Note to Chinese Dad

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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Category: Fiction

Elegy for My Father

The Beheaded (or, A Sward for the Disembodied)

I Loved the Dog So Much

Ghosts-Turned-Blue

Are they starlings?

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?

The Strangers

The Ball Spun

Empty Suitcases

Delivery

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