Tag: fiction

We Regret to Inform You

We heard from Amanda in sales that a gurney had been sent up to the third floor this morning. We received the email from HR after lunch.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email stated, “that Mark Lawson, senior director of communications, passed away this morning. Mark has been with the company for 24 years. He will be missed. A grief therapist will be available tomorrow in the conference space next to the break room for anyone who would like her services.”

 

It looked just like the HR emails that reminded us of upcoming holidays and that skin cancer screenings were available on the top floor. Navy blue font, no orange exclamation point. It blended in with the rest of our inboxes. We could have missed it had we not been waiting for it.

 

We all went back to work. No one in the contracts department knew Mark that well. Ellison had only been at his position for three months. Yasmina had been here almost a year, the longest of us new hires. We were young and promising and ready to go over terms and clauses. The only time any of us had contacted Mark was when our boss told Julie to check with the communications department on a stipulation involving a client and a third party.

 

“That’s a marketing question,” Mark had replied via email.

 

For the rest of the day, we heard whispers about how this man we’d never met had collapsed at his desk. We gave our condolences whenever we passed anyone from the communications team in the hallways. We asked Amanda what she had seen, but she told us that she hadn’t gotten a good look at him as he was wheeled out of the building. There had been a wall of EMTs and HR representatives surrounding Mark as if he were the eye of a storm, as if they were shielding us from witnessing something unsightly.

 

We knew our morbid excitement over the email had marked us as immature and unprofessional to ourselves and to each other. We fidgeted at our desks and spoke in soft tones, worried that raising our voices would further our insensitivity. Amanda, meanwhile, had been with the company for seven years and was unphased by anything that happened in the office. Her heels made the same measured clack across the floor; her smile held the same welcoming broadness. At the end of the day, she told us how relieved she was to have completed a huge campaign.

 

She was older than us and yet young enough for us to feel comfortable inviting her to lunch, complaining to her about our department, and asking her for dating advice. Julie had taken to wearing her stringy blond hair into a top bun like Amanda’s, while Wes had adopted the same smirk Amanda used when someone asked for help on their projects.

 

John, in the accounts payable department next to ours, took the news harder than we did. He paced our floor and muttered to himself, his bald head sweating.

 

“Mark was three years from retirement,” John said. “I’m ten years younger than he was.”

 

“It’s so sad, John,” we said to him.

 

“Cardiovascular problems run in my family,” John said.

 

“Don’t worry, John,” we said.

 

“I should exercise more,” John continued. “My wife takes spin classes. We have a stability ball in storage.”

 

“Sounds good, John,” we said.

 

John replaced his chair with the stability ball the following day. When he left his cubicle to attend a meeting, we took the ball, formed a circle, and rolled it back and forth to each other.

 

It was a rare moment during which we had somehow scanned and duplicated each contract, updated the statuses of all our business deals, triple-checked for signatures on every line. Yasmina’s shoulders relaxed after so many months of them tense near her ears, and Randall had stopped sighing at the top of each hour. We talked about what hobbies we had, which home towns we had come from, whether we were using this job as a step toward a better company or grad school. As we let the ball travel across the floor, Axel heard us laughing and left his office to see what we were up to.

 

“So new here, all of you,” Axel said. He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his gelled hair. We smiled nervously. “And so strong as a team! You’ll all need each other to stick it through. It’s hard to find a workplace that really functions as a second home.”

 

He looked at us one by one before heading into the boss’s office to discuss some nonstandard client agreement. We returned to our desks. As soon as we emailed Amanda to joke about how Axel’s life lessons must contribute to the department’s high turnover rate, we received two more emails from HR, one after the other.

 

“We regret to inform you,” the email started again.

 

“That Susan Shields passed away this morning.”

 

“That Chris Pall passed away earlier today.”

 

They were both in accounting. Julie asked if any of us knew the difference between accounting and accounts payable. Our boss walked by as she asked the question and frowned. None of us knew, and none of us asked John, either, when he returned from his meeting even sweatier and paler than usual.

 

“I’m taking the stairs now,” he said. “I’ve got to keep my health up.”

 

Amanda hadn’t heard how Susan or Chris died, but she did know them both and told us she wouldn’t be joining us for drinks after work that night. After our boss gave us each a new stack of assignments an hour before the end of the day, none of us went out for drinks either. We stayed until 7:30 and went home straight after.

 

We had moved to the city to work here, all of us young and promising contracts people. Wes’s fiancé had been living in the city two years prior to complete his master’s. Ellison’s family was on the other side of the country, and he planned to keep it that way. Sunny had an abuela in the suburbs. Our friends and mentors and older brothers had gushed about the city before the move.

 

“There’s energy in everything,” they had said. “So many people, so many things to do, so many adventures to have.”

Our bedrooms were the sizes of halal carts, and the rest of our apartments weren’t much larger. Our roommates were polite and out of the way, even if at night our walls were so thin we could hear each other typing on keyboards.

 

“Can they hear us?” we asked our partners after sex.

 

“Probably,” they answered. “We can hear them.”

 

They would go to sleep while we lay awake, listening to our roommates’ phone calls home, the foreign music of the restaurant on the ground floor, laughing groups leaving the movie theater down the block, food delivery boys flying past on their bicycles. We hoped the experience would feel less strange with time.

 

We tried inviting each other, us new hires, to the same clubs and festivals and parties that our friends and lovers would take us to, but we often found ourselves too tired to do much more than take the subway home and stay there.

 

When we arrived in the office the next day, HR had sent six more emails.

 

“We regret to inform you,” they began. Someone from the copywriting department, another from communications, three from production. The sixth was to let us know the elevator was under repair after its cord snapped. When we had walked in that morning, there was a single yellow band stretched across the elevator doors.

 

Randall complained that HR should switch up the emails a little, change the font color or add a picture or something, after he nearly forwarded one of the emails to a client awaiting approval on a rider. We nodded, as we had almost done the same thing.

 

A seventh email came: a memorial service would be held at the end of the month for everyone who had passed away, and a voluntary company-wide meeting would take place in the ground floor event space tomorrow morning for anyone concerned about the state of the office.

 

“I can’t work like this,” Mallory said. “Whatever is going on, I can’t deal with it.”

 

She told us she was taking a walk, but she never came back. We spent our lunch break that day waiting in line for the grief therapist.

 

“I don’t think it’s affecting my work, but is it bad that I’m bad at my work?” Ellison asked.

 

“Can we get more than ten minutes of time with you?” April asked.

 

“I know you’re here because you specialize in grief, but can we come to you for other non-grief-related problems?” Julie asked.

 

We saw Amanda in line for the therapist on our way back to our floor. Her face looked just as emotionless as ever, which we admired, and we told her we were excited to catch up with her soon. She grinned with a stiff precision that frightened us and said she wouldn’t be available for drinks again until the weekend.

 

While we ate lunch at our desks and filed our work, we asked each other about the loved ones we’d lost. Our lists were short, but we were young. And promising. The boss came by to ask how we were all doing, then walked back into his office. We watched him shut the door and heard him turn his lock.

 

“I sent my two weeks’ notice yesterday,” Victor said. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll even stay two weeks longer.”

 

Two of us nodded, having also sent our two weeks’ in. We thought about Mallory. Yasmina said she was ready to just quit with no notice, just like her. None of them had other positions lined up yet, but they were done with the company, done with the thankless work. The rest of us looked down, wondering whether what we were feeling for them was panic or jealousy.

 

At the company-wide meeting, we sat in a group at the back of the event space and tried not to think of how late we would have to stay that evening. Our phones buzzed with four more emails from HR. One in public outreach, three in sales. From our spot, we watched Amanda’s smooth, placid face from across the room as she checked her phone.

 

A row of chairs lined the right side of the stage. As the graying CEO asked the room to quiet down from his spot at the center of the stage, the chairs filled with small, nervous women in pale cardigans and paisley dresses. They introduced themselves as the HR department, saying their names down the line as if they were doing roll call in grade school. Somewhere near the front, we heard Axel let out a low whistle. After some brief remarks on the arrangements being made for the memorial service, the CEO asked if anyone wanted to voice their questions or concerns.

 

“Have the elevator shafts been checked? How about the fire alarms? The stairwells?”

 

“How does HR learn about these deaths before my department does?”

 

“Is it true that the building’s haunted?”

 

“Where do the bodies go?”

 

“Why do these deaths keep happening?”

 

As the room grew louder, the HR department stood up from their chairs quietly and filed out of the room. The last of the nervous women pulled her phone from her cardigan pocket and let out a sob as the door closed behind her. A second later, the room filled with various chimes and buzzes. Another email from communications. The room exploded with questions being shouted over those who were weeping.

 

“That’s it,” Yasmina said. “I quit.”

 

Wes, Sunny, and Adrian agreed. They walked out of the building, as did a few others from departments we’d never been in touch with. The rest of us went back up to the top floor to continue working.

 

The boss came by and asked if everything was alright, ignoring the empty desks. He didn’t wait for our replies, instead walking briskly into his office to lock himself in again. One by one, the HR emails began to appear in our inboxes by the hour, still bearing names of people we never met, hardly knew, and couldn’t find in ourselves to mourn. One by one, more of us got up from our desks and left, sliding letters of resignation under our boss’s door. We were down to a handful of people by the end of the day.

 

On our way out of the building, we ran into Amanda. She flashed a perfect smile at us and mentioned that she was on her way to celebrate another successful campaign.

 

“I can’t wrap my head around what’s going on,” Julie said. “How are we expected to handle this?”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda said, her eyes wide. “Everything is fine.”

 

“Everyone is dying,” we told her.

 

“I worked hard on this campaign,” she said. “I can’t focus on anything else.”

 

She turned her back on us and left, the clack of her heels echoing across the building floor. Except for Julie, who was crying, we did what Amanda had done and pretended nothing had gone wrong.

 

Once we had gone our separate ways, I loosened my tie. There was a park by the office that I would go to when it was a particularly nice day. It had a fountain, some men who played chess, a dog run. I sat on the lip of the fountain, watching other people file in and out of skyscrapers. I stayed there until the sun went down, looking at my office, wondering if the lights inside always stayed on or if there was ever a moment when the whole building went dark.

 

The next day, I was the only one who returned to the office. The boss’s door remained closed. Axel came by to ask how I was doing, what the team was up to, what it was like to be so young, so promising, with so much left to look forward to.

 

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How This Works

When Betsy gets back from the nondenominational church, she boils water for tea and slides open a kitchen drawer to find a teaspoon. But most of the teaspoons have disappeared. There is only one in the slot where eight should be nested in a thick pile. The single spoon left has been ravaged by the garbage disposal, the oval mouth of it chewed up and spit out.

 

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but Betsy jolts when she sees it. This used to be a safe neighborhood, the kind of place where children turned cartwheels in the front yards. But the past few months the neighborhood has been plagued by small thefts. A baseball bat left under a squat palm tree gone along with several low hanging fronds, a collar slipped off the neck of an outdoor cat, tulips cut with the precision of an exacto blade from a side yard.

 

And now this.

 

She will tell her husband about the spoons, and he will be pleased that she noticed. So many little thefts. They must be recorded. Greg is in charge of the recording and the neighborhood watch. He is the Captain. He is so busy with the neighborhood watch he calls in sick to work. He has been a mortgage broker for their entire marriage and, before this, has never used sick leave. He used to talk about rolling it over, cashing it out when he retires. But now, she hears him on the phone in the mornings faking a cough, lying about a fever. “I’ll work on that at home if I feel up to it,” her husband says. “No, no. I’ve got everything downloaded.”

 

Betsy’s husband is so busy as Captain of the neighborhood watch he has barely noticed that their 19-year-old daughter, Charlotte, left home in the middle of her spring break from college and disappeared, has been missing from their lives now for two months. Certainly she is back at college. Betsy has logged into the small amount of parent access she’s allowed online and watched Charlotte’s meal plan dollars continue to dwindle. But she doesn’t answer texts or phone calls or emails.

 

I should have been more patient, Betsy thinks. I should have taken her sadness over that boy in college more seriously. Every day Betsy thinks these same thoughts. Sometimes she adds new ones. I should have sent her to an all-girls college. I should have given her a sibling. I should have gotten her a Persian cat.

 

Betsy stirs her tea with the spoon upside down, so the gnawed-up mouth doesn’t rip open the tea bag. The string comes loose from the rim of the cup and loops around the spoon’s stem.

 

In truth, Betsy never liked this flatware. She would have preferred something plainer than the braided floral design. Something truly flat. She remembers registering for it quickly before she and Greg got married, when picking bath towels and a toaster oven and flatware were equal parts momentous and dull. When all they really wanted to do was go back to Greg’s apartment and pull shut the black-out blinds and sink deep into each other’s bodies, amazed at their single-minded good luck.

 

Now, two decades later, her husband’s body is as familiar and tuneless to Betsy as a dining room chair, a dishwasher, a potted plant. When she bumps into him, it is by accident, as she does now in the kitchen when he walks in and takes a beer out of the refrigerator.

 

“The teaspoons,” she says.

 

“I didn’t see you there,” he says.

 

“They’re gone.”

 

“Time to run the dishwasher maybe,” he says.

 

Betsy opens the dishwasher and stares at seven teaspoons draped across the cup rack. “Oh,” she says. “Of course.”

 

Her husband is carrying a clipboard in one hand, his beer in the other. “Making some notes,” he says. “It’s important to keep track.”

 

“I thought I was,” Betsy says, but he has already left the kitchen.

 

Greg is walking through the house and out the front door. His beer is balancing on his clipboard and he is pulling out a pen from behind his ear and walking down the block slowly, shuffling really, as if he might be older than he is, as if he might be his own father, stopping and inching his beer over on the clipboard where it is balanced, so he can write things down. So he can make notes.

 

Betsy boots up her computer. She has been lurking in an online group for parents of missing teen and young adult children. She haunts the edges of the conversations, not sure if she belongs here. The children are runaways and drug addicts, living on the streets, and their parents are sick with worry.

 

There are other groups where she definitely doesn’t belong, groups for children who have disappeared from bus stops, groups for children who have been kidnapped and taken to other countries in the middle of custody battles. And the groups for children who have died from cancer, car accidents, botched deliveries.

 

Many of the adult children—Betsy has learned from the forum this means eighteen or older—disappeared for no discernable reason at all, and these are the parents whose comments Betsy reads and avoids reading. I don’t know what I did wrong, the parents write. Tell me. What could I have done differently?

 

These parents are sleepless and oversleeping and they are breaking out in rashes and hives and their stomachs are twisted tight. They have developed ulcers and migraines and aches deep in their bones, aches that feel like some new kind of cancer. The parents in the online forum have hair that is thinning and falling out in clumps. Their children will not talk to them because the parents have failed in ways that are too countless to list.

 

The parents try to list them anyway, all the ways they have failed.

 

I worked too many hours. I was home too much. I didn’t let him breathe. I didn’t notice how sad she was. I shouldn’t have gotten divorced. I am a terrible mother. I was a lousy father. I should never have had children. I should have had more children. Her father was too strict. We should have moved from the suburbs. We should have been more consistent. I never really wanted children. I always wanted to be a mother, that’s all I ever wanted. We shouldn’t have moved to the suburbs. I shouldn’t have made him cut his hair. I shouldn’t have made her wear that dress. I should have let her get that piercing. We should have been more flexible. I should have made her stay in Sunday school. I should have volunteered in the classroom more when he was younger, when I could. I should have left her father. I should have pulled her from that school. I shouldn’t have gone back to work. Her father was too lenient. I should have made my son unlock that bedroom door. I shouldn’t have taken off the door. I should have let her lock her door. I thought it could have been worse. I didn’t know it was going to get worse.

 

I thought it was normal for teenagers.

 

I thought I was normal.

 

I thought she was normal.

 

I thought he was normal.

 

Is it normal to feel this way?

 

I thought this was normal.

 

Thanks for making me feel more normal.

 

Hello, is anyone out there today?

 

Betsy quickly logs off before she is spotted, although she doesn’t know if this is possible, how this works. She is new to online forums. She is not a joiner. For the past nineteen years of her life, she has been Charlotte’s mother. She knows she should have been something else, too, should do something else now, but she cannot remember what else she knows how to do.

 

Her phone is beeping on the desk, and she is afraid to look at it. She decides to let it beep a second time, the way it does when you miss a text. She makes a deal with herself that if she waits to look, it will be Charlotte texting. Her daughter will say she’s sorry. She’s been so busy. Come down to school and we can have lunch, Charlotte will say. Betsy will say, Of course. I’m on my way, pleased how smart she was to just hover around the edges of the online group, that this group of parents, of lost parents really, was not her group at all.

 

Even though Betsy counts to sixty before she looks, the text is not from her daughter. It’s from the lady at the little church one town over where Betsy helped clean the chairs that morning. When they were done working, the lady took her into the church kitchen and made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat across from Betsy in the middle of the day, at a thick, dented table and watched Betsy try to chew and swallow. When the lady asked, Betsy remembers now she had typed her name into the woman’s phone before she left.

 

Just checking to see if you made it home safely.

 

You are not my daughter, Betsy types back and then erases. She took valium earlier in the day, but the sweet, blurry effects have worn off.

 

Yes, she types. Here I am. Safely home.

 

Betsy wants to say there is nothing safe about home, that things have gone missing all over the neighborhood. Chimes have disappeared from side yard gates. Just yesterday, a neighbor reported spokes gone missing from the wheels of her daughter’s first two-wheeler. Betsy walks outside to find her husband. Maybe she can help him make notes, she thinks.

 

But she doesn’t see him when she looks down the block. Instead, she sees a little girl pushing a plastic shopping cart back and forth in front of a rental house. There are other rental houses on the block, but people have lived in those for years. This house has a regular turnover. Usually it’s young couples who start out with doormats that scream WELCOME TO OUR HOME before the letters fade to gray and hanging pots of begonias dry out on the front porch.  And then there’s a U-Haul truck or somebody’s brother’s pick-up or both because it’s over now, and they’re moving to separate places. And the garbage cans in front of the house overflow with soiled throw rugs and yellowed pillows as if they’ve lived there many years instead of just one year, or even less. And then they’re gone, and a few weeks later, after the painter spreads a new coat of paint over the bruised living room walls, it all starts again.

 

This time it’s a small family, a mother and father and preschooler. The little girl chalks the sidewalk in front of their house with pink hearts and yellow smiles. She draws a crooked hopscotch with angled squares that are not squares at all.

 

Today the little girl is pushing a plastic shopping cart. When Betsy gets closer, she sees the cart is full of baby dolls that once belonged to her own daughter. Betsy recognizes the matted hair and blurred eyes, the result of Charlotte playing with them in the bathtub despite the fact that the dolls were not made for water. Betsy remembers leaving them out on the curb at the end of a yard sale last summer before this family moved in.

 

Charlotte was home over the summer, and the yard sale had been her idea.  “I want to clean out my room,” she said. “Can I keep the money?”

 

The dolls that weren’t ruined were purchased for a dollar each by a woman from Leisure World who planned to make clothes for them and give them to the women who missed their own children and grandchildren who rarely visited. The woman stroked a doll’s dark hair and said, You’d be surprised what comfort a doll can bring.

 

Seeing her daughter’s ruined baby dolls being pushed in the plastic shopping cart brings Betsy no comfort. “Where did you get those?” she asks the little girl.

 

“They’re my babies,” the little girl says.

 

“No, they’re not,” Betsy says.

 

The little girl’s eyes have welled up, and she is grabbing the dolls from the cart and hugging them, but they are tumbling to the ground.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says as the front door of the rental house opens. “We were just chatting,” Betsy says to the woman who glares at her. “You have to be careful. There have been thefts here recently. It used to be safer.”

 

The woman is shooing her daughter inside, and the little girl is hiding behind her mother’s legs now.

 

“I live down the block.” Betsy points in the wrong direction and walks that way with purpose.

 

She walks all the way around the block and sneaks back into her own house. In the online support group some of the parents of missing children count absences in holidays: three Christmases, the fourth Thanksgiving, a sister’s bat mitzvah, a quinceanera. Others count in tangible losses: dogs and grandparents, a lemon tree gone to rot. A cat is eaten by a coyote that wandered down from the mountains through the public golf course.

 

They’ve missed so much, the parents write. It doesn’t make sense, they say. How can they stand it?

 

 We can’t stand it, they write

 

Betsy’s mother is planning an anniversary party for Betsy and Greg. She is full of questions Betsy doesn’t answer. We need to pin down the time, she says on a voicemail. We need to finalize the guest list.

 

Her husband is standing in the entranceway when Betsy sneaks back into her own house after accusing a preschooler of taking her daughter’s ruined dolls. He is holding up Betsy’s housekeys.

 

“You left the door unlocked,” he says.

 

“I’m sorry,” Betsy says. She looks around for his clipboard and finds it on the stairs. The paper clipped onto the board is full of house numbers, check marks and asterisks, and notes written in tiny script, her husband’s empty beer can tilted-over on its side on top of it.

 

“A Mexican tile is missing from that front stoop,” Greg says. “You know the one. Down the block.”

 

“I was just saying hi to the new neighbors,” Betsy says.

 

“It’s important to keep track,” he says.

 

“The ones with the little girl. I think she’s about four. Maybe five. I can’t remember what four looks like exactly.”

 

“A reflector is missing from a child’s bike.”

 

“Was she always so sensitive?” Betsy asks.

 

“You can’t assume just because you’re down the block, things are safe here.”

 

“It’s been two months. How much longer, do you think? It’s like I’m holding my breath.”

 

“You’ve got to remember to lock up,” Greg says.

 

“I was just out for a minute.” Betsy wishes she had never agreed to the yard sale last summer, that she had made her daughter keep it all, every bright pink jacket, every framed poster of a kitten, every boy band key chain.

 

“That’s how it happens,” Greg says. Her husband is staring past her, his eyes flat and focused.

 

I’m right here, Betsy thinks but doesn’t say.

 

“That’s how fast,” he says. “That’s exactly how it happens.”

 

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Ink

 

It’s the beginning of the school year, raining hard. C’s parents never leave town, but tonight is sweet and swollen—their departure some kind of unconscious allowance for youthful dalliance. They’ve gone to see friends, will return tomorrow.

 

C is freshly sixteen, a sophomore, which means the evening possesses infinite potential for teenage ruckus, a chaos she would have gladly exploited, but is, instead, sitting cross-legged inside her bedroom closet. The choice to keep the fact of the empty house from friends is part of a new installment of withholding, not unlike two weekends ago when her friends tied themselves in corsets, legs crisscrossed in fishnets, eyes blackened and glittery, and couldn’t understand why C wouldn’t join them for Rocky Horror. To walk out like that at midnight, to indulge her bare skin to the end of summer air, was compelling, certainly, yet she’d refused, sat in a patio chair, half listening to CocoRosie, half expecting K not to show. That night, the odds were in her favor. K had shown up around 1 a.m., after her parents had fallen asleep, in that quiet, liminal hour that had, over the past three months, come to feel synonymous with him. Other nights, he wouldn’t show at all, leaving C alone with her writing and desire. If he comes tonight, C decides, she will give it to him if he asks—her body. Her virginity, a nagging, heavy thing she is ready to cast off. She pulses with nervousness.

 

—

 

Inside the closet she lights a small votive candle, enough for total luminescence. The closet in her room, her room inside the only house she’s ever lived in: suburban, old, creaky, wooden. The closet is barely a walk-in, tracks of carpet nails steal inches from the tight quarters, and there’s a wide wooden step separating the space into two tiers—the upper platform just large enough to sit on, which is where C is, tucked away behind a waterfall of clothes.

 

On her face, makeup. She’s dressed in a fitted shirt, tights—a stretchy black skirt lies outside on the bed, ready to slide into. She’d finished getting ready, sucking in, changing clothes, clamping the straightener over her hair until the entire room smelled of charred tissue paper. She’d paced, lit incense, opened the window to let the storm smell in and considered what she might do until K got there, if he even showed up at all. In the past she would take out her favorite book or a notebook, reading or writing until he arrived to find her that way: gripped, intellectual, withholding. “What are you doing?” he’d sometimes ask, and she’d smile coyly, close the book and say, “How are you, K?” This was in the summer when the nights were humid and the moon was always out.

 

Something urged her to the closet. The desire to feel contained, resume her waiting close to the womb of her consciousness, an innate teenage desire for dimness.

 

More books and papers than clothes. On the floor below her, a haphazard row of thrifted shoes and an old cardboard trunk. Inside, a matrix of journals, books, loose papers with black, blue, pencil writing, a beating drum of life. By the time she is a senior, there will be no room left inside the box, the material collapsed all over the floor, all angst and longing.

 

C’s phone vibrates: Walking. C and K’s houses are almost four miles apart; it will take him at least an hour to get here. The news of his distant travel on foot, in the rain no less, thrills her, proves something. She looks at the time: 8:36. She’ll wait until 8:40 to respond. From the depths of the trunk, C finds the clean manila folder, the one labeled C + K—a not-so-subtle attempt at encoding. Inside the folder is a thick packet of their online correspondence, so hefty it had taken all the printer ink. There are emails and Instant Message conversations going back three months, when K was bored one night and sent her a simple message, hello. She studies for clues to his inner workings, every utterance like a delicate poem worthy of dissection. She lets out a sigh. She flexes her muscles to release the anticipation running beneath the skin. She looks at her phone. 8:41. You must be getting soaked, she types and sends. A little wetness never hurt anyone, K replies. She reads into his words, smiles, buries her face into a jacket hanging above her head.

 

—

 

C is coming down from her first summer of men, John and Max interested in her at the same time—a sudden jolt of attention.

 

John’s main appeal resided in the fact that he is a year older and had a new obsession with C. “It’s lame,” he said when she asked him about his nickname, Coffee. “It’s just because I coughed a lot one time when we were all smoking. Now I’m stuck with it.”

 

“That is lame,” she agreed.

 

On their first hangout alone, Coffee took C to The Portal, a place she’d heard people talk about and which she discovered was nothing more than a family of shrubs, fucking bushes, alongside a neighborhood church. No one can see in, he emphasized, but from inside you can see out. He’d kissed her so hard, and she was so focused on doing it well, she didn’t feel her arm rubbing against the brick side of the church. When they came up for air, C’s arm was bleeding—it was bleeding a lot. “Oh shit,” he’d said. A few weeks later Coffee started confessing his love to C, and their hangouts consisted of him crying over her dating Max, her sweet, good-looking friend who would come over while her parents were at work. In broad daylight they’d watch movies in their entirety, not touching until the credits rolled and Max would get this boyish look on his face, lean in close and say, “I know what we can do now…” his dimples too cute, his tongue in her mouth like a torpedo.

 

Both wanted to be her boyfriend, but she was afraid of her own sexuality, too self-conscious, too in love with K, the one she knew she could never fully have, the fact of him like a sacred name embroidered in the skin, not fit for articulation. With K, she understood the urge of lovers to tattoo each other’s names onto the flesh. If asked, she would ink him into her, somewhere where it hurt, like down the long spindle of her spine.

 

She looks down to her body, to her hands smudged with ink. Yes, she says silently. Tonight is the night.

 

—

 

One might say C, barely a sophomore, is too young to reminisce over teendome, but she’d already completed one year, had accrued a rebellion, steadfast, miserable, thrilling. Her high school is large, the teachers terribly disengaged, sour. While most of her peers deal with the lack of care by erupting into violence, C and her friends opt to guzzle 40’s of High Life in the school’s basement, or ditch all together, go to the public library and read what’s useful—oh, the immaculate shelves, the books like dormant specimens, coming to life under C’s touch.

 

From the trunk, C pulls more paper, a wrinkled computer paper in her best friend’s large, masculine handwriting: Beauty has much more to do with an individual perception of something than any tangible or quantifiable quality, it begins. She doesn’t know how this private manifesto ended up in her box, although in the past she’d been guilty of stealing scraps of her friends. After two 40’s, the information strewn all over Naomi’s attic—cartoons depicting their own lives, paintings, journal entries—tantalized C in a drunken way and convinced her of their ability to reveal something subtle, yet remarkably true about this friend she loved. So she’d trace her hand over the floor—Naomi’s entire attic the equivalent of C’s closet, both always writing themselves out of something—and like a deck of cards, she would pull whatever felt smoothest under the pads of her fingers, slip the paper into her bag to open later, a piece of her friend to fold into the reservoir, Jung’s collective unconscious, a weak, murky attempt at reconciliation for her thievery. Her knowledge is my knowledge. Like most things, she didn’t think about getting caught, didn’t end up with anything that was, necessarily, personal, except the one that read: I am not very articulate, I am bad at math, I don’t consistently recycle, I steal alcohol from CVS, I’ve never had a boyfriend, I don’t play any sports, I think I know everything—a double-sided litany of self-loathing. C didn’t judge, liked the fact that she could read it impartially, fold it into the canon to dissolve with her own loopy thoughts.

 

The candlelight bobs, heat rises in the closet. A dark cherry smell grows, the smell of blunt papers kept hidden away in a shoebox above her head. She stands up, using the upper platform to peer over the top shelf that houses a typewriter, her grandma’s old hat rack, and in the very back, the box she’d painted gold. She removes the lid; inside it smells of bong water—papers, but no weed. She’ll have to wait for K.

 

Like Coffee, K has a street name, one that she would never use, but is there, sewn in, part of his identity, painted on the walls of their high school and the restaurant he worked at. He is two years older, their freshman-year drug dealer, that’s how it started. She loves what he does with words, the way he calls her Ma, as in, “Sup Ma,” as in, “I like how you think, Ma,” or can say, in all charm and seriousness, “Hello young love, the moon is bright and full, let’s make love on your roof beneath it,” perfectly delivered, astonishingly real. Yet the ins and outs of his everyday life are murky—he offers only snapshots—shards of parties, pieces of friends, shadowy nights alone making art—all of it so encrypted she’s left to design his hidden life for herself. Coffee had recently found out about the two of them, not that there was much to find out, and had messaged C a somber little message that read, You’re fucking K-Wil? You got yourself the player. She didn’t say anything. And they weren’t fucking.

 

K’s reputation is obsolete when he comes over, kisses C’s neck, plays whale songs on a small speaker. “This shit is real,” he’d say to the amniotic sounds. He’d say, “I want to be Rastafari, a poet, an artist; I want to leave my mom’s place, I want to take you for a drive.” He teaches C to drive down the slick streets of her childhood, and then sneaks away at sunrise. Addiction, obsession, crept up on her, slowly then all at once. Now she lied, gave up nights to see him on the flimsy chance he’d make it. How much time had she wasted waiting? She glances back to their folder, to the C and the K, finds an old pencil, and writes C + K, they make the same sound…but they are not interchangeable.

 

—

 

In the closet her palms sweat. He’s walking in the rain, four miles. She can hear the rain pounding down on the flat rooftop and wonders if the dining room ceiling has begun to leak. She thinks about getting up, but the thought of the house feels too big, too filled with her parents’ belongings—she wants to stay close to her things. Among the pile of books, Miranda July, Freud, zines, a dictionary whose pages she flutters between her fingers, the paper-wind wicking the candlelight. She closes her eyes, pretends she is on a train, the flicker practically audible on her eyelids. Then the fire goes out, and the darkness feels good too. You smell like a birthday cake, she can imagine him saying to her hair when he greets her. She gropes around for the lighter, lights the candle back up, lands her finger on a random word in the dictionary, on the word truncated, meaning shortened, sounding a lot like trunk, like the one in front of her housing her mess of thoughts, so dissimilar from abridged. For a moment C grows tired of her manic upheaval, her restless writing, her own obsession with his words and how he might use them on her tonight, all of it so cluttered. Had she a metal pail, she’d have all the tools to start burning, cleansed and ready for him. Blank, new, virginal. Instead she pulls from the trunk The Four Noble Truths, a packet from Political Philosophy, one of the few papers from last year that felt worth keeping.

 

…The truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. More simply put, suffering exists. The concept of pleasure is not denied, but acknowledged as fleeting. Pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. The same logic belies an understanding of happiness. In the end, only aging, sickness, and death are certain and unavoidable.

 

She’d written in the margins, and this marginalia makes her laugh, jolts her out of her own silence. Aside the truth of suffering she’d written school = imprisonment, and next to pleasure she’d drawn a pot leaf; unquenchable thirst, a simple heart. The predictability of her trope embarrasses her, brings heat to her cheeks. More intriguing, however, was what she’d written in a sloppy script barely recognizable at the bottom of the page: Every person, no matter how plain has one great erotic performance in her life; the second performance would only be a copy of the first. It was a quote from somewhere, a book or song lyrics. She scans her mind in search for a connection to The Truths, the two pools of ink like shadows of one another. She finally settles on the idea that they are related merely by the fact that knowledge builds on other knowledge—something else she’d heard and jotted down. Joined but unjoined. What would it feel like to finally let their bodies do the talking?

 

Her ass hurts. She grows restless, anxious. She won’t get up yet, afraid her thoughts will spread thinly over the furniture, like she’ll have nothing to say when he arrives. In the pocket-sized book, Freud has a lot to say about sexuality, dreams, the subconscious, and the points at which they intersect. Maybe this is something she can talk about. Plant the seed of seduction by talking psychology, quoting the dead. She yanks the jacket from the hanger, uses it as a cushion, crosses her legs again, and thinks of him walking in the rain. A lovely landscape of purple and blue erects in the hippocampus. This is how the night will build, like it always does. They’ll talk and talk and when their words have crescendoed themselves, after their speech draws into the folds of the long night, they will lie down, this time in her bed, this is that night.

 

—

 

Below her, she feels a light rumble, practically undetectable, then the sound of the kitchen door closing. Shit, she thinks. She’s still stocking-footed. She tiptoes out of the closet. Outside, the bedroom air is cool, humid, the spell broken. The rain comes on slower now. He doesn’t call out for her, but she can hear him making his way through the rooms downstairs. She quickly slides into her skirt. Lightning cracks the sky, illuminates two over-stuffed pillows on the bed so they look like storm clouds, or phantoms. The house is old, each stair with its own category of sound, so C can almost track K’s progression, his slow ascent.

 

“Hey!” she finally calls out, releasing her voice.

 

“Hello?” K slowly opens the bedroom door, where C stands still, shocked out of her solitude.

 

“Hey,” she says again, leaning in for a long, damp hug. More than how he looks, he smells so good—faintly vanilla, but more masculine, like figs and leather, brown sugar—a scent she believes was crafted for her own enjoyment. She could live off this smell. He carries an orange construction cone.

 

“For you. A gift from along the way.”

 

“Something I’ve always wanted.” She laughs. The cone is huge, streaked with traffic muck.

 

“So, what have you been up to, chica?” K’s eyes scan the room, land on the closet where candlelight dances softly and jagged corners of paper poke out. It must look like some strange séance, C thinks. She had wanted him to see the oddity of it all, to wonder about her as much as she wonders about him, but now she feels exposed, naked, wordless.

 

“I was just looking at stupid shit I’ve written,” she says, blowing the candle out and clicking on a lamp. “I can’t believe you walked here.” She waits for, it was worth it or, I’d walk longer to see you.

 

“The rain is my friend,” K says instead, setting the cone down.

 

“Do you want to head to the patio? I still have some of your beers from last time. They’re warm. I had to hide them.” C gestures toward the darkened closet, where two High Lifes lay nestled inside coat pockets.

 

“I actually can’t stay long, Ma. Zach needs me to hook him up with something tonight.”

 

“What?” The news is sharp, hits her like a frigid wind. “What do you mean? You just walked, like, four miles to get here.”

 

“Yeah, tell me about it. And it’s a beautiful night.” K lowers to the floor, sits at the closet’s threshold. “I’d much rather kick it with you. We’ll do this again.”

 

C grabs her bath towel off of the hook and hands it to him. She sits on her bed, tries to hide the sudden rush of disappointment, but it roils. Come here, she thinks, I’m ready.

 

“I’m still looking all into Rastafarianism. I want to write my own bible one day, write my own religion,” K says, patting himself dry. He goes on talking about things so abstractly she confuses it for his genius. She soaks him in, would be happy to skip the conversation for tonight if it means she could feel his mouth on hers, become absorbed in that smell. Instead she tells him about The Four Noble Truths and he tells her about the way he watches his mom suffer; she’s ill, an immigrant, divorced, and angry. No one else has heard this coming out of his mouth before, she thinks.

 

K points to the trunk. “Tell me what you’ve been writing,” he says again. From this angle, everything inside looks like nothing more than a messy pit, an unruly recycling bin.

 

“Oh, nothing. It’s stupid,” C says, cursing herself for leaving their folder out in plain sight. And how many of those documents were laced with his name? How many journal entries began in I need, or, I can’t stop, etc? Too many, probably.

 

“Nah, I bet your writing is dope,” K says. “I have a box, too, filled with photos of me as a little punk kid.” C tries to imagine K as an innocent, young boy, but nothing comes to mind. In front of her his arm muscles glisten from rain and his confidence spews like his own beautiful odor. “I think I see one of you right there.” K points to some gloss peeking out from behind the manila folder. Before C can protest, he reaches inside her closet and pulls a small deck of photos from the rubble, not seeing the folder. Missing it all together. Outside the storm resumes its pounding, shaking the wooden floorboards and lighting the room with its electricity. She cups her hands over his, over the photos.

 

“Come on, I bet you were cute,” K says. Together they peer down to the photo of C and her dad at the zoo; C lounging in a blue kiddie pool; C on her first bicycle; and she hopes, she prays the photo she doesn’t want to be there won’t be, and then K shuffles through and finds it: a young C, five or six years old, on her bed wearing white tights, a white turtle neck, and large, plush rabbit ears, lined in pink. Between her legs, a half-dozen rabbit stuffed animals: one sitting upright holding a small brush for grooming its long ears; another red-eyed, albino; two man and woman rabbits dressed in Victorian clothes, velcroed paw-to-paw—married rabbits. The image is innately sexual, of course taken innocently, a little girl dressed identical to her toys, on her dreamy, pastel bed. Outside a horn sounds off, K’s friend ready to take him away from her. But K is transfixed, doesn’t move. Please find this sexy, she thinks. Silence hangs between them, just the rain falls. He looks up at her.

 

“I liked my rabbits?” C says.

 

K reaches for her face, tugs at her hair a little, draws her close.

 

Kiss me, she thinks. But K doesn’t kiss her. He bypasses her lips, goes straight to her ear; the skin around the drum tightens.

 

“You look like. A little. Bunny. Porn star.” His words slide in. Explode. The car in waiting wails its horn, doesn’t let it up for several seconds. The two look at each other, and C cannot tell if it’s longing that she feels.

 

But still she says, “Stay.”

 

And still he says, “I have to go.”

 

“My parents will be gone all night.”

 

He gives her a hard kiss between the eyes before descending.

 

Downstairs, C watches the car rush away, making small waves in its hurry. The cavernous rooms and she alone among them. Isn’t that enough? But he is gone, and she is left with the same humid quiet, the same rain coming down in sheets, his words echoing in her ears. The dining room ceiling drips one drop at a time onto the floor. The rhythm has a numbing quality, but yearning has a way of jostling the body back to feeling. She meanders into her mom’s study, past the stacks of books that hold no interest to her. She grabs a fancy calligraphy pen off of the desk, then approaches the staircase and begins climbing, articulating her foot heel to toe, heel to toe, heel to toe, the way she’d read monks do in walking meditation. I am here, she thinks, I am here, but all the while her fist is tight around the pen, the nails carve red crescents in the flesh. The night is long ahead of her and there are words, she knows, that will make the time go by, but she’s not sure which ones or when they’ll find her.

 

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Evolution Kit

According to the manual, the “Theistic-Science World Building Kit” contains the following:

 

1. One forty-gallon terrarium (48″ x 12″ x 16″)

2. One shaker of “Evolution Mix” biosphere food (red)

3. One prepackaged rock to make the core

4. One shaker of “Planetary/Ecosystem Dust” (blue)

5. Something called “Matter,” which has the exact color and consistency of chalk dust

6. The Evolution Manual, as yellow and glossy as a school bus

 

The manual tells Katie that she should expect all life in her biosphere to map onto the evolutionary trails of Earth species. She can expect fish to crawl up on land, sprout into dinosaurs and birds: an inherited morphology spread throughout the ages.

 

STEP ONE: Pour Matter into biosphere and add one to five shakes of Evolutionary Dust.

 

STEP TWO: Begin.

 

Katie pours the chalk dust into the terrarium. She sprinkles a heavy dose of blue dust and a bit of red. It looks as though she has dumped food coloring into milk. The blue gains dominance, takes the red and drowns it. Katie imagines hydrothermal vents blasting within the rifts of the biosphere’s surface like primordial, cosmic wounds.

 

She does not regret her drunken purchase. The kit was purchased whilst shitfaced the night she got laid off. The package arrived on May 21st, which Katie remembers only because it was an ex-boyfriend’s birthday. The return address listed the town of Gammelstad, Sweden, but the box claimed manufacture in Stockholm, and the postage stamps revealed a journey from Oslo to Reykjavik to Paris for some reason to Reykjavik again to Halifax to Denton, Texas, where it found Katie’s front door. The return label said Play God Theistic-Science Company in block blue lettering, followed by a clip-art icon of a FedEx truck, even though the shipping service was a third party called Ilmarinen, Inc.

 

Katie adds more Planetary/Ecosystem Dust and goes to bed.

 

When she wakes, fish have formed in the theistic-biosphere. The terrarium is an aquatic underworld: jellyfish sway near the surface; shadowy agnatha—jawless fish—swarm at the bottom. Small, armored sharks with little plated spines of cartilage that the manual calls acanthodii appear. In the tank’s center, there is a tiny quadrant of shore.

 

STEP 3: So, you think you’re beginning to see fish.

 

Titaalik roseae, a four-limbed Devonian vertebrate fossil found in Nunavit, Canada is thought to be one of the first creatures to have walked on land from the sea. Both fish and tetrapod, the Titaalik supported gills, fins, a pelvic girdle, and partial wrists. Keep watching. The next step is dinosaurs.

 

Katie looks back at her terrarium. She wonders if the tiny creatures she sees emerging onto the shore resemble Titaalik, their toothy mouths gaping, marble eyes glistening like new olives.

 

The world around her but for these little creatures feels ill with the lack of hope.

 

It is sunset by the time there are dinosaurs. Evening coats Katie’s window in shades of blue. The dinosaurs are small at first, but by the time Katie is getting ready for bed, wings break through their scales in the most beautiful colors: Jupiter red, asteroid brown, Neptune green. Katie falls asleep in front of the terrarium.

 

In her dream a great wind blows through the house, far too powerful for her tiny dinosaurs to fly. To protect them Katie must huddle over the biosphere with a blanket around her shoulders, arms spread out like a mother bat, to block the wind.

 

When she wakes, the dinosaurs are the size of bumblebees, flying and bumping into the glass. One of them belches a candlewick cough of flame.

 

STEP 4: After archaeopteryx, notice mammals.

 

But there are no mammals, and Katie recognizes the dinosaurs for what they are: dragons. They buzz like trapped flies, spurting flame at each other. It is impossibly cute.

 

If any cryptozoological creatures appear, immediately implement World Extinction Kit (sold separately at a 15% percent discount with purchase of a second Theistic-Science World Building Kit).

 

Online, Katie looks up the Extinction Kit. There is a tiny rock that looks like an asteroid and a shaker of something called “Anti-matter.” There is no explanation as to why the dragons must die. Why can’t Katie have dragons instead of dinosaurs? She watches the dragons play with each other. They keep bumping into the glass. Katie opens the top of the terrarium.

 

One immediately begins to nest in the rafters. Another begins hoarding loose grains of rice in her pantry. It sits atop the rice as if on a bed of gold. Katie chucks the Evolutionary Manual in the trash. There is no real plan to a world, she knows this. Only chaos.

 

The terrarium is a dead planet now. No more creatures will appear. Katie wonders if the dragons feel like astronauts, like explorers. She wonders if they are triumphant or afraid. If the sound of her microwaving ramen sends a message of doom throughout the apartment. If they heave a tiny sigh of relief at the “ding.” She wonders what it feels like to have left behind the world of false order and live in the stars.

 

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To the Elk

They were hanging it against the barn wall. The head limp to the side. With a snowmobile they had dragged the dead elk from wherever in the mountains the pile lay where it had been gutted. For this bloody spectacle.

 

“That’s a big fucking animal.”

 

The porch of the main cabin: Wyatt was there with her, and so was this man Dale from Seattle plus the three highballs in his veins. That’s a big fucking thing, Dale kept saying. This was at the ranch that was in Wyatt’s family. The Smith River was nearby. It was Thanksgiving night.

 

“They got one last year too,” said Wyatt.

 

“It’s bigger than a buffalo.”

 

Savannah was thinking of her father and brother and this same performance. They would return home to the triplex by the refinery, north-side Great Falls, with a carcass in the truck bed and blood dripping from the tailgate. And she was saying to herself, for this….

 

Up the porch steps came the hunters. They had been out all day and were covered in mud, and Savannah thought they smelled. Wyatt congratulated them and asked about the hunt. An uncle said they’d been lucky to shoot it from fifty yards. It ran a hundred and died, and a young cousin took the killing shot.

 

Wyatt’s uncles and cousins started applauding. They shook hands all around. Even in daytime she didn’t remember their names, and it was not daytime. The dark was long past gathering; it had mustered.

 

“Last year they got a bigger one,” Wyatt said.

 

By now the hunters had gone off to their different cabins to clean up.

 

“Bigger?” said Dale. “Bigger than that?”

 

“It’s missing half its rack.”

 

Savannah looked at the head again and saw only one antler.

 

“Do they spar?” asked Dale.

 

“I think they grind them against the trees,” said Wyatt.

 

“Not as impressive.”

 

“True.”

 

Speaking to her now, Dale said, “Let me ask. As a Western woman, does this arouse you? These men returning from the hunt?”

 

“I hope not,” said Wyatt. “I’m related to them.”

 

“I don’t mean the men. I mean the blood. I mean the sight of this big, beautiful dead thing.”

 

Savannah said, “I’m used to it.”

 

In fact by now—being from this region and educated in a different one (the opportunity belonging to so few from that refinery neighborhood)—she had a rule for herself: no dead animals or fresh-caught fish, not in real life and not in any photographs in any public medium, app or profile, or anything else. None of that spectacle would be permitted with regard to whatever partner or friend she kept. Wyatt’s pictures were full of other things: the neoclassical façade of the apartment building where he used to live in Missoula, an Old Fashioned in a bar in Chicago where his roommate from college played jazz guitar, a portrait in graduation robes and the sandstone arcade columns flanking him, that one now six years old and his hair (shorter back then) tousled from doffing the cap, the PBK cord helpfully around his neck in the foreground….

 

“Does it arouse you, Dale?” Wyatt asked.

 

“No, I’m so boring. No kinks for me. For me it’s all dollars and cents.”

 

“You’ve seen more blood than any of us.”

 

Seattle Dale was a political communications consultant. Fundraising was his higher function.

 

“Violence to me is writing a strongly worded email. But—I mean—you look at this, and you know these men can provide. I mean, this is vacation—it’s fun—for us. But—I mean—it’s something, something more.”

 

His tumbler was down to the ice melt.

 

“It doesn’t arouse me,” Savannah said.

 

A cone of light and warmth and festivity spiraled out like a dust devil when the door opened. A terrier called Sonny with long distinguished whiskers came out and trotted down the steps and went to piss on the snowy lawn. Inside, Wyatt’s aunts and mother, and his father also, were preparing the table. His father specialized in sweet potatoes.

When the little dog came back Dale went in for another drink and called the dog in using baby sounds. At last they were alone.

 

She watched Wyatt’s face. There was nothing there but anticipation for dinner and for his wine. She had looked at him before and had seen whole worlds where they would go together and more from which he’d come. A lick of dark hair came down out of the front of his cap. He put himself together well and tried to dress of his time, but it did not subsume him. Not too clean with the effort, his good shirt just a little too big. He liked big clothes. To have something fit perfectly—was that another of the things that would make him feel ashamed of his upbringing?

 

The glass against Wyatt’s lips now. Rare content passed through his eyes as he swallowed, the fire weeping in them. He made his deep voice go high and feminine. “Does it arouse you?”

 

“Ask me again,” Savannah said.

 

“As a Western woman?”

 

She moved to hit him, and his arm was around her.

 

“It’s cold.”

 

“I’ll get a fire going in our cabin.”

 

“That sounds nice.”

 

“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know it’s unbearable.”

 

“It’s not. It’s really not. I love them.”

 

There were many people she didn’t know. But at length you would know them. It was not being away from home, that wasn’t the difficult thing. Anyway you only had to get through dinner and then go to the little cabin and go to sleep. The drive had been beautiful, and they hadn’t argued.

 

She stood on toes to kiss the bottom of his neck.

 

“Do you really?” he asked.

 

Tears were in that question. Tears were good. And her rule was a good rule, a necessary rule to have for men. Education in history and politics had made her question whether it was for the better passage of life not to have relationships with men. That was a resounding theory up until graduation. Anyway, at minimum you had to have a rule you stuck with.

 

He went to wash his hands before dinner. When he was gone she admired for a while the dark mountain on the horizon above the ranch gate. The cold clean air touching her eyes, inflaming the veins. She didn’t look at the dead elk on the side of the barn. Then she went in for dinner.

 

—

 

The table was so crowded with people that her shoulders never relaxed. Her shirt went too low, she thought.

 

The food was very good. The green beans were perfectly seasoned. There were two turkeys; one was local and lean and the other was a butterball. They filled their glasses with red wine out of towering decanters. She was at the end of the table beside Wyatt. His father was at the head. She was across from his mother. It was a good meal. Everyone talked to each other.

 

“How come you didn’t want to hike,” the mother was saying.

 

“I thought I’d stay around and get something done,” said the father.

 

“Get what done?”

 

“Work. Caught up on emails.”

 

She watched Wyatt. He was drinking fast. She touched his knee under the table. His leg was vibrating under her hand. You could duck under these little breakers of talk like a child playing in the surf, but Wyatt was not possessed of that lightness. Later they would have to talk at length about it—whatever thing was said at the table that stood out to him as particularly abhorrent.

 

Things got formally quiet as everyone took turns saying gratefuls. The woodstove atmosphere and the gray iron of the gun barrels on the walls and the smell of the old rugs and leather furniture gave the quiet an oppressive quality like overwhelming heat, inescapable intimacy, absorbing silence into it.

 

From the other head of the table, “To the elk.”

 

“To the elk.”

 

“Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

 

“It’s special.”

 

“There are times you’re facing an animal and you’re not ready to take a life. It’s not an easy thing. To the elk. And to Harrison. He took the shot.”

 

She drank a little faster after the toast. When her turn finally came, she said, “Thank you for welcoming me. It’s a wonderful place.”

 

“To the ranch.”

 

“The ranch.”

 

They drank. All agreed—the ranch and the dead elk held all that was beautiful and dear. She didn’t look at any particular face; from having run meetings she understood how to look between people when addressing a table. She went on, “It’s been a good year. Better than I expected.”

 

Wyatt mugged for the crowd, and everyone laughed.

 

“Really, thank you for having me.”

 

Later they stood around the long kitchen island and ate the pie she had baked. She explained again to one of the aunts the decision they’d made to move in and what went into it. The uncle who had toasted the elk asked what she was doing for work and followed her answer with, “Do you work together?”

 

“No,” said Wyatt. “She works for a Dean. I work in Admissions. The worst office to be in right now.”

 

“It’s a good place to work,” she said. “I can do four tens in the summer when I want. The benefits are good. Campus jobs are nice.”

 

“When you add your union dues to the premiums you’re losing half a paycheck,” said Wyatt.

 

“But you can’t have one without the other,” she said.

 

“It’s beautiful how that works.”

 

“Can you run this up the flagpole?” the uncle went on. He had not listened. “Why the cuts to English? You can’t cut English. What’s the point of having a public college if you’re going to get rid of English?”

 

“English isn’t going anywhere,” she promised, wearily. Because she thought there was more than just the appreciation of literature in his concern for the survival of English.

 

“Well, run it up the pole if you can. It’s terrible what’s happening over there with the cuts. And Will Tunt retiring is a big loss.”

 

“It’ll get better,” she said.

 

“Enrollment always goes up when there’s a recession,” said Wyatt. “Folks would rather be in grad school.”

 

The uncle had taken several big bites of her pie. He told her how delicious it was and asked if she had made it herself, yes. After a long while the grown-ups were too drunk to stay awake and the teenage boy cousins had grown too weary for the world outside their heads and the girl cousins were sleeping in the corners cuddling with the dogs and it was over, she had survived it, and Wyatt was not saying anything else about the college where they worked and how it was a poor school serving poor students who were going to stay poor, and they were on their way out.

 

“Take Sonny with you,” said his father. Handed the terrier’s leash to his son. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good.”

 

Together they walked the little dog from the big cabin to the small cabin where they were staying.

 

While Sonny sniffed around at the base of the cabin steps, they sat on the porch, on top of a bench covered with a buffalo hide, and they looked across the lawn at the barn where the dead elk was hanging. Savannah wondered if it was going to start smelling.

 

“I wish I’d been out there to see,” said Wyatt.

 

“I don’t.”

 

“I mean to see it when it was alive.”

 

“I’m glad you weren’t there to see it get killed.”

 

They were holding each other. The wind moved over their faces, and they squeezed closer.

 

“Not that I want to hunt,” Wyatt was saying. “But you sort of wish that you knew what it was like.”

 

“I don’t. I don’t want you to be like,” she raised her voice and imitated Seattle Dale, “Harrison.”

 

“Me neither. I just wish I knew.”

 

“It was fun walking to the cliff,” she said.

 

The hike they’d done in the afternoon took them across the western expanse of the family’s great tract, past a tipi erected for ambience, to the edge of the river gorge. Fathoms down, you could see the frozen banks. In summertime you could swing from a hammock between two ponderosas with a cocktail in hand, maybe a book in your lap. This was how she imagined him.

 

Then she thought that the dead elk had moved, swung a little.

 

“It’s—” he started. “My dad didn’t know how to field dress an animal. His dad never taught him how to hunt. I’m not any better because I don’t do it.”

 

“It’s not about being better.”

 

“One feels somehow emasculated,” he said.

 

“Because you don’t know how to hunt?”

 

“Not exactly. I don’t think you’d get it. You remember Chuck asking what I do?”

 

“He didn’t ask you. He asked me.”

 

“But then he asked if we work together.”

 

“So.”

 

“I always have to prove my worth. That’s what I mean: I don’t think hunting is impressive. But doing something impressive is impressive. Knowing how to do things.”

 

“I don’t think that’s what Chuck meant.”

 

“I know my family.”

 

She didn’t want to argue. She said something about how it would be cold and unpleasant to have to go pee in the middle of the night, since the nearest outhouse was across the lawn, behind the barn with the dead elk. After that they went inside and got changed for bed; or, she did, and he started trying to make the fire.

 

The plush duvet cover was cold on her bare legs. The hairs stood up, and while she waited for the fire to start she was self-conscious of having prickly legs. Sonny was on the ground, sitting obediently and anxiously, watching her in bed. Wyatt was kneeling and using a hatchet to make kindling. Erratic banging shook the door when he wedged the blade into a crack and slammed a log against the stone base of the fireplace to split off flakes of pine. He built a pyre in the iron woodstove with newspaper and tinder and tried to get the flames started and took a long time to do it and tried opening and closing the flue and could not get it right.

 

“It’s so cold,” she said.

 

“Almost got it. I smothered it last time.”

 

“Maybe you could just get in with me.”

 

“No, I have to do this.”

 

She could fall asleep even when she was freezing, especially after enduring something. Enduring did make you tired, but it was alright to be tired because you could sleep easily. Her father had said to her once, do you sleep easy because you’re a princess?

 

She was almost in a dream and Wyatt was still working on the fire, and she felt Sonny climb up onto the bed and lay down on top of her feet, and her legs got warmer, and then she was all the way in the dream and almost asleep but still heard the newspaper flare up quickly and burn out each time he tried and tried, Wyatt still in the waking world.

 

—

 

Much later in the night she woke up because she had to pee. It was hot in the cabin. The fire was going, she did not know for how long, and the twin bed beside the queen was unmade but empty.

 

She pulled sweatpants on and went to the door and had to push it very hard till it flew open and slammed against the wall. No other noise out there. She saw the moonlight, bright on the snowy lawn, and the big cabin like an embalmed giant. She saw the elk, its fur matted and dark, and the tongue spilling out of its cracked mouth. Its open eye was black.

 

And Wyatt was sitting on the bench next to the cabin door. He was all in his winter gear, which he had formerly peeled off when he labored to make the fire, and his elbows were on his knees and his cheeks were in his hands, and he was undoubtedly facing to look at the elk.

 

“It’s cold,” she said.

 

“It’s not too bad.”

 

“Do you want to talk?”

 

“About what?”

 

He wasn’t wearing shoes. His bare feet were on the ground, his toes a few inches from the pastry-thin ice. He had taken off his thick wool socks and left them between his feet, inside out.

 

“What are you doing? Come to bed.”

 

“I can’t,” he said.

 

“Come on. Don’t do this.”

 

“I’ll be in later. I’m sorry.”

 

Savannah recalled that she had to pee. Without answering the apology she went down the cabin steps. The sudden reminder, the pressure in her stomach returning to the front of her conscience, was as heat coming back into a room after a door is shut against winter.

 

She walked out over the snow. The dead elk grew larger and larger in sight the closer she came to the barn. The texture of its fur was nauseating, more than the smell of the outhouse.

 

Sitting down, she hated herself for the lapse. It wasn’t useful to be bitter about anything, but it had gotten to you anyway. The transference: you’d caught it just as it was done.

 

When she returned he had already gone back in. The socks remained. She picked them up and shook a little ice from them. In the cabin he was lying flat on the twin mattress, with hands folded on his chest. She got on the queen and pushed all the bad air from her lungs.

 

“Come on up.”

 

“Just calming down.”

 

It was the same thing. Civilized men would kill something, civilized men would watch. In his pictures the elk was there. Strung up between the arcade columns, its outline and ghost.

 

“Get in with me.”

 

After a minute he said, “Alright.”

 

There was love too, that was true. He was the product of a rule, an algorithm that had narrowed so many variables to her preference. They resisted the same things. Like the logs and pine flakes and newspaper it would keep the fire going, but also they would be consumed and used up. There was no rule concerning what to feel.

 

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Freebirds

My mother calls to tell me she cannot get on the plane. She has had a premonition.

 

“You’re going to crash?” I sit upright in bed, sheet clutched to my chest. When she says stuff like this, my skin gets crawly.

 

“Not exactly a premonition.” She sighs. “I can’t say what will happen. A foreboding. Emmy, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t zip up my suitcase. And I wanted to get out of here so badly.”

 

“Are you sure it’s the plane?” I look to my left where the baby is sleeping in her bassinet. I look to the right where my husband is sleeping in our bed. “Could you be foreboding something else?” I say as I tiptoe out of the room, which is not actually a room. We put up a wall in the studio after the baby was born.

 

No, says my mother, she’s sure it’s the plane, and of course, I could try to reason with her. I could tell her to go ahead and pack that suitcase, get in a taxi, buy a tea and sit at the airport, see if the foreboding recedes. Until she’s actually on the plane, she has not committed to anything. Instead, I say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Because really, what should I tell her to do? Get on the plane and then the plane crashes and then she’s gone and then it’s my fault? Because planes do crash. They do.

 

In the background, at my mother’s house, radio voices are murmuring. “I have to think,” she says. “I’ll call you back.”

 

—

 

As soon as I hang up the phone, the baby is up. By up, I mean that she’s screaming. She’s always screaming and we don’t know why. I don’t know why. My husband comes out of the bedroom and hands her to me. “I have to go,” he says.

 

“It’s six thirty in the morning.” I follow him into the bathroom. He’s a real estate broker, which means that he works on commission, which means that the more he works the more money he makes, at least in theory. I’m no longer sure I buy this direct correlation. He works seven days a week. Before we had a baby, this wasn’t a problem. But now we do have a baby.

 

I sit on the toilet, bouncing the baby in my lap, while my husband brushes his teeth. “My mother might not be coming,” I say.

 

He spits into the sink. “Is she sick?”

 

“Sick in the head!” I say. “You’d think she’d want to see Eva. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with this delightful creature?” I kiss the top of Eva’s head, which is covered in the silkiest hair, soft and ticklish on my lips. She smells like a baby, like white soap and milk. She likes to be bounced, likes the sound of the water and the echo of our voices in the tiny chamber of the bathroom. She and I spend a lot of time in this bathroom. On the rare occasions when she is content and awake, I adore her so much I want to stuff her whole hand in my mouth. Both hands at once.

 

My husband is sliding the stroller out of the way to get to the door when my mother calls me back. “I’m in line at security,” she says.

 

“What changed your mind?”

 

“I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I cannot live my life in fear.”

 

—

 

I spy her on my building’s doorstep, from four stories up. She is covered chin to foot in a camel-colored, fur-trimmed coat. Her bright blond hair spills over the collar. Since the divorce, she has made herself thin and sort of glamorous.

 

She is also late. More than two hours late. Thirty minutes ago she called from a taxi to say she was on her way but couldn’t talk. Before that, I was very worried. Fear gnawed my stomach from the inside out. I called the airline. The plane had landed safely, on time. So if something had happened, it had happened only to my mother. Baby in my arms, growing heavier by the minute, I paced the apartment. What had she been foreboding? A car accident? A fainting spell?

 

“I met the pilot,” she says, over coffee, at the cafe around the corner, Broadway and 100, where we have settled ourselves at a cozy table. The baby is asleep in her stroller and I am actually drinking my coffee, my guard down, more relaxed than I’ve felt in weeks. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother can stay with the baby. If the baby wakes unexpectedly, perhaps she can even hold the baby.

 

“He’s a very nice pilot.” She pauses. “He’s not actually a pilot.”

 

“What is he?”

 

“He’s a flight attendant.”

 

“How did you meet a flight attendant?” I say, pleased by the inanity, the frivolity of this conversation. Really, I am pleased to be having any conversation. I am so happy my mother is here and I am not sitting alone.

 

“It’s a long story,” she says. “But when I called you from a taxi, it wasn’t really a taxi.”

 

“What was it?” I say, stupidly, my brain dulled by motherhood, perhaps, which is what happens to you, they say.

 

“He keeps his car at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride.”

 

“If he gave you a ride, you should have been early. Or at least, not two hours late.” I pause, comprehension forming. “What did you do in his car? Mom?”

 

“Oh my goodness, nothing like that!” My mother flushes. “But he was very nice. We had a wonderful conversation.”

 

“That’s great,” I say and I mean it and I would ask for more details, such as whether she’s planning to see him again, but the baby is starting to stir. I watch her like I’m watching a bomb about to explode. Except, if a bomb were about to explode, I’d run. My mother is distracted. She hasn’t noticed yet. I stand from the table. “I’ll be right back. Could you watch her?” I don’t look back.

 

—

 

The last time my mother came to visit, I was very pregnant and my mother was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. She was on a mission. According to her surgeon, you were not supposed to touch your face until you had achieved your ideal weight. This was the reason she hadn’t gotten a mini-facelift years ago. For years, she was a slave to her daily pint of pecan ice cream, until, one day, she wasn’t. One day she realized she could live and thrive on little more than lettuce.

 

“Don’t lose any more weight,” I told her. “You’re thin enough.”

 

My mother patted my shoulder. “Don’t take this personally, honey, but your perspective might be a little skewed.” She was very concerned for me and how unwieldy I must feel, how uncomfortable I must be in my swollen body. But I thought I looked fine, maybe better than I’d ever looked. I’d asked her to wait a month before visiting so she could be in town for the birth, but she said she could not push off her trip because she needed to schedule her surgery before the doctor’s schedule was full and she really wanted to get my feedback before she made her final decision. There were so many options, she said—facelift, brow lift, botox. “We could Skype,” I said but she shot that down quickly. She needed me to see her in person, the texture of her skin, the full 360 degrees.

 

She had not been to the city in a while, since before the divorce. Like a flower, you could see her drinking in the energy; you could see her bloom. Smohio, Ohio, she said, she loved everything about the city, the noise and the streets and the interesting little apartments.

 

“When you were a baby,” she said, “we lived in an apartment like this.” I knew this story. Living in that apartment as a hopeful young wife was a shining time for her. Dad was gone all day, a low-level administrator, not yet the boss. The days were just us, playing in the complex playground, walking to the mall next door. She loved to tell how there was a hole in the fence between the mall and the complex, two missing boards. The shortcut saved ten minutes walking, a lot in the winter. The geometry of it was tricky, but after many attempts, she figured out how to take me out and angle the stroller through just right.

 

On that trip, we were both waiting, preparing for a big change. In the mornings, I put on my one pair of dress pants with the stretchy panel and took the train to my boss’s office in midtown East, where I worked as an executive assistant. In the afternoons my mother and I wandered the city in the late September heat, shifting from one café to the next, where I would sit back with my hands on my belly, under which I could feel the baby moving, poking and pushing from inside of my body, and my mind was overtaken with the strangeness of this, I couldn’t really think about anything else, but my mother’s mind was somewhere else. When the waiters came to ask us if we wanted something to drink, she’d be pulling at her face, lifting the skin with her fingers, asking if this was too tight or not tight enough. I wanted to be able to tell her that she looked fine how she was, but the truth was, she looked so much better, younger and fresher, when she lifted up her face.

 

A week after the baby was born, she backed out of her facelift, paying a steep penalty for the cancellation. She spent her deposit on a peel and fillers instead. “I’d love to come see how you look,” I told her. “But I really can’t leave this baby.”

 

Now, in the bathroom mirror, I look at my own face, which would look better with a little makeup. I luxuriate in the ease of washing my hands and smoothing out my hair without a baby tucked under my arm. I feel so light and unencumbered I could fly straight up to the sky.

 

—

 

When I get back, the baby is screaming. I hear her before I see her. The sound of her cry is the sound of pure uncomprehending terror. She always sounds like this when she cries. Are these her authentic emotions, I wonder, or is she the girl who cries wolf all day long?

 

“Where were you?” says my mother, thrusting her into my arms.

 

People are looking at us. “Let’s go,” I say, as I bounce the baby up and down, bouncing her into oblivion. She quiets and falls asleep. I put her hat on her head and zip her into my coat, which is about three sizes too large for me, chosen because she and I will fit in it together.

 

On the street, I secure the baby to my body with one hand and push the empty stroller with the other. We trudge uphill and duck our heads against the blustery wind. Snowflakes swirl in the air.

 

“I think I’m finally ready,” my mother says, “to go back to work.” Now she is skinny and presentable; she has plans to expand her hypnotherapy business, to move from one-on-one sessions to larger seminars on stopping smoking and losing weight. She’s had to stop seeing most of her personal clients because they were getting too personal with her—they told her too much and made her worry at night, made her feel that she should help them in ways that went beyond the scope of hypnotherapy.

 

I also want to go back to work, but I am only an assistant. By the time we pay a babysitter, we don’t know if it makes any sense. I have the idea that my mother could do it. She could move to the city, watch the baby. In my mind, this is something she ought to do, should want to do, should be asking to do. But she hasn’t asked.

 

A couple blocks from my apartment, we are brought to a halt. Shouting, brakes screeching, a bicycle tipped over in the street, and a man in sleek spandex clothes standing by, helmet on this head, looking dazed. The driver gets out of the car, a young woman who looks terrified. Her blond hair is sleek and perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She is wearing razor-thin heels and short, wide pants that display her pale, delicate ankles. Her ankles must be freezing. Perhaps she is on her way to an interview? I feel certain that the interview was for the girl’s dream job and that she would have gotten it except that now she will not make the interview. Tears run down her face. “Did I actually hit you?” she says.

 

“You hit me,” says the man.

 

We cannot look away. We stay until the police arrive. I bounce to keep the baby asleep. The snow thickens and falls down on our heads and on the scene, obscuring the people and the street and the buildings, obscuring the man on the bicycle and the woman who ran into him, but none of this obscures what my mother and I have seen, by which I mean, the things we have seen in our minds, the more terrible things that could have happened.

 

—

 

We take the baby home. While I am feeding her, my mother dresses for dinner. She puts on a camel-colored dress and a big gold necklace. She looks wonderful. I’ve decided her face looks wonderful, too. The baby presses her soft skin into my skin. Very gently, she pets my shoulder with her chubby baby hand. When she’s done, I put her down on a blanket. I give my mother a hug, and her body feels strange to me, so thin, not at all like the mother I know, a woman who might eat half a cheesecake for dinner then go power-walking through her Ohio neighborhood, at any time of night, arms pumping away, a bullet in white tennis shoes, Walkman tuned to her motivational tape of the moment. She’d come back red-faced and full of ideas. The world is awakening, she might say. Get enlightened or get left behind.

 

My husband is supposed to be meeting us but he calls to say that he’s running late and we should go on ahead. I don’t have anything to wear and I mean that very literally. The only clothes that fit me are yoga pants, so I put on my nicest yoga pants, the ones that look the most like real pants. I tuck the baby into her stroller and by the time we’re out on the street she’s fallen asleep. My mother and I walk to dinner. We are shown to a table close to the door, presumably because we are saddled with a baby and might need to make a fast escape. Every time someone exits or leaves, we are hit with a blast of cold air, which makes this a terrible table for a baby.

 

We order a bottle of wine, something my mother and I have never done together. I can’t drink much because of the baby but I assume my husband will take most of my share. I am drinking wine with my mother, who looks like a glamour girl, and she is talking to me about men, how much she wants to meet a man. She orders a salad without any dressing. She takes one tiny sip of wine. I eat all the bread in the basket. I can’t stop drinking the wine or asking my mother questions. I am having a wonderful time. “What about the pilot?” I say. “I mean the flight attendant.”

 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s always traveling all over the place.”

 

“There’s no reason why you can’t travel,” I say. “Shouldn’t you travel? You’re so free. There’s no reason for you to stay in Ohio. You’re unencumbered. You could travel all the time.” I am getting excited. I keep drinking wine. “You could do your seminars like that,” I say. “You could just travel and give your seminars wherever you travel. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful life? Maybe you should marry the pilot.”

 

My mother puts down her fork. She is taking a break though she hasn’t eaten anything. “Mark hasn’t called me,” she says. “He said that he would call me but he hasn’t. So I think that we should forget about that.”

 

“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I say. “Maybe he’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

“I was hoping that he would meet us for dinner. I was hoping to have a date.”

 

“Well, I don’t have a date either,” I say. “So I guess we can be each other’s date.” Really, the baby is my date, and I’m worried that my date might be waking up. I watch her like I can hypnotize her with my will to go back to sleep.

“I’m tired,” my mother says.

 

“Move here!” I say. “There are men everywhere! You’ll get a place near me. You can help with the baby.” As soon as I say this out loud, I realize how badly I want it. “Wouldn’t you like to spend time with the baby? You can help me, I can help you.” I knock over my glass of wine, I am so overwhelmed with the perfection of this idea. As I mop up the mess, I think how this is what I need. This is what she needs. For the first time in many years, my mother and I will fulfill each other’s needs.

 

My mother shakes her head. “I can’t move here. I don’t like it here. All the people. That accident. I’d be afraid to cross the street.”

 

“I thought you loved it here,” I say.

 

“I want to work on my business. I want to work on myself. There are so many years—I really don’t know what I was doing. I need to make up for lost time.”

 

“The baby’s here,” I say. We both look at the baby, who is starting to stir in her stroller. Her face wrinkles and un-wrinkles. I turn to my mother and I can see that she is unmoved.

 

Before I can reach her, the baby escalates to a full-on scream. As quick as I can, I lift her out of the stroller, but the crying doesn’t stop. Everyone is looking at us. I bounce and bounce. I look for a nook. The bathroom is tiny. There’s nowhere to go. The screaming gets louder. I am starting to panic. The waiter is approaching. I was silly to bring a baby to this place. In a second, I will get kicked out.

 

“I’m going outside,” I say to my mother, zipping myself and the baby into my jacket, pulling our hats onto our heads. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

 

Outside, the snow is falling. It lands gently on our heads while the baby screams. “Don’t cry, baby,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel a little woozy, my cheeks flushed and warm from the wine. Despite the crying, I am glad to be outside, where the air is bracing and fresh, where the baby can scream to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone—anyone other than me. This is where we belong.

 

We walk to the end of the block and come back. The baby is starting to quiet but I can’t quite bring her inside. Through the window, I watch my mother, who is eating her salad, one leaf at a time. She does not touch the bread. She looks lonely to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wants to be lonely. Maybe being lonely is better than the alternatives.

 

After a couple minutes, my husband shows up with a camel scarf around his neck and ear clips on his ears, huffing from the cold. He is finally here. He is my most familiar person, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in weeks.

 

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing out here?” He puts an arm around my shoulder, kisses the top of my head. The baby lets out a sigh and relaxes her body into my body. I relax my body into his body. The snow falls and falls on all of our heads.

 

“Go in there,” I say. “I’ll be in in a minute. Just sit with her at table, okay?”

 

“Okay,” says my husband. He opens the door. Warm air rushes out. Cold air rushes in. He greets my mother. He gives her a hug. He takes off his coat and sits in the chair across from her, the chair where I was sitting before. The snow is melting in his dark hair. I can make out the faint sheen of wet. He talks to her, she shows him something in her notebook, and I feel calm, the baby’s body against my body makes me calm, but underneath I am bereft. She starts to smile. He takes a sip of my wine. She takes a bite of her salad.

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Identity and Empathy in America and Assam

His Father’s Disease by Aruni Kashyap

Context / Westland Books, 2019

Hardcover. 184 pages. 

 

Cover of His Father’s Disease

 

In His Father’s Disease, Aruni Kashyap asserts himself as a master of the skill of empathy-building. This is no fluke. It is common to read the debut story collection of an author and feel that there is a lot of technical prowess—say of dialogue, or of voice, or of structure—but little sense that the characters are in fact alive, or come from a lived space. Kashyap, however, who is from the Northeast Indian state of Assam, has already established himself as one of India’s rising literary voices. He has published novels in both English (The House of a Thousand Stories, Viking, 2013) and his native Assamese (Noikhon Etia Duroit, Panchajanya, 2019) and edited an anthology of stories centered on the experience of insurgency in Assam (How To Tell the Story of an Insurgency, HarperCollins, 2020). It is no surprise, then, that in each of the ten stories in this collection, one reaches the end feeling completely immersed in the world Kashyap has created.

 

The stories in His Father’s Disease can be roughly divided into two settings: either a remote part of the Indian Northeast or a provincial American suburb that a Northeastern Indian has made their home. Kashyap addresses this dichotomy directly in “Skylark Girl,” a metafictional narrative of a Northeast Indian author being paneled at a festival in Delhi, interval-led with a folk story about a woman who is killed out of pettiness, only to come back to haunt the village as a ghost. During the panel’s Q&A session, a woman asks the narrator, Sanjib, “why [he] had . . . decided to write about this magical world, instead of the insurgencies, the violence, and the more immediate topical stories. [Sanjib finds himself] surprised by the question because . . . back home, his Assamese readers did not expect him to write about this or that topic. He was free to write anything.” Much like Sanjib, Kashyap’s stories are foregrounded by a Northeastern perspective, not because he wants to limit himself, but because he feels the freedom to write whatever he wants. Perhaps he chooses to write about Northeast India because this part of India is rarely portrayed in international literature.

 

Again, this is by no means a limitation. In fact, part of what makes Kashyap’s stories work so well is that they mine locations the author knows so well. The most successful story in this regard is “Bizi Colony,” which details the haphazard and troubling life of a youngster named Bablu, told from the perspective of his brother, who explains how Bablu’s glue addiction and penchant for violence affects everyone in their family:

 

“Long before my younger brother Bablu began telling our neighbours that Ma sucked Papa’s best friend Hriday Uncle’s dick while Papa was away on official tours to New Delhi, he would touch the breasts of our forty-year-old maid and ask her how it felt. When the timid Geeta-baideo wept, saying that she was the one who brought him up, washed his ass after he crapped as a baby, he beat her up with a cane.”

 

Bablu is a heinous example of a twelve-year-old, with all of the makings of a sociopath. He causes his mother to cry at odd times and take out her anguish at her husband, just as he causes his father to reflect after traipsing around the house, “‘Am I a failed father?’” The story is a melodrama; what saves it from the common pitfalls of that form is the sense that while Bablu sells drugs and associates with prostitutes, tarnishing the family name with no self-awareness, his behavior is fully his own. Glue addiction is a common problem in South and Southeast Asia, and there are children who seem almost born to be malicious in all parts of the world. No matter how heinous Bablu’s decisions appear, they are rooted in realism.

 

Kashyap also foregrounds “Bizi Colony” not as Bablu’s story, but as a story about the effect of Bablu’s behavior on his family. When “Bablu [breaks a] tall, thick juice glass on [Ma’s] head because she’d refused to give him money to buy Dendrite or Eraz-ex,” we don’t see it from Bablu’s perspective, but from the narrator’s, who doesn’t cry but “[feels] a strange burning sensation in [his] chest, and a strange, choking lump in [his] throat.” This distance allows readers to observe Bablu’s actions while still benefiting from the emotions and proximity of the first-person peripheral narrator, as if Bablu’s behavior is very much happening in front of us.

 

 “The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn” is another story that benefits from Kashyap’s command of point of view. The third-person narrative tells the story of a writer heading to an international conference in Michigan. He bonds with a woman on the plane, in a way that suggests a possible sexual attraction, until she says, “‘You know, you remind me so much of Kal Penn . . . you look like him, quite a lot, do you know?’”

 

I am a person of Indian origin, so I too receive this comment often. The actor Kal Penn is one of the very few people of Indian heritage who is prominent in American media, so people are quick to say that anyone who is South Asian looks like him. Therefore, I relate more than the average person when the narrator Arunabh is offended and frustrated by the comparison. The manner in which Kashyap arranges Arunabh’s reaction in language is what summons empathy for readers of any background. In the taxi after this encounter, Arunabh “[studies] his reflection in the rearview mirror, and more than once had considered asking Jim whether he saw any resemblance to Kal Penn. And he will always remember the fall colours, his first fall in America: the gold, the yellow, the orange, the red; the blue sky that was slowly turning grey; and his yearning for snow.”

 

By melding the reaction to a very particular moment, and the feelings evoked by the natural world framing the scene, Kashyap creates multiple spaces for a reader to react to or reflect on Arunabh’s experience. If they cannot relate to Arunabh’s gripes, seeing fall in a new country for the first time may resonate, and if not that, provide a sense of nostalgia through the colors, sensations, and feelings of fall in the USA.

 

Kashyap also employs this multi-pronged narrative approach to empathy-building in the titular “His Father’s Disease.” The story details the frustrations of widowed Neerumoni as she discovers that her son Anil is homosexual, much like her own husband. She repeatedly walks in on her son with men and finds herself bereaved. The village also reacts hostilely to her son’s sexuality. At one tragic point in the story, soldiers shoot Anil’s lover. The idea of the scene is harrowing enough, but what grounds it as a piece of literature is how Kashyap describes the aftermath: “The blood looked like a red rose blooming on the white bedsheet, and the room smelled like coconut water.”

 

In choosing such evocative language, Kashyap renders the moment not merely as a violent one, but one grounded in nature. The scents and colors give the reader a critical distance from an extremely emotional moment. The reader is allowed to come back into the scene with their own feelings attached to it rather than only those evoked by the violence.

 

The power of fiction is to make the reader feel as if these imagined characters are very much living real lives, and more, to feel connected to them even if they reside in completely different worlds. Kashyap understands that to write is not simply to get lost in the individual sentences, but to create characters that resonate. Anyone who reads fiction to explore emotional spaces, both interior and exterior, should absolutely seek out His Father’s Disease. They will find themselves not only intrigued, not only inspired, but utterly absorbed into the world of Aruni Kashyap’s imagination.

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The Crypt of Civilization

“It’s the size of a swimming pool,” I said, “and locked in stainless steel. Locked for six thousand years, in fact.” I was telling my son about the Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule in Atlanta. We were in the basement, sorting his toys into piles. An overdue project, because now he used electric razors; he studied for the driving test. I picked up a tiny plastic mare and her tinier plastic foal. I asked, “Do you want them, your Horse and Baby Joe?”

 

He shook his head. “Sounds ambitious,” he said, “that thing in Atlanta.” He was burning through the matchbox cars and the doll that looked like a businessman, the Lincoln Logs and the book in which the bear is forever snoring on. Discard, discard, discard.

 

“These are in there,” I said, holding up a log the size of a finger. “In the Crypt of Civilization.”

 

“Why save a bunch of sticks?” he said.

 

I kept talking. Other items in the crypt: recorded birdsong, aluminum foil, ashtrays, the form of a woman’s breast, a “Negro doll,” a piece of soap in the shape of a bull.

 

“Jesus,” he said, taking a pterosaur from my hands and tossing it with the discards. “Are you kidding me with that list?”

 

I shrugged. “It was 1940,” I said. “Not a great year for time capsules.” I didn’t say: As if there have been so many other, better years. Our hopes and our hubris, the human experiment laid bare, thanks to the Crypt of Civilization.

 

His class did a time capsule once, back when he was in the first grade. A moment in time, or, as the principal said, a moment in conversation. “What will we choose?” she’d asked. We were gathered in the gym on parents’ night, the thick heat of September rolling in through the propped-open door. “Will we choose something that says how far our civilization has come, like light bulbs, or will we choose things from today, from here in 2010?”

 

Later, his dad and I joked. Let’s put in some guns. A bottle of DEET. A white guy billionaire, maybe Jeff Bezos. But our coal hearts burned away when our son chose to add his stuffed lion. Other kids picked the yearbook, mechanical pencils, a photo of Phillip Stanning, the third grader who’d died of leukemia the year before. His parents gave the school their permission.

 

“Why tell me this now?” my son asked when I reminded him. He glanced at the clock, wanting to go upstairs, but I was thinking of stories unearthed. Of conversations between a dreamed-of future and the best and the worst of our past.

 

And what of the forgotten capsules? Conversations never had, conversations still in the earth, magnolia roots pushing against old tin boxes, letters in bulldozed attics, bottles left floating eternally at sea, through storms and under scorching skies. A metal ball orbiting the earth, the silence of that, its secrets tucked in like a heart.

 

“Mom,” he said. “Let’s be done. Let’s give it all away.” It was like this more and more with us. He looked forward, to the car he’d soon drive and the girls he’d soon kiss and to more distant visions—college, roommates, drugs, maybe—while I held his Horse, his Baby Joe and said, let’s build ourselves a capsule.

 

I scooped the discard pile my way. “I’m saving these,” I said, the Legos and the frog blanket and the board book with a dollop of oatmeal on it, long hardened into milky cement. The toys that came later—the stacking robots, the sticker sheets. He knew it would end this way, and I did too. An hour used or wasted, depending on who you asked.

 

“Time,” he said, standing up. “You always talk about time.”

 

As if this was so boring. As if time didn’t start and stop and shift to the left, didn’t corrode and make you whole. Didn’t change little boys who cried as they buried their lions into bigger boys who thought that Lincoln Logs were sticks, discard who they were for who they would become again and again and again.

 

And what of Phillip Stanning’s parents? Sometimes I wondered, across the hurried years, as the elementary school collected artifacts from one class and then another, moved from one principal to the next. As the Crypt of Civilization sat in its deluded wait. What did time become for them that April afternoon when they put their boy into the ground, when they tucked away that last thing with him, that final conversation, that favorite plushy bird?

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Refrigerator Girl

Truck leaned in for the kiss. Nabi tried not to flinch, but how could she not when her principal stood ten feet away, her fourth graders running to the buses? It was 2:30 on a Wednesday, the air thick with humidity, the branches heavy with leaves. Truck had once again shown up at school, unannounced. On any other occasion Nabi would have thrown her arms around Truck, but her tight tank top and her leopard-spotted hair just screamed need, determined to provoke a reaction. Why was Truck always trying to test her?

 

“Well, hello to you, too,” Truck said. “So much for a little sweetness and light.”

 

“We’re at school, babe. I told you. I have to be careful.”

 

“You wouldn’t even know what love was if it smashed light into your mouth.”

 

“What?”

 

Truck was already storming off to the car. Now they’d spend the rest of the afternoon in silence, Truck slamming kitchen cabinets, seething, until Nabi gave in with a question. How was Nabi going to survive Truck? The truth was she’d never been attracted to most of her previous girlfriends. They had blonde hair while she was drawn to dark. They were earnest and sincere while she was excited by black humor, irreverence, the possibility of danger and surprise. The refusal of her deepest urges seemed to be the foundation of these relationships. She could have sex, yes, cozy, pleasant sex. And she could take delight in conversation, that gorgeous, underrated thing. But with Truck? In the six months since they’d been together, Nabi had lost sixteen pounds. She’d had to buy all new pants, toss out her old wardrobe, and though she was mesmerized by the sensation of getting to know her body—who knew that the back of her neck wanted to be probed with two fingers?—she honestly hadn’t slept well since the night they’d first fucked. People at school were worried about her. The hollow planes of her shoulder blades—they were always asking if she’d been eating, and what could she say? Oh, I spent the last eight hours fucking, and I should feel like a porn goddess but honestly I’m in this state where I could take four naps a day.

 

How had Nabi become this kind of person? She loved sex; she’d always loved sex. She could not walk by another beautiful woman without sending out a dart of focused intensity through her eyes before the performance of looking straight ahead. The other woman would do the same thing, as if she also knew that a body was trouble, too easy to lose. Occasionally someone pushed through that reserve, through grit and determination. Inevitably that someone turned out to be a person she couldn’t fight with, couldn’t even disagree with—though the two of them had great sex–at least for a while. People threw around words like boundaries. For some, that metaphor had physical, pictorial significance, but not for Nabi. All she knew was that whenever she attempted to fight with Truck, she had the awful suspicion that both of their souls were in danger of implosion, and that implosion would damage them down to their cells until they were done.

 

When Nabi was seven, she spent afternoons with Harris and Lily Carr, the brother and sister who lived just down the street. She did not exactly like Harris and Lily, their finicky taste in sweets, their hands sticky with jam, but their mothers were friends, and there was never any question they’d spend the days after school together. When the mothers were off to the swim club, the children shut the door in the bedroom, where brother and sister put Nabi through various tests. She didn’t know why she agreed to these tests but she was eager to be a good student. First they asked her to take off all her clothes. Then they held a struck match to her skin, not just to her face but down to her private parts—their words not hers. Over the course of an afternoon she took part in a series of tests that went from extension cords to light bulbs. These rituals did not faze her because she could at least see was impressing Harris and Lily—she could see the respect blazing in their hard little eyes. But when they started clearing the top shelves of the refrigerator, she knew it was time to get out of the house. They had already talked about shuttering her up between the bread and the milk, and that was definitely enough. She’d once heard of a girl who had almost suffocated in such a refrigerator, tumbling out on the floor when the door opened, her face ashy and blue.

 

Nabi walked straight out the Carrs’ front door.

 

She still thought of that girl twenty years later, though she wasn’t always sure why. The refrigerator girl was both talisman and warning, and when she looked at her lovers she still saw the faces of that brother and sister—she still knew she could escape them. No one, on the other hand, was better at taking a test than Nabi, and perhaps Truck had intuited this all along. She sensed too well that Nabi hungered too much to succeed and would never let you get a rise out of her as hard as you’d tried.

 

The beach was more crowded than usual, the tide line nearly reaching the lifeguard stand. Nabi and Truck unfolded their blanket up near the dunes. To their left was Maureen Keating, the mother of one of her fourth graders. Closer, to their right, were the Artmans, old friends of her parents. All around them were people she knew, people she had some connection to, either through school or yoga, and maybe that was why Truck stood up, started digging the hole close to the blanket. She looked so gorgeous and strong as she pitched the shovel into the sand, her arms striated, muscular, sleek, tan. Why had she brought along such a serious shovel, the kind you’d use to plant shrubs? The people around them were probably asking a similar question, but they appeared not to be distracted by it, as they ran back and forth to the water or tossed footballs. The hole before her deepened. Every time Nabi asked Truck why she wasn’t going into the ocean, Truck would not answer; she remained silent. Which might have been why Nabi’s stomach was in distress. She pictured herself running up into the dunes and throwing up a little, but when she thought of her fourth-grade class, the faces of her students attuned to her, depending upon her calm to make them feel safe, the feeling passed.

 

Truck stood before the hole in a posture of deep accomplishment. “Get in,” she said, in a voice of purest love. She was playing of course–Truck was always playing–but this time there was something darker beneath the theater.

 

“Truck?”

 

“Get in,” Truck said, more gently now. “It’s for you. I dug this big and beautiful hole for you.”

 

The hole was as wide as it was deep. Too close to people: What was Truck thinking? And how could she get back to the car, leave for home without Truck running after her, wrestling her to the beach, chafing her wrist? Nabi imagined herself on her back, Truck filling in the hole around her until she couldn’t move. She thought of her private parts packed with cool sand until the itch was unbearable, the blazing sun on her face parching her lips, making her woozy with heat. On the other side of the dune, not so very far away, a baby cried. They were over. And as if to prove that to herself, Nabi kicked Truck’s keys down into the hole and waited, just waited.

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