Category: Fiction

My Abuela, the Puppet

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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A Warning

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Only Tourists Remember the Alamo

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What are you doing? he asks.

 

You said you had something to teach me.

 

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

 

You don’t belong here, baby girl.

 

How do you know?

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Orchidaceae

I—Orchidaceae

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

 

II—Bulbophyllum

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

 

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

 

III—Epidendrum

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

 

IV—Dendrobium

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

I cried myself to sleep that night.

 

VI—Pleurothallis

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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The Void Witch

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Caught

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Yes,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

 

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

 

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

 

Mama! Mama! Mama!

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

And the front door groans open.

 

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

 

I run.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Puncture

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

“Oh, honey, you’re home!”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“This her?” he asked.

 

Melissa released her.

 

“Sonya, Craig. My husband.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Jay, Sonya realized, was the swaddled lump.

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

“I don’t know her anymore, Ma.”

 

“But she knows you, honey.”

 

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

“I’m so sorry, Melissa.”

 

“Working?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

—

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Punch me in the stomach.”

 

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

 

“Please,” she said.

 

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

 

“Come on,” she said. Sonya followed.

 

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

 

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

—

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

 

“Honey?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“The family is going to say goodbye.”

 

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

 

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

 

“Why are you here?” Melissa said.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“She was premature.”

 

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

 

“Look,” Melissa said. Sonya started.

 

“Fucking look.”

 

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

 

“Jesus,” Sonya breathed. “Melissa.”

 

Sonya raised her nails to her face on impulse.

 

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

 

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

 

“Are you . . . now? In the hospital?”

 

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

 

How could she have missed it? The eyes, the skin, all wrong. Not a pregnancy glow—a curtain of sweat. Withdrawal, sickly sweet. And guilt, guilt, guilt—whole body shaking like Plexiglas in a storm.

 

“Will you come?”

 

Did she have a choice?

 

—

 

Melissa’s mother took photos of it that would surely be posted on Facebook, all pink and shiny. It made Sonya want to hurl. Once, one of her mother’s dog had dragged in a squirrel, a plump thing, split at the seams, spilling maggots. It reminded her of that.

 

The nurse was posed in the corner, pressed up against the wall. You could only focus either slightly right or left of the carnage, most choosing to keep their brimming eyes on their sneakers.

 

Sonya stared at Melissa, noticed a tremor, a hand shaking like a screen door. An unfocus in her yellowed eyes. Craig clutched at his wife, and she became the space between his fingers. The nurse asked her a question, soft, and she bowed like a young birch. Sonya could have sworn the baby cracked what would have been an eye, stared at Sonya through the equipment, through the tubes: picking her out.

 

Sonya had collided her bike with a taxicab. She had passed kidney stones, watched her mother pass kidney stones. She had been slapped during sex. She remembered the big pad they had given her in the clinic for residual bleeding, like a diaper, the way she cramped for days after. Had seen pictures of children with legs blown off and women, branded, for their last names. But nothing like Melissa’s mother, thumb on the record button, as the parents each kissed the bundle on what would have been its forehead.

 

The nurse hummed. The beeping ceased. Craig drew away. Melissa didn’t remove her lips, stood hunched for a long time, over the gore, over the tubes, over what would have been the nose.

 

Sonya once saw a man jump in front of a train, saw him blast into pink mist—had to sit in the shower afterward for hours. She wondered all day, Had it hurt?— yes. This was worse.

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My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

 

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

 

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

 

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

 

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

 

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

 

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

 

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

 

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

 

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

 

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

 

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

 

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Intervals

Matt builds makeshift bridges across creeks in the woods behind his house. He takes bush axes and handsaws to cut down small trees standing in the way of his new bike paths. Sometimes he brings lighter fluid and gas station cigarette lighters when he needs to kick the demolition up a notch. He can’t stand school, studying, or too much time indoors. He thought about playing football, but he’s not looking for any kind of afterschool prison-yard where a bunch of men his dad’s age bark orders and blow whistles all day, even if he does know a few kids on the team. He’s got a lot to do and can’t be bothered with others’ demands.

 

At night, Matt’s sister Mallory studies through her tears. She weeps into the wee small hours over her US History AP notes, memorizing details next to names like Henry Clay and Cotton Mather, and phrases like “The Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny.” She traces the names and phrases with an orange highlighter, their definitions in yellow. The ones she can’t remember after three tries, she underlines with a purple highlighter. She works at the bar in the kitchen, her books and notebooks spread everywhere, and all the lights on like no one in the house is trying to sleep. Sometimes when Matt wakes in the night, he witnesses this scene on his way to the bathroom. He never says a word to her, but pissing in his half-sleep, he makes a vow never to strive too hard for academic success. Why trade hard classes for even harder classes? She watches him as he silently walks back to his bedroom. Back in bed he notices the thin line of light under his closed bedroom door. He pities her.

 

One night after dinner, Matt plays Mega Man 2 in the kitchen while his parents watch Columbo in the living room. Mallory’s in her room practicing runs on her flute. Now that the marching band competitions are over, she’s learning a few solos in the hopes of making all-district band—an extracurricular ensemble students from all over the eastern half of the state audition to play in. It’s a classical piece, and the sixteenth-note run she practices is swift and complicated. As he blasts flying buzz saw blades at mechanized birds and gorillas, he shudders at the shrillness of the instrument. For fifteen minutes she’s played the run at a faltering tempo, stumbling over the notes, missing accidentals. In the next ten minutes she learns the fingerings and picks up momentum, hitting each note with clarity, until at last she’s found she can play it perfectly—perfect notes, perfect pitch, perfect timing, over and over, and when a mechanized rooster takes his last man, Matt curses and pounds his fist on the kitchen counter hard enough it resets his Nintendo. The screen blinks and the game’s opening animation begins anew. The game is lost.

 

He opens her bedroom door. “Can you shut the hell up? You’ve been playing that same piece of shit for hours.”

 

“I’m practicing for all-district.”

 

“Well, play something different; you’re making me crazy.” He slams her door and goes back to the kitchen.

 

“Matt,” he hears his mother say.

 

“Leave her be,” his father says.

 

He selects a new first boss, Crash Man, from the screen as his sister starts slowly playing a chromatic scale.

 

“Oh, God.”

—

Mallory drives them both to school. Sometimes she puts on her makeup in the rearview mirror while she drives. Matt insists on sitting in the back seat because it gets on her nerves. He likes to pretend she’s his chauffeur. When he does this, he attempts a British accent and pretend-reads an imaginary newspaper. He says things like “Tallyho!” and inquires about the current price of “petrol.” Some days he lies down in the back seat.

 

Near the end of the school year, Mallory has a bad week. She learns that even though she will be a junior marshal for graduation, her best friend Shannon will be head marshal because her GPA has surpassed Mallory’s by a few hundredths of a point. As head marshal, Shannon will be wearing the coveted red sash over her white dress rather than the standard navy blue. Yesterday the band director informed her that she did not make all-district band this year in spite of a near-flawless audition. To add to these calamities, she still doesn’t have plans for the prom. These all weigh heavily on her mind one morning as she applies eye shadow on the way to school. The roads are wet, and they are running late as usual. Matt is prostrate on the back seat, his face resting on a duck-print pillow he grabbed from the living room couch, when he feels his stomach fall with the screech and skid of tires on wet asphalt, followed by the jolting GHUZZS of the Honda’s front bumper and hood colliding with the back end of an older lady’s Buick LeSabre. The impact rolls Matt and his pillow harmlessly into the foot of the back seat. Everyone’s shaken, but nobody’s hurt. Busted radiator, burnt rubber, engine smoke, fire truck, sirens, strobes, police, license-registration, insurance, telephone numbers, classmates driving by, disappointed father, more tears, and all of it while standing in the rain.

 

But Matt’s a few years from learning how to console another human being, let alone his sister. He doesn’t even give her a hug there in the rain before the melee arrives, an unfortunate detail from this memory she’ll never forget. Sensitivity is the kind of thing that gets you punched in the arm in the hallways, roughhoused or head-locked outside the locker-rooms, verbally emasculated in the cafeteria, always in front of the prettiest girls, and always at the hands of the most abnormally tall or muscular boys.

 

Mallory exiles herself to her bedroom nightly. She doesn’t study quite as much. The prom feels less important, and being “good” at anything seems like a dream deferred. She no longer has a car. The world has become a quiet, claustrophobic, suffocating mess.

 

But time begins to heal her eleventh-grade wounds. Soon music comes from her bedroom again starting with her favorite classical pieces, but also a few jazz standards, ballads mostly. She again pours herself into precision, practicing scales, arpeggios, and new songs. As a result of her proficiency, the summer before her senior year, she’s progressed to section leader in the marching band. Before the start of band camp, the band instructor loans her a piccolo, a new flute half the size of her old one, an octave higher in range. This transition further renews her zeal for music, and she plays twice as much on the shrill new instrument.

 

Matt loses it.

 

One Saturday night his sister leaves with friends to go eat by-the-slice pizza at the food court. Matt rummages through her book-bag, through her closet, and under her bed for the piccolo case. He finds the case under a pile of clothes.

 

Matt hops on his bike, pedaling furiously eight, maybe ten miles. When he finds a road that looks desolate enough—no houses or anything too close, just woods—he stashes his bike in the ditch, walks through the forest a bit, and flings the case into the air as far as he can. He hears it bounce twice in the fallen leaves, and then silence.

 

There are many kinds of silence to a boy of fourteen: there’s the grim, caustic silence of scribbling sentences and filling of bubbles meant to measure the scope of his future; there’s the anguished silence of ever-smoldering swallowed words when fear of adult authority trumps his sense of justice; there’s the wakeful silence he feels, stirring and restless, groaning in his lengthening bones before he finally sleeps; and there’s the possessing, lonely silence when he first understands his actions are no longer those of the man he envisions himself becoming.

 

He remembers how pathetic she looked in the rain the day she totaled her car, her frizzy hair, her unfinished makeup streaking down her face. By the time I’m home, she’ll already know, he thinks, and he wonders if she’ll ever forgive him. He begins to walk back to his bicycle, but then, no, he turns in the direction he believes he threw the instrument. It’s a nearly moonless night and his only light, he recalls, is affixed to his bike. He kicks around leaves in the darkness hoping his shoe will land on the small case. Suddenly, one step finds him up to his knee in a hole a dead tree has left behind. It’s hopeless without a light.

 

He walks, one minute, two in the direction he believes his bike to be. He’s soon aware he’s walked longer now returning than upon arriving, but he can’t yet see the edge of the woods. His breathing quickens. He’s sweating now and close to panic. Get quiet and calm down, he thinks. He stands there in the woods, controlling his breath, trying to remain motionless so that even the leaves under his feet are quiet. Alone he waits, listening through the silence for anything at all. Eventually, he hears the faraway sound of a passing car. With a sigh of relief, he follows the memory of the sound out of the forest. He walks up and down the road a few times until he stumbles over his bicycle.

 

In his fear he’d momentarily forgotten the flute, but as he begins pumping the pedals homeward, knowing what lies ahead, the enormity of it all takes his wind. His arms tremble at steadying the handlebars.

 

She’ll forgive me for this, he thinks. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll come back. I’ll find it.

—

But Matt never finds the flute. His sister is more devastated than angry at first, and privately his parents contemplate corporal punishment before deciding he’s too old for a spanking. “He’s clearly upset,” his mother offers. His father agrees and decides waiting on a sentence is a nice phase-one for his punishment. Matt searches after church and every afternoon that week and the following weekend to no avail. After conferring with Mallory’s band director on the cost of the piccolo, Matt’s father arrives to a solution: Matt’s first job.

 

Matt makes minimum wage—almost five dollars an hour—at a small shop in town called Computer Connections. He knows little about computers beyond Oregon Trail, Solitaire, and control-alt-delete, but the proprietor finds busy work. At fourteen he can only do a couple hours on school days, and his father finds him unpaid labor in chores at home on the weekends, so by the time Matt’s earned enough to pay for the piccolo, Mallory, through hard work and strategic scheduling, satisfies the academic requirements of the state a semester early, and she moves away to start college in the new year.

 

On the day of the long-awaited recompense, he hands the money—to the tune of at least twelve decent Nintendo games—over to his father, who writes a check to the band director, who thanks him on behalf of the county school system and promptly deposits the check into his own personal account to help pay for an in-ground pool he plans to have installed in his backyard that summer. All those hours spent dusting and defragging customer computers, stocking recordable CDs, cables, and hardware, manning the register and phone, he felt sure settling his debt would feel better. However, in the coming years, when he recalls the whole business, Matt will always remember how hollow paying the debt felt in Mallory’s absence, how quiet those four months were without her music, and how back then he wondered if his sister kept someone else’s brother or sister up all night, studying and practicing in her dorm room.

 

“The Hidden Flute,” a companion story to this one, appears in 42.1 of the print Florida Review.
To find out what happens to the piccolo, order a subscription or copy of 42.1.

 

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Aftermath

The holy place is here, crouched before the fan of white plastic. Morning coolness stirs the tiny hairs on your legs, the ones you forgot to shave in the shower last night. You can stand the heat of your hot coffee right now, you can almost stand the heat of your memories and the bruises they show.

 

You have a tiny house in a West Coast town. The name matters only a little. Your waist is still a small one; your body remembers the shapes of love. Your body may. Your mind cannot.

 

Once you thought of fame.

 

The thought has not penetrated your fog for years now.

 

Four years? Five?

 

How do you count the aftermath? In friends forgotten because you cannot bear their happiness? In jobs lost, opportunities floundered? Maybe in towns you tried and failed, or in classes you can’t attend, or in pancakes—tiny, or as wide as your face, stacked like fluffy amber coins with pools of copper syrup melting into the cresting waves of butter.

 

You do not think of violation. You do not think of it but it thinks of you. At night, before the coolness comes like a blessing, it thinks of you.

 

So now you crouch with the joy of morning on your face. You wonder how much longer, then you forget to wonder.

 

The holy place is here.

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