogenous: white stucco ranches with red clay roofs, small trimmed lawns watered at 6 a.m. daily, boxwood shrubs under bay windows. They are the same house, pressed from a mold, the address numbers a sole identifying characteristic. The empty ones stand out, scabs on an otherwise flawless complexion.

He comes for the discarded. The foreclosed. This one, a ranch-style house with a patch of wilted rosebushes in its front yard, sits on a cul-de-sac wound deep into the suburban maze. Aaron parks on the street and climbs out of his pickup truck, a clipboard in his left hand. A man watering shrubs in front of the house on the right approaches as Aaron walks toward the front door. The man clutches the dripping nozzle of a green vinyl hose at his right side.

“Isn’t anybody there,” the man says as Aaron approaches. “They were long gone before the bank put up the notice.”

“I’m aware,” Aaron says. He hands the man one of the cards he keeps on his clipboard. “I’m here to inspect the property. Mind if I ask a few questions?”

“Not at all.”

“How long have they been gone?”

“Six months. Nice people. Moving van just showed up one day.”

It always does, Aaron thinks. Nobody publicizes giving up the house. Some just can’t afford the payments, because they lost jobs or the rates on their mortgages ballooned. Others simply decide to walk away after years of watching the value of their homes plummet. Either way, it ends the same: the moving vans arrive and drive away. The only question is whether they wait for the foreclosure notice—for the Sheriff’s deputies to arrive and escort them from the property—or slink away before it is hammered to their doors.

The neighbor frowns. “Seems like more and more houses have those notices posted. It’s not good for the neighborhood.”

“I’d imagine not,” Aaron says. “Does it seem like anybody’s messed with the property? Anything unusual?”

“Nope.”

“Animals?”

“How do you mean?”

“Did they have any pets?”

The neighbor shakes his head. “No. No pets.”

Aaron thanks the man, turns and approaches the house. The front windows are covered by drapes. There is no lockbox on the door, meaning the locksmith hasn’t come. This isn’t a surprise. His employer, First Western Financial, is drowning in repossessed houses. There are usually problems coordinating all the contractors needed to handle the properties—the locksmiths and cleaners, haulers and handymen, painters and realtors.

Aaron’s job is to scout the homes, to inspect for property damage and itemize any furniture, appliances, or other debris left behind. He catalogues couches and televisions, washers and dryers, desks, tables and chairs. He finds bicycles, books, paintings, children’s toys and hundreds of other flotsam and jetsam that people see fit to leave behind. Today, inside the house on the cul-de-sac, there will likely be more to add to the list. He first needs to get in.

He tries the front door. Locked. The front windows and garage door do not budge. A tall wooden fence frames both sides of the house, blocking his view of the sides and rear. If there are any weak spots—a window left unlatched or a hidden key the owners forgot—they’ll be back there.

Aaron finds a gate along the fence on the left end of the house. He reaches over the top to dislodge the latch and peeks inside before moving further.

He knows to be cautious. Surprises lurk behind these fences.

The first window he tries after entering the yard is unlocked. He removes the screen and lifts himself in, stepping into an empty bedroom. Aaron finds nothing as he walks between rooms aside from empty picture hooks on the walls. There are vacuum marks in the carpet. Sometimes they clean, unable to leave behind an untidy home. Others abandon houses in shambles: holes in the walls, junk strewn across the floor and yard, stinking of cat urine and other odors. Aaron wonders whether these people live in such conditions or simply trash the place as a final insult toward the bank.

He’s always thankful for clean ones.

There is a dollhouse in a small pink bedroom. It is about five feet long and as tall as Aaron’s waist. Three levels of tiny white rooms sit below the house’s powder blue roof, each stripped as bare of furniture as the larger house in which it sits. He guesses it didn’t fit in the truck. He imagines a father kneeling next to a little girl, surrounded by boxes, both clearing the dollhouse of its contents. The father promises the girl they will come back for it or that he will build her a new one for her new bedroom.

He lifts the clipboard, clicks his pen. Writes dollhouse, large under Miscellaneous Items. Moves on to the garage.

—

One house is abandoned. Then another. Then two more, three, four. Each foreclosure devalues the neighborhood. Homeowners watch prices plummet, stare at the balances owed on their own mortgages, calculate how long it will take to break even. Whether it is worth paying anymore. Too many owe too much for properties that won’t fetch a fraction of what is needed to sell. Desperate sellers unload million-dollar homes for $500,000 or less. The panic spreads. The banks print more notices.

Before the crash, there is the boom. Stockton is a crumbling port in the middle of a wide, dry valley, sitting an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. The coast is flush with money from the Silicon Valley, but land is at a premium. People look inland, where acreage is available and housing inexpensive, to erect castles displaying their wealth. Builders descend upon the region, buying up land, drawing blueprints, planning subdivisions. Orchards and pastures disappear, paved over, covered with houses, houses, houses. Prices rise with every property sold. Home values double, triple. Owners borrow against this newfound wealth, put in pools, take vacations, buy luxury cars. Houses become investments, part of a portfolio.

Aaron works with granite, installing kitchen countertops in new and existing homes. Business is brisk. Once one owner has the stone installed, everyone in the neighborhood follows. The pitch is easy: Granite is nearly as strong as a diamond, is scratch- and stain-resistant, non-porous. Instant equity. It sells itself.

He buys a house and a new car. Goes on vacations. Gets married and has a child.

Then the economy turns. Construction ends. People stop buying. Aaron stays afloat as homeowners remodel their kitchens in desperate attempts to sell. Those calls then stop coming. Granite becomes a luxury most can no longer afford. The business folds.

He goes to work for First Western to pay the bills. In the evenings, he takes classes at the local community college in search of a new career. The books sit stacked on the passenger seat of his truck so he can study between jobs: Introductory Statistics, Accounting, Ancient Civilizations. It is the last text he can’t keep away from. He takes the course out of a fascination that began years earlier, during a day-trip to the Mayan ruins on a vacation to Mexico. It’s a great puzzle to him: Societies rise, erect spectacular cities, develop customs and innovations, only to disappear. There are those with which he is already familiar: The Aztecs and Incas, the Romans and Mesopotamians. But there are also dozens of others, like Clovis, Nabta Playa, the Minoans. He daydreams about visiting the remnants one day, when each paycheck isn’t necessary to keep the lights on at home.

His wife returns to work, waiting tables during lunch shifts at a local restaurant. Anna is still in uniform when he arrives home after today’s inspections, a large red stain spread across her white buttoned-down shirt. She has dark circles under her eyes. The gray shows beneath her blonde tied-back hair. It reminds him of his own age, the lines deepening on his face, his dark hair thinning, the way his knees ache in the morning.

“Have an accident?” he asks, pointing out the stain.

“Marinara. I was covered in spaghetti.”

“Nice.”

“I wore it all day.”

“Good for tips, right?”

Anna shakes her head, pulls out a small fold of cash. Forty-seven dollars. Aaron kisses her forehead, tells her to take a bath and relax, he’ll get ready for when Robert comes home from school. He doesn’t tell her about the dollhouse. She’ll want to take and sell it. It’s not stealing, she says. They’re not coming back for them. He knows she’s right, but can’t bring himself to do so.

It feels like going through the pockets of the dead.

Forty-seven dollars. He’ll have to pick up some inspections during the weekend. There are times when they fall behind, when the notices and phone calls begin. He worries the bank will take his house as well.

He enters the kitchen, pulls bread, mustard and lunchmeat from the refrigerator and begins making sandwiches—one for himself, one for his son. He cuts the crusts from Robert’s sandwich directly on the granite countertop. No need for a cutting board.

—

There is a passage in Aaron’s textbook about a culture dead five thousand years . The Cucuteni-Trypillian society’s settlements stretch across a wide expanse of Eastern Europe, with some growing as large as fifteen thousand people. They plant and harvest agriculture and raise livestock, make tools and pottery and clothing, hunt for food, and develop a religion. Yet every six or seven decades—once a lifetime?—these enormous villages are mysteriously burned to the ground and built new. Is it a sacrifice to the gods? A ritual of renewal? Why build a home only destroy it?

—

The empty houses are an invitation to the lost, the addicted, the fugitive and forgotten. They break windows and nest, stripping the house of fixtures and anything else that can be sold. Liquor bottles and beer cans litter the floors, burn marks from cigarettes and crack pipes in the carpets. Remnants of meth labs: two-liter bottles, plastic buckets, and long tubes, countless emptied packets of Sudafed tablets.

Sometimes people are there when Aaron arrives. The first time this happens is in an impoverished neighborhood in city’s southern end. He enters the house and finds two men—ghosts, emaciated, covered in scabs—hastily disassembling a makeshift lab. One of the men pulls a knife and sneers. Aaron turns and runs.

There are others: Drunks who ask for change or offer Aaron a beer when he enters the home. Taggers who cover every inch of wall space, inside and out, with graffiti. In one neighborhood, a kid who goes by the tag SURGE! hits every vacant house—at least two dozen.

He now calls the police whenever he’s suspicious about a house. He now carries pepper spray. But they still sneak up from time to time. One day he finds a thin young man sitting with his back against the wall in the living room of an empty duplex. The man is unconscious, chin resting against chest, a syringe and blackened spoon lying at his side. The paramedics say he’ll be fine as they cart him away on a gurney. Aaron writes it up on his clipboard, itemizes the paraphernalia left on the floor.

—

The Harappan civilization has as many as five million people living in its cities and villages in what today is South Asia. Its borders are filled with complex brick-and-mortar buildings, its web of streets equipped with sophisticated drains that carry waste from homes to sewage disposal areas. It is a center of agriculture and astronomy, commerce and craftsmanship, pioneering technology that remains in use today.

It is all abandoned, nearly one thousand years before the founding of Rome. Only the streets and buildings remain.

—

He is called to an older neighborhood east of downtown. Aaron’s notes say sheriff’s deputies removed the owner a week before in anticipation of a foreclosure auction. He approaches the lock box at the front door. It is clear that someone is living there when he enters. A blanket and pillow lie on the carpet in the front room, along with a small radio. Empty soup cans neatly line the kitchen countertop. Aaron pulls the pepper spray from his belt and quietly walks from room to room.

She is in a closet in the back bedroom, an old woman, the tips of her short gray curls barely reaching Aaron’s chest. She winces when he opens the door, eyes on the pepper spray. He puts it away, helps her out.

Her name is Mrs. White. The home is hers—was hers, until the previous week, when the bank changed the locks and her daughter took her to a retirement home. The story is common: her son encourages her to take a loan on the home’s rising value, telling her she is sitting on a goldmine. She loses it when his investments fail and can no longer keep up with payments.

“I told the people at the home I was visiting a friend,” she says.

She’s hidden there for five days.

Aaron calls Mrs. White’s daughter. He tells her he won’t call the police on the condition that her mother does not return. He cleans up evidence of her stay, omits it from his report. He wonders how long the bank will sit on the place, how little they’ll eventually take to unload it on some investor looking to flip for a profit.

Whether it could have more value to anyone but the woman who has to be evicted twice.

—

The city of Petra is carved into the sides of desert cliffs in what today is Jordan. Its buildings are etchings, like sandcastles turned on their sides: columns, arches, friezes and pediments mirroring the architecture of ancient Greece, coupled with statues of various gods and beasts. These masterpieces are facades for a network of ventilated, underground tunnels and chambers. It is a city that takes lifetimes to build.

It is a work of art, a labor of love. Its people are gone.

—

The house is in a neighborhood where vacancies are a virus. Everybody’s gone. Entire streets in foreclosure, each house empty and abandoned, real estate signs advertising “Bank Owned” properties posted on browning lawns. This is most common in the new neighborhoods, the ones where investors buy up blocks of homes as rentals, or the developer can’t get rid of the properties once the market crashes. Aaron’s surprised at the lack of vandalism as he drives down the street—usually the taggers and squatters quickly claim such areas.

This house is at the end of the block. It is the white stucco-red tile design, the old standby. It appears to have been empty for months. No lock box. Of course.

He climbs a graying wood fence. The first thing he sees is the doghouse, sitting next to the side of the house near the backyard. It is wood with a black shingle roof. The name Buster is posted above the front door.

The moment his feet touch the other side of the fence he smells the decay, hears the buzz of the flies. To his right, in the corner between the fence and the house, lies a dog. Long dead. Picked apart by scavengers, leaving only dark brown fur and bones behind. That and a black collar, still around its neck, attached to a long chain leading from the doghouse.

Aaron presumes the tag he sees dangling from the collar also says Buster.

He turns away, covers his mouth and nose. Then he notices. The fence. The claw marks. The blood. They cover nearly the entire inner surface of the fence, cascading down from as high as five feet off the ground, some cuts as deep as half an inch. Inside one of the gashes, Aaron sees a single black claw, torn from Buster’s paw. He imagines the dog lunging at the fence, flailing, trying to climb or knock it down until his paws grow raw and bloody. Trying to rejoin his family. The chain tensing behind him, yanking him back with each attempt at escape. The dog’s eventual surrender, curling up in a corner, thirsty, hungry. Alone.

Aaron sinks to the ground, sitting with his back along the fence opposite the house, his eyes on the curled figure before him. There are bowls near the doghouse, presumably for food and water, long empty and dry. He wonders how long the dog lasted, how long Buster survived once he lapped up the water in those bowls. Days. A week. Longer. Howling prayers to an abandoned neighborhood. Dying steps from a doghouse built and personalized just for him.

The owners likely moved someplace that did not allow dogs—an apartment, perhaps, or a relative’s house. Aaron wants to find them, deliver their dog’s corpse to their doorstep, a housewarming gift for their new hearth. He wants to chain them to this doghouse in the summer heat, leave them with nothing but a fast-evaporating bowl of water. He wants them to see what they’ve done.

He contacts First Western about tracking down the former owners, pressing charges for animal cruelty. He takes pictures to the sheriff’s office, gives them whatever information he has. He is assured: We will do what we can. He knows what little that means.

—

The Olmec in Mexico build communities around massive pyramids, courts, monuments, and statues. The Aksumites in Ethiopia coin money and erect stone obelisks that stretch toward the sky. The Anasazi develop an agricultural society in the southwestern United States, chiseling their own settlements into the region’s red clay cliffs.

Empty. Empty. Empty.

—

The trip to Mexico often replays in Aaron’s mind when he lies in bed or drives from house to house, like a home video on a loop: There is the dusty gray bus, rumbling along a cratered dirt road running inland from the coast. He and Anna are younger, only just married, not yet parents. They sit near the front, taking pictures out of a cloudy side window. Eventually, the great stone ruins of Chichen Itza come into view.

Aaron walks in the shadow of the ancient gray structures, awed at their size and craftsmanship. He wanders through the Great Ball Court, once a gathering place for Mayan athletes and spectators. He examines the Temple of the Warriors, a tiered pyramid surrounded by long rows of carved columns honoring the bravest of the civilization’s people. He inspects El Caracol, the domed stone observatory offering a view of the starry night sky.

At the center of the site sits El Castillo, a massive four-sided pyramid stretching nearly a hundred feet above the ground. Aaron climbs the tall stairs that run up all four sides like wide waterfalls. He turns at the peak and sits on the top step, staring out at the sunbaked ruins below. He imagines this place in its prime: A bustling square filled with cattle herders, traders, farmers with baskets of grain and produce. The shouts of merchants vying for customers and haggling over prices. People playing games, cheering, laughing. He wonders why they’ll leave, whether it is war, drought, famine, or disease that forces them to leave their kingdom behind.

He asks: Where did everyone go?

It is this that now gnaws at him. Each empty house reminds him of those Mayan ruins. The homes are abandoned, just like those of the Anasazi, and Harappa, and Petra and so many others. Left to crumble.

Aaron imagines the Mayan ruins beginning with one or two vacant houses. People watch neighbors go and follow, sparking an exodus, emptying more and more homes. Fewer stay to reap the harvest, bake bread, hunt game. Those who remain die off or fade away. Only the buildings survive.

Where did everyone go? Aaron can’t stop asking the question. The houses he inspects each day no longer have minivans in the driveway and bicycles on the front lawn. The smell of Sunday barbecues and fresh cut grass is gone. The people have vanished. He wonders if the houses will ever again be filled, if the foreclosures will continue until there is nobody left. One home becomes three, streets turn to blocks, blocks to communities. All of it empty. Landscape erodes, dust gathers, wildlife returns. Hundreds, thousands of years pass. Archaeologists delicately brush dirt from plastic big wheels, DVD players, picture frames. From giant, empty dollhouses. Tourists come with cameras, snapping photographs, buying T-shirts and key chains. Vacationing in the suburban ruins, the remnants of America.

Aaron pulls up to the first of seven houses on today’s schedule. The front door is locked. He approaches the fence, unlatches the gate and slips inside, unsure what he will find on the other side.

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Indiana, Tennessee

“You’re my stars,” she used to say. “My Indiana and Tennessee.”

She named us after the places we were born. Once, I asked her why she didn’t name us after more exotic places, like California, Kenya. I would have liked to be named California—then when people said my name they’d think of hot sand between their toes and palm trees shimmering in the heat. They could call me Cali for short. But my mom said she named us the way she did because she wanted us to remember our roots.

“You’re a mountain girl, Indi,” she said, “And don’t you forget it.” As far as I knew, there were no mountains in Indiana, but I didn’t bother to mention it. It’s not like I remember Indiana. We moved to California soon after I was born, because my mom wanted to “try her hand in the music biz out West.” But I don’t really remember California, either, at least not the parts I want to remember, like the beach. I remember this blue couch we had in our apartment that had bed bugs. They covered me with so many bites that my mom thought I had chicken pox. I got chicken pox, too, but that was later.

When I was still small, some music producer told my mom her voice would be perfect for country music, so we hightailed it back in the direction we’d come from, but we stopped in Texas for a few weeks that turned into a few years. Some of my first real memories are of Texas, of the high electric whine of the cicadas and the way our porch sloped down to the right.

In Texas, it was just the two of us. Mom had a gig performing at this little bar every night except Friday and Saturday. Because there was no one else to look after me, I went along. Some nights I slept in the car, but some nights I sat on a stool just behind the stage, smelling the old cigarette smoke that had gotten trapped in the curtains and watching Mom. I remember her wearing a red sequined dress and sandals that had bows on the straps. I’m sure she didn’t always wear this outfit, but in my memory it’s the only one she ever wears. She’s singing “Ring of Fire,” my favorite song, making her voice go all deep like Johnny Cash’s because she knows that, behind the curtains, I’m laughing quietly into my small fist.

We left Texas after Mom got into a fight with the manager of the bar. He said she was late to work too much, and she said she didn’t know why the hell she was wasting her time in that Podunk town anyways when she should be making it big in Nashville. I loved that word, Podunk. I said it all the way to Nashville, every time we hit a pothole in the road. “Po-dunk, Po-dunk, Po-dunk,” I said, and Mom laughed and laughed. I later learned from a library book that the word “Podunk” was originally the name of an Algonquin tribe that lived in Connecticut. Like just about everything else, we took it from the Native Americans and made it our own. Typical. I told Mom this fact when I read it, and she said “Hmm, interesting,” in a way that told me she wasn’t listening.

When we got to Nashville, two things happened: one, I got really good at telling time, and I set our kitchen clock an hour early so Mom wouldn’t be late to work. Two—well, you guessed it. Tennessee was born. I was six by that point. Mom complained a lot when she was pregnant with him that he was preventing her singer-songwriter career getting off the ground, but when he was born, we were both equally enthralled with him. When Ten was awake, he was red-faced and squalling most of the time, but when he slept, he looked like an angel. Mom and I used to both stand over his crib and watch him sleep, saying things like “Look at his tiny nails” (me) and “Do you think he has dreams yet?” (Mom).

Ten’s dad was around for a while, before he wound up in jail for the first time. Mom later told me incredulously that she really did, yes, she really had, believed that he made all his money selling handmade ukuleles, but I’m sure she must have known he was selling drugs. After he went to prison, Mom stopped using his given name and started calling him Sonofabitch Lee. At least Sonofabitch was a real person, though, a person I had met and known for a short while before Ten was born. I remember his mustache and the snake tattoo coiled around his lower right arm. That was more than I could say of my own father. But on the other hand, at least I knew that my own father didn’t come looking for me because he didn’t know I existed. That was better than Sonofabitch, who didn’t seem to care at all about Ten because he never came to visit even when he wasn’t in prison, and he never paid his child support payments on time, and even when he did pay them it was probably with the money from stolen car radios or something.

In Nashville, Mom got another job at a bar because she said it would help her connect with music business types. She also got to sing at the open mic nights every Friday, which she said was “a good way to get exposure.” Mostly, Mom’s job meant that she stayed out late at night and slept most of the day while we were at school. This in turn meant that I was in charge of getting us up and fed and out the door in the mornings, which meant we were almost always late to school. We brought home stacks of pink slips, piled them on the kitchen counter. Mom didn’t care, though. She sat on the couch in her pajamas, strumming a ukulele. She said, “Listen, you two. School is just a way to brainwash you and keep you out of trouble during the day. The public school system wrings the creativity right out of kids like you! If I didn’t have to work so blasted much, I’d homeschool you and y’all could finally learn three-part harmony.” We lamented this right along with her. Like a lot of Mom’s plans, it seemed really great and also far out of reach.

This one time when I was ten or twelve, Mom came home late from her shift at the bar and wedged herself next to me in bed, waking me up. I rolled over and mumbled, “What?”

She leaned in and kissed me on the forehead and I said, “You smell like beer,” and she said, “That’s what happens when you work in a bar,” and I said, “No, your breath smells like beer.”

“Scrunch over, Indi,” she said. “My bed is lonely tonight.” I moved over, but I rolled to face the wall. After she fell asleep with one arm draped over my back, I stayed awake glaring at the wall. I have to remind myself, now, that she didn’t always come home with beer on her breath, because that one memory stuck so insistently.

The year he was six, Ten decided he really wanted a dog. I mean, really wanted one. Of course, we weren’t allowed to have pets in our apartment. He kept checking out this book on dog breeds from the public library, and he’d lie on the dirt-colored carpet in the living room and study the big color pictures, debating aloud the advantages and disadvantages of various breeds, as if the only reason we couldn’t get a dog was because he couldn’t decide which breed he wanted. He’d spend hours sketching, mostly Briards, the breed he loved best. They’re these enormous French dogs that look like a cross between a German shepherd and an Afghan hound.

Mom would lean over the table, curlers still in her hair, and say, “Wow, Ten-nes-see! Amazing!” She didn’t ask if he had any homework. Not like she could have helped him with it. She was a terrible speller, and anytime she spelled his name she had to say aloud, “Two n’s, two s’s, one-two-three-four e’s. Tennessee.” I was the one who helped with spelling and fractions and the state capitals of Louisiana and Arkansas. I was the one who made mac and cheese or tuna salad for dinner, because Mom left for work right around dinnertime.

Anyway, instead of a dog, Ten had this red rubber frog that he treated like a real, alive pet. He called her Strawberry, because we figured out from another library book that she was probably a strawberry dart frog. She had black spots on her back, and in order to make her look more realistic, Ten colored her legs with black Sharpie. We read in the book that some of these frogs have what’s called a “blue jean color morph,” which means that their legs are blue instead of black. But we didn’t have a blue Sharpie, so Strawberry wore black pants always, like Johnny Cash. Strawberry fit perfectly in Ten’s palm or in the pocket of his jeans. She went to school with him every day, and no one knew about it. In the evenings, he fed her baby carrots, because Mom had banned him from bringing ants into the apartment. Strawberry swam in the tub when he took a bath. She slept on his pillow next to his head, although she usually fell off during the night, and then we had to frantically search the sheets for her in the mornings.

I worried that what Ten needed was not a dog, or a frog, but a friend. Neither of us hung out much with kids from school. Parents weren’t too keen on letting their children come over when there were no adults in the apartment, which was often the case. Sometimes Ten went to play at other kids’ houses, but I didn’t hang out with people my age because I was always watching Ten. I didn’t really mind. Most of the time it felt like a relief to be able to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I have to watch my brother.” Watching Ten meant playing hours of Monopoly with our own made-up rules (Strawberry guarded the jail, and you had to pay her to get past, and we added liberally to the pile of free parking money, like whenever anyone rolled a six or a three). It meant reading aloud Peter Pan, doing a voice for Hook that always made Ten laugh. It meant dragging the sandbag weight of his body off the couch and into his room when he fell asleep, so he wouldn’t be woken up when Mom stumbled in late and turned all the lights on.

Of course, we fought sometimes, and of course sometimes I resented him. Sometimes he got in the way, like the summer I was fourteen, when this girl in my class, Maggie, got a job at a retro drive-in movie theater. I desperately wanted to work there with her, to carry the trays of popcorn and wear roller skates and these cute short dresses with frilly aprons attached. But Mom said I couldn’t. I had to watch Ten.

Ten also got in the way the year I turned sixteen, when I fell in love with a boy named Dallas Leland. The infatuation began, of course, with the fact that he, too, was named after a place, and a place I’d actually been, at that. But I wasn’t the only one fascinated with him. Dallas Leland was one of those people who got popular in high school not by any particular effort or because he had any particular charm. People were drawn to him for two reasons: first, his spectacular hair, and second, the fact that he didn’t talk. I mean never talked. He sat right in the front row of our U.S. history class and never once raised his hand. None of the rest of us could imagine being that bold, so we spent more time watching him than watching the teacher, Mr. Francis. We wanted to see what Dallas Leland would do if Mr. Francis got the guts to call on him. That, and we loved looking at Dallas’s hair, the red-gold color of it, and the way it swooped out from a point toward the middle of his skull, just a little left of dead center. His hair was the color of sunlight, and if Dallas’s head had been the sun, I would have willingly blinded myself to look at it every fifth period. Luckily, I didn’t have to pay much attention in that class. Ten was learning a lot of the same things in fourth-grade history, so I knew everything I needed to know from studying with him.

Our final project that spring was to be done in pairs. We were to write the story of an American tragedy from two perspectives. The project instructions didn’t really say “tragedy.” I added that part. The instructions said “significant and controversial event.” But events that are controversial are always a tragedy for somebody, I think.

In the interest of fairness, Mr. Francis had us write our names on slips of paper and drop them into Eric Poleski’s cowboy hat. Then Eric, who in cowboy boots was a solid five-foot-five, swaggered around the classroom and let us pluck the pieces of paper out of his hat. While I waited for my turn, I sat with my hands wedged between my legs, all eight of my non-thumb fingers twisted around each other in pairs for luck. Apparently, it worked. When Eric held that hat out to me, I snatched up the piece of paper with a D on it scratched in blue ink. Dallas in messy boy handwriting shone up at me from the crumpled sheet. I looked across at him in triumph. He was looking out the window, apparently uninterested in the project proceedings. He probably had more important things to think about. I thought he must be writing a novel in his head or coming up with the next equivalent of the Theory of Relativity. He was glorious. He was going to be mine.

After school, Dallas stood at the center of a group of people, all of whom were always talking. Dallas didn’t talk. He smoked. The chances of getting him alone were slim to none, so I approached this group, clinging to the straps of my backpack. I can see myself now, my hair falling out of my braid, my shins spattered with bruises in shades from purple to green from playing with Ten, not realizing I was breaking every social rule there was to break by approaching him in this way. What did I know of social rules? My life took place outside of them.

The group parted as I approached, standing aside to look at me. A couple of the boys hid smirks behind their hands, and in my presence the girls grew interested in pulling at the ends of their hair or adjusting the pleats of their cheerleading skirts. I saw all this. I realized what it meant. But it was too late to let it deter me.

“Hi, Dallas,” I said. He looked at me through a cloud of smoke.

“We should talk about a time to work on our history project,” I said.

“Yeah, Dallas,” said one of the boys. “Our history project.”

I held my ground; I didn’t blush. My heart was clattering around, ricocheting off my ribs like a bowling ball off bumpers, but they couldn’t see that.

Dallas nodded. He let his cigarette fall to the ground and smashed it with the toe of his shoe. He walked a little way away from the rest of the group. I was so surprised by this that it took me a moment to follow. I could hear their murmurings behind me, not the words themselves, but the hostile, jealous tone of them.

We stood facing each other under a tree. I realized I’d never faced Dallas before. He had a tall, reedy body that drooped forward a little. His eyes were brown with flecks of gold in them. They were a little unnerving in their intensity. I dropped my gaze to the ground.

“So,” I said to the grass, “Maybe we should go to the library after school one day?” I thought of the library, sadly, because I knew that Ten would have to come along, and the library was a place he could stay occupied for hours. Dallas might not even know Ten was there with me. Dallas and I could work side by side, leaning over the same book, reading about the Cherokees and the Trail of Tears, breathing the same air, until Dallas had fallen in love with me (it seemed to me that simple). Then I could retrieve Ten.

I waited for Dallas to say something. What would his voice sound like? For a moment I thought, Is he actually mute?

“Hate the library,” he said finally. His voice sounded like any other voice, like a regular boy’s voice. “How ’bout by the river? Over by the bridge? Saturday afternoon?”

“Oh, umm, okay,” I said. “I’ll check some books out.”

I wanted him to say, “Don’t bring the books. It’s a date.” But he didn’t say anything. Just nodded.

“I’ll bring some sandwiches, too,” I said. Food meant it was a date, didn’t it? I just had to find a way to get Mom to watch Ten.

That afternoon when I got home, Ten was sitting on the kitchen counter eating ice cream out of the container, and Mom was dancing around the kitchen in her underwear. The silk kimono that she wore as a bathrobe was fluttering around her as she spun in circles, though there was no music on.

“What’s going on?” I said, dropping my backpack on top of the jumble of shoes by the front door.

“Indi!” cried Mom, rushing over and grabbing my hands, dragging me into her frenzied dance. “Great news! I’m headlining!”

“Where?” I gasped. I saw it all changing, finally, all of it actually happening, everything she’d always talked about. We’d go on the road with her; we’d have private tutors instead of school. We could travel all over, go all the way to California again. We’d sit in the front row at her shows. We could afford a real house, out in the country. We could grow sunflowers and have a vegetable garden, and Ten could get a dog.

“Open mi nigh,” Ten said, around a mouthful of ice cream. I pulled away from Mom.

“Open mic night?” I said. “How do you headline at open mic night?”

“I’m not headlining at open mic night,” she said. “I’m headlining before open mic night. I get to do my own show—well, with Frankie.” Frankie was Mom’s music partner of the moment, a guy with a thinning ponytail and a perpetually doleful look.

Mom was still talking. “…Amazing! You guys are going to come! Get dressed, everybody, because we’re going shopping!”

“You’re the only one who’s not dressed, Mom,” I said. This made her laugh, and she disappeared into the bedroom, still chattering.

“You have homework?” I asked Ten.

“Did it in class,” he said.

“Can I have a bite?” I asked. He proffered his spoon, but I dug in the silverware drawer for one that was less spitty. I felt suddenly tired, not like I wanted to take a nap, but like I needed to lie in a dark, quiet room for about ten years and not move. I didn’t realize at the time that that feeling was sadness. All I knew was how it would go at the shops, how Mom would flirt with all the shopkeepers, men and women alike, how she’d tell everyone she met to come to her show, how she’d pull armfuls of things off the racks and shove them at us through the curtains of the dressing rooms, how she’d make us come out and turn around in circles for everyone in the store to see, how she’d buy more than we needed and more than we could afford, and that when I tried to draw her aside at the checkout and tell her not to do this, she’d laugh loudly and say, “That’s my Indiana!” and she’d strangle me in a hug and buy everything anyway.

Friday night came, and I found myself wearing a black dress, the first one I’d ever owned, and a pair of new boots that pinched at the ankles. My skin was a sleek golden tan, my hair about four shades darker, and Mom had carefully lined my eyes for me. I looked good and I knew it, and I wished that Dallas Leland were there to see it. I imagined him sitting there, looking at me across the table, his eyes flicking up and down with a question to which the answer was YES. But even imagining it was spoiled by the thought of my mom up on the stage. Even if we did date, I could never invite him to watch my mom perform. I had at least enough concept of social etiquette to know it would be humiliating for everyone involved. Except, of course, my mom.

The first thing she did when she got on stage was wave to us and point us out to the audience and say that she was dedicating her performance to us.

“Those are my stars,” she said, “My Indiana and Tennessee.” People who didn’t know her probably thought that was some kind of strange metaphor, not our actual names. Those are my stars, my Indiana and Tennessee.

We weren’t really supposed to be in the bar, of course, so the owner, Larry, put us at a little table in the corner where he could keep an eye on us and keep us well supplied with Shirley Temples. I didn’t like maraschino cherries, but Ten did, so every time Larry brought me a new drink I pulled them out and gave them to Ten. He left one sitting on a napkin for Strawberry, who he’d placed on the table. He wanted her to be able to see the show. Just that afternoon he’d carefully recolored her legs, which had begun to wear off after all their baths together, despite the supposed permanence of Sharpie. She was all spiffed up for the occasion. Ten was wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt with small green cacti on it, and a blue bow tie that Mom had insisted on even though he said he felt like it was choking him. He kept tugging at the tie, but whenever I looked over at him he gave me a big smile, showing the quarter-sized gap in his front teeth that would never be fixed because we couldn’t afford braces.

Mom was up there on stage with Frankie, who was the real headliner, because the sign out front said “Frankie Ray with Lilah Archer.” Mom’s real name was Debra Moore. It was lucky for Mom that Frankie was a pretty laconic guy, because she liked to talk a lot in between songs. After they did a few songs of Frankie’s, dragging ballads about lost loves, she looked over at us.

“Now we’re going to speed it up a little,” she said, winking at me, “And play an old favorite by Mr. Johnny Cash.” She said Cash with an affected drawl. Mom didn’t naturally have a drawl. She was from Idaho. (Thank goodness she didn’t name one of us that.) They played “Ring of Fire,” of course. Mom’s voice sounded okay. Sometimes she tried too hard to make it sound twangy and it went flat. The muscles in the back of my neck tightened when she leaned in too close to the microphone and it made a staticky humming sound. She looked at Frankie a lot when they were singing and went over to sing into his mic with him. It occurred to me that there was something going on between them. Did he come over to our apartment while we were gone during the day? Was he the source of the cigarette smell that I’d noticed a couple of weeks before, the time Mom said she didn’t know what I was talking about? She could have lied better than that. She could have just said Frankie came over to work on some music.

Mom’s hair glowed in the stage lights. It was long and red and curly, like Reba’s. It wasn’t naturally like that. Naturally it was straight and light brown, like mine. But Mom’s hair was part of what she called her “presence.” That and her sparkly eye shadow and the big gold earrings she wore. When I was a kid, I’d thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, like a real fairy. That night, I saw that the sparkles over her eyes did nothing to conceal the bags beneath them. When she bent her head down to lean into the mic, you could see her brown and grey roots like a sad river down the center of her scalp. In her rhinestone cowboy boots and her long lavender dress, in the haze of cigarette smoke and the glare of the stage lights, Mom looked like something not quite real. She wasn’t quite real. She was something of her own creation.

That night, I saw through her caked-on makeup. She looked old. I realize now that she wasn’t that old. She was only thirty-seven the year I was sixteen. Not that old at all. But too old to start a singing career. Too old to be wearing sparkly eye makeup on a stage when her half-grown kids were in the audience. I looked at the people around us. Most of the audience was middle-aged, too, a mix of married couples trying to rekindle their dying love, divorcées on first dates trying to kindle new love, and alcoholics who were there not for the performance, but because they were there every other night of the week, too. This wasn’t where the music business people came to scout for talent on Friday nights. I looked at Ten, at his bright round face. He saw me looking and smiled. He still thought she was beautiful. He still believed in the magic. I tried to smile back at him, but my face felt like silly putty, all rubbery and stretched-out. It was ten o’clock when they’d started their set, already past the time he should be in bed.

The next morning (by which I mean noon) found Mom and me whisper-yelling in the kitchen, trying not to wake Ten up.

“Do you even know this boy at all?” she hissed.

“It’s a school project, Mom!” I said. “It’s worth twenty percent of my grade!”

“If you get pregnant,” she said, “Your life will be over.” She made a sweeping gesture in the air that I thought perhaps referred to her own life.

“MOM!” I said. “It’s not a date!”

“Well, I can’t watch Ten,” she said. “Frankie and I are re-recording some tracks over at Wild Oats.”

“Reschedule it!” I said. “Take Ten with you! He’ll be quiet.”

“Why don’t you reschedule, Indiana?” she said, in a scarily quiet voice. “You can do your project after school one day. This is my career we’re talking about.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, your career!” I yelled. “What number demo is this, Mom?” I didn’t even get a chance to say anything about how I knew she was sleeping with Frankie. Ten came in with sleep-mussed hair and round eyes and said, “What’s going on?” and we both said, “Nothing.”

Mom went back to her bedroom and I could tell she was starting to cry, which made me even angrier, so I pulled five dollars out of her wallet and said to Ten, “Wanna go get ice cream and then go down by the river?”

When Dallas arrived, Ten was playing with Strawberry in the reeds on the edge of the river. He’d been delighted to go. He wanted to look for real frogs to be her friends.

“Do you think the river frogs will like her even though she’s a tree frog?” he’d asked. She’s not even a real frog, I thought, but my mouth was full of ice cream, so I had a good excuse not to say anything. I’d watched him kneeling there for some time, paddling her around in the ripples of the shallow water. The river was wide and green and fast. It was a warm day and people were out kayaking and the tourist cruise boats were full.

But then Dallas’s stoop-shouldered form appeared, and I was suddenly only aware of the way my sweaty palms were sticking to the plastic cover of the library book on my lap. I’d completely forgotten about sandwiches. I hoped he wouldn’t be mad.

Dallas raised a hand in greeting as he approached. He sat down on the opposite end of the bench I was sitting on. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and shook one out, held it out to me. I shook my head.

“I forgot the sandwiches,” I said. “I’m sorry. We could go get some—after.” Dallas lit his cigarette and nodded once.

“That’s my brother down there,” I said, gesturing toward Ten, who was peering into the reeds a little way down the bank. “I couldn’t get out of watching him.” Dallas nodded again, leaned back on the bench, and blew smoke toward the sky. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t think of a single other thing to say to him. It was as if my mind had been wiped blank. If you’d asked me my name at that moment, I don’t know if I could have told you.

“So,” I said, after a long moment. “The Trail of Tears. You wanna do the side of the Native Americans or the side of the Jackson administration?” We were supposed to each pick a side.

Dallas had been looking out at the river. He looked at me with his gold-flecked eyes. “Trail of Tears, I guess,” he said. “Sounds cool.”

I stared at him, waiting to see if he was joking. He stared right back at me. Apparently not. The sunlight reflecting off his hair sure was beautiful, though.

“It’s all the Trail of Tears,” I said, trying not to sound impatient. “You have to pick a perspective to tell the story from. Andrew Jackson or the Cherokees.”

“Jackson,” said Dallas dreamily. “Stonewallllllll Jackson.” I stared at him. Was it possible that he’d paid no attention in history all year? Still, Albert Einstein hadn’t done well in school. I decided to take a different tack.

“So, Dallas,” I said. “What are you into, outside of school?”

“Nintendo. Basketball. Def Leppard.”

I glanced over at Ten, leaning over the reeds, looking for frogs. I was going to tell him to come a little closer, but then Dallas said, “So, are we gonna make out, or what are we doing here?”

“What?” I said. I think I was as shocked hearing that many words from him as I was by the content of them.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked. I thought the vein in my neck might explode, my pulse was suddenly pumping so hard.

“I—” I started to say.

“STRAWBERRY!” Ten’s shriek is something I cannot forget. The pitch of it, the raw, searing terror and grief. Before I could scream NO, before I even really had time to think it, my brother had thrown his small body into the river after his plastic frog.

He didn’t think; I know that. He thought only of the thing he loved most, the thing he couldn’t bear to lose. He did what he felt he had to do not to lose her.

I saw Ten’s head, an arm; I thought I saw his eyes looking wildly toward the sky, but who knows if that’s something real or something I imagined. The current was swift; his head, bobbing, was dark like a log drifting downriver.

“TEN!” I screamed. “TEN!” If you didn’t know, you’d think I was yelling out a score, a perfect score for diving, not for drowning in the river. People in boats looked at me at first like I was crazy, then they followed the line of my arm as I pointed at the water, at where I’d last seen his head, though I couldn’t see it anymore. I leaned out over the edge, my feet slipping and scrambling on the muddy bank. I wasn’t as sure as he was; I didn’t immediately fling myself into the water for the one I loved.

Dallas interpreted my flailing as preparation for a jump. He jumped in front of me and heaved me backward with a push of my shoulders, and I yelped as I felt my feet leave the ground. I thought I was falling in. We landed hard on the grass, Dallas on top of me, pinning me down. It knocked the wind out of me, so for a second all I could do was lie there, breathing frantically up at him. We were as close as we’d ever been and would ever be, but I barely even saw him. His hair, glowing in the sun, blinded me, and his dense odor of cigarette smoke burned my throat. As soon as I was able to get a breath, I shoved him off me and was back on my feet.

I searched the river for Ten, but I couldn’t see his head. There was a tourist boat in the process of trying to turn around to go after him, but it was too slow, clumsy in its bulk. On the deck, people were shouting, waving at me, but I just stood there and stared at them, my body rigid and motionless. What good did they think they could do? For those people, this was a story they’d be able to tell about their vacation, about that one day, oh, what a calamity, that poor little boy. For me, it was—“Oh, god, I see him!” I slapped at Dallas’s arm as I saw my brother’s round, pale face struggling to stay above water.

It was a crew team that got him. I watched them strain against the current, pulling hard on their paddles just to hold the boat in one place. The coxswain made an elegant little dive off the front of the boat, barely making a splash. He didn’t surface, and for a moment I thought he’d drowned, too. I couldn’t see that he’d come up on the other side of the boat, that he held my brother tight in his arms against the pull of the river. When the crew team leaned in and dragged a person into the boat, I thought it was the coxswain. He was small, too, though not as small as Ten. It was only when they heaved a second person into the boat that I realized the first body had been my brother’s. It wasn’t until I saw the oarsmen propping him up against their knees, his small body shaking and alive, that I began to cry.

When the crew team came to shore with Ten, when the ambulance came, I couldn’t even look at Dallas. I should have thanked him for anchoring me on the shore, so someone didn’t have to rescue me, too. But I felt that by wanting him, I had caused this to happen. If I hadn’t wanted him so badly, we would have stayed home; I would have kept my brother safe, far from the water. I watched two paramedics hold Ten upright while he coughed and coughed. I saw his small body heaving, his lips the deep blue-purple of a fresh bruise. I thought, If he lives I will never want anything again that is not for him. I will never ask for anything for myself. When I turn eighteen I will buy us a trailer out in the country. I will buy him a dog.

Dallas didn’t come in the ambulance. We left him there on the riverbank. When we met up the following week (for the second and last time), all he said about the incident was, “That was wild, huh? Hope the little guy’s okay.” The day of the presentation, I spoke for the Cherokees while he held up the poster I’d made, and then he said a few sentences (which I’d written for him) from Andrew Jackson’s point of view. We got a collective grade, a B minus, which dragged down my average for the whole year, but I didn’t care.

Before that, we sat in the blue light of the hospital, Mom and me, on either side of Ten, holding his hands while he slept. I moved my arm, and it rustled the papery sheets. I looked at him in apprehension to see if it would wake him, but it didn’t. They’d drugged him pretty good. The half-moons of his eyes, fringed by lashes, stayed closed. I looked across at Mom. Slow tears were sliding down her face, creating muddy mascara tracks on her cheeks.

“You have to give it up, Mom,” I whispered. “We need you at home. You’re supposed to take care of us.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said. She shook her head vigorously, her red curls bouncing. They seemed so garish, so out of place, in that otherworldly light.

“Mom,” I said.

“You’re my stars,” she said. “I wanted it all for you.”

“You didn’t want it all for us,” I whispered. “You wanted it all for yourself.”

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Driving East at Christmastime

My father is outside the car, hugging the guardrail on the I-35 bridge. Cars are honking. He’s under a lot of stress, Mom says, like we haven’t noticed this festering since Thanksgiving. We’re driving home from Fargo. The sun blinks through pregnant clouds, melting snow on the shoulder. Stay here, Mom says, like there’s someplace we can go. The car idles.

Hey, fag. My older brother, Kyle, punches my shoulder. I twist to return his blows, and he spits a Skittle that strikes the bridge of my nose. I swing at his face, but he ducks and pounds my thigh and yells, Charlie horse! My brother, Kyle, only fifteen, already a hyper-masculine caricature of his younger self, the Kyle who only a year ago planned D&D campaigns with me, whom I once believed would protect me from anything.

I can see Dad’s shoulders heave. Mom crouches next to him, rubs his back. Whispers into his hair. Kyle unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs over me and into the driver’s seat, kicking at my face.

I ask him what he’s doing.

Getting away from you, he says.

I catch Mom’s eye, and she winks. It’s going to be okay, she’s saying, to all of us, to everyone on the freeway. My mother, the steadfast. Unfazed, as always. It’s going to be okay. I climb into the front passenger seat.

Dad is yelling at the clouds. Under stress. This all began when Grandpa—Mom’s dad—died. We were packing for the annual trip to visit Dad’s family in Wautoma when Mom’s phone rang. A stroke. Seventy but healthy. So of course, plans change. We head west instead of east. In Fargo, Dad called the office and said he wouldn’t be in on Monday. On Monday, they said come in or don’t come back. And, of course, he couldn’t. And he said as much, but they wouldn’t back down. So then there’s the stress of holidays plus death plus, now, what we can and can’t afford. He said we’ll need to cancel our summer vacation. That Christmas might be leaner this year. And Mom doesn’t even blink. A rock, always.

And then there was the flat tire on his motorcycle. The car broken into, the driver-side window smashed (still covered with fluttering plastic and duct tape). All this in the last month. So of course, after he received pity money from his widowed mother-in-law; and traffic has been stop-and-go for four hours; and at last there’s a respite, a sigh of collective relief: finally, let’s floor it; and then brake lights re-emerge like angry fireflies—of course he was going to snap.

It began with yelling, with cussing. And Mom whispering sternly: Jeffrey. And then he started smacking the roof, the dashboard. Alternating open palm and closed fist. And Kyle and me in the back seat, silent for once. And then he stormed onto 35 and left the door hanging open; 35, packed with its slow and stopped cars and Minnesota plates and Minnesota Nice yelling and honking, and he’s on the guardrail letting God know.

Cars begin veering around us, the gap between their fenders and our bumper shrinking with each pass. Kyle engages the emergency lights like he knows what he’s doing. He’s quieted, and the space in the car seems endless. I’m startled to feel lonely, to feel nostalgic for the times these trips weren’t so miserable, when we would lean our heads together and he’d read from The Two Towers or Dune.

I crack the window and press my face against the cool glass. Dad hasn’t moved. A cop pulls behind us on the shoulder, lights flashing.

Good afternoon, sir, Mom says. He’s just stressed is all, just stressed. You can understand. The cop’s stride is measured, and he hasn’t said a word. He tips his cap. My brother is holding his breath. There’s tension in the car I can’t grasp. It’s all above me, like I’m submerged beneath the Mississippi. But I’m buoying toward the surface, about to break through: Kyle’s hands are on the wheel. Everything registers at once like oxygen flooding my lungs. My parents on the shoulder. The cop, mid-stride. The car casting its long shadow across all lanes of stagnant traffic. The smell of a warm winter, of exhaust fumes and evergreens.

This is what will happen: Kyle will put the car in gear. We’ll jolt forward, the pedals unfamiliar beneath his adolescent foot. He’ll swerve, smash the taillight ahead of us. And we will be rear-ended by the impatience behind us. And the cop will ticket everyone, and traffic will crawl and crawl and crawl, and my father on the bridge will call a tow truck.

But first, the cop approaches my window. He instructs Kyle to turn off the vehicle, to please remove the keys from the ignition. But first, the sky sears open and heavy raindrops spill down. And my father, this large, aching man screaming at the sky, feels he has rent the heavens. He releases the railing and sits on the shoulder. He begins to laugh. It will be okay.

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Bootleg

Just for laughs, me and my cousins grab one of Violet’s wigs and we dress baby Matty up like Elvis Presley. We’re on the back porch—smoking Violet’s dope, drinking beer we bought with Charles’s fake ID—when the B-52’s come on the radio. Everybody gets caught up in Private Idaho. We forget all about tiny Elvis. He takes a nosedive out of the porch swing and starts to wail like a wounded bobcat. Charles and his younger brother, Clay, head for the woods at the first sign of trouble.

Matty reaches out and hollers, “Budger, Budger!” It’s Matty’s word for brother, which is what he calls me even though I’m really his uncle. I pick him up. His lip is busted; there’s blood on his face and his Elvis-do is sideways.

Behind us, the screen door opens and slams shut. My big sister, Violet. She’s skin and bones. A red bandanna covers her bald head, and her eyebrows are painted on with a pencil.

“Give him here,” she says.

“I got him,” I say. “Go back in and lie down.”

“Let me have my boy.”

I hand him over but he’s too heavy for her so I help her sit on the steps.

“Run and get a bottle of Mercurochrome and some cotton balls.”

I don’t move. I stare at the tree trunk we use for a table and the ashtray on top. It’s overflowing with butts and roaches. Beside it sits Violet’s medicine bottle. It should be filled with weed, but it’s every bit as empty as the Old Milwaukee cans scattered around the porch.

“Go on. Run.”

I go, but for a time I stand on the other side of the screen door watching Violet rock Matty and sing to him. She doesn’t really sing so much as she just hums along with Have You Ever Seen The Rain, but it works and Matty stops crying.

I’m rummaging through the medicine cabinet when I hear mini-explosions coming from the woods. Charles and Clay are setting off cherry bombs. They sound like little cannons. I close my eyes and imagine one of those Civil War battles we’re always hearing about in school. Everybody likes to say it was brother against brother. I see Charles and Clay dressed in matching uniforms. Even though they’re on the same side, they still fire their baby cannons at one another because they’re such assholes.

Charles always has a pocket full of fireworks. Black Cats, Silver Foxes, Smoke Grenades and M-80s. Every night when we’re walking out of the woods, he drums up one last bottle rocket—like it’s a big surprise—and hands it to Clay. He hands Clay his lighter, too, and lets him fire off the final one of the night. It’s always the best.

I spot the Mercurochrome. It’s buried in the medicine cabinet. Stuck on a shelf in the middle of Violet’s painkillers. I pull it out and put it in my pocket, then I study Violet’s medicine, picking up one bottle after another, reading the labels and staring at the pills inside. They’re shaped and colored like freaky planets from an alternate universe, and they’ve got outer space names to match: Percocet, Darvon, Elavil. Useless against Violet’s pain. It’s weed she needs.

Charles knows a guy. He sells bootleg and fireworks. Other shit, too. Like weed. His name is Commodore and sometimes this Commodore will make a trade with you if you’re in a bad way. Last year in eighth grade, Tommy Larkin got a box of Roman Candles for a busted-up Zebco rod and reel. I calculate the value of a day spent on Planet Percocet, or an afternoon rolling around in the purple haze of a distant galaxy called Darvon. I come up with one million dollars. I convert that number to an earthly sum fitting an ex-con named Commodore who lives with his one-legged mom in a rusty trailer at the dead end of a dirt road on the other side of Lively Creek. I figure a dime bag, two at the most.

But I need Charles to get to Commodore, and King Charles doesn’t need anything from me. What stands between us now is a bicycle, beat up something awful with most of the green paint flaked off and a chain that won’t stay on. But it might as well be a brand new Cadillac for all the weight it carries between me and Charles.

“You two will be just like brothers.”

That’s what Violet said the day she told me Charles and Clay were moving in.

I said, “He’s already got a brother, thank you very much. And so do you.”

“Now, don’t be that way, honey. You’ll see, you two will be just like Dad and Uncle Willis.”

We keep a picture over the mantel, of Dad and Uncle Willis with their arms around each other. They’re both wearing mirrored aviators, t-shirts and dog tags. It’s the day they shipped out. A Pall Mall hangs from Uncle Willis’s lips. Dad is smiling.

Uncle Willis did all right. He made it out. He came home. Dad didn’t. After Uncle Willis got back he started drinking and running around with married women. He finally got himself shot and killed by Tanya Clark’s husband, Hoyt. Charles and Clay shuffled around a lot after that. They went up north and lived with our old lady aunt who was rumored to be a Catholic. Then down to Mississippi to a foster family who raised baby goats. Last year they came back to Georgia and moved in with me and Violet.

Charles showed up wearing Uncle Willis’s aviators and his dog tags. “You’re every bit the spitting image,” Violet said. Then she said it again, “Every bit.”

I decided I didn’t much care for the looks of him. What right did he have? Showing up looking like that and talking like that? Telling his stories about that fishing trip on Nickajack Lake when Uncle Willis let him drive the boat, or that one time when they went to Atlanta to see the Braves play and spent the night in a Howard Johnson’s with a swimming pool. And Violet hanging on every word. I never said anything about it, but that’s what I thought. What right did he have?

I cram Violet’s pills in my pocket and head back to the porch. Matty grins and reaches out. Violet’s taken off his wig and fixed his hair so he looks like Matty again. She hands him over. I doctor his lip and he starts to wail. But I walk him around the yard, and we count the lightning bugs that are starting to shine.

In the woods, Charles fires off the first bottle rocket of the night. It barely makes it above the treetops, and it’s nothing more than a flicker against a sky that’s just beginning to fade. But when I point it out to Matty, he laughs and he claps, then he reaches for the empty sky and hollers for more.

—

The next morning we’re sitting there in our underwear eating Pop-Tarts when Clay starts in. “How come I can’t go?” he wants to know. “I’ll mind you. I won’t talk back.”

Charles ignores him. He licks his saucer clean, then walks over to the sink and tosses it in. I get up and follow him.

Clay won’t let it go. “Is it because I sassed you yesterday? Is it because I sassed you in front of Hub Grant and all them?”

Charles still doesn’t answer. He turns on the water and goes to town on last night’s supper dishes. I cooked—Beanee Weenees and Tater Tots—so Charles is supposed to clean. That’s our deal. But he barely finishes his own saucer before he shuts the water off and turns to look at me.

Wearing those aviators, and with that smirk on his face, he’s every bit the spitting image. All that’s missing is the Pall Mall.

“Explain your brilliant plan to me one more time, Einstein.”

I say, “I reckon we could trade the pills to that guy you know. We could get a couple of dime bags for Violet. We could trade our goods to Commodore. We could do it for Violet.”

“Our goods? You’ve been watching too much Starsky & Hutch.”

He’s leaning against the sink with his arms folded and his legs crossed. The pills are on the table.

Clay picks up a bottle and gives it a shake, but Charles snaps his fingers and points to the table so Clay puts the pills back. Then Charles tosses him the dishtowel and Clay heads to the sink. He lays into the supper dishes while Charles crosses to the table and sits down. He opens up each bottle, dumps out the pills and runs his hand over them like they’re a pile of rock candy.

I take a seat across from him.

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” he says. “Commodore sells fireworks and bootleg. What makes you think he’d be interested in this big load of bullshit?” He picks up a hand full of pills and lets one or two spill through his fingers. He looks at me, but all I see is my own twisted face reflected in his aviators.

Then I think about that bicycle. Lately, I’ve been thinking about that bicycle a lot. Every time I look at Charles, that’s what I see.

The fight was over a year ago, soon after Charles and Clay moved in. At the time, I walked away from it feeling good about things. After a while, it hardly ever crossed my mind anymore, and when it did, I was convinced that I got the best of Charles. Then Violet got sick, and I found myself recollecting on a regular basis. Me and Charles rolling down the stone steps on the back porch, the pain in my wrist when I fell on it and broke it. The feeling of satisfaction, even joy you might say, when I jumped up and swung my other arm and made contact with Charles’s lip. His aviators flew off and in the middle of it all I stood there trying to remember if I’d actually ever seen his eyes before. I was sure I had but I just couldn’t recall. That pause gave Charles the upper hand and he was on me again, then we were both on the ground once more. I was on my back, and Charles, the same age as me but a lot bigger, was on top of me with his fist pulled back ready to do some damage. But he didn’t slug me. Instead he started to cry. He put both fists against my chest, and I couldn’t move. He held me there, dripping tears and blood all over my face.

I push my chair back and get up from the table. I walk over to the sink where Clay is almost finished with the dishes. Then I walk back to the table and sit down.

“What makes you think Commodore wouldn’t be interested?” I say, “You don’t know. Bootleg’s no better than pills. Especially to some loser shacked up with his mom in a rusty doublewide. You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure that one out, Einstein.”

“What about me,” Clay hollers from the sink. “I’m part of it. Don’t forget about me.”

We ignore him.

Charles says, “And tell me this, what do you plan on saying to Commodore? Howdy Commodore, pleased to meet you, would you like to buy some dope off me and my cousin?”

We sit there cussing and trading Einsteins while Clay finishes the dishes.

Soon as he turns off the water, we hear it. It sounds like the dishwater leaving the sink, but it’s not. It’s Violet breathing in the other room, low and gurgly. It keeps going long after the dirty dishwater has gone down the drain, and Clay is standing by the table with the dishtowel in his hand, waiting for a word or a look or anything from Charles.

Nobody says anything.

Violet sucks in a fast and deep breath like she’s been under water, then she coughs.

“Yuck,” Clay says.

“Don’t be a dick,” Charles tells him. Then he says to me, “Well, put your shoes on, asshole, unless you plan on going to see Commodore in your bare feet.”

I go to my room and throw on yesterday’s smelly t-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes, then I sit on the bed.

I guess you could say the fight was my fault. Like I said, Charles and Clay had just moved in. It was summer. We were on the back porch. Clay was playing Superman. Or maybe it was Batman. I just remember he was wearing a towel like it was a cape, and he would jump off the side of the porch, again and again, with his ratty-ass cape flapping behind him.

I was shelling corn for the chickens. Charles had wandered off someplace. He was supposed to help with the corn. That was the deal. The last thing Violet told us when she left for the flower shop that morning was to shell all the corn in the crib. “All of it,” she said. “I mean it, boys. Don’t burn down the house. Don’t kill each other. And finish shelling the corn. Besides that, I don’t really care. Is that too much to ask?”

But soon as Violet left so did Charles, and I sat there shelling corn by myself. The kernels were hard and dried. Perfect for shelling. By noon I’d half way filled the oil drum at the end of the porch. I got up to walk to the corncrib for another bushel, that’s when I saw Charles. He carried a greasy chain in one hand; with the other he was pushing a piece-of-shit bike up the drive. It used to be green, now it was mostly rust. I figured that’s why whoever owned it had tossed it, or why they wouldn’t much care that Charles had come in and stole it right out from under their noses. He wheeled it up to the porch and stopped, held out his arms in a big, showy gesture, with a shitty grin on his face that said, Now I’ve got a bike and you don’t.

I went to the barn, filled up my basket and hauled it back to the porch. Charles occupied himself with the bike chain, Clay kept jumping, and I shelled my way through the rest of the corn.

By dark, the oil drum was finally full. I got up to go to the kitchen for a glass of tea when Charles said, “Hey man, while you’re up, how about bringing me a Coke?”

I stood there watching Clay jump and watching Charles mess with the bike chain. I bent down and picked a kernel up off the floor. It was shriveled to the size of a BB. “Hey man,” I said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

It wasn’t planned. I’d never thought of it or practiced it. The words just came out in a perfect imitation of Charles’s voice.

He stood. He didn’t come at me. Not at first. It wasn’t exactly a smile that played around his lips. It wasn’t a smirk either. He wasn’t the spitting image anymore.

He shrugged and started to turn away.

It came as natural to me as baiting a hook or wringing a chicken’s neck. The kernel flew from my fingertips like it had been fired from a slingshot. It hit Uncle Willis’s aviators on the upper right side by Charles’s nose, and it barely made a sound. One small speck of mirror is all. Damage the size of a fruit fly. It was nothing. But to Charles it was something.

A few days after it happened, Hub Grant came by to pick up the oil drum full of corn. He works at the Co-Op. He grinds the corn into chicken feed for us.

Violet was at the flower shop. It was hot, so Clay was trying to work up a breeze in the porch swing, fanning himself with a Frisbee. Charles had wandered off again. I helped Hub load the drum into the back of his truck as best I could with my messed up wrist. He asked me what happened to it. I told him I fell. He didn’t ask me anything else about it. He got in his truck to leave and stuck his head out the window.

“Hey buddy, I meant to ask you, how’d you like that bicycle?”

I was standing on the steps; the truck was parked a couple of feet away.

“You know … the one your cousin fixed up for you. It used to belong to one of my boys. Charles found it in the shed behind the Co-Op. Said he wanted you to have something nice. We made a trade. I’m gonna raise some hogs on that piece of land I own behind the post office. I need a fence. Charles is over there right now, creosoting the fence posts and laying them in the ground. Lordy, can you imagine? In this heat? You ask me, I sure got the better end of that deal.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“Well, you boys stay out of jail now.”

“We’ll try,” Clay said from the porch swing. “Come back and see us.”

“I surely will.”

He drove off.

It wasn’t in the tool shed, or in the corncrib, or anywhere else in the barn. I walked across the pasture and down to the little holler where everybody dumps their broken shit. It wasn’t there either. I stopped at Tommy Larkin’s house. They weren’t home but I looked in their carport anyway. Tommy’s older brother Hank steals stuff. Even from people he likes. Tommy calls it a friendly five-finger discount. The bike wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. I looked until dark. Charles never brought it up again. Neither did I. I kept waiting for him to tell Violet what an asshole I’d been. I figured I see him riding the bike one day, popping wheelies and showing off. None of that happened. Then Violet got sick.

Now I worry over Violet’s life and that fight with Charles like they’re the same. When I’m not thinking about one, I’m thinking about the other.

I get up off the bed and go out to the living room. I pull a chair up to the couch and hold Violet’s hand. She’s sleeping, and Matty is sitting on the floor with Clay. They’re pretending to play checkers, but mostly Matty just likes to stick the checkers in his mouth because he’s teething.

I tell Clay, “Don’t let him swallow one of those, do you hear?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Do you hear?”

“I hear you, I’m sittin’ right here. I’m not retarded.”

Charles comes out and says, “Don’t be such a dick, Clay.” Then he grabs the pills off the table and goes out and waits for me on the porch.

I hold Violet’s hand as long as I can. It’s as light as air, like a quail feather or a June bug. Something that could float away as soon as I let it go.

Charles hops off the porch and heads down the drive towards the main road. When he crosses the highway and steps into the woods—woods that are as thick and overgrown as any jungle anywhere—when I lose sight and sound of him completely, I finally let go of Violet’s hand, and get up to run after him.

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Salvio: A Short Story

Mary Margaret Makepeace Bonifacio, age 82, passed from this earth December 13, 1974. Mary-Maggie was know for her rapt affections for crewelwork, Perry Como, houseplants, and public television; and for her marinated five-bean salad. She leaves behind her only child, Salvio Bonifacio. No services will be held. Please do not visit Salvio, or call him on the phone. Please.

Salvio had wrestled with the wording of the thing, composing it in his mind even as the ambulance, red swirling lights turning the early morning frost hibiscus pink, carried his mother away. He had held her hand while he dialed the emergency number, feeling its coolness and knowing she was gone, wondering when it would turn wooden and stiff, wondering why he was calling at all for help, why it was necessary to involve the authorities, wondering if any droplet of her being remained inside the failed body, evaporating, condensing. Knowing he owed her this rightness.

He typed the obituary onto lined mint green paper that he found in the drawer of her vanity, wrote the required two-dollar check, and put both in an envelope, addressed to the newspaper, care of Deaths and Notices. Please. He did not want to shake hands with weepy, old strangers, did not need flowers brought to the house, did not want visitors perched at the edge of the yellow sofa, offering to do anything at all that might help him through this difficult time, laying out cold cuts (slices of dead bird rolled tight like fingers), sweating cheese, and knuckles of raw cauliflower on the sideboard. Please, he had typed. Please. Don’t.

One stamp in the desk drawer, one crack beneath the front door, just enough daylight for sending his message to the moon.

—

Three months gone, Mary-Maggie, one quarter of a year like a wedge of pie left malingering on the countertop. On the living room rug mail accrued, vomited through the tiny brass mouth, an ever-expanding peninsula of bills and notices and Chinese food menus, beneath those a reef of condolence cards.

Milk bottles festered on the porch, small, foamy stalagmites. For a time, neighbors had brought lasagna dinners and foil-shrouded banana loaves, setting them on the welcome mat when he declined to answer the door. Gleeful raccoons gorged, then mice upon the leavings, and roaches upon the final, microscopic remains.

Then: there was no more light, no electricity for the television, the can opener, the toaster. Cans of frozen orange juice loosed long, sticky tongues down the front of the Frigidaire. Fish sticks grew green fur. A group came, church folk, with rakes and garbage bags and pruners. One of them turned on a car radio, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, whistled along, and hosed rot from the porch.

Another rang the doorbell, dark suit, bolo tie. Salvio, wrapped in the living room curtain, watched the man’s mustache, how it did not move while he talked, more than ninety days, your mother’s remains, not claimed, next of kin, Mr. Bonifacio you must answer this door, the mustache a bumper on a car, the guardrail on a terrifying curve. You have abandoned her, sir. Salvio stayed there, swaddled, until the dark suit went away.

And then Salvio took to his mother’s bed. He bid sweet sleep, as ever, to her jar of Pond’s cold cream, the green glass bottles of pills, the arrested clockwork of her oxygen tank, the porcelain shepherdess lamp (dim, but smiling).

He slept the kind of sleep that felt like falling into warm gravy, like a journey to the farthest place he could fathom, Saudi Arabia, or Tibet, like swimming all the way there and all the way back. Dreams grabbed at his ankles, slowing his strokes: faraway sounds of telephones, doorbells, bewildering questions from men in plaid suits and paisley ties, in striped suits and bowties the doorbell again, fists thumping against wood, Salvio, are you there, open the door, Salvio, I never promised you a rose garden, a droning near the front of his skull—then the sensation of being touched, of his mother’s thumb melting a blessing around and around into the skin of his forehead, Salvio, honey, wake up, a hovering that brought him to the surface, opened his eyes, lifted his hand to his brow.

She had touched him, he felt it. Then he remembered.

The ambulance, the neighbors peering out through their bedroom curtains, my good golly it’s Salvio, he actually came outside, it’s been years—decades, maybe, that poor man, I’d forgotten he lived there, how old would he be, fifty-five, sixty years old, the paramedic shaking his head, I’m very sorry, sir, the unhurried departure to—where? What had the ambulance driver said, where did she go? Morgue, mortuary? Mars? If not his mother’s hand, what, then, had he felt? Salvio sat up, fingering crust from his eyelids, wiping drool with the sheet’s embroidered edge. The only other being in the room, save Melinda Lee, his mother’s prized philodendron, sat atop a half-eaten cough drop, flexing its wings with some distress.

A bee, a honeybee (Apis, he recalled, mellifera, tatters of school Latin). Lucky he wasn’t stung, he thought, looking around the bed for a magazine to crush the pest. Finding nothing, he put his feet to the floor. Then he looked more closely, leaning over the bedside table. Pulsing its hind end, the poor thing labored to release its feet from the gummy Sucrets lozenge, each outsized effort producing a minute kazoo sound. Salvio had to respect the creature for trying so hard, for its frazzled industry. He admired the tidy subdivisions of its wings, the mustardy gold tucked into its leg sacs. Its banded abdomen reminded him of his mother’s hair, dyed dark molasses brown with bright, brassy stripes.

Free it, he decided. I will free this bee.

He found his mother’s magnifying glass, the one she used for crosswords back when she could still sit upright, and studied the problem. Force would sever its legs. He wanted to avoid that throbbing stinger, and not damage the wings. Submersion seemed unwise, as did melting the lozenge over flame. Dissolution, he theorized—yes, that might work.

Salvio mixed soapy water in the saucepan and borrowed a dropper from his mother’s ancient tincture of Merthiolate. He drizzled a gentle wash over the bee’s feet until, one delicate limb at a time, the little beast found liberty. The bee traced an astonished spiral above his head, finding a perch, eventually, upon one of Melinda Lee’s hoary leaves.

Tingles of comprehension passed through Salvio—the blessing on his forehead, the brown-and-yellow hairdo, the affinity for exotic foliage and throat remedies—his mother had not in death delivered to him a herald, a solemn, comforting seraph, but a smaller, less conventional envoy. She had sent a bee.

I understand, Mama, he said to the ceiling. I understand.

Bees lived in groups, in colonies. It would need to find its family, could not survive alone in this house, this he knew. None of the old Queen Anne’s windows opened, except the tiny attic porthole at which Salvio knelt as a child, spying as the neighbors around them drank, and gardened, and mated, so confident of their privacy. He could prop open the window and calmly herd the bee, using one of his mother’s head scarves to guide it from behind, upstairs and into the pre-dawn sky.

This was the time of day he’d always liked best, no furious lawnmowers, no bawling toddlers, no boys on skateboards riding past, laughing at the Bonifacios’ pigweed lawn, their balding roof. Earlier, even, than the milkman in his belching truck. He climbed the attic stairs, reaching into the dark for the handrail, swatting at cobwebs. Several days’ rain had swelled the wood, so Salvio kicked, hard, again, and yet again, throwing his right knee and shoulder into the place where knob met jamb. He felt bruises, small raisins of pain, germinate along his joints—proud evidence. He was saving his mother’s messenger.

When the door gave way, Salvio fell backward halfway down the steps, not from impact, not from relief. It was the aroma (unexpected, pleasant, like opening drawers full of cathedral candles, warm wax and a sweet musk) that pushed him, the novelty of it in a space that usually smelled of mice. Then, balanced once more, Salvio heard the sound: to call it a hum used too few letters—three insufficient to capture the carbonated rise and fall, otherworldly, circular, an incantation made of a million fractal notes. He shone a flashlight. The bee, his bee, his mother’s bee, joined her song to the one in progress, her wings to the turbulence of bodies in motion, thousands of them, fused by some alternate form of gravity around the crystal chandelier his mother had installed in the unused attic years ago. A ballroom, my darling Salvio, is what we shall have. They crawled over each other, obscuring the bauble completely, seeking purchase and contact, some flying free of the scrum to measure its sum total.

Their sound swelled and throbbed as he entered the space: let us out let us out let us out let us let us out out out. The huddle seemed to still itself as he tiptoed to the round window. A coterie of bees followed him, one of them colliding with his ear, the nape of his neck, prodding him on, hustle up, move it along, time is ticking (hadn’t his father once cuffed his head so, move it, son, have a purpose in this life for God’s sake). He dared not swat in response. Salvio wiped away brittle webs with his sleeve, swept to the floor a pepper of dead gnats. As his hands met the oak mullions, four glass panes tumbled to the bare dirt below, and the frame yelped wide into the cool morning vapors.

Behind him: acceleration, a stirring madness. As the bees took flight, Salvio flattened himself to the attic floor, breathing their collective zephyr. No air traffic controller could have choreographed such maneuvers, he thought, watching them spin lace from atmosphere while following some sort of ancient wiring. The exodus took many minutes and made a vibration he felt in the puzzle of his spine. A few stragglers clung to the chandelier, disoriented, or perhaps too spent to travel. Salvio found a stack of discarded old Reader’s Digests, and using January 1973 as a chariot, shuttled tired bees, one at a time, to the porthole. He tipped the magazine gently to the sill, depositing them in the dust.

Where had the hale among them gone? And which was his mother’s ghost? Salvio ran back down the steps to the second-story bay window. There, hanging from the old elm’s least frail branch, assembled in the shape of Africa, teeming and tangling about eight feet above the sidewalk, he saw them. A mammoth snarl turned rosy by a klieg of early sun—the bees looked like grapes, almost edible. He stomach railed. Salvio opened a can of pork’n’beans (fifty-seven left, plus the sauerkraut, the chutney, and twenty-eight jars of okra) with a hammer and screwdriver, grabbed a spoon, and returned to his observation point.

A lone bicyclist tossed newspaper capsules onto driveway tongues. Jacob Dilwell, to whom his mother once wrote monthly checks for two dollars and fifty-seven cents (plus a one-dollar tip and a thank-you note for feeding their paper through the mail slot), paused beneath the bees, set one meaty tennis shoe on either side of his green Schwinn, put his hands on his hips, and stared upward, jaw slacked. He took a rolled paper from his bag, lobbing a forehand at a few low-flyers. The mass shifted in shape (like a slumbering, tossing bear, Salvio thought, or an inflating airship). Jacob tried again, jumping, connecting with the swarm’s underside, and knocked a handful of bees a few feet toward the street. A hue and cry, a warning from the dark, changeling blur—less of a peninsula now, more a coiled, taut motherland—every set of antennae pointed upward, every poison dart deployed towards earth, toward the boy, the stupid, stupid boy.

Hey, he tried to shout at Jacob, palms flat against the glass hey, don’t, don’t do that, you will hurt them, stop that, stop it now, but all he produced was orange spittle. Hey. Hey, stop! Jacob swung his bike in a wide bend and circled twice before wiping some sweat from his fat neck and pedaling away.

Salvio made binoculars of his hands and scanned for casualties. A few bodies languished on the flagstone walk—stunned, dead? Magpies, a pair of them, arrived at the scene and pecked at the fallen. He smacked at the window with his hands and flailed, wheeling his arms to scare them away, a frenzied scarecrow, don’t eat them, don’t eat them, and startled Mrs. Montieth, who had just stepped outside to retrieve her paper. She reciprocated with a confused wave, and adjusted her housecoat’s closure.

It was the four of them—Salvio, the birds, and shower-capped Mrs. Montieth—who witnessed, seconds later, the specter of Jacob Dilwell standing atop the pocked chrome of his handlebars, tennis racket held to the heavens, being powered toward the swarm at impressive speed by a skinny-legged accomplice.

Just before the racket made contact with the bees, Jacob unthroated a bellow—the deep-belly bray of a Viking at pillage—and leapt from the bike into the elm’s crisp arms.

Detonation followed: within seconds a buzzing thickness obscured the houses across Alcott street and darkened an otherwise vivid May morning. Jacob Dilwell, armpit impaled upon the remains of a diseased branch, wore a fuzzy armor of furious honeybees.

The screaming, oh, the screaming. Had Jacob not flailed and thrashed, unleashing one shoe and a sprinkle of blood upon the shoulders of his minion, he might have remained in the tree for quite some time. Mrs. Montieth, who had raised five boys without the aid of their merchant marine father, positioned herself beneath Jacob and called out orders: Kick, boy, kick like hell, you hear?

Jacob did. He kicked the heel of his shoeless right foot against the willow’s trunk until, his supply of swear words exhausted, dropped to the asphalt and fainted.

Mrs. Montieth removed her shower cap and began wiping the insects from Jacob’s body, from her own arms, from the hills of his cheeks and forehead, batting as they dove and whined, as blood spread around them. Another neighbor (new, a car salesman, rumored to cultivate cannabis) arrived with his garden hose in tow and unleashed its pressure upon Jacob’s form. Mr. Toomey brought clean rags to press against the wounds; his basement tenant, an army reservist, took Jacob’s pulse. Someone dispatched the bicyclist to fetch Mrs. Dilwell, a school cafeteria cook. They, together, huddled over the calamity, hands in frantic concert, calling the boy’s name over and over again, shaking the lumps of his shoulders.

One bee, a solitary, wandering velvet diplomat, had visited Salvio, had come in peaceable confusion—and now this doom, this fracas. From the north arrived a keening ambulance, from the south, Jacob Dilwell’s plump mother and a quartet of younger siblings. Paramedics shoved aside the throng and scissored Jacob’s t-shirt away from his distended trunk. One medic hammered at the rising dough of his chest, the other breathed into his tumid mouth. Mrs. Dilwell, hands clasped over her own heart, nodded in time to the rescuers’ rhythm. On the curb, head slumped to his knees, sat the skinny boy.

From the window, Salvio counted thirteen people in his front yard, seven in the street, and four, that he could see, standing on the nearby corner. The number swelled by two when a local news reporter, cameraman in tow, exited a Channel 8 van. Mrs. Montieth courted local fame by recounting, directly into a satellite-shaped microphone, the velocity and amplitude with which Jacob Dilwell approached the tree, the force with which he pummeled the bees. She described his plunge from above, the sound (like a half-dozen stuffed turkeys hitting linoleum) he made upon impact. When asked to describe his current state she said: Oh, he’s bit half to death, you know, just plain bit to heck.

The number of vehicles expanded by one when Mr. Dilwell, a stonemason, settled his Dodge truck atop Mrs. Montieth’s juniper hedge and charged across the street. He bypassed his helpless wife, his son’s beleaguered body, the paramedics preparing for Jacob’s transport, and the reporter with her vanilla-custard hair. He clumped past Jacob’s friend, who (infectious, incurable idiocy, what was wrong with kids these days?) busied himself setting wounded bees aflame. Mr. Dilwell found his way to the Bonifacio’s front porch and threw his football fists against the screen, bellowing for Salvio’s audience: Goddammit, Bonifacio, come out here, come and see what your Wild Kingdom of a dump has done to my boy. Get out here and handle it like a man. I’ll have this property condemned. This has gone on long enough, by God. I know people, Bonifacio.

The mob’s energy attached itself to Mr. Dilwell and his demands. Salvio could not see his caller from the upstairs window, but felt in his metatarsals the man’s ire, his broad-backed vim. He did see the faces of at least two dozen bystanders (how the vicarious multiply themselves around tragedy) lift themselves to where he, framed by drawn-back lace curtains, peered right back down at them. Index fingers rose like missiles—the most scrutiny Salvio had endured since boyhood, since his father’s departure.

There he is, there’s Salvio, that’s him, his mother, she died around the holidays, I saw the ambulance, was it cancer, helluva thing, who knows, maybe she’d been gone for weeks, bad ticker, could be, ramshackle, destroying home values, strange lot they are, what a family, the father in prison all those years, died there in fact, you remember, the treasury scandal, embezzlement, never quite recovered, heart trouble, bedridden for ages, never let anyone help them out, crazy as billy goats, never mow the lawn, probably riddled with vermin.

Salvio backed away from the glass, from the speculations and truths. He heard the reporter at his front door: Mr. Bonifacio, could we have a word? Salvio, are you a beekeeper? How do you know Jacob Dilwell? Mr. Bonifacio? He feared faces at the parlor windows, at the kitchen door, hands rumbling the doorknobs, picking at the locks. He’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all, he was just a man in a house. Alone. How long before those doors gave way?

Sit, he needed to sit, to think calmly, to keep himself safe. He found the arm of his mother’s favorite chair, found the needlepoint seat, the upright comfort of its gilded back, and found those surfaces alive with bees. While he had watched neighborhood theater, a tragedy in three acts, his home had become a hive, a habitat. Across walls, around the phonograph’s mahogany cabinet, traversing a fern, flocking a plaster bust of the Blessed Virgin. Everywhere he could see, or touch, or step. How could so many materialize from one? In the kitchen, they’d found the overflow from a bloated can of corn, an apple core, the dregs of orange juice at the bottom of a glass. In his bathroom, they dabbed dainty feet to the backed-up drains and drank.

Salvio walked with care. Bees danced on the parquet floors, bees probed every window, bees sampled toothpaste, the ficus tree, the potpourri. Thousands and thousands of them, each a tiny soul.

More children gathered outside to hear the fresh legend called Boys Become Fools, and to bid Jacob’s ambulance swift passage. More parents came to lead them away from trouble, from the possibility of another monstrous swarm. The crowd moved to Mrs. Montieth’s lawn and quieted. Mr. and Mrs. Dilwell followed the ambulance in their flatbed Dodge.

Local news writers took photos, climbing through shrubs and over piles of bricks and rubble to photograph the Bonifacio’s home and the sickly elm. Onlookers described the scene to newer arrivals, pointing to the broken, bloodied branch, clusters of bees, the place where Jacob fell, explaining his fondness for dumb ideas and broken bones. The boy finds trouble. Always has, remember when he took a chainsaw to the fire hydrant?

By noon, there were no more stories to tell about Jacob Dilwell. Mrs. Montieth promised everyone she would be the point of contact for word of Jacob’s condition. The Channel 8 van departed for more emergent affairs.

Salvio watched a bee crawl in and out of his pajama sleeve. The sensation—feathery, benign—reminded him of a kitten he once held. He would not be alone as long as the bees lived here in the house with him. They would surround him with their chatter, their stirred air and primordial rituals. A beekeeper, him: a purpose for Salvio Robert Bonifacio.

The bees would need freedom, a fail-safe way in and out of the house. He returned to the attic with a hammer and a bread knife. Where daylight peeked through, Salvio chiseled at plaster, sawed at lathe. He worked a rusty golf club into cracks, and brought decayed shingles down upon his head. Then he stood back, satisfied. Roof and sky shared a generous maw.

Bees explored their new convenience and Salvio’s perspiring scalp. He unintentionally squashed one while swabbing himself, earning a stinging rebuke and a blazing, guilty headache. He would need protection to move easily among them. Duct tape strapped a lampshade to his head, and a lace tablecloth, draped over the shade and knotted between his legs, covered his most sensitive regions. He found work boots and tough leather gloves in the furnace room (should it smell faintly of egg in there?), and calamine lotion in the downstairs bath. When he stretched his arms wide, he felt moth-like, made of something holy.

As he moved from room to room, lord and keeper of this manor, bees took refuge on his veil. He found himself enjoying the weight of them—one felt like nothing, like the molecular zero of a single hair, but hundreds, together, became a chain mail that both endangered and guarded him. In the attic, beneath his mother’s chandelier, he tested a stiff foxtrot while the bees clung fast. In the parlor, he spun to what Chopin he could hum. He set out saucers of jam, and misted the houseplants with droplets of water for them to drink.

At five-thirty, he ate some pickles from a cracked jar, offering tastes to any interested bee. He read to them: excerpts from A Tale of Two Cities, and his mother’s favorite recipes (meatloaf au vin, almost everything au vin). At sunset, Salvio eased himself to the attic floor for sleep. Bees blanketed him with gold.

Superficial, childlike dreams followed, a slideshow of sensations and memories. Salvio dreamed of his mother making popcorn at the stove, the percussion of it, then the time he sat, as a toddler, for portraits at Sears (smile, darling, you are my sunshine) and cried at the flashbulb’s rude sparks. Arrows, when he was cupid in a play at school, then hailstones, the tingle of them on his arms, the orange fizz thrown by a campfire, the sparkle of ginger ale upon his chin. He dreamed of shouts that fell like stones, of jeering, of watching from the porthole window as other boys drove cars to girlfriends’ houses. Of his father’s cigars, of Independence Days.

He awoke to stars, to war.

Bits of brightness, all around—bottle rockets, their burning-candy smell, their small tongues of flame. He heard one scream, watched it duck into the attic through the hole he had made. Then another, and still more. One landed on his shroud, feeding itself on cotton and starch. Salvio smothered it with his gloved hands. Below, boys (Jacob Dilwell’s faithful) called out dark and vengeful oaths. Salvio stood, and stomped on a dozen eager fires.

Restive bees smelled smoke and anger, took to the air, made a sound Salvio had not heard before, like far-off bagpipes, wide and bottomless. He ran downstairs to the bay window, apologizing as he cut through clouds of them. He felt a sting at the back of his neck, another on his thigh. Panic made him enemy, foe.

In the street, a mob. Mr. Dilwell, braying, the boys trading playground epithets, feasting upon odium. Light another one, kids, keep them coming. We’ll make him come out face us, won’t we boys? That’s right, it’s about time. Think of Jacob, boys. Think of Jacob.

Salvio filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and ran to the attic. Much of it sloshed over the sides and onto the stairs, causing him to slip and blunt his knees. Staggering, squinting, he arrived at a conflagration gorging on boxes of old books and papers, nibbling at his mother’s chandelier. He doused himself with the remains of the water.

Fire was loud, he decided, the greedy roar of it larger than Mr. Dilwell’s noise. It was also beautiful, painterly, much more colorful at close range than expected—pale lemon when encountering new fodder, deepening to tangerine, then russet, and finally a violet blue as temperatures crested, as surfaces succumbed. He pressed one gloved hand over nose and mouth, awed. With the other, he drew circles in the smoke.

Below: the caw of fire engines arriving, the thin wheedle of squad cars. A megaphoned order to the crowd, desist, disband, though Salvio could not say if the words were meant for Mr. Dilwell’s militia, or for his own nation state.

Salvio took to the floor once more. He felt washed pure, thawed to his core. Goodness fell on him from above, amber, and thick. The rotted attic walls released themselves, nectar rained down. He licked his lips; the taste was sweet.

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Should we go outside?

Will it be any moment?

Are they starlings?

Will they come much after sunset?

Should we go outside?

How long will it last?

How will we know when it’s really begun?

Who will be the first to roost?

Become a Christian

Don’t Make Friends

Avoid All Types of Playing Fields

Make Up a Girlfriend

Near Final Note

The Return Home

Glossary

New from Aquifer

To Bury a Secret: A Conversation with Brian Alessandro

Coming Home to Roost

What Washes Up

CONFESSIONAL

Solace and Hope: A Conversation with Bridget Bell

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