“You remember that guy Mickey Mikalski, used to hang out with Nick DeSantis?”
“Had a split lip.”
“Hare lip. Had an operation to fix it. He’s been tryin’ to grow a mustache to cover up the scar but hair won’t grow there.”
“What about him?”
“He got nabbed boostin’ a car. Drove it through a fence, how the cops caught him. Winky Wicklow says his uncle Bob, who’s a cop, thinks Mikalski’ll get five years at Joliet ’cause he ain’t a minor no more.”
“That’s rough.”
“You know what the Arabs do to a horse thief?”
“What?”
“Cut off one of his hands so he has to eat and wipe his ass with the same hand.”
“Who told you that?”
“My dad. He heard about it when he was in Morocco.”
“Are he and your mother back together?”
“Sort of. He’s been traveling a lot lately.”
Roy and his friend Tommy Cunningham were sitting on the front steps of Tommy’s house on a Saturday morning.
“It’s gonna rain,” said Tommy. “I don’t think we’ll get to play the game this afternoon. Which would you choose, Roy, five years in prison or lose a hand?”
“Be tough to play ball one-handed.”
Tommy nodded. “I’d rather have a car than a horse.”
“What’s that about a horse?”
Tommy’s mother stepped out of the house onto the front porch.
“Morning, Ma. I just told Roy I’d rather have a car to ride around in than a horse.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Cunningham,” said Roy.
“I liked to ride horses back in Ireland when I was a girl.”
“Gee, Ma, you never told me that before.”
“It was a long time ago, in my ghost years, that time in your life you don’t know won’t never come again. I remember my favorite, Princesa. She had Spanish blood, belonged to a farmer down the road from us. He let me ride her after school and on Sundays after church.”
“Not on Saturdays?”
“Saturdays were for marketing and chores. Now it’s every day and it’s only police who ride horses in Chicago. What’re you fellas up to?”
“We’re supposed to play a ballgame against Margaret Mary’s at Heart-of-Jesus, but looks like we’ll be rained out.”
“I could use a hand with the laundry.”
Roy stood up.
“I’ll see you at the park, Tommy, if it clears up. Bye, Mrs. Cunningham.”
On his way home Roy thought about what Tommy’s mother might have been like as a country girl in Ireland before her family moved to Chicago. She was a strong, heavyset woman now, with bright blue eyes and thick red hair. Her face had deep creases on the cheeks. Roy’s mother, who was a few years younger than Mrs. Cunningham, had no lines on her face and she was much slimmer, but she was always nervous and worried about something. Mrs. Cunningham always seemed calm and spoke in a gentle way to Tommy and his brother Colin. Maybe his mother would be calmer if she had spent her childhood in the country and had a horse to ride instead of living in a big city and then being sent away to boarding school.
The sun was trying to break through the clouds. Roy decided to get his glove and go to the park even if it started to rain. On his way there he spotted a powder-blue Cadillac getting gas at the Mohawk station across Ojibway Avenue. His mother was sitting in the front passenger seat next to a man Roy did not recognize. The man was wearing a brown fedora and a beige trench coat, the kind private investigators wore in the movies. He was talking to Roy’s mother and she was looking out the closed window on her side. Roy watched her for a minute until the attendant stopped pumping gas. The driver paid him, started the car, and pulled out of the station. Roy’s mother kept staring through her window.
His baseball cap was wet and water was leaking through into his hair but Roy began walking again toward the park. He was certain his mother had not seen him.
At the park six blue-and-whites were parked at a variety of angles in the street in front of the entrance Roy commonly used. A few people were gathered on the sidewalk in front of a line of several policemen who were blocking the way.
“What’s going on?” Roy asked a man wearing a Cubs hat and a green tanker jacket.
“There’s a dead body lyin’ on the pitcher’s mound. A kid, someone said.”
“Did you hear the kid’s name?”
“No. The cops aren’t givin’ out any information. They might not know yet.”
Tommy Cunningham punched Roy in his left arm.
“All these people here to watch our game?”
“Thought you were helpin’ your mother with the laundry.”
“I did. Somebody get shot?”
“Maybe. There’s a dead kid on the mound.”
“You’re jokin’. Who told you that?”
“Guy over there. Cops won’t let anyone into the park.”
“Let’s go around to Kavanagh’s house and go in through his backyard.”
The boys ran around the block, cut through Terry Kavanagh’s yard into the alley, and crept up a dirt path where there weren’t any cops. A bunch of men were standing around the infield, a couple of whom were taking photos. Tommy and Roy kept their distance and half hid behind a large Dutch elm tree. An ambulance drove into the park and stopped next to the first-base foul line. Two male attendants wearing white coats and trousers jumped out, opened up the back doors of the ambulance, and pulled out a stretcher. The men on the infield parted to let them through but not enough so that Roy and Tommy could see the body on the mound. It was ten minutes before the attendants carried out the stretcher. The corpse was covered with a white sheet, but as it was being loaded into the ambulance the stretcher tilted and the sheet slipped off the face.
“It’s Louie Fortini,” said Tommy, “Artie Fortini’s older brother. Remember him? He must be about twenty years old. He was a pitcher, had a tryout with the Braves but didn’t get signed.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. He and Artie both got big hook noses. It’s Louie for sure.”
The ambulance drove out of the park the way it came in. Rain fell harder and some of the men walked off the infield.
“I wonder if his family knows,” said Roy.
“The cops probably called them. They’ll have to identify the body.”
There was a flash of lightning followed by thunder.
“Let’s get away from this tree,” Roy said.
The next day there was an article in the Sun-Times about the dead boy. Louie Fortini had shot himself in the head with his father’s gun, a Luger Anthony Fortini had taken off a fallen German soldier during the war and kept as a souvenir. Louie had been a day shy of his twenty-first birthday. In the article his father was quoted as saying that his son had been depressed ever since his unsuccessful tryouts for major-league baseball teams.
On their way to school Tommy said to Roy, “I wonder if he tried out for the Cubs. He could throw a screwball. I saw him throw it in high school.”
“Artie would know.”
“Man, I’d never kill myself. What about you, Roy?”
Roy remembered his mother once saying that if things got any worse she’d commit suicide.
Before he could answer, Tommy said, “Do you think Louie told Artie he was thinking about shooting himself?”
“We shouldn’t ask him that,” said Roy.

---

Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include Ghost Years, The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea, How Chet Baker Died, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, and Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels. He cowrote with David Lynch the screenplay for Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

The story appears in Gifford’s new book, Ghost Years, out this month from Seven Stories Press.

Illustration: Barry Gifford.

It’s in the morning that the sun comes around the massive guava tree, above the electric fence, and, as a narrow beam of light, touches Selene’s face as she lies in bed with the tips of her toes against the top bunk. Every day, she waits for this sunbeam, which, on blue-sky days, arrives punctually through a barred window measuring just thirty by thirty centimeters, into the cell shared with three other women. Over forty minutes, it shifts, millimeter by imperceptible millimeter, from Selene’s face to the wall before vanishing.
Everything happens slowly when you’re behind bars. The torture of being jailed is compounded by the torture of emptiness, the total absence of anything to do. Selene has already counted how many times her heart beats in an hour. She’s collected cigarette butts from the courtyard and halls. Using an old world map that some prior inmate left behind in the cell, she started learning by heart the names of countries and capitals. Selene doesn’t get visitors. Ever. Since her arrest, her husband, mother, siblings, none of them has come to see her. She doesn’t miss them. She doesn’t miss anyone. She feels empty most of the time. When asked about her crimes, she shrugs. At times, she can be seen crying discreetly. No one knows if she’s sorry. She doesn’t say.
She bites her tongue most of the time. She smokes most of the time. She cleans the kitchen every day after lunch, scrubbing the walls and floor hard. Always hard. Because this is how Selene does everything in life. Hard. The extra pounds concentrated in her belly and flanks leave her arms dangling on her body. Walking is hard, just as breathing takes effort when she gets bronchitis. If it weren’t for the dark purple lipstick on her lips and the big silver earrings, you’d say she didn’t care about her looks at all. She’s rough: in her soul, in how she talks, in how she walks, in how she eats.
She bore two kids. She hasn’t heard anything about them since she was arrested. They’re twelve already. Twin boys. Identical. Though not that identical for Selene. She doesn’t tell them apart by how they look, but by what they’re like. On one of her boys, she can smell death. It’s her smell, too. The family thinks that raising the boys far away from their mother means they won’t be influenced. Selene knows that one of her boys is already doomed, just like her, to be no good. Could be karma or genetics—doesn’t matter. She’s their mother. She knows what grew inside her. She knows what’s good and what’s bad inside her.
Selene doesn’t have friends in prison. She prefers being feared. Still, she has the best bed in the cell, complete with a daily strand of sun. She even gets lunch leftovers when she cleans the kitchen.
As she peruses the world map, she wonders what exists beyond the small, miserable places she’s seen. Her pointer finger travels along the delicate, meandering lines dividing countries and continents. Locked up, Selene carries the whole world in her hands, tracing an imaginary line that crosses borders and takes her everywhere. The cell door unlocks. It’s time to go out for some sun, look at the sky, and wait for the day to end.

---

Ana Paula Maia (Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter and has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterrâneas (2003), De gados e homens (2013), and the trilogy A saga dos brudos, comprising Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009) and Carvão animal (2011). Her novel A guerra dos bastardos (2007) won praise in Germany as among the best foreign detective fiction. She won the São Paulo de Literatura Prize for best novel of the year in 2018 for her novel Assim na terra como embaixo da terra and in 2019 for Enterre seus mortos.

Padma Viswanathan is a writer, playwright, translator, and journalist. Her most recent book is Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime. She is the author of two previous novels: The Toss of a Lemon, shortlisted for the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize, and The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, a finalist for Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo (2020), by the Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and runner-up for the UK Society of Authors TA First Translation Prize.

 

One night she was woken by a noise coming from one of the living room windows. Of course, it was nothing. But she wasn’t yet used to being alone in that big house and was easily frightened. Before going back to bed, she went to the kitchen for water. She didn’t have her lenses in and everything was a confused blur, shadows within shadows. She thought it must be about three, maybe four in the morning because she was emerging from a dense fog of disconnection. Her senses were divorced from her body and she found it hard to make her way. The cat appeared behind her and arched its back as if its stomach were about to shoot off an arrow toward the center of the earth. It purred its confusion, demanding breakfast from between her legs, and she almost tripped over it.
When she opened the refrigerator and the white pearl lit up the rectangle—the green floor, the marble worktop, the faucet, and all the other things that stood silently like grazing cattle seen in the distance—she saw a dark form on one of the blue wall tiles. The glasses were on that side of the kitchen. She’d intended to feel for one in the dish rack but was so deeply in the grip of the fear that had woken her, so prepared for disaster, that she decided to go back to the bedroom to put in her lenses before doing anything else. The cat jumped onto the bed again. She returned to the kitchen and realized that the dark shape was a slug. Had that repulsive mollusk been inside the glass? Best not to use it now and, in the morning, rinse it out thoroughly. She grabbed the plastic bottle filled with water from the faucet that had been chilling in the fridge. As she walked along the hallway, she took a swig from the neck. The thought that she’d come close to touching the slug, that it was still there, made her shudder. But it surely couldn’t, or so she imagined, move very far.
In the morning, there was no trace of it. She put down a bowl of food for the cat, then she wiped the sticky-sweet smear on the worktop with detergent and then bleach. And her day went by as other days had, and that night she went to bed but couldn’t sleep. One thing after another passed through her head as if her skull were a miserable black hole. The same gravity that kept her stable, propped against the pillow, began to press down on the images entering her mind, crushing them flat. Perhaps they were clips from other people’s heads, and as those people were able to sleep, the clips had taken up residence in hers, with all its available electricity.
She got up to make herself a cup of lime flower tea. Just in case, she put in her lenses and found her slippers. And in the flickering of the cold strip light, she saw three of them. White light fell on the room with the conclusiveness of a thing that in itself is wholly itself, and she immediately knew that this had been going on before, but as she never used to wake in the night, she hadn’t been aware of it.
When he was living in the house she’d slept soundly, straight through until her cell phone alarm rang. And she sometimes even allowed herself the luxury of ignoring it. Her love was the shell of that amazing mythical turtle that carries on its back elephants, which in turn carry the whole flat world on theirs. And she used to be there, on that fine, safe Tetris. These days, just to have company, she didn’t let the cat out at night, even though it woke up before her and bit and scratched to get whatever it wanted, and she’d be forced to further interrupt her sleep putting it out. And by then the sun would be rising, and what was the point of keeping up the charade? The presence of the cat didn’t make her any less alone. Yet, at that moment, she was glad it was there, and in some way expected its assistance. If it ate moths and flies, maybe it could also save her from this.
She spotted a slug on one of the wall tiles. Was it the same one? It was very close to where she’d seen the last one. There was another on a plate, bottom sweeping. She swore she’d never use that plate again, would smash it on the patio if necessary, even if it did belong to him. And the last slug, almost indistinguishable from the collection of stones on the worktop, was only inches from the microwave. She had no idea what to do. Not just one, but three slugs! She grabbed a can of Raid and sprayed.
The following day, she found nothing and was certain that they must be nocturnal. And that they had teeth, even on their tongues. At three in the morning, after waiting a reasonable time, she went exploring again. The number had doubled. One was climbing up the tall cabinet and another was even perched on the side of a knife she’d left to dry.
Google said: if you put out a glass of beer, the slugs go for the yeast and die, stupefied by their thirst.
So she bought some beer. She drank a little that evening, with the cat squirming in her lap as she watched one of the movies he’d always vetoed. There was still quite a lot left; she’d never really liked beer. She placed the glass in front of the stove, in the middle of the green kitchen floor gleaming with bleach. And that night she slept through without waking. It was the alcohol, or weariness, or just one thing on top of another. In the morning, she got out of bed and went straight to the kitchen to brew the maté, without putting in her lenses or even remembering her little homemade trap. That was when her bare feet collided with the glass.
Ah, they were the source of her revulsion. Not the rest of it.
She cried a little, unsure whether it was for the slugs, her home, or him. For herself. So, she cried for quite a long time, as if it were a form of entertainment or her tears were some kind of watery celebration. Maybe it felt good to have a more trivial excuse for feeling low. Something that wasn’t, for just one minute, her stupid heart that had plummeted down from cloud nine.
That night, when she woke to make an inspection, she found a dozen. Had her attack made them multiply or had they called up a secret army? Where had they all come from? How did they manage to reproduce so rapidly? Long, moist, sturdy bodies littered surfaces in outlandish, defiant positions. She thought she’d go crazy with disgust. She took salt from a cupboard and, without discrimination or even direction, began to sprinkle it about. The white, impalpable shower martyred several, but not all the slugs. When they began to dissolve, she felt her stomach churn.
As she had no desire to clear up dead slugs from among the living ones, she went back to bed, closed the door, and stayed there with the cat. Her brain was working along these lines: if I fall asleep, it will all die for a while and so will I, and maybe tomorrow something will have sorted out the night for me.
She’d also had those kinds of thoughts when he was still with her, in the big house they had fixed up, painted, and redesigned together. The house they had filled with marvelous objects; objects she now observed in the same way the glass eyes of those stuffed animals some people have on their walls observe their surroundings. Except that these days those objects seemed lifeless. The invading slugs were more alive.
Despite her heaving stomach, she put on a pair of rubber gloves, poured more bleach on the floor, and set to work with the mop and cloth. The cat was mooching around, hoping to find something useful. She disinfected. Then, one by one, she opened all the compartments in the kitchen, moving the saucepans, plates, Tupperware containers, jars, and packets. The cat happily nosed about in those hiding places. But, like someone returning from a restful vacation, it brought back no news. Where were they coming from? Where did the slugs spend the day? How did they get into the kitchen? Or were they already hidden there, camouflaged, when she was walking around restlessly, making noise, and the sun was progressing from one window to the next. She wanted to find their origin.
And so the days passed. One after another, all seemingly alike. Every time she opened the front door, she expected to find him there. When he wasn’t, she felt as if a hammer were knocking her into the floor with a single blow, flattening her to the surface. She cried into his shirts, into the curtains, with her nose in the cap of the bottle of cologne he’d left behind. She hugged the jackets on the clothes hangers in the walk-in closet—they were at almost the same height he’d been during all those years, receiving her with love. She talked to the cat, talked to herself. Neighbors asked cruel questions. But then, is there really any question that isn’t, in essence, an act of cruelty, a test of resilience? She scrutinized those neighbors at lunchtime, watched the cars pass by outside, watched the buses pass by, the sun pass by, the clouds pass by. She lay on the big bed and listened to the creaking in her temples, old wooden stairs that her ghosts ascended. She rehearsed conversations and was filled with rage. Her anger was a way of avoiding the pain.
It was only at night that she thought of the slugs: when she got out of bed to check—now without the energy to do anything about them—if they were still multiplying. The cat growled at them, its jaw trembling; she’d seen it like that once before, when it had killed a pigeon on the roof and then hidden it as a present under a plant in one of the flowerbeds. He’d picked it up by its bloodied wing and put it in a bag. But the cat did nothing more than growl. What could it do when faced with slugs? She wasn’t any better.
The number doubled every night. She could no longer count them.
They had taken on the communal form of a tide, and now reached halfway across the kitchen floor and up the wall tiles. Piled on top of one another, they gave the impression of being about to pronounce, in unison, a single word, perhaps a name. She thought it strange that a formation of that size didn’t emit any sound. She considered trying the salt again, but already knew what would happen the next day. She considered calling someone, but the truth was that she didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even to give instructions. She wondered again during the day about where all those slugs went. She checked the whole house. Nothing anywhere. But things were different in the daytime, her mind was occupied with the hologram of the last time she’d seen him, in the garden, his back turned to her.
And there were all kinds of other, ordinary things to occupy that mind: her accounts, the rent, repairs, the future, her horoscope, which hadn’t been at all positive lately, and the advice that arrived in bunches of inutility, and the messages—disguised commiserations—from friends, and the assistants in the bakery across the road who corralled her with their suggestions. Even so, she’d get out of bed to check on the slugs’ progress, wanting to know the extent of the hell that was expanding in her kitchen. She used lipstick to draw lines on the floor, the way you mark the wall to record a child’s growth. The next night, there would be many more, the red line already swamped by the tide. The kitchen was a huge blob, an oleaginous river occupying every space, right up to the ceiling. She’d stand before it and watch those quivering, living creatures, their feelers, the outline of their soft internal shields. They were an enormous stagnant animal: some higher power controlled those gelatinous individuals. What was to be done? She had no idea, and so she did nothing.
One night, she found that they had reached the dining room and crawled up onto the chairs and the table. She wept a little, but as tears were now nothing unusual for her, she went back to bed. The cat, twisting and turning at the end of the mattress, no longer even bothered to wake for these inspections. In the morning, they had vanished again. She prepared the maté and walked through the now empty rooms. She watered the plants. Nothing.
Some days later, their advance had reached the living room, but, like floodwater, the current took an unexpected turn and, instead of covering that large space, veered into the hallway leading to the bedroom. He’d come around to take away items of furniture and pack the things in his drawers. He’d taken, for instance, the shirts she used to cry into.
She made mental lists of the empty spaces around the house. Where there had been armchairs, the coffee table, the huge television they had inherited, the magnificent bronze lamp, were now disturbing absences. She stared at the things she could no longer touch and couldn’t overcome her astonishment. The cat was confused. It meowed, demanding the comfortable chair where it lazed away the afternoons. She meowed a little too, just to try it out, but nothing of what had been taken reappeared.
By the time she recovered sufficient energy to check on the slugs in her drowsy state, the most daring were lapping up against the bedroom door. She stood before them and saw that, farther back, the joints between things were moving crazily. She raised the blinds just a few inches, opened the window to let in fresh air, and returned to bed. There were so many of them! What did they want?
The following day, everything was dry. Almost clean. But anyway, she wiped the surfaces with bleach, until the bottle was empty. Then she went to the store for more. She also bought fruit, wine, bread, and cheese. Things like that, which she put in the refrigerator. She fed the cat.
Each night, she serenely observed how their boundaries extended. She took everything from the floor, rearranged her shoes. She washed clothes, swept under the bed, and realized that the floor down there was thick with dust. How long had it been there? And, come to that, where did it all come from? Who made it and where? Who dropped it among the people, furniture, slugs? She piled up the three coins she found to give them some meaning.
That night, she got up and saw that they were at the foot of her bed. She was lying diagonally, no longer keeping to her own side. Two days later, although every surface was by then covered, they were still creeping over the floating flooring they had chosen together; pale, gleaming wood to reflect the daylight. Would the flooring be ruined? It wasn’t supposed to get wet. The seams between the planks would open up. They’d been warned that humidity damaged it. From the bed, she could see the slimy ocean. That night, the cat didn’t sleep; it growled until morning.
But she did sleep.
It was five o’clock when she woke; outside, the darkness was tinged with light. Had she woken in the morning or the afternoon? She wasn’t sure. How long had she slept? In any case, the inevitable had happened: a slug was crawling on her bed. The time had come. She picked it up by its tail, opened her mouth, and swallowed it. She congratulated herself on having slept so well the previous night: she still had a lot of work ahead of her.

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Valeria Tentoni, born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in 1985, is a writer and journalist. She is the author of several poetry books, including Antitierra, Piedras preciosas, and Hologramas. She is also the author of children’s books, such as Viaje al fondo del río, and two short story collections: El sistema del silencio and Furia diamante. In 2022 she won the first Marta Brunet Latin American Short Story Contest in Chile.

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms.

 

Dear fellow delinquents,

Because our counselor—Vlad Siren, whose name sounds suspicious to me—asked us to write a bunch of dirgeful crap to be read aloud here in Tophet County Detention about whether we felt ashamed of ourselves, and because Trusty John claimed he suffered from a sudden and severe case of graphospasm (his letter was blank) despite his priapic drawings of genitalia, I’ll make this short letter as insightful and therapeutic as possible. We’re faced once again with the task of having to sit alone under the pressures of confession and guilt and give the staff insight into our thoughts and motivations, no matter how strange or selfish, so that they know where to refer us for long-term treatment, if we even need it, and to help us understand ourselves better with a goal of rehabilitation and self-forgiveness and a whole-hearted freedom from shame, with the primary, predictable, and asinine icebreaker being: What’s a memory of feeling ashamed?
A few years ago, I drove myself to the most horrific visions: I began seeing dying birds. Hallucinations like this, when a room would fill with birds who fell to the floor and twitched in suffering as if they’d been shot, only confirmed the ancient certainty that the strongest feelings of envy, jealousy, and especially anxiety exist within ourselves, in our minds and hearts, and that the people we admire and envy most are the very people who create the fear that lives and breathes inside us. Anytime there was an open window, I would see birds sweep into the room and fall to a slow death. I saw cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, grackles. I saw crows and finches. I saw colorful island birds, twitching, trembling, their wings and necks broken, calling out for help. The visions started sporadically but grew more abstract and detailed the older I got. I saw frogs, hundreds of them, gathering in a room among the dying birds and croaking to their own deaths. Frogs with protruding violet tongues, blinking slowly in the light until their eyes closed and they stopped breathing. I would rush out of the room and tell my dad or mom, who escorted me back to show me there was nothing there, such a sly and evil gesture, playing tricks on me, threatening me with the consequences of demonic possession if I continued to watch horror movies on cable TV, and yet they returned to the living room to sip wine and watch their own movies with nudity and strong language. On occasion I would storm out of the back door while spitting the froth from my stomach bile and stare into the glaucous glow of moonlight and see another frog or dying bird twitching, trembling, suppurating a yellowish custard from their eyes, and because we lived near a river, this fool feared the frogs were arriving from the sleech to seek shelter in our house. They appeared in my dreams, parading in from coastal villages while I heard my father shouting at my mom from another room, several of them crawling into my bed only to die at my feet or on my legs like a wet, heavy blanket. My parents started taking me seriously when I woke them with my screams and they found me cornered in my bedroom at four in the morning breathing the same air as them yet feeling asphyxiated and coughing, kicking at the dead birds and frogs surrounding me. I left a trail of crumbled crackers from the pantry that led from my room all the way out the front door and into the street. For a while I could not find a moment of rest, worried these creatures were invading our home and me specifically for no other reason than mere torture. My parents worried I needed to find a hobby, so my father forced me to watch baseball with him, collect baseball cards, and listen to sports radio. We played dominoes, chess, checkers, and board games for many nights in a row. “Learn to be great at something,” my father said. Like so many other children I was told, after all, that I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be, no matter what the circumstances, and that as long as I worked hard my dreams would come true; it was the American Dream, my father continually told me. Work hard and you find success. You can be anything you want. Hard work builds character. I was certain, even at that young age, that I wanted to be famous, and my parents took it seriously enough that my mom often accompanied me to the public library and let me pick out art books. I was particularly drawn to surrealism—Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Joan Miró. At night I studied their work, emulated it, and wrote stories to accompany the drawings. My first story I ever wrote, age six, was titled “The Sad Roach,” about a roach who wants to be a bird so he can fly but instead drowns in a pot of stew. The more I painted, and the more I wrote, the more I felt at ease, less anxious, and happier. I eventually learned to dismiss the visions of dying birds and frogs, even though they continued, because I knew I was safe and they were harmless, but I still kept my guard up anytime I saw them near my bed at night or twitching in my closet. My parents, in strong denial of any mental illness, dismissed these delusions as hyper imagination and encouraged me to use that anxiety and energy toward my art.
Around this time, I first experienced the panic. It was something that led to great shame, mostly due to my own puerile nescience as my father lay drunk in bed after his brother’s funeral while the rest of the guests mingled quietly in the living room with my mother. I found him mumbling something as he rolled over in bed and hung one arm off the side, which was the first time I had seen him that drunk. I sensed the struggle in his body and dizzying mind, heard his throaty cough and groan, and thought the best thing to do was to help my mother with the guests in the living room, but as soon as I entered, everyone stopped talking and looked up at me at the same time. To say this moment was terrifying is an understatement, because all the sudden attention on me felt like I was suffocating, or having a heart attack and needed to vomit. I was certain everyone was staring at me because I had disappointed my family, the dark sheep if you will, always getting in trouble at school and at church, and somehow I felt responsible for my father’s drunkenness that day and felt like everyone knew it.
While the burning pain hit my chest, I was able to retrieve my inhaler from my blazer pocket and take two quick pumps before losing my breath, thankfully, but it didn’t help. The cads who gambled and drank in secret with my father lurched toward me just as I blacked out and fell forward on the hardwood floor, bloodying my nose and cheek. I woke on my back to them breathing down on me with pimento cheese breath, their jowls sagging and cold hands on my jaw and forehead. “Breathe,” they told me. “Are you OK? Breathe.”
The panic attacks continued after that, and every one of them grew worse, so that soon enough I wasn’t able to walk into a room with more than three people in it, which is one of the reasons they put me in the alternative school in North Creek. Try getting dizzy anytime a group of people look at you, or vomiting in church or at the mall. Sixth-grade graduation gave me the stomach cramps, but my father blamed it on the Frito chili pie and Kool-Aid I’d had for supper. I won’t tell you how strong my antianxiety pills are, but it took three different times for me to black out before my father agreed to get me put on meds.
My father is a nondenominational pastor with a love for baseball. He played high school and junior college baseball and had high hopes for me to be a great baseball player, possibly the best since southpaw pitcher George Little Bird, who had made our town proud. I’m aware most of you know who George Little Bird is. His son is here locked up with the rest of us. I wasn’t a pitcher, but my father taught me how to throw a curveball and a fastball. He helped me lift weights in the garage and took me to the park down the street to throw baseballs at the backstop. I wanted to be a catcher, like Johnny Bench, but he insisted I try out for pitcher and stood on the mound with me every Saturday and after church on Sundays and some days after school, even in winter, showing me a good windup and form and reminding me of what I kept doing wrong. He would stand with his hands on his knees beside me as I pitched, his face swollen and pink from coughing his lungs out (he was a closet smoker but a heavy one, at least one or two packs every day), trying to distract me on purpose by making grunting noises during my windup because he said his distractions would help me block out other distractions, like crowds during games, which ultimately would make me a better pitcher. He made sure I threw with my right hand always, even though I’m technically left-handed. I’ve been ambidextrous thanks to him, able to write with either hand, bat left and right, and throw the ball especially hard with my right.
However, I had no interest in being a pitcher. On that cloudy day in the last light of a late afternoon winter, when I finally admitted this to him and said, “I don’t want to be a pitcher and I don’t even like baseball anymore,” my father kicked the dirt and sent me to the car, where I sat in the backseat and stared out the window while he lit a cigarette and collected the baseballs. His silence in the car on the drive home was expected, but when I was in bed that night in the darkness and my bedroom door opened and he entered, a tall, towering presence standing in the light from the hallway, he said he was grossly disappointed in me and saddened by my decision not to play baseball, and that there was no use going to the park anymore, what was the point, and that it had all been a goddamn waste of time, which on one hand pleased me but on the other hand his words “I’m grossly disappointed in you” ran through my head all night and for several days afterward, a moment that I would think about every night in bed for weeks, even months, and sometimes I thought about it at the dinner table when my father stabbed his meat with a look of weariness and regret instead of satisfaction and happiness. He was a man who kept to himself at the table, even at restaurants, rarely looking up from his plate, never conversing with my mother and certainly never with me, belching into his fist, staring watery-eyed at his food and chewing with a slow orgasmic intensity that appeared almost theatrical. I watched him eat this way for years. How is eating such a dead and lonely experience? After I told him I didn’t want to play baseball, he used his silence to dismiss me, not speaking to me for days. Even weeks. This was only a few years ago. When he finally spoke to me, he told me he didn’t care whether or not I chose to be left-handed. “The devil is a southpaw,” he told me. “He wants you to rebel against my wishes.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, and in the silence tried to figure out why he believed that. But I felt ashamed of myself, for not loving baseball, for not respecting him, and for disappointing him. My head felt dizzy every time I was around him after that, and I grew angrier and more hurt. I’m not worth much, I guess. I’m not trying to gain your sympathy, but right now I like this place better than I like living at home.
I’ll end by saying that even though many of you delinquents have done terrible things, I have done nothing that wasn’t in the name of justice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and in fact all my good deeds would be way easier to list here than talking about my early memories of shame. For instance, I have tried to understand what it means to love and to be in love with someone, that loving a dog is no different from loving a person, and that with love comes obedience and discipline, which is to be learned if we are to love. Our elderly neighbors once owned a yellow dog. While they were at church on Sunday mornings, I would sneak into their yard and feed the dog, whose name was Honey, and she was a dog who loved honey, crackers, slices of bologna, and even plain bread, which I would keep in my coat pocket for her. Honey appreciated my gifts but growled at me sometimes, and I tried to teach her the importance of trust and affection in a private way without the elderly neighbors finding out.
Understand: soon enough, Honey accepted me, so do not ever say I’m not an empathetic, loving person the way I have loved animals, especially Honey (and later other dogs in my neighborhood), because I love those animals, I really do, I love them deeply, the way the python loves the pig under the deep red moon.

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Brandon Hobson’s most recent novel is The Removed. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his novel Where the Dead Sit Talking was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Reading the West Award, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other distinctions. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he is the editor in chief of Puerto del Sol. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation tribe of Oklahoma.

“Letter to Residents” is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress.

Illustration: Josh Burwell

 

Cat got out last week, the gray one with the orange and brown spots, the one I found in the alley behind my apartment a few years ago, the one I lured inside with the rest of my turkey sandwich, I’d gone out to eat a sandwich in the park and I couldn’t finish it, I wasn’t hungry but I’d wanted to eat because it was something to do, and on the way home I took the alleyways like I usually do and there she was, but last week she got out, slipped past me when I was coming in with the mail, and it wasn’t my mail, it was Bill and Judy’s mail, I always bring up their mail with mine but that day I didn’t have any, it was only an electricity bill for Judy and a phone bill for Bill, they’re an old couple and they live above me and they fight all the time but I don’t worry about them, they’re better off than I am, they have each other, I don’t have anyone, I had the cat but she slipped right past me, out the door and down the metal stairs and now she’s gone.
So many verbs in the following sentence. I’m in the kitchen, thinking about the cat, putting the kettle on for coffee, waiting for the water to boil, walking down the hall, sitting at the desk, writing the story.
The thing is I wanted to meet some people, people like me, people who like to read, I guess that’s all I like to do, and I tried a book club at my local bookstore but I’m not any good at discussing books. I used to talk about novels on the phone with my father, in fact literature was the only thing we discussed on the phone, but after we read Madame Bovary two summers ago his eyesight began to deteriorate and his new prescription gives him a headache whenever he tries to read, that’s what he said, so he mostly just looks at the television and I don’t know if I believe any of this about his eyes because when he hands the phone to my mother I no longer hear the TV in the background, he’s either turned it off or muted it, and I can almost hear the sound of pages turning, because he’s sitting there right next to her in bed, and they’re not newspaper pages he’s turning, but the pages of books, of novels, if you listen closely you can tell the difference, and whenever I ask my mother what my father is reading, she puts her old fingers over the receiver, and I hear her panicked, muffled whisper and the volume of the TV goes up, louder than it’d been before, so loud I can hardly hear her when she says, “Reading? Your father isn’t reading. It hurts his eyes to read,” and so I don’t call very often anymore.
It was December when I went to the book club, and it was only a group of old ladies whose husbands had died or who didn’t talk to them or look at them anymore. We sat in a circle on the patio and the propane heaters pumped out enough heat to remind us that we were cold but not enough heat to keep us warm and they discussed Middlemarch and many of them probably wondered why I was there because I didn’t say a word because, like I said, I’m not any good at discussing books and because I have never read Middlemarch.
I was there to see if I would enjoy the book club or if I would enjoy meeting people who like to read and I did not enjoy the book club and the people who liked to read were old ladies and we did not have a lot in common, I’ve never had a husband who died or who wouldn’t talk to me or look at me anymore, but they invited me to lunch after the book club, and one of the old ladies, Linda was her name, paid for my french onion soup and when everyone else stood up to leave the table I stayed behind and drank the rest of my coffee and Linda stayed with me.
“Petracelli. Linda Petracelli.” She held out her hand.
I shook her hand and then put my hands back where they’d been on my lap and then used them once again to lift the cup of coffee to my lips. After swallowing the rest of the coffee I said, “Italian. That’s an Italian name. I read a book earlier this year by Primo Levi.”
“It was called Earlier This Year? I haven’t heard of that one.”
“No, no. It was a memoir, he was in Auschwitz, and I read the book earlier this year. You made me think of it because he was Italian.”
“He was Jewish.”
“Italian and Jewish. You can be both.”
“Well I’m not. Not both. I’m not even Italian.”
“Petracelli?”
“My husband’s name. When he died I kept it. Why would I change it? Back to Smint? Anyway, who cares what my last name is or was. I certainly don’t.”
“Linda Smint?”
“That’s me. Was me. When I was a kid, a girl, growing up. Until I met Peter.”
“Peter Petracelli?”
“Good name right? Why I married him.”
I nodded—and this is the only time I’ll nod in this entire story, others may nod, but not me—and looked around at the other tables. Every table had a muffin on it and none of the muffins looked the same but I won’t describe the muffins anymore other than by saying that they were muffins.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “I married him because he had a big pecker! Peter Petracelli with the Big Pecker! Kidding again. I married him because I liked him. So what’d you think of the book?”
“It was about Auschwitz. It was sad. I liked it but it was sad. It was difficult to read,” I said. “Actually, it wasn’t difficult to read. I’m only saying that because I think I’m supposed to. It read like a page-turner. When bad things happen to people in books it’s interesting.”
“No, Middlemarch. The book we just talked about for an hour. The reason we’re sitting here right now. You didn’t say a word in that thing.” Linda pointed her thumb over her shoulder, as if right there behind her was the bookstore patio where we’d just sat for an hour and not a preteen picking muffin out of his braces.
“Oh, right. I didn’t read it. Have never read it. I was just trying to get out of the house. The apartment. What’d you think of it? You said you liked it. You said you liked a lot about it but that you thought she could’ve used an editor.”
“I said I thought he could’ve used an editor.”
“But George Eliot—”
“I know who George Eliot is. Was. I know who she was. But they don’t. No one corrected me. When I said ‘he.’”
“Maybe they didn’t want you to feel stupid. Maybe they knew and they didn’t want you to feel stupid. Or they thought you misspoke. They were giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“Maybe.”
“But what’d you think of the book? Off the record.”
“I haven’t read it either,” she said.
Linda Petracelli drove me home and that was the last time I saw her. I should have seen her again—I liked talking to her and I think she liked talking to me—but I never did. I did use her last name in a short story I wrote about a year after meeting her. Smint, not Petracelli. Petracelli has too much of a ring to it. You can’t put a name like Petracelli in a story, it’s distracting. On the way home it occurred to me that she’d never asked me what my name was and that I’d never bothered to tell her. And I don’t know why I asked her to drive me home that day. My car was parked in front of the bookstore and I lived two miles away from the bookstore so the next day I had to walk two miles to retrieve my car. I don’t like how I used “car” and “bookstore” and “two miles” each twice in the previous sentence but I don’t dislike it enough to spend the time reworking the sentence, and I’ve now used “sentence” three times in this sentence (now four times), which is also an issue but one I won’t correct. I guess I liked being in the car with her, I guess that’s why I let her drive me home. I guess a lot.
I started writing stories about a month after I went to the book club. I’d joined “social media”—a euphemism for all of the apps I don’t want to put in my story, a euphemism that is somehow as offensive to me as the names of the apps themselves—looking to find others who cared about the books I cared about, and I found many of them, but none of them simply cared about books, they wanted to write them too. This seemed naive to me. I watch baseball but I don’t have any notion of becoming a professional baseball player and I like to eat a good meal but I don’t plan on opening a restaurant. Why couldn’t they just enjoy the books without attempting to write their own sorry knockoffs? Why was it always this way? But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to want to create. It was probably a good impulse and I was probably just in a bad mood. Probably, probably, probably. But I noticed that the people I gravitated toward, who read similarly to me, they always wanted to know what I was working on and if I had any writing published, online or in print, that they could read, and when I said no, I wasn’t a writer, only an enthusiastic reader, our conversations tapered off and I rarely heard from them again. It seemed the only thing left for me to do was to write.
I’d noticed that these people, the ones I’d interacted with, had a habit of sharing their stories with each other before they were published. Many times I’d been asked if I’d like to trade stories with these people. They emailed their writing to each other, asking for general feedback and line edits, but of course all they wanted was to be told that their story was brilliant and there wasn’t anything to be done to it, it was perfect as is and would surely be published. If you gave harsh criticism you’d be excommunicated or ignored and then you’d be alone, surrounded by the books you didn’t actually like to read and with no one to motivate you to write the books you so desperately wanted to write.
And it was around this time that someone I’d met online, a guy named Frank Giblin, who’d self-published a couple novels and hadn’t been satisfied with the experience—he wanted the real thing, he wanted someone else to publish him—posted about wanting to have a space to share his writing with others. A handful replied to his post expressing a similar desire and so they decided to create an online writing workshop that met, virtually, once a week. By this point, many of these people had lost interest in me, they’d unfollowed my accounts, it was clear I wasn’t a writer, and I’d stopped contributing to their feeds by sharing the book covers of the books I’d been reading, and screenshots of quotable passages, and what I thought of said books. It felt like my last chance.
I didn’t have anything to say, I wasn’t particularly upset about anything in my life, other than the fact that I was bored and alone, and I didn’t know how to write a story about being bored and alone. I loved my cat but I was beginning to realize she wasn’t enough for me, she had beautiful green eyes and she was always at the door when I came home from work but our conversations were one-sided and it was time I heard from someone, or multiple someones, on the other side of the conversation. So I sent a message to Frank Giblin. I asked him if there was any room left in the workshop, lied and told him I had a story I’d been working on for months and just couldn’t figure out how to end it, I was never any good at endings. He said of course there was room for me and that I’d make the group an even eight.
And since I’ve joined I’ve had a handful of stories published in some pretty good places, nowhere anyone actually reads, but respectable places, places I can tell people I’ve been published in and they’ll nod and say, “Oh, I love that publication,” which only means they’ve heard of it, and every few months I get a check in the mail for a story I don’t remember writing and it makes me feel good about myself. Sure, it’s not enough to live off of but I don’t need the money. I have a day job that I can’t write about because one day my managers caught me writing one of these stories—I didn’t know they were behind me, they move so quietly, and always together, and they stood behind me watching me type away at the thing, it was only when one of them leaned in to try and read over my shoulder that I noticed them—and the next day I came in to work and there was a form they wanted me to sign, on my desk, right on top of the keyboard, something about how I must not, under any circumstances, write about the company. I signed it and gave it to them but at the end of the day, I’ll write about what I want to write about, because what are they going to do? I’ll say it was all fiction, I’m a short story writer after all. Some other time I’ll tell the story of my coworker, Edward, and our furtive friendship, and how he was goddamned unjustly laid off because they caught him multiple times reading paperbacks at his desk, while on the clock, and they searched the desk and found more paperbacks, which led them to believe he’d been reading at his desk, on the clock, for years, and how he had to move back in with his aging, widowed mother and get a job brodarting books at the local library. It is a moving and tender story.
In the meantime, I get the ideas for my stories from reading other people’s stories in the online workshops. It’s not the same as picking up a published book for inspiration, it’s better, because no one is quite done with what they’re writing and they haven’t shown it to hardly anyone, but the ideas are there and every once in a while you get a line or two that’s perfect. Sometimes all it takes is a strong opening line and then it’s go, go, go, run with it, stamp my name on it and send it out, it’s mine now, finders keepers. And usually, by the time the story is published—if it’s published—the person I stole from has forgotten their beautiful sentence, they’ve forgotten their unforgettable premise, and they’re happy for me, and in a way, they’re happy for themselves, because they were in a workshop with me, and now my story is being published in a physical magazine, and they think they played a part in my acceptance by encouraging me to keep working on the story and to move that paragraph over there and add an extra beat at the end and tweak that sentence here, but they don’t remember what I took from them, they’ve forgotten about their story, the one that’s gone unpublished, the one that will never be published because mine has been published, and if theirs were to be published now, it’d look like they’d stolen from me. I’ve gotten emails, I’ve received physical letters in the mail from these people, congratulating me on my acceptance, and oh how wonderful it will be to see the story in its final form, in print, oh how they can’t wait to hold the magazine in their hands. I pity these people, I do. And I’m grateful for them. Take Greg—he’s a mechanic, he gets up early and climbs underneath all kinds of machinery and fixes things and he comes home from work in the afternoon and washes the grease off of his hands and he writes. He writes stories about the things he fixes and about the guys he works with and it’s better than anything I can do. He logs on to these online workshops and he says hello and he’s got an accent—I think he’s from North Carolina—and everybody loves him and wants to hear what he has to say and I love him too, I want to hear what he has to say. I love his accent and I love his story from last week about Chuck the mechanic who spills coffee on the book he’s reading while on his lunch break and how he puts the book on the hood of a jet-black 1991 Chevy Silverado that’s waiting on a repair. The Silverado’s been sitting in the sun all day and it’s so hot that the coffee dries up in just a few minutes but then the dust jacket of the book sticks to the hood of the car and Chuck doesn’t want to ruin the book, any more than it’s already been ruined, by tearing it off the hood because it’s a first edition of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—I haven’t read that one, haven’t read any Faulkner, so I don’t know the significance of it being that particular book, and while we’re at it, I don’t know the significance of the truck being a 1991 Chevy Silverado, but that’s not the point of the story as far as I can tell—and it was Chuck’s father’s favorite book and this was his father’s copy, and his father recently passed away and Chuck is reading the book because he’s trying to get closer to his father, even though his father is gone and even though Chuck doesn’t like to read, so when the owner of the truck comes by to pick it up, Chuck offers to buy the truck from him for a flat five grand. The owner is so sick of the way the truck keeps breaking down on him when he needs it most, the last time it broke down he was miles away from a gas station and his pregnant girlfriend started having contractions, so he says, “Sure, you’ve got yourself a deal. It’s about time I got rid of that cursed thing,” and the story ends with Chuck at the bank, withdrawing the five thousand dollars in cash and thinking about how it’s the most expensive book he’s ever bought and maybe the only book he’s ever bought and how the hell is he going to get it off the hood of the truck. Greg’s story is called “The Wild Palms” and the one I’m working on doesn’t have a title yet. I can’t share it with the workshop on Monday because they’ll know exactly where it came from. I’ve got to give it at least a couple months, these things take time, and once I feel it’s done, as done as I can get it, I’ll send it out to some places. It’s about a guy named Stanley who repairs refrigerators. He’s a devout Christian and he carries around his great-grandfather’s Bible in the back pocket of his Levi’s wherever he goes. There are a couple of Christians in the workshop and they seem to be doing pretty well in terms of publications, better than me, and one of them—Devin—had a novel come out last year and people are excited about it, they’re still talking about it, and he’s got this great web presence, sort of a combination bodybuilder-minister thing going on and every Sunday he posts a video of himself doing pushups with a stack of Bibles on his shirtless back while he recites the Nicene Creed. The other Christian in the workshop—Grace—she’s from a small town in Canada and she’s soft-spoken, what I imagine an angel must sound like if an angel must sound like anything, and I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so special about her but there’s definitely something there, she’s mysterious and guarded, severe and playful at the same time, and she’s articulate, more articulate than I’ll ever be, maybe that’s what it is, she’s one of the only people in the workshop who gives real feedback and I guess people don’t mind hearing her criticisms because she makes it sound like she really cares about everyone’s stories, and maybe she does, and anyway, according to her, she was this close to going into a convent before she met Devin and fell in love with his brain and his biceps. I don’t know if they really believe in God or in Jesus Christ, and what the hell, Christianity looks good on those two and what they do on Sunday is none of my business, for some reason my business these days is writing short stories, and if putting a Bible in one of my stories will help it to get published, then so be it. If I’ve learned anything in these workshops, it’s that if you somehow include, in the story you’re writing, the names of authors and titles of books that have inspired you, readers will, often unconsciously, begin to conflate your fiction with the fiction of the authors you’re attempting to emulate. I did it earlier with Primo Levi, when I was talking with Linda Petracelli, I stuck him in there. I did it with George Eliot too, but it’s true I’ve never read Middlemarch, never read anything by her. Greg did it with Faulkner in his story. And, in a way, I’m doing it right now by letting you know that I’m typing this on Stephen Dixon’s typewriter. Do you know who Stephen Dixon is? He published thirty-five books of fiction in his lifetime and he didn’t use a computer when he wrote, only this typewriter I’m typing on right now. He died a couple of years ago but before he died, I wrote him letters because I liked his work and felt he was underappreciated and he wrote back to me, and we had a back and forth like that for a while. He was the last friend I had and after he died, when his daughters were cleaning out his house, they found the letters I’d written him and they wrote to me and asked if I’d like to have his typewriter, and of course I said yes, yes I wanted his typewriter, not to use it, just to have it. I’d been in a bad mood for weeks before I got that letter. I’d gone to the corner store to buy the newspaper with his obituary in it and inside the store I had to dig through the papers to find the right paper and while I was digging a man with a beard and a bald, freckled head said, “Excuse me?” And I kept flipping through the papers, looking for my friend’s name or his face, and I said, “Yes?” without looking up and the bald man said, “Look at the sign.” I stopped flipping through the papers and looked at the man. He was pointing at a sign above the papers. BUY BEFORE YOU READ. I said, “Oh, I’m not reading. I’m looking for an article. I want to make sure I buy the paper that has the article I’m looking for.” He sighed and gave me a look like, Okay, buddy, yeah, sure. “Look at the sign,” he said. “If you’re going to read the papers, you need to buy them first.” I said, “Look, I didn’t want to get into it but my friend died and I’m trying to find the paper that has his obituary in it, okay? Is that okay? Or do I need to buy all of these papers, bring them home, and look through them there?” I thought he’d let up but he didn’t. “I’m just saying, we have that sign there for a reason.” “You’re one of the most bald-headed people I’ve ever met,” I said. “What? Bald-headed?” he said. “And later tonight, after you’ve closed and gone home and you think the worst part of your day is done, I’m gonna throw a brick through this goddamned plate-glass window, I swear to God.” I threw the papers back on the rack and he shouted, “Don’t come back,” and as I was walking home I thought about how it probably wasn’t a good idea to threaten my corner market and how I have nothing against bald-headed people, one day I’ll be bald if my mother’s father’s head is any indication, and now I wouldn’t be able to shop there when I needed a can of crushed tomatoes or a lemon or lime or a newspaper with a friend’s obituary in it and I’d have to walk about a mile to a different grocery store where there was only one cashier and the line was a mile long and everyone hated everyone else for buying groceries and being in each other’s way, but the good news was I never saw the bald-headed man ever again because the corner market went out of business a few weeks after our altercation and it was replaced by a new market where college students worked the registers while listening to their headphones and it’s great because they let you look through the papers before you buy them and they don’t say anything to you when you’re checking out, they don’t even tell you how much you owe them, you just give them your card and they give it back to you with a receipt, and you can kind of disappear for a while when you’re in there. But I was telling you about Stanley. Do you remember Stanley? He’s the refrigerator repairman in the short story I’m working on. So, one day Stanley’s in somebody’s apartment fixing a leaky refrigerator and he bends over and his great-grandfather’s Bible pops right out of the back pocket of his jeans and lands in a puddle that’s formed around the refrigerator. Stanley’s quick and the first thing he thinks to do is to put the heirloom Bible in the freezer of the refrigerator. So that’s what he does, and he slams the freezer door shut and continues working on the refrigerator. And here I had to research refrigerator parts, not a big deal, we’re all a Google search away from knowing how to repair refrigerators. There are four main types of refrigerators: compressor, absorption, Peltier, and magnetic, and I had Stanley working on a faulty expansion valve in a regular old compressor refrigerator. Do you see where I’m going with this? While he’s working on fixing the expansion valve, the leatherbound Bible freezes and sticks to the bottom of the freezer next to an old Popsicle and a half-eaten pint of ice cream. When he’s finished with the repair, he opens the freezer door and there it is, a frozen Bible block. Stanley’s afraid if he tries to break it off the bottom, it’ll crack the frozen book into pieces. So what does he do? He decides to leave the Bible in the freezer and tells the customer he’ll buy her a new fridge if he can take her old one home with him. She doesn’t care about the fridge, she just wants one that’ll keep her desserts cold, she’s had it up to here with this refrigerator, you should’ve seen what it did to her coconut cream pie last week, so she says, “You’ve got yourself a deal. It’s about time I got rid of that cursed thing,” and the story ends with Stanley and the woman in a Sears picking out a new refrigerator. Of course he knows a lot more about refrigerators than she does because refrigerators are his life and he’s trying to tell her which one will give her the most bang for her buck and I’m still deciding whether or not they’re going to get together, maybe he’ll take her out for a slice of coconut cream pie and coffee from his favorite diner, or maybe I’ll just keep it simple and Stanley is strictly business. At this point it doesn’t matter. The clock is ticking. I’ve got to send this one out soon or next thing I know I’ll be congratulating Greg on the publication of “The Wild Palms,” and I’ll be in the magazine section at the Barnes & Noble down the street, struggling, unable to find a copy of the magazine Greg’s story appeared in—I’m not going to read it, I just need to see the damn thing with my own eyes—until a bookseller asks me if I need any help and I’ll say no, well, yes, yes I do need help, do you carry such and such magazine, expecting the bookseller to say no, of course not, we’ve never carried that magazine, but the bookseller will find it almost immediately, somewhere between Harper’s and the New Yorker, how could I have missed it, and when he hands it to me—it’s always young men working in this Barnes & Noble, young men who look like me only they’re wearing name tags—instead of looking at the magazine, I’ll bring it straight to the counter and buy it and take it home with me and read Greg’s story in one sitting in the armchair by the bay windows, wishing the whole time that I’d written it, I should have written it, it should be my name on that story, my name in that magazine, and I’ll close the magazine and stand up and go to my desk and open the bottom drawer where I keep the others, drop it in and close the drawer, and type up an email to Greg, telling him how special it was to see the story in its final form, in print, and I’ll keep the email brief and read it over twice to make sure there aren’t any typos or grammatical errors and then I’ll send it off.
I need to go for a walk. Bill and Judy are fighting above me and Bill’s playing one of his jazz records and I think I like jazz but I don’t like the way it sounds coming through the ceiling, I don’t like the way anything sounds coming through the ceiling, and I know I need to go for a walk. I put a jacket on even though it’s hot in my apartment and probably near as hot outside. I don’t like carrying things in my pants pockets, they fit better in my coat pockets, so I put my wallet in the left coat pocket because I may want to buy an ice-cream cone and I put my phone and keys in the right coat pocket and I leave the apartment. I’m halfway down the street when I realize I forgot to lock the door but it’ll be okay, it’s always been okay, no I’m not going to return to my apartment and find it’s been burglarized, that’d give me something to write about for Monday and I have nothing to write about for Monday. Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing I can write about for Monday. I walk to the park two blocks away. I see a lot of dogs in the park and none of them are dogs I want to pet but when I pass them the owners give me that look, Yes, go ahead, you can pet my dog, even though I’m not interested in petting their dogs, any dogs, but I do. I pet every dog I pass. And I say, “Isn’t she cute,” and the owner says, “It’s a he,” and I say, “Well, isn’t he cute,” and I force a smile and keep on walking until again, “Isn’t he cute,” and, “It’s a she,” and, “Well, isn’t she cute,” and I keep on walking until I climb the stairs that lead out of the park. I take the side streets and alleyways home to avoid other pedestrians and dog owners and dogs. I don’t stop for ice cream. I need to get home. I have to write something to show these people on Monday. I think maybe I’ll see a cat, not my cat, any cat, pop its head out of a dumpster or a trash can—that’s good luck—but I don’t, only garbage. A warm breeze blows a chip bag and it follows me for a few feet before I turn the corner. The last story I wrote had “chip bag” in it and here it is again, it must mean something to me, there must be something I like about the phrase “chip bag.” I should’ve named my cat but I could never decide on a name and then it was too late, she was “cat,” just “cat,” just “my cat.” I’m the same way with my stories. I can never come up with a title I like, one that fits, I usually just pick a word or a line from the story and then if the story gets picked up, the editor changes the title to something else, something that makes sense and doesn’t feel forced. But I should’ve named her, she wasn’t a story. I walk up the steps to my apartment and turn the handle on the door but it won’t turn because it’s locked. So I didn’t forget to lock it. I reach into my left pocket for the keys but they’re not there. They’re in my right pocket. I unlock the door and open it and go inside and it smells like something’s burning. I go into the kitchen and the kettle is on the stove and water is bubbling out from beneath the lid and hissing on the burner and I turn off the stove and move the kettle to a different burner. I go into the living room. Bill and Judy aren’t fighting anymore, at least I can’t hear them, they must’ve gone out or gone to bed, but Bill left his record player on and he didn’t flip the record and the needle skips and skips at the end of the record and it’s about time he got rid of that cursed thing.

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Joseph Grantham is the author of two books of poems. His fiction has appeared in Bennington Review, New York Tyrant, Autre Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in America.

Illustration: Rae Buleri

 

If a man named Jake ever asks you on a date, you should know what you’re in for. Names are important. Not to me, really, but to Gemma. She says she can tell a lot about a person from their name.
There are good names, hot names, cute names, ugly names, names that bore, names that imply raunchy bathroom sex, names hinting at vegetarian tendencies, and names with the potential for a crippling, overbearing mother-in-law one day. I’m sure the list goes on because it’s not really a list. It’s just however the name makes her feel in the moment, what it reminds her of, or the possibility hiding between the letters and the sound they make combined on the tip of her tongue.
Every time I meet someone who has an inkling of potential, and by that I mean someone who looks like they’re too busy for me and has chiseled facial features, I text Gemma to see if I’m in the clear. She usually responds with warning signs, but every once in a while I get the green light.
Michael . . . sounds a little boring, doesn’t it?
Jon . . . def will have a dad bod someday.
Eric . . . oh damn, that’s an extremely cute name GO FOR IT.
I consider the tarot-card–like advice and place my bets accordingly. Once, I fostered a crush on said Eric for an entire year after conversing with him for under two minutes at a pop-up tiki bar. Blond hair, blue eyes, biceps, and a name dreamier than his LinkedIn photo? These are hard to come by.

So recently Gemma started going on dates with a twenty-seven-year-old named Jake and the whole world seems off. Here’s what we thought about the name Jake at first: nothing.
It never crossed our mind. It was a name floating in the sea of names, one perhaps used to describe the man wearing jeans and a sweatshirt watching TV in one of those cheesy ads plastered on the side of the bus stop. Someone drew a mustache in Sharpie on fake Jake and I laugh at it on my way to work every day.
But now, after two dates, Gemma can’t stop thinking about this plain-named creature. At my apartment, I scroll through Instagram as she sits scrunched up in the corner of the couch, studying his name. She writes it down on paper in cursive and in print. She types it in the notes section of her phone and says it out loud a few times in different octaves. She googles it; looks up the etymology of “Jake” (early twentieth century: of unknown origin) and then searches for historical, legal, and religious references as well.
“Did you see Jana is engaged?” I say. It’s the third rock glimmering in my feed so far this week.
“Who?” Gemma says, distracted.
“Jana, that friend of Gina’s.”
“Gina, who’s obsessed with Jenga?”
“Yeah, so weird. I don’t know why she wants to play it every pregame.”
“Yeah, so strange.”
“Want to see the ring?” I say, hoping it will break her hypnosis.
“How big?”
“Big.” I shove the phone in Gemma’s face and she glances for a second and agrees, but then goes back to googling millionaires named Jake.
I sigh, letting my thumb roam free again as she reads me an article about a man named Jake from Louisiana who discovered dinosaur bones under his back porch.

It started out fun. It was fun to look at the profile pictures this Jake guy decided to upload: him standing on a porch with a beer, him huddling with a group of men in suits, him as a tiny speck swinging at a microscopic golf ball. It was fun to hear about the first date, where he pronounced the L in “tortilla chips” because he thought it was a hilarious thing to do. And even fun to dissect the second date, where he took Gemma to a restaurant called Jake’s because he passed it one day and had to go in.
But usually Gemma, the girls, and I go on a few dates and that’s it. We chat about them, give the boys and scenarios names. We cry together, laugh together, and then something happens to stop the trajectory, to put an end to the story. For example, once I dated an architect who wouldn’t let me in his bed unless I showered first. (This raised questions for our group about cleanliness, OCD, controlling behaviors, white sheets, and where to buy the softest towels without breaking the bank.) On our third date, encouraged by the group discourse, I refused to shower just to see what would happen and fin, finale, ende. The fledgling relationship shattered over an argument about the potential of mascara smudges on pristine paper-like pillowcases.
Or take, for example, the time Gemma went on a date with a guy she met at a coworker’s birthday party. He licked her ear not once, not twice, but three times over the course of the evening. (This provoked deep discussions on sensuality, the senses in general, and, of course, tear-inducing jokes about licking in general.) RIP Ear Licker. We will never forget you.
But with this new boring-name guy, the story hasn’t run its course yet. It’s been a whole month and I’ve been waiting for the situation to fold in on itself. Gemma doesn’t find the name “Jake” attractive at all, but she does find this particular human form of Jake attractive and so the dates continue even though I point out this unfortunate tension as often as I can.
When she begins stress-eating leftover Halloween candy in the kitchen at work, she texts me and I try to console her by telling her a name can be changed. Instead, Gemma brainstorms names for their future kids that will combat their father’s inadequacy. My phone blows up with options like “Persephone” and “Zander.” Besides, she says, by then I’ll be able to reference him as Dad or Daddy anyway, so everything will be totally fine.
Don’t you already call him daddy? I respond.
She doesn’t text back for a full two hours. 

As I scrub down my kitchen, Gemma perches on a chair and rehashes her latest date with Jake. Their fourth, which is a little bit unbelievable. We’ve officially entered the territory where we can’t just think “nothing” about his name anymore. He can’t just be a name floating in a sea of names because he is becoming a real, human man with each consecutive date that Gemma goes on.
I try to wave the red flags—Only ever orders beer! Watches reruns of Survivor! Thinks Taylor Swift looks like a mouse!—but Gemma shakes her head. She insists he’s unique and that we need to recalibrate the meaning of his name. So after much debate, here’s what we think of now when we hear the name Jake: a real live man who lives in the frattiest, douchebaggiest, young-and-fresh-from-college-est neighborhood of the city with three roommates and no art on the walls. Not one piece.
The real Jake doesn’t have a Sharpie mustache; he has a real one. And ferocious sideburns. When we think of the name Jake now, we think of someone who is extremely loud. Someone who goes to give you a hug and pulls you into a headlock. We think of someone that Gemma should not date.
Nothing adds up but Gemma can’t stop trying to make things work in her mind, which is essentially ruining them in real life, making her do things like fake a sneeze attack every time he starts talking about his dad, who is also named Jake, or use new nicknames that come out wrong.
SOS I just called him sugar pussy, she texted me last week.
I respond with a gif of two monkeys who run into each other and fall off a branch.

On a random Tuesday after work, five of us crowd around my small, wobbly Ikea table and sip fifteen-dollar red wine, calling it a treat because we didn’t go for something under ten. After discussing things like graduate school and siblings and articles we read about the benefits of legalized marijuana, we move on to what everyone was waiting for, the reason we came together for this Tuesday night rendezvous in the first place: boys. B.O.Y.Z.
While walking home from the office earlier, it occurred to me that girls can’t stop talking about boys because other girls can’t stop asking about them. We want to know every detail from whether or not his fingers grazed yours when you walked past the street-meat cart on the way to the subway to . . . Wait, he asked you to take the subway? Did you sit or stand? Did you grab on to him for “balance”?
Sometimes girls ask so many questions about boys, we start making up the answers. Exhibit A:

Girl: He made me tea last night.
Friend: Whoa, that’s big. What kind? Tea reminds me of home.
Girl: Chamomile. And that’s so true, tea is very homey. That’s a good thing, right?
Friend: Definitely. It probably means he wants you to feel at home at his apartment. Did you feel comfortable there?
Girl: (Sits for a moment with visions of moving in together, getting married, and drinking tea for the rest of their lives in front of a gigantic stone fireplace while snow falls lightly outside.) Yeah, I mean I’ve only been to his place once, but now that you mention it, I do feel really comfortable there.

You get the gist. We make up answers and then convince ourselves of their validity. It’s actually a very detailed process, one that only the most sophisticated and intelligent creatures can pull off, which I think is partially why by 2026 over 58 percent of students admitted to college will be female.

Anyway, one of our friends, a blonde with a laugh like a lawnmower, pours more wine. Tell us about Jake, everyone chants and Gemma smiles deviously. I settle back into my chair, and prepare for a story.
Gemma is by far the best storyteller I’ve ever met. When she talks, she puts on a show, accenting sentences or building suspense with pauses that are almost too long but not quite. She raises her jet-black eyebrows in surprise or sucks in her cheeks like a fish. And if it’s a good story, which it usually is because Gemma can turn even the simplest sidewalk run-ins with an ancient high school foe into a gripping tale, then she does not limit herself to sitting but rises to the occasion, literally, by which I mean she stands.
Gemma takes a sip of her wine, pats her cotton-candy lips together with a smack smack, clears her throat, and starts off a little timid, not wanting to give Jake that much space in the conversation. She has to pretend, at least at first, that she isn’t interested in this not-attractively-named person even though she told me about their fifth date over the phone on the way home last night and again when she arrived at my place twenty minutes early today so we could rehash it just the two of us.
“Oh, it was fun, we made dinner at his place,” she says nonchalantly. But it’s enough for the gang to grasp on to, and the can of questions has been opened.
“What did you make?”
“Whoa, he actually has pans at his place?”
Gemma gives us a verbal tour, complete with hand gestures, of the kitchen in Jake’s apartment. It’s long, like a hallway, which is bad for living but good for flirting. Tons of opportunities to accidentally rub arms. There’s a stainless-steel sink and one dish towel that was maybe red at one point but as it currently stands is a pilly, faded, grayish pink.
“One,” Gemma repeats, scrunching her nose while holding up her hands to outline an imaginary dish towel hanging desperately alone. Our imaginations wander, debating when he might have washed it last, if ever, or what has been cleaned up with it, if anything.
But before our minds can spiral too far down a rabbit hole about dish towels, Gemma continues her story, telling us about the wood cabinets and how when she opened them looking for some olive oil for the pasta—yes, they were making pasta with red sauce, Jake’s idea—she found, instead, four canisters of whey protein and remnants of the white powder sitting on the empty shelves like fairy dust. This, the group decides, is classic Jake. Classic! It’s the third time I’ve heard this detail, and something about the way Gemma tells it makes me pull out my phone to tap through apps. I land on a dating one and swipe lazily while I listen along. Private equity, sure. Round head, why not. I finish my wine and accidentally swipe on a man chasing a pigeon, causing my screen to explode in hearts, showing we matched.
“And get this,” Gemma continues, pulling one of her naturally curly hairs straight and letting it slingshot back into place, pausing her sentence for what I think is a little too long before revealing the information that I already know is coming. “When the pasta was done, he only had one bowl, too.”
“One bowl?” someone gasps, and it is pretty shocking, I have to agree.
Gemma juts her chin out and nods.
“One bowl!” she repeats. “And guess what it looked like?”
She cups her hands together to form the shape of a bowl and I don’t doubt that her measurements are probably accurate. Then, she describes it: a ceramic one with wisps of yellow paint and a light blue handprint at the bottom, that of a child. Jake made it with his grandmother when he was five years old and has kept it ever since.
This throws the entire group of analysts off their game. We can’t decide if this is cute or weird. If eating out of one bowl together is romantic or elementary; if keeping a childhood bowl means this boy has a soft spot or a lazy, cheap heart.
As the debate carries on, I glance at Gemma, whose blue eyes sparkle giddily. It’s in moments like these that the whole female-male dynamic becomes lucid, even if just briefly. We’re not interested in boys or dating, but rather in the platform for discussion they provide, the clay for legend building each man enables.
“So, he’s kind of an interesting dude,” someone finally says, breaking our ceramic bowl reveries.
“Yeah, he’s like a dude and a bro at the same time,” someone adds.
“Oh my gosh, you nailed it!” Gemma says, and claps her hands together. “He’s totally a combo. He’s like a dude-bro.”
Cheers emerge as a new category of man is born with Jake as its mascot. The dude-bro: a man who is still raw in his elemental state, one who cooks eggs for dinner and eats them over the kitchen sink, shoveling them from the pan into his mouth after working out. He probably has no idea we’ve spent the last forty minutes of our Tuesday discussing his lack of kitchen utensils. While he’s dominated our conversation, we’re most likely not even a speck in his evening. I wonder if his friends have even asked about Gemma at all.
And as for the ceramic bowl dilemma, the verdict is in: anything would be better than nothing, the analysts decide, especially when that anything is made with love.
Made with love? I think to myself, and stand up to break out the tequila now that the wine is gone. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t say it, because we’ve already been discussing this Jake character too long and with each moment his outline gets a bit more filled in. He was just a profile, just a boring name, just a guy Gemma had sex with, but due to our endless efforts and thinking, he might stop being nothing. He might actually become something. The thought is both beautiful and horrifying, so I stay busy mixing drinks, making them strong before passing them out.

As the night fades into endless giggles and muted, unsaid disappointment in the way time passes, we become wobbly drunk, hugging each other just for fun. Music blurs and the ambling conversation veers between discussions about dates the other girls went on and important items in the news like real estate being bought with bitcoin.
Between sips and swipes and giggles with the girls, I look across the table at Gemma and notice she’s texting and smiling. My hands begin to sweat, my stomach churns: it must be Jake.
I take a sip of my not-very-mixed mixed drink and open my phone again. The dating apps show me thousands of men and I swipe and swipe and sip and swipe. I’m looking for a Gerald or, better yet, a Tim. Someone unexpected, or overly expected. Someone who could wreck my year in just one night. Or even a drab lawyer might do.
Each time I look up, I see Gemma smirking like she’s carrying a secret. I didn’t realize how far into the deep end we’d moved. I begin to swipe faster. I can feel her slipping away. Getting further from me even though we’re in the same room, even though I get up and go sit on her lap.
She’s here but she’s on her way somewhere else, I can feel it. And as she teeters on the diving board above a pool of normalcy that, according to Instagram, is our fate, we’re going to need backup.
I swipe right on everyone now, because of the tequila, or because of that dreamy look Gemma still has even though we’re discussing dental procedures. I swipe right on Ben, Jerome, Harold, Keetz, Jared, Robert, Moe.
My thumb works on overdrive because I need to find someone that will bring us back next week. Because every face on the phone has something we can work with. More names to read into, more dates to debate, more problems to create so we can keep solving and solving and solving them together.
Just us girls. Just me and the girls. Just us, forever.

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Charlee Dyroff is a writer from Boulder, Colorado. She received an MFA from Columbia University, and her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Lapham’s Quarterly, Guernica, The Best American Food Writing 2019, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Most Human Thing, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

 

“When I was a boy I knew a man in London named Aloysius Gonzaga Jones, named after a Roman saint who died of the plague at the end of the sixteenth century. I ran errands for Aloysius around the East India Docks.”
“What kinds of errands?”
“Delivering things to people, small packages, mostly. I didn’t know what was in them. Aloysius always carried a pistol in one of his coat pockets. I told him I wanted a pistol, too, in case someone tried to steal a package from me. I was about nine or ten years old then. ‘When you’re older, Jake,’ he told me. He always called me Jake.”
“Did he ever let you hold the pistol?”
“Once. It was heavy. Aloysius had big hands, huge hands. The gun looked like a baby’s rattle in one of them.”
“So you never carried a gun?”
“No, I’ve never even owned one. There’s only one reason to have a gun, Roy, and I hope you never do.”
Roy’s grandfather, his mother’s father, whom Roy called Pops, ate smoked fish for breakfast every morning. He dressed well, wore three piece suits when he sat down at the table. Pops had been born and lived in London, England, until he was in his early twenties. He came to live in Chicago with his daughter, Kitty, and her son, Roy, when he was in his mid-seventies. Pops’s name was Jack Colby, he was in the wholesale and retail fur business with his brothers Nate and Ike. Another brother, Louis, was the founder and president of the Chicago Furriers Association. In the 1950s, all of them had offices in the State and Lake Building across the street from the Chicago Theater.
From the age of five Roy considered Pops to be his best friend. He told Roy and Roy’s friends stories about his own childhood in London, about growing up poor in the East End on Plumbers Row near the Mile End Road, a market street where Pops and his brothers—there were six of them at that time, two having died before the others emigrated to America—ran errands for the men and women who sold vegetables and fruits from wooden carts. The kids loved Pops’s accounts of the Colby brothers’ adventures with their pals and adversaries, such as Top Hat Tom, Black Harry, Dickie Apples and Pears, and Bob the Knifer.
Roy disliked the stink of smoked fish in the morning, which he refused to eat, but Pops always poured Roy a half cup of coffee with cream and two cubes of sugar in it. Sometimes before breakfast Roy would go into Pops’s bathroom with him and pretend to shave with one of his grandfather’s razors without a blade in it, soaping his hairless face and making strokes like Pops did. Pops had diabetes, so he tested his urine every morning, passing some into a glass tube along with a solution that turned the mixture gray, a positive result of his condition. Roy did the same, only the liquid in his test tube turned blue, negative evidence of his not having diabetes.
Pops was mugged late one afternoon when he was on his way home, walking the one block from the bus stop to Kitty’s house. Two young guys wearing leather jackets and burlap caps assaulted him from behind. One grabbed his arms and knocked off his glasses while the other stole Pops’s wallet and pocket watch that he kept on a chain attached to his belt, then they ran off. After Pops got to the house, Roy’s mother called the police. Two officers showed up, filled out a report, and said they’d keep an eye out for the muggers. They were never apprehended, and neither Pops’s wallet nor his pocket watch was recovered.
“I had about thirty dollars in the wallet,” Pops told Roy, “and the watch was only of sentimental value. It was a gift to me from Aloysius Jones on my twelfth birthday.”
“I’m glad they didn’t hurt you,” said Roy.
“I’m an old man, I didn’t resist.”
“If you’d had Aloysius Jones’s pistol you could have shot them.”
Pops shook his head. “No, Roy, they got the drop on me. But if my friend Bob the Knifer were around, he’d hunt them down and get even for me, and maybe get my watch back.”
Roy’s grandmother, Rose, from whom Pops had been divorced for many years, died a year before Pops moved into Kitty’s house, where she had been living. Because Rose always blamed Pops for their breakup, Kitty was cold to him. She took her father in due to his dire heart condition and close relationship with Roy, whose own father had died soon after Roy’s birth.
Shortly before Pops passed away at eighty, he had been relocated by his son, Buck, Kitty’s brother, to a nursing facility near his home in Florida. Buck thought the warm climate would be good for his father, and Kitty did not oppose the move. Roy, however, missed his grandfather terribly, and for a time after he learned of Pops’s death withdrew from his normal routines. He was not eager to play with his friends and often refused to go to school, claiming that he did not feel well. This wound never did fully heal.
Roy felt the loss of Pops for the rest of his life. Years later, when his mother told Roy that she should not have treated her father so badly, that perhaps she had been unduly and wrongfully influenced by her mother, it meant nothing to Roy. The only thing about Pops that Roy did not miss was the smell of smoked fish in the morning.

---

Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea, How Chet Baker Died, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, and Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels. He cowrote with David Lynch the screenplay for Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. “Pops” will appear in his next book, Ghost Years, out in the spring of 2024 from Seven Stories. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area. 

Illustration: Barry Gifford

 

Angela faked the seizure on a Tuesday. She’d meant it as a joke—a bit of post-lunch humor to lighten the mood—but no one thought it was a joke and she could see that it wasn’t funny, that there was no circumstance in which it might have been funny. She blinked her eyes a lot coming out of it, glad she’d put on mascara that morning.
Her coworkers were solicitous, even the ones who disliked her, and Corrin made her a smoothie with blueberries and flax seeds, which was a random but kind gesture. After that, Mr. Kenny insisted his secretary drive her to the ER.
Angela buckled herself into Dana’s hideous yellow hatchback and said, “Take me home please, 214 South Church Street. I’ll call my doctor when I get there.”
“Mr. Kenny said I should take you to the ER.”
“Mr. Kenny can handle his medical affairs and I’ll handle mine.”
“Of course,” Dana said, “right.”
Angela took a sip of the smoothie. She wasn’t going to mention HIPAA, but she could. She doubted anyone in her office knew what was in the law, but they took any mention of it very seriously. They drove in silence. Angela rested her head on the window, and it bounced lightly against the glass, making her headache worse, but it was pleasurable nevertheless. She was hungover and wondered if that was why she’d done it. Why had she done it? It was a terrible thing to do. Perhaps illegal. Like yelling fire in a crowded theater. She wondered what the difference was between theater and theatre. She remembered looking at each of her coworkers’ faces—their big noses and draping hair, how people became unrecognizable in such positions—and thinking how many hours of their lives they spent together. Most of them had been together for years and years and they hardly knew each other but harbored plenty of resentments; it was like a school project where one person does all the work, but it lasts twenty years.
As Dana pulled into her complex, Angela said, “I’m all the way in the back, just follow the road and watch these bumps.” When they went over the first one, she said, “I have got to move,” though she liked the complex, and she liked being all the way in the back where she felt tucked in.
Dana parked and got out. Angela was surprised by this but didn’t say anything. She unlocked the door to her first-floor, one-bedroom apartment—a garden apartment it was called—and Dana followed her inside, helped her get situated on the couch with a pillow and blanket.
“What can I do?” Dana asked. “Can I get you some water? Start a load of laundry?” she chuckled. “Tell me.”
“I’m fine. I appreciate the ride.”
“What about your doctor? Do you want me to call him and make an appointment?”
Angela wished her doctor was a woman so she could correct her. All of her doctors were men, even her gynecologist. Even her dentist, and the guy who checked her moles. “I just want to rest for a few minutes,” Angela said, and she looked directly at Dana, who had perched herself on the arm of her good chair.
They held each other’s gaze. Dana was wearing a fitted bright-blue dress that looked okay but not great. It was fashionable and appropriate for the season. It hit at a weird spot, though, midcalf, where her thick calves were thickest. Her legs hadn’t been shaved in a long time. Dana was in her late twenties or early thirties, and this was more acceptable in her age group. Shaved pits, legs, bush—all optional. Or maybe just the pits and legs were optional. Angela had quite the bush, but she shaved her legs and armpits every other day.
They were opposites but the same. Old or young, women conformed, even if it wasn’t obvious, even if they didn’t let you see it. No one had seen Angela’s bush in years. She thought about the last action she’d gotten—a married guy fingering her in the bathroom at a concert. When the knocks came, they’d gone quiet, looking at each other, waiting for whoever it was to go away. It had been exhilarating, she’d loved every moment of it, but she still wished she’d shaved or waxed. He might’ve called if she had.
Dana went into her kitchen and poked around. The kitchen was a wreck. Angela hoped she didn’t have to use the bathroom.
“It’s gross in there. You shouldn’t be in there.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Dana said.
Angela had let the dishes pile up for a week or longer, and it smelled. She’d smelled it as soon as they’d walked in. At first, letting the dishes accumulate had been a way to teach herself to be less rigid, more flexible—to learn to live with the mess of life instead of fighting against it—but it had gotten out of hand. She looked around her apartment and saw that everything had gotten out of hand, and yet she didn’t feel any more flexible. Her rigidity had only shifted. She’d become preoccupied with her teeth, flossing after every meal and going through a box of whitening strips in two days. She had splurged on “the Cadillac of lighted makeup mirrors” so she could check for cracks and discoloration. There were other shifts, too, ones she wanted to think about even less, that she was not going to think about. Like how she only bought wine in a box with a spigot.
Dana rinsed and scrubbed, began loading the dishwasher.
“You don’t have to do that,” Angela said.
“It’s either this or go back to work.” She turned off the water and said, “I hope I haven’t overstepped.”
“Oh no, you’re not overstepping.”
“At work I’d just be watching the clock . . . Don’t get me wrong, I like my job, it’s a good job.”
“It’s a great job,” Angela said. “I wouldn’t have stayed there thirteen years if it wasn’t, but sometimes you just have to play hooky.”
“I have permission,” Dana said.
Angela thought about explaining herself, how she’d always been the kind of person who wouldn’t leave a cup in the sink, even if it was rinsed, that the mess was an experiment that had gone badly, like so many of her experiments—she wasn’t a scientist!—but she barely knew this woman and didn’t want to know her. Dana had only been in the office for three or four months, and she was the boss’s secretary, didn’t mingle much with the general office population, insofar as they mingled. Angela thought of her as big boobs and bouncy hair inside of a glass box.
“Should I start the dishwasher or will the noise bother you?”
“You can start it.” Angela closed her eyes. She wanted this woman to leave, but Dana had moved into the living room and was folding a blanket. Gathering a pile of self-help books and placing them on the wrong shelf. Once Angela had been reading a book about making friends—something like How to Make (and Keep) Friends for Life!—and had unashamedly shown it to a woman who’d asked what she was reading. The woman had frowned and stammered before walking away, and Angela felt a deep shame, an old familiar feeling but new. Self-help books weren’t as embarrassing as they’d once been, though. Lots of people read them and talked about them, and it was viewed as a positive thing to want to better oneself.
As if to prove Angela’s point, Dana held up one and said, “This is so good.” It wasn’t one of the more embarrassing ones, but a classic: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Angela remembered when she’d first read it, and how it made her brain feel like it was changing shape. Like she could feel her brain making connections that hadn’t been there before. The Four Agreements had led her to other books, and then others, as she searched for more brain-altering ideas, but they were few and far between.
“By the way, are you on any new medications?” the secretary asked. “New meds can trigger a seizure.”
Angela pretended to be half-asleep and mumbled that she was going to close her eyes.
“Or maybe you’re photosensitive?”
“What?”
“You know, flashing lights. You might’ve watched something that triggered it.”
“I don’t think so?”
Dana watched her for a few more seconds—some of the longest of her life—and then walked to the door. “Okay. I’m going to go now, let you get some rest.”
“Thanks again,” Angela said.
“I’m gonna hit the coffee shop on Fortune. Probably sit in there and stare out the window for a good half hour.”
“Enjoy.”
She heard Dana’s car start, reverse, drive away. Angela peered out the window, watching the hatchback hump over one speed bump and another, Dana’s bouncy head bouncing. Then she got a mug of wine from the fridge, the spigot so easy to push, and stripped out of her clothes. She donned a fat robe and put on Grey’s Anatomy. She was late to the party with Grey’s and only started because her sister told her she had to. They hardly ever liked the same things, but the older they got the more it seemed like they might.
In the first episode, there was a teenage girl driving Meredith crazy, paging her because she was bored, because there was nothing on TV. The girl was clearly being set up for something tragic, and then she had a grand mal seizure, and if they didn’t find the reason for the seizures, she was going to die. Time was running out, McDreamy said. What did it all mean? Angela wondered. She refilled her mug.
She watched two episodes and decided she was in. What a pleasure to have something like seventeen seasons to keep her company, which might as well be a million. She texted her sister the good news and napped for an hour. Then she watched another episode and declined a call from her friend Nicky, who almost certainly needed someone to feed her cats for the next week. Angela had fed her cats a dozen times and had never felt sufficiently appreciated. She’d told herself she wouldn’t do it again, and she wouldn’t. Pretty soon Nicky would stop calling. She had been mighty persistent, though. Angela could see her mumbling, becoming agitated as the ringing went on. But this wasn’t Angela’s fault. Nicky should have offered more than a cheap souvenir or a token payment. And to be fair, Angela should have asked, but she didn’t feel like she should have to ask. Nicky should have known she was taking advantage and corrected the issue on her own. Angela wasn’t her teacher, her mother.
On the cusp of drunk, she ate a couple of Thin Mints from the freezer and realized she was ravenous, at which point she drove to Taco Bell for two chicken quesadillas and a Mexican pizza.
She ate while watching another episode and got into bed early. While lying there, she felt some guilt—and buried beneath that, horror—but there was excitement too. Something unusual had happened, she had made it happen, and everyone had been so nice to her; her kitchen was clean, her books neatly stacked. Overall, it had been a good day.

The following morning, her coworkers stopped by her desk to ask how she was doing or to give her “a little something.” She received a get-well card drawn by a child (wild-haired family of four, a dog, and a snake), a bag of caramels, a tiny cactus, and a gift certificate for a massage. She hadn’t received so many gifts in years. People seldom give a single, childless, forty-seven-year-old woman anything. She felt like crying and must have looked like it because three people stopped to pat her on the shoulder.
Dexter, who’d given her the card, circled back. “I forgot to put this in there,” he said, handing her a Starbucks gift card.
“Oh, that’s so nice. Thank you.”
“There should be at least twenty-eight dollars on it.”
“Great, I’ll enjoy it.”
“Might be thirty bucks . . .”
“Who has the snake—your son or your daughter?”
“Mine,” he said, proudly. He was just standing there, but Angela imagined him with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet while fondling himself. That was the kind of energy Dexter gave off. “He’s thirty-six years old.”
“Wow,” Angela said. “That’s a long time to have a snake!”
“Almost as old as me.”
“Wow,” Angela said again. “What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t really have a name.” Dexter paused and Angela knew that a name was forthcoming. “I just call him Mr. Snake.”
“Classic,” she said, and Dexter went back to his desk and Angela wondered how old he was. He looked to be about fifty, but maybe he was only in his early forties? Or perhaps even his late thirties? This made her feel worried. How old did she look? Would someone mistake her for a woman in her fifties or, God forbid, her sixties? She looked around at the others and tried to guess their ages. When they had birthday parties, there were never any numbers on the cakes and only three candles, enough to blow.
As she worked, everyone seemed to be sneaking peeks at her, waiting for her to have another seizure. Her workload was half of what it was on a normal day so she scrolled Facebook and ate caramels, marveling at how delicious they were. The gold wrappers were a bonus. She loved everything about these caramels. If she had a million dollars, how many bags of caramels would she buy? She would roll around on a bed of gold caramels. She went to the bathroom and brushed her hair, which was long and graying at the temples. Why shouldn’t she make an appointment at a salon? She didn’t think enough of herself, that was her problem. She had always cut corners unnecessarily.
That afternoon, when her boss called her into his office for her quarterly review, he marked her “excellent” in every category. This wasn’t out of the ordinary, she was usually pretty excellent, but maybe not quite this excellent. Then he asked if she needed some time off and she said she didn’t, but she had a doctor’s appointment Friday and would need to leave early.
“Of course, of course,” he said as he held the door open for her and patted her on the shoulder. As an office, they had decided that pats on the shoulder were okay, though they should be light and infrequent. They had all agreed to this, and no one opted out. Angela didn’t mind being touched on the shoulder. She was born in the seventies, a time of secondhand smoke and no seatbelts, children roaming the streets until their mothers whistled for dinner. Her brother had slept with three babysitters before her parents hired an old lady named Bea.
Dana stopped by her desk to ask how she was feeling. Dana hadn’t given her anything, which was disappointing. Angela put her finger on the tiny cactus, which had a serious lean, careful to avoid the needles. “I’m feeling okay,” she said. “Better.”
“I’m glad. You should probably take that guy home, he needs sun to thrive.”
“Hm, makes sense. They live in the desert . . .”
“Not too much sun, though. Too much and it’ll turn yellow.”
“How do you know this?”
Dana shrugged. She was wearing another breast-showcasing outfit, this time in pink. Angela wondered what kind of undergarments she wore, if she had a full bodysuit under there. She wished she had some younger friends so she could ask these questions, but her youngest friend was Nicky, who was in her midthirties, and she wasn’t speaking to Nicky. There was a chance she would never speak to Nicky again because she wasn’t going to take care of those cats, no way no how, she couldn’t do it, she wouldn’t let herself be taken advantage of again.
“Were you able to get in touch with your doctor?” Dana asked.
Angela tilted her head and squinted, hoping to make clear that Dana should mind her own fucking business. “I have an appointment on Friday.”
“Oh good, I’m glad. I’m sure it’s nothing, a new medication or light strobe or whatever.”
“I wanted to thank you again for taking me home, doing the dishes. That was over and above—over and beyond. Really.”
“Of course.”
Angela bumped her mouse, positioning her hands on the keyboard. She watched Dana’s pink ass as it rounded the corner. Was Dana suspicious or was she trying to be nice or was it something else? Perhaps the boss’s secretary was falling in love with her. That would be unexpected, but Angela had kept up her body—she had a stationary bike and a treadmill and free weights at home, which she used to use regularly and had been meaning to start using again—and she had nice eyes and decent hair and she probably seemed mysterious because she kept herself apart, as if she was something special. She had always been one of the prettier friends in her friend group, if not the prettiest. But no one thought about a woman of her age in those terms. No one had called her pretty in a long time.
She went to the bathroom and washed her hands. One of the claims reps came in, Felicia. They said hello and Felicia went into the handicapped stall and farted obscenely. Angela continued washing her hands. She didn’t say anything, of course she never said anything, made any kind of noise or acknowledgement whatsoever, but she’d always found it curious, this unabashed gas when you knew someone was in the bathroom with you, someone you had just interacted with and would have to interact with again seconds later.
Angela would look at her and know . . . what? What would she know? That Felicia was the kind of person who let loose in a place she was expected to let loose? Angela felt like the world might be divided along these lines. The people who could fart and shit loudly in a public bathroom and those who drove home recklessly, nearly soiling themselves to get there.
She played around on Facebook again, not even pretending to work. She sent a message to one of her high school friends named Katie, asking if she recalled the time they were lost in their hometown, circling the west side for hours in Katie’s stepfather’s truck. They’d stopped and bought a map because they’d wanted to figure it out on their own. Katie was online and wrote that she vaguely recalled the experience, but what had made that day memorable was the man at the gas station masturbating. Angela did not remember this part. She tried to visualize a man looking at them as he went at himself, the two of them peeling out and laugh-crying or perhaps just crying. If this had happened, why couldn’t she remember the most important detail? They hadn’t been lost for more than a few hours. And the two of them had frequently been lost. They were the sort of friends whose general cluelessness multiplied tenfold when they were together. If Angela had been smarter, she would have befriended people who were competent and sure of themselves, but those people had better options.
Her boss patted her on the shoulder, his second pat of the day, and leaned in in a way that made Angela think he might embrace her, but he only rapped his knuckles on her desk and told her to go home and get some rest. She thought about the time she’d been at church and went in to hug an old lady—a distant relative—and the woman said, “Not on the lips,” as if she was going to kiss an old woman on the lips! She would have never, never in a million years, and yet the old woman must have thought she was going to or she wouldn’t have said it. Angela had no idea what her body was doing sometimes, her face, what people thought her body or her face might do. She’d found it hilarious at the time, but had continued to think about it and each time she thought of it, it was less funny. Why would the woman have said such a thing? Angela hadn’t wanted to embrace her at all, had only gone in because it seemed she had no choice.
“I am tired all of a sudden,” she said. He smiled down at her. He was a preacher on Sundays, and he liked to smile down at people. She dropped the bag of caramels into her purse and held the cactus with two hands.
At home, she set the cactus in a spot where it would get sun throughout the morning and early afternoon. She would have to watch to make sure it wasn’t turning yellow. She checked Facebook again and Katie said that another memory had come to her: the time Angela got drunk and fell down the stairs at Scrooge’s and her skirt flipped up.
Angela remembered this well because her panties had been oversized white ones—the most unfortunate kind of baggy old droopy things. She hadn’t been wearing a skirt that day, but a dress, one she would never wear again, not once, even though she’d loved it. Every time she opened her closet and saw it hanging there, it all came back: the gravel in her busted knee, the boys laughing and even some of the girls, her friends, before they’d helped her up. The boys called her “granny panties” for weeks to her face, and behind her back they called her “big gran,” likely for years.
Angela wondered why Katie would bring up a cruel memory when she had brought up an innocuous one, one that she’d thought was humorous, at least without the masturbating man, and Angela didn’t remember a masturbating man. She was pretty sure this had happened to Katie on some other day. Had Katie been mad and this was her way of lashing out from hundreds of miles away? Angela tried to remember a humiliating experience about Katie but couldn’t come up with anything. She tried to recall the humiliations of any of her friends—someone bleeding through their pants, a naked Polaroid circulating around school—and couldn’t recall anything, not a thing. Angela had plenty of humiliations that haunted her. Who had access to them, and why couldn’t she recall any of theirs? She cried until her eyes were red and her face was puffy.
That evening, after three episodes and a bowl of buttered noodles, Angela googled “seizure.” She read about the four types of seizures. She learned that if she had another within a short period of time, it would be considered epilepsy, and she didn’t know if she wanted to be epileptic. She would have to be willing to commit, which would be a fucked-up thing to do. Now it was a one-off, a lapse in judgment, an odd but brief break from reality or whatever. Even as she was telling herself all of the reasons she shouldn’t do it again—that if anyone found out, she would be ruined—she knew it was a question of when, not if.

She started seeing seizures everywhere. In every TV show and movie, in every article she read, people were having seizures. Had the seizures been there all along, or was it like the car thing? Like you buy a white Volvo and all of a sudden you notice all the white Volvos in the world. Angela’s brain was making connections it hadn’t made since The Four Agreements. Also, she had written Katie a dozen fuck-you messages but hadn’t sent any of them, which was curious.
At work they were watching her, waiting, and Angela was watching herself. She could do it at any time. She had a lot more information, and if any of them were seizure experts, she figured she would do better this time around. She had always thought she could be an actor.
On the following Tuesday, her brain and body knew it was time. She was hungover again. Why she liked to get drunk on a Monday night—the whole week ahead, the worst day of the week to do it—well, it just seemed to happen. No foaming at the mouth, but she let a few globs of bubbly spit run down her chin and pool on her shirt. Dana assumed the role of caretaker. Dana was her girl, whether she wanted her to be or not. On the one hand, she wanted her to be. Dana was an unknown entity within the office. Angela believed she was from Iowa, and she had never met anyone from Iowa. On the other hand, Angela didn’t know what was on the other hand, but she had come to the conclusion that Dana was smarter than the rest of them combined.
Her boss handed her a Subway napkin and she blotted her mouth. She looked to see if it still listed all of the subs and their calorie content and was pleased to see that it did. She missed those chocolate chip cookies, three for a dollar back when she was frequenting her local shop.
Dana drove her home. Angela told her to watch the speed bumps. Dana looked at her and Angela turned her head to look out the window.
Dana took the keys and unlocked the door as if she was in charge. She moved the cactus to a place where it would get the perfect amount of light, or so she said. Then she sat in her good chair while Angela reclined on the couch with a blanket and pillow.
“You think you could make me a smoothie? It made me feel better last time.”
“Sure, what do you want in it?”
“I’ve got some bananas and frozen fruit, the blender’s on the counter,” Angela said. “Are you a good smoothie maker? Do you need me to look up a recipe? There’s almond milk and regular. I like almond milk in my coffee and cow milk in my cereal, but I’m not sure which I’d prefer in a smoothie.”
“I don’t drink cow milk.”
“A lot of people don’t anymore.”
Dana opened and closed the freezer, opened and closed the fridge. “Do you have honey?”
“In the pantry.”
Angela hoped she wouldn’t ask any more questions. She wanted the smoothie that Dana would make for herself. Angela knew what kind of smoothie she would make, and she didn’t want that. She closed her eyes and listened to the blender, listened to the clack, clack, clack of Dana’s high heels.
“I hope you’re thirsty,” Dana said, so close Angela could feel the fabric of Dana’s pants brush against her arm. Polyester. She opened her eyes to a green-colored smoothie.
“I put spinach in there.”
Angela sat up and took a swallow. It was just like she imagined. Dana sat in the chair and watched her. After a while she said, “So these are the first seizures you ever had?”
“Yes,” Angela said, wiping her chin. She hoped she didn’t get a pimple. Sometimes, even though she was old, she still got pimples on her chin.
“How have you felt otherwise?”
“Okay. Like normal, though I’ve been more tired than usual.”
“You haven’t been sleeping well?”
Angela acted like she was considering the question. “Not really, no.”
“What’d the doctor say?”
“My bloodwork’s fine . . . He’s going to run some tests next week.”
Dana did the dishes again, which were smelly and stacked up. She ran the dishwasher. Angela imagined Dana taking off her clothes, one item at a time, dancing for her, moving her hips in a slow circle. Propping one high-heeled foot on the coffee table. Angela had never been with a woman, couldn’t remember ever thinking about a woman in this way.
“Do you mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Go ahead,” Angela said. She had planned for this, to some extent, and had cleaned somewhat, put away her embarrassing things, somewhat. She listened to Dana’s piss hitting the bowl, the flush. How awful it was to be human.
Dana emerged from the bathroom picking at something on her blouse, a piece of thread or a flake of dandruff, and let it drop to the floor.
“It’s too bad you’ve been stuck taking care of me like this. Like it’s part of your job now.”
“It’s no trouble,” Dana said. “I actually like this part of my job.”
“I don’t really need your help.”
“I know, like I said. I like doing it.”
She didn’t have a crush on Dana. She didn’t want Dana to be her friend or her girlfriend. What might they possibly do together? Garden? Yoga? Go out for brunch and get excited about bottomless mimosas?
“My sister’s epileptic,” Dana said.
“Oh?” Angela said.
“Runs in my family. Not me, I’ve never had one, but my mom and sister and one of my cousins.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yours are different from any I’ve seen,” Dana said, “but I’m not an expert.”
“Don’t shortchange yourself,” Angela said. She imagined Dana recording their encounter, pressing a button on her phone to hear Angela admit she was a faker, a malingerer. Playing it for their boss. “I think I should get some rest now.”
Dana left. Angela closed her eyes. Then she opened them and drank her smoothie. There were people she felt ugly around and people she felt pretty around and people she felt neutral around, neither ugly nor pretty, not conscious of ugliness or prettiness, fatness or thinness, anything to do with looks—they might as well be plants, some that had been watered a bit more and others that had been watered a bit less, but that was the rain’s fault. Those were the people she wanted to be around most, the people around whom she could forget her body, forget about having a body, being a body. She didn’t want to have or be a body, didn’t want to think about her body, everything she put into it, the harm she was doing to it, the things she swallowed, all of it nonstop, always ingesting and purging, in and out.
She composed a note to Katie that began, “Dear Katie, you always were a fucking cunt.” She didn’t hesitate this time before hitting send.

---

Mary Miller is the author of four books, most recently the novel Biloxi. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and American Short Fiction, among others.

Illustration: Jess Rotter

 

“We need the monsters’ art,” he said, and produced an official document mandating as much.
The bailiff swept his eyes slowly over the document, as though assessing its gravity, but he wasn’t assessing it, just giving the impression of doing so.
“Of course,” he said. And turned.
He pushed open the wooden door now in front of him and walked into the next room, showed the document to the secretary, who solemnly swept his eyes over it and nodded, then walked to the back of the room, turned the knob of the second door, which was plastic. In the next room was nothing but a desk with a single drawer. He opened the drawer and extracted a ring of three keys, used one to open the next door, the aluminum door, and walked into the next room. Nothing in it, just silvery metal walls. He used the two remaining keys to open the next door, which had an oak finish but a soul of steel, and entered the last room. This one was also all metal but littler than the others. The ceiling was a single square bulb, which illuminated one shelf holding bottles and another shelf on which lay a blunt-tipped cane and a box containing rolls of paper of various textures; on the floor was a square black device with a cord, also black. He placed one bottle, the cane, and a roll of paper on top of the apparatus and pushed the whole of it to the next door, which resembled that of a safe. The bailiff spun the dial on the combination lock this way, then that, then this again, this again, this, that, spanning the segments of each revolution with expertise, tempo, and determination until the lock went click. Then he pulled the titanium-handled hatch and entered the monsters’ room.
By the entrance, hanging from a nail, was a clipboard with a paper with squares to be ticked off. The bailiff made three ticks on as many lines, turned, took the cane, turned the handle, and entered the first monster’s dungeon. He caught the monster making art. Banging and banging its hairy fists against a sheet of sepia paper that had been marked up in distressing fashion on the concrete floor. Catching the monster making art was extremely difficult, as the monster was timid, but it didn’t mind being seen making monstrosities, for which they provided all required supplies. There was no one left in the dungeon, just shreds of clothing and shards of bone; maybe that was why, with no one to manhandle, it had begun making art.
The monster turned to the bailiff, stunned and slobber-mouthed, and tensed its muscles, preparing to pounce and tear him to pieces, but by then the bailiff was wielding the cane and whacked it down on the monster’s back until he felt it go soft and then on the monster’s skull until he felt it go soft and then on the monster’s extremities until he felt them rendered useless and only then did he approach to examine the art on the floor; fortunately, the art had been spattered with blood. He picked it up, left another piece of paper in its place, and walked out.
The bailiff slid the monster’s art into a cardboard tube, tucked the bottle into the waistband of his trousers, and moved on to dungeon number two. The monster in this dungeon was expecting him. It was curled up in a corner, hurling a litany of hatred with its gaze, almost as if speaking with its eyes. The litany grew louder and louder and the monster began unfurling from the corner toward the bailiff, as though its bones were slow springs, and brought its nose right up to the bailiff’s, a nothing away. The bailiff was frightened but remembered his training: he must not let himself be intimidated by the litany or by the monster’s unfolding bones, so he brandished the cane and crashed it down, shattering an eye socket. No problem; they healed. Then he shattered its mouth, and once the monster had curled back up, he pushed it in order to collect what the monster was hiding, but the monster turned its back on the bailiff and held on, refusing to let go, so the bailiff began striking its claws until it finally let go and the bailiff was able to pick up the bundle, which was a doll representing something, a girl or a cat, something with huge smiley eyes. He took the bottle from his trousers, opened it, sprayed firewater onto the monster’s wounds, and then threw it the bottle, which the monster rushed to pick up and bring to its mouth.
He placed the doll and the tube by the door to the monsters’ ward, hooked up the square contraption, and nudged it along. Before entering the third dungeon, he turned the thing on and a series of lights on the rim of the box blinked. He bent over it, pressed a concealed button on the top, and said, “Testing, testing,” pressed another button and heard himself speak, and nodded in satisfaction. As soon as the bailiff stepped into the dungeon, the monster began to wail. The bailiff carried the box in with him and the monster’s wails became more desperate. It was small and misshapen, with some extremities shorter than others. The monster used them all to bury its nails into its skin and injure itself and began to expel various secretions—brown, yellow—from its orifices.
“No, no, stop that,” said the bailiff, attempting to approach the monster, the cane in one hand, pushing the black box with the other. “Don’t do that.”
But the monster wouldn’t stop spraying him with its nauseating secretions. It was no longer making any sound and instead was focused on making more and more pus-secreting wounds, until the bailiff began to strike strategic blows with the cane, first on its extremities, and then, since the monster only moaned crossly, on its chest and genitals. Then the monster really did let out a sound that was first deep and low, then sweet and almost sharp, and all the while blue. The bailiff pressed the button on the box and, when he noticed that it had stopped singing, struck the monster again and it sang again, in great pain and in a great range of keys; at one point the bailiff even began tapping his foot in time, until the monster seemed to falter irremediably and stop secreting and stop singing and turned into a useless blob.
The bailiff exited the dungeon, put the other pieces of art atop the recording box and exited the monsters’ ward.
He went back through the shock-absorbing rooms, making sure to lock each one carefully. In the penultimate room, the secretary made note of the art he was removing before finally returning to reception.
The messenger waited in mute impatience. He made no gesture or comment about the filth covering the bailiff. He took the monsters’ art, turned, and walked off.
The bailiff looked down to record the removal in the day’s logbook before going off to change. As he did so he began biting a nail and, without realizing it, kept going until he noticed he was gnawing the bone. He stood staring at the naked tip of his phalanx and only then did he feel a stab of pain, though flesh was already beginning to cover the bone once more. The bailiff began to cry. Not because it hurt but because of all the times he’d eaten his own flesh and told himself that he too had what it took to make art.

---

Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of three novels, including Signs Preceding the End of the World, which was one of the Guardian’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” and won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Lisa Dillman lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she translates Spanish-language fiction and teaches at Emory University. Her recent translations include National Book Award finalist The Bitch by Pilar Quintana and A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire by Yuri Herrera.

“The Monsters’ Art” is taken from Ten Planets, which will be published by Graywolf Press in March 2023.

Illustration: Vicente Martí Solar

 

Prisoners will speak to the importance of having a routine. It helps to have a schedule and stick to it. The years go by fast the more you do things the same way, the same time, same place. Science even supports this, for what that’s worth, as I’ve since seen a talk somebody gave, what was on YouTube—a TED Talk—wherein the guy talking’s a neuroscientist and says the trick to slowing time down so as you’re not depressed by how you’ll be dead in what’ll seem like five minutes is to change shit up as much as possible day to day, like drive a different way to get home every day, wear your watch on the other wrist than you normally do, shit like that, like jerk off with the left hand if you’re used to doing it with your right hand, whatever. You get it.
As a prisoner though, you want to do the opposite, you want to speed up the process of time, unless maybe you got a life sentence, in which case you may as well try and slow it down, that or just kill yourself, depending on how it’s all going, but this is neither here nor there because everybody where we were had an out date, and everybody could appreciate how important a routine was. It was the advice you invariably got from the old hands.
Get a routine, they’d say.
That was what I was aiming to do.

I had absurd goals as far as how many books I was going to read. I worked from 6:45 to 3:30. I meant to read at night in the cell. Then I was thinking how I ought to make sure to get outside sometimes. I’d go to lunch at 10:30, direct from work, and I didn’t have to go back until the work call at 11:45. There was an open move while the chow hall was open for lunch, what meant I could go to the yard then, get some daylight, walk around, listen to music. I wanted to make a point of listening to music too, to learn about classical music, for lack of a better way of putting it. I had got into the violins and pianos and shit while I was in jail, listening to public radio in Chicago and in Youngstown. I’d found it calming, calming in a way that felt like escaping. You could shut out the jail sounds with some violins or a piano—a piano like Chopin or Liszt. Incarceration is loud, in the pods, the housing units, the cellblocks, no matter what you call them, with the doors slamming and all, with the agonies, with the PA announcements. If you could block it out with something else, something that wasn’t meant to make you insane, it was like escaping—or like half escaping, anyways.
The yard was good for it. There was a field with a track going around—not like a proper track, more like a ring of asphalt, meant for walking on. It wasn’t like you could go for a walk the typical way. The fences and razor wire—and, moreover, the guarantee of repercussions—prevented you from walking very far going one way or another.
There were hills beyond the wire though. You could see those. It was an almost absurd amount of scenery for a prison to offer, surprising that the prison didn’t have it all strip-mined on GP. Most times you’ll be at a place and there will be nothing to see, nothing that’s worth looking at, while at this place you had the hills to look at, and there were trees on the hills. One hill even had little houses on it, and you could look at the houses and daydream about living in one of them, all comfortable and not incarcerated and getting high in the morning. Which was a beautiful thing to daydream about.
I wanted to be doing heroin in one of those houses. If I’d got a wish just then, it’d have probably been to live in one of those houses, in the clear, like paid for, and with a magic bag of dope that never ran out and people leaving me the fuck alone, especially the police and judges and people of that nature, hurbs in general, all of those types for real leaving me the fuck alone so I could bang that magic bag of dope in peace, with a rig that didn’t ever get dull, listen to whatever music I wanted to and maybe have a patio I could stand out on and smoke cigarettes and look at the trees, maybe go for a walk when I felt like it, and walk in a straight line for a while without worrying about any fences or razor wire, go up and down those hills and find places where it was nice to be, places nobody else went to or knew of, where shit was simply peaceful.
I had arrived the fall of that year, when the leaves were changing, as they’re wont to do, and the hills with the trees unspeakably beautiful then, to where your heart feigned death just to see them, on a day when as badly as life had gone, you felt you weren’t done with it yet, lifted up by the hope that the death of what was will lend to you, when you’re one who stays in the business of being fucked, a hope that’s more dear and dearer to you with each year that passes, on account of your having felt it less and less as time’s gone on, the more you’ve understood that hope is worthless, like all other forms of waiting, and how before long it will be too late, be it in twenty or forty years or the day after next, not that you’ll know when it is. But even the hopeless have their own consolation, that being that they’re not alone, that it makes no difference, in as much as the hills themselves will be dead and gone in time.
The best days would be overcast. I could go outside on my own time and listen to violins and pianos on the headphones, look at the trees on the hills, where the leaves were dying, where another year I already regretted made its deathbed, and it was the closest I could get to being alone. I wanted to be alone then. Alone was the closest thing of all to free.

I’d got away with this a few days as of that morning. I’d gone out to the yard with some headphones on and walked the track. I didn’t hear a sound except violins or pianos or some near equivalent. I’d have to keep an eye on the gate or else I’d miss the work call, because no way could I have heard it. That on its own was lovely enough. I didn’t like to have to hear the PA. That was the voice of the enemy. In the early morning it’d have been bad too, they’d have had it cranked up, control would. It was the fucked-up captain we had at the time who’d put control up to it. The way they did the PA in the mornings then, there was no being asleep after six. They’d really let us have it with that, blasting us awake. You knew how Noriega had felt. On the yard, that was out of mind though. On the yard, my thoughts were only my own.
Up until Steve caught up with me:
“McFly!”
Jesus, fuck.
“Earth to McFly!”

The downfall of a routine was it could be hijacked. You had to be on the lookout for that. Like I’d been set on having time I was by myself, on the yard after lunch, what I could count on every day, except it wasn’t to be, because Steve walked the track then.
The violins were fucked.
Ditto the pianos.
“It’s been noticed that you eat with the Mexicans,” he said.
“I do.”
“Why do you eat with the Mexicans?”
“I’m cool with a Honduran guy. He’s my neighbor. We both play soccer.”
“I heard you play soccer.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not very good though.”
“I’ve only been playing a few months. This is the first place I’ve ever played on grass. My neighbor, he’s probably the best player on the compound though. He played professionally.”
“Was that in Honduras?”
“Yeah, in Honduras.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He caught a weed case.”
“How’d he do that if he was playing soccer in Honduras?”
“He wasn’t.”
“He was here.”
“Yeah. He had a thing back in Honduras. He shot a cop.”
“Well, goddamn.”
“He didn’t kill him, I don’t think, just shot him.”
“So he was on the run.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he got in any trouble. The cop had shot him first. Also, he was a cop too.”
“Who? Your neighbor?”
“Yeah, he was a cop.”
“This was after he was a professional soccer player.”
“Presumably.”
“So a cop shot another cop, who was your neighbor, and then he shot the cop back.”
“Yeah.”
“And he told you he was a cop.”
“He doesn’t give a fuck.”
“Apparently not.”
“He thinks it’s funny. He gets out in, like, spring. He got, like, three fucking years for growing some weed, is all.”
“They’re deporting him?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“He’s not worried about getting shot again when he goes back to Honduras.”
“He doesn’t seem to be.”
“And he told you you could eat with the Mexicans.”
“Dude likes to talk about soccer. We were waiting to go to chow, talking about soccer. We get called to chow. We’re talking about soccer. We go through the line. He’s still talking about soccer. He doesn’t want to stop. He says it’s cool, I can go ahead and eat where he eats at. He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s a nice guy who shoots policemen.”
“The policeman shot him first. And he was also a policeman, so it’s kind of different.”
“He’s an attempted cop killer.”
“I think he shot him in the leg. They both got shot in the leg, I think. Maybe it wasn’t like they were trying to kill each other.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, he’s alright.”
“You should eat with the white guys though.”
“I mean, that’s fine. I don’t really do that race shit.”
“And that’s your prerogative. But the problem is you’re in prison, and when you’re in prison and you don’t eat with your own race, people start asking questions. They might think that you’re trying to hide something.”
“I’m not worried about it.”
“Maybe you should be. We’re at a low-security prison. A lot of pedophiles are walking the compound.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a pedophile.”
“So I’ve heard. On the other hand, I don’t know that for a fact.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“It’s not a big deal. I’m only trying to advise you, because you need advice. If you were at the penitentiary, like at Terre Haute, where I’ve done time, and you tried to pull some shit like that, you’d have two choices. You could either check in or you could get fucked up. You’d probably get stabbed.”
“Seems a bit petty.”
“And you could try and make that point, but in most instances the white guys would have stabbed you up already, they’d have at least split your head open, and the guy who told you that you could eat with the Mexicans would have got stabbed up also, by the Mexicans, because that’s just the way it is.”
“Yeah, but we’re not there.”
“No, we’re not.”
He paused then, maybe thinking about the pen at Terre Haute, where they’d sent him the second time he’d been fucked around by the feds. It’d been his first stop on the second bit. They’d wanted to teach him a lesson, he would say of it later.
“So when your friend gets deported,” he said, “what do you intend to do then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re tolerated over there because this friend of yours, I guess, is the best soccer player on the compound . . . for now. Then he goes, and all of a sudden you might not be welcome there anymore. This may come as a surprise to you, but you’re a white guy, and there are Mexicans who don’t like white guys, because there’s a lot of history there, CIA shit, coup d’états, shit we’re not even told about. Texas used to belong to Mexico, so did California, not that they were doing much with it at the time.”
“I know all that, man.”
“It might just be that there are some Mexicans who simply don’t want to eat with a white guy because they’ve come down from a high-security place where prison politics is observed, strictly, and you eating with them makes them feel uncomfortable because it goes against procedure. Do you ever ask yourself how you make them feel? Or are you so preoccupied with trying to not be white that you don’t care?”
“. . .”

I got to know about Steve this way, walking the track with him. He had another year left to do before he was eligible for halfway house, and I’d be walking the track with him at lunch, Mondays through Fridays, until then. It was a routine, and a routine wasn’t a thing you could break, because breaking a routine was considered a bad look, what meant you lacked character.
So I got to know about Steve. He had grown up working in the car business. His dad had sold cars, which accounted for that. What was more a mystery was how Steve came to work at the United States Congress when he was only eighteen years old. He worked in the mailroom of the Capitol building. He had been the top man, the top kid, whatever, a rising star, and he still counted hisself as an authority on national politics for this.
In a parallel universe, Steve may have made a career out of it, may have met the right people. Somebody important may have noticed him. In a parallel universe, Steven J. Raines could have been president of the United States, only in this universe it all got fucked up. Steve branched out into the drugs business, selling weed and cocaine to staffers, to House representatives and senators, to their friends and mistresses.
This was how he told it to me.
One day the people came for him—FBI or Secret Service or one of those, I don’t remember this particular detail.
They said, Are you Steven J. Raines?
And he’d known what it was about.
They didn’t prosecute him, oddly enough, didn’t even handcuff him. They just had a word with him was all, asked him where he would like to go. He told them he wanted to go to Miami Beach. They put him on the next train, told him if he showed his face in Washington again, they were going to kill him.
“They were pretty cool guys,” he would say.
That had been his first brush with the law. He landed on his feet almost. There had been an offer from the Air Force Academy.
He was told he could be a navigator.
He was into it.
He didn’t get past the psych exam though.
Probably a credit to him, in light of everything.
Besides, fuck it.
He was still young. He was in his prime. When he walked into a room, women swooned. It was the 1980s. Cheers was the big show on TV, and Steve looked like Ted Danson, aka Sam Malone, who was the main guy.
Steve looked like Ted Danson if Ted Danson earned his living charging people a quarter to punch him in the face. In other words, Steve was even better looking than Ted Danson. So he married well, to an heiress, of all things.
“She was a great beauty,” he would say of her.
“Just before I met her, two men had died because she was that beautiful. The one guy had killed the other guy and then committed suicide after they took him to jail. It was a scandal that rocked the foundations of that community. She was thought of as the most beautiful woman in the area, and there was a lot of money out there, a lot of beautiful women. It was like they bred them like horses. Her dad and I got along great. I went into the family business. I became a gentleman farmer. I had it made. It didn’t last long. She kept trying to change me, bro. And when that didn’t work out like she had thought it would, she grew mean, always reminding me that none of the shit was really mine. I was a kept man. She wanted to put me in my place, or in what she thought my place was. It was all bad. I started drinking too much, doing a little cocaine when I wasn’t supposed to be doing any cocaine, fucking other women. In the end, she divorced me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. They wouldn’t let me on the ranch, not even to get my clothes. I left there with the shirt on my back. I nearly froze to death in a ditch, like a goddamned dog. It’s a miracle I was able to find my way back to Miami Beach. I really should be dead, but I had seen the writing on the wall, saw the way she was acting, and I knew I was living on borrowed time. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not stupid. By then I had already fucked one of her relatives. So I started putting some money away, a little here, a little there, so that way when the hammer came down, I knew I wasn’t going to starve, at least not right away.”
He received no settlement:
“I didn’t ask for alimony. I didn’t want the money. The only thing that I wanted was my self-respect back.”

But in Steve’s case, I will say, I think it was the car business that pushed him over the edge.
After his marriage fucked up, Steve got back into the car business, and on the surface it may have seemed like the right move, he may have seemed to be doing alright, to have reasons to be optimistic. It got to be the 1990s, a prosperous time in America. Nobody really knew then, and Steve was selling cars, going to work on time, doing a fine job of it.
Steve knew the car business.
He even liked it, he said.
Selling cars was no joke though.
He told me all about it:
“I don’t care if you’re an old widow walking onto the lot with your grandchildren. I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck.”
“Christ, man.”
“You can’t have a conscience in the car business. Not in Miami, you can’t.”
So as you see, perhaps it was the iniquities of the car business, the miserable capitalism, what pushed him over the edge. Or perhaps it was the cocaine, because he was on cocaine. It could have been the sun. We’ll never actually know. When we talk about motives, the best we can do is theories. What’s facts is Steve robbed a couple banks and got caught and he didn’t really try not to.
The way he’d gone about it, he brought an unloaded shotgun, walked into a place, took a little money, and drove away. Then he stopped in a bar to get a drink.
I hope I’m doing it justice. Maybe Paul Harvey told it better. Work with me though.
Picture this guy Steve, a car salesman. He’s wearing slacks probably, and a golf-shirt-looking thing. His car’s probably not a piece of shit because he sells cars. And he’s cruising around, looking like Sam Malone had a baby with a Frankenstein monster.
A handsome fucker.
What does he do?
Well, like I already said, he needed a drink. He’s just held up a bank, so money’s not a problem. He’d like to go to a nice place maybe, the type of place a businessman would go. He is like a businessman, after all.
And he does.
He leaves the shotgun in the car, not that it especially matters, seeing as it’s unloaded. It’s just that Steve doesn’t want to be rude. This is a nice bar, and you can’t just do whatever you want in nice places. That isn’t how it works. Steve knows this.
He does bring the money in with him.
Some of it, at least.
The bar is empty, or nearly empty.
Steve sits at a table. It’s the kind of bar where somebody will come to the table and take your order. It’s probably a restaurant. That’s unimportant. Steve doesn’t want food, because he’s coked up. It’s daylight out, but he’s on some rock-and-roll shit. He’s feeling good. He’s got confidence, a certain confidence: that of a man in control of his own destiny, in Miami Beach.
He’s sitting in the bar area of the establishment, so it’s the bartender who sees him. The bartender will remember him because Steve is very high on cocaine and he probably still looks a lot like Sam Malone at this point in his life and Cheers is still fresh on everybody’s mind—no doubt on a bartender’s mind. Basically the zeitgeist has walked into the bar, and he’s got money to burn. Like all habitual cocaine users, Steve likes to see a little money get blown now and then. Yet you would think that since it’s Miami and since it’s the ’90s, a coke user wouldn’t raise a bartender’s suspicion, not even at a nice place like this. Post–Miami Vice, people are expecting this sort of thing, one imagines.
The same goes for people fucking off a lot of money.
Steve gets his drink. He gets another. Let’s say he got some food too. He doesn’t eat it, just orders it and looks at it and maybe has a few bites. The TV’s on. It’s showing The Price Is Right. Bob Barker’s up there, going beauties this beauties that. Salt-of-the-earth type people are abasing themselves, one after another, all for dryers and Jet Skis, all to be seen for once, to be near to Bob Barker. It doesn’t get more famous than Bob Barker right now. The man is an American institution. The man is bigger than Pat Sajak and Vanna White put together. He’s bigger than the pope. He’s untouchable, and everybody knows what he does. He gets away with it, running wide-open. Nobody can touch him.
Steve doesn’t even fuck with TV. He doesn’t notice. Steve was in Congress. Steve was a gentleman farmer. Steve was married to a beautiful woman. Steve’s good at selling cars. Steve just robbed a bank. Steve’s getting bored.
This is when the shit gets interesting.

Steve pays his tab or whatever, leaves a big tip, a hundred-dollar tip. One bill, a hundred. Leaves it on the table like it isn’t a big deal. It’s the 1990s and a hundred dollars is not a fucking joke. He leaves it on the table though, and he’s on his way.
Where does he go?
He robs another bank.
He didn’t, you say.
But you bet your ass he did.
Thing is, he didn’t just do it right away. He had to drive there. He had to decide that he really wanted to do it. In the meantime, the Showcase Showdown is over, The Price Is Right goes off.
What comes on?
The local news.
What’s the local news talking about?
A bank robbery.
Indeed.
Let’s go.
What happens next?
Steve goes back to the same bar. Does he have a funny feeling? Is the staff acting differently toward him? Maybe. The bartender definitely saw him on the news. The bartender already recognized him. I don’t know if Steve wore a mask, but I doubt it. Steve isn’t the type to try and get away with some shit. That’s how he is.
The bartender’s already phoned the police. The bartender phoned the police before Steve came back. The bartender told the police that the guy was just in the bar, spending money like there were no tomorrow, left a big tip, a hundred-dollar bill on a hundred-dollar tab, ordered shrimp cocktail, the catch of the day, barely touched it, probably on drugs.
So what does the bartender do now?
Does the bartender warn Steve off? Does the bartender say, Steve, you probably ought to scram, the law’s about to come in here, looking for you?
Fuck no. The bartender gets on the phone again.
Just because somebody’s a bartender doesn’t mean shit’s cool. Tons of bartenders don’t even drink alcohol. And that isn’t to say one has to drink alcohol to be cool. All it means is, if you think a bartender who doesn’t drink won’t sell you out in a second, then you’re a babe in these woods.
Bartender calls 9-1-1 this time.
“He’s here,” says the bartender.
“Who’s here?”
“The bank robber from TV.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a hundred percent sure it’s him.”
Thanks for the tip.

One day there’s sympathy for a criminal, and the next day they want you dead. It all depends what movies just came out and whether or not there’s a war on. That’s just how it goes when you’ve got so many who haven’t been anywhere. It’s those ones and the ones who forget where they’ve been. They’re the ones you have to watch out for. You can’t trust anybody who hasn’t been fucked or doesn’t remember it. People are dangerous when they don’t know what kind of time they’re on. It doesn’t make them bad people. Show me a hypocrite and I’ll show you somebody who’s trying. They can bay for that blood all day. What’s that to the likes of us, who’ve already been down? Why explain? There’s no saying what makes us go wrong. We just do. Then it’s wreckage. Explaining is easy because it’s meaningless. We all lie, and we lie to ourselves. If we didn’t lie, we couldn’t live like this. We have to live, though. Sooner or later, everybody’s an asshole.

---

Nico Walker is the formerly incarcerated author of the novel Cherry (Knopf, 2018). Walker was released from custody in April 2020 and lives in the Northern District of Mississippi, where he is fulfilling a five-year period of federal supervision. His work has been featured in Esquire, Interview Magazine, New York Magazine, GQ, and Office Magazine. He is married to the poet Rachel Rabbit White.

Illustration: Michael Carney

 

I look up from a book toward the fountain of a cherub spitting water I wouldn’t dare drink. Two women on a bench in the shade of a maple. One is short, both are brunette. The tall one calls her friend bro with excitement in her voice like I haven’t heard in so long. They remind me of Jack and myself when we were young. We shared an apartment. Life was a bonfire.
Unlike now, back then there were no lines on my face as we signed our names to the lease. We passed our days in parks smoking cigarettes laughing like she cackles now. We roared with delight when we thought of what was on its way. These women are us back then. Brash. I see him in her cocky smile.
I remember, we were convinced that life wouldn’t grind us down to dirt and dust like it did the others, childhood friends lost to burdens neither of us wanted. We were certain that age and death and mortgage payments were trifles for others. Those born with no sense of humor and a taste for bowing down. They never got a chance to start.
Hubris made us think we were better.
We were the same.
Before we met I often wondered, Why does it matter if you step out of line, if you move too quick for others to keep up? Jack was the proof that I wasn’t alone. He and I were antisocial with a smile. Winking while holding fast to our mantras of don’t go to college or get a real job, do different than your parents did before you, not better.
Everyone needs a best friend.
The tall one wildly waves her arms in the air as she speaks, and all of a sudden I see Jack’s quirks. She gives advice in a cloud of smoke with the air of never being burned, of not losing the one person in the world that makes you feel it’s finally in color. Before Jack, my life had the air of an attic.
Above me squirrels run along branches as I wonder, Will these two lose touch? Jack and I grew apart like all things do. He gave himself up to something bigger. Not a god but a drug. Or any and all he could get into his veins. The quicker the better was the pace that he moved at.
If he was looking to forget or remember, I can’t recall.
But for me, sitting here, I’d like to bring them all back. The days and weeks and months that we passed carving lines in our faces with laughter. It’s what you look back on and think with a smile those were the best years of my life. And some nights, as they rolled by in front of me, I sensed they were. That it couldn’t last forever. In my gut I knew we were fated to lose.
Oh well, fuck him babe, you’re better than that, you’re beautiful dude one says to the other. I peek from the book I pretend to read. She waves her cigarette in the air as she speaks, pausing to take long drags, exhaling sharply. Her face is a mess of emotion. Jack had all the same passion.
I wish I hadn’t lost him so soon.
But still, I’m happy he didn’t make it, I’m ecstatic he doesn’t have to know what it’s like to lose the faith as your hair turns gray, your skin starts to sag, and the brain between your ears turns to mush. He’ll never have to know how loud the sound of death can get.
He took a shortcut.
He cheated the reaper tattooed on his chest.
No surprise.
Because Jack was never going to succumb. All of his days were according to his gospel, so why wouldn’t death have to kneel? And when he drank that concoction he was laughing at all of us. He raised his middle finger in the air one final time, at life as much as it was at me.
He chose to lie down in a battle none of us win.
And by punching his own clock he showed me a weakness I didn’t know he had. Before the drugs he was the first to say face your demons. And anyone that didn’t he looked down on. I owe him for saving me. I repaid him by pretending I was blind.
In the end he couldn’t swallow his own medicine.
In the end he went out like a hypocrite.
I’m sorry old pal, it’s the truth.
While admitting I’m mad he left me alone, the two women get up from the bench. Long strides on tanned legs carry them off to their futures. I’ll never get over how the world feels empty now that Jack’s gone. When you ended your life you took all of my hope. I lie on the bench staring up at the sky, using the book for a pillow. The clouds part. I’m able to see the sun.

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Steve Anwyll is the author of Welfare (Tyrant Books). He lives in Montreal.

Illustration: Steve Anwyll

 

I tied your heart on a string. Even though you’re fragile and old, the myocardium density of the muscle sheath held firm at the center of mass. I hung it on a hawthorn branch above a three-dimensional cube I sketched in black chalk. No one noticed your heart as they passed by on the sidewalk; no one stopped to see the sketch of the cube smeared beneath their shoes. No one looked up or down. They took the pumping for their own pulse, your drops of blood for rain.
I checked on you three times a day, moving between the tree and the shed where I kept you, fraught with fear of your instantaneous dislocation. I’d come to rely on you. You had invaded my thoughts by proximity and you kept leaching time from my everyday life. You spoke to me in that code you use, the one I’m not sure I will ever get right no matter how hard I listen for a connection. I tried. I am still trying. I will try, again and again.
I’m tired, but I promise I’ll try; I’ll remain vigilant in pushing back against time. I won’t ever sleep again. You mean more to me than temporal rest.
When I check on you, I try to follow the alien thought patterns, the trials and turns of your moods. I know this doesn’t make sense. There’s something I see in you. A spark of understanding, a twist I can give by accommodating the disorienting rapidity of your action. I’m trying to explain how confusing all of this is for me, moving from past into present and back again. I’m trying to meet you at zero.
In my last check, if you’ll pardon the adherence to chronology, your mass seemed to increase or decrease in my absence. For a long period of time you stopped responding. In a frantic attempt to bring you back to what I understood as life, I recounted to you step by step how we met and came to inhabit this dark starless moment that feels so endless together on this night in the shed. Reciting unfamiliar facts, I faltered. I wasn’t sure if I’d captured you or if you held me hostage in your service. I made up what I didn’t know in a frenzied bid to keep going. I’m sure I sounded desperate and unbalanced, but I didn’t care anymore. By then I’d lost all shame.
I hoped—I hope we are in love. I still don’t know if that’s the best way to describe the unstable equilibrium point of our bonding and if we are bonded or not. Your code is too oblique for me. I can know only my own part in this, my choices, and my systematic maintenance prolonging your repeated reversals of time. To avoid your inevitable decline, I check on you three times a day, five times a day, seven times a day, day and night, back and forth between you and the plumb line that suspends your beating heart.
This conflict between two spaces that exclude me one after the other interchangeably (shed and tree, front and back, in and out) proves your extra-dimensional freedom compared to my simplicity, your sufficiency compared to my need. I’m running on the fragile hope of a homotopic return, tripping on the lack between going backward and forward in time. When you dropped into my world and onto the wrong map, I sensed by the strange tingling sensation under my scalp that I had to cut out your heart to keep you alive.
I didn’t have to lose my mind. I didn’t have to act upon you with care and deliberation. I could have let you fade and die.
I cut out your heart because it was too beautiful to bear alone. I saw how it hurt you to hold such beauty in your semitransparent gelatinous chest. I cut out your heart because I was greedy and I wanted to keep your beauty alive in my life, my ugly, loveless life. Like some poet discriminating against science, I refused to accept that all beauty must die, and I built a puzzle to restrain you from topological mutation. I held you. I hold you. I didn’t let you phase back to your invariant homeland, transforming within yourself and vanishing from perception in the same sudden peripheral flash as you appeared.
I tied a string through your heart and hung it on a hawthorn branch to hold you here and hide beauty in plain sight. The string doesn’t wind across the yard and over the roof and through the alley to the shelf in the shed where you watch me and spin in your jar. The string is too short. I don’t have any more to give. Even now, as you rotate slowly behind the glass, I’m not sure I understand the signals or make the connections. Your undulations and jerky movements could mean anything or nothing. They might not even be for me.
The heart is mine, though. It must be. It thrives in the sun where I strung it up, bleeding, pulsing, and resisting the flow of entropy that beseeches it to disintegrate into rags.
The string plumbs from the branch, slick and wet with your blood, a liquid semi-opaque, the color of old amber. It holds. When we started, I cut off a piece of the string to place inside your jar because it wasn’t long enough to reach through visible space. I’m still relying on the unseen in our future. When we started, I measured the time it took to pull your heart out through your throat after cutting it loose in your chest, the distance between each one of your many vibrating limbs, and the reflection of light on a knife edge held perpendicular to the center of your heart. I counted the myocardium spirals and multiplied by zero. With the final calculation, I made my cut.
You’ll understand the math is a paradox and the process is impossible. The best way for us to connect in real time is to pretend none of this ever happened. The center of your heart is a conjecture.
Are you listening? Awake. Let me tell you how we met, how we meet, how we will meet and depart and will meet again. Listen to the form we take in the future.
I placed the piece of string in your jar. Your many limbs nursed like leeches’ mouths at the amber liquid that effused from the segment of string. It responded as if sentient by threading the limbs together to form an asymmetrical flower shape composed of shining tubes. The form was somewhat like a sea anemone, an organism functionally immortal. In the skewed center where your throat still moaned open from my invasive fist, a color like flame arose: gold, scarlet, white, and at the base of the erect stamen a transitory cobalt blue like a cock ring carved from lapis lazuli, glowing brightly.
I tied your heart on a string and hung it from the hawthorn branch like a pendulum. It beat the air methodically, its size and swing equal to my small fist. My fist fit around it like a glove when I tore it out and pulled it through your throat. Like a small insistent fist it still beats and it doesn’t know when to stop.
This repetitive violence keeps time. Time keeps your heart. Your heart holds me here. Your amber blood runs up the string and seeps into the segment despite severance. From fluid below the threshold of visible space, continuity grows roots through hidden speculative complexes infusing you like prayer. I hold you there.
I rush to check on you again, again. Your jar floods with amber. You undulate slowly. You send out electrical signals and illuminate the liquid, which rattles the glass and shakes the shelf. The shed remains steady, however, anchored by the certainty of its unimaginative suburban construction, and I’m excited by your signals, excited you’re responding again. I’m trying to shake you out of your stasis while keeping you safe. I’m trying to hold you in constant stasis by running back and forth faster than the pendulum race can alter your fluctuating mass. I have faith in your ability to maintain these two opposing states at once.
I won’t lose control. No matter how starless this night, I blink only to refresh the contradictory stillness of your speed.
You spin ten times slower than the spiraling myocardial layers of the hanging heart muscles that twist and untwist with each developmental pulse of the pounding fist, swinging in the steady rhythm of the pendulum as I run and check again and again. Back and forth, speeding and slowing, defying the demands of my distressed body, I reek of moss and sweat, having gone too long without a shower or bath. My lips crack. I’ve forgotten to drink or eat. The way time exists in my body, I’m not made for this vigil, but I hold it. I hold you. I return.
You stare at me like a slug, eyeless. You press your overly lipped mouthparts on the jar. You pretend you have teeth or extra holes where the roots of teeth have dug in deep and bored down into the gums to leave empty channels of holes. Holes amass like inverted limbs, vibrating through the pocked surface of your more loose and spongy parts. I used to worry that you hated me, but now when I look in your cratered mouth, I have no more doubt.
Please tell me you love me. I’m running as fast as I can. I’m trying to meet you at zero. I’m trying to exert a restorative pressure equal to the violence of your displacement and hold you close. I need to hold you without risking your extinction. I need to feel you on my skin, your pockmarked holes like many lipless mouths pulling on the elastic surface of what is seen. I am begging you for this connection in our shared tangible space.
I need to enter your code like the liquid signal that electrifies your amber blood. I hung your heart on a hawthorn branch above a cube sketched in black chalk. The cube fades as excess amber falls, a simple trap eroded, not the best but the best my finite mind could make.
I need to stop us moving forward or backward in time. I swing back and forth, a pendulum trying to keep the center of your heart stable and sharpened to a single point. You exist in too many places at once. Pinning you down to a stable point excludes time. Whetting the knife tip on this map is how we conquer death. I can see it like a graph but I can’t explain how this works, how confusing all of this is for me, this moving from past into present and back again so rapidly.
I swing between your points to bring them to zero. I am begging for a sign.
I can’t explain the language of your lights blinking in and out like floaters caught in the corner of my eye, invading my thoughts by proximity while stubbornly maintaining a steady distance. Blinking rhythmically like the pendulum swing, like the pummeling fist that closes around a swelling, twisting, screaming heart until its electrical impulses flatline in a rush of panicked discharge and its very eyes and lights go black. What were we thinking when we invented the stars?
The glass rattles on the shelf. I realize I’ve slept.
The shed is dark but for a sickly glow seeping from your jar.
Your amber blood is suffused with a greenish tinge. An odor of sea rot pervades. The lid is off the jar. What rotates slowly inside appears at first glance like a pair of mating starfish burnt in the midst of their reproductive act and fused in charred ecstasy. As the object turns, the dense liquid reveals a shrunken head with wild black locks. A human face ravaged with sleeplessness and speed, with unwashed hair, cracked lips, and hunger-fraught eyes. Not burned by fire but seared and darkened with time. Not lifeless, though, for its mouth moves in sluggish ardor as if it would speak.
Bubbles percolate from the splintered lips. I try to read the light patterns in the liquid signal, but the code is in some unfamiliar past tense—inadequate to grasp my multiple locations of being forward in time. Simplistic in its funny rhythmic patter, the head drifts in a tight circle, propelled by its bubbling rant as it slides nowhere inside a collapsing dimension.
I recognize the little monkey face, the monkey that swings back and forth between my multiple states. Incremental changes accelerate with each forward pendulum motion reversed. Coming through the cube on the sidewalk sketched in black chalk, employing the functional framework in place, I root in a paradoxical shift, breaking the rotation at our phase point, breaking the axis of a terminal planet.
I hop on the monkey’s head. I give it what it wants.
The sensation starts in the scalp, below the skin, close to the skull where a thin layer of fatty tissue quivers. Hair follicles sharpen to pinpoints. Tingling starts. An esoteric sense of omen approaches spasm. Blood vessels grown near the intersection of unrelated planes divide our shared millisecond at cancerous angles. They branch in immediate contact, assimilating time to render it inept. Scalp, skull, and head speed off like past, present, and future suctioned into the ululation of the vacuum yawning between my sewn appendages. I am not a flower. Popping loose, un-mouthing prehensile tubes leak unlimited anemone holes as the swallower of light regurgitates light. The smell of exchange is simultaneous: a fire’s gasp.
The indigestible lump of the monkey’s head is excreted into amber. I’m pleased by the cylindrical match of its anatomical errata, with the way my asymmetrical form finds circular footing atop its meaty neck, and with the robust beat of the replacement heart. An old heart shreds in a tree outside as twisted rags disintegrate. Monkeys hang such rags as prayer. I stand, elevating my new vehicle, curious to experiment with the hybrid apparatus fixed in finite space.
Atonal humming vibrates from the open jar. Darkness reigns, my gift. This planet’s over-exuberant sun doused, the air is as dark as the bottom of its ocean, and the glow of old blood from the jar emits a jaundiced radiance within the shed. Green bubbles seep through ruptured lips like slow rot. Cracked lips pucker, stretch, and mewl. The little monkey head suspended in amber chatters as if it would speak to me:
“I tied your heart on a string. I hung it on a hawthorn branch to hold you here. I hid your beauty in plain sight. I cut out your heart because it was too beautiful to bear. It hurt you to hold such beauty in your chest. I was greedy. I wanted this beauty to stay alive in my life, my ugly, loveless life. I don’t know how to explain. I need to hold you and feel you against my skin. I’m trying to explain how confusing all of this is for me, moving from past into present and back again. I’m trying to meet you at zero. Please tell me that you love me. Tell me this is love.”

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Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive. They’ve had over fifty short stories published in books and journals such as Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Vastarien, and The Queer Book of Saints.

 

EDITORS’ NOTE: We are excited to announce that “War of the Worlds” is the first SwR Soundstory. Access the audio experience through a streaming service or read the story as text below.

I just thought I’d make some money. That’s all I was aiming for. The invitation to the station manager’s office, his proposal—I thought they would put some cash in my empty bank account, so I accepted the idea right away. Who could fault me for that? Given what happened afterward, I guess anybody could. Anybody could ask what the hell I’d been thinking. I was an adult, after all. Not a senile septuagenarian, not a wayward child. I was a man who said yes without thinking it through. When you’re not used to being given anything, getting handed something comes as a surprise. I accepted the proposal at face value, which was purely monetary as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t exactly ethical, but ethics were not on my mind. Being offered three times my monthly salary to take a stab at announcing a boxing match, that’s what I was thinking about. Okay, I was going to narrate the match three days before it happened, but who lives in an ideal world? I was thirty-seven years old, with only a bed and two changes of clothes to my name. It wasn’t like Cordobés asked me to kill somebody. At worst, he proposed that I stretch a possible truth. When I stepped into his office, no black hole swallowed me up. I was in a room well lit by the mid-morning sun, where no conspiracy was being hatched. After two days of torrential rain, the sky had cleared and the city shone like a freshly polished gold ring (spit polished on a coat sleeve, maybe, but glowing nonetheless). That’s how I remember the day—the city wasn’t just a promise, it was an opportunity served up on a platter. I grabbed at the chance before it could disappear. The “afterward” is a different story.
When Cordobés summoned me to his office, I was putting the finishing touches on that week’s serial. I stopped in the middle of a sentence because his secretary said the station manager wasn’t a man to be kept waiting. Cordobés offered me a seat and a cigar, but he launched right into what he wanted before I could take either one. He told me he’d been thinking about some changes in the station’s programming. He said I was the right guy to make them happen.
“We want to grow,” he added. That was all.
While I was trying to get rid of my cigarette, he lit up his cigar. The only ashtray was on the other side of his enormous desktop, and I couldn’t toss my butt on his office floor, so I put the thing out against the bottom of my shoe and stuck it in my pocket. I found myself staring at the tips of my fingers, the dark stains on my fingernails that, it occurred to me, must match the discolored enamel of my teeth. All in all, this was testimony to how uncomfortable I felt. I didn’t know where this conversation was headed. It was the first time Cordobés had called me to his office. I had no idea he knew I existed. I was just a scriptwriter, without my own office, just some space the news staff shared with me. But that morning, wonders never ceased. The manager said those few words, lit his cigar, and pulled a bottle of cognac out of his desk.
“In this new era, I want you to do the sports reporting,” he said while extending a glass in my direction.
He didn’t give me time to answer before he assigned me my first task.
“I want you to announce next Sunday’s fight between Bull Guzmán and Gold Gloves Jurado. And I want you to have it written and ready by Thursday.”
My throat tightened, so I had to spit out the cognac to keep from choking. Watching that imported booze hit the floor made me shudder, but I pulled myself together because Cordobés took a long puff on his cigar and then walked over to me as if nothing had happened.
“Of course,” he said, “thing number one is that we’ll triple your salary.” He pushed a chair in my direction, which was followed by an uncomfortable silence, and then he seemed to take a careful look at me. That’s when I realized that so far I hadn’t said a word. He added, “We’re the new official broadcasters of the federation.”
When he left it at that, I understood how our relationship was going to work. It wasn’t going to be his job to explain things, but mine to figure them out. And I figured out, from the moment he offered me the cigar, that there would be no turning back. If I left his office without accepting his proposition, I’d lose my job. If, on the other hand, I said yes, then I’d be pronouncing sentence on myself. It seemed like a simple choice, though in hindsight it wasn’t. He also told me I was to report only to him. I’d be dropped from the regular payroll of the station, and I wouldn’t have to come to the studio on any set schedule. All I had to do was wait for his calls. There was no point in confirming my acceptance or offering any thanks. He knew I’d do it. When I stood up, he saw me to the door, put a hand on my shoulder, and, as he turned the knob, he told me he was sure I’d handle the assignment very well and the program would be a success. Then, as if adding a comment of trifling importance, he said that, given Gold Gloves’s evident ability, surely he’d win the match in the final round.

In the skies over Plaza Belmonte, updrafts of wind are twisting the white clouds into arabesques, but in the distance, by the towering summit of the Pichincha volcano, more ominous, dark, and heavy clouds are headed our way. Ladies and gentlemen, the approach of the storm is as rapid as the footwork of Saturnino Guzmán, known to all as the Bull. Will his speed be enough to defeat Soldier Jurado, Gold Gloves to his fans? Will the fight come to an end before the last scheduled round? Only time will tell. Time and the skies . . . But wait, Jurado has just connected with a jab to the Bull’s jaw. The Bull is tottering, no, now he’s got hold of the ropes. The referee gets between the fighters and holds Jurado back. Gold Gloves wants to finish off the fight and his opponent before the skies open up. We thank him for that idea, but the Bull seems to have a different one. And he must have an in with St. Peter because right now, at four in the afternoon, the rain is threatening but something is holding it back. Just like us, the rain is waiting for something to happen in the ring. Maybe the Bull thinks today is his day, and maybe he’s not wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t explain what’s going on. Gold Gloves is all brute force, no technique, while Guzmán has technique in spades—but there he is, back against the ropes. He can’t get away. He’d better fight his way out of that corner, or he’s doomed. He’s got to rethink his tactics, and right away, here in front of the hundreds of spectators jamming Plaza Belmonte. He’s got to surprise his opponent with speed and the movement of his hips. Otherwise, his end is in sight. Gold Gloves Jurado’s frenzied attack is battering the Bull without mercy. Guzmán tries to get away, to protect himself in the north corner of the ring, but Gold Gloves has landed a series of hooks, followed by a half dozen jabs. But wait, the Bull isn’t giving up! He’s hitting back with a hook of his own and now two more. The bell! Belllll! The two fighters collapse in their respective corners while their trainers fan them with towels, trying to revive them or—at least blow some confidence their way. If I could offer a few words of encouragement, I’d tell them the world is made of nothing but energy and movement. That’s the ticket—energy, movement, and control. To go forward, what you need is control. That’s the only way to advance with the power of a Ford automobile, now for sale here in Ecuador. Never lose control, boys, and victory will be yours. Today and tomorrow. That’s what I’d say, my friends, but enough advice because now the break is over. The bell rings and we’re on to the fifth round. Gold Gloves and the Bull stand up, approach the center of the ring, grapple, and pound each other’s kidneys. Listen to me, gentlemen, neither of the two is offering any quarter, it’s incredible what’s going on. They break loose, and here comes a brutal assault. The only way to recover from such a shock is to take Dr. Ulrici’s Cerebrine Cordial solution. Gold Gloves is launching jab after jab to the Bull’s belly. The Bull tries to protect himself with feeble hooks that can’t find their target. Jurado’s hitting back with hard lefts, and now an uppercut, and now a straight knockout punch, but the Bull mounts a spectacular response, he’s got Gold Gloves back against the ropes. This fight is over, I tell you it’s nearing the end. It’s the Bull, the Bull, the Bull, coming for Gold Gloves, who can’t recover, but wait, there’s the bell. Bellll! It’s the bell closing the round, gentlemen, with the thunder right alongside. Now we’re just seconds away from the eighth round. Either this round will be the last, or the downpour will swamp us. It’s now or never. This fight is going to end with a knockout, take it from me. That’s the only way.
This is a day full of surprises, the saint’s day of San Modesto, but there’s no modesty on display. Each of the pugilists pitted against each other in this match is showing off his best work. Moments ago I would have said the Bull was about to finish off Gold Gloves, but now I’m ready for anything. We’re in the tenth round, and Soldier Jurado just landed an uppercut with his left hand, right to the chin of the Bull, who’s falling like someone going backward in time, back before the day of his birth, and there he is, dropped flat on the canvas. He lifts his legs but they drop back like branches torn from a tree. Can he recover? Hold on, he’s summoning all his spectacular strength, I cannot believe it, ladies and gentlemen, but there he is—what willpower, what aplomb, what control. It’s a struggle, but he’s getting up while the referee counts—one, two, three, four—he lifts his glove to his temple and holds it right there—five, six—he gets to his knees, kneeling there—seven, eight, nine—gentlemen, he’s on his feet. He did it! This fight is going to go on and on like the Chimbacalle railroad, because the indomitable Bull refuses to throw in the towel. Bell!! Time for everyone to take a breath, and time to remind you that, in order to offer better service to its valued customers, the Pichincha Pharmacy is now open till 10 p.m. every night of the week, Sundays and holidays included.
Ladies and gentlemen, the first drops of the storm are now upon us. Nothing, though, to faze the true boxing fan, nothing to drive us away from this contest, which is shaping up as the best fight of the year. Maybe life is a battle, but this match is a true feast for the eyes. We’re about to open the eleventh round, and if the fight is going to be decided on points, it’s beyond me to say who will win. It’s been a constant back-and-forth, a give-and-take of willpower. No one who walks out onto Calle Antepara today will be leaving disappointed. Everybody here is hanging on what the next few minutes will bring. Guzmán has allowed Gold Gloves to take the initiative. Jurado challenges his rival with a solid punch and then follows with a downward hook while the Bull counters with an effective jab, but Gold Gloves backs away and then launches another hook. I’d say fatigue is starting to take its toll on Soldier Jurado. Blood is flowing from his nose and he’s losing speed. It looks bad for him, but he’s holding on to his composure to stave off the looming catastrophe. Who knows what hiding place the Bull is pulling strength out of now. He advances with a pair of skillful steps and lands a right that has his opponent staggering. Now he follows up with a hook and a jab directly to the jaw. All Gold Gloves can answer with is a weak cross, it looks like he can hardly guide his glove to its target. Bell, gentlemen, there’s the bell!!
And now the sky is really letting loose, and along with it comes a whirlwind from Gold Gloves, now it’s his turn to summon all the strength he’s got left, charging out of his corner like a locomotive, headed straight for the Bull. He raises a fist, and with his last burst of energy, which is more than a little, slams it into his opponent’s face, giving the Bull no time to duck. The Bull falls backward. But now the rain is falling so hard it’s impossible to see what’s going on. There’s a virtual pillar of water obscuring the ring. Wait, someone is moving, it must be Saturnino Guzmán, still drawing on whatever he’s got left, trying to confront not just his opponent but the elements too. We’re moving right up to the ropes, in the hope that we can see more clearly, and . . . Gentlemen, I have never seen anything like it before! The Bull is completely without a nose! His face is a mass of bruises surrounding two eyes and a mouth. Where his nostrils used to be, his septum and cartilage, where he used to have a nose, all that can be seen is an enormous, endless hole!

When Cordobés okayed the cloudburst and the annihilation of Gúzman’s nose, I knew I could do whatever I wanted. According to what he told me, our new stations were out in Bolívar, Los Ríos, and Tulcán, but even so, anyone who wanted to check could have discovered whether what I announced happened or not. Anyone could have investigated whether sheets of rain inundated the capital that Sunday, or they could have looked into the health of Bull Guzmán, but those possibilities didn’t even make Cordobés blink. I figured, at this point, that he had decided no one was going to doubt what was announced on the radio, although it did also occur to me to wonder whether there could be something else in play. Maybe it was just a test, and they never actually broadcast my version of the fight. Be that as it may, I took him at his word. Or, better put, given that he’d paid me an advance, I believed in the power of the money at his disposal. With cash in my pocket, who was I to entertain suspicions? I mean, in a perfect world there would have been perfect alternatives, but in this world, there was what Cordobés was offering me on the one hand, and nothing on the other. Put that way, all I did was choose something over nothing.
After turning in that first script, I stopped working on the regular broadcasts. I don’t know who took my place writing serials. I didn’t have any friends at the station, or well I did have one, but he worked on the news desk, not with the scriptwriters. Yet Elias—that was the name of my only friend in the city, who had achieved that status because we lived in the same rooming house when we first came to town—wasn’t someone to really miss once I stopped having a job with regular hours. I’d never known when I would see him anyway, and when he did show up, he’d disappear as soon as I glanced away. Since I’d come to Quito, eleven years before, I had promised myself that I’d concentrate my energies because that was my path to triumph. Triumph could be measured in a cash equivalent, which in turn equaled dreams come true. That twisted equation I’d accepted as my goal didn’t leave much room for friendship. I had decided years before that I didn’t have time to socialize with anyone, just time to make something of my life. And if it had taken me a decade to get to the point of sitting at a desk in a tiny office shared with seven other people, that was simply proof that I had no time to waste. Now, Cordobés’s invitation reminded me that the world owed me something. Accepting his offer meant it was time to collect on that debt. The only obstacle that I saw in the way of my complete success, my ascent to heights I’d never before thought possible, was that Cordobés continued to repeat that my promotion, my new salary, our arrangement as he called it, was just that—ours. I couldn’t talk about it, and in that sense it was as if it hadn’t happened. I had learned something over those years, which was that mere existence is not enough. To succeed, to really succeed, you have to get up on stage, with the flashbulbs popping and thousands of fingers pointing your way while someone announces your name. I’d done that for a nineteenth-century patent medicine, and thanks to me Dr. Ulrici’s Cerebrine Cordials had become a fad and quadrupled their sales. I knew the value of words, their value and their power. I knew how to use them to manipulate, and that made me fear them. Or respect them. Or something halfway between. So I thought—wrongly perhaps, but what matters is that I believed it—that having a way with words would give me control over my life and, therefore, power. I was, I recognize now, an idiot.

After a month without seeing hide nor hair of Elias, I ran into him on the street. He was wearing a jacket two sizes too big, and he seemed to me to have lost some thatch on his head. Seeing him always threw me because he felt like my double. The same wide forehead, the same pointed jaw, like an inverted triangle. He was taking fierce drags on a cigarette held between thumb and index finger. He was more nervous than usual, hands shaking, unable to stop moving his right foot while he talked. We went for coffee, but after the first cup we moved on to something stronger. When he started to order aguardiente I interrupted, said I was buying, and ordered two whiskeys. Whatever he’d been wanting to tell me since we bumped into each other, he decided to hold on to it until he could find out what was up with me and, especially, how I’d gotten the money to buy those whiskeys.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” His foot kept on fidgeting under the table.
I didn’t beat around the bush. I told him about Cordobés and the new radio stations, the boxing match, and the disappearance of Bull Guzmán’s nose. Elias listened silently, drained his glass, and then asked for two more, this time aguardiente, for which he paid.
“If there were new stations, I’d know about them. I have a friend who works on the transmission towers.” He gave me a searching look, and only after draining the second glass did he resume the conversation. “If I were you, I’d keep my eyes peeled. Why did Cordobés choose you for his accomplice?”

I didn’t pay too much attention to what Elias said, because Cordobés’s money had allowed me to erase any remnant of guilt I might have had while writing my script. Still, I had plenty of time to think, so much so that I spent most of the day looking out the window and daydreaming. That morning I was trying to figure out why I kept up a friendship with Elias, because, when all was said and done, he always made me feel bad. He was such a straight arrow, while I preferred zigzag paths. Maybe that was it, maybe having him as a reference point was a way of keeping a life preserver at hand, or maybe it was just that I liked him and enjoyed our drinking together. Anyway, it was no big deal. The sun shone in, and I went to the kitchen for a beer. When I came back I saw the cat, and immediately thought of Alcaraz. If I’d been in the midst of something useful—I was sure of this—that never would have happened, but I didn’t have anything to do, so I free-associated any idiocy that went through my head. The cat fell to the street from a zinc roof. It was not a graceful landing, so what fell with feet splayed out on the cobblestones didn’t even seem like a cat. I could almost hear the plop of its landing, and then I watched it run away down the street. It was the sound, more than the cat itself, that brought Alcaraz to mind. I hadn’t thought about him in years, and it was strange how his image welled up so easily and lodged in my head, making me wish he were with me in the house right then. He was the only one who might have been able to understand what I was feeling. If I’d listened to him way back when, maybe by this time I wouldn’t have been a ghostwriter hanging on the whims of his boss, but the owner of my own station. Yet when I met Alcaraz, all I could see was a dirt-poor charlatan. Because when he showed up, four years earlier, in search of the programming director, I let myself be swayed by his patched and threadbare pants, the torn cuffs of his suit, and the scraps of newspaper covering the holes in the bottoms of his shoes. Not to mention the heels, which lifted him an inch and a half above the ground, elevating him to a status this side of dwarf. He waited all morning and part of the afternoon for Cordobés to see him, even though the secretary told him several times, in the course of the day, that it wasn’t going to happen. At 5 p.m., more worn out by the tiresome wait and hunger than disappointed that he hadn’t been seen, he stood up and left. I don’t know why I went after him, but I was done for the day, and the man’s obstinacy had awoken my curiosity, as had the crazed expression in his eyes. He walked hunched over like an anarchist hiding a bomb under his coat. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing in Quito, because he was no Ecuadorean, though I couldn’t quite figure out where his accent was from. As dusk fell, he reached the Central Market. I followed him through the passageways, watching him steal two oranges and four bananas and slip them into his pockets. When he was about to stick his hand into a garbage can, I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t jump. It was me, not him, who found myself trying to explain what had brought me to this dim passageway. I told him I’d recognized him from the radio station and I’d be honored to invite him for a meal. He took my arm and asked where we should go. Making my excuses, I said all I could afford, on my salary, was someplace right there in the market. With a show of magnanimity, he accepted that offer. He downed three plates of pulled pork with mote, never taking his eyes off the food, and then ended up staying at my place for a week. On the fourth day of eating my food and sleeping in my living room, he told me about the script he was trying to sell to Cordobés, because he thought I could serve as a go-between. It was a big disappointment when he learned I didn’t know the station manager personally, and a worse one when he dropped the name of Orson Welles and I didn’t so much as blink. He tore into me, even at the risk that I’d throw him out. “Ignoramus” was the least of his insults. How could I call myself a scriptwriter if I didn´t know about Welles and his feats? He went on to cast doubts on the morals of my mother, to try to kill me with a sneer (which didn’t get him very far), and finally to explain that if I didn’t know what Welles had done in ’38, I might as well quit my job. At that point, since I was somewhat accustomed to his outbursts after four days together, I left him talking to the air and went to the kitchen to rustle up something to eat, which I was sure he’d be willing to share after he appeased his demons by himself.
When Alcaraz popped into my mind because of the cat, I thought that in truth he wasn’t just some failure that I once put up in his hour of need, but rather a manipulator; he wasn’t pursued by problems but rather created them so as to later dangle them like carrots in front of the unwary to get them to bite at his schemes. In those seven days that we lived together, I listened to him cook up countless plans that would turn us into magnates of the airwaves. All of those plans included me. And though all I did was listen, I couldn’t decide what to believe or what to be suspicious of. His arguments followed an implacable logic, until you focused your gaze on those thin lips that always had a backlog of dry saliva sticking to the corners. He talked and talked, evidently entranced by the sound of his own voice, never ceasing to build castles in the air. But who could take him seriously? He had a high, reedy voice, and nonetheless, according to him, the first step along his highway of successes was going to be a speech academy we’d set up in our station. His plans spun a sense of comradery that I was sure would dissolve into a stab in the back if they started to stagger, or into a farewell pat if they actually worked out. I never found out what he did during the day. After joining me for a breakfast, he’d go out, saying he had to tie up the loose ends of some contracts he was about to sign. These accords involved, in general, the highest authorities of the city. At night he’d tell me of his accomplishments, and sometimes he managed to shake my certainty that he was a swindler, because he’d have all the names down right or he’d describe to a T the office or reception room where he met with a certain cabinet minister. Had it not been for his thin, oily hair and the fact that his only shirt was stamped with an impenetrable ring of grease around the neck, I might even have believed him when he told me he’d slept with the wife of the minister of defense. Because when he wasn’t talking about businesses, he was boasting obsessively of his amorous conquests. The last time that happened, I laughed in his dirty, gnomish face while we emptied the final bottle of aguardiente that had survived his visit. But later I was sorry: my last of image of him was of his back as he jumped out my window in his underwear after a group of soldiers broke down the door and pointed six gun barrels at his face. Then came the plop, just like with the cat. The soldiers just wanted to scare him, because they could have blown him to smithereens in my living room if they wanted. After they left, and before they had a chance to come back, I tossed his pants and shoes out the window after him. He never came back, and I knew he must have been pretty scared because he didn’t come for that script of “The War of the Worlds,” which I’d seen him clasp to his chest every night as he slept on my couch, and which was the only thing he truly believed in. When I remembered all this, I went looking for the script. Not having anything better to do, I started paging through it while waiting for my next call from Cordobés.

The fourth time I went to collect my check at the station, without having done anything to earn it and still waiting for a new assignment, Cordobés called me into his office. He didn’t pull out any cigars this time or offer me any foreign liquor to drink. He just sat me down in front of him and, after a deprecating look, asked me how I liked being a worm. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“How long do you expect to go on doing nothing?” he asked.
I still didn’t understand. He had told me to wait for his orders. He hadn’t asked me to put together any kind of plan.
“You’re not irreplaceable. You know that, don’t you?” he went on. “Right this minute I could find three other guys to do what you’re doing, which is to say nothing, and at a much lower price.”
Then he stopped talking and gave me another one of those looks. What came into my head were Alcaraz and his script. Without hesitating, I tossed that ball of smoke in his direction.
“We could broadcast ‘The War of the Worlds.’” His eyes met mine again, but he said nothing, so I kept going. “It would be a smash hit.” More silence. “It would raise the station’s ratings.”
“We don’t need to raise the ratings,” he replied. He opened his desk drawer and poured himself a drink, but didn’t offer one to me.
“We’d make history,” I plowed ahead.
“What do I care? Tell me what I’d get out of doing this.”
“More sponsors,” I told him, and that did get his attention.
Or at least it put a dent in his thirst, because he let his drink sit there and waved his hand for me to continue. I improvised on the basis of a ton of garbage. Or, really, I repeated everything Alcaraz had told me those nights we sat drinking till dawn. And, against all odds, Cordobés agreed with every detail. The number of actors, the budget, me as director, the lead time needed, the secrecy that would have to surround the project. That was the only area in which he asked to have a hand. He told me that he himself would write up a confidentiality clause so that no one who joined the project could “betray” it. That was the word he used, and only because it was such a stretch in relation to something I’d just made up on the fly did it catch my attention. Maybe it should have set off an alarm, too, but it didn’t. A month went by in which I never slept more than three hours, adapting the script to the Ecuadorean context, auditioning voice actors, commissioning the musical score, contacting sponsors. Nothing came easy, some new complication always arose. When I finally had a full team working against a looming deadline, one of the actors, the one who was supposed to speak the part of the archbishop of Quito, disappeared for three days. On the fourth, I personally went to find him. It was too late to get a substitute, and I managed to convince him to come back only by giving him more flexible hours, because after the story he told me, what else could I do? On his way home, one night when we’d been working till the wee hours, he found a woman lying in the street. She had been assaulted and was unconscious. He picked her up, brought her to his apartment, and called a doctor friend of his. After making some inquiries among his contacts in the police, he discovered that no one had reported her missing, and he decided to take responsibility for her. His problem wasn’t exceptional. Complications like that came up every day and needed to be resolved.
The hardest thing was getting sponsors. Next to that, crafting the show itself was a breeze. No potential advertiser had ever heard of Welles or his Martians, and everybody I approached thought I was a nut. All but Cordobés, who was, after all, the only one that mattered. I managed to get everything I needed. With the help of a call from Cordobés, I even got the Orangine soft drink company to take an interest in the project. This convinced me of my own value. I came to believe that I had organized the greatest feat in Ecuadorean radio history (though, in some hidden corner of my atrophied brain, I knew it was also the greatest fraud, and the idea wasn’t even mine, since all I’d done was steal it). That didn’t curb my enthusiasm or shrivel my ego. I believed in my own genius.

Late one night, defeated by insomnia that only grew worse as the date of the broadcast approached, I went out for a walk. In a dive near Avenida 24 de Mayo, I ran into Elias. He looked as bad as I did, and, when I got close, I could have sworn that he was carrying a dead rat in the pocket of his jacket. Elias told me he hadn’t been home for several days. He said that the last time he’d slept and changed clothes, he’d barely escaped being killed. That story didn’t surprise me, because I’d heard so many from him over the years. Only this time, I had to say, Elias looked more bedraggled and, if possible, still balder than the previous time I’d seen him. He told me he was tired of hiding the big scoop that, according to his editor, would carry him to glory. Without lifting his eyes from the table, he muttered that glory was no good if you had to die for it, and the way things were going he would end up in a mausoleum but not exactly one for heroes. He asked me for a cigarette, drained the aguardiente in front on him, and began to talk, as if that would carry him away from the real or imagined danger sitting in the bottom of the glass he’d just pushed aside. He didn’t seem to pay me any attention. He was talking to unload because if he didn’t, he’d be doing a favor for those who wanted to put a bullet in his forehead. He told me that when he’d been assigned his most recent story, it had seemed routine. The city had a plan to fill in some ravines for a new street layout, and he was supposed to interview the people who would have to give up their homes. But once he’d interviewed a half dozen families, he realized that there was a pattern, that something was distorting the minor news item that his editor was likely to bury somewhere in the third section of the paper—the eviction of a group of families who didn’t even have legal title to their land: all these families spoke of a person who appeared two weeks before the official notification. They told Elias this man showed up and offered them money, a pittance but still real money, in return for their signature on a blank document. He spoke of a threat of eviction and offered them cash as compensation. Everyone gave the man their names and signed or put thumbprints on the paper. Everyone took the low-denomination bills that were given to them and started thinking about where they would move. It seemed strange to them, but anything that got them involved with legal documents was always strange. They couldn’t see why anyone would want to kick them off these lots that, with every downpour, slipped a bit farther down the slopes. Nobody but people as poor as them would want to build homes on these cliffsides, but they didn’t say a word about this, because what good would it do? When the city officials came to tell them they’d be evicted, it came as no surprise, nor did they request time to pack their belongings. They picked up their bundles, which they had already packed, and went to the south of the city, where it stopped being called Quito at all. I was sure this was only the beginning of Elias’s story, but his mood started to plummet for lack of liquor. I asked for another bottle of whatever he was drinking, and he revived. He told me that he’d gone to the registry of deeds and found more than sixty-five land sales legally processed and accepted in the last week. They were all for land in the ravines. He was surprised by the speed of the transfers, but after seeing the name of the new owner, he understood the bureaucrats’ efficiency. Elias had been in this business for more than fifteen years, so nothing shocked him anymore. Along with his press card they should have pinned a medal for cynicism on his chest. That was the only way he managed to survive his work, that and the half bottle of aguardiente he drank every day. But this wasn’t what he told me. What he told me was that all the properties, the ones that had been inhabited and others that had also been bought up in recent weeks, were now in the name of the city’s current mayor, Arnulfo Baca. Elias’s next step had been to go interview the mayor. At that point in the story I took his arm and asked him whether he wanted to be killed. He told me no, not yet. He did not confront the mayor or say anything about what he’d discovered. The interview merely focused on the new street plan. Elias noted everything the mayor told him about the need to fill in the ravines for reasons of sanitation and in order to build a modern street grid for the city. He asked why not broaden and improve the existing streets and forget about the fill plan, which, it seemed, brought no great benefits and, on the other hand, implied an enormous drain on the municipal finances. Baca then gave a speech, as if his life depended on it, about all the benefits that the fill project would bring, and he urged the journalist not to oppose the modernization of the capital. He ended by saying that the mayor’s office had no intention of negatively affecting anyone, and that the city council had voted in favor of not expropriating the land but rather paying the best market price to the owners. And that was just what Elias needed. I congratulated him. On the article, and on what it would mean for his career, since the few newspapers that existed in the city would fight each other to hire him. But he told me the article would be about as good for his career as stepping into quicksand would be for a man lost in a swamp. I didn’t get it. Before he continued, he emptied a third and then a fourth glass. He told me he took the article to the paper, but found that his editor was not there. So, given the importance of the piece, he went looking for the editor in chief, who likewise couldn’t be found. The only person who was free that afternoon was the managing editor, who was also the man in charge of the radio station. That didn’t matter to Elias. All he needed was an order to stop the presses and rewrite the next day’s banner headline. The managing editor was Cordobés, my Cordobés. Elias sat there in front of him and explained what he had discovered. He said he had the article written and ready to go to press. When he told me this, he took hold of the tabletop and banged his forehead against the edge. I had to stop him, but by that time he had already broken open the skin, and a line of dark, thick blood was running from his eyebrow to his cheek and then to the center of his chin. I took my handkerchief, soaked it in aguardiente, and pressed it against the wound. While I was doing that, Elias leaned his head against my chest and began to snore. Who knew how many sleepless nights he’d had? By now dawn was approaching and I couldn’t leave him alone in that dive. I took hold of his waist and lifted him up, getting him to put one of his arms around my shoulder. In the process I reactivated the stench of that rotten animal holed up in some cavity of his body. When we got out on the street, a fine rain was falling like mist over the city. I had to stop several times along the way to clean my glasses with my fingers. Only when I managed to lean Elias against a wall and take off the frames to rub the lenses with my shirt could I, at last, make out more than silhouettes. When we got to my house, I stretched Elias out on the couch and collapsed into bed.

When I woke up, Elias had disappeared and I had less than two days to finish all the preparations for the Martian landing. I quit worrying about what I’d heard, which, after all, was none of my business. I went right to the station, without letting anyone know I was coming. I got to Cordobés’s office, and, since his secretary wasn’t there, I headed for the boss’s door; but when I was about to knock, I stopped because I recognized a voice from inside. I don’t know how long I stood there. I just remember that Cordobés’s secretary touched me on the shoulder, and I jumped. She asked whether she should announce that I was there, but I turned around and ran. I didn’t stop until I reached the tram line and hopped a southbound car, which I rode to the end of the line. The whole way I couldn’t stop thinking what a fool I was. How could I possibly not have tumbled to this earlier? I got off at the end of the line and wandered aimlessly till it started to get dark. Then I walked the whole way back on foot, turning the same things around and around in my head. I hadn’t run away as soon as I heard that voice, because I wanted to be sure, I didn’t want to have the slightest doubt that Alcaraz was there in the office, talking with the person who had hired me for my insuperable brilliance. The person who had accepted every absurd request I made about the program. During the walk back, a hole in my stomach grew bigger and bigger. How long had the two of them been working together? When had they decided I would be a useful pawn? Why me, and for what? Did Alcaraz leave the script in my house on purpose? Why wait so long? It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to come to any conclusion. I don’t remember how I got home, or what time, or how I got to sleep with that noxious brew decomposing in my brain. I slept badly, and the next day I woke up around noon with a faint hammering inside my head. I didn’t pay it much attention till I heard shouting from outside and I realized the hammering was out there too. It was a messenger pounding on my door, with a note from Cordobés for me. Very brief, very diplomatic, very to the point. He asked me to sign a document, and he told me that from then on he was taking charge of the radio play, and that if I signed the paper, I could come and collect my severance pay. I was too dazed to argue. Anyway, the messenger told me he wasn’t leaving till I’d signed the document, so I did. I knew I was buried up to my neck and the document couldn’t make things worse, only perhaps set them in stone. I signed without reading, kept a copy, and went back to bed. When I woke up, I drank two cups of coffee, read what I’d signed, and realized it was my own death warrant. The document said that I was the sole author, inventor, and creator of the radio play that would air the next day. I didn’t even have a right to protest. I got dressed and went to collect my money. After all, that was what had brought me into this game. At least I wanted a big bankroll filling out my pants when my life disappeared. Cordobés didn’t want anything to do with me, but his secretary gave me an envelope. With that in hand, I went up to the studio. I didn’t go in, but I could see Alcaraz giving instructions to my actors. I stood there in the hallway for a good part of the afternoon, until they took a break. When Alcaraz came out for a smoke, he looked right through me. That’s when I left. I had sowed the whirlwind, and it was only fair that I would be swept up in it.

I took myself to the registry of deeds. Maybe if I could learn something more about the ravines I would understand Cordobés’s need to silence Elias, because, even though he never finished telling me what happened, his article had not appeared in the paper. I wasn’t doing this just to help my friend, but because Cordobés had to have something bigger up his sleeve. Otherwise, why take the risk of covering up the land deal? And whatever that something was, I was pretty sure it was connected with the sudden reappearance of Alcaraz, and my being fired. I confirmed that the sales had gone through and all those lots now belonged to Mayor Baca. Then I went to the office in charge of handing out radio frequencies. I asked to see the documentation for the stations within the city. There was one new station, frequency 104.2, registered under the names of the partners Cordobés and Baca. My boss, and the mayor of the city.

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our regular programming to read an urgent telegram that has just arrived at our studio. A few seconds ago, in the area of Latacunga, it was reported that a blinding flash of blue light crossed the sky with incredible speed, with such force that it felt as if a gigantic long-range rifle had been discharged. We will keep you informed. Now we return you to our scheduled program of night music sponsored by the refreshing beverage Orangine:

There’s pain in my soul I can’t rise above
Your memory is a thorn that tortures me
Come back, come back, come back to me, my love
Let my torment end, please nurture me . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt again to bring you alarming news. The city of Latacunga has been destroyed. It disappeared, moments ago, under a cloud of smoke and flame. It was attacked by a fleet of flying objects firing potent and highly destructive rays. Our sources tell us this fleet is headed toward Quito. Attention! We repeat, they are headed for Quito. Given the gravity of this news, we will remain on the air to keep you informed.
When the second interruption came (after the announcer reported that the city of Latacunga had disappeared in a rain of fire), several windows opened and some heads emerged, looking up at the sky. No windows closed after that. The effect of hundreds of radios tuned to the same station, with volume at full blast, created a strange sensation. You could almost see the expanding wave as it grew.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a note from our correspondent in the town of Sangolquí. Dear radio audience, we are told that at least forty people, including six local police, are lying dead in the pastures to the east of the city, their bodies so burned and deformed as to be unrecognizable. These macabre and alarming events, both those of Latacunga and those of Sangolquí, must be connected to reports issued this afternoon by the Observatory of Mount Jennings in Chicago, in the United States. That report confirmed several explosions of incandescent gases that occurred at intermittent intervals on the surface of Mars. This afternoon’s reports, to which we are paying utmost attention, note that spectroscopic readings showed alarmingly high concentrations of hydrogen; they also revealed that fireballs, stemming from these explosions, were nearing the Earth at high velocities. Ladies and gentlemen, imagine what speed must be involved if those occurrences took place this very afternoon on Mars, which is located forty million miles from Earth. We have asked for someone here in the studio to convert that figure to kilometers, but in any case, we can assure you that the number is very high—too high to imagine that the vessels that destroyed Latacunga could be Martian. But, for the moment, that is all we can deduce them to be. What is most alarming is that these vessels are making their way to the capital. It should not surprise us. The magnetic force of the center of the world is well known. If an extraterrestrial attack were to come, it is logical that it would be focused on Ecuador. That seems to be what we are experiencing now.
When the announcer read the report sent from Sangolquí, I saw a woman in a window opposite mine faint. Sangolquí was right next to the capital; it was a place people went for weekend excursions. If the spaceships had sped the forty miles from Latacunga to Sangolquí in just a few seconds, they would reach Quito in no time at all.
We are waiting for contact with some civil or military authority who can inform us about what is happening and how the population should respond. Don’t touch your dial, because the latest information can be found only here. Attention, ladies and gentlemen! I have just been handed an official communique from the Mariscal Sucre Air Base in Cotocollao, in the northern part of Quito, which states that several unidentified objects have landed on the airport tarmac. In a few seconds we should have a live feed from there. Meanwhile, we are continuing to seek contact with some authority to make a public statement over this station . . . Yes, yes, we’re listening . . . Good evening, we are here outside the Cotocollao air base, where a large number of neighbors who have been listening to our report have gathered, as well as several police patrols. The Victory Battalion is here in full strength, and we have been told by unofficial sources that several military tanks are on their way. We don’t know, yet, how many . . . Excuse me, Jorge, for interrupting your valuable report, but what can you see? . . . Dear listeners, all we can make out are some enormous holes in the ground and, around them, scorched grass. Inside those craters are several cylindrical objects. Each one must be twenty yards wide, to give you an idea of the proportions of their awe-inspiring presence; each one—and there are several—is the size of two tennis courts side by side. They give off a strange glow, a kind of milky color. Now some spectators are pushing up against the police lines in an effort to get closer, and they are blocking our view. Please sir, ma’am, could you move to one side? Thank you. While the police are trying to establish some kind of control, I have here at my side a resident of this area, Señor Quintero, who perhaps can share with us some important information.
When the report from the air base in Cotocollao began, that new voice belonged to the regular newscaster of the morning news. I could see, through my window, how everyone drew closer to their radios. This was a voice they recognized and trusted, one that, they thought, could bring them relief. I won’t deny that I was enjoying this: the public was falling into my trap, even if I had fallen in another. I was smiling and kept on listening just to be able to pat myself on the back. I had done it, I was doing it. Those were my words that held the city captive in their grip.
Señor Quintero, could you please tell us, what happened a few minutes ago? . . . Well, I was listening to the radio . . . Could you come closer and speak louder, please? . . . Oh, sorry. Let’s see, I was telling you that I’d just poured myself a little drink . . . Yes, yes, Señor Quintero, but what happened? . . . I’m getting to that, I had my drink, in front of the radio . . . Yes, and then, what did you see? . . . No, first I heard something . . . What did you hear? . . . A sound, like, it was like the sound a snake makes . . . A snake? . . . Yes, you know, ssssssssssssssss . . . Like a tire letting out air? . . . I’ve never heard a tire letting out air . . . All right, Señor Quintero, you heard that sound and then, what happened next? . . . I looked out the window and I thought I was dreaming, because I saw a blue light but it was sending out sparks as it flew through the air . . . And? . . . . BOOM! It exploded right here, it was so strong the impact knocked me against the wall and the glass in my hand, the one with my drink, it shattered . . . Were you afraid, Señor Quintero? . . . What can I tell you? . . . Thank you very much, thank you . . . Don’t you want to hear more? . . . No, no, that’s enough. Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I could describe what’s happening, now the tanks are here and more and more residents of the area are arriving too. The police can’t stop them, some are walking right up to the objects and trying to touch their surface. But there’s something else, something I haven’t said because of the confusion that’s setting in around here. There’s a sound, maybe some of you can make it out, it’s been getting more and more intense since we started this broadcast. Can you hear it? It’s a murmur that’s growing and expanding, that seems to be coming from the center of the Earth. Let me bring the microphone closer . . . Now we’re about thirty yards away. Can you hear it? Wait a minute, something’s happening. Ladies and gentlemen, something completely new is going on. The upper part of the object is turning, as if it were a separate piece. The vessel must be hollow in the center.
When I recognized the sound of a jar with a metal cap being unscrewed inside a bucket (that was the programmed effect for the moment when the top of the first flying saucer would open), I saw that the panorama on the street had changed completely from less than ten minutes before. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I felt like my face was melting and dripping like wax toward the ground. The street had become a runaway river on which hundreds of salmon were trying to swim upstream to save their lives. Women and sleepy children were dragging bundles, baskets, and barely closed suitcases up the steps of Calle Esmeraldas, up toward the lava caves on the flanks of the volcano, where they thought that maybe, protected by the darkness, they could escape the extraterrestrial attack. Down the same channel, en route to the city limits where the electric lines ended, were men armed with clubs, torches, and rifles. It was not hard to imagine they were marching toward their deaths. Their faces were marked by resignation. I had been so stupid, unable to look several moves ahead on the chessboard. If I had done so, I would have known which pieces would advance, which would remain in place, and how the checkmate would be achieved. Only now could I see it, dazzlingly clear and impressive. Cordobés had done it, had set up the chessboard months before, knowing my moves long before I did. He’d planned things so that, when the landing occurred, it would be the radio station he managed that would be placed in check. So that his own station, the new one he’d set up together with the mayor, would take off—just as soon as he’d eliminated the only real competition, the most important in the capital. When what was going to happen happened, the entire city would no longer believe a single piece of news from the microphones of the station that had broadcast the extraterrestrial landing. Cordobés was counting on something more than the truth: he was counting on the pleasure that comes from hearing the knuckles of the powerful crumpling as they fall. His ploy would destroy not only the station, but also the newspaper that owned it. Even if Elias’s article managed to get into print, even if the scandal was exposed, it wouldn’t matter. The mayor would have his landfill project, and, soon, he’d have in his inside jacket pocket a thin, discreet check given to him by the city he governed in exchange for the land he had managed to acquire. Also, he’d have a radio station that would broadcast his accomplishments in case anyone had any doubts. Cordobés would take care of that.

It’s changing color, it’s turning red as a kettle over a hot flame. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in my life, the lid has now come off and something—or someone—is coming out . . . I can see two luminous spheres that are peering toward the horizon from the dark hole . . . Can they be eyes? It could be a face. Do you hear the crying and wailing of people around, ladies and gentlemen? They are crying for a reason. We have to put ourselves in God’s hands. Something is slinking out of those shadows—it looks like an enormous gray snake. Or several of them. Or tentacles. I can see the body of that thing. It’s big, as big as a bear and it shines like wet leather. But its face is . . . it’s . . . ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I almost can’t look at it, that’s how horrifying it is. Its eyes are yellow and glow like a cobra’s eyes, its mouth is shaped like a V and a long string of saliva is drooling out. Its shapeless lips are trembling. But it’s not moving, maybe the Earth’s atmosphere prevents that. No, I’m wrong, here it comes, and the people are moving back. Some are running to get away, but we’re holding fast in our posts, as is our duty, to keep you informed. We’ll stay here as long as we can. Here come the soldiers, some of them inside their tanks. Wait, what’s happening? The figure is straightening up, it’s pointing something that seems, from where we are, like a mirror. A flame is darting out toward the tanks! My God, I can’t believe it. The solders are burning like paper dolls. I can’t find the words to describe it, but the screaming around me speaks volumes. The whole field in front of the cylinder is in flames now. The gas tanks of the cars are going up, the trees, there are four dead bodies only thirty feet from where I stand. GRZZFJKKKK. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back in the studio. Due to circumstances beyond our control we can’t continue with the live broadcast from Cotocollao. We’re taking you now to another live broadcast, this time from the Ministry of Defense . . . Citizens of Quito, this is the defense minister of the Republic of Ecuador speaking to you. I’m addressing you in these moments of great consternation to ask you to stay calm, because we need your help to organize the defense and evacuation of the city. And to the forces of order, with whom we’ve lost contact, I ask you to come to the air base to reinforce the battalions now defending the entrance to the city. GRRZZFKKKKK. We interrupt this broadcast to return to the studio, where the mayor . . . People of Quito, we’re depending on you for the defense of the capital. I’m asking all able-bodied men to take action against the invader. GRRZZJKKKKK . . . Now a communique from the archbishop of Quito . . . We pray to God for His blessing and protection and put our fates in His hands. I ask the parishioners of our churches to ring the bells to send our common prayers to the protective heavens in this hour of great bewilderment. GRRZZFJKKKKK . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I have just received a note informing me that from the Previsora Building, the tallest in the city, a ball of flames and smoke can be seen advancing toward the center of the capital . . .
That was the moment, as planned, to shut down the radio signal. In such circumstances, nothing could induce more fear than a total lack of information. I went down to the street, which was bathed in fog, but I hadn’t gone more than four steps when I heard a moan and saw a glow across the street. That was the same moment in which the city’s bells began to toll all at once. The Martian invasion had worked to a T. After the archbishop came on the air, the ringing should start, and it did. The ecclesiastical community responded to his call. On the street, I could feel more sharply the panic that had taken hold of Quito and its inhabitants. When the truth came out, their belief would turn to uncontrolled rage. I wanted to get to the station before that happened, but the moaning was so continuous and agonized that I made my way through the blanket of fog to the glow. Some girls were kneeling in front of a row of candles on the cobblestones. A woman in a flimsy nightgown was pacing nervously behind them. The girls were praying, what prayer I could not tell, while the woman went up and down the street unconcerned with her clothing or her half-naked breasts. When I started to move away, I heard, over all the other noise, the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. They belonged to someone with the look of a madman, who threw himself into the woman’s arms. The girls stopped praying when their mother crossed the street with a cry so full of panic that I had to stop in my tracks. I don’t remember the exact words, or who said what, only that faced with the imminence of death, the threat of dissolving in the flame of a Martian ray, decorum no longer counted. Or it had slid into an underground fissure from which it could no longer dictate daily life. Throughout the city, the ugliest of words issued from people’s mouths. Since there was no tomorrow, nothing had any consequences, and everything became terrifyingly real. As real as death. I felt another shudder in my spine. This night was not going to end well. How could it? The woman grabbed the two youngest girls, and in the same shrill voice, she informed them that the man standing in front of them was their father. She could have told them that pigs were flying through the sky, or that in two weeks the fields would be full of forget-me-nots, because the result would have been the same. The concept of a father disappeared under the woman’s hysterical screech, the man’s lost gaze, the impossibility of associating this night with happiness of any kind. The scene was still frozen like that when a second woman appeared. She ignored the man, presumably her husband, but tore at the hair of the mother of the girls, whom she evidently had never met before. The man watched them, a spectator with vacant eyes. It was not clear who was the victim, who the victimizer—only that the mother had a much more developed and practiced repertoire of reproaches. I left them there: the girls crying, the women screaming, the man watching. I passed similar scenes breaking out across the city. People in nightshirts and nightgowns dragging their sins through the street, prayers of atonement, pleas for forgiveness for small and mundane offenses. This was the real invasion: the torrent of words that crisscrossed the city and rendered everything darker and more destructive. As I descended the twisting streets of the mountainside neighborhoods toward the Plaza de Independencia, I saw how the restraint so characteristic of the city had ceded completely to piercing invective. All Quito had poured into the streets, and the sound was ominous, like that of some monster with multiple, gaping maws. Once I reached the station, I tried to enter, but someone had ordered the guards to bar the door. With good reason, because a crowd was gathering. The dank air could barely support the rage of those who now began to surround the building. All conversations were variations on the theme of the deception that had been practiced on the citizens. I saw one of the linotype operators from the newspaper smoking a cigarette under a lamppost. Nothing in his appearance indicated surprise. His expression was that of someone who knows that reality will not go away just because you stop believing in it. He seemed to know that the delicate membrane that held together the structure of the city had dissolved, and now its most acid instincts were fermenting up a storm, catalyzed by a current of the highest intensity.
Cordobés crossed in front of me, not looking upset in the slightest. I followed him and, once face to face, asked for an explanation. He didn’t say anything, just laughed in my face. Then, as he walked on, he warned me in an almost friendly way that I should get away.
“There are flammable chemicals inside,” he said. He paused briefly. “When the first bomb gets thrown, it’ll all explode.” He didn’t wait for another question. “Because someone’s going to throw it. I swear to God, that’s what’s going to happen.”
Cordobés’s sworn word wasn’t much to go on, but what he said made sense. I turned back toward the building that housed the station and, in the basement, the printing presses of the newspaper. Right then I heard the roar of the first explosion, just before its shock wave threw me to the ground. The shards of glass that now covered the street reproduced the image of the flames, creating the sinister effect of a city floating on a river of fire. With the bellow of the second explosion, the whole night lit up, as the roofs of all the neighboring buildings caught fire.

Night fell, the fog lifted, and the streets emptied. I set off to look for Elias. I didn’t find him, but I couldn’t go home, couldn’t do anything that I would normally do, so, when dawn broke, I went back to the station, or what was left of it. Cordobés was still there. His face was a chalkboard on which any emotion might be drawn. His shoes were smudged with soot, as were the cuffs of his trousers. He was walking through the rubble as if in search of something. As I approached him, a feeling of moral superiority rose up from some hidden place inside me. But Cordobés annihilated it with the smallest shrug of his shoulders. Still, I asked him again why he had done it.
“Done what?” he asked me.
I didn’t know how to answer. There were too many things about which I was still in the dark, especially the contours of the circles in which he moved. So I looked at him and waited— in vain, because he didn’t say a word. Across the street I spotted one of the actors from the night before. He was slumped against a wall, with what looked like three days’ growth of beard and a gaze as opaque as a tar pit. I crossed the street, and when he opened his mouth to tell me something, out poured a good portion of the alcohol he had consumed during the night, which must have been working on his conscience for hours. Then he asked me whether it was over. His will to go on seemed to hang on my response. Whether what was over, I asked him back. Without changing his expression but in a tone of tranquility that belied his state, he said, all of it. I managed to get my arm around his waist, lift him up, and drag him over to a mound of dirt where at least he’d be free of the river of vomit he had discharged. Nothing is over, I told him. I felt my answer had taken a metaphysical turn that the situation did not deserve. He covered his head with his hands. Maybe he was right, the sky was about to fall in on us. He shook his head, which seemed to help him focus, but the sudden clarity only added to his distress, as if a severely nearsighted man had put on a pair of glasses for the first time. He launched into a speech and didn’t stop even when he stood up, or when he started to walk, or when he was seated with a cup of coffee in front of him, or when I got him to the door of his house. No questions from me were needed. He told me how they had begun the broadcast at nine on the dot, and twenty minutes later, when the actor playing the archbishop asked the churches of the city to ring their bells, he was shocked to hear all the bells of the city responding on cue. He said this as if he’d been the only witness, and again covered his head with hands, as if only then recognizing his own role, and mine, in that night’s events. He launched a fist at my shoulder but the blow landed with the consistency of a raw egg, and I barely felt it. I didn’t try to dodge, I wanted someone to hit me, I needed to make it clear that I wasn’t washing my hands of the thing, that part of what happened was the direct result of what I had imagined when I had written and staged the arrival of the Martians in Quito. Otherwise I would have remained paralyzed, assailed both by my sense of guilt and by the lack of recognition of my role. Regardless, he kept going. He said that after the ringing of the bells, Cordobés had yanked out the wires and disconnected the microphone. No one objected. At first the commotion in the streets was so deafening as to dissipate any sense of danger. Then the radio silence itself became a threat. He didn’t know how to explain it. He started to shake with fatigue and fear, and asked for a cigarette that would allow him to go on. When he finished his smoke, he was ready to continue. He said that when he realized what had happened, his thinking got lost in a maze of white noise. He watched the radio station crackle in flames without the firefighters lifting a finger to douse them, without the police or the army trying to hold back those who were throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks, and he lost count of how many bottles of aguardiente he downed until he fell onto the patch of sidewalk where I had found him. As I left him in front of his house after a walk that used up a good part of the morning, he took me by the shoulders and asked whether everything was going to be okay. With a toneless voice and looking through him as if he weren’t there, as if what I was doing was answering the question I hadn’t been able to pose to myself, I told him no, nothing was going to be okay. And with those seven words I left him propped against his door and went on my way.

When the list of those who had died the night of the broadcast was released, Elias’s name was on it. He was found among the incinerated bodies and twisted steel of the pressroom, one more piece of collateral damage, and I thought of Cordobés sifting through the rubble in front of the station with his feet. I considered going to the police, I thought of making a formal accusation, and then I realized that from the moment I accepted his offer to announce the boxing match, I had lost that right. I shut myself in my house with my pockets full of money. For two weeks I didn’t go out, expecting the police to come for me at any moment. But something strange happened: silence took possession of the city. It must have been, I thought, that if the people admitted how they’d been deceived, they would also have to admit that the confessions, betrayals, vulnerability, mob violence, and deaths had really occurred. And that was unacceptable. So nobody was going to push very hard to identify guilty parties or clarify events. What for? Nobody came after me, or at least not the police. Other radio stations, yes, but I rejected their offers. I spent part of the money I’d saved over the past months on a funeral for Elias. With the rest, I bought a plane ticket. I dropped all the money that remained onto the counter of a travel agency and asked the woman behind it how far that sum would take me. She picked up a globe, twirled it, and told me to make it stop wherever I wished. That was how far I could go.
I closed my eyes and touched my finger to the sphere. Venezuela was where it fell.

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Gabriela Alemán lives in Quito, Ecuador. Her literary honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship; member of Bogotá39, a 2007 selection of the most important up-and-coming writers in Latin America; and finalist for the 2015 Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) for her short story collection La muerte silba un blues, from which “War of the Worlds” is taken. Her novel Poso Wells and her story collection Family Album are both published in English translation by City Lights Books.

Dick Cluster’s translations from the Spanish include Gabriela Alemán’s Family Album and Poso Wells (both from City Lights Books), Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux (FlowerSong), and Kill the Ámpaya (Mandel Vilar Press), a collection of Latin American baseball fiction. Cluster is the author of History of Havana (a social history of the Cuban capital, from OR Books) and a detective novel series.

Illustration: Sam Ward

 

To begin with, the father removes ten years all in one go. He looks phenomenal with no dark circles under his eyes, and in the mornings he goes around yelling yeehaaa with the razor in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other, and by the time he reaches the kitchen his chin has become smooth and clean and his breath is rotten. But that doesn’t bother anyone, because those first days are a celebration. His daughters—there are three of them—adore him. He’s never tired anymore, nor does he yell at them to be quiet or go to bed; now the whisky makes him happy or, as he puts it, gives him a lift. When he gets in from work, the first thing he does is pour himself a glass. Then he goes in search of the girls, making them stretch out their arms so he can grab them by the elbows and lift them up to the ceiling, repeating: How are my little skylarks? How are my swallows? He has even invented a ritual. Once they’re fast asleep, all three of them together in the same bed, he comes in disguised in a bear mask and scares them. The mask allows only his tiny blue eyes to be seen and has a hard, black nose that the girls imagine to be damp, with the scent of the woods. This ritual soon turns into the most eagerly anticipated moment of the night. The three daughters don’t even sleep. They spend all night with their eyes open, huddled under the sheets, whispering to each other: they imagine how he’ll come in through the door, whether he’ll growl, whether he’ll launch a tickle attack, whether he’ll yell yeehaaa once the show is over and then lift them up to the ceiling because they’re his swallows, his skylarks, his little darlings. To begin with, their mother regards this change with suspicion, and in the mornings she’s downcast, her hair unkempt. Perhaps she’s the only one to notice that their father is rejuvenating too quickly. His chest is sprouting fine hairs, and at a certain point she realizes that his smooth chin has become covered in acne—small, greasy pustules that make her recoil when he leans in for a kiss. The girls begin to notice the change when their father starts shutting himself in the bathroom for hours, emerging with his face all red and covered in small cuts that he tries to hide with a white ointment that only makes it look worse. He no longer enjoys his “lift,” everything infuriates him, and he begins to reek of armpits and alcohol from the moment he gets up. Days pass by but resemble years, because the next thing they know, their father is almost a child. To begin with, the daughters play with him, hopping through puddles and catching tadpoles in glass bottles. Afterward, the girls release their tadpoles, but they watch how he takes his and throws them down the toilet. Little by little, they come to realize he’s a dirty, violent child. But their mother protects him. She, too, has changed; it seems she now prefers him this way, as a child, in fact they’re sure she does. Respect your father, she says, when one of them yells at him to let go of her hair or begs him to stop killing animals. At first it was just mice, but now it’s any animal: ducks, foxes, cats. He stalks them, chases them down, and tortures them—pulling out their claws, jumping on top of them—before coming home with his face all covered in muck and eating with his mouth open, demanding seconds and then going around leaving a rancid stench of gases all over the house. And the girls shut themselves away and shed their tears in silence. Since their father became a child, they do everything in silence. Things change. Their father becomes even smaller. He throws tantrums. He breaks things and eats too much, he yells and never switches off the television, leaving it at full volume, with films about aliens and murderers. He’s a horrible child. But their mother prevents them from saying this. She forbids it. He’s not that bad, she says, he’s your father, a father like any other. By now he’s almost unable to speak and has started wearing diapers, but they chafe and nobody is allowed to say anything about the way the child howls like a hyena and throws up all the time. Their mother seems to have become someone else; her hair shines and she puts on lipstick. Now she has to work all day because their father can’t, and it’s the girls who are left to care for him. The three of them take turns changing their father’s diapers and applying cream and talcum powder, they take turns feeding him, rocking him, and putting up with his pinching, his kicking. When their mother arrives home, the first thing she does is check in on him. She’s the only one who can get him to quiet down and go to sleep. She rocks him in her arms and caresses his fat, red face. And when she leaves the room, she asks for silence, complete silence. Then the three girls, their hair dirty and disheveled, move about the house like ghosts so as not to wake their father. They shut themselves in their room and begin covering the walls with drawings of animals they’ve invented: ducks with fox legs, swallows with rabbit faces, curlews with owl wings. They draw these strange creatures and cry. More often than not, they draw the bear mask. In the mornings they have dark circles under their eyes, the house always reeks of piss and shit, and they find their mother cradling their father in her arms, sometimes breastfeeding him while telling him stories, ones they’ve never heard before. They feel nauseous. They no longer go to school, because they can’t leave their father unattended. Sometimes, they take turns going into the woods. Two of them stay with him, while the third just races through the trees, faster and faster, more and more desperate. They run like madwomen, run until they feel an urge to be sick and faint and die, their bodies exhausted. Then they return home and everything starts up again. One day, one of them—the littlest one of all, the quietest—broaches the subject. She suggests they do something. She’s the one who dreams each night of their father and the bear mask, except that at the end, when the moment for their embrace arrives, she removes the mask to find their father’s face deformed and bleeding. Then she wakes up sweating and, because she mustn’t scream, pinches her own hands instead. She’s also the one who fetches the baby carriage their mother has recently purchased and places their father inside it. Let’s take Father into the woods, she says. Her sisters follow, holding hands. The girls walk very close together, as thin as three toothpicks, hunched like old women, with the carriage in front. They take turns rocking their father and telling him not to cry, but he doesn’t listen. When they reach the spot with the eucalyptus trees, the two elder sisters dig a hole, not too deep, scrabbling with their nails until a tiny crib appears in the dirt. The littlest one takes their father and sets him down, gently. Their father kicks, screams, cries. He’s a damn hyena. He’s what remains of their father. The girls start to lob on earth, yelling more and more loudly, flinging handfuls of dirt that begin to cover his face, his tummy, his hands, until they bury him completely, until he is finally quiet.

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Natalia García Freire (Cuenca, Ecuador, 1991) is the acclaimed author of the novels Nuestra piel muerta (2019; translated by Victor Meadowcroft as This World Does Not Belong to Us, 2022), selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019, and Trajiste contigo el viento [You brought the wind with you] (2022). Her journalism, chronicles, and profiles have been featured in BBC Mundo, Univision, Plan V, CityLab Latino, and Letras del Ecuador.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese. His published translations include This World Does Not Belong to Us (Oneworld/World Editions), a debut novel by Natalia García Freire; Stranger to the Moon (co-translated with Anne McLean, New Directions/Mountain Leopard Press) by Evelio Rosero; and five stories by Agustina Bessa-Luís in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books).

Illustration: Casey Booth

 

On Saturdays Angela would arrive at her grandmother’s house with the groceries she’d requested (mostly candy and ice cream) and some sort of treat—scratch-off tickets or a CD audiobook or a box of kołaczki from the out-of-the-way Polish deli.
Angela put away the groceries, and her grandmother poured her a glass of chocolate milk on the last day of its life, which Angela pretended to drink as her grandmother got down to business.
“What does this say?” she asked, handing Angela a piece of cardstock.
Angela looked at the high-speed Wi-Fi flyer and said, “It’s trash, Tookie.”
“What is it though?” her grandmother insisted.
“An ad for the internet,” Angela yelled. Her grandmother’s hearing was nearly gone. She’d gotten hearing aids as a part of a senior support initiative close to a decade ago—she was entitled, she said—but hadn’t put them into her ears a single time. She’d gone through the steps to get a flip phone, too, but never turned it on. Tookie didn’t have a computer though, so the internet was useless.
“Well, that’s trash! Throw it away!” she said, ripping the card in half and putting it in the broken-lidded can beside her. “And this? I think it’s my property tax. Is it my property tax? How much?”
Angela looked over the bill. Her grandmother was right. She didn’t know how she could tell. Context clues, she guessed. Over the past decade, macular degeneration had slowly taken all but the very periphery of her grandmother’s sight. For the majority of her retirement until then, her grandmother had read a book a day. “Bring me that witch book,” she’d demanded of Angela when the Harry Potter books started making the news. And then, “I don’t get the fuss. Do you get it? Did you read it?” Angela had taught her grandmother to use a portable boom box, and then started checking out every audiobook in the library, five at a time, for her grandmother. If she brought a repeat, her grandmother blamed it on the authors. “All these books sound the same. Nothing surprises me.”
Angela shrugged and eyed the stack of tabloids her grandmother still received in the mail. Her grandmother read the headlines and circled the stories she wanted to know more about with a big black Sharpie. Angela hadn’t been able to visit the previous weekend, so the pile was larger than usual.
“Well, how much?” her grandmother asked.
Angela remembered the bill in her lap. “Two thousand, for six months,” Angela shouted.
“Highway robbery!” Tookie exclaimed. “Write the check.” She pushed her checkbook to Angela, who dutifully wrote the amount, pointed to the line where her grandmother should sign her uneven scrawl, and balanced the register. She dug through her grandmother’s pile of papers for a stamp.
“Tabloids?” Angela asked.
“Brad Pitt is up to something,” her grandmother said. “And I need to know about this cancer cure they’re making from bug stuff.”
Angela smiled and hunted through the pages for these two stories, none of it reliable. Her grandmother was sharp and practical, but she also had an insatiable appetite for gossip. Angela admired Tookie’s contradictions.
Her grandmother paused. “I have one more thing to ask you.”
“What?” Angela asked. These interactions, where her grandmother had a question to which she didn’t have an expectation of the answer, could get hairy sometimes. With standard conversational back-and-forth, her grandmother could anticipate. She could formulate her questions to receive yes or no answers, but when she needed a lengthy explanation, her lack of hearing made things especially difficult. No matter how clearly Angela explained herself, she’d have to repeat it several times, in different forms, to make sure Tookie understood. She could feel both of them steeling themselves for one of these complicated exchanges.
“Now listen carefully,” her grandmother said. “Someone is projecting pictures in here through the windows, like movies. I’ll shut my eyes for a little while, and then when I open them, I’ll see a naked man in the dining room. Totally naked. It’s disgusting. Or I’ll see a little country town, from above, and all of the people are down there running around with their horses and buggies. It looks just like a scene I remember from a movie.”
Angela’s stomach dropped. This was new territory for Tookie. Was this the beginning of dementia? Her grandmother refused to leave her house. She had pledged to die there at all costs, and Angela and her mother had tried to make it work as best they could between them, but if Tookie became a danger to herself or her neighbors, all of this would have to end.
“I know who must be doing it, too. It’s their son next door. He’s mad that I told him he couldn’t park his car in my garage anymore, so he’s getting back at me. But how do you think he does it?”
Angela couldn’t help but smile at the sensible way her grandmother approached what must be a hallucination. It gave Angela hope for Tookie’s sanity.
“I don’t know, Grandma,” Angela said. She wanted to stay calm. She wanted to affirm her grandmother, worried Tookie would get scared or agitated if she made light of what Tookie was claiming.
“Your boyfriend is a cameraman, right?” her grandmother asked. “Could he come here and figure it out? Maybe he’ll know how they do it.”
“I can ask him,” Angela replied. What she meant by that was that she would do some research about what might be happening to her grandmother and her mind. “I’m sorry, Grandma.”
“Well, don’t be sorry!” Tookie said, exasperated. “Just help me figure it out.” She laughed like it was no big deal. “Now come with me and tell me if you want any of this stuff.” Their visits always ended with Angela’s grandmother showing her a pile of items she no longer wanted, and Angela taking as much of it home as she could. She rarely kept any of it, but she understood that it made her grandmother feel good to help Angela and to slowly empty out her cluttered bungalow. Angela accepted a tiered gold cookie plate she actually liked, an industrial-size stack of Styrofoam cups, polyester sheets still in their packaging from the 1970s, a baggie of orphaned earrings, and a cardboard box of her deceased grandfather’s old dress shirts. Angela would deposit some of this in the can in the alley on her way to her car, and the rest she’d drop off at the Goodwill before getting back on the highway.

Angela avoided the topic of the visions with her grandmother for the next few weeks; she assumed maybe the pictures had stopped. Angela had filled her mom in, and they’d decided not to panic. They remembered the time when her grandmother swore that the upstairs tenant had been playing his guitar at all hours of the night, when the tenant crossed his heart that he didn’t have a guitar or even a radio. That period had passed and they hoped this one would, too.

One Saturday in late June, the first really hot day of the year, Angela arrived to find Tookie’s house shut up tight. “Grandma! Grandma!” she called. Angela had her own key to the back door, but she never wanted to startle her grandmother. The doorbell was too quiet for her to hear, so the best Angela could do was to begin shouting as soon as she opened the door.
Angela made it all the way to the living room without a response; it was darker than she’d expected considering the midday sun. All the shades were drawn, and her grandmother sat in her chair, eyes open, staring, but totally unaware of Angela’s presence, even when Angela waved in front of her face. Only when she gently squeezed her grandmother’s arm did Tookie give a little jump.
“Angela?”
“Hi, Grandma! Why don’t we open a window? It’s so hot in here!” she yelled.
“Sit down,” her grandmother commanded. “The boy next door is doing that thing again with his projector. I saw that naked man again. I shut all the windows and closed all the blinds, but the pictures are still getting in here. Did you talk to Ben about it?”
Angela had told her boyfriend about what was going on, but he’d of course agreed that the idea of a holographic projection was a tough sell. “He said he doesn’t think it could be a projection, Grandma, but he’ll come here to try and figure it out if that would help.” Angela had weighed the pros and cons of what she said next. “You don’t think maybe it’s just a daydream?”
“I’m not seeing things, Angela. I know you think I’m old and batty, but I’m not hallucinating.”
“I don’t think you’re batty!” Angela shouted. “I just think your eyes might be playing tricks on you!”
Her grandmother shrugged. “I see what I see. I’m not afraid of the man. I know he’s not real, but I am afraid of what that boy next door might do. I’m definitely not letting him rent the garage again, but how is he getting around the shades and the curtains with his movies? I don’t like it.”
“We’ll try and figure it out,” Angela said. “I brought you chocolate-covered strawberries. Let’s eat them before they melt. And I’ll carve up this cantaloupe for you, too. It’s perfect. You should try to eat it fast before it turns.”
Her grandmother hoisted herself out of her chair and followed Angela with her walker, decorated with plastic Aldi’s bags full of tissues and her wallet and whatever else she needed to cart from the living room to the kitchen.
Angela talked her grandmother into cracking a window, and they ate the strawberries and sliced melon while Angela wrote checks and organized the discs from last week’s stack of audiobooks.
“Bring Ben next week,” Tookie said. “He’ll know what to do.”
Angela smiled at the way her tough-as-nails grandmother still thought technological know-how was a skill held only by men.

Ben had met Angela’s grandmother before, but Angela still reminded him about the need for clear and concise explanations.
Her grandmother described what she saw again. “This week it was the village scene, but I haven’t opened the curtains all week. It’s been so hot that it’s good to keep the sun out, but I need to know how he does it if the curtains are closed.”
Ben walked around the house, looked at every window and mirror, and then sat down close to Angela’s grandmother. “I don’t think it’s a projection. You’d need a very strong light and a background. There is an illusion called Pepper’s Ghost—”
Angela shook her head. If he explained Pepper’s Ghost to Tookie, she’d become convinced that that’s what the neighbor was doing, but there was still no way. The windows were blocked. Her grandmother’s home hadn’t been fitted with angled panes of glass. The less her grandmother knew the better.
Tookie scowled. “I’m not asking you if I’m seeing what I’m seeing. I’m asking you how.”
Angela broke in and took her grandmother’s hand.
“My arthritis!” Tookie cried, and Angela loosened her grip.
“Grandma, I’ve been doing some reading. I read about something called Charles Bonnet syndrome. Your eyesight is going, but you still see things where they used to be sometimes. Kind of like if you lose a limb, but have phantom pain. You see things where there’s nothing, or you see blurs and your brain tries to understand them as something more coherent.”
Her grandmother’s face showed confusion, but she waved Angela closer and leaned in to listen again.
Angela explained three more times until, eventually, Tookie flapped her hands and pushed back in her chair. “You think I’m off my rocker.”
Angela didn’t. She felt sadness for her grandmother, for how real the visions must seem and how frightening that must be, and respect for Tookie’s attempt to rationalize what she saw.
“You’re no help at all,” Tookie said. “If it happens again, I’m calling the police.”
“Grandma, don’t do that. If they think you’re unwell, they might not want you to live here alone.”
“But maybe they can tell me what’s going on, or at least go talk to the boy next door and tell him to stop bothering me.”
Angela pulled up pictures on her phone. “Grandma, look at the quilt I’m working on.” She changed the subject and hoped Tookie wouldn’t call the cops, but there was no way to stop her.

The police called Angela’s mother that week, after responding to a call from Tookie. They’d knocked on the house next door, but the boy next door hadn’t even been in town the week prior. None of the windows lined up, and the space between the houses was too narrow. They reassured Tookie as best they could. Tookie had put on her best act, behaving respectfully and pretending like she understood the officers and agreed with their assessment. The police mentioned sending social workers for welfare checks, but Angela’s mom assured them that that was unnecessary. She and Angela would try to help Tookie understand.

Angela had trouble sleeping that week. Every time the phone rang, she wondered if it would be the police, summoning her to come calm Tookie down. But what Angela couldn’t stop thinking about was how her grandmother was alone for so many hours of the week. Angela couldn’t imagine the loneliness of it, and then, on top of that, the isolation of no one believing Tookie when she told them what she saw with her own eyes. Angela had offered to bring Tookie to live with her countless times before, but her grandmother valued what little independence she had left. Angela tried to conceive of a life in which she’d want to be alone and quiet for the majority of her time, unable to watch or listen to anything, just feeling and sensing the little bit still available to her in the noiseless dark of her own future. It wasn’t the choice Angela would make for herself, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t meaningful to Tookie. Angela thought of the internet flyers that her grandmother would scoff at. “Who needs all that information right this second?” Tookie had asked once. “We don’t understand what we already know.”

The following weekend, Angela’s phone rang with Tookie’s number. “Are you on your way?” she whispered.
Angela said she’d be there in five minutes. “Why? Do you need something else?”
“No, but the man is here now. He’s in the dining room, just standing there. He has an armful of oranges this time. I’m not scared because I know he’s not real, but if you hurry, maybe you’ll see him, too.”
Angela drove as quickly as she could. She looked up at the sky, clear blue, wondering if a change in cloud cover could shift the light in the house and erase the image. She parked in front and glanced at the house next door, but there was no light coming from the side windows. Their shades were drawn just as tightly as her grandmother’s.
Inside, Tookie’s house was dark. Angela’s eyes adjusted and she found her grandmother in the dining room. “Angela, do you see him?”
Angela looked where her grandmother was pointing. She squinted, trying to see what was in Tookie’s mind. Her eyes tried to turn the light and shadow into a male figure, but all she saw was the arched entrance to the living room.
“There?” Tookie asked.
Angela paused. “I think I do,” she said. “I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, it’s fading,” her grandmother said. “When the sun is bright, it’s harder to see. You didn’t believe me. You all thought I was a crazy old woman.” Angela saw Tookie breathe a sigh of relief and turn to her granddaughter. “What do you have for me this week?”
Angela held up the net bag. “Sumo Citrus,” Angela said, and her grandmother gasped.
“Let’s share one now. I want to save one to give to the cleaning lady and maybe a couple as a peace offering to the neighbors. Kill ’em with kindness, right, Angela?”
Angela glanced back toward the living room as her grandmother pushed into the kitchen. She saw the stack of this week’s tabloid stories on the ottoman. She saw the pile of mail they’d sort through shortly, deciding what was worth their attention and what wasn’t. And then, for a moment, the light shifted, and Angela saw a pale figure in the archway, arms empty—maybe just a ghost of what her grandmother had seen.

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Jac Jemc’s novel Empty Theatre will be published by MCD x FSG Books in February 2023. She is also the author of The Grip of It, False Bingo, My Only Wife, and A Different Bed Every Time. She teaches creative writing at the University of California San Diego and serves as faculty director of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

Illustration: Mike Dubisch

 

As for the roux, our dad explained, the first morning after he lost his job, melting that first quarter-pound stick of butter the way the French did when preparing their sauces, he could not turn his back on the pan for a minute—and so that afternoon when we got off the bus to find him still whisking the roux in the kitchen, none of us were that surprised because when Dad committed to something, he meant it. Here is how he made the roux:

1. Melting huge sticks of butter to sludge in the pan.
2. Sifting the flour in.
3. Whisking it fiercely.
4. Repeating this process, but often enough that the flour and butter mixture never thickened past a liquid so Dad could use it later on to sauté the seafood and veggies and spices.

Dad was still in his pajamas, purple with the mascot of his alma mater on them. The tendons in his arms were corded; his wrist muscles bunched with the back-and-forth motion. The roux was thick and chocolate colored, a beautiful roux by any standard, and Dad had been building it up for so long that it nearly sloshed over the top of the pan. Nothing else of the gumbo to come was in sight: No peppers or onions. No okra or corn.
He could never stop whisking, we knew from the past, until the roux was rich and done. He literally could not step away from the pan. “I literally cannot step away,” he would say and had said in the past and said now in the kitchen as we stood in the door with our backpacks and gym bags, waiting for him to come hug us or greet us—to lift our bags from us and fix us a snack. If he did step away, then the flour would congeal and the roux would turn into a doughy, charred mess and he’d be forced to scrape it out and clean the pan and start again.
After he lost his job, Dad was back home again. That meant he was always cooking.
Dad had us prepare our own dinner that night—for ourselves and for Mom, who’d be home any minute. Salmon (though we’d never cooked it before), the cook-by date a day away. And when Mom did get home from work to the sight of us trying to preheat the broiler, Dad stirring the roux in the stainless-steel pan with the delicate bloom of the gas flame beneath it, she went to the island where Dad hadn’t left and whispered in his ear a moment. We couldn’t hear the words she said. She said them and waited, then said them again. And when Dad had absorbed them or seemed to absorb them, his face through the waver of steam never changing, our mother knelt down and she gathered us to her, telling us that there wouldn’t be gumbo that night, maybe not even tomorrow night or the night after. The gumbo Dad was making now might never even pass our lips; it had never been “for us” so much as “for him,” which we were meant to understand. But none of us did; none of us looked at Mom. All of us were watching Dad.
For signs of surrender or humor—some shift. But nothing in him changed at all.
He had the face of someone whisking.
Whisking, whisking through the night, long after his family were all in their beds. We knew Dad was whisking because we could hear it: the gurgling scrape of the whisk in the pan, the occasional tick of the gas flame restarting.
We woke up to the smell of fat. Dad was still with the roux when we entered the kitchen. All that sat out was the flour and the butter, the whisk and the pan. One bag of flour empty, another half-finished; husks of greasy butter paper. When we entered the kitchen, Dad’s eyes brightened at us, though Dad himself appeared not great. His cheeks were cadaverous, his hair butter-coiled. He smelled like the line at the DMV office. He was already shouting to dig in the cabinets for the “big pasta pot” and to “hand it up pronto” so that he could transfer the roux from the pan. When it poured in the pot without spilling a drop, we heard Dad exhale like he did watching sports. And then he called out from the stove the steps for making toaster waffles.
But Dad never told us to take off the plastic. A few seconds into the toasting, it smoked, giving off a noxious taint. Then the toaster caught on fire. There was so much smoke—black. It rushed up in this funnel. We were scared and we backed away from the toaster as one, looking panicked at each other, and when nobody spoke, looking only at Dad, who stood at the island still whisking the roux, a paralyzed anguish at large in his eyes. Though he’d said he literally could not step away, we saw he was trying to step away, now—that his body was telling him, Step away, do it! Your home and your children will die if you don’t! But his mind, or whatever his mind had become, seemed to be telling him: You can do both. So he stretched endlessly in his purple pajamas for the cabinet doors beneath the sink, which still had a child lock securing them closed so that the youngest among us would come to no harm from the cleaning supplies hunkered under the pipes, and with his whisking arm still whisking (his left arm, we’d started to notice more often, the arm that Dad favored in most everything), he ratcheted the child lock open, flipped open the cabinet doors, and reached in half-blind for the thing that he sought, cursing and twisting and fumbling around as the smoke from the fire made us tear up and cough. He slid us the fire extinguisher, pin up, clattering over the tiles, toward the toaster.
“My sweethearts,” he said, when we’d put out the fire. “So proud of you, my little champs.”

We say back home again because not long ago Dad had been our sole caretaker. He’d accepted the leave he’d been granted from work for a month after each of our births in succession to care for us after our mother returned to work but before we went into some manner of daycare. Though we barely remembered the growls that he made as he chased us around with his terrible arms, or the prickle of his belly-blows as he nuzzled us into the living room couch, when he did return home after losing his job for what we assumed would be longer this time, it wasn’t without a half-glimpsed recognition on all of our parts that we’d done this before.
The roux, too, was familiar to us.
We’d seen him discard other imperfect roux if they didn’t taste right or chunked up in the pan. To Dad, every meal was like something alive you could kill with impatience or just being sloppy. But this roux, too, was somehow different; it was more than a roux, after all, to our Dad.
It was almost like one of us. Dad couldn’t leave it—even after Dad left us to fend for ourselves.

That evening, when Mom got home, she attempted a different approach from last night. Instead of approaching her husband directly and whispering tenderly into his ear, she went to the refrigerator and began to remove everything for the gumbo. One by one she placed these items surrounding the burners, where Dad could get at them.
She put out the okra. She put out the corn. She put out the celery, carrots, and onions. She even put out the frozen shrimp to thaw in a mesh colander in the sink. Moving over the counters, our mother gave pause at the foul, blackened niche where there wasn’t a toaster and where the flames had spread, as well, to singe the bottoms of the cabinets, none of which we’d been able to do much about in spite of Dad’s forceful instructions to clean. This time she looked like she’d say something for certain, something everyone there was intended to hear, but her nostrils twitched spastically, flattened with stench. She went around opening all the windows.
With his eyes never leaving the 40-quart pot, Dad tracked her with a quiet panic; his head tracked Mom, now here, now there, like some creature, blood-hungry and blind, in a cave. The cook pot was filled with a velvety roux the likes of which we’d never seen, more shiny and rich for there being more of it—though all of us knew there was too much already. When Mom began to run the sink, Dad’s purple pants darkened.
Mom flew from the room.
She avoided the kitchen the rest of that night. Making sure that we did too, she even took us out for pizza. There were checked tablecloths and a run at the Claw. No one ever mentioned Dad. When later that night we returned to the house and had to enter through the kitchen (there was no other way to get into the house, which so far hadn’t been an issue), walking across the shadowed tile with pizza boxes held before us, Dad was there at the island, still stirring the roux. He seemed to lean toward us as we moved toward him. He wanted that pizza; he smelled it like breathing. As we walked past the back of his sagging pajamas, where a third smell, not pizza and not the roux cooking, wafted up into our noses, Mom reached up and side-slapped the back of Dad’s head. Not playful and cheery, but sorrowful, violent. The force of the slap jerked his head toward the pot. We wished we could see what the front of him looked like. When we were almost in the hall, for some reason still bearing the leftover pizza, Mom snuck back into the kitchen. Slapped Dad on the back of the head two more times.
Where else would Dad be when we woke in the morning but at the island where we’d left him? We already knew how to make toaster waffles—except there wasn’t any toaster. And so we put them out to thaw to eat them later, sad and damp. The puddle at his feet had dried but the smell was still there, hovering in the grout. Our dad had lost weight since beginning the roux, and when our dad lost weight—our dad—you always saw it in his face, which was now a gray cheese from the grease in the pot, with bruised-looking pockets surrounding his eyes. Strangely, though, his whisking arm appeared three times its normal size, as though it had grown from the nonstop activity or as though the rest of his body had shrunk around the whisking arm itself.

A week passed then. Or seemed to pass.
Maybe it was several weeks.
The roux graduated from Dad’s pasta pot to the one he used for crawfish boils, a 120-quart monster of steel that came with a specialized colander insert. This pot was for a propane burner set up on a cook stand in someone’s backyard, not for a gas range in the kitchen, but since Dad literally could not step away, two stovetop burners were needed to heat it. The whisk was too short for the depths of the roux. Dad now used a long wooden spoon for the stirring, like a warlock hunched over inscrutable broth. Mom no longer whispered to him, or bothered shouting at him either, as she’d done every night for the first several nights as soon as we were tucked in bed, but when she got home turned completely to us—our needs and our tempers, our comforts. Our dinners. As singularly fixed on us as Dad was on his endless roux. She made sure that we’d done our homework. She made us dinner, something simple, though we weren’t allowed to step foot in the kitchen unless it was to wash our hands, and even then Mom stood there, braced, in front of the spot that our dad couldn’t leave. Sometimes, though, we hid and watched as she worked around Dad at the heart of the kitchen. There wasn’t that much room in there. Mom would brush past Dad somehow and it felt like the contact ignited a fuse. She slapped his head, hard, with the side of her hand like she had done on pizza night, or kicked him sharply in the shins, or once even pulled down his pants in a stroke so Dad had to claw them up two-fingered, grunting. Summertime and she turned up the heat in the house. Put on jazz flute recordings, which Mom knew he hated. Went around to the side of the house with a wrench where she cut off the gas and came back in the house, going straight to the kitchen where Dad stood immobile, the roux congealing underneath him, and that was the moment she gathered us to her, like she had on his first night of making the roux, longer ago now than we could remember. She actually beckoned us into the kitchen and grouped us around her, Madonna and children, kneeling as one behind Dad, at the stove.
Did we kneel on the tile because Mom told us to? Or did we for another reason? And did all of us know as we lowered our heads that here was our final, unshakable prayer for Dad, our dad, to come back to us? For Dad, our dad, to make a choice between us and the roux that would be never be done?
His face was turned in profile to us. Even so, we saw a glimmer. Not the glimmer of love, as we’d hoped we would see, but the glimmer of painful, spontaneous death if the roux lay there fallow for one moment more.
As soon as Mom saw it, the wrench in her hand, she went back around to the side of the house. A minute later at the stove the burner flame concussed to life.

We had dinner in front of the TV that night. Watched whatever we wanted, ice cream for dessert. Mom herded us up to get ready for bed. Made sure we washed and brushed our teeth. Read us a story and tucked us in bed.
There could be nothing strange about this. In the past, she had done it a million times. And yet for the moment there was something strange; it should’ve been different.
It should’ve been Dad.

Back in the days when our dad had cared for us, content and alone with us here in the house, he’d done it by instinct: an edge to our cries would let him know when we were hungry; a look of pleading in our eyes would let him know when he should hold us. But that instinct had left him. He’d lost it, forgotten. What remained was misguided and monstrous.
A figment.

Soon he could no longer stand without the support of the island before him. He’d figured a way to still stir with his left arm while his right one supported the weight of his body, three-fourths of him staggering into the counter, curled around the stovetop burners. The arm that still stirred was a thing to behold. Still hale, though the rest of his body had withered, and still able to work the spoon with artful, unrepentant speed. Someone—not us—must’ve fed him. Still, Dad never asked for food. In fact, the only thing he’d asked during these last several weeks of concocting the roux was for us to stop at the store after school to buy him more butter and flour for the pot, an errand our mom had forbidden us to do. And yet somehow the roux still grew with phantom flour, phantom butter. Sighing and bubbling, crinkling and smoothing, in some process of growth whose foundations escaped us. The gumbo ingredients Mom had set out had long since turned black in the air of the kitchen, the see-through plastic slick with rot. It was as though while Dad’s life dwindled, the life of the roux became ever more full. One of them must shrink and shrink until it flinched first or was nothing at all.
And we thought when Dad’s fingernails slid in the pot that we’d begin to understand, because nothing so awful as this could go on; it was only a matter of time before Dad turned around at the stove and said, SORRY, JUST KIDDING! HAD YOU FOR A MOMENT THERE! And when his hair began to shed in greasy clumps and fall in, too, we sensed the truth was coming for us like the beckoning scent of a warm, home-cooked meal—how he’d nourished us simply by being our father, how everything else was a flash in the pan. But did we really understand? Or understand any more now, looking back? What more was there to understand than the swirling, dark depths of the roux in its pot?
But that wasn’t the worst part, believe it or not. The worst part hadn’t even happened. No, the worst part would come when Dad stood at the island, barely upright, barely there with bowls of gumbo set before him, and like any proud cook would await the verdict on the meal he had made us with such loving care.

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Adrian Van Young is the author of two books of fiction: the story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press) and the novel Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media). His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, Slate, VICE, BOMB, The Believer, and The New Yorker, among others. His third book, Midnight Self, a story collection, will be released by Black Lawrence Press in October 2023. He lives in New Orleans with his family.

Illustration: Calum Heath

Stefania anticipated a tough time of it. She had come to escape the din of the linen factory, the tightness of her family’s apartment, the harassment of the neighborhood bullies, the suffocating press of Hartford’s tenements, but she had also come expecting to work, and to work hard. This was the only expectation that the American Thread Company actually fulfilled, despite their advertisement’s promises that A glorious new life awaits the young woman upon the scenic banks of the Willimantic.
The mill proved louder than the workshop where Stefania had sewn uncounted miles of linen using the very thread she now drew from the enormous spinning frames. Long after her shifts ended, she felt the thunder of the machine thrumming though her ears and chest. A constant mist of lint hazed the bustling work floor. Even though she kept her long braid coiled in a bun and then tucked under a net for safety’s sake, the downy white particles infested her black hair. Between all the pale streaks in her tresses and the arthritic cramping in her hands, she would have felt like a princess prematurely aged by a crone’s curse in her nonna’s fairy tales, save that her parents had made sure she’d known from the time she could walk that Stefania was no precious child to be pampered . . . and that even in her stories, Nonna was more likely to cast Margheriti women as Roma witches than royals, the beatific ancient kissing her crescent-moon necklace and waggling her fingers in a faux hex whenever Papa complained about her feeding Stefania such stories. For a girl raised on a filling yet bland diet of prayer and work, the old stories were rich and rare as gelato—both her mother and the mother church insisted that suffering in this world was necessary for glory in the next, but her grandmother’s fables provided the sweetness of immediate satisfaction. While Stefania appreciated from a very young age that even virtuous women couldn’t expect to find much justice until the hereafter, it was fun to listen to the fairy stories and imagine the wicked facing abrupt consequences for their ill manners. What a world it would be, where drudgery could be escaped forever through quick wits and a pure heart . . .
The long days in the Connecticut mill were the best part of Stefania’s new life, as they kept her mind from dwelling on just what a terrible mistake it had been to come here to Thread City. This wasn’t just homesickness—she’d felt that when her family had taken her away from Volterra, an ache she still carried with her when she thought of her distant grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, when she remembered the thick sunlight dripping down the familiar hills to pool in the Etruscan necropolis that honeycombed the base of the cliff. That pain had inspired her to seek out better wages, however farther afield, so that instead of guiltily turning over every penny to her parents, she could save enough to return to the Old Country . . . assuming there was any home to go back to, if the Americans didn’t work up the moxie to join the Italians, English, and everyone else fighting the good fight against the Hun.
Homesickness, though, that came easy. She missed her family, she missed real food, she missed a good night’s sleep in her old bed, she missed the comforting drone of Italian around the dinner table, however much the Yankees tried to make her feel ashamed of who she was . . . she missed all of that, but she was almost sixteen years old, and she could bear it. The thornier burden was that the girls here made the bullies back in Hartford seem as hissing cats to biting dogs, her roommate at the boarding house the worst of all.
The older girl had acted polite, if a little aloof, when “Grandma” Snow introduced them. But as soon as the landlady left them alone, Frieda made it clear that she wasn’t about to share the cramped room’s sole bed with a greasy dago . . . and if Stefania tried to make a stink about it, she would pay a stern price. Either of Stefania’s older sisters would have put up a fight, she knew, but try as she did to grow the courage to push back, it always withered before it could bloom, even after weeks of sleeping on the floor and enduring countless abuses anytime they were alone together. As a result, she spent as little time in their shared room as possible, silently praying the girl would soften with time and patience, but even after Stefania cut her palm on the edge of a cracked spindle, Frieda had only laughed at her clumsiness and loudly told her friends that the thread would need an extra turn in the dyehouse, since guinea blood left a powerful stain.
Yet for as polluted as she seemed to find Stefania, Frieda certainly had no compunctions about borrowing her roommate’s clean socks right off the line, or helping herself to the pizelles Stefania’s mother had sent her. Stefania wasn’t surprised the girl was a thief as well as a bully, the two going hand in glove, but the lack of consistency made the trespasses all the more galling. Especially since she would have gladly given Frieda all she had to offer, if only the girl would politely ask. She never did.

“Hey!” Stefania winced at the feminine call as she left the gate of Saint Joseph’s one evening after the days had grown long enough for her to retreat there after supper. The church was one of the few true sanctuaries she had found in the smoky, crowded burg, even if she always felt like the Irish congregation was giving her dirty looks, but now it seemed like this safe haven had also been discovered by her tormentors. She put her shawl-covered head down and quickened her step back toward the relative safety of the boarding house’s parlor, but the girl caught up alongside her. “Hey, you’re Stephanie, right?”
Stefania curtly nodded, too angry to reply to the girl’s cheery tone. This game they played of acting nice only to then mock the stupid wop for being taken in was the nastiest in a rotten repertoire, and she wouldn’t be duped again. She kept her brisk pace.
“I’m Helen, I work the next floor over from you.” The twang in the girl’s voice marked her as a local, and since most of Frieda’s gang were fellow transplants at the boarding house, Stefania dared a glance at her shadow. Helen was a big girl with a big smile, braids shining like spun gold as the setting sun caught on a shop window and flashed over her face. “Say, mind if we take it a little easier? I just put in an extra four, so unless you’re in some kind of a hurry . . .”
“Sorry,” said Stefania, slowing down but not really sure what else to say. Apologizing had always come naturally, but even though she had taken to English better than anyone in her family, she had never figured out how to talk to American girls. It was as if there were some hidden layer to the language that she couldn’t quite make out, leaving her forever below, squinting up into the glare.
“So hey, I’ve got a favor to ask,” said Helen, which put Stefania a little more at ease—she was used to people asking for things. “I live clear out of town, and since it got so late, I thought I might try a night at the Elm instead of walking all the way home in the dark. You reckon I could sleep on your floor? I don’t snore or nothing, and could make it up to you.”
“Sorry,” said Stefania again, imagining Frieda’s reaction if she tried to sneak another girl into their room.
“Hey, no trouble,” said Helen, affable as ever. “I’m sure they’ve got someplace for stray mill girls to bunk down around there. Maybe you could just vouch for me with whoever runs it?”
Stefania readily agreed, and not wanting Helen to get the wrong idea, added, “I would let you stay with me, but my roommate has me sleep on the floor.”
Helen’s sunny features clouded over. “Well, that is some trash right there. I was your roommate, I’d let you share the bed.”
For the first time in a very long time, Stefania’s throat tightened from something other than fear and sorrow.
The Snows were very accommodating of Helen, letting her bunk in the extra room they kept open in case a girl fell ill and needed to be isolated. Frieda was less understanding of the circumstances, hissing in the dark of their room that she would slit Stefania’s throat if she ever brought a dirty melonhead into the boarding house again. Just for a moment, lying there on the worn floorboards, Stefania imagined herself doing something terrible to Frieda. Worse than the visceral image was the smile she couldn’t quite shake off as she drifted to sleep.

“Are you sure?” Helen dubiously accepted Stefania’s sandwich the Friday after Pentecost. They had repaired to their usual spot a short walk down the muddy river, the two girls always lunching together now. Helen didn’t seem to have any friends, either, despite being every bit as outgoing as Stefania was shy. “My daddy always says say thank you the first time but ask why the second.”
“It’s Embertide,” said Stefania. “I have to fast tomorrow, too, but after Sunday I’ll be done with them for a while.”
“Oh, well, if it’s just one of your pagan rituals, I’m all for it,” said Helen with a wink, biting into the stale bread. Stefania knew her mother would have turned white as the lint on their dresses at the way the girl teased her about their faith, but she felt a secret thrill at how Helen always found a way to make something as mundane as church sound mysterious. It reminded Stefania of her nonna’s folktales, the ones where witches were far more common than saints, though they might still turn you a good trick instead of a bad one, so long as you demonstrated kindness and sound judgment. Her parents worried the fables would frighten her, or worse, turn her into a superstitious fool, but Stefania was clever enough to recognize them for the parables they were . . . and as Nonna always said, the only difference between a martyr’s miracle and a sorceress’s spell was how the story ended for the vessel of the divine.
Through a mouthful of her second sandwich, Helen asked, “What it’s for, all the fasting?”
“To show our thanks to God for the bounty of nature by exercising moderation in how we make use of these gifts,” Stefania recited, and then caught sight of the fleeting edge of last night’s dream winging past her mind’s eye. She hadn’t remembered anything upon waking, but there it went, a vision of flight over dark forests, and as it did she remembered something else her nonna had told her, the sort of story the old woman always concluded with a kiss on the black medallion that hung around her wattled neck: “In ancient times the good witches would fast through the Ember Days, and their hunger gave them the strength to change shape when they slept at night.”
That got Helen so excited crumbs rained out of her mouth as she said, “Really?”
“It’s just some old story my grandmother used to say,” said Stefania, immediately regretting giving her friend further cause to dismiss the church as silly and superstitious. “Nobody really believes in witches anymore.”
“Oh, but you should,” said Helen, scooting so close Stefania could smell the onions on her breath. “Witches are all around these parts, and have been for a long, long time.”
There was none of Helen’s usual playfulness in her tone or expression, and Stefania was about to change the subject when something shied through the grass of the riverbank not two feet from where they sat. The girls both startled to their feet as it splashed into the water, and only when the second rock narrowly missed Stefania’s head did they turn to see Frieda and three of her cohort farther up the shore. Frieda wore Stefania’s best shawl, and the sight of it on her square head made Stefania shake with anger as well as fear. Fortunately some men appeared along the path behind them, and the bullies turned back to the mill complex rather than carry on in front of witnesses.
“I guess you are right about witches,” said Stefania as Helen angrily bit into the squashed remains of the sandwich she’d crushed in her hand. “I live with one, I should know.”
“What she is well rhymes with ‘witch,’ but it’s not the same, not by a yard,” said Helen through her mouthful of bread, but at least returning to that subject brightened her mood. “A real witch, well . . . that’s why you always be nice to a stranger, because you never know, do you?”
“I guess not,” said Stefania as they waited for the men to overtake them on the riverwalk so they would have a buffer on their return to work. “You would like my nonna, and she would like you.”
“I bet we’d get along swell,” said Helen in that wistful voice she got whenever Stefania told her about her childhood home. The farm-girl-turned-mill-worker was the first American Stefania had ever met who actually wanted to hear about Italy, and she eagerly shared her daydreams of returning to the winding stone streets of Volterra, to once again explore the creeks that coursed through the valley, and the caves carved in the base of the cliffs . . .
“Witch caves?” asked Helen as the first millhouse came into sight. The girl was obsessed.
“I doubt,” said Stefania, though her nonna had tried to scare her away from playing in them by claiming they were actually ancient tombs haunted by restless spirits. “I do not think witches have caves.”
“Of course they do,” said Helen, as if this were knowledge so common even her foreign friend should know it. “There’s one up on a hill between here and my place. Back when all this was just colonies they had a bunch of trials, I guess, and tried to burn the witches out. But they didn’t catch them all, and them that got away learned to keep their practice away from prying eyes—in the darkest glens, in the deepest caves. Like the one up behind my farm.”
“There is not,” said Stefania, not so much because she didn’t believe Helen as because she didn’t want to believe her. The whistle blew.
“I’m only telling you this on account of you being my best friend,” said Helen, stopping by the gate even though they were already late. “But it’s true. The witches had their church in that cave, and it’s still a magic place. Anyone who’s brave enough to spend the night there will get their wish granted.”
“How would you even know such a thing?” asked Stefania, feeling a chill despite the muggy heat of the day.
“Because I slept there one night last summer,” said Helen, clutching Stefania’s cold hand in her sweaty one, “and I had all these dreams, and then my wish come true. It was scary, I won’t say it wasn’t, but it was real.”
Stefania didn’t know what she could possibly say, and Helen dropped her hand. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I . . . I want to?” Which was the truth, because Stefania would rather Helen be an aspiring witch than either a crazy person or someone who would lie to her only friend.
“Then come up there with me, and I’ll show you! Tomorrow night, you tell Grandma Snow you’re going to stay out at my farm, I’ll tell Daddy I’m staying at the Elm with you, and right after work we’ll light out for the cave together. Say you will!”
“Come on, ladies, no shirking!” a mustachioed carder shouted as he passed through the gate, never minding that he was as late as they were. Looking at the cavernous windows of the stinking millhouse that stood ready to swallow her whole for another shift, Stefania felt too tired to resist her friend. She was too tired to even feel scared.
“All right, but only since I sleep on a floor anyway.”
Helen’s smile was bright as the bank of candles at Saint Joseph’s, as if Stefania had agreed to share a secret family recipe instead of engaging in a witchy pact. Well, even sorcerous old crones were young and happy girls once upon a time, weren’t they? Helen was the first person Stefania had ever met who genuinely seemed to believe in the stuff her nonna always prattled on about, and instead of chilling Stefania’s heart, this warmed it. Meeting Helen was definitely the closest she would ever come to knowing what her grandmother might have been like as a bright-eyed young woman with her whole life at her toes instead of her heels.

Coming back so late meant the only open spindle was right next to Frieda. The German had warned Stefania against working beside her, but the great whirring machine muffled the girl’s insults into canine grumbling. Before she met Helen, the bitter inflection alone would have ruined Stefania’s shift, a harbinger of the true unpleasantness to follow when they were alone in their room, but knowing she would soon escape Frieda’s wrath for at least a night, she found herself almost enjoying the girl’s muted abuses. Maybe it was the conversation she’d just had with Helen, or maybe it was the floaty, disconnected sensation that came from fasting, but Frieda’s droning reminded Stefania of her nonna’s incomprehensible murmurings when she was blessing her favorite grandchild.
“What kind of blessing?” Stefania had asked after obediently kissing her grandmother’s skin-warmed necklace, her voice just as low so her parents wouldn’t hear what they were up to in the old woman’s cramped kitchen.
“Bad practice to ask,” Nonna had said, tapping the little scar on Stefania’s forehead that she always told her would let her wits slip out, if she wasn’t careful. “You’ll learn, in time, if it comes to pass. You’ll have to be good, though, good and clever both.”
“I’ll try,” Stefania had said, knowing it was neither good nor clever to automatically pledge to be both.
“Of course you will!” Her grandmother had turned back to the ribollita she was ostensibly teaching Stefania how to make. “You’re a Margheriti woman, after all, and the deserving find helpers everywhere. You’ll do as fine on the wrong side of the sea as you do on the right.”
“I don’t want to go.” Stefania had repeated the same invocation she had unsuccessfully tried on her parents. “I want to stay. I could take care of you. Somebody has to.”
“And somebody does,” her nonna had said, but her eyes were shimmering like the oil she skated around the saucepan. “Just as I’ll be watching over you, until you learn to watch over yourself. Things won’t be so bad on the other side, you’ll see. They never are.”
“I’ll come back,” Stefania had promised herself and her nonna. “As soon as I can, I’ll come back.”
“I’m sure you will, if the moon is right—now chop that onion!” Nonna’s way of signaling the conversation needed to turn to supper. That had been the last time they’d ever spoken alone, and Stefania had been too nervous to ask if the moon was ever wrong.

The sun had nearly set by the time they reached the cave. Stefania’s heart pounded, and not from their hike—after all of Helen’s talk of their destination being atop a great big hill, Stefania had expected an arduous climb through the forest, but compared to the steep slopes back home, this gentle hummock beneath the maples and birch felt anticlimactic. Until Helen triumphantly pointed at the black opening that yawned in the modest rise. There had been no trail to follow, but ever since they had left the road out of town, the local girl had led them unerringly to this place.
The cave looked smaller than Stefania had expected, a bolthole in the humble hillside barely big enough to accommodate the bundle of blankets her stocky friend had stashed along the roadside that morning on her way to work. Then Helen dropped down and wiggled inside after the bedding without even checking for snakes. For a moment it looked like she was actually stuck in the tight opening, the hem of her long calico dress kicking up around her calves as she squirmed in place, but then she was through, leaving Stefania alone in the darkening forest.
It felt like waking from a dream, the abrupt clarity of where she was, what she was doing. She should be at Mass, preparing for Trinity Sunday, but instead she stood shivering at the mouth of a witch’s church. The second day of fasting in a row always made her a little delirious, and between the arduous work in the spinning room and then the march out of town and through the woods, she felt on the verge of collapse.
“Come on!” It sounded like the hillside spoke to her, and Stefania obediently went to her knees, then her stomach, her hands shaking as she crawled into the cave. It was everything she feared, and halfway through she realized it was too tight, that she couldn’t move forward, but when she tried to back up, she couldn’t find any purchase either, back and bosom wedged into opposing shelves. The closeness of the passage seized up her chest, making it impossible to breathe. Jagged rock scored her back like a penitent’s lash, dead leaves whispered their prayers against her kicking shoes, a light flashed in the blackness ahead, and then something clawed at her grasping hand, seized her wrist.
“Easy, easy!” cooed Helen, and as Stefania let out a ragged moan she found she had wormed herself out of the tight spot. Crawling the rest of the way into the larger opening, she lay shivering in the leaf-strewn dirt as Helen struck another lucifer. This time she found what she was looking for, lighting a dirty stump of a candle sprouting from one rough wall. In the flickering glow Helen’s healthy skin had taken on a sickly pallor, her golden hair as pale as unbleached cotton, and the hungry way she leered in the gloom gave Stefania a fresh coat of gooseflesh . . . but then her eyes adjusted, and she sat up, letting out a little laugh at being so ridiculous. Helen was just Helen, and she always looked hungry.
“What do you say we break that fast of yours?” said the girl, licking her lips as she took out the baked potatoes she had secreted away from her father’s kitchen the night before. There was some old story or other about the feast that awaited those good witches who stayed true to their fast, a grand banquet held in the wilderness and attended by the beasts of the forest and the birds of the air, but Stefania was too exhausted to remember the details. Too hungry not to eat what was offered.
As she bit into the leathery skin of the potato, she saw curling black symbols on the walls of the narrow chamber, a small aperture framed by stacked stones at the top of the rear wall. A comforting smell filled the air, like freshly turned earth warming in the sunlight, and she relaxed into the wall of the cave, felt it soften against her freshly mortified back.
“When you came before . . .” Stefania swallowed a hard mouthful of potato. “What did you wish for?”
“You have to keep that secret if you want it to last,” said Helen, the jovial girl sounding about as forlorn as Stefania had ever heard her. There was a darkness there, so black and lonely it took Stefania aback. Helen really believed this stuff, and that made Stefania wonder if she should, too. The girl handed over the canteen. “But we both know, don’t we? Just like we both know what we’re wishing for tonight.”
Stefania wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t want to disappoint her friend, so she just nodded and sipped the warm water. They ate the rest of their potatoes in silence, and then Helen uncorked a bottle of the cordial her family made for special occasions. It was so much sweeter than wine, but Stefania found she came by her taste for it naturally. She had assumed that when the time came her fear would find her, deep in the woods where any mountain lion or bear might discover them, but now that she was in the moment, Stefania wasn’t scared at all. As the candle nub gutted in the sweet-smelling fume that wafted through the window in the back of the cave, she felt ecstatic.

Stefania was with her nonna, but she also was her nonna, picking her way alone through the tall trees along the steep ridge, searching for some hidden door to the world below. High overhead the walls of Volterra gleamed in the moonlight, but her kind belonged down here, in the necropolis that was ancient before the first stone was laid in the castle above. She passed by many grand choices, ignoring arched portals guarded by winged demons with serpentine limbs, and then ducked into a crescent-shaped crevasse so tight her skull could barely scrape through. It didn’t hurt, but she could feel the scar open on her forehead—the raised half-moon she would always ask her nonna about, and each time the old woman would touch it and tell a different tale—and then she was through, into the blackness beyond.
She scrabbled in the darkness, like an animal, turning the hard earth beneath her harder claws. When the hole was deep enough, she took off the medallion she always wore, a black moon on a long black chain, and she planted her legacy in the fertile soil of the grave. As she piled the gift with prayers and dirt, an arrow of moonlight pierced the window above her, shining on the entwined girls, but neither awoke until after she had slunk past them, outside into the Connecticut woods, looking back at the mouth of the witch’s cave, where—

Stefania opened her eyes but it made no difference, the moon set or never risen on the far side of that small window. Her skin crawled at the unknown, unnamable sensation, but she couldn’t move. Something was just outside the cave, something watching them, something that had been inside but moments ago. She could hear it breathing in the blackness, the rustle of leaves as it lay down at the mouth of the entrance.
Then Helen stirred softly against her, skin and blankets sweaty in the early hours of the late spring morning, and Stefania started the rest of the way awake. Helen’s breath, warm against her neck. She sighed and almost let herself relax back into Helen, when the detail of the dream prodded her to action. The cave was small enough she could reach around without leaving the protection of the blankets, the hard-packed earth cold against her questing fingers . . . until she brushed the mound of loose dirt, warm and soft to her touch.
The depression wasn’t very deep, and as soon as the chain brushed her fingers, she felt a charge more powerful than anything at work in the mill course through her body, electrifying her in ways that not even Helen had. She felt the familiar crescent of the medallion, just as she had on her nonna’s lap a decade ago, an ocean apart . . . and badly as she wanted to put it on right then, she leaned over and hid it in her shoe instead. Not because she didn’t want Helen to take part in the miracle, but because she didn’t want to hurt her friend by proving that they hadn’t actually wished for the same thing.

Never before had Stefania had so much to confess on a Trinity Sunday. And never before had she skipped it altogether, eschewing the flesh and blood of the church for something more substantial at Helen’s farm. The girl’s father was a kindly man, but ever since Helen’s mother had passed the previous summer, he seemed perpetually distracted, oblivious to even the girls’ holding hands underneath the supper table. He was just so very glad Helen had finally made a friend at the mill, after how badly she had wanted to work there despite his wife’s insistence that she should stay and help on the farm instead. Would that Agnes were still with them, she would see their daughter had been right all along.

The whistle. Stefania was on her feet before its trill had faded, staggering around her room and throwing on her least dirty dress, wadding up her hair under a net. She couldn’t believe she’d overslept, but it was no surprise that Frieda had slipped away to work without waking her, no doubt hoping Stefania would accrue another demerit for tardiness. As she gave herself a perfunctory glance in the vanity mirror, she gasped, her hands flying to her sunburned neck—the necklace she had finally allowed herself to clasp into place before falling asleep the night before was gone. She scoured her tangled blankets on the floor, searched everywhere even though she felt the weight of futility bear down on her. It was gone.
A dream. Of course. Whether from cordial or witchcraft or plain old exhaustion, the entire delirious weekend had been one fever dream. She gave up the search for the necklace that never was, hurrying out the door, but as she passed Grandma Snow in the parlor, the landlady called, “Stephanie, dear, may I have a word?”
“I’m late,” protested Stefania, almost barreling past the old woman, but then remembering herself. “I mean, sorry, of course. How can I help?”
“I won’t keep you,” said the kindly matron. “I just wanted to say that while it’s nice that you and Frieda are such close friends, I don’t want to see you put yourself out, is all. I know this is your first time living on your own, and while that is exciting, it comes with its own responsibilities.”
Stefania had no idea what Grandma Snow was talking about, and although a week ago she might have just smiled and thanked her for her time, now she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The necklace, dear.” Crevasses deepened around the old woman’s mouth as she frowned. “Spending hard-earned money on such frivolities for yourself would be bad enough, but when I complimented Frieda on it this morning, she told me you’d spent a week’s wages to buy it for her . . . is that true?”
“No,” said Stefania, her every hair standing on end, touched by that same deep current that had flowed through her back in the cave. Frieda must have noticed Stefania’s new necklace as she dressed in the morning and stolen it off her very throat as she slept. That bitch. “I have to go, Nonna Snow.”
“Oh,” said Grandma Snow, and she was saying more as Stefania flew out of the boarding house, something about how she didn’t think necklaces were allowed anyway, but Stefania was already gone, dashing to the mill as hard and as fast as her legs would carry her. Helen was waiting for her by the gate, apparently more than willing to earn another tardy demerit herself if it meant exchanging a brief hug and a few words with Stefania before they started their shift. The girl’s handsome smile turned to alarm as she took proper notice of Stefania’s frantic pace, her furious expression. Helen moved to intercept her but Stefania dodged around her, her rage a hawk that had spent its whole life in a cage and only now knew what it meant to fly.
Crossing the yard and barging into the millhouse, bumping past workers, the tumult of the monstrous machines was as the gentle lapping of the Willimantic beside the roaring inside Stefania’s skull. She charged into the spinning room. Frieda was lined up with the other girls working the massive spinning frame, turning and stretching the cotton roving into thread, and Stefania was almost upon her when it happened.
What it was, she couldn’t say exactly. Nobody could, not at first. And even after, the explanation didn’t help. It was just one of those horrible things that happen sometimes.
Frieda leaned forward to draw out a length of yarn from the wall of machinery, and then was yanked face first into the spinning frame. Afterward, nobody could figure out exactly what part of the mechanism had even caught her necklace, because it somehow came loose again after a few turns . . . but a few turns were enough. Frieda flopped around as she came free, pawing at the thickening red line where the black chain had disappeared into her milky neck. Her wide eyes met Stefania’s, and then her head fell back, her split throat stretched open like a cave, and there was so much blood on the cotton there was no hope of salvaging it in the dye room.
So many questions lingered. How a chain that thin could do that kind of damage without just snapping from the pressure was as much a mystery as why a mill girl with Frieda’s experience would wear a long necklace into the spinning room. She just seemed so taken with it, Grandma Snow sniffed, and though she didn’t say anything directly, Stefania could tell the old woman was judging her for having reclaimed it from the foreman after they cleaned Frieda up for the funeral.
Well, the busybody was entitled to make any judgments she wished, especially since Stefania would no longer be lodging at the Elm. All the other mill girls looked out their windows, but nobody came out to say goodbye as Helen helped Stefania up onto the riding board of her daddy’s wagon, onto the rose-embroidered cushion where her mother used to sit when they road to church. As the two girls crossed the dye-darkened waters of the Willimantic and headed back to her new home on Helen’s farm, Stefania supposed they might have both wished for the same thing after all.

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Jesse Bullington has published three novels, edited two anthologies, and released stories, reviews, and articles into such colorful landscapes as The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13, The LA Review of Books, and VICE. Under the pen name Alex Marshall, he’s written the Crimson Empire series. His work has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the David Gemmell Morningstar Award, and the Kitschies.

Illustration: Nicole Rifkin

 

The wáay’s—the sorceress’s—head detached from its trunk, jumped out of the family home, bounced around, and moved down the streets in the middle of the night. It strolled through the village among the pitiful howls of the dogs and the quick steps of the surprised passersby outside at this evil hour.
Night was catching up with dawn, but the insomniac grandmother shucked her story amid an audience of gaping children. I clearly remember her white hair, her serious countenance while she talked, and her thin legs with which she rocked lightly in her hammock, her feet on the ground.
The husband didn’t know his wife was a sorceress, explained the grandmother.
Every night the wife silently got out of bed, uttered certain mysterious words, and moved her hands in the air, above her husband’s face, so that he would sleep more deeply.
Once her husband was fully asleep, she went to a corner of the house where she settled in and the impossible happened: her head detached itself from her body and bounced to the ground. It went to the door, opened it—I don’t know how—and went out into the street for its nighttime jaunt.
Who knows if it did evil deeds to other people? Be that as it may, the fact that a human head went for a jaunt alone in the night when the village was asleep was in itself horrific. Have you heard the pitiful howling of dogs? Barks at first, then yelps mixed with howls, and in the end only baying, as if somebody were throwing rocks at them. The scariest dog desperately scratched at the door to get in. When they heard this, the elders used to softly say: “Je’e’ ku taal le wáayo’,” or “Here comes the wáay.” If any children are awake at that time, their parents immediately hush them. And the neighbors can sometimes clearly hear the ku taal u kilin—the thunderous tread—of the thing.
With this kind of incident, one might expect that the terrorized villagers would organize and search for the origin of the events until they found the house from whence came the head.
One day, a man chosen by the families spoke with the wáay’s husband: “Something strange is happening in your home. I shan’t tell you what because you wouldn’t believe me. But so that you see it with your own eyes, tonight go to bed as usual and pretend to be asleep. Put a little pepper in your eyes so you don’t fall asleep.”
So it happened, and the poor husband verified that one never knows one’s wife well enough.
“You’ll do as we say,” they told him the next day. “Tonight, when she goes out, put a handful of salt on her neck where the head comes off. She won’t be able to do anything.”
When the head went out for its nocturnal jaunt, the heartbroken husband got out of bed, sprinkled salt where the head had come off, and sat down to wait.
Very early in the morning, his wife came back, and when she went to put herself in her place to reawaken, she found she couldn’t fit on her body.
She tried several times but couldn’t return to her place. Then she began to cry, asking her husband what she’d done to him and imploring him to help her, but she got no answer.
She told him that she loved him, that she’d never done him any harm, and asked him to take pity on her, but she still received no answer. Heartbroken, she left the house and wandered around until, perhaps finding she was lost, she threw herself into a well. She never came out of it.
The body was buried, and the husband left the village forever.
Years later, in a village in the eastern part of the state, I heard a nearly identical story, though this one concerned a man, not a woman. The man without a head? a friend who had been affected mockingly asked and then launched into a speech about the nervous system, referring to the sympathetic and parasympathetic, in which he made an argument about the impossibility of a man surviving without a head.

---

José Natividad Ic Xec was born in Peto, Yucatán, and lives in Merida, the capital of the state. He worked for the newspaper Diario de Yucatán for many years, then became independent and created his own editorial project, Elchilambalam.com. He also teaches Mayan and Maya literature.

Nicole Genaille is a French honorary professor of classical languages and a specialist in the Isiac cults. She now studies Mayan and Maya civilization. She is a friend of José Natividad Ic Xec and translated his book into French as La femme sans tête: Et autres histoires Mayas (Presses de l’ENS, 2013) with notes and a postface.

Illustration: Sam Hadley

 

I rest on a bed of fine dust beneath the fridge with my mother and siblings, hidden away from the bright lights and loud swell of music that vibrates the floorboards beneath us. As the moon rises outside, its glow slicing through the open curtains of the patio door at the rear of the kitchen’s dining area, the roar of the people grows louder, more raucous. There are many more of them than the human woman and girl child we are used to sharing our home with, and they have wrapped themselves in brightly colored fabrics and painted their skin or covered their faces with strange masks. Mother says it’s a Halloween party, a rare event that will yield sweets enough to feed us all. Though I am excited by the prospect of such a feast, I know we must be patient.
The voices of the partygoers build to a crescendo of shrieks and screams, until they disappear one by one. The repetitive boom underlying the beat of the music finally stops, and the strobing lights go mercifully dim. Mother leads us out from our hiding spot into the cool dark. The only light is the flicker of a dying candle in the carved head of a pumpkin. I survey the room in one look, my eyes taking in three hundred and sixty degrees. Cupboards topped with countertops that often hold valuable crumbs tower beside me, and the dining room chairs that lead to a table potentially holding dishes of half-eaten food sit empty, but I ignore my usual feasting spots. Tonight won’t require climbing.
Mother was right about the sweets, and I follow my brothers and sisters to the scent of the sugary candy strewn across the floor, my six legs propelling me in a soundless scurry. I probe the air with thin antennae and locate a treat unclaimed by my siblings, a banded triangle of pure sugar that gives way before my mandibles. The candy is sweet and nourishing, a satisfying meal, but I scent another, different flavor close by and venture farther.
I step over the half-eaten treat, toward a human woman lying prone before me, the woman who shares our home. I scamper closer, my legs encountering a pool of warm blood that I sample as I move through it. A snarl of hair trails through the blood, and I maneuver across the strands, reaching soft skin. My feet leave footprints like the pricks of a needle across her pale cheek as I make my way toward her eyes, which stare upward, wide and glassy. Her scent and the feel of her flesh is familiar to me. She is a heavy sleeper, unlike the girl child, who tosses and turns, and when there are no food scraps, I feed on her fingernails.
Tonight, though, the woman is not sleeping, so there is no need for me to be gentle as I feast on her eyelashes, tugging them from her lids and nibbling on the mites that call the follicles home. This treat rivals even the fun-sized candy peppering the floor. A current of air stirs the cerci on the underside of my shell at the same moment that a brilliant light spoils the darkness. I turn to flee and glimpse a man in a mask, smooth and featureless, raising his booted foot and bringing it down on my fleeing mother, my brothers, my sisters. Their exoskeletons crunch beneath his weight, their creamy insides spurting out to mingle with spatters of blood.
Our numbers are our only advantage, there are too many of us. We scuttle over candy and prone bodies, back to the darkness of our safe place beneath the fridge. I savor the remnants of sugar that stick to my mandibles and front feet as I watch the man. He crouches on the floor beside the woman and removes his mask, then strokes her face. He is familiar to me, this human man who used to live in our home, too, and would disturb us with his shouts and broken things. But then he was gone, has been gone.
He uses a long, serrated knife to dismember the woman’s body, wrapping each piece in plastic. Next he moves to the girl child, who isn’t tossing any longer, isn’t sleeping tonight either. There are other dead humans, ten at least, and he handles each of them more quickly, with less care than the woman and child. My own family litters the floor among the spilled candy, but I don’t mourn them. I only wait and watch, knowing that darkness will fall again and there will be plenty left to eat.

---

Angela Sylvaine is a self-proclaimed cheerful goth who writes horror fiction and poetry. Her debut novella, Chopping Spree (2021), is an homage to 1980s slashers and mall culture. Angela’s short fiction has appeared in various publications, including Dark Recesses, Places We Fear to Tread, and The NoSleep Podcast. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Under Her Skin and Monstroddities.

Illustration: Nathan Milliner

 

I’d been obsessed with sound long before my accident. However, losing my sight—just for a while, hopefully—allowed sound to take over my life. Then it did more than that.
I was teaching audio editing and radio reporting at the University of Texas at Austin when things went wrong. I was an adjunct and the pay was trash, but the health insurance was decent and I loved the city, so I stuck with it. Like most people, I was willing to put my dreams on hold as long as there was food on the table and money to cover my bills. A crippling sense of agitated stagnation is better weathered with a full stomach.
As part of my class, students produced a news show that ran on the school’s radio station. Production began in the fifth week of class every semester. The first few shows were always messy, and putting them together meant we had to stay in the studio until late at night on Thursdays. I was driving home at 2 a.m. after putting together our fourth show, going north on Speedway, when a drunk driver in a black pickup truck barreled through a red light on Thirty-Eighth Street. I slammed on the brakes of my old SUV—of a brand that shall not be named—and the brake pump decided to take a nap. I slammed into the back of the huge metallic monster in front of me so hard that the toolbox the guy had in the bed of the truck disengaged, flew through the windshield, and stopped when it met my skull.
The aftermath of the accident was ugly. I woke up six days later and had never been so thirsty in my life. The toolbox—which was thankfully empty (the guy had bought just because he thought it looked cool)—fractured my skull and knocked out nine of my teeth. But the worst of it was that the traumatic brain injury, which doctors were surprised I’d survived, had taken my vision. In a nutshell, it’s easy to lose your sight when the front of your head caves in like an overripe melon. As the swelling receded, doctors were confident my vision would come back because my optic nerve was intact. It didn’t. The weight of possibility was almost as bad as the pressure from facing a life-changing event. I decided to hold on to hope.
The guy who flew through the red light at Thirty-Eighth Street got caught doing so on the camera mounted on the light, and he couldn’t drive away because he only had half a car left after my own vehicle ripped apart the back of his, so he stuck around. I guess the silver lining was that his daddy was a full professor at UT’s School of Law who had made a name for himself before that, so he was super nice to me because he knew his boy was in a world of trouble. Between what he gave me to stay quiet about junior’s drinking and reckless driving and what the car manufacturer paid me to stay out of court, never mention their brand, and forget about their faulty brake pump, I was set for life.
After the hospital, I went straight home. My dad had passed away at seventy from a heart attack after one too many burgers, and my mom had succumbed to breast cancer—mercifully quickly—two years before, so I was alone. I had enough money to pay for it, so I hired a woman by the name of Sandra González to teach me how to be blind. She had worked for years at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired and eventually started her own business serving recluses, agoraphobics, and rich people who craved individual attention. After ten months with her and with the help of a plethora of technological advances I didn’t even know existed, I could fend for myself. When she told me I was ready to live on my own if I wanted to, I closed my apartment and bought a recently remodeled cabin that sat on nine wooded acres out near Fredericksburg. It was far enough away from Austin to help me battle the depression that was threatening to destroy me and close enough to the city that I could get folks to bring me food and get drivers to take me to my appointments once or twice a month.
When I could see, I loved reading and watching movies. With those things gone, audiobooks became my go-to. Unfortunately, I quickly grew tired of bad readings, shoddy production values, and robotic voices that always seemed to emphasize the wrong words. I knew that if I didn’t stay busy, hopelessness would devour me, so I filled most of my time with music and strange sounds.
Recordings of weird sounds had been a huge part of why I got into audio in the first place. But as it became my job, the part of it I was passionate about vanished into the background. They say that if you work at something you love, you won’t work a day in your life, but the truth is that if you work at something you love, you’ll eventually stop loving it as much. With free time on my hands and nothing to do but listen, I went back to sound, looking for my salvation, and was almost immediately obsessed once again.
When I was seventeen, my friend Arjun sent me an email with a two-minute MP3. If you played it loud enough, you could hear what sounded like a loud, small electric motor and some beeps. According to Arjun, he’d found the clip on the dark web. It was supposed to be a recording of a hovering UFO someone had seen over a town in California I’d never heard of before. I spent the next five years looking for weird sounds online, and then did more of the same while finishing college.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with that image of an iceberg that shows how “deep” the dark web goes. Well, that image is relatively accurate, but the main difference between the dark web and the internet that everyone uses every day boils down to the tools you need to access it and the fact that, on the dark web, you have to know exactly where you’re going because things aren’t indexed. I never bought drugs, hired anyone to kill my enemies, or looked for the kind of porn that makes regular people nauseous. No, my passion was sound, and the go-to place for sound on the dark web was a place called Dark(Sound). It wasn’t easy to get there with my new computer, which worked mostly on verbal commands, but I managed to find Dark(Sound) again, and I soon realized how much I’d missed hunting for bizarre audio clips.
After having my computer read me a few descriptions, on the first night of hunting I ended up downloading two pieces of audio. The first, titled giuliaesorcismo.wav, was, according to the two-line synopsis provided by the uploader, who called himself El Demonio de Culiacán, a recording of a young woman’s exorcism in the small town of Alberobello in Italy. The clip lasted seven minutes and two seconds and ended abruptly. For most of that time, you could hear a young woman screaming, deep voices speaking a language I’d never heard before, and two male voices praying in Italian and then Latin. During the last few seconds, the sound of breaking bones could be heard just before one of the men screamed something that turned into a strangled moan. The audio quality wasn’t great, but it was clear enough to be engaging. It was an impressive piece of audio if you believed that everything you were hearing was real, but I’d heard audio exactly like it in a dozen movies, so it didn’t impress me as much as it would have if I had heard it when I was seventeen.
The second clip I downloaded had no synopsis, but the file’s name, which took me a few minutes to crack after asking the computer to spell it out for me, piqued my interest: vinieronaporgustavo.mp3. They came for Gustavo. It was a very short clip, just forty-nine seconds, but it was creepy as hell. The file, obviously a chunk of something larger, started mid-scream. However, there were things behind the screams. After importing the file into my editing program and filtering out the screams, the sounds of the background became clearer: a manly voice chuckling twice and the sound of something wet . . . sliding? After isolating that bit, I became convinced it was the sound of a knife going in and out of human flesh—or maybe a pig?—based on the small pop of the skin. I was sure it was a recording of a man getting stabbed repeatedly.
Being by yourself in a small cabin in the woods is great for relaxation, but awful once you spend almost five hours dissecting audio clips of a young woman’s exorcism and a man getting stabbed, so I managed to stay off the dark web for a few days and listened mostly to dark, multilayered atmospheric music that I knew would keep me entertained—Robert Rich, Lustmord, William Basinski.
I only managed to stay away for three days.
After my brief hiatus, I spent a week glued to my computer with my headphones on, ignoring my phone and only remembering to eat when my stomached grumbled. It was like entering worlds in which audio spoke to me, dared me to clean it up and expose its secrets. I didn’t need my sight to stay there, to be good at playing with the sound until it was revealed as a hoax, a bad joke, or the real deal. I listened to a full recording from an autopsy performed in New York City in 2018. The body in question belonged to a young man who’d been shot nine times in the face and four in the chest. The most interesting thing about it was the voice of the medical examiner, Dr. Elvira Ramírez, who sounded like a relatively young woman. As she carefully described the damage done by the bullets, her voice changed. I could hear sadness creep into her voice, and I loved her for it.
I listened to audio that had allegedly been recorded at 112 Ocean Avenue, the famous Amityville house where Ronald DeFeo Jr. brutally murdered his whole family. The recording came from ghost hunters who’d broken in right after the family who had moved in after the DeFeos’ deaths moved out. A young boy—presumably a ghost—can be heard saying “Help me” twice.
And those were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and my apologies for coming back to that image again. I listened to a group of young ladies chanting to a “White God” in an abandoned house somewhere in Ecuador. According to my research, they had all been found dead a few days after one of the girls recorded the whole thing on her phone. I listened to a Black Mass in its entirety, sacrifices included. I listened to a long, macabre clip of an unknown serial killer forcing a man to eat parts of his own leg. I listened to all sorts of chaos, mayhem, torture, ghosts, EVPs recorded in cemeteries, murderer confessions, and suicide notes in audio form. Some of it was obviously fake. Some could’ve been real. A handful of clips were the real deal, or real enough to fool my trained ears and top-notch editing software.
The days rolled by and I was having a blast. Not needing my eyes was great. Sure, some stuff gave me nightmares, but the hunt was exciting. I never knew what I was going to find. About two weeks into it, I downloaded a nine-minute clip titled theyrehere.mp3. That’s when everything changed.
The clip started with a small hiss and the amplified thumps of feet on a carpeted floor. The hiss and the way the steps sounded told me it’d been recorded on an old Zoom H4 recorder, which was the same kind we used at the university back when I started.
The stomping around ended and the first thing you could hear clearly in terms of ambient noise were the crickets. A lot of crickets. It reminded me of the sound that surrounded my cabin every night. Then a male voice came on: “What the hell are you doing, Sam?” Then came more moving around, some kind of cloth brushing against the recorder, and more hurried feet on the carpet. After a few seconds, a female voice whispered: “I set up my phone over there on the little TV table. Now I’m recording everything on that.”
“Why?”
There was more running around. The male cleared his throat. Then came the sound of something sliding smoothly against metal, which I guessed came from curtains being drawn.
“I fucking told you, Bobby! I saw those kids out there again.”
A sigh.
“The kids from yesterday, right? The ones with black eyes?”
“You don’t have to beli—”
“Fuck!”
Running feet stomped on the carpet again. There was heavy breathing. When the man spoke again, he was much closer to the recorder.
“I saw one. I fucking saw one trying to peek through the window!”
“I told you I wasn’t making it up!”
Then I heard something falling down and hitting the floor, but there was no carpet to cushion the impact and I felt the vibrations through my feet. Something had fallen inside my house. I jumped and my fingers flew to the keyboard to hit the space bar and stop the recording.
The ensuing silence wasn’t absolute. The fridge’s motor made its usual sound, the insects outside birthed their own small cacophony, and my pulse was pounding in my ears. The world is full of sounds that we ignore because we’re used to them. When we pay attention to sound, we notice those background noises, and we can also notice things that aren’t supposed to be there.
I sat and listened . . . and there was something else in that silence, a presence that quietly announced itself merely by the space it occupied. I focused as hard as I could and stayed still, trying to slow down my breathing. After months of reminding myself daily that my vision would come back and that this was temporary, the mental structure that held up my sanity over a dark maelstrom of chaos, anger, desperation, and grief was threatening to crumble. I wanted to be able to see the world around me. I wanted confirmation that I was alone and that whatever had fallen was of no consequence. Instead, I was submerged in darkness with the knowledge that something I couldn’t see was definitely out of place, and that I wasn’t alone.
After a few minutes of sitting there in absolute silence, I got up and felt for my cane, which I’d left propped against the wall, next to my desk. Sandra had told me stories of people who, after years of using their cane, learned to interpret the sound it made because it bounced back differently when things of various sizes were in its path. I tapped my cane against the wooden floor. It sounded the same as it always had.
I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. It didn’t do much to calm my frayed nerves, but it gave me something to do. After a while, I went back to the living room and used my cane to explore the floor in front of the sofa and around my desk. There was nothing there. I’d imagined the whole thing.
When I had learned to get my computer to read to me, I went down a bizarre research rabbit hole about the senses. The main takeaway was that the thing we believe to be the real world around us is nothing more than an illusion: layer upon layer of processing of sensory information and the way our expectations shape our interpretation of the information that comes from all that processing. For example, there’s a thing called the Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which the brain, desperate to see even in the absence of vision, creates bizarre hallucinations that include Lilliputians, monsters, and even cartoon characters, all of which blind people “see” perfectly clearly. Maybe something like that was happening to me, some misfiring of my senses caused by my brain trying to adapt to my new reality.
After sitting on the couch and thinking for a while, I went back to the computer and put my headphones on. Moths are attracted to the light, but I think most people are attracted to darkness. That explains our fascination with things like death, serial killers, cults, and ghosts. Audio had always been my way of satisfying that craving, so I went back to it despite the tiny voice at the back of my head whispering that it was a bad idea.
I pressed my space bar. The audio began again.
“I didn’t say you were making it up!” said the man. Underneath the sound of his voice there was nothing. The crickets had gone silent. The absence of their sound became an ominous presence. No one spoke. Both individuals breathed heavily.
“What are we gonna—”
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Someone pounding at the door interrupted the woman.
“Shit, shit, what is happening?” said the man.
The pounding at the door came back, this time constant and steady like a heartbeat. Then a sound began in the back, something akin to the low whine of a drone.
“We have to go. I . . . I didn’t tell you all of it,” said the woman.
“All of what?”
“All of what I saw yesterday.” The woman’s voice was a cocktail of fear, nerves, and remorse mixed with something else I couldn’t identify.
The sound of the drone increased steadily, gaining decibels and occupying the space the crickets had left.
“What are you talking about, Sam?” asked the man. He was afraid, but desperation had crept into his voice, giving it a sharp edge that hadn’t been there before.
“The . . . the kids. When I saw the kids out there last night? They weren’t kids. I mean, they looked like kids and I was sure they were kids at first, but then they came closer. I noticed their arms and hands even before I noticed the eyes. Their arms were way too long and their hands . . . their hands . . .”
“Their hands what?”
“I don’t know! It was like their fingers were all wrong. I don’t know how to explain it. The fingers were way too long and thin. They were mostly gray and that’s why I couldn’t make out what they were wearing. One of them came from behind a tree. He . . . he popped up about ten feet away from me. That’s when I saw their eyes. I looked back at the other ones, the ones that were walking toward the house, and they all had those same black eyes, like the man in that recording I told you about. I ran here and told you about the eyes, but I didn’t tell you about the rest because I was sure you’d either call me cra—”
There was a loud crash followed by screaming. It didn’t sound like glass, so I guessed it had been the door.
“They’re here!” screamed the woman.
The sound of the drone was louder now, and there was something inside it, something like the clicking of insects mixed with whispers. The woman screamed again. Someone ran. Under the sound of the drone and whispering voices, there were feet, slowly approaching. Six? Maybe eight? I couldn’t keep the count straight.
The sound of the drone became so loud it was uncomfortable. The voices were clearer and seemed to move around, sometimes close to the recorder and sometimes far away. They were genderless and spoke some strange, guttural language I’d never heard before. Along with them, the man and woman who’d been there were screaming. His voice was stronger, but then it turned into a wet gargle that sent shivers down my spine.
There was more screaming, but the sound, which was more like a sustained scream than a drone now, drowned out the words. Everything had been relatively easy to follow, but then the voices, steps, screams, and whatever the overpowering sound was melded into an impenetrable, complicated stridency. I would have to filter out the drone/screaming to see what was behind it. I hit the space bar to stop the audio and the screaming stopped, but the sounds of the drone—lower but still discernible—and the voices stayed. I hit the space bar again and the screaming resumed. A glitch? I stopped the audio again and the drone and the voices were still there. I took off my headphones . . . and the sounds were still there. And I couldn’t hear the crickets outside.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If that’s true, everyone is a bit insane. I started the audio again and then stopped it again twice. That didn’t stop the sounds. I pushed my chair back, kneeled, and felt around on the wall behind the desk until I found the computer’s power cord. I yanked the cord and unplugged the computer.
The sounds were still there.
The thoughts in my head were coming so fast they were running each other over. A glitch. A nightmare. A malfunction. A prank. A curse.
Someone pounded on my door. I grabbed my cane and thought about going to the kitchen and grabbing a knife, but then I heard something like branches scratching against the windows in the living room and that stopped me in my tracks.
The sound of the drone had morphed into a sustained scream and the voices I’d heard on the clip were all around me, whispering in that strange language, flying around me like insects. I screamed.
A strange sense of déjà vu came over me when I heard my door break. It was exactly like the sound on the clip.
The cabin had wooden floors instead of carpet, so I clearly heard the small feet as they crossed the threshold and entered the place. I think I screamed again, but the voices and the sustained scream were so loud I couldn’t hear myself.
I swung my cane and hit something in front of me. A second later, I felt something touching my arm. My heart jumped into my neck and I wished, again, that my sight would miraculously return, even if just to allow me to see the inhuman horrors I knew were standing in front of me with their black eyes and thin fingers.
They grabbed my arms. The sound grew so loud it felt like it was inside me, shaking my lungs and squeezing my heart. For the first time ever, I wished I could jump into the endless darkness, the only thing I could see, and let it swallow me.

---

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, Texas. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints, Coyote Songs, and The Devil Takes You Home. Iglesias’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor, and his reviews appear regularly in such places as NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Illustration: Mike Reddy

 

On the kitchen table, their new essentials: a tarnished machete, gauze, painkillers, gloves, several meters of sturdy rope, surgical needles and thread.
“Come on, Diana, it’s time to go buy Daddy’s medicine.”
There was no reply.
Diana’s mother was in the kitchen, lit only by a lamp. Ever since the city gates had to be closed, light bothered her. This meant going against the experts’ recommendations. Whoever ventured out into those streets at twilight would find houses and shops alike with their windows and doors shut tight, but all the lights blazing. Some families, perhaps getting a little carried away, even went as far as swapping out their regular light bulbs for stronger ones. She imagined all those sleepless people, hoping, eyes wide, that the bright light would ward off the jaguars.
“Diana? Diana?”
Near one of the doors to the kitchen, reinforced with newly installed locks, the red light on the alarm flashed. Some of the jaguars were clever and had even managed to outwit that. She knew every departure was a risk, but supplies were starting to run low at the house. Going out meant coming up with a strategy and weighing risks and getaway plans. A lot of people judged her for going across town with her daughter in tow. She’d simply convinced herself she had no other choice. Everybody had heard the latest rumors about jaguars tearing apart children who’d been left home alone . . . jaguars opening doors. What’s more, Diana, from a young age, had always been a very clever girl. The moment mother and daughter set foot onto the pavement, Diana would begin to study the rooftops. She was able to pick up on nuances of sound and movement, or the flicker of the moonlight in a cat’s eyes. What is a daughter anyway? An angel, a weapon, permanence, salvation? Diana enjoyed—her heart pounding—the make-believe of being a hunter on unclean street corners.
“Diana!”
“I’ll be right there, Mama! I’m here with Daddy!”
The mother carefully touched the fresh scar. It started just below her left eye and continued down her entire neck. She’d nearly bled out; the blow had almost blinded her in one eye. She remembered, with a half smile, Diana asking if her sick father had come home for good.
“No, sweetie, we’re just borrowing Daddy.”
She didn’t see anything noble about the decision to take him in. In fact, after everything, she allowed herself very few things. The house, her daughter, her sick ex-husband. It made her days expand. Night, afternoon, morning, these meant nothing to her anymore. Her heart was a fossil. Breathe in, breathe out, walk, eat, defecate—protect the offspring at all costs! And protecting meant, first and foremost, not dying or being eaten.
Refrigerator: carton of milk, bottles of water, a bit of cheese, ham, some greens, colorful yogurts for Diana. The old house, with its well-heeled past, was big enough to have an ample pantry—packages of rice, beans, pasta, sweets, and snacks. She walked silently in the dark. Her rejection of bright lights led her to scatter lamps and candlesticks around the house. She inspected the windows—wooden planks and thick iron nails; she inspected both sitting rooms. There were, they said, specific household precautions to be taken that could scare off the jaguars. Every day, while Diana played alone in her room or watched TV, her mother began a procession through the house, checking locks and boards, testing alarms, spraying doors, windows, and the yard with scented sprays and cleaning products whose odor and chemical properties, she hoped, would repel jaguars.
She went upstairs. The hallway to the bedrooms on the second floor was dark except for Diana’s flashlight. Sitting on the floor in her white dress and sandals, the little girl was holding a book and reading it aloud. Every now and then, she would stop and stare at the closed door of the room in front of her. The girl showed no sign of having noticed her mother’s approach. The light from the flashlight created a luminous shell around the girl. Shadows swirled and curved around a tiny silver castle. The mother saw herself playing one morning in the yard. The memory was so old, so very old, that she could have been making it all up. Maybe she’d dreamt it and unknowingly stitched the dream to her real life.
That house had belonged to her family for generations; it’s where she was born, where she’d cemented her legacy and seed. A small child, she looked out at the yard. It seemed enormous! Suddenly, she realized she was alone. She took her first steps. She looked back—no one. Not her father, not her mother, not her nanny or the maids, not her grandmother. She loved to run, but she was afraid—the yard ended far, far ahead, it ended in mystery. She walked a little farther, took slow steps. She looked back again. She was no longer alone. A female figure, her face impossible to make out, said, in a low, gravelly voice, like a voice that had been scoured with steel wool:
“Go, run, little girl.”
She hoped the hall floorboards wouldn’t creak.
Diana looked to her like she was made of delicate glass.
Her daughter had extreme mood swings and crying spells. They’d had to go back to sleeping in the same bed. There were feverish moments, too. Diana would rave about jaguars, monsters. And death. She had to admit that the return of Diana’s father, even in that condition, had had a positive effect on the child. She’d even started eating better.
Pride be damned—if it’s better for him to stay, let him stay!
“Diana . . .” she whispered. “Sweetie?”
“Shhh!”
She ended her story:
“. . . and after she threw the frog against the wall—yuck!—the princess saw that he had turned into a handsome prince, Daddy! And then they got married and lived happily ever after!”
Pleased, Diana closed the book, got up off the floor, and kissed the door.
“Bye, Daddy! We’re going to go buy your medicine.”
The door was locked from the outside. Discreetly, meekly, the father made himself heard.
With some force, the mother grabbed her daughter’s arm and pulled her away.

The air, or the glow, or maybe some play between the dancing light and shadows, in short, something in the surroundings of the street emanated that uncomfortable, but subtle, electricity—a certainty of how big a threat hung over their heads.
The mother could feel it on her skin.
It had been a few days since they’d last set foot outside. It was as if the city didn’t even exist until Diana and her mother arrived on the scene. The street, the city, and its invasion of jaguars were a book that you open and then set aside and forget. Diana’s mother always liked to monitor her daughter’s initial reactions. First the girl became alert, looking for any sign of a jaguar in the street. Then she would relax. Finally, a sad acknowledgment—there was a street, was it real?—washed across her daughter’s face.
They lived in a small tourist town famous for its well-preserved historic district. The mother was born and raised there, and now she was afraid of being devoured there. The only time she lived away from the town and that house was when she was in medical school. Her family still had some holdings, though nothing like those bygone glory days, with warehouses and textile and clothing stores. The street was warm and quiet. It was fairly wide and paved with uneven stones. She had always loved her street’s cobblestones, but now, in these new times, they were a problem—it wouldn’t be easy to run on that ground. Diana and her mother’s house was part of the neighborhood’s row of colonial houses, almost all of them carefully preserved by wealthy business owners or families.
Before the jaguars, both sides of the street would have been filled with little tables and chairs; people of all ages drinking, talking, smoking, flirting; regulars and tourists alike at the various bars and restaurants, with delicious aromas and colors that cut through the wee hours.
Street performers would juggle and play music; artisans, either indigenous or local, would roll out their mats and peddle their artwork and trinkets; beggars would also pass by and hold out their black and brown hands in search of some change from visitors and residents, almost all of whom were white. They would ask fearfully; they would ask furtively. Because everybody knew—Diana’s mother shut her eyes and ears to those terrible stories—about the clandestine militias who had the habit of carrying out periodic cleanup operations.
And now? Nothing.
Nothing, nobody.
Nothing.
Just that warmth, hanging in the air.
It was better not to draw their attention. The mother knew, however, that when the jaguars did decide to get you, there was no point in running. On their walk they would have to pass three street corners before reaching one of the neighborhood’s two main squares, where essential services like pharmacies, a police station, and a market still operated. They wore running shoes, the soles of which they had both covered with quilted fabric. Once again, they noticed there was still that strange contrast that had caught Diana’s attention on their first few outings. Look, Mama, look how funny, she would say, pointing at some of the houses. Because the languorous twilight, coupled later with the newly fallen night, acted as a reverse mirror, reflecting the houses that radiated the intensity of the glowing light bulbs. Doors and windows were shut with metal boards and bolts; but through the cracks in those windows and the doors, a pulsing light, a light welcoming the sleepless prey.
Some streetlights still worked; others not. In front of several of the houses and businesses, piles of garbage, plastic bags trembling intermittently.
Diana made a startled gesture to get her mother’s attention.
Movement.
The two were on alert.
Diana squeezed her mother’s arm.
The machete, steady in her fist. Show yourself! Come on, you piece of shit animal!
But the animal might also be human. There were reports of the militias breaking into houses, or charging for protection, or prowling around and raping women in the streets. Common criminals might also come out. On the other hand, radio and text messages assured that everything was under control. Without a doubt, tanks patrolled the streets. Armed soldiers in protective vests, masks, and helmets could be seen, though not often enough. It even reminded her of her adolescence, in the early 1980s, when she used to secretly smoke weed at her student movement pals’ house and go to a bar nearby that played subversive records, and every now and then got beaten up by soldiers. Just around the corner, then down an alley up ahead. The bar was over there. Long after, it was set on fire. Then it became an electronics store. And finally, a church, whose founding pastor, she’d read just before the jaguars arrived, when newspapers and magazines were still circulating, wore an electronic ankle bracelet.
On the right, around the corner . . . All the streetlights were out—only two houses glowed through the cracks.
Movements, something big and burly. Yes, something just over there.
“Mama?”
“Shh. Quiet.”
Diana had the talent and soul of an artist. At first, her mother had wanted to stifle it, pressured mainly by Diana’s father, back when they were still married. One of Diana’s most beautiful drawings consisted of moving shapes, in colors blending tones of navy blue, a leaden hue invented by the girl, and shades of black (when Diana painted in black, she was so delicate, and morphed, in her mother’s eyes, into a fairy). The movement in the drawing suggested bodies of jaguars, which in Diana’s eyes were reincarnated on the thick sheets of paper as hybrid beings of movement and smoke. Whatever lay in the darkness around the corner, moving and breathing and lurking, that’s what Diana drew and transformed.
They followed the safety instructions. The mother raised her arms, made sudden, jerky movements, snorted; she shook the blade over her head, hopped around. Anybody watching her from afar (and there were eyes peering from the windows of the houses) might compare her to a marionette. Diana also pitched in: she screamed and flickered her flashlight on and off, swinging it around at random. When they were locked inside the house, from time to time the two of them heard, from a distance, the very noises they were now making.
It worked. Coincidence?
Nobody really understands the jaguars. They already know where they came from, and when. But what do they want, besides occupying, devouring, and reproducing?
They are not ordinary jaguars by any means. Their presence has spread throughout the country’s towns and threatens to infect other countries as well. They display unprecedented intelligence and brutality; on the other hand, they have phobias and behaviors not seen in any known feline species.
Right, the mother breathed a sigh of relief, I think it worked. And in the shadows? Warmth, once again.
They proceeded.
On the next block, that house. Still abandoned. As pressing as this trip was, both Diana and her mother always glanced in its direction, however briefly. For Diana, the house reminded her of the evil castles in her comics and cartoons; for the mother, the house jerked the rug out from under adulthood, revealing a trapdoor that was always open. It wasn’t even a happy memory. It also wasn’t something she would consider a trauma, or a defining moment. The house just came to her.
The Vampire’s House.
That’s what she and her little friends used to call it. One of their games involved throwing stones at the windows and running away at full speed. They also ran whenever Mr. Khalil, the owner of the house, approached. Their families, very discreetly, had advised their children to avoid contact with the Lebanese man. Khalil owned a business in the historic district and two cheap restaurants in nearby neighborhoods. Sometimes he spoke a different language, which couldn’t be human. And, they all whispered, he’s not a Christian. He married and had two daughters, who inherited the house. Ever since the jaguar outbreak had started, however, they’d fallen off the map. Had they run away? Been murdered, kidnapped, eaten? All she knew was that the house had suddenly been abandoned. Now it resembled a shell, a carapace, something that insects shed and forget forever.
On the next block, Diana let out a scream.
“Diana!”
The mother covered the child’s face, Diana’s left arm pointing frantically at something on one of the sidewalks.
A mound of flesh and bones lay on the ground.
It was a gruesome sight, but one of undead horror. As Diana clutched at her mother’s waist and buried her face in her stomach—trembling, cornered, like a tiny crystal bird—her mother almost admired the sight of death. The dog—or what used to be a dog—lay there, ripped apart. Blood was everywhere, fresh blood. The mound was not the slithering horror of something rotting, maggots squirming; it still had a fresh glow, in its flesh, fluids, bones, its newly forsaken life force. Hours, or just minutes before, the dog had run and lived on the neighborhood streets. It had been something designed by nature, a desire.
There was only chaos on that sidewalk. Unmade beds came to the mother’s mind. Rooms destroyed by internal storms, miniature domestic storms.
This was very good, the mother concluded. Somebody’s had dinner and is lethargic, belly full.
“Come on, Diana.”
The child couldn’t move. She was still clinging to her mother, arms of steel locked around her mother’s waist. The mother looked around. They shouldn’t stand there for too long, because not all jaguars eat at the same time.
“I’ll get you some chocolates, but just today, okay? And if they have any comic books, we’ll buy those too.”
Unfortunately, the streets had no desire to spare them. Just ahead, between the end of the street and the square, a car, still running, had been abandoned. Its headlights were still on, illuminating a disembodied arm on the cobblestone street.
Shit . . .
The mother sounded the distress call. They should run past, but first she needed to check. What if someone was asking for help? She’d stopped practicing medicine shortly before the divorce, but she could still give first aid. Diana was rattled, about to lose control. Quickly, the mother took the gauze from her backpack and wrapped it around the girl’s eyes.
“Sweetie . . . sweetie! Calm down. Mama’s going to see if these people need her help.”
Inside the vehicle, a disaster. Shredded seats, blood, guts. Two children. She doubled over in agony as she looked at them there, in pieces. As she scanned the inside of the vehicle, the light from her flashlight seemed to slice through the bodies once again. There was no way anybody was still alive inside that car. My god, my god.
Then a head moved. She almost let out a scream. The passenger? No, the driver.
“Sir? Are you okay?”
She moved slowly closer to him. But when she shone her flashlight over the driver’s drooping head, his mouth was open, and a slimy black centipede slithered out. Some insects, possibly flies, buzzed all around.
With a near howl, the mother collapsed. She knelt on the ground in shock—the flashlight she was holding toppled out of her hands and spun around a few times, flickering across the empty street until it went out. Diana, without pulling off the gauze, felt around until she found her. Touching her mother’s face, her fingers got wet.
“It’ll be okay, Mama. We’ll be okay.”

And they were.
They returned home at a brisk pace. Daddy’s medicine, some supplies, cheap comics in front of the drugstore. They’d had the fortune of joining forces with a neighboring family, whom they met at the supermarket. They didn’t speak to each other; the whole group kept their eyes on the street and on the corners.
It was on the corner of their street that they came across the jaguar. Huge, one of the biggest the mother had ever seen. The animal lay down, that fulsome pose cats do, in the middle of the street. The group whispered to one another; some wanted to flee, others tried to muster the courage for battle. The mother shushed everyone.
Something was wrong. There was something very, very wrong with that animal.
“Do you hear that?”
The jaguar moaned in pain. It writhed, licking certain body parts incessantly. The group even retreated, calculating the best response for survival. But the jaguar didn’t change its behavior. It glanced at the group with disinterest and continued to moan. After quick deliberation, the group continued along the sidewalk farthest from the jaguar. Pressed together, the members of the group lined up and slid down the street in a movement similar to that of paint being squirted forcefully from a tube.
The mother, at a glance, thought she recognized, resting between the jaguar’s gigantic paws, a piece of clothing worn by one of the victims of the abandoned car. A frenzy of death and bloodlust churned the woman’s stomach—the group, Diana in particular, watched in terror as the jaguar came closer and closer, staring the woman down. The jaguar didn’t try to defend itself—it rolled onto its back, lifted its paws, and, groaning, offered its neck.
She raised her blade, but held it there, because Diana clutched at her mother and screamed:
“Mama! Mama?! Mama?! Please, no no no no!”
The cat’s entire body was reduced to painful spasms.
She felt rescued from a nightmare. She was ashamed to look directly at her daughter, whose face was pale. She slipped from the attack position and turned her attention to the jaguar. She, and it was a female jaguar, had a golden coat with irregular dark spots that looked so soft and beautiful to her . . . She held back an almost automatic urge to pet her. The jaguar’s cries of pain were interspersed with a purring sound, like that of any house cat; although the jaguar was wounded, the purring had depth and power. And a heat emanated from the jaguar. The smell of life mixed with the strong odor of blood.
The mother was able to get a better look at the wounds from what she assumed had been a fight. Let’s get out of here, come on, let’s go, somebody said; or was that her instinct speaking, her perception of risk? But was there any way back now? Diana, weeping, felt pity for the jaguar. Was there room in that child’s heart for another act of mercy? Mercy in her disappointment, stamped with her mother’s name and face? It’s just that the jaguar had become unescapable. If there were an attack, if the jaguar awoke in a fit of rage, or in a defensive reflex for not quite understanding those two human females, there would be little hope for mother and daughter; they, of course, would try to defend themselves, flee, kill, survive. But no, the jaguar wasn’t unescapable for that reason. It’s not that Diana and her mother were positioning themselves for a sacrificial suicide on top of a mountain. Pain, anxiety, and fear coursed through the bodies of those three females in such a way that an invisible bond committed them to a new story, a story woven in an unknown but profound language.
Angry at herself, and under Diana’s proud supervision, the mother cared for the jaguar. The animal understood her care. She did not threaten them at any moment, allowing the mother to apply anesthetics and antibiotics, and to suture her wounds. After her treatment, the jaguar leapt to her feet, scaring her caretakers. Nothing happened. She just crept along the street purring, glancing back one time, before she disappeared into the night.
Back at home, the mother kissed Diana several times and hugged her. She tousled the girl’s curly hair—just like her maternal grandmother’s—and wiped her face. In the kitchen, the groceries were strewn across the table. A chair called to her. But she knew that if she sat down, she would pass out from exhaustion. Better to get everything sorted first.
After putting their things away, they went down the hall.
“Do you have the key, Mama? Can I open it, can I?”
“You know I’m the only one who can open the door, sweetie,” she lied.
She took the key—heavy, long, with a heart-shaped adornment on the end—and slid it into the latch, then slowly unlocked and opened the door.
Diana tossed the medicine through the bedroom doorway—half a kilo, partially unwrapped, of raw, bloody meat. In the domesticated darkness of the bedroom, feline eyes emerged. Glowing and hungry.

---

Cristhiano Aguiar is a writer, critic, and professor originally from Paraíba, Brazil, and now based in São Paulo. He was named one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists in 2012. His work has been published in translation in Argentina, Ecuador, the US, and the UK.

Zoë Perry’s translations of contemporary Brazilian literature have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Astra, Latin American Literature Today, and The Paris Review. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a literary translators’ collective.

Illustration: George Wylesol

 

Gary put his car in park and shut off the engine. It idled for a few seconds, then was still. It reminded him of a death rattle. He grabbed the bouquet of artificial flowers and got out of the car. Slamming the door was a necessity, not an expression of his current mood. If he didn’t, the door wouldn’t close properly. The November wind swirled around him, picking up a few leaves and spinning them in a pirouette. Gary paused, watching those leaves tumble and twist. When he was a child, his grandma had said dust devils were actually people we loved who had gone on trying to pierce the veil. Back then the idea had seemed funny. An old wives’ tale from an old wife. Now, as he started for the cemetery, the notion made his stomach convulse.
The H. T. Barlow Cemetery was used by three different churches to bury their dead. Gary hadn’t been much of a churchgoer before taking his five-year fall and he hadn’t gone at all since he’d gotten out, but his mother had been a faithful congregant of the Holy Church of the Redeemer, Red Hill County, Virginia. His aunt had written him and told him that this was the place his mother had spoken of often. This cold, deserted corner of the county bordered by beech and oak trees was where she wanted to rest for eternity she said, as the lupus turned her own body against her. Gary had tried to get out on a furlough for the funeral, but when you’ve been convicted of beating a man to death over a card game, the state doesn’t see you as a viable candidate for mercy. He’d gotten parole on his manslaughter charge a year and one day after his mother had finally, mercifully, died.
His aunt told him his mother had been buried in the far corner of the cemetery, near the edge of the forest. The first time he’d come here last summer he’d searched for about an hour before he finally found it. He’d been expecting to see some kind of headstone but his daddy hadn’t gotten around to getting one yet, so the only thing that marked his mother’s final resting place was a small square aluminum sign with her last name and date of birth and death stamped into the pliable metal. A complimentary gift from the funeral home. Gary had finally saved enough money working at the fish house to put a flat granite headstone at her grave earlier this year for the anniversary of her passing. His daddy had seen him at the gas station and commented that it was a nice stone.
Gary had nodded and gotten in his car, feigning tardiness for a commitment that didn’t exist.
Brown grass crunched under his feet as he made his way to his mother’s grave. He gripped the flowers tight in his massive hand. It never got any easier coming out here. It never got any easier saying the words “my momma is dead.” When they had pronounced him guilty (not of the murder the prosecutor had wanted but of the manslaughter his state-provided attorney had pushed for with herculean effort), his daddy had been at Sailor’s getting drunk. His mother, on two canes and her face swollen and puffy from steroid injections, had screamed out to God asking why he’d let this happen to her boy.
The bailiff had shushed her, which had drawn the ire of the gallery. His mother, who had prayed for him every night, who had gone to church every Sunday until her legs stopped working, who read the book of Job for life lessons, had experienced her first crisis of faith that day. The fact that he had caved in Sully’s head with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s had done nothing to lessen her faith in his innocence. Sully was a known wife beater and womanizer and minor drug dealer. Hadn’t Gary done the world a service putting him in a hole?
Gary knew he hadn’t acted out of righteousness that night. He’d told his mother that things had just gotten out of hand, but that was unequivocally a lie. He’d gone to that game specifically to kill Sully. Nisha had confessed how she’d paid for her last hit of horse. How she and Sully had made an arrangement. From the moment the words had left her mouth, Sully Morgan was a dead man. Gary wasn’t a hardhead or a small-town gangster. He’d been a manager for the big hardware store in the next county. But he had a temper. A temper born from a crucible formed by his father’s irresponsibility and his mother’s illness. A rage lived in him that was stoked by the years of having to track down his daddy when his mother had a bad spell with her illness. Of seeing his daddy in the arms of other women while his mother needed help to the bathroom. Of watching his mother decline inch by painful inch and still calling on a God that seemed to have gone senile. When his wife had told him she’d paid Sully with her mouth, the weight of that rage was like gravity pulling down to a singularity in the black hole of his heart.
His mother’s faith in him, like her faith in the Lord, had been sadly misplaced.
Gary cut across a few graves with headstones so weathered the names had all but disappeared, when suddenly he stopped in his tracks. There was a figure standing at the foot of his mother’s grave.
He knew that figure, knew the subtle slope of its shoulders. The way the head seemed perpetually bowed and leaning to the right.
Gary took a deep breath and continued on his way. When he got to the grave he spoke to the figure in a voice that sounded alien to his own ears.
“Daddy.” Was all he said. The thin, stooped figure shrugged.
“She always wanted to go to Dover for her birthday. See a show. Play on the roulette wheel. Stay in a nice hotel. We just never had the money,” his father said.
“You mean you drank the money up,” Gary said. His daddy shrugged again.
“Yeah. I drank it up,” his daddy said.
“I’m just putting some flowers out here. You stay as long as you want,” Gary said. He squatted on his haunches and stuck the plastic stake at the bottom of the bouquet into the ground.
“It was hard watching her, watching what that shit did to her,” his daddy said.
“Not as hard as it was for her living with it,” Gary said.
“Things got really bad when you was gone. Worse than you could think,” his daddy said.
The words came out slurred. Gary had checked his watch before getting out of the car. It was half past ten in the morning. When he stood he could smell the whiskey coming off his father. A sickly sweet scent that instantly transported him back to his childhood. The smell of whiskey, the rough sandpaper of his daddy’s cheek as five-year-old Gary kissed him before going to sleep for the night. The hushed sounds of his mother and father arguing as he drifted off to sleep.
“You was treating her like shit before she got sick. Cheating on her. Stealing her money. You tell yourself whatever you want but don’t say them lies here. Not today,” Gary said. There was an extra bite in his speech that frightened him. The rage was stirring in its cage and the bars were fragile as tissue paper. He didn’t want to get into it with the old man while they stood over his mother’s body on her birthday, but the audacity it took for him to say it was hard watching her? He had more nerve than a toothache to even think that, let alone say it.
“That’s how you talk to me? I’m your daddy. You think you know everything, don’t ya? You think you know what went on between me and my wife?” his daddy said. He’d straightened to his full six-foot-three height. He was just as tall as Gary but only half as wide. Gary balled his hands into fists. Was fury the only gift his father had given him?
“Your wife? She was my momma! And you treated her like you was ashamed of her!” Gary said. He squeezed his fists so tight his knuckles cracked. His father lowered his head again. The momentary strength of character he’d exhibited had ebbed.
“I was never ashamed of her. You don’t remember how things was before she got sick. I loved her, boy. Your momma was the woman I wanted to have babies with from the first day I saw her. But she had a devil in her. You don’t remember her throwing lye at me when I came home late from Timmy’s birthday party? Or the time she put her foot on top of mine on the gas pedal when we was coming home from the store? Or how about when she slapped me so hard she loosened my tooth? That was why I used to drink. That was why I went out. I loved her but she could flip on you like a switch went off in her head. Where you think you get your temper from? Huh? You ever see me put my hands on her? Ever? Then she got sick and that devil inside her got quiet. She turned all that energy on the church. But by that time, I had crawled in a bottle I couldn’t get out of. She was my wife long before she was your momma. I knew her like you couldn’t. Child shouldn’t have to know their momma that way,” his daddy said.
Gary unfurled his fists. What his old man was saying was obviously a lie. Wasn’t it? He’d never heard his mother say a cross word to his daddy. True, she had said harsh things about his daddy, but that was after he’d been gone all weekend and come back smelling like a brewery. His daddy was lying.
He had to be.
“I ain’t come here to argue with you,” Gary said. He wiped his hands on his jacket and headed for his car.
“I loved her, Gary. If I didn’t love her, how could I have done what she asked me to do?” his daddy murmured.
Gary stopped. He turned and faced his daddy.
“What are you talking about?”
“You wasn’t there. They’d locked you up. You didn’t see the bedsores. Didn’t see the way her legs twisted like pretzels. How the steroids swole her up like a piece of sausage. I didn’t want to do it, I told her. What was I supposed to do without her? How was I supposed to go on without her, knowing what I’d done?” his daddy sobbed.
The sound of a rabbit in a snare trap.
“What are you saying?” Gary asked. His voice was baby-skin soft.
“She asked me to do it. She couldn’t do it herself. Her hands had stopped working. They buried her out here and I just wanted to get in the casket with her. I didn’t want to do it!” his daddy moaned.
Gary seemed to be watching himself from a seat in a theater. Watching as he walked over to his daddy. Watching as he put his hands around the old man’s throat.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?” he screamed. The echo reverberated off the trees and the tombstones.
“She wanted to be done with it,” his daddy gasped.
Gary saw that his daddy was crying.
He felt tears on his own face as well.
The wind blew harsh and cold through the garden of stone in which they stood. Like the breath of an ice god come down from a mountain, snatching away the warmth of Gary’s body even as he squeezed his hands around his daddy’s neck.
Even as he saw his father’s eyes roll back in his head.
Heard the rattle in his throat.

---

S. A. Cosby is a best-selling, award-winning author from Gloucester, Virginia. His books include Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. 

Illustration: Lucinda Rogers

People tell this story:

An elderly widower had a beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter with a serious eye problem that no doctor could cure. Time and again he had visited the healer’s house to ask for help, but the man had refused to see him. Eventually the girl went blind and the widower decided to make one more visit to the healer, who on hearing his story interrupted to say: “Take your daughter to the other side of the river. When you reach the center of the next town along, wait and listen to the street peddlers who walk up and down, crying their wares, each with their own particular tune. The peddler whose cry and melody you like the most is the one who will cure your daughter.”
The man did exactly as the healer said, and at the first light of dawn he and his daughter sailed on a raft across the still river that lay between the two towns; the straight line of water made him feel calm and steady, and he was drifting peacefully from thought to thought when they arrived in the next town. He left his daughter in a guesthouse. In the center of town he found a man selling wildflowers whose musical cry pleased him as much as the colors of the flowers, which were as bright as fireflies. He bought his daughter some tiny yellow ones, the brightest of all, and asked the man to come to the guesthouse that very afternoon with more flowers like them for his daughter. When the peddler stepped into the room, carrying the flowers on his back, the widower locked the door behind him. He began telling him what the healer had said, upon which the seller shouted: “I don’t care. Let me out right now or I’ll cut off your fingers like I cut these flowers in the forest this morning.” The widower, terrified, opened the door. The seller vanished and the young girl, instantly cured, thanked her father for the many yellow flowers.

People also tell this story:

A beautiful girl of sixteen was taking care of her melancholy widowed father. One night, the girl had an upsetting dream about searching for her mother in the forest until after dark. She came upon a swarm of fireflies in the tall, dry trees; as she watched the ones hovering among the low branches, all of a sudden she thought she saw her mother behind them, in the trees in the distance, but the fireflies’ movements meant she lost sight of her. The next morning, the girl didn’t want to make her father sadder by telling him her dream about not being able to see her mother again, so she kept it to herself. That night she began to have a serious problem with her eyes that no doctor could cure. There was a healer in the town, a short-statured man who liked a drink, often spat when he spoke, and was famed for his psychic powers. People knew that moonshine made from roots sharpened his powers, and that he ate mushrooms from the forest to refine them yet further. Time went by and still the healer wouldn’t see them and the doctors couldn’t find a cure for the girl’s problem, until one morning she awoke without leaving the dark night behind her. The father suffered in silence when he saw that his daughter had lost her sight. She wanted him to be as strong as a rock, but at the sound of his voice she knew he was broken. In her blindness, hearing became her guide, and one of those afternoons her father’s voice said, with gusto, interrupting her thoughts: “There’s a present I want to give you, my dear, but we must go to the next town. Tomorrow at the break of dawn we’ll cross the river on a raft.”
The girl did as her father said, and they sailed on a raft across the murky river that lay between the two towns. The winding, unsteady line of water put her on edge; she sensed the risk of falling, even submerged as she was in that darkness, as if she had always been in its midst, but she enjoyed the feeling of bobbing up and down, the unpredictable shape of their journey through the darkness, and the anxiety, she thought, of not knowing where they were going. She followed her father’s voice and they soon reached the guesthouse, where he told her to wait. The girl fell asleep in a chair, her head on a wooden table beside a still-warm hearth. Her arms were framing her face when the sound of a slamming door woke her: she saw a great many, too many yellow flowers, just like the swarm of fireflies in her dream that had kept her from seeing her mother again. As if despite her failure to see her mother again in the dream or at that moment, the blindness had been no more than a still, murky parenthesis.

---

Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor. She is the author of the novels Todo o nada (All or Nothing, 2009), which is being adapted for the screen, Cuaderno ideal (Loop, 2021), Brujas (Witches, 2022) and a book of short stories, Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognized by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under forty years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America.

Annie McDermott is a British translator whose work includes Empty Words and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translated with Carolina Orloff), Loop by Brenda Lozano, Dead Girls by Selva Almada, and The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías. Her translations, reviews, and essays have appeared in Granta, The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement, and LitHub, among others.

 

We got the gig from our singer Gary’s cousin, who was in the music business. Or actually he was still in junior college now, but he was moving to Nashville in the fall to go to Belmont, where they had a music business school. I was very impressed. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as music business school.
I was seventeen and it was summer break, July, and nobody had anything to do. I’d been fired from my job at a drive-through frozen custard stand, which was really just mediocre ice cream, for having a bad attitude. That’s what my supervisor said, after my first week. I showed up for work and he sent me home, then he called my house and said, “Sorry, we have to let you go.”
“Why?” I said.
“It’s just not working out.”
“Why?”
“Because you have a bad attitude.” Then he hung up.
I was shocked. I wasn’t rude. I didn’t talk back. I didn’t even really hate the job that much. All I had to do was wear a headset and take the order and then take the money and then hand the change back and then hand the food over. Sometimes I wished customers in the drive-through would have a fender bender and fight over it. Maybe that was it. I spent the whole night afterward riding through the neighborhood, flashing my brights at deer on the roadsides, wondering what in the hell was wrong with me.
Anyway, I got fired and I had nothing to do. Aaron was mowing yards, so he was free at night, and Lord only knew what Gary did for money, but somehow he always had some. So Gary’s cousin shows up and tells us he can get Stockholm (that’s our band) a gig “out of town,” and of course we said yes. So what if it was only in Greenville, Mississippi? That was two whole hours away. Might as well have been New Hampshire. It was more than half the way to Memphis, for Christ’s sake. And like Gary’s cousin (his name was Steve, I should have just called him Steve) kept saying, it was in a club. Like, with a real PA. The only place outside of Gary’s bedroom that we had ever played was this one youth group coffeehouse event at church, and it was awful.
We didn’t have a van or anything, so we just had to take Aaron’s dad’s pickup truck, load the gear in the back, and hope it didn’t rain. The radio worked, but only the passenger window rolled down and there was no AC. Like I said, it was summer in Mississippi, so we’re talking temperatures in the upper nineties, even at night. I didn’t care though. We were headed north to play a show in an actual club, where people would come to see us. Our very first out-of-town gig.
“This is how it starts,” said our singer, Gary. He was the one with the talent.
“How what starts?” I said.
“Our career,” he said. “Our whole fucking lives.”
Sweating in a pickup truck with three other dudes didn’t seem like much of a life, but whatever. After a few shows we would get a van, then when we were really big, a bus. Hadn’t 3 Doors Down been from the coast? Sure, they sucked, but that just proved the point even more. If it was possible for them, it was possible for anyone.
We stopped at a gas station and I bought a Coke Icee and a corn dog and a pack of Twizzlers. I was starting to get excited.
We pulled into town around sunset. Greenville was all gray and busted and falling down, a wreck of ugly and broke, right up until a series of ancient mansions rose up like ghost cavalry out of the soybeans. One minute there’s an old guy asleep on a porch with flies on his beer, and the next you’re in a sea of gazebos.
All the streets were named after Confederate generals. The sidewalks were cracked, with little tufts of yellow weeds squeezing through, trying to be pretty. Most of the stores were shut and bolted. An old white man rode by on a bike, his bony ass hanging out of his blue jeans. Aaron honked at him, and he gave us the finger.
The club was called the Hangar and we passed it twice before we found it. The parking lot was full of busted beer bottles and old Wendy’s bags. A stray cat huddled under a truck, waiting out the sun. The back door to the bar was open, and I followed Gary inside.
The Hangar was shocking. I’d never been in a place like it before. The barstools were crooked and the bathroom had a chicken leg on the toilet seat with a hypodermic needle floating in the bowl. My shoes stuck to the ground with every step, and the whole place smelled like BO and spilled beer. The bartender had a bulldog with one eye who lay there, belly to the floor. A broken-looking mechanical bull sat crooked in the back, surrounded by a sea of soiled mattresses. Pink lacy panties hung rotting from the ceiling fans. There was an old jet turbine in the corner, for atmosphere. I wondered where they’d gotten it. I wondered who would have gone through the trouble.
The club owner was a guy named Poe. He had a goat beard sprouting off his chin.
“You boys are on for two sets,” he said, “one from nine to ten thirty, the other from eleven thirty to one. In between there’s a wet T-shirt contest. You play your cards right, some of them girls might come home with you.”
“Sounds great,” said Gary. “We’re your boys.”
“Better be,” said Poe. “Look like a bunch of queers to me.”
He walked off.
“How are we supposed to play for three hours?” I said. “We only know eight songs.”
“We’ll just play every song twice,” said Gary. “Or three times if we have to. That’s what the Beatles did in Germany. That’s how they got so good.”
“But we’re not the Beatles,” I said.
“The Beatles suck,” said Aaron.
“You guys are idiots,” said Gary.
We unloaded our gear and lugged it in through the back door and up to the stage, which was only about a foot off the ground, tucked in the back of the room. Everything seemed to have survived the drive. I gave my bass a good thump, and the low end thudded all the way down to my toes.
Gary asked Poe if we could soundcheck.
“If you want,” he said. “PA’s over there.”
There was only one mic, for vocals, and nothing for the kick drum or snare. That was fine. Aaron was the loudest drummer I’d ever heard in my life. At practice we begged him to play softer, just so the neighbors wouldn’t complain. Gary did a mic check, and we blasted through a song. We actually sounded pretty good. It was amazing to hear our own songs belted out into a bar, a real actual bar. I started to feel a little bit okay.
“What do we do now?” asked Aaron.
That was a good question. It was still an hour and a half before we were supposed to go on. Poe vanished, and the bar was completely empty. I went over to pet the bartender’s dog and he lifted his head and growled at me.
“Might want to stay back from him,” said the bartender. “He’s a sweet boy, but he’ll rip your nuts off.”
I let the dog be. Gary figured it was lame to stand around onstage like a bunch of assholes, and since there wasn’t any greenroom that we knew about, we went back outside and sat on the tailgate of the truck, watching the night come on. Slowly the moon poked out and gave some mystery to the parking lot. Potholes became faces, greasy puddles became mirrors, mangy dogs turned demon in the dark. The moon can do stuff like that. It’s like the moon is a beautiful woman who walks into a room and makes you feel like a king just by noticing you. In the right kind of moonlight, anybody can be the Beatles, or at least a third-rate Deftones.
Back in the Hangar things had gotten interesting. The place was split into two rooms, a bar space with booths and a stage area, connected by a big open archway. The bar was hopping, sort of. A few old guys sat drinking at the bar. A lone woman in a cowboy hat smoked a menthol. At least there would be a crowd for us.
I started to get nervous, and suddenly I had to pee. Too late. It was time to go on.
We kicked into the first song a little fast. Aaron broke a stick, and Gary’s guitar was kind of out of tune. My bass was fine. I played the parts just right. I pulled my hoodie on, even though it was hot as fuck in there, just for effect. I hoped it looked cool.
When we finished, nobody clapped. It was almost like we hadn’t been playing at all.
Still, some people were starting to show up. Old guys, sure, but also young dudes in cowboy boots who were around our age, or maybe a few years older, with their hot redneck girlfriends in tow. One of the young guys got on the mechanical bull and the thing jolted into action, half-assedly slinging him around while he laughed and made fake cowboy noises. It didn’t seem much of a bull to be honest. Not much fight left. Any moment they could unplug that mechanical bull and walk it out to the junkyard forever. I got distracted and flubbed a chord change and Gary shot me a scowl, so I put my head down and stared at my shoes, trying to look cool again.
We finished, and still nobody clapped. Song after song, nobody clapped. They barely even looked at us. It was like we were too negligible even to boo. I started to get that peripheral feeling again, like the universe was some other world where things happened, and I was a kind of human breathing ghost. At least when we’d played at the church coffeehouse an old man had covered his ears and frowned. A little hate is better than nothing.
By our sixth song, I was so depressed I couldn’t even look at the crowd. At least this one was fun to play. It was called “Drone Gods of Middle Earth,” and it was probably about war or something. It was loud and fast, our heaviest song, and it was so easy I could play my bass part with one finger. You could really headbang to it, is what I’m saying. If anything was going to get the crowd’s attention, it would be that one.
Across the room two women crawled onto the mechanical bull. One had black hair and the other’s was a fake-looking orange. They were both gorgeous, in that specific way only small-town redneck girls with fake dyed hair can be. You either know or you don’t.
The bull got to bouncing.
I don’t know. That’s when something strange happened.
Maybe it was a change in the air, an electric fuse popping in the bar somewhere letting out some magical spark, or maybe it was just the frustration of not being heard. Maybe it was the magic of those two women on the mechanical bull, I don’t know.
But all of a sudden we sounded great.
Gary was screaming his balls off, and Aaron hit the drums harder than anything I’d ever thought possible. Even my little Ampeg bass rig was shuddering the earth beneath me like a whole squadron of thousand-pound war elephants. I felt historic. Fuck the Beatles. Fuck even the Deftones. We sounded like goddamn Hannibal storming the Alps. I climbed up on my bass amp and took a leap off, landing perfectly on the beat, like a fucking badass.
Everyone in the room could feel it too, even if they weren’t watching us, I just knew it. We were all locked in, all moving together, even the cowboy guys with their backs to us tapped their feet to the beat. The two women on the mechanical bull kept gyrating, moving in time to our music too, like even the bull had caught the beat, puny as its bucking was.
The black-haired woman pulled the orange-haired one’s top off. She had big titties. In the bar lights they looked glowing, radioactive. The whole crowd roared, and people started throwing beer in the air. I’d never seen an actual titty in real life before, not since I was old enough to know what a titty was. It was incredible, the whole thing. I watched the bull putter out, defeated, and the two women raised their arms up in the air, breasts free and beautiful. Then they leaned into each other and kissed, long and slow. Not in a show-offy way either, but in a way that seemed like they meant it, like it was the best kiss of their whole lives, the weird barroom lights on them, everyone cheering, surrounded by bar trash and stained mattresses.
All soundtracked by us, by my shitty band that had just figured out how to be the greatest band on the planet.
That’s when some drunk guy, probably the orange-haired woman’s boyfriend, walked up and grabbed her by the shoulder, yanking her right off the bull and onto the mattress. He stood over her, screaming at her, waving his hands all frantic. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, not over our band and its holy, righteous noise. He must have pissed the black-haired woman off, because she leapt from the bull and landed on his back. I think I saw her take a bite out of his neck. Another guy jumped in, trying to pull her off his back, and the orange-haired woman kicked him in the balls.
“Drone Gods of Middle Earth” had this one great part, a big pause right at the end of the bridge, before we kicked back into the chorus one last time. It was my favorite part of the whole song, the kind of thing you can imagine millions of people loving if you shut your eyes and pretend hard enough. I tell you, that pause was my absolute favorite thing we had ever written.
Anyways, right before we came to the pause, the guy who got himself dick-kicked turned around and backhanded the orange-haired woman in the face. I saw blood sling itself from her mouth in a red splatter across the dirty mattresses.
This was the exact moment of the pause.
In the sudden silence it was like the whole room took a breath and held it right quick. The whole bar had gone silent, still, like nobody could believe it, like a permanent line in the night had been crossed, and there was no coming back.
We bashed into the chorus one last time, perfectly on beat, the three of us playing better than we had in our entire lives. As if on cue, the orange-haired woman screamed. She screamed so loud I could hear it over our music. It was the loudest scream in the world.
It wasn’t a hurt scream, or a pained scream. This wasn’t a cry for help.
It was pure, furious anger.
The orange-haired woman wanted blood.
She leapt at the man who’d punched her, face bloody, fingers out like claws.
That’s when everyone in the bar rushed in. I mean it. The teenagers, the old guys, the woman in the cowboy hat, even the bulldog, roused like an angry god from his slumber, ripped the pants of a man wielding a busted wine bottle. It was like somebody had tripped an alarm, like this was the moment they’d been waiting the whole night for.
We finished our song. Again, nobody clapped. They were too busy beating the hell out of each other.
“What do we do?” I said.
“We pack up our shit,” said Aaron.
“Fuck that,” said Gary. “We’re not going anywhere. We haven’t even played ‘Penumbra of Sorrow’ yet.”
That was Gary’s favorite song. It was a ballad about his shitty ex-girlfriend Clara who everybody hated. It was like seven minutes long.
A tall middle-aged man in khakis came running up to the stage, chased by this fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt. I thought he was going to hit me in the face. The tall guy grabbed Gary’s mic stand and swung it like a baseball bat. It hit the fat guy in the head so hard I saw a tooth leave his mouth and arc through the air, a gory star falling.
“We’re leaving,” said Aaron. “Fucking right now.”
He grabbed half his drum kit and ran it outside. I lugged my Ampeg and hurled it in the back of the truck, Gary tossing armfuls of cords and pedals like they were junk. In minutes we had it all packed up in a heap of gear. I only had my bass left to grab.
I ran back into the Hangar.
The bar people bashed each other. The cowboy woman smoked her menthols. The bartender punched a man in a red polo shirt. It was hard to take your eyes off of it, all this chaos, like how it must have been in the universe right after the Big Bang happened and sent all those molecules flying, so they could tangle and burn and make up the cosmos. It was so beautiful I wanted to watch it forever, the way you do the first time you see a waterfall, or a burning building. Destruction and rebirth, the pure roaring energy of it all.
I heard a growl from the floor. The one-eyed bulldog. He had blood on his snout, and it sure as hell wasn’t his blood.
“Easy, buddy,” I said, backing away.
The dog ran toward me. I ducked a bleeding regular and pushed him down in the dog’s way. Didn’t help. He leapt over the man like so much debris and kept coming. I ran, cutting a path through the crowd, seeking high ground. And then I saw it. The mechanical bull.
I scrambled up the mattresses, crawling over the brawlers, until I stood atop the bull. The dog leapt up at me but I dodged him okay, trying not to fall off. He couldn’t get up top the thing. Maybe his legs were too pudgy, I don’t know. He barked at me, snapping at the air.
I was safe, kind of.
But then I realized everyone was staring.
The beat-up, the bloody, the mangled. Rednecks and lawyers and off-work nurses and whoever the hell else. Looking up at me, like I was some kind of rock star.
“Show us your tits!” yelled the orange-haired lady.
The bulldog took a running start, bounding up the mattresses, preparing a mighty leap. He was going to make it this time, I knew that, he was going to tear my nuts off.
So I did the only thing I could do. Just as the bulldog went airborne, sailing straight toward me, I jumped as far as I could, hurling myself out over the gathered crowd.
I don’t know. I thought maybe they would catch me, carry me out like a hero to safety.
They did not.
I crashed hard on the tail end of a busted mattress. I whirled around, expecting a face full of teeth lunging at my throat.
The bartender had his dog by the collar. It was snapping at me, slobber flying, trying to yank itself free.
The bartender had a cut on his cheek and his nose was crooked, bleeding.
“Get out,” he said. “Now.”
I got up and ran myself toward the exit. But when I stopped to grab my bass, I saw something there, lying on the ground. The fat man’s bloody tooth. It lay at my feet like an offering.
I don’t know why, but I bent down and scooped up the bloody tooth and stuck it in my pocket. When I got to the truck, Aaron peeled off before I even had the door shut.
“This is bullshit,” said Gary. “We didn’t even get to finish our set.”
“I think my kick drum’s busted,” said Aaron.
“What a terrible night.”
“The fucking worst.”
I crouched in the back seat, feeling like I was about to puke. Outside, horrible Greenville became the clear, cool Mississippi countryside. I looked out the window and watched the moonlight make a cosmos out of a cotton field. I couldn’t stop thinking about those two women glorious on their bull, making out to our own band’s music, to the huge crushing sound of it. How quick it had all plummeted, limbs flying, orange hair yanked out in troll-doll handfuls, while our music raged behind it, fueling the melee.
I remembered it over and over again, fingering the bloody tooth in my pocket.
This is the world, I thought. I’d heard about it, seen glimpses of it around town, maybe when my parents had too much to drink, or else when Rod’s stepdad Jonathan crashed his car into a lamppost outside my house. But never had I been so close to it, never had I been a part of it like this. I shut my eyes, and in that horrible truck bouncing down the shit Mississippi highway with a whole sky full of angels watching down, I smiled.
This was the whole world, and I was finally in it.

---

Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.

Illustration: Josh Burwell

 

The normal precautions and rules were somewhat out the window. I made my costume and had some sort of shoes I could dance in. Her costume was something with feathers—something birdlike.
There were balloons and streamers. The music was loud. You could buy beer or wine and the people that you came with soon disappeared.
I found myself with her and around other people I didn’t know, and she had about her, I thought, an aura of world-daring, except that I was not ready—that was for sure.
She gave me compliments and smiles and we had a lot of fun dancing.
She was quite a bit older, I guessed, so when she said she lived nearby, sex was on my mind.
We ended up in bed and after kissing and hugging for a while, we proceeded to the more essential part, having intercourse.
I had little experience. Eventually, I landed in the right space and then after, it wasn’t a long time, she pulled back. So at that point I was looking at her.
I didn’t have preservatives—whatever they’re called, starts with a p. Anyway, she said she had protection and I said, “So what should we do?” and she said, “Let’s complete it.” And I did reach a climax. I don’t know if she did. I just felt awful.
She was talking about continuing our relation and I said, yes, yes. So we parted and I felt something between exhilaration and shame, shame because I could not see any future with Margareta. I was not a good candidate and I did not want to give her any hope. We spoke on the phone and I was very sad.
So, do I even know why I submitted to her continued pursuit—in the end?
Ever since and years later, I have stayed on with Margareta, all the while considering myself unalterably naive.
For instance—what is it that constitutes deep and enduring affection? This remains to be seen.
And I am still bent on strictly assessing myself.
Is my background well rounded enough? Have I a passably pleasant personality?—the right combination of theoretical and practical knowledge to remain reasonably competent, acceptably up to the standard in everything that I do?
Or, can I make it look like that?
Am I qualified for my reward?

---

Diane Williams is the founder and editor of NOON. She is the author of ten volumes of short fiction and the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. Her most recent book of stories, How High?—That High, was published by Soho Press in 2021. A new collection of stories, I Hear You’re Rich, is forthcoming from Soho Press next year.

Illustration: Rae Buleri

 

I walk to the corner store in slippers and pajamas. It’s Sunday and I slept in, sort of, though not as late as I’d have liked. Early-bird habits are tough to break on weekends. The light, skittish sleep that’s only good for getting me through the night—there’s no comparing it to the deep and morbid plunges I often take into dark chasms during daytime naps. Three, five, even seven times. I’m no longer afraid to roam the musty tunnels of the unconscious. I enjoy it, actually. So I’d rather get up early, have breakfast, and take one of my heavy siestas later on, resting my head on the desk or table while the others chat, on the bus, in the library, at the temple. Sleeping at the temple is my favorite. No one can tell me off for being narcoleptic.
The sun is shining by now, setting ablaze the stone wall and its coat of bougainvillea, the façade of the orange house, the white wall at the end of the street. I should have worn sunglasses. I buy four rolls and two pineapple empanadas. I also pick up a can of salsa and a cup of beans sealed with plastic wrap and a rubber band. We’ll make molletes. I break off a little piece of bread and stick it in my mouth. It’s almost unchewably tough. I leave the store and cross the street to buy the newspaper. The soles of my slippers are flimsy and the sharp stones of the median strip dig into my feet.
A few feet from the newsstand, I recognize him. His face is on the cover of a tabloid. My hands shake as I try to extract the magazine from the line where it’s hung on a clothespin for display. The woman who runs the stand snatches away the pin, scolding me. The copies for sale are stacked to one side, weighed down with a hunk of cement. I take one and ask for the Sunday paper we always buy. My hand is still trembling when I hold out the coins. I drop an empanada as I try to press the bundle of papers under my arm while keeping hold of the bread bag, the cup of beans, the can of salsa roja.
I leave the empanada where it fell, beside a planter, for the birds to peck at. I wait impatiently for the light to change, then cross to the median strip. I’ll never be able to open one of those tabloids at home without getting interrogated, so I decide to sit there, on a metal bench. I spread out the paper and read. First I look. Yes, it’s him. The butter man, who else? “Movie Marathon,” reads the derisive headline in big white letters.
His face is barely distinguishable in the photo. Flanked by police officers, he’s dirty and disheveled, his eyes cast low. Looking like that, he could have passed for any old bum, but it’s him, I recognize the brown sweater draped over his shoulders, sleeves drooping like an extra pair of dead arms, and that blue striped shirt of his, or what’s left of it after . . . eight years.
There’s also a photo of his lair, which may be a hovel but still looks pretty comfortable to me, well equipped for forgetting all about the outside world. Just as I remembered, the walls are padded with scraps of carpet and there are posters taped up on top of each other. In a corner, there’s still the same sack filled with foam rubber, molded to the shape of his back, along with a heap of rumpled blankets and a dozen notebooks lined up neatly in a crate.
The article describes what they found during the theater renovation, joking indulgently with the ruthless humor of sensationalist journalism. He didn’t say a word. The manager, meanwhile, claims to be as shocked as anyone else: “I didn’t know, I didn’t suspect a thing. It’s like someone up and told me I had an alien in the trunk of my car. Let the authorities investigate, I have nothing to do with it.” Then he talks about preventative measures to ensure that such an incident never happens again, and seizes his chance to advertise the new concept of VIP movie theaters: reclining seats, air conditioning, surround sound. “Now lots of folks are going to want to move in with us,” he quips.

I must have been about twelve, though I’m not totally sure. I know I wasn’t in sixth grade yet. In fact, I bet it was summer break when I met the butter man. There was a whole battalion of us, maybe ten or fifteen kids, all cousins or friends or neighbors. We’d go to the movies at the Multicinema under the leadership of my sister, who was both the oldest and apparently the most mature, though I had my doubts. She’d worked hard to earn this reputation, but all she did in those days was daydream about her beloved Fabrizzio, an absolute idiot from a so-called good family who turned out to be a pathetic has-been and a humorless cheapskate. He acted as if he were doing my sister a favor by giving her the time of day, since he didn’t even acknowledge that they were a couple. Fabrizzio only wanted to be admired and my sister did exactly that. I was furious with her. And with everyone else. At eleven, being furious with everyone is a natural state, which I guess is something that doesn’t really go away, you just get tired of showing it.
I didn’t get along with anyone in the group. And “didn’t get along” was just another way of saying I didn’t fit in. I was forced to keep ranks in the freak army, and my sister, my sole ally, was busy being bewitched by Fabrizzio the moron.
The only thing that had dragged me there, besides my mother’s imploring gaze, was that we were supposed to see Robin Hood, with Kevin Costner. But no, Fabrizzio roped us all into seeing some Van Damme movie instead, God knows what it was called. Enraged, I stomped into the theater and sat all the way down in the second row, by the emergency exit, far from all the others.
During the movie, I’d turn around to look at my sister, her face fixed in an idiotic smile, pretending to be wowed by Van Damme’s martial feats as she ogled Fabrizzio. I fumed with jealousy. When the movie was almost over, I decided to put her careless contempt on full display. I slunk down in my seat so they wouldn’t see me when the lights went up. As soon as she came looking for me, worried, I would pretend I’d been overcome by one of my bouts of narcolepsy, and she’d feel so guilty that she’d forget all about stupid Fabrizzio and focus her full attention on me. It was Thursday and the theater was nearly deserted. Besides our pack of imbeciles, there may have been two or three other people sitting toward the middle and upper rows. They didn’t make much noise as they left. My sister wouldn’t stop gushing and cooing and beaming at Fabrizzio even for a second, and I fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke, the theater was empty and completely dark. “Laura,” I called, but the darkness didn’t answer. I felt as abandoned as Hansel and Gretel being led into the forest to die. Laura had forgotten about me as readily as if I were scattered popcorn, crumpled bags, nibbled paper cups.
I felt my way up the stairs and reached the exit to the main lobby. The doors were locked. From up above, I could make out the outline of the seats, the neon emergency exit sign, the smudge of the screen like a dim rectangular moon, floundering into a terrifying horizon. The emergency exit was locked, too. Out of fear or rage, I couldn’t tell which, I burst into tears.
When I’d worn myself out crying and lifted my head, I saw a slit of light alongside one of the wall panels that lined the hall, right by the door to the corridor. My senses sharpened and I thought I heard the murmur of a portable radio. Now that I think about it, I bet the butter man actually heard me crying, maybe even saw me sitting there, hunched over on the carpeted steps with my face between my knees, and waited for me to notice him so he wouldn’t freak me out. I got up to peer through the crack, which revealed a Libro Vaquero comic book and a flashlight.
I knocked on the panel, assuming it was a door and the man on the other side was the security guard. “Sir, I’m locked in,” I called. “Could you let me out?” Slowly, he rose to his feet, switched off the radio, unhooked the flashlight from the shoelace he’d hung it from, and shifted the panel to one side, like a stiff curtain. When he stepped out, he glanced around like a rodent leaving its burrow, which I didn’t find odd at the time. I explained that I’d fallen asleep, that I’d come with my sister and her friends, who’d left me behind. He used the flashlight to study my face. I couldn’t see his, but I pictured him as I pictured all security guards: flabby, gloomy men, weighed down with exhaustion and monotonous routines. “You fell asleep,” he echoed, incredulous, in a voice that sounded too alert to me, the voice of a young man. I recited my usual explanation of narcolepsy; by then I’d memorized what I needed to tell people who’d never heard of the disorder. No one knew much about any disorders in the early nineties. The butter man seemed confused or indecisive. He swiveled the beam of the flashlight across the hall without a word. I expected him to suddenly procure a heavy wad of keys, jangling them in his hands as he headed for the exit, where he’d lead me to a phone and scold my sister and parents for their oversight. Instead, he seemed apprehensive, uneasy: “This way,” he ventured, as if I were capable of hurting him. He lifted the latch on the panel and motioned me inside.
I started to doubt he was a security guard at all and felt a flash of preteen alarm. I’d received countless lectures on not talking to strangers. But there was also something that made me trust him. Was it his voice? The smell of warm butter? I stepped into his lair. I remember suddenly longing to live there myself. The space had a warm, cozy feel to it, like a blanket fort in the living room or a little tree house. But I didn’t have time to take in the details, because he led me through a narrow opening between the walls and over a thick pipe, maybe twenty centimeters around, that seemed to run through the entire theater. I could feel the sweat of the brick walls, the damp lapping at my arms like a cat’s tongue. On the other side, a pillar of light announced the exit. The butter man pressed a finger to his lips and turned off the flashlight that had shone onto my feet as we went. The mouth of the passageway was blocked by an acrylic screen. On the other side of the screen was a poster of Beauty and the Beast, which I could make out from the back. The man asked me to step aside so he could peer around the edge of the screen, although the space was so tiny that it was impossible to step aside, so he was actually just warning me not to panic when he crowded me there. That’s when I realized I should call him the butter man. To this day, whenever anyone makes a bag of popcorn I think of him, warm and feverish and fragile. A little mouse like the kind you can buy at a pet store, quivering in your open palm. A tepid creature, suffused with the scent of butter, that carefully moved the screen just enough for us to slip out.
The man went straight to the soda fountain, as if he’d forgotten I was with him. Now that there was enough light for me to get a good look, I saw that he couldn’t possibly be a security guard. He was barely taller than I was and so skinny he looked breakable. He reminded me of emaciated figures in photos from the Holocaust, an image intensified by his shapeless striped shirt and sagging pants. He opened the freezer and took out a cup of Neapolitan ice cream that he proceeded to eat in four spoonfuls. I sat on one of the stools at the counter, gaping dumbly at his every move: he opened the hot dog roller and brought the kitchen to life with the deft hands of an orchestra conductor. He placed four hot dogs in four buns slathered in mayonnaise. He looked up to ask: Onion? Dazed, I shook my head, as if a ghost were making me dinner. He pushed me a paper plate with my hot dog, no onion, and wolfed down the first of the three he’d made for himself, piled with tomato and pickled chiles. Then he went to the fridge for a drink and took out a bottle of Mirinda orange soda for me, this time without asking. I liked Mirinda. Although, truth be told, I’m not sure if I liked Mirinda already or if that’s when I developed a taste for it.
I finished my hot dog and asked if I could have another. He smiled, pleased. He took his time to assemble this one, squeezing out little waves of ketchup and mustard like in the commercials. I hadn’t yet registered how strange it was to be there. Maybe it wouldn’t fully hit me until later. All the dense darkness of the night was pooling on the other side of the glass doors. Not a single car passed by and the streetlamps were waiting for daybreak. The butter man glanced at his watch. A very elegant watch, it seemed to me, practically jewelry. He took a final swig of soda and placed the two glass bottles by the grate, I guess to avoid suspicion.
He asked if I liked horror movies and I shrugged: I wasn’t allowed to watch them, I explained. Once again, he pressed a finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow. We made our way down a long corridor that led to the different screens until we reached the very last door, a tiny room, a veritable shoebox of a theater. It can’t have fit more than thirty people. The screen was lit and showed the closing credits of a movie. He told me in a whisper to sit by the door. Minutes later, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare started to roll. After twenty minutes, I’d bitten my nails to the quick and yanked out a hangnail that hurt like a mortal wound. He left halfway through the movie and returned with a bag of popcorn, two sodas, and a cup of Neapolitan ice cream for me. Then I went out because I had to pee. By the time I came back, the butter man was gone. So was the rest of the food. I waited for the Freddy Krueger movie to end, but there was no sign of him. Suddenly I had to clap a hand over my mouth to contain my excitement: Robin Hood had begun.
I knew this was all very wrong, but I wanted to teach Laura and my parents a lesson, wanted them to worry about me for once, to remember I existed. Of course, I also wanted to see Robin Hood. The last thing I remember is Marian’s autumnal wedding, her red curls adorned with a lovely headdress of flowers and dry leaves. I vowed to myself that I’d wear one just like it when I got married, in the woods, golden leaves raining down from the treetops. I woke up a little while later, frozen stiff in the very same spot, huddling numb by the theater door in the dark. I stumbled out to the lobby. The blue dawn had started seeping through the glass doors. I reached out to touch one of the bolts. It was open. There, in the ticket booth, was the night guard, who really was exactly as I’d pictured him: gloomy, flabby, small. He was lying on some flattened cardboard boxes with the light on, fast asleep in his undershirt. I crossed the parking lot and looked for a pay phone.
There weren’t many blocks between the theater and my house, but I waited in the cold for my parents to come get me before I offered the necessary explanations: I’d had a bout of narcolepsy, Laura and the others had forgotten I was there, I’d wakened early in the morning and gone immediately to call them. Even though I was the victim here, I wasn’t spared the flurry of finger-wagging and concern, the awkward questions, the saga of how they’d looked all over for me. I was sorry I missed the earful they must have given Laura. At last came the hugs, the reconciliation, the café con leche. It’s strange how the butter man was wiped from my memory altogether, as if I wanted to keep him a secret even from myself, and the best way to keep a secret is to forget it, or at least act as if it’s forgotten.

A parakeet hops over to the empanada and pecks earnestly. Then there are two, then four. I have to get back for breakfast. I have to do something. Do I have to do something? I do. I want to, but I also have to. I owe it to him. I decide I’ll try to find the butter man.
First I have to go to the movie theater, which is near my house, as I’ve said. I shed my pajamas and slippers and put on a T-shirt and jeans. My mom says she thought I was staying for breakfast, and I make something up: I’d forgotten it was the last day to return a library book, so I’ll stop by now and eat when I’m back.
The theater has changed so much that I barely recognize it. I haven’t been back since the years I spent glancing around for the butter man, waiting for a wall panel to shift aside as we watched The English Patient or Kolya. The lighting makes the place look new, a far cry from the old bulbs there used to be, yellowed and sticky as caramel popcorn. The glass door doesn’t have those battered aluminum edges anymore, the soda fountain is a far more hygienic and sophisticated setup, and the cups of Neapolitan ice cream are long gone.
I approach one of the young guys in navy-blue shirts and ask for the manager, whose name I’ve memorized. He’s resistant at first, says he doesn’t want gossips snooping around this whole business. I suddenly hear myself saying in a low, steady voice, “I’m his daughter. I haven’t heard from him in eight years.” His expression changes instantly. Then he leads me to his office and explains with great caution that my alleged father was “not all there,” that he’d gotten very aggressive when asked to leave, so they had to “hand things over to the authorities.” He jots down the number of the precinct that’s handling the case and hands me the slip of paper. On my way out, one of the blue-shirted employees hands me a garbage bag filled with “his personal effects.” The guy’s shifty gaze says that he knew the butter man, too.
Then the manager asks me to follow him and leaves me with the head of security. This time the man offers no show of sympathy, nothing of the sort. As it turns out, my alleged father owes a lot of money in compensation for the damage incurred by his illicit stay behind the theater walls for all these years. The guy says threateningly that his lawyers will be taking legal action. I assure him that I’ll do everything in my power to straighten things out and pay what’s owed. I give him a false name and phone number and bolt for the door.

Back home, Laura’s baby wakes at the sound of the door and starts to cry. Laura peers out, furious, then steps back into the room without a word, soothing her daughter in her arms. My parents are out. I set a large pot of water on the stove for soup. Then I shut myself in my room and dump the contents of the bag onto the floor. The smell is overpowering. The butter man had hidden in there for eight years. There are photographs, newspaper clippings about movies, tons of papers, the portable radio, broken, and small shiny objects like a rhinestone earring, beads, buttons, and a little mirror with a faded photo of the actress Verónica Castro. His watch, which looks like a knickknack to me now. And the notebooks, of course. There are six of them and they’re scrawled with dense handwritten notes about movies. Anyone might think that these scribbles gave rise to the screenplay of Interview with the Vampire or Forrest Gump. He describes details, dialogues, gestures. He analyzes episodes and rewrites alternate endings, all in wild handwriting and delirious language. Suddenly I feel like I’m invading someone’s home, encroaching on his privacy. I push everything aside and go to the kitchen to season the soup. I pour it out into Tupperwares, pack the butter man’s things into a gym bag, and fill a plastic bag with the containers of food. On my way back to the precinct, I think about why on earth the butter man would have wanted to live behind a panel, next to an air vent, inside a movie theater. I wonder if they’ll let me see him, if he’ll be willing to explain, if he’ll launch into some dramatic or horrifying or delusional story. Probably not. Maybe I’ll find him so far gone that he won’t be able to speak at all.
I reach the police station. This time I tell the truth. I say I have no relationship to him and can’t pay his bail, just that I’ve come to give him his things, some food, toilet paper, shampoo. After a long wait, a woman officer takes the bags and asks if I want to go in and see him. I hesitate. Then I say no. I don’t want to. Some things are best kept secret, and the best way to keep a secret is to forget it, or at least act as if it’s forgotten.

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Ave Berrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) holds a degree in Hispanic literature from the University of Guadalajara and for several years was editor in Oaxaca. She received the Sergio Galindo Award from Veracruz University for her first novel, Puertas demasiado pequeñas (A Door Too Small). She also writes short stories and has published the illustrated children’s book Una noche en el laberinto (A Night in a Labyrinth, Edebé 2014). She currently lives in Mexico City and is writing a new novel, Tratado de la vida marina (A Treatise of Marine Life), with support from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA). Her latest novel, Restauración (Restoration), was published in 2019 in Mexico and Spain.

Robin Myers is a New York­–born, Mexico City–based poet and translator. Her translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Harvard Review, Two Lines, The Offing, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. In 2009, she was named a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC); and in 2017, she was selected to participate in the feminist translation colloquium A-Fest. Recent book-length translations include Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel, Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos, and Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek.

Illustration: Nick Stout

When yacare caiman are babies, they have herons and foxes as predators. When they’re adults, they have almost none.
—Nat Geo Wild documentary

When Amalia was twelve, she was always going over to her neighbor Celia’s house. Their families lived next door to each other in a community of country homes. When the sun went down, around five in the afternoon, Amalia walked down the dirt road that led to Celia’s front gate. She didn’t look back or to either side. She had promised her mother she never would.
That day, she had put on her white linen dress and pulled her hair tightly back, leaving her features clearly defined and letting the air caress her ears. Her friend’s house had a fence of steel bars and a white exterior of water-resistant paint. Amalia never went in through the front gate alone because Celia’s father, Silvio, had adopted a baby yacare the year before and he let it roam free in the yard. So Amalia stood outside and clapped until Celia came to the window and ran down to let her in. Celia’s mother had assured her the reptile was docile and would never hurt anyone. But the assurances of strangers never bore fruit in Amalia’s ears, so she preferred to clap.

The yacare would spend hours in a six-meter pool in the middle of the yard. At first, the reptile was very small, and whenever it opened its mouth, any visitors would give little cries of fright mixed with affection. Then it grew, as all creatures do with the passing of time. As an adult, it weighed almost fifty kilos. It pawed its way across that lawn of lush grass freshly planted by the hired gardener.

Amalia had seen the yacare up close only twice: the day Celia’s father brought it home in a box like a souvenir, and now, at the barbecue her friend’s family was hosting that afternoon. Silvio was turning sixty and wanted a big party. Celia’s mother had invited more than eighty people from the neighborhood and gotten a professional magician, one of those of the never-seen tricks. She strung the yard with gold and white garlands and hired a DJ with a thin physique and a formidable bald patch. As soon as Amalia entered the house, she told her friend that she hadn’t seen a party like that in their gated community for a long time. Celia said proudly that it was true and showed her an online tutorial for how she wanted to do her hair later that night, when the Cuarón boys got there.
Amalia and Celia ate finger sandwiches with olives and drank all the sparkling water their stomachs could hold before all their burping left them out of breath. The sun still hadn’t set, but they danced and made fun of the sagging skin of some older women who had just arrived at the party.
The yacare was hidden behind golden bars. Nobody wanted a typical isolation cage. Silvio had it specially designed: it was big and pristine. A temple. Silvio had a particular fascination with animals that walked close to the ground: he thought crawling a transcendent act. After a while, it was time for cake. Everyone came inside and gathered around Silvio, singing the familiar verses. Silvio blew out the candles gracefully and raised both hands in the air. He didn’t offer words of gratitude but downed his glass of white wine in a single swallow. He glanced at Amalia and winked. Amalia smiled. It felt good to get a look from her friend’s father at such a big moment. Some guests ate cake, and everyone else went back out into the yard. It was such a nice night. The two friends danced to a song they knew and let their hair down; then they lay in the grass and rolled around. Their faces were flushed. The youngest of the Cuarón boys hadn’t left the table. Celia was nervous. The boys’ presence had that effect. She excused herself to go to the bathroom. Amalia was left alone, surrounded by smoking adults. She noticed the grass had stained her white dress different shades of green. Her parents were probably sitting in the living room watching TV right now. She had tried to get them to come, but they hadn’t wanted to. Amalia felt strange, out of place. From a distance, she watched a woman three times her age struggle to tear a piece of meat off a toothpick. Who was she? Everybody knew everybody in their gated community, but Amalia had never seen her before. Then she realized that there were a lot of people there she didn’t know, and felt even stranger. The bald DJ changed the direction of the party and added a light show to the dance floor, awash in smells of nature. Elderly couples filled the space, moving gingerly, to the extent their spines allowed. Amalia twirled her dress and saw Silvio watching her. She decided to get away.
She took the opportunity to walk over to the yacare’s cage. For the past year, she had been fascinated by her friend’s pet. Amalia’s mom made fun of Celia’s parents, especially Silvio: “A yacare? Seriously? My God. So pretentious.”
With the rest of the yard decorated, inside that big cage the animal looked like a wax sculpture. Amalia stared at it. The yacare’s eyes were watery and indifferent, like someone who’d been crying and didn’t want you to know. She sensed a kind of agitation in the animal; wanting to communicate understanding, she reached out her hand across the golden threshold. Behind her, Brazilian bossa nova played and a few couples feigned drunken dizziness.

A month before, at a family dinner Amalia was invited to in the role of “sleepover friend,” Silvio had told a story about his childhood in the south. Celia and her mother no longer found the story entertaining, but Amalia listened eagerly. Silvio told them about Moris, a thrifty neighbor who lived deep in the forest of Patagonia. It was Moris’s custom to invite the neighborhood children over for afternoon tea, Silvio and two brothers around his same age among them. He offered to watch them for free, and their parents were quick to accept. Silvio remembered Moris with such feeling that Amalia found it startling. A grown man getting emotional can be unsettling at that age. Silvio wiped away a tear and continued, telling them how he spent hours and hours at Moris’s house, and how sometimes Moris let the boys take naps in his bed. And how Moris, fond as he was of children, also had an odd habit: he liked to buy eggs at full gestation. He got them at a neighbor’s farm and often had boxes full of them, Silvio said. And it happened a few times that, as a kind of show, Moris enjoyed squashing those eggs one by one on a wooden table in the living room. And after squashing them and watching what could have been a chicken spill out, Moris would smile and say that he had the power to turn the future into remnants. That sometimes it was better not to let a thing grow. Celia asked why they didn’t just eat the eggs, but Silvio didn’t answer.
And then he told them how he and the other boys would stay at Moris’s until nightfall, and sometimes he made them soup. He would sit them on his lap and brush their short hair. Even when they didn’t need it, he would do it anyway, saying he was polishing them.
Silvio concluded the story with eyes fixed on a point on his porcelain plate. Celia’s mother asked if he wanted to go to his room and he said no. Celia kept eating as if it were a scene that’d played out a thousand times before. Silvio looked out the window, craning his neck to check that his yacare was still there. And indeed, there it was, eyes shining in the deep end of the pool. Amalia tried more than once to imagine Moris, but couldn’t. She never told Silvio’s story to her mother or father. Or to anyone.

Celia came running back with a pastrami sandwich in one hand and a glass of sparkling water in the other. When she saw what her friend was doing, she shouted no, but Amalia ignored her. The caress was already underway. The young yacare brought its snout to Amalia’s outstretched hand and sniffed it. Celia’s sparkling water spilled across the grass. Amalia smiled and Celia released a high-pitched scream, the kind that turns children’s throats hateful and venomous. “Papá!” she cried, “Papá, the crocodile!”
The yacare had never harmed anyone in the family, but obviously Amalia’s blood smelled different. A group of adults mimed catastrophe. Amalia lost hearing, as if a shrieking alarm were going off. She saw hairdos, belt buckles, cigarettes in the mouths of men. She remembered that egg-breaking adorer of children and the lost gaze of the birthday boy above the candles of an overpriced cake. Celia’s mother tried to calm the situation, soothing the guests and telling the bald DJ to turn the speakers and lights back on.
Amalia was safe and sound in the arms of Silvio, who looked down at her as if he had discovered something. “Don’t worry,” he said, “yacares are almost extinct.” Amalia shut her eyes from the pain and Silvio carried her to his room to treat her. The party continued. Celia doesn’t remember anything else about her father’s birthday. Amalia doesn’t either. The yacare still roams the yard. The species hasn’t disappeared.

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Camila Fabbri was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a writer, director, and actor. Her first work of fiction was the short story collection Los accidentes, and her second was the novel El dia que apagaron la luz.

Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, and Juan Villoro, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Granta, Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, Slate, The Arkansas International, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

I arrived in Paris on November 23, 2015, ten days after the Bataclan massacre took place.
The Parisians bore their grief swathed in a kind of invisible shawl. The silence of those days was a scarf made of the very air, wrapped close around the necks of the locals and us foreigners alike.
“Yes, peculiarly cold this winter, isn’t it?” said Mme Rachou in her elliptical Spanish, when I brought this up.
The feeling solidified when you rode the metro. Nobody talked. The babies didn’t cry. And the dogs, which you’re allowed to take with you on public transport there, didn’t make a sound either.
The apartment I got for myself was on the south side of Paris, in an area called Le Kremlin-Bicêtre. The university was in the north, in Pontoise. And for the entirety of the metro journey, which would take an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, I would hear no conversations, not a single word being spoken.
The only people who said anything on the metro were the mad people and the drunks.
In the case of the drunks, they tended to congregate at the ends of the platforms. Many of them were Russians. They had red, chapped faces. They were like the leftover bricks from a building site.
The mad people, on the other hand, were always alone—each connected up to the throng of voices inside their brains.
It wasn’t much different at the university itself. My stint as a guest researcher at the Laboratoire Linguistique, Dictionnaires et Informatique was due to last a year. This laboratory was, from what I could ascertain when looking into options for internships abroad, one of the most advanced institutes in my field, which was the application of computer science to questions of linguistics. But my colleagues didn’t seem to be programmed to say anything more than the cold, punctual “bonjour” they met me with each morning.
Certainly, my below-par French didn’t help.
The only opportunity to vent was on Wednesdays and Fridays, when I went to evening classes—language and French culture—at the Sorbonne.
The classes ended at 6 p.m. and a number of us sometimes went to one of the cafés on Boulevard du Montparnasse afterward. A Korean couple, a Dutch woman, and two Algerians, along with myself, were the regulars. The common language was English. We’d sit and talk for an hour, then go our separate ways.
And it would be back to the silence.
I would walk down to the Vavin metro stop and, rather than going home, get on line 4 in the direction of Saint-Michel. Almost without me realizing it, my footsteps would once more lead me to 9, Rue Gît-le-Cœur. I’d stand before the commemorative plaque and re-read the names of the legendary guests at what was once known as the Beat Hotel: “B. Gysin, H. Norse, G. Corso, A. Ginsberg, P. Orlovsky, I. Sommerville, W. Burroughs.”
I’d try to guess which room Ian Sommerville and William Burroughs had stayed in. It was there that the fresh-faced computer scientist, recently in from London, had accompanied the much older writer in the inferno of one of his countless detoxes.
I tended to feel very despondent on the way back from those excursions. In the metro, I thought about what would happen if I started shouting. From the look of me, people could well mistake me for an Islamist. And yet I was sure that the same would happen as I’d seen so many times when the normal run of things was disturbed in any way: in the end, my fit of madness would be buried by the stunning imperturbability of Parisians.
Other times, I had the idea of abandoning my doctoral thesis and putting my energies into developing some kind of software that would process the language of those voluble Paris down-and-outs. I envisaged a miraculous interface that would transmit the messages they were sending. I fantasized about the effect my discovery would have: the inhabitants of Paris getting to discover how alike they all were in their various solitudes. The end result being a global, fraternal embrace. Maybe even an orgy.
Clearly, I was depressed. It wasn’t long before the panic attacks began.
Or something very similar, because they never spiraled. Although, as Bogdan would later explain, the worst panic attacks were precisely that: the sense of an infinite anguish growing and growing, but never quite managing to overflow. Nobody bats an eyelid, and that’s when you start thinking you’re really losing your mind.
One Wednesday, the urge to start shouting became unbearable. I was in a metro car, riding a Saint-Michel-bound train. What stopped me, or saved me, was looking up and finding a phrase somebody had scrawled on one of the doors:
Parlez vos voisin!
The person who wrote it must have been either a sage or someone who’d been driven to despair. Or both.
I looked to my right and saw a man, a handsome blue-eyed Caucasian, somewhere in his fifties and smartly dressed. He was busy on his cell phone. I checked the graffiti again to make sure I’d understood what was undoubtedly fate stepping in to give me an order: “Talk to thy neighbor!”
I got ready to use a phrase in my rudimentary French, one of the formules de politesse we’d learned in class.
But when I turned to face the man, I couldn’t speak. He was still looking at his cell, only now his free hand was engaged in a very specific, and quite horrifying, activity.
Nobody else in the car seemed to have noticed.
I watched with a mixture of disgust and fascination. The man was picking his nose with his middle finger, which then traveled directly to his mouth. At times he left it resting on his tongue. Or he let the residue get stuck on one of his front teeth. You could see from his expression that he liked the taste. And he went on doing it.
He got off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And I, just as the doors were about to slide shut, followed him off the train.
Coming out of the station, I saw the man walking ahead toward the corner where the Deux Magots café was. I followed him at a distance and he soon stepped inside the L’Écume des Pages bookstore. I went in after him and pretended to take a look at the new arrivals table. He went all the way to the back. He returned carrying a squat-looking book; it was thick, but the cover can’t have been larger than half a sheet of paper. I couldn’t see the title or the name of the author. The man paid and went out. I waited for a few seconds before following him. I saw him cross the boulevard, heading south. The walk sign on the pedestrian crossing came on again, and taking long, loping strides, I gained on him as he started down Rue Bonaparte.
The man was moving very quickly, and I lost sight of him. Moments later, the narrow sidewalks gave way to the wide-open space of Place Saint-Sulpice, with its fountain out in the middle and the majestic church at the far end. These were names and coordinates I would come to learn later on. For now it was only a case of spotting him going up the church steps, and then hurrying after him without asking myself where we were.
When I went through the church door, I was immediately struck by the deep beauty of the interior, like that of a pool of water suspended high above. Though I didn’t know why, I experienced a profound sensation of guilt. It was as though the Gothic concavity of the nave had been flipped over and had pierced my sternum.
I caught sight of the man. He was kneeling on a prie-dieu in front of a priest. They were on the other side of a glass screen that separated them from the aisle.
It took me a few moments to understand that what I was seeing—which looked more like a bank manager’s office than anything else—was the confessional.
Still keeping my distance, I went along the aisle.
I spent a short time looking at the main altar in the central nave, the lateral staircases, and all the screens and ornamentation. I went around the back of the altar, which brought me to another aisle, and it was then that I found myself at the Lady Chapel.
I sat on one of the small chairs arranged around it.
The statue of Mary is framed by marble columns. She appears with a baby boy in her arms, and she’s crushing a serpent underfoot. She stands on an orb representing planet Earth; the serpent is trapped between this and her foot. The orb, in turn, half protrudes from a stream of molten lava that threatens to spill over the edges of the frame. Yet it doesn’t. It’s as though Mary, via the weight of her immaculate foot, immobilizes the serpent and at the same time turns everything around her to stone, thereby stemming the evil that wants to devour the world.
That image gave me strength, but at the same time it troubled me. The thought I had was this: What happens if Mary lifts her foot?
I forgot about the man. I lowered my head, said a prayer under my breath, and started to cry.
As for the man I had seen, who turned out to be named Bogdan, I saw him again a fortnight later, again inside the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Later on I found out that, while I had been going back there evening after evening hoping to catch sight of him once more, he’d been going to different churches. Churches, as I would also find out, were one of his two great passions. The other one being zombies. Everything to do with zombies.
In the churches, Bogdan confessed. He wasn’t a Catholic, and though he felt guilt for certain things in his life, it didn’t weigh that heavily on him. He was Romanian but had lived much of his life in West Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet bloc, he went back to Romania and there became a pioneer in the world of financial services. He made a lot of money, and three children and two grandchildren arrived along the way. He’d put off enjoying his success and made many sacrifices, and just when it was coming time to retire, time for him to enjoy his life alongside his beloved wife, she died.
Now, more than a year after her death, he felt it was his duty to try to be happy, and that he had a license to do whatever he wanted.
As well as Romanian, Bogdan knew English, Russian, and German. But he’d always wanted to learn French, hence his decision to spend a year in Paris. He was taking an online course and, after every lesson, would go out and try to practice. The issue, unforeseen by him—it’s something no language institute or embassy will ever tell you—was the reticence of the Parisians.
And that was the challenge he had been facing when, visiting one of the city’s many churches one day, he happened upon the solution. Stepping inside the confessional was the perfect opportunity to practice his French, given the fact that the priest had no choice but to listen to him. And, unlike psychotherapy, it was free.
Now that they had gotten to know him, his confessors had even started correcting his vocab and pronunciation.
“And I’ve improved quite a lot,” Bogdan said. “You should try it someday.”
We were having our first beer together in the Café de la Mairie, across from Place Saint-Sulpice.
So as not to raise suspicions, Bogdan avoided going to the same church more than once a fortnight. He told each of the priests a different story. Or, rather, variations on or offshoots from one single ongoing story. To avoid confusion, he had a notebook to which he consigned what he said each time, along with the basic coordinates: priest’s name, church, time of confession, and penance.
“And where do you get your stories from?” I asked.
“From my novels,” he said.
In this new life of his, Bogdan had decided to fulfill another of his ambitions: to become a writer. The novels, or what he understood as such, would be based on his own life. An anodyne existence interrupted, when least expected, by something staggering: a zombie attack.
“Obviously, I never talk about zombies when I’m confessing. But I do manage to get across the sense that my life’s in danger. And so I’ve also come to see that this is precisely what a good novel is: a zombie attack always being imminent, but never actually happening.”
At that moment, Bogdan was working on a novel set in present-day Paris, which had its customary joie de vivre on show but was also riddled with the fear of terrorism. More than ever, this was a Paris under the long shadow of the city’s first bishop, Saint Denis, whom Bogdan furthermore considered the first zombie of the Christian era.
I don’t know whether Bogdan finished his novel. In fact, I don’t know for certain that he ever wrote a single page of it. But he did show me the stained-glass window in Saint-Sulpice’s with the terrible image of the decapitated saint hugging his own head to his chest. On another occasion, he showed me the inlaid statue at Notre-Dame Cathedral that repeats the same motif, as well as the one in Suzanne-Buisson. I went with him to Rue de Mont-Cenis and walked the three miles that, according to legend, Saint Denis walked holding his severed, bleeding head in his hands, before collapsing in the place where they would go on to build the great basilica that now bears his name. And where, additionally, the remains of all the French monarchs are buried, from Clovis I to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the two last true monarchs of France who—as I ought to know very well, Bogdan said—were also beheaded.
Bogdan’s explorations weren’t limited to Paris. He went to see churches in all corners of France. I was never asked to join him. He’d sometimes take off with no notice for two days or an entire week at a time.
I would become desperate.
To begin with, as a way to calm myself down or simply to fill the time, I gave his advice a go. I went to Saint-Sulpice’s, and to Saint-Séverin’s as well, and confessed. I adapted the story of Sommerville and Burroughs: Bogdan was a Moroccan poet and recovering alcoholic; I, on the other hand, remained a Latin American computer scientist working in linguistics. Instead of the infamous Dreamachine, he and I were working together on the “Kremlin-Bicêtre project.” When I tried to explain how the software worked, the priests started looking at me like I was from outer space. And at that point I dropped the whole masquerade.
Mme Rachou unwittingly gave me the name for the project. It was a day when the urges to start shouting were very strong. I remembered the underground mantra, parlez vos voisin, and went and knocked on her door. Mme Rachou, as well as being my landlady, also lived right next door.
“Oh, yes,” she said when I brought up the subject. “We have a long history of mad people in France.”
I’d told her how struck I was by the number of disturbed people in the city. And particularly on the metro.
Apropos of that, she explained the story of the name, or at least part of the name, of the neighborhood we were in. If you went up Avenue Général Leclerc you came to the Bicêtre Hospital, one of the oldest and most historically significant asiles des aliénés, which at other times had been a prison—it was there that Louis XVI said that the vagabonds and mendicants of Paris ought to be locked up.
“And what about the ‘Kremlin’ part?” I said.
“Oh . . . je sais pas,” she said.
The information I’ve just given is provided on a panel outside the hospital, alongside a map of the building. However, the fact I found most striking was the following: it had been there, in Bicêtre, on April 17, 1792, that the guillotine was first trialed.
I immediately thought about what Bogdan would say when I told him this new fact I’d learned. Then his continual rebuffs came to mind, and I decided I wouldn’t tell him anything.
That which I spitefully kept to myself in his absence, later evaporated completely. My interest in Paris’s psychiatric hospitals was the only proof of an incipient interior life that, the moment he came calling, I instantly forsook.
That life, nonetheless, gradually came to transform my doctoral mission.
One morning I found a book entitled Le Kremlin-Bicêtre: identité d’une ville, by M. L. Fernández, in the university library. Its author explains the origins of that ville’s name by first explaining that the Bicêtre Hospital harked back, via some mangled pronunciation, to the Bishop of Winchester, Jean de Pontoise, who had been awarded the land in that area in 1286. The “Kremlin” part, on the other hand, was part of a great business strategy. In 1812, on the return of Napoleon’s devastated army after the Russia campaign, large numbers of the veterans took refuge in the hospital. As a way of attracting this clientele, a local tavern owner with a nose for business had the idea of opening a bar named Au Sergent du Kremlin, and in time, with the bar’s rise in popularity, the name ended up extending to that whole outlying area of the city.
Other pieces of information emerged over the course of those months. Connections that would briefly illuminate a system of signs otherwise enveloped in fog.
The problem was Bogdan.
But what interest could that presentiment of mine hold when Bogdan showed up at my apartment and, without so much as asking if I wanted to, took me salsa dancing in a place overlooking the Seine on the Quai Saint-Bernard. How was I going to solve the algorithm France had become if he, after we’d been dancing, asked me up to the terrace of the Arab World Institute for a drink, thereby, with that view over Paris in the spring, deactivating all my fears?
Then, one day in May, Bogdan announced that he was leaving. He wanted to spend a couple of months looking at churches in the north of France, and from there move on to Belgium.
I didn’t want to say goodbye. Nor did he insist. I shut myself in my apartment and cried for a week. Then I came back to earth. I felt completely empty, ready to think.
Mme Rachou thought I’d been away on a trip.
“You look very pale, young man. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, Mme Rachou. Nothing to worry about.”
“Your friend, the Russian, left this,” she said, handing me a package.
Opening it, I recognized the squat book. It turned out to be a copy of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
“He isn’t Russian,” I said.
Mme Rachou’s answer pulled the rug from under me completely:
“Of course he’s Russian.” She smiled as though to forgive my naïveté.
I took the book with me to the university that day.
He hadn’t written any dedication. There were only some underlined phrases in the introduction relating to Gothic architecture in churches and the many restorations undergone by Notre-Dame.
What did it all mean? Maybe he’d known from the beginning about me following him? What had Mme Rachou meant by her answer?
I started to investigate. I soon established some of the historical context, which at the same time would help my argument should anyone ever decide to put any money behind the project. As I continued to read around, I was able to home in on what I was really trying to find—for example, when I came across talk of the Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse psychiatric hospital, which had wings for mentally ill people set out according to the revolutionary calendar, I knew I was starting to see what was really in play here.
When I read the news about the attack in Nice, during the Bastille Day celebrations, Bogdan immediately came to mind. I don’t know why, given he’d said he was heading north, not south. I spent a number of days poring over everything that emerged to do with the attack: articles, reports, videos, the statements of the people who had been present.
Before July was out, there was the attack on the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. I had hardly so much as read the headline and I already knew, this time beyond question, that Bogdan was involved. Not only because that church was in northern France, or because of the two terrorists’ horrifying decision to slit the priest’s throat, but because of the two nuns and two parishioners who had been inside the church at the time and were taken hostage. One parishioner was French, and the other was Russian.
There were no photos of the sacrifice that took place, nor did the names of the hostages who had witnessed it appear. But such proof was beside the point. Now all I wanted to know was Bogdan’s connection to everything that was going on. Did the attacks have anything to do with him? Or was it all confirmation that, in spite of his hoax confessions, he was actually in danger? Or, the strangest possibility of all, had Bogdan worked out some way of anticipating the attacks? His confessions, the supposed zombie attacks—were these not coded references to terrorist activities?
Anxiety began to boil up inside me, and this time it seemed like the lava would overflow. But then I remembered that I had the book.
­I went and found it and started going through it again. Something told me to check that Bogdan hadn’t hidden a piece of paper somewhere between its pages. Doing this, I happened upon a number of paragraphs he’d underlined in the lengthy Notes section contained in that edition. Specifically, the second and fifth notes to page 68, which, following on from the also-lengthy introduction, corresponded with the second page of chapter one.
These two notes made reference to the fête des fous, or Feast of Fools, a remnant of the Roman Saturnalian festival celebrated by the clergy during the Middle Ages. The activities that made up this carnival, in which a false bishop, archbishop, and even pope (un pope des fous) would be elected, were taken on by the wider populace, and in particular young écoliers, leading on several occasions to brawls and disturbances, imprisonments, and the whole event being outlawed.
The notes also mentioned a book called Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, by Henry Sauval, which Victor Hugo himself had made liberal use of in the construction of his cathedral.
The interesting part, at least for Bogdan, who made a note in the margin, wasn’t only the evident relationship between these “clerics” (in the medieval sense of the word, as revived by Julien Benda in his famous book) and the makers of the Enlightenment encyclopedias, but also the fact that Hugo’s and Sauval’s dates didn’t match up.
Sauval had the feast happening on the day after Twelfth Night: January 7, that is. Whereas Hugo had the two celebrations on the same date: January 6—the day the novel begins. Was Twelfth Night, associated in continental Europe primarily with the Three Kings, the same as the Feast of Fools? Did this constitute backhanded criticism of the Restoration? Veiled support for the Revolution of 1830, which was already beginning to raise its head and in fact exploded into life on July 27, only two days after Hugo started work on the novel?
I initially took the comparison to be Hugo’s way of casting aspersions on the monarchy. But, looking at it again, a more profound interpretation was suggested: when the powerful have their feasts, it’s just mad people and abject drunks having a high time. What else could Bogdan have meant by the emphasis he’d placed on Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette having been France’s “last true monarchs”? Wasn’t this ultimately the same mistrust as Hugo’s for any form of “restoration”?
There were too many questions. So many, in fact, that I only managed to work out—through an instinct I’d thought completely extinguished in myself—where the answers were certain not to be. And that was in the outward, surface-level Paris, lovely to a fault, where the calculated staying power of its architecture has combined with the tourism industry to turn the past into a single, undifferentiated weft.
It was in the subterranean city that I would have to go looking for Bogdan.
I’ve learned a great many surprising things, living in the Paris metro these years. The first being that the Kremlin-Bicêtre project was already a reality a long time ago. Some of my companions, when they’re in high spirits, or rather when the booze takes them to the brink of delirium, go so far as to say that it’s always existed. Under other names, and taking different routes, but always coming out in this place that is both origin and spillway.
The second is that Parisians, to a one, confess. You only need to look at them from the platform, going around in those glass-sided booths, so reticent, so unforthcoming, while at the same time saying—shouting, at times—so much.
The third is that Russian is a beautiful language, which when mixed together with French, alcohol, and the cold, becomes something prophetic.
What we have done down here is to prefigure that which, sooner or later, will end up happening up above. The victory of the Front National, for example, was predicted by one of the Saint-Lazare station’s cells (which is one of the oldest), long before Le Pen Sr. came on the scene.
France imploding is another recurrent topic of conversation, one that only we—Russians or French, it doesn’t matter anymore—link back to its original cause: the nostalgia we felt for our fleeting empires (and even the Revolution), and for the hell we failed to unleash. The older guys always end up telling the stories of the disaster that was the Russia campaign. The incomprehensible loss of life which seemed to punish, rather than to reward, the advance. The promise of entering Moscow, only to find the city absurdly empty, razed to the ground by the Russian army itself.
We are the only ones capable of understanding that a young French person has it within them to point a machine gun at their classmates, or at the people in the café where their parents used to go, and, with a cry of “Allah is great” or “Death to all immigrants,” open fire. It’s in those moments that we accept the truth of the matter: other people ought to be apprised of these things. Which means that the project, and completing it with somebody from outside, remains as pressing as ever.
I nonetheless feel that I am the only one who understands the true importance of the interface. I am occasionally surprised to find myself sitting alone in the Kremlin Tavern, at the table at the back, arguing. But it doesn’t stop me.
This is the reason I still go out.
I go to Saint-Sulpice’s to look at Mary’s immaculate foot and see how long we have left.
Then I get on one of the metro trains, taking up position between the confessionals. If someone is careless enough to come and sit next to me, I start picking my nose. And if not, I just read the writing on the doors, the seatbacks, and the walls, looking for the hidden truths, just as the saints, the mad people, and the lovers of Paris do.

---

Rodrigo Blanco Calerón has received awards for his stories both inside and outside Venezuela. In 2007 he was invited to join the Bogotá39 group, which brings together the best Latin American writers under forty years old. In 2014 his story “Emuntorios” was included in Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America, issue 46 of McSweeneys. With his first novel, The Night, he won the 2016 Paris Rive Gauche Prize, the Critics Award in Venezuela, and the 2019 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize.

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustín Fernández Mallo, María Gainza, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and has twice won a PEN Translates award. His own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, LitHub, and The Paris Review. He is currently a Royal Literary Fellow, teaching at Swansea University.

“The Mad People of Paris” appears in Sacrifices: Stories, to be published in September by Seven Stories Press.

Illustration: Calum Heath

Roy was with his friend Daniele, a Swiss film director, in a roadside café in Italy when a man Daniele recognized came in and sat down at a table near theirs.
“I know him,” said Daniele. “He wrote a novel twenty years ago about young Ukrainian girls in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s who were recruited into prostitution and sent to other countries. All of the women were Jewish. Picasso called it ‘insolence raised to the level of art.’ His name is Edgardo Despavorido, he lives in Buenos Aires, although I’ve run into him more often in Paris.”
They sat at their table drinking coffee for a short while before Roy asked Daniele if he were going to say hello to him.
“He’ll see me, then he’ll come over.”
Two minutes later Edgardo noticed Daniele, nodded to him, picked up his coffee cup, and joined them.
“Ça va?” he said to Daniele.
“Not so bad. This is my friend Roy—an American writer.”
“I’ve read one of your novels, in French, Les aveugles font-ils des rêves,” Edgardo said. “It’s a strong title. Provocative, like Chekhov.”
Despavorido looked to be in his seventies, perhaps fifteen years older than Daniele, twenty-five years older than Roy. They spoke in English.
“Daniele was telling me about a book of yours based on Ukrainian girls forced into prostitution.”
“El rufián judio. I first wrote it as a play, in Yiddish. At one time Daniele thought it might work as a film.”
“Are you still living in Buenos Aires?” Daniele asked.
“No, only in Paris. I grew weary of the fascists in Argentina, especially Borges, whom I once considered a friend. There are fascists in France, of course, but they would rather eat and drink well than torture and murder those who disagree with them. I also like to eat and drink well.”
“Why are you in Italy?”
“To deliver a lecture at the university in Trieste.”
“Is Claudio Magris still teaching there?”
“He invited me. And you?”
“We’re on our way to spend a few days with friends in Venice.”
“And where are you living now?”
“Zurich.”
Edgardo stood up, put a couple of coins on the table, and extended a hand to Roy, which he shook.
“A pleasure to have met you,” he said. “And to see you, Daniele.”
They did not shake hands. Daniele and Roy sat without speaking until Edgardo had left the café.
“Edgardo gave you a nice compliment, likening your story to Chekhov.”
“It was the title he liked.”
“He was a pimp, pas méchant, mais un peu pervers. His wife was a whore. I don’t know if they’re still together, or even if she is alive. Her admirers included royalty from all over Europe. Some of the men offered to marry her but she wouldn’t leave Edgardo. Her name was Zsuzsa. I had her in front of him, in a suite at the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo. She told me it was what he preferred.”
Months later, when Roy was back in America, he discovered by chance in a used bookstore Edgardo Despavorido’s novel, an English translation entitled Bad Guy. It was a cheap paperback edition with an illustration on the front cover of an ogreish man hovering over a half-naked woman kneeling on the floor next to an unmade bed. Roy bought it and read it that night. The novel was short and read like a play. He never forgot a description in it of a girl who “smelt of recently watered grass,” and the following sentence: “She kissed me and whispered words in my ear in a language I did not know, and yet I somehow understood.”
It displeased Roy that Daniele had told him of his dalliance with Edgardo’s wife, though perhaps at that time they were not yet married. The book was dedicated “To Zsuzsa, the only one.”

---

Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea, How Chet Baker Died, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, and Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems. He cowrote with David Lynch the screenplay for Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Illustration: Barry Gifford

 

The first time I met Frankie, he told me he was a “lawyer turned venture capitalist,” which meant nothing to me. He also said he’d been responsible for the last financial crisis, then, after a pause, he said, “Like, literally.” The word “venture” reminded me of “adventure,” lending it a wild and dangerous feel, like a John Wayne movie, but this job would take place in the abstract matrix of money, not atop horses whose hooves pound the dry-dead earth. Frankie had an undercut, the top part slicked to the side. He wore Converse high-tops and dressed like the bassist of an early 2000s indie band. I couldn’t imagine anybody in a corporate setting taking the man seriously.
After he paid, I walked him to the front door, kissed him on the cheek, then strolled into the other bedroom, $260 richer. Misty lay sprawled on sheets in fleshy lingerie. The house laptop played a looped YouTube music video of bells and chimes that was said to bring about luck and abundance. She always listened to those.
“Got a client, finally. Fuck holiday season,” I said.
“Lucky you,” Misty said. “I haven’t had a client in days.”
Misty basically lived at the Handjob Palace. She worked more shifts than anyone, but seemed to see the fewest clients. Honestly, she looked rough. Before the Palace, she had worked at a canning factory in Queens. She posted fake pictures in her ads, of other girls from the internet. It explained why she didn’t have regulars, but new clients could have still called for her. Since she posted almost every day, I figured it was simply a matter of supply and demand. But she didn’t ask for my opinion.
“He was cute,” I said. “Have you seen Frankie?”
“Frankie? I don’t know any Frankie. I just got off the phone with my psychic though. She’s good—I’ll give you her number. She studied under the late Sylvia Browne.” Misty raised her eyebrows at me. “She said I’ll be meeting my money man soon. I’m about to have a real sugar daddy, Sadie! These one-time pops can suck it.” The glint in her eyes made me nervous.
“Did you hear back about that Craigslist gig?”
“I fucked the guy for my ‘interview’ and they never hit me back. Assholes. Some kind of agency they run.”
I left the room flabbergasted, opened the fridge, and shook the organic charcoal lemonade Frankie had left me. He had asked to be conversationally cucked. I pretended to be his wife who had just cheated. He prompted me to talk about an old friend from college, and he requested I use the name Micah. “How was it seeing Micah?” I told him all about my time with Micah, how he made me cum so hard in ways that Frankie never could, because Frankie was a sissy limp-dicked faggot. I said I couldn’t help myself—he loved that. I couldn’t help but fuck the sexy alpha man who had played football and lived in a frat house back in school. Frankie told me before our session that he loved the idea of a woman who couldn’t control her sexual appetites, a woman driven by pure sexual desire to the point of wreckage. Like a ship full of cum that couldn’t weather a storm. It was fun. He had given me an organic strawberry lemonade too, for “the other girl,” though he didn’t specify which was for her. I picked the charcoal one because it was supposed to clear you out. I’d heard once that doctors give charcoal to people after their stomachs are pumped, that it filters 60 percent of toxic substances from your system. I was always hungover, in need of purification.

When I started the job, I wasn’t paranoid. I would see any client who called, whether or not they’d been in before, or had any proof of identity. I was high on the money, averaging three times what I made from bartending and working half the hours. We were advised to ask for a LinkedIn profile, then to verify the phone number on Spokeo. If it was an internet phone, we’d tell them to call back from the real one, which they rarely did. I’d just see them. I felt safe enough in the city. Hundreds of people walked by the apartment building every minute.
But then a different location got raided. Then another. One time a cop called to ask if the ad I’d posted had been a solicitation for prostitution. I threw on my clothes, canceled all upcoming appointments, and power walked for several blocks, heart pounding each time I saw the red light of a siren. I called the girl who rented the apartment, Marcelle, and she insisted it wasn’t a real cop. “A cop would just come in undercover,” she’d said. “They wouldn’t just be like ‘Hi, I am a cop.’” I didn’t believe her. He sounded too assertive, too authoritarian. She said he must just be some sick fuck who gets off on scaring girls, and told me to get back in there and work.
I was afraid of getting caught, but Frankie was afraid of germs. I closed the blinds before I buzzed him in. If during any session he accidentally touched my bare labia, his face would turn hive red and he’d run to the bathroom. I would pass the time by peeking out the window or queuing more songs on Spotify. Every time he returned, he carried a familiar scent. It took weeks of sessions before I realized he brought his own soap, which was manufactured by one of my favorite fragrance houses. “Oh shit, you like Le Labo?” I asked once when he came back calm and clean. At the beginning of our following session, he handed me a bottle of bergamot massage oil and said, “So long as I’m the only boy you use it on.”
I liked that he called himself a “boy.” He must have been fifty, a father of two. I think it started there though, with the soap. He had a fresh tan from a trip to Mexico, and when I dripped the oil along his spine, he shone like a recently waxed muscle car. The sweetness and spiciness bergamot intermingled in the air. I pressed my clit against his hamstring as I kneaded his back, and when I switched positions, he told me to go back, to sit how I was before, that he liked feeling how wet he made me against his skin.
After he finished that day, he asked me to read him something. My RubRatings ad had mentioned I was a poet. I didn’t have my journals with me, but I did have one poem memorized.
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t laugh.”
“I’d never.”

“Cannon Beach

I accurately guessed
the height of
Haystack Rock           

You fed me blueberries
Crunchy with
The texture of sand.”

Frankie stared at me as he sprayed his thighs with rubbing alcohol, then said, “I like to be monogamous with these things. Can I see you on a weekly basis?” I had several clients who came in just for me, so I was down even though he only ever tipped $20. I gave him the number to my burner app, and he texted right away. The text must have gone through as a green bubble because he laughed, pointed toward my phone, and said, “Nice iPhone.”
I felt embarrassed and restless from the phone thing, so I went to Misty’s room after I walked him out.
“Meet your sugar daddy yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she sighed, “but I will. Madame Hazel said it’d be during Capricorn season.” She crossed her fingers and held them in the air. “I’ve been manifesting though. You have to really imagine it happening, and feel the feelings that you’ll have when it does. This one guy put a picture of a nice house on his vision board and, lo and behold, moved into the same fucking house decades later. Didn’t even realize it until he looked at the vision board again, hidden in the attic.”
“What’s a vision board?”
“Oh it’s like . . . Have you seen that episode of It’s Always Sunny?”
I shook my head.
“Okay, well it’s like a poster of what you want, basically. Just put whatever you want on it. Money, cars, jewelry, whatever. Mine’s a bunch of cutouts of rich men from GQ and some real shredded money. The more concrete your visions are, the more concrete they become, the more materialized.” The chimes played again from the laptop’s speakers. The tape over the webcam read KILL ALL MEN.
“Does it work?”
“For that guy with the house it sure did! Jim Carrey wrote a check to himself for $10 million dated ten years into the future and kept it in his wallet. Ten years later dude was in Dumb and Dumber. Guess how much they paid him.”
“Ten million?”
“Cha-ching, bitch!”
I laughed as I went to change the sheets. I had another client in five minutes, which didn’t give me enough time to verify him.
When I buzzed him in, his appearance startled me. He looked like a murderer. He was my height, with buggy brown eyes, deep-set wrinkles, and a handlebar mustache. He reeked of cigarettes. I led him into the room and he stripped down immediately, not even bothering to make conversation. He sat on the edge of the bed rather than the customary lay down, and said, “Come over.” His voice reminded me of the cop who had called. He spread his legs open and gestured for me to sit on his lap. “My name’s Steve,” he purred.
I worried he would somehow handcuff me. His jacket lay on the floor within reach. I hesitated, then steadied myself onto his lap and said, “Hi Steve.”
He rubbed his calloused, grubby fingers along my back and unsnapped my bra.
“That’s extra,” I said.
“Money isn’t an issue. Have you been a good girl this year?”
I broke into a sweat as he cupped his hand and placed his palm over my left nipple, running his fingers around my small tit.
“Yes, I have.”
“Good.”
He grabbed my hand and placed it on his flaccid cock, which oozed pre-cum as it began to bob its head at me.
“Would you like to lie down so I can give you a nice, relaxing massage?” I asked.
He wrinkled his nose, then said, “Sure baby, whatever you like.” He pressed his thumb hard into my hip bone until I fell off his leg, and then he lay down. I pumped the scentless lotion onto my hands and began the massage, starting at his shoulders and working down his hairy spine, his pungent ass, and his drainpipe legs. I stayed silent, wishing for no more knowledge of Steve. I listened to the music I had queued up beforehand, soft dream pop. I wondered if there were YouTube videos that manifested safety or security. I’d ask Misty.
He came so hard it almost hit the ceiling, then handed me $240. I reminded him of the extra fee for undoing my bra. He laughed, pulled a crumpled ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, and said, “Keep the change.” I didn’t walk him to the door. He slammed it on his way out.
I wished Steve had seen Misty instead. If another client called who I couldn’t verify, I’d just give him to her. She needed business more than I did. Her pictures were fake anyway; it’d make no difference. I visualized her on Steve’s lap, awkward and giggling, his fingers tracing her nipples rather than mine. I envisioned it had happened to her. I tried to feel the feelings she would have if it did.

Starting the following week, Frankie texted my burner app every Thursday night: Herald Square? 10:30? And every Friday morning he buzzed right then. Twice he texted me midweek at midday just to say he wanted me, but I only checked the app while I was at work. Sometime during this period I began masturbating to him. I’d think back to our sessions, the curve of his cock, and I’d cum up to ten times per day. I wanted him but knew better than to say it back. I couldn’t give a client that satisfaction. I had to act professional and disinterested, which I did, up to a point.
On my days off, which were every day but Thursdays and Fridays, I found ways to spend my surplus. I signed up for acrobatic yoga classes, booked a flight to Iceland for the summer, and ordered one hundred TULIPMANIA shirts I designed through a website using Hulk Hogan font when I had been stoned. I skipped the yoga classes, and the shirts gathered dust in a box. My roommate Alex and I got sloshed every night. He had stolen a bottle of Fernet from the bar where he worked, and almost every hour he’d run into my room with a shot glass and sing, “It’s time to Fernet about it!” This would continue on the hour until I was drunk enough to stay in his room, where we would smoke weed and watch videos about the Mandela effect or Scientology, which further heightened my general paranoia. I became convinced that cops would access my data and use it against me in the court of law. I downloaded a web browser called Epic, whose emblem looked like the Tide Pods that people were eating the year before. Alex and I asked our landlord to install bars on our windows. I paid for rent in rubber-banded bundles of cash.
It didn’t take long until Frankie and I progressed to full service. It started when I put a condom on him so he could rub his cock against my clit. He drenched the latex in lube and dug his fingers into my hips. He whispered “Use me” as he pulled me onto his lap. I slid against his shaft until I was slick with sweat. His eyes bugged and his mouth parted like a wanting dog. I couldn’t pretend with him like I did with the others. I really did it until my legs trembled. He loved to see me above him like that, using him, as he said, like “my little toy.”
The third week of dick-as-toy, he whimpered, “Let me inside you,” so I did. I started by slowly slipping it in so I could acutely feel each rung of pleasure, then he flipped me over onto my stomach and fucked me hard from behind, eventually lifting my ankles to rest on his shoulders. I yelled, “Micah! Micah!” He came within a few minutes, then we lay side-by-side silent until my heart slowed. “Wow,” he said. “How do you feel?” I felt relaxed. I watched him spray his balls with rubbing alcohol. He excused himself to take a shower, as he always did, and I didn’t peek out the blinds or queue any songs. I fingered my clit in quick circles until I came again. The scent of his Le Labo soap preceded his return.
“I’ve never done full service before,” he said. “How much is it?”
“Four hundred more.” I lay on my stomach and seesawed my legs into the air behind me. He lifted his bent jeans from the floor, took out his wallet, and lay four hundreds next to the $260 already tucked beneath the tissues. When I walked him to the door, we kissed on the lips. He pulled my flesh against him like Clark Gable. When he said bye, my stomach fluttered. I changed the sheets in the room, which still smelled like his soap. I daydreamed about him for the rest of my shift. Flashes of his biceps followed me through the subway and the walk home.

Frankie didn’t text me the following week, but he had warned he wouldn’t. He was going to Oaxaca again to escape the New York winter. Instead I saw another regular, James. He tipped $300 for a bare blowjob, and I enjoyed a lavish Friday night supper with Alex, on me.
When Frankie returned to the city, he seemed nervous. He couldn’t get hard and didn’t say why. I assumed he had been with his wife and kids during the trip, that maybe he finally felt bad about us. Maybe he didn’t want to see me anymore. I used the oil I kept just for him and rubbed his sunburned shoulders. The heat radiated from his skin. For whatever reason, the citrus scent was more pronounced that day. I thought of essential oil warmers. For the first time, I worried about what would happen between us. When it was time for him to flip over, he sighed, then asked why I was doing this.
“Doing what?”
“You’re such a talented writer,” he told me, despite hearing only the blueberry poem I recited months earlier. I didn’t argue the compliment, but I did tell him that being a talented writer doesn’t pay the bills. He chubbed a bit. I did all the things that he liked to get him there. I talked about Micah. I rubbed my ass against his cock, tickled his balls with my fingernails, kissed his ears.
“Can you use a different name?” he asked.
“Sure. Whose?”
“Shalmaneser.”
“What?”
“It’s from the Bible. Just say it. Please.”
I’d do almost anything for Frankie, so I tried. I could hardly pronounce Shalmaneser, so I said “Shal.” I said that Shal’s cock was so big it tore me open. Shal’s cock was so big it made me scream. Frankie eventually sighed again, stood up, and headed for the shower. He returned with the soap smell, cross pendant bouncing against his chest. “I have a proposition,” he said. “How about you quit, and I’ll take care of you. So you can work on writing, and you won’t have to keep doing this.”
I told him he was sweet and that I’d think on it. He left me an extra $200 on top of the $640 and a small gift-wrapped box. “It’s an incredible gift, but don’t open it until you’re home,” he said. “You’re gonna love it.”
I noticed new freckles on his nose when I kissed him goodbye.
That night I visited Alex at work. He gave me free drinks, but I always tipped well in cash, usually two twenties. This time I left a fifty. It was still early, 6:30, and Clownie’s was empty besides two people in leather jackets who seemed to be on a Tinder date. Alex leaned against the edge of the bar, polishing martini glasses.
“I mean, what, you’re gonna rely on this guy who you already know is disloyal, at least to his wife?”
“I don’t know, I mean, it could be nice. I wouldn’t have to deal with creeps anymore. But I’d miss a lot of my clients. And the other girls.”
“Dude you cannot put all of your eggs into one asshole’s basket. Bad idea. You aren’t hurting for cash. If he leaves and you don’t have enough other clients to replace him, you could just work here again. Paul still loves you.” He gestured toward the bar I had helped set up, where we had first met.
I wanted to call Misty for advice, but I knew she’d be jealous. She had put so much effort into manifesting a sugar daddy, and here came Frankie, like a friendly stray cat rubbing my legs on a walk home from the bodega.
I decided that I liked my job. Frankie was my favorite, but it wasn’t like I’d never see him again if I stayed. I didn’t want to be someone’s private whore; it felt too obligatory. That’s why I avoided Seeking.com and allowances. It was too weird to me, the terms too ambiguous. Plus, other clients tipped better and I adored many of my regulars. I texted him from my burner app that night: Sorry, Frankie. Your offer was sweet but I don’t feel comfortable sacrificing my job.
He didn’t get back to me that night or the next. I sat on the couch, stress-eating popcorn and throwing back tallboys, worried that his wife had seen my message. Or maybe he was mad at me for declining his offer. Maybe his wife had found out earlier and blocked my number so he never even saw my reply. I knew I shouldn’t have sent the text at night, but I wasn’t thinking. Alex told me to chill.
“Dude he’s probably just salty you don’t want to be his concubine. It’ll blow over. You’ll see him this Friday or the next week.”
But Frankie didn’t text me that Friday or the following week. Instead, I saw an NYPD van parked outside the apartment. I panicked, ran into Misty’s room, and together we climbed the stairs to the roof of the building, where we shivered and smoked cigarettes, keeping a lookout. We called Marcelle, who told us it was unrelated. “I doubt it has anything to do with the apartment,” she said. “There’s a lot going on in Herald Square. They wouldn’t sit in a marked van during a stakeout. It’s too obvious.” Misty and I refused to go downstairs until they drove away, which took about an hour. Capricorn season had ended.
“Fucked up you haven’t found your sugar daddy,” I said.
“Right?” Misty blew a cloud of what could have been smoke or freezing water vapor. “It’ll be okay though. Madame Hazel says it’s all about learning that I can create abundance on my own, that I don’t need no man. That’s the lesson. Had I already been looking within, I would have met him, but now I have to work on myself until my next planetary conjunction.”
“Planetary conjunction?”
“It’s like a new beginning.”

The next week we all lost our jobs. No one told me. I came in for my shift and the door didn’t work. I tried the key over and over with varying pressure. I knocked on the door until my knuckles numbed. I called Marcelle and it rang through the first three times, then went straight to voicemail. I thought to text Frankie but didn’t. I remembered the police van as I tried my key one last time.
Months later, after my shift at Clownie’s, I dropped the remote under the couch. Alex sat next to me with a fresh bottle of Fernet. When I reached down, my hand hit something sharp with an edge. I held it in the glow of the TV.
“Oh my God,” I said. “That gift from Frankie. I must have drunk-dropped it under here back when he gave it to me.”
“Well go on,” Alex said. “Open it up.”
Blueberries, moldy on a pile of sand.

---

Shy Watson wrote Horror Vacui (House of Vlad). More of her work can be found in Joyland, New York Tyrant, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana and an instructor at Catapult.

 

“To love is to tremble,” Luciana said.
“Then the earth loves us too much,” I replied, the sky turning gray and narrowing and sucking up all the light.
Lava ignited the ocean.
Thus I began measuring time according to Luciana’s pulse.“This is what it means to live among volcanoes,” she said, letting me listen to her lamb heart. “This is what it means to breathe in the  mouth of death.”
To love and die.To step over cracks in crumbling bridges.
There was a time when the ground didn’t move. Then came the mother quake, and Luciana opened her legs engulfed in my shadow. There were many before, but none like this one: the apocalyptic one, the one that made us disappear into the planet burning like my sister’s tongue on my pelvis.
We played a game of picking out the differences between her name and mine.
Lu-ci-a-na
Lu-cre-ci-aWe interlaced our fingers in the semidarkness to cultivate a memory of the liquid fire that was our flesh.
We took refuge among the condors.
We hid from the blood of those who roamed dodging horses.
Luciana was afraid of the roofless darkness, that’s why she used her braids to measure the height of our walls. The house could’ve fallen, coming down with the hoarse, rocky sound of the earth, but she said that dying crushed inside your home was better than surviving without a shelter; that dying with our blood indistinguishable, red like the moon, mixed up in the foundation was poetic.
“Have you seen how battered you are?” she said, caressing me with her knuckles.
Volcanic eruptions painted the sky a sickly yellow.
Greenish yellow.
Pus yellow.But our house was a rock where colors didn’t matter. The earthquake destroyed the city and populated it with deserted shoes and carrion. People abandoned their shelters, ran outside dodging the horses and condors, left their buildings, their houses, their caves, because they didn’t want to be crushed to death. “The sky is the only thing that cannot fall!” they screamed, clawing at the city in ruins.
They put up tents on the sidewalks.
The children and elderly were swallowed with a belch of dusty vapor.
“Fear makes us stupid,” I whispered to Luciana while making love amid the disaster.
“It’d be perfect to die right now,” she gasped.Her tongue was long as a rope I would’ve liked to jump.Her tongue was a rope tying me to every corner of the house that never fell.
“To love is to tremble,” Luciana uttered so that I’d feel her words. She wanted a perfect death, but our house was a temple jealously guarding the history of what doesn’t fall.
“This is what will kill us,” I told her one night. “This absurd resistance.”
People preferred the darkness, the lava, or the open legs of the earth to approaching a house that wouldn’t fall.
Outside, the screams were weaker than any of my moans.Luciana counted the cracks with her eyes closed and had nightmares with her ears open. The condors were the only breath of God’s crashing into the incessant flame of the volcanoes. We watched them clean up the bodies the earth didn’t manage to devour and held each other to keep warm.
There were bones bigger than Luciana’s legs. She opened them engulfed in my shadow and demanded I touch her in that forbidden place. “Walk on top of me like a sexless dead man,” she said and then asked: “Do you like the taste of blood?”
“I do. It tastes like language,” I replied.Outside, men and women distanced themselves from our house like from a hellhole. “Ñaña, my ñañita: please, close your legs engulfed in my shadow,” I implored in the evenings, but Luciana wanted me to throw her corpse into the stables where a horse would never trample the dead.
“I want to be like that dead body the wild horses of your brow wouldn’t trample,” I told her the night I jumped over her rope and emerged from bed like someone drowned.
The night I drenched the corridors caressing the walls and their cracks.
The night I learned that swallowing ash was better than taking shelter in a hellhole.
Before jumping her rope and emerging from bed like someone drowned, I said: “It’s better to be food for condors than to live in this hellhole.”
Her insides dug my grave like a fire under the water.
“The perfect death doesn’t exist, there’s only death,” she told me, crying from beauty.
And I went outside so the sky would fall on me.

---

Mónica Ojeda was born in Ecuador and is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva (Premio Alba Narrativa, 2014), Nefando (Candaya, 2016), and Mandíbula (Candaya, 2018), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de la Iguana, 2015) and Historia de la leche (Candaya, 2020). Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos (Candaya, 2014) and the collections Caninos (Editorial Turbina, 2017) and Las voladoras (Páginas de Espuma, 2020). In 2017, she was included on the Bógota39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honor of her outstanding literary achievements.

Sarah Booker is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on contemporary Latin American narrative and translation studies. She is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy, 2022), as well as Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also appeared in such journals as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:AM Magazine, Nashville Review, MAKE, and Translation Review.

Collage: Ibrahim Azab

Author’s note: This installment in the ongoing saga of the Brothers Squimbop begins directly after the ending of “The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas,” published in the previous issue (Winter, vol. 106.4). The Brothers have now refreshed their origin story through a protracted mime routine in western Kansas, and set off into the Dust Bowl to seed the legend they hope to one day be famous for. Events take a turn for the strange when they pass through a fantastical curtain set up by an enterprising farmer, and the Brothers find themselves jockeying for position with thousands of other Squimbop duos along the yellow brick road, which, in this version of events, leads straight to Dodge City.
From here, the action ties together several of my ongoing fictional locations and scenarios, primarily “Dodge City,” an absurdist version of the actual frontier town and site of my Room in Dodge City trilogy (2017–2023), and the saga of “Professor Squimbop,” one-half of the Brothers Squimbop duo and antagonist of my 2019 novel Angel House, which begins just where the action here leaves off. In this sense, the following story fills in both temporal and spatial lacunae on the map that I’ve been developing for many years.

---

Like so many duos before them, the Brothers Squimbop emerged on the other side of the farm curtain with the Kansas they’d embarked into behind them and nothing but Dodge City up ahead. The curtain rippled shut on the endless wheat expanse of Ransom County so that here, on the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City, as the mummers and drum corps chanted, they were in the thick of something at once contiguous with and entirely discrete from all they’d been brought up to consider their place of origin, to say nothing of the heroic future they had also, until a moment ago, believed to be their birthright.
With no time to reflect on what this transition might signify, they committed to marching along the road, straight as a parade route toward an altar already decked out and waiting to celebrate a sacred event. Their feet fought for purchase on the yellow bricks among the feet of thousands of others, some faster than they were and some slower, while some bled out in the crush, turning the parade route into a Red Sea that showed no sign of parting.
Through all this they marched on, their determination growing as the density of slick material underfoot also grew and their eyes fixated on the distant but increasingly vivid silhouette of The Dodge City Skyline up ahead, strung from one corner of the horizon clear across to the other. Each Brother—still Jim and Joe, they all took pains to remember, though none dared to assign himself either name at the other’s expense—kept his eyes on that skyline, determined not to waver and even more so not to fall under the million feet churning behind him, a churn whose relentless pace dragged the horizon closer one grueling step at a time, as if Dodge City were a massive float on wheels, rolling their way as their feet pushed a crank buried just beneath the bloody bricks.
As the ramshackle network that strung their minds together began to seize and then insist upon this understanding of the present episode, each Brother kept his eyes on the skyline to such a degree that he lost track of the Brother beside him, terrified to look away even for the instant it would’ve taken to verify that he was still marching as half of an iconic duo bearing the inviolable particulars of a shared life story ready for The Dodge City Biopic Treatment, rather than as one node in a million-headed Brother pack, a lone speck of fuzzy Kansan memory in a tumbleweed procession that was now, once again, composed of nothing but strangers. Each began to fear he was lost in the lumpen horde, frothing with anticipation at the chance to dominate, to have his story alone committed to the celluloid he could already hear hissing beneath the crunch of Squimbop skulls underfoot, regular and comforting as the popping of popcorn in Tommy Bruno’s machine.

This sound spurred them all to yet greater speeds as the road grew dense with Outskirts, the open desert of their early approach thickening into one- and two-story buildings and, soon after that, filling in with booths staffed by former or pseudo-Squimbops in fright wigs and novelty mustaches that hung crooked as their glue melted in the heat of the growing frenzy.
“The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas!” shouted a monger draped in the black dress of the woman who’d borne them so many times over. He leaned across the lip of a makeshift puppet booth and held out a cluster of marionettes. “Collect ’em all! The mime, the other mime, the black-clad woman, and . . .” he shook the cluster hard enough that a few heads and feet fell off, vanishing into the churn, “. . . the Brothers themselves! Jim and Joe, so tragically lost in their haste to reach Dodge City that they’ll never find each other again, and even if they did, they’d never know it was their Brother they’d found! It’s every man for himself now, with no mother to say which is which and which the other!!”
He pulled out a model of the farm curtain they’d passed through to end up here, and stuck his finger in and out with a ghoulish grin, increasing the speed until he mimicked an explosion and smashed the model with his other fist, feigning shock on impact.
The procession cackled, all the Squimbops as one, even as they swooned beneath the terror that what this puppet salesman had said was true. “All of us”—or all of them, they couldn’t help thinking—“could be Jim or Joe now, any two heads could form a set, any two out of these thousands could be the Real Brothers Squimbop, and we’d never know it. And what’s worse, the real ones would never know it either . . . their being real would amount to no more than a piece of trivia recited by schoolchildren on a tour of the Media Center in Cooperstown, NY, in exchange for a pat on the head and a token for a gift shop Squimbop Suit while the school buses idled in the lot at the end of the day.” They heard themselves chanting this lament, their mouths fixed around the words like the mouths of carriage horses around their salty bits.
“The Brothers Squimbop on the Road to Dodge City!” shouted another puppet salesman. “Relive a simpler time . . . relive the long, long approach, before all that happened in Dodge City had to happen. Before the vectors of authority grew so muddled that all narratives fell off the cliff of wishful thinking and sank into the swamp of . . .” He dragged his puppets along a model of the road laid out on the booth’s counter, smashing some under the feet of the others, laughing and squishing the rest together, until most were ruined. He regarded what was left with a look of real confusion, as if he’d expected this remnant to resolve the entire conundrum, while the mummers sang, “Now even the puppet sellers look confused / Bad moon a-rising, good times on the wane / True Story of the Brothers S . . . / Enough to drive a sober man insane.”
All the Squimbops sang along, too caught up in the tune to wonder how they knew the words.
The sales pitches and the songs about them continued to one-up each other, while members of the procession took over for those salesmen who’d been slain in the line of duty and The Dodge City Outskirts grew denser and denser, until they were hardly Outskirts at all. When the prospect of arrival drew near, a run on the remaining puppets occurred. Soon all the booths had been ransacked and the passion play of The Brothers Squimbop on the Road to Dodge City, told through an infinitude of marionette mouths all mashed together, coincided with the survivors’ emergence in the town proper so synchronously that later accounts, buried deep in the biopic that played on loop in one of the Media Center’s three main auditoriums, would claim the puppet reenactment had served as a lucky charm, permitting the survival of those relatively few Squimbops that did survive . . . without whom, so the story went, all of what’s known about the Brothers would have been lost to the same swamp from which the culminating forces of the present episode will be dredged in due time and, in contravention of a dozen international treaties, deployed on the field of battle.

Those who’d made it this far kicked over the last of the puppet booths that clustered even more densely inside the town, drank and ate from donkey carts selling roast goat and malt liquor, and shoved inward, shoulder to shoulder, mouths chattering around whatever they’d managed to put in them, desperate to go on telling their story lest, in the chaos, they forgot it and reverted to remembering only what they could hear themselves sing, unable to break rhythm with the mummers.
But their heads were so close together, each Brother’s mouth pressed wetly against another’s ear, that even though they’d made it to the center of Dodge City, where the True Story would finally be put into production according to the framework they’d agreed to acknowledge on the parade route, no such story emerged. “Ship” emerged, as did “Black Forest,” “mime and uncle show,” “Alaska,” “Olathe,” and “farm curtain,” but nothing resembling a sentence, let alone a large enough sentence cluster to cohere into a tale, which might develop into the script for the canonical biopic whose sale they’d ostensibly risked their lives to come here to broker.

Instead, a pregnant pause ensued, a collective exhalation that could only last so long. There was only so much breath they could expel, and only so much spittle they could wipe from their ears, before it was time to ask in earnest why they’d come to this town, if not to see the True Story unfold, complete and clarified as never before.

The square took on a powder keg atmosphere as the peace they’d fought so hard to achieve began to fester. They returned to fighting over puppets, turning the square into a facsimile of the road they’d marched down to arrive in it, even if now this required marching in circles. “We haven’t arrived yet!” they began to chant, as they hastily erected puppet booths from scraps of smashed wood and shredded velvet, while others began to jockey for position, determined to reinvoke the afternoon’s now-sacred parade, when the Promised Land was still up ahead, shimmering on the horizon, and not yet underfoot, slick with goat grease and spilled liquor. When all that mattered was making it to Dodge City, knowing full well that most among them would not.
“Onward, onward, noble soldiers, into The Real Dodge City at last,” chanted the Brothers, attempting to pick up where the mummers—who, believing their work was done, had dispersed—left off. For a long, dire moment, there were no iconic songs about this second procession, which would at last achieve in reality what the first had merely glimpsed in a fever. Then there were.
Singing these new songs, they marched in the widest circles that the square would permit, pressing up against the storefronts and cafes, doing all they could to convince themselves that Dodge City still lay up ahead, on the far side of a bloody conflict that would determine nothing less than whether any of those gathered tonight had the right to live safely and peaceably in a clarified future, as upstanding citizens of a sane community, veterans of the War to End All Wars, or whether they’d be vaporized or banished to roam as nameless outlaws, alternating between calling themselves Jim and Joe, riding a trail of ever-diminishing returns as they ducked into one roadhouse and small-town Elks Lodge bar after another, placing their hats on the scuffed brown wood and hoping an old tale of The Dodge City Civil War would earn them a domestic lager or shot of watery Jack, even as the old bartenders grew older and older and then, as had to happen one day, began to grow alarmingly young.

The Dodge City Civil War. None could say where the notion had come from, other than to picture a cue card thrown onstage from an unseen audience eager to push a flailing act into its next phase, but now that it had arrived, there was no masking its import. The square was so narrow, and its energies so jagged, that—this much was beyond clear—something had to occur to make their arrival stick. To bring the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City to a viable climax, beyond which whoever survived could settle into a sort of afterlife, a Postwar Era of peace and prosperity where any remaining simmer would be shunted safely into cinema and Dodge City would mean the end of the wilderness rather than its impassible continuation.
An endless spool of Dodge City Civil War cinema, they all thought. To age gracefully into a war movie senescence, first must come the War. As soon as this notion arose, it began to spread. The remaining Squimbops traced the square’s perimeter over and over, letting the prospect of War work its way through them, until they stood together before a plaque that read Sacrifice Square: Site of the First Battle of The Dodge City Civil War.
If they’d been ready to risk their lives a moment ago, suddenly some of them weren’t any longer. Now, as in a dream where a reprieve is granted via mysterious channels at the last possible juncture, some of them became convinced that the Civil War was long over, safely contained in plaques, flags, and benignly fading statuary. They began to chant, “We survived! The Civil War is behind us now, and here we stand, victorious, west of the crisis, in virgin territory at last, free to devise a new settlement and tell our story as it deserves to be told in the gilded cinema palaces of The Real Dodge City!”
“A new settlement! A new settlement!” they chanted, clinging to the horrible memory of the Civil War, whose material evidence still soaked their soft bodies, while so many of their brethren were gone, stomped like wine grapes along the yellow brick road. “To their memory,” chanted the Brothers clustered in the center of what they now called Sacrifice Square, “to their memory we consecrate this new settlement we’ve found!”
They hoisted high what puppets remained and pumped them in the smoky evening air, tiny wooden mouths frantic with glee, while behind them, another family of goats was slaughtered and a ritual pyre was stoked, and new stands began to emerge, selling hard cider from yellow oil drums and Civil War uniforms in the blue and grey trim of the two sides whose irreconcilable differences had shaken the fledgling nation to its core.
“Reenact the foundation crisis!” shouted the Squimbops who’d taken it upon themselves to become uniform salesmen. “For tonight we celebrate those who gave their lives to the Civil War, we honor them by donning their uniforms and retracing their footsteps, as Brothers . . . Brother against Brother to the death of all, here again as it was before, in the earliest days of Dodge City!”

As soon as the remaining Squimbops had donned the uniforms of their respective sides, half blue and half grey, the excitement of the reprieve began to wear off and some of them again began to suspect that, grim as the notion might be, The Real Dodge City Civil War was in fact still to come. For the second time today, they felt the bliss of true arrival fade into a shadowland of premonition, still awaiting its chance to come true.
“Not yet!” they began to shout. “We haven’t reached the Postwar Era just yet!”
“First the War, then the Postwar Era!” they shouted, the words as familiar as the mummers’ songs had been. “No rest until the blood of our enemies runs deeper than the blood of our comrades ever could! No solid ground of Dodge City until its mortar has been mixed with the blood we must first spill in earnest!”
“Perfect reenactment!” insisted one contingent, while the other countered, “No reenactment at all! The Real Dodge City Civil War is about to begin at last!”
Like so were the battle lines drawn, as those decked out in blue and in gray departed in identical columns from Sacrifice Square, which either already commemorated or was soon to commemorate the blood spilled for the sake of a sane future in a Dodge City waiting to be made Real, where each Squimbop would know his place and his heritage and would pass such knowledge onto whatever children he was fated to have, with a wife who would admire him equally for the journey he’d undertaken and the stasis he’d settled into upon reaching that journey’s western terminus.

Simultaneously jittering with the mania that precedes a massacre and still cognizant of the biopic they’d come to Dodge City to sell, they set out marching toward the warehouses and backlots of The Dodge City Film Industry, urged on by a collective force that already knew where the climactic battle would play out.
But first they marched past the Temple, downtown’s flagship cinema, done up in a mixture of Aztec and Egyptian styles. The Coming Soon boxes out front were empty, but Tommy Bruno was already at the concession stand, popping a fresh batch of popcorn and stocking the empty shelves with Twizzlers and Raisinets. He nodded sagely at the Squimbops who peeled off from the march, loosened their uniforms, and filed into the theater, hardly bothering to mask their shame at the decision to watch the Civil War from the comfort of plush reclining seats, indifferent to however long the footage might take to arrive.
Those determined to produce this footage marched on, back through the Outskirts and into a sandy stretch of desert between where the main road ended and the path into the replica town maintained by The Dodge City Film Industry began. The moon simmered on the horizon as the desert closed in, and in its light they could see that the farm curtain they’d all passed through was still open, admitting more duos from the ranch- and farmhouses of Ransom County, conscripted directly into a Civil War whose underlying conditions they’d never be invited to absorb.
These new recruits, already forgetting the life stories that just a moment ago they’d believed they were on the verge of selling as The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop, swarmed both armies, filtering into and swelling their ranks to such a degree that some began to worry whether there’d be enough space among them for blades and bullets to fly.
Crushed together just as they’d been on the yellow brick road, they watched the moon float up to the middle of the sky as they marched out of the desert and into The Dodge City Film Industry’s version of Sacrifice Square, fringed by a grove of warheads, silently standing guard, a becalmed but volatile Stonehenge that none paused long enough to salute.
Beyond the warheads, the night boiled with creamy off-white static as the Brothers separated into their respective sides and listened as their respective generals made their opening remarks, one insisting on reenactment, the other on that which would one day be reenacted, with only the covenant of War itself to decide which account the future would consider true.
When all had said their piece, they loaded their muskets, screwed on their bayonets, and surged into the alleys and backlots of the replica town, defending their positions with the full zeal of men who knew that most would not see the dawn.
“Brother against Brother!” declared the offstage voice they could still hear running through their heads. “A bloodbath the likes of which none had seen before, fought with technologies that would forever alter the sacred proving ground of the battlefield, in which men become Men before becoming meat. A War, indeed, for the very soul of Dodge City and, as such, for the ongoing legacy of the Brothers Squimbop and furthermore, for the legacy of America itself. For all this, for the True Story and its sequels beyond counting, tonight we rage!”

The War raged as promised through the night, tearing the very fiber of time asunder so that here, in no uncertain terms, the future itself was at stake. Suddenly, it was not inconceivable that the entire Squimbop Saga might extinguish itself, leaving nothing but cacti and lizards to see the sunrise.
Some Brothers ran to the equipment sheds and attempted to film the carnage, as if seizing control of the biopic could be that simple, but they were easily dispatched by the volleys of canon and missile fire launched from the weapons that had likewise been dragged from those sheds, all of them laid out to be used in exactly this way, in this exact time and place, while the other Brothers, the cowards and pacifists among them, dozed in the Temple watching the screen buzz with the same loop of pre-trailer advertisements over and over again—radiant Kentucky bourbon in an etched-glass Squimbop canister on ice, platinum or white gold mime-and-uncle cufflinks free with a blue or pink silk deluxe Squimbop Suit upgrade, dentures as sharp and white as the living teeth of the legendary Professor Squimbop himself, fed on a strict diet of full-cream milk and raw beef—until it grew as familiar as the litany of a religion absorbed in earliest childhood, before its signifiers amounted to anything more than the promise of a totalizing benevolent attention at work everywhere in the universe.
As the battle raged on, no advantage emerged. The question of whether they were reenacting the Civil War or enacting it for the first time was both primary and secondary at once, insofar as it determined the purpose of the mass bloodshed they were now unleashing, yet also, as that bloodshed took on a logic of its own, there were ever fewer heads to house the question whose resolution the death of their fellows was expected to produce, nor, as these fellows continued to drop, even many heads left to absorb the answer when it came.
To make matters worse, berserkers began to arrive. Lunatics, psychopaths, Squimbops from villages deep in the nation’s interior, where multi-generational blood feuds were still the only means of achieving restitution. The farm curtain flapped open to admit them, still dusty from the Kansan roads they’d traveled clutching their shovels and pitchforks, barely able to wait for the chance to do the one thing they knew they could succeed at.
They thronged the battlefield, naked or in street clothes or Squimbop Suits they’d picked up on their travels, hacking and slashing and firing into the crowd. As the Civil War grew increasingly illegible in terms of any side versus any other, a secondary uniform industry sprouted up along the peripheries, manned by those who’d declared themselves veterans. They roamed the battlefield skinning fallen Squimbops and tanning their hides in brilliant yellows and greens and reds, so that even from this chaos the semblance of a multivalent Great Power Conflict emerged, a full-blown World War growing, according to well-established precedent, out of what, earlier in the evening, had been a mere domestic dispute.
The more Squimbops fell, the more arrived, in almost perfect parity—an instantly iconic slapstick routine in its own right—as the legend of the Civil War that was fast becoming a World War spread through the Dust Bowl, offering a last-ditch reprieve from the economic drought that had throttled half the nations on Earth.
The scale of violence grew proportionally, breaking the bounds of the original biopic and bleeding directly into a sequel, or a series of sequels, spinning with a centrifugal force that threatened to suck in all of the living, pulling the Black Forest in from the east and the Pacific Theater in from the west, compressing it all into a town-sized black hole of such density that all those who’d survived thus far would be compacted into a single grain of sand, within which they’d have no choice but to go on fighting forever.

Thus the chaos reached a stalemate, bleeding every side dry as rival papers issued front page stories declaring rival victories and self-published books began to line the costume and puppet racks, alleging that the entirety of the visible war was nothing but a front for an intractable cabal that thrived on the confusion of its unwitting subjects, wresting a form of absolute control from the appearance of global disorder, while, at the same time, self-published books debunking those that made this claim likewise sprang up, just ahead of the crop debunking them in turn.

Out of this untenable condition, a single Squimbop, maddened by the mise en abyme that he could tell was just beginning, unless the way in which it seemed to be just beginning was itself a cleverly seeded delusion, marched beyond the battlefield and back to the henge of warheads, panting with the enormity of what he could sense he was about to do.
He stood in the shadow of the nukes, running his long fingers through his short hair, and gave himself all the time he needed to make his decision. Beneath the clouds of mustard gas and Agent Orange, the fray of musket and cannon fire, and the combined shrieking of those impaled on bayonets and those attempting to narrate the carnage for a proliferating stable of rival news outlets, he counted his inhales and exhales and began to develop an image in his mind of a Bachelor’s Cell on a dark corner at the edge of Dodge City, lit only by the glowing white of the supermarket next door. He could see himself in that room, over the years, gazing out the window through all that white glow and across the battlefield to the cluster of nukes he stood within now. He began to remember standing at the window studying the shadows the warheads cast in the moonlight, and then he remembered scribbling at his desk in the supermarket glow, page after page of blue ink on yellow paper, birthing his manifesto one frantic line at a time, his plan for a post-nuclear Dodge City, an end to the stalemate at last, a finale to the War that could only otherwise go on and on and on, indifferent to the passing of generations, turning into a grotesque form of stability from which it would become impossible to break free, given that War itself remained the only means known to man of leaving one historic era behind and compelling the next to begin.
The more he worked at his desk, the more he worked himself back in time, deeper into the Manifesto, so that now he could also see himself sourcing the uranium from Dead Sir, the swamp just outside Dodge City where, according to the legends that the Manifesto cited, all that the town sought to collectively forget was buried, gone but not gone, a function that—he wrote—perhaps all towns needed a swamp to provide, if they hoped to cross the brink where the past finally became the present. “So here I am at Dead Sir,” he wrote, “paddling on a skiff of lashed-together vegetable crates, fishing for the uranium that was buried on the bottom after the last nuclear holocaust, because none is ever the first, just as no Cold War begins in a vacuum.”
He could see himself dredging up fistfuls of the buried element, which, as he’d known it would, had only grown more potent from steeping in the silt of all that Dodge City sought to repress. He dredged it up and, over the course of long, feverish nights on the Outskirts of town, while the rest of the population battled on and every death summoned a new Squimbop through the curtain, he assembled the warheads, piece by laborious piece, growing ever more convinced that only a single, decisive blow could end the stalemate that had gripped the culture. “No future without annihilation,” he wrote, in the Manifesto that he’d begun to call My Nuclear Dissertation. He cobbled the warheads together one by one, sweating even when the nights were cold and sustaining himself on eggs and burnt toast from the diner in the center of town, where he worked three mornings a week to support his project for as long as it took. “No way out but through, no green lawns and white picket fences without first pulling the ultimate trigger.”

When his project was complete, the Professor—the title followed the completion of his Dissertation—wiped his silty hands on his pockets, dragged over an empty vegetable crate from the replica supermarket, and, standing upon it, announced into the general fray, though he had no illusion that his voice would be heard, “This stalemate must end! The nuclear era has guaranteed that no decisive victory is possible. We cower, instead, in terror of the earth-shattering technologies our forefathers fashioned out of the quantum disturbance of the last World War, and satisfy ourselves with an endless succession of proxy wars that never result in the clarifying epochal shift we so profoundly crave and, indeed, deserve. No, instead, these minatory witnesses,” he patted the nearest warhead, “have locked us into an endlessly self-perpetuating present. A zombie present, decades beyond its expiration date, and yet unable to expire because our fear of the future,” he patted the warhead again, harder, nearly slapping it, “has sealed us inside a loop where time can only grow stranger and stranger and stranger, as we play at war without allowing it to swell into the kind of seismic historical shift that man-to-man violence, in its very essence, exists in order to activate. The very reason we wage war, the dim yet sacred hope of peace on the other side, is an utter sham so long as these monstrosities watch over the battlefield, mocking it in silence!” He pounded the warhead now, loud enough to send off an echoing ping!
Though the melee continued, several Squimbops did turn to regard him lighting a match and holding it down by the warhead’s fuse. Several even appeared to bow as the fuse sparked alight and the flame began to travel. As it reached the reagent and the warhead shuddered and then soared upward, the War came to a halt and an instant of perfect communal clarity ensued, a pause while the warhead described its parabola across the nighttime desert, hanging silent and nearly motionless, as if briefly conscious enough to gaze down upon all it was about to destroy, pointing like the finger of God so that, if anyone were watching from a safe enough distance, they’d know just where Dodge City used to stand.
Then, perhaps spooked by its own sudden self-awareness, it fell. Screaming and boiling downward, it crashed into the foam cobblestones, incinerating them on contact before billowing outward in a mushroom cloud that precisely resembled the thousands that Professor Squimbop had studied in the long, lonely nights in his Bachelor’s Cell, the pages of his Dissertation lit only by the glowing white supermarket next door, itself a perfect fluorescent emblem of the Postwar Era he so longed to find a way to reach.

All went black. Then, slowly, greyish-white fog filled the scene and the Professor blinked, spit out grit and bone chips, and got to his feet, wincing in the rank air of the world he’d wrought. The foam cobblestones had melted and the desert sand beneath them had turned to glass, which he skated across, away from the carnage and into The Dodge City Postwar Era, real now for the first time, though it was in every regard just as he’d described it. In the distance, the farm curtains had fused with the horizon; they looked painted on, like relics from an age that had turned archaic overnight.
“So it begins,” he thought, walking out into the ruins, nostrils flared as the fallout began to mix with his mucus and turn his saliva sour. It took him the first part of the day to realize that he’d written nothing on this contingency, having assumed that he wouldn’t be here to see it. “Indeed,” he thought now, “my starting position, despite the green lawns and white picket fences and overstocked supermarkets I must’ve described to the point of morbid obsession, was that no one would be.”
“Therefore, all that follows,” he heard an offstage voice confirm, “will for you be a kind of afterlife. A kind of heaven or a kind of hell. That much, Professor, is up to you.”

I stand there squinting in the nuclear sunrise, blinking and licking my lips, my whole body sore like I’ve either just given birth or just been born. I gag as an image arises of my Brothers hurtling down a sinkhole, clotted together like a ball of mucus and hair, leaving me alone in a future that shouldn’t exist. I picture them under Dead Sir, down in the muck the uranium arose from, where they will in time revert to that same element, so that a future Squimbop, eons hence, will once again fish them out to make the bomb whose impact has rendered the world just the way it is this morning, once Dodge City has fed the Postwar Era back into its own ever-hungry Foundation Mythos and reached a new legitimacy crisis, which will in turn necessitate a new Civil and then a new World War.
I swallow and pinch my nose, trying to force down the feeling that the future Squimbop I’ve just now pictured will likewise be me, just as convincingly, or just as tenuously, as “this morning’s Squimbop”—a term I wish hadn’t just come to mind—is me as well.
When I close my eyes again, fallout settles on my eyelids. Beneath them, I see a mime, a ship, a mass grave, and a mushroom cloud, spinning like cards in a zoetrope, until they feel burned into the skin under my eyelids, an imprint of the fallout itself, a barcode stamped on the soft flesh of the Squimbop that, for now, I’m obliged to call me.
I squint and sputter and step backwards over a cold, soft lump that sends me sprawling onto my back. My head bounces against the melted Styrofoam and hits the glass beneath, causing my teeth to clack together. This triggers a scene of a street-choking procession descending on the town, armed with wooden puppets, their teeth clacking even louder than mine as they spew stories of conquest and adventure, of the glories of the Civil War that has finally ended, and is soon to begin.
Once I’ve gotten my mouth closed again, I roll over and push myself up, wincing not so much from pain as from the numbness that now fills my body, revealing what I’d both hoped and feared would be the case—that I’m on the other side of something, here and not here in a manner impossible to describe using the language of whatever life I’d been living before.
Back on my feet, I begin to survey the damage. I walk among the corpses—“my fallen Brothers,” I feel compelled to call them, though nothing in me feels any kinship with these bloated bodies clad in the dyed skins of their own fallen forebears—and I lose or fail to generate whatever thought I’d expected to have upon beholding them. I yawn, squint again, and find myself back in the zoetrope of mime, ship, mushroom cloud, and mass grave, a sequence whose compulsive reiteration fills me with shame.
I swallow and continue my grim route, beginning to wonder—this too feels predetermined, like I’m on a walking tour of the Media Center with a guide who’s already done two or three such tours today—whether I killed all these men, and if not, whether I’ll be blamed for it anyway. “As the lone survivor of whatever happened, it stands to reason . . . ” I hear the offstage voice assert, though, for the moment, it asserts nothing else.
In its absence, my mind loops back to the burden of selling the life rights for the True Story to whichever proponents of The Dodge City Film Industry remain. I picture them lined up in a dim boardroom, their notarized contracts and Mont Blanc pens reflecting back to them on a smooth onyx tabletop. Though I tremble on the threshold, I don’t resist when an aide pushes me inside and closes the door before I can turn, sealing me in there with the board members, the True Story now only what I say it is. I nod to all the aging men and women in identical silk suits, all of their eyes on me though their attention is clearly elsewhere, as they sip mineral water from sheer glass cubes and tap painted nails along the line where my signature belongs. I swallow, then I sign. Then I swoon.

I awaken on my back beneath a boiling Tommy Bruno hologram. His gaunt cheeks, lightly stubbled, and bald head fringed with two tufts of black curls look down upon me, his mouth opening and closing without seeming to speak. I lie there and watch as the hologram zooms out, revealing the concession stand that has followed me all around North America. Now, in a medium shot, Tommy Bruno sells popcorn and Raisenets to dozens of Squimbops who take their turns in single file, flickering like those reels of workers climbing on and off of locomotives in the very first days of the cinematic medium.
The hologram boils, dissolves, then drifts back together to reveal row upon row of nearly catatonic men waiting in a dim theater, watching the pre-trailer advertisements again and again and again, all blinking in unison as they dig into their treats. I try to sit up, but my body is numb to the point of uselessness, like all my nerves have been cut, leaving only sacs of fat and muscle atop bones that no longer have the power to compel them to move.
I try to swallow but taste only fallout, my mouth packed with dense, crunchy dust that I can neither chew nor spit. So I lie there, my Adam’s apple vibrating to no effect, as the hologram darkens then comes alight with a blazing True Story of the Brothers Squimbop title card. A cheer goes up in the theater as the opening credits play, and I see Tommy Bruno sneak in beneath the exit sign, a solid indication that he’s never seen this one before.

Something in the numb back of my head flickers as the rest of me prepares to leave this body and enter the one at large in the True Story. Only the flicker clocks the violation, the abandonment of what, a moment from now, I’ll no longer believe was ever me.
Then I’m gone, back on my usual stool at the diner where I’ve worked for years, hunched over my cup of too-sweet coffee and my usual plate of eggs and burnt toast. I lean against the overfamiliar counter and watch, on the TV mounted above the rack of vintage bourbon bottles and baseball pennants, a work crew dredging a gigantic houseboat out of a swamp. Picking at my breakfast, I try to keep the vision of what happens next from flooding back in. I can see myself floating away on that houseboat, taking to the waves which, loosed by the nuclear blast, have begun to flood inward, restoring to Middle America the Inland Sea that has already covered it at least once, rendering Dodge City an island, soon to sink.
The offstage voice, which sounds pinched and enervated now, says, “Proceed to the cinema, the show is about to begin. The show within the show, the molten core of the True Story itself, the safe harbor you think you left me for.”
The abruptness of this phrase causes me to turn so quickly on my barstool that I knock my coffee into my eggs, causing two hefty truckers to laugh so hard that they too spill their coffees into their eggs, causing two more truckers to laugh, and spill, and . . . in the far background, as I’m reminded of the room in which the self I abandoned lies watching, I hear the Squimbops in the theater laugh as well, slapping their thighs and spilling Raisinets between their seats.
“Well?” the voice asks, and I look around, desperately, coffee soaking my khakis as the TV shows the boat balanced beside the swamp, while an anchor says, “And there we have it, folks . . . The Dodge City Angel House Exhibit has been officially exhumed from Dead Sir, dislodged by the colossal blast that set The Dodge City Post-war Era in motion, and is hence ready for its maiden voyage, all the way to its berth at the Squimbop Media Center in Cooperstown, NY, as if the very events for which it’s been canonized have, in reality, not yet occurred but are now, after generations of waiting, finally about to!”
All the soaked truckers clap in what strikes me as a particularly postwar manner, a tense combination of macho triumphalism and nascent paranoia, as the enormity of what was hashed out abroad begins to seep into the woodwork at home. They crowd me, their eyes ashy and unfocused, as if they were no more than avatars of the Squimbops laughing and munching in the darkened theater, with Tommy Bruno standing by the exit behind them. They draw nearer with each impact, their feet following their hands as they clap in syncopated unison. I blot eggy coffee from my pockets, slip off the barstool, and run, elbowing three clappers aside as I ding the bell on my way out.

I run down the ruined main street of Dodge City, over puppets smashed flat as fossils, as more and more clappers emerge, coming up from alleys and down from stairwells and out from the bus and then the train station, masses of drifters in Squimbop Suits just now arriving. “Board the ship! Board the ship!” they chant. “Deliver us, before the waters close in, before the tidal wave washes all the . . .”
They chant this again and again, coming in and out of sync, sometimes doubling each other’s voices and sometimes cutting each other off, driving me toward the Temple, where the line snakes three times around the block. “The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop: OPENING TONIGHT” glows on the marquee, surrounded by pulsing flashbulbs.
As I run, my bowels tremble and I scan the line, wondering what would happen if I forced my way in past these hundreds of identical men, ghosts, and veterans waiting side by side to view the spectacle for whose production they gave their lives. I picture myself shoving past them, past the concession stand and down to that bathroom in the basement where the subway maps of Paris and London surely still run together above the urinals, forcing my way into a stall at the last possible second.
I see myself emerging from that stall and climbing the stairs onto a tremendous ship leaving Alaska, pulling southward out of the harbor, captained, now as ever, by Professor Squimbop. I try to picture him speaking to me, or miming his old speech, sending me back to Kansas to relive my origin story as one half of an iconic duo just setting out along the yellow brick road, but now, try as I might, I cannot force myself back into that scene. “Now it’s only you, my friend,” the voice shrieks in my ear. “You left me on my back with my nerves sliced to shoelaces. Now it’s only you and you and you and you!!”

As the voice ripples and bends, traveling through the fallout or emerging directly from it, the air begins to smell like seawater and each clap—the thousands of waiting Squimbops are synchronized now, shaking Dodge City like children in a cardboard castle—knocks deeper cracks in the sky and surrounding air, through which seawater begins to spill.
I spit as the first salty gust passes my lips, and I can tell, with a certainty I’ve never felt before that this, exactly now, is the only moment of decision I’ll ever have. Everything I am, whatever that may be, will only endure based on what I do next. I eye the line one last time, contemplating grabbing one of the Squimbops and taking him with me as a dummy Brother, a prop version of what I’ve lost, but then a wave crashes over us, wiping out half the line, and I’m swimming through it with Squimbops drowning all around me, fighting for the houseboat that has been unearthed from Dead Sir for my sake alone, to serve as the vessel upon which my journey across the Inland Sea will begin.

So my decision has been made, perhaps longer ago than I imagine. The waves carry me over the death throes of Dodge City, as thousands of Squimbops are swept into the sunken cinema below, and I crawl up the rigging on the side of the boat when it bobs into reach, coughing and crying as the same voice says, “Welcome aboard, Professor.”
Then I’m on the upper deck, falling sideways along what feels like a waterfall, full of fish and crabs and eels, careening through a slamming door and down a wooden staircase, washing into a soaked office where books, papers, and bottles of wine float, clinking together in welcome.
I fight my way to my feet and then, exhaling so deeply my lungs go flat against my ribs, I stride over to the window to watch Dodge City vanish beneath the waves, one more Atlantis among so many thousands—thousands behind me, and thousands more to come. Through the window, the air is fuzzy and grey and I can’t help picturing the nerveless, flattened self I left behind, lying on his back with all of this playing out as a hologram before eyes that will never blink again.
As if to confirm that I’m no longer him, I blink several times. Then I turn and look up the soaked staircase, deciding that this nerveless viewer is up there, in the Master Bedroom watching the film whose sale he brokered play out unto eternity, starring whoever I am now.
“And who’s that?” he asks. “Who is it that’s spending the money I earned, living like an aging bachelor prince on the houseboat I purchased?”
“I did this for you, not me,” I reply, as a bottle of port bobs against my ankle. “So that one of us might live to tell the tale. To spread the gospel from town to town, so deep into the Postwar Era that that the War itself will soon be forgotten. Is this not what we wanted when we were young?”
As I bend down to pick up the bottle and read the label in cursive Portuguese, I wonder whether all those drowned Squimbops are proud to know I’ve escaped, or if I’ve damned them by leaving like this, consigning Dodge City to the fate of all towns rather than sacrificing myself upon the altar of its singularity.
My eyes tear up as the boat begins to chart its course. I can hear the wheel creaking overhead, driven by my Distant Master, as I’ve decided to call him, sprawled painlessly in the Master Bedroom. I remove my soaked clothes, pull on a plush red robe I find hanging by the door, embossed with Prof. Sq. in gold cursive above its fuzzy breast pocket, pour a snifter full of port, pat a life-sized Tommy Bruno cutout on his bald spot, and begin to rifle through the video collection, neatly arranged on an adjacent shelf. The Brothers Squimbop, The Brothers Squimbop in Europe, The Brothers Squimbop in Hollywood, Squimbop Fever, The Brothers Squimbop in Kansas.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, refill my snifter, select The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop, Vol. 1 from a seven-video boxed set, pop it in the VCR, and sit down on the couch just as the FBI warning fades into a master shot of thousands of duos marching along the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City. Though I know it won’t amount to much, I use all my remaining energy to hold myself back for a long, breathless moment, before leaning in to study the screen, in search of myself and my Brother, lost but still discernible somewhere in the flux.

---

David Leo Rice is a writer living in New York City. His books include A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories, and The New House.

Illustration: Jan Robert Duennweller

I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and when I turned on the light, a ton of them scattered.

Holy shit there were a lot.

German cockroaches.

That’s what they were.

Learned that later with some research.

But at the time they just looked like crickets.

Except not good.

Bad crickets.

Big ones, small ones.

It was a mess.

I watched them scurry toward cracks where the curled linoleum missed the baseboards.

Or beneath the fridge.

Into cabinets.

Into outlets.

Like something in reverse.

One was crawling over a glass in the sink.

And so, forgoing the water, I retreated to my room.

To prepare for war.

Early the next day, the building manager and plumber came by.

They inspected the pipes every winter.

Did we wake you up?

Ha, no.

I was in a paint-stained hoodie and sweatpants, half a boner left, hair sticking up.

Barefoot.

The plumber went to check the bathroom.

Building manager told me some shit about fixing the parking lot, some new online app thing too.

She began to fawn over my cat, petting him as he threw his side into her legs.

His eyes were halfway closed and he was licking his lips rapidly—just about to bite her—when she stood.

Asked me if everything else was good, did I need anything, had I seen any bugs . . .

“Bugs?”

“Yeah like cockroaches, bedbugs.”

“No.”

The moment swelled.

“Wait, yeah actually I saw a few the other day. Here and there.”

Another long pause.

The last of my boner dissolved.

“Nnnnnlike . . .” she said, doing a juggling motion and looking up toward the ceiling. “Crickets? Ants? Whatta we talkin?”

What, am I the fuckin bug guy now?

What is this.

And how did she know . . .

“I don’t know, I’ll keep an eye out and let you know.”

“OK well, let us know if you see any,” said the plumber, stomping back into the room, “and you’ll see me again.” He thumbed himself and nodded with a confident, dutiful look on his face. Then he smiled. He had the zeal of a man recently hired. Plumber and exterminator and any other “er” they needed. “We’ll take care of that, don’t even worry.”

And I believed him.

The building manager smiled and said they’d try to get me a different oven too, gesturing toward mine because the door was hanging off.

[They never did.]

I had fixed it with rubberbands but now that was failing as well.

“Thanks.”

“You’re paying for it,” said the plumber, “why the hell not.”

“Yep.”

“OK bye-bye,” said the building manager. “Bye-bye cutie,” she said to my cat.

He meowed at her in a yelling/angry way.

I closed the door behind them and looked around the kitchen, the livingroom.

Silent but swarming with the enemy.

My walls, teeming.

I imagined one scouting with binoculars, from high atop a cabinet.

I was cornered.

Infested.

But no I wasn’t gonna tell Management.

Fuck Management.

This was crossroads connecting.

Enemies, destinies.

Poured into each moment with perfect reason.

Fuck Management.

I’m Management.

So that night I checked again.

Had to.

Like I didn’t want to delude myself.

I had to see it.

And there they were.

There they fucking were.

Scattering again.

Of course—I thought—if I’m seeing them at all, there’s tons.

They’re never just “here and there” like I said before.

It’s not like a couple vacationing.

There had to be tons and tons.

At this point they’d probably established rudimentary governments, verging on nuclear capability.

Space programs.

I realized that—in addition to whatever natural disposition my building had to bugs, like the giant gaps in the flooring and cabinets, as well some of the plumbing leading to literal dirt/outside—leaving cat food out wasn’t helping.

A number of them scattered from the bowl.

There was what seemed like, to my still sleepblurry eyes, a giant one—some deep-hive queen they brought out when an area was secured.

I genuinely thought they’d advanced a larger, more esteemed member of their overall population as a sign of victory.

Taking over, progress.

But then I focused and saw it was just a shred of cat food with a couple roaches on it.

Anyway, real or not, that was what did it.

I’d had it.

This imagined affront of some biological victory float, this was enough.

I saw a roach on the counter, looking at me like hehe what.

Antennae moving in circles.

So condescending.

A greasy, terrible, alien-like cricket, looking for . . . what?

A few crumbs?

Fuck you!

I snapped out of my daze and started killing.

Smashed the roach on the counter with a papertowel.

(Yeah, I had papertowels, bitch).

Grabbed this bleach-based cleaner I had in a spray bottle.

Fiff fiff, let off a few in the direction of one still looking for a crack.

Another one paused in the middle of the kitchen floor, fiff fiff, it ran for a second then flipped over and writhed, dying.

Pumped its legs in slower pulses.

Yeah fuck you too.

Smashed a couple more in the sink.

Antennae circling slow as they perished in their own juice.

I mean I was crafty.

Even early on, I rarely lost a hog.

“Hog” being slang for when they freak out.

Because when they sensed danger, their movement changed.

They went hog on ya.

I caught a couple in quick succession with the papertowel.

Legs smeared on the counter.

Threw the papertowel out and went to reload but saw a big one and hit it with a marker I had nearby.

A stunning direct-hit even while hoggin.

The roach stopped abruptly then continued on in little lurches, like something with a triangular wheel.

I pressed my finger onto a small one looking for escape on the counter.

Sprayed some as they entered a crack in the flooring.

When I moved the coffee maker, a bunch scurried.

So I sprayed, smashed, repeat.

Wiped up bodies.

But there were always more.

Yeah, standing there holding the bleach and my white rag of death, I realized I was meeting the problem at a point of the problem’s choosing and not my own.

I mean this wasn’t some movie stuff, where they’d work in tandem to comb my hair or make my bed, make food, etc. sing me songs as I cleaned them with a toothbrush in my sink or some such thing, no.

This was real life.

And violence, the solution.

Endeavoring war only at the border of coexistence, that’s denial.

Meeting them where they were.

Which, to be fair, was only the kitchen.

I will admit that at first I was lulled by this treatise, them remaining in the kitchen and not anywhere else in the apartment.

Yes for a moment, this recognition of boundaries had me feeling some sick respect for them.

Some vague appreciation, beginning on a negative.

Hey, at least you didn’t infest ALL of my apartment.

Because it would be the bathroom and my room next.

And then, in all likelihood, the world.

And there I go again being the damn hero.

But first I had to do some research.

I went to the coffee shop in town the next morning to regroup.

Looking for answers, looking for something, but what?

That’s when I found out the fuckers were German roaches.

[Dropping manila envelope with case files/mugshots on police chief’s desk.]

German roaches.

Wouldn’t ya know it.

I paused between sips of black coffee to stare tired-eyed out the coffee shop window, at the quiet street, absorbing this new reality, the infester, an enemy.

Which now had a name.

The German cockroach.

From my studies, I gathered they could live off soap and shit, like toothpaste, or just water left in the sink.

Goddamn.

The German cockroach is the most common cockroach and one of the more common infestations. German cockroaches are serious pests that can put you and your family at risk. They spread diseases like salmonella and ruin food. These resilient insects are experts at scavenging for crumbs and leftovers. They’ll quickly build colonies in apartment buildings and houses if the resources are there. They’re unable to survive away from humans.

I envisioned one looking through my mail.

Brushing its teeth at my kitchen sink.

I saw one wearing my clothes.

Wasn’t immediately clear whether it would be a situation where my clothes were smaller and fit the roach, or just my normal-sized clothing moving across the floor, with only the roach’s head sticking out.

They said the best way to get rid of them is to make it a not-welcome place.

Clean a lot, nothing resembling food out at all.

I found someone had—via a search engine’s recommendations—already popularized the search “why are German cockroaches the worst.”

And indeed, they were.

Man, were they.

I looked out through the window again, across the street, and saw a roach doing the throat slicing with finger move, disappearing as a car passed by.

Where Do German Cockroaches Come From? The German roach is easily transported. It can catch a ride in your grocery bag. Eggs are attached to things and then hatch in the new destination. Cardboard, clothing, etc. Inadvertently introduced into your pantry or your kitchen cabinets. Given a choice, they’ll opt for sweets, grease, starches, and meat. When food is scarce, however, they’ll eat anything from pet food to soap to hair to excrement to glue.

There were pictures of adults and babies.

The babies were called nymphs.

Pictures of the egg sac, which was called an ootheca.

Which looked like a small piece of graham cracker.

The females carried them on their back beneath their wings.

German roaches can’t fly either.

Because they’re the worst.

Couldn’t even survive without humans in a temperature-controlled environment.

Living on crumbs, soap, toothpaste, and in dire situations, each other.

In famine conditions, they turn cannibalistic, chewing at each other’s wings and legs.

Eating out the dead shells of their brethren, like so much forbidden lobster, my god.

There was an icon of a roach—bird’s-eye view—in a crosshair, above some facts.

I scrolled a little more, mindlessly, about to close the website when I saw the word “blattellaquinone.”

Blattellaquinone.

The sex pheromone of the German cockroach.

It said their presence, with high infestation, carried a musty odor.

Which was their fuckjuice.

Which accounted for the smell when I checked beneath the sink.

Ah, blattellaquinone, that’s what it was, yep.

Saying that to the person next to me at the coffee shop, pocketing my phone.

Roach fuckjuice, ah that’s what I was smelling OK.

Blattellaquinone.

Man.

Sex parties on my fucking dime . . .

Salmonella . . .

Oothecae . . .

Fuck all of that.

No.

I wasn’t having any of it.

On the walk home, I re-upped on papertowels and bleach spray, and passed my friend Mack’s shop, needing the advice of a seasoned warrior.

But I saw he was showing someone a shotgun, so I kept walking.

On a mission anyway, fuck it.

Mack and I will meet again in the afterlife.

That night, it was nonstop carnage.

I set my alarm for 3am and flipped the lights on, ambush.

Quickly sprayed down the sink, which was full of them, then grabbed my bludgeon and began bopping.

I’d fashioned a striking object out of an empty papertowel roll, with a taped handle.

Crimped and taped the top too, for durability.

My bludgeon of many-kills.

Quicker than the papertowel for that initial rush.

I smashed a bunch on the counter.

Bop bop bop.

Whittling away at their numbers.

It was a numbers game, really.

Followed some scurriers back to major cracks, which I taped over with packing tape.

I put packing tape around outlets too.

Discovered a makeshift camp beneath the crockpot.

They scattered.

I set the crockpot down on one by accident, smashing the back half, leaving the front half intact and pleading forward.

Hardwired to continue.

To go.

But it was not to be.

This is the end for you, my friend.

Goodbye.

I killed as many as I could and when everything cleared, I decided to stay up and discourage scavengers.

Because it wasn’t gonna end with small measures.

So I grabbed my .308 and patrolled the kitchen.

Practicing raises/dry firing here and there.

I’d bought the rifle off Mack a couple months ago and he told me the real lessons are learned dry firing.

Gun up/arm out, aim, work the bolt, pull the trigger, tsik.

It was a cheapo rifle but, for whatever reason, it was the only time I’d heard Mack express jealously toward a firearm.

Scout rifle in .308, carbine length, mag fed, iron sights, and rail for scope.

Designed for be a do-all gun for a single soldier on any given mission.

Light enough to carry but plenty of firepower if needing to engage.

I saw a roach crawling up the wall and killed it with the butt of the stock.

I woke late the next day in my chair, lights still on in the kitchen.

My .308 leaned against the wall.

I made coffee, doing some more research.

Technical research, if you will.

What to do.

The right course.

It said I had to locate and destroy the nests.

Nests are often found behind refrigerators, in kitchen cabinets, crawl spaces, in corners and other compact places. Telltale signs of a nest include mounds of cast skins, egg cases, dark spots or smears, and live or dead cockroaches.

Smears . . .

Anyway, the problem had to be rooted.

An unwelcoming.

I sipped my coffee and checked the areas I’d taped up.

There were bodies, legs, antennae in the tape.

Poppy-seed-looking things, which was their shit.

I swept around the fridge and oven and found a number of dead shells.

Dumped the dead shells into the garbage and waited for sundown . . .

Which in Michigan in December was 4pm.

That night, I went after the nests.

Pulled the fridge out.

A ton of them scattered.

It was the most I’d seen.

I swear I could hear the sounds they were making in the ear-ringing silence of the kitchen.

A sort of dry clacking sound.

The room condensed around me.

Mesmerized by the fuckjuice.

But I shook it off.

Bleached the inside of the back of the fridge, where the internals were exposed.

Fiff fiff fiff.

A bunch more came out, including a number with (licking lips, impossibly evil rasp) delicious oothecae on their back . . .

They popped a certain way if you got them just right.

The egg carriers.

I’d found a nest.

Tons of nymphs emerged.

But I drowned them with the bleach spray.  

My spray-finger, cold and true.

I sprayed some bleach into the back area of the fridge again.

A couple more came out.

I smashed them with my bludgeon.

Bop bop.

Juice exploded out of them and they went to god, there on the kitchen floor.

I set down my bludgeon and inspected the back of the fridge again.

There was a deep bush of lint and fur and whatever else over the engine(?) grate.

So I sprayed it down good.

And the lint wetted and sagged.

Roaches came out.

Crawling out of the soaked lint.

The smell was terrible.

A musty, deathly odor.

A taunting cologne . . .

When I moved the oven out, same thing.

I sprayed the entire kitchen floor and wiped it, dumping heaps of folded and soiled papertowels (bought the nine-pack, bitch) in the garbage.

The garbage can, piled with papertowels besmeared with random body parts.

A monument to Death.

I mean they didn’t ask.

If I’d heard a knock at the door and opened it and saw all of them there, with one in front, hat in hands, toeing the ground sheepishly, asking for shelter, I would have gladly taken them in.

I’m saying this in all honesty.

That would have been no problem.

But they just started in on my shit, with their fuckjuice.

And I wasn’t having any of it.

When I finished cleaning, I sat in my chair again, ready for another long night.

Practicing raises with my .308.

Raise/arm out, aim, work the bolt.

Tsik.

I remembered a text from Mack that I hadn’t responded to.

It said to come down to the shop, he’s got the stuff I wanted.

For trimming .308 brass.

It was getting late, but in the winter he was always there.

I set the rifle down beside my chair and got dressed.

When I left my apartment, it had just begun snowing.

Big flakes.

The OPEN sign blinked at Mack’s, behind the steel grates covering the windows.

Inside, him and some other old man were laughing, standing with their hands in coat pockets, near a propane heater.

Hunting and fishing gear lined the walls.

The guy wore a hat that said he was a veteran of Vietnam.

Mack had a pretty (I must say) preppy new winterhat, but the front of his coat was still smeared with dirt/grease/solvents.

Oversized jeans and velcro shoes.

Gray moustache waxed at the ends.

“Alright then, addy ohs, I’ll be seein ya,” he said. “Stop by Tuesday then and I should have that ready for ya.”

“OK then, Mack. I’ll be seein ya.”

“Okedoke.”

The other guy walked out, making quick, cold eye contact with me.

“Boy I tell ya,” said Mack. “It’s been one a them days. How ya been. Oh, before I forget, here.”

He held up a finger, patted his coat, looked around his bench area.

Handed me a couple small packages with the cutter and lock stud to trim .308 brass.

“Thanks man.”

“Got this I wanna show ya too,” he said.

He beeped some buttons on his safe.

Took out a .38spl revolver, Smith and Wesson Model 10, with “Michigan State Police” engraved on the backstrap. “That come walkin in today. Try the double action. That’s been jobbed.”

I aimed at a stuffed squirrel on a fake branch wall decoration he had.

Tsik.

It was nice.

“Try the single.”

Cliiick. Tsik.

It, too, was nice.

They always were.

Old guys don’t mess with shitty triggers.

I handed it back to him.

So what’s new, he said, closing the safe.

I said nothing.

He said that’s good.

Then he told me a sizable biography of the man who’d just left.

How he knew him, detailed work history, some fun facts, etc.

Repeat champion of a contest in town where they shoot at an egg at 100 yards with a .22lr and have to break the yolk.

They were both Marines.

Which segued to a story about the last Marine killed in Vietnam.

Mack knew him, knew his family.

Blown up by a rocket.

Death and war were always the topics at Mack’s.

People he knew who had died, or who he’d seen die.

People shot.

Blown up by rockets.

Drunk drivers.

Farm accidents.

Domestic disputes.

Military and cop work.

I realized Mack just had to say them out loud, to pass them back on to the world.

And for me to listen was no big deal.

To take the hot potato.

“Let’s just say, they didn’t have to crush his car too much to get it into that cube size, it was already there,” he said, as I ramped back in to what he was talking about.

The stories blend together with him doing almost all of the talking.

“Shit,” I said.

“Take on a tree at 120mph and shit happens. He was a good kid too.”

He described having to smudge some brains off an odometer to get a reading, which was procedure at accidents.

He rested a hand on his vice.

Twisting moustache with other hand.

The propane heater scorching my eyes.

He told me about a gunfight he was in.

Where he almost got shot through a door.

Which is why he instinctively stands to the side of every door he approaches.

Because when a load of buckshot comes through one at you, you think about it differently.

You ever been in a gunfight, he asked, squinting rhetorically.

Because he’d been in many.

And they ain’t fun, he said.

Which segued—as it always did—to him insisting warm socks to be the most important piece of gear.

Guns and ammo are good, but warm, dry socks win wars/gunfights.

Every one of his stories ultimately boils down to having clean/dry socks.

“I get a kick out of these bozos talking about a civil war now,” he said. He absently moved the crank on his vice. “It ain’t gonna happen. Not with these knuckleheads, no way.”

He said you gotta know when you enter war, you’re making a huge sacrifice.

Because you die no matter what.

Are you ready to take arms against your fellow man.

Are you ready to sit in a ditch for days in the cold, waiting.

And somehow, as it always did, this morphed into a scenario where I felt like he was directly addressing me for making some wild claim.

Like I’d just told him that I wanted a civil war and that it would be easy, I’d win it myself with no socks.

You gotta be ready to lose some, and take some, he said.

It’s not a game of pool.

The wager is different.

You cross a line.

That’s how it works.

So you gotta be ready.

“You gotta have a plan,” he said. “The side that has command and control will win. If you don’t have command and control, you got nothin.”

Lord, didn’t I know it.

Like I hadn’t been stacking bodies the last 48 hours.

Like I wasn’t a cold killer.

Like their juice wasn’t all over my hands.

I saw a montage of helicopters, with audio of machinegun fire, screaming, pictures of various German roaches dead on the counter, barbed wire, bombs going off.

Me, red-eyed in my chair holding the .308.

“Mack what do I owe you for this.”

He looked at the stuff and said, “Mmm [shrugged] . . . Merry Christmas!”

“Alright, thanks.”

“No problemo.”

Then, as he always did, he judo’d that deal into a favor.

I never got anything for free, I exchanged work after the fact.

This time it was helping clean up his condemned cabin.

The last time I worked up there I got a rash that lasted two months, as well as like, four ticks.

“Yeah I figure when the weather breaks we go up there and knock it all out, see if we can’t get a beam under that roof so it doesn’t fall on us and all that.”

“Sounds good, let me know.”

I was on my way out, holding the door, the cold coming in.

“Might do Grand Rapids gun show too, so let me know what weekends you’re free.”

“Will do.”

“And hey come by more often. Haven’t seen ya.”

“Alright.”

When I got home and turned on the lights, there was nothing.

None scattering.

None in the sink.

None in the cabinets.

None beneath the crockpot.

None beneath the fridge.

No bodies or bug shit stuck to the tape covering the outlets.

No nymphs.

No oothecae.

Everything smelled clean.

But for how long, I thought.

And that, really, was the key.

To zoom out and understand, no end.

Only the battles of in-between, the many and all-important.

No ultimate measure.

And no way to avoid engaging.

Which felt comforting to acknowledge.

The natural state.

Command and control in the face of surrendering to helplessness.

Killing all doubt in an instant.

I tossed the .308 trimming tools into my jug of .308 brass and grabbed the rifle again for a couple raises.

Shooting arm winged out wide.

Worked the bolt a few times while maintaining aim.

I pointed the rifle at the window, and the dark blue-gray winter expanse beyond, snow falling in big pieces.

A world of battles.

The big in-between.

Snowflakes moved through the ghost-ring sight, resembling a small snowglobe.

With the front red fiber-optic bead like a powerline in the distance.

The same scene just outside my window.

As within, so without.

And I thought about how tomorrow might as well be today.

As I often had.

Except where once that thought was a sentencing, now it just made sense.

Command and control.

I caught something out of the corner of my eye and turned.

There was a roach, crawling up the wall.

I raised my .308 and aimed.

Captured the roach in the ghost-ring and kept it beaded as it crawled.

And then it stopped, antennae circling slowly, suggesting, “Do it, motherfucker.”

I worked the bolt, keeping the roach beaded.

Tsik.

---

Sam Pink is just a Lil sweetie. Twitter: @sampinkisalive. Instagram: @sam_pink_art. 

Illustration: Sam Pink

We went bowling after work for team building. I found a severed finger, calm and blue, on the floor near lane number five. It still wore a wedding band. Joanna suggested we phone for help. Ann told Joanna to stop using phone as a verb, nobody here was British. George suggested it was a prop finger, perhaps left over from Halloween. Joanna disagreed. Mary was singing the latest earworm song of the summer and Joanna told her to shut her face already because this was serious. Ann loved George who was married to Mary who was in love with Joanna. I was trying to find love myself and hoped the severed finger was pointing the way.
It pointed, suggestively, in the direction of Joanna.
We worked in a building that was designed to look like ships sailing through rough seas. A metaphor for commerce, my welcome email told me. The man who built it, Bob Oscar, owned the apps for most of what the world consumes. Food, drugs, entertainment, relationships. I worked on the floor that sold the app that finds you love. Many long years of planning were put into how to make money on the app that finds you love. The team brainstormed, pounded their heads on the meeting table, ordered catered lunches, played beer pong, decided they needed another round of funding, realized maybe it was sex they wanted to sell instead of love, but were told that the app that finds you sex was on a different floor therefore they’d better stick to love. Love it was, then. But morale was low. They bought new hoodies for the team. A robot coffee maker for the breakroom. Hoverboards for the mail guy. There was almost too much good living to care about selling love. Everyone was too wasted on lunch hour cocktails to answer emails. They wanted to change the way the world finds love, but it was getting hard to find anyone left who deserved it.

One of my jobs was to write the office newsletter.
I wrote about the chaos and mystery of life. From my desk I could see the window washers on the new skyscrapers. They were like angels with broken wings when they fell.
But I digress.
Joanna had ancient eyes that made you want to write a song about her. I wanted to realize her, in an animal way, on account of the severed finger suggesting it.
Everyone else was boring, or worse.
George, my deskmate, had a passive-aggressive streak and wore only orthopedic shoes. He danced outside twice a day as instructed by his doctors for stress. Mary and Ann liked to order out for sushi and they’d make me hold their soy sauce in a little bowl for dipping like a priest.
I don’t really like holding people’s soy sauce, I said.
Oh come on, they said. This job is actually terrible. Getting our soy sauce held is the only thing we have that gives us meaning anymore. Take that away, we’ll jump off the roof.
Okay, okay, I said and the years rolled by.

I looked out at the skyscrapers often and thought about those workers up there balancing their lives away and I almost understood why they jumped. Or was it that they simply stopped trying not to fall?
I didn’t have time to wait for answers.
I tried to talk to Joanna with my eyes. I tried to use the app to tell her that I loved her but it only showed me women who were seeking love, not women who didn’t know love was staring them straight in the face.
Anyway, I had a newsletter to run.
There had been stories online about how wacko everything in America was and I got pretty worked up about all that. Acid in drinking water and pedophile bankers and terror, all kinds of terror, filling the streets. It was hard to know the difference between mercy and pain. It was like everything was beautiful and bad.
George was always saying maybe the universe was an alien hologram. Or that our world is someone else’s dream. I said that was nonsense. Instead, I was convinced we were all made from the same cosmic dust. I was the same thing as a house cat, a nuclear submarine, and Joanna.
But Joanna felt so far away.
I wrote all this up and put it in the newsletter. Told my fellow workers of the struggle, the corporate ennui. I cast our daily slog as the long and meaningless fuckery of time.
Outside, the helicopters circled the skyscrapers. They made shadows the size of pterodactyls. Everyone was going bowling again after work for team building. Joanna raised her eyes to me once that day. She had dark Spanish eyes, red French lips, and a big dumb American mind.

Outside, rain came down like a soft curtain.
I’d always been a daydreamer. In school my teacher would be going on and on about parallelograms and I was crossing the Alps on a hovercraft. Back then love was wild and easy. In my dreams I went everywhere. Played dominoes on the moon. Drank Shirley Temples with Marie Antoinette.
I put all that in the newsletter too.
But most days the world seemed too grave and annoying to get back to doing any actual work. I thought of shooting someone, or myself, but changed my mind so many times I gave up. At home I kept the blinds low, avoiding the light. Woke up still dreaming of Joanna and her international body.
Sometimes the words of the newsletter rearranged themselves and came back to me as poetry. They made a bow and arrow and I shot it at Joanna’s heart.

Then something not so good happened.
Everyone in the office actually started reading my newsletter. Mary lost it on George. She said all love between men and women was assault. George told Mary he thought that was a radical position for her to take, seeing as she was the one. The one what, Mary asked. George said nothing. He watched Ann. She was in the corner harming (or pleasuring) herself, barely concealing it. The interns were slowly deleting the hard drives.
Did love mean anything anymore or was it all a wildfire, destroying everything as it grew?
I tried to talk to Joanna with my eyes again.
Nothing seemed to work and so I dreamed a little more. Somewhere out there, in the forests and jungles, millions of animals were brutally murdering each other without love, craving no meaning.
I watched the river reflected in the windows of the building next door. The water seemed trapped in the glass.

Soon after that the crash came. Everyone lost everything. The bosses began jumping from the executive suite. I sat in the breakroom, trying to explain to the robot how I liked my espresso. I opened the window. I wrote out the last newsletter by hand on a legal pad and folded the pages into paper airplanes and aimed them at the falling billionaires.
I took the severed finger from my pocket. The wedding ring reflected in the dull fluorescent light.
I spun it once and then again. It pointed, suggestively, to the open window. I walked over and felt the cold air. The sun was going down. Joanna took my hand. She closed her eyes as if in prayer. I turned to her.
If things were different, I asked, could you ever see yourself with a poor boy like me?
She didn’t speak but I knew what she wanted. She wanted to make love on black sand beaches beside blue crashing waves. She wanted to live outside the law. She wanted a best friend. She wanted to eat guiltlessly all the meals denied her through the years by her own desire to stay attractive in the cruel world. She wanted a dog. She wanted a sheepdog. She wanted a sheep too. A flock of them and strong boots and a countryside to roam around in and a stout umbrella and a warm wool coat against the storms. She wanted better vision. She wanted a song to sing. She wanted to harmonize with the vibrations of the earth. She wanted to be free from suffering. She wanted to dance on the razor’s edge of madness and be home in time for dinner.
She too could see yearnings in my eyes.
She could see I wanted a new way. I wanted to hold her hand. Something fundamental was moving between us, lover and beloved. A weird gravity urged us toward a most drastic conclusion. Of course it didn’t matter what we desired. We were subject to the constant tug of insignificance.
I’m not sure I could love you, Joanna said. To be honest, I’m not in the mood.
That’s the trouble, I said. No one’s in the mood.
There was another long pause like so many before it. Was it awkward or dramatic, I couldn’t tell.
You know nothing about me, she said.
I wanted to tell her that I knew everything about her. I knew her deepest fears. I knew the names of her invisible friends. I knew the way she drank her martinis. I knew her favorite day of the week. But then, quite slowly, perhaps it was the length of the pause, the weight of it, that caused me to understand that in fact I knew nothing about Joanna at all. I didn’t even know her last name. I didn’t know where she was from. If I’m honest, I didn’t want to know any of those things. I just wanted her to want me.
I understand, I said.

I used to daydream when I was a kid about what I’d do with three wishes. After I wished for more wishes and I’d gotten everything I ever wanted, I started to build in my mind a new society. One without gods and bosses. There would be no more need for money and no more need for love. The only law would be irrelevance. Everyone had to strive in my new world to become less and less relevant. All things trending toward laziness and indecent fun. If someone tried to play King of the Mountain, I’d destroy the mountain. But always there would be some spoiler in my daydream. Some pedant who would point out that this new lazy community was all well and good but how are we going to eat? Who was going to take care of the babies? And while we’re on the topic, while everyone’s out having big fun, who the hell was going to make the babies? I never had an answer to these questions. And soon the daydream would fade and I would return to the world of glass and water.
This is what I was thinking about when Bob Oscar himself walked in. He was shirtless and drunk. For a moment I thought he was holding a weapon but it turned out to be a small radio that was tuned to the news. It squawked out sad headlines.
A life’s work, Bob said. All gone in an evening.
He was edging toward the open window.
Are you okay, asked Joanna.
What’s your name, Bob asked.
Joanna, she said.
How long have you worked here, he asked.
Almost two years, she said.
Bob looked down at his feet.
I wish we could’ve gotten to know each other, he said.
I almost pushed him, but he did the job for me.
Then George and Mary and Ann made their way into the break room. They’d been chasing Bob Oscar, it seemed. The coffee robot was out of control, spitting hot water into the air like venom.
Where is he, Mary asked.
I motioned toward the open window.
George and Ann were holding hands.
We all poked our heads out into the dangerous night. I was envious of all who could jump so freely. I could feel the black wind in my hair. We were finally a team and maybe more. Maybe a family. Soon a decision would need to be made, but not yet. There was nowhere else I wanted to be.

---

Michael Bible is the author of the novels The Ancient Hours, Empire of Light, Sophia, and Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City. His work has appeared in the Oxford American, Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, Vice, The Baffler, and New York Tyrant. Originally from North Carolina, he lives in New York City.  

Illustration: Nick Stout

 

Time wore on up there in Alaska, while I—barely half a duo by that point, no longer a Brother to anyone—watched the Fever spread. Though it had eroded both its origins and its nature, to the point where I could say neither how it had begun nor what it had become, I couldn’t fail to perceive its presence in the bleak fishing town I’d washed up in, along with the crimes I’d committed.
I’d done what I’d done, down in California, and there was no denying it, nor even slowing the rate at which it was bound to continue up here, not so much catching up with me as emerging from whatever now passed for my being, as if my entire northward journey had been for no purpose other than to birth the Fever in its mature form. Bodies turned up dead, sacrificed to wax Squimbop statues that would never come alive no matter how hard I, or the dozens of others like me, tried. We did all we could, and more than we should have, but wax remained wax and flesh remained flesh, whether living or not, and we remained alone, sealed off from ourselves and one another, nodding remotely when the ding of the diner door was louder than expected, keeping our eyes on our eggs and burnt toast when it wasn’t. Mouth full of the toast that none of us could keep from burning, as if the heat from the toaster were impossible to resist, I’d drink coffee with more sugar than it could absorb, enough to sicken me, trying whatever I could think of to kindle a buzz inside my khaki coat up there in the pitch dark, under stars that seemed deployed to menace me in particular, portending a strange new chapter that was ready to begin and yet, still, wouldn’t.
There was no question of bringing the Fever to a halt, nor even any serious means of trying. Any officer saddled with the task quickly succumbed to it, as the Fever spread quickest among those who evinced even a modest intention of curtailing its trajectory and living complete unto themselves rather than as half of a sundered Squimbop duo. One officer after another—Pinkertons or Pinkerton impersonators, sent up from Portland and Seattle, or self-deputized, in the grips of a primitive vendetta that amounted to no more than another symptom of the same condition—succumbed as that first, black winter in Alaska gave way to the next and the next and the next, the distinction between them purely philosophical, or even less than that—an idiot’s notion of philosophy cribbed from the kind of Borscht Belt routine that, in another life, part of me still believed my Brother and I used to perform, to rapturous, if ghostly, applause in the function rooms of colossal mountain hotels, so deep in the Catskills that, as I might’ve quipped back then, my accent that of a Yiddish-speaking child who’d learned English at public school in Canarsie, time nearly forgot to forget them.
As the winters passed, more and more of the town’s dark storefronts, whether they’d once been leather goods outlets or antique malls or saloons, grew marquees until, it seemed, every space that could possibly become a cinema had become one. Whether this represented a distortion of the town or the emergence of its true form was another question that the idiot philosopher I’d once played, while my Brother played my endearingly puckish, unteachable pupil, enjoyed pretending to consider while hopping from leg to leg in the freezing dusk before the show began.

In those very deepest of the Alaskan days, which in retrospect I miss almost as much as the Borscht Belt days buried under so many layers beneath them, and yet, along another axis, cloaked in the very same shadow and thus nearly equivalent, I hurried from one makeshift cinema to another to another, many with walls that didn’t quite meet and roofs made of aluminum and fiberglass that rode up in the vicious wind, my patched-together khaki coat pulled tight over three sweaters. If I could get the timing right, I’d catch three or four runs of Brothers Squimbop Classic Era revival shorts in three or four cinemas along the only street of that exhausted, murder-soaked town high up along the coast of nowhere, as close to the top of the world as the living can come without traversing a twilight zone beyond which all events freeze into legend and in that sense cannot occur.
I sat in the dark and watched, over and over again, The Brothers Squimbop in Europe and The Brothers Squimbop in Hollywood, The Brothers Squimbop Burst the Borscht Belt Vol. I and Vol. II, and even rare showings of the nearly snuff-grade Squimbop Fever, probing the snowy footage onscreen—the snow falling outside penetrated the cinema, filling the empty space between me and the screen with soft gray fuzz—for any hint as to the nature of my old face, any clue within the expressions of the actors or documentary subjects that these stories, which I remembered so well, or at least felt that I ought to remember well, were indeed about me, so that I could be certain I had once been elsewhere, and might thus end up elsewhere again.
The films, I insisted, were about me and, of course, my Brother. There were nights when the return of his absence was enough to send me reeling onto the streets before the credits rolled, knife drawn even as the population of eligible victims dwindled toward zero, replenished only by stringy drifters deposited in silence by the Night Bus. On such nights I’d drag them stunned and insensate toward the shed behind the diner where I worked three days a week, just enough to pay for my room out by the gas station and for occasional visits to the glaring white grocery store, on a corner where, even in the daytime, the sky was always black.
Inside the shed, I took no pleasure in going through the Fever’s motions, rote as a nickel-operated roadside attraction, though sometimes, in the necessary heat of the routine, I’d flash back to an earlier go-around, farther down the coast, in Oregon maybe, and, as the hot blood pooled around the feet of that shed’s wax Squimbop, melted and refrozen so many times it looked as muddled as I felt—every shed in town had one, presumably crafted and left there by an earlier Squimbop generation, even more naive than we were in its belief that the Fever could be satisfied through sacrifice—I’d feel a shiver of purpose return, and, for a blessed instant, it would seem as though the insanity I’d long ago consigned myself to wasn’t yet terminal. Perhaps, I’d think, as I locked the shed and dragged the spent body on a hook toward the dump just as the Night Bus pulled back into town, I’m no closer to this story’s ultimate end than I am to its long-forgotten beginning. Perhaps I’m still a sane, strapping dweller of an expansive and even nutritive middle, with much excitement and a little satisfaction still to come, my time outside the clarifying bond of a Squimbop Duo only an interregnum, soon to be restored, so that these long, strange days in the dark will seem to have been no more than a necessary regrouping between one tour of the Inland Circuit and the next, from the Catskills to Lake Tahoe and back and back again, a thousand times over, unto the eternity that my Brother and I, after all we’ve been through, surely deserve.

When I went to sleep on nights like this, improbably warmed despite the unremitting cold outside, I’d sink into my thin mattress and begin to rock, as if I were already at sea, floating as fast as the waves would allow back out into the world, never to revisit this lonely phase again. I’d lie there watching the terror of my singularity recede as a new shore of restored Brotherhood pulled into view. In other versions of the dream, as fluorescent light from the grocery store across the street filtered into my room, both of our heads would rise from the ocean’s depths, titanic and mossy, mountainous, volcanic, twin Atlantises named Jim and Joe, resurrected from the innermost vault of the world’s founding blueprints. Then, if I couldn’t keep from sleepwalking, I’d find myself back in the cinemas, which seemed never to close—or else to open whenever I turned up—watching Squimbop footage at three and four in the morning, when it appeared raw and unedited, as the northern lights danced in the rocky crags to the east, and the frozen Pacific split the docks in that town’s narrow passable stretch of harbor.
This footage likewise grew increasingly nautical, exchanging the familiar pie-stand and hotel-lobby sagas of the Squimbop Golden Age for new material set upon a colossal turn-of-the-century steamer or, in some instances, a rough but sturdy Norwegian deep-sea fishing vessel, adjacent to but clearly distinct from the ferries my Brother and I rode so many times to and from Europe, back in the Golden Age these films seemed determined to commemorate, as if they’d developed a memory of our circuit while they traced their own, from theater to theater around the continent, before ending up here, at the very end of the line, where no one wanted them back and they were thus free to unspool and drift into dust, hovering in the air that only I was breathing.
I’d breathe this air in and out and in and out until Tommy Bruno, the bald, smiling, tuxedoed usher and concession man who’d been here so long that I could see the cinema going up, board by board, around him where he stood in the snow, ejected me for a between-film cleaning, squeezing my shoulder with a delicacy that indicated he was well aware of my state, having seen many of my forebears grow fragile along similar lines. Still half-awake and fearful of the air outside, I’d then find myself back at the diner, either cooking if it was my day to cook or chewing eggs and burnt rye at the counter if it wasn’t, and then, with a thin paper cup of dangerously sweet coffee in each hand, I’d find myself at the harbor, sitting on a bench, listening to the waves crack and crunch together, watching the horizon for the ship that I was certain would be here soon, emerging out of the static just as it would have if I’d been allowed to remain in the cinema.
Indeed, it was not lost on me that, if I could see myself from afar, the tableau of a fading Squimbop on a bench with two coffees about to freeze would sync up exactly with the last scene from the film I’d watched the night before, and the night before that, and perhaps—nothing, when it came to gaps or eerie continuities, seemed impossible up there in Alaska—every night of my life, slowly developing a naive Squimbop obsession that, I couldn’t help but suspect, had no more to do with me than it did with the billion others who’d happened to see the same footage and latch on to it with the same desperation that, by this point, was probably all that kept us alive.
As I sat there and sipped and waited and watched, feeling myself uneasily housed within an iconic Squimbop Pose, the kind that everyone would’ve recognized years ago, or would come to recognize years from now, if and when the famously scandal-ridden development of the Squimbop Media Center in Cooperstown, New York, was completed, I began to understand, through no force other than what I could sense in the wind, that the supply of stringy drifters would soon run out, and that it would then be time to renounce the Fever, even if I was far from cured, and resign myself to the care of the captain of whatever Ship of Fools finally materialized out of the premonitory murk I could tell it was already sailing through, assuming the pride of place in my imagination that, until now, the Night Bus had occupied.

After all this became clear to me, the run of winters peaked and began to trickle toward spring. The ice in the harbor broke up and ran back into the ocean, and the superabundance of winter cinemas reverted to grain storage and ironworks, until only one remained. It was there that I watched the first half of my final murder, a flickery, groaning scene, the footage much degraded after playing in a hundred towns before this one, in which I scooped up a barely conscious drifter in a slick raincoat, fresh off the Night Bus and huddled on the far side of the otherwise empty auditorium, and marched him down the stairs to the basement restroom, its walls adorned with scuffed maps of the subways of Paris and London, and began to saw mechanically at his throat, back and forth and back and forth, in time to the clattering of the footage overhead, until I could no longer be certain whether I was watching the scene or acting it out, watched by yet more Squimbops in a silent theater—the Real Theater, I thought, home of the Real Squimbops—on the other side of a screen whose existence I could just barely intuit, deeper into a topography that, at times like this, I could feel extending all around me in a precise yet inscrutable design, built as a stage for all that was going to happen.
Admitting this allowed me to likewise admit that I was confused about whether the man I was sawing was a real drifter or a wax statue, and thus whether I was sacrificing him to a sacred Squimbop effigy in hopes of bringing it back to life—thus was the narrative of Squimbop Fever, as best I could recall—or, rather, slaying the last of the innumerable wax idols that had, for far too long, stood between my Brother and me.
I sawed his, or its, head clean off as I deliberated, growing ever more certain that, beyond all that was irresolvable in these questions, some clarity was indeed pulling into harbor; I was indeed making a kind of progress.
When I was finished, I placed the head in the trough of the ceramic urinal, wiped my fingers along the Champs-Élysées, buried the knife in a wastebasket full of ticket stubs, and walked upstairs, picturing myself emerging onto the upper deck of the ship that would sail me to the reunion I was now certain I had earned. As I passed the concession stand for what I considered to be the very last time, Tommy Bruno awoke from a doze, smoothed his bowtie, spread his hands across the warm surface of the glass tank that held the fresh popcorn, and smiled in such a way that made it clear he believed I would soon be back.

Precisely as I’d foreseen, I emerged abovedeck just as the ship was pulling out of port, icicles forming along the thick coil of rope that held its weed-choked anchor. Whether I surfaced first in the cinema and then proceeded through one last tour of that godforsaken outpost, stopping in my room by the gas station to fill a duffel bag by the light of the grocery store and then at the diner to quit the job that had made possible my stay in that room, taking three limp twenties from the register, or if this sequence was merely implied, seems now, as I watch the Alaskan coastline recede, to be well beside the point.
For the first time since our bleak sojourn in Hollywood, a spirit of newness hangs over me, a sense that the Brothers Squimbop are, at last, soon to be deployed in tandem again. Men clearly in the grips of the same conviction line the edges of the upper deck, keeping their distance, some reclining in hammocks, holding their coats to their sides as the wind shears past, while others lean overboard to watch our wake fan out as we leave behind not just the town where I served my term in purgatory but, I presume, the towns where they served theirs as well, if it’s true that we’ve already been on this ship long enough to gather many souls in my position, or former position, all of us perhaps no more than standard Americans at the ends of our ropes, prostrate inside ourselves as we beg sources unknown for rescue.
“Good morning, pseudo-Squimbops,” says a man in a tightly tailored gray suit with an earpiece and a wraparound wireless mic, his eyes wet and blinking as if unaccustomed to the abovedeck air. We all turn to face him, admiring his alligator-skin boots and thick, black mustache, as I pour any dawning familiarity he stirs in me into the rippling pool of Squimbop Cinema that now fills most of what I might otherwise have still considered my self.
“I said,” he repeats, louder this time, hitting what’s clearly a practiced note, his boots glowing in the sunlight, “I said . . . Welcome pseudo-Squimbops!” He raises his hands, as if expecting applause, which we haltingly deliver. I see myself clapping along with the others, all of our attention fixed on this man, who I can’t deny bears a resemblance to the rest of us, but looks—I can think of no better way to express it—more like us than we do.
“I am Professor Squimbop,” he announces, circling his hands like an orchestra conductor in what we take as a sign to gather around. “Much as I obey a Distant Master, you will obey me, for I was once, and not so long ago, a pseudo-Squimbop like you, lost in an Alaska of my own. And aren’t they all the same!” He scoffs, makes a show of recomposing himself, then adds, “but I found a way to become Real. I generated the power to transform and leave the Fever behind, and so, in time, will you. The process won’t be easy, but it will, if you’re willing to follow me all the way there, deep into the subterranean reaches of memory, prove possible. And if you aren’t,” he emits a forced laugh that causes his mic to glitch, “then, well, the Night Bus stops all up and down this coast. It will prove trivially easy to arrange passage for you back up north, and all of you know what happens there. So, let me hear it: who’s ready to become Real?”
I find myself cheering along with the others, at first quietly and then with moderate gusto and then, though I can hardly believe it, it seems I’m chanting and shrieking and dancing around the machinery on the upper deck, whooping and hollering in a circle, first in a voice I didn’t know I had and then in a voice I can’t be sure is mine, with the Professor at the very center, holding us in orbit as he closes his eyes and appears to listen to a yet-stranger voice, coming from much farther away.

As we chant, the landscape seems to melt and simmer, so that, by the time we’re done, the frigid waters we embarked into are a distant memory and we’re cruising through cool British Columbian fog and then southern Californian and then Hawaiian heat. We sail through bays and up rivers that bisect mountainous islands, into turquoise lagoons and mangrove swamps, cutting the engine and drifting for days at a time. Occasionally, the Professor directs the crew to disembark and bring huge drums of sand aboard, all stowed in a lower chamber to which none of us, as far as I can tell, has yet been granted admittance, even as the Professor comes for us one by one, manicured hand outstretched, saying only, “Time for your Past-Life Regression. You and only you. Just as you were conceived once, and then gestated, and then, upon being born, made Real . . . so will you be again now.”
With a wink and a curl of his mustache, he adds, “But for Real this time.”
These pseudo-Squimbops never appear again. Naturally, word begins to spread that they’ve been eaten by the Professor and his crew, or rendered for blubber to fuel the ship, but this causes no major ripple among those of us who remain. Although suspicion lingers as we sleep under the stars and the heavy sun, taking meals of fruit and nuts when they’re given, listening to the Professor’s brief, emphatic speeches when he chooses to make them, none of us attempts to spark the kind of conversation about our shared fate that, as I picture it, would only lead, rightly or wrongly, to mutiny.
We are, it is clear enough, too enervated to turn on one another, or, certainly, to band together against whatever scheme the Professor might be running, although it does occur to me that, in our desperation, we may well have boarded the wrong vessel, thereby forfeiting whatever chance we had at getting the Brothers Squimbop back on the road. At best, I now sometimes fear, this sorry episode will occupy a single side room in the Wing of Aborted Enterprises in an outbuilding of the Squimbop Media Center, if the Cooperstown City Council, in accordance with the bylaws of New York State or whatever shadow charter governs these things, ever manages to get it built.
Musing on an eternity spent in that particular limbo, we swing in the hammocks that used to be in short supply but are now more than adequate to our shrunken number and ask ourselves in silence when the day will come. We feel like lobsters in a tank, bobbing together, angry but impotent, our claws clasped shut, a numbed mass of consciousness capable only of the dullest hope and fear as the inevitable culmination of our boredom draws closer in the form of a single mega-lobster who, claws unclasped, roams the tank floor, reaping us one by one.

This lobster phase drags on, more and more reminiscent of my spell in Alaska. Our self-awareness coils ever more tightly inward as the number of heads it’s distributed among continues to shrink. The we on the upper decks again approaches the state of an I as the mega-lobster, embodied of course by the Professor, summons one pseudo-Squimbop after another, sometimes getting through several in one day and sometimes spending several days with each one, and then taking several days off—days spent gathering sand—until I’m the only one left, a development that I take as evidence that I was indeed the Real Squimbop all along, though I can’t suppress the suspicion that whoever was left would’ve felt the same way.
The Professor emerges onto the upper deck, earpiece and microphone in position, looks wistfully down at his alligator-skin boots, then up at the rows of empty hammocks, then smiles and beckons to me. “I always save the best for last,” he says, with a wink, before adding, “are you ready to be conceived anew?”
I nod, which causes him to shake his head and say, “I require verbal confirmation, my friend. This is a one-way trip to the Dust Bowl, so a yes or a no is the least I require.”
Mind already filling with what feel like ancestral memories of traipsing through the dust of the path that connected the cabin where I was born to the cities where my Brother and I became famous, I nod again, almost but not quite forgetting to add, “Yes,” just before the Professor is forced to drop the nice-guy act he’s barely kept up so far.

After this word is absorbed into or beyond his earpiece, he extends his hand, takes mine, and leads me down a steep, narrow staircase and into the ship’s cavernous interior, full, as I’d suspected, of grayish, dusty sand. He walks me through it, past a model gas station with a single tank and a handwritten sign that reads “For Ness County Farm Collective Members Only,” and a chrome billboard for “Dottie’s Soup Counter & Pie Rack,” and positions me in an armchair deep in the sand, making a “shhh” gesture when I open my mouth.
“Welcome to the Dust Bowl,” he whispers. “Authentic emanation point of the Brothers Squimbop. It is, at last, time to regain that which, over decades and decades upon the road, at large in the flux of the already-wide and ever-widening world, has been lost. Or,” he feigns forgetfulness, “has nearly been lost. For if it had been lost entirely, you would be beyond my help, and I would’ve left you in that frozen harbor you washed up in, waiting with your mouth open for the Night Bus to return. No,” he circles the chair here, covering his face in white pancake makeup and pulling off his sport coat to reveal a mime’s striped turtleneck underneath, no, he mimes, it has not been lost entirely. It remains in the dull bottom of your cerebral cortex, down on the ocean floor where movies seen in the depths of night recut themselves into what they truly are, only and always The True Story of the Brothers Squimbop, which no mortal editor can assemble . . . No, our story is not over yet. Together, we will fit the spool back onto the reel or, he grows giddy, hopping up and down, losing himself in the routine, the reel back onto the spool!
Either way, he mimes, drawing his energies back down to a simmer as he circles my chair one last time and blows sand in my face, let me tell you a story of the Dust Bowl. Your story and my story too, lost but not forgotten . . . and, as such, both my gift to you and your gift to me, as, together, we offer up our bodies to The True Story, so that it might recut itself around us back into its authentic form, at last healing the myriad deformities incurred by years of Squimbop Fever.

I close my eyes as deeply as the physics of my skull will permit. Behind them is the same Dust Bowl I’d begun to perceive while they were open, but larger now, more all-encompassing, and laden, suddenly, with sound, smell, savor, all the subtle stimuli that together boil into an atmosphere one can inhabit, move through, and, with sufficient force of will and submission to a larger psychic project, begin to consider Real.
Trudging into this project, already weary and parched, I train my eyes on the mime in the near distance as he bounces over dunes and through thorny scrub-brush, leaping into the air and kicking his heels together when the weather’s fine, bedding down in dry riverbeds when tornadoes render us helpless, and otherwise soldiering on for what feels like days, although the sun doesn’t rise or set, only wobbles around a fixed axis in the center of the sky. The landscape wobbles with it, jogging dim memories of the open ocean, but this seems impossibly distant, as far as the West Coast is from Kansas. The destination of a lifetime, I think, squinting to keep the mime centered in my vision. The site of all aspiration, the West Coast, the end of the line. I’ve made it this far, halfway at least . . . surely it will prove possible to keep going once I regroup and get my wits back about me.
I smile and then begin to laugh, unsure if I’ve made a joke or heard one. This uncertainty makes me laugh harder, so much so that I begin to suspect there was no joke before, but there is now, the eternal joke of whether, as I put it to an imaginary audience obscured behind the dust that’s now clotting in around me, the Brothers Squimbop are at root actors or directors . . . indeed, I mug, picking up on the mime’s mannerisms as I step out onto the stage of the frontier opera house in Abilene I’ve kept in mental storage for the better part of a century, the question is really whether we’re reprising a timeworn routine or making it up as we go, reminding all of you gathered here tonight that the Spirit of Adventure is alive in this nation, seeded here before your very eyes . . . and, beneath all this—the audience is in hysterics now after waiting a century in near silence, rolling in the dust, decomposing and coming back together as the plains boil with hilarity—the deeper question is whether there really are or even were any Brothers in the first place, if the legendary duo every existed, or if it’s only ever been me, alone in this wasteland for all time, neither living nor dead, neither near nor far, in relation to nothing at all, blindly following a mime who . . .

The mime swarms me as I begin to rave, pulling the horizon in with him like the thick, dusty flap of a circus tent, closing it around the intimate, candlelit scene inside. Evening falls across the broken porch slats of a one-story frontier cabin in Ness City, Kansas, he mimes. Year of 1934, year of hunger and thirst, the Crash a long way back, the War barely a glimmer up ahead . . .
Yes, we’ll post up here for a while. Here, until history compels our escape, our ship comes to anchor and our horses trudge no farther. We have, have we not, traveled long enough.
Nestled in his armpit, I allow the mime to lead me to the cabin’s front door and extend my arm with its hand attached to rap at the knocker. After a dead spell, a woman in a long black dress opens up and looks us over. When she makes eye contact, first with the mime and then with me, the tiniest glimmer of recognition plays across her face, as, I’m sure, it does across mine. Another life, I think, a dewy forest in deepest Bavaria, a village that, thanks to us, reduced itself to eggshells and cinder as it sank through time, back to the Dark Ages it had only lately emerged from. Another sweltering road, in another country, on another continent, this same woman, in the same black dress, leading a donkey, while my Brother and I, as thirsty then as we are now . . .
“Well?” she snaps, recognition draining from her face as the present asserts its total if temporary dominance. “Did you come to eat or come to gawk? Because I take in hobos for the one but not the other.”
The mime makes an elaborate show of mocking my hesitation, shifting his weight side to side in weepy impatience, yawning and tapping his mouth until, though I only feel more shaken than I did a moment ago, I get a provisional hold on myself and cross the threshold, trying to suppress the overwhelming suspicion that I won’t cross it again.

Inside, the woman induces us to sit around a narrow table, lit by more of the candles that light the whole scene. Our chairs rock with a distant oceanic pulse as she ladles out three bowls of chili and cuts three slices of hard white bread.
When she’s likewise taken her seat, we say a brief Grace in which she invokes the majesty of the Kansas wind and prays for rain. Then we begin to eat in silence as the mime entertains us with tales of the wild, weary Dust Bowl he’s come to know during his journey from Pittsburgh, where, he claims, he’d managed a sandpaper factory until the going got rough. He tells of cannibal hives in Kentucky and a trade in human molars in Tennessee, of telepathic leviathans beneath the Mississippi and a tree that bled sticky, sickening wine in uppermost Arkansas, potent enough to render that very tree hallucinatory in retrospect, so that no traveler could say for sure if it was there. Our chili dwindles and the woman pours us frugal shots of brown liquor as the mime dances around the kitchen, leaping up onto the counters and making a prop of his busted chair as he introduces us to a songster in Olathe who wrote murder ballads for a dollar apiece, the only hitch being that he required the salient events to be acted out before his eyes—and not merely acted out, the mime adds, with a leer—and then he’s onto a pair of ex-boxers who offered their bruised faces as stand-ins for local personal injury lawyers in upward of two hundred Missouri towns, claiming variably to be the Law Offices of Stevens & Sandino, or Lewis & Willmerdorf, or even Fujiyama & Stephanopoulos, and a nunnery in Chase County where all the nuns created cloth facsimiles of themselves in order to trick Death into taking these and leaving their flesh in peace, the only problem being that the facsimiles grew so convincing that the nuns were likewise fooled, so that perhaps this nunnery was, or was soon to be, no more than a cloth museum, sterile as a marble shrine on a mountaintop in Armenia, awaiting the rival cults that would in time form to revere and deny what had happened there.

The mime takes a victory lap around the kitchen upon concluding this story, and just as he shows signs of beginning the next, the black-clad woman rises, gathers him bouncing under her arm, and, leaving me alone with my chili bowl, sighs, “Excuse us, it’s time for the Primal Scene.” She doesn’t add again, but her sigh more than conveys that she thought it.
I remain in position a moment longer, jilted surprise on my face as if I were the mime now, wearing an expression that someone else painted on, but when lewd, magnified shadows begin to play across the walls, I tiptoe past the room they’re coming from, more frightened of creaking the floorboards than I have any good reason to be. Frozen just outside the open door, I watch the mime and the black-clad woman perform the Primal Scene, its shadows now intertwined with my own, so that I feel myself being pulled in and, soon, cannot be sure whether I’m in the hall by myself or in the room with them. My attention swivels between the bodies and their shadows, back and forth, until my eyes blur and I sink into another memory, that of my Brother and me on the open road, years ago or years from now, behind a Shoney’s in El Centro, ribbing each other about this very scene, always claiming, to the point of lurid mania, to be the other’s father. A smile spreads across my face, growing painfully wide and wider still, as if extending beyond my head, until I explode in a fit of hysterics that I just barely manage to contain by hugging my sides and tiptoeing down the rocking hall, through ever more vivid shadow play, into what is clearly the Bachelor’s Cell, made up identically to the room I occupied in Alaska, the windows still full of the white light from the grocery store across the street.
The cot in the Bachelor’s Cell squeaks when I collapse upon it and, letting go of my sides, the laughter spills out of me and into the coarse, cigar-burned bedding. I laugh, exaggerating my expressions just as the mime would have, while the cell rocks and the shadows follow me, twisting and twining beyond all geometric sense, projecting every conceivable—no pun intended, I smirk, slapping my thighs—permutation of the Primal Scene that my Brother and I joked about so long ago, and all I can think, as the mad repetition of the shadows dulls my faculties, is that I wish he were here with me now, to see such crude living proof of the routine that sustained us so long, throughout so many dismal teaching gigs along the backmost and bottommost edges of the nation, in which I was his father, much as, of course, he was mine.

I awaken to a baby’s sobbing, so loud and regular that it seems impossible to attribute to a single source. When does it breathe? I wonder, as I lean up on my elbows in the cot that I only now remember falling asleep in. I yawn and feel the Bachelor’s Cell rock and tip me back to the lost oceanic expanse of the womb, the all-encompassing aqueous eternity that feels at once terribly far away and terribly near at hand, as if I’ve only just now been expelled from it with a directive to ply my trade upon the surface of the planet for as long as anyone there will have me, weaving my saga into the fabric of the nation before—the warning is at once frighteningly direct and maddeningly opaque—it is, once again, too late.
As the sobbing continues, I rise, yawn, pee in a pot, and resolve to creak into the kitchen and face there whatever new turn this episode has taken. I press my hands against the walls of the cabin, making my way out of my solitude as slowly as I can while also miming this same emergence, squeezing my way out as if from the womb, and blinking in what I pretend is the first sunlight I’ve ever seen.
In the kitchen, I surface upon the mime ladling gruel into bowls for the black-clad woman and two small boys, who sup desperately, licking the last meager crumbs of brown sugar from the edges of their too-large spoons. No one admires my routine or even looks my way until I tramp over to the table, feeling my bones thicken and my skin sag, and look down at the cracked wood where no place has been set for me. I tramp out to the shed with practiced heaviness and return with a cracked spare stool, where I sit until the mime has no choice but to spoon what remains into the bowl he’d been eating from, and place it with a scowl before me. He mimes disgust while I mime embarrassment, doing my face up into an impression of a dubious lodger who’s long outstayed his welcome. Though it feels tired, our routine now elicits modest laughs from the woman and the boys, enough that I can’t suppress a blush of pride to know I haven’t yet lost my touch.
Still blushing, I watch the dirty spoon tremble as it conveys my portion to my mouth while my eyes likewise tremble with crocodile tears, and the laughter simmers down and the morning approaches its next phase.
Don’t get too comfortable here, stranger, the mime mimes as he takes my bowl before I’m finished and tosses it into a pail of suds on the counter. He tips the edge of his fedora, winks, and sets off, out the door to, as I imagine it, ply the dusty trails between here and Ransom in search of whatever work is to be found. Back in the cabin, the day stretches ahead of us, the black-clad woman and the two boys and me, all of us straining, it seems, to prolong a routine that’s long since abdicated its claim to relevance without yet nominating a successor.
Save me from this stasis, I beseech the three of them, as they traipse through the cabin and out to the yard in back, the boys whipping each other with wet towels while the mother picks what few scraggly pears protrude from the trees that verge onto a field behind their property, or that which they occupy. Release me, for my Past-Life Regression has only just begun, I wish to tell them, but I know the words, even if I found a way to say them, would fall on deaf ears. So I mime the day away, trying to devise a routine in which I leave this stagnation behind and travel on with my head held high—in the routine, I’m more than able to travel alone, forsaking whatever need for reunion initially compelled me aboard that ship in Alaska—but, although I do manage to walk down the front steps several times, some principle of the larger scenario will not allow me to breech the sidewalk. Indeed, each time I try, laughter rises in the background, the routine growing steadily more ridiculous with repetition as, somewhere in the dark at the edge of my psyche, Tommy Bruno scoops fresh popcorn into a series of cardboard containers and smiles his tired smile while a series of guests makes its way in to behold my leashed circuit in glorious black and white.
Thus the day goes on, and thus the days go on, the boys growing steadily while I seem to shrink, losing my orientation within the makeshift family that the mime returns to late each evening, launching always into the same hard-luck show as the night before, unaware of or indifferent to the boredom that it now provokes in his supposed wife and children, to say nothing of the strained relationship that’s evolved between him and me, paterfamilias and bachelor uncle, one Brother gone straight, the other back from the past to skew it all sideways again.

One night, several more years into this arrangement, after the others have retired and I’ve taken it upon myself to scrub the dishes stacked in the washbasin, I hear the mime creep up behind me and turn to see his face painted with violent red streaks and green fanged dentures gleaming in the moonlight. He grins, pulls the washrag from my hands, and motions for me to sit.
I comply. He sits across from me, dancing his legs back and forth on the kitchen floor, warming up for what I can tell will be a routine he’s had planned, perhaps from the beginning, for this precise moment, neither a day earlier nor a day later, as if, seen from a more distant vantage—that of Tommy Bruno, eternally unchanging save for his random alternation of black and white bowties and the nights on which he appears to be drunk on more than cinema—all of this had been a single elongated episode, and now, right on time, we’ve reached the finale, stasis breaking at last not because of any internal development but simply because the appointed moment has arrived, and the theater must be emptied, cleaned, and made ready for the next showing.
Go to your cell and get your things, he mimes. Then—his made-up eyes come to rest on the turkey knife on the counter, with which the black-clad woman slaughtered an ancient bird in the sink—it will be time for you and I to take our walk, as Brothers one last time.
Compelled by the same logic of imminent climax that has just compelled him, I get up with a flourish, turn, and slump down the hall, adding weight to each reluctant step until I’m nearly stomping on the loose floorboards.
As I wind my way toward the cell in this fashion, past the wall where the shadows of the Primal Scene still flicker like a property of the wood itself, something else comes to mind. A final errand to attend to, perhaps my first since the Past-Life Regression began. I check behind me, wary of the mime’s roving gaze, and then steal into the room where the boys are sleeping. I stand in the corner, hidden in shadow, and watch their faces, nearly identical and yet not quite, one already more dominant, the other a shriveled version thereof. Just like, I can’t help thinking, though it feels like overkill, the surest way to neuter a joke, the mime and me.
I hit myself in the forehead and mime a belly laugh at the obviousness of this thought. Then I lean over them, feeling the fullness of my role as their bastard uncle come surging up from my core, and say, breaking my silence for what feels like the first time since Alaska, “From this point forward, you are the Brothers Squimbop. Jim and Joe, blessed and cursed to ply the interior of the nation in every form it has left to take, and to deform it into yet further permutations from there, kneading the land into a bastion of the very forces you embody, so that you will exist always as both destroyers and destroyed, bastards bastardizing the order of things until it—”
Footsteps rush up the hall, a desperate, racing violence coming to purge me from where I don’t belong, the mad pervert uncle loose in the room where the precious boys are sleeping, about to seed in their past a violation so profound that they’ll never quite . . .
Knowing all this because it is in some sense the story I’m telling, I lean over the bed and shout, spittle flying from my lips, “Live on so that we might live on too, so that we all, all of this, the great wheel we roll within, might not stop here, as if it’d never started . . . Roll on, let the legend of the Brothers Squimbop roll into the future and not lodge here in the Dust Bowl, to which I never would’ve returned had I not—”
The mime’s hands are around my neck, the turkey knife stretched between them, realer than anything I’ve ever felt or expected ever to feel.

The Brothers Squimbop, Jim and Joe, jolted upright in bed as their father dispatched the last of the pervert uncle whose long, lecherous presence throughout the years of their youth accounted in no small part for the dim view they’d already taken on humanity, the viper ethos that would, before very long at all, serve as catalyst for the adolescent exploits that would in turn, not long after that, serve as seedbed for the growing reach of their legend, two damaged Kansas farmboys at large on the high prairie, raising more hell than any pseudo-Squimbop could ever have dreamt possible, magnetizing a torrent of attention and ramifying narrative so colossal that any attempt to encompass it within a Media Center in Cooperstown, New York, would be a fool’s errand of such magnitude that the City Council, when presented with the proposal, would only laugh at the naivete inherent in this most American of all ambitions, still the nation’s greatest asset, after so many centuries of frenzy and flux.
They marinated a little longer, there in bed and then at the table and in the fields out back, scrounging for sustenance as their sweat thickened into a shell around their growing frames. The black-clad woman came and went from their vision, resentful of the burden of bearing them, thrust upon her more times than she could count, even if this time, like every time, was the first, and hence, though the paradox had long ago maddened and then begun to bore her, the only.
Then came a muted Last Supper, in which the black-clad woman killed her prize chicken, fried it in a pan, and served it with honey, butter, and the Brothers’ favorite cornbread, dotted with green peppers and baked in a skillet in the oven. The walls turned to curtains again and blew in close, and the lighting framed the three of them suggestively, as they sat rocking on the precipice of a new era. They could all imagine this very scene rendered into a folk painting on the wall behind them, and, though none turned to check, it soon grew impossible to say it wasn’t hanging there already.
The Brothers’ mother regarded them from across the table that she knew she would from then on occupy alone with the painting, sinking into history as the legend grew and, like all legends, obscured its true origin in layer upon layer of eager hearsay, until she’d be nothing save for what drunken strangers in loud rooms said she was, at least until the mime and uncle darkened her door again, and, buried in memory and half-yearning to surface from it, she again invited them in, provided they’d come to eat and not to gawk.
She looked from Jim to Joe and Joe to Jim, committing their faces to memory and building, insofar as anyone could, a bulwark against the infinite revisions that would soon be relayed back to her, in print and newsreel and painting after painting, and, before very long at all, on the television sets that first one and then all of her neighbors would turn out to have bought in secret, just as the War was ramping up. Then she said a prayer inside her head, admitting to herself that she loved them even if, in some regard that could never be untangled, they weren’t really her sons, only beings who had passed through her on their way between worlds, and then she excused herself, stooped and rocking down the hallway beneath the weight of knowing that she would never be given the credit she’d earned.

The Brothers left soon after she was gone. Finishing the drumsticks that were already in hand, they wiped their fingers on their corduroys and packed modest satchels from the ill-fitting clothing strewn about the room they’d been fledged in, laced up the boots that had served them well enough so far, even if they’d soon be outgrown, and walked down the road that led, in the direction they’d begun to travel, away from the cabin that the Past-Life Regression had seen fit to provide, and out past Ransom, Kansas, crossing a county line they’d never crossed before.
As they sallied forth, each Brother began to work to solidify what he was leaving behind, adding details where details were missing—a stifling country schoolhouse where he’d been taught the rudiments of Greek and Latin along with Eliot, Hopkins, and Poe by a saintly schoolmistress whose belief in the education of minors was a godsend unlikely to be repeated later in life; an almost-chaste summer romance lit by fireflies and a moon full to bursting, though shadowed also with the heartache of knowing that in September her family was moving to Lincoln; a sinister yet charismatic uncle who, although he’d done unforgivable things in the night, had also revealed the secrets of card counting and the power of suggestion—and guarding these against the inevitable discrepancies in whatever account his Brother was forming in the same sacred moments. More than anything, they worked to clear space in memory, opening as many spare rooms as they could find, suddenly aware, as they put one foot in front of the other toward the West, that only in the Media Center of these spare rooms would any of what had happened and was about to happen achieve any cohesion at all.
They began to suspect one another as the night wore on, each keeping more and more to himself, a hand clamped over his lips for fear of muttering any part of his ruminations aloud, and thus they trudged, increasingly out of breath, through lunar canyons and beneath sharp outcroppings of glinting limestone, across open tundra and fenced-in paddocks dotted with sleeping horses, only just beginning to gain a sense of how large the world they’d spilled out into, in search of the future, truly was.

It wasn’t until the first light began to flicker in the distant East, lapping at their heels and then the backs of their legs, that they were forced to stop, take water, and gnaw the drumsticks they’d packed. As they did, still wary of making eye contact with one another, a rustling in the creosote a few feet from where they stood stole their attention, so that they had no choice but to amble over to where it was coming from, drumsticks dangling by their sides.
By this point, the sun had risen high enough that they could see the tableau in all its ramshackle, rustic glory: the mime slitting their pervert uncle’s throat with a turkey knife, while the uncle groaned, “Boys, never forget, I’m your real father, sent here from deepest Alaska to seed you. To thread the legend back onto the spool so that it might not terminate in blackest arctic gloom, where Tommy Bruno will only ever . . . But—” he spluttered as the mime dragged the turkey knife back and forth, graceful as a cellist bowing out Bach, “you mustn’t tarry, lest you end up like me. There are thousands, perhaps millions of murders to your names. A Fever precedes you that nothing can describe. You won’t outrun the forces that are seeking you, even if it’s not altogether you they’re seeking. The crimes occurred and it is you who must pay.”
The tableau stopped, and the Brothers began to figure that the cycle was restarting, when, instead, the pervert uncle gasped, “Let nothing stop your approach to Dodge City. Trudge on, no matter how vastly they swarm you, but make haste, for others are trudging the same path as we speak. Other iterations, other Past-Life Regressions, pilgrims on the road, too numerous to reckon, and only one biopic will be made. See to it that it’s yours, pledge yourselves to cinema and you will never pay for what you’ve done, you will never—”

Here the tableau stopped again and a voice from behind them, sudden enough that they both jumped in unison—perhaps their first coordinated motion, a harbinger of great things to come if, as the tableau urged, they made it to Dodge City before the law caught up with them—said, “Speaking of paying, that’ll be a nickel, boys. Pay up and you can pull the curtain back for free.”
They turned to regard a farmgirl who stood all of three feet tall, holding a power cord that stretched between her and a distant tin shed beside the farmhouse she surely inhabited, if she inhabited anyplace on earth. The length of the cord corresponded to the length of time they stood there, insofar as neither Brother felt compelled to respond until his eyes had traced the cord all the way from where they stood to its distant terminus, and back, and, though they could sense that this was pushing their luck, back and forth a second time as well.
After this was complete, they resolved to regard her—she’d gone nearly as still as the mime-and-uncle show whose power she’d cut—and, clearing their throats with a confidence they’d never expressed before, said, “Show us the curtain.”
She snapped back to attention and bundled the cord more steadily in her arms, nearly vanishing behind it so that only her head appeared above the coil, with her feet peeping out below. The Brothers followed in her dust, past discarded pieces of the mime-and-uncle show—broken turkey knives, cracked dentures, weedy bald spots—as, in the distance, the footsteps of other duos on the Road to Dodge City begin to boil, like locusts about to make landfall. The Brothers hurried toward the shed where the curtain was housed, at once fearful of losing time and determined to get their money’s worth, even if they hadn’t paid yet.
Following the cord, the farmgirl led them past the rest of the equipment, over a metal grate that traversed a pit of fur and manure, and into the shed, within which a holographic wizard hovered in nervous anticipation. “I am the great and wonderful Wizard of—” he sighed, as Joe Squimbop, even more confident than a moment ago, reached past his Brother to yank the curtain open, revealing a small, bespectacled man behind a typewriter-sized console.
He peered out, startled, and said, “Gina, have they paid yet?”
The farmgirl shook her head and the room contracted, growing clammy as the mist the wizard had been projected through began to condense on the floor. “You watched the mime-and-uncle show?” the man asked, rubbing his forehead and sighing, like he was already near his emotional limit for the day.
The Brothers nodded in unison, and then, also in unison, joined suddenly by clarity of purpose, said, “Dodge City. We’re on our way there, to sell our life rights. We’re the Brothers Squimbop. Famous outlaws. Drifters, hooligans, gypsy tricksters. Call us what you will, we have millions of murders to our name. The biopic must get this right. Which way is quickest?”
The man sucked his face into a grimace, then exhaled in what was almost a laugh. “You’re the Brothers Squimbop!” Now he laughed outright. “You know how many times I’ve heard that today? And I can still taste my breakfast! And this is just one shed-show of dozens!” He laughed so hard the Brothers couldn’t help laughing too, while Gina stood back, fidgeting with the cord.

In this commotion, Joe dropped the edge of the curtain he’d still been holding. As soon as it fell between them and the man at the console, the wizard reappeared, green and garish in the stillness of the shed, bouncing with the kind of jagged energy that only flares up in moments of extreme exhaustion. “Dodge City?” it boomed, swelling so that its head alone filled all the space between the Brothers and the door, backing Gina into a rake-strewn corner. “Behind this curtain lies the road, it’s the shortest way by far, but be warned, you won’t be on it alone. I owe no special favor to you, nor do I have any reason to imagine you two, alone among the thousands, are the Real Brothers Squimbop. The ranks of pseudo-Squimbops, as your progenitors knew and you will soon learn, are nearly infinite, and the culling they are bound to suffer will be gruesome beyond imagining.”
The head shook in silent laughter, boiling in a loop while the Brothers deliberated, torn between soldiering on along the hot, dry road they’d set out upon last night, charged up and ready to commit the legendary crimes it now seemed they’d already committed, and peeling the curtain aside a second time, thereby taking their chances on the shortcut.
“Pay us that nickel,” Gina said, from the corner, “or you’re going to bear a curse that—”
If only to be free of additional threat, Jim reached past his Brother, grabbed the edge of the curtain, and hauled it aside again to reveal a dusty path choked with duos, so thick it was impossible to distinguish one from another. Some had fallen on the yellow-brick road, while the rest laughed and bickered and chattered as they sped along, speaking in high tones of the redemption they sought on the backlots and in the gilded cinema palaces of the world-famous Dodge City Film Industry. Some acted out satires of this road scene with hand puppets and marionettes, while others formed harmonica and ukulele bands to sing folk songs about the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City, many of which the Brothers found they already knew.
Suddenly fearing the loss of their last tether to the Real, they recoiled and even fought, for an instant, to remain on the near side of the curtain, with their memories of the cabin, the mime-and-uncle show, and the life of crime they’d embarked upon last night. But Gina, who’d surely seen this same hesitation many times today and could tell she’d never get her nickel, leapt behind them with a rake, prodding first Jim and then Joe over the threshold, beyond the curtain and into the sweat of mummers and the clang of war drums, along the bloody, bloody Road to Dodge City.

---

David Leo Rice is a writer living in New York City. His books include A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories. His next novel, The New House, is forthcoming.

Illustration: Jan Robert Duennweller

 

Say you’re leavin’ on a seven-thirty train
and that you’re headin’ out to Hollywood

When I was twenty, my best friend left the city, never to be seen again. Carolina was her name. After her brother was kidnapped, her father asked for political asylum in the US. It was granted, and they left.
Her brother was held captive for a month, and the money they paid for his release was like water off a duck’s back for Carolina’s family. Before leaving the country, they invited a group of friends and relatives to the island they owned in the archipelago of San Bernardo, where they had built a Tuscany-style mansion (although of course never in their lives had they set foot in Italy). Among the many guests, I was Carolina’s only friend. The rest were a flock of old men with bottles of Old Parr under their arms.
We sailed there on a white yacht called Alondra, and on the deck there was a band playing Cuban son, with musicians who were genuinely Cuban. Fake Cubans seemed to abound back then. The musicians from Cartagena only needed to adjust their intonation slightly to pass as defectors from Havana who, thanks to the wind and bad luck, had supposedly been diverted from their way to Miami and had ended up in this fraud of a city instead. A city that was just like theirs, except it was racist and slathered in mascara.
A few months earlier I had heard a phrase similar from the mouth of a Cuban who wasn’t a defector, but actually the opposite. I’d met him at the film festival. I was working as an usher in the theater, and he was in the competition with a forgettable film about a whore that died.
“There seems to be an elementary law of exclusion at play here: the entire Black population has been hidden away,” he said after the first drink.
We were in a bar on the city wall: the sea in front of us, the sun about to dive into the horizon, and the moist breeze hitting us on the face like a tongue bathed in saliva. I sat up straight in my wide wicker armchair, stretched my neck, and looked to one side, then to the other.
“Where?”
I had abandoned my seat in the theater just when the Bolivian film was starting. I didn’t feel like talking about hidden Blacks. Or whores or drugs. Or flea-bitten children or beaten mothers. For that, I already had the films in the Latin American competition that I was forced to watch.
Between the film festival and the university, it was hard to find people not talking about these kinds of things. Everyone did so in that overbearing tone used by those who feel the need to explain why the world is so fucked up. That was one of the reasons I liked being with Carolina. For her the world was the size of a well-poured glass; and sometimes, that was the case for me too.
On the yacht, Carolina’s mother, whose name was Soraida (although everyone, including her children, called her “Muñe”) kept exhibiting the Cuban defectors on the deck as if they were some kind of trophy from a funfair. Carolina’s father had gone to Florida to close some real estate deals. Carolina’s brother had gone with him. The young sister had stayed behind in Cartagena with her grandmother because boat trips made her terribly seasick. And Muñe, after almost losing a son, appeared happy and free, fondling those sinewy, dark-skinned, good-for-nothing young lads.
At the beginning, Carolina was upset, but a short while later, after a few rums, she began ignoring her mother. It was then that she pulled out the perico.
“Help yourself,” she said to me, “it’s premium quality.”
The truth is that I had never seen cocaine before (Carolina had never offered me any prior to that party on the yacht), be it premium or not, but from that point on, I would understand the difference. The coke from that evening was, according to her, mixed with crushed diamonds. Everything I knew about cocaine came from stories that my dad had told me. He used to work in customs and had confiscated tons of it. Sometimes, while we were having a meal, my dad would tell me about a container full of washing machines, or legs of ham, or tuna cans, all of them stuffed with the drug.
“The bricks were huge: hard, white, bright . . .” His tone would quickly mutate from dismay to fascination. And even though he would always finish his stories with some horrendous moral lesson about the sorry state cocaine addicts ended up in—swollen, sweaty, sterile, full of nervous tics—talking about it made his eyes sparkle.
So when Carolina gave me the tiny bag, I didn’t quite know what to do, but I certainly knew that I would do it. I went to the bathroom, opened it, pinched a little bit of powder, and put it on the crook between my thumb and forefinger. That much I had seen a million times in films. I snorted and my head caught fire inside. One blink of the eye later, I was out dancing to the rhythm of a caballo vamos pal monte with a guy I had never seen before. His name was Lucio. He was a friend of one of Carolina’s relatives.
The memories from that party became intermittent.
The fits of laughter began high up and the sea would swallow them up.
Lucio’s fingers drew letters on my back that I had to guess.
The red crack in the horizon resisted the imminence of the night, and every now and then, it seemed to me that it was blinking.
The clothes dripping with sweat, the hair greasy, the bodies all sticky, the thirst . . . I remember I was very thirsty.
When we arrived on the island, no one was sober. As soon as we touched dry land, Muñe and one of the percussionists lost themselves in the depths of a hammock. That weekend, I inhaled more cocaine than oxygen. On Monday, when I got back home, I locked myself in to sleep for two whole days.

I had met Carolina three years earlier. She wasn’t one of those friends that you’d keep all your life. She hadn’t been to my First Communion or to my quinceañera party, nor did we live in the same neighborhood. It made sense: she was rich and I wasn’t. I met her working as a promo girl for Lucky Strike cigarettes, a job that a friend of my dad’s had managed to get for me for the summer season. They paid very well. My duties consisted of getting wrapped up in a Lycra uniform and walking in and out of bars giving away packets of smokes. You had to paint your lips bright red, smile, and spit out the slogan left, right, and center, giving the impression that this made us feel an irrepressible excitement. I needed to work because since starting at the university, I hadn’t received a penny from my dad, not even to cover printing costs. Carolina didn’t need to work—of course she didn’t—yet back then she was obsessed with being independent and moving out on her own to a bare room in the Marbella guesthouse.
“And why would you want to do that?” I asked her one of those evenings.
We’d already done our rounds in the bars. We were parked up on a jetty, perched on the hood of her Mitsubishi, smoking, staring at the lights that outlined the bay’s shape.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I dunno.”
Carolina never won her independence, not even from the Sunday lunches that they used to make in her home. Yet in her head, she said, she’d taken huge steps toward a nominal independence. Six months after I’d met her, her ambitions changed. She was convinced that the only possible way out for the country’s economy (and of her own financial situation) was to legalize not so much the consumption of drugs, but the trafficking. Exporting cocaine. Not the leaf, or the flower, or the cheap workforce growing it. Rather, exporting the end product in optimal conditions.
“Premium-quality products,” she’d say, “that’s what we’d sell.”
“Right.”
“We’d be more than Acapulco Gold. We’d be ‘Colombia Diamond.’ Do you like that name?”
“No.”
Carolina didn’t go to college. She had plenty of time to fill up her nose with dust and her head with fantasies. In her ideal world, my father was unemployed and hers became an ambassador. Her dad’s business was a well-known secret. Some people said that he was now clean, that he was no longer involved, that he had left all that behind, and with what he’d collected, he’d set up a real estate business. He now built sumptuous blocks of flats that no one with an ordinary job could ever afford to buy. When they kidnapped Carolina’s brother, rumor said it was a settling of scores. That the FARC had nothing to do with it, that in actual fact he had been taken by some people from Cali who, in addition to demanding money as a condition for his release, were demanding that the family leave the country.
“They are up to their necks,” my dad told me one evening. “If they don’t leave, the young lad’s head is going to be delivered to them wrapped in cellophane.” As he was saying that, he slit his throat with his index finger and then knocked back his beer. My father was a haggard version of John Travolta. He enjoyed acting like a tough guy with a good conscience.
The idea of exporting cocaine, like all the obsessions Carolina had, soon disappeared. She told me one day when we had gone to pick up her little sister from school, which was opposite the Bocagrande esplanade. We got there early. She parked the car, we got out, and we went to sit on a bench. The seashore was carpeted with dead fish because that week a cruise liner had arrived in the city and there had been an oil spill from it. The air was coated with a strong, sour, putrid smell that settled in the pit of my stomach and made me want to puke.
“My business idea is over,” she said.
“Oh, is it now?”
She shook her head heavyheartedly, like someone who’d just been cheated.
“I looked into it: there’s just too much competition.”
“Is there now?”
She went to buy something from the corner shop.
I went closer to the sea, picked up a stick, and prodded the eye of one of the dead fish. Blood sprouted from the socket. Carolina came back with two cans of cold beer. As soon as I grabbed mine, I placed it on my forehead to relieve my discomfort. She knocked hers down in three swigs. Then she burped.

Carolina’s brother was called Jorge. He was two years older than us, and the only conversation I’d had with him had been about King Kong. Carolina was busy in the bathroom doing her makeup, while I waited for her in her bedroom before going out together. I was trying on some of the hundreds of pairs of sandals she had, when Jorge came in and said:
“Tell me something. You watch a lot of movies, right?”
I raised my shoulders.
“Sometimes I work at the film festival.”
“How come King Kong falls for a gal?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, I don’t get it. A monkey falling in love with a woman? Makes no sense.”
I tried to laugh but I sensed he was being serious.
“Can you recommend a movie to me?” he said later. “A good one, not like King Kong.”
“Who the hell is Yuliet?” I said.
“Dunno.” he replied. “Yuliet who?”
At that very moment, Carolina came out of the bathroom and we got going.
Jorge had done two terms of industrial engineering at college in Bogotá and had gone back home because his dad needed him in the family business. When he returned, he bought himself a degree from a mediocre local institution before becoming the manager of his dad’s building company. The day he was kidnapped he was coming back from his trail-bike practice ride in the city outskirts.
Carolina could have gone to study in Bogotá or in Miami or wherever the hell she’d wanted to, but she just didn’t. She had signed up for a theater course at the School of Fine Arts. She enjoyed the first month. She had blended in with the others perfectly: all flower power and hot flushes on the steps to the school. Her classmates adored her, and in her view, they were all talented and authentic and trendsetting like Andy Warhol.
“Andy Warhol hasn’t set a trend in fifty years,” I said to her.
After three months, she could no longer stand being surrounded by “filthy hippies.” She had ups and downs. She’d go from worship to contempt in a matter of hours. In her social map I was a rare constant. When she got tired of talking, she would look straight into my eyes and say: “Sometimes I think I made you up, that you exist only in my head.” I’d seethe and light up a cigarette.
Carolina hated her brother and Muñe, she was indifferent to her little sister, and she adored her dad. I couldn’t understand how people so close to one another could inspire in me such extremely different feelings. I didn’t have much experience when it came to family ties. I didn’t have a mother or siblings or grandparents. I had some aunts and uncles that lived in a village far away and whom I’d seen only once or twice in my life, who knows why. And then there was my dad, whose presence was becoming more and more haphazard. I’d always felt sorry for my dad’s background story. I imagined him as a young widower, his law degree interrupted and a baby in his arms. He left me to my own devices very early on, which meant I grew up a bit like I was no one’s daughter. It wasn’t bad. Independence was, I thought, a good legacy.
The School of Fine Arts was in San Diego, the district where I used to live. The months she did attend, Carolina would skip her classes, ring my doorbell, and make me come down at five in the afternoon with the idea of going to hang out on a jetty. Most of the time I’d refuse, telling her I had to study, that unlike her, there were people with no choices. She’d get upset.
“Selfish bitch,” she’d shout from the pavement.
I would close the door to the balcony and go inside.
The day her brother got kidnapped she had also come to find me. I had an exam the following day and didn’t feel like seeing her. She rang the bell several times and I didn’t come out. Then she shouted my name out loud. Then she threw stones at my balcony. Then she went back to the doorbell, until she got bored and left. When my dad returned from work, he found a note under the door. It said something about what’d happened to her brother and to call her. At first, I thought she had made it up. I switched on the local news channel and waited to see if they would report the incident. They only mentioned an anti-FARC mission taking place at Los Montes de María. An army commander read from a list of aliases in an enthusiastic tone, informing the journalists of the casualties. He was a short, dark-skinned man; the uniform looked tight on him. He would have benefited from some dental work. My dad used to say that police represented the first line of the fascist poor, that social category so deep-rooted in our country.
I gave Carolina a call.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Muñe?”
“Sedated.”
“And you?”
“Drunk.”
My dad was making a stew with too much onion. When I went into the kitchen to tell him that I was off to see Carolina, I found him with bright-red eyes.
“But I’ve cooked us a meal,” he complained.
I left.
He didn’t like Carolina, but he didn’t interfere with my things nor did I with his. On Fridays, for instance, he used to bring women home and I wouldn’t say a word. Always the same two or three—he rarely improvised. Women who wore a lot of makeup and were very loud in bed. The following morning, they never stayed to have breakfast with us. They would exit the room when my father and I were already at the table. They would poke in their heads with their eyes all smudged, their broken lips, their porous skin, punished by the light of day. “Bye, sweetie,” they would say, and blow kisses from the door.
My dad would raise his chin and growl something.
I took some clothes to Carolina’s house to last me a couple of days, as well as my college books. Late the first night, when we had already turned the bedroom light off and I was about to fall asleep, Carolina said:
“I hope they kill him.”

Carolina’s family came from a town in Córdoba. I wasn’t exactly sure which one because they never referred to it directly. For them, life had started when they moved to Cartagena and began building those towers lined in marble. They lived in a massive three-story penthouse with a completely independent apartment for their staff. That apartment alone was bigger than my flat in San Diego.
I spent almost a month in Carolina’s house after Jorge’s kidnapping. During that time, we didn’t see much of Muñe, the little sister, or her dad. The sister was staying at an aunt’s, and according to Carolina, her dad spent his time at work trying to get the ransom money together. I thought that it would have been enough just to sell the brother’s motorbike, but I didn’t share my views. I honestly couldn’t have cared less.
In that house I lived at my leisure. During that time, I stopped attending college, and since I didn’t have enough clothes, I’d borrow Carolina’s. I’d also wear her perfumes, go to the supermarket in her 4×4, pay for everything with her credit card, and even give orders to her maid, Yanilsa. I would decide what we’d have for lunch, what we’d watch on satellite TV. I even answered the phone. Carolina spent her days lying on the sofa, malleably accepting all my decisions. She would get aggressive only when Muñe turned up, dressed up in her robe, shuffling in her slippers like an old woman. Carolina would say to her:
“Why don’t you pay for a nice Black guy to eat you out?”
Muñe stared at her as if she spoke a different language.
The strangest thing that happened round those days was the arrival of a certain cousin called Alfonso, who came from the village. He had phoned several times before and was always very solicitous, saying the right things: asking how everything was, concerned to know if there were any updates, and letting us know that the entire family had Jorge in their prayers.
“Thank you very much, Alfonso,” I’d say to him.
When I asked Carolina who this guy was, she said:
“He was one of my dad’s houseboys. He let him go because he was useless.”
One day, cousin Alfonso came to their door. The porter told Yanilsa, and Yanilsa let him in. Carolina and I received him because Muñe had been put back to sleep.
“Dear cousin, I am entirely at your disposal,” he said to Carolina. “Please tell me what it is you need.”
He was an utterly bland guy: pleated trousers, stripy shirt well tucked in, loafers, rucksack on the shoulder. His face pale and moldy-looking, as if he’d just emerged from the jungle.
“Nothing,” she said. “We are fine,” and she offered him something to drink.
Alfonso refused the offer and looked at the window: a panoramic view over the sea. From there, the sailboats looked like toys, the clouds seemed to be made of cotton, and the sky was a poster-blue color because it turned out the glass had a special filter. On the promenade next to the bay, people were walking, looking tiny in the distance. Some evenings I would stare out of that window for a long while, imagining that I could pick up those little people with my fingers and move them around or simply drown them in the bay. Like Zeus on Mount Olympus, deciding the destiny of the mortals. Anyone looking out from up there was required to feel powerful.
“Could you leave us alone for a moment?” Alfonso asked me.
Carolina shook her head and I didn’t move. Alfonso stared at the ground. When he raised his face back up, his eyes were tainted red with fury:
“They are going to kill you all,” he said. “Tell your mother that you need to gather your things and leave. They are going kill you all because your father is a pig who doesn’t know how to do business.”
Carolina was speechless for a few seconds and then burst into tears. I asked Alfonso to leave. I was shaking but managed to shove him toward the door. Every few seconds, the guy would step back and scream:
“He’s a fucking dirty swine! He’s going to die, you are all going to die!”
When I did manage to get him out, he stuck the tip of his shoe in the door, stopping me from shutting it completely.
“You get yourself the hell out of here,” he said, his finger pointing up, “because these people are not safe.” His face was livid. He removed his foot and the door slammed shut. I looked at the buzzer screen and he was still there, breathing slowly and noisily. The fear I felt blended with pity and even a certain amount of empathy.
“These people are always safe, Alfonso,” I whispered.
Three days later, Jorge was sent back.

I saw Carolina only once again after the yacht party. I had found a full-time job at a pizzeria, and she was busy filling in applications for some college in Florida. Her dad had come back for her. The rest of her family had gone to live in Weston.
One afternoon Carolina came to the pizzeria to get me. I said to my boss that I had to attend a family emergency, and the guy, who was simply the sweetest, not only let me finish early but also gave me a pizza to take with me.
We looked for a jetty to park by, but it was school holidays and they were all full of skinny teenage girls with their crop tops and hair down to their waist.
“Let’s go to one of the buildings,” Carolina said.
She had the keys to some of the flats in the buildings her father managed. Most of them were empty. When she got sick of Muñe and Jorge, she fled to one of these huge flats and stared out of the window. The view calmed her down, she’d say. Mind you, I’m sure every time she did it, she scoffed a Xanax first.
I had gone with her to one of these flats just once. It was on the top floor with an outdoor jacuzzi. We went with a guy from the School of Fine Arts who had got hold of some marijuana for us. We went into the jacuzzi and he stated something totally obvious about Cartagena and racism, to which I replied:
“There seems to be an elementary law of exclusion at play here: the entire Black population has been hidden away.”
The guy frowned and nodded slowly, as if he were trying to solve a riddle. Then he dodged the topic, saying he felt like he was in Aerosmith’s video for the song “Crazy,” and burst out laughing. Carolina took off her underpants, climbed on top of him, and kissed him. I got out of the jacuzzi feeling disgusted.
This time we went to a different flat. It was on floor eleven and had a massive balcony with two immaculately white loungers. We sat down and I opened the box with the pizza. Carolina had bought a six-pack of beer. I asked how her family was and she said they were fine. She asked after my father and I said the same, although “fine” was not a word my dad would have used to refer to himself. Never. When someone asked him “How are you?” he’d reply “Not bad,” and that was, in the midst of it all, an encouraging answer. Not bad. So-so, average, unremarkable. That was what his world was like, his girlfriends, his stratum, his days. His life. And that was what it would always be like. And mine? What would my life be like?
It was hot and there was no wind. We could hear the music coming from a van parked by the water down below. We could also hear laughter.
“Do you have a visa to go to the US?” Carolina asked.
I shook my head. She knew I didn’t. We had talked about it one of those first evenings, dressed for Lucky Strike, perched on the hood of her car. “They cannot close the borders to the world, they are going to suffocate in their own stupidity,” she’d said back then, when she wanted to live in the Marbella guesthouse and grow dreadlocks. “Sure they can,” I replied, “and they will not suffocate—they will have more and more air to breathe.”
“I don’t know if I’ll go to college,” she was saying now. “Perhaps I’ll find a job.”
“Right.”
“And I won’t be able to come back for a while, you know? The conditions for political asylum include not returning to Colombia for five years.”
“Sure.”
“But I was thinking that, I don’t know, perhaps we could meet up somewhere in the middle. Like in Mexico. Maybe Cancún. They say it’s dreadful but it’s a good place to get drunk. Or somewhere nicer . . . Cuba! You love Cuba, don’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I’d pay for it all, of course. If you want to and you are able to. Will you be able to?”
“Not sure, don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to.”
“But why?”
I knocked down the beer and my eyes filled with tears. I thought it would be easy to push Carolina and throw her over the balcony. I imagined her body falling against the pavement, the crack of her bones when hitting the ground, followed by people screaming, running to surround her. Carolina was a believable case for suicide, I wouldn’t have to convince anyone. A sad rich girl, lost in drugs, with a conflictive family who wouldn’t miss her. “After what happened to her brother, she was never the same,” I imagined myself saying to the police, to my dad, to hers. I saw all of them agreeing, with a grave and resigned expressions, thinking to themselves: “There was nothing we could have done to save her.” It was getting dark. The red split on the horizon was waging a battle with the impending night. The bay was a deep hole, but beyond it the lights were beginning to come on like a pale sign of hope.
What would my life be like?
Carolina placed her hand over mine:
“We will see each other again,” she said, “I promise.”
I dried my tears and nodded.
“Yes, for sure we will.”

---

Margarita García Robayo, born in Colombia in 1980, is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays, and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Región: cuento político latinoamericano (Political Latin American Short Stories, 2011) and Childless Parents (2014). Her books have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Holiday Heart will be her second book to appear in English, after Fish Soup. 

Carolina Orloff, originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, is a translator and researcher in Latin American literature who has published extensively on Julio Cortázar as well as on literature, cinema, politics, and translation theory. She is the co-translator of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate and of Ariana Harwicz’s trilogy—comprising Tender, Feebleminded, and Die, My Love—which was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Prize and longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2018. In 2016, Orloff co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as publishing director. For her work at Charco Press, she was named Emerging Publisher of the Year by the Saltire Society of Scotland in 2018. Orloff holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh.

Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

For Francisco Olmeda, Halloween was the gateway to a life spent studying spooky things. He was seven when he asked his mom about the story behind the mummy costume she got him at Goodwill. His mom, Eloiza, didn’t know much about mummies, so she mumbled something in Spanish about the Egyptians and then told her son she’d take him to the library that coming Saturday. Eloiza worked at a restaurant and Francisco’s father, also named Francisco, was a mechanic. They called the older Francisco “Paco” to differentiate father and son. Eloiza and Paco hadn’t gone to college, but they eagerly pushed books on their son and had taken him to get a library card the previous year. The books worked. They made Francisco curious about everything, and his thirst for knowledge often backfired and put his parents in a weird spot where they were forced to make a decision: lie or accept that they had no idea. Whenever that happened, they went to the library.
Back then, Francisco thought librarians were geniuses that were given jobs at the library because they knew everything, or at least knew which book had answers to your questions. The pre-Halloween trip to the library was short, but Francisco went home with three books about mummification. Learning that his costume was based on something real blew his mind. If mummies were real and his grandma back in Puerto Rico was, according to his father, a real witch—“a bruja, but not like the ones in the movies”—then what was the story behind things like werewolves, zombies, vampires, ghosts, and demons?
Francisco wore his mummy costume for an event at school that week and then again on Halloween night, which fell on a Friday. He went trick-or-treating with his three best friends, David, Sebastian, and Abe, and told them about how Egyptians placed major organs in canopic jars to preserve them but thought the brain was useless, so they used a hook to pull it out of the skull and then got rid of it. They talked about cutting bodies open and using different tools to yank out a brain through a corpse’s nose as they ate an unhealthy amount of candy. The next day, Halloween was over, but for Francisco, it never ended.
As the boys got older, they developed unique interests, but they stayed friends and had enough interests in common to become brothers. David excelled at sports and his parents hoped he’d go to college on a tennis scholarship. Sebastian got into cars and wanted to become a mechanic. Abe loved comic books and got into video games, which meant that for two years all they did was stay in his room playing Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition on his Sega Genesis and eating pizza. Francisco studied spooky things. He read true crime, books about haunted places, and horror novels like they were going out of style. Once he discovered the internet, he spent time reading about the paranormal and studying videos of ghosts and strange creatures caught on camera with the same passion other kids showed for the kinds of websites their parents didn’t want them to visit. He was always looking for answers to the weird, the creepy, the mysterious. He constantly pursued the feeling he’d gotten from learning mummies were real.
The first thing Francisco learned is that there is usually a truth behind every horror story, every urban legend, every old wives’ tale, every spooky thing whispered among kids to scare each other to death while roasting marshmallows around a camp fire. He spent a lot of time looking into the horror stories everyone knew in Madrigales, his hometown. With enough time online and in the library, where Becky, the main librarian, happily got him as many interlibrary loans as he needed, Francisco carefully dismantled every supernatural narrative and every urban legend he came across until he got to the nugget of truth at its core. For example, people said the I-83 tunnel out of town was haunted by the ghosts of children. It wasn’t. The story came from a school bus that crashed there in 1962 while taking kids on a field trip. There were a lot of injuries, but no casualties. Francisco found it all in the microfiches of the Madrigales Gazette, the local newspaper. One of the kids, Alberto Davidson, worked at the post office and was on friendly terms with Paco.
Folks also claimed that at night a dark figure roamed the old Madrigales Cemetery, which took up a lot of space on the east side of town; it had been seen by many residents. That was true. An Italian immigrant named Luca had worked as the caretaker there for almost five decades, until his heart exploded while he was digging a grave. He slept during the day and walked around taking care of business at night because he claimed the sun hurt his skin. It was a creepy story about an eerie place, but not a haunting.
While Abe, David, and Sebastian never read the same books or shared Francisco’s passion for unnerving yarns and urban legends, they enjoyed learning about them. They also loved telling Francisco about any new scary tales they heard because he always knew the story behind them or would spend weeks looking into it and then would share whatever he’d learned. In all their years doing it, they had found two stories that were real, or at least appeared to be. The first one was the Crying Girl, a disembodied voice that could be heard around Johnston Street, where a somewhat recent row of houses stood against the back of the local grocery store. Construction workers talked about how they always got out of there before the sun went down because as soon as it got dark, they could hear it—the sound of a young girl crying. After the houses were finished and they went on the market, the stories proliferated, and the folks who moved into those new abodes corroborated them. There were plenty of videos about the Crying Girl on YouTube, as well as a thousand theories on as many websites, and a TV show had once come to town to spend a night recording the crying and looking for its source. They got a lot of great audio, but couldn’t solve the mystery. The ghost of a sad girl really walked around Johnston Street at night, and that was enough to keep Francisco looking, digging, and reading.
The second real story was the one Francisco obsessed about the most, and it was the one they wanted to figure out before life pushed them closer to adulthood than they wanted to be and college became a thing between them instead of a communal dream. The second story was about the entity rumored to inhabit the woods to the south of Madrigales, an area the locals called “the woods” and maps claimed was officially called the Westcave Nature Preserve.
According to a book Becky had gotten Francisco—and thirteen articles of varying length published between 1981 and 2009 in the Madrigales Gazette—six government workers, three Madrigales families, and the nine kids and two adults that made up Boy Scout Troop 413 had gone missing in those woods. The Boy Scouts story went national. According to experts, the Westcave Nature Preserve wasn’t big enough for people to get lost in it forever, so conspiracy theories grew up around it like mushrooms after three days of rain. A cabal of Satanists operating in or near Madrigales had kidnapped everyone in order to sacrifice them to the Devil. An international ring of sex traffickers had beaten the Satanists to the punch and the kids were now in basements and dungeons in “evil” countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Aliens had abducted them and taken them to some faraway planet to conduct experiments on their bodies. A serial killer lived in those woods, hiding in a tiny cabin no one had seen. The list went on and on. The truth was this: none of those people were ever found.
Francisco had a few ideas, and none of them made him comfortable. You could blame a disappearing family on a killer, but the nine boys and the construction workers were a different story. According to the articles he read on microfiche, weird things started going on when the government decided to slash into a corner of the woods to make the construction of I-83 easier. Equipment malfunctioned regularly, things were moved around, and tools went missing during the night. They placed a cyclone fence around the machines and placed a guard in a little wooden shack outside the entrance. The guard went missing the first night he was there. After the second guard suffered the same fate, they couldn’t find people to work that gig. Because they wanted to beat the heat, workers on the site started so early it was still dark. At the end of the second week, a worker vanished on his way to a bathroom break. Three more followed, with one vanishing from his tractor while operating it, which caused a lot of mayhem and made the news. As quietly as they’d come, the workers left, and I-83 now skirted around the east side of Madrigales like it was trying not to touch it.
Francisco had been collecting books, articles, and videos about the Westcave Nature Preserve for almost a decade. He could find no explanation that satisfied his curiosity, and now that August and his move to Austin to go to college felt like something barreling at him at top speed, he wanted to spend a night there.
The thing about the woods is that Madrigales residents seemed to think that not talking about what happened would make it go away. Francisco knew things didn’t work like that. But he also understood that most people had an aversion to the kinds of things he was naturally drawn to. In a way, he knew he was the weird one, not the other way around. Bringing the story up with his parents never led to anything positive. The same happened to Abe, David, and Sebastian when they asked their parents about it. For years they had talked about walking a couple miles into the woods and camping there for the night. They never asked for permission to do it and knew that lying and trying was too risky. Now they would be away from each other for the first time since they met at school, and they understood it was now or never. They had all graduated high school, so vanishing for one night wasn’t as hard. Sebastian and Abe had cars. They could pull it off.
Eloiza and Paco were in Francisco’s head as they all shouldered their backpacks and began to walk into the depths of the Westcave Nature Preserve. He could hear his parents, could feel their disappointment if something happened to any of them. The woods were bad and you didn’t go there at night. It was easy to understand that, an easy rule to follow.
“Never asked you, man,” said Abe. “Why the hell do they call this Westcave? Is there a cave in here?”
“Nah,” said Francisco, happy to be distracted. “One of the theories says there is a cave around here and that a creature lives in it. They claim that’s what came out and ate or . . . you know, did whatever to make all those people disappear.”
“And how do we know there’s no damn cave?” asked David.
“We know because the government had to check for them before they started trying to construct a chunk of interstate here. They used radar that goes into the ground and shows if there’s a hole in there. They didn’t—”
“Okay, so here’s the question: What do you think is here?” asked Sebastian. For that, Francisco didn’t have an answer.
Abe and Sebastian stopped walking, their eyes on their horror-loving friend.
“You don’t have a clue? Are you for real?”
Francisco looked at Abe. The knot in Abe’s brow spoke volumes. Francisco knew they expected more. They were here on an adventure, but he knew that in their heads, the adventure wasn’t dangerous because Francisco always knew the truth about things, and if he brought them here, that meant there wasn’t anything truly horrible out there.
“I don’t have a clue,” said Francisco. “But listen, I’m going away in two weeks and David is heading up to NYC in a few days because practice starts before his classes do, so this is the last chance we have to get in here together until god knows when.”
With that, they walked on.
As they made their way deeper and deeper into the woods, Francisco’s mood changed. His nerves subsided and his love for his friends took over. They were ride or die friends before they even knew that was a thing. You picked on one of them, you had to deal with all of them. They loved each other the way only people who grow up together can love each other. He was happy about moving to Austin and starting his journalism classes . . . and the anthropology classes he’d managed to work in there after explaining to his advisor that he planned on pursuing anthropology once he was done with his BA. But he was going to miss these guys. He was going to miss them a lot.
Over the years, Abe’s love for video games and pizza had caught up to him. His body filled out, and then it kept expanding. When he stopped, sweat plastering his light brown hair to his forehead, they all stopped.
Setting up didn’t take long. A hundred nights camping in each other’s backyards and with their parents by the river on fishing trips meant they were very familiar with the process.
An hour later, the sun had gone down, and the darkness around them, which the fire they’d gotten going struggled to push back, had come alive with the sounds of insects and small things scurrying around.
Whenever Francisco, Abe, David, and Sebastian got together, their conversations became a living thing that constantly shifted around and went from sad to hilarious to insulting to dirty to profound. Francisco knew this time it was all that, like always, but it was also special. It was special because they were all hurtling toward different futures in different places. He knew this magic was about to end, and the thought was strong enough to fill his eyes with tears. Luckily, the smoke occasionally flew his way, which gave him an excuse to pull his shirt up and wipe his face.
David was saying something about roasting hot dogs over the fire when they heard a twig snap. The sound was loud enough to soar above the rest of the night noises surrounding them. They all went quiet and looked around before searching for reassurance in each other’s eyes.
Abe opened his mouth to say something, but a sound akin to the hiss of a city bus’s breaks interrupted him. Unlike the snapped twig, this sound came from a specific spot in the darkness, and they all looked in that direction—right behind Sebastian. In the darkness caused by the night and the dancing shadows of the trees, something darker moved, something long and tall. Francisco thought about pulling big catfish from the bottom of the muddy river, their bodies a black smudge emerging from the coffee-colored water, a thick, solid dark within more darkness.
Fear was something Francisco had read a lot about. He also knew fear because he had felt it before. He’d been afraid of getting caught, afraid of the dark, afraid of bad grades. This, however, was a different kind of fear; this was fear of the unknown, and it felt like a strong person was squeezing the back of his neck.
The four friends watched as the shadow in the darkness came together and coalesced into something undeniably physical, something they knew they could touch. Then the thing in the shadows moved into the space illuminated by their fire; an impossible column of ink-black darkness that stood about fifteen feet tall. With another hiss, a hole lined with teeth emerged from where the thing’s head should have been, and tendrils of what looked like thick smoke erupted from its sides and writhed in the air like electrocuted worms.
Sebastian screamed. The sound pierced through the air and shook them all to the core. They jumped to their feet in unison.
The thing in the shadows moved again, descending on Sebastian with a quickness that belonged to something much smaller. The thing’s movement made Francisco think of liquid running down a window. Abe, David, and Francisco watched, frozen in fear, as the thing that had emerged from the woods’ shadows stretched the hole lined with teeth and swallowed their friend whole.
The one thing Francisco had never read about is how fear can scramble your thoughts. They all ran, scattering in different directions like cockroaches under a bright light. They had no plan, but in that moment, being away from that unholy column of death was enough.
Francisco stumbled and fell twice, but the adrenaline pumping through his veins made him jump to his feet and keep running. He wondered if he was running toward a road or a house, some kind of civilization that could translate into salvation. He was gulping air and blood was pounding in his ears, but he knew stopping was not an option. Somewhere to his left, a scream cut through the darkness. It was a panicked, desperate sound. It was the sound of terror clashing against a real monster.
A rock or a root grabbed Francisco’s left foot and pulled him down to the ground. Fire flared in his ankle. He tried to stand up, but the pain was too much. From behind him, the hissing sound came again, and it sounded as close as it had when they were all around the fire.
Francisco turned to the noise and something else tripped him up and landed him on his ass. The towering darkness was there, not ten feet away. The fear he’d been feeling suddenly vanished like Sebastian had; there one second, gone the next. In its place, a heavy sadness flooded Francisco. Time didn’t slow down, but his thoughts traveled at the speed of light. He knew the sadness came from lives cut short way too early. It came from shattered futures that would never be. It came from his friends no longer being with him.
The hole lined with teeth expanded and a choke escaped from Francisco’s throat. Here was his answer, the last one he’d ever get. A second before the thing descended on him, Francisco realized the worst part of looking for answers is that sometimes you get them, and that sometimes it’s better to let creepy stories just be what they are.

---

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, editor, and book reviewer living in Austin. His most recent novel, Coyote Songs, was nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award, and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2018. His nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues.

Illustration: Mike Reddy

“Listen,” Ms. Harrison says, smoothing down the back of her blond bob, “if you’re having second thoughts . . .”
“I’m not!” Michelle says too quickly. She knows she has no poker face. Her current roommate recently asked her, “Why do you always look so sour? Everyone can tell you hate them.” Michelle had heard similar comments before, so it hadn’t hurt her feelings too badly, plus her roommate was a total piece of shit, but she had wondered who everyone was. She’d made a game of it, listing people her roommate knew she knew: their mutual thesis advisor, the barista at the coffee shop across the street, the parade of lovers and friends the roommate brought back to their tiny, shared space.
“It won’t bother you,” Ms. Harrison said, lowering her voice so that the word “it” came out a whisper. “It’s been down there since we bought the house, and we barely think about it. Seriously.”
“Really, Ms. Harrison. I’m glad for the peace and quiet.”
“Oh good. Great. Please call me Helena. We can’t be that far apart in age, can we?”
Michelle was twenty-five and in graduate school, living in a shitty apartment with the aforementioned shitty roommate in a shitty part of town. They had roaches that were so small and fast that they didn’t bother to squish them. She was perpetually single and had never learned to drive a car. She knew how to study, sit in a library, teach a freshman comp class, but other than that, she was barely an adult. This woman, Ms. Helena Harrison, was light years ahead of Michelle.
They were seated across from each other in a large room with a marble floor and a long wooden table that Michelle knew she was likely to scuff or scratch. Even a slight depression of her fingers on its surface would leave a mark that would embarrass her. The house was a Victorian at the top of a steep hill in the oldest and richest part of the city. It was a regal thing from the outside. So many windows blinking in the sun. The inside smelled pointedly of the ocean, even though the water was miles away. The Harrison family had modernized it in every way possible, stripping the inside of all history. White walls, marble floors, all sharp angles that ran perfectly parallel to each other.
The chairs they sat in were little sculptures in and of themselves. The same slippery wood as the table. Michelle sat on the edge of the seat, keeping her spine straight and far from the bare rail of the back of the chair. Two vertical spindles to hold one singular, horizontal bar that Helena leaned against with ease. Michelle reminded herself that she wouldn’t ever have to sit in this chair again, nor would she have to occupy much of the house at all. Not if things went according to plan.
“You still look worried,” Helena says, scooting forward on her impossible chair. Little diamond studs in her earlobes.
“Oh, what? No. I’m not worried. Preoccupied, always, but it won’t impact my time here. I’m very organized. Super careful.” Her discomfort with this woman and the grand house must be obvious. Her face grows hot, flushing with a pink that she knows she can’t possibly hide, even as she untucks her hair from behind her ears. I’m so fucking dumb, she thinks about herself. Spineless and ugly and small.
In contrast to Michelle, Ms. Helena Harrison is tall, willowy, and blond, as perfectly hewn as that horizontal chair rail. It makes Michelle more aware of her own stature. Her small frame disturbed by disproportionally wide hips. Hair that is neither brown nor blond, elbows and ankle bones that stick too far out like little doorknobs and are the only parts of her unwieldy body that look like they belong to a skinny person. Even her clothes are ugly, so cheap they pill inexplicably at all the places where her larger body parts rub together.
“It’s our hope that you will feel at home here. Eat what pleases you. Pretend it’s your own. But no guests. You understand that, right?”
The our being the husband and two daughters who remain images in the singular picture frame on the marble mantel in the front living room. All three are impossibly handsome.
Helena rises from the table, touching its skin with her palms and Michelle watches, fascinated, as they meet the gorgeous wood and then peel away, no trace of them left behind. Michelle has already been given a tour of the whole house, all except one area, so she knows where they must be going now and her skin tingles with anticipation.
The kitchen floor is a bumpy stone. It has been carefully lacquered to appear wet, as if the floor were a riverbed, and Michelle thinks of that old game she played as a kid, pretending the floor in her bedroom was lava. She’d loved to throw out pillows, books, stuffed animals, and then hop from one to the other. She was an only child. Lonely. Lonelier still after her father’s death, so it was easy to convince herself that things that weren’t real might be real after all.
“So,” Ms. Harrison said, stopping to stand with her hands on the butcher block of the kitchen island, “if you take the job . . .”
“Oh, I’m taking the job.” Michelle had not let Helena finish. The flush that had begun to vanish reignited. She could feel it in her neck now, and she knew from experience what it looked like. She’d watched it bloom in the mirror before. A bright red that left grotesque white blotches on her cheek bones, at her temple, and around the pop of her jugular vein at her throat.
“You’re sure?” Helen asks, and Michelle nods her emphatic yes. “Fantastic! You won’t regret it.” There was so much relief in her voice, so much joy that it brought up the first nervous feelings in Michelle. “It’s just that we’ve had trouble keeping house sitters in the past. I don’t know why. I tell them the exact routine to follow and everything seems fine, but then, the next time we need to travel, I call and they won’t even pick up to say no!”
Michelle sees Helena glance at the cracked door at the back of the kitchen and begin to flush a bit herself. It’s the first time it occurs to Michelle that Helena is embarrassed by the situation. That the animal living in the cellar is a point of shame.
“Have you taken care of one before?” Helena asks.
“No, never.”
“It’s honestly not a big deal. I know there is at least one other in the city. They are rare nowadays, but people have them. If you’ve house-sat with any frequency, you know other pets are much harder. Not that it’s a pet, but you know what I mean.”
“It’s what attracted me to the job,” Michelle offers. She hadn’t thought she’d share this bit of information. No point to it and it might make her seem creepy, like some sort of stalker, but now she had started, so she kept going. “I’m working on my thesis, so I won’t need to go out much. I just need a quiet space, and the thesis, well it’s a novel, historical fiction, and it reimagines the mass extermination. Like, what if they’d been allowed to live?”
“A dystopian book?” Helena asks with a nervous laugh.
“Utopian.”
Helena is staring at her now, and Michelle can’t tell if it is out of concern or disgust.
“Your entire thesis is about those things taking over and it’s happy?”
“Well, sort of. I’m not done yet. I’m interested in how humanity reacted to them. Our management of the problem. It seems metaphorical for a lot of other atrocities.”
“Isn’t that like getting a PhD in cockroaches?”
“An MFA. And, to be fair, people study entomology.”
“Right. And just to be clear,” Helena says, pausing, “am I part of the atrocity in your book?”
“Oh,” Michelle says quickly, realizing what she’s done and trying to buy herself time. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m so, so sorry. I’m just a curious person, a big imagination and all that, and well, I mean it’s interesting, your family’s choice to preserve one, and I have a lot of sympathy for that. Do I mean empathy? Empathy. My characters do the same. I am not here to judge. Not at all. Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop talking.”
“Preserve . . .” Ms. Harrison finally says. “Avoid might be a better word.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s just down there in the root cellar and the girls were so young. They named it, at first. Wanted to interact with it a bit, but of course, as you know, that makes it grow which is, in fact, illegal. Anyway, we let them call it something for a while, and they fed it, and by the time they were bored of it, it was just habit. And they are expensive to terminate.” The last sentence is tacked on, an odd excuse considering the wealth around them. “Honestly, I wanted to kill it. I might still.”
“Well, if it helps at all, I think it’s great that it’s still here. There are so few left.”
“You aren’t planning to . . .” Helena looks suddenly horrified.
“No! I mean, no. I would never. I just want to be in the same house with it. Occupy space.”
“That’s fine,” Helena says, but Michelle can see it might not be fine. Luckily, Helena and family are meant to be on a plane the next morning. Michelle is their only option. “Anyhow, I’ll leave a list here that will remind you of when you need to offer food. I’ll leave some other notes too, but making sure to feed him on schedule is the main thing.”
“Him?”
“Well, we don’t actually know. The girls named him King Eric the Wicked and Heinously Hairy way back when, and so I think of him as male, but I also understand they don’t really have genders.”
“Not solid ones anyway,” Michelle offers.
“Anyway. The cellar door is at the back of the pantry and kept locked. We don’t even have keys for all the locks so no worries there. And we’ve found lunch meat fits under the door nicely. Doesn’t matter what kind, as long as it’s thin sliced. I’ll leave plenty.”
They move to the pantry, a surprisingly large room with shelves on both walls. The back wall is almost entirely the cellar door, an old door, original to the house, the varnish pickling. Its glass doorknob gleams. There are a disconcerting number of locks added to the top and side of the door: a sliding bolt, a chain, a small golden hook.
“Does it try to get out?” Michelle asks.
“What? Oh, lord no. Those are from the previous homeowners. Most of them anyway. I think they were afraid of it. They were older and probably remember how bad it got. Back when you could make a living killing the things and delivering the husks. I’ve always heard they dry up right away when dead.”
“Yes, it was hard for people to really report how many they’d exterminated for proper payment. They’d turn to dust in transportation. People would varnish them in advance so that they wouldn’t get undersold. That’s why we have so many in museums. I’m told they look very different alive. Like guinea pigs with spider legs.”
“So anyway, you need to put food right under the door with a little still peeking out, in case it doesn’t get eaten and you have to pull it back. The smell of rotten lunch meat does not go away quickly. Hold on. Let me get a slice.” Ms. Harrison slides past Michelle back into the kitchen, their hips touching briefly.
Michelle is left in the pantry alone. She moves closer to the door, squats down. Feels air pushing out from the crack. Interaction makes them grow. She knows that. Touch. Eye contact. Emotion. The largest recorded had grown to the size of a crocodile; its legs, when unfolded, the length of a city bus. They weren’t violent. Not by nature. Just so numerous. So large. Michelle moves her fingers closer to the door, slides them under the wood and into the dark, yanking them back as Helena reenters the pantry.
“Here,” Helena says, shoving a piece of meat in Michelle’s face. “It’s about that time anyway. Give it a go.”
Michelle slides the piece of salami under the door. Waits. Nothing.
“He doesn’t always eat it right away and that’s fine. What you’re trying to actively avoid is the screaming.”
“Screaming?”
“Yes, it’s awful. One time the car broke down when we were coming back from Big Sur, and we were out of cell range so we couldn’t tell the sitter to stay on. Anyway, when we got home, it was louder than the house alarm. We knew he’d been screaming for a long time because his voice was almost hoarse. The neighbors haven’t talked to us since.” Helena shudders.
“I’ll keep on schedule, it won’t be a problem.”
Michelle squats down again. They watch the crack. Helena and Michelle. The round red slice against the stone floor. The dark behind the door quiet.
Nothing happens.

The family is gone by the time Michelle arrives with her stuff the next day. She texts Ms. Helena Harrison to let her know she’s settled, and then sets about making herself at home.
She drops her duffel and sleeping bag in the pantry, and walks the three floors of the house, starting at the top. She shuts the door of each room as she comes upon them, wandering only into the eldest girl’s room, where an old-fashioned dictionary lays open, spine wide. The word “precious” has been aggressively scratched out with a pencil and Michelle touches the angry spot, feels how the pencil has dug ruts into the page, almost broken through. Michelle takes an eraser from the desk drawer and rubs at the gray scratching. She finds what she knows to be true—“of great value or high price; highly esteemed or cherished”—and, seeing it there, under the smudge of the blacked-out marking, feels like a revelation.
Michelle makes her way back to the kitchen, continuing to shut every door she passes.
She rolls out her sleeping bag under the lowest food shelf. Her pillow fits neatly at the top, nearest the cellar door. In the kitchen, she fixes herself a sandwich and takes extra slices of meat back with her.
When Michelle was a toddler, she’d lived in an apartment complex that broke out with a rash of the creatures, and they’d had to move to a hotel for a few days. Michelle didn’t remember this, but her father claimed that when he’d gone back to quickly grab her favorite pacifier, the dumpster had been open. A soft series of keening wails coming out of the dim, dark of the metal. He’d walked up to it only to see that it was full up with the creatures. Stinking and stuck to traps that didn’t kill them, but instead, kept them still until they died. He said they seemed to sense him when he walked up, opened their dark mouths to scream for help, growing louder and louder. He tried to save a few. Reached in to pull them free, but all that came loose were bits of the creatures. Legs. Clumps of fur. Unrecognizable bits of flesh that stuck to his fingers and palms. Her father had died of cancer when she was five. Some of her first memories were of his body in a hospital bed, so tightly tucked and riddled with tubes and machines that he too was glued down, stuck. She’d spent her whole young adult life conflating those two images, mixing them up in her dreams; her father caught inside dumpsters, screaming for her to pull him free.

The next day, she opened the toolbox she’d brought with her. She didn’t have much, but she had screwdrivers, a hammer, a crowbar. The locks on the cellar door were numerous but old. She was able to remove most of them without too much difficulty. She piled them on the floor. Their screws and chains and other sundry bits in individual piles so, even without their designated space on a door, they kept their shape.
Soon the cellar was free of its locks, littered instead with dozens of spiral holes that she imagined into seashells, pressing her ear to the door to listen for the beast as if it were the sea.
When she was done, she went back into the kitchen and filled the cooler she’d brought with ice and food. She filled jugs of water. Food for a month will have to be enough, she told herself.
Next, she moved the locks one at a time to the pantry door, shutting herself in. She mirrored where they’d been on the cellar door; ritual felt somehow important. When she was done, she could feel it was late, so she slid lunch meat under the cellar door without opening it and fell asleep on her sleeping bag, deciding that when she woke up it would be the beginning.

Her body jolted awake. She sat up suddenly, hitting her head on the bottom pantry shelf. She listened to the quiet of the little room and the house beyond before standing up to pull on the light. If she did not know better, she’d think she was all alone. The idea of this made her catch her breath. What if all of this was made up? If she’d kept her own thoughts so closed and so private, no one had the opportunity to tell her she was crazy. The stone floor beneath her feet began to rumble, glow red. She squinched her eyes shut against the lava. What if there was nothing beyond the cellar door? No story. No next step. No purpose. She kept her eyes squeezed shut and deepened her breathing. Pictured the lava flowing out the pantry door.
When she opened her eyes, the pantry was just a pantry. The door to the cellar was just a door, and before she could give her imagination too much time to ponder, her hand rushed for the doorknob, twisting it easily. The old wood pulled smoothly from its frame. The smell came next. Damp. Moldy. Earth kept dark and soft. The edges gone moldy.
“Hello,” she said down into the pit of earth.
For years, since she was a kid really, she’d imagined how she’d speak to one, making up imaginary conversations. She’d landed long ago on the decision to speak to it as she would a child or perhaps a sad friend. “Don’t be afraid,” she said down into the dark. “I’ve come to get to know you.”
Michelle knew what it felt like to be locked inside a place, her own skull such a whirling torture chamber at times that she felt she understood now something that her father didn’t. It was worth losing a few limbs to escape.

For a long time, Michelle sat silent and cross-legged on the floor at the top of the cellar stairs, the stone floor making her sit bones ache in a way she found pleasing, a mark of her patience. Eventually, she began talking. She talked and talked in a way she hadn’t in a long time, or maybe ever.
Michelle talked about her novel. How the protagonist looked too much like her no matter how hard she tried to change her, and so it was horrible to hear about her unlikability as a character, when she knew, they all knew, it was her. She shared how her mother left her voicemails. Long voicemails about her own activities. What she’d eaten. If she’d been exercising. What she liked best on TV. Long anxious messages that made Michelle’s stomach hurt, primarily because Michelle knew she wouldn’t ever return them. The guilt had gotten so great that she no longer pressed play.
She didn’t know exactly when it had begun to feel like each day was wading through the dark. Maybe it had always felt like that. Maybe in the crib she’d felt stale air on her face. The mud of the world heavy on her kicking feet. Maybe it was after her father died. Maybe it was when she hit puberty. Maybe it was when she realized she was never going to finish her book or, therefore, her degree. And maybe it wasn’t about finding the moment it had become so hard, but instead about the moment she realized this wasn’t how everyone else felt. There were people all around her, every day of the damn week, living a life of peace. Laughing because they thought something was funny. Smiling because the sun felt good on their skin. Holding hands with another human because they felt love. Some people could turn their thoughts off whenever they chose to. Not everyone was an animal chasing their own uncatchable tails. She understood too that life was a costume one could put on, fake it for a bit and then fall into a pattern, but the problem was, she said into the dark, that she’d never understood how to piece together that outfit, let alone plaster it on her body. She was all innards in the world. All pokey emotions and ever-apparent feelings. She had lost her guardrails, if she’d ever had them.
The nature of her introspection, the volume of it, meant that when the creature first emerged on its eight spidery legs, Michelle did not immediately notice. She was too deep in her own thoughts. The rhythm of her voice had done something accidental. It had soothed her mind and body.
When she looked down at the first step, she saw a fat caterpillar. Its eight legs stretching out from its torso like car antennas. It was absurd, really, the little hairy body, no eyes or mouth or nose to mark one end from the other. The legs shown in the light, long and thin and sharp at the ends. It made her laugh. The sight of it.
“Hello,” Michelle said, pleased by the cheer in her own voice. The creature said nothing back, but a million tiny, indiscernible hairs rippled, as if she’d made its skin crawl. For a moment, she thought it might turn and disappear back into the dark, but then its sharp, spindly legs disappeared into its body and it curled roly-poly style and rolled into the pantry to rest its tight little body against Michelle’s calf.
Her heart raced. Her eyes widened. She reached out her cupped palms and scooped up the creature. It stayed curled, and she held it up to her face, the brown hairs bristly, the legs entirely tucked inside of it. Michelle held it to her nose and inhaled. The smell of it was delicious, like popcorn, and repelling, like dirty feet. She moved cautiously to her sleeping bag and placed it on the softest patch, and then turned off the pantry light and shut the cellar door.
Michelle lay on her side, curling herself around it, two spiraling bodies beating in the dark.

The Harrison family returned early from their trip. Michelle would have known this if she hadn’t turned her phone off, but it didn’t matter. They banged on the pantry door. They pleaded. They threatened to call the police. They grew angrier and angrier, but the locks held and behind the anger was, Michelle guessed, fear. Shame. And she was right. She knew they would stop eventually and so, when they did, it was no sooner or later than Michelle had hoped.

The creature grew. Slower than Michelle thought it might, but it grew all the same. Its fur longer too, dragging out under its body—its legs remaining sucked in, like a ball of hair plucked from a hairbrush. Michelle and the creature grew more alike in this way. Hair growing into tangles. Bodies merging in scent. Eating together in the soft dark.
In the fourth week, Michelle realized the creature had grown eyes. A long blinking line of them in the part of his hair all along his spine. They shone like the glass doorknob did in the pantry light and no matter how many times she counted them, she got a different number, like counting the rays of light reflecting off a prism. In the sixth week, it smiled at Michelle. A big slash of a mouth that ran along its midsection on the right side.
In the eighth week on the fifth day, the legs appeared again. Four on each side. Silver and sharp as knives at the tips. Like tent poles that held its body high above the ground, so that it could rise above Michelle, bonk its many eyes on the light bulb.
“What now?” Michelle asks. And the creature purses its long lips before opening its mouth wide. An invitation.
“Will it hurt?” she asks.
The creature does not answer, but Michelle understands that it won’t be painful. It will feel the same as climbing into her sleeping bag.
The monster opens its mouth wider. It stretches long on its side. Toothless and surprisingly bright. The opposite of the cellar or of the inside of Michelle’s head. Its interior sparkles with brightness, a disco ball of a heart. Michelle lays down on the floor and the creature retracts its legs in order to be on the ground next to her. Michelle lets the bright white take over, rolling into the joy of it. Her mind is quiet and her eyes open. She peers up through the creature’s spinal eye sockets at the pantry ceiling. Its white, bumpy plaster suddenly seems ancient and beautiful, stalactites in a cave she might never see again.
Michelle lay still inside the creature, telling it how to undo the locks on the door with its legs. It works smoothly, one lock at a time, until all hang loose and the door swings open. They lumber out together. The noises of the Harrison family all around them. Screaming and hollering and making a fuss, but Michelle remains calm, wondering only if they could see her beautiful form inside the creature. The bumps of her wide hips, the curve of her thighs, the smooth back of her skull shaping the creature from the inside out.
The chaos of the world outside the pantry filters through, but it hardly matters. The only direction Michelle can see is up. The back door bangs open. Soon they are outside, the cumulus clouds above them, large, beautiful puffs in the blue, blue sky. The sun big and bright and, beyond it, the endless universe. A world full of light that she’s never allowed herself to see, so busy was she looking down.
Michelle basks in it. The never-ending clarity; a sky opening to everything she’s never fully seen.

---

Rachel Eve Moulton earned her MFA from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Beacon Street Review, Bellowing Ark, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Bryant Literary Review, Narrative, New Ohio Review, and Button-Eye Review, among others. Her debut novel, Tinfoil Butterfly, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and nominated for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a Bram Stoker. She’s spent most of her life as an educator and writing coach. She lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains east of Albuquerque.

Illustration: Calum Heath

When the housekeeper asks, “Will you be all right? I have called you a cab,” in his lilting German accent, we hesitate on the stoop and assure him that the child’s behavior is nothing more than a blip on the proverbial radar. An unfortunate but ultimately forgettable event. But that is a lie.
“How long has the girl—” Maureen starts and then abandons the question, not knowing exactly what she is asking. Failing, she buttons her coat. Her fingers are clumsy with cold.
“No, she is normally a good girl,” the man says. Klaus is his name? Clement? A Manhattan before takeoff and a scotch on arrival and consequently I don’t recall the servant’s names, however imposingly Teutonic.
“You will be all right, won’t you?” Klaus or Clement or Kurt asks again.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course. I hope she gets some help.”
In the cold, huddling down into our coats, we wait for the cab. Maureen looks back at the house. The car comes and we ride back to the hotel silently. Georgetown passes, shuttered windows and coagulate fog, gloomy patches of yellow light in procession. It might have ended behind us, but Maureen says, “I just can’t imagine. How embarrassing having her—her what? Mentally disturbed? Her seriously screwy kid come out in the middle of a dinner party of all things. And piss on the carpet. I just can’t imagine.”
“Bugfuck,” I say. My flight back to Canaveral was at 0600 hours, and I was already sure I would be feeling every microliter of fuel I’d burned this evening. I asked the cabbie if I could smoke and cracked the window.
“How’d she know me?” I ask. “This is my first space mission. It’s not like I’m famous.”
“Yet,” Maureen says and works her hands inside my jacket, to my belly and chest. Cold little hands. Kissable, knowing, worried hands. “There was the article in the Post. Which I guess is why they invited us. She listened at the top of the stairs to the senator. Who knows?”
“Movie stars holding court with the ecclesiasts and the politicos. They call it Hollyweird for a reason, that’s for sure.”
“I thought Chris was quite down to earth for an actress. It was the priest who was outrageous. The show tunes! He really missed his calling.” We don’t return to what the girl did. What the girl said.
The hotel hoves into view, appearing slowly in the thick air. A bell tolls somewhere off in the distance as I pay the driver and Maureen waits for me in the light of the hotel lobby. Midnight.
In bed, Maureen puts her hand on my chest and worms her way into the crook of my arm: Prelude to what? Either talk or sex and I’m not interested in either, now. I stare at the ceiling. “You’re thinking about it. Don’t,” she says in the way that feels like she’s admonishing me for driving too fast or having an extra nightcap. Both things I’m prone to. Talk it is.
The little girl’s face. Cracked lips and dry, non-reflective eyes. Blank and knowing, all at once. You’re going to die up there, she says again within me. Then the actress mother snatches her up, yelling for the servants to get rags, and the Kraut immediately starts pouring soda water and toweling up the urine. I’m old enough to remember when Klaus or Clement might have been clad in a smart jackbooted uniform. Now he’s mopping up lunatic piddle. Maureen says, “Don’t,” again, drawing it out like the church bells that tolled on our arrival. The urine coming out in a rush, the words measured. Both done to shock, maybe. A game. How old was she? Thirteen? Twelve? To come down in her nightclothes and intone his dire fate. Prognosticate. Urinate. A real fucking Cassandra, that one. You’re going to die up there.
“No, honey,” I say. “Just quarantine by tomorrow. And in two weeks—”
“Don’t,” Maureen says.

Two weeks later is a wash. A decade then, before I get my chance, my very own personal launch window closing fast. Every time I’m on deck, something stops me. A pressure deviance from the norm on the liquid oxygen tanks, a fuel leak. A short in a gauge. Hyperactive pelicans and seagulls shitting on the booster’s hard carapace. Apollo ends, its remaining rockets and expertise used for catch-as-catch-can missions. Presidents fall to dust. My peers shake hands with the Russians at fifty miles altitude and thirty thousand miles per hour. My own velocity holds: at thirty-five, I approach too old for missions. They want to move me into the more avuncular position of training. I decline. The air force keeps me busy: I remain flight ready. The space shuttle program starts and I don’t get tapped. I don’t think about the girl anymore, except before sleep and even then with some humor.
The end of my marriage begins with an acronym over a charcoal grill on a summer day. Mai tais and beer and cannonballs into the pool at a bungalow outside of Jacksonville.
“Hey, Howie, those burgers look BBR!” Baltimore calls, and Maureen, always wary, asks, “What’s bee bee arr? Isn’t it called BBQ?”
The boys of Flight Group 13 and their wives laugh at what they think is a joke, but I watch and listen as Joyce Trammell says quietly, “Burned beyond recognition,” to Maureen, whose eyes go wide. She turns to me, her mouth tight. By the seventh funeral of the boys from Flight Group 13 in two years—including Ted Trammell’s—Maureen is done. Round and round we go. Widowhood won’t suit her. She knew what she was getting into when we married. Twenty-three percent chance of ye olde BBR. What is death but the loss of self, Howie? Someday I’ll just be known as the astronaut-that-never-flew’s widow. That one hurts. Etcetera, etcetera. I am not kind and there are no children to bind us. Maureen leaves me for more present and earthbound companionship.
Then: “There’s a secret war going on,” the senator says. From Nevada, just like me, and the familiarity of his thickset body, of his glutinous voice and its western cadences, puts me at ease. Back in Georgetown once again, not very far from the house at the top of those fucking steps. Heavy-drinking politicos spew cigar smoke into the general haze at the ceiling. No one cares that we sit, quietly talking. The walls of this watering hole have heard thousands of schemes and plans, and never once has one been told to the wider world. Let the general population stay asleep.
The senator from the cocktail party where the girl pissed on the rug and upset Maureen so. Long ago. “And we need good men like you in it.”
I’m not used to skirting the scrub brushes. “What kind of war?” I ask.
He points a thick finger toward the hovering wraith of smoke above. “Satellite surveillance. Classified payloads. MSEP,” he says. Another acronym, as if that means something. But he goes on: “Manned Spaceflight Engineer Program. Have you ever been to French Guiana?”

They’ve called it a Roman candle, a pillar of fire. A flaming metal prick to fuck the heavens with. It’s all of that and more. We joke that the humidity and the mosquitos might throw off trajectory. They won’t and don’t. The fact that I’m wearing no national insignia, and that no one will ever know—no one can ever know—what is done here this day, only bothers me when I have the chance to think about it.
They count numbers and inject them into my ear.
Pressure. The suck of gravity never wants to let go. I am a babe, shaken by his mother viciously and I don’t know if the shaking will ever stop. It’s hard to turn my head, but I look to my crew—Hollis and Beansy—two of the most promising pilots the navy’s flight test program has ever produced. The boys rattle like maracas. Below us civilizations flash by: the Americas, the darkness of the Pacific, China, India, the cradle of the Middle East where dawn is just breaking anew over Nineveh, Jerusalem. The wine-dark Med. Beansy grins wildly and says something I can’t hear—

you’re going to die up there

—even though I should be able to make him out clearly through the headphones over my ears. Sensory overload—auditory equipment is offline at the moment. The vault of heaven goes white to blue, blue to black. Stars prick the eternal darkness. Orbit. Earth passes below us, massive and fragile, framed in a small, riveted window.
The pressure is gone, Earth’s gravity well behind us: all of our gorges rise. Two days of heavy hydration and twenty-four hours of fasting for me. The euphoric thrum of the first pangs of starvation keeps my mind bright, my reflexes keen. But it seems the navy boys haven’t prepared like I have, despite our talks about it. Beansy coughs and yanks off his helmet and grabs for a flight bag and gulps air, followed by Hollis. They manage not to vomit. I maintain at my position at the controls, helmet fastened.
A moment of silence. An absence. Floating. Each of us in our own thoughts. The window turns, the arc of blue shifts. The stars wheel in their migrations.
I stabilize the capsule’s roll. Gauges read nominal. We have established orbit, and now the payload—what the Lockheed Martin folks are jokingly calling Charybdis—will be deployed.

On a galactic scale, an asteroid travels at a sluggish pace, a mere hundred thousand miles per hour. This bit of . . . rock? Heavy metal? We will never know. For my purposes, call it a rock—I can’t think of anything better. This bit of rock hurled into the void at the moment of creation will never complete its fall to Earth: atmosphere is a real bitch on near particulate matter. This one, this singular mote in the eye of heaven, punches through the command console, through Hollis, through Beansy, and farther: through the meat of my left arm and the metal seat behind me, before drilling into the control panels. A goddamned interstellar vandal.
Silent alarms. A misty, glittering red fog. Turning and wheeling yellow lights. The controls seem crusty, granular. Either Beansy’s or Hollis’s or my own blood has turned crystalline and settles on everything. The gauges are dead and my headset is silent since suddenly there’s no air to vibrate with sound waves anyway.
Duct tape and vacuum saves me. I patch my arm first—the cold has cauterized the wound, and it seems the asteroid got nothing but meat. My mouth moves like the maw of a catfish pulled from the Mississippi—opening and closing in desperation for water-thick oxygen. The exit wound is harder to reach, and in the end, I get the dull gray tape on my arm by simply wrapping the fucking thing like a plumber until the hissing in my ear stops, the air pressure leveling out. Everything is more difficult in the bulk of a launch pressure suit. But we have trained for this, and even now that amazes me. Some earthbound brain gamed this out already.
The pain makes its entrance now that the possibility of suffocation or freezing has been removed. Outrageous. Incandescent pain. The puncture feels as though someone took a Dremel and bored into my arm and I guess that someone was the universe. I take in huge draughts of the canned air. Think, Howie. Calm yourself. Save your air. So fast. Everything happens so fast.
I pop the clasps, giving myself room to twist and move. The asteroid took Hollis through the temple, leaving a gory yet intimate ejecta crater in his right eye, and Beansy laterally through the clavicle like a furrow, tearing his pressure suit wide and gaping, and then continued on that diminishing trajectory, perforating my triceps, which must’ve been in the way and at task upon the controls. If I’d been jerking off, I’d be hale and hearty. Billions of blood crystals rotate, forming new constellations. Galaxies. Joining and separating and joining once more, their puny masses not enough to create boluses of ice. Beansy’s and Hollis’s corpses have come to rest in a zombie-like position, arms up as though, if they could, they would shamble. The entry mark of the transgalactic fleck of matter is easy enough to spot—the hole is rimed in pink ice where the air, its moisture, its blood was sucked out in milliseconds.
I take stock of myself, of the capsule. The controls. There, the dimple in metal where the fleck made its exit, continuing on to parts unknown. The vandal’s wreckage is a death sentence.
I thumb the transmitter. “Kourou, do you read? This is MSE-Polyphemus, over. Q, do you read?”
Nothing, but I expected that. I have air at least. If I can patch the capsule and then turn my attention to the communications—
A knocking sound comes, faint but audible. I hear it not through my ears but through the points of my body that make a connection to my suit and from my suit to the hull of the capsule. Listening with my ass, my legs, my forearms and fingers. I unstrap. The worst has happened, anyway, no big deal to violate protocol now. I move back toward the stern of the vessel where the payload is visible in the rear, riveted window. This first flight should’ve been a cakewalk, and here I am with two dead under my command. At least—and this is the bare minimum—we are not BBR.
I approach the capsule door. The knocking seems to come from there. I don’t know how I know, but I do: it’s flesh on metal. A fist. A small, girl’s fist. Rapping. But she must be in her twenties now, if she lived through whatever ailed her. Married. Prosperous, the child of a movie star, with all her troubles behind her. A percussive vibration shivers through the floor. I put the glass of my pressure suit’s helmet to the door’s metal and put my face to that. Cheek to curved window to hull.
“Hello,” the girl’s voice sounds. All the children I knew threaded string through tin cans and spoke across the vastness of hallways and backyards. This is worse but somehow . . . I can hear her clearly. “So glad you could come,” she says, as though this was just another cocktail party. Now that I think of it, had she said this on that night so long ago, her mother, the Kraut, the priests, and Maureen would’ve praised her for her maturity.
“How is this possible?”
“You’re suffering from hypoxia,” the girl says. “Your oxygen-starved tissues are creating sensory input that isn’t there.”
I look at the pressure suit’s gauges again. Nominal, though I’ve lost quite a bit of air.
“Am I hallucinating too?” I ask. I hold up a pressure-suited paw, fat and ungainly, and waggle my own fingers at my face.
“A death dream, then. The asteroid punched through your cranium as well, dragging star-stuff behind. Drilled good and hard like Beansy and Hollis. And in the wreckage of misfiring synapses, here I am. A single moment stretched into taffy.”
I can’t touch my face, but it doesn’t seem real. Because my arm hurts so goddamned bad. Would my arm hurt so bad in a death dream? I look toward the two navy boys. Those poor young men. They knew the risks but came anyway. They said we’d be serving our country even out of uniform. MSE: manned spaceflight engineers. Astronauts no more.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you.”
“De gustibus non est disputandum.”
“What?”
“Taste is indisputable,” the girl says. “Then eliminate the improbable. You’re actually in a hangar in French Guiana and this is all mummery. A television set. A psychological test to make sure you’re hale enough mentally and physically for the rigors of space flight.”
“I’ve done everything they’ve asked! Passed every test!”
“LSD then. Psychotropic experimental testing. Real black-box stuff.”
“No, they would never.”
She laughs.
“You poor man. They’d tear down heaven for an aircraft carrier. They’ve deposed good men and propped up serial killers with crowns. There is nothing they won’t do.”
Beansy’s skin has gone from livid to white craquelure in . . . what? How long has it been? Just moments.
“Well, then how am I here?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, helpless.
“Then let’s assume, for the time being, I am here. We can leave the rest open for debate later,” she says, utterly reasonable.
“All right,” I say.
She raps on the bulkhead door, exactly where my faceplate rests.
“Let me in,” she says. “I can save you.”
“What?”
“I can save you. Let me in. You’ll return to Earth and be a hero. People will know your name. The astronaut who survived catastrophe. You can become a senator. A president. Anything you want, with my help.”
“How is this even possible?” I say. “You’re just a girl!”
“Yes. Just a girl in this vast outer dark, then. Waiting to fall to Earth.” For an instant I imagine her, floating there, hand out touching the door. Her nightgown wreathing her like the bell shape of a hyacinth, haloed in glittering shards of ice urine. Beatific.
“You’re not really here.”
“That’s possible. We’ve already established that.”
“No!”
“Let me in. I know all the circuits and geometry of man,” she says with such gravity I know it is true.
I remove my helmet from the door, silencing her. In the riveted window, the blue Earth swells and turns, a jewel of living gradients. Down there, every door I ever passed through opens onto summer. Green grass burning sweet beneath the sun, rivers running cool and swift to the sea. There was a day. A perfect day. A day before flight school, a day before acronyms. We were young and went on a picnic in a deserted field on a hill and kissed and groped each other and lay back on the checkered blanket and looked at the clouds passing by and I pointed a finger toward the sky and said, “I’ll be up there, someday,” and Maureen kissed me again and climbed on top to ride, her hair a curtain around my face. An endless day. I remember her. Heat. Afterward she said, “I so want a baby girl, Howard. We can have that, can’t we? A girl?” and I told her yes a thousand times but we never did. “What is love but the loss of self?” she said, thinking of a daughter, and those words echoed through the years, twisting inside me.
My faceplate is pressed to the door once more. If I’m dead, I’m dead, and this dream will end soon enough. But—
“Let me in,” the girl says.
I begin cranking the door’s locking mechanism.
“No, not that way,” she says. “You know. Doors mean nothing. Acceptance is all.”
“Yes,” I say, and stand watching the empires of mankind wheel and turn beneath me.
Her face swims into view through the window. An occultation of the entirety of Earth. Sunken, hollow eyes with flecks of hatred animating them. A ruin of a mouth. Grinning. Ecstatic.
“Howdy, Captain,” she says.

---

John Hornor Jacobs is the award-winning author of Southern Gods, This Dark Earth, the young adult Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy, The Incorruptibles trilogy, and A Lush and Seething Hell. His fiction and essays have appeared in Playboy magazine, Huffington Post, and CBS Weekly. He’s been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, Bram Stoker Award, David Gemmell Award, and Morningstar and World Fantasy awards. Jacobs resides in the American South and spends his free time, when not working on his next book, thinking about working on his next book.

Illustration: Nathan Thomas Milliner

The birds began falling dead, tumbling earthward in great clouds. Millions of them. They fell and fell, and we became consumed with the proper naming of the thing, as if affixing the right name to it might save us. Might stop what was happening.
Large pale heads appeared on television, their foreheads sweat-damp. They regaled us with terminology and facts. We took a grand comfort in it; their words were serious and grave. The fields and streets lay clotted with dead birds even as they continued to fall in inked swaths from the sky, as they tumbled like stones into the chokepoints of chimneys. As they starred windshields blue with impact and a black smear of feathers. The large pale heads gathered on-screen and their words were like incantations against the dark: Zoonoses. Spillover. Cross-contamination. If we named it, we believed, it might become less fearsome. Our torch against the night.
So we became obsessed with the names of things even as the naming did little else. We called on our leaders to take action and some of them issued statements of concern, statements that showed how troubled they were, while others were maddeningly silent—waiting, perhaps, to see what would happen next.

It was an aching, crystalline winter afternoon and you peered up at the sky and said, “Maybe we can catch one before it hits the ground. And then we can rescue it. And feed it, and make it a little birdhouse to live in.”
We were standing out on the deck when you said this, your eyes turned up to the white, featureless sky. You had always been a watchful child. Your caution a thing born of necessity, I imagined, given the nature of your life. That morning we could hear nearby trees crack in the silence, their limbs grown too heavy with ice. I was grateful for the cold—the previous summer had scoured the nation with wildfires; smoke had grown toxic and heavy in the air, casting our days with a strange and noxious pall, days where we could not step outside.
But I recognized in the smoke, and later the falling birds, that the world of my boyhood was dead. I was an old man who could no longer expect the world to behave as it should.
On the deck that afternoon, your breath danced from your mouth in shuddering clouds. Your mittened hand was clasped in mine. I stared out at the backyard, shapes out there softened under the snow: a lawn chair, your grandmother’s wheelbarrow. It would be lunch soon, and Helen would make us all sandwiches and heat up cans of soup and then the three of us would sit at the kitchen table and play Go Fish, Old Maid, Pass the Pigs, until your mother called us. We would try not to flinch if a bird hit the roof, or plummeted, a dark bullet, into the snow before the window. It had happened before, and every time it reached between my ribs and squeezed there at the tender meat of my heart.
“Honey,” I said to you that afternoon, and gave your hand a squeeze. “I think they die when they’re flying. Up in the air. I don’t think they can use their wings anymore, and that’s why they fall.”
I watched you try to understand this. A snowflake fell on your eyelash and began melting, jeweled there, slowly vanishing against the heat and blood of your living. I felt a stutter of fear of what the future might hold for you, for the rest of your unbroken life. The fear was like someone pulling a thread taut. It was not a new feeling in me.

Winter broke loosely, ugly, a drunk spilling change on the floor. Spring brought thawing and floods, tornadoes, states suddenly waist-deep in mud-water. We watched the news, the three of us, saw streets of small towns grow brachial with dark floodwaters, water spread out like the veins of some opened heart. The now-common sight of people moored on the roofs of their homes.
Soon you began having nightmares after watching the news, nightmares in which Helen and I tried to save you from drowning and could not, couldn’t pull you up from those dark waters.
I blamed myself. Who else was there? Your mother was my child; you were the blood of my blood. We should have known better than to let you watch the world’s unraveling. You would cry out at night, and when I came to your room, you gripped my neck, small-limbed and sweaty and weeping, your pajamas soaked in urine. This small weeping child, clutching at me, afraid to let go. You wanted your mother, pined for her. Those nights, I felt a flash of self-pity, quick as a knife-twist: I was an old man who had already raised his child. I shouldn’t have to be the one doing this.
“Your mother is doing the best she can,” I wanted to say.
“She loves you,” I wanted to say.
But I said nothing like it, held you in silence. We lived in a time, after all, where the naming of the thing counted for nothing.

Spring rains incessant, spring rains torrential. Even on our hill, our basement walls wept water. Your feet sloughed dead skin from playing outside in your boots so much. The birds, so said the pale heads, were dying in smaller and smaller numbers; they were mostly gone now. There would be, they said, devastating repercussions from this, in an ecological sense, and Helen wisely changed the channel when you came into the room now. Your mother lost phone privileges for a while—a fight with another inmate—and Helen and I took turns naming the things your mother loved about you, the things we loved about you. Your long toes. The freckles dusting your cheeks. The way you said “Excuse me?” before you asked a serious question. How you lifted your chin when you laughed, as if informing the world of your joy. Your tenderness, that ceaseless caution. Your kindness toward a world that had been profoundly unkind to you. Your endless, endless resiliency.
Here then, there was no shortage of things to name.

You had a birthday and we invited your schoolmates, and for an afternoon our old creaking house was filled again with the sounds of laughter and yelling and children’s feet thundering up and down the stairs. Parents closed their umbrellas and carefully avoided questions about why a six-year-old—no, seven now!—was living with her grandparents.
Helen’s cake brimmed with candles and the children jostled for a spot next to you, and as you made a wish, your lips silently moving, there came the sound of a window breaking upstairs—the adults exchanged glances—but you and your friends were too enrapt with the cake to notice. You blew out the candles and everyone clapped and I trod stealthily up the stairs, as if to surprise the tiny body splayed out beneath the skylight, its wings fanned on the carpet.
The rain, assured the large pale heads, would be good for the snowpack, even as rivers flooded their banks, as towns became submerged.

Next went the dogs.
Black clouds that dissipated in an eyeblink, clouds where a dog had been, a pet, clouds that left a fine wash of grit where a living thing had been only moments before. Perhaps a chip of bone left, a flinty shard of tooth among the black smear. So many gone, in a span of days! Think of how many millions of dogs there were in the world! We watched scenes of it on television, on Helen’s laptop, our mouths knit in tight, bloodless lines. The way the natural world seemed to be joyously, darkly veering off its given path.
There were reports then. Of unrest, of riots. Guardsmen called in to flank city streets, police firing their guns into crowds of frightened people. Godly ones screaming on street corners.
We shut the curtains and closed the laptop and played Go Fish, Old Maid, Pass the Pigs.
The dogs continued to disappear in their curls of char, their wash of black sand.
I realized then that I must consider that a person can grow accustomed to anything. The world felt as if it had become some strange and malevolent dream. Helen spent an afternoon on the computer—she was always better than me at navigating technology—and came back to the kitchen table looking dazed and frightened.
“There are all kinds of opinions about things,” she said, “but no one knows. Everyone thinks it’s a conspiracy—”
“Of course they do,” I snorted, grateful for the contempt I could muster. Luxuriating in its safety, its distance.
“—but everyone thinks it’s a different conspiracy. Russia, the government. PETA!” Helen laughed drily, pressed her knuckles against her mouth. The rain kept falling. The street was empty, silent. We had cultivated this—this quiet street, this house on a hill, food, clean carpets, ceilings that kept the water out—through decades of sacrifice and hard work, and there seemed no shortage of things conspiring to encroach upon it. First there was your mother (forgive me, it’s true) and her endless hellraising, her drugs and drinking and willingness to place herself in the indebtedness of terrible men. Her willingness to call that love. How she raised you as an afterthought at times, how that killed Helen a little bit, the sometimes offhanded way your mother loved you. Perhaps this isn’t kind of me. The caseworker urged us to view your mother’s trajectory with compassion, that she was locked in the arms of her addiction, and I wanted to tell her that we knew your mother. We’d raised her, after all. We’d known her as a little girl, willful and stubborn and afraid of so many things, so angry, and we’d watched her grow, saw her veer willfully toward paths other than those we’d wished—demanded—for her. So first your mother and her arrest and how you’d come into our lives. We retired years ago, and hadn’t been expecting this. We had cultivated a life and you threw a monkey wrench in it. Helen wanted to see Rome, walk the dusty streets of Pompeii with a camera, before her sciatica got too bad. She wanted to order wine in her terrible French at some busy Paris café. These, I felt, were not unreasonable dreams. We had saved, been frugal. We were selfish enough to think that we deserved such things. But what could we say? To the DHS worker, to your mother? To you? Sorry, dear, but we were planning our vacation?
Sorry, dear, but we are tired?
This is how love works—it snares you in spite of your intentions. If it weren’t for Helen and me, where would you go? Where would you land, in a world where birds plummet from the heavens and animals turn to smoke? Love is an anchor, dear heart. Love is a debt endlessly paid, repeatedly negotiated.
It’s impossible not to blame myself in a situation like this. I felt that I had failed your mother in some intrinsic way, though I never told Helen this. That she had come to rely on weak-chinned, hurtful, violent men, men that used her—what did that say about me, as a father? The caseworker talked about addiction as a disease and Helen and I nodded in sympathy, but I didn’t believe it. I knew that I had failed her. I had not been strong enough, loving enough. Disciplined or flexible enough. Some combination of things.
And now: we took care of you and the world filled slowly with smoke and floodwater and death. And then the rest of the animals began perishing in the strangest ways, the hands of some terrible clock moving faster along.
Tigers—rare enough in the world—turned to glass, frozen and blue.
Sharks hardened to ceramics and tumbled spinning into dark and unseen waters. Perhaps shattering on the ocean floor, perhaps coming to rest gently in the silt like a shopkeeper laying a precious gift in tissue.
The brains of gorillas turned to shards of crystal; the animals fell in a collection of limbs, brainpans shattered and filled with treasure.
Ants became grains of sand.
And then: the buds of fruit trees turned to stone, stones that clattered to the ground.
Insects disappeared in small puffs of frenzied air, minute cyclones.
The world was quickening, leaning, wounded.

Summer. Riots. No electricity. Money had become valueless. The supply chain had broken down. Stores burned to the ground. Libraries robbed of their paper. The roofs of churches bristling with guns, their floors slicked in blood.
A dead man lay face down in the road at the bottom of our hill, grown huge with gasses.
We had taken as many precautions as possible, stockpiling and whatnot, but hunger still carved the fat from us. Cabinets bare, I walked the house hollow-eyed, a revenant. Clutching my service pistol, a thing untouched for forty years before this.
Your head, dear, was like a skull with the skin wound tight. We were all so hungry.
Helen fed you her rations—vegetable broth, a knuckle-sized potato—and then, with a look both baleful and shocked at my reluctance, bade me to give you mine as well.
And I did. And you ate. And love was a debt navigated and incurred and paid a million times a day.
Then, that summer day, we stood out on the deck, you and I. Hot outside, hot and still. Helen was in bed upstairs.
Sand riffled in eddies down the hill, sand that claimed the dead man now. No birds, though, to pick at the flesh of him.
You and I, we stood and stared at the backyard. A hot wind blew across the yellow grass. There was the lawn chair. The overturned wheelbarrow. Somewhere someone rang a bell again and again. I remembered the way the snowflake had fallen on your eyelash and melted there, back when it was only the birds that were dying. Back when we believed we were impervious, that nothing terrible could truly happen to us. That this collapse was something separate from us, something to marvel at.
I held your hand and I felt something fierce and brutal within me, some animism that raged against the walls of the world. A rage that I had again failed at protecting someone, that the world had made me small again.
And then I felt a lightness in my hand. I looked down and saw that I cupped a handful of vapor. Mist. Mist that held your shape, and then you blew away on that heated wind, an outline of you on the worn planks of the deck.
You were gone.
You were gone, and I felt fear, and a yawning chasm, and a hidden, animal relief.
I saw the water droplets on the deck—the shape of you—disappear in seconds beneath the sun.
I called your name. Timidly at first.
Then louder, screaming it, needing the ache and rasp of your name in my throat. Finding at last a territory of belonging in your vanishing. Finding a sick, hateful succor in the fact that I had failed to save you. I screamed again, a pure animal sound. Something in my throat threatened to tear, and I wanted that.
I screamed and screamed. I would do this, I decided, until the diminished world began forging itself back together again.

---

Keith Rosson is the author of the novels Smoke City, Road Seven, and The Mercy of the Tide, as well as the story collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons. His short stories have appeared in PANK, Cream City Review, Outlook Springs, Phantom Drift, and others. He is also a legally blind illustrator and graphic designer whose clients include Green Day, Against Me!, and Warner Bros.

Mom got so mad at my itsy bitsy teenie weenie fluorescent pink hey-boys-come-fuck-me bikini. Guess her stupid rule came back to haunt her, didn’t it? “If you want this junk so badly,” she’d totally droned, “buy it with your own money.”
But that was gift shops ago. She was referring to some dumb bottle opener keychain with my name engraved on it. SARA. No “H.” Most mementos always put the stupid “H” at the end, so when I saw this keychain emblazoned with my name, I was all like—Oh, finally, someone actually spelled it right. That’s when Mom’s Sunday school upbringing decided to suddenly kick in for once in her life. She put her foot down, saying, “I can’t quite justify buying a bottle opener for a fourteen-year-old.” It’s not like having some dumb keychain would send me downward-spiraling into alcoholism or whatever, but she wouldn’t budge.
Like $1.99 would break our vacation’s budget, anyway. She bought Peter that stupid hat that said BEACH BUM, a pair of pale butt cheeks under it, but Mom apparently didn’t have any moral quandary over that particular purchase. She can be such a fucking hypocrite sometimes.
I spotted the shoestrings dangling on the rack back at the last hotel, along with all the Budweiser beach blankets and god-awful T-shirts.
CHECK OUT MY LADY NUTS.
I NEED AN ALCOHOLIDAY.
SHELL YEAH, BEACHES.
That’s what I totally thought they were, at first. Neon lime shoestrings. Cotton candy laces. Just a few loose threads suspended from a coat hanger . . . but no, those were totally meant to cover your boobs. As in, that’s it. Nothing else. Just some fluorescent floss and a pair of triangles. Nipple pyramids. I knew it would piss Mom off, but what was she going to do? Stop me? It was my money. If I wanted any of “this junk so badly,” I could “just buy it myself.” Her words.
Now I never take it off. It’s my highlighter pink protest for the duration of our family vacation. If I’m going to be stuck in the car for two weeks, suffering next to my dipshit baby brother and his incessant nose-picking, then I’m wearing my brand-new bikini through our whole road trip, rain or fucking shine, and nobody can stop me.
“At least put a shirt on while we’re in the car,” Mom grumbled from the front seat. She wouldn’t look at me, couldn’t grace me with eye contact, speaking out the windshield instead.
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like anyone’s watching.”
“Truckers are watching. Biker gangs are watching. Anyone who drives by is watching . . .”
Nobody’s noticed me. Yet. No sixteen wheelers honking their horns or bearded, beer-bellied Hell’s Angels revving their engines as they pass our car on the highway.
The bikini definitely has taken some getting used to. At first, I kept covering myself with my arms. Too many exposed moles. The seatbelt saws at my chest, chafing against my skin.
Dad hasn’t waded into the bikini discourse, aside from suggesting I should put on suntan lotion, even in the car. “You’re destined for skin cancer without it.”
He’s more focused on the road, to be honest. Reaching the next destination. No HoJo’s for our fam, no sir. It’s been backroads and roach motels for the Pendletons all the way. Dad’s so hell-bent on his Americana Tour, steering clear of the interstates as much as possible for what he says is “a real good look at what’s left of the country.” “The forgotten America,” he calls it. “Let’s see it before it all fades away.”
Whatever that means.
I’ve sulked next to just about every pool within a three-thousand-mile radius of our house. At least now I can do it in style. See how Mom feels about all the gents checking me out. I don’t care who’s looking. Let the dads all stare for all I care. I definitely don’t. Care, that is. The acne-riddled hotel clerk with the protruding Adam’s apple can stare too, if he wants to. Or the dudes who seem to be living out of the back of their trucks, or the traveling bible salesman, or any of them. I just don’t care. Hey, everybody, let’s all have ourselves a poolside peepshow!
This was supposed to be my Spring Break. We could’ve gone anywhere, but no, we all had to pile into the car and make every single pitstop Mom and Dad wanted, just to see the world’s biggest ball of yarn or some prehistoric tar pit in the middle of nowhere. I was missing my friends for this?
The war started between Mom and me after she took my phone away. Dad made some grand sweeping statement at the beginning of the trip that he didn’t want to see our faces buried in our screens while there was a whole world just waiting outside our windows for us to witness, but he didn’t enforce it or anything. That was up to Mom. Dad focused on driving while she always got to be Bad Cop. We battled over who gets to charge their phone, and I lost out because she said she needed hers to navigate, but Dad won’t even let her turn on the map app. He says, “that defeats the whole purpose,” which I completely agree with, taking his side much to Mom’s chagrin. She still wouldn’t let me use the charger. She took my phone away after three warnings, which I didn’t really think she’d do because who even does something like that, but here we are. I told her I was taking pictures of our trip to share with my friends—you know, all my friends, who are all having the time of their lives in Daytona with their families right now? Not like there’s any reception out here on the backroads, anyway. It’s been zero bars all week.
“Hand it over,” Mom had said. “Now.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know, hon,” she said. “Read a book.”
I picked up some dumb paperback left behind at the last hotel. Someone must’ve read it then abandoned it. There was a whole shelf of forgotten novels. Beach reads. Boddice rippers. That sort of thing. I found a copy of A Million Little Pieces and figured I’d give it a spin. The cover was curling over, the spine cracked back so you could barely read the title anymore. But it was about drugs and I could tell Mom didn’t want me reading it, so I had that going for me. She asked to read the book description on the back, so I gave it to her and watched her face pucker as she took it all in. “I remember this,” she said, tossing it back. “Turns out it wasn’t true.”
“So?” I asked. “Still pretty stimulating.” To prove my point, I read a particularly heinous passage from the backseat for all to enjoy. The one about the teeth. The root canal stuff. Peter started crying, so Mom made me stop. “What’s everyone’s problem?” I asked. “This is literature.”
“No,” Mom retorted, “that’s just you pushing your brother’s buttons.”
“You could just give me my phone back . . .”
“Not happening.”
Every motel has the same setup: some concrete pool just off to the side of the parking lot, wrapped in a rusted chain-link fence. No umbrellas, so the sun soaks up into the asphalt. Plastic lawn chairs. Not beach chairs. Lawn chairs. There is no ocean out here. No sand. All we have are these roadside oases. Concrete beaches just next to the highway. The water usually has a slight greenish tint to it. Who knows the last time anyone dumped any chlorine in. I can always feel the algae clinging to my skin whenever I climb out, totally coated in this sticky thin film of slime that dries into a coagulated crust, like soda. There’s always a bevy of dead bugs drifting along the water’s surface. Fist-sized mosquitoes. Beetles paddling on their backs.
These pools are supposed to be the main draw for most traveling families. Some motels have a putt-putt set up or free HBO, never any Wi-Fi, but the pools are the real lure. Always with a sign, NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, posted on the fence. There are always a couple kids splashing around, floating on some inflatable unicorn. It’s a miracle there aren’t any drowned babies bobbing along with the bugs. Mom makes Peter put on these inflatable armbands that make him look like a total ’tard. As soon as we pull into the hotel, or motel, or no-tell, li’l Petey leaps out of the car and races to the pool faster than Mom can blow up his rubber biceps.
Take a wild guess who’s inevitably put on babysitting detail?
“Keep an eye on your brother,” Mom said.
“Why?”
“You want to unload the car instead?”
“Fiiine.”
I could tell Mom was hating our vacation just as much as I was. Maybe even more. The only people who seemed to be enjoying themselves, or pretending to enjoy themselves, were Dad and Peter. Mom seethed through each state. I almost felt bad for her. Almost.
I plopped down in a lawn chair next to the pool while Pete had the water all to himself. Nobody else was out here, thank God. I had a pair of sunglasses that kept the rest of the world at bay, just in case. I had dragged my paperback halfway across the country at this point but I’d barely made a dent into it. Most days I don’t even open it. Just carrying it around gives me an excuse not to engage with anyone. I’ll just flip to a rando page and stare off somewhere, anywhere else other than the words, hiding behind my sunglasses and just tuning the fuck out.
“Good book?”
Where the hell had he come from? The skin on my arms prickled from his proximity. One second, I was all alone—the next, there was someone else, a stranger, invading my space. Probably somebody’s dad, bored with his own family, singling me out and hoping to flirt. Ick.
I side-glanced the guy but pretended not to’ve heard him. He wasn’t in my field of vision, even if I could feel him close by. I didn’t want to turn my head and acknowledge that I’d heard him, not yet, but I still couldn’t quite clock his location. Which was weird. Where was he?
I felt his eyes.
On me.
I suddenly found myself wishing I was wearing a T-shirt. Too much of my skin was exposed to this creep. The laces of my bikini slowly constricted around my torso, the strings tightening like a garrot at my chest, squeezing against my ribs until I couldn’t breathe.
“Never read it.” This guy clearly wasn’t taking the hint, so I closed the book and turned.
That’s when I found him.
Actually saw him.
He was sitting two lawn chairs down from me. There was an empty seat between us. Which was weird. Again. Just a second ago, I could’ve sworn he was sitting right next to me. Leaning over. Sharing the air between us.
How was he so far away?
I had to bring my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun to see him, almost as if he was hiding behind the light, his silhouette keeping his features in the shadows.
What I could make out was handsome enough, so at least he had that going for him. He looked like he was in his thirties, I think. I don’t know, it was hard to tell. Older guys just look old to me. I have this affliction called “adult blindness.” When men reach a certain age, they all begin to blend together for me. He could’ve been thirty or fifty or whatever and I really wouldn’t even know the difference.
He was alone. That much I could tell. No beach towels or inflatable pool toys. No bottle of sunscreen or six-pack of Bud. He wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. Just dull adult clothes.
“. . . Well?”
“Well, what?” Ugh. That was the best I could do. Echo his question like some dumb parrot.
“Do you like the book?”
“It’s okay, I guess.” My shoulders sprung up in an involuntary shrug.
“Just okay? I’ll pass. Life’s too short for ‘just okay.’ I want something that’ll change my life.”
That could’ve easily been the end of the conversation. I was already feeling the urge to pick the book up and hide behind its pages, but he kept looking at me. Staring at me. Not at my bikini or anything. Just me. At me. Like, my eyes or something. There’s a difference. He seemed genuinely curious. About me. It felt weird. I didn’t really know what to say, so I said nothing.
This guy seemed to live in that silence. Like, he was totally okay to just sit and stew in that awkward quiet for as long as he wanted. He smiled even. Just basking in it all. He knew he was in control of the quiet and it was going to be his decision to break it, like popping a tiny bubble of saliva clinging to my lip with just the tip of his finger—plip.
“So where you heading?”
“West,” I said, even if I had no idea if we were coming or going. It was totally one of those noncommittal answers that doesn’t give away too much information. I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t about to give him our home address or anything. But it was enough of a bread crumb to keep the conversation going. He could come back for more, if he wanted. Follow me, if he wanted.
“You with your family?”
“Yeah.” I turned to look over my shoulder, just to see if I could pinpoint my parents. They must’ve still been checking in to our room. Unloading the car. They certainly weren’t here, protecting their kids against the poolside advances of some potential serial killer. Thanks, guys.
“Must be a drag.”
“You said it.” He didn’t say anything in response to that, so instead of stewing in even more awkward silence, I managed to ask, “How about you? Are you with your family?”
Ugh. Even I could hear the yearning in my voice. It was too much. I’d given him too much. I could feel the blood rush straight to my solar plexus, this rash spreading across my chest and here I am, wearing a shoestring for the love of God and I can’t hide it. I sounded like such a cooze and now I’m full-on blushing and I have nothing to cover myself up and I’m so—
“No family,” he said with the slightest exhale of a laugh. Maybe it was a laugh. “Just me.”
“That must be fun.”
“Sometimes. Feel like I’ve been stuck here for ages, though . . .”
Okay. This was interesting. Here’s this guy, this stranger, offering up a little something of himself. To me. This was the first honest conversation I’d had with anyone in like, days. Weeks.
“Does it get lonely?” I had to ask. “Traveling all by yourself?”
“Depends. Every so often I meet somebody nice. We get to talking and it doesn’t feel so—”
“Sara!” Mom’s voice cut through the parking lot, snapping me out of our conversation. I spun around in my chair to find her standing there, arms planted on both hips. Even from across the lot, I could sense the exasperation seeping out of her pores. She waved me over, beckoning me back to the car with a single sweep of her arm, as if that’s all it took to get me to come trotting. Couldn’t she see I was in the middle of something here? Couldn’t she just, you know, give me a minute to finish my conversation? “And pull Peter out of the water!”
Fuck. Peter. I’d totally forgotten him. Luckily, he was still alive, bopping about the water with his floaties. Not floating face-down or anything. Thank God for small miracles.
“Sorry” I felt all of me blush. My whole body this time, not just my chest. “I gotta go . . .”
“No worries, Sara,” he said—and I could tell, I could just tell, he knew my name didn’t have an “H” at the end of it, saying it so succinctly, so sharp. “You know where to find me.”
It wasn’t until after I left that I realized I didn’t even know his name. I hadn’t asked.
Totally slipped my mind.
He was still there after dinner. Just sitting by the pool by himself. Nobody else was around. The sun had sunk down, so the lights kicked on under the water, casting this cerulean sheen across his face. The water was still. Nothing broke the surface except for the dead bugs.
“Hey,” I said. “This pool taken?”
“You came back . . .” I don’t think I went back for him. Not exactly. But I was curious. Just to see if he was a man of his word. From the way he was sitting, I would’ve believed he’d been there this whole time, except he wasn’t sunburned or anything like that. The pool was pretty close to the highway, so everything had a burnt asphalt aroma to it. You could almost taste the tar. The thickness of it clung to my tongue, and in a way I imagined that’s what he tasted like. If we were to kiss, which is totally not what I was expecting to do, but still, if—if—we did, I imagined he’d taste something like the road. Like concrete and exhaust. Like heat waves oscillating off asphalt. Even his skin probably felt rough as pavement. Gravel and broken glass.
“I was hoping you’d find me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, not like there’s much else to do here . . .”
“There’s plenty.” He didn’t offer up any suggestions and it felt weird to ask.
I dipped my legs in the pool this time. The water felt warm. I gently kicked my legs, sending these ripples radiating across the surface. The light now warped and danced, casting these baby blue shadows over his face. Why were his features always hiding from me?
“So have you been, like, staying here a long time?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
“Where are you heading?”
“Don’t know just yet . . . who knows? Maybe I’ll follow you.”
He was flirting. Obviously. But it was the way that he was doing it that felt so—I don’t know—uncharted. Most guys just go in for the kill, “God you’re so hot,” but he was talking in this way that felt both extremely direct and frustratingly indirect at the exact same time. Like, if I called him on it or something, he could easily say I had just misunderstood him and then I’d feel like a total idiot. He was subtle. Casting out these lines like I was a fish he was hoping to lure in.
Finally, I said, “You wouldn’t want to be trapped with my family, trust me.”
“Says who?”
“What?” I suddenly felt bold. “You wanna come with me?”
“Maybe I do.”
“Liar.”
“Who says I’m lying?”
“But it’s . . .” My voice faded. I couldn’t find the right word. Boring. Stupid. Soul-crushing. None of them felt right to say right then. They all sounded like something a kid would say.
“But . . . what? What is it, Sara?” He said my name like he’d known it for years, like we’d been sitting by this pool, stranded at this hotel together forever. Like I was his and he was mine.
“Endless,” I said.
He wasn’t at the pool when we checked out the next morning. I never got to say goodbye. Never got his name. It’s strange, but the farther away from the hotel we got, the further his features faded away from my memory. I couldn’t remember what he looked like.
If I ever knew at all.
The rest of the day was spent pretty much in the car. Dad found the world’s biggest ketchup bottle in Collinsville, so we just had to stop there and snap off a few pictures.
I held my paperback in my hands during the ride but never really opened it. I just pressed my temple against the window and stared out at the world slipping by. I rolled down my window at one point to take in a deep breath, just inhale the aroma of the road through my nose, take the highway into my lungs, but Mom scolded me for letting all the A/C out.
The next hotel wasn’t any different than the last hotel. Same set up. Same pool.
Same man.
When I first spotted him sitting in the lawn chair, I accidentally dropped my suitcase. Mom told me to pick it up but I wasn’t really listening.
He was here. Sitting by the pool, like always. Like nothing had changed.
Staring at me.
Smiling.
I didn’t go to the pool right away. I waited until after we’d checked in, and even then I wasn’t in a rush. Peter kept begging to go to the pool, whining like a tea kettle on the stove.
“Sara,” Mom pleaded, her face buried in our bed for the night, her muffled voice seeping out from under the pillow, “take your brother to the pool, pleeease?”
Had he gotten in his car and driven ahead of us? Had he somehow checked in before we did? How did he know this was where we’d stop for the night? It couldn’t just be a coincidence.
Was he following us? Following me?
Hotel to hotel?
Pool by pool?
I almost said something to Dad, but I knew I’d be blamed for ruining our trip by seducing some total stranger with my choice in poolside apparel. Somehow this would all be my fault.
Other people were at the pool, thank God. Kids splashed in the water. There wasn’t anything he could do to me. Not in broad daylight. Not with so many other families around.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Who says I ever left you?”
“I’m going to tell the manager you’re following my family. They’ll call the cops.”
“Sure. You could do that.”
Okay, that wasn’t the reaction I expected. He didn’t seem to be worried at all. He just seemed happy to see me again.
See me.
“. . . Who are you?”
“Someone stuck on the road. Just like you.”
“What do you want?”
“What you want,” he said. “Someone to talk to.”
“If I see you at the next hotel, I’m telling my Dad and he’ll—”
“Who are you talking to?”
It was Peter. In his pajamas. Picking his nose. The sun had gone down. The pool was empty. It looked just like the last pool, which looked like the pool just before it, and on and on.
Wasn’t I supposed to look after Peter while he went swimming? Or was that yesterday?
Which hotel was this? How many pools had there been?
“Mom says it’s time to come inside,” Peter prodded.
“Go away.”
“But Mom said to—”
“I said go!”
I stopped wearing my bikini. Not that Mom noticed. She hasn’t said much of anything to me for the last few days—I think it’s been days—on the road. She just stares out her window. We all do. Everyone’s been so quiet in the car lately, like we know something’s changed.
Mom knows. She senses it. Smells it, maybe. I’m not a little girl anymore. I don’t need a stupid bathing suit to prove it. Whatever’s been unlocked within me happened at one of these rundown hotels and I think that scares her. When she turns around in her seat to look at me now, I just stare back. No whiny retort. No pithy comeback. She doesn’t recognize me anymore.
Where did her little girl go? Oops, sorry, she must’ve gotten left behind at the last hotel . . .
Should Dad pull over? Turn around and go back? Nah, it’s been miles now . . .
We’ve all come so far.
Seen so much.
I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a woman now.
He told me so.
He was waiting for me at the next hotel. And the next. Wherever we pull in, it’s like he’s been sitting next to the pool all along. Just waiting. Smiling as soon as he lays his eyes on me.
We talk about all kinds of things. I learned that he’d been stuck at that one hotel—where I first found him—for years. Maybe even longer. “Time sure loses shape out here,” he said.
I was the first person to see him, he said. Actually see him. Which is weird ‘cause I still couldn’t tell you what he looks like. Couldn’t describe his features. I don’t know if that’s true, but I want to believe it. Believe him. That means I’m special, then. Different than all the rest.
I was the first to see him. And he sees me. For who I am.
A woman.
Some of the things he says don’t really make much sense, but none of this makes any sense. None of this feels real. But here we are, sharing the road together. The endless road.
He tells me about the rooms. Every hotel room we stay in together. Everything that’s ever happened inside them. Things that, if you knew, really knew, you’d never check into a hotel again. He points out the bloodstains under the beds. The brown spots speckling the mattresses. The moles of mildew. The solar flares of urine stains radiating out beneath the bed sheets. The sun patches of dried blood. The rusted crust just under the bathroom sinks, still clinging to the faucet. All the nooks and crannies where the bleach couldn’t reach. The hidden crevices the cleaning ladies never found.
These rooms are bad places. This is where he’s lived. Where he always lived. He calls these hotels home.
But now he wants to come home with me.
Whenever I try to change the subject and ask him why he was stuck at that first hotel, he closes up. It’s weird because he’s so open about everything else—”an open book,” he said—just not about that.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, “because we found each other.”
I imagine he must’ve been left behind, like a brush or book you forget in your room, abandoned beneath the bed until the cleaning lady picks it up and tosses it in the lost and found. I imagine him as some forgotten item accidentally stranded at the hotel until someone—me—came along and claimed him. Books get left behind at hotels all the time. When somebody finishes their paperback, rather than throw it out in the trash, they just leave it for someone else to pick up and flip through. They pass it along. You never know where it might end up.
Who it ends up with.
“Where are you?” he asks me. “You seem distant . . .”
Miles away.
Tomorrow we’ll finally make our way home.
Dad mapped out the rest of our trip and he says we’ll reach our house in less than eight hours, as long as we wake up early enough and don’t make any more pit stops.
“We’ll all be sleeping in our own beds tomorrow night,” he said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Hallelujah,” was all Mom said.
I don’t have the heart to tell him. I know I need to. Say goodbye. But I don’t know how he’ll take it. If it’ll hurt his feelings or something worse. I don’t know.
But he can’t come home with me. He can’t.
So I end up saying nothing.
I say nothing for the rest of the ride home. All eight hours.
All the way home.
Mom’s breath catches as soon as Dad pulls into our driveway. She sees it first. I lean forward in my seat and glance out the windshield, even though I don’t need to see.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asks. He doesn’t know yet. Doesn’t see.
“The front door’s open,” Mom says.

---

Clay McLeod Chapman writes novels, comic books, and children’s books, as well as for film and TV. He is the author of the horror novels The Remaking and Whisper Down the Lane.

 

He had always been the Fear, regardless of the name he was born with, and regardless of the name those he hunted knew him by, Sweet Dreams. Given to him because if he ever caught one of them, the last thing they heard besides the rattle of his smoker’s cough were those two frayed words, his favorite catchphrase, “Sweet dreams!”
He wormed his way into the minds of his victims—mostly young teens—as they slept, and stalked them through a nightmare of his own making before slaughtering them in some outlandish way. The patients who managed to escape these nightmares and share them with their therapists got the same textbook response: Sweet Dreams was a story, an empty vessel, a symbol. The mind poured its deepest fears into this vessel. Sweet Dreams was a cypher for their residual trauma, anxiety, depression—nothing more. And when these therapists received phone calls to inform them that Alice or Nancy or whoever had been murdered—their parents opening their bedroom door before the school bus arrived to find a cornucopia of organs, hair, and teeth piled on their bed—they chalked it up to this increasingly violent and heartless world of ours, not to a supernatural entity.
But he was the Fear, and in his mortal years the Fear lived in a cabin on the outskirts of a small town, working as a bus driver for a local school district. If, at the end of his route, a student was still sleeping in a back row, he drove to a vacant lot and parked the bus, his hands brushing over the tops of the leather backrests as he made his way toward the rear. The kid’s eyes would open to a waterfall of fingers cascading down his or her face. “Shh, little one,” the Fear would say. “Sweet dreams . . .”
The police failed to charge him with any of the disappearances, but a mob of parents refused to let it go. When he disappeared, they tracked him two towns over, working as a groundskeeper for another school. They didn’t care what the police said. They just knew, the way people know something without knowing how they know it. So when the law failed to deliver justice, they took it into their own hands.
They told him as much in his cabin, the Fear on all fours and struggling to catch his breath through the fumes of gasoline dripping off his body. One mother pointing a gun at him, another father writing the suicide note, the others pouring gas around the perimeter.
They fled and the Fear crawled after them. “You’ve got the wrong guy . . .”
Tears mixing with gasoline, he said, “I’m innocent!”
They sparked matches and tossed them, and the cabin lit up like a stove burner.
Of course he fucking did it. That wasn’t the point. The point was that they didn’t know he did it. Not the police, not the prosecutor, not even the judge knew. He was careful, calculating. It’s about what you can prove, not what’s true. That’s the game. The game of everything. Take it up with your local congressman, or philosopher, not with him.
Death had the familiar feeling of the Fear being stuffed into a clothes dryer when he was a kid and his mom’s boyfriend was looking for a way to keep him busy. In the blind, rolling chaos, a voice rose from the white noise, devoid of gender or form, without history or perspective—a voice for the wind or the periodic table of elements.
Do you want to live? the voice said, echoing around him in the expanse. Without understanding how this was possible, the Fear shouted in the spinning darkness, “I want revenge!”
Will you make the ultimate sacrifice?
“Yes!”
What those parents did to him, it was an example of everything wrong with the world. The weak banding together to topple the strong. By killing him, they had gone against what could be proven, which was reality, for what they intuited, which was subjective and therefore meaningless. And he simply could not abide a world where that shit was affirmed, so they all had to pay.

It was hard to know how many years passed in the dreamscape, but at some point the nightmares became more and more apocalyptic. This was how the Fear became the first to know.
He read the unconscious of his victims like chicken bones in a witch’s bowl, and what he saw were long lines for rice, overloaded morgues, power outages, death pits. Crowds stumbling through a haze in tattered clothes. Gray and desolate cities. Red lakes and beaches of salt. The earth one big morsel of blood suspended in space. The soil made of flesh and teeth and plasma. The air arterial and metallic.
The flux that carried him from mind to mind no longer dumped him into dreams. Wading in the raw for what felt like an eternity, it became harder to remember what he even was by the time the flux spat him out into another sleeping mind. And in that last mind, he found himself already in a nightmare. All around him was a crumbling city, rows of naked bodies sprinkled with lye, big red letters running vertically on a skyscraper that read WE TRIED.
A little girl was calling out for her mom. Her clothes were rags, face covered in soot. She backed into the Fear and he scooped her into his chest, her face inches from his sinewy face.
The Fear squeezed, but only enough to get her flailing. “Wake up, bitch.”
Her fists thumped against him. “Mommy!”
“That’s it. Now wake for Daddy.”
In the physical world, the mom woke to see her daughter fighting a nightmare. “Honey, wake up.” She reached over and shook her daughter’s arm. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.”
The girl turned and something flung from her into the sterile moonlight. They both looked up at the Fear’s shocked expression as he stood before them on an abandoned highway, the burnt husks of dead traffic going for miles before them.
“Please,” the mom said. “Don’t hurt us.”
But the Fear wasn’t listening. He was too busy taking it in. He saw everything man had created for himself, and it was good.

The sound of moaning woke the Wrath from his slumber, even if technically you had to be living to “slumber,” and the Wrath’s existence at the lake was anything but “living.”
The moans were a strike into the void that housed him. The outline of a perspective began to take shape.
Something was zooming out. Darkness, then light reflected off borders.
The echo of something thought, now gone forever. The sensation of a force pulling him through a sieve.
His hands and knees in the sand.
Moans.
For years, couples hiked to this lake, and for years their fornication woke the Wrath from his slumber. All died brutal, violent deaths. One cooler than the next.
The Wrath stood, and water dripped off his mask. No need to look for a weapon, the machete was already in his hand.
“Help . . .”
An emaciated old man was sitting against a tree, gray bearded, jaundiced, the soles of his feet cracked and bleeding.
The Wrath’s shadow cast over him.
“Water . . .” the man groaned.
Water dripped off the machete’s tip, so the Wrath plunged it into the old man’s throat. He drove the blade down into his gut. The old man’s stomach burst and shards of degraded plastic skittered to the ground. The machete’s serrated edge was gooey with blood and microfibers, dried beans, cigarette butts, twigs. The entrails of a parking lot albatross.
Then nothing happened. The Wrath just stood there, staring at the old man’s slack-jawed expression like the corpse would tell him what came next.
Most of the lake was a dried crater ringed with layers of sediment. At the center was a pool of silty water. The Wrath stood in it because, maybe? But the sun and moon switched places, switched back again, and still no fade into oblivion, so he left.
It was worse in town. Storefronts were blown out, glass in the gutters like New Year’s Eve confetti. The tip of his machete scraped the sidewalk where the slabs buckled. His eyes scanned for movement, for life, but there was nothing. The roads he followed became interstates. Creaking above him was the turnstile of night and day.
He was somewhere in a residential neighborhood, outside of what was left of a two-story home, the face of it ripped off and revealing both floors like a dollhouse. Someone was standing in the rubble of the living room. The shape was that of a tall, broad man with a pale white face. A spider web clung between his right shoulder and a banister that led to nowhere.
The Wrath cut across the front yard and stepped over the bricks. He saw that the man’s bone-white, pared-down features were actually a mask.
Dead vines laced over the Will’s boots, meaning he had been there a long time, not that it mattered to him. Nothing did. Behind the Will’s mask were unblinking eyes fixed on a shattered family portrait, generations standing around a frail elderly woman in a wheelchair, her shirt partially visible behind her cardigan: ODE FAMILY REUNI.
The Wrath’s bulk brushed against the Will. They turned to one another. Wave functions collapsed. Galaxies collided. Jesus wept.
By the angle of his shoulder, the Will’s arm was extended in the gesture of a handshake. The Wrath’s eyes lowered to see the handle of a kitchen knife sticking out of his stomach. He raised his machete but the Will caught his wrist. The only sounds were their feet pushing against the debris. No grunts, no screams, no blood.
A voice like gravel called out. “Look at these two bitches about to kiss.”
Both masks turned to the Fear. The smile on his face faded as the Wrath barged toward him, kitchen knife still in his gut.
“Wait a minute, Sloth! Everyone’s dead. There’s nothing in it to kill each other.”
The Wrath lowered his machete. He turned back to the rubble, but the Will was gone.

They passed abandoned checkpoints, military posts, border walls, with no real sense of where they were going. They felt only an intense pull to head south.
Maybe they were being drawn to the world’s last few survivors, but the Fear didn’t think so. Like he told the Wrath in Haddonfield, Poughkeepsie, San Antonio—he had a feel for sleeping minds, and he couldn’t feel a thing anywhere. Humanity had snuffed itself out. The world was on its way out too. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why they hadn’t died with everyone else. He wasn’t sure what it was they were supposed to do now that they were free of their domains. He wasn’t sure how long he could exist on this plane. What would happen if he died here? Would the voice be there again to bring him back? Would he return to the dreamscape? Was there a dreamscape without any dreamers?
Well into northern Mexico, a breeze swept through the badlands. On the tail end of it were the soft cries of a woman. “Mis niños . . . Mis niños . . .”
“Bullshit,” the Fear said. The Wrath stomped after the cries anyway.
Kneeling next to a dried creek was the Grief, wearing a black gown and black veil, weeping softly into her hands. “Mis niños . . .”
“Cut your shit,” the Fear said. “They’re all gone.”
Her fingers spread across her face to reveal yellow cat eyes staring back at them. She stopped crying.
The Wrath lowered his machete. He offered her his hand. She extended hers, but only to pull the knife from his gut.

At the next town, the Fear gathered books on Mexican history and a Spanish-to-English dictionary from the husk of a bookstore. It was what he did when there wasn’t a kid in the back of the bus to occupy his time: read. He read books on serial killers, dictators, hitmen; books on experiments, plagues, famine. He loved the Torah because it was the best part of the Bible. And its God was a baby killer, like him. It was a shame there could only be one God. It was the only true vocation for someone who knew the power and pleasure behind such an act. Maybe that’s why God populated the world with maniacs and killers. One needed the adulation of their rivals to feel fully appreciated.
At night, the empty buildings climbed into the star-matted sky. With nothing else to do, the Fear practiced his Spanish, getting good enough that the Grief shared her tale of woe with him, how she had drowned her two sons so they couldn’t be taken away from her. How she chopped them into pieces and threw them in the river before killing herself, and now she was cursed to walk the earth until she found them again, or two who looked just like them.
The Fear laughed. He pointed at her and then at the Wrath. “You drowned your kids, and he drowned as a kid.”
He meant it as a troll, but the Grief burst into tears and pulled the Wrath’s fire hydrant head to her chest.
“Mi niño,” she said, and the Wrath let his frame sink into her motherly embrace. “Perdóname. Perdóname . . .”

After days of seeing mountains on the horizon, they were suddenly surrounded by them. Sitting among the mountains were giant pyramids, their flat summits high above the valley.
The Fear leafed through one of his books. “Holy shit, it’s Teotihuacán.”
A red clay path led to the razed fields where the pyramids stood. They reminded the Fear of the architecture people would clutter their minds with at night. It seemed like an eternity since he was in the dreamscape. His body felt wet and heavy here. He missed the transiency of dreams, the blurring of borders. Everything was too concrete here, too restrictive.
Centuries ago, human heads rolled all the way to the bottom of those same pyramid steps. He imagined the blood soaked deep into the soil. Tens of thousands of sacrifices. Enough to replace the molten core of the world with blood. Fucking Aztecs.
The others followed him up the steps of the Pyramid of the Sun. At the top, the Fear felt a warm current running through him like electricity. The urge to keep heading south was gone. He felt home.
The Avenue of the Dead laid before them, smaller temples surrounding the behemoths: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
“They would have worshipped us here,” he said. “We would have been gods.”
From his books, he already knew the gods they would have been. The Wrath would have been Tlaloc, the rain god who demanded children as sacrifice. And Crybaby Girlfriend would have been Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of streams and childbirth.
The Fear had no doubt who he was. He would have been Xipe Totec, the Flayed Lord, god of sacrifice. They even had the same ruddy skin color, but the Grief reminded him that this wasn’t actually his true body. He had been pulled into this world. His true self was in the dreamscape, so technically he was already wearing someone else’s skin, same as the Flayed Lord.
This didn’t make the Fear feel as good as he thought it would. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time filled his chest, that inner sensation of free-falling, of not knowing what comes next.
She was right. It wasn’t his body. And what revved the nameless feeling in his chest was the thought that if they opened him up, if they used the Wrath’s machete to cut him down the middle, would they find any proof that he was there at all?
The sun had doubled its size since the three of them had come together, a red star surrounded by a magnetic field that glittered at dusk. The mountains were turning to rust. He didn’t want to die. He wondered if they would still be around when the sun finally exploded, its red cloud enveloping the earth, shattering the morsel of blood into dust. Would they die, or would they be thrust into the void of space with the rest of the debris, living but not living, floating for eternity, no planet for old slashers?
There on the summit, painted in the red glow, he felt as close as he would ever get to the dreamscape again.

“Was that always there?”
They were back on the ground, and the Fear was pointing to an entrance in the pyramid’s base. A response came from the dried reeds at the edge of the razed fields, swaying in the breeze.
They crouched to enter the narrow tunnel. The uneven stone walls were cool against the Fear’s skin. An air current flowed through the passageway, gliding over them like whispers.
The tunnel opened into a large space filled with nothing but a mound of rubble. Tiny openings in the pyramid walls allowed beams of light to enter the chamber. In the dirt were footprints leading away from where they stood, disappearing into the far shadows.
This wasn’t their first rodeo, but they were typically on the other side of this game. So it wasn’t panic they were filled with, staring at the mysterious footprints, but curiosity.
The footprints traced the base of the mound to a set of steps carved into the bedrock. The stone steps descended into the mouth of a cave. They reached the bottom and spread into the darkness. The Wrath struck his machete against the craggy walls and its sparks illuminated the space in quick, seizure-inducing flashes.
It was a small chamber in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Whether natural or man-made, they couldn’t tell. The sparks revealed a small pool bubbling in the center of the dirt floor.
The Fear crouched at its edge. The fumes coming off the black, viscous surface reeked of rotten eggs and freshly tarred road. One of the bubbles burst and black spittle dotted his chest. He touched his shirt and rubbed his fingers together, studying the oily texture, when something he’d read sprang to mind.
He shot up, startling the others in the dark. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They turned back to the stairs, but the Will was blocking their path.

According to his books, Teotihuacán wasn’t built by the Aztecs. The Aztecs were initially a nomadic tribe. They discovered the city in the middle of the jungle almost a thousand years after whoever created it disappeared.
The Pyramid of the Sun had been built over a natural cave that the Aztecs came to believe was the cradle of the universe. Caves symbolized the emergence of new worlds. Caves were portals between the gods and humans.
The Aztecs believed their world was the result of four previous worlds, meaning four previous cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation. To start each new phase, the gods sacrificed one of their own to create the new sun. Our world was the fifth and final world, and the Aztecs were the People of the Sun, whose sole responsibility was to wage war forever. This was why the Aztecs sacrificed humans, to nourish the gods that nourished them with their own blood. It was the highest honor they could provide to prisoners of war, who were treated as living gods for a year, pampered with every luxury conceivable in the pre-Columbian world. At the end of that year, the Aztecs marched this god up the Pyramid of the Sun, bound his arms and legs to posts, and ripped the beating heart out of his chest, all to keep the universe from falling apart. To sacrifice yourself was so revered that when there were no prisoners to sacrifice, the royal class willingly offered themselves.
That last part left a bad taste in the Fear’s mouth when he first read it. Sacrificers without a sacrifice. And the carousel of divinity. What was the point of being God then, if his victims were not his own, if it meant his work had been feeding something greater than himself this entire time? He didn’t kill kids to save the universe. The idea of being captured, being given everything your heart desired only to have it ripped from your chest, terrified him.
Death was just another cog in the wheel to the Aztecs, and the Fear’s only comfort, besides not being Aztec, was the fact that these were only stories. But the smell of rotten eggs was what made him realize the black liquid was bitumen, a plant resin the Aztecs used in religious ceremonies, somehow kept in its liquid form after thousands of years. Meaning this was the cave where, to start each new phase, the gods sacrificed one of their own to create the new sun.
The bitumen had already coated the Fear’s hand and was now oozing down his forearm. He reeled back as the Wrath appeared out of the shadows, machete over his head, but the Grief intervened.
“Let them fight!” the Fear said, his voice reverberating in the cave, but all she did was place a hand on the Wrath’s chest and he stopped. They turned to the Fear and watched the flecks of bitumen spread across his chest like cooking oil in a hot pan. She knew the score, even if he didn’t. The more he pawed at himself, the more it clung to his flesh, using his scar tissue like canals to spread further.
“Ayúdame!” he said.
“Mi niño,” the Grief said, watching the bitumen envelope him. “Perdóname. Perdóname . . .”
He backpedaled and his right foot fell into the pool. “Oh fuck, oh fuck!” He pulled his foot out and dragged himself toward the stairs, the oil climbing up his leg. “This is a mistake! You’ve got the wrong guy!” But the Will didn’t move; even when the Fear stamped his oily hand on the Will’s chest and the bitumen spread, the Will would not let him pass, possessed by a knowledge far beyond the comprehension of any of them.
A tremor rolled through the pyramid, shaking the ground and the cave. The Fear pitched forward on his hands and knees, struggling to catch his breath through the fumes. “No . . . no . . .”
He heard the sound of metal on stone, but instead of it being the Wrath striking his machete against the walls, it was the Will standing before him, holding his kitchen knife and a large rock. He struck them together, another blast of sparks, and the Will was now Tezcatlipoca, God of Night, God of Time, God of War. The Red of the East, the Black of the North. He was Death and Cold and his kitchen knife was as mirror-clean as obsidian, and with it he saw everything we cannot, the wheel of life and death and rebirth. Like a priest pouring baptismal water over a baby’s head, the Will struck his knife with the rock and sparks rained on the Fear’s glistening head, overtaken by the bitumen, and he was back in the cabin again. Back in the dryer. Back on his hands and knees. Engulfed in his own fear and rage, in the unfairness of it all. Because a part of him always knew this was going to be how it ended. That this was how it always ended. Each and every life. With him on fire, wondering if there was something on the other side.

It was midday, and without a cloud in the sky, the sun was at its most unforgiving. A strong wind laced with sand cut through the valley, stinging Abraham and Isaac as they pushed on. Isaac held the donkey’s reins as it jerked its head, blinded by the sand. The sun grew stronger, a mixture of sweat and sand forming a rind on their skin. The donkey pulled a small wagon filled with wood, rope, kindling, flint, and a knife. Abraham shielded his eyes and looked into the sky. He was waiting for a sign.
For three days they traveled in silence, and at night Isaac slept while his father agonized over what needed to be done. He had been gathering wood to build a home in this barren land when a voice called unto him.
Abraham . . .
He set down his hammer. “I am here, my Lord.”
Will you make the ultimate sacrifice?
“Say the word, my Lord, and I will do as you command.”
The next day, Abraham and Isaac loaded their donkey and headed into the valley.
It was the voice of the Lord that told Abraham he would have a son, a great son, a father of nations. Being old and frail, Abraham did not believe the voice. And he did not believe the voice was God. There were other men who claimed the god of one thing or another spoke to them—the god of fire, the god of rivers, the god of the moon. Vengeful gods whose idols were constructed to match their domains—burned, bloated, gaunt, stoic—who were said to terrorize nonbelievers after sundown. These prophets were madmen, and Abraham feared he was one of them, but before long, his wife Sarah bore a son. A miracle. So when the Lord asked him to offer this son as a sacrifice unto him, he knew to place his trust in the voice, for the Lord never led him astray. For he was the one true maker, creator of heaven and earth.
They came upon a mountain ringed with layers of red, white, and orange sediment leading to the summit.
And the Lord spoke to Abraham. There.
Abraham turned to Isaac, who was sitting on a boulder, petting the nape of the donkey.
“Unload the supplies and follow me.”
The son did as he was told.
They ascended the mountain in silence, save for the sound of their breath. At the summit, Isaac set down the supplies. Abraham grew nervous. He listened for God, but all he heard was the wind.
“Father,” Isaac said, “if we’ve left the donkey below, what will be our offering?”
“The Lord will provide us the offering.”
Finally, he grabbed the rope. “Turn around my son.” He bound Isaac’s hands and feet together and laid him on the wood. When the Lord did not speak, Abraham grabbed the knife and extended his hands over his head. Sweat dripped down his forehead. Isaac closed his eyes. He did not fight his father, for he, too, believed in the word of the Lord.
Abraham’s clasped hands trembled. He looked down at his son, whom he loved more than anything in the world. If the Lord wills it, he thought.
His grip tightened around the handle. The air around them became still.
He waited for the Lord to intervene, to release him from this task, to send an angel to stop him, to replace his son with a ram or goat, to explain what was meant from such a test.
His prayers were answered, for the Lord did speak in his gruff, raspy voice, the sound of pebbles being rubbed together in Abraham’s head. But it was not a reprieve, only more of His mysterious ways. Another passage in the labyrinth that was His grace, with everlasting life and love at its center. The only requirement was faith. For where was Abraham when the Lord created the lattice of the universe, to which Abraham hung his hopes and dreams, for his son, and for the future of life itself? This was only part of a greater story, an arc too vast for any mortal mind to comprehend. Our only purpose was to obey, and Abraham had done so, blade over his head and Isaac trembling on the wood. It was faith that kept the horror from rising out of Isaac’s throat and reverberating through the valley. The glint of the blade suddenly in his eyes and fear pouring into his heart as the Lord’s voice slithered into his ears. Shh, little one. Sweet dreams . . .

---

Gus Moreno is the author of This Thing Between Us. His stories have appeared in Aurealis, PsuedoPod, and Burnt Tongues, an anthology. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and two dogs, but never think that he’s not from Chicago.

 

We were so many. Latchkey kids and runaways, hardscrabble children for whom home was a motel or a broken-glass abandoned storefront or a flat patch of dirt under an off-ramp—but also indolent, precious bunny-rabbit boys and girls abandoned to the elements by their wealthy parents. We were immigrants learning English from badly translated video games, and Jersey-born locals destined to never leave the tri-state area. We came carrying hundreds of quarters, or with hands and pockets empty. We came to make money. We came to spend it. We sold drugs, or rented out parts of our bodies for brief periods of time. We lived our lives in a strip mall archipelago a hundred miles long. The arcade children of Interstate 287 were a great and numerous nation.

My mom’s boyfriend from the time I was ten to around when I turned eighteen was a guy named Tomm, and whether the extra “M” in his name was his own doing or the work of an imaginative parent I was never able to discern. Mom told me once that Tomm had made a lot of bad decisions in his life. He didn’t drink, and he flinched when mom popped the top off a can of beer for herself.
I never knew exactly what he did for a living, just that it meant he dropped me off in the morning and came for me sometimes before sunset and sometimes long after. Same pep talk every time, when I got out of the car—don’t talk to strangers, don’t be rude to the staff, always keep an eye on the exits. Same five-dollar bill for food every time; same roll of quarters for keeping me entertained. Sometimes he’d be gone for an hour, and sometimes twelve.
Mom didn’t know what he did either, and didn’t want to. I suspect we both believed it was something illegal, or borderline-legal. I never told her anything about what my days were like, when Tomm “took me to work.” She never asked questions. The poor woman was forever overworked. Tomm took care of child care concerns for a lot less than a babysitter. I came home unharmed each time, and that was probably enough to calm her down. I knew, somehow, that telling her the truth would mean the end of it.

We were the numerically dominant species in the arcade ecosystem, but there were others. Most of them predators. Some sold us drugs: speed or spiderwebbing. Cheap at first, but pretty soon you were selling off pieces of yourself. For many of my fellow feral arcade children, especially the older ones, life was pain. I could see why they’d choose to escape into substance abuse.
Other predators, occupying an ecological niche so well-fitted to the drug dealers that it seemed like symbiosis, gave us the money we might need for drugs or quarters. Some wanted to fuck us; some wanted to get fucked. Some would want it out in the parking lot. Some fucked us in between the machines in the back. Some, the ones with the most money or the oddest hungers, drove us off to motels or homes or undisclosed locations.
I didn’t see it, then. The difference between me and the kids who took those five- and ten-dollar bills.

You want to know about the urban legend. That’s why you’re here, really. You’ve heard rumors, tales told so many times it’s like an endless game of Telephone, and you know better than to believe them, of course, but still.
The mysterious arcade game that kills people. Some kid died, right? Or kids? In Seattle, or was it somewhere down the Jersey Shore? Killed, or just disappeared? Kidnapped, probably. Sex criminals. Russians. Something.

Cops were our apex predator, and they came through all the time. Cracking down on sex work or drug sales, usually, or occasionally dragging out a drug-addled or overdosed or antagonistic adult. But mostly it was us they preyed on. The johns, they barely saw. Too busy cuffing kids. We were so vulnerable, us feral arcade children.

Sex was not some secret world for me. Even before Tomm arrived in that crummy apartment with only one thin wall between their bed and mine, we had lived in a dozen or so spots surrounded by people who lived their most intimate lives very publicly. Women who screamed the obscenest demands through slammed doors at three in the morning. Men who sobbed out the most unnecessarily detailed confessions. Couples fucking in stairwells, who didn’t stop when a wide-eyed, eight-year-old me came stomping down from the floor above.
So, no. I was not ignorant of the fact of sex. It was one more realm of terror that lay waiting for me. One more inscrutable aspect of adult villainy. The one my mother warned me about the most. “Sex criminals” were everywhere. Stranger danger. “Perverts” who waited in every corner for the moment you let your guard down so they could kidnap you and do terrible sex things to you until you die.

Unwashed boy, beer gone sour, spilled soda and ancient cigarettes. Sperm and sweat and lube. By age thirteen, the smell of the inside of an arcade could bring me to an instant pubescent erection. It smelled forbidden; sexy. Seedy. Slothful. So when I first saw Fenn at fourteen, slumped against a Gaijin Ninja cabinet in a dark corner; when he looked up and caught me staring and winked, I instantly imprinted all that eroticism onto him.

Who knew what weird electricity drew me to Fenn, or Fenn to me. He spent a long time scoping me out, I know that. He told me later he’d been watching me before we first made eye contact—Fenn always had his eye on everyone, assessing who was a threat and who had potential, but potential for what I wouldn’t learn for a while. And even after we did lock eyes, he didn’t come right over and say hey. He slipped into the shadows, and I didn’t see him again for a couple of weeks, when he popped up beside me and poked me on the nose and said, “You’re cute.”

Fenn lit me up like electricity, like a quarter slid into the coin slot of my soul. His smile set my pinball flippers flapping; his touch made me clang like a new high score.
Bright blue hair. Barbed wire bracelet. Tall and lean and dark. Brown eyes ringed with green. The third time we talked, he took hold of the hood of my sweatshirt and tugged, pulled me into a corner. Not gently. Pushed me up against the wall. Put his mouth on mine. Slid his studded tongue past my lips. Metal probed flesh. Something unspooled inside of me. Fenn reached into my pants and sex suddenly ceased to be scary, which is probably a way of saying I stopped being a little kid.

After that, I carried sex around with me like a switchblade in my pocket. Every scary situation got a little less scary, knowing I had it. Even if I couldn’t use it right there and then—it was mine, it was waiting for me, it was a reminder that even if we had to be human (and humans were awful), we were also animals (and animals were amazing).
Fenn introduced me to Jenny Ng. A chubby girl from a good home, smart in that way where it was scary. Where you found yourself compelled to either talk too much, to prove you could keep up, or stay quiet so she wouldn’t know you couldn’t.
“Don’t say anything about her name,” Fenn said, when she headed for the restroom. “Apparently it’s not weird at all in Chinese.”
Jenny had a jacket full of markers, all sizes and colors and levels of toxicity. She handed me one, told me to think up a tag for myself, or a slogan.
“The world needs less clean surfaces,” she said. “McDonald’s tabletops, plate glass storefront windows, whatever. Everybody wants to pretend like everything’s clean and happy and perfect. People like us, who know how fucked up everything is, we have an obligation to tell everybody else.”
I nodded. This thought was electrifying, no less than when Fenn pushed me to my knees and unzipped. I was honored that she thought I somehow shared her rebel spirit, when I was pretty much the squarest soul imaginable.
“Ish,” I said, tagging up my palm.
“See?” she said. “It’s perfect. You were made for this.”
“Ron found a black-box game at the Dauphin mall,” Fenn said.
Jenny asked, “Was it one of . . . ?”
“Not sure. He only had a couple quarters. Said he had a headache afterwards, and nightmares. Game was called Destroy All Monsters! I think.”
She made a note in a sketchbook full of graph paper. Her letters were so precise she could have actually been a robot. I wanted to ask to read it, or to know what they were compiling notes on, but we’d only just met.

Black-box games were not such a big deal. Bootleg knockoffs, stolen cabinets spray-painted over. Hacks out of Hong Kong or Hoboken; Mega Pac Man or Pac Man Gaiden or Sexy Pac Man. How were we to know the difference between a legit sequel and a work of piracy? We’d get all excited to start playing, only to pop in a quarter and find a simple color-shifted carbon copy of the original.
And then there were the games that had been slapped together by computer school dropouts or programmers for the mob, soldered and wired together by utter amateurs. Weird shit you couldn’t figure out, where polygons roved and shattered and shrank and it wasn’t clear which one you were, or what each button did, if anything. The video game industry was a much less structured place back then. Anyone with a hundred bucks and a garage full of parts could create a game, and any halfway-smooth talker could get it into an arcade.
So, yeah. There were lots of strange games. Some arcades switched them out on a weekly basis, and other spots kept the same games so long we imagined they’d been forgotten by their owners. And since stories were our stock and trade, the only mass media in a nation served by no newspaper or radio show, members of our tribe were forever reporting on what games were turning up where.

There were other games. That much is true. Ones that were weird in ways that had nothing to do with amateur programming or inept piracy. Monster games. Games we had good reason to be afraid of. I watched one girl stagger back from a black-box game she’d spent five short minutes playing, and saw the blood coming out of her ears.
Fenn had seen worse; so much worse he would not tell me what.

Fenn wasn’t scared. Neither was Jenny. I was, but I let their fearlessness be a safety blanket I could hide beneath.

Fenn pressed his fingers against the screen and shut his eyes. “Come here,” he said, grabbing me by the collar, pushing down my head until my cheek was flush with the console surface, my eyes inches from his fingertips, then he draped his hoodie over my head.
The smell of him was so strong that I swelled to a state of full immediate erection.
“Watch,” he whispered, and I widened my eyes, stared into the musky dark.
My mouth opened, my throat desert-dry with thirsting for it.
“No,” he chided, with a chuckle. “Dirty boy, Ish. But not that. Not right now. Just watch.”
Blue light crackled, lit up his fingertips and the battered plastic buttons. Tiny little strands of electricity stuttered in the air between man and machine. Clicks rattled in the cabinet. A gong sounded, then a shrill high buzz.
Player up! the machine said, which is what it said when you stuck in a quarter, but Fenn had done no such thing. He’d zapped it with his fingers, tricked it with little bolts of blue lightning.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, staggering to my feet, aroused in a whole new way.
Fenn shrugged, and kissed me hard.

One monster arcade game attack was so bad it made the news. Kid ended up in the hospital. Paralyzed from the neck down. No sign of trauma or evidence of damage. News didn’t mention she was an arcade kid. But we saw her, and we knew.
The place was packed when we went there later that week. All the tribes of our whole far-flung nation had sent delegates. The woman behind the counter hadn’t been on duty the night the kid collapsed, but she’d heard. “Wasn’t an ambulance came to get her,” she said, over and over, delighted at all the attention. “Unmarked van. Black and shiny. Brand-new. Two women and three men took her out, none of them looking like EMTs. That was four in the afternoon. She got dropped off at the emergency room at nine at night.”
“What game was it?” Fenn asked, and some people said Destroy All Monsters! and some said Polybius, but most people said Destroy All Monsters!

“Try it,” Fenn said, standing behind me, holding me by the shoulders.
And so I did. Flicked my fingers, tried to summon blue sparks.
And kept trying. For an hour. By the end of it my heart was beating so fast that Fenn giggled when he kissed my jugular, and all I managed was one quick spray of blue lightning tendrils that didn’t give me a free game at all, but did delete every saved high score in the console. Six entries, all identical, a whole long line that said FEN.

“I found it,” Fenn said, one grey Jersey morning near the shore, the sky smelling like fried seafood, and he did not look well. Blue-black circles beneath his eyes; a brand-new furrow in his brow.
“Destroy All Monsters!? Where?” I asked. Jenny was not around. It had been a week since the last time I saw Fenn.
He named a place. “It was gone when I went back the next day.”
“You played it? What was it like?”
He nodded. Locked eyes with mine. Did not look away. He was trying telepathy. He did that from time to time with people. My head filled up with horrific images—children screaming, a white gorilla with fur stained red—but I was pretty sure they came from my imagination and not his memory.
“I know what it is now,” he said. “I don’t know who made it—aliens or evil corporations or whoever-the-fuck—but I know what it’s here for.”
He shivered. Sucked in a long slow drag on his cigarette. He hardly ever smoked.
“What’s it for?”
“It’s here to kill us.”

“I don’t get it,” Jenny said. “If it’s so evil, why do you still want to play it so bad? Why don’t we fucking destroy the thing?”
“Because the only way to do that is to play it. Find your way to its cold wet heart. And beat it.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Pull the plug on it, pour a couple of cokes into it, zap it a bunch for good measure, and I know you can fry the fucker.”
“It’ll just come back,” he said.
It’ll respawn, I thought. Like any video game villain.
“How do you know that?”
“I saw into its . . . I don’t know. Soul? CPU? Black twisted heart? It’ll keep killing us until we kill it.”
“That’s fucking idiotic,” she said, blowing a bright green gum bubble.
“It’s a monster, Jenny,” he said, his voice going halfway British the way it did when he wanted to mock her for being so brilliant. “Monsters are real. Surely you’re not too smart to see that.”

Mom kept telling me to get a job. Said I was too old to be spending all my time in stupid arcades. That was kid stuff, and I was not a kid anymore.
Tomm tried to shield me, but we both knew he couldn’t do it for long. Sooner or later I’d have to find a fast food joint or mall kiosk, plop myself down in front of a deep fat fryer and be careful I didn’t get stuck there for the rest of my life.

Fenn dreamed of playing professionally. Somewhere, he’d heard, were whole leagues of competitive video gamers with big corporate sponsors. Every game he played he was gunning for that glory, for the day when they’d swoop down and snatch him up.
Hearing him talk about it was the first time I suspected that maybe he was nowhere near as smart as I imagined him to be.

I played along with Fenn’s fantasy. Talked about how we’d conquer the competitive gaming world. With his electric mastery, and once I learned to leverage my clumsy, destructive ability to jinx things for his competitors, I swore we’d swiftly rise to the top of the list of whatever they were looking for.
Turned out I did have a gift, and it was telling stories that were not completely true.

I’d imagined ourselves to be a nation of equals, all the arcade children united in our status of outcasts, but suddenly I could see how that was bullshit. Hearing Fenn talk about his dreams of competitive gaming, I could see how out of touch he was with how the world worked. How for all his wisdom, he was still just as ignorant as I was, only differently ignorant.
We had a hierarchy, the feral arcade children. So wide and extreme that it took me a long time to see myself on it at all. Jenny had a car, had money, had college in her future. I had none of those things, but I had so many things Fenn lacked. And once I could see that, I couldn’t see him—couldn’t see any of it—the same way anymore.
We were not one thing, one united nation. We were so many things. How could there be any hope for us, as divided as we were?

And, sure, Fenn had nothing, but plenty of kids had less. Boys and girls who sold themselves in significantly less safe ways than Fenn did. Kids who wandered through with their eyes full of fear, for whom the measly 25-cent cost of admission was too much, for whom the arcades were one more space full of bright, beautiful things they’d never have access to; a space where the wind and rain couldn’t hit them, but still full of predators both potential and actual.
Fenn went out of his way to befriend them. To show them how to game the machines. To make them magical monsters like himself.
Once, I watched him lead three eleven-year-olds out into the parking lot. He placed their hands against the massive metal pole that supported the sign listing all the stores for that particular strip mall. He shut his eyes, whispered words. They shut theirs.
One of them jumped, stepped back. They laughed, shook it off, put their hands back on the pole.
“Yeeeeaahh!” Fenn cried, clapping his hands.
They grinned, electric. Unstoppable.
Something metal screamed. High above them, the sign burst into flames. Fenn put his finger to his lips and they stepped away, vanishing into invisibility again.
After that, I started noticing blackened, burnt-out signs outside strip malls all up and down 287.

Sometimes I heard him talked about. The kid with electric fingers and electric blue hair. The faggot who can control machines. And once I saw a magnificent, stocky Mexican girl, who said she’d been taught by someone who’d been taught by the electric kid, as she lit up a whole line of pinball machines with nothing but a snap of her fingers, and let an ecstatic gaggle of our fellow feral arcade children play for free all afternoon. I followed her at a discrete distance, my mouth stuck open in awe. She could do things Fenn could not; whatever it was had evolved on its way to her, or been transformed by something special inside of her.

We looked and we looked, and we never found it.
And then . . . we found it.
Destroy All Monsters!, nestled in a corner of one of the weirder spots, down the Shore, a strip mall where half the stores were left empty when summer stopped. And it was at the one arcade where a super hot dude worked, not much older than us, known to rent his mouth out to richer men himself sometimes. Jenny and I meant to go talk to him when Fenn sparked the Player up! chime, see what we could learn about the game and who brought it, but five minutes after he started playing, we could see that Fenn was sweating.
“What?” Jenny said. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t describe it,” he said.
On the screen, his monster stomped through city streets and gobbled up children. Seized them by the fistful, swallowed them whole. Every fifty kids, his hairy, long-armed T-Rex got bigger. A big white gorilla waited for him at the center of the city, which he could challenge when he got strong enough.
Muscles twitched. Eyes flickered. On the screen the game seemed simple enough, but inside his body he seemed to be at war.
Who knows how long it was before the game went black. “Fuck,” Fenn hissed, but none of us could look away from the screen. So it took us a solid forty-five seconds to realize that it wasn’t just the game that had gone out. The whole arcade was dark. Every cabinet was silent. Kids wailed in the distance—their digital lives cut short, high scores lost, hard-earned quarters wasted.
“You okay?” I asked Fenn, and he was trembling, but he nodded.
“I can do it,” he said. “I can see how.”

On our way out, I felt so full of life and power and potential—like we could solve every problem, like the monsters could be defeated, like the mysterious forces of the world could be comprehended and conquered—that I said, “See you tomorrow” to Super Hot Dude, even though his hotness was super intimidating. He flashed a smile full of teeth.

Getting Tomm to take me back the next day was basically the hardest thing I’d ever done. He said “no” at first—and at second, and at third. I had to tell my mom I’d start looking for a job the following week—which put her in a great mood—which made him happy enough to consent to take me back to Destroy All Monsters! And Jenny. And Fenn. And the secrets of the malevolent universe.
Sweat dripped, puddled on the console beneath Fenn’s fingers. Strangled sounds gurgled out of his throat from time to time. Kids came; crowded around. Watched his ravenous creature gobble down children.
Most games were bloodless, scoured clean. This one was not.
“Look at his eyes,” I said, because I had never seen ones so bloodshot.
“You need to stop,” Jenny said.
“No,” he barked. “I’m so close.”

To what, we didn’t know. We were watching the same screen, but I could tell we saw different things. Fenn flinched, tapped buttons in response to apparently nothing. Something about the angle of where he stood, maybe. Or the deeper he went, the more it bored into his skull, until only a very small part of the game was playing out in the console.
He died fast, and often. Kept zapping blue flame at the coin slot. The air stunk of ozone and scorched machinery.

I went to get a cherry soda. Flicked my wrist at the coin slot. Pressed my hand against the glass. Snapped my fingers. Blue smoke spattered, sparked. It took me twenty tries, and when it finally “worked” the machine gave me three diet ginger ales instead. On my way back, though, I saw Super Hot Dude standing at the front door, talking to three cops. And then he pointed in Fenn’s direction.
My heart clenched. My jaw dropped. Super Hot Dude saw it, and flashed me the same terrifying line of teeth.
“See you tomorrow,” I’d said, and wished I could take back the words. Wished I could die.
I’d imagined him to be benevolent, but why? Where had it come from, the possibility of assuming best intentions in strangers? One more difference between me and Fenn, another insurmountable wall. Somewhere along the line, something in my life—maybe my mother and maybe the minimal solid stability of our shitty little apartment—had given me the luxury of mistakenly believing that maybe people weren’t so bad.

The cops stomped toward us. Monkey Fracas kept chanting its chim-chim-chim jingle, synthesized cymbals ominously happy.
“You’ve been playing this same game for three hours,” one cop said. The crowd of kids had scattered. Jenny and I stood there, mouths dry, hands wet, feeling sick with helplessness.
“I’m just really good,” Fenn said, sounding like something else.
“There’s no quarters in this machine.”
“Even if that’s true,” Fenn said, “what is that, like, twelve dollars? You gonna take me in for that?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” the cop said, and of course we knew, all of us, that that wasn’t what they’d be taking him in for, but none of us knew what the real reason was. It could have been so many things. For selling himself; for underage drinking; for carrying condoms; for transforming a tribe of feral arcade children into an army of magnificent monsters.

“They were looking for him,” Jenny whispered, as they took a cuffed Fenn out of the arcade. Her hand gripped mine so hard it hurt, and I was happy for the pain of it. “They’ve been looking for him, and the game helped them find him.”
“Who’s they?”
She shook her head. Kids drifted over. I could feel our anger in the air.

Sparks flew. Games spat quarters. Vending machines sprayed scalding soda. We moved towards the exit after them, as one, ready to rain blue hellfire down on all who would harm us.
Fenn saw us, and stopped us with one stern head shake. And maybe it was telepathy and maybe I just knew him, finally, so I could read a whole speech in that tiny motion. We all could.
This is not the moment. Don’t let them know what you can do. Don’t come to their attention.
Not yet.
Keep going.

The whole crowd of feral kids followed them out. We felt way more numerous than we had inside, scattered through the vast, empty, dark space.
Someone picked up a stone. Hurled it at the cop car. A beer bottle followed. Then a solid wall of insults, jeers, shrieks. The officers stared out at us impassively, but Fenn’s smile was huge.

When the cops had taken him away, I looked around. All those kids, faces twisted up, tight, dark, or pale with rage or grief. My pain was like theirs, but I was not one of them. Neither was Jenny, but she had picked up rocks and chucked them every bit as hard.
I hadn’t been able to do that. But this, I could do.

You are one of us, even if you never knew it. Even if you only ever saw us in small clumps or couples, and never suspected what a mighty nation we were. Even if by the time you were born there weren’t any arcades anymore.

“Stop fucking crying,” Jenny whispered, but she was crying too. The Mexican girl spoke in angry, urgent whispers to a small crowd of comrades.

We sat in Jenny’s car for an hour, letting the rain tick-tock against the roof.
I was convinced they’d kill him. Torture him first—take him apart on an operating table, try and fail to figure out how he worked.
Jenny said they’d probably lock him up overnight, and then remand him to foster care. Maybe juvenile detention. Juvie until jail. “Fenn had priors,” she said.
I told Jenny he’d make a new army in there. No matter how different they all were. That’s what an army was, I realized. A bunch of different things that become one thing. Locked up together they’d be able to go deeper, develop their skills, refine and expand whatever it was until they could summon blue lightning bolts out of the sky to slay every evildoer and break down every wall.

Sometimes I’d see our skill at work in the world. Creeps’ cars fried; arcade cabinets that let you play for free forever.
Fenn’s still out there. Somewhere. Maybe he’s still Fenn and maybe that body was already broken, and he’s been reborn in a brand-new body—or, even better, let loose to wander the world unencumbered by the awful ugliness humans are subject to. Doing his thing, far away or just around the next corner. Maybe I’ll find him, and maybe you will.
Jenny sends me updates occasionally. She’s still looking for the robots. The aliens. The Army.
Me, I see the monsters everywhere. They have no need for wicked mind control machines. They have cable company contracts and strip mall parking lots and deep fat fryers, sucking out our souls for minimum wage and sending us home stinking of grease and the flesh of animals even less fortunate than ourselves.
They have all that. But we have the spark.

---

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula Award–winning author of Blackfish City. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Sam’s short stories have won a Shirley Jackson Award and been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards, and have been reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He’s also the last in a long line of butchers. He lives in New York City.

Illustration: Nicole Rifkin

Hello? Are you there? I miss you. It’s been forever, Sissy. Can I call you Sissy? I know I shouldn’t be calling. I know you don’t want to hear from me. I remember what you screamed at me before you left town the last time: “Don’t ever talk to me again!” Gosh, that hurts to hear from your one and only sister. How could I possibly never speak to you again? I don’t have any other sisters. I don’t have any other anything. And I miss you. Sissy, I miss us.
Do you remember how we used to play one fish, two fish every day after getting off the bus? I picked it up from that kid Ronnie who lived down the block, the one who got sent to juvie and never came back. You pick a spot outside your house, not too far away, walk ten steps forward, say “one fish, two fish, live fish, dead fish,” walk ten steps back, say “count to ten and make a death wish,” and then, right when you feel a tickle on the back of your neck, you start your countdown and run, run, run as fast as you can to your front door!
Mom hated that game. She thought we were going to break our necks running home on that busted sidewalk. But you loved it, and you wouldn’t stop playing it even after I got bored with it, even after the neighbors thought there had to be something wrong with you. “Isn’t she too old for that?” they’d say, and Mom would blush. Funny, isn’t it, how habits worm their way in? The way they itch at the bottom of your feet, the way they rewire you?
Do you still play one fish, two fish on your way back to your apartment building? Do you clench your toes in your little kitten heels when you run? Do you avoid the sewer grates? You should. You don’t know how easy it is for somebody to fall through those.
Mom said you played it because you had nothing else to get worked up about, because you didn’t have your own friends. She’d always tell me, “Go play with your sister!” and I knew exactly what you liked to play. You liked stories about shapes that crowd out the light. Sounds that make your skin curdle. I did give you a choice when you were little—what kind of story do you want to hear, what kind of game do you want to play? And every time, your eyes would get really big and you’d say: “Something scary!” So eventually, I stopped asking.
You got harder to scare as you got older. I used to just jab you under the blanket during scary movies and you’d shriek—that was back when Mom would tell you when you could and couldn’t look, not that you’d ever resist looking—but by the time you got to middle school, you needed more. You even started thinking you were tough shit, just because you’d trick me every now and then with some stupid jump scare video. Those weren’t even real scares, Sissy—you know that, right? It’s just an electric shock, a teeny reminder that your lizard brain is working.
But I suppose you’ve gotten very brave by now, Sissy—living in your own apartment in a big city and everything. What do you do when you see a shadow at the far end of the laundry room? Or when you hear scratching noises when you’re alone in your office? What about when a cold hand falls on your shoulder while you’re waiting for the train? Do you hear Mom’s voice, whispering, “Don’t look”? Do you look? What about when you hear a faceless woman crying in your kitchen, in the dark? What do you do then?
Now I know you remember that video. The Crying Woman: True Ghost Video. Guy sets up a security camera in his house because the neighborhood’s had a bunch of break-ins, records this woman standing in his kitchen, crying blood. People who’ve only seen screenshots say it’s fake, of course—say it’s just somebody in makeup, say her glowing eyes are just special effects—but if you watch from start to finish, you know it’s not. You hear her crying over your shoulder, even if you have headphones on. You look into those eyes and the next thing you know you’ve got the video playing on loop and it’s been hours, you and this ghost looking into each other’s soul while your battery drains. That’s how she gets you, the Crying Woman.
You had nightmares for a week after that one. Couldn’t sleep with the lights off for months. Probably the only time Mom ever scolded me: “Why would you show her that stuff?!”
I know it seems mean. But I really was trying to help you—I’m your big sister, after all. Imagine if you went off to college thinking that the worst thing that could happen to you was Linda Blair’s face popping up in a car commercial. You’d be dead meat, Sissy.
So I had to show you something really fucking scary. Something that would burn so deep your nerves would have to rewire around it. So deep you’d never be able to forget it.
I’m still not sorry about showing you that video.
But I am sorry that it made you cry.

Hey, Sissy. It’s me again. Still waiting to hear from you. I know you must be so busy-busy-busy with your fancy job in your fancy city. Don’t have time for your big sister anymore. What’s your official title now? Junior communications assistant? Are you required to return phone calls, junior communications assistant?
I’m sorry, Sissy. I shouldn’t tease you. I know how hard it is to plant the seeds of a life, and I know the last thing you want is to end up rootless and lost out there, because then you’ll have to come crawling home to me. So take as much time as you need to weave yourself into that fancy life. Catch those rush-hour trains, drink that overpriced wine, smile at every man in a suit who smiles at you. And don’t forget to glue your mask on before you leave your apartment.
Just remember to scrape it off before going to bed. That fake laugh, those lying eyes—they eat away the skin underneath if you leave them on too long. Then again, maybe you want your face to stick like that forever, because then you’ll get to forget that you were ever my sister or Mom’s daughter, that you ever came from our shitty little town.
I bet you’d like that.
And I bet your mask is really pretty, besides. Classy, right? Like French perfume? You probably got it at a nice department store, the kind we didn’t have growing up, the kind with couches in the restroom. Bet it comes with that confidence you were always wanting more of. Bet it’s covered in stories about joyrides with friends you never had, pranks you never pulled, teams you never joined. Maybe even that winged eyeliner you used to watch me put on, huh? Now you can be the pretty one. Now you can be cool. Pretend that all you’ve ever seen is happiness, and that you have no idea how easy it is for entire families to go up in flames, for little girls to fill with dirt. Pretend that, on the inside, you’re not a boiling sea of blood.
Even though you are. Just like the Crying Woman. You know, a funny thing I just remembered: I don’t know who first showed me that video. Isn’t that weird? It’s almost like I’ve always known about it and was just waiting to share it with you. I know that can’t be right. The mind plays tricks, Sissy, when it’s only got itself to talk to.
I worry about you, you know. I worry that you’ll get yourself into trouble out on your own. Those city people in their boutique designer masks—just because they’re rich, just because they went to college, just because they’re funny or pay for drinks or whatever, Sissy, doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful. If anything, you ought to be more careful. There’s good magic and there’s bad magic, and it’s very hard to tell which is which. Bad magic tends to look good. Good magic tends to feel bad. Like medicine. I’ll tell you how I know, if you call me back.
Maybe I’d feel better if I knew more about where you’re living. Are whole buildings haunted in your city, or is it just certain floors? Does fear cut less deeply when there’s always someone else around, or does it make every tremble worse? It’s got to suck to know there’s no such thing as safety, even in the company of others. Especially in the company of others.
Are there intersections in your neighborhood like the one at Harold and J? Where you walk from corner to corner until you find the one spot where the temperature drops by five degrees and your hair stands on end, because that’s where a man whose name no one remembers once got beaten to death? I suppose in big cities like yours, people get beaten to death everywhere. I suppose the whole city is one giant cold spot, one massive mausoleum.
But I understand that the lights stay on all night over there. That would be nice, I think. You’re going to laugh at this, Sissy, but I’ve gotten scared of the dark. I don’t like it when the lights go out, don’t like it when the traffic dies. Maybe it’s because Mom told us to always be home before midnight, and here you’re nowhere to be found. I call and you don’t answer. I reach out to give you a little jab—to grab your little toes—and all I touch is air.

Do you remember, Sissy, the time that you lost at one fish, two fish? You were thirteen. You tripped over your shoelace, and you didn’t make it to the house in time.
You shoved your key in the lock, and it didn’t turn. Just like the game promised would happen. Sometimes game is a word we use to soften the impact of a painful and predictable pattern. Sometimes “games” aren’t fun at all. You were so scared, not only because you knew what would happen if you lost at one fish, two fish—you’d see a ghost—but this happened after you watched the Crying Woman video, so you knew. You knew that some fears are earned.
And you were right to be scared, because you did see a ghost when you turned around, didn’t you? Oh, it didn’t look like a ghost. Not like the ghosts we saw in movies, not see-through or floating or a ball of light. Not like the ghosts in ghost videos, either your kind or mine. This ghost had skin and flesh and a voice that cracked, didn’t he? If you’d let him get close enough, you’d have found out that he had breath, too. But that ghost, Sissy, was well and truly dead.
Do you still remember the ghost? It was your music teacher. My music teacher, too. Coolest teacher in the whole school, cool like somebody’s big brother, cool like a minor TV star. He always used to pay extra attention to your smart, pretty friends, and you’d think to yourself, what’s wrong with me, am I less smart, less pretty? You didn’t have music that semester, so you were surprised that he recognized you, maybe even flattered that he remembered your name. You’ve always worried that you’re forgettable. But the truth is, Sissy, there are some people who you’d want to be forgotten by, and he was one of them.
It’s a funny thing about being a girl, isn’t it? You want to be noticed, until all you want is to disappear. You need to be left alone, until that means you fall all the way through the cracks. You know nobody knows who the Crying Woman really was? The guy who posted the video never posted again. I guess she’s just another woman who got into the wrong car, trusted the wrong man, took the wrong job. It happens all the time.
He looked different outside of the classroom. Less like the god of his own kingdom, more like any man you might pass in a grocery store without another glance. And he actually was carrying a plastic bag, the little black kind that you get from liquor stores. He asked if you needed “some help” and nodded at the keys in your hand.
Now the correct answer here, Sissy, would have been a calm, stern “No.” Maybe if you had kept listening to me instead of tuning me out, you’d have known that. I’m sure I told you. I taught you every trick you needed to survive—how to turn yourself into an eel and slip out of reach; how to turn yourself into a porcupine and become untouchable. But in this moment of truth, you fumbled. Your tongue twisted and died in your mouth, your hands froze, your feet sank into the asphalt. If they’ve already got their eyes on you, dummy, it’s too late to play dead.
And who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t pulled into the driveway that very minute. Maybe you’d have become a ghost yourself. I didn’t tell you this back then, but there was a part of me—some twitchy muscle in my right thigh, I think—that wanted to hit the gas instead of the brakes and feel his weakness give way to my power. Sometimes I still wish I had. I think it would have felt good.
Did you hear what ended up happening to him? Mr. Music Man? He hung himself, Sissy, in his jail cell. I guess the birth of such a pathetic ghost doesn’t make the national news.
Don’t cry for that weasel, Sissy, just because he didn’t get his day in court. Like I always told you, everything in this world has a price—some dues get collected in the here and now, some get collected later. I told you that before anyone else wanted to tell you, because even the young can make very expensive choices. And we were never rich.
So I know that you’ll understand when I make you this promise: you will regret not answering my calls. Someday, and maybe when you least expect it, you will regret not replying.

What goes through your mind when you see I’m calling? Even if you’ve deleted my number, even if it comes up Caller Unknown, I can’t believe that you don’t know it’s me. Do you roll your eyes in irritation? Or do you shudder? Do you tremble? Do you think of the way you left me and feel just the smallest needle prick of guilt?
I know you got jealous about the fact that Mom always left me in charge. You’d slump over whenever she waved you off on her way out the door, telling you to just do whatever I told you to. I remember once you even tried to say that I scared you. Do you remember that? “But Mom, she scares me!” God, you were such a baby. No wonder she ignored you.
Because of course she had a reason for putting me in charge. I was older and I had my head on straight and I knew things, Sissy, that you didn’t. That hasn’t changed, by the way. I ran the house while she was gone because I knew where we kept the lightbulbs. I knew how to write a check. I knew which neighbors to run to for which emergencies and I could do it by myself.
And maybe you were too young to notice, back then, but Mom didn’t exactly have the energy to deal with your whining. She was working overtime at the hospital when you started high school. Do you spend a lot of time on your feet, in your fancy office job? Do you work much overtime, junior communications assistant?
Mom was already at work on the night you abandoned me. Her shift started at seven p.m. and I walked in around eight. There was a party. Over by the college. I don’t remember how I got home, but I remember it was dark in the house and I thought that you were out but then I heard you thumping around upstairs and I thought, thank God, thank God, thank God I’m not alone.
But when you came down the stairs, you didn’t stop. You saw me crying in the kitchen and you ran off and slammed the door. So hard the pictures rattled. Even though I’d been gone for over twenty-four hours by then, and for all you knew I was a missing person. Even though I said your name. What went through your mind, Sissy? Couldn’t you tell that I needed you?
I guess you were in a hurry. You had a slumber party with some other loser girls, I know that—your first time having your own friends, and I bet you couldn’t wait to scare them with one of my stories. The Girl with No Hands. The Unlucky Babysitter. The Ex-Best Friend. Then again you were never one to look before you jumped. For all your schoolgirl brains, you never had any common sense. You’d run into traffic just to get your backpack. Yet another reason why Mom always left me in charge. The truth is, Sissy, we thought you’d be the one to get yourself killed.
So I tell myself that you didn’t know it was me. That you still saw the Crying Woman’s eyes when you tried to sleep at night, and when you saw this tall dark shape crying in the kitchen, you thought the Crying Woman had come for you. I tell myself that all you saw in the kitchen was a tall dark shape without a face, just the whisper of a woman. I tell myself you didn’t recognize my voice because I never cried in front of you, because somebody in that leaky house had to be strong. This is what I tell myself—that you were only saving yourself.
But Sissy, I said your name!
What does that say about how much you cared for me? Before the drugs, I mean. Before I needed them. Before I met Peter and before he needed me. Before I became your fucked-up big sister, your train wreck back home—before all that, you already hated me.
I don’t think I ever said your name again.
Not when you got dropped off at the cemetery for Mom’s funeral and barely made eye contact with me. Not when you refused to give me a proper goodbye before getting on that bus to go to college, tapping your foot like you just couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I wasn’t going to fight for your acknowledgment. It was already too fucking late.
Because here’s the thing, Sissy. For all the times that I’ve looked out for you, that night in the kitchen was the one time in my life that I needed you to look out for me. You could have saved me, Sissy. But you didn’t. That’s what I remember, is that you didn’t.

I have another scary story to tell you. It’s a new one. I’m sure you’ve missed my stories. Maybe you can share it with your new city friends, if you really want to impress them.
Are you ready?
There is a world beneath every town and every city, and that’s the world of the dead. Down in the dirt, down in the dark, there are no city limits. There are no jurisdictions, no state lines, no national borders. Freedom of movement is the one benefit you get from being dead.
Down in the world of the dead, we can hear you stomping and limping and dragging in the open air. That’s how I know you still play one fish, two fish when you get off the bus outside your apartment building. I hear you pause at the bus stop. I hear you take ten steps forward, ten steps back. And I hear you run. Bad news, Sissy: you don’t run as fast as you used to. Maybe you’d do better without the kitten heels, but honestly, I think you’re out of practice. I think you’ve lost that drive to survive.
If you want to get that edge back, Sissy, here’s what you should do: get on your knees on an asphalt road at midnight, and put your ear to the storm drain. You’ll be able to hear the dead—shuffling, gurgling, asking for the people they knew in life. Guarantee you’ll go running back to your apartment building faster than you thought you could. Running, like Mom used to say, like a bat out of hell. And I’ll be running with you, in the world below.
Speaking of Mom, she still asks for you. Her jaw sticks out of the limestone and digs between my bones—she still thinks it’s my fault that you left town, that you were terrified of ending up like me. I think you were terrified of ending up like her, but I don’t tell her that. So she says your name. She asks me when you’re going to get here. And I keep telling her, “Soon.”
The dead, you see, they want. It’s the one thing that never goes away. There were things I wanted to do, too, Sissy, but I bet you never think about that. There were places I wanted to ruin, people I wanted to become. There were more stains I wanted to leave on the world than just the mark I know I left on you. And I would have done so much more with the gift of life, my lovely, than become someone’s junior communications assistant.
Most of the dead ask for people they love. Some of the dead ask for people they hate. Give it enough time, and you can’t tell the difference. Those details fade. It all blends together into this gnawing urge, this churning want. And before you know it, the want has become a need.
Most of the dead have been wanting for so long that they’ve forgotten why they want whoever or whatever it is they want. They probably wouldn’t know what to do if the object of their craving suddenly slid down into their arms, through a cave, or a subway, or a storm drain. Maybe all they’d do is hold it still, hold it close. Like a doll.
But not me. I’ve planned. I remember. And I know exactly what it is I’ll do when I finally get my hands on you.
I think this is where I’m supposed to pause and say, “The End,” to assure you that this was just a story, and that story is over, and you are—what’s the word?—safe. But there is no such thing as safety, or endings, and every story I tell you is true.
You’ll see, Sissy, when you get here.

---

Nadia Bulkin is the author of the short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017). She has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award five times. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She has two political science degrees and lives in Washington, DC. 

Illustration: Fien Jorissen

CRACK OF DAWN

In these ashes beneath a fine blue sky, you’ll find bones and memories, burned by wasted love. Fine flesh has been transformed by hot licks of flame into ash and scraps of charred flesh. The ashes are buried in a heap near the river’s edge. The summer has been dry and the river has been small. There are blackened bones projecting from the pile, for the wind has picked at the grave and the rain has eroded it, but for the most part, the grave has remained. Inside the grave, the ash has become sticky with mud that has partially dried after being first hot with fire then damp with dew, then baked by the summer sun, dew-licked again each morning, dried again by a new day.
These bones and ashes and spots of flesh are almost the end of the matter, such as an end can be determined.
Here is the beginning.

Carry you down at the crack of dawn to where the Sabine River flows, out where the fish can be caught with a cane pole and cheap fishing line, a floater made of a cork from a bottle of vinegar. Add a golden-colored hook, a squiggling worm, a soft lead sinker or two—squeezed onto the fishing line by pliers—draw back that cane and cast the weighted line into the river and watch the water spread in little circles around the line and slowly grow still.
The heat lies on the back of your neck and arms, which you have coated in cheap sunscreen that is more like turkey basting than a preventative. You are both warm and invigorated from having walked from town carrying your gear. Sixty years old and in fine health, retired early with a good retirement plan, and now you can do what you have always wanted to do come early mornings besides go to work. Fish.
Cast and wait.
And then they came.
In your ears the roar of an engine as the car comes down from the long Sabine River bridge, down the concrete boat track that leads to the water.
A man and a woman getting out with the man carrying a folded blanket and the woman carrying a shoulder-slung purse the size of a picnic basket, wandering down a side trail, braving brambles and water moccasins and the occasional swarm of mosquitoes. Stopping at a clearing that has been made by the flames of lightning one summer past, but is a perfect spot to spread the blanket and sit down.
A large rise of bushes grows in a green cluster between you and them. If they looked, they could see you. But they don’t look. The man sets to work as if he has just punched a time clock and has a quota. He is fondling the woman’s breasts through her clothes in a manner to suggest the breasts might run away. She has a black eye. A beautiful, one-eyed raccoon fondled by an ape.
From concealment you sneak closer to the swathe of bushes, peering through gaps in the limbs and leaves.

The woman lifts the strap of the purse off her shoulder, placing it beside her on the blanket.
His hands continue to move without tenderness, but with clutching precision. And then the woman, pushing him back gently, smiling, teeth shiny as porcelain, says, “Tim, I know you’ve been with other women. I know their names. I know when they call you and when you call them. Their perfume on your shirts is like poison to me.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I know you have and I don’t like it.”
The woman has somehow scooted back from him, and the smile is gone from her face.
The man’s face is a thundercloud. “There’s going to be things in life you don’t like, woman. You’re mine. But you don’t own me.”
“That hardly seems a fair proposition.”
“It’s how the world is made. It’s God’s law that the man can do as he will. By marriage, you are my property. You know what happens when you don’t mind? And don’t talk like that.”
“Like what?”
He studies her face, her defiance new to his eyes.
“Like you have education.”
“But I do. I have college. I have a degree. You have you, but you don’t have me. Not anymore.”
“I’ll tell you again, and no other time, quit sassing me. You know what happens when you do?”
“I’m wearing it on my face.”
“That’s right, and such a pretty face. Don’t make me do it again. Don’t make me not want to look at you. That black eye is hard enough to stare at.”
And in her mind the woman thinks of all the times she “made him do it,” him wanting sex when she didn’t, him wanting dinner NOW, and the times when he wanted things so vague, she could neither understand nor deliver. The times she trembled in her bed, her phone taken from her, not able to visit friends, her food portions monitored to keep her weight the way he likes it. Remembers so clearly being called stupid and ugly and worthless and insane.
Maybe she was in fact the last. Driven there by a truck of circumstance, fueled on insecurity and his inexplicable meanness. She could live with her own insanity, if there was such. It was him she could no longer live with, hoping for respect to take root, hoping for love and change. She realized now, those things would never come.
She pulls a hatchet from her large purse, the hatchet she has polished like a precision surgeon’s tool, the one with the carefully wrapped duct-tape handle. When she pulls it back to strike, the sunlight sparks off the blade and she has a delighted front-row view of his shocked, wide eyes, his lips drawn tight, his head leaning back, as if that would help.
And then she strikes his handsome face.
The axe cuts through bone and flesh, smooth as a hot knife through a mound of warm butter.

LATER

Deep morning. A Boy Scout troop will be out for a march. Their Scoutmaster is tall and lean, a cool-skinned fellow without pops of sweat, even though the temperature rests heavy and hot on the marching troop of twelve. The Scoutmaster has little moons of sweat beneath his armpits, but they are faint, and his knees are jerking out and back under the cut of his khaki shorts. Their movements have a machine-oiled precision about them, as if he had been built to order in a Boy Scout Factory, a mannikin motorized and bolted, screwed together with laser beams and socket wrenches.
The Scouts who follow him in a long trail like ducks in khaki and red scarves, are made of the lesser stuff of flesh and bone, greased by sweat, swooned by heat, pumped with blood, not machine oil.
They walk along the edge of the highway toward the lake. Time of arrival planned for noon, but a pause by the Scoutmaster, as they enter the depths of the trail into the woods, to point out Poison Ivy and Poison Oak and a bluebird on a limb with a worm in its mouth, will put them behind.
The Scoutmaster likes to lecture. He knows a lot of stuff. He knows what kinds of blisters the poisoned plants make, the mating habits of bluebirds, the life of wriggling worms that do best beneath the soil. He points out a worm wriggling in dark loam.
In that moment, the worm lifts its wiggling head only slightly, as if in acknowledgement. Lifts it right where a beam of sunlight shoots like an arrow between the trees.
The beautiful bluebird, in mid-sweet song, spies it, turns into a miniature, bright pterodactyl that chokes its song and swoops down from its limb to claim its wormy prize. Soft and gooey, an avian treat.
Whoa, the Scouts say, obviously thrilled by this dark example of nature at work. Later the bird will fly toward town and rest in an apple tree in a backyard, belly full of worms. And it will sing until a redheaded kid with a BB gun and an accurate eye shoots him out of the tree and the bluebird falls to the ground. It will lie there overnight to be found by a stray cat and taken away into a wooded grove to provide a nice supper.
Next morning, the stray cat will cross a road after a scampering mouse and be hit by a car.
But back to our Scouts.
For all the Scoutmaster’s observation, he fails to note a thin black wisp of smoke rising above the trees, some distance away but noticeable to all the boys, who see it through limbs and leaves but don’t really give a shit. They are happy to pause beneath the shade of the woods to pretend to listen. They have lost their military-style line and have become a wavering group around the Scoutmaster. A long rat snake on the hunt crawls between the legs of one of the Scouts so swiftly and quietly, it goes unnoticed. Later, a wild hog will notice it, but that is another story, sad for the snake, happy for the hog.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RIVERBANK

Axe murder in progress.
The fisherman hears and sees it all through the gap in the bushes, the woman swinging the axe in savage arcs, the blade cutting with loud but smooth precision through flesh and bones, the blood spray seeming to burst out in slow motion, hot, copper-colored streams and drops that glisten in the sunlight, fall and spatter to the blanket, turning it wet and dark. Her face, blood blemished, as if she is wearing a camouflage mask of blood and skin, her teeth drawn back and flecked with splashing gore.
“Oh shit!” says the fisherman.
As the words come out of his mouth, he knows he should have kept them tight inside. He drops the fishing pole as the blood-spotted woman’s teeth clench and her lips crawl and wriggle. She comes to her feet in one smooth move, like an acrobat.
The fisherman runs back to the river, darts down the trail along its bank. His boots smattering mud as he runs. Sixty years old but in prime health, he tells himself. I got this.
But swift behind him comes the Blood-Spotted Lady of Death. He hears the thundering of her feet in motion, and those thundering feet are gaining, and then he sees her shadow as it falls over him and his own shadow, its dark elbows and knees bending, flowing swiftly as if pushed by the wind. Her shadow raises its arm high and swings the shadowy axe in a swift dark curve.
There is a sudden burst of crows lifting in a dark, startled flock, up and away from the trees, their little shadows clutched together, dragging the ground.

CHOPAPALOOZA

She discovered that it was easier than she thought to drag the men to the riverbank and into a muddy pit carved by water, pull off their clothes, and take her axe to their flesh and bone, chopping and chopping, so happy that once or twice, she burst into song.
Retrieving the full gas can and shovel she had placed in the trunk before luring her prey with a promise of romance renewed, obedience accepted, hand jobs and blow jobs, oral and anal, and traditional too, she brings them to where the butchered bodies lie.
She pours the gas onto the chopped flesh and bones of the men, on their clothes, then gathers dry wood, scoops the gassy, bloody remains onto the pile with the shovel, and with her husband’s lighter, sets it all afire.
Flames jump so high and hot they crinkle the tips of her hair. An eyelash is toasted. The skin on the hand that holds the lighter is lightly kissed by fire.
Tossing the shovel and the gas can, even the lighter, out into the river where the current moves, she enjoys the splash, as if it is the burst of energy that created the universe. The cotton blanket she folds carefully and places on the blaze.
Flame wraps around the cotton, blood-soaked blanket, and caresses it rapidly to ash. Wood in the fire crackles. Bones in the fire burst. Flesh sizzles. Blood boils. She does a dance with her hatchet in her hand. Dances three circles around the fire. She sings again. Her voice is deep. When she stops to breathe, from where she stands, she can see the Sabine River bridge.
All the while that she has chopped the men, built the fire, danced and sang, cars have been whizzing by. No one has noticed. Or perhaps she has been seen, but no one understands what they see. Most likely, eyes were on concrete or the horizon.
My lady, she says to herself, your escape route and conveyance await. Away, my lady.
Finally, reluctantly deciding to let it go, she tosses the hatchet into the slow-rolling, brown water.
She leaves with a spring in her step and the odd feeling of having had an orgasm, made by chops instead of thrusts.

Moments later, the Scoutmaster and his troop arrive like a khaki cyclone, crashing through brush and dodging between trees, on out to the edge of the river.
The Scouts run along the riverbank and point at the smoke and yell, and one, with a droopy face, his sweat-damp hair cut close under his field cap, looks at the remains of the fire, says, “Look, bones! People bones!”
The Scoutmaster strolls to the smoking pit full of burnt wood and bones and curling black smoke, and looks. Pursing his lips, hands on hips, face puffed with satisfaction, he says, “Son. Don’t make foolish pronouncements. Don’t you know a cook fire when you see it? Meat has been cooked here. Animal meat. Not human meat. Hog, I believe, from the state and size of those bones. But human bones? Not at all. As a Scout, you need to know what to look for.”
The boys begin to pogo around the fire like hungry cannibals.
“Eat them bones,” one says, and then another. It’s a ring-around-the-rosy of voices and leaping.
“Stop!” the Scoutmaster says. Then: “What is our Scout rule that has been broken here?”
The Scouts freeze, study the face of their oracle.
Droopy Face steps forward, says, “Never leave a fire burning. Smokey Bear says the same.”
“He does. And what is the rest of that rule?”
“Leave the place like it was before you used it.”
“Correct. It shouldn’t look as if a fire were ever here. Scouts! Camp shovels.”
Camp shovels are removed from backpacks and unfolded. The boys set to work digging a pit next to the existing one. They rake the remains of the wood and the bones into the pit and cover it. One of the boys leans into Droopy. “Looks like a piece of human skull to me.”
But Droopy is defeated. “Scoutmaster knows what’s up, not you or me.”
The boy who still thinks Droopy was right, and that there is in fact a piece of human skull in the smoking pile, tucks in his thoughts, digs with the others, and covers the remains. By nightfall, he will have forgotten all about it.
Eventually, they smooth the burnt spot into a mud slab on the banks of the old Sabine.

THE HATCHET LADY

She reports her missing husband and the cops ask questions. She looks teary, and the tears are tears of freedom, but the cops falsely believe the loss of true romance glistens on her cheeks. A search is made all over, but turns up nothing.
One of the cops is quite handsome. He wishes he could meet a woman like her. One that would cherish and hold love delicately. He is secretly smitten.
In the meantime, a fisherman’s car is located near the river, well back from the big bridge. Parked on one of the red dirt trails, not too far from where the river flows. The fisherman is missing too. He has no wife. He has no friends. He’s retired. All that is known about him is he likes to fish.
His rod and tackle box and some sun-toasted worms in a bucket are found. Thoughts are that he slipped and drowned and has been borne away. The river is assumed guilty of murder.
As for the Hatchet Lady.
At the Methodist church the Hatchet Lady attends, rumor is her husband has abandoned his job as well as his wife. Ran off with another woman. Someone quick to drop their knickers and take up with wedded men. Has her own car, most likely, and they have rode away in it. It’s been said by some to some others who know some others, that he and a hot blond with a dress so short she has to powder two sets of cheeks, have been seen somewhere up in Waxahachie.
The Hatchet Lady gradually acquires the personality of a bird freed from a cage. She sings in the choir. In time she will marry the handsome cop that came to ask questions. The search for her husband gets lost in the shuffle of time.

THE RIVER

Rain storms come and go. They wash the river and make it flow. The river expands and covers the bank where the bones lie buried. Over time, the water erodes the shore. The burnt wood, bones, and memories of murder that the shoreline knows, are washed away in a torrential downpour, dissolving wood, tumbling those hatchet-snapped bones on out into a fast-flowing current.
In the night, the full moon lies on the water like a flat polished stone. In the day the moon goes away and the sun comes up, makes the water yellow and shiny. Moonlight and sunlight rise and sink.
And the river churns along, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, carrying the remains of the men out to the Gulf of Mexico.

---

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of fifty novels and four hundred shorter works, including stories, essays, reviews, and film and TV scripts. He has received numerous recognitions for his work, among them the British Fantasy Award, the Edgar, the Spur, and ten Bram Stokers for his horror works. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Literature, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and is the writer in residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, their pit bull, and a cranky cat.

Illustration: Matt Rota

Ed Chaney shot Lesser Dunn to death in 1907. This was only a few years after Ed was elected sheriff and his wife succumbed to an affliction of the brain. She had been a kind woman in life, Ed’s Vera, known for her patchwork quilts, but no amount of tongues or hands laid upon her at the Holy Christ Church ever tamed the demon in her skull. Ed’s father, Otis Chaney, who’d sold dry goods across the railroad tracks, was dead a while by then. Ed himself was the father of no children. After Vera was buried, he took comfort solely in the weight of his office, which he bore with the same solemnity and grace as the gold wedding ring he had yet to remove. He never wore a badge, or a gun. But he always wore that ring.
Back then, at the turn of the century, these hills were yet wild and a man could get lost up here and never see home or kin—or himself—again. Back when the ginseng was thick and the water was clear and Lesser Dunn lived in a cave at the top of Black Arrow Rock, or as we knew it, the Bar. We still tell stories about Lesser: How he had a silver mane like a spray of falls down his spine, eyes black as volcano glass. How, if a man was vigilant by light of the full moon, he might spy Lesser creeping out of them trees on all fours to raid some chicken coops. Strip a bird with his teeth, eat its flesh raw. Those kinds of stories.
But this ain’t that kind of story. Not really.
Ed was the only man living in Ransom County who knew the truth about Lesser because Otis Chaney bought whiskey from him when Ed was a boy. Otis took cornmeal and salt pork up the mountain to trade for liquor, and Ed went along at his old man’s heels. Lesser kept mostly in the shadows of his cave during these transactions, venturing out as far as a cusp of shaded rock that overhung the gorge like a swollen lip. There, he just hunkered down, tall and gangly, face overrun by a mossy gray beard. That hair, spilling down his shoulders. He wore overalls smudged with soot and stained in rust-colored patches. His corn-whiskey still, Ed’s father said, was forty or fifty yards up in a stand of spruces, near a running brook. Lesser traded with no one but Otis, who sold the old shiner’s liquor in his dry goods store. I bought a bottle or two myself, back in the day.
Ed was twenty-nine when his father died. Otis was hoeing up a new vegetable garden behind their little clapboard house when his heart just stopped like a clock at three in the morning. Afterward, for a while anyway, Ed kept up the store and the trade with Lesser, carrying bundles of beans and pork and meal all wrapped in butcher’s paper up to the Bar. Lesser barely spoke to Ed, who as a boy had sat on the edge of that great granite slab for sometimes over an hour, waiting on his father to emerge from the dark mouth of Lesser’s cave. Looking out on the land below, hardwoods and hills and meadow balds, marveling at all the things he didn’t yet know.
Once, Ed asked Otis if he and Lesser were friends.
“Much as men like us can be,” was what Otis said.

In the spring of 1907, a logging outfit moved in and set up its headquarters in Otis Chaney’s old store. The railroad brought strangers in heavy wool coats and fingerless mittens, knit caps pulled down on heavy brows. Soon enough, saws chewed wood in the foothills below the Bar. We all watched from our tin-roofed porches as ancient trees toppled. We mended corn cribs and slopped hogs while the timber cracked. Above us, looming, that bald jut of rock like a knob of gristle and bone. The only part of us that company didn’t want. Somewhere up there was a cave haunted by a creature we prayed the Lord God to loose upon them company men, before the whole of creation fell beneath their blades.
It was a rainy March day, about noon. Ed sat on his porch, tuning up a banjo made from a turtle’s shell. Down the road came a sullen, pimple-faced boy in denim and boots. He pushed through the rickety gate at the edge of Ed’s property and Ed got a look and saw it was the eldest boy of a pig farmer named Spitz. Ed called out a warning as he picked his shell: “My day off.”
“Your sorry-ass deputy sent me,” the boy smarted. He tucked his hands in the bib of his overalls and spat snuff. “I done been to see him.”
“Well, what can I do Ronald Biggs can’t?”
The boy’s shoulders slumped. Most likely, he’d been roused early that morning for chores, made to walk the dusty road into town after a long three hours of milking, pitching, planting. He had a half-moon bruise beneath his eye in the shape of his daddy’s knuckles.
“What’s wrong, Elmer?” Ed said. “You and your sister well?”
Elmer Spitz rubbed his nose and shook his head. “Ain’t that. Daddy said tell you them damned loggers done kilt our hog.”
The boy’s words felled something in Ed. A crack like a great pine giving way, crashing forever to the ground. But he only said, mildly, “Well, I am sorry to hear it. Why would they do that?”
“On account of Daddy won’t let ’em cut up above our holler.”
“Don’t seem like killing your hog would persuade you.”
The boy spat again and met Ed’s gaze. “They done bad things to her.”
It was not a quarter hour before Ed’s horse was clipping along the dirt road up into Spitz Hollow, the boy dozing behind him, cheek warm against Ed’s back. A Winchester rifle was lashed with rawhide cord to the pommel of Ed’s saddle. A pair of rutted tracks forked off from the road and wound up to a mud-daubed cabin. Spitz sat on the rough-hewn steps of the porch, ladling water from a cedar bucket over his shoulders, a pair of red suspenders like fallen wings around his waist. Holding the bucket, eyes red and cheeks swollen from hard crying, was a freckled, plump girl in a homemade dress, thirteen or fourteen.
Ed drew his mount up, let the boy get down, then swung out of the saddle.
Spitz threw the ladle back in the bucket and told the girl to get. To Elmer, Spitz said, “Take the sheriff’s horse out to the barn and give it water.”
Ed took his rifle down before the boy led the horse away. He hung there in the hardpan of the yard, eyes traipsing the encroaching woods, where a veil of mist still clung between the treetops. On the breeze, the stink of hogs.
“Well,” Spitz said. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Best see it for yourself.”
Wordlessly, Ed followed him out past the barn and a patch of newly sprouted squash and tomatoes, past plowed rows that would, come summer, be corn, past several muddy hog pens—one of them empty—then beneath a canopy of pines and cedars, dogwoods and white-blooming rhododendrons.
“Right up here,” Spitz said, pushing aside a fistful of branches.
Ed drew a breath and swallowed a rank, metallic stench, beneath it the damp scents of rot and earth. In the next breath, he saw it, and his stomach rose hotly into his throat. He covered his mouth with his sleeve.
Just up the hill, in a fall of dead leaves, a giant sow lay on her pink, hairy side, stomach slit down the middle, insides heaped beside her on a slab of rock. In a litter about her teats, as if they had burst forth and wriggled back to suck, were the slick, curled shapes of six piglets.
“She’s due any day,” Spitz said.
“Where’s her head?” Ed said.
Spitz pointed.
It was set on the rotted stump of a beech tree, a few yards in back of them. Facing its own corpse. Thick tongue lolling out and turning black. The eyes tattered holes.
“Jesus wept,” Ed said.
“So did Alma. She loved this pig.”
“Alma saw this?”
“She found it. Come out here to gather kindling early this morning. Ran back to the house a-hollering. Thought she’s snake-bit the way she took on.”
Ed gave a grunt.
“Inside the head,” Spitz said, “it’s scraped clean like a porridge bowl.”
With a white handkerchief from his pocket, Ed tilted the head back by one of its leathery ears, but the ear slipped from his fingers and the head tumbled wetly from the stump and rolled in the leaves. He squatted, looked up into the neck. “You hear or see anything?”
“Howling. Last night. Elmer heard it, too.”
“Like a wolf?”
“Like a man.”
Ed said, “Like a logger?”
“Could be.”
“They been here almost a month, Jim, ain’t caused any trouble.”
“Took ’em that month to get within half a mile of my property. This is a warning, clear as day, Ed.” Spitz pointed at the unborn pigs strewn on the rock. “They mean to do me and my family harm. Clear as day.”
Ed folded the handkerchief and covered his mouth with it and hunkered down by the carcass. Ran his finger over six purple slashes on the haunch. Each one long and deep and ragged. Another set, on the ridge of the hog’s back. “Ain’t nothing clear here, Jim.”
Spitz craned over Ed’s shoulder. “What you make of them marks? Some kind of saw blade?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
“You can’t say.”
Ed met the farmer’s eyes. Stared hard. “I can’t. Say.”
Spitz bit his words and swallowed them.
Ed followed what would have been the pig’s eyeline from the stump to the slab, where black flies lit and crawled. He wanted her to see ’em, he thought. Wanted her to see her babies.
Overhead, buzzards circled black against a tombstone sky.
Ed wondered, briefly, what old Lesser had done with the pig’s brains.

Ed had not exchanged words with Lesser Dunn for a long time. A week after Otis Chaney’s funeral, he’d taken the old man one of his wife’s nicer quilts, along with a bundle of food and cornmeal. He’d called out several times but got no answer, so he’d left the provisions on the doorstep of the cave. Promised the old man he’d carry on, keep selling his liquor. And he had, for a while. Until a better offer came along from the company. Until the day a farmer shook his hand and said he ort to run for sheriff. Still, Ed had kept on trudging up the mountain each month for the liquor, always finding a crate of jars on the rock, always leaving in its place a crate of meal and food. A bushel of peas, a mess of his own fresh corn. And cash out of his own pocket, too, what he estimated each batch was worth. Some of the shine he drank himself, but most of it he poured out in a pit behind his work shed, where nothing green grew anymore. Inside, the shed was heaped with empty jars.
Now, as Ed made his way up onto the Bar, horse pinioned far below, rifle in hand, he saw sign of the old man’s coming and going: broken saplings he’d cut to cover a new still, droplets of cornmeal along the damp outcropping. Ed hesitated at the cave, though he knew Lesser was up in the woods above it, cooking, for out of the earthy woods a breeze brought the tingling smell of burning hickory. For a moment, he stood at the edge of the Bar. Looked down upon the valley. A mile, maybe two, eastward, the logging outfit advanced. A wide swath of primeval forest now made into stumps and mud. He wanted it to be them. Wanted to bring down trouble on their heads, to step into his father’s old store and ask to see the boss. He wanted it for himself, for Jim Spitz, for all who lived in the shadow of that rock.
But he knew better.
He found Lesser in a grove of spruces. The by-then ancient shiner was bent in his soot-stained overalls and humped over a fifty-gallon wooden barrel. He stood stirring uncooked cornmeal into a stew of freshly cooked mash. He stirred with a long wooden stick. A stone’s throw away, atop a furnace built out of rock and red clay, a dented copper still smoked and bubbled. Lesser stopped stirring and stared at Ed, blinking. He looked at the Winchester in Ed’s hand, its barrel tilted skyward.
“Lesser,” Ed said.
Out of the mash Lesser pulled the dripping mash stick—a shovel handle with six long, rusty nails driven through one end. He stood it against a spruce tree.
Ed’s eyes followed it.
In a voice that sounded like a rusty hinge that had not moved in years, Lesser said: “It ain’t ready.”
Ed said, “That’s not why I’m here.”
Lesser hunkered down at the base of a tree and squinted at nothing. He plucked at the damp morning ground with his fingers. His clothes hung off him like loose skin.
“Farmer in the holler lost a pig last night,” Ed said. Staring, yet, at the mash stick where it leaned against the spruce tree. Six long nails. “She was pregnant. You know anything about it?”
Lesser reached into the throat of his dirty shirt and drew out something that Ed, in all the years he’d known the moonshiner, had never seen before: a bullet, tied to a bit of string that was knotted behind his neck. The old man’s limbs were long, his elbows sharp. He turned the bullet in his knobby fingers and met Ed’s gaze through a haze of woodsmoke, his eyes sharp and clear and green. He nodded once, slowly, and there was the seed of something terrible in those eyes, Ed thought. A flicker of twin flames in a corridor of blackest night.
Gooseflesh prickled over the sheriff’s arms.
Lesser looked off, and his eyes seemed to dim, to fade.
Ed said, “Hate to ask it, Les, but I need you to come down with me. Into town.”
Lesser tucked the bullet back into his shirt, into a nest of wiry white hair. “Not now.”
Something in the old man’s voice—something certain, something cold—made Ed’s hand tighten around the Winchester. The barrel tilted down from the sky, toward Lesser. Then dipped on, toward the ground, as Ed took a deep breath and calmed himself. He scratched the base of his neck. “I won’t lock you up, if I don’t need to. That’s the best I can promise.”
Lesser stayed hunkered for a few seconds longer. “I trusted your daddy,” he said. He hawked a wad of phlegm into the leaves. “Reckon I can trust you.”
“Sure you can,” Ed said.
So, after the fire was kicked out and the barrels all sealed, the two men walked side by side down the mountain, picking a path over the mossy rocks and rotting logs, Ed stumbling once or twice, the old shiner as sure-footed as a goat.

An hour before sundown, Ed stood on the jailhouse steps, smoking a clumsily rolled cigarette and missing his wife, whose light touch had always made a firm smoke. How they’d laughed, Ed the only man in the county, Vera reckoned, whose wife rolled his cigarettes for him. Directly, the loggers came and clambered out of their wagons and into Otis Chaney’s old store across the tracks. The sign that hung over the porch now read “Baxter Company Store.” His father’s name had long been whitewashed out. Some of the men were young and loud and whooped and drank from pocket flasks. They fell about one another and held one another up. They seemed to Ed like airy spirits roused from the woods, whiskey-lit and careening nowhere. He finished his cigarette and went inside.
Lesser Dunn sat on a cot in the back cell, elbows on his knees, head of white hair hung between them. Ed’s deputy, Ronald Biggs, had brought a tin plate of steak and potatoes over from Elsie’s before his shift ended, but the food sat untouched on the straw-tick mattress. The cell door was open at Lesser’s request.
Danny Miller was on night duty that week. When Ed walked in, the kid dropped his feet from the desk and stuffed his Western magazine under him where he sat.
“At ease, son.” Ed smiled at the deputy. He carried a wooden footstool into Lesser’s cell and sat on it, trying hard in such cramped quarters not to breathe the old man’s stink of woodsmoke and unwashed skin. The bullet dangled on its cord, out of Lesser’s shirt.
“You under one of your spells last night?” Ed asked.
The old man stared at the rough stone floor.
“If’n you weren’t, what was you doing up there?”
“. . . New still.”
“Up behind Jim Spitz’s property? What the hell for?”
“He got a branch runs off his place. Water’s real clear.”
“And the sow?”
The old shiner’s eyes flicked left and right, as if searching for the why, the how, in the corners of his cell. “Reckon it was rooting in my mash. You know how a pig loves mash.”
“It was in its pen, Lesser. It was drug up that hill. You do that?”
Lesser shrugged.
“I want to help you. Do you believe that?”
“You a honest man.” Lesser looked up, straight into Ed’s eyes.
Ed felt a weird prickle, on the back of his neck: He knows. He knows you empty them jars. He knows you pity him. And it wrecks him, to be pitied. It wrecks us all.
“Why don’t you stay here tonight, Lesser. Where you and Jim Spitz’s livestock will all be safe. What do you say?”
The shiner’s eyes flicked away then, to the open cell door. “Can’t,” he said.
“Seems it’s a hair better than an old damp cave.”
“Can’t do no jail. I told you.”
“We won’t even lock the door, will we, Danny?” Ed called up to the desk.
“No, sir,” the boy called back down the hall.
Here, Lesser’s voice dropped. His hands roamed back and forth over one another, whispering, as was he. “She told me to do it and I did it, Sheriff. But I felt bad after. I wanted her to see her little ones, but it was too terrible a thing to see. I took her eyes so’s she wouldn’t have to look. The other one, the one up there, she didn’t like it. She said I’s weak. And now she’s telling me: I can’t be here tonight.”
For the second time that day, Ed felt gooseflesh burst over his arms. “The other one up where?”
“Her,” Lesser said. He cut his eyes up high, at the narrow window, through the iron bars, beyond which the sky was purpling into twilight and the moon hung full and round like a piece of crosscut bone.
An uneasy feeling crawled around inside Ed. He thought of the day of Vera’s funeral, when he’d gone up the mountain in the rain, same black suit he’d worn to his father’s grave now drenched, hat brim dripping cold water. How he’d stood outside the maw of the cave and called for Lesser, begged him to come out, but there was only the sound of his own voice hollering back down the long throat of the rock. That, and the rain, a curtain of silver shimmering over the mouth of the cave, like a veil separating Ed Chaney from the last great mystery. There, he’d sat in the rain and wept, high above a world forever changed, a wilderness made remote.
“Lesser,” Ed said. “I’m locking you up tonight. To keep you safe. From yourself. Do you understand?”
The old shiner never moved as Ed crossed the floor of the cell, carrying the wooden stool with him. He pulled the heavy iron door shut. He told Lesser that Deputy Danny would see he got breakfast in the morning. Then he turned the key and the lock clicked, and as he turned away, he heard Lesser say, “May not be a chance later, so I’ll say it now.”
“What’s that?”
“Your daddy’s was the only kindness I ever knew. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For him. For your wife. For whatever happens tonight.”
Ed stood watching him. He told himself he was doing the right thing. He had been telling himself this, he thought, for a very long time.
Lesser stuck a finger in his mouth and dug at something between his teeth with his nail. He looked at his tray of meat and potatoes, set it gently on the floor, and lay back on his side. He tucked his knees up to his chest and lay on his cot with his eyes open, staring up at the narrow window of his cell. At the moon.

Ed Chaney slept fitfully that evening, troubled by dreams of his father and his dead wife and the dark cave at the top of Black Arrow Rock. He dreamed he was eating something red with his fingers out of a human skull. He sat at a fire and across the fire was his father, and beside his father was Vera. And when he passed the skull to his father, Otis Chaney looked into the bowl and stared back at his son as if he did not know him, and that’s when a pounding on the front door jerked Ed awake. He kicked off the sweat-soaked covers and strode in his long johns into the vestibule. For a reason he couldn’t immediately figure, he reached for his Winchester where it leaned beside the door. He’d never done this before, and he’d answered many a late-night call at his porch. The dreams, he told himself. “Who is it?”
“It’s Danny, sir,” came an urgent voice.
Ed set the gun aside. He cracked the door. “Danny, what’s—”
The door opened on the lean, boyish face, pale and frantic in the moonlight, his short red hair plastered to his forehead. His horse stood snorting in the yard. “Sheriff, you gotta come. I’m all alone down there and—”
“What the hell are you up to, abandoning your post?”
“The old man’s acting plum weird, Ed, and I don’t think I should be the one—”
“What’s wrong? Is he sick? He has fits, sometimes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s like that.”
Ed took a breath. “Fine. Ride out to Ronald’s. Bring him back. I want you both there in a quarter hour.”
Danny turned and ran for his horse.
Ed shut the door and went to find his pants.

He’d just drawn up to the hitching post outside the jailhouse when an inhuman cry froze Ed in his saddle. His horse danced back, into the street. The sound shot out from the narrow alley between the jail and the post office, from Lesser Dunn’s narrow cell window.
The moon above was huge and yellow.
Ed dismounted, calmed the horse, and hitched it.
Inside, the shiner was on all fours in his cell, scuttling back and forth across the concrete floor. His mouth drew down in a rictus of pain. He made snarling, trapped sounds. Mewled. His cot was upset, mattress and blankets flung across the bricks.
Ed only stood and stared.
He almost hollered when, behind him, Danny said, “It started about nine. Ronald’s on his way.”
Lesser slowed his pacing and began to whine up at the window. He reached up toward the bars with crooked, gnarled fingers. His hands shook.
“He say anything?” Ed asked.
Danny scratched the side of his nose. “Yeah. Called me a shit-eating pig fucker.”
A howl, like a rupture of the spirit, deep inside the old man’s chest, and then he collapsed into a corner and began to tug at the neck of his shirt and grunt and heave. His whole body arching as if in the throes of some galvanic current. He began to tear at his overalls and shirt. He threw them into a corner of the cell and rose upright from hands and knees, then ripped away his undershirt and stood half clad, bullet bouncing against his chest. He raked his fingers down his face, even as a bright yellow circle began to spread on the crotch of his long underwear.
“Damn, Ed,” Danny said. “He’s just pissing.”
Raising his big hands and skinny arms above his head and arching his crooked back, the old shiner drew in a deep breath and let out a gut-wrenching scream. He continued to scream, over and over, even as he tore at the cotton of his soiled undergarments, until finally he stood naked before them, arms thrust heavenward, as if caught up in some horrible state of religious ecstasy.
Danny backed away, toward his desk. He wore, Ed noticed, his Colt revolver.
Ed himself held his Winchester. Held it so hard his knuckles were white.
The old man’s cries ceased suddenly, the ensuing silence tomblike.
It was then that Deputy Ronald Biggs, who’d been standing waxen-faced in the open jailhouse door, made his presence known by saying: “God a’mighty, fellows, would you look at his pecker.”
Surprised, Ed and Danny turned to Biggs, who pointed.
Indeed, they looked and saw that Lesser, who was sniffing the air and grunting now, had an incredible erection. His liver-spotted penis jutted from its nest of pubic hair like an angry rhinoceros horn. “COW HUMPING TITTIES!” the shiner cried, dropping to all fours.
Ronald Biggs threw back his head and laughed.
“God,” Danny said.
“TEAR YER SHITTIN HEADS OFF AND COOK YER BRAINS, YOU SONS A BITCHES!”
Suddenly, Ed remembered his dream, his father holding a skull by firelight.
Lesser’s forehead struck the iron bars of his cell as he threw himself against them. He licked at the blood as it coursed over his mouth. Again, he hurled himself at the bars.
“Stop that, Lesser,” Ed said. His voice trembled.
Lesser grinned, backed away, gathered his legs beneath him, and sprang again. And again.
“We’ve got to stop this,” Danny said.
“Let him knock himself out,” Biggs said.
“He’ll kill himself trying,” Ed said. He threw his Winchester across the desk and snatched a heavy ring of iron keys from a hook on the wall. “Get me that rope from the cabinet, Ronald.”
When he saw Ed coming with the rope and keys, Lesser scurried to a far corner of the cell, crouched down, and pressed his weight on his knuckles. He hissed: “That’s right, ballsuckers,” then gave out a higher-pitched howl, one that was pure animal.
It made Ed falter, key in the lock. “Danny, you cover us now.”
Danny drew his sidearm.
“He’s just an old man, Ed,” Biggs said.
“Not right now he’s not. Right now he’s something else.”
The key turned, the lock clicked, and the door popped open a fraction of an inch. Ed swung it wide and the two men entered. In the second that Biggs was locking the door behind them, Lesser sprang, quick and low, to the deputy’s side. Ed held the rope in both hands, tried to wrap it around the old man, who instead wrapped himself around Ed’s leg and bit down. Ed cried out, trying to get the rope over Lesser’s shoulders, even as Biggs grabbed the shiner around the waist, trying to pry him from Ed’s leg. Lesser let go and he and the deputy went tumbling, and as they went, Ed heard that gentle, easy sound of a pistol leaving its well-oiled holster and had time enough to blink and see Ronald Biggs’s sidearm in Lesser’s big-knuckled hands before the old man put the barrel to the deputy’s temple and squeezed the trigger.
The top of Ronald Biggs’s head blew apart.
The explosion drum-bursting.
The next bullet caught Ed high in the shoulder, hurled him back against the bars.
And now Lesser Dunn was up and leaping at the door and Danny was firing at him, but the old man was moving too fast. Danny’s bullet sparked the iron and ricocheted into the brick, where it remained until the old jailhouse was torn down in 1933. The pistol bucked in Lesser’s hands and Danny skipped backward onto the desk, scattering adventure magazines. Ed’s Winchester rifle clattered to the floor. The sheriff himself slumped against the cell bars, shoulder on fire, as above him Lesser snarled, twisted the key where it still hung in the lock, and threw open the door of his cage.
He leapt on Deputy Danny, still sprawled on the desk.
Lesser howled.
Danny screamed.
Ed scrabbled across the floor to his rifle. He seized Lesser from behind and hauled him off his deputy, then threw him to the floor.
Flat on his back, Lesser brought up Biggs’s pistol. Spittle flew and he snarled: “SHITHOLE!”
Ed shot him in the chest. The Winchester bucked and blasted Lesser Dunn’s life onto the stone floor. He was dead before the deputy’s pistol had slipped from his hand.
It was said, by some, that Lesser did, in fact, shrink before the sheriff’s eyes, diminished from the wild thing he had become. Just an old man again, that strange bullet yet around his neck. Naked, dead, nothing more.
Ed knelt beside him, heart a runaway carriage in his chest. He followed Lesser’s glassy gaze heavenward to the jail’s beadboard ceiling, the wood there warped and water stained. What do you see? he wanted to ask. What do you see?
Danny moaned. The boy’s left eye was gouged into its socket. Blood pooled there, trickling down the deputy’s cheek.
Ed got moving, ran all the way to the doctor’s house.

In the days that followed, with his right shoulder and arm in a sling, Ed Chaney went up onto Black Arrow Rock with an axe, a gallon of kerosene, and a box of matches and destroyed Lesser Dunn’s still. He poured out barrels of fermenting mash and hacked them up as best he could, burned them, then broke apart the rock furnaces and copper cookers. He smashed all the jars of liquor he found—all but two—and buried the shards.
He went into the cave and looked around by the light of a kerosene lantern. The rock rose up sharply on either side and glittered with minerals and damp. Quickly, the ceiling became too low to stand upright, until finally it opened onto a narrow chamber, the floor of which was littered with the pale, gnawed bones of tiny animals. A few of these were bigger, one the length of a man’s shin. Scattered among them, a pack of nudie playing cards. Far overhead, an oculus of stone through which a fattening moon shone out of the bright blue sky. Finally, in the farthest corner of this den, Ed Chaney found his dead wife’s quilt, worn and wet, but folded neatly on a slab of rock.
He took the quilt and wrapped the last two jars of shine in it and carried them off the Bar. Then he rode out to the doc’s house near the sawmill, where he found Danny Miller sitting on the porch, sporting a black eye patch and a splinted leg. They sat together and drank the moonshine until nothing made sense and everything was clear.
A few months later, we weren’t all that surprised when Ed Chaney left the office of sheriff. The woods all around were gone by then, the Baxter Company had moved on, and his father’s old store was empty again. Some folks said Ed went south, down to where the trees were sharp and spiny and the air was warmer. Others said he went west and crossed the Mississippi, took a job with the US Marshals Service in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Others said he went north, into the Smokies, where he married a half-Cherokee woman in the business of making pottery. It’s said, on the night they wed, after all the lights were out and husband and wife had made love in the dark, the bride woke to find the groom’s side of the bed cold and empty. So she slipped from the covers and walked barefoot through the cabin until she saw her husband through the screen door, silhouetted on the porch at the rail, naked. She stepped outside and pressed up against him, ran one hand over a pale white scar—a camellia bud—on his shoulder.
“What, old man,” it’s said she asked, “do you see, out here in the dark?”
And Ed Chaney, the people who remember him say, pointed to the full moon in the sky, touched the bullet that hung around his neck, and answered: “Her.”

---

Andy Davidson’s most recent novel, The Boatman’s Daughter, was listed among NPR’s Best Books of 2020. His debut novel, In the Valley of the Sun, was a 2017 Bram Stoker Award nominee. Born and raised in Arkansas, he makes his home in Georgia with his wife and a bunch of cats.

Illustration: Matt Rota

 

It was hard for Ruger Floyd to watch another man making money like that, all those pretty mommas dropping hundred-dollar bills into a red gym bag the Black dude had set up in a lawn chair; couple footballs, six orange cones—and that was it. A twelve-hundred-dollar operation, if Ruger’d counted right, running back over the numbers in his head when a voice behind him said, “Which one’s yours?”
Ruger had both elbows resting on top of a chain-link fence. He pressed his chin to his shoulder, beard stubble scraping leather as he turned and saw a woman who’d gotten lost in the shuffle of the big-haired blondes, all those other women sitting in the stands on the other side of the field. They looked like Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—shit, they probably were at some point—but this one was different. Had three solid black bands tattooed around her left wrist, and a nose ring. Jesus Christ. Hair parted straight down the middle like a hippie but wearing a five-hundred-dollar Patagonia jacket. A rich hippie. What was the word? A hipster? Ruger wasn’t sure but he guessed this one was real picky about what she ate. Open-minded when it came to other stuff, though. Ruger pictured himself in bed with the woman, a mosquito net dangling from the ceiling, sticking to his back as he gave it to her somewhere down in Mexico.
Ruger said, “Which what?” and the woman took a step toward the fence, getting right up beside him, almost like she was hiding, before nodding to the swarm of little boys in Dri-Fit Nike gear running around on the artificial turf. “Which kid. I mean—” She stopped and rolled her eyes. “Which quarterback?” Grinning at Ruger now. “They can’t even throw a ball yet, but here we are. Only in Texas, right?”
Ruger was in Mesquite—a suburb of Dallas—after serving sixteen months at Hutchins State Jail on aggravated assault charges. Two days on the outside and he was horny as hell but keeping his mind occupied hunting up work. Had applications in at a Pizza Hut and the Superfast Lube & Oil over on Kearney Street. A manager at the McDonald’s inside the Walmart just off East Main had asked to do an interview on the spot, like Ruger’s leather vest and cutoff T-shirt didn’t scare him one bit. Only thing that’d bothered the little guy, whose name tag read Chad, was the fact that Ruger’d been convicted of a felony within the last three years. Ruger cracking his knuckles as he told him, “That charge was bullshit. Didn’t have no knife. No gun. Nothing. Hit the dude square in his eye with my fist and broke his face. Not his nose. His face. Eye socket. Cheekbones. Everything on the left side. Got some kind of infection he’s in the hospital and died. Tried explaining all that to the judge and he told me to watch it. Said he’d slap my ass with second-degree murder and put me away for twenty-five to life. Know what I said to that?”
All Ruger’d said to the judge was, “Yessir,” and that’s how he’d gotten out of Hutchins after sixteen months. He never got the chance to tell Chad that, though. Didn’t even get to tell him about the guy he’d punched; how he’d hit him for less than sliding out of a McDonald’s booth and walking away, which was exactly what Chad did midway through the interview.
The old Ruger would’ve hopped the counter and pushed Chad’s pointy head under the McFlurry machine. The new Ruger was different, though. Reformed enough to leave the McDonald’s and take a walk to clear his mind, a walk that had led him to E. H. Hanby Stadium. Besides, there wasn’t any money in aggravated assault. There wasn’t any money flipping burgers for minimum wage, either. There was, however, over a thousand bucks in that Black dude’s gym bag, the big broad-shouldered brother out on the field now, chasing a bunch of White kids around some cones.
The woman said, “I noticed you right off,” and Ruger cut his eyes at her. “Don’t see many dads at the sessions when the boys are this young.”
“Well . . .” Ruger shrugged, glancing at the money bag. “I ain’t most dads.”
“You’re a good guy.”
“I’m just here for my boy.”
“You still haven’t told me which kid’s yours, Mr.—”
“Mine’s the one with the headband and the hair.” Ruger nodded toward the field, trying to decide whether to make up a name or just keep giving the woman his strong, silent act, when she said, “Cute kid. How long’s he been coming to see the Guru?”

Jade had to pinch her nose to keep from laughing when the burly dude coughed into his fist and said, “The Gu-ru?”
“The parents came up with that, four, maybe five years ago. Right after one of Daye’s quarterbacks signed a full-ride scholarship with UT.”
“The Longhorns?”
“You brought your kid here, paid the hundred bucks, but you don’t know the story?”
“Course I know the story.”
The guy didn’t know shit. That kid he’d claimed was his with the headband and the hair was one of Daye’s prized pupils. His older brother was the one who’d put the Zen QB System on the map. The first quarterback from the program to sign a D1 scholarship. Jade glanced across the field to the mothers in the stands, focusing in on the skinny blonde wearing Lululemon leggings and a neon-green sports bra, wondering if the woman could see her too, and if she could, how much did she know? Jade knew one thing for sure—this guy was lying. What she didn’t know was why he was hanging around a quarterback training session for five- to eight-year-olds on a Saturday afternoon, dressed like an extra from Easy Rider.
“That quarterback who signed with UT?” Jade said. “He was drafted last April. Daye got to go to Las Vegas with him and everything. ESPN did a segment called ‘The Guru and the Kid.’ Things got crazy after that.”
The guy said, “Who’s Dave?” and Jade told herself to walk away right then. Wait till she was back in her car and call the cops. But instead she felt herself staring at that green sports bra again, six inches of cleavage going up and down, as she said, “Daye,” then spelled it out for him. “Like night and—”
“I got it.”
“Daye Jones. He played quarterback for the Cowboys back in the mid-2000s. Filled in for Romo here and there.”
“Ah, shit. Yeah,” the guy said, wagging a finger in Jade’s face. “Course I remember Daye Jones. Muffed the hold on the extra point would’ve sealed the division for the first time in forever. Jesus. Now he’s stuck running kiddie camps for a hundred bucks a day?”
Jade laughed. She couldn’t help it. “It’s a hundred dollars an hour, man. Daye’s had three sessions this morning. Four more after lunch. Didn’t you sign the waiver?”
The guy had hair on his shoulders, curly black sprigs trapped under his leather vest as he hunched forward over the chain-link fence. “You’re telling me he’s got close to ten grand in that bag? And that’s just from today?” The guy shook his head. “But he was just a backup. A backup quarterback that muffed—”
“Daye says that extra point—the one that cost the Cowboys the division back in ’09—was the singular turning point in his life.” Jade took a long breath in through her nose, still not sure what she was doing there, why she was wasting her time with the hairy trucker-looking dude, but not quite ready to walk away yet either. “It made him slow down, really focus on what he was doing. You know, live in the moment. Meditation. Mindfulness. All that Zen stuff.”
The guy sucked his teeth, still staring out at the field. “Why the hell you know so much about him, huh? You like a groupie or something?”
“A groupie? No,” Jade said and glanced at the stands again. “I’m his wife.”

Ruger didn’t see that one coming, but he played along anyway, letting the woman explain how her husband made his living teaching little boys to breathe in real deep through their noses. “Everything starts with the breath,” the man’s wife said, waving to the field where the twelve tiny QBs were sitting cross-legged on the goal line, eyes closed as Daye walked behind them, tapping their heads with the back of his hand. “Posture’s important too,” the woman added. “Daye calls this opening sequence the Uncarved Block. It’s a way for the kids to clear their minds before they get into the meat of the session.”
“They ain’t even thrown a ball yet,” Ruger said, eyes jumping from the row of boys to the red gym bag stuffed full of money sitting right out in the open, all those orange-faced women in the bleachers behind it. What Ruger needed was a distraction. Something that’d get the momma bears looking the other way long enough he could grab the money and go.
“The ball’s not important,” the woman said. “Daye teaches the boys to focus on the process instead of the result. The ball will find its way . . .”
Ruger said, “Jesus H. Christ,” and slapped at the chain link. “I’m sorry, lady, but your husband’s full of shit.”
The woman didn’t say anything, and that surprised Ruger, the ex-con watching her as the boys straddled the goal line in the distance, standing over it now, palms pressed together in front of their chests.
“You hear me? I said your husband’s full of—”
“I know.”
The woman’s voice was so soft, Ruger could barely hear it. He leaned down, close enough to smell her hair, watching her lips move as she said, “But the parents don’t. They eat Daye’s shit up. Which says something about you, doesn’t it?”
Ruger straightened.
“What’re you doing here, man? What’s your angle?”
Ruger took a step back and raised both hands, palms out toward the woman.
“You some sort of perv?”
“Shit, no,” Ruger said. “Told you, that’s my boy out—”
“That kid’s mom is the blonde with her tits hanging out in the top row of the stands. His name’s Sailor. You believe that? Sailor. Stacia used to be a Cowboys cheerleader back in ’09.”
“Staci-a?” Ruger said. “Shit,” starting to get the picture now, the dates coming together in his mind. “ ’09, huh? The same season Daye muffed that hold.”
The woman went quiet again, squinting at the Black man on the field. Ruger followed her aim, watching as Daye Jones hovered over the longhaired kid with the headband, all the other boys milling around in the end zone, bored because the Guru had his mind on Sailor’s momma’s monkey.
“Listen, if you’re after the money,” the woman said without turning, “I don’t care. I’ll even help you get it, but you’ve got to do something for me first. Okay?”

The guy looked like a professional wrestler walking onto the football field. Jade’s daddy was a Hacksaw Jim Duggan fan, always hollering at the TV whenever Hacksaw’d face off against Kamala on WCW Monday Nitro, a redneck with a two-by-four going up against an obese Black man from Mississippi, James Arthur Harris portraying a Ugandan giant dressed in a loincloth, toting a shield and a spear.
Maybe all those Monday nights had given Jade the idea, or maybe she just couldn’t stand the thought of spending another Saturday staring at Stacia’s tits. It didn’t matter now. Things were already in motion, the big guy whose name she still didn’t know was halfway across the field carrying a piece of metal pipe instead of a two-by-four but other than that looking exactly like her daddy’s favorite wrestler. Daye didn’t need to wear a loincloth or an African tribal mask, his name had already been given to him, “the Guru” looking up from Sailor’s shock of bronze hair as the big guy said, “You and me, brother. Right here. Right now,” sounding like Macho Man Randy Savage doing a Slim Jim commercial, all the boys huddled together, wide-eyed in the end zone.
The way Daye rolled his head around his shoulders, a look on his face like, Here we go again . . . , surprised Jade but also made her feel better about telling the big guy she’d pay him half of whatever was in the gym bag to rough Daye up, publicly. The guy’d said, “Come on. Not in front of the kids.” But that was the only way it’d work. Jade wanted a front-row seat to the show.
Daye said, “Hold up, man. Hold the fuck—” and the big guy swung the pipe but whiffed, Daye sidestepping the lumberjack, a Black ninja walking sideways and backwards at the same time, both hands erect and ready in front of his chest. All those hours spent talking about Zen, Jade thought, maybe Daye’d picked up karate through osmosis. She wasn’t sure, but the women were stampeding down the bleachers now, Stacia leading the charge, pumping her fists as she hollered, “Whoop his ass, Daye!” Like her son wasn’t right there in the middle of it, Sailor and the other eleven boys forming a loose circle around the men.
Jade stood on the other side of the field, taking in the spectacle and guessing maybe this sort of thing happened more often than she’d realized. She only came to a few sessions per month—whenever Daye was in or around Dallas—but he worked six, sometimes seven days a week. The Zen QB System took him all across the country. Daye probably had housewives lined up at every stop along the way. Probably had to deal with pissed-off daddies from time to time too. No wonder he’d learned karate, or maybe jujitsu. Whatever it was was working. Daye had the big dude in a sleeper hold now, his bicep flexing around the guy’s neck as he brought him down to one knee, then the other.
The pipe slipped through the man’s fingers and hit the turf without a sound.
Jade whispered, “Shit,” and took a deep breath in through her nose, telling herself to focus on the process instead of the result. Then thinking, Fuck that. There was still one angle left she could play.

Sirens wailed in the distance. That’s what Ruger heard when he opened his eyes, darkness giving way to blue Texas sky, twelve smiling faces staring down at him.
“Daaamn,” said the boy with the long blond hair. “You just got knocked the fuck out!”
It was the kid Ruger’d tried to claim as his own. He looked different up close. Darker. The one with the funny name. What was it?
“Sailor,” a woman’s voice said. “The man got choked out, hon. Not knocked out. Watch your words, hon.”
Ruger blinked, trying to make sense of what had happened, how he’d let that Black dude slip around behind him, but then the huddle of boys began to part, clearing a path for the guy. The Guru. Shit. He had the pipe Ruger’d found beside the gate in one hand, that red gym bag in the other.
“The hell you think you doing,” the Guru said, smacking the pipe against his palm, “coming at me like that, man?”
Ruger said, “I’s aiming to whoop your ass.”
The Black man leaned back and laughed, glancing around at the kids, then to their mommas behind them, arms folded over silicone sweater mounds. The Black guy had a goofy name, but Ruger couldn’t remember it. He was still thinking of him as the Guru when the guy squatted down and said, “You was aiming to whoop my ass, huh?”
“That’s what I said.”
The Guru tapped the pipe gently against Ruger’s left knee. Ruger was so busy watching the pipe, he didn’t notice the gym bag between his legs.
“Where’s my money, man?”
Ruger stared into the empty bag, licking his lips before he said, “Your wife, she—”
The pipe touched Ruger’s chin, making his eyes cross as he looked down at it, then back up at the Guru.
“You say something about my wife?”
“Yeah, she—”
“Hold up.” The Guru turned his head but kept both eyes on Ruger. “You hearing this, baby?”
The boys shifted as the woman pushed through the crowd. Ruger looked down. His head felt fuzzy, like the morning after a night spent drinking prison wine. What had he been thinking? A woman like that coming on to him, two days out of Hutchins? He hadn’t even had time to shave. He should’ve known it was a setup. Two days out, he should’ve known better. Eyes still down, Ruger saw the woman’s rainbow-colored tennis shoes snap to a stop on the turf.
“You know this man?” Daye said, the name coming back to Ruger just like that. Night and—
“Daye, baby. Look at him. He’s got hair on his shoulders.”
Her voice—it was all wrong. Ruger looked up, straight into the biggest pair of knockers he’d ever seen on a woman didn’t weigh over two hundred pounds. Jesus Christ. They were something, wrapped tight in a green sports bra, but they didn’t belong. The woman who’d said she was the Black dude’s wife had gymnast tits, peeking out from under her puffy jacket a couple times while she was telling Ruger to go whoop her “husband’s” ass.
“You got sixty seconds,” Daye said, still squatting in front of Ruger, cocking his ear to the sirens in the distance, getting closer now, “maybe less, before the police get here. So let me ask you one more time. Who the hell took my money?”
Ruger said, “Was this girl, man. I’m telling you.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Different. I don’t know. Said she’s your wife and I believed her ’cause she looked like the kind a woman—”
“—that’d fuck a Black dude?”
“Marry a Black dude,” Ruger said, frowning. “She was cute. Like a gypsy or something. Had a nose ring and three black bands tattooed around her—”
Daye stood up, quick. “Get the hell outta here, man.”
Ruger blinked and saw Daye waving the pipe across the field now, pointing toward the nearest exit, saying, “Go on. Before I change my mind.”
Ruger stood and took one step before the big-breasted woman in the green sports bra said, “That’s it?” planting both hands on her hips. “You’re letting him go?”
“You see the money on him anywhere, Stacia? I whooped his ass already. What else you want me to do?”
Daye looked from his wife—his real one—to Ruger, and the ex-con finally saw the truth in his eyes, the reason the man had stopped asking questions. The same reason the man wanted him gone.
“Excuse me, Mr. Guru?” Ruger said and raised a hand. “Since I didn’t take the money and you already whooped my ass, like you said, I’s wondering if you might be willing to tell them officers pulling up in the parking lot over there”—Ruger pointed—“that this’s all just been one big misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding my ass,” Stacia hissed. “You came at my husband with a pipe!”
“Yeah, and I’m real sorry about it, but what I’m talking about now don’t got nothing to do with that. Ain’t that right, Daye?”
Ruger gave the Guru a grin and a shrug, knowing he could get away with anything now. All it’d take was a couple more words, a few more details about the girl in the Patagonia jacket, and surely Stacia’d realize her husband had been fucking around.
Daye pressed his fingertips together upside down above his waist and said to Ruger, “You and me, we gonna go talk to the police together. Put this whole thing behind us. Aight?”
Ruger nodded, then winked at the man’s wife, picturing her in that bed down in Mexico, the one with the mosquito net, the other woman rolling around in there too, but not Daye. He could keep his ass in Texas. Shit. The Guru’d had both women already—probably a whole bunch of other ones too—and all it’d cost him was a measly ten grand.

---

Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level, peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and kids. Eli’s novel Don’t Know Tough won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and will be published by Soho Press in 2022. Along with fiction, Eli writes a nationally syndicated sports column, and his craft column, “Shop Talk,” appears online monthly at CrimeReads. Eli is currently at work on his next novel.

Josie had tried to unsubscribe from the emails, but they just kept coming. She didn’t even know when she had signed up for the newsletter, to be honest. It must have been during her first breakup, the one with the woman who now lived on an artists’ compound in Texas, along with two girlfriends and a dog. Josie’s dog, to be clear. Josie had looked up pictures of the compound once.
“It looks like a fucking cult!” she had cried to her best friend, Kim, on the phone as she sat on her bed, cradling a large bowl of spaghetti. She didn’t even care that she was wearing outside clothes on the bed right now. No one would ever sleep in bed with her or see her ever again anyway. “A fucking cult!”
“What do you mean?” Kim said. “I think you may be overthinking things a bit.”
“No, there’s like, so many trees. And people smiling really big and looking disheveled and stuff. Oh my God, I bet she’s dating the cult leader. The one with the ugly, beady eyes is definitely the leader. I’m sending you a pic.”
“Okay.” There was a small pause as Kim looked at her phone. “Yeah. Wow. Could be.”
“And the other one! The one with the huge tits. I can’t even think about it. Is that why she left? Because my tits weren’t big enough? Even though they’re already pretty big?”
“No. It wasn’t the tits. Also, she wasn’t really nice to you anyway. You were always complaining about her. How she didn’t really talk to you, or told you you weren’t dating for the first nine months of your relationship. Also, when she said it was your fault for being upset when she started dating someone and didn’t tell you. While you were still together, by the way. Do you remember any of that?”
“I loved her,” Josie sobbed. “Looooooved herrrrrrr.”
“And I’m saying you’re better off. Also, please take a shower. Eric told me you said you hadn’t showered in two weeks.”
“Eric told you that?”
“Yes. Also, sorry, Mae is home so I have to go now. I’ll text you later. Love you.”
“Okay. Okay. I love you too.”
“Please bathe.”
Then the phone had gone silent, and Josie had gone silent for three months after that, avoiding Kim, Mae, Eric, her parents, her landlord, the delivery man, her boss at the photo retouching studio. She almost lost her job for that last one. Or did lose it. But she made her way back into her boss’s good graces by not sleeping for two weeks to take on more projects, her eyes shot from staring at a screen for hours on end—fixing blemishes, restructuring cheekbones, lengthening and shortening chins, smoothing out the crinkly lines underneath eyes so that these people could go onto covers of magazines and albums and billboards. When she was finally able to sleep again after those two weeks were over, she had passed out for forty-eight hours, her dreams rotating images of body parts being rearranged to form perfect bodies, perfect people.
When she got home after work, though, that was when things could get bad.
She had a lot of tarot decks. Around fifty or so. Maybe even more. At first it had been innocent—just something that she liked to collect. She had always loved how different artists drew the cards, their personal interpretations of Strength or Temperance or The Tower, loved that the cards would give you advice that you most likely already knew and could use for personal betterment. Friends gifted them to her on birthdays or even just as a “thinking of you” sort of gift, and if she was wandering through a thrift shop or used bookstore, she would quickly rummage through the spirituality section in search of a deck she didn’t own.
But she would never let something like what happened with The Ex happen again. Next time, she would be able to anticipate something horrible like this happening, right? And if she could see something coming in the future that she didn’t like, she could change it. Easy. Every decision was one the cards could answer. To get Cheerios or not get Cheerios? To wear this sweater or that one? Should she bring an umbrella to work in case it rained? Would this date be a good or a bad one? Should she go with the nicer mattress that would last around ten years or the cheaper one that would last around three? Should she go outside or not? Any wrong decision could lead to something bad happening, which is why this practice sometimes took up whole nights, Josie staying awake from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., flipping, shuffling, trying different spreads—Celtic Crosses; Past, Present, Future; The Year-Long Tree. Ten of Swords. Two of Swords reversed. Ten of Cups. Six of Wands reversed. Five of Swords reversed. Each of them compelling her to keep asking, to not stop until she had arrived at a firm answer. One that she wanted to hear.
It got to a point where she was even reading during dinners, at parties, shuffling through things underneath tables or excusing herself to go into the bathroom. Josie could tell that everyone was worried about her, but she just couldn’t stop herself. And it wasn’t like she wasn’t ashamed of it either. If she wasn’t, why would she go to the bathroom?
Finally Kim had intervened.
“I’m coming over.”
“Right now?”
“Yes,” Kim said, and hung up the phone.
After that Kim had taken all the decks, all the runes, the crystals and books and everything, and loaded them into her trunk while Josie cried and tried to grab at things. Kim just kept shaking her off as she shoved the Aleister Crowley deck, the Druid Animal Oracle deck, the Romance Angel deck (the last of the haul) into a trash bag.
“I’ll keep them somewhere. I won’t throw them away. Okay?”
“Okay. Okay. Thank you, Kim. I love you so much.”
Kim didn’t say anything. Then she brought Josie’s form toward her and put her forehead to Josie’s for a short minute. It was very warm.
They stood in the driveway, breathing. Then Kim moved away, giving Josie’s hand one last squeeze before driving away.
That moment had given her the strength to call a therapist, who helped her work through control issues, letting go, blah blah blah. Every time she wanted to read she would write down her worries, a list starting with the very worst thing that could happen and ending with the least catastrophic option. That way she could see if she was being realistic or not.
“Just remember that your mind can lie to you sometimes,” Tina would say, as Josie picked at the raw skin on her thumb with her teeth or looked at the floor after revealing something embarrassing or sad about her life. “You don’t have to believe everything that it says.”
She didn’t see Tina as often anymore—maybe once or twice a month. Because now Josie could say she was functioning. If nothing else, she was functioning. She had her apartment that she shared with the roommate whom she wasn’t really close with but had known in college, and from whose room she could hear sounds of a controller being mashed late into the night. Sometimes they would see each other in the mornings and ask polite questions about each other’s lives before they headed off to work.
She had her neurotic, lanky cat, Terry, whom she loved. She had Kim and Eric and some of their other friends, whom she also loved. Sometimes on her days off, she would walk to the café down the street to order a slice of coconut cake as a treat, eating it by herself as she read through books or flipped through her phone or journaled things like “Today I feel a little bad,” or “I passed by a stream today. Azalea bushes growing by it. Very beautiful. I want a better dildo,” before going back home.
So yeah, it had all been very dramatic and tiring, for Kim especially. It had taken a lot of work to get this far, to being a semi-stable person with a job and a cat and friends.
But now there were the emails.
The sender was Divine Tarot Guidance. All the subject lines were different iterations of the same thing, more or less.
Don’t underestimate this person.
Josie, your true love is waiting for you.
Been thinking about that person from your past again? They’re thinking about you too . . .
Who is this new moon bringing toward you?
And when you opened an email, there was a small, glittering wheel you could spin to get a look into what might happen. After that, you had to pay two dollars to get the full reading.
There it was. That itch. Why not, for old times’ sake? Tina had even told her it wasn’t something that would just disappear overnight, right? It’s a constant process, she had said in her calm, measured voice as they sat in her office, Josie crossing and uncrossing her leg on the green velvet couch, Tina passing her some eucalyptus lotion to calm her nerves. It’s hard, but I know you can do it.
So this meant that it was okay. Just this once.
Josie didn’t have a specific question in mind, but she held her breath and pressed the wheel.
It spun for about ten seconds before slowing to a stop.
CLICK TO SEE! appeared in blue cursive, an arrow pointing toward one blurred-out part of the wheel.
And so she clicked.
The wheel spun and spun, a whir of pink as Josie held her breath. The arrow slowed until it landed on a card. HERE’S WHAT THE STARS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT YOU. She turned it over, trying not to think.
Six of Cups. On the card was a scene of two children dancing in front of an idyllic garden, a brown fence decorated with weaving white flowers. One of the children was passing a cup to the other, who reached for it with trusting, chubby hands.
Of course Josie knew the meaning of it instantly. Memories, revisiting the past. Something returning. Most people thought of it as being a sweet card, a good card, but Josie had never had a good experience with any of the cards people thought of as good. And this one terrified her. Who was coming back? What did they want from her?
She hit unsubscribe again and waited until she got to the confirmation screen before she slammed her computer shut, trying to take deep breaths and failing as she paced around her apartment. She tried not to think about any people from the past or any people in the future at all. She wanted to never see anyone again, in fact. Okay, this wasn’t true, this wasn’t true . . . Tina had told her to not do this. The self-isolating.
She picked up her phone and called Kim.
“Hey, what’s up,” Kim said. She sounded high, her voice deep and apathetic. But then again, that was always Kim’s voice, and Kim was usually high.
“Hey. Um. The stuff is happening again.”
“What stuff? Did you get a yeast infection again?”
“No, Kim. I take those boric acid supplements you gave me after my period now.”
“Oh, okay. Well, then, what is it?”
“It’s actually serious okay it’s like I’m seriously freaking out can you at least pretend that you care.” Josie spat it out without breathing. She could feel the anxiety screaming inside of her, trying to claw its way out of her throat.
“You don’t have to be mean about it. I was just asking.” Kim didn’t sound high anymore. She sounded hurt.
“Oh. Kim, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Kimmy.”
“You know I don’t like—okay, whatever.”
There was a brief, hesitant pause. Josie could hear The Sopranos, Kim’s favorite show, in the background.
“Sometimes . . . sometimes I wonder if you just don’t care about me anymore, and it’s just nice to have me around, or something.”
“No, Kim, I really do love you. I really do. I know I haven’t been talking to you as much recently, but it’s just because I’ve been really busy and stressed. You have been and always will be my best friend. I mean it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
There was a brief pause. Suddenly they were eighteen again, at art school, and Josie was forcing her fingers down Kim’s throat to make her throw up all the pills she had swallowed after her dad had died, Kim saying Why won’t you just let me fucking die, why doesn’t anyone just let me fucking die, and Josie had sat there with the wet puke on her fingers until their friend Eric had come running into the painting studio where they were sitting on the tile with a jar of activated charcoal. I have never seen Kim like that, Eric said later on, after Josie had put Kim in bed at their house and as the two of them smoked cigarettes on the porch. Weak, I mean.
“Thanks,” Kim said. “So are you.”
“Of course.”
“So what is it?” Kim asked. In the background, Tony Soprano was saying, They think you’re weak. They see an opportunity, to his therapist. The scene following this one featured Tony fucking up one of his crew members on “Bada Bing.” She had watched this episode with Kim before—a lot. What would Tony do in this situation? Kim was usually the one who got in fights, but should Josie also beat someone up?
“There’s been emails,” Josie said ominously.
“O . . . kay . . .” Kim said. “That’s normal, yeah? Just put them in your spam folder.”
“No, but it’s weird. I keep unsubscribing and putting them in spam and all of that and they won’t stop.”
“Okay. Well, then try to call HQ or something on the website, if you can find it.”
“Oh, duh. I’m so stupid. Thanks. Do you want to get Sichuan this week?”
“Yeah, I’m down. Also, wait, what are the emails?”
“It’s, like, you know.”
“Josie,” Kim started to say, before Josie interrupted her.
“Okay! I’m gonna go take care of it, so I’ll text you later. And we’ll go to HuPo. Bye,” Josie said, and pressed the end button as if her phone were on fire.

There was no number to get to HQ. Well, there was, but she couldn’t get through to a real person. When Josie tried calling, the automated message on the other side of the line said, “Thank you for calling Divine Tarot Guidance. We’re currently busy assisting other light-seekers at this moment. Want to know if this connection is worth it? Then stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly.”
“No!” Josie shouted. Oh my God, she was going crazy. She was yelling at the automated voice on the other end of the line. She needed to do something to calm down. Her cat wasn’t doing anything. It sat licking droplets of water out of the kitchen sink. Her fern was dying again—it was past the point of salvaging, its brown limbs reminding her of just how embarrassing it all was. How much of a failure her life had become.
I’ll prove it wrong, she thought to herself, grabbing a cup of water and filling it up. I’m in control of my life, just like Tina said. She splashed water onto the fern. It looked at her like it didn’t care. She was the one who had killed it, after all.
It was too sad to keep staring at it, so instead she tried to make some lunch. Inside her fridge was a pack of Velveeta cheese, a bag of wrinkled grapes, a half-eaten Pop-Tart, and kefir. Maybe she could make some rice and put the cheese on top of that.
Closing the fridge again, she looked at the pictures held on by magnets. There was one of her and Kim from grad school, their faces thin and pale from hours spent in the photo labs or studios. Another was of her and her mother on the Golden Gate Bridge, Josie leaning into her mom’s stomach as they held each other close.
She didn’t know why she kept that second one there. All it did was make her feel sad. Her mom’s smiling face, her long, curly hair; the orange blush she always wore. The way her skin looked, so soft and clear and sweet, before the heroin and the meth.
But on the other hand, if she looked at the picture, she could sometimes feel happy. She could forget about the time when she was eighteen and walked in on her mom fucking someone that wasn’t Dad, and her mom saying, “Close the door, Josie. Please close the door, I’m sorry,” in a voice that wasn’t hers, and for a second she looked into her mom’s eyes and she saw a glimpse of the person who used to be there.
Maybe I should give Mom a call, she thought as she pulled out the rice from the pantry and washed it, feeling the cool water rush over her hands as she scrubbed the rice clean. She could put some money in her mom’s commissary, but Josie knew that the more she thought about doing it, the more she would be scared to do so, because she didn’t want to hear her mom’s voice on the other end of the line telling her how much she missed her, and asking her about her life, and saying how she wished Josie would come visit more often because while she had the letters and the pictures, she sometimes forgot what Josie looked like, and that terrified her. Most of all, Josie didn’t want to call one day and hear that inmate #2194 had died.
She put the rice in the pot and covered it. Why hadn’t the cards told her that her life would become this? Maybe if she had gotten into tarot sooner, all this could have been avoided. She could have stopped her mom from hanging out with the guy she knew from her job working in Home Depot’s floral department, and she wouldn’t have started using, and then her dad wouldn’t have beat the shit out of her mom when he found out what had happened, and then . . . she didn’t want to talk about what had happened that got her mom locked up, not really. She didn’t feel like sharing that right now, okay?
Her phone rang and she jumped. It wasn’t a number she knew, but she decided to pick up anyway. Josie coughed before doing so, because Eric had told her once that if you coughed and said hello in a voice that wasn’t yours, then you would know if it was a phishing scam because no one would say anything back.
“Hello,” she said, in a voice she imagined was dark/deep/threatening.
“Josie?” said the voice on the other end. “Is that you?”
And suddenly Josie felt very dizzy. She saw the rice boiling over and she slammed her hip against the counter to turn the knob. Her cat wasn’t drinking from the sink anymore. She was all alone.
“Josie? I . . . I know it’s been a while. But it was just . . . I wanted to see if maybe we could catch up.”
Josie didn’t say anything, but she didn’t hang up either.
The person was silent for a second.
“All I mean is that four years is a long time. And if you can forgive me . . . I just want to be friends again. I’ll always forgive you, okay? It’ll always be okay.”
“I have to go,” Josie said suddenly. “I have to go right now.”
“No, no Josie, please,” they said, sobbing. “Please just talk for two minutes, that’s all I ask.”
“I loved you so much and I still love you so much and because of that I fucking hate you and wish you were dead so stop just stop don’t ever call.” Josie was screaming, she realized, screaming so loudly that she couldn’t hear herself even though the words were coming out. She could still hear the other person crying when she hung up.
It must have been fifteen minutes that Josie stood there unmoving after the ex had hung up. She left the rice in the rice cooker. She walked to her bedroom and sat on her bed. Her roommate was still awake, playing games. Maybe this could be the time to ask for a friend, but on second thought, she knew it wasn’t possible.
The Six of Cups. The Six of Cups had cursed her. If she hadn’t started reading again, then this wouldn’t have happened and everything could have been avoided. The memories wouldn’t have come back.

After Josie lay in bed for a while, she got up and walked to her car. She hadn’t bothered changing out of her biking shorts or her dad’s old T-shirt that she had been wearing for the past three days now. The sun felt so hot on her hair. Her lips were chapped. It was all so tiring. Still, she managed to pull the door of her piece-of-shit Honda open and back out of the gravel driveway. She went to the bookstore she used to work at two years ago, the place she had bought her first pack of tarot cards from. The owner, Petra, was one of the kindest people she had ever met—one summer, when the fig trees in the backyard bore fruit, Petra had made tarts for Josie to take home. For you and Kimmy, Petra had said, patting her hand, because she knew that this week was her mom’s birthday, and that Josie had gone to see her the day before and called out of work crying because she wasn’t able to handle it. They had been delicious, those tarts, and she loved Petra for making them for her.
The bookstore was a bright blue building that had originally been a house, and its sign hung a little sideways. A small wheelbarrow with hens on the outside of it stood in the front yard. As she walked up the steps, Josie thought again about how this was a mistake. This was most definitely a mistake, but this was just something she had to do. There would always be relapses. That’s what Tina had said, after all, right? And if it was her first relapse in a year, then, well, it was okay.
The wind chimes rang as she opened the door. The store smelled of clove and cinnamon, and for a moment she stood there, thinking about the person she had been when she was still working there. And was she even any different now? Maybe nothing at all had changed.
Petra was restocking cards. “Hi, hi, just a second,” she said, pulling back her gray hair into a ponytail. Then she looked back and clapped her hands together.
“Oh, Josie! It’s Josie!” Petra exclaimed, putting the cards on the floor before running up to hug her. Her hair smelled like chamomile. “Oh, Josie. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. How are you doing these days?” Behind the counter, Josie saw books that a customer had dropped off: Ferrante, Allende, Bolaño. The name taped to the bag said Sally, a regular who often called in to order Christian CDs and Biblical storybooks. She wondered if Sally ever asked about her.
“I’m doing fine. I missed you, Petra. I . . . I was wondering, um, if anyone had dropped off any tarot cards recently. Maybe a deck we hadn’t seen before.”
Petra hesitated. Suddenly, Josie remembered the obsessive way she had stared at the computer at work, constantly refreshing different websites where she could get free rune and tarot readings. Petra didn’t say anything, and that was part of what made her so ashamed—that Petra pitied her.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Petra asked, gently.
“Oh, you know. I was just feeling nostalgic. How are the grandkids?” Josie suddenly felt the need to change the conversation, and quickly. She looked at the table with the new books on it and picked up a small paperback with a black cover. “I’ll take this one.”
“They’re fine,” Petra said as she rang her up, gently placing the book in a brown bag. “Lia asks about you sometimes. She said she liked it when you two read books together.”
“Tell her I say hi.”
“I will. This is a good one, by the way. You’ll like it.”
“I’m sure I will.”
“Come by some time, all right?”
“Yes, of course. I promise. I do need to go now, though, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no worries, no worries,” Petra said as she ran Josie’s card through the POS system. “I understand. Busy life, doing all that design work that you do.”
“Thanks for everything, Petra,” Josie said, and she meant it.
“Of course, Josie. Anytime.”
It was only after waving to Petra a couple of times and getting to her car that she saw that Petra had still given her the thirty percent employee discount, with a small pressed flower tucked inside. She didn’t even know what book she had picked up, but when she turned it over, she saw that the title was Signs Preceding the End of the World.
How fitting, Josie thought. Then she drove to the grocery store.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Josie shook a pack of Marlboro Reds out of her pocket and lit one in the parking lot before she went in, stamping it out with a wet boot as a slow drizzle started forming around her. Once inside, she bought cloves and cinnamon, a pig’s tongue, a yard of black twine, some paper, black pepper, rosemary, and red chili powder. She kept her head low at the self-checkout line, feeling as if somehow the people around her would be able to read her thoughts. She pulled her hood over her head and ran through the rain.
Once back at her house, she did what she remembered how to do. First, she made the salt circle in the correct way—clockwise, three times. She got up from the floor for a minute to get a candle from the kitchen, then anointed it with olive oil, slowly massaging it from the bottom to the top. After that, she rolled it around in the rosemary and some calendula that she had found sitting at the top of the pantry. She carved all the runes she could think of onto it—Thuriaz, Sowilo, Isa, Nathuriz—with her old dagger, which she had retrieved from its spot beneath her record cabinet.
She carefully wrapped the pig’s tongue with black twine. Then she filled a jar full of oil mixed with the black pepper, the red chili, the cloves, and the cinnamon. Josie didn’t care if someone passed by the window and saw her right now. “You can’t speak to me, you can’t speak to me,” Josie whispered as she held the flaccid weight in her hand, wet and heavy with blood. “Shut the fuck up. Shut up. You can’t call me again.” She kept repeating these words as she dunked the tongue inside the jar and quickly thrust it underneath the kitchen sink.
She could hear her roommate singing in his room, some pop song from the early aughts that she recognized but couldn’t put a name to. Suddenly, she felt terribly lonely.
Josie picked up a bag of cat treats and shook them. Terry came galloping toward her, and as he lapped the surface of her palm, she stroked his glossy black fur. “What would I do without you, Terry?” she whispered. Because the fact of the matter was that if Josie were to let Terry out now, release him into the wild, he would be fine. He would learn how to survive and maybe even forget about her after a while, settling into his new home somewhere among the trees.

She wanted to punch something like she had when she was younger, but this wasn’t what Tina would have wanted her to do. She found a pen and stabbed it into her thigh. Blood leaked out of the small hole.
She sat at her desk, Terry purring on her lap. As the blood soaked through her bike shorts, she started thinking again. What exactly was it that she wanted so badly to avoid?
She couldn’t help it anymore. She found some images of decks online and printed them out on construction paper. This was more accurate than any other system, to do it physically. After they were done printing, Josie cut them out and quickly shuffled them, her heart beating fast.
What do I need to know, she asked the cards. That’s all. I just want to know what’s going on. What do I need to know. Please.
She laid each one down, and with each overturned card came a sense of horror. She looked at her spread laid out on the floor.

It made sense to her now. Unfortunately, it all made perfect sense.

“I didn’t mean to,” Kim sobbed. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“You did. You never cared. You didn’t care about Mae’s feelings, or mine. Jesus fucking Christ, Kim, does Mae even know?”
High Priestess. Seven of Swords. What was going on? What had really happened between the two of them? That was the first thing she had asked when Kim had picked up.
“You know I wouldn’t do something like that to you, Josie. You know I wouldn’t, you know I wouldn’t—”
“Stop. Just stop,” Josie said. At this point, she couldn’t feel anything: not rage, not sadness. Just numbness. “You fucked her, didn’t you? I knew it. I knew you did, and I pretended you didn’t. You acted like a fucking stupid slut who doesn’t care about anyone but yourself. You’ve only ever cared about yourself. You’re just a burden, to everyone. Remember that time when me and Eric had to stop you from offing yourself? And you act like I’m the one who needs help? Ha ha. Everyone’s so tired of you. I’m tired of you. You were right. Oh, also, did you help upload my pictures onto that site too?”
“Josie,” Kim said, sobbing, but Josie didn’t care anymore.
“Put Mae on the phone,” Josie said. It felt so good to be angry. It felt so good to finally not be weak. Blood was rushing to her head and she realized she could barely see. “I know they’re probably right there. I want to tell them just exactly what kind of slut they’re with. You probably haven’t even told them.”
Josie smiled to herself, her entire body pulsing. Kim’s sobs faded as Kim passed the phone to Mae.
“Josie,” Mae said calmly. “There’s something you should know.”
What had it been that she so desperately wanted to avoid again?
“Sure, whatever,” said Josie. “Let’s hear it.”

Josie was sitting at the dam that crossed the river. As a kid, she and her mom would sometimes come here and search for crawfish, though they never found any. There had been some boys catching them, and Josie had wanted to do it too. Do you think you could help us? her mom had asked, but Josie tugged at her hand and forced them to leave. As they walked across the grass, she told her mom that she didn’t care anymore about any damn crawfish. All her mom ever did was embarrass her.
She would never forget the look on her mom’s face when she said that, her curls falling over her face as she glanced downward like a chastised puppy. Why had her mom been ashamed? It was Josie who was the asshole. Her mom had tried her best. She always had.
Was this what the cards were trying to tell her all along? Look, she wanted to tell the universe. It isn’t my fault, okay? Can you get that through your fucking head?
She pulled up the HQ number for the tarot website again. She immediately got through to someone this time.
“Hello,” a voice said.
“Hello, yes. How are you?”
The woman laughed. Her voice was so soft and warm and lovely. Josie felt calm now, so calm that she felt as if the last forty-eight hours had never happened.
“Oh, I’m great, Josie. How are you doing today?”
“You know, I’m not doing so well. I found out that my ex had been cheating on me for three years. And Kim had walked in on her once at this guy Eric’s house. You know what’s fucked about that? Eric was Kim’s and my friend. And Eric made Kim promise not to tell me, because I would lose my mind. Because everyone knows I’m psycho. Ha ha.
“Mmm,” the woman said. “That is just so hard.”
“And you know the reason Kim tried to kill herself was because of what happened to her as a kid, right? Her dad doing that disgusting shit to her for years and years and years. She tried to kill herself a lot of times, actually. But I was horrible. I could’ve guessed it. I did guess it. Eric had tried to tell me something but I walked away in the middle of him talking to me. Ha ha. And years later I read these cards and I thought that what they were saying is that Kim had fucked my ex like a slut and was hiding it from me. So I was so angry. I called and I was so, so angry.”
“Right, of course. That’s very understandable, to be so angry,” the woman said.
“I’m going to kill myself. Not Kim. Kim is good. Kim has always been good to me. Just myself.”
“Mmm,” the woman crooned again, “that’s so awful to hear. Everyone knows how much you love Kim, Josie.”
“It’s just that she was my best friend, and I didn’t mean to say such awful things to her. I didn’t mean any of it. Doesn’t she know how much I love her?” Josie was crying now. She hated how much she was crying.
The woman started crying along with her.
“She knows. Of course she knows. You’re doing the right thing, Josie.”
“Thank you so much. I love you, too. Even if you’re just some person.”
“Thank you, Josie. When are you coming to visit?” Suddenly the voice turned into her mom’s.
“Mom? Mommy? Is that you?”
“Yes, it is. Oh, and your ex is here too. I always loved having her around the house. She was such a help, you know?”
“Yeah, she was. She really was. Maybe she wasn’t such a horrible person after all, right?”
“Kim wants to get on the phone now,” her mom said. Josie waited as she passed the phone to Kim.
“The right thing to do is not always the right thing. You’re listening to your mind right now, aren’t you?” Kim said, and for a moment Josie could see Kim in her mind’s eye—the freckles stamped across her nose like stars, her broad face and watery brown eyes.
Oh, Kim. You’ll never know how much I loved you.
Before Josie could say this, though, a car showed up nearby. Josie squinted away from the bright white headlights.
“It’s past curfew, young lady,” the man in the uniform said. “Isn’t it about time you went back home?”
“Who’s going to take care of Terry after I’m gone? Will you take care of him for me?”
“Excuse me?”
He glanced down at her hand and saw the dagger, the blood pooling from her arms and throat, her hair scraggly and wet, her clothes the same ones she’d been wearing all week as she crouched like a gargoyle near the water.
“Hey, are you all right? Are you all right? Why don’t you give me that, and we can get you to a safe place,” he said softly.
But she knew what safe places looked like, and she knew that him speaking into his radio wasn’t what he was saying to her. Everyone lied. Everyone left, or lied, or they were hurt by people she thought she could trust. Josie lied and left and hurt people, too.
“Alright, I’m going to ask you to drop that now, little lady,” he said.
A muffled voice came through the radio, staticky and small.
They were on their way, and they would do what they had to do.
Josie knew destiny when she saw it. She grabbed the dagger and, slowly, directed it in the cop’s direction.
“I loved those fig tarts,” she said, and ran toward him laughing, her teeth and the knife glinting in the dark, the river and the crawfish inside of it laughing alongside her. Destiny was beckoning and she followed it, her limbs becoming liquid, becoming water.

---

Daisuke Shen is originally from Greenville, South Carolina, and Kitahiroshima, Japan. Their work has previously been published in The Asian American Literary Review, Maudlin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Autostraddle, Joyland, and more. They are currently working on a short story collection.

Those were the nights of the first great snowfall in Buenos Aires. An unanticipated, white fury that turned a few streets into low- or moderate-risk slopes. Everyone bought skis and wool hats, and kiosks popped up on corners where vendors sold hot chocolate and roasted chestnuts in pans misshapen by dents and desperation. Everyone said that yes, that now, at last, we were an indivisible part of Europe. Some people froze to death and said nothing.
Those were the nights, the first nights of the Third Millennium.
And the nights were no longer black. Now the nights were gray.
The tyranny of progress and the dictatorship of neon had eradicated the idea of darkness forever, and everyone slept with sleeping masks on and the blinds drawn and circled the wagons in the event of the unsurprising eventuality of a surprise attack.
But there are several ways to start this story. One way—as we’ve seen—is to hold aloft the beams of Universal History, to settle for the deceptive spectacularity of traveling without moving via email and the information superhighway, to succumb to the idea of being everywhere when really we’re nowhere.
The other way—the one that most interests me—is to lean on a private history. A minor history and, as such, a graspable history.
Those were the nights when a man couldn’t stop thinking about the name of a woman.

Let me explain: when we think that everything has come to an end, the dead live on in the most unsuspected places, almost always in close proximity. In the brief sigh of silence between one word and the next, for example.
Like this:
What (Diana) are (Diana) your (Diana) plans (Diana) for (Diana) next (Diana) Monday (Diana) night? someone asks the man who can’t stop thinking about the name of a woman.
Diana is dead. Diana died. Diana remains dead but Diana still breathes in the five letters of her name. The word Diana like a microorganism, invisible yet omnipresent, in the idea of that party he assumes they’re about to invite him to. He’s already grown accustomed to the well-meaning inefficiency of these lifesavers. Then the worn-out lines of no, I don’t have anyone to watch my daughter, and the telephonic smile of but why don’t you bring her along and we’ll put on a movie in the bedroom and she’ll be all set, and the idea that if he doesn’t say yes at least once for every nine times he says no, things could get complicated. He’ll really start to believe that Diana isn’t exactly dead, that Diana is still alive, and that he—more and more like a dead man than a living man—is breathing for her.
A dead man who takes a breath.
A dead man who takes a breath and this time says yes.
A dead man named Daniel.
A dead man who is a father and a widower and has a daughter who is alive, a daughter named Hilda.

At first, we resist with all our might and all our terror coming anywhere near a dead body. We prefer not to see it, “to remember them as they were when alive and blah blah blah.” Then something strange happens: all it takes is a glimpse out of the corner of our eye, an involuntary intuition, to realize that from now on we’ll never stop seeing it.
It’s then that we lean over the rim of the coffin like a cliff’s edge and look down, defying the vertigo of our own inevitable future.
It is then that, behind the inanity of “She looks like she’s sleeping,” we approach the certainty of “She’s dead, she’s other, she’s the same, and she can’t recognize me anymore . . . this dead woman has forgotten me forever.”
In any case, nobody in their right mind who saw Diana’s body could have said, “It looks like she’s sleeping.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now, on my screen, Daniel enters Hilda’s room and tells her to wake up, that they’re going to a party. Hilda was sleeping, it’s eleven o’clock at night. Hilda opens her eyes and realizes that she’s back on Earth, that she has a mission to carry out. Hilda gets dressed slowly. Daniel sits on her bed and watches her put on her pretty little dress and he lights a cigarette and keeps watching her, wondering why she hadn’t died instead of Diana, then immediately thinks that it’s not okay for him to think such things and averts his eyes.
“I don’t imagine that you’re going to bring that grubby little pillow with you,” Daniel says to Hilda without looking at her.
The smoke of those words ascends to the ceiling and hovers there.
Hilda doesn’t respond. Hilda knows from experience that it’s better not to respond to her father when he’s about to leave for a party, and she grabs her pillow and squeezes it tightly against her little chest and leaves the room, followed by Daniel.
Walking from the door, Hilda pauses for a few seconds in front of the television. The man—that man with the red eyes and messy hair and twisted tie who is on all the channels all the time—says something about “stratosphere,” about “rockets,” about “Argentine interplanetary exploration,” about “the cosmic fatherland.” And although Hilda doesn’t watch much television—Hilda never refers to the television as “the TV”—something makes Hilda want to stay and listen to him.
Maybe the man will say something about Urkh 24, Hilda thinks.
Hilda’s convinced that she wasn’t born here, that Diana and Daniel aren’t her real parents, that she’s part of the advance party from a planet that doesn’t appear on maps or through telescopes.
A planet called Urkh 24.
A planet where Hilda is beautiful.

Hilda’s room is decorated with posters of galaxies and constellations and a mobile with all the planets of the solar system and a bed in the shape of a space rocket. Hilda is eight and—Daniel is not entirely sure why—Hilda is obsessed with the idea of the immensity of the universe and its multiplicity of possibilities and with the idea of inherent limitations and of one’s own modest glow being nothing compared to the flashing brilliance of light years.
When anybody asks Hilda with a mellifluous voice what she wants to be when she grows up, Hilda takes a deep breath and answers without hesitation, with a furrowed brow and the speed of someone pronouncing a really long word and trying not to fall into the hole of its vowels or to get snagged on the thorns of its consonants.
“When I grow up, I want to be the person who discovers irrefutable proof of intelligent life on other planets,” Hilda says.
And the person who asked the question says, “That’s cute,” when really they think, “That’s strange.”
Diana told me all of this, and the truth is that, yes, Hilda is a really strange kid. Maybe it has something to do with the way Hilda was conceived. On a night when Diana and Daniel were watching a documentary on TV about the planet’s slow and inexorable overheating. One of those apocalyptic documentaries where a grave voice applies just the right words to images of forest fires, earthquakes, floods.
That night, Diana and Daniel decided they weren’t going to have kids, that it made no sense to bring a new life to this doomed planet, and one thing led to another and they switched off the TV, made love, and switched on Hilda.
Hilda was born two months premature, dead.
Hilda was born and didn’t cry and hasn’t cried since.
Hilda was born with the umbilical cord wrapped round her neck and nobody really knows how she came back to life, and even then, her chances of survival were exceedingly slim.
That’s why they named her Hilda. An old name. Out of superstition.
“We gave her that name because they told us her chances weren’t good, that she would only be on the planet a short time. We named her Hilda so she would seem larger, sturdier, and stronger,” Diana and Daniel repeated over and over, as if apologizing.
Hilda survived. Hilda sleeps among planets and shooting stars. Hilda wakes up in the night screaming, not because her mother is dead, but because of the uninterrupted expansion of the diameter of the black hole in the ozone.

Who does Hilda look like? One thing’s for sure: Hilda looks nothing like Diana or Daniel.
Even before they decided to work in advertising, Diana and Daniel always looked like two fashion-show fugitives, two models who grew weary of that whole circus and went strolling off down the runway. Diana told me how, on the street, people turned to watch them walk, and some even took their pictures, mistaking them for who knows which demigods. Japanese tourists, always. Here and in Europe and in the United States. Obviously they just laughed it off. And kept on walking. All they had to do was smile and mountains would move, as if they lived in constant rear projection, as if someone were paying an invisible creature to swap the landscapes behind them, across a backdrop bluer than the bluest of skies. Maybe there was something almost obscene—almost pornographic—in the combination of their respective beauties, added to the now almost-legendary happiness they exuded together. Diana and Daniel were an archetypal couple. The exception that proves the rule. A couple too beautiful to be real and, as such, too enviable. Maybe the true nature of their tragedy lies in the fact that Diana and Daniel decided to take the easiest of streets: Diana and Daniel ended up being just what they appeared to be. Argentine models. And so more than one of their friends breathed easy when Hilda was born. Hilda as the irrefutable proof that not everything is perfect. Almost all of Diana and Daniel’s friends were or had been Argentine models or were on the point of becoming Argentine models. I was an Argentine model too.

I say model and immediately jump back and stick in an Argentine because it seems more definitive, it seems right. An Argentine model is one who—between one stroll and the next along the catwalk—won’t hesitate to announce that he recently broke into film, when the truth is he played the part of an airline pilot in one of those brief informational videos that precede the takeoff of an airplane and the beginning of a journey and that are intended to demonstrate for the passengers the distracting inanity of the flotation device under their seat in the event that it all comes crashing down. We were all Argentine models; which is to say, models who worked only in Argentina, models who weren’t known elsewhere.
If there is one distinctive trait that accompanies all the weak people of this world, it is their insistence on, time and again, doing that which they know will turn out more or less well for them. Argentine models are, accordingly, weak people, and I was a weak person. I was one of those typical forty-something men, ideal for cigarette ads aboard a sailboat or automobile ads beside a polo pitch. An impossible-to-export national product. I suppose Diana and Daniel might’ve had a chance abroad if they’d made it out in time, if Hilda hadn’t been born.
The only Argentine model who’s not Argentine is Piva and she’s dead now. Piva died of a new disease, a rare disease, and—before the end—Piva stipulated that her wake should be a gigantic photographic production. No coffin. Piva standing, suspended by an invisible mechanism that, every five minutes, made her move ever so slightly, defying the immanence of rigor mortis. Guests and flashes and multiple TV channels, Helmut Newton taking the photos. It’s all there, on the cover of Vanity Fair.
But Piva was nothing more than the exception that proves the rule in a country where Hurricane Anorexia blew powerfully and Cyclone Bulimia tactlessly lashed the figures and waistlines of languid virgins desperate for quick and easy fame. A country where so many people had renounced the gift of a smile because it hurt the stitches of their latest but never last cosmetic surgery.
At some point I read something a professional photographer said. A famous photographer; I don’t remember her name but I do remember that she started out doing fashion shoots in the fifties and wound up following freaks and aberrations of nature through New York nights. A photographer who ended up exposing the negative of her own life by cutting open her veins. That photographer said that a photograph is the secret of a secret, that a good photograph is a photograph that could tell its own story.
If this is true, our photographs—the photographs of Argentine models—don’t work as stories, don’t conceal stories.
Everything is out in the open.
In black and white or in color.
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing.

This is also, in a way, a love story.
All love stories remind me of my mother’s story.
My mother was another of beauty’s countless victims. A provincial beauty queen who left my father and fled with me to the capital to seek her fortune and ended up finding it serving glasses of vodka to a popular showman who would slug back a long swallow and exclaim, “But oh how tasty is the agüita today!”
My mother always told me that there were two forms of love: the love of those who took each other by the hand and began the arduous climb up the mountain, and the love of those who took each other by the hand and threw themselves down the mountain. When I asked her if there might not exist another possibility, my mother—whose only responsibility as Chica Agüita was to pretend to remind the host what brand of water was sponsoring the show and who ended up diving off the highest diving board into an empty swimming pool—gave me a pill-saddened smile and blubbered, “Of course: blowing the whole goddamn mountain up with a good charge of TNT and blasting all of it to the most reverential of hells.”
I wonder where on the mountain Diana and Daniel met each other.
I wonder if the fact that Diana and Daniel had cheated the system, that all of it had begun with them flying over the mountain in an airplane, might not have exerted some influence on the unfolding of future events.
Diana and Daniel met by accident, literally.
Diana and Daniel met on an airplane that was crossing the Atlantic. They were talking about how irrational it was that airplanes flew, that airplanes could fly, when—as if that jumbo jet had heard them talking and what they had said sent it plummeting into the deepest of depressions—events precipitated. The plane went into a nosedive and the luminous signs had the horrendous taste to inform the passengers that it wouldn’t be a bad idea—just in case, in case God happened to exist—to perform the farce of fastening their seatbelts and extinguishing their cigarettes. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, the plane leveled off as if waking up from a nightmare, and the voice of the pilot announced with a cowboy accent that “we almost bought the farm in the sky, wooooweeeee!!!” Diana and Daniel didn’t hear him. Diana and Daniel were under a blanket making love like cats in heat, sweating out the terror of imminent death, thinking that nothing happened by chance and that there would be no need to call the flight attendant to ask her to bring them some simultaneous and multiple orgasms.

Once, in Japan—they had traveled there to film a cigarette commercial, one more in a series that showed them smoking the world over, life is smoke and geography too—Diana and Daniel stopped in front of one of the latest attractions in Tokyo’s colossal video arcades.
This was during the peak of the Pachinko Fever, which drove people to play and play and keep on playing.
A machine called Love Love Simulation.
A device designed to predict what the child of a given couple would look like. Five dollars into the slot and the device recorded the faces of the man and woman and then combined them into a perfect digital prediction. Laser chromosomes. Diana told me about it in a postcard. If you were single, the machine also offered potential candidates or—if you preferred—it combined your face with flowers, orangutans, or famous paintings. Diana and Daniel uploaded their respective faces and—Diana told me—the end product, the hypothetical child, was so beautiful that the machine recommended viewing it with half-closed eyes, from behind dark shades, and at a distance, just in case. An angel of light, a new nova.
Another demonstration that machines are not yet on a level with humans. Machines make mistakes, and if you were to ask me who Hilda looks like—if there existed a machine that traveled the inverse path from Love Love Simulation, a mechanical invention that traced parents instead of children—I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that Hilda looks like, that Hilda comes from, that Hilda is the fruit of the improbable marriage of Ernest Borgnine and Edward G. Robinson.

Hilda is ugly.
Hilda is ugly and lightning strikes the surface of the planet about one hundred times per second and the temperature of lightning is five times that of the temperature on the surface of the sun. Thirty thousand degrees Celsius.
Hilda is very ugly.

The first person to tell Hilda a story about Urkh 24 was Diana. She told her those stories so that she would fall asleep, so that she would travel through space, so that, from a young age, she would assimilate the possibility of better worlds.
As time passed, Diana’s stories changed. Diana stopped describing the natural wonders of that planet and focused on certain details. “On Urkh 24, Hilda would be the most beautiful of all the children,” Diana told her one night before leaving for a party of models. Daniel overheard her while tying his tie and it was all he could do not to strangle Diana, not to strangle himself. Later, in the elevator, they fought about whatever other thing while Hilda was left alone in the dark.
Hilda lying in bed saying things like “Planet Earth is 4,600,000,000 years old, it contains ninety-four natural chemical elements, and it is believed to have been home to life for three or four billion years. Modern man has only been around for 10,000 years . . .”
Hilda knows all these things because she read them on the box of the planet Earth–shaped pillow that I gave her on her fifth birthday. I was impelled to buy it by a strange feeling that struck me as interesting to respect. That night I gave it to Diana so she could give it to Hilda.
The pillow was North American, and so all the cosmic data was in miles and not kilometers, which is why Hilda is now having problems in school.
Hilda has no interest in kilometers or in the Hispanic acceptation of billions versus the Anglo acceptation of billions.
Hilda began to pray.
Hilda learned to believe in something, from the box of an imported pillow.
Hilda prays every night to the Great Hierarchs of Urkh 24.
Hilda will never betray her pillow.
Hilda takes her planet pillow with her everywhere, even though, with the passing years and fading colors, it gets increasingly difficult to identify the silhouettes of the continents.
Better, Hilda thinks, my pillow isn’t Earth anymore; now my pillow is Urkh 24.
I remember that Hilda opened the package and hugged the pillow and gave me a gap-toothed smile, and for an instant, Hilda seemed almost beautiful.

Daniel thought it was a party for models, but it wasn’t.
Daniel remembers that models don’t invite him to parties for models anymore. Daniel is too unstable these days, he stumbles, comes out blurry in photographs, wears wrinkled clothes. Daniel damages the product image.
This is a different kind of party and Daniel wonders what he’s doing here. Daniel can’t remember who invited him. Almost everyone is younger than him. He doesn’t know any of them. He sees someone he recognizes. Out on the balcony. That musician. The one who married one of Diana’s model friends who lost her mind or attempted suicide or got committed to an insane asylum. Something to do with a baby. Daniel isn’t sure and doesn’t want to be. The man looks at Daniel and Daniel looks at the man—“Federico,” he thinks, “the man’s name is Federico something”—and the two of them take the measure of each other, as if wanting to determine who had the greater tragedy, whose was better and whose was bigger. They wave to each other across the living room, from one point to the other, but neither of them makes any effort to meet in the middle. That would be too much bad karma coming together in one place. It would be dangerous, and after all, identical polarities repel.
Daniel is a widower now.
Widowhood is like having moved to a foreign country without even realizing it, like speaking a new language learned in one night using one of those audiovisual methods, like the preview of the new European collections. That’s the spring line and this is the fall.
Someone once told me that to be widowed was like waking up underwater and discovering that your lungs had been removed during the night. In that sense, models are lucky. Models learn to breathe underwater. Models are accustomed to being captured in the flesh on film, to being seen and appreciated like fish floating in an aquarium.
I think about how Daniel thinks about Cary Grant, about James Stewart, about celluloid widowers. Daniel watches those black-and-white films in which the figure of the widower is vaguely romantic and even funny and, of course, coveted by all the young girls at the party. Daniel never watches those films all the way to the end, because the idea of discovering that they have happy endings makes him panic, that then he too might find himself obliged to fight for the possibility of a happy ending, or that, even worse, life goes on.
So Daniel turns off the TV and concentrates on the glossy pages of Diana’s book. Big photographs, eyes looking you in the eyes. Diana getting out of a limousine, Diana climbing a painter’s ladder, Diana walking out of the sea, Diana slipping into a bathtub. Daniel is surprised to discover that photographs die too. Photographs die when the person who appears in them dies. Then the photographs change sign: before, the photographs were the immovable evidence of a living being, and now, all of a sudden, they are transformed into the photographs of a dead person when they were alive. Now he discovers that the photographs of Diana are more alive than Diana. Sometimes, if he stares at them for hours, he could even swear that those photographs move, that Diana winks at him in those photographs.
Daniel laughs too hard and there are nights when he wakes up Hilda with his laughter. Daniel’s laughter is one long and piercing and unbroken note. Daniel laughs the same way that Chinese people weep.

Daniel gave away all of Diana’s clothing. He donated it, wondering who could possibly find anything practical in all of that. There was nothing more useless than excessively beautiful clothing specially and beautifully designed for an excessively beautiful woman. Not even another excessively beautiful woman could get any use out of it.
The only thing Daniel kept was Diana’s toothbrush.
Portrait of a man brushing his teeth with his dead wife’s toothbrush.
Every night, right around this time.

The night that Diana died, Daniel got home late. Hilda was at a friend’s house or an aunt’s house or shut in her room looking up at the sky through her telescope. There was a message on the answering machine. Daniel was returning from identifying Diana’s body at the morgue, and then, standing in front of the device’s little blinking light, Daniel identified Diana’s voice. Diana’s voice saying: “Problems at the channel. Some videos got erased. We have to rerecord an entire episode. I don’t know what time I’ll be home.”
“Problems,” Daniel thought. And then he thought “Erased” and “I don’t know what time I’ll be home.”
Daniel listened to the message multiple times. Too many. “It’s true, ghosts do exist,” Daniel thought as he listened to Diana’s voice lying to him over and over again.

“All morgues are the same,” Daniel thought. Of course, he wasn’t sure about that, but he was sure that he thought that. In other words, that’s the kind of thing you think when you go into a morgue. Just the fact of thinking it—of discovering that he could still think—calmed him a little. Thus, the circular reasoning—you climb up onto the diving board of a cold and impersonal abstraction so you can dive better, from on high, into the breaking waves of pain—goes like this:

1. I’m in a morgue.
2. I know all morgues.
3. There’s no point in ever going into another morgue for the rest of my life.
4. This is the worst thing that’ll ever happen to me until I die, until they bring me to a morgue.
5. Diana.

Then, all police officers are the same and all morgue employees are the same. They all smell of formaldehyde, of cold, of heavy doors and metal gurneys with a drain in the center. First, Daniel sees the body of an old woman someone left out in the corridor. He looks at it hard, stares at it, with all of his eyes, thinking that if he looks at another dead body first—any dead body—the sight of a dead Diana won’t be so horrible and devastating. The employee says something to him, shows him a purse, and yes, it’s Diana’s purse, so why don’t I just go home now, Daniel thinks. He remembers having read somewhere that there are already televisual morgues, dead bodies on closed circuit. You tune in a dead body. You see a dead body on a television—brightness, color, freeze—and wonder when it will cut to commercial. Daniel and the employee descend in an elevator, walk down a corridor, enter a room. Above the door, in Latin, in capital letters, it reads: Let words fall silent, let laughter flee, herein the dead are pleased to help the living.
One of the employees tells Daniel that Diana had donated her organs. Daniel says he didn’t know. The employee gives him a form to sign and warns him about something, explains something to him.
Later—in the middle of a too-long fashion show where he came to a stop at one end of the runway and began to talk and talk and not stop talking even when several other models came out and dragged him back to the dressing rooms—Daniel would think that nothing mattered anymore, that everything was fine, that all sense of ridiculousness was lost on you after you threw yourself down onto a dead body to kiss it and beg it to speak to you even while, somewhere inside, you know that you’re kissing that dead body just so you wouldn’t have to wonder, later on, why you hadn’t kissed it.
Daniel feels embarrassed to be kissing a dead body only identifiable by a ring and the most famous pair of legs in the country.
Then, when Daniel had calmed down, they brought him clean clothes and took him to a bathroom so he could wash off the blood.
Then they gave him a warm and cheap whiskey.
Then they asked him if he could identify the man who came in with the deceased.
Then they showed him my body.

I never take my documents when I go out.
I always thought it brought bad luck to go out with documents, to be easily identifiable, to be easy.
Ha.
In the morgue, Daniel got my last name right but messed up my first name, and—when it comes to the most pertinent identifications and authenticating credentials—you would all do well to ask yourselves why I’m the one telling this story. Why not Diana? Where is she, anyway?
The answer is not simple and I haven’t been here long. I’ll just say that she’s in that place that we, from there, when we’re alive, don’t hesitate to call The Beyond, and that, since I’ve been here, I’ve been quick to rename The Abroad.
One of Diana’s many aristocratic aunts claimed that dying was a gesture of profoundly poor taste; as such, whenever a family member breathed his or her last breath, she didn’t wait to inform all her relatives—as if the obituaries in La Nación were nothing but an inopportune paper-and-ink mirage—that that person had “gone Abroad, that he’s off traveling, we don’t know when he’ll come home.” Diana’s aunt said “Abroad” as if it were capitalized, as if it referred to the most expensive and exclusive hotel of the Côte Bleue.
That name and idea, it didn’t take me long to discover, fit this place perfectly. A vague sense of ceaseless transit, a mix-up involving a suitcase with no space left on it to tattoo a new sticker with the name of some exotic city, a feverish customs experience, and that smell of ozone that tickles the nose and that you only breathe at airports, on docks, at train stations, and, yes, in cemeteries.
The Abroad is not exempt from certain bureaucratic matters, of course. Descriptions of physical order are not the most useful when it comes to explaining the void where I now float; but it wouldn’t go too far, shortening the distances, to compare it to certain office buildings with floors divided into cubicles subdivided into smaller cubicles.
I am in one of them.
I have a chair, a desk, and a television. Nothing out of this world, the television. I’ve seen better and more modern ones in Buenos Aires. The Abroad or The Beyond, as all of you prefer to call it, is slightly behind the times.
On the television I watch Hilda and Daniel and Daniel with Hilda. I suppose that Diana is in another cubicle. Sometimes I think I hear the white whisper of other televisions, of other shows, in the air. I haven’t seen Diana since the night of the accident. Maybe her absence has to do with the damage done to her body and the fact that she took almost half an hour to die.
Maybe Diana has been rerouted to some kind area for making repairs.
Maybe they’re doing her makeup.
Maybe I’ll see her again one of these days.
I, on the other hand, didn’t suffer at all, and when it came to identifying my body, Daniel had no issue placing me, other than the one aforementioned error. I easily fell into the stupid category of “he looks like he’s sleeping,” in the lineup of good-looking corpses. Just the trail of Diana’s fingernails across my left cheek.
I ceased to exist in the time it takes to read a haiku, head twisting impossibly, neck breaking like a branch.
Maybe it has fallen on me to tell the story because I always wanted to be a writer and never wanted to be a model, but, as you know, pictures pay far better than letters.
Maybe this is my postmortem prize, my slice of paradise—the opportunity to tell a story. Or maybe an indecipherable code of ethics and good practice determines that the dead lover of a dead mother is obliged to watch over the surviving daughter for all eternity.
Maybe I’ve become something like Hilda’s guardian angel.

Maybe Diana’s absence is intrinsically linked to the fact that it was her fault that we died. She was driving the car. She was swerving all over the place and kept taking a tiny silver flask out of her purse and sticking it up her nose while howling a formless song.
(I think about Daniel and think about how Daniel couldn’t have helped thinking, every time that Diana spiraled into another of her increasingly frequent histrionic excesses, about what Diana would be like in twenty or thirty years. It frightened Daniel a little to imagine it; but it’s true that Daniel had always been one of those people who are overly concerned with epilogues, while I, on the other hand, never projected myself beyond chapter one or two of my life. For me, the overrated idea of the future always presented like one of those animals everyone thinks is soft and cuddly until they come up to lick your hand or face and then gross! The future is a guinea pig in the same way that we’re all the guinea pigs of the future. Now, none of that matters, now everything is undefined present.)
Diana was driving with one hand, using the other to stick that little flask up her nose and inhale deeply. At some point in the night, we were stopped by a police officer who recognized Diana and asked her for an autograph for his wife. Diana had gotten a minor role as Ani, the young hysterical mother of Tony, a young autistic model on a TV show called Beataminas. Diana opened a folder and took out a copy of that photograph in which she appears almost naked and scrawled her signature across it, as if wanting to cross herself out forever, and she promised the police officer that she would drive more slowly and then floored it, accelerating away at top speed.
Then, to distract her, thinking it would help—I was wrong—I told her stories about Piva.
Diana wanted to be like Piva, and I told her stories about Piva every time I felt her start to lose control and take too-tight curves at too-high speeds. I told her how Piva had been discovered teaching swimming classes to five-year-olds and how she came to shoot with a maudit film director named Lyndon Bells, a man who had managed to finish and debut a masterpiece back in the thirties or something like that, Amo del mundo, and who from then on devoted himself solely to unfinished films. As time passed, many of them were assembled by film-archive rats, which gave them the prestigious look of involuntary documentaries, of successful chronicles of cyclical failure.
In one of them—in one of the most famous scenes from another aborted project whose working title had been F for Fashion—there appears an already legendary close-up of Piva that managed to consecrate her as a great actress even though she never stood in front of a camera ever again. In the scene, a whirlwind of emotions seems to lash her perfect and changeable face: lust melts into the surprise of fright and then bursts into indignation and tears. More monographs have been written on those fifty seconds of celluloid than on black holes or Giorgione’s The Tempest. I told Diana how Lyndon Bells’s trick for achieving that miracle—like almost all tricks behind all miracles—was banal and even vulgar: without Piva knowing, Lyndon Bells sent one of his assistants to grab her ass while they were filming. Piva told me about it one night in bed, I told Diana in the car. I laughed. Diana laughed a little, she laughed without laughter, she laughed as if she thought I were laughing at her. Then, at some point along the route, Diana began to scream like a madwoman and to hit me and the next thing I remember is the car crashing into the back of a truck full to bursting with black-and-white cows.
The night filled with mooing.
Argentine meat for export.
Very appropriate.

Obviously Diana wasn’t in love with me at that time or anytime. Nothing further from the truth. I wasn’t in love with her either; but there is something in the glamorous sordidness of our profession that prevents us from denying the bodily needs of one of our female colleagues. It would be unprofessional because we are our bodies.
If you were to ask me—in light of the impossibility of asking her—I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that Diana loved Daniel or, at least, that she loved the idea of loving Daniel. I, like so many others, was nothing but a shadow for Diana. I had the irresistible appeal of being older than her and, as such, safe. I was one of the older men that Diana slept with to keep from falling. Black mirrors, convenient and interchangeable refracting surfaces, alternative possibilities, Love Love Simulation.
If you were to ask me again, I would find myself obliged to tell you that Diana succumbed first to the allure of a double life and then—almost right away—to the panic of discovering that being someone else didn’t exclude her from the generalities of the situation and the obligations implicit in the matter. That other person that she had become was also the owner of her corresponding quota of frustrations and fears. And so Diana ended up suffering doubly, and too much has been said and written about the terrible fall of models. The dark arc of physical decadence invariably linked to decadence in all orders of life. The stigma of having worked as a beautiful person and all of that. My mother put it better than anyone. My mother said incredibly intelligent things without even realizing it. My mother was the closest thing to a hypothetical Zen monk who thinks that the I Ching is a dish of Chinese food. My mother once told me that “the bad thing about youth is that it grows old.” But if you insist, I think that the horror of Diana’s life lay elsewhere and was, as such, far more horrible and personal and difficult to control and easy to accelerate away from at top speed.
I think Diana never got over having an ugly daughter.

Maybe Diana is somewhat redeemed by the fact that the last word she spoke—I was the only one to hear it; I was there, dead and floating amid the flashing red lights and the sirens and the static of walkie-talkies and the first snowflakes—was her daughter’s name.
“Hilda,” Diana said.
And it began to snow and Diana died while everyone looked up at the sky, incredulous, to see who was the joker throwing fake snow down with a fire extinguisher.
Diana said “Hilda” one more time. Diana said “Hilda” and died before her daughter, who, supposedly, was going to die before any of us.
Then, as the medics and police officers fantasized about having a snowball fight, someone started up one of those ear-splitting saws for cutting steel and began the slow and difficult process of extracting our empty bodies.

Nobody knew the truth. Actually, a few people knew the truth, but they decided not to say anything. To hide the evidence. An oath of silence. To cover up for us. To let us be lost and let the snow hide us forever. Everything looks better draped in snow, as if it were more pure and clean and Christmassy. To ruin the love story between Diana and Daniel, to tell it from that perspective, to dare to come to grips with what had happened, was to ruin the two of them somehow. To deny any possibility that love between Argentine models could exist, that love between any two human beings was even somewhat unrealistic. And so the love story of Diana and Daniel grew and kept growing until it acquired superhuman, mythic proportions. Even Daniel—who thought about nothing but getting a divorce, about taking the air out of the golden couple forever, about reducing the whole thing to levels of nicotine and the insufferable stench of cigarettes burned down to the filter—ended up believing it. I don’t exist. I never existed and Diana died at the hands of a drunk driver.
Daniel told Hilda that that man is in prison now and that she has nothing to fear because he’ll never be let out. Sometimes, Daniel forgets what he has told her and tells Hilda that the drunk driver also died in the crash. It doesn’t matter.
Details.
Daniel prefers to focus on the figure of Diana. He practices every night, and—he calculates—it won’t be long before he gets to do the morgue scene over. In the new version—in the morgue, on the gurney—Diana is more beautiful than ever and even seems to smile at him, and he just plants a brief and elegant kiss on her mysteriously warm forehead.
When it comes to love, death always immortalizes. Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare know it better than anyone, and—having come this far—I can’t help but acknowledge my own limitations as an effective storyteller, as well as the naive blunder of whoever conferred on me such a responsibility. My description of the love between Diana and Daniel arouses, no doubt, the same suspicions as that meteorite tattooed with fossilized microorganisms trying to convince someone that once upon a time there had been life on Mars. I guess this story would work better if I concerned myself—if I spent hours of programming or pages in a book—with transforming Diana and Daniel’s marriage into something epic, into an intimidating and perfect feat of romantic engineering. Tighten the screws, put the engines in drive, earn the respectful awe of the spectator, and only then, deliver the low blow of my presence and the collapse of the farce.
I’m sorry, I’m no good at such things, and if there’s one thing I always took issue with in narrative structures and fashion shows, it was the precision of the dramatic tempo, the ability to maintain a rhythm and to change it at will whenever the plot required, the eternal consideration for the viewer and the constant fear of losing him or her forever. The happy ending and the applause and the flashes and the finale of a bride advancing through a silver storm of flashes and applause. Life isn’t like that, and—you can take my word for it—death isn’t either.

Daniel at parties is something worth addressing. And why everyone chooses to look the other way when Daniel enters one of his dark phases. And why everyone goes with a “pobrecito” instead of a “pobre tipo.”
Daniel doesn’t wait to deposit Hilda in the coatroom. Daniel doesn’t think twice about leaving Hilda alone in the dark. I lose sight of Daniel because, when they separate, my unknown camera director always focuses on Hilda. Tonight Hilda is not alone, from a dark corner in the room emerges another little girl. A strange little girl, deformed, uglier than Hilda. It takes a few seconds for me to adjust the controls and to determine that the girl is wearing a mask. Turtlehead.
“What’s your name?” Turtlehead asks in a deep voice, attenuated by the rubber mask.
“Hilda,” Hilda says.
“My name is Selene,” Turtlehead says, and I realize that Hilda is jealous of that name, because Selene is Latin for Moon, and that she would like to have the name of a celestial and solitary body. Hilda longs to live in orbit.
“Earth is the third planet of nine that make up our solar system,” Hilda recites, spinning the pillow in front of the little holes in Selene’s mask, as if wanting to hypnotize her, “and it has a moon whose distance from Earth, from center to center, is 238,855 miles. The Earth and the Moon travel an average of 66,620 miles per hour in an elliptical orbit of 584,017,800 miles around the Sun and . . .”
“What are miles?” Selene interrupts.
Hilda gets nervous and shuts her eyes and squeezes her pillow very tightly.
“Did you know that Selene means Moon?” she asks, changing the subject.
“No.”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Donatello, the Ninja Turtle . . . And you?”
“WhenIgrowupIwanttobethepersonwhodiscoversirrefutableproofofintelligentlifeonotherplanets,” Hilda says, and smiles, satisfied at not having made a mistake.
The two of them look at each other in silence for a second.
“Are you also like me? An extraterrestrial?” Hilda asks in a whisper.
Then someone comes into the room, a man lurching, and the two of them scream as if possessed and run out of there, and I can’t stop laughing like a madman or a dead man, here above, here below, here wherever.

It’s like this: at parties Daniel functions something like a roller coaster. The slow and apparently calm ascent, a slight curve, letting go and plummeting down with arms in the air, eyes wide, mouth open in a full-throated scream.
Daniel screams. Daniel shatters plates and glasses against the wall. Daniel explains that it’s a Greek custom. Several people grab him and throw him to the ground. They tell him to calm down, that he’s acting crazy. Someone goes to find Hilda and asks her to please take him home. As if Hilda were an adult. Hilda has that effect. People speak to her in clipped phrases and short sentences. People don’t look at her face when they speak to her. People prefer to stare at that planet Earth–shaped pillow and to speak directly to the spot where Russia appears. People speak to Hilda as if they were talking on the phone to someone very far away.

In the taxi home, Daniel spends the ride asking Hilda to forgive him with the voice of someone who, actually, is demanding an apology without really knowing why. Hilda doesn’t pay him much attention. Hilda says, “Yes . . . Yes papi . . . don’t worry,” and she squeezes her pillow tightly and thinks about getting home fast so she can go lie down beside the washing machine. Even though there’s no sound in space, and Hilda knows this, it always seemed to her that the secret voice of the cosmos must resemble the sound that a washing machine makes when it’s running. A sound like a circular tide spinning around on itself, biting the tail of its own foam of stars.
Hilda thinks about the dark and heavy waters and about how the distance between the Sun and the Earth at the closest point in Earth’s orbit is 91,402,000 miles, and at the most distant point, is 94,510,000 miles.
Hilda thinks about how our solar system travels around the center of the Milky Way once every 225,000,000 years at a speed of 481,000 miles per hour. Hilda smiles soundlessly and remembers that the Milky Way encompasses a distance of 100,000 light years and that each light year equals 5,878,499,814,000 miles.
Hilda thinks about how right now there are more than 300,000 terrestrial objects orbiting the planet—orbital trash, scrap metal, bones of rockets and satellites. Mortal remains that, probably, are like the dead spinning around the living, who have abandoned them there forever.
Hilda thinks about something she read in the newspaper the other day: about how now you can shoot the dead into orbit, capsules with ashes, the price is exorbitant, but in the end, the thing about the dead going into the heavens is true.
It’s that terrible hour when those dogs take those owners out for a walk.
The taxi turns slowly down an avenue. Hilda loves the sound the snow chains make on the brakes and then she decides to think about Earth. About the 1,700,000 kinds of known species on the surface of the planet and the ghosts of the 5,000,000 to 35,000,000 organisms that are here, with us, and that mankind hasn’t yet been able to classify. I ask myself if I might be one of those specimens. Ectoplasm watching television.
Hilda, on the other hand, wonders if the taxi driver might not be the prototype of an unknown race. Someone who shouts and shouts and bangs on the steering wheel and turns around in the seat and grabs Daniel by the lapels and shakes him and tells him to give it a rest, that that’s enough, to stop saying Diana-Diana-Diana-Diana-Diana over and over.
Hilda sees that the taxi driver is missing a few fingers on one hand and wonders if that might mean something. The taxi driver opens the door and orders them to get out and Daniel begins to quiver again. Daniel is almost certain that the snowflakes are going to burn his face and his hands and his clothes; Daniel shakes himself to scare away a swarm of wasps of cold and pushes Hilda out of the taxi. Hilda slips and falls in the snow. Like in cartoons, as if someone has pulled the rug out from under her, she pirouettes back in the air and lands facedown.
Hilda thinks she could just stay like that forever, with her face cold and white and hidden. Maybe people would walk by and see her lying there and, unable to glimpse her face, would think to themselves, what’s that pretty little girl doing, Hilda thinks.
“What’re you doing?” Daniel asks her, and tells her to get up and then asks her to forgive him again. He asks her to forgive him as if the word had a very long number in front of it. A quadrillion light years of forgiveness and we’re just getting started, this is just the beginning, we’ve got a long way to go before we get to forgiveness.
Hilda pushes herself up with her arms and slowly gets to her feet, feeling suddenly light and empty, and then she realizes. The pillow. Earth. Urkh 24. The taxi. Hilda looks at her empty hands and wonders—Hilda has heard that crying redistributes the bones in the body; that it rearranges ideas; that, sometimes, it can even change things—if this might not be the right moment to cry for the first time, to learn to cry, to let tears fall like the falling snow.
Hilda asks Daniel what snow is, where it comes from, how it’s made, and what it’s for. Of course Hilda knows all the answers, she knows all about sudden changes in atmospheric pressure and the secret sound that, if you listen very carefully, you can hear a second before the snow starts to fall, the sound of someone pressing a button. Of course Daniel doesn’t. An Argentine model has no need to know what snow is for, it’s enough for him to know that the snow will change the trends in the next Winter Collection and that all those clothes will be a little harder and hotter and more exhausting to model but might be more fun to pose in for the photographs.
Hilda asks him to keep from crying.
Hilda thinks that maybe words function like a dish towel, like a floor rag; that maybe words dry, that words make you a more eloquent person and, as such, more deceptive when it comes to sentiments and sensations.
Hilda and Daniel walk under the snow and at first Daniel tells Hilda that he hasn’t the faintest fucking idea, that snow is for making all the taxis disappear, and then he smiles. Then he thinks better of it and he tells Hilda that, really, the snow is God’s dandruff. That when God gets mad, He shakes His head and He has a lot of dandruff and the dandruff slips through little holes in the sky, through the stars there above.
Daniel points up at the night sky and for a moment he almost tells Hilda that one of those stars is her mother, but no; he thinks better of it and better not because it would be like telling her that her mother is a hole.
Hilda smiles and hangs onto Daniel’s arm and thinks that she loves him so much without really understanding why, and it frightens her a little to think that that’s what love is: something you don’t understand and that you enjoy while you have it without asking questions or demanding answers, something almost extraterrestrial.

Here, in front of the blue and deep and submarine light of my television, I learned something that Hilda always knew. Some bad TV shows—the ones starring models, the ones in which the protagonists always seem to be playing the part of a psychopathic serial killer perfectly when the script is asking them to be romantic and affectionate—are actually a lot like real life; only a small group of privileged individuals find just the right screenplay for their dramatic potential.
Reality as we understand and live it is nothing but a huge casting call, and so the information—random data, whimsical thoughts, famous quotes, true stories?, fake news?—comes to me as confusing lines of letters filing uninterruptedly across the bottom of the screen like the peaks and valleys of the financial markets of the world.
Reality resembles television more and more all the time. Reality resembles “TV” more and more all the time, and the reality of what was—your own life contemplated on a dead television—is like one of those multiple-choice tests, with the crucial difference being that, right away, the answers begin to be erased by oblivion and we find ourselves hesitating in the face of suddenly supernatural questions like what’s your date of birth. And it isn’t long before nothing matters to us less than our own past, and we mark the always convenient option (d)—which tends to be all of the above or none of the above—and we choose to tune in the far more interesting and fun present of those who are still alive.
On my television, Hilda and Daniel are always perfect in their roles, and there’s something of poetic justice in my television or—maybe—something of cruel irony in that I spend all my time following them in front of this machine that never turns off.
I remember that my career began with the role of a blind child on an afternoon soap opera thanks to the soft connections my mother had with lecherous TV bigwigs, and that ever since, the idea of sex has almost always struck me as cold and functional and as easy to manipulate as the buttons on the remote control when zapping horizontally from channel to channel.
I remember—I remember less all the time or, which is almost worse, my memories resemble a bad TV show more and more all the time—that my family was very poor when I was little, in a small Patagonia town named Sad Songs. I remember that, back then, all my birthday presents had to be not only cheap but also endowed with a furious and immediate utility. My birthday presents had to be for something.
I remember that when I turned five, I got a broom, and I remember also that, days before leaving Sad Songs forever, when I turned six, resigned to receiving a shovel, my father showed up with a small television under his arm. Black and white and nobody dared ask him where he’d gotten it for fear of what the answer would be. I remember that we spent several hours sitting in front of it, and I remember that my father let escape a sigh as long and sad as the night that was falling down on us before saying, “But how great would it be if we had electricity, right?”
Ever since then, television and televisions never ceased to produce a cautious intrigue in me. It always struck me as strange the way in which people refer to the television as “the TV.” Why this affectionate diminutive nickname of the kind typically reserved for living beings, and why not, for example, “the fridgey,” “the washy,” or “the phoney”? What did televisions have that other household appliances didn’t? What caused that surge of affection—for a machine—that most people couldn’t even tune in for another person?
I never learned how televisions function or why airplanes fly or how the voice travels across telephone wires. Hilda always knew—for example—that “planet Earth is now going through what’s considered its middle age and that it originated 4.5 billion years ago out of a turbulent cloud of dust, gases, and asteroids suspended in orbit around the Sun. Over a period of 700,000,000 years, this cloud proceeded to settle into place until it gave way to what we know as our solar system. The destruction of our planet will take place within four or five billion years when the Sun, having consumed all of its own hydrogen-based fuel, initiates a process of expansion that will end up incinerating all the planets in its orbit. That will be the end of our solar system.”
Hilda knew this and the elegant malevolence of the people who write those informative texts never ceases to amaze me. I can’t help but notice that it predicts the beginning of the fire and the fury but says nothing about anyone who might still inhabit planet Earth. Will there be anyone left? I wonder if Hilda knows anything about that. One thing is certain: there is one thing I know that Hilda doesn’t. And it is this:

Every so often, the programming of my television undergoes certain intriguing alterations. Antenna adjustments. Interference. Sudden accelerations. The speed of things. Every so often, my television tunes in Hilda’s future. A snowstorm of dirty and gray static and I stop seeing Hilda walking under the snow, pulling Daniel by the arm. Then comes the secret hour when the night seems to gain momentum in order to arrive at the right ending, the precise instant when all the newspapers are starting to be printed, and if you put your ear to the cold asphalt, you can hear, with no trouble at all, the subterranean passing of a black-and-white river of news.
Then, in the future, the show is something else and the landscape is different. A desert. Mojave, Nefud, Atacama, Nostalgic Rancheras. It doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. The sand—the sand new and freshly made, the sand as old as the world—always looks like itself, and I see Hilda twenty years later, standing on a hillside, wearing the clothes of an explorer, like in one of those old adventure shows.
At Hilda’s feet a formidable expedition unfurls, ants working at digging holes, heavy machinery, men who ask her questions and seek her begrudging approval.
Hilda’s face is the same face that, in a matter of days, will appear on the cover of Time magazine and on the front pages of newspapers the world over.
Nobody will dare to say that Hilda is ugly then, because Hilda will be unique, and—in the first years of the Third Millennium—people will have already renounced the uniform idea of beauty and gone off in search of more singular attractions.
An explosion shakes one face of the hillside—more than anything I’m pleased to discover that Hilda is the one who presses the button of the detonator—and the mouth of a cave is left exposed.
Hilda enters first and walks ahead.
Hilda always walks ahead and first and advances and descends into the depths of her dream made reality.
Hilda stops in front of the mouth of a dark pit. Scaffolding and flashlights and orders in multiple languages.
Hilda descends down a rope.
Hilda suspended on a system of pulleys.
Hilda with a small camera on her helmet and a microphone in front of her mouth, which never stops moving, her voice speaking words that will soon be as well known as “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Hilda reaches the bottom of the pit and takes a few steps. An invisible sound falls over everything like the voice of the ghost of an ocean that once was and no longer is.
It buzzes in Hilda’s ears and she remembers the words uttered a few days before, near the excavations, by a sand warrior, a very tall man with a very deep voice, who had arrived to their encampment offering stories in exchange for food and water.
Hilda walks behind the thin beam of white light emitted by her flashlight until the flashlight ceases to be necessary. Now there’s more sun than at midday and she almost can’t tell that she’s underground and she enters and walks and arrives at the center of an enormous chamber of curved walls. It’s like having been devoured by a whale without even noticing, she thinks.
Hilda comes to a stop in front of a small steel pyramid that is floating a meter off the ground. On one side it has the drawing of the contours of a hand and Hilda is not at all surprised to discover that the size of that hand coincides precisely with the size of her hand. Hilda presses her hand against the side of the pyramid and it quivers like a cat that has spent centuries waiting for just such a caress.
The pyramid opens with the delicacy of a piece of origami retracing the path of its construction, and there it is, smiling in the half-light and suspended dust. The happy mummy of an extraterrestrial sitting on a throne, illuminated by a beam of yellow light as old as the universe. The skin rosy and tattooed with concentric circles, the oblong head, the eyes that seem to want to escape the skull, the mouth like a precise rectangular fissure, the double line of teeth, the four arms open wide to form a cross or to initiate an embrace fossilized in time and space.
“Urkh 24,” Hilda thinks then, and she embraces herself as if she has reencountered a long-lost pillow, as if she feels the entire world pressing against her body, the universe inside her body, as if she has come home after so much time out walking under the snow.
And in some fleeting place and for a long minute—through tears, my tears and the euphoric shouts of the members of the expedition and the prayers of the natives who point up at the sky and to history that has been changed forever and for the better—Hilda thinks about Diana and Daniel.
Hilda laughs like she always laughed, like when she was little.
Hilda laughs soundlessly and then she wonders what that other new sound might be and she discovers that it is coming from her, that now she is bursting with new and warm laughter.
Hilda laughs and thinks that she can’t believe what she’s thinking (irrefutable proof of intelligent life on other planets after all), what she’s thinking is that, yes, she is more beautiful.
Hilda is much much much more beautiful than the extraterrestrial.

---

Rodrigo Fresán was born in Buenos Aires in 1963 and has lived in Barcelona since 1999. He is the author of the books Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra (winner of the Premio Nuevo Talento Fnac, 2002), Kensington Gardens (winner of the Premio Lateral de Narrativa, 2004), The Bottom of the Sky (Locus Magazine Favorite Speculative Fiction Novel in Translation, 2018), and the triptych comprising The Invented Part (Best Translated Book Award, 2018), The Dreamed Part, and The Remembered Part. His next novel, Melvill, will be published in Spain in 2022. In 2017, Fresán was awarded the Prix Roger Caillois in France for his entire body of work.

Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, and Juan Villoro, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Granta, Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, Slate, The Arkansas International, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

Illustration: George Wylesol.

One summer ago, I made the mistake of rooming with a woman named Mukta, an Indian-Irish beauty who was in New York without a visa. I hadn’t known her very well before we became roommates—a glorified velvet curtain being the only thing that separated us while we slept—but I liked the way she talked. Most notably, I liked when she said “fuck,” which sounded like “fook,” as in, “I’m gonna be fookin’ sick.” I liked it when Mukta swore in her merry Irish way, and she did swear, a lot, that summer we lived together. Mukta wanted to be an actress and this pursuit involved a good deal of rage and disappointment.
What was I doing? In the name of honesty, Mother, I’ll tell you: a whole lot of nothing. Specifically, I was a salesgirl at an expensive boutique on Franklin Avenue, on account of my beauty and generally docile attitude. I’d gotten the job through a man who wanted to sleep with me; his cousin happened to own the place. I slept with the man, I sold the clothes. I was thankful and also very bored.

The last time I saw you, you were holding a martini with two olives in the Marlton lobby. You looked at me like I was a dog dying in a suburban street: sad, incongruous, unavoidable. You narrowed your two thick eyebrows over your salty drink and said you were disappointed; I squandered the things people gave me, you gave me. I was “studying” hotel administration and studying it poorly. I was wearing accessories purchased for me by rich, depressive men. I was flirting with academic probation and drinking my calories.
You’d always been careful (and forceful) in reminding me: being pretty is easy and leads to nothing but boredom. Idle minds, you started to say that night in the Marlton. I interrupted you. These were the matriarchal maxims I’d heard since babyhood. Yet you repeated them once more before you left both the hotel and New York altogether, and I responded that it was best for us to take a break as mother and daughter.
And I hate to say that you were right. But now, after two years of silence, I’ve seen a little of the world—I’ve seen Mukta and me, like mirror twins—and I also hate to say that you were wrong. I’m at an impasse, now, and I’ve just got to know what you think of my life. So that you can help me change it.

You would have liked Mukta, too, at least at first. Because although she was pretty, she was also unique, which is something I know you wished I’d been more of. I met her in my last year of college. She had already dropped out by then—had gone on a wild goose chase to Los Angeles, where some noodle executive had promised her she’d be the new face of Beckel’s Noodles. (Though Mukta, like me, never ate noodles and especially not Beckel’s.) Needless to say, the pasta gig didn’t work out and she came back our senior year with her beautiful tail between her long, brown legs.
We met at a party on a concrete rooftop in SoHo. My friend Marianne had a brother who worked on Wall Street, and he liked to host parties here. Marianne—blond, short, brainy—was set to work in finance too; in just a month’s time, she’d be sitting high on the tenth floor of a skyscraper downtown, a building with honeycomb windows and a Dutch name. Marianne and I weren’t popular or well liked in school. On weekends, we mostly lurked around in corners at parties planned by and designed for people ten years older than us. We would sip margaritas and talk quietly. That’s what Marianne and I were doing that night.
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE FOOKIN’ KIDDING ME!” rang a voice demonic and musical.
“Marianne!” It was Mukta. She stood in front of us, tall and backlit by the city. She’d been brought to the party by a chubby white man with perpetually moist skin and she was trying to get rid of him.
After we chatted a while about school, the party, and whatever else came to mind, Marianne left us to rub elbows. “Duty calls,” she sighed. She was so confident. (We’ve lost touch now. I’ll acknowledge, Mother, that I haven’t spoken to Marianne in a year, and I’m afraid it might be my fault, on account of the stupidity I inherited from whatever catalog stranger sold you his sperm.)
Mukta and I slunk further into our corner and sipped our margaritas, and Mukta told me her Beckel’s noodles sob story.
“What are you going to do after college?” she asked me when she was finished. She blinked through tears. Very theatrical. She must be a good actress, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother and I aren’t speaking. So I can’t move home.”
“Where is home?”
“Los Angeles.”
Mukta deformed her face to indicate that even the mention of Los Angeles was enough to make her weep.
“But I also don’t have a job and I don’t want to work in hotel administration,” I said.
“Why did you study that?”
I shrugged.
Mukta opened her wide mouth and smiled. She glowed like a battery-powered crystal ball. “Live with me.”
And I did. When I graduated, I got the sales job at the boutique and Mukta begged her parents to send her more money from Ireland and we moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint with no living room and a single-burner oven. Well, is that called a hot plate? I feel, sometimes, like I’ve spent the last few years learning nothing and now I’ve got, predictably, nothing to show for it.

By mid-June, Mukta and I had been living together for almost two months. I was making good money at the boutique because it operated partly on commission, and it turned out I was talented at selling things. I sold these things by looking unattainably beautiful, and when women tried on various plaid dresses and linen pants, I stared at them blankly and said, “You look beautiful.”
I stated it deadpan and sullen: like I couldn’t believe my eyes how beautiful they were. And when it came from me, they believed it.
So that month I spent five hundred dollars on a keratin straightening treatment. The air was getting humid. Remember when, growing up, summer would come and I’d weep all day, lamenting my curly hair? It sprang from my head like a thousand wires; like snakes or poodle fur.
Do you remember when, one day, we were supposed to go to Point Dume beach for a Labor Day picnic? We were already late, and I was holed up in the bathroom screaming and crying and cursing you, for your terrible curly-haired genes, for all this muck that I’d never asked to receive, when you barged in and slapped me across the face?
“I give you the world and you hide in the motherfucking bathroom?” you said.
We went to the beach after that. I must have been fourteen, so I guess that made you fifty-seven. Someone needed to slap someone else for things to get better.

Although I was making a decent amount of money that June of last year, Mukta was not. She was rarely home when I went to sleep, as most of her sustenance came from men she met: hipsters in skate shoes and tiny beanies; Wall Street boys with chambray “after work” shirts; partial retirees who showered her in dresses and liquor. Here is how you can visualize: Mukta was the kind of beauty that crossed borders. I was the kind of beauty that just made everyone want to do “reverse cowgirl.” There’s a slight difference.
One morning, Mukta and I were eating breakfast bars in the kitchen that was also our living room. She’d returned at dawn that morning, crashing into our curtain-wall on her way to bed. Now she seemed rested. Pigeons and blackbirds watched us from the trees outside our kitchen window. She sat on the nonfunctioning radiator and looked particularly cheerful.
“Do you have pigeons in Ireland?” I asked.
Mukta nodded. She smiled at me like I was a helpless toddler, wobbling around our kitchen and bumping my head. You know I’m used to this. She sang something low under her breath. Before she’d dropped out of school, Mukta had studied musical theater.
“What’s up with you?” I said. “You seem happy.”
She looked out the window. “Oh fook,” she said. “He’s here again.”
There was a man who liked to pee on the cars outside our window. (Mukta informed me soon after that he doesn’t necessarily like to pee on parked automobiles, he just does it.) He’d been there since early May and would outlast both of us in that apartment, on that street.
“He’s doing a fookin’ job,” she observed. Then she bit into her bar and said, “Yum.”
“I am happy today, Leah,” she said. “I’ve got an audition that’s legitimately perfect. If they don’t cast me, they’ve got their heads so far up their asses that they’ll never see daylight again. They’re covered in shit and blind as bats if they don’t cast me for this. Because it’s—read this.” She scrolled through her phone, pulled up the casting call, and read aloud: “Indian woman for the part of the best friend on NBC sitcom. Ages 21­–32. Must be able to do an Irish accent.”
It was, indeed, perfect for her. I told her she was right.
“Do you want to borrow any clothes for it?” I asked. We wore the same size and I owned a lot of expensive things from the boutique.
“Yes, yes, YES.” Mukta tore through my closet, which was really part of one large, shared closet divided by another velvet curtain, tossing jumpsuits and jeans and camisoles onto my bed. “Fook yes,” she said.
When we both headed out for the day, she was wearing a pair of wide-legged slacks and a pink top with princess sleeves. “I’m going to best friend the shit out of them,” she said.

Mother, I was happy for Mukta but I was also envious. Mukta seemed so alive to me. She wanted things so ardently. She writhed and raged and desired. That’s the kind of chutzpah it takes, you would have told me. Watch her, you’d say. This is how you do some shit. I could imagine it so easily, what you’d say and think.
I felt I had no desire left within me. It was like a loss of libido for the entire world. If I’d done what you told me to do when I was nineteen, taken an assortment of prescriptions and talked things out with a professional in Pasadena, one that came highly recommended by your girlfriends, virtually all of your girlfriends said that yes, this professional was the best, maybe I’d have an antidote for it. Maybe I’d be fat but at least I’d be happy. Maybe I would have had a few thought exercises to practice when the world seemed dull and still.
Mukta went to her audition. I walked to work and stood behind the counter. The boutique was small with lots of windows looking onto the street. For the past week, our air conditioning had been broken, so I often had to sneak into the back room to cool myself in front of the mini-fridge. My boss, Maritza, had tried every day to get someone to fix the AC. The landlord made excuses.
That afternoon, Maritza was pacing around the back of the store, near the dressing rooms, talking to him on speaker. The phone sat atop a package of sunglasses. She used her free hands to fan her forehead. Our landlord constantly spoke like he was screaming and so did Maritza.
“My AC guy is out of town,” he scream-spoke. “He is in CANADA. He can’t do work from Canada.”
“Get another AC guy,” Maritza said. She was about to kick a box of jelly shoes and stopped herself. She tugged at the long braid down her back instead.
Of course, the landlord did not get another AC guy and we were very, very hot. Maritza called her boyfriend and asked him to take a look. She was constantly talking about this guy, detailing the various projects in which he was involved. A man with projects, okay, you’d say. Classic spin doctor, you’d say, just watch.
Why would Maritza’s boyfriend be of any use? “I guess he’s not not handy. If that makes any sense?” she said to me.
When he eventually arrived, I was surprised to see that Maritza’s boyfriend was very handsome. He smelled like sweat. He seemed like he wouldn’t be able to name one thing sold inside our entire store, let alone date the woman who owned it. Most of the men I went out with that summer were slick-haired accounts men who took me out for sushi and wanted to have sex reverse cowgirl.
Maritza’s boyfriend expectedly had no idea what to do with the AC. Maritza growled, punched the air with her tiny fists, and sulked into the back room with the refrigerator. Her boyfriend smiled crookedly, stuck out his palms like “What can I do?,” and touched my arm before he left the boutique.
The next day, he came back. Tried to fix the AC again. Failed. Hugged me. Pressed his chest against my breasts.
Later that week, he returned while Maritza wasn’t there and pretended he’d miscalculated her schedule. He watched me with hawkish interest as I attended to three customers: a mother and two daughters, all dishwater blond.
“You look so beautiful,” I said to them. They spent $800.
Another: a big-boned brunette with a button nose.
“You look so beautiful,” I said to her. $250.
Meanwhile, Mukta was overcome with anticipation. Her audition, she said, had gone perfectly. A lightning bang of a success. It’d only been her and two casting executives, sitting together in a mirrored room. Within one hour of cold reads, she said, they all laughed, cried, and laughed again. Cried a little more. That’s what acting is.
“Drinks on me,” she said that Saturday, paying for our margaritas with the zero money she had. We sat at a new American bistro by the park. Our second and third margaritas were free. I licked the salt off my third drink’s rim, slowly. I thought I could feel the sodium rushing to my head, my feet, my fingers. Dogs cantered through the park; dawdling children in summer bonnets held their mothers’ hands; a hobo took a poop in the middle of the street. We went dancing; a man with orange hair offered us cocaine off a key in the bathroom. It was around midnight. Mukta snorted the white powder, rubbed the remaining dust all over her gums, and I was reminded of that night I first met her, on the roof: Mukta, tall and backlit. The world was still. The air was slow and we were bullets. As we walked home at dawn like ants scrambling frantically over a dirt hill, she broke out into song:
“GOOD MORNING BAAALTIMOORE.” Her voice was a bell, pinging against the building sides, clattering down fire escape stairs.

Monday came. I went to work and sold more linen things. On Tuesday, I got a message from Mukta.
“I DIDNT GET THE MTRFKN PART.”
“Why not?” I texted.
“They gave it to mtrfkn Lebanese girl from Binghamton,” she replied.
I didn’t know what to say. I stared at my phone. Maritza’s boyfriend came through the door and winked.
“Just checking up on my friend,” he said. He leaned his elbows on the counter. The friend was me.
“I. Am. Going. To. Shit. A. Brick.” Mukta texted.
We went out that night. Mukta punched a bathroom wall. A slew of beautiful boys showed up to tend her bleeding knuckles. We drank for free.

We didn’t know it at the time, but that moment signaled a certain separation between us. Perhaps you, with your wisdom, your doubt and suspicion, would have been able to predict this. As Mukta went to more and more auditions with bandages around her left hand, I started selling more and more linen dresses at the boutique. Now we called our customers “clients.” A few of them—an older woman with impeccable plastic surgery and tiny boobs; a new mother who purchased half a dozen wicker purses—even requested my personal email, for up-to-date information on sales and my work schedule.
By July, Mukta was penniless and eating nothing but power bars. She bought them in bulk, in a carrot cake flavor, and stored them in our unused microwave. She ate two a day and looked to have lost almost ten pounds: her bones jutted out of her cheeks and chest. I envied it a little, vowed to eat more power bars and less of everything else. Mother, I sound like a fool, I realize it. I realized it then. When I was eighteen, before I left for school, you gifted me The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, wrapped in newspaper and wildflowers from Elysian Park. You smiled and said, “Fuck Camille Paglia; this shit’s accurate.”
So I knew that the world was starving me. I know it still is. But I needed a goal, you see, and I couldn’t find a better one.
Mukta had tried out and been swiftly rejected for the roles of best friend, love interest, background dancer, drunk girl, model, 1960s opium addict, tomboy. She tried out for a man’s role—had argued with the casting director that she brought a distinctly feminine worldview to an otherwise limited and stereotypical character, had pled the tradition of operatic trouser roles like Prince Orlofsky, Cherubino, and Orpheus. This also did not succeed. She was trying so blindingly hard to be absolutely everybody. Anybody. She wanted to drink margaritas every night; she wanted to visit me at work; she wanted to take the train to Queens and buy illegal firecrackers.
Maritza, in the meantime, was noticing my own victories as a sales assistant.
“At this rate,” she said carefully, “we might want to revisit your title.” It was the Fourth of July, and I was working while the neighborhood laughed outside.
This meant taking me on full-time, giving me a promotion. My heart lit a little: I wondered if you’d be proud of my upward mobility. I wondered if you’d be disappointed that it all came on account of beauty and lies.

The remainder of the month, I tried to sell more: look prettier, speak more sullenly. Mukta, for her part, tried to assail directors on the sets of television shows filming in our neighborhood. The first time she did this, it was twilight and the sky was purple. The air was sticky and my dress clung to my legs. I felt heavy. I thought I’d gained weight, my slight increase in funds having created a worrisome access to things like dinner, breakfast, and snacks. We walked by the park and that same American bistro was blocked off by caution tape. Men in black jeans with walkie-talkies made an exciting barrier from the rest of us.
“Look,” I said, expecting to do exactly that and nothing more.
“Fook it,” Mukta said, and grabbed my hand.
“What the—what are you?” I said, staggering along the sidewalk. I was weak and Mukta was strong despite the fact that she moved like a jangly skeleton.
“DIRECTOR! DIRECTOR!” Mukta called. We approached the caution tape. She tugged on my hand and ducked under. “Oh director, sweetie director!”
“The fuck is she doing?” said a man in black jeans, looking to me for explanation.
“What do you want, folks?” she called. “Sing? Dance? Fook?”
Mukta had trained in ballet until she was fifteen. She did a pirouette. She leaped into a painful-looking front split.
People stared. I stared.
“Oh,” she said, straightening up. “You want me to act? Perhaps you want me to act?” She paused.
“Sad, sad, sad . . . ,” she began, in a different voice. Nasal, American. She paced around and thwacked her right hand into her left palm, crinkling her brow. She was, I figured out, acting. “. . . Whom I will not forgive for coming to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes, this will do. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for it!”
“Muk—” I began, inching back against the caution tape.
“What? You don’t—” She gazed around at the members of the scraggly film crew, any of whom could have been the director, dismayed. “Edward Albee? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? An American treasure, motherfookers?”
Mukta and I were then, as expected, kicked off the set. Exactly who had or hadn’t seen her performance was a mystery. We walked to the next bar and I watched Mukta take a shot of vodka from her own cleavage.
I don’t know why, because it was Mukta who was sad, and not me, but I wished for you.

At the end of July, Maritza gave me the promotion. She raised my wages by five dollars an hour, raised my hours to thirty-five. The next day, her boyfriend came into the boutique and crossed behind the sales counter. He pressed himself against me and breathed his starchy, ripe breath into my face. He tensed his jaw like he was doing everything he could not to choke me.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” he said. “You could sell me anything, Leah.”
Of course, at the same time, twelve blocks away, Mukta was hurling herself onto the set of a wry, female-led sitcom set in 1950s Brooklyn. She talked in a twangy mid-Atlantic accent and tap-danced. I know this because I was called by a policeman who had been asked to escort her (forcibly) from the premises. I do really believe that I was a good friend. I am a good friend. Was that ever something you wanted me to be? By then, you and I hadn’t spoken for over a year, and I was trying to piece together what you’d wanted, what I’d done wrong. Having a beautiful fool for a daughter wasn’t what you meant when, at age forty-three, you said you’d earned the right to raise a baby on your own. You made enough to be your own husband. I think you wanted us to fight crime, kick patriarchy in the crotch, drink wine, and spit knowledge.
Is that what you wanted? One of the rare August nights that Mukta was sober (I think it was a Sunday), I confided in her about you, and me.
“Seems reductive,” she said.
“On whose part?”
“Either.” She shrugged. She stared out the window and watched the homeless man peeing on a green Ford Fusion.
“But your mom sounds like a regular, ah, firecracker.”
“Which is to say?”
“A cunt but in a good way.”
I think you would have enjoyed this. Do you? I feel that Mukta, perhaps, would have known better how to talk to you, what you would have liked.

And now here is what I’m most ashamed to tell you. It comes in two parts.
The first part is that late one afternoon in mid-August, Maritza’s boyfriend came into the boutique, turned the Open sign around to Closed, drew the window shades, and fucked me on the floor of the back room near the mini-fridge. The AC was still broken. We gulped the cool air.
Then the door opened, a muffled, harried sound emanated from the sales floor, and Maritza walked past the counter and into the back room, carrying the Closed sign in her hand as evidence of an entirely different and quotidian crime.
Maritza had a clear American accent. When she cursed, it wasn’t merry or charming. It was bad and hard and gross, and I ran from the boutique on Franklin. I scurried home like an ant running from the Biblical flood created by a child’s curious water pail, and I lost my job.
The second part was that all this while, Mukta had been applying for an artist’s visa to live in the United States. New York specifically, but Los Angeles would do. Without it she was, she said, illegal. The catch was that in order to get an artist’s visa that would enable her to stay in New York long enough to get acting gigs, she had to get acting gigs in New York to qualify as an artist in the first place.
I hadn’t known how long she had left, how precarious the situation really was, and she didn’t say. I suppose I should have wondered. I suppose I should have thought, for a second, critically. And asked. But I didn’t pay attention. Not until that August evening that I came home shocked and dirtied from the boutique, jobless, did she tell me.
“It’s over,” she said. “My visa was rejected.”
“But could your parents—?” I said.
“My parents stopped sending money two weeks ago,” she said. She looked over at our microwave full of bulk carrot cake power bars. She nodded at it, gratefully.
“So now what?”
“I’ve got to move back,” she said. “To fookin’ Ireland. What the actual fook. My parents sent me the most batshit fookin’ letter,” she said. She pulled up an email on her phone and told me to read.
It was a message demanding that Mukta return to the family home in Northern Ireland. It seemed to have been written by a father but was signed by a mother. “Or we’ll come over there and drag you back so help us G-d,” was the last line. Then, “Love, Mum.”

Mukta left, and for the next two weeks, I lived off margaritas and carrot cake power bars taken from the unused microwave oven. I did not go by the boutique. I rarely left the house, except to get margaritas.
I haven’t written Maritza’s name in the “past employers” section on subsequent job applications, am too afraid of what might happen if someone ever calls her up. In the interview for the next job I took, a server at a vegan gastropub in Alphabet City, the manager asked me why I had no prior work experience. I shrugged and looked sullen. “It’s a beautiful day,” I said.
The restaurant manager, a man with his hair combed back over his head like a fat wave of brown, looked out the window, at the sky, dumbfounded. It was gray and windy, the first day of a real fall.
“Wow, yes,” he said. “Beautiful. Yes it is.”

My hands are chapped from scrubbing the counters and cleaning the juicer. My armpits smell like garlic. I had a boy here, just after Mukta left, who cooked me food and paid half the rent. That lasted four months. But now he’s gone, too. I never heard from those people, Mukta and Maritza and her strong-jawed boyfriend, again. It’s May now, and I hate it all. And I don’t know what to do. If I had some money, I could fly home. Well, Mother. What do you think of that? Would you welcome me with open arms? Would it really be so bad?
Tomorrow, my landlord will show the apartment to new tenants. I left most of my stuff in a box on the sidewalk. The homeless man has peed on it, joyously. This morning, the landlord knocked on the door.
“When that beautiful woman left town,” he said, “I shed a tear.”
“She’s in Ireland now,” I said.
“Ireland.” He said it with a gauzy stare.
“I’ll leave both keys in the mailbox.”
Where do I go? Sometimes, when the world feels still and dark around me, I think about Mukta, what she’s doing. She once told me her family lived on a crag in a valley in Northern Ireland so unknown they simply call it Unknown Valley. She said that growing up, they were surrounded by wildflowers and twisting briars and rosebushes, all sorts of windy Irish green. There is a creek where she, her family, and the surrounding homes would swim in summer.
“Fookin’ boring,” she’d said when she first told me about it. We’d been sitting in the park on a blanket, licking salt off the margaritas we’d ordered to-go in Styrofoam cups. These specifically were the specialty of the bar across the street, which was full of large flat-screen televisions, drunken minors, unhappy Polish men. My treat. We’d just moved in together, so it must have been late May, a year ago. I want you to know that the park was calm, quaint. A dog sniffed the hem of my skirt. The sky was wide and bright.
That craggy valley sounded like heaven to me. Just what I needed. To be cradled alone in a world of green. But imagining Mukta there, now, I can’t help but think she doesn’t belong. I picture her there and it looks so ugly and wrong.

Before she left, that stinky, wet day last August, I tried to comfort her. We were waiting for the cab to take her to the airport. We stood on our front stoop. Music from the neighbors’ apartment was busting through their complex walls, bumping and bumping the same three beats over and over.
“Your home sounds beautiful, Muk,” I said. “You’re lucky. You live in a jaw-droppingly beautiful place, a ghastly beautiful place full of roses and life and history. And love. Water, trees.”
Mukta said nothing. She glared down the street.
“Maybe you just need to go back to realize how nice it is,” I said.
“Leah, my sweet, dumb Leah, I’m miserable here.” She flailed her arms around: at the neighbors’ apartment, at the scrawny trees, at the sweltering sky. “Fooking hellfire-Sodom-and-Gomorrah miserable. But I’m even more miserable everywhere else. Who the fook needs a valley or green? Not me. Do you know what I mean? Do you get that?”
I shook my head. She let out a sigh. Theatrical.
“You wouldn’t understand it because of where you’re from,” she said.
Her cab pulled up to the curb. She hugged me. Her arms were sharp, winding.
“I love you, Leah,” she said. “I’ll always think of you when I think of America.”

---

Emily Hunt Kivel was born in San Francisco. Her recent fiction appears in The Paris Review, New England Review, Fieldnotes, and Guernica. She has taught writing at Columbia University and the University of Texas Permian Basin.

 

My father knows a man who is no longer a farmer, but when this man was a farmer, a pesticide salesman knocked on his door one afternoon. The farmer invited the salesman into his kitchen, where they sat at the farmer’s table, drinking cups of chilled brown pop.
The farmer listened to the salesman’s pitch, then retrieved a small article he’d saved from the prior Sunday’s paper, about how this particular pesticide disfigured babies in utero, made bees lose their way, and damaged a bird’s ability to sing. It caused cancer in lab rats, too—but that was nothing new.
The salesman waved his hand the way some will dismiss a loud woman. From his kit, he took a little sample bottle of pesticide and unscrewed the lid. He poured the yellow liquid into his empty pop cup. If it was dangerous, he said, would I do this? He gulped it. He wiped his mouth and grinned.
I’ve got chores to do, said the farmer, and thanked the salesman for his time.
The salesman sat in his car in the farmer’s driveway and watched the farmer walk across the yard and into a barn. The salesman’s gimmick always worked—he was angry. He felt queasy, too—but that was nothing new.
The farmer sat on a short stool in the quiet barn milking Gertrude, his favorite cow. He squeezed her teats tenderly and patted her behind gently while Gertrude munched on a sheaf of alfalfa. The farmer thought about his father, a farmer, who’d died of cancer, and his mother, a farmer, who’d died of cancer, and his uncle, a farmer, who’d died of cancer, and his cousin, a farmer, who’d died of cancer, and his older brother, a farmer, who’d died of cancer, and, most recently, his next-door neighbor, a farmer, who’d died of cancer.
Shortly thereafter, my father’s friend, who was forty-two at the time, announced his retirement from farming. He and his wife sold their farm and moved their family to Scottsdale, Arizona, where the former farmer built a respected private investigation firm.
Years later, utilizing his professional resources, the farmer-turned-private-dick ran a trace on the pesticide salesman, whose business card he’d kept. He wanted to find out what happened to the man who—as the dick would have it—saved his life.
The salesman was born in the spring, in a scantly populated state, to a young war widow. After graduating from a local business college with average grades, he worked at a tomato soup factory, a poultry plant, an insurance firm, and a used car dealership before his stint in agricultural sales. He’d been renting a room above a laundromat and was twelve thousand dollars in debt when, aged forty-five, he died in the hospital where, years earlier, all three of the dick’s children had been born. The dick, however, was unable to discover the salesman’s cause of death.
As of this writing, the dick is alive, and so is my father—and so am I. Even Gertrude the cow is still getting milked by another man’s hands. I know all of this because I’m a dick, too.

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Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles and is the recipient of a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Illustration: Michael Carney.

This happened in the sixties, in a town on Mexico’s Costa Grande called Técpan de Galeana. Dad was sixteen and my uncle Julián fourteen. On the weekends, they used to work in my grandmother’s copra orchard.
A copra orchard is a sloping coconut plantation. The fruits are chopped and opened using machetes; you split them in two and drain off the liquid or drink it, and then leave the two halves in the open air. When the white, sun-dried meat known as the copra is ready, you grate and boil it to remove the oil. Depending on how good the harvest is, you then either sell the oil from door to door or send it to a factory in Acapulco, where it’s made into soap.
Grandmother’s orchard was small enough for two young kids to be able to take care of it on Saturdays. The tough days are when the green coconuts have to be harvested, peeled, and split; the easy ones are when you’re just there, watching to make sure the birds don’t peck the copra. There are wild birds but also domestic fowl, because what else can you do in a plantation of trees that practically grow without human assistance besides raise a few chickens? What else can you do besides raise chickens and lie in a hammock? And eat mangoes? Raising chickens, lying in a hammock, and eating mangoes are three things that coastal dwellers have got down to a fine art.
This happened in the mid-sixties, in my grandmother’s copra orchard, on one of the easy Saturdays. Dad and my uncle Julián arrived early in the morning. They put their belongings under a mango tree to keep them from the sun, though not from the muggy heat, took out their hammocks, and strung them between a branch and a pole fitted with hooks. Then they lay back to work. And so the day progressed until three in the afternoon, by which time their stomachs were growling. They opened their bags and took out the buns with relleno de cuche their mother had put together. A bottle of Agua Yoli. A flask of cold chilate. A couple of tecoyote biscuits.
“When life’s this good, who’d desert their post?” my father must have asked. It was his favorite phrase for chewing the fat. Or that’s what my mom used to say. The truth is that I only ever met him once or twice. Mom told me this story, and she heard it from him when they were dating.
After their meal had settled a little, Uncle Julián and my father returned to work.
“Hey, man, go check the birds aren’t eating the copra,” ordered my father without getting out of his hammock.
“No can do, pardner,” replied my uncle Julián without getting out of his hammock.
“What’s stopping you, man?” insisted his elder brother from his hammock, serenely angry: I’m not sure if this is true, if it’s just my family, all coastal people, or something to do with growing up without a father, but you wouldn’t believe in what high esteem people on the Costa Grande hold the rank of Elder Brother.
“I’m fishing a ripe mango,” said Julián.
“Ripe mango, my foot! They’re all still green.”
“To be sure, there’ll be one.”
Dad looked up to the top of the tree in case his shortsighted eyes managed to spot a ripe fruit among the branches. As if: the season didn’t start for another fortnight. You could fish a green one using a fruit picker (a two-and-a-half-meter pole tipped with an open-weave cane naza—a sort of creel with a claw inside: you raise the pole, trap the fruit, tug, and the mango falls cleanly into the naza) and then eat the slices with chili and lime. But that’s all it was good for.
“There’s no ‘sure’ about it. Just go check, will you, man? I can hear the hens.”
“I’m busy, pardner.”
Dad calmly began to get really mad.
“Hey, little bro, if you don’t go check, I’ll hang you.”
“Hang me then, pardner. I’ll fish a mango while I’m waiting.”
I don’t know where he got the idea. Maybe from the red tops.
He stretched over to his bag and took out the long piece of rope he had there for some reason or other: could be that it was part of his equipment or that his mind had been stalking the idea of killing his younger brother before they set out. First, he started to tie a slipknot. Slowly, slowly, still lying in his hammock. That went on until five in the afternoon. Second, he began tossing the lariat at his brother’s neck. If he didn’t manage to lasso him, that was partially because Julián—still fishing his mango, an activity that required a level of mystical concentration—dodged the trap by dipping his head every so often.
Dad finally got tired of trying to achieve his aim from the hammock. He slowly extracted himself, walked over to Julián, and passed the noose over his head. Julián didn’t turn a hair.
“This is your last chance. Go check the copra and the hens.”
“No can do, pardner.”
Dad looked up in search of the ideal branch for lynching his brother. Once again, his shortsighted eyes betrayed him: he wasn’t sure which fork would bear the weight of a fourteen-year-old boy. That was the kind of thing the eagle-eyed Julián took charge of.
“You didn’t think that one through, did you, motherfucker?” said my uncle, reading his brother’s mind.
Dad passed the rope over a lowish fork that seemed to be pretty well aligned with the trunk. Now all that was needed was to see if a single person would have the strength to haul Julián—well built if not to say fat for his age—up on the pulley. But before he could do that, there was the matter of putting on his work gloves to stop the rope from cutting his hands. Added to that was the matter of finding a long slope to carry Julián’s body down, and running off, pulling on the rope with all his might. And then, too, there was the matter of putting a piece of sacking over his shoulder and winding the rope around his torso so he could use his whole weight to complete the task without the aforesaid rope burning him. And hoping to goodness that the aforesaid rope was strong enough not to fray on the first contact with the wood. He discovered that punishing insubordination required an incredible amount of labor and energy. Just working it out made his head hurt.
“You didn’t think that through either, did you, motherfucker?” my uncle laughed, again reading Dad’s mind.
Dad donned his work gloves, armored his chest with the sacking, wound the end of the rope around his hand, and was ready to start running down the slope when my uncle pointed to a spot in the mango tree.
“There it is, pardner. I’ve caught it. Quick, pass me the picker.”
Dad suspected that my uncle was playing a last-minute trick in order to save his life, but what the hell, he decided, if it also saves me from so much slog for sweet fucking all, just to teach that disobedient bastard a useless lesson; Cain must have been thinking what a pain it all was when the moment came to kill Abel.
He dropped the rope and passed his brother the picker, which was lying two or three steps away. Without getting out of his hammock, Julián raised the pole and fished the mango. Then he lowered it and carefully inspected the contents of the naza. It was a plump, yellow, smooth little fruit, without a single black mark.
“It’ll be a bummer,” my father prophesied.
“Lend me your knife,” replied Julián.
My uncle Julián cut the mango in two and offered one half to his elder brother. Dad said (I didn’t get this from my mother: I heard it in my father’s own voice years later, just before he died, when we finally got to know each other personally) that it was the sweetest, softest, juiciest little mango he’d ever eaten. Out of season. An aberration.
Dad returned to his hammock to better enjoy his half of the fruit.
And that’s how my grandmother found them when she arrived to take them home; torn between the rage of finding them lying in their hammocks, sucking on the mango while the birds pecked the copra, and fright: they were so at ease that it hadn’t even entered their minds to remove the hangman’s noose from around uncle Julián’s neck.

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Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of The House of the Pain of Others and Tomb Song, as well as several volumes of poetry and two story collections. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.

Christina MacSweeney is the translator of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, The House of the Pain of Others, and Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, and has published translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms and contributed to several anthologies. She was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. She lives in England.

 

There I stood before the board of reviews because of the grievances regarding the book I’d written on sabbatical, a book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, and I’d been tasked with defending my book because of the pushback and complaints regarding my book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, although not strictly a book about Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning, I felt, but a book about rapture, storytelling, and the holy spirit, not holy in the religious sense, not religious as in blood and wafers and a weeping Jesus or Mary and I’m not exactly sure who was weeping only that there’d been weeping, I’d always heard about the weeping, and certainly someone somewhere was weeping, anyway I was a Jew and a relaxed Jew at that, a lapsed and indolent Jew, lazy about being Jewish on my best days and sometimes I’d completely forget I was a Jew and if someone had approached and asked, Jew? I would’ve had trouble answering; point being, I had enough on my plate.

In any case, there I stood; the very room in which the board of reviews had taken place for over a century, frigid and bleak, serious and somber, hidden away on the second floor of an academic structure whose name changed no less than twice a decade; the Robert L. Kurtz Wing when I’d first arrived, a young instructor, wide-eyed and tender, then, a little later, the Estelle Gawronski Lecture Hall, and the current name I couldn’t quite recall, although I was almost certain it was the Hershel Something Complex, Hershel being a long-forgotten professor who’d written something once about Auden. Yes, the building’s name changed often and without notice and just as quickly transformed from Wing to Hall to Complex, adjusting its purpose overnight, furtively shape-shifting so to speak, though this wasn’t really the case because, monikers notwithstanding, the Hershel Whomever Complex was nothing if not static, from its design and odor to the half-lit vending machines, infinitely stubborn in its aesthetics, as if its ever-changing moniker was an effort to challenge the solemnity of its architecture, that of a bland, mid-century edifice owing as much to academia as to Marxism.

Besides the dean, the board consisted of another ten souls, administrators mostly, but a handful of retired academics as well, pensioners who faithfully emerged from the woods of senility whenever a little dust was kicked up, brittle bones be damned, they likely thought, there was drama to be had, and this group had small patience for chitchat, wanting nothing more than to commence with the harassing of the instructor, in this case me, about whatever the current controversy might be because the board of reviews was the most forbidding inquiry on campus, a procedure reserved for the most austere and grave offenses, and letters were notarized and letters sent and I’d received the summons a week before about the troubles and misgivings and, to quote the summons itself, factual quandaries about my book regarding Cervantes, bliss, and the search for meaning or, depending on the order, the search for meaning, bliss, and Cervantes, the order mattered more to them than to me and I was baffled because I’d defended the book and spoken eloquently about the book and received what I believed at the time was glowing praise and adulation for the book, a conclusion made from observing the tremulous eyes and stunned expressions of my superiors, as if they’d expected very little and I’d confounded their expectations, bringing to light a new branch of scholarship. Now, though, the tone had altogether changed and the first question posed from the board of reviews, once everyone was seated and offered water or coffee, was how could I support the central argument, thrust, or gist of my book, mainly the part where I claim Cervantes was not a writer of fiction but a biographer and a serious one at that and, following this reasoning, so went the first question, you assert that Don Quixote was real? I affirmed and blithely declared yes, adding that the man was as real as you or me.

There followed some audible gasps, largely, I think, for dramatic purposes, and I gazed across the conference room at Kate, a colleague and fellow professor in comparative literature, someone of whom I’d once been fond but had grown to despise, mostly, if I’m being honest, due to the company she kept, because whenever I looked at Kate I couldn’t help but think of her husband Archibald, an insufferable man who’d once taught at the college himself, computer science I believe, but had left after inventing a link or an app, some sort of digital contraption that had become incredibly popular and had thus made them, that is Archibald and Kate, remarkably wealthy, a device, I was told, designed to inform people how many breaths they’d taken in a day or an hour or even, I suppose, a minute, devised to help people relax, I was told, to keep track of their breathing, I was also told, measuring their heartbeats and, in essence, their general health, and there were countless similar apps, but Archibald’s app, Kate once explained in tedious detail, was the most precise and accurate app, an app having the catchiest name and the most fashionable logo, an app that people couldn’t get enough of, hundreds of thousands of people purchasing and downloading the app in order to track their breaths or count their breaths, compelling people to compete with themselves or their friends about the number of breaths taken and exhaled and I of course knew nothing of Archibald’s invention except it was incredibly popular, an app essentially counting a person’s inhalations and exhalations, and making matters worse, I despised Archibald’s name, a name that felt garish and archaic and drew attention to itself as well as to the enormous success of his breathing app, as if success had made Archibald grow into his own name, as if the name he’d been given at birth was merely an augury of his future self as an insufferable app inventor, and now he and his terrible name tormented me equally, and because of the success of Archibald’s inhaling/exhaling app, Kate didn’t have to work, making sure everyone on campus knew this, that work for her was a choice, that she showed up each day out of passion and generosity of spirit, a job she could just as easily walk away from, and each day as the rest of us locked our cars and trudged the seemingly uphill parking lot to plod the seemingly uphill halls amid our seemingly uphill careers Kate appeared to float. She smiled more easily now because she had Archibald’s app money or digital device money or whatever the fuck money he’d made for having invented a way for people to count their breaths and keep track of their breaths, both inhaling and exhaling, without actually having to count or keep track, who knows how the money from these things was generated, but once begun, I was told, it never ceased, because the app was intended to count people’s breaths and as long as people continued to breathe, they reasoned, people would continue to pay, and who could say, perhaps even after they’d died and their breathing stopped forever, perhaps even then Archibald would still find a way to be paid, so no, I cared not a whit, because it had nothing to do with anything I cared about, certainly not Cervantes or the search for meaning and certainly not the current defense of my book upon which my tenure, thus my future, depended, a book about Cervantes and my contention of his being a writer of nonfiction and not, as historically believed, fiction, thus meaning Don Quixote himself was real.

Not surprisingly, Kate posed the second question, which was about evidence and did I have any, meaning evidence, to support my claim that Don Quixote the novel, and by extension, the person, was the stuff of real life. It’s in my works cited, I said, forgetting if I’d included a works cited, if a works cited was even required anymore and were they called works cited or footnotes nowadays because I’d always confused the two, always been incredibly aloof regarding the finer points and minutiae of academia, downright incurious said some, and was the works cited the same as a bibliography or an appendix and Jesus Christ, I’d thought, there are so many words for things. I tried drawing the board’s attention to my sabbatical instead, illustrating in dramatic detail the months I’d spent conducting research, recounting my trip to Spain, the visits taken to the Toledo province and Alcalá de Henares, illustrating my meticulous analysis of Cervantes’s life as well as the keen scrutiny I’d made of the national registries and source materials; I described the museums and the national archives, musty with scholarship, the same tactic I’d used initially, a month earlier, when defending my book (the very tactic, in fact, used years earlier when defending my thesis) in order to display not only the passion I had for my subject but my capacity for research, describing the archives visited and the papers uncovered, one in particular, which related Cervantes’s admission that his famous novel, what everyone agrees to be the very first novel, is in fact a biography. I spoke of Cervantes having been captured by the Turks, along with Fernando Gutierrez Delgado, a fellow Spaniard, and how the two became dear friends during their years of captivity, and later, once both men were freed, Gutierrez Delgado, suffering from the harsh conditions and threats of death, had gone insane, had begun dressing in armor, chasing windmills, seeing things that simply weren’t there. Yes, I told the board of reviews, Gutierrez Delgado saw himself as the brightest star in the world’s greatest adventure, thus becoming the subject of Cervantes’s biography, because who could ignore a maniac who believed himself a goddamn knight errant, I asked. It wasn’t only entertaining, Cervantes surely thought, I said, but it was too rich to ignore, and Cervantes the biographer pretended to be Cervantes the novelist until he became that way. My book included a litany of accounts never brought to light, coarse and tawdry misadventures, of Cervantes in particular, who wasn’t the kindest influence on Gutierrez Delgado and instead of escorting his ailing friend to the nearest asylum, which, I believe, would’ve been the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians, goaded and badgered the feeble Delgado into fistfights, duels, and the instigation of general turmoil. Yes, I went on, the faces of the board pale and inscrutable, Cervantes attached himself to Gutierrez Delgado and studied Gutierrez Delgado as if Cervantes were Gutierrez Delgado’s loyal sidekick, his Sancho Panza as it were, and thus the biography of his dear insane friend, Fernando Gutierrez Delgado, emerged as the novel we all know and love. It certainly doesn’t take anything away from his genius, I continued, after all, this isn’t a character assassination, simply a breakthrough in literary scholarship, and yes, I thought to myself, I’d made it all up, of course I’d made it up, I’d had to make it up, Gutierrez Delgado’s entire existence and a litany of other details produced from thin air and written about exhaustively, although not my love of Cervantes, no, my love of Cervantes was perfect and pure; I loved Cervantes and Don Quixote, at least the parts I’d read, it seemed like a fun book and once finished I was sure to have stronger, more sophisticated feelings, but returning from Spain I realized I had less than ten days to write the book expected, guaranteed, in fact, to my advisor, and of which I’d composed not a single word because my sabbatical was simply the greatest experience of my life; I’d felt my heart expand, felt my soul at the mercy of rare and fragile longings. I had a vision of bliss or what I took to be bliss or, if not bliss, joy at the very least, and I hadn’t visited a single archive, museum, or university, I hadn’t made the slightest of efforts because, I’d thought, fuck them, instead I’d gorged upon cheese and olives and tapas, climbed the green hills of San Isidro, made love to a woman named Isabella, at least that’s what she called herself, and in the morning, after counting her money, she placed the softest, most tender kiss upon my forehead, a kiss infused with history because in Spain a sense of illumination and calm overcame me, the sort of calm one sees in the eyes of a Buddhist monk or a cow employed in the chewing of its cud, and I fell in love with life, perhaps for the very first time, and the arc of the sky was a page of possibility. In Spain I fell in love with the faces and the streets and the faces in the streets and the sunlight too, especially the sunlight, the way it curved in soft, crepuscular streaks that eluded description, and in the mornings that pale-yellow light, almost golden, eventually fuchsia, finally flamingo red, settled upon the structures softer than a suggestion. In short, Europe agreed with me and quickly I’d forgotten the purpose of my sabbatical because life, true life, had intruded.

The dean rifled through my manuscript, producing a booklet from my primary source materials, something I immediately recognized as the menu from Sala de Despiece, a restaurant I’d frequented during my visit, at first because of the outside patio and later because of the effect the sunlight had on the outside patio and lastly, after striking up conversations with both the staff and the locals, for the outstanding cocido Madrileño, a stew that would sate the most demanding of palates, and soon enough I’d become friends with the staff and judging from the photo you’ve just retrieved, I told the dean, that would be Miguel, a young waiter studying architecture but taking a gap year. We became quite close, he and I, he has the most charming parents by the way, Adelia and Pedro, yes, we got to chatting, Miguel and I, and soon enough I was invited to their home because that’s how the Spanish are, I said, courteous and frank, not simple or gullible, not at all, merely warmhearted and without pretense and Miguel’s parents were worried because Miguel had taken a year off from college and Adelia and Pedro urged me to talk sense to Miguel, to convince him to return because it’s so easy, as we all know, to abandon school and never go back, but his talent at design and architecture, his father said, taking me aside, whispering in tender-hearted disappointment (resigned to his son’s fate but saddened by his own resignation to his son’s fate), because Miguel’s talent is innate, he whispered, he has a natural gift, the father ushering me to Miguel’s bedroom to show off his sketches, and yes, I’d agreed, the boy was not without talent. The dean extracted more of my source materials, parading a series of photographs I’d taken: the Royal Palace, the Prado, the Quinticas Gap, some lovely shots of local graffiti along with a series of snapshots of some Polish backpackers I’d attached myself to for several weeks and, lastly, the brochures from a wax museum and a Segway tour I’d taken and it was, I thought, a lovely montage of those happy months.

Simple question, sighed the dean, closing my manuscript, are you fucking insane? I sighed in return, discouraged by the direction of the proceedings, disappointed the impression I thought my book had made a month before meant so little, and I looked into the eyes of the board and saw nothing, no understanding, no comprehension, no appreciation for the transformation I’d undergone, and asking permission to speak, I expounded the importance of our collective fictions, explained how our collective fictions revealed our most inner truths, that the pinnacle, the apex, the triumph of existence is the stories we tell, no matter their veracity or legitimacy, if the tale told feels real it becomes that way, meaning real. I said some other things as well, mostly to buy time, things about faith and destiny, superstition and the sublimity of the human soul, and once again Madrid (I always found myself returning to Madrid); the smell of the streets in the early morning, the storefronts not yet open, how the shopkeepers, cumbered in their private thoughts, faithfully washed their sidewalks, how the Spaniards ate dinner at absurdly late hours, that eleven o’clock at night in Spain meant the evening had only begun because life in Spain, I said, was lived the way life should be lived, that is ecstatically and Debra from Humanities chimed in, called me a lunatic, and the dean, whose expression had become fixed and severe, accused me of academic fraud, promising an immediate search for my replacement. Kate began checking her husband’s invention to see how many times she’d inhaled and exhaled since the start of the review and a spirited argument broke out between Debra, an evident fan of the app, and Chris from the history department, over their rates of breathing, meaning who had inhaled and exhaled more and Chris laughed, pointed out that the point of the app was to breathe less, not more, that the lower number was indeed the better number, as the lower number translated as having a better resting heart rate and this was achieved, or at least proven, by breathing less, and there followed a series of lighthearted jabs at Debra’s expense for not realizing, after using the app for over three years, that the goal was fewer breaths not more, and Chris made another joke about Debra’s outlandishly high number of breaths, asking if she was having any pain in her chest and she should seriously consider seeing a doctor and the board laughed and offered one another coffee or water, and even though I was standing before them I’d been all but forgotten, my dismissal, it seemed, the most obvious outcome in the world and my thoughts once more returned to Spain, the light especially, the yellows and the golds, the flamingo reds, colors so rich they felt invented, and gazing out the single window was a sky waiting to cry and the disparity of the skies between here and there, meaning the sky over the board of reviews and the sky over Spain, Madrid in particular, was not lost but heightened by the fact that the sky that day was so heavy and oppressive, identical to the room, the building, the entire campus. No matter, I thought, I’d begun packing my apartment the moment I’d received the summons, because getting summoned to the board of reviews meant only one thing, the end of one’s career, and I couldn’t help but smile, knowing I was one day closer to Spain, and the Prado and the green hills of San Isidro, and the sunlight as well, don’t get me started on the sunlight, and the stars too, not that I’d paid attention, but I was certain the stars in Spain were glorious, they had to be, no less glorious than the patio of Sala de Despiece and Cervantes of course, who could forget Cervantes and the greatest novel ever written, a book I promised one day to finish and perhaps, I thought, I’d bring it on the plane.

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Mark Haber is the author of the 2019 novel Reinhardt’s Garden, nominated for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award, and the forthcoming novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, both from Coffee House Press. He is the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore.

 

There’s a worse punishment than having a Jewish mother or an Italian one. It’s having a mother who writes. The two bloodlines flowed together in my own mother, and as if that wasn’t enough, my mother was also possessed by literature. Julia Goldemberg rejected her bourgeois family of origin and at age sixteen, after a brief involvement with Maoism, became a hippie, left the house where she was born, and went to live in a commune at a country house in Moreno. When they threw her out of the commune for keeping the proceeds from the sale of incense, her parents, Don Saúl and Doña Donatella, a couple of shop owners from the Once District, received their prodigal daughter with open arms and tears in their eyes. Especially Don Saúl, always ready to forgive her, like when she returned deported from Germany. However, let the record show that by that time Julie Gold—her nom de guerre—was no longer a little girl.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should mention those times when she brought me into my parents’ bed. That was in the days when we lived together. Although when she brought me into her bed, she wasn’t always in bed with my father. Sometimes she was with a woman friend. By then my mother was already Julie. That’s what she asked me to call her. What I remember: Julie would lay me back down on the floor on my mattress, wrap me in a Peruvian blanket, and softly hum a pacifist ballad by Joan Baez. But let’s take this one step at a time.
In the early seventies Julie Gold published The Madwoman Down the Hall. The novel, which told of her muddling around in the hippie community, was picked up by the censors, an event that for Julie represented a success, affirming her self-esteem. It was her only success. As well as her only book. The enfant terrible single mom. Even though by the end of the sixties she was living in a tenement in Tribunales with Rafael Míguez, an avant-garde poet, my father. Rafa, as I was supposed to call him, introduced himself as an anthology poet. Which, in fact, he really was, because all he ever published were three poems in an anthology. At that time I was a baby, an obstacle to the talents of both of them. Julie worked for a women’s magazine. And Rafa for a weekly. They hated those jobs, but without their salaries they couldn’t have rented that loft facing Plaza Lavalle, a beehive occupied by the trendiest bohemians of that small village, a village that, let’s be honest, was too small for them, and the reason why they would soon traverse the broad and alien world. The farthest they got: Machu Picchu. Rafa couldn’t stand the months-long fame that Julie enjoyed with The Madwoman Down the Hall. It was the cause of their separation. He wasn’t as bothered by the number of bodies Julie had bedded or the quality of her writing as he was by that sparkling popularity, so sudden that when they walked into El Colombiano, everyone greeted her, and when they arrived at the Di Tella, all eyes focused on his companion. You think you’re more important than I am, flaunting that piece-of-shit novel everywhere we go, Rafa said to her. You’re the one who’ll feel like shit when you see yourself in the one I’m writing now, she replied. And she left, slamming the door behind her. Forever.
Not knowing what to do with me, Rafa left me at his parents’ house. Grandpa Jacinto and Grandma Mari were both teachers in Las Heras, in the province of Buenos Aires. And so my grandparents raised me in a house in the middle of the countryside, a few kilometers outside of town. Shortly afterward I found out that Rafa, threatened by the dictatorship, had split for Venezuela. I didn’t see his face again till ’83.
After that novel, Julie never published again. She maintained that publishers didn’t understand the Beckettian turn her prose had adopted. The seventies came to an end. An era of writer’s block for Julie, who attributed her paralysis to the military dictatorship. It comforted her to fall in love with Sergei, a Ukrainian bassist who gave private lessons in a tenement in San Telmo. Sergei had won a German grant for young composers. The foundation offered him a three-month scholarship in Berlin. I still remember when they came over to bid farewell to the countryside. My grandparents regarded them scornfully. Good luck to you, said my grandmother. And don’t come back, my grandfather added.
When his scholarship ended, Sergei crossed the Wall, and my mother was left alone in a seedy apartment in a housing project. The last information she had about the musician arrived a few months later: he was teaching music at a school in Smolensk. On the back of a postcard Sergei asked her to come. Julie would fall in love with the Dnieper, he promised.
But Julie preferred dying of hunger to crossing the Wall. An artist had to put up with economic hardship, she thought. Besides, it was better to sell your body than your soul. Around that time, she met Hannah Biermann, a sociology student and call girl who would later triumph in the field of noir fiction with her stories of eroticism and violence. Hannah convinced her that she could survive more easily in the port city of Hamburg. Since Julie wouldn’t accept just any client, her choosiness was the cause of her misfortune. The pimp beat her senseless, breaking two of her ribs and leaving her lying at the port. But Julie never was one to let herself be defeated by troubles. She didn’t wait to be officially discharged. She couldn’t stand that Nazi hospital, she said. The truth was that she had no documents, and once she was back on her feet, she’d have to deal with her situation as an illegal. She fled the hospital, leaning on a crutch, with a stolen coat over her white hospital gown. In the end, destiny was kind to her, offering her experiences that deserved to be told. The money she’d saved in Hamburg was enough to allow her to return to Berlin and pay a few months’ rent on a basement apartment. She had decided to write an autobiographical novel. The neighbors complained about the clatter of her typewriter. As she still had no papers, she never left her room for fear of being reported as an illegal. She ate whatever she found in garbage bags. She wrote day and night, on practically no sleep. She was faint from hunger, but she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to rob a supermarket. One windy morning, a newspaper fluttered by her ankles. An article caught her attention: in Paris, a Japanese student had eaten a classmate. She made a mental note.
Julie was never one to give up. She was caught at a supermarket, stealing a carton of milk. To compound her woes, the police arrested her. When they discovered that she was undocumented, they deported her back to her country. And on her return, she had no choice but to appeal to her parents.
By this time her parents were two ailing old folks, and she a thirty-something woman who looked older because, as she used to say, she was weather-beaten. And this, her return from Germany, was more than thirty years ago. But time was never a concern for Julie. You have to live in the present, she often said. The past is a sheet that tangles around our feet and keeps us from moving forward, and the future is a night that descends on us. All we have is the light of the present, a light that lasts as long as a match flame. That light, the present, would never illuminate someone: her son, me.
Don Saúl had closed the store on Calle Larrea. Doña Donatella, despite what Julie had anticipated, refused to take her in this time. But Don Saúl, a sentimental type, managed to soften up his wife. For a while, as she tried to get back into journalism, Julie slept in the empty store. At last she found work editing the “Daily Living” section of a newspaper. Julie detested nothing more than “daily living.” She never understood what “daily” could possibly mean besides “the adventure of living and telling about it.” Regardless, she got her bearings in the section and managed to rent a studio apartment in Parque Chacabuco.
Not long after renting the apartment, she went to the country to find me. She tried to take me away to live with her. But my paternal grandparents objected. I’m going to report you for kidnapping, I remember Julie shouting as she returned to the train station. Not only did she not file a report, she didn’t come back for me, either.
I should mention that my father came to visit me in ’83. He brought me a toy airplane. He stayed for just a few minutes. Grandpa Jacinto threw him out. It was too late to make up for the abandonment, he said. Grandma Mari cried. My father agreed. I never heard from him again.
Julie remembered my existence when I published my first book of short stories, Son of the Madwoman Down the Hall, in which, predictably, the last and longest story stank of autobiography. I published it with a small press and didn’t receive too much critical attention, but the few reviews that did come out were favorable. I worked at an advertising agency. I was in love with Mariana, an art director. We lived together, first in an apartment in Olivos, by the railroad tracks. Later, when I became creative director, we bought this house near the cemetery. This is an upper-middle-class neighborhood. There’s a tennis club, a little plaza, and security booths on the corners. A quiet neighborhood whose buildings date from the fifties, many of them refurbished while still respecting the gable roofs and the gardens in front. Most of them have a tree planted on the sidewalk. You can see orange blossoms, magnolias, laurels, and palm trees. In the spring, the whole neighborhood is in flower and there’s a fragrant breeze. It was springtime again: Mariana and I had a baby, Martín. Even if we weren’t a dream couple, we were very much alike. Though no one can forget where he comes from, at least I felt I was comfortable there; I resembled the person I had wanted to be. I was in love and had started writing my first novel on weekends, a coming-of-age tale. Salinger was my master.
When Julie called one Saturday afternoon, I arranged to meet her at a café in Belgrano. I didn’t want her nearby. I hesitated to tell her she was a grandmother.
I thought we should talk, Julie said.
I asked her if she wanted coffee or tea. She ordered a dry martini. Not me—I had coffee.
I was about to call her Mom. No son of hers would have called her that. I asked her:
Talk about what, Julie.
You’re a very good reader, she said.
What are you talking about.
The madwoman down the hall is me, she said.
I wondered how to react. What to say to her after so long. I shouldn’t have written about Julie, given her the satisfaction. I didn’t know what to say. Julie stared at me with her pale blue eyes.
May I order another, she asked.
I called the waiter over.
I was about to tell her that Martín had eyes just like hers. But it wasn’t the right moment. It never would be. Julie didn’t tolerate imitations.
You used me, she said. You have no shame.
Never before had I seen anyone down a dry martini in one gulp. Or after, either. Julie stood up. Straight, like a classical ballerina. She looked down at me from above. She couldn’t lower herself, not even a centimeter.
Did you read the book, I asked.
I don’t need to, she said. I’m your mother.
She started to walk away.
It’s not the end of this, she said.
But it was.

It was the end till one winter night five years ago. A call at three a.m. startled us awake. It woke Martín, too.
Forgive me for calling at this hour, Julie said. I’m in trouble.
It was a well-known fact that trouble didn’t faze Julie. She’d been held up, coming out of the mini-mart. Two thugs, in the Constitución district. I asked her what she was doing in Constitución at that time of night.
If you cared about me, you’d know that I live in Constitución, darling, she said. I live in Constitución. In a rat trap, but with internet. The worst part is that I had my meds in the supermarket bag.
I calculated a half hour from Olivos to Constitución. I ran all the red lights. It was a drizzly night, and below zero. The address was on Calle O’Brien, a narrow, two-block-long street between the walls of the railroad tracks and Calle Salta. I stopped at the corner of Lima. I didn’t dare go any farther. There were bars, as sordid as they were noisy, interspersed with doors leading to dark hellholes. Whores and gangsters on the sidewalk. Brothels, red lights. Cumbia music rang out and zombies stumbled. To either side and on the pavement, thugs, druggies, and drag queens ambled around. I threw the car into reverse. I had to maneuver carefully to avoid running over a couple of brawling drunks. A blow exploded on the trunk of the car. Some kids were coming after me. I hit the gas and went back along Lima.
I drove around till I found a parking lot on Santiago del Estero. I walked toward O’Brien. Three drag queens emerged from a doorway, hugged me, we struggled; one of them grabbed me by the balls. I managed to get away.
If you come back here, it means you like it, baby, said the stockiest one.
We’ll be waiting for you, sugar, said another.
They left me reeking of a nauseatingly sweet perfume.
Calle O’Brien stank of fried grease and piss. I spotted several druggies. On that street you could buy anything you wanted. From smack to blow. A Dominican girl. Or several. In order to walk that street, you had to look like someone who was interested in whatever was on offer. I didn’t have that look. In a little bar, two cops were drinking beer with a couple of hookers. They looked at me, I looked at them and kept going. An old hooker offered me her services. I kept going. A bottle smashed against the wall behind me. I heard loud laughter. I kept going.
The building where she lived in that pigsty was murky and dark. A small yellow lamp barely illuminated the entrance. You could hear cumbias blasting. Also shouting, cursing, a child crying. A scrawny, toothless, graying Paraguayan stopped me. He had a pistol.
Where ya goin’, my man.
The guy studied me with his toothless smile.
You want pussy?
No, I said.
Weed, he tempted me.
I was looking for my mother, I explained, a woman who looked like such-and-such . . .
The one down the hall, he said. The crazy broad down the hall.
Reality imitates art, I said to myself.
I had to admit that Julie had stayed consistent throughout the years. I entered the building. At the end of a dark hallway, I found the door. Julie had hung two decorative posters. The first announced: “Julie Gold, Literary Expression Workshop.” The second warned: “There is no money here. Only books.” On that same poster someone had written: “Crazy old bat,” “Get help, Granny,” “Suck my dick,” “I wipe my ass with your books.” There was no bell. I knocked on the door three times.
Coming, Julie said. It was her voice. Hoarser than I remembered, but her voice.
Neither of us ventured a kiss.
How are you, I asked.
Julie was a woman of seventy. Maybe more. I never knew her age. She had short white hair, like Jean Seberg in Breathless. The difference between Jean Seberg and Julie was that Julie hadn’t committed suicide. I wondered what Jean Seberg would have looked like as an old woman. Julie wore a plaid shirt over a black T-shirt. And torn jeans. She had on woolen socks and clogs.
I’m as well as can be expected, she smiled. At least they didn’t knock me down or kick me. What I feel worst about are the meds.
It was true: Julie lived in a pigsty. The atmosphere smelled of incense, joints, and stale tobacco. But she had figured out how to conceal the damp spots on the walls with posters of nouvelle vague films. She had also decorated her rat hole with throw rugs. Her library: cement blocks and unfinished wood. There were stacks of books on the floor, on the table, around an old computer: white letters on a black background. I went over to read the screen. There was a Japanese name. I could see she was writing about anthropophagy and beauty. She lit a joint. And she told me. In Paris, Issei Sagawa, a Japanese literature student, had murdered and devoured Renée Hartevelt, a friend from the university. With the excuse of chatting with her about his progress in analyzing the European avant-garde movements, young Sagawa invited Hartevelt to his apartment. He shot her, butchered her, and ate her. Raw. He liked her thighs. He made special mention of the clitoris, a delicacy. He was tiny, scrawny, with a disabled man’s body and an oversized head. The picture in the newspaper revealed a malnourished Japanese man. Sagawa also said that by eating the young woman, he was trying to absorb her energy. How could the writer, as weak and skinny as an Egon Schiele, fail to understand him? Understanding and writing him a letter were Julie’s immediate reactions. She was prepared to convert his story into a novel.
Your meds, I said. Let’s look for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, Julie.
Once again I was about to call her Mom, but it wouldn’t have been like me. Or her, either.
Have a pisco first, she said.
No, thanks.
She poured me one anyway. I didn’t touch the glass.
Aren’t you interested in what I’m writing, she asked.
Maybe later on you’ll accuse me of plagiarism.
You couldn’t, she said. You’d have to swim in deep waters.
She had spent the whole last year corresponding with the anthropophagus. In jail Sagawa was dying of a brain disease. The French got rid of him by vacating the charges and extraditing him. His father, an entrepreneur, was waiting for him in Tokyo. He had his son committed to a psychiatric clinic. Miraculously, Sagawa recovered, and as he had no charges against him in his country, he regained his freedom. Today he’s a commentator for a TV show and a food connoisseur. Julie got in touch with him. Although there already was a novel out that told his story, Sagawa’s Letter by Juro Kara, Julie found it not only insufficient, but also mediocre. She was prepared to write a great story. She exchanged emails with Sagawa every week.
I don’t think you’d be able to get deeply into a story like that, darling, she said. In order to write it, you need to have lived deeply.
Let’s find a pharmacy, I said.
It’s not necessary, she said. I have the meds. I cried and pleaded with the robbers, and they let me keep them. Two possibilities: either they showed some moral fiber, or else they got frightened and thought, maybe the old bitch will go and die on us.
Why’d you call me, I asked.
Because I knew you’d come, she smiled.
Julie was sizing me up.
The truth is, I wanted to tell you about my project, she said. I need you to be a reader.
You’re crazy, Julie.
Another pisco? she asked.
I hadn’t drunk the first one.
I left.
Out on the street, the wind and rain shook me. I didn’t know what to feel, other than the cold and desolation of the neighborhood. Maybe that was all I could feel. But one thing was very clear: I didn’t want to see her again. The drag queens were still on the corner. I crossed the street.
When I returned home, I needed a hot shower, a change of clothes.
Then I slipped into Martín’s bedroom. He was sleeping like a little angel. He was a little angel.
I didn’t want to cry. But I cried.
Tell me, Mariana asked.
What.
Julie, she said. Tell me.
I told her. We sat down in the living room and I told her.
It’s her life, Mariana said. Not yours, not mine.
She’s my mother.
She’s an independent woman, Mariana said. You can’t deny that she did what she wanted to do with her life. She had balls. Not like us. That’s the part of her generation I admire. That freedom she had. She didn’t wait to be given her freedom; she took it. And she always risked everything for what she believed. Look at it that way.
What do you mean, Mariana.
In a way, I admire her.
In what way.
I always wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d kept on painting instead of becoming a designer.
Why didn’t you.
You didn’t get very far with your ongoing novel, either.
If you hadn’t gotten involved in design and I had continued with literature, we wouldn’t be thinking about moving to a gated community.
But maybe we’d be happier.
What’s happiness, I asked.
I didn’t stick around for her reply. I had to be at the agency early the next day to present an ad campaign for a new model car. A small convertible, fully loaded. I went to sleep. I dreamed I was a baby with an adult-sized head. I was swimming in a fishbowl. Julie and I were both in the bowl, and Julie was a barracuda. She chased me around, baring her teeth. She ate one of my feet, then the other. The water turned red with blood. I woke up. And I couldn’t fall asleep again. I climbed on the exercise bike.
We didn’t discuss the matter again. Mariana was still pissed off. It was a week of silence. We barely exchanged the occasional word about Martín. Martín might have been the only thing we had in common. And that joined us together. But if I thought about it a while, not even Martín held us together. Because her Martín wasn’t my Martín. Our son had become a form of entertainment, like the TV. And each one of us saw him on a different channel.
One night, when I got home from the agency, I made a suggestion:
We need to take a trip.
What about Martín, she asked. He’s very little.
We’ll leave him with your parents—a week, ten days.
Mariana’s parents are young. Fifty-ish. Good jobs. Eduardo is a court clerk. And Fina’s most important occupation is playing bridge. The kind of perfect grandparents you see in commercials. Besides, they’re always asking when we’re going to leave him with them. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to leave Martín with them for a few days.
But where would we go.
Europe, I said.
Europe, she repeated.
Barcelona, Paris, Rome.
Why not Berlin, she said.
Why Berlin, I asked.
There’s a lot of art in Berlin.
Not Berlin.
Give me a reason.
I didn’t reply.

I had news of Julie last week. Twice. The first time, when I was about to walk into the agency. I saw a homemade flyer stuck to a light post. Right in front of the agency. It was her photo. In black and white. “Looking for Julie Gold,” it said. “Last seen in Constitución. Wearing a jacket and jeans. Black T-shirt. Clogs. Talks and laughs to herself.” Then a phone number. I yanked off the flyer, folded it up, stuck it in my pocket.
I called that number. The Paraguayan guy picked up. I told him I was looking for Julie.
The one down the hall, he said. Wait a second, my man.
I didn’t wait. That afternoon, when I left the agency, I went to Constitución. The winter was even more wintry. Night was falling as I parked. The sensation of falling into a trap, getting stuck in a spider web.
In contrast to the early morning when I’d walked into that grimy, stinking building, now there was movement. A gang of kids was drinking beer and smoking in the doorway. They didn’t move aside to let me pass.
One of them stepped into my path: A couple of pesos, don.
In order to see Julie, I had to pay an entrance fee. I gave them a few coins. They didn’t even budge. I gave them a bill. They ran away. I could hear their laughter behind me as I advanced down the hall. Some of the doors were ajar. The cumbia was deafening. Also the shouting. I walked toward the back.
I knocked three times.
Come in, said Julie from inside. It’s open.
I knew you’d come, she said. Sooner or later you’d come.
Can you explain this to me? I said.
And I showed her the flyer.
Want a pisco? she asked.
No, thanks. Explain this to me.
A joint? she asked.
No.
She rolled one, lit it, inhaled deeply.
That’s why we’re like this. We don’t connect.
Why did you make it? I said. The flyer.
It was a slump, she said. I thought I didn’t exist anymore, that no one remembered me. Not a nibble, can you believe it. I figured maybe you’d see it and would remember me. But I had my doubts, and then I cast off the fantasy. I asked around. You were easy to find. You advertising types change agencies but not lifestyles. You like money. I called the agency where you worked before. They told me you had changed jobs. I followed your trail. Now that you’re here, my slump has passed. Also because I finished the novel. It’s incredible how my mood has changed. I’m going to send it off to contests. I’m not going to drag myself around to publishing houses, asking them to publish me. It’s a sure thing I’ll win some contest. Though, now that I think about it, juries are so vulgar. These days everything is marketing. But who knows, maybe one of them will bite.
You finished the novel, I said.
I sent it to Sagawa, she said. I explained that I couldn’t pay for a translation. And look how sweet, that courtesy they have, the Orientals. He told me he’d take care of finding a Spanish-Japanese translator and that he would read it. Maybe it’ll come out first in Japan. No one is a prophet in his own land.
Then you’re okay, I said.
Julie handed me a brown envelope. It contained a file.
It’s a copy for you. In case something happens to me. I want you to be my executor.
I picked up the envelope.
But I want to warn you about one thing, she said.
What.
Don’t even think of plagiarizing it. I registered it as Intellectual Property.
Thanks, Julie, I said.
You’re not gonna drink the pisco?
No, Julie. I have to drive. And I’ve got a family.
You’re always the same, she said. A real goody two-shoes.
As I was leaving, I gave the kids another bill.
Thanks a lot, boss, said one of them.
There was a dumpster on the same block as the parking lot. I lifted the lid and tossed in the envelope with the novel. I wanted to feel relief, but I didn’t. I thought of Martín. All I wanted was to get home once and for all. I got into the car. Leaving Constitución behind, I merged onto the highway and accelerated.
But as I approached the Ugarte exit, I realized I had been humming a song, one of Joan Baez’s. Guilt had won me over. I turned around and headed back to the capital. I returned to Constitución at full speed. I parked next to the dumpster; once more I lifted the lid.
It was empty.

---

Guillermo Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires in 1948. Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a copy writer in the advertising industry and as a script writer for cartoons and other films. A prolific writer, Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. His novel Bajo bandera was adapted into a film by director Juan Jos. Jusid. Among Saccomanno’s many literary distinctions are: the Premio Nacional de Literatura for El buen dolor (2000); Seix Barral’s Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista (2010); the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro (2010); and the Dashiell Hammett Prize, won twice (for 77 in 2008 and Cámara Gesell in 2012). His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, and Russian.

Andrea G. Labinger translates contemporary Latin American fiction. Gesell Dome, her translation of Guillermo Saccomanno’s noir novel Cámara Gesell (Open Letter, 2016), won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. Her translation of Saccomanno’s 77 has been longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award by The Millions magazine. Labinger’s most recent publications include Proceed with Caution: Stories and a Novella by Patricia Ratto (Schaffner Press, 2021), Daughter by Ana María Shua (Literal Press, 2020), and The Clerk by Guillermo Saccomanno (Open Letter, 2020).

 

I guess I should get to the incident with the gun. Our life before the incident was full of parties, drinking, playing poker for cigarettes. At the first party Daddy took me to I sat on the arm of his chair while a girl asked me who I was, what I did. I felt shy, threatened by her beauty and her relationship to Daddy—I made up different scenarios, that perhaps they’d fucked before or kissed or at least shot-gunned weed. I walked onto the patio to smoke. Four men played poker for cigarettes on a frosted-glass top patio table, a mélange of Kools, Camels and Pall Malls all piled in the middle. Daddy came outside and the sound of Tech-Nine echoed and muted as he let the door close behind him. He placed his hand at the small of my back and we joined the poker players at the table. I was more comfortable out here with Daddy and the other men. The women wore dresses that swung from their hips and had straightened their hair. A stocky man wearing a white t-shirt and black Dickies tossed me a few cards. The assortment seemed random to me so I aimed on collecting colors; that seemed right. When we revealed our hands, I laid mine out and looked at everyone’s else’s, all indiscernible to me.
“Is this anything?” I asked. Daddy slapped the table, laughing. The other men roared with laughter, too. I hid my face in my hair. “I don’t know how to play.”
Daddy touched my arm. “Girly, you just won.” He slid the pile of cigarettes into a gallon-size Ziplock bag. “That’s a flush.” It was enough for a week or more between the two of us—a whole carton.

After the party, I stayed at his apartment for a few weeks. When I think of our time in his studio, he had very little belongings. A bed, an entertainment center, a TV and a gaming console. He played war games all night, slept all day. When he was high, he wanted to hold my hand and lay his head in my lap, ask me questions about my dreams or plans. They all included him. Then we walked to the grocery store and got whatever we could afford to eat for the night, sometimes just apples, cheese, a loaf of bread. Once, he made me miso soup. He began smoking weed constantly—not a second without it. On the twelfth consecutive day of being high, he woke up at four p.m., smoked a bowl, and left the room to brush his teeth. The shower faucet turned on. I scrolled through news on my phone, not paying much attention. He yelled my name from the shower.
“I’m staring at the tile,” he said, “and a portal to hell has opened up. Daisy, how long have I been here? Will I ever come back?”
Four days later, he felt sober again. After that he didn’t smoke anymore.
A couple times, neighbors called the cops on us for our parties. You’d hear everything through the walls. At three a.m., Officer Halstead came and told us to keep it down. A group of us had been singing “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus at the top of our lungs.

Everything was good with Daddy. We drank and drank, and had parties on the weekends. Full-time employment was difficult for him for several reasons I can’t divulge. Daddy must have anticipated the change that had to come, but maybe he wasn’t ready. I had to stop drinking.
It was a morning I had to be at work at five a.m. to open. It didn’t matter where, all those jobs were the same. I woke up at 3:45 to shower, and when I checked the date on my phone, I’d realized something felt off. I pulled back the shower curtain and found Daddy in the tub, his gun held tight to his chest, empty beer bottles in his lap.
He took a pull of his beer, and it reminded me of the darkness that lingered in him. We were bound now and yet I knew of his past, the potential for future grief. Daddy would always be unstable. He was sad and his sadness manifested as anger. When I think of it now, the stability, what I could have had, something hardens in me. At one point in my life I may have cried, but now I don’t anymore. I know what I have chosen.
I was tired. And a little nauseous. Daddy offered me a beer.
“I’m pregnant,” I said. I hadn’t bled in two months, had somehow missed it. My stomach distended sorely. I didn’t need a test. Daddy shifted in the tub, and a jealous throb rang through my ears. I could no longer be complicit in his ability to commiserate through drinking.
“A baby is such an abstract thing before you have it,” my mother once said. “But you give birth to it, and this thing becomes your baby. A hole the size of a grave widens between you and your friends and in the grave is your child-free past. Gone.”
Daddy swilled the liquid around in his beer bottle. The nausea lurched towards my throat.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said.
“Are you going back to sleep?” he asked. His speech slurred.
I nodded. “I’ll call in to work.” The warmth of his flannel comforted me when I leaned to kiss him on the forehead. He put a hand on my stomach and left it there for a moment. I had a feeling everything was going to be okay.
I left and crawled back into his bed—a mattress on the floor. The sky grayed through the windows, and the radiator hissed on. I was happy to be alone for a while. Soon I would never be alone again. I placed my hands at the flattest part of my body, right beneath my ribs. My stomach rounded up a little, but only on one side. I placed my hand on the firm lump. I imagined it growing, able to receive all it needed. This small human in my charge could die. Part of me was also dying. The internet told me the baby was the size of an olive. Somehow, it seemed so much larger already.

Out of the dark, I heard what sounded like a heavy plank of wood fall against a floor. I knew immediately what it was. I waited for scuffling, or screaming. The moment stretched and my heart beat heavy patterns into the silence around my ears. I dialed 911, but did not call. I hid beneath the sheets, instead, waiting.
The last time I had done this, Daddy and his friend Jeff had stayed up drinking, like any normal night. I woke to fighting. They moved across the apartment and I noticed the friend wasn’t playful, this time. Jeff had become belligerent, too drunk to realize. Later, Daddy said he thought he might have to kill Jeff that night. Something turned in him, some raw, angry thing had been let out, something that had been holed up for a long time. Jeff wasn’t letting up, and Daddy moved into a guillotine pose to choke him out. Daddy tried to subdue him and failed at first. He rolled and got him in something that looked like a cradle hold. His face was red and wet with spit. I hid in the bathroom, wondering if I would have to grab the gun. Jeff packed, too, and for the first time in my life I feared what it meant to have a gun in the apartment.
Footsteps rang from the bathroom and the door burst open to a glowing silhouette of Daddy, the pistol in his hand. His hair was ragged. He gripped a pulsing dark spot at his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” he slurred. He took a step closer and I jumped out of bed, ran towards him. His eyes were tight pinpricks of fear.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said again. I placed my hand on his gut and took Daddy to the bed. We lay there in the dark. He put his hands on me in protective places, one over my stomach, and one on the side of my cheek. His mouth hovered close to mine. The purposeful in-out of his breath at my lips.
“I can’t stop making bad decisions,” he said, in a low whisper. “I keep trying to do the right thing, but each step I take seems to be a wrong turn.”
“You don’t make bad decisions,” I said, trying to pull him from the bed.
“The gun isn’t legal,” he said. He went deadweight.
An urgent dread filled my lungs and I breathed the way I’d learned from watching pregnancy videos, “Hehe, hoo,” as I struggled to get my foot through the bottom of my pants. I looked for my sneakers, and slipped my feet into them, sockless.
I threw a faux fur coat on over my pajamas and tied my hair up into a ponytail.
Daddy turned off the lights, leaving a splotch of blood on the switch. By the front door, I noticed it: a small bullet hole in the ceiling, and two smaller holes in the wall near it. He gripped his torso with an apologetic look.
I led him out the front door and locked the apartment. We rushed down the stairs towards the car. My foot caught a banister on way down, and we tumbled forward to the landing. For a split second we both were weightless. I thought of the grave then, a deep well, each new moment a handful of dirt being thrown inside.

---

Elle Nash is the author of the story collection Nudes (SF/ LD Books, 2021) and the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.” Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and edits at Hobart Pulp and Expat Press. Nash also teaches a biannual workshop called Textures.

“A Deep Well” appears in the story collection Nudes, out now from SF/LD Books.

Thanks again for the invite to your “villains” comic anthology, and the rate you quoted for ten pages sounds more than fair to me. I assume the artist will be paid the same or more, right? They should get more given how much of the story the artist will have to convey. I’ll admit right up front that while I have read—and do read—comics, I’ve never written one and I don’t know what a comic script looks like beyond hearing it’s not totally dissimilar to screenwriting, not that I’ve written a bunch of screenplays either. How’s that for a pitch? Sold, right? If you go for my idea, I’ll certainly do my homework, and I’ll take you up on the offer to send me some sample scripts.
Anyway, the pitch for real:

There will be no dialogue or narrative commentary in this story. It will be told exclusively via the images/art. The art will be black and white, with an aesthetic of Charles Burns’s Black Hole (see, I told you I read comics) mashed up with 1950s atomic monster movies. A stark or minimalist style while also looking like it might’ve come from a Twilight Zone episode.
The opening panels: An empty stretch of desert with a silhouetted person approaching in the distance. With each panel the person comes closer into view until he’s finally in focus. He’s a haggard, unshaven, middle-aged white man wearing tattered clothes and sneakers, and carrying a backpack. He’s slumped and his eyes are down at his feet. We get the sense he’s been walking for a while.
We follow him for a few more panels that spotlight him from a wider view. Looming in the background are large monoliths with wide bases tapering toward their rectangular tops. The structures are not recognizably human-made. Think the film Phase IV and the ant-colony towers in the first act, or, at the discretion of the artist, Devils Tower as featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In a hoary nod to a trope from scores of old movies, the man carries a tattered photo of his wife and a whole brood of kids, four or five. The photo could be right out of the insufferable Family Circus comic strip.
He continues walking, each panel sinking us and him deeper into a seemingly endless desert. More monoliths dot the horizon.
Near an outcropping of boulders and caves, the man stumbles upon a community of survivors, a diverse group of about ten or more people who, unlike the disheveled man, appear to be thriving, with a variety of structures and gardens built.
The group is initially wary, but they welcome the man to their community. He spends that first day working hard as part of the group, helping to reinforce irrigation lines and tend a garden.
At dusk, with the day’s work done, the community gathers to eat and socialize. The group is suddenly attacked by a horde of car-sized ants—think the ants from THEM! (1954).
The community is prepared and fights back valiantly. They manage to kill some of the ants, but the numbers on this day are overwhelming. Some people are killed. Some people escape into the reinforced caves.
Throughout the fight the man does nothing. He sits with his hands covering his eyes, like a child trying to hide from the scary part of a movie.
The ants eventually gather around him, their antennae twitching. The art will show wavy lines emanating from the antennae to imply that they are telepathically communicating. While he might appear ashamed and devastated, the man obediently scrambles onto his knees, assuming a supplicant’s pose, and holds out his hands.
An ant spits up a bowling ball–sized glob of glucose.
The man deposits it in his backpack. The ants crowd and touch his head with their antennae, then they let him leave.
The man resumes his walk through the desert as night approaches. He eventually comes upon a lone house in the sand, one that wouldn’t be out of place in an affluent suburb. This House of Usher has yet to collapse, and it rests in the shadow of one of the giant anthill monoliths.
He goes inside. His family (the one from the picture he carries) greets him with smiles and hugs and kisses
He places half of the globule from his backpack onto a serving dish. The other half goes into a larder in the kitchen (there are many more half-globules there).
The family sits at a dining room table, they bow their heads in prayer, and then they eat.

What do you think?

---

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards, and is the author of Survivor Song, Growing Things, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Illustration: Nick Stout

All through the nights in which their mother lay dying, his sister recited to him the fable of the night archer. She told it to the boy to scare him, he knew that. But it wasn’t until he was grown that he realized she had only wanted to scare him with it so as to distract him from his mother’s dying. At first, they had lain each in their own beds, his sister’s bed against the outer wall, his own against the wall adjoining his mother’s room, listening to their mother struggling to breathe. After a few nights of that, though, his sister had felt sorry for him and swapped beds. And then, a night later, she dragged his former bed away and up against the other bed so they both would be as far away from their mother as they could be.
Their father had fled. It had been—so their mother told them early on, back when she was able to respond—too much for him. It isn’t that he doesn’t love you, she claimed, only that he can’t stand to watch me die.
But if he, a grown man, couldn’t stand it, the boy wondered, then how can we?
As soon as they were out of the room, his sister told him that what his mother had said was a lie. If his father really had loved them, she whispered urgently, he would have goddamn well found a way to stand it.

Your sister is old enough to take care of you, his mother had said, and his sister seemed to agree with this. But his sister also made it clear that not everyone would agree, that if they didn’t want to be taken away from their mother, it was best not to tell anyone their father had fled or how sick their mother really was.
“But what if she dies?” the boy asked.
“She will die,” his sister said, looking at him like he was stupid. “She doesn’t have long left. We’ll figure things out when we have to.”
Maybe their father would come back, the boy speculated. Maybe he did love them just enough to come back once their mother had finished dying. Or maybe, when someone did take them away, they would take both him and his sister away to the same place. But his sister said little in response to these speculations, which made the boy doubt the likelihood of any of them.

“Tell me a story,” he asked her one night. “Like mom used to do.”
“I don’t know any stories,” his sister at first claimed, and then, when he persisted, “Do you mean a tale? I’ll tell you a tale if you’d like.”
“What’s the difference between a story and a tale?”
In the darkness, he heard her rustle in her bed. Perhaps she was shrugging her shoulders while lying down. Perhaps she was simply shifting, getting more comfortable.
“A story,” she finally said, “is something that isn’t true, at least not in a real way. A tale isn’t true either, except in a real way.”
“A real way?”
“Except in a real way,” his sister repeated. And then she began.

Do you know the tale of the night archer? his sister asked, her voice asked, from out of the darkness.
The night archer? he said.
He hunts at night, his sister continued. He is dressed in boiled leather that has been dyed black, unless it is naturally black: there are different opinions about this. He wears a peaked leather cap, the inner band of which has been sewn into the skin of his forehead so that the hat will never fall off. Because he can never remove his hat, he can never enter a church, nor can he ever sleep.
He prowls through the darkness on the back of a gigantic black stork with a bill as black and shiny as a slick of oil but sharp as the tip of a pick. He carries a bow made of yellowed bone and strung with human sinew, and a quiver of arrows tipped with jagged bits of mirror. He travels with one hand cupped to his ear, always listening.
What is he listening for? the boy asked.
I’m the one telling this tale, his sister said. Be quiet and listen.
The night archer listens for the sound of someone summoning him to the hunt. He lives for the hunt. Those who know to call him know they must go to the fireplace when the flames are guttering and thrust their head in, not minding the smoke or heat, and stare up the chimney. They must take a coin and tap its edge three times against a brick.
“Night archer!” they must hiss up into the chimney. “Night archer! Hunt for me!”
And then they must wait. Will they see the night archer? No, no one ever has. At most they will glimpse a disturbance of air at the top of the chimney, the damping out of stars, the deepening of the night.
If you are lucky enough to glimpse that, you can be assured the night archer is there, hand cupped to his ear, awaiting your instruction.
“Hunt for me,” you must whisper again. And then, “Now, hunt.” If you like, you may whisper what sort of creature you prefer him to hunt. Or what person. But, be warned: he will not always bring the prey you request.

That was how the story—the fable rather—always began, with those words or something near to them. After that, the rest differed with each new telling. His sister would tell of this one or that one who called the night archer to the hunt. For some—a few anyway—this went well, and the night archer brought them the prey they requested, which they broiled and happily ate. Most, though, ended up with prey they had not asked for, and then had to either make do with what they had been given or suffer. A very few, who would not or could not make do, eventually became prey themselves.
They never saw the night archer, either at his initial summoning or when he returned. They only knew of his existence because, on the stroke of midnight on the night after the summoning, a quarter of a carcass would tumble down the chimney, meticulously bled. This would go on for four consecutive nights, a quarter of the carcass each night, until the whole disjointed creature had arrived and the bargain was concluded.

One night his sister told of a man named Ulrich who had summoned the night archer on a whim, not really believing. This Ulrich hated his wife, for no particularly good reason. To whisper up the chimney that he wanted her hunted and ridden down was a great relief, and made him feel like he might be capable of living with her a little longer. So he tapped a brick with the edge of his coin, whispered up the chimney, experienced a rush of relief for having unburdened himself, and then returned to bed and thought no more about it.
The next night, at midnight, he lay asleep beside his wife. A clattering from the living room awoke him, his heart beating in his throat. The sound did not wake his wife but it woke him. Anxious, he got out of bed and went to see what was wrong.
“Hello?” he called from the entrance to the living room. “Who’s there?”
There was no answer. But when he turned on the light he saw that ash from the fireplace had spilled onto the floor. In the fireplace, too, lay something. When he got close, he discovered it was a woman’s leg and part of her body, neatly bled, clean.
The leg looked familiar to him. Following a premonition, he ran back into the room and turned on the light. He could see the shape of one of his wife’s legs pushing up the coverlet, but where the other had been the covers were flat.
His wife woke up, hiding her eyes from the blaze of light. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come back to bed.”

His sister had tried to end that version of the fable there, at what seemed to the boy the wrong place.
“What did he do?” he finally asked. What he would have done, the boy thought, would be to take the leg and press it to the place where it belonged until it stuck again.
“He hid the leg in the cellar and went back to bed,” his sister said. “What else could he do? The next morning his wife got up and showered and made breakfast just as someone with two legs might do, only Ulrich could see that one of her legs wasn’t there. She was walking just as if it was, but it wasn’t. It made him feel crazy to see her walking calmly about and putting her weight on a leg that wasn’t there. But the following day, when she began to walk around with no legs to support her, was much worse. And the next day, when all that was left was half of her head, one arm, and half of her torso, was almost unbearable. By the time the final quarter of his wife tumbled down the chimney, he couldn’t see her anymore, but he could still hear her speaking, bustling about. So, he went to the police and confessed to killing her, just to try to get away from her.”
“Did he get away from her?”
“Let’s put it this way: if Ulrich hadn’t been in jail, if Ulrich had been at home near his fireplace, he would have tried every night to summon the night archer, to ask it to hunt and kill him. Death, he came to feel, would be the only way to escape her. And he wasn’t sure that even that would be enough.”

The world is a terrible place, the boy began to feel listening to these tales, but wondrous too. During the day, he and his sister never spoke of the night archer, and sometimes after the tale was concluded the boy struggled to fall asleep, but at least he was thinking of the night archer, not of his mother. Indeed, his mother’s breathing over the course of listening to the many tellings of the tale had come to seem like white noise, like waves. Eventually it began to lull him to sleep.
By day, the boy and his sister went to school. They pretended everything was all right, told no one how sick their mother really was. Once home, they would sometimes sit with her, and sometimes, for a few minutes anyway, she seemed to recognize them. The sister would take a small sponge and dip it into a bowl of water and then squeeze a few drops between their mother’s parted lips. The sister would try to get their mother to take a few bites of food and then would roll their mother onto her side and change her bedclothes. Later, she would cook something for herself and the boy. She would do her homework and help the boy with his. And then they would go to bed.
That might have gone on forever, or at least until they ran out of food, except that one day when they went in to sit with their mother they found her dead. The sister did not cry, though when she stopped staring at the corpse and turned around to look at him, it was as if her face had turned to wax. He did not cry either. What point was there in it? They had known for days it would turn out like this.
“What do we do now?” he asked his sister.
When his sister just shook her head, he came closer and took a better look at his mother. She did not look like his mother now: the skin had settled oddly on her bones. True, it had been a long time since she had really looked like his mother. But even so, when he looked at her now, he began to grow dizzy.
And then his sister had him by the arm and was helping him out of his mother’s room. Once they were out, she reached back in and locked the knob from the inside. She pulled the door shut, then rattled the knob to prove to him, and to herself perhaps, that it was locked, that their mother couldn’t get out.

And so they did nothing about their dead mother. They had been pretending to others that their mother was not sick. It was not a far stretch to move from that to pretending that the mother was not dead.
At least not at first. Where before they had been haunted by the mother’s labored breathing, now they began to be haunted by the absence of it. The boy would wake up at night not hearing it and wonder what was wrong, and then he would remember that the mother was dead. The weight of his mother dead there on the other side of the wall was almost too much for him to bear.
By day they kept going to school, kept pretending everything was normal, but the way he caught his teacher looking at him made him suspect he was not doing as good a job pretending as was needed. His sister’s pale face and glazed eyes made him think the case was the same for her.
“We need to do something,” he finally told his sister.
She shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done.”
That was that, then. They would simply go on pretending until they ran out of food or were caught.

At the time it felt like he and his sister lived on in the house for months after his mother’s death, but it was probably only a few weeks, not long enough anyway for the school term to reach its terminus and summer vacation to begin. Long enough, though, that the smell of the air in the house became different, particularly the air close to his mother’s room.
Once when his sister was in the bathroom, he crept out of their shared room and pressed his ear to his mother’s door. He heard a dim humming—probably flies, he told himself, though that was not the image that came first into his head. Just in case, he began walking past the room as silently as possible, so as to escape notice.
That was how it was then, the two of them waiting for whatever life they were living to end and for them to become, as his sister had phrased it once, wards of the state. In a manner of speaking, that earlier life had already ended. It was just that the next life hadn’t yet begun.
Or maybe, the boy began to think, they could live on here, just him and his sister, becoming a complete family in a way that would feel normal and natural. If it felt natural to them, nobody outside would notice anything amiss. But for that to happen, he knew, they would have to get rid of what was left of the mother.

For a long time he lay there, pretending to be asleep, a silver dollar clutched tightly in one fist. For a long time, his sister was restless and not asleep, and then perhaps asleep only lightly. It was hours, or what seemed like hours, before her breathing grew regular enough for him to risk getting up.
As quietly as he could, he left the bed and crept toward the door. He eased it open and slid into the hall and moved toward the stairs, the smell of the air shifting to tell him he was passing the door to his mother’s room. He negotiated the stairs in the darkness, one palm brushing along the wall.
At the bottom there was one step more than he remembered. He stumbled and nearly fell, the silver dollar slipping from his grasp and tinking its way across the parquet floor. He fell to his knees and searched for it, sweeping his hands across the wood. How far had it gone? Why couldn’t he find it? Had it fallen into the heating register? Just when he was ready to give up, his fingers brushed across it and he had it again.
The living room was far enough away from his and his sister’s room that he felt safe sliding the dimmer as low as it would go and turning on the light. There it was, the fireplace. He approached. Did it matter that there was no fire in the grate, that there had never been a fire in it? In the tale, there was always a fire. But he didn’t have any wood, no matches either. No, he tried to convince himself, all that mattered was that it was a fireplace and that it had a chimney he could speak into.
He crouched down and stuck his head in. He couldn’t see anything but darkness higher in the shaft. Maybe that meant the night archer was already there, crouched over the opening, ear cupped, listening, waiting.
He tapped the silver dollar against the brick, three times. It made less noise than he had imagined it would.
“Night archer,” he hissed. “Night archer! Hunt for me!”
He waited but heard nothing. “Hunt for me,” he whispered again. And then he thought about how to phrase what he wanted done.
He knew from the tales his sister had told that when you asked something of the night archer, you had to do it with great care. But he could not think of how else to phrase it except the words he had originally settled on. “Hunt for my mother,” he finally said. “Hunt for her, even though she is already dead.”

After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Either the night archer would hunt for his mother or it would refuse and hunt for something else. If his mother, she would tumble down the chimney in quarters over four consecutive nights and her body would disappear piece by piece from the room it was sealed in now. Like that, sectioned into quarters, he and his sister could manage to gradually carry his mother out of the house and get rid of her. And if the archer brought them something else, at least they would have meat to eat. As long as that something else was an animal, and not another human.
When he was done, he extinguished the light and groped his way back upstairs. His sister was still asleep. He climbed up onto his bed from its foot and settled in.
Tomorrow he would know if the summoning had worked. Either part of his mother would tumble down the chimney or something else would. Or maybe, if the night archer had not heard him, nothing would happen at all.
He was very tired now. Now that the task was done, sleep was catching up to him. And then it caught and took him.

He dreamt that he was back in the living room, the dimmer very low, alone again. Where the entrance to the room was normally lay a cloud of variegated darkness, ruffled as if made of feathers. When he walked into it and tried to leave the room, he found himself walking not out of the room but back into it.
After a few times of this happening, he began to become afraid.
He tried the room’s solitary window, throwing up the sash and pushing the screen out with the flats of his hands. He could hear the chirp of crickets outside, could vaguely see the screen in the darkness where it had landed in the bushes below the window. And yet, when he climbed up into the open window and squeezed through and out, he ended up not outside in the bushes but back on the living room floor.
The only way left was the chimney. Perhaps he could climb out.
He moved toward it, but before he reached it there was a thump and a cloud of ash. Lying on the grate he saw a child’s leg and part of a hip. He could tell the child had been a boy. He took another step and there was another thump and puff of ash and the other leg and hip had arrived now too.
By the time he reached the fireplace, the rest of the body had fallen. He found himself looking at the stacked pieces. At one extreme of the topmost piece was the pale and startled half-face of a boy that looked exactly like him.

He awoke with a start. It was morning. Someone was in the room with him and his sister, sitting on the foot of his bed. Fleetingly he thought the night archer had come for them.
“Hello, son,” said his father.
His sister was already awake and sitting up in her bed, clutching herself in her own arms.
“It’s nice to see you,” said their father.
Neither he nor his sister said anything.
“I’ve wanted to see you for a while,” he said. “If your mother will allow it, we can spend the day together. Would you like that?”
Beside him, his sister hesitated, then briefly nodded. The boy, though, held perfectly still.
“All right, then,” said their father slowly. “I’ll go work it out.”
He stood and left the room.

They heard his footsteps move down the hall then stop outside their mother’s door. He knocked, and called her name.
When there was no answer, he called again, a touch of irritation in his voice now.
And then he must have caught a whiff of the smell, because when he called her name the third time, his voice was very high and laced with panic.
The boy heard a thumping noise. He heard it again, and again, and suddenly understood his father was kicking the mother’s door down. He turned to his sister to tell her, and saw from her face that she had already understood.
They heard a loud crack followed by the sounds of their father retching and stumbling. Soon he was back at the entrance to their room, hiding his face in the crook of his arm, breathing heavily, leaning against the doorframe.
When he lifted his hand away, the look the father gave them was the look of someone who wanted desperately to flee. The boy, knowing he would need only a little encouragement to do so, returned a look that was expressionless, no look at all. His sister, he was sure, was doing the same. Together they stared, blank-faced, waiting for him to either come and gather them up or turn and flee.

If he comes to them, well, they will see how it goes. It may be possible for the three of them to start a family again, now that their mother is dead. It just depends on whether their father can learn to love them enough.
But if the father flees, as the boy fully expects him to do, the boy will have to take matters into his own hands. He imagines himself rapping a quarter against a brick of the fireplace below. Night archer, he sees himself saying, hunt for me.
The night archer will be waiting there at the top of the chimney, hand still cupped to his ear. Will the boy have a specific prey in mind? Yes, of course he will—he already does. The person who has abandoned them not once but twice. Make my father your prey, he will say. Now hunt.

---

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019), which was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He has also recently published the collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Another novel, The Open Curtain, was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the critical studies program at CalArts.

Illustration: Mike Reddy

The previous summer, Ralph and Chris had sworn to run together every morning in hopes of losing their baby fat. It was their freshman year of high school. Stories of eternal virginity and ostracism blurred their perceptions. They were anxious about transitioning from a small Catholic middle school to a large regional high school.
The plan had worked for two weeks before Ralph took up with a girl from a different neighborhood, abandoning Chris to his trails and desired weight loss goals. But the romance flared out in months, months Ralph swore he regretted, apologizing for the injury it caused their friendship, the distance he’d placed between them.
“Hey, love’s weird. I get it,” Chris said, pushing his hair out of his face as they sat on the front steps of their school. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”
“I’m not planning on it. Unless the next one’s way hotter, or plays bass or something,” Ralph replied.
Chris punched him in the arm. Ralph flinched, but only slightly. Ralph was taller than Chris, tan from the summer sun, hair shaved short. Chris was more compact, narrow jawed, plastic-framed glasses correcting astigmatism. They wore T-shirts with the names of punk bands written across the chest, Dickies work shorts, and skateboard shoes.
“Next summer will be different,” Chris promised, recalling the three months he had spent alone, the dark places his mind had wandered. Chris had no other friends. When Ralph wasn’t around, he felt bisected, half-made, a phantom limb grasping with fingers no longer attached. They’d been together since first grade. No family member could boast the closeness he felt with Ralph. “We’re going to get those runs in and make the cross-country team.”
“Probably have to grow those legs a little longer then. I’ll have my dad build us one of those stretching racks. The medieval ones.”
“How about no,” Chris replied, smiling. “I appreciate the creativity, though.”

The next summer, after the first month of their running regimen, Chris and Ralph grew bored of their usual bike-path laps, the circuitous route around the dog park. They decided to take to the woods, carve paths through the overgrown forests. Chris’s house abutted acre upon acre of undeveloped land. They traced deer paths between oaks and cedars, dipping beneath vines of bittersweet snaking between trees. When the woods grew thick, they’d change direction, veering around kettle ponds and fallow bogs.
Chris carried a compass. Due south was Route 139. There was no way to truly get lost.
“You ever worry we’ll step into a coyote den?” Chris asked Ralph, trailing at his heels, the summer heat oppressive.
“They’re nocturnal. They’d be asleep.”
“But they’d wake up.”
“Are you particularly quick in the morning?”
“Not really.”
“They’re probably the same. We’d be fine.”
A thorny vine caught Chris in the shins, mid-step, sinking deep. He swore and stopped, gently easing the barb from his raw flesh. Sweat dripped down his face, trickling out of his hair. Ralph stopped a distance ahead, calling back to see if he was all right.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Chris replied, shaking off the sting. He looked up from the tangle of vines, noticing a narrow corridor between a wall of evergreens. “Care for a change of direction?” he asked.
“Hell yeah,” Ralph said. They’d been heading north for twenty minutes, the scenery uniform and forgettable.
The two slowed, pushing low branches from their path. The scent of pine overcame the humid breath of mulching leaves. Their sprint slackened to a jog. The press of trees was claustrophobic, pine needles gritty between their teeth.
When they came out on the other side of the tree-bound wall, the forest thinned. A huddle of moss-covered chimneys stood in an empty field, their cottage counterparts eaten away by time. Chris counted ten in all, some in better shape than others. Cracked pediments, slouching spines, trees growing between the mortar.
Without breaking stride, Ralph ran up to the first chimney, placing his hand on the weathered brick, looking out across the overgrown field.
“Your parents ever mention anything about this?” he asked, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“I doubt my parents ever actually walk in the woods,” Chris replied. “They say it’s where dark things ends up happening. Real puritanical.”
Earlier that year, Chris had refused to continue attending Mass with his parents. It had been a battle waged over several months. Groundings and innumerable repercussions followed. Disciplinary action eventually faded to passive-aggressive remarks about the state of his soul. His parents had given up.
Chris couldn’t sit through the homilies, couldn’t believe the creationist teachings of his earlier academic life. The break truly came when his biology teacher, Ms. Reilly, asked how to identify the sex of a human skeleton. He answered by the number of ribs, Adam having sacrificed one to create Eve. The laughter in the class still stung.
“Well, at least they keep life interesting,” Ralph replied, walking to the next chimney, parting tall grass and clusters of holly saplings. Chris didn’t like the feel of the place. Seeing the chimneys separated from the buildings made him think of abandonment. He’d never understood the idea of leaving a house to rot. The number of homeless people he’d seen lining Main Street in Hyannis made a case against any rational argument.
The small village was ringed with trees. No real road cut into the enclave. Chris felt hemmed in, as if something watched from the tree line.
“What do you think they were growing?” Ralph asked, kneeling by a patch of rough earth, a garden plot likely barren for centuries.
“Corn and squash. That’s what they always grew around here. Potatoes maybe. I don’t know,” Chris replied, skirting the fallow field, attention drawn to a flare of color at the base of a distant chimney. It was a wreath of wildflowers, stems twined together, bloodroot and toadflax, lupine and chicory. Unlike the rest of the abandoned village, the garland was fresh, the clippings no more than a day severed. Chris picked up the ornament and breathed in the floral scent, the sweet aroma flourishing in his sinuses.
“Well, that’s out of place,” Ralph said, taking the wreath and inhaling deeply.
“Considering we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Chris replied, knowing they were at least a mile inland from the nearest road. “Yeah, it’s super weird.”
“Leave it.”
“I wasn’t planning on taking the thing home.”
“Good. Your parents might be right about the whole dark-woods thing. All we need now is to see a black goat wandering through the field and we’d have all the makings for a good found footage flick.”
“Blair Witch was terrifying,” Chris added, taking the wreath and dropping it back onto the brick hearth. “I’d prefer to avoid being an extra in the reboot.”

On the way to church the following Sunday, Chris’s parents dropped him off at the library. A snarky comment about wasted time followed him from the car. Ralph met him out front. The renovated, white-fronted colonial was within walking distance from his house, the path shaded by horse chestnuts and aged birch. The library was open only a few hours. A skeleton crew staffed the front desk. They’d have to make the most of their time.
Beforehand, they’d googled every combination of words that might lead to some understanding of the chimneys. Abandoned village Harwich, MA. Forgotten towns of Cape Cod. Chimneys abandoned in the woods. Every attempt brought disconnected results. None shone light on their recent running route. They’d trekked through the village three times since, on each iteration winding between the brick outcroppings, noting the wreath’s gradual wilt.
Pushing through the front doors, they were confronted by the portrait of Mr. Brooks, the library’s namesake, done in dark oils.
“That guy would have definitely known the answer,” Ralph said, passing by his gaze.
“Or at least pointed us toward the right book,” Chris replied.
The library was all high ceilings and expansive rows of books, mismatched plush chairs and graying carpet. A circular display hunkered in the foyer, exhibiting latest releases and summer reading suggestions. Natural light bled through high windows. One of the librarians directed the two upstairs, to the reference section and computers designated for research.
After another hour of fruitless internet reconnaissance, they abandoned the computers and approached the reference librarian, seated behind a desk lined with encyclopedic texts that looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years. The bearded man’s name tag read JACK.
Chris didn’t know exactly how to phrase his question. He didn’t want it to seem like they were sneaking around somewhere they shouldn’t, or like they were trying to play a practical joke on the man. He always feared such things would make their way back to his parents and they’d forbid him from hanging around Ralph anymore.
As Chris hesitated, Ralph filled the silence. “Do you know anything about a small village out in the woods about four miles that way?” he asked, doing his best to point in the right direction.
“Are we talking Harwich, Chatham, or Brewster?” the man asked.
“Harwich. At least we get to it through Harwich. It might be in Brewster if I really think about it,” Chris answered.
“Well, you’ll have to narrow it down. There were a few villages that didn’t make it through the years out that way,” Jack said, nodding.
“It would have been somewhere a mile or so north of Route 139. Does that help?” Chris asked.
“Actually, it does,” Jack replied, rising from his desk and walking into a row of shelves cordoned off from the public with a velvet rope.
“That’s where they hide the Necronomicon,” Ralph whispered. They’d snuck in a showing of The Evil Dead on their last sleepover. Chris’s parents refused to let him watch R-rated movies, but Ralph’s didn’t care. They thought Chris was too sheltered. A little demon possession wouldn’t hurt.
Jack returned with a thin book bound in cracked leather. “We don’t let people take this one out, and we usually don’t let people take it out of sight. You two can read it over at that table,” he said, pointing to the scarred wooden fixture next to a shelf of periodicals. “Chapter six. That one might make more sense for your purpose.”
“Thanks,” the two said in unison, carrying the book to the designated space.
There was no title, just a call number of 974.4 HAR. The early chapters detailed cranberry harvesting techniques, the founding of the first school within town limits, early interactions with the indigenous Wampanoag people, and brining methods using salt harvested from local inlets. The first page of chapter six showed what appeared to be a mask stitched together from dried leaves, the edges overlapping to obscure the wearer’s eyes. The section was titled “Heretics of the Green Thought.”
“Jesus, that’s a terrible name,” Ralph said.
“Really? Is it any better than Peoples Temple or Heaven’s Gate? At least it’s floral,” Chris replied.
“Fair enough.”
The next page showed a charcoal sketch of a rustic hamlet hemmed in by trees, large stretches of tilled soil neighboring each cabin. In the background, the stooped forms of peasants plucked something from the earth, but Chris couldn’t tell what. The subsequent five pages detailed how the town existed outside the surrounding villages, growing its own food, avoiding Puritan churches nearby in favor of pagan approaches to spirituality.
The article said that most inhabitants had been pushed out of the church for their repudiation of strict scriptures. The town of Green Thought existed for almost thirty years before people from neighboring communities started going missing. A total of twelve men and women disappeared from Chatham, Brewster, and Harwich over a two-year stretch. A local vigilante group, members of the church and the loved ones of those lost, decided to search the village and interrogate the inhabitants. It took only two hours to force a confession out of a young man. Second thoughts about abandoning the church plagued his conscience.
The people of Green Thought needed fertilizer to appease their deity, an omniscient presence promising to restore the land to nature, all nonbelievers swallowed by vine and tendril. The crowd unearthed the bodies of two men in a nearby potato field and the body of a woman in an onion patch.
The book didn’t detail the punishment for those who murdered their neighbors, but it wasn’t hard for Chris to guess. They’d read The Crucible in English class. Salem was only a short drive north.
“How does no one talk about this?” Chris asked the reference librarian when they returned the book.
“People don’t talk about a lot of things,” the man replied. “How do you think people believe half of what they do? The answer to most things is out there, people just don’t take the time to look.”
“How did you know where to find the information?” Ralph asked.
“I wrote an article on it for the Harwich Chronicle a few years back. I freelance as a local historian. People love a buried cult story,” Jack replied.

The next week, they told themselves they’d stay away from Green Thought, but every path through the woods led back to the abandoned chimneys. Even when they swore they’d stick to the bike path, they ended up in the clearing. Chris would take out his compass and scratch his head at the way west had become east, how his directional inclinations fell apart before his eyes. After a time, he gave up fighting, allowing the village to draw them near despite the nucleus of fear blossoming in his chest.
Curiosity always won out.
Sometimes, after they entered the clearing, Ralph would ask if Chris had heard something, tilting his head toward the imagined sound. The words Ralph claimed to hear, the crooning insistence to sow seeds and harvest thistle, never resonated with Chris. It only made him worry about Ralph’s senses, the sway the story held over his friend.
“It’s the power of suggestion,” Chris said as they ran the perimeter of the village.
“It was real close this time. Like the person was next to me,” Ralph replied.
“We’ve literally watched nothing but horror movies for months. When I look into my backyard at night, I see deer skeletons by the shed. But they’re not there. It’s a flicker, confusion between screen and reality.”
“Is that something your parents told you?”
He hadn’t realized he’d regurgitated one of his mother’s aphorisms, one of the reasons she’d been so strict with movie privileges.
“I guess it is,” he replied, before skidding to a stop, nearly twisting an ankle on a rotting log. Where the day before there had been a weed-choked plot of bramble, crabgrass, and mullein, there was now bare earth, freshly turned, raked lines dividing the space into even rows. Chris waited, ready for his vision to realign, carpeting the soil with tangled vines and greenery, but the verdant blanket never rolled into place. Someone had been digging in the garden, getting it ready.
“Still looking for that black goat,” Ralph said, eyes wandering from the tilled garden to the tree line.
“Shut up,” Chris replied. “No one’s bringing a goat out here. This though, this is bad. There’s no reason someone would walk into the middle of the woods to do their gardening.”
“There’s a land shortage,” Ralph replied. “Mom talks about it all the time. Her coworkers have a rough go finding rental property . . .”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I know, just trying to lighten the situation.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s fine. I’m sure next time we’re out here, nothing will change . . . unless that voice is right. Like you said, no one’s coming out here to grow cabbage.”

Over the course of two weeks, more and more of the tangled undergrowth around Green Thought was tilled and turned over, exposing rich brown soil. With each lap around the abandoned village, Chris’s stomach gnawed inward, the fear of the book’s citations haunting his mind. The bodies buried in the field, the harvest from neighboring communities. Wasn’t his house one of the closest to the forest? Didn’t his parents forget to lock the doors at night? Chris liked to think he was more mature than his years, but when such thoughts assailed him, he found himself crawling back to infancy, base fears clouding his vision.
He’d been raised on the Bible and all its supernatural logic. Resurrection. Angels. Whale digestion. How was a woodland deity any different from a vengeful God? The thought wouldn’t leave Chris no matter how much he wanted it gone.
“That’s a lot of effort to go through if you’re not going to start planting,” Ralph said.
“It’s too late in the growing season. There’s no way anything’s going to come up,” Chris replied.
“Unless they’re burying something else. With the right fertilizer, who knows? It’s like the voice said.”
“There’s no voice.”
“You’re probably not listening.”
“I am and there’s nothing there.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Ralph said, running toward the path leading away from Green Thought. Chris wanted to linger, to examine the soil further, but he didn’t want to do it alone, and Ralph obviously wasn’t into the idea of surveying the site.

The bones appeared the next week, some whole, others powdery fragments poking through the soil, femurs ground short, clavicles yellowed with age. They seemed haphazard in their arrangement. No care had been taken to hide their presence from wandering eyes. Chris and Ralph stood over the empty plot, the only visible growth belonging to the undead osteology collection. The powdered bones lent a whitened appearance to the soil, mellowing the rich brown it had been before. Chris squatted, retrieving what might have been a minute bone from a human hand, or a leg bone from a squirrel. There was no saying which was which.
“So how are we feeling about the whole not believing thing?” Ralph asked, watching as Chris pushed the bone back into the soil after wiping it off on his shirt. He didn’t want to leave fingerprints in case the authorities stumbled on the clearing.
“These bones are old. Whoever’s doing this isn’t out killing people to fertilize their crop,” Chris replied.
“Maybe they haven’t worked themselves up to it yet. This could be step one, easing into the deep end. Just because you don’t want to believe it, it doesn’t mean you’re right.”
“That’s not it. We don’t even know if these belong to humans.”
“We don’t know they don’t. Regardless, this is sketchy. There’s no reason to bury bones in a garden. This is straight out of that book.”
A flock of sparrows dropped into the glade, some alighting in neighboring pines, others perching on the chimneys, peering down at where Chris and Ralph stood. A shiver passed through Chris’s limbs. The birds focused on them, their tiny eyes moving from the bone-strewn plot to the teenage boys in their running shorts and band T-shirts. Chris felt vulnerable, laid bare. The birds chirped and squabbled before taking wing, leaving the friends to sort what lay before them.
Is that the voice Ralph has been hearing? Chris wondered. The chattering of birds? There was no way to mistake their chitters for actual sentences. He knew he was searching for grounding, something to explain the unraveling reality before him. Nothing was lining up. He couldn’t find his footing.
“Believe what you want. I see a fully tilled field. The book said this was part of the buildup. We both know what their next step is. Either we’re going to do something about this or we’re not,” Ralph said.
“How about we pretend we didn’t see this and run the indoor track after school instead,” Chris said.
“You know that isn’t an option, no matter how much you wish it were. No one else is going to stop this.”
Ralph had always been more inclined to action, less research, more bravado. He didn’t like to wait or ask permission. Chris figured that was why the girl from last summer chose Ralph over him. They were attractive in similar ways since they’d lost weight, minus the height difference. Their interests and hobbies aligned. It was Ralph’s confidence that made him more desirable.
Chris couldn’t bring himself to argue. The dread of pushing Ralph away with disagreement rivaled any leaf-choked Armageddon he could imagine. But he was imagining a leaf-choked Armageddon, so there wasn’t even that.
“So what do you want to do?” Chris asked.

“Doesn’t this seem a bit extreme?” Chris asked, holding the hand scythe Ralph unearthed from his father’s potting shed. The man was a professional gardener and reserved an entire outbuilding for his soil and spare ceramics. Small seedlings wound pale roots through several grow trays, waiting to be ensconced in a more permanent home. The setting sun crept through the small windows positioned high in the walls, the scent of organic fertilizer acidic and sour.
“If you consider this person’s beliefs, who knows? I wish you could hear what the voices . . . Well, I don’t want a thousand tree branches tapping on my window tonight, asking me to come outside. If they’re planting the bones, then they’re serious,” Ralph said, testing the weight of an axe against his palm.
“And you’re going to be able to swing that into someone’s skull?” Chris asked, gesturing to the axe.
“If it comes to that, yeah.”
Chris had never been good with violence. On the screen it was one thing. In his personal life, not so much. He’d never been in a fistfight, never had his eye blackened over a gym class brawl. Ralph had been a scrapper since they were young. The scar from a dozen stitches traced his left forearm, a reminder of the kid who had tried to steal their skateboards in seventh grade. But Chris had his doubts. The violence Ralph had been capable of was minimal, never something with consequence. Murder was in another category.
“Is it the voices?” Chris asked.
Ralph shrugged. “This is the logical progression of things. These people are coming after our families. We’re going after them. It balances out.”
“And the cops?” Chris asked, his last holdout for resolution aired.
“You think they’re going to believe us about some farm in the woods and a book with no title that exists only at the library? Even if we showed them the body, they’d say it was a hoax or some old deer carcass. No one believes stuff this far away from what they expect.”
“I know,” Chris replied.
Years of listening to punk anthems had made him suspicious of police involvement anyway. He just wanted to keep his hands free of blood and saw no other way to broach the subject.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be the backup. Maybe you won’t even have to use that thing,” Ralph said, clanging the axe head against the curved blade of the scythe. A ringing note sang through the small shed, trilling in Chris’s ears. It reminded him of the sounds of shovels striking stones in preparation for the season’s first sowing.

They told their parents they were sleeping over at one another’s houses. Their weekends were rarely spent any other way.
Before it got dark, Chris and Ralph tucked their blades beneath black hoodies, ducking into the forest a distance down the road from Chris’s driveway. They couldn’t follow the path they usually took from his backyard. The lie wouldn’t stick.
The setting sun sifted through pitch pines and oaks, staining the leaf-choked forest floor with emaciated shadows, the first hints of fall in the air. A flock of grackles chittered in overhead limbs, their calls reminiscent of unoiled door hinges, rusted and grating. The two moved quietly, not knowing when the second party would arrive. Surprise was the only way. Their pace was cautious, sidestepping brittle sticks and twigs cast off by old growth.
Chris tried to form a complaint, a reason to turn back, but the excuse wasn’t forthcoming. He didn’t want to disappoint. Chris was cautious with his words, the fear of a solitary existence plain before him. His stomach rose into his throat, pulsing with each step, nerves threatening to override conscious thought.
They weren’t turning back.
At Green Thought’s tree line, they paused, scanning the withered village for signs of life. The chimneys cast angular shadows across the unkempt greenery. The garden plot on the far side of the glade had receded further, more bare earth peering through the underbrush, more bones speared up in ragged protrusions. Ralph gestured toward a chimney on the opposite side of the field. It was the closest to the trees and would provide the most cover.
“Stick to the trees until we get there,” Ralph said, gesturing with the axe.
“Yeah, okay,” Chris stuttered, the soft padding of moss giving way beneath his step.
When they were hidden by the blind of a holly tree, Ralph turned to Chris, whose hands trembled.
“It’s going to be fine. You’ve always wanted to be a hero, right?” Ralph asked.
“I mean, who doesn’t?” Chris replied.
“Good. Someone’s always got to be there to brain a zombie or exorcise a demon. Think of it like that. We’re here to stop cultists from taking over our town, or something like that.”
“I know, I know. It’s just hard to imagine the next step.”
“It is. But someone needs to be there before they get too far. When carnivorous plants crawl across your front porch, there’s no hindsight. I’m not letting those things get my parents.”
Ralph fell silent. The trees on the other side of the glade quivered and disgorged a man pushing a wheelbarrow. A leaf-stitched mask obscured his face. He whistled, high and off-key. The wheelbarrow seemed to give the man some difficulty, even though it only contained a minimal assortment of tools. Chris recognized the mask from the pages of the nameless book, the way the leaves wove together to cover the eyes and give the impression of a blank surface.
Chris prayed he wouldn’t recognize the face it hid.
The scythe’s handle was rough in his palm, the wood coarse and unfamiliar. The image of the blade slipping into the man’s chest flourished with each blink of the eye, churning Chris’s stomach.
He turned, ready to run.
Ralph caught him.
“Just wait. It’s not time yet.”
Ralph had mistaken Chris’s flight for an overzealous strike. He’d missed the desperation in Chris’s eyes, the heave and shiver in his chest. He couldn’t hear the chittering scream welling inside Chris.
“A few more minutes and we’ll be set,” Ralph said as Chris squatted, fleeting courage pulling him back to earth.
Then the man removed his mask.
Moonlight fell upon aged features. Overgrown eyebrows swam above a sea of wrinkles. His hair was brushed in a thin comb-over, eyes focused on the patch of upturned earth. Chris nearly dropped his scythe. The man looked like every lonely parishioner he’d seen hunched in a church pew, the priest’s call for thoughts and prayers announcing a sickened spouse. He’d seen the man’s countenance replicated a thousand times in those that were left behind. Those who’d lost the one thing guiding them to draw breath. Chris saw the worry and sadness engraved on the man’s skin, the distance between the world he wanted to live in and the one he inhabited.
“We’re not—” Chris began.
“That man wants your family dead, swarmed by flower petals until they choke. Don’t bail on me,” Ralph replied, clutching the axe to his chest.
“He’s just a gardener. A lonely old man.”
“A lonely old man that’s wearing a cult mask. And the bones. You can’t explain that away.”
“What do you—”
“Even if he doesn’t seem like he’s trying to kill you, he is. Cause and effect. He wants to bury us all in his garden.”
With the last words, the old man stopped unloading his wheelbarrow, looking up from the pile of rakes to where the two boys hid in the holly. His hand drifted to where the discarded mask lay, as if he hoped to hide beneath it.
“Who’s there?” he called.
“Don’t make me do this alone,” Ralph said, stepping from cover, axe raised. Then he was running, full sprint, the weapon before him. Chris was running too, breaking from the undergrowth, following his only friend’s footsteps, scythe catching the glint of moonlight as he trailed behind. The last thought left to him was of Ralph’s body twisted and mangled beneath the roots of an ageless oak, life crushed from his limbs by swelling bark and heartwood. That was the world the old man had painted, the verdant monstrosity he had breathed into life.
The man was feet away.
The scythe no longer felt unfamiliar in Chris’s hand.

---

Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his partner, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian and landscaper. His fiction has been published in Catapult, Redivider, Hobart, Blue Earth Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction can be found in The Coil.

Illustration: J. Hoyt

It couldn’t have been trying to hide, the way it poured from the brush and lay on the side of the open road.
“What the fuck is that?” Brandon squinted and leaned closer to the dashboard. “Didja see that?”
I had seen the flurry of movement in the outer circle of the van’s headlights. The tall brush moved violently, as if something huge slid through it.
Granted, it was dark that night, the kind of dark that only seems to happen on lonely Texas backroads. Brandon and I drove slowly down the rocky path, trying to prolong our limited time together. We turned a sharp corner and there it lay.
The beams of the headlights didn’t reflect off its eyes the way they did with most animals. We almost missed it, in fact, because there was no reflection.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“What is that?” We both questioned again, words exploding simultaneously. We laughed. Even though we’d only been together for a short time, it seemed we thought with one brain, we were so close.
Now, we had had some beer at the drive-in theater we were just leaving. We liked to go there to see our movies because we could bring our own food and weed. And we could fool around in the back of Brandon’s old van. They always showed two movies, so we had about four hours to do the things my mama wouldn’t let us do at other times.
Brandon backed the van up, slowly, turning slightly so the headlights shone in the direction where we’d seen the thing.
I don’t think either of us was ready when the lights found their target. Reclined in front of us was the biggest piece of roadkill I’d ever seen. It looked longer than I was tall, and it had two human-looking legs.
The legs were attached to what looked like a chewed-up looking torso, also humanlike, but with no skin. The flesh underneath was mangled, but not oozing like I would have expected.
Impossibly long arms, strewn out in front of the thing, looked like human bones that had also served as chew toys. I felt Brandon looking at me for an answer, but I was mesmerized by our discovery.
“What could possibly have chewed on it like that?” He turned wide eyes back to the road.
“What is it, even?” I whispered my question.
Looking at the head made things worse. I felt the beer bubble up in my belly and threaten to spew out as my stare landed on a desiccated deer head, antlers and all. Then the thing moved.
“It’s still alive.” Brandon put the van in park and placed his hand on the door handle. “We have to try to help it.”
I grabbed him, pulling him closer to me. “Do you see that thing? It has no skin on most of its body. We can’t help it. It’s gonna die anyway.”
“You’re right. But we can’t just leave it.” Brandon was really sweet like that sometimes. It was just like him to want to help a monster.
I sighed. “Okay. Let’s leave it some food. That seems like a merciful thing to do. At least it won’t die of starvation before its injuries kill it.”
Brandon left the van running and grabbed the leftover snacks we had inside. Then we slowly walked toward the thing on the ground. It didn’t lift its head, but it began to clench and unclench its massive fists, which were tipped with what looked like talons. It hadn’t looked that large in the headlights. The beam hadn’t caught the ends of the humanlike legs or the top of the deer head. It was easily seven to eight feet tall.
I was glad the thing was injured. The sharp teeth that jutted unevenly from the mouth could easily have torn us apart if it had been healthy.
Brandon put his arm up in front of me to keep me from going too close. He must have also seen that the thing was larger than we’d originally thought. Its hands, if outstretched, might have reached us.
In his free hand, Brandon held the bag with the hot dogs and chips we’d nibbled on earlier. He gently tossed the food toward the creature, near the clenching hands. We stood back and watched it for a moment. It continued to stare at us, its mouth hanging open, the lolling tongue lying between the many teeth.
Suddenly, a clenching hand grabbed the bag. The thing played with the food for a few seconds, before trying to half throw and half shovel it toward its head. The movement created a moist, sucking sound, as exposed tendons and muscle worked against one another.
I again felt the urge to throw up.
“Maybe we should cover it up, too, so it can die in peace. Buzzards will be here soon and pick it apart before it even dies.”
Brandon pulled me toward the van as the creature finally got some food near its mouth. The long, mottled tongue snaked out and dragged the remnants into the mouth. I jumped into the van, too horrified to look away but too frozen to help, as Brandon tossed a sheet over the lower half of the creature.
“Let’s go,” I mumbled to Brandon, who still stood outside the van. I reached to honk the horn just as he turned back toward the van. All I’d wanted to do was enjoy the feel of the smooth, slick leather on my skin where it peeked out from beneath my miniskirt and maybe play around some more on the way home since everything was still tingly from earlier. Maybe smoke another joint or pop another X. Now, I didn’t want anything other than to leave the monster where it was and get away.
Brandon finally got back inside and slowly put the van into gear. We started to drive off, with him hitting the brakes once to take the next turn back out. The faint red of the brake lights illuminated the thing in the rearview mirror. Its head was raised, eyes following us out of the area.

Brandon pulled the van up at the corner, half a block from the fourplex where I lived with my mother.
“Damn. You know Mama’ll be tripping again since it’s ten minutes past midnight.” I hated hearing my mother’s mouth about every little thing. I hated my mother. She would never allow me to be an adult if she still gave me a midnight curfew at the age of twenty-two. It didn’t matter that I had a job and went to college full time. I was almost done with my degree and she still treated me like a child.
“I wish your mama would get a life. Find a man. Or a woman. Something so she can leave us alone and get out of our business.” Brandon didn’t like Mama, either, and that was okay, too. She didn’t like anyone anyway.
“I wish she would just fucking disappear.” I gave him a lingering kiss to keep myself on his mind through the next couple of days. “Text me when you get home. If I don’t answer back, it’s because she took my phone.” I slid from the van and walked the rest of the way to the apartment.
The slap caught me unawares, even though I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“The hell you been, you little tramp?” Mama was on a bender. I had smelled her before I felt the backhand. She hit me again, this time punching me in the chest. The wind spurted out of me and I doubled over. The drugs I’d had earlier helped take the edge off the pain. But the drugs Mama did around the clock made her especially strong.
“You’ll get enough of dealing with that little nothing-ass boy. He don’t mean you no good. Get your dirty ass in your room. And leave that damned phone out here.”
I struggled to catch my breath. “No.”
Her eyes widened and she took a lumbering step closer to me. “What you say?”
I stood up, still gasping. “I said ‘No.’ I’m grown. I pay most of the bills here. You can’t tell me what to do.”
She snatched my hair up in her hand and twisted it tightly. I tried to lean in to her grasp as I felt some of my tracks slipping. “Oh, you got you a little piece and now you smelling your ass. I’m still the mama.” She punched me in the face. “And you gonna respect me.” She punched me again, this time in the eye. I saw blinding stars across my field of vision. She reached back to hit me again.
“I wish you were dead!” I yelled at her. “I wish you were fucking dead! I’m sick of you fighting on me. You didn’t care about my dirty ass when you were tricking me out to your boyfriends, so don’t worry about it now!”
Our neighbors wouldn’t hear me. They were either out partying or strung out. They never heard when Mama beat me and threw things at me. If they did hear, they wouldn’t care. They never came to help or call the police or anything. I was on my own. Like always.
Suddenly, Mama let go of my hair. I had been leaning against her hand, and I fell backward from the momentum of my weight. Mama hung from a long, cadaverous arm, high off the ground. My brain refused to comprehend exactly how much strength it would have taken for anyone to have lifted her that way.
But the thing was super-strong. It shook Mama like a rag doll. It clenched her from the back, its talons protruding from the front of her large body. I hadn’t remembered them being that long. The creature took a swift bite from Mama’s head and half of her head disappeared into its mouth. I watched as the skinned ribcage expanded with the bounty, then flattened again.
It ate at her again and again until nothing was left. It happened so quickly there was hardly any blood spilled. My eyes met its gaze. An unspoken message passed between us. I had called. It had answered. And then it was gone.
I should have been in shock, but I called Brandon. “You have to come get me.”
“Why? You okay? Your mama fighting you again?” I could hear the squeal of his tires.
When he arrived, I was waiting for him at the corner. I shivered, the realization of what had happened finally weighing on me. I told him the whole story.
Brandon pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the van. “You’re sure it was the thing we saw? It was dying. How do you know it wasn’t another one?”
“Another one? We don’t even know what this one is, much less if there’re more somewhere. I just know. Its eyes were exactly the same. It was different, though. Stronger. Fuller. Juicier.” I shuddered as I remembered the teeth.
“And it just . . . ate your mama? Like, all of her?”
“All of her. Real fast.”
“And it didn’t hurt you?”
“No, it didn’t want to hurt me.” I struggled to find the words to say what nagged at me. “It’s almost like I wished Mama dead and it came to help me.”
Brandon whooped until tears cascaded from his eyes. “You mean like a zombie genie? Granting wishes and shit?”
“Babe, I know it sounds crazy. And I can’t tell you how I know, but that’s exactly what this is like. Either a genie or a golem. Either way, it sort of spoke to me inside my head and told me that.”
Brandon continued to laugh, but started to drive again. “Shit, if it’s granting wishes and shit, then wish for four million dollars and seventeen cents.” He continued to guffaw. “Matter of fact, I wish it would eat my damned boss so I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” He grew solemn and squeezed my knee. “You’ve never spent the night with me and I want to stay wrapped up in you all night and all day long.”

We got back to his apartment, where Brandon made good on the first half of his desires, and I stayed the night. Exhausted, I decided I would cut classes the next day and just head in to work later that night. Early the next morning, Brandon’s cell phone rang.
As he answered with one-word responses, his brown face grew ashen. He ended the call and stuttered. “I . . . I don’t have work today. Mr. Teeter, he . . . he was murdered in the shop last night. It’ll be closed until they finish the investigation.”
We stared at each other until he began to jump up and down in the bed. “It worked! That shit worked!”
I felt queasy about our good fortune coming at the expense of others’ lives, but then I thought about how many times Mr. Teeter had messed up our plans and underpaid Brandon for all the overtime he worked, and I smiled. I didn’t know that old man. And Mama had deserved every bit of what she got. I moved back into Brandon’s arms to make good on the second part of his wishes.
We spent the rest of the afternoon thinking of everyone who had ever done us wrong. “Remember that damned bully I told you about from fifth grade?” Brandon asked me over hot wings.
“Yeah. He sounded like the worst.”
“He was. I hope he dies a horrible death.”
“And my microbiology professor. She’s a stone-cold bitch. She needs to be erased.” We fell into a fit of giggles, sharing ranch dressing–laced, weed-high kisses.
Over the next few days, I stayed with Brandon and continued my regular routine. The news channels reported a serial killer that was especially vicious. They also reported on numerous unexplained disappearances. The police had no leads and the town was in a panic. Mama always stayed in the house and got high all day, and she didn’t have a current boyfriend, so no one would probably miss her until her dope boy came ready to deliver again. The investigators would also probably start to see the connection between all our victims soon. We needed a plan to leave town.
In planning, we took some time to do research on our creature. Its description fit that of a wendigo, an immortal creature that ate human flesh. They usually didn’t venture to warm locales, though, so we were stumped as to how it had gotten all the way down to Texas. But we really didn’t care what had brought it to us, global warming or whatever. We were just glad it was helping us out and clearing our lives of haters.
Brandon and I watched just to see who caught it next. Our zombie genie was coming through for us in big ways. We didn’t get the money Brandon had wished for, but all our death wishes were granted swiftly. We quickly figured out that we had to kill off Brandon’s relatives who could leave him money, and that would be how we’d get rich and bail to Mexico.
One night, Brandon’s phone rang while he was in the shower. I picked it up because I saw Mr. Teeter’s name flash across the screen. “Hello?” I answered the call, thinking it was the shop calling Brandon back to work.
“Ummm . . . is Brandon there?” The breathy voice on the other end of the phone wasn’t a resurrected Mr. Teeter. It was a woman.
“What do you want with him?”
“He’s the father of my kids and the one I’m carrying now and I don’t owe you any explanation anyway. Who the hell are you and why’re you answering his damned phone?”
I saw red. I hung up the phone and burst into the bathroom.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you got a baby mama tucked away somewhere?” I snatched the shower curtain so hard the rod fell on Brandon.
“Wait. I can explain.” He slid around in the tub trying to evade my slaps. “I wanted to tell you. She wouldn’t let me go.”
“How pregnant is the bitch now?” I continued to slap and punch his wet body.
“Four months. But wait! Angel . . .”
“Wait, nothing. We been together for seven months. You been seeing her all this time? Since before me? I’m the fucking ‘other woman’?” The hurt I’d been trying to ignore stabbed through me like a blade. I collapsed against the bathroom wall.
Brandon struggled to wrap a towel around his body, still explaining. “We were on a break and she was sweating me about getting married and shit. I ain’t ready for all that. Then she threatened to go get my child support increased if I didn’t stay with her. I had to try and pacify her on that.”
“So you pacified her right into another baby? Okay.”
“Angel, baby, please. I love you. I don’t love her. She’s trying to make life hard for me. For us. Just let me get her off my ass so we can be together.” He wrapped me in his arms and I could sense his hesitation. He wanted to know if I was buying it.
“So you’re leaving her to be with me?”
“Yeah, baby. Yeah.”
I stepped back just far enough so he could see my face clearly. “She’s the enemy, then?”
“She is, baby. It’s just you and me in this. Forever.”
“Then I wish that bitch was dead. And those damned babies. All. Of. Them.”
Brandon’s mouth formed a perfect circle as my words registered. He scrambled to get dressed. While he did, I threw his van keys out the window as far as I could.
“Go on and run to your bitch, now. How fast can you get there?” I pulled on my clothes, determined that he wouldn’t leave me behind if he managed to find the keys.
The joke was on me. Baby mama lived only a few blocks away. I followed behind Brandon as he raced into one side of a small duplex, wrestling with a key I didn’t realize wasn’t on his key ring.
By the time I got through the still-open door, Brandon was cradling a woman in his arms. She was half-eaten, the bottom half of her body gone, ripped apart directly beneath her belly, where a piece of the recently detached umbilical cord lay on the floor. Chewing noises drew my attention to the corner of the room where our creature stood, a tiny leg hanging from between his jaws for a brief moment before he swallowed it, too.
Brandon never looked at the creature. He caressed the woman’s face, kissing her and mumbling, “I’m so sorry. I love you. I’ll always love you. I’m so sorry.”
His words hurt more than I thought possible. I was beyond hurt.
“You can go join her. I wish you were gone. I can’t stand to look at you anymore.”
The words had barely fallen from my lips when our creature moved from the corner. Slobber dripped from its jaws as it stood above Brandon. He didn’t have time to yell before it bit his shoulder.
“No! No! I wish you would eat her. Eat Angel.”
I couldn’t believe he had the nerve.
The creature turned toward me, dropping Brandon. It seemed hesitant and I moved in quickly. It served both of us, so I had to eliminate the other master.
“Eat Brandon quickly, starting with his head. I wish he didn’t have any more time to speak.” The wendigo turned and devoured my ex-boyfriend where he sat on the floor with his lover. It also completed its abandoned meal, and so both traitors were gone. I watched, partly in awe, partly in satisfaction. I slid across the room and sat down at the dining room table to think.
The creature followed me there. I wanted to ask why it was sticking around that time, but before I could do so, it grabbed me in its talons and pressed the deer mouth into mine. My lungs filled with rot and decay. I felt my body dying as the beast continued to breathe more and more deeply into my essence. As I filled and grew and transformed, its voice spoke inside my head.
“Accept me. Your spirit is soiled. I will live in you.”
That was why the creature had sought Brandon and me out and granted our dark wishes. It needed to know which of us had the blackest soul. Apparently, I had resolved its conflict.
It became me and I disappeared.

---

R. J. Joseph earned her MFA from Seton Hill University and is currently an associate professor of English. She has published stories in various venues, including two anthologies by black female authors—Sycorax’s Daughters and Black Magic Women—and Road Kill: Texas Horror from Texas Writers, vol. 2. Her academic essays have appeared in applauded collections, such as the Stoker award finalist Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism, and Innocence in the Series. Her most recent essay appears in the collection The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Her poetry will appear in the upcoming HWA Poetry Showcase VII.

Illustration: Erin Schwinn

Shortly after midnight Morgan was ripped from sleep by the damn dog howling. Groggy, he felt around the sweat-dampened sheets for Doreen, his heart catching at the emptiness before he remembered she was six months gone. He sat up, uncertain at first of which world he was in: dream or waking. Sometimes they braided together and he had to dig his nails into the calluses on his palms to draw the world back to him.
Nugs’s wails echoed across the soggy fields. He shoved a pillow over his head, but it did no good. Goddamn that dog. He flung the pillow to the buckled hardwood floor. “Shut it!”
He clambered downstairs. Evening beckoned through the windows. Beside the crab apple at the end of the garden he saw movement, but when the clouds opened, he realized in the grim light that he was mistaken. He rubbed his thumb over the rusted hook-and-eye latch at the screen door and crossed the yard, the dewy grass licking his bare feet.
Nugs was a demonic shadow near the barn, fur spiked along his neck, and his mouth lathered into vicious foam. The hair along Morgan’s arms pricked. His eyes slipped over the pasture, faint in the gloom, intent on catching a coyote shimmying through the yard or town kids sneaking off.
This had been happening for months, since Doreen had passed. Each time was the same: Nugs jolted him awake. He moved from window to yard, his eyes roaming the dark, but always he saw nothing. His leg slowed him, and whatever was in the shadows vanished before Morgan could catch it.
Abruptly, the howling strangled in Nugs’s throat like a wire snapping on a piano. The dog dropped his head to his paws with a whimper. The chilly silence sped up Morgan’s heart. He coaxed Nugs to the house and poured three fingers of whisky into a coffee mug, his twisted leg a dead appendage propped awkwardly on the floor. Before Nugs had jilted him awake, he was certain Doreen lay beside him, her breath warm on his neck. He swore he heard her flutelike whisper, her words like music just out of earshot.

Afterward, there was never any chance of sleep, but he had been a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps and was used to ticking the hours off long nights. He hunched at the kitchen table with his whisky and his dog while his thoughts retreated, sending him into the swelling heat of the desert that dropped cool at night. He heard again the eerie yipping of wild dogs, feral twitches against the jagged teeth of the mountains that sat at the desert’s edge. He saw again all that had gone wrong.
The night Doreen had died, the coroner made a point of saying she was gone as soon as the other pickup hit her. She felt nothing, he assured. No pain. Just out like that. He snapped his fingers, like Doreen dying was as simple as cutting off the lights. Morgan didn’t correct the guy, but he knew there had been shit-pissing fear as death barreled at her full on. He had witnessed enough near-death to know fear was a chokehold on the heart, had known it again and again at Al-Saqr. Knew it the day on patrol when he committed his unforgivable mistake. Maybe she had died on impact but that didn’t erase the terror stronger than pain. It didn’t ease the raw emptiness tearing at him now.
His bum leg began to itch where the graft lines hardened into white puckers, the hairless skin a translucent sheath of pink. The docs had told him to stay off his leg as much as possible, but they didn’t understand he had a farm to run, a livelihood to make. The farm income barely filled the hole of his reneged military pension. The crops didn’t stop growing because of a little nerve damage.
He tugged at his greasy red hair and lit a cigarette. At the screen door, there was a scratching. Morgan looked out, surprised by a tiny hiss from the dark. Nugs smacked his lips and growled. Crouched on the porch was a small black cat with a dab of white on its chin, its yellow eyes shimmering in the ripple of light as he opened the door.
He lured it in with a puddle of milk on a teacup saucer, part of the fancy wedding china they had never used. The cat paced back and forth before it crept forward to lap the milk with flickers of its pink tongue. Morgan stroked the kitten and it stretched toward him with easy trust, whiskers wet with milk. Its eyes shone with feeling at being saved, a dart of intelligent hunger in the yellow-flecked orbs.

The house moaned in the swelling heat of the following day. The breeze carried the sharp smell of manure, and the air plumped with the promise of unneeded rain. Morgan’s demons receded in the day, cooled and soothed by the farm routines, though he was sore and exhausted from his night without sleep. He ground three aspirin in his teeth and splashed a generous helping of whisky into his coffee.
The little cat slinked across the linoleum to rub its head against his blue jeans. He scooped it up with both hands, its body soft and delicate. He gently rolled it over to look at its sex, determined it was a she, and scratched her chin, the kitten wriggling in his hands to right herself.
“You little devil,” he said. She mewed softly. In a way, she reminded him of Doreen, who had been good with animals, loved them like children. Her heart had been larger than his. Two strays had showed up since her death and he’d shot them both.
Morgan tucked the kitten’s head under his chin and made his mental lists for the day. First the chickens, then the stackyard. He would help his farmhand, Charlie, with field spraying after lunch. Run the horses. Tinker with the lazy combine. Find money to fix the cultivator.
Outside, Nugs dozed with muzzle buried beneath paws. The cat leapt onto silent feet and vanished into the damp twilight of the barn where the swallows agitated the eaves. The air held the ripeness of animal dung and sweat. He patted the mare and gelding as he passed. Their wet eyes tracked him. The horses had always seemed to be suspicious of him, though he tried to walk and talk soft with them. Some creatures had no trust.
The farm rustled with sound: The ache of cicadas and hum of crickets. A blue jay’s shrill, its ostentatious display whipping past. The low baritone notes of the clothesline posts made of hollow pipe, sentinels guarding the house. Morgan added his own sound, the high notes of his whistling cracked, his throat cotton-dry. The day’s early heat gnawed at his bum leg. The nurses had told him he was lucky to be alive, though luck had a strange way of morphing into a curse.
At the haymow, his tune dropped silent when he saw them. Black slashes crisscrossed the beams, hard-scarred burns that glinted with menace in the slip of sun that pushed through the wall slats. The slashes darkened the wood, spreading like fungus. When he turned his glance, the burns rippled as if alive.
Anger exploded in his chest. It wasn’t right to sniff around a man’s land at night like a coward, no matter what you thought of him. He knew folks didn’t think much of a man with a limp, but this was his property. Here, he was the head motherfucker in charge.
Charlie’s pickup rumbled into the yard. He had hardly dismounted the cab before Morgan rushed at him spitting curses, his hands punching the air.
Together they stared at the marks that spilled down the drive bay.
“Those would be tall kids,” Charlie said. He was skinny with large hands and an impassive countenance. His words rolled with an easy, matter-of-fact cadence. “I couldn’t stretch on my tippy-toes enough to reach some of them.” He fanned his red ball cap for a makeshift breeze and bent to scratch Nugs’s ears. The dog exhaled, blubbering air through his teeth, and rolled onto his back for a belly rub that Charlie obliged.
Morgan touched the nearest scar, surprised when it pulsed warm like a living thing. He snapped his hand away. The heat throbbed along his palm and slid into his skin.
“You didn’t see nothing? No one?” Charlie asked. Morgan said nothing about Nugs’s nighttime racket. Charlie fit his ball cap on his head, ears protruding like burls. “May’s got Lestoil and ammonia that should clean things up. Can’t do much about the wood scarring though.” He looked off and coughed. “Also meant to say that May’s having a baby.” Charlie nudged the ground with the toe of his Red Wings.
The news settled between them heavier than a baby should weigh. He and Doreen had not been blessed with children, though a secret gratitude had nestled in him for he did not think this world was a welcoming place.
A crack of swallow’s wings startled them both as the bird dropped from the eaves and swooped out the barn door, a black gash against the blue sky.
“Well, that’s good news for you both, I hope,” Morgan said, his distraction blunting his words. His mind tipped heavily toward the vandals. “Congratulations.”
Charlie shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “It is, thank you. We’ve been trying.” He blushed, as if making love to his wife was an embarrassment. “May won’t be able to work much after a point, and I’ll need to be around more.” Charlie nodded in agreement with himself. “I’m not ungrateful to you. It’s just time to be on my own.”
So that was it then. Charlie was leaving him. Good, reliable Charlie, who hadn’t yet learned how life could hurt. He’d come up in Doreen’s English classes at the high school, and of anyone at her funeral, Charlie had said the kindest words. He thought to clap the boy on the back, maybe buy him a drink at Duke’s, but instead gestured to the surrounding fields. “The work’s not doing itself.” Charlie pulled his cap to his brow and made for the tractor.
Morgan loaded the wheelbarrow with a bag of chicken feed from the crib, and his uneven gait rocked the wheelbarrow wildly. He grit his teeth as a streak of pain pierced his hip joint and rode the circuits round his good leg. He was only forty-one, but his body belonged to an old man. But there was no changing being a cripple. It was his burden for what he’d done.
The black kitten leapt gracefully onto the feedbag, yellow eyes flickering. “Enjoying the free ride?” Morgan asked as he rolled the wheelbarrow to the chicken coop. The burns in the drive bay throbbed with energy. She held up a paw and licked her black-and-pink-speckled pads.
The chicken coop’s tarpaper roof pulsed with the sun’s heat. He ripped opened the feedbag and sliced a paper cut across his palm that sprang a dark rivulet of blood. He drew his palm to his mouth and sucked, the kitten watching him. Then he tossed the bits of seeds and crushed oyster shell into the enclosed yard. The hens emerged from their lazy morning to jostle one another with half-open wings. Their claws tore at the dirt, eager for the feed. Chickens were stupid animals destined for a beheading and the dinner plate. He held no sentiments toward them.
The feedbag slipped from his hands, a yellow-white pool spilling at his feet. He cursed and struggled to pick it up, his leg stiff. The hens flurried, gullets bobbing. His legs locked and he toppled headfirst into the birds.
The ground was littered with chicken shit, and the birds reeked of it. The feverish sun rolled sweat down his brow. The hen nearest adjusted her feathers with a cooing trill. He pushed up on his arms and teetered to his feet, only to have his bad leg buckle, sending him down again. The sinewy legs of the chickens fenced him in. He covered his face with his hands, afraid they would peck his eyes out. His goddamn leg. He tried a final time to stand before he gave up and yelled for Charlie.

Morgan sunk his head into his hands, the loud buzz behind his eyes fed by the grinding of Charlie’s rusty thirdhand Dodge, windows rolled down because the AC was busted. The wind roared between them enough to make conversation itself, though he turned to Charlie at a point and asked, “Does May ride in this?”
“Yup. We bring the dog,” Charlie pitched above the ruckus.
The round trip from the VA hospital in Beckley was four hours, plus two hours waiting to be seen by a doc who spent three minutes with him and hadn’t told him anything new. Like the folks who said Thank you for your service, they didn’t really see him. They saw only the trail of surgeries in his file and his OTH discharge, as if his twenty-three years as staff sergeant meant nothing. Jesus, wasn’t he only human like everyone else? His one fortune was having the VA medical facility access at all. It was Doreen’s doing, her hours on the phone pushing for reconsideration, her determination like flint even after the court-martial had called what he’d done indiscriminate. No pension. No disability pay. His words turned against him.
Morgan stared at the pulpy prescription note crushed in his palm. He had not wanted to go, but Charlie had shut him into the pickup before he realized, and now fiddled with the radio dial, his ball cap pushed high on his forehead for driving, his sunglasses black holes on his face. Morgan watched the fields and distant blue-shadowed mountains beyond, feeling the scorched wind and ceaseless sun.
They stopped in at Becker’s Grocery and Pharmacy, where he kept two accounts: one for his medicine and one for drinks to help keep the medicine down. The springs in the bench seat squeaked as Morgan leaned forward and hung from the cab, searching for solid ground. He steadied his weight against the truck, then thumped into the store, one good leg, one bad, like a monster.
The store’s narrow aisles pressed at him, and he had to turn sideways to make his way past the canned vegetables and boxes of food. He felt the stares. His bones knew the feeling of eyes pressed against his back.
At the pharmacy counter he rang the bell. Mrs. Becker, the old lady who ran the place with her son, tittered when she emerged.
“Bless you, Morgan. How’ve you been keeping?” He smoldered under her warm voice and pushed the doc paper at her. She looked at the notations, then at him. “Never a rest with farming, is there? This won’t take long. Have a seat while you’re waiting.”
“Think I’ll stand,” he said. “No need for charity.”
She shuffled along the narrow galley behind the pharmacy counter, talking at him like she would to her grandchildren. Her words mingled with the pleasant tones on the radio. “This rain’s no good. The church has been praying for you and the other farmers. Praying for a bountiful harvest. You’ve had your fill of bad luck, I know.” She whistled on, a forgotten teakettle, and tapped pills from one bottle to another.
The radio broadcast switched to the local affiliate. “This hour’s breaking news: Prosecutors announced a guilty verdict just minutes ago for Mitchell Cain Compton, convicted for the brutal slaying of a family in Sophia last March. Speaking from the Raleigh County Courthouse, the lead prosecutor on the case . . .”
The pill bottles clattered on the countertop. Mrs. Becker clasped her hands, her eyes on Morgan. “Oh, the Lord has seen he gets what he deserves. He heals all wounds.”
“Except mine.” Morgan gestured to his twisted, fucked-up leg.
Mrs. Becker’s mouth set firm. “He heals,” she repeated.
Morgan flared at her insistence. Nothing healed—not God nor Jesus nor the well-wishers who didn’t know what it was like, who couldn’t possibly have sat with his wounds. What was healing—what was justice—in war? Morgan knew he hadn’t intended to kill the kid, but intention wasn’t proof. It didn’t matter. He would never be whole again, and he couldn’t undo the past. He had escaped the dirty mines by signing up with Uncle Sam, but he had to fight. Pickaxe, gun. He had seen what was out there and it was shit, big and confusing and full of people who hated each other. And in the end, the recruit he’d murdered was in the ground same as those people Mitchell Cain Compton had murdered—same as Doreen—and there wasn’t anything more to it than that.
A car door slammed in the parking lot like a gunshot. He bucked at the sound and crashed backward into a shelf. Packages of Band-Aids and aspirin tumbled to the floor. He snatched the prescription bag from the counter and fled. At the exit, he passed a guy in an oil-stained flannel who looked like a marine he had known in Alpha Company. He had seen the marine’s head blown off by an IED, and for just a moment, he thought a ghost stood by, watching him.

That night, he was toweling off from his shower when he saw it glowing on the washbasin’s white skin: Doreen’s favorite piece of jewelry, a bronze barrette with a small, nested pearl. He had received it in a clear plastic bag from the coroner and had buried it in the storage closet under the stairs, locked and untouched since her death. He sucked breath through his teeth. His bum leg, though the docs said it was cauterized of feeling, began to burn.
He dragged his body to the closet at the house’s center, its heart. He rattled the doorknob impatiently, the lock an easy open with his thumbnail. The smell of decay clung to the walls. He covered his nose with his hand and felt in the dark for the chain switch to the bulb.
Dim light scraped at the corners of the cramped space. He spotted a tangle of tattered paper bulleted with black pellets of scat. The rotting smell shrouded him, clung to his skin. Varmint had got in the closet. They had dragged the barrette upstairs. He touched the walls and dragged his fingertips across the low ceiling, a hum niggling his stomach. Varmint, maybe. But something was amiss. It wasn’t visible. It was a feeling. Presentiment.
He unscrewed the light bulb from its socket and smashed it on the floor. He backed out of the closet and locked the door.
She wasn’t meant for it. He spoke to the dark that had eaten him since her death. I wasn’t ready for her to go. The barrette dug into his hand. Maybe Doreen was his punishment for killing the kid. But what did it mean that she was returning to him piece by piece? First as a presence that lingered from his dreams and now here, with the barrette. He held the metal thing to his chest and closed his eyes. She was trying to tell him something that he couldn’t quite hear.

The summer days grew longer, and his nights began to creep into his days, his thoughts more and more leaving the farmwork to retreat to the past, returning to things he preferred to forget.
He was a West Virginia boy, born and raised, and he had been proud when he enlisted instead of going into the mines. Despite his OTH, he was still proud to call himself a marine. Oorah. But he didn’t know anymore who he was. He had joined the marines to get out of West Virginia but had married Doreen eight years into his service, and she tied him right back to the land he had wanted to escape. He loved her, but now she was dead and he was stuck, plagued by memories he couldn’t shake.
May’s Lestoil and ammonia mix hadn’t been able to fix the strange burns in the barn wood, but he liked laying his hands upon them, soaking up their healing touch. They seemed to ease his body’s revolt: the headache that pulsed behind his eyes, the tremors that shook him in daily possession. The docs didn’t believe any of it was real. They said it was all in his head, as if that made it less true.
The welts were the worst. Two or three inches long and more each day, the boiled red streaks rose like burns across his skin, rendered it raw. He thought at first it was heat rash, familiar from his tours of duty in sandy, searing climates, but nothing improved them. Neither calamine nor milk worked, and the welts swelled and burst with yellow pus before they scarred over, as if the breathing heat was captive in his body and his boiled skin was merely the manifestation of a fire within.
Charlie sauntered down the drive bay. He would be gone in two weeks, May soon to give birth, and Morgan would be alone. Once Charlie left, there would be no one to help with the harvest and the tilling, the preparations for the long and dark winter months.
“You feeling all right?” Charlie asked.
Morgan raised his eyes, took in the dusty rafters painted with white streaks of bird shit. “Healthy as a horse.”
“I know it’s been rough lately.” Charlie stared at him, an uncomprehending slit to his eyes. “If you’re not feeling good—”
Morgan cut him off with a flap of his hand and gestured that there was work to be done. He watched Charlie amble down the drive bay with a bag of feed tossed over his shoulder.
The angled cut of the barn doors framed the sky in a rectangle of charcoal blue. The sun slid behind a gray stack of clouds that moved in from the west, and the humidity deepened. The sweat dripped across the new welts that had emerged that morning. He was alone. He had nothing.
As if to remind him, the kitten crept into his lap with a yowl and nudged under his hand, her body warm against his thigh. He petted her, calmed by the motion, his thoughts halted by her tiny face and black nose, her long whiskers that faded to white at the ends. Nugs sniffed nearby, nose to ground, trailing a scent only he knew.
Charlie yelled, his voice sagging in the humid air. Morgan huffed and gamboled down the drive bay, Charlie’s red ball cap a floating speck that grew as he limped closer. Clouds pummeled the sky. The shrill squawking of the chickens pierced the disquieting hush. Morgan grumbled at the farmhand as he approached, but Charlie only stared open-mouthed, pointing. Morgan turned to look.
Black spray paint marred the barn’s cheery red face. He stared at the uneven, jagged lines as they resolved into letters that scrawled a word: M U R D E R E R.
Charlie’s mouth moved but the world had dropped silent. Morgan had gone temporarily deaf in the days after the incident, the cathedral whispers of the hospital muted to an eerie nothing.
A loud crack of thunder brought the world rushing back. A downpour fell around them, the rain like pellets from a BB gun. The thirsty ground drank what it could and released the excess water into a gelatinous pool that ran in streaks over the dirt and collected in thick puddles in the low spots. The kitten sat in the doorway of the barn, its eyes shining with each flash of lightning.
Charlie grabbed his elbow and shouted his name. The black letters screamed at Morgan, each letter stroke a puncture to his core.
The young recruit was about Charlie’s age, green and a little slow. Morgan had heard of marines who choked, marines who couldn’t hack it, whose minds gave out, who retreated into cowardice and fear. He had done none of that. Either you were a marine or you were a weak little pussy, and what he had done was only an accident. An accident.

He awoke in the barn uncertain how he had gotten there. Was he dreaming? The breezeless air hung like a woolen coat over his body, but the hard-packed dirt of the barn was cool against his feet. He pulled his hands over his face, his palms wet with sweat. Between the cracks of his fingers, he saw the burns glisten wetly in the gloom.
His hands reeked with the sharp sting of gas, and his T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He was awake; he had been sleepwalking. He stumbled through the dark, kicking a jug of diesel fuel and upturning it. He cursed. Charlie must have left the jug in the barn.
Morgan paused at the sawdust bucket to listen to the insects chatter. The hens were quiet in their roost. He dug the scoop into the bucket, stopping when his shovel hit an object. He dug out a canister of black spray paint and rolled it between his hands, listened to the clack of the metal ball inside its body.
The motherfucker who had defaced his barn had the gall to leave the empty can behind, as if they didn’t care whether he found it. The fucking motherfucker. He heaved it into the dark and heard the ricocheting echo as it hit something in the distance, metal on metal.
He stalked the perimeter of the yard, Nugs trotting alongside. The stars were too weak to hold off the night’s emptiness, and the tractors were jagged ghosts against the deep blue-black of the sky. The cat swayed inside its inky coat and skittered across the gravel.
He had lost his family young: mother to cancer, father to a mine collapse. With no one to take him in, he had lived in a boys’ home, a rough and violent place that taught him how to fight. He perfected his skills in the marines. He would show whoever was behind this. He would hunt the bastards down.

The clock had run dead, its hands stopped in the sliver of time before dawn. His watch had run out, too. His hand fell across the sheets, the hard metal of a rifle nestled beside him. He couldn’t recall putting it there. He opened the chamber and saw it was loaded.
He stumbled into the bright daylight and vomited into the azalea bushes. The yard smelled like a rank, festering sore. He careened toward the western field and watched Charlie traveling the rows. The tractor swung around in the headrow, returning in his direction, and puttered to a stop few yards away. Charlie jumped down, ball cap in hand.
“Things okay, Morgan?” Charlie scratched his arm, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses. “It’s nearly noon and the first I seen of you all day.”
Morgan felt the world shift and tilt, and the bitter, dead taste on his tongue soured his words into silence. Charlie had no right to pry.
Charlie slid off his sunglasses and stared at him. His right eye was a bloody red orb. A monster’s eye, as if Charlie wasn’t fully human.
“Busted vein,” Charlie explained at Morgan’s stare. “Should clear up in a week or so.” Charlie reached for his shoulder but Morgan jerked away, his balance tipping.
Charlie replaced the sunglasses, and Morgan saw his distorted reflection in the black lenses, his face stretched and bent to odd proportions: his gaping mouth and taffy skin pulled longways, his nostrils flared into large disks, and his eyes shrunken to pinpoints. He patted Nugs, who stood guard at his side, and said, “Things is good, things is bad. That’s how life goes.”
Charlie nodded. “Life goes all kinds of ways we can’t predict.” He returned to the field to spray the wheat with what little fertilizer was left.
Morgan dragged a bucket of bleach water to the barn and scrubbed at the heinous word, but the paint had been absorbed into the wood. No amount of elbow grease would fix it. He kicked the bucket and the water ran its fingers across the dirt. The ground stained with a patch soon sucked dry by the sun. The air held no memory of yesterday’s sudden thunderstorm. Morgan closed his eyes and leaned against the barn wall. He couldn’t think straight, could hardly think at all.
He began to walk. The movement felt good and soothed the black pain that was like tar. He walked to the farthest edge of the property, his leg pulsing with its own heartbeat. He discovered a half-full flask in his pocket and pushed on. When he reached the line fence he paused, putting his hand for support on the crooked yew tree bent into the row, then crossed into the next field, which belonged to Charlie and May. The muddy ground slopped around his boots, the suck of the mud a strange balm. Morgan made it to the copse of trees at the field’s far end before he collapsed.
In war, you were always lucky at the end of the day to be alive. Threats loomed everywhere, though you acclimated to the constant danger and settled into the long moments of boredom, knowing they would soon be sliced open by the unexpected. What he had done was one moment in thousands and the recruit hadn’t moved fast enough.
The secured road. The convoy. The limping beggar who leaned into his crutch as he crossed and slowed them just enough to fuck their shit up. The company scattered at the enemy fire and the onslaught of explosives, half on one side of the road and half on the other. They fired back at the motherfuckers responsible. Morgan had reached into his training and let his reflexes take command. The bullets ate the air before him. He didn’t hear the PFCs yelling or see their arms waving as he pumped round after round, a grin smearing his face at the satisfying kick of dust curtained between him and the enemy. The not-enemy. The young recruit. And the explosion. He woke with an IV in his arm, his body bound in a sheet, and no feeling in his left leg. His fate sealed.

The sun dipped low. Charlie picked his way across the field and Nugs trailed behind, nose to the ground. Morgan’s leg had the tremors and his eyes stung like they were filled with sand. He hoped the boy wouldn’t see.
Charlie rocked on his feet, his boots smeared with field mud. He lifted his eyes toward the horizon and asked, “You going hunting?”
Morgan coughed. The rifle lay in the grass, though he didn’t remember carrying it.
“Protecting the farm. The varmint come out at night,” he said. He snapped his fingers for Nugs, but the dog circled a dark smudge nearby and didn’t listen. Two crows flew low overhead, their wings casting grotesque shadows. Nugs began to paw the quackgrass furiously.
“What’s that damn dog got into?” Morgan muttered, struggling to stand. His joints needed greasing, but he’d emptied his flask hours ago. Charlie offered help, but Morgan waved him away.
As they drew close, he recognized the body of the black kitten, curled and bloodied, its head severed from the body.
“Did you do this, you stupid mutt?” He thwacked Nugs’s snout with the butt of his rifle. The dog snapped his teeth.
Charlie stepped forward, his eyes hard. “You know Nugs isn’t the type, Morgan.” He bent to examine the kitten’s body, which had begun to turn in the heat. Maggots crawled through the eye sockets and along the raw stem of its neck. “A coyote wouldn’t leave it out in the open like this.”
“Something else then,” Morgan said.
“Something else,” Charlie repeated.
He asked for help burying it. Charlie looked surprised but fetched a shovel from the barn. They interred it in the fencerow, the hole an easy dig in the wet ground.

Dusk crept through the front door and filled Morgan’s chest with dread. The house inhaled, sucking in the dark things that stretched their limbs at twilight. He locked the door, ridiculous since nobody in the county—even after the Mitchell Cain Compton murders—kept a locked door. He wrapped his hand around Doreen’s barrette for luck.
Morgan barricaded the bedroom door with a dresser still packed with her clothes. He leaned her tall, oak-framed mirror against it. If someone tried to get in, he would know.
He propped his body on a stack of pillows. Nugs curled on the floor. Morgan searched the sheets for the lightness of her scent, but her pillow smelled only of his sweat. The rifle shivered on the pillow beside him. Metal wife. Makeshift wife. He pulled the blanket up and draped a hand across his heart with a heaving sigh, his body overtaken by the exhaustion that crouched in his bones since her death.
In the dream, the recruit stepped through the shroud to greet him. He looked whole, fixed. Morgan started to apologize, but the recruit lifted a hand and shook his head no. He tried a second time, but again the recruit stopped him, then shrugged, a slow grin spreading across his face, his lips pulling back in a grimace, his teeth bloodied and broken. He turned to walk away, and the back of his head was a terrifying black hole.

He was startled awake by the clatter of the empty bottle on the wood floor. The TV glowed blue and flickered strange shadows on the bedroom walls.
The bedroom door was ajar. The dresser had been shoved aside and the mirror lay shattered on the floor. His body stilled; his senses thickened. Goosebumps puckered his arms.
He heard the unmistakable sound of small noises creeping from downstairs. He gripped the rifle, its lightness a toy after the GPMG he had used in Iraq. He felt something draw its attention to him. Outside, the bright half-orb moon emerged from the clouds, its pure light splitting around the barn’s peak. He heard the popping crackle of fire. Smoke crawled through the open bedroom door.
Nugs growled a low warning from the bedroom floor. Morgan tensed. The dog was all he had left. Then, Nugs howled and exploded past, his yips shredding the dark.
Morgan jumped from the bed with a scream, rearing like an unbroken stallion. His left foot quaked as he slid over the broken mirror and rushed to the landing. Smoke hung thickly in the air. The shadows shifted and morphed, the night blurring. Whatever it was, if it hurt Nugs, he would blow its head off. He fired two warning shots into the dark.
He thumped toward the sound of heavy gasping in the living room, his hands itching to pull the trigger again. He wanted to kill the thing that haunted him, but the shadows were disorienting and flickers of movement alighted in every direction. Fire licked at the kitchen door, pushing from the porch through the screen door, calling him.
Morgan coughed from the smoke and gripped the rifle. The metal burned in his fingers. Nugs was hidden and silent, but a whispery laughter swelled to fill the house and danced into the yard. It pinged off the aluminum sides of the silos and echoed back to him with a preternatural din that pricked Morgan’s skin and ate into his heart.
His dog. He had to protect his dog. Doreen had chosen Nugs at the shelter when he was just a tiny runt. She’d held him in her lap the entire ride home, her fingers gentle against his soft head while the pickup rolled down the potholed highway.
The memory ignited in his brain as she floated in front of him and then receded, gone, replaced by the laughing recruit who reached for him, alive and looming in the burning orange shadows. Morgan’s throat spilled with his sobs. The rifle’s barrel rested against his chin. The snapping and hissing of the fire burrowed into his ears like tiny critters as a tunnel of heat and smoke rose, and the swirling flames surrounded him with a delighted whoosh.

The sun reflected brightly off the silos and lit the yard in a golden blaze. Charlie parked his Dodge behind the barn and jumped out. He whistled for Nugs. The hens and horses were quiet. He whistled again, both for the dog and for the comfort of the sound.
Nugs was hunched and shivering in the barn, his eyes glassy. He had been shot twice and had licked the wounds on his hind leg clean of blood. He limped toward Charlie with a heavy wheeze. Charlie scooped the trembling animal into his arms and laid him on the floor of his truck, his heart twisted at the thought of a person shooting a dog. The vet was thirty miles away, and Nugs had begun to shiver. He passed back through the barn toward the house to tell Morgan the bad news.
Charlie gasped when he saw it. The house’s charred limbs rose toward the blue sky. The broken windows gleamed jagged in the sun, a menacing face that beckoned him closer. Fire had consumed the house’s insides. The roof had collapsed over the kitchen, and the smell of singed wood clung to the breeze.
He looked through a blown-out front window that lay smashed and glistening in the grass, until he saw the fire-blackened sole of a boot. The singed butt of a rifle. He traced the barrel. The metal was twisted and clasped by what looked like cylinders of soot. He moved his eyes up, past the charred black skin. Up, up to the remains of a jawbone that opened wide. To the yawning nothing beyond.

---

Lacey N. Dunham is a writer and editor whose fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Witness, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, and Wigwag, among others. A first-generation college graduate originally from the Midwest, she now lives in Washington, DC.

 

Louis pushed the battered green wheelbarrow down the gravel path, his rough hands darting out to keep his tools from bumping onto the ground whenever the screeching wheel hit a rut or hump in the pitted and graveled lane.
Clicking through the catalog he kept in his head, he settled on Barber’s Adagio for Strings, hit the play button. The picture for it wasn’t a supplicant Sgt. Elias, but rather the archangel Michael, frozen in flaming mid strafe over an unrepentant cityscape. Louis had gone to Chicago Public Schools, where he graduated from eighth grade, and not much more. Those classrooms were nowhere for a Native to be, and music was his world anyway, even if they didn’t care too much about that at Sullivan High School up on the North Side. He took all the music classes they offered and dropped out after getting A’s in both, signed up for four in the military instead of three to five in Joliet. He stopped for a moment, set the wheelbarrow down gently. Dug through the inside pocket of his gray wool overcoat, pulled the last smoke from his pack, bent and wrinkled, lit it with a well-worn Zippo, delicious naphtha fumes lingering in the still and foggy air. He took a drag, blew it out, looked to the ground at his right. There had been flurries that morning. It was only the second snow of the year and it floated across the still-green grass like torn white lace.
This fog’ll take that out, he thought, putting the warm lighter in his pants pocket. Nothing like fog to tamp down snow. It’s what every old person ever had told him, anyway. They were probably right. Still, he thought rain, but why argue with elders? And the veil would thin everything tonight, anyway. All Hallows’ Eve the whites called it, a remnant from when they were tribal, too.
Even though he grew up in the city, Louis came from a long line of medicine people. If he moved out to the rez, he’d be busy with ceremony all the time. But here in the city it just made his life strange, and difficult. Not too many people knew what he was talking about, what he carried in his head, what it was like when the thunders came to talk, and fewer cared. That was okay, though. In the city, you needed all the friends you could get, even if no one else could see them, hear them, if only a couple of your buddies knew what you were even talking about. There weren’t too many Natives in his neighborhood since he’d moved out of Uptown farther north, and that made for a lonely life. Some days, it made him feel special, but those days weren’t enough to make it okay. That singular sense was enough to carry him through, to make him feel old-timey some days, like he was a real Indian or something special, anyway, but in the city, mostly, those extra senses were a drag, and manifested themselves in ways that tore at his spirit.
Arguing, heard or unheard but still raging, hurt his head on this job. He’d hang back by the nearest mausoleum, waiting to get to work, switch to whatever he wanted to play between his ears, drown out the harsh words and whispers and wonder if the people being lowered into the ground could hear them, thought jeeezus, is this how I’m going out, what my big sendoff is going to be? What if that’s my eternal accompaniment, my idiot relatives wondering who gets what, the kids just hungry, grammas needing to pee, moms and dads planning how to ditch the after-funeral feed early and enjoy a bit of a day away from work.
Louis thought, one day some dearly departed is gonna get sick of this.
He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grabbed the handles, and shoved off down the path. The moldering leaves, wet and burntbrown, rotted in windswept piles, and the smell made him queasy. He used his tongue and lips to roll the cigarette to the other side of his mouth, grateful for the acrid smoke that masked the overwhelming decay, if even for only a few seconds.
Rain rushed in without warning, fog and snow both disappearing under its relentless fall. Take that, old people, he thought. He watched a drop hit his smoke, just behind the cherry. Took a big drag, listened to the wet paper sizzle, queued up Le quattro stagioni, seven Spanish angels in sepia held hands, St. Vitus gripping their pale feet.
Sure enough, even though he knew it was coming somewhere at this bend in the road, the wheel hit a dip and he had to lunge for his falling shovel, his shoulder hitting a rake handle as he reached out, the tangle of equipment in the wheelbarrow an interlocked mass whose wooden poles and angles grabbed up in his open topcoat, their combined resistance shoving him ass over teakettle into the mud at the side of the narrow path.
He sat there for a good five minutes, nowhere to be anyway, his client not going anywhere anytime soon. He managed to hang on to his smoke, though it only had a few drags left. He knocked the cherry off, stuck the butt in his back pocket. It’s rude to stamp out your smoke on the ground in this judgmental city of the dead. Six or seven chickadees came by, mocked him. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, they laughed. He laughed back, put his hands out behind him, squeezed his fingers into the icy mud. He tilted his head up, peered into the thinning canopy of oak and maple, counted maybe a dozen leaves holding out, gold and proud, clinging to whatever trees thought summer was worth to them. An owl stared back down at him, ruffled her feathers and bobbed her head at him. He shuddered as the rain ticked down, fat and heavy, but sparse, in countable drops, so slow he made a point to catch three or four fat silver beads in his mouth.
He wiped his hands on his work pants, pine-green baggies so old they had sewn-in cuffs. He looked down at his boots, black waterproof Tims that had saved his feet a hundred times from trench foot. He reached in a coat pocket, pulled out his lunch: a Braunschweiger sandwich with yellow mustard on cheap white bread, his favorite. His other pocket held a glass bottle of Coke, thankfully unbroken, and he opened it by holding his index finger tight under the top of the neck, wedging the edge of his lighter in to pop the cap.
He ate and drank quickly, a holdover from being in the navy, where they gave you thirty seconds to eat in boot camp. That never bothered him, though, made sense, the business of getting the necessaries out of the way as soon as you could. For dessert he hit the flask in his other back pocket, two deep pulls of Connemara finished his midday repast. He didn’t make much money, but he never skimped on his liquor.
Louis and his well-worn tools made their way over to the fresh grave, now devoid of bickering mourners. He stared down into the freshly opened earth as a magpie landed on the brass rail edging the pit.
They must’ve been particularly quarrelsome—his eyes widened watching the ebony casket lid rattle and crack open.
Sonofabitch.
He grabbed a shovel, furiously turned the piles of dirt into the hole, the rain picking up.
Six ravens dropped in to watch the proceedings. They croaked to themselves, making and taking bets on the outcome. Ravens are inveterate gamblers. His new client struggled to free themself from the casket even as Louis was winning the burying battle; their interment was almost complete.
Almost, but not quite. The earth churned in one final heave as they reached out for the grave’s edge.
He smashed the clawing hands down with the business end of a rake, burying it in them deep enough that only the tops of the tines were visible above the shattered knuckles, white shards of bone shoved through the soup of mud and blood. Louis shot the ravens a look as the sharp edge of his digging spade cleaned the head off the neck. It rolled a few feet away. They laughed and exchanged rocks and brass tacks with each other, shiny black wingtips pushing bits of foil and lost single ruby-red earrings in piles between them. He switched to the ten-tined potato fork, scooping up the head with a well-practiced move that dropped his shoulders and came up under his prize. A snap of his wrists flicked the head into the hole. He wrenched the rake out of the pulsing fingers, then deftly moved to the short-handled shovel and filled and graded the hole in a matter of minutes. The owl silently settled on the rail, supervised the final strokes.
There was no arguing to be heard.
Balefully white-eyed and black tricorn-hatted, the Requiem in D Minor replied to the silence.

---

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s linked story collection about sort of growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes (University of New Mexico Press), won the 2019 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing. His next work, Sacred City, will be published in fall 2021; he is also the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. Van Alst is the creative editor for Transmotion (a journal of postmodern indigenous studies) and an active Horror Writers Association member. His fiction and photography have been published in The Raven Chronicles, Red Earth Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Unnerving Magazine, The Rumpus, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others.

 

Annabelle woke up on the anniversary of her second sobriety with a dry mouth and a doomed certainty that she would fail. She could hear Luke rummaging around in the kitchen, the clink of pots and pans, water running over dishes. She rolled over. She pulled the blankets over her head. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she slept the day away, she might make it. She felt a weight on the edge of the bed.
“Coffee,” Luke said. “I made a scramble too. But you have to get up for that.”
Annabelle lowered the blanket. Luke had already dressed in his gray suit, gray hair slicked back in that business way she didn’t like. She preferred his weekend hair: unruly curls and stubble. He handed her a cup of coffee. She let the steam tickle her chin before taking a sip.
“I dreamed about our pond,” Annabelle said. “The water was red.”
“Blood?” Luke said.
“Wine,” Annabelle said. “You’re sure you have to go today?”
He reached out and touched her hair. “Call me if you need me,” he said. “But I believe in you. You got this.”
She had been furious when he told her the date his company had decided on for the opening of the warehouse he’d designed. Not at him, he couldn’t help when they decided to throw him on a plane, but angry at a world that delighted in such coincidences.
“It’s just a day like any other,” Luke said. “You’ve changed so much in a year, Annie.”
Annabelle groaned and pulled the blanket back over her head, over the coffee and her hair. Inside her blanket tent, there was no opportunity for mistakes.
One year ago, after six months of her first go at sobriety, she had woken up not in a bed but on the kitchen floor of a coworker’s house, the stench of vomit overwhelming. She’d stumbled to the bathroom and seen not herself but a monster in the mirror: or maybe, she’d thought, this was her, in all her glory, with chunks of the stew her coworker had cooked for her stuck in her disheveled hair.
Luke had left her there. He’d instructed her coworker to do the same. He had begged her to stop drinking. He’d set his boundaries: he would never carry her home again. It worked. For six months, it worked, but she thought she could handle herself. She thought she could have a glass of wine with dinner. She should be able to; adult women should be able to drink a goddamn glass of wine from time to time. One had turned to four had turned to shots snuck from her coworker’s liquor cabinet.
The coworker didn’t have to inform Annabelle’s boss of her dinner performance; Annabelle’s boss had been there, had seen it all firsthand. Annabelle arrived at work the following Monday to an email. Meet me in my office asap. It didn’t look good for the company, her boss said. Especially not one that created content for children.
Annabelle didn’t need Luke to tell her she’d gotten out of control again. She returned home and poured out every bottle of alcohol in the house. Except for one: a special liquor they’d picked up on their first trip together, a cherry-flavored gin from the Netherlands. She couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. Instead she asked Luke to lock it up in the gun safe and never tell her the combination. He had obliged but made sure to let her know that he trusted her. She’d made the right decisions for herself over and over. She appreciated the trust. She refused to know the combination anyway.
“You can’t hide under that blanket forever,” Luke said. “For one thing, you’ll suffocate.”
“Will not,” Annabelle said, but he was right, she couldn’t breathe well in the hot coffee stench.
“Join me if you will, Annie,” Luke said. “I’ve got an hour until my airport ride comes.”
She felt his weight leave the bed. She sighed in her tent. She emerged from the dark to a room half-lit from the window. Annabelle swallowed the rest of her coffee and crawled out of bed. She paused to peer outside. The house had been built near a dried-up creek. Over the previous year, she and Luke had taken down the rickety bridge the previous owners had built over the creek and dug out a pond. Her sobriety project, they called it. Water made her calm. The pond would remind her, Luke said. The blue-green water sparkled in the sunlight.
Annabelle slipped on her robe. In the kitchen, she refilled her coffee cup and sat at the table with Luke. His suitcase was by the front door. They ate breakfast together. Filled with anxiety, she found the eggs tasted bland and unsatisfactory. The coffee seemed weak. Before Luke left, he held her hand.
“You got this,” he said.
“I know,” she said, but she knew nothing of the sort. Outside the window, the bushes rustled.

When Annabelle had realized that her first anniversary would come on a weekend, she felt a drop in the pit of her stomach. After losing her old job, she’d taken on the first work she could find: a telemarketing gig. The work didn’t fulfill her, but sometimes she caught herself taking pride in her efficiency, in the ease with which she moved through her caller lists, the professional tone she took with her supervisors, her ability to push away the insults leveled at her by the people she interrupted during their lunches. They didn’t know her faults. They assumed that calling her a terrible person would sting, but she knew how she looked at her worst. Calling people who did not want to be called was the least of her transgressions.
Annabelle looked down at her hands as she cleaned the dishes. They were shaking. She glanced out the window again. The water hissed down the drain. The surface of the pond rippled, as though someone had thrown something into it. Probably an acorn fallen from a tree. Annabelle finished up the dishes. She thought about calling a friend, but she had lost most of those when she stopped drinking the first time. She stood at the window. She might spend her whole day standing at the window, and that would be okay. It would be better than what she wanted, what she always wanted: to crack open that safe and drown her heart in the bottle there. To rest.
It was okay to ask for help. Luke told her that all the time, as did her therapist. But it meant something to stand at the window alone. It meant something to keep herself from dialing Luke or her sister, people who would listen and offer platitudes, people who would never really understand. Luke had told her to call him if she needed him, even though he would be on an airplane for the next three hours, then working steadily after. He was kind. The perfect partner for someone like her who needed help but didn’t want to need help.
Someone knocked at the back door. Annabelle looked out the window. Nothing. She opened the door, but no one was there.
Annabelle went back into the bedroom. She opened her closet. The safe was still there, locked. Luke knew the combination. He would give it to her, if she asked for it. She sat in front of it and touched the black metal. It was cold. When she’d first insisted that they keep the bottle inside, Luke had asked why.
“You say you’re never going to drink again,” he’d said. They were sitting at the dining room table, the cavalry of liquor in formation before them. “I’m not going to drink it without you.”
“It’s important to me,” she’d said. “Please.”
She had tried to form the words. She wanted to tell him, but sometimes her brain fogged when she thought of alcohol, or when she thought at all. There were warring reasons in her mind: she didn’t want to have to be the kind of person who couldn’t live with a bottle in her house. She wanted to be so strong she could handle having it there, even if it was locked away. But she also didn’t want to let all of it go. Wasn’t alcohol a part of her, the way her love of water was a part of her? She went back and forth. Her therapist advised her to let it go. Let it all go. Annabelle had not told her about the remaining bottle, about the safe. Annabelle clicked the combination lock. She unfolded herself from the floor. She returned to the window.
A troll stood at the edge of the pond.
Annabelle had never seen a troll before. It stood at the height of a nearby holly bush. It stared down into the water with a face that, from the window, looked like a scrunched-up rhino. Its body was covered in folds of gray skin. Annabelle’s heart skipped a beat. She stood frozen in the glass. When she finally returned to herself and stepped back, unsure if trolls were friend or foe, the troll turned its gaze to her. It had white tusks protruding from its mouth. It growled. Even through the glass and all the way across the yard, she heard it: a deep growl like an overprotective dog. Annabelle yelled and ducked to the floor. Her hands shook harder now.
When she stood back up, the troll was gone. Annabelle sighed. She was letting the stress of the day get to her. She laughed at herself.
The troll stepped out from the shadows on the porch. It slammed at the window with its fist. Its five claws pierced the screen. It pulled down, ripping the mesh. Its eyes were dull black holes. It bared its razor teeth.
“You,” it screamed. “What have you done with my bridge?”
Annabelle yanked the curtains closed.
The troll banged on the glass for what seemed like five hours but was only, as Annabelle watched the minutes click by, five minutes. Some days were a long stretch. Many days were long stretches. Her heart hammered. Her throat was parched. She couldn’t think. She needed a drink to calm her nerves. She couldn’t have one. She reached into her pocket for her phone.
She typed a message to her husband: What’s the combo? She needed the gun. She needed it. She didn’t send the message. Instead she raised her phone up through the curtains and snapped a photo. She stared at the picture of the troll, out of focus but undeniable. The troll stopped pounding on the glass. She caught her breath.
Annabelle crept around the silent house inspecting objects and locking doors, checking windows. She peered out through the window in her bedroom and saw nothing but a glint of light on the pond. Before, she had sensed two paths branching before her: she would make it through the day or she would not. Now, the troll opened other doors, doors less certain. She knew nothing of trolls. Except, no, she thought as she double-checked a window near a bookshelf. She knew a little: they lived under bridges. And she knew more now: they looked like rhinos. And this one was angry.
She grabbed first an old statue she had won for the lesson plans that she had written for the city’s after-school science program; it was the shape of a rocket and as heavy as one, or so she joked with guests, when she had guests, before people stopped showing up to her parties due to the lack of alcoholic activities allowed under her roof. In the kitchen, she swapped the rocket for a book of matches. In the bedroom, she left the matches and grabbed the Taser she kept for protection out of her bedside table. A Taser would allow her to protect herself without bloodshed, without getting too close to the troll.
She opened her back door and stepped onto her porch, finger on the button that would fire the electrical charge up to twenty feet away.
The troll emerged from the bushes beneath her window. It stepped toward her once, twice. It stopped. It watched her. She stood still, then called out: “Leave me alone. This is my house.”
The troll dragged its heavy body forward. It was close enough to hit with the Taser, then close enough to smell; the troll smelled like bog stench, like a murky lake in the heat of summer. The troll growled as it approached.
“Don’t come any farther!” Annabelle yelled. “What do you want?”
“You leave this house,” the troll said. “Or I will make you leave.”
Annabelle stood her ground even as the troll’s great hulk advanced. Its tusks were red at their ends with dried blood. “Why?” Annabelle said.
“My bridge,” the troll said. “My water.”
“I built that pond,” Annabelle said, her voice shaking.
“I built that bridge,” the troll said. “To cross the creek.”
“This is my house,” Annabelle said. “I live here now. The creek is gone.”
The troll snarled. It picked up its pace. It charged.
Annabelle pressed the button. Two wires shot from the Taser, the arrows at their end piercing the top layer of the troll’s flesh. The troll shook with electricity as Annabelle dropped the Taser and ran back inside. She flipped the lock.
From the window, she watched the troll tear the arrows out of its skin. She watched the troll turn toward the door. The troll ran toward her. It gored the wood, then wrenched its tusk free. It looked in at Annabelle, who was too frightened to move.
“You leave, or I’ll make you leave,” it said.
“What do you mean?” Annabelle yelled through the door. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You leave,” the troll said. “Or I’ll come in there. I’ll rip you open. I’ll build a new bridge with your skeleton.”
The blood drained from Annabelle’s face. She had been threatened over the phone before; there was no end to the death threats men lodged at female telemarketers. But this was the first time she’d believed a threat. The first time it had come at her face-to-face.
“When your man comes home,” the troll said. “I’ll tear out his skeleton too.”
“All because of a rotten old bridge?” she said.
“You think I don’t know how to get through this door?” the troll said. It smiled with a mouthful of terrible teeth.

Annabelle’s husband answered her message within seconds.
Are you sure?
I’m sure, Annabelle wrote.
The code is 10-23-15, he wrote back.
He’d used the date that they’d first moved into the house. It had always been a dream of theirs to build a pond. For a year, Annabelle had been depressed, sorry for herself, crying every night at her failure. She had been anxious. She had obsessed over new hobbies, knitting until her husband requested that she find some other people to accept her gifts of scarves. She’d broken down; she couldn’t live her life without some all-consuming thing, and she hated knitting, really, and she took to pacing the yard until she determined to build the pond they’d wanted since that first time they’d laid eyes on the spot where they put it.
It had been backbreaking work. She’d shoveled by hand and lined the edges with marshland plants. She’d stocked the thing with fish. She’d tended to it every morning since the day they’d finished it.
She opened the safe. She pulled out the gun. She pulled out the liquor. She put the liquor back. She left the safe open. She loaded the pistol.
Her husband had taught her to shoot when they first met, out at his parents’ ranch. The power of the gun was overwhelming in her hands, the ease of the bullet leaving the shaft. She was keenly aware that any slip she made, any fall, could cause destruction. She asked her husband to keep the guns in the safe, away from her. Now, she once more held one in her hand.
The troll had camped out in front of the back door. It had stopped head-butting the wood; blood dripped down its mouth where it had rammed its bottom lip into the doorknob. Annabelle studied it from the bedroom window. While she’d gathered the gun, the troll had torn crisp lines in the window screen. Annabelle had a clear shot where she stood. In the distance, the pond water stayed still, nary a ripple. Water didn’t understand conflict, turmoil. Annabelle glanced once back at the safe and the liquor, then opened the window quick as a relapse and shot the troll right in its bloody face.
The troll whipped its gaze to the window, to Annabelle and her weapon. It reached its hand up to its face, where the bullet had lodged next to its left eye. It dug its claw into the wound. It scooped the bullet out. It dropped the bullet on the porch. The metal landed on the concrete with a single clink. It clonked toward the window, one step, two steps, a dance to hint at violence. Annabelle shut the window.
“I won’t leave,” she said.
Blood dripped down the troll’s face and onto the concrete. She didn’t want to look away from the troll, to show her weakness, but she felt in her stomach an emptiness that had one cure. She dropped to the ground and gasped for breath. Like so many things, it was her fault that the troll was here: she had finished her pond. She had thought it would help, would cure all her ills, but in doing something to help herself, she had called the troll instead. As with anything she ever did, she ruined the thing by trying to improve it. She held her head in her hands and cried.
The troll screamed outside. It ripped out the screen and pounded the window once with its fist. The glass cracked, then shattered. The troll roared. It poked its head inside the broken window. Blood dripped down on the top of Annabelle’s head.
“You’re not worthy of the water,” the troll said.
She heard its words, and she heard the words’ meaning: you don’t deserve this pond. You don’t deserve this life, this satisfaction at a shitty job well done. Annabelle yelped and crawled, without looking up at the troll, on all fours across the floor to the closet. She grabbed the bottle. The glass was cool in her hands and smooth. She uncapped the bottle and stuck her nose in the opening: the smell burned her nostrils and cleared the ever-present fog.
In the bedroom, the troll yanked its head out of the window. It disappeared. Annabelle heard something drop outside, then the sound of stomping above her. She’d forgotten: the outdoor patio had been a sunroom before the previous owners took the windows away. They’d left an unsecured attic access. Annabelle looked up at the access door in her own ceiling. The troll smashed through and fell to the floor. It grinned its ugly grin at Annabelle but did not move toward her.
Annabelle lifted the bottle. She was a trash fire of a person. She should light herself aflame. She started to drink, and in tilting her head back, from the corner of her eye she caught sight of the matches she’d left on the bedside table. She lowered the bottle.
Annabelle gripped the bottle and rushed at the matches. The troll’s eyes widened. Shards of glass stuck out of the troll’s neck. Annabelle scurried over her bed and past the troll. She jumped up on a table by the window and crawled through. The troll wedged itself into the window and reached for her, but she’d fallen onto the deck outside, out of the troll’s reach. The troll screamed. It tried to pull back, but it was stuck at the shoulders. Annabelle stood and moved right next to its face and stared it right in those bulging eyes as she doused the troll’s head with the precious liquor she had saved. She lit a match. She smiled a terrible smile. She dropped the match onto the flesh. The troll burst into flame. It screamed as it burned, its gray skin turning quickly to black. She watched as it died. She turned on the water hose she’d used to fill the pond and doused the fire before it spread through the walls of her home.

Annabelle dragged the dead troll’s body to the pond and heaved it in. Sweating, muscles quaking from the effort, she watched the body sink. There was a part of her that felt bad for killing a creature who had only wanted what she wanted: the comfort of the pond. But there was a part of her, too, that smiled at a job well done. She stood at the shore of her pond long past the time the troll’s body had sunk. She watched the sun sink, too, watched the moon rise and shed its light across the pond surface. She watched the day disappear into midnight. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out. Her husband’s face flashed on-screen.
She answered. “I did it,” she said.
He breathed out. “I knew you could.”
Annabelle would always want, would always long for the taste, for the smell. The memory of a free-flowing creek she had never seen. But she would be content, in those rare moments of serenity, like this one, to stare at the pond she had made. It was hers and only hers, and nothing in this world or worlds beyond could take that from her.

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Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry have appeared in over fifty publications, such as The Offing, Fairy Tale Review, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny, and in six languages. She was the featured author at the Dallas LeVar Burton Reads event. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, placed second for Selected Shorts’ Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and won the Grand Prize in the SyFy channel’s Battle the Beast contest; SyFy made and released an animated short of her short story. Stufflebeam curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth.

Illustration: Matt Rota

He steps off the trail and into the woods—hacking the foliage with a field machete until he arrives at a waterfall with a sparkling pool. Around the pool, people are basically naked. They’re beautiful and having fun sunning themselves on the smooth rocks. Our guy clears a spot on a stump to sit and snack. With the machete tip, he cuts up an avocado; he sets the slices on a paper towel in his lap and produces a lemon from his jacket pocket. Until now, the day has been cold and damp, but with the midafternoon sun punching through, his windbreaker seems excessive, so he sheds the coat and goes to work on the lemon, chopping it into six equal wedges that he balances on his thigh. He opens the sleeve of saltines he brought, places an avocado slice on a cracker, sprays the avocado with lemon juice, and brings the seasoned avocado cracker to his mouth. It’s beyond delicious. For some reason, everything tastes better in the woods. He thinks it has something to do with technology. At home, he’s surrounded by it. LED TV. Wi-Fi. 5G. He sleeps with his phone at his side. There’s information in the air. He feels like he’s inhaling data every day, and he often dreams of abandoned shopping malls or dusty chalkboards filled with insane equations. He tries solving for x all night. Eventually, everything irreducible will be reduced, he concludes. Either that, or we’ll merge with machines. This thought terrifies him. But out here in the woods, he harbors no fear. He just savors his avocado crackers and admires the nudes on the rocks. They are a handsome bunch and they hardly move at all. It’s like looking at a painting. If he were a painter, he’d call this one Rock Bottoms, and he’d paint it as accurately as possible, but since he isn’t an artist, he briefly considers taking a picture with his phone. Instead, he freezes the scene in his mind, and later, he unthaws it on the long ride home. The hot thoughts cool over many miles, and soon enough, he lights a joint and finds himself contemplating his past. He’d stayed stoned for most of it and felt lonesome even around friends. Otherwise, he doesn’t remember much. Besides, it all adds up to the army anyway, and he can barely remember that awful business other than a handful of scenes like that night in the Sandbox, during Desert Storm, with the platoon embedded south of Baghdad in a place called Taq Kisra, when the bombing began. Scuds and Tomahawks scorched the sky and blasted Baghdad all to hell. The oil wells burned for weeks afterward, and everything he touched felt like it was on fire. For some reason, those days remind him of these. There isn’t a direct link necessarily, just the same electromagnetic buzz in the air, almost as if his life force has been zapped on high heat in the microwave. Now the gasoline light flashes on the dashboard of his truck and breaks the spell. Two miles later, he pulls into a Shell station and fills up the tank with something called V-Power NiTRO+ Premium Gasoline. What does that even mean? he wonders. Just then, a palomino horse busts loose from a trailer and gallops through the parking lot only to disappear as quickly behind the nearby car wash, and meanwhile, the sunset suffuses everything in a kind of neon pink glow. Man, he thinks, life is wild. You never know what’s going to happen next.

---

Ryan Ridge is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, most recently New Bad News (Sarabande Books, 2020). He has received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Linda Bruckheimer Prize in Kentucky Literature, and the Kentucky Writers Fellowship for Innovative Writing from the Baltic Writing Residency. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from American Book Review, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Post Road, Salt Hill, and Santa Monica Review, among others. Ridge is an assistant professor at Weber State University, where he codirects the creative writing program. He also edits the literary magazine Juked.

 

My grandfather had a blimp. He would fly over fields where workers sweated and harvested crops.
He waved to them. They waved back.
He flew the blimp in circles. He aimed it into the mouth of clouds, like a magic trick. He imagined what the people on the ground were thinking. They wished they were floating too, he thought.
The blimp drifted above houses and he would see peoples’ faces, looking out their windows. Cars would stop on the roads. Animals would look up. Birds would marvel.
It made him feel like a hero. Though, at the end of the day, he wasn’t really doing anything important.
But that time in the air felt glorious. Like he was doing something. And everyone knew him. They expected him. He was a beacon.
We, the descendants of Grandfather, would walk the mile down the road to his farmhouse and assist him each Tuesday and Thursday (and sometimes Sunday) as he untethered the craft and prepared for his day’s journey. As it billowed upward, I wondered what was inside of it. I pictured a movie theater, a bowling alley, a dance floor pulsing with strobe lights. I knew my thoughts were fantasies. My older brother, Dirk, told me there were birds inside it and that’s how it flew. He couldn’t fool me though because I was twelve and already entering the eighth grade.
Only my mother had seen the inside. She told us it was full of cakes. She described them to us. Frosting whipped into waves and shining with the glint of its subtle sugars. Sheets of chocolate heaven. Perfect circles of lemon begging to be cut into.
My dad didn’t care for cake. Plus he was in a wheelchair and would constantly remind us that he couldn’t do anything fun like look into a blimp to see what was inside. He did play trumpet though, and that seemed to be the only thing that brought him joy. That and Walter Cronkite on the nightly news.

One day, Grandfather stormed into our house and said his blimp was shrinking. “How am I going to continue my duties?” he asked to anyone who’d listen. We went outside and walked quickly down the road to look at the blimp. It did seem smaller. Perhaps it was deflating. Maybe, if my brother was actually right, some of the birds inside had died.
My curiosity was reaching a breaking point. “What’s inside a blimp?” I asked Grandfather.
“What’s inside a blimp?” he repeated back at me incredulously. His rubbery lips quivered for a second, searching for an answer. “What’s inside you?” he finally said.
It was a Thursday, so we continued, business as usual, to help Grandfather get into the air. He was visibly angry as he steered his smaller craft toward the clouds. We saluted him and when he saluted back, it was like a quick karate chop.

Just a few days after this happened, someone on the other side of town started flying a Cessna 350 over the town. This was especially noticeable because the plane was painted to look like a giant purple hawk. It was flown by a beautiful blond woman who had recently moved to town after a divorce.
She flew over the fields and waved at the workers. Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. Her plane sparked against the sunlight. It made its own clouds. It stopped traffic and concerned the birds.
Every day she flew, she did a different trick and people began to cheer for her. As she did loops and dramatic dives, all eyes were on her. Dirk and I rode our bikes to the other side of town one summer day to spy on her, to learn more about her.
She lived on Corncob Road, in an unassuming brown house next to a lot where she kept her plane under a red, white, and blue hangar that bowed in the middle from rain and age. The lot also served as a takeoff and landing strip for the plane and next to it was a cornfield, lined with tall stalks of corn, all green, yellow, and gold. Dirk and I steered carefully between them and imagined we were on a narrow city street and the stalks were tall trees, showing us the way and keeping us shaded. The chains of our bikes had different squeaks—mine a metallic scratching and Dirk’s a loose rattle of links sometimes catching awkwardly in his sprockets. We got off our bikes as we got closer to the lot and hid them in the corn. I felt a bubbling dread, like a broken lava lamp in my chest.
When we got close enough to the hangar, we could see the precise detail of the plane’s paint job. I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the day’s fading light but the plane really did look covered in feathers. I reached up and ran two of my fingers from the tip of the right wing to the belly of the hawk. Dirk grabbed my hand away and said something about my “goddamn fingerprints.” He pulled two pairs of gloves out of his pocket. They were white, like the kind a magician would wear. Then he took off his backpack and fished out a pair of binoculars. I was impressed by my brother’s preparation.
He fixed his magnified gaze on the woman’s house and I waited for his instructions. I listened for any sounds out there—music, animals, a television, the ticking of hot engines—but could hear only Dirk’s mouth breathing.
“Hmm,” Dirk finally said. “I don’t detect her in there. Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”
“Is she taking a shower?” I said, and quickly realized it was a question he couldn’t answer.
We stood near the front of the plane and I turned to look at the serious face of the hawk. The narrow eyes watched me intently, with the propeller centered between them, its blades sharp as talons. I felt myself cower for a moment, as if it was really watching us. “That bird is so creepy,” Dirk whispered. For some reason, he took a rock out of his backpack and threw it down the long runway in front of us. It was the size of a potato and it bounced across the cracked concrete and rolled to a stop. We both looked at the rock, sitting there, like a grenade waiting to explode or a futuristic listening device or a secret camera.
A hawk screeched somewhere above us and I thought for a moment that it was the plane coming alive. Then the sound of rustling cornstalks and we turned to see the blond woman emerge from the field, riding Dirk’s bike and holding a brown grocery bag. She saw us immediately and swerved over to us. “I was wondering whose bike this was,” she said.
Dirk and I felt stuck to the ground, like the soles of our shoes had melted into the concrete. “We just wanted to look at your cool airplane,” said Dirk.
“She is cool, isn’t she?” the woman said, dropping Dirk’s bike to the ground without even looking for the kickstand. Dirk looked at his bike as if someone just rubbed poop all over it. I looked shyly at the woman and realized that she was even prettier than everyone said. It looked like she was wearing field clothes—a short-sleeve denim shirt, blue jeans, dusty boots. Her hair was pulled back tight, making her eyes pierce us more directly. Her face was soft and sharp at the same time. All I could think of was that she was like a weather lady on TV, wearing farmer clothes.
“How fast does it go?” I asked. It was a weird question, but I was nervous and I’ve never actually known how fast airplanes went.
“Fast enough,” she said. “What’s your name?”
I looked at Dirk, trying to figure out what to say. An uncomfortable pause. “Walt,” I said. Grandfather’s name. “Walter. But friends call me Jojo.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I was confusing myself and on the verge of gibberish.
“Okay, Walter,” she said. “And you, Binoculars? What’s your name?”
“D-D-David,” Dirk stammered.
The woman opened her brown bag and reached inside for something. The crinkling of the bag was so loud, it made my spine freeze.
“What’s your name?” Dirk bravely asked.
The woman stopped her reaching around in the bag and stared him down as if he interrupted something important. “My name is Margaret. And that’s the truth,” she said. Her hand came out of the bag and she was holding a fistful of candy bars in silver wrappers. “Want a 3 Musketeers bar?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she held a candy bar out to Dirk, and then me. We all unwrapped the candy the same way: wrapper peeled like a banana, halfway down.
We ate our candy bars silently. Dirk and I were waiting for Margaret to ask us more questions, but she didn’t seem like she was in a hurry to. Finally, she gazed over to her house with a squint, as if there was something wrong with it. She pointed her right hand at it like a gun. “You guys want to come over?” she said.
We all walked down the concrete strip toward her house. My knees felt wobbly. Margaret walked slowly and I tried to walk with small steps like her but it kind of hurt to move that slowly. She stopped at where the rock was and picked it up. I thought she was going to throw it in the fields, but she smelled it and then carried it with her into the house.
Her home was decorated with a strange mix of hard and soft objects—rusty saws and hammers hanging on the walls, tables and counters covered with lace and velvet, a mounted coyote head over a brick fireplace, a whole wall of bookshelves that were so full they looked on the verge of tumbling over, and a row of different helmets on a shelf by the door. A couple of large old-fashioned-looking lamps gave the place a golden wash of light. I didn’t know what to say or what to look at. Finally, she asked us, “Do Walter and David like poetry?” She asked this as if Walter and David were other people entirely, and I guess they kind of were.
“I like Robert Frost,” Dirk said. This was news to me, but I was glad that he knew how to answer the question. Margaret held her hand up in the air, as if trying to remember something. She said a few lines of poetry, her voice changing into something fancy and younger. I can’t remember the words but it was something about the woods and a trail and it made me think of scary life things. For some reason, this was the first time I noticed she was taller than either of us. Reciting the poem made her seem like a superhero in that moment. David clapped when she was done and I felt like throwing up.

The next morning was a Sunday and Grandfather called to tell us he wanted to take the blimp out. He said it would help with the shrinkage to keep it in the air more regularly. There were some days when the blimp was only as big as a midsize U-Haul truck. I felt fearful and light-headed whenever the thing lifted into the sky.
Dirk and I didn’t say anything to anyone about meeting Margaret the day before. We had stayed there until the sun started to lower over the horizon of the cornfield and we figured we had to get home for dinner. Dirk was acting funny on the way home, like he was in deep thought.
“She seems like she could be a crazy person,” I said, as we rode our bikes out of the bumpy cornfield.
“I thought she was really cool actually,” he said.
“I didn’t know you liked poetry,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m starting to,” he said. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that.”
We usually played video games together before we went to bed, but we didn’t on this night. He stayed in his room and listened to some kind of orchestra music on low volume, and didn’t even say good night.

As we watched Grandfather steer his blimp over the churches, Dirk put on a pair of sunglasses I hadn’t seen before and said, “In the sky nothing touches me. Even birds think I am some kind of magic.”
I looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant. “Where did you get those glasses?” I asked him.
“Margaret gave them to me. She had many styles. They wouldn’t fit you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt a little hurt, or left out of something.
“When you went to the bathroom,” Dirk said. “She gave them to me and also a copy of a poem she wrote.” He pulled a folded-up wad of papers out of his pocket and held it out. “It’s twelve pages long.”
My first impulse was to grab the paper and tear it up, as if it were a curse that had to be vanquished. I’m not sure why that was my first impulse.
“Is it good?” I asked, not sure what the barometer of good poetry was. “I mean, do you like it?”
“Yes, it is, and yes, I do,” he answered.
I wondered why she didn’t give me anything. Was I really in the bathroom that long? I guess she did give me a candy bar, but I felt sad that I didn’t have anything to keep.
He unfolded it and read aloud, “I look into the eyes of stars that no one else can see. I am closer to them than you are. I am farther away from you every day because of my wings. You hated my wings. You hated the stars.”
He folded it back up and put it back in his pocket. Over our heads, we heard the distinct buzz of Margaret’s plane. It cruised high above us and we saw that there was a banner trailing behind it this time. We’d seen these before, on other planes. Usually they were advertisements or special messages about birthdays or graduations. This one said: morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
“Emily Dickinson,” said Dirk. He shook his head, as if amazed.
“Who’s that?” I said.
He looked at me and winced behind his glasses. The glasses made him look older for some reason. “She was a poet, and a recluse,” he said.
I couldn’t remember what recluse meant, but figured it had something to do with reckless behavior, like flying planes and writing poetry.

For the next few weeks, people in town began speculating more about Margaret and the messages attached to her plane. But so much of this talk was wrong. Most people didn’t even know her name. And Dirk told me they didn’t understand poetry either. School had started back up and he was doing all his book reports on poetry in his AP English class.
Everyone assumed that the messages were intended for her ex-husband, but no one knew who that was. Maybe it was someone who didn’t even live in the same state, or maybe he was dead. Some thought she was trying to send messages to heaven. Dirk started to think some of the words were meant for him. Although we only went to spy on her that one time, I got the feeling that he was possibly visiting her on his own. When she flew over our house one day, her banner stating, i know i am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year, Dirk started crying.
In the meantime, Grandfather was growing more tired and looked sickly. He refused to see a doctor until one day he had a hard time breathing and we took him to the hospital. They told him he had emphysema and gave him an inhaler. He was sixty years old and they said he probably had two years to live. Upon receiving this news, Grandfather smiled and said, “Well, it’s not forever, but close enough.”

Grandfather started receiving get-well cards from people in the town. He would open them and stack them on top of each other, right next to his pile of monthly bills. I’d look at them whenever I was there on his blimp-flying days. It was nice to know that so many people were thinking of him. One day, I saw a card from Margaret in the bundle. It said, I know that you fly to keep love alive. When you are not in the sky, I will be. I’ll know what it feels like for you. I will continue.
I took it and showed it to Dirk and then asked Mom what it meant. She took us out to Dairy Queen that night, which usually meant she was going to tell us something serious. I liked Dairy Queen but also had bad memories of it from when our first cat died. I had a conflicting psychological relationship with Peanut Buster Parfaits.
“Do you know why Grandfather started flying his blimp?” she asked us, a candy sprinkle sliding down her chin.
Dirk and I had our stock answers, but we said them this time like they were questions.
“Because it makes people happy?”
“Because it’s relaxing?”
“Because he’s the only one in town with a blimp license and everyone else is too afraid to learn?”
She looked at us like we were a pair of cute but dumb puppies. “Boys,” she said, “you never knew your grandmother—your dad’s mother—and we don’t talk about her much because it’s painful—and don’t tell your grandfather I told you this—but he flies the blimp in memory of her. She was just thirty-nine when she died. And she didn’t die of the plague like we told you but she was killed in a motorcycle accident.”
Dirk and I looked at each other quickly, and then back at our mother. We had no words to say. We buried our plastic spoons into our blobs of ice cream and let them stand straight up like surrender flags in front of our shocked faces.
“She was wild in her life,” Mom said. “Your grandfather tried to settle her down but he just couldn’t. She hung out with . . .” She paused and looked around cautiously before lowering her voice. “People thought she was in a motorcycle gang. Men with long hair and dirty jeans and . . . tattoos. She even had tattoos herself. Your father was teased a lot about this. One of her tattoos had a bad word in it.”
“What did it say?” Dirk asked. I wanted to know too. My imagination was really going, but if it was the F-word I didn’t want to hear Mom say it.
“I don’t think I should say. It’s not appropriate in a family establishment,” she said.
“Will you tell us in the car?” Dirk asked.
“Oh, hush,” Mom said. “Let me finish the story.”
Dirk and I grabbed our red spoons and started shoveling our melting desserts into our mouths.
“So, Grandma—Aretha was her name—had just bought her own Harley and Grandfather was not happy about it. They had a big fight and she took off, angry as a buzzard. She didn’t come home that night and the next day the police came and told Grandfather that she was in a bad crash on the highway. He went to be by her side at the hospital, but she couldn’t speak. The doctors said she must have been going eighty miles an hour when she hit something in the road. She was barely alive for the next two days in the hospital but Grandfather never left the room. And then when your father visited on the third day, she finally started to stir. They called out for the doctor and then leaned close to her, trying to coax her awake. As the doctor came in the room, she let out a low moan and said some words so quietly they had to get right up to her lips. She said, ‘Faster faster faster.’ And then she died. Grandfather was just a shell of himself after that and wrestled with thoughts in his head—about their fight, about how she may have crashed, about how scary that must have been. He wondered what she thought about in that flash of flying through the air or when her body skidded down the pavement. He wanted everything to slow down. He never remarried and everyone worried about him. About seven years after that, he decided he wanted a blimp. We all thought it was strange, but we were just glad he wanted something.”
Mom looked over at the metal napkin holder on the table and seemed shocked to see her reflection there. She squinted at it, turning her head and watching it distort. Then she looked up, gazed through the window, noticed the dimming world outside, and swallowed some of her ice cream. “He once said he likes flying the blimp because he can see everything and because it’s slow and just floats around like a god or guardian angel. It makes him feel close to her.”

The next day, Dirk and I were walking to the library and we saw Margaret zip her plane above us. Her banner read, remember me in the sky witnessing love in vast directions. Dirk looked away, like it was the sun blinding his sight. I focused on each fluttering word, trying to unlock their meanings.
Inside the library, we read magazines and comic books for a long time and then chose books to check out. I picked a book called Brian’s Song, about a dying football player. Dirk found an anthology called English Romantic Poetry and a book about a famous woman who flew airplanes in the 1920s and ’30s before she disappeared. I looked through the book of poems because I thought there might be some dirty parts but Dirk said, “Romantic poetry isn’t really about romance. It’s not sexy.”
As we were leaving, someone whistled at us from down the sidewalk and we turned to see Margaret. Her arms were full of books and her hair looked longer and bigger than before, like a golden halo. She was wearing lipstick, which most women in our town didn’t do, but on her it looked natural. Maybe more serious. “Some back-to-school reading?” she asked us. She saw the poetry anthology. “Focus on the Keats and skip the Lord Byron chapter.”
Dirk stuttered, “I like W-W-W-William Wordsworth.”
“Oh yeah?” said Margaret. “He was kind of a bore. His sister is more interesting, I’ll have you know.”
I had no idea what this conversation was about and suddenly blurted out, “I saw the card you sent to our grandfather.”
She smiled gently at me. “He has a poet’s heart,” she said. “I’m sorry for his struggle.”
“What do you know about his struggle?” I said. I felt protective of Grandfather and this deeper life of his I was still processing. I felt tears starting to form.
“I knew about him before moving here actually. I saw an old newspaper story about him at a library in Ohio, on microfiche.” She looked at Dirk, saw that he was tensing up, shifting his weight from left to right.
“We never knew our grandmother,” Dirk said.
“I wish I knew what to say,” Margaret said.

A few days later, I was walking to Grandfather’s by myself. Mom sent me there to pick raspberries for a pie she was going to bake. In the field next to his house, I saw Grandfather looking at his blimp, which had shrunk significantly. I walked over and Grandfather took a hit off his inhaler and wiped at his eyes. “Am I seeing this right?” he asked me. The blimp barely looked bigger than a Volkswagen Bug. Even the cabin, where he sat to fly it, looked smaller somehow. The door could only open halfway. “Is this some kind of joke?” Grandfather said, and I turned to see him yelling up at the clouds. He waved his fist toward the sun. “I’m not ready for this!” he shouted.
“Grandfather, please don’t yell,” I said. “It’s not good for you.”
He looked at me, his breathing heavy and sweat dripping from his hair. He noticed my arm wedged into the door, prying it open little by little. “Keep going,” he said, his eyes brightening. “See if you can get in.” He grabbed the door, too, pulling as hard as he could. I got stuck for a moment, neck twisted, with one leg in and one leg out. I turned my head and then my shoulders were in. I could smell the waft of musty sun-baked leather. My other leg finally slid in with me, though my shoe fell off. Grandfather leaned over, resting his hands on his knees, smiling and then giving me the thumbs up. I wasn’t sure how he could have ever fit in there. I looked at all the buttons and switches and tried to spot something that would indicate why the blimp was shrinking. Grandfather held my shoe in one hand and his inhaler in the other. I waited for him to give me instructions but the door of the cabin clicked closed between us. He started to tell me something through the small window but began coughing. It felt like some kind of wall was pressing on my back and I sensed the space around me getting tighter and I couldn’t move. Grandfather backed away from the blimp, coughing and fumbling with his inhaler. I remembered the time I asked him what was inside a blimp. This was my first time in the blimp. It was like the blimp was trying to eat me. He dropped my shoe on the ground and waved his hands around. I tried to push my way out of the blimp. I couldn’t. I watched Grandfather, hoping he would find his strength and save me. He wouldn’t.

When Grandfather’s obituary appeared in the newspaper, it included a black-and-white photo of him with his wife. They were so young and happy in the picture. She looked beautiful and tough, with a smirk that conveyed an unpredictable personality, like she could play a joke on him at any moment. Grandfather had his arm around her and I could see his right hand holding on to her waist tightly. The look on his face was one of surprise and below the photo it said, Walt and Aretha.
They had to have the funeral service at the high school football stadium so they could fit everyone in. Even people from other towns came to give their regards. A lot of folks who had moved away but heard about Grandfather’s death returned by the busloads.
Dad tried to play a song on his trumpet to start things off, but was too upset to make it to the final note. Mom spoke after that and several old friends took turns telling stories about Grandfather. Some of the stories didn’t seem real. Some were sad or funny. Dirk read a poem that he wrote called “Into the Mouth of Clouds.” He had to stop halfway through so he wouldn’t start crying. Everyone waited patiently and it became a moment of silence before Dirk felt strong enough to finish the last lines.
Margaret was there, too, but she sat by herself and didn’t speak to anyone. I glanced at her a couple of times but she was wearing sunglasses and it was hard to tell what she was feeling. I thought maybe she was crying a little. At the reception afterward, in the cafeteria, she hugged us and kissed our foreheads. She said hello to Mom and Dad and gave them a poem in a gilded frame. There was meatloaf and corn and pie. All over the walls were photographs of the blimp taken by various people of the town. You could see the sky—blue or gray or white—behind it. You could see Grandfather’s heroic hand waving. In a couple of the photos, you could see his face, blurry and smiling.
At dusk that night, Margaret flew her plane back and forth over the town. The banner said, faster faster faster. Dirk and I watched her until it was too dark to see her.
The giant purple hawk. The poet. The stars turned up bright like flickering candles. We never saw her again after that.

I finally did get a chance to look inside the belly of the blimp. But it had shrunk so small after Grandfather died. It was the size of a pillowcase, almost nothing. It was just air really. But I still believed that when it was up in the sky, it was more than simply air. It could have been anything. 

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Kevin Sampsell’s writing has appeared in Paper Darts, Longreads, Salon, Fairy Tale Review, Joyland, Hobart, and elsewhere. His books include the memoir A Common Pornography, the novel This Is Between Us, and a forthcoming book of collage art and poems, I Made an Accident. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and runs the small press Future Tense Books.

This morning, while we were eating breakfast, my wife looked at me over her cup of tea and said, “I have to tell you something.” In her eyes, I saw a problem without a solution: I saw tenderness, I saw love, I saw an opaque glimmer of shame, but I didn’t see regret. I love my wife deeply, I think I know her and the limit of pain she can bear causing me, but nothing in her eyes led me to suspect the nature of her imminent revelation. It was clear she was still in shock from what she had to tell me, whatever it was. “I had a horrible dream,” she said. “You’ll never imagine what I dreamed.” I smiled—we smiled when we said such things—and shook my head no. But for her, there was nothing amusing about it, not in her words and not in my response. Lowering the cup she held with both hands ever so slightly, looking me in the eyes, she said, “I dreamed I cheated on you.” What can you say in that situation. I looked at her. There was no question in her voice. She wasn’t expecting anything from me yet. First, she wanted to tell me what she’d dreamed: “In the dream, I woke up beside someone else,” she said, looking me in the eyes, looking at me as if I, too, could see the images still dancing before her. “In the dream I knew perfectly who he was. I knew the house too: a house I went to as a girl on vacation. But I didn’t know what I was doing there. I got out of bed, got dressed, tripped on his clothes strewn across the floor, picked them up, threw them on the bed, asked him to leave. Putting on my boots, I left the house to try to find you, but when I opened the door, I remembered we were at a beach, a thousand kilometers from Buenos Aires, on a road nobody came down, and the only car there belonged to that man. The one person who could take me to you was the very man I was trying to get away from.” Anybody who heard her would imagine a flushed woman, speaking without blinking, eyes fixed at a point on the table, recalling the images as she described them. But that’s not how she spoke to me. She spoke without breaking eye contact, from somewhere deep inside, with all the sincerity her own confusion allowed. When she finished, she set down the cup on the same halo of dampness it left when she’d picked it up, and walked around the table to hug me. “Forgive me,” she said in my ear. I didn’t know what to say. I hugged her back and we stayed that way for a long time, each of us breathing on our own.
We didn’t broach the subject again all day. But as the hours passed, a memory came back to me of something that had happened a long time ago, before I met her, something I’d never told her about and, I understand now, I never will.

I don’t remember who recommended the place, but I do remember I arrived in the off-season. A beach in southern Mexico, before the flood of tourism in the region reached its peak, and the town gave no indication of wanting to expand. It was the first time I’d traveled alone: I was just out of school and getting over a bad relationship. The concierge, alert to what had been an oversight on my part, offered me a bungalow, more comfortable than the room I’d reserved. There were only a few guests, and from the bar on the terrace you could see them down on the beach, moving naturally, familiar with the place, strangers to each other but connected by the secret of having come to that town, seemingly hidden away from the world. With a gesture of complicity, which could’ve also been an apology or a warning, the concierge told me the next day I’d have it all to myself: the locals and couples from nearby towns were only there for the weekend, and that night they’d return to their homes and their jobs. As she spoke, the phone began to ring in a room behind reception, but she seemed in no hurry to answer it. I thought it might have been me calling: I remembered how difficult it’d been to get in touch with them from Buenos Aires.
I had just gotten settled in, and though it was already too late to go down to the beach, that first night I learned two fundamental things about what was to come. First, the place breathed a supernatural calm, deeper even than what I’d hoped to find. Second, unlike what I’d been told, there was no point hanging out downtown after eating: the town seemed to be decompressing after a long summer of welcoming strangers, and the few bars still open along the three or four blocks of the street where I’d gotten off the bus that afternoon put their chairs up early. Only one was open: the one where the owners of the other bars got together after dinner. That first night, I saw them talking around a table, taking beers from behind the bar, sharing life in a place where everyone else was just passing through, raising their glasses every so often for a joke or a memory that made them laugh. They radiated a feeling of warmth and good cheer, illuminated by the flicker of dwindling candles.
Walking back to the hotel, I felt that I, like the town, wanted a break from being myself, and I thought there might be something good in the seasonal serenity of the place, so I decided to stay a few more days and let it wash over me.

And yet, when I fell asleep I had a menacing dream.
I dreamed I woke up in the middle of the night and went down to the beach. Sitting on the shore, looking out to sea, a man was waiting for me. As if it were a preordained encounter, as if we were bound together circumstantially yet intensely by a shared interest, he wasn’t the least surprised when I walked up and sat down beside him.
Accustomed to occupying the dreams of others, the man seemed to be concentrating on some invisible yet palpable thing: something that might emerge from the darkness at any moment and endanger the dream.
Out in front of us, the sea was an ominous mass, lapping the sand over and over without ever reaching us. The clouds in the sky, grayer than the night, illuminated by the metallic glow of the moon, resembled the unsettling gaze of a blind man.
As I sat down and the dream took on a solid consistency, the man spoke without looking at me:
You’ve come to the wrong place, he said.
I didn’t know how to respond, and it didn’t seem necessary.
You didn’t know where it was you were coming to, I heard then. His voice was too slow, a tired voice, as if it were already too late and warning me about the place where I’d ended up was pointless.
And then, having said what he had to say, definitively severing the bond that bound us together, the man stood up and walked out of the dream.

When I woke up, it was already light out. I remembered the dream with extraordinary clarity, and while drinking a coffee at the bar on the terrace, I was struck by the precision with which the place had been reproduced in my dream: though the sky was bright and the darkness had completely evaporated, the previous night seemed concealed by the day, hunkering down, contained within it like a photo in its negative. That first morning, I felt I was somewhere I’d been before.
The concierge had been right: the beach was empty. I went down and took advantage of the sun. I swam for a while in the waves, under the watchful eyes of the vacant bungalows, and fell asleep on the sand and didn’t dream. I ate a sandwich at the bar, waited on by the same woman who’d checked me in. I saw a man doing some repairs, but he didn’t look anything like the man I’d seen in my dream. I read for a while and as the sun went down, with the memory of the dream slowly fading from my mind, becoming diffuse in the way of things that start to seem innocuous, I went out for a walk on the beach.
I left the bungalows behind, walked past some old boats run aground on the sand, and came to three or four houses with manicured but empty gardens that opened out onto the beach. Farther along, beyond some rocks, the bay came to an end. I was alone, and though I wasn’t really enjoying myself, I felt calm. I decided to take a shower and go eat something downtown.
That night, when I came back, in part to definitively reject the warning I thought I’d been given the night before, in part because insomnia is an invisible magnet, I went back down to the beach.

I could’ve sat down to look out at the sea or walked down to the boats and the houses with the gardens. Instead, I walked along the sand, listening to the sound of my own footsteps, secretly hypnotized by the supernatural silence of the night: the sound of my footsteps was the only sound I heard, and yet I moved as if I were following that sound, as if I were walking in my own footsteps.
I looked around. The night was motionless: it seemed like someone had blotted out the sea, the air hung suspended. The world, the heart of the night, was still.
The night—I thought—was a dream, a dream no one was dreaming.
On the other side of the bar, the beach narrowed, disappearing into a forest. I moved in that direction: I wanted to see what lay beyond; I wanted to see if the forest was as still as the beach; I wanted to see if I could find the edge of the silence, the border of the dream.
I walked into the forest. I stepped on dry branches and leaves that snapped as if the air itself were cracking. A forest is like a cave, I thought. But then I realized that no—inside, the forest wasn’t still. Nothing moved, but the branches were like the wild hair of a boy after the wind has whipped through it. Whatever had frozen them there, it hadn’t even given them time to settle back into place. The trees, it seemed to me, were like two wide, unblinking eyes.
I walked farther and farther into the forest. I didn’t feel afraid: fear was a feeling that had been frozen too. Instead, what I felt was water. Not the water of the sea—I was sure that lay behind me. A different body of water. Like intuition, like animal instinct, I sensed it. I moved forward, and just as I was getting used to walking through the forest, I took another step and the forest came to an end and was behind me.
I couldn’t see anything. The night was completely dark, as if a thick layer of black ink had been spilled across the world. Every leaf, every branch, every blade of grass seemed folded in on itself, under a substance that covered everything, even the silence. Standing there, eyes wide, I realized I’d come to the water. I smelled its freshness. I felt the cool air drifting across the surface of a lagoon.
I kept breathing, and little by little, with each breath, I let that darkness fill me until I became a part of it. Then I began to hear a murmur, a murmur so constant it seemed fused with the silence. A murmur that—it dawned on me just then—I’d been hearing the whole time.
As if discovering a crack in that smooth, impeccable darkness, I looked toward the place the sound was coming from. I saw a man, his back to me, standing in front of the lake. It was the man from my dream: arms spread wide, palms open to the sky, as if asking someone above to read his fate.
As the shadows were thrown into relief—the lagoon, the overcast sky, the forest all around—the man’s intelligible murmur began to take shape. I stood still, transfixed, like someone staring at the page of a book written in a language he can’t read, losing himself in the shapes of its alphabet, its infinite possibilities. I watched him, hypnotized by those sounds, sounds that seemed of a tongue that left no space for silence between words, but enveloped them in it and left them there, floating in the air, echoing out across the lake, as if the surface of the water were trembling at the secret of their meaning.
I couldn’t say how long I watched that man. At some point, it seemed the night might last centuries. But before long, I felt the first snap of fear, thawing somewhere in the night, as if the force holding together that ecstatic serenity had slowly but inexorably come undone. Then I turned around and made my way back through the forest, faintly illuminated by the memory light leaves on things.

I walked to the shore and looked around. The place seemed to be exactly what it was: a small beach, a summer night, vast and empty. And I, a sleepless man under the stars. And yet, it wasn’t the same night: it was the night after, or the night before.
I was standing there looking out at the sea, when I heard him arrive. He stopped a few steps behind me, and though I couldn’t see him, without a greeting, in a voice I’d not yet heard from him, he asked if I knew how to identify the stars.
I looked up at the sky. I wasn’t expecting a question.
Just Orion’s Belt, I said, without turning around.
Enough to know where you are, he said. His voice was neither urgent nor menacing: for a second, I imagined it wasn’t the same man.
Sometimes the Southern Cross, I said then. Though most of the time I don’t know if I’m inventing it.
The man laughed—laughed as if he were the Southern Cross and he’d just heard someone say that about him.
Don’t worry, he said. If you see it now, you’re definitely inventing it. It’s not visible here.
Suddenly, I felt I was at the bottom of an incomprehensible sky. That man, on the other hand, could have traveled the world over with only the stars as a guide. Maybe he already had, I thought, and had wound up marooned on this beach.
I heard him sit down on the sand and, as if the rustling of that movement were an invitation, I did the same.
I guess you want to know what I saw, I heard him say then.
There was neither reproach nor embarrassment in his voice.
He didn’t wait for an answer. The man—that shadow sitting just behind me—began to speak.
First, he told me about that place.
He said that, centuries before, that region had been occupied by an almost unknown people. A people there’s virtually no record of. A tribe, not too big or especially powerful, but nevertheless the only people on the gulf the Aztecs never tried to conquer. Not because of particular military prowess or some secret technological superiority, but because of the lagoon, the one I’d just seen.
They say, he told me, that in the few Aztec codices that survived, the place was represented by a hieroglyph no one could decode. Some say it’s the drawing of a constellation that no longer exists. Others say it’s an abstract picture whose outline captures the atavistic respect great warriors feel for something they know they’ll never conquer.
What was known was that the tribe wasn’t the lagoon’s guardian, but charged with revealing it to whoever came looking for it. The place was forbidden to no one, but to find it, you had to know how to wait: you had to have nothing to lose but time. Then there could be a night such as this. One of those nights when the stars are reflected in the sea. Dark nights when things glow with the power of their own light. Nights that fluttered like flags in a motionless wind. Nights heavy with ancient gods.
In the depths of the lagoon, he said, there live luminous fish, and their light, on nights such as this, reaches the surface. Nobody’s ever seen them, nobody knows what they’re like: all that’s known is they were created by the gods of the gods, they’ve lived in the lagoon ever since, and anyone who tries to catch one loses their mind and drowns in the sea of madness.
They say their bodies are made from the same light as the stars, and anyone who might come to understand them, on nights such as this, will make the water reverberate with their words.
They say those fish have the power to make time material, like what wind does to air. And on nights such as this, the lights shining under water rearrange themselves, and everything written in the sky can be rewritten.

His words hung in the darkness and, little by little, I felt them fade away, as if they, too, were made of light. I turned just enough to look at him. Then I realized that, until that moment, I wouldn’t have been able to say how old he was. He was, I saw now, much older than me. Fifteen, maybe twenty years. But it wasn’t his age that seemed to matter, but whatever had happened in the years setting us apart, whatever had brought him there: a war, a shipwreck, a divorce. Whatever it was, he seemed to have carried it through the years to that beach, as if that were as far as he was allowed to go, and once there, all that was left was to sit down and wait.
The man looked me in the eyes for the first time and asked if I believed in fate.
I said no. And then I said yes. I said I didn’t know whether or not to call it fate.
The man smiled. If one were to call it something, it wouldn’t be fate, he said.
And then, he opened the last door of his memory and began to speak, without hurry and without stopping, as if, on the other side of that door, he’d been carrying years of silence.
A long time ago, he said, he’d gone on vacation with his wife to the beach. Not that beach, but a city by the sea, full of people strolling along the boardwalk, accompanied in the distance by the sailboats out on the water, a port of moored yachts, a dock where you could dine by night and fish by day.
One of those nights, walking through the downtown, a gypsy woman approached them and asked for a cigarette. He, happy and distracted, gave it to her. In exchange, the woman offered to read their fortune. For a second, the couple felt the terror of, maybe, not wanting to know it. But the gypsy stared into the man’s eyes and told him the woman beside him would give him the best years of her life. And one terror replaced the other: something in the way she spoke—the deathly seriousness with which she referred to happiness, the black pools of her eyes, the surreptitious way she stowed away the cigarette in her clothes—told him those years wouldn’t be many. He knew in that moment that he would survive and happiness would be a land he would never be able to return to.
The gypsy was lost in the crowd, his wife smiled, and they went on with their vacation, but a small part of that moment stuck in his mind and began to infect him.
At night, he started to dream of his wife: to have domestic nightmares in which trivial misunderstandings eroded their relationship. Each morning, he woke up with the bitter taste of what he’d dreamed the night before. With time, the bitterness turned to resentment and he began to lose control of the feelings that brought on the dreams. All day long, he dragged around the pain accumulated in the night, and little by little, his behavior toward her was conditioned by his dreams: mistreatment, incomprehensible reactions, the surprising way he blamed her for the things she didn’t know. His life with her by day was a dream he forgot at night when he encountered her again in his dreams. In his dreams, their life together got worse and worse: the dreams began to have continuity, taking up arguments from previous dreams, and she began to have routines. At a certain point, she got in the habit of showing up late to the dream, and he never knew where she was coming from.
Soon, the relationship fell apart. She didn’t recognize him anymore. He, hurting, exhausted, decided to leave her. She was devastated. They stopped talking. The dreams didn’t end. And though he kept an eye out for any news from her, the news became less frequent and more intermittent.
Little by little, the years passed, until one day they ran into each other in the plaza. She was pushing a stroller: she’d been alone for a long time, she told him, until finally she found a man who loved her, and they had a son.
What’s his name? he asked.
The baby had the same name as him.
I never understood why we broke up, she said. When you left, I felt I’d been widowed.
He didn’t know what to say.
He kissed the baby, kissed her. He wished them luck. He still doesn’t understand how fate deprived him of all of that.
He finished speaking.
It was sad to see him like that: orbiting the memory of his wife like a satellite orbiting a planet that no longer exists.
We didn’t speak anymore. I considered hugging him, but all you can do with a secret is keep it.
The man kept staring straight ahead as I stood up and walked out—me this time—of my dream.

Now, it’s three in the morning and I watch my wife sleep. Every so often, I see her face convulse with the shadow of faraway lightning, a tiny explosion of involuntary twitches, muscular tremors, indecipherable expressions, that rise to the surface like the faint echo of a dream.
We have a good life, I think. We have no idea where it’s going. 

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Juan Ignacio Boido is an Argentine writer, critic, journalist, and editor. He has a degree in literature from the University of Buenos Aires. He has published articles, interviews, essays, and stories in magazines such as Granta (Spain), Playboy (Mexico), and Página/30 (Argentina). In 2012, he published his first collection of short stories, El último joven. He currently works as the editorial director of Penguin Random House Argentina.

Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, and Juan Villoro, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, The Arkansas International, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

We carried you through the streets of our youth in an open pine box. Buried among piles of concrete, I found a peach-colored plastic doll, limbless, its stumps singed. It reminded me of the one your sister used to play with. Remember, Brother, how when we were younger, she would stand under the shade of a balcony and talk to her doll, while we smoked cigarettes and kicked a ball back and forth. Those were glorious days of freedom. Then the Americans came—and left. Now they have come again, but you are gone. Under the cover of a moonless night, we honored you with many volleys and sang songs in memory of your martyrdom. Your father sobbed, repeating, “O, Lord, you may accept him.” I wonder if the Lord will forgive me my sins. Brother, tell me, has He forgiven you yours?
Back before the Americans bombed Baghdad, I told you we should embrace them, extend an olive branch, a peaceful revolution. Or was it the other way around? We were still in university then. I was studying poetry, you engineering. At nights, your mother would serve us chai steeped in sugar, the two of us at the dinner table still hungry for debate. Your father would tease me about my love for verse. He kept telling me that I should follow the divine path instead. He wanted us to become praiseworthy men, men whom people would listen to and respect. War has made it so.
When this new, blessed battle began—before our own people began to fight alongside the Americans—we huddled in my flat and, again, sipped chai for comfort. Your sister made it the same as your mother had, a black and bitter sea resting on a thick bed of sugar. That was the last time we all were together, Brother; our two tribes once one. You, me, your sister, Saja—now my wife—and our daughter, Sakhira.
The soft, golden glow of the minaret was seeping through the sitting room, the wall facing the street long ago scraped off from the shelling. A few blocks away, a loudspeaker from the army of unbelievers blared, “The salvation hour is near. Come toward your true brothers, your armed forces, and you will find the proper care: food, medicine, clean water.” As if in response, sporadic gunfire had sputtered. A waste, for we do not have vision in the dark as the Americans do. They are like bats.
You warned us that we should seek safety.
“And flee from our homes like cowards?” I said, vowing to fight.
When the earth began to shake, you said, “But, Brother, the building feels like it’s going to fall.”
“It is safer here than out in the streets.”
“Please, Brother,” you said. “Let me at least take the girls to my parents. The fighting isn’t too bad there.”
As a compromise, Saja and I took our daughter to the back bedroom to hide in the closet. Saja gave Sakhira a doll—an old favorite from her childhood—and told her how she should keep it company because it was scared. Sakhira hugged the doll and smiled. I put my finger to my lips and closed the closet door. Upon hearing Sakhira whispering to the doll, Saja and I turned to each other and smiled, enjoying the beauty that we had brought to the world.
But then the hand of Allah struck from above and snatched back our blessings. Every corner of my flat is now filled with blood and memories. On our kitchen table, Saja’s mug remains covered in dust. To this day, when I wrap my hands around it, I swear, Brother, it still feels warm. It has been months since I sent her to Syria for safety.
I had thought the images of that day would shake the core of the world. But they did not back in the first war, and they do not now. Everybody still watches what happens, yet remains as silent as the burial ground where my sweet Sakhira still sleeps. When this war is over, and the Americans slaughtered in shame, I will again make love to Saja, Insha’Allah, and our daughter will be reborn as a son, a true martyr to be proud of—just as you and I had once vowed.

Dawn is beautiful, Brother. A new day has come, and with it, my spirit feels renewed. The melodious morning call to prayer stretches from the mosque across the street and into my flat.
“Come to prayer,” the muezzin’s voice sings to me. “Come to success.”
I stand and close my eyes, touch my hands to my ears, and then fold my arms across my chest and begin to pray. “Allah is the greatest, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgment, You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.” I kneel and press my forehead against the prayer rug, submitting myself fully to Allah. “Guide us to the Straight Way. The way of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace. Not the way of those who earned Your anger. Nor of those who went astray. Ameen.”
By the time I conclude my prayers, the warmth of the sun feels like Allah’s fingers prodding me to go forth and unleash His will to the people. I sit back on my bare feet, look over my shoulder, and hope to see you, Brother, still faithfully by my side. Instead, I see Ahmed standing guard over his cousin, Samir, who remains blindfolded and on his knees.
Recently, the Americans have sown seeds of doubt in our soil, taking advantage of those whose spirits are strained. They pit brother against brother, and then wait and watch as we kill each other. It is the American way, the cowards. Through this, Ahmed has remained my most faithful follower. His cousin, however, I do not know.
I motion for Ahmed to remove the blindfold. Samir squints up at me. He is the latest in a line of boys eager to do violence, excited by tales of the Butcher. Ahmed was once the same way. But in battle he has proven himself a patient warrior. The other week, while others rushed the Americans on a rooftop, he stood in a tub for an hour, the barrel of his rifle poking out of a hole in the tile. His cheek was married to the wood stock, his eye lined up behind the sights. As soon as an infidel’s head popped up, Ahmed struck the soldier down. It was glorious, praise be to Allah.
“Forgive this spectacle,” I say to Samir. “But after what happened with our beloved Brother, one cannot be too safe.”
“So, it’s true then?” Samir says. “He was betrayed by one of our own brothers?”
Ahmed spits on the floor. “They are not our brothers. I wipe my shoe on their faces.”
“Your cousin is right,” I say. “They are no longer our brothers. They are traitors—to themselves, to us, but most importantly, to their faith. These unbelievers are worse than the infidels.”
Samir cocks his head back, trying to follow my every move. “I have seen more of them in my neighborhood, with their shiny yellow belts and weapons. My neighbor, a former soldier, has even joined their ranks.”
“The Americans are arrogant,” I say. “They think they can give away these belts to everyone, and trick us into believing that our own people are turning against us. They do not know the true strength of our struggle.”
“I am ready to help, Brother,” Samir says.
“And what are you willing to do for your faith?”
“I will strap on a vest and walk into the den of traitors.”
I wave away his offering. “I can convince any poor boy to blow himself up.”
Samir looks at his cousin in disappointment.
“What I really need,” I say, “is men who will fight in this world with their faith still strong. Men like Ibrahim, who was ready to sacrifice his own blood rather than betray his beliefs. Men like your cousin.”
“Go ahead, tell him,” Ahmed says to Samir. “It’s OK.”
“Tell me what?” I say.
“I can give you everything on the traitors,” Samir says. “Who they are, where they live—even their family.”
Ahmed turns to me and says, “We can hunt them down and hang them by their belts for all to see.”
I gesture for Samir to stand. “And how do you know all of this?”
“My uncle,” he says, dusting off the dirt from his knees. “He’s the security minister.”
I look at Ahmed, who nods and smiles, confirming that what his cousin said is true.
“That means,” Ahmed adds, “that he can also warn us about any raids, Brother.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, and walk to the edge of my flat and stare down at the street, at the tangle of wires strung from one bombed-out building to another, as if begging for bodies to be hung on them. Soon, a surge of savagery will cleanse this land of all its filth.
“Or lead them right to us,” I say.
I wave for Samir to follow me, leading him down the dark hallway. I point ahead at the last room on the left—my daughter’s old bedroom. “In there,” I say. “It is time for you to prove your fidelity to your faith.”
Samir presses softly on the door. It opens with a slow creak. Like a baby’s cry. The room is dark, save for the sunlight spilling through a hole in the roof. It takes Samir a second to see the girl sleeping in the corner. He steps back, bumping into me.
“You are afraid of such a tiny thing?” I say, pushing him forward. “Come—she will not bite.”
I slam the door behind us, startling the girl awake. As I approach her, she scuttles back and shields her face. As if I have ever done anything to warrant such fright in her. Until now, I have fed her, kept her from the others, protected her in ways I never could my own daughter. I lift her head by the chin, wipe her wet cheek with my hand, and then stuff a sock in her mouth to silence any screaming.
I look back at Samir and notice he seems scared.
“You want to kill infidels, yes?” I say.
He nods.
“Well, here one is waiting for you.”
“But, Brother, she’s just a little girl.”
“You think too simple, Samir.”
I hand him a knife.
He holds it in his hands and hesitates. Many people come to me professing their faith, but few are willing to live with what is necessary to prove it.
“Brother, forgive me,” he says. “This wasn’t what I was expecting.”
“What? She is too pretty for you? You can fuck her first, if you like.”
He shakes his head, as if ashamed by the suggestion.
I laugh. “Do not tell me you are a virgin? You two have something in common then.”
Samir studies the knife, and then swipes his thumb across the blade. Drawing blood, he drops the knife and sucks his thumb.
“Did you expect it to be dull?” I say. “We are not monsters, Samir.”
I pick up the knife and try to hand it to him, but he jerks his head toward the shattered window on the far side of the room.
“Do you hear that?” he says.
He must think I am stupid not to see he is stalling.
But then I hear it, too. The deep, rough rattle of a military vehicle. It stops underneath the broken bedroom window, its engine idling.
We both crouch behind the bed. The anxiety starts to stir within me—same as when I made love to Saja for the first time, same as when I killed for the last. I glance at Samir, who appears calm. It is then that I realize the bastard has betrayed us.
“Stay here,” I say, wanting to warn Ahmed.
I run out of the room and turn into the hallway but am too late. A single shot from Ahmed’s rifle rings out from the restroom; the battle has begun. I continue to the kitchen, grab the rocket launcher, and walk up to the exposed wall. With the cold tube pressed to my cheek, I lean out the open space and take aim at the truck with the largest gun. A blast of heat singes the air behind me, and I watch as the round veers across the street and destroys an empty falafel stand instead. You were always the steady shot, Brother.
The turret on the truck swivels, its large gun strafing the building from the back bedroom to the sitting room. I crawl back to the hall for cover, and then drag myself into the bathroom, where Ahmed has taken up his position.
During a brief break in the fighting, the Americans trying to figure out their next move, we hear shouting from the back room.
“My cousin,” Ahmed says.
“Leave him,” I say. “It is too dangerous.”
“I can’t—he’s family.”
I want to tell him about his cousin’s betrayal, but some secrets you should figure out for yourself. And Ahmed is smart; soon enough he will start to wonder why the Americans found us so quickly.
“I’m sorry, Brother,” he says, and bolts out of the bathroom.
The shooting starts again—and then the shouting.
I step out and see Ahmed stumbling down the hall, his arms wrapped around his cousin’s shoulders for support.
“Help,” Samir says. “He’s hurt.”
Together, we stumble down the stairs.
As we wind our way to the first floor, a loud explosion from above covers us in a cloud of dust and debris. I reach for the rail, look up through the motes of dust hanging in the air like a soft veil, and listen to the faint, familiar screams of the young girl.
Ahmed turns to his cousin. “You told me you killed her.”
Samir stares at me in silence.
“Enough,” I say. “Her fate is in Allah’s hands now, not ours. We must hurry and get your cousin to a doctor.”

In a basement flat in an old abandoned building, a fat man with a stubby beard clears the dining table. We slide Ahmed across the operating table, and then watch as the doctor works on him. He cuts through Ahmed’s bloodstained jeans, empties a bottle of water on his bloodied flesh, and begins to pick at the shrapnel stuck in his skin.
“Can you get that stuff out with a magnet?” Samir says.
The doctor glances back. “It’s made of aluminum.”
I stare at the doctor, who shakes his head slightly. I tell Samir to shut up with such nonsense and let the doctor work. When the doctor lifts Ahmed’s leg, Ahmed balls up his fist and clenches his teeth.
“All tendons are torn,” the doctor says. “He will need rest. A few months, at least.”
“It’s a shame, cousin,” Samir says. “You can’t play football anymore.”
Ahmed tries to smile through the pain. “There is still coaching.”
I push past Samir and squeeze Ahmed’s shoulder. “No, Brother, you belong here on the field.”
Ahmed slams his head against the table, his eyes beginning to flutter like a moth’s wings in the light of a lamp. He cries out, “Allah, I want to become a martyr.”
The doctor rushes back and rolls Ahmed on his side. He splits his shirt down the spine to search for more wounds, but finds none.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “There must be something inside I can’t see. There’s nothing else I can do.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“I don’t have the proper equipment.”
The doctor walks to the stove, strikes a wooden match against the counter, and clicks on the gas. “You can stay here for the night.” The flame catches and begins to burn blue. He puts on a pot of water and adds, “Tea?”
I grasp Ahmed’s hand and kiss him on the forehead. “Be proud of what happened, Brother. Be proud of the sacrifice.”
“It’s for Allah,” he repeats, each breath softer than the last. “It’s for Allah, it’s for . . .” He reaches out with his hand, as if realizing his dream is slipping away. I see it slipping too. I hold out hope, but when I let go of his hand, it falls and hangs over the edge of the dinner table. All I can do now is plea to Allah for patience and pray that more martyrs like Ahmed will be resurrected, for we need more men like him to spurn Paradise in hopes of dignity ten times over.

Outside, I find Samir around the corner, smoking a cigarette. He avoids my eyes, as he has my edict, knowing full well his weakness. It is a shame how this war has worn us thin. He reminds me of you, Brother, toward the end—spirit hollow, shoulders heavy.
I gesture for the cigarette. “May I?”
Samir seems skeptical, but then hands it over. I stare at the small, orange ember pulsing in my palm. In the days of my youth, before I found my faith, I loved the way the smoke would fill my chest. A burning yet soothing sensation. It is how I imagine the breath of Allah. Tempted, I toss the cigarette into the street and stamp it out.
“What are you doing?” Samir says. “That was my last one.”
“I am sorry about your cousin, Samir. I know it is easy to give in. But we must not let the blood of the martyrs be spilled in vain. It is up to us, the devout, to continue to carry within ourselves the burden of belief.”
“Screw you,” Samir says. “You talk of burdens, as if it’s you, and not everyone else, who suffers. You’re the reason my cousin is dead. Brother Ibrahim too.”
I grab the knife hidden behind my back. “Be careful with your words, Samir. You do not want to say something you will come to regret.”
“What are you going to do?” Samir says. “Kill me?”
He lifts his head back, his throat practically bulging for the blade.
“Well,” he says, “what are you waiting for?”
“You are not useful to me dead.”
“See, you can’t do murder,” he says. “No, you leave that to everyone else. My uncle was right—you hide behind Allah like a coward.”
“It is disappointing how people always think they can see in others what they often overlook in themselves. You can be angry at me all you want, Samir. But it is you who are responsible for your cousin’s death.”
“Me?” Samir snickers. “You’re crazy.”
“Laugh if you want, but I told Ahmed to leave you. I told him that you had betrayed us, that you were the one who led the soldiers to us.”
“You lie.”
“He did not want to believe me either. Which is why, when he heard your cowardly cries, he went back for you. So you see, Samir, his blood is on your hands, not mine.”
For the first time, I see the potential in his angry eyes.
I grip my knife and glance down at the blade. It catches the light just right. I close my eyes and suddenly see you, Brother, before me again, the sun shining off of your reflective belt piercing my eyes, the knowledge of your apostasy, my belief. It was foolish of you to believe that the bright belt of the infidels would protect you. From them, maybe. But for those of us still true to the faith, the reflective belts only made it easier to see who among us had been led astray.
I had raised my rifle and taken aim. “He who kills his own people is a traitor.”
You laid down your rifle and walked toward me. Most people have something inside of them, a threshold of fear. But on that fateful day, Brother, I could not find yours.
I slung my rifle over my shoulder. “Ibrahim, why?”
“Look around, Brother. No food, no water—only ammunition and death.”
It was true; homes had become graves and the remains of shops had spilled onto the sidewalks. But it is as the infidels say: To rebuild, you must first destroy.
“This is only temporary,” I said. “What we are fighting for is eternal Paradise.”
“The Americans promise our people peace—and now.”
“That is your problem, Ibrahim. You always put too much faith in people, when it is Allah you should serve.”
“Do not do this.”
You left me no choice, Brother, but to draw my knife and drag the blade across your blasphemous throat. As I watched your fall from grace, I marveled at how quickly the faith faded from your face. I only wish now that there was somebody here who understood, somebody trusted I could confide in and ask for forgiveness, someone to help put me at peace. But Allah is all I have left. 

---

Ramiro Hinojosa is a veteran of the Iraq War. He has since earned an MFA from Texas State University, and is the recipient of an NEA-funded fellowship for veterans from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His fiction has appeared in War, Literature & the Arts, Salamander, and Huizache, while his nonfiction has been published by Tin House’s The Open Bar, Guernica Daily, and the Texas Observer, among others.

By the time Mrs. Spencer arrives in Jackson, I’m exhausted. In five days I’ve given four readings in four different towns, appeared on a midmorning television program, and had many glasses of cheap red wine. I’ve signed hundreds of books. I’ve done my best to be charming, to smile and remember people’s names. For a person who’s terrified of public speaking and doesn’t like to be looked at, I think I’ve done pretty well—better than pretty well—but I’m tired and just want to listen to podcasts in my pajamas. Unfortunately, there’s no time for this because I have agreed to chaperone a ninety-two-year-old woman on her own book tour.
“Chaperone” is the wrong word. I could have used a chaperone, someone to water down my drinks and tell me it was time to go home, to tell me I had passed the point of friendliness and was just leading some poor guy on, a guy who is already texting me boring messages—Hi, how are you? What are you up to? What are you doing now??—Jesus H. Christ.
I am to be Mrs. Spencer’s driver. I’m to make sure she gets to her readings on time and see that she has everything she needs. More than anything, though this has not been verbalized, I am to keep her alive. I know how I’ve come by this gig—we have the same publisher, and because we’re both from Mississippi, our publisher thought that we might get along, and because this business is ultimately a business like any other, that I might write an insightful and moving essay about this journey through our home state and publish it someplace amazing like The New Yorker: a young female Southern writer learning the ropes from an older, established one.
Mrs. Spencer calls at 5:08 p.m. to ask where I am. She’s at the airport. She’s early. My mother is driving because we have dinner plans, more precisely we are going to the midwinter Lebanese convention at the Downtown Marriott, where she hopes I might find the Lebanese husband she didn’t. I’m wearing a blue dress and strappy three-inch heels, red lipstick. I have no intention of finding a husband at such an event, but this is something else I have agreed to months in advance and without forethought.
I’ve only been to one convention in the past, in Memphis, as an undergraduate in college. I left the seated dinner to play pool with the blond bartender and failed to return until the early morning hours, and my mother banned me from subsequent conventions for well over a decade.
When we arrive, I jump out and find Mrs. Spencer in a wheelchair, parked next to another elderly woman. Her suitcase is very small. Black and beat up, it appears to be the only thing she’s skimped on. She is thin and elegantly dressed, wearing wool slacks and a fur coat.
“Mrs. Spencer?” I ask, though she has already recognized me and is gripping the arms of her chair.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
“Your flight was early.” An airport employee begins to push her out but she stands and walks with me. I don’t know whether to hold her hand or offer my arm.
“My mom is driving,” I say, as we make our way to my mother’s BMW.
“You’ve brought your family,” she says.
“Just my mom.” I open the passenger-side door and get her situated in the front seat. Then I go around to the other side so I won’t be talking to the back of her head.
After I introduce them, I ask about her flight. “I don’t like airplanes,” she says.
I tell her I don’t either. Who likes airplanes? I know people who like airports but I have never met a single person who likes airplanes. The air is stale and people pass gas and the bathrooms are so small you pee on yourself. I can always talk myself into a panic attack on an airplane.
“I had a layover in Charlotte. It’s just as bad as Atlanta.”
“Oh, Atlanta is terrible. Is Charlotte the one with all those rocking chairs?”
She responds, but I can’t hear what she says. I’m pretty sure Charlotte has the rocking chairs. I took a picture of myself in one a few years ago but it didn’t turn out—my face wasn’t photographing well that day. I don’t know where I was headed—Boston? New York? I was alone. I remember the light streaming in, how bright it was. I remember tying my shoelace, which is an odd thing to remember.
My mother gets us lost, has to stop and turn around. Mrs. Spencer wonders aloud if we’ll make it. My mother has glaucoma and shouldn’t be driving at night. I should be driving but I’d rather sit in the backseat and find all of this annoying—my mother getting old, the three-inch heels, Mrs. Spencer in my charge. I’m used to my mother being competent, relying on her, and I’m not ready to relinquish my role as her child. If I relinquish it now, it is gone forever.
I call her Mrs. Spencer two or three times before she says, “You’re going to have to stop calling me that. Call me Elizabeth.” She says this so sternly I feel like I’ve been slapped. I wonder if “ma’am” is okay. Can I say “ma’am”? I realize I am trying too hard, that my politeness has passed the point of politeness and is bordering on obsequiousness and condescension, and it’s clear she won’t put up with this. I will have to be accommodating but not overly so. I have also been talking too loudly, like I do with all old people.
“I’m reading your book,” she says.
“Oh, that’s nice.” I never know what to say to this. What do you think? Thank you for buying it? Only she didn’t buy it; our publisher sent it to her. She says nothing else about it.
My mother makes another wrong turn and I plug the address into the GPS on my phone, the computer lady telling us to “make a U-turn, make a U-turn.”
Mrs. Spencer says she’s hungry and asks if we’re going to dinner and I explain our plans, preplanned months ago, the midwinter Lebanese convention. I don’t know how to describe it and it makes me feel strange, foreign. My father is German, I want to tell her. I’m only a halfsie, third generation. Or is it fourth? It wouldn’t matter. I open the gold clutch I borrowed from my mother and finger two airplane bottles of vodka, my ID, lipstick, and a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill. All of the things in the same borrowed clutch I might have taken to a school dance twenty years ago.
We arrive at the Fairview Inn, where she’ll be staying, safely. I feel like maybe I can do this, maybe it won’t be so bad after all.
The check-in girl says she’ll be in the Strawberry Room.
We walk through two dining areas and down a hall, take the tiny single elevator to the lower floor.
The Strawberry Room is garish—pink and red and floral with too many throw pillows and lace curtains; there’s a smell I can’t place, unpleasant. I set her suitcase on the bed and ask if she’ll be okay.
“Of course I’ll be okay,” she says. “I have people.” She picks up the telephone and checks for a dial tone, sets the receiver down. I walk back the way I came: elevator, hall, two dining rooms, and out into the night, stumbling slightly.
“She’s had her face redone,” my mother says.

The following morning, as I leave my parents’ house to pick up Mrs. Spencer for our first day on the road, I’m in a good mood. I’m driving my mother’s car, which is much nicer than my fourteen-year-old Honda. I dance and sing along to the radio: Tom Petty and Journey and Bruce Springsteen. I think about the bankers and lawyers I met last night and how it didn’t matter how dull they were, at least for a little while, because I could be the interesting one. And I was—I was charming and funny and several of them asked for my number. My mother had been proud.
After we’re on the interstate, headed north, she says I seem like a very nice girl.
“Thank you.” I think I know where this is going. “You’re not married?”
“I’m divorced.” I give her the condensed version: married too young, shitty town, shitty jobs, few friends, left him after having squandered nearly all of my twenties. I always mention that I’m the one who left, that it was my decision.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asks. “No, not right now.”
She waits for me to explain, so I do. I loved someone and he didn’t love me back, or he loved me for a time and then decided against it or fell out of love. Who knows? I still think about this man every day even though he hasn’t been my boyfriend in ten months and I haven’t seen him in seven. I had to change the dedication of my book at the last minute. In the final email he sent me, he said he’d gotten married and I should never contact him again.
“How old were you when you got married?” I ask, though I know the answer. Last night I read her interview in the Paris Review along with a few others in case I needed conversation starters. In one interview, she is quoted as saying that The Light in the Piazza, her most famous work, “did not relate to my life in any way,” which I found shocking in its insincerity.
“I was in my thirties,” she says. She met her husband while living in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She’s a woman from a conservative Protestant family in rural Mississippi who broke away from them to move to New York and then to Italy by herself in the early 1950s, so I can’t fathom why she’s questioning my choices, particularly after I’ve already told her that I left my husband to pursue a life beyond the confines of a town in which I was underemployed and unhappy. In a place where I spent my time wandering the mall and eating at country buffets, drinking with our one alcoholic friend, now dead.
Husband. My husband. Saying these words was the best thing about being married. I want to ask about her husband, why she hasn’t remarried, but her husband is dead and it seems impolite.
I expect this line of questioning from other people—my aunts, for example—who are praying to St. Jude and St. Philomena and St. Rita, all the ones who deal in hopeless causes. I didn’t expect this from Elizabeth Spencer though. I thought she would understand. I thought she would understand that there is nothing to understand. I was married and now I am divorced. I won’t marry again just to be married.
“Don’t you want children?” she asks.
“I never wanted children,” I say, hoping this will end the conversation.
She regrets not having them, she tells me. By the time she and her husband were settled in Canada, it was too late. I think of all the times I’ve asked young married couples when they were going to procreate, as if my childlessness, my single status, gave me permission. What an asshole I’ve been. What a meddlesome, intrusive asshole.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“I usually eat at one o’clock.”
“We can stop whenever you want. Just let me know.”
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“I can eat whenever.”
“Well, you’re a very healthy girl,” she says.
I look over at her, hands on her knees, gazing out the window. Wow, I think, wow. So this is how it’s gonna be. And then we’re quiet. It is so quiet in this car. We pass the sign for Carrollton and she tells me about growing up in Carroll County, not even in Carrollton proper, but I’m too busy wondering what I’m going to feed her. We should have stopped in Canton, or eaten before we left Jackson.
Since it’s already one thirty, I know I need to get her something quick. Our choices are limited to fast food, a Waffle House, and a Huddle House. I pull into the Huddle House because I can’t picture her at a Waffle House, and without thinking, I park farther away than I should. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a Huddle House. Why haven’t I eaten at a Huddle House? Who eats at a Huddle House? How does this place sustain both a Waffle House and a Huddle House?
She orders a BLT, no fries, and I order a veggie omelet. It comes with toast and hash browns, but I don’t touch the hash browns. I am conscious of being so healthy. I haven’t been overweight since my divorce, seven years ago, but I don’t weigh myself anymore, so I have to keep track of things by my clothes and most of my clothes stretch. Perhaps I’ve gained weight without realizing it. Perhaps, like one of my aunts, she is only trying to encourage me to be thinner; it is easier to find a man when you are very thin. I think about her stories and how much I like them and how she’s nothing like I thought the writer of these stories would be, and then I’m thinking about other writers I’ve met whose work I love and how they weren’t like I thought they would be either. They cried for no reason I could discern, lived in converted garages in near destitution, were ugly, acted humble to the point of humiliating everyone around them. We’re all just people, after all, and it’s disappointing. And yet I still want her to like me, and I want to like her. But then I mention a male friend and she says, “Is that your boyfriend?” so long after it’s been established that I am divorced and not seeing anyone that it seems cruel. My mother, where is she? I wish she were driving and I was only a passenger.
Back in the car, she reminisces about the towns we pass and the people she knew in them.
“I had a boyfriend from Water Valley,” she says. It’s the second town along our route that she has pointed out as a hometown of a boyfriend. “I liked him a great deal but he drank too much. Back then the roads weren’t paved.” She waves her hands around to indicate that it was all very dangerous.
“Water Valley. I like the sound of it. I’ve never met anyone from Water Valley.” I think about Nancy Lewis, the young narrator of “Ship Island,” which is my favorite story of Elizabeth’s, one of my favorite stories by anyone. Nancy Lewis’s father is in debt and the family is trying desperately to hold it all together. They’ve recently moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast from Little Rock because he’s lost his job again—”transferred” her mother calls it, as any good Southern mother would. That summer, Nancy is dating Rob Acklen, a wealthy, good-natured boy, and hanging out with Rob’s wealthy, good-natured friends. She imagines his parents talking about her late into the night, wondering if they should intervene or let him have his fling, let the summer pass. One night, when she’s out with Rob and his friends, she wanders away from the party and “runs off” to New Orleans—a place she has never been, but dreams of—with two men in a Cadillac, where she gets herself into some trouble that isn’t quite clear. Was it a car accident? Was she beaten and raped? When Rob asks why she did it, why the hell she did it, she says, “I guess it’s just the way I am.” I guess it’s just the way I am. It’s a sentence that’s stuck with me—if it’s just the way you are, then there’s nothing to be done about it, nothing to fix.
I want to ask Elizabeth what happened to Nancy Lewis, but I don’t want her to scold me, and it’s possible she doesn’t know, herself. It’s just a story. Perhaps she doesn’t remember writing it at all, it was so long ago.

When we arrive in Oxford, I call the bookstore owner, whose home we’ll be staying in for the night, to get the address. I met the Howorths last week at my own reading and they were nice but didn’t invite me to stay with them; my mother and I shared a motel room. Lisa says she’s at Kroger but the door is open and we should go on in and make ourselves at home—Elizabeth’s room is the first door on the left and I’m upstairs to the right.
It’s a thrill to walk into a house with no one in it, the house of someone you don’t know. I show Elizabeth to her room as if it’s my own home and set my bag on a chair while I look at the bookshelves. There are so many books by so many writers I love. I look at all of the Larry Browns, no doubt lovingly inscribed, and think about taking one off the shelf and slipping it into my bag. I would never do something like this and yet I like the idea that I could.
Larry Brown. He would have liked me.
Lisa comes in with groceries and I take them out of her hands, start unloading things onto the island.
“Did you get any Ensure?” Elizabeth asks. “I like to have an Ensure in the afternoon.” Since Lisa did not, in fact, get any Ensure, she goes back to Kroger while we wander around. I hear Elizabeth mumbling under her breath; it sounds like she’s praying. She socks me in the arm to show me the dogs, two of them, lounging by the fireplace.
“Do you like dogs?” I ask.
“I don’t mind them outside,” she says.
The dogs are completely uninterested in us. We could load up everything, including them, and they wouldn’t care.
Lisa returns with a six-pack of Ensure and hands one to Elizabeth.
“Thank you,” she says to Lisa. “I don’t like the chocolate kind,” she says to me, loud enough for Lisa to hear, and she carries it to her room and closes the door.
While we drink a glass of wine, I recount all of the offensive things Elizabeth has said to me in the past twenty-four hours and we laugh.
“I just hope she doesn’t die on us,” she says.
“Imagine how I feel. And I’m a terrible driver, like really bad. Someone should have considered that.”
“Did you mention it?”
“I think I did,” I say, and we laugh some more.
After a while, her husband, Richard, comes home and we talk about an old friend of mine who ran for mayor even though he’d never voted in his life. This old friend was never a real friend but someone I went to high school with; one time in Florida we all got into the pool topless and I let him piggyback me around.
That evening, Elizabeth reads the first story in her collection. She is poised and articulate, her voice carrying throughout the room, which is crowded with people who want to see this woman who rarely makes public appearances. She didn’t want to have the book published, she told me, but her friend Allan Gurganus insisted. He sent out the manuscript and found a publisher. She told me she wrote the stories in Starting Over years ago and doesn’t write anymore. I imagine her walking around her house, looking out the window as if her backyard is a foreign land, drinking tea, keeping her lunch dates and doctor’s appointments in a book with paper and pen. I imagine her house feels too large and empty and she thinks about the children she might have had—she doesn’t want me to make the same mistake. I wonder if I’d want a child if I met the right man. My cousin, who tried for years to have children with her husband, also found they were too late. People mean well; they’re only trying to protect you from the mistakes they’ve made and the circumstances in which they have found themselves. And what if all of the time I’ve spent insisting I don’t want children has only been a form of protection against something I never thought I could have, or deserved? I suppose I won’t know for sure until the time has passed, until it is no longer an option.
After the reading, the Howorths take us to dinner at City Grocery. When we’re seated and drinking wine, John Grisham walks in with his daughter. The Howorths introduce me as the next writer in residence.
“You’re the first one that’s going to be living in my house,” John says. He has recently donated his home and eighty acres to the university. I have seen only the fence and the little yellow guardhouse from the road.
“I am,” I say, and can’t think of anything else to say. He’s so beautiful it’s like he’s not real. I want to touch his face.
Lisa runs over to the bookstore to get his latest novel, Sycamore Row, and he signs it “To Mary Miller, Welcome to Oxford. 3 February 2014.”
It’s strange to think I will live there, in the house where John Grisham raised his children, that this town will soon be my home, and these people my friends. But I can’t move into the house until August, which seems very far away. This will be my home, but it’s not now.
When we get back to the Howorths’, Elizabeth goes to sleep and I stay up with Lisa and Richard. We drink brandy and talk about the evening and once I’m having a good time, feeling normal and happy, they excuse themselves. I go upstairs to sleep in one of their daughters’ old bedrooms. There’s a four-poster bed decorated with Mardi Gras beads, and so many pictures and trophies and records, and everything seems like something I shouldn’t touch. I want to be the kind of person who does anyway, who piles the beads around her neck and tries on clothes from a stranger’s closet, who sleeps as soundly as if this was her own childhood and she’s come home.
The house is old, the wood floors squeaky. I tiptoe around, brush my teeth and wash my face. Then I shut the door to the bathroom and turn on the fan and smoke a cigarette, wondering what the hell I’m doing.

In the morning, I find Elizabeth in a silk nightie and socks, holding a mug with two hands as she stands in front of a painting in the hall.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.” She doesn’t look at me.
Lisa pours me a cup of coffee and then I’m helping Richard carry boxes of books into the dining room for Elizabeth to sign.
“Do I have to sign all of these?” she asks. “Yep,” he says.
“It’s so many.”
It really is a lot, way more than I signed last week. We get to work. Richard opens the book to the correct page and passes it to her; she signs it and I box it back up. We’re an efficient little team. She stops and shakes her hand, looks at us, aggrieved. She is so old. What a trooper. I ask about the cover art to distract her, tell her I like it even though I find it immensely dull—gray and beige—a wheat field or a bunch of weeds with a lopsided shack in the background.
“It’s a William Hollingsworth,” she says.
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“You haven’t? He’s from your hometown.”
“I don’t know a lot about art.”
“I bought two of his pictures in the forties, one for twenty dollars and one for twenty-five. He killed himself young.”
“How young?”
“Young,” she says, pausing to examine me. Her hair, it’s so perfectly coiffed, which is a word people don’t use anymore. “He’s very famous.” She shakes her hand again and we sit there and wait as she continues shaking her hand and I check my phone because we have to get out of here soon. She has a reading at five in Jackson and it’ll take us two-and-a-half hours to get there plus I’ll have to make sure she’s fed on time and the weather is bad and on top of it all I’m hungover. I am so tired of being hungover, and yet when evening comes, I can’t imagine not having a drink, the day has been so long. I remind myself that these are trying times.
By one o’clock we’re on the interstate, the rain coming down like it only does when I’m driving. Rain so heavy I can hardly see even with the windshield wipers at full speed. I drive slowly, crouched over the wheel, recalling all of the times I’ve had to pull over at McDonald’s or a rest stop because the windshield wipers on my own car don’t work well and I don’t replace them because the only time it’s brought up is when I get an oil change and I say no to everything, as my father has taught me, believing that they are taking advantage of me because I’m a woman. But every few years someone gives me a compliment or is persistent enough and I say yes to it all, the whole shebang, and feel bad about myself for days.
The only sound is the rain. Even if the radio was on we wouldn’t be able to hear it. I look over at her, thoroughly content.
We stop at McAlister’s for lunch. I’ve hopped a curb and missed the exit twice, looping back around because the frontage road confuses me. I hate myself and want to give up even though it’s just driving and rain and everything is fine. It is her stoicism, her endurance, that I find so agitating.
I order a club sandwich and she orders a salad. I pay, as is our custom. There is an agreement that I wasn’t aware of and it is that I should pay for everything and ask our publisher for reimbursement. My heart beats fast as we sit across from each other in a booth with our big waters. When the enormous salad is placed before her, she looks at it as though it offends her, as if she’s never seen anything like it in her life.
“It’s so large,” she says.
“It is,” I agree. “But it’s mostly lettuce.”
“There’s so much of it.”
Welcome to Mississippi, I want to say, where the portions are enormous and people know how to clean their plates. Lots of healthy people down here! She hasn’t lived in Mississippi in a very long time. She can still claim it, but three-fourths (or four-fifths? or five-sixths?) of her life has been spent elsewhere. Also, I’m pretty sure North Carolina has its share of fat people. She eats a cube of ham and a few leaves of lettuce, leaving a portion so large and undisturbed it could be served to someone else. I eat everything unapologetically, including the pickle and the potato salad, and ask if she needs to use the bathroom.
“I took care of all that before we left,” she says, as if one only needs to use the bathroom first thing in the morning and right before bed. As I pee, I think about all of my bodily functions—if I could live on less, if I could need less and want less.
I emerge from the bathroom smiling and offer her my arm, which she takes.

I’m driving to pick up Elizabeth less than an hour after I’ve dropped her off. I’m clean, at least, and wearing a dress that makes me feel pretty—my go-to dress, I have it in three different colors like a man. Tonight I wear blue. The car is nearly out of gas. I am so incredibly tired and am unused to doing things I don’t want to do. I try to remind myself that this is adulthood, that every day people do things they don’t want to do, but this has not been my experience.
In the car, she’s so chatty and friendly it feels antagonistic. She tells me about a beauty-parlor game people used to play when she was growing up—they would name characters in a book and try to guess who the character was based on. Then she tells me she’s cousins with John McCain but he’s stopped answering her letters. This interests me but I don’t question her about it. Was it because you asked him for things he didn’t want to give, or is it because people don’t write letters anymore except for funeral condolences and to acknowledge wedding gifts? I imagine it is the latter. I should explain this to her but I don’t. I picture her seated at a desk in front of a window—the birds outside, a cup of hot tea, perhaps a single cookie on a dish—composing thoughtful letters to people who will never respond.
Once we’re at the bookstore, someone ferries her away and I stand at the entrance with the owner. My mother calls him Johnny, which seems too personal, so I don’t know what to call him. I’d like to call him Johnny. I haven’t called anyone Johnny since high school.
“She’s a very attractive woman,” he says. “I might ask her out.”
“You should do it. I hear she’s available.”
He introduces me to a guy perched on a stool. “Y’all have the same publisher,” he says.
“Oh?” I know his book; it’s one I would never read. “Where all have you been reading?”
“Anywhere that’ll have me,” he says, and I wonder if the publisher is still funding his tour, nearly a year after the book’s publication, or if he’s paying out of his own pocket. I should be doing more. I should be driving around the country and sleeping on couches, shaking hands. Promoting myself on Facebook and Instagram, trying to think up witty tweets. One witty tweet could gain me hundreds of followers. I smile and tell him that’s awesome. Then I go over to the counter to buy a beer but the girl recognizes me from last week and won’t take my money.
I sit in a chair toward the back of the room, watching Elizabeth talk to her fans.
She says she’s going to read from the longest story, that it’s too long to read in its entirety, so she’ll just stop when she gets tired. But she doesn’t stop. I try to black out but I’m still here, sandwiched between two middle-aged women who chuckle and clutch their purses on their laps. I finish my beer and place the can between my feet and wait for it to end.
She reads the entire thing, every word.
When it’s finally over, Elizabeth tells me she’s having dinner with Willie Morris’s widow and some other ladies and I’m free to go. I check my phone: ten minutes past six o’clock. Now I feel like I want to do something but there’s nothing to do so I drive to my parents’ house and sit with my mother and father. My father falls asleep in his chair. My mother gambles with fake money on her iPad—she’s got it up to $80 million.
“Give it to me,” I say.
“Don’t lose my money,” she says. I usually lose her money because I’m too lazy to press the button over and over. I just put it on auto-bet and let it play itself.
I pour myself a vodka tonic and take it upstairs to my childhood room, lie in my childhood bed. I listen on repeat to the song the man I love wrote for me. I bet he has to play this song a lot because it’s his best. He has to play it and think of me. Or he doesn’t think of me but my name is in the title so how could he not? He loved me when he wrote it. He loved me so much then, and that time has passed and now he is married to another woman. It seems impossible, all of it.

In the morning, I get back in my mother’s car and turn on the radio. I try to sing along to “Jack & Diane” but it feels forced so I turn it off. I’m wearing my fat jeans, which are too big, and a shirt I found in the closet that must have belonged to one of my brothers, my hair piled in a bun.
Elizabeth is waiting outside even though I’m on time, one minute early according to the clock. I’m the most punctual person I know and yet she makes me feel as though I’m shirking my duties. Perhaps in the long-ago past, before cell phones or any phones at all, people arrived fifteen minutes before they were supposed to be anywhere. As a child, I loved to call the time lady, a computer voice that gave you the time and date and temperature. I’d do this when the power went out and our clocks got messed up. Sometimes I did it simply because I wanted to dial a number and hear a voice on the other end.
The drive to Greenwood is less than two hours and we wouldn’t have had to leave so early but she has an interview.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Very well,” she says. She tells me about her dinner and the pleasant company.
We see a dog dragging something large across the road and I hit the brakes. It has a long tail, maybe a raccoon?
“Was that a creature?” she asks.
“I think it was a creature,” I say. “It was definitely a creature.” I wish she would say it again and I could record it.
I turn on the radio. She’ll listen to the news—she likes to keep up. Unfortunately, Tim Gunn is talking about his asexuality on NPR and it makes me uncomfortable. I have no idea how she feels about homosexuals or asexuals and don’t want to discuss it with her. Otherwise, there’s only religious talk. I turn it off.
“Tell me about your family,” I say. “You said you had a brother?”
“Yes,” she says, “one brother who was seven years older, so I grew up feeling like an only child.” She tells me she was close with her parents until her first book came out and then she wasn’t close with them because they didn’t accept it, didn’t think she should be writing such things, and it was never the same after that. This makes me sad for her. My parents have always been supportive even when I know they must have been disappointed. They would never admit to disappointment, not even when I moved into their house after my divorce with no job and no plans and hardly left my room for months. They’ve had to continuously reimagine the life that they’d hoped for me. In her Paris Review interview, Elizabeth said, “The family assigns unfair roles, and never forgives the one who does not fulfill them.” She said she couldn’t be straightjacketed.
“Do you regret writing things they disapproved of?”
“No,” she says. “You just write what you’re going to write and deal with the fallout later.”
“That’s really brave.”
She shrugs. “You must do it too.”
“I mostly write about people who are no longer in my life or people who don’t read. Almost no one reads.” I wait for her to say more on the subject but she doesn’t. I want to ask about particular instances, situations, and how she dealt with them, how many people she had to let go. I wish I were braver. If I were braver, we might like each other. We might be friends. But it’s like she’s been sent here—only a few weeks after the publication of my debut novel, when things are supposed to be exciting and fun—specifically to torture me.
In Greenwood, I pull up to the Delta Bistro: front-door parking.
“This is a nice place,” I say. “You’ll like it.” My mother and I ate here after my reading, along with the boring-text guy and the only people who’d shown up to my reading: four recent college graduates from up North who are down here with Teach for America. I insisted on paying, said I would write it off.
She takes a sip of water. I look at the walls. There’s a long piece of artwork on a chalkboard, divided into seven days: create and divide light; separate waters; land sea and all vegetation; sun moon and stars; sea creatures and birds; animals and mankind; rest. Below that: and then there was evening and then there was morning. And then there was evening and then there was morning. Yes, I think, it is always like that. And in the morning you pay for what you did in the evening.
“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” I ask. Her family owns land in the Delta. She used to come to Greenwood to have lunch and shop, to see movies.
“It’s been a while. The last time I was in Mississippi I didn’t come here. I went to Laurel, where they gave me a lifetime achievement award.”
“Oh, that’s cool. What does it look like?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just put it on a shelf with the others.”
It is astounding—a lifetime achievement award!—and yet I already know how she feels. It is something for a short time and then it is nothing again. I think of all the goals I’ve set for myself over the years—publication in certain magazines and journals, a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers, my book reviewed in the New York Times—and how I have achieved them. How it seemed as though each one of them would offer me a new and better life.
At the Alluvian, Elizabeth asks if I can carry both bags.
“It’s no problem.”
“Well, you’re very husky,” she says.
Husky! I think. What a word. I’m a husky girl who refuses to marry, or who can’t get anyone to marry her. At this point in the trip, I find her comment humorous, or nearly so. I want to write it down with all of the others. I am very healthy and husky and what else? What else did she call me?
She takes over the bathroom, fixing her hair and reapplying makeup. Her things spread out everywhere—just like my sister or one of my prettier friends. Beautiful women think nothing of taking over the bathroom, hoarding the mirror. I’m annoyed and yet there is something extraordinarily brave about a ninety-two-year-old widow putting on makeup so far from home, preparing her face for TV. If I were ninety-two, I’d be in bed listening to podcasts. I won’t live to be ninety-two. I haven’t lived nearly well enough to see ninety-two.
I tell her it’s time and she emerges from the bathroom looking exactly as she did before. She really is an attractive woman.
We wait for the elevator. And wait. She takes the opportunity to focus on me. “You wear your hair up like that so it’s easy,” she says—not a question but a statement. “You’re lucky. I can’t wear my hair like that. It wouldn’t look good.” Her hair is long for an older woman, shoulder length, blond.
“Thank you,” I say. The elevator arrives and up we go.
There’s a lot of activity on the fourth floor, lights and cameras, people who have come here to interview Elizabeth for the Mississippi Tourism Division. I say hello to a girl I know. I ask after her family, her husband.
“Hey,” she says, “do you want to be on TV too? You could talk about driving Mrs. Spencer around or your book or whatever you want.”
“Thank you, but no.”
Back in the room, I unzip my bag and take out a sweater. Elizabeth will be staying at a cousin’s house and this room is mine; I have a proprietary feeling as I look at her makeup brushes and powders, various toiletry bags. I open one carefully to see if I can find any toothpaste. How come I never bring toothpaste? I always rely on someone else to bring it. I close the bag without touching anything and open another but don’t find any. Maybe she travels without toothpaste too. I turn the magnified mirror off and try to do something with my hair. I should have washed it.
Forty-five minutes later, I go back up to fetch her. “How was it?” I ask.
She was bored by their questions, the same questions she has been asked now for half a century. I can’t even imagine. Sweet good heavens, to have to answer the same questions over and over again from people who mostly have no idea who you are.
We sit in the double beds with our clothes on, legs extended. I think it would make a good picture. I imagine it in the New Yorker alongside the essay I can no longer write because what would I say? Elizabeth thinks I should remarry ASAP before I get too husky, and pop out a few children. She hasn’t written in years and doesn’t want me to end up like her, alone in a house in a state that is no longer home. I have moved enough already to know that home doesn’t exist in a place, in a particular location.
The room is spacious and bright, overlooking a street where no one walks and few cars pass. It is such a quiet town. The bookstore closes at six o’clock. Viking, the largest employer, has pulled out.
Elizabeth gets out of bed and stands in front of the TV changing channels, comments on the weather. I open my laptop and start making notes.
“I think it may rain forever,” she says. “Who are you texting over there?”
“I’m typing. I’m writing.”
“You’re doing that in the room with me? Ooh, I’ve known people who said they could do that but I’ve never actually seen anybody.”
I’m writing a story about you, I want to say. I’m writing what you’re saying right now. Say something.
“That girl who interviewed me—what was her name?”
“Anne Catherine.”
“Yes, Anne Catherine. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“She’s nice,” I say, “a very nice girl.” Anne Catherine is perfectly attractive but she’s no great beauty, and so it seems Elizabeth is commenting upon me again. I just can’t figure out what she’s trying to say—that I should wear makeup and fix my hair? That I could do so much more with what I have? As an undergraduate in college, I joined a sorority because my mother worried I wouldn’t make friends otherwise. My sorority sisters would take me into the bathroom and apply mascara to my lashes and blush to my cheeks, offer to curl my hair, lend me their clothes. I dropped out after a couple of years, after getting into as much trouble as I could, much to my mother’s embarrassment and shame.
Ten minutes later, Elizabeth says, “I bet you’ve finished a whole story.”

That evening, she reads a different story from the collection: three different towns, three different stories. I’m impressed. I’ve read the same excerpt every time.
The people in her stories are assholes, like the people in mine, like the people in so many of the stories I love. They say inappropriate things and offend people and this works in fiction—it’s amusing and witty, keeps the tension high—but it doesn’t translate well to real life. I think about Nancy Lewis again, wonder how much Nancy Lewis and nineteen-year-old Elizabeth had in common. I can’t imagine she ever felt she wasn’t good enough for some boy.
During the Q and A, a woman asks who her favorite writer is and she gives the answer I always give, that she has many favorites and her favorites change. “Who’s yours?” she counters.
“Faulkner,” the woman says.
“Well, that’s the right Mississippi answer,” she says. She has recently reread Absalom, Absalom. She tells us about the two times she met Faulkner: once he was standing in the corner of a party with a drink in his hand, not talking to anyone, and another time he was at a dinner party, not talking to anyone. It’s too easy, how one person can turn another into a taciturn figure based on such a narrow and limited assessment, and still I find myself believing it. I can see him standing in a dark corner with his drink, avoiding everyone, and I can see a much younger Elizabeth wondering what all the fuss is about. Why they aren’t looking at her.
Someone else asks if her characters are based on people she knew growing up and she says the people in her fiction aren’t real, that they are entirely contrived, and then moves on to the next question. Having read her work and spoken with her about her life, I know it’s not the case. Why not admit it? Perhaps it’s simply something she has insisted for so long that she can’t stop insisting it now, or perhaps it’s just an aggravating question that doesn’t deserve an answer.
After the reading, Elizabeth gets in a car with a disheveled-looking man in overalls, his beater at least thirty years old. She doesn’t fit with this man or his vehicle and I have the urge to pull her out and tell her to stay with me, but he’s her cousin and there is some small pleasure in seeing her with him.
“Thank you,” she says, gazing up at me from the passenger seat. The car is so low to the ground.
“You’re very welcome.”
And with that, my driving duties are done.
I leave the store with a guy I met last week, the boring-text guy, a real sweetheart. If only I could be happy with someone like him. He’s from up North and doesn’t know how he found himself in such a place. He teaches at Mississippi Valley State and is up for tenure, works at the bookstore as a way to dispose of the rest of the hours in his day.
We walk over to the hotel to have a few drinks. Since the five stools at the bar are occupied, we take our beers into the darkened lounge area, which is large and empty.
“It’s like The Shining,” I say.
“It’s always like this. I’ll probably be stuck in this town until I die.”
“There are worse things,” I say, though I’m not sure there are, at least not for a single man from up North. In a town like this, even if he were good-looking, he’d be suspect. Perhaps if he were good-looking and rich he’d be welcomed into the community with open arms but probably not. Not even then.
“I suppose I like having a job,” he says.
“And you can walk down the middle of the street if you want. I always like that.”
“I rent a twelve-hundred-square-foot loft for five hundred dollars a month. You should see it.”
“I should,” I say. I fold my legs beneath me and try to get comfortable. “My aunt’s family used to own this hotel. My uncle’s wife,” I clarify, which is odd because she’s been my aunt since before I was born. The money’s on the wrong side, I might have said. I won’t inherit this hotel or the money from its sale.
He listens to everything I say with interest, asks questions. I feel pretty around him and it’s nice—it’s also strange to feel so different from the person I felt like only a few hours before. I am pretty, and thin enough. I can touch my collarbones and feel the hollowed-out spaces, my rib bones and hipbones. Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but it just seems like another way to make women feel bad about themselves.
At nine o’clock there’s not a night clerk behind the desk or a bartender behind the bar. There’s not a car on the road. We might as well be the last people on earth.

It is Super Bowl Sunday. I haven’t seen Elizabeth since I left her in Greenwood on Wednesday, but she’s still in Mississippi because she has people to see. I’m still here because the drive to Austin is nine hours and every day I find some other reason not to make it. There’s the rain and my exhaustion and my father fixing drinks in the evening and the way my childhood bedroom and all of the things I have accumulated over the years take up an increasing amount of space in my head. The longer I sleep in this room, the more space the stuff wants. I open a closet and there is my wedding dress, my wedding album. My husband, as I still refer to him, so handsome. If I only ever have one, he will forever be my husband. I open a book to find my five-year-old handwriting and the backward a that plagued me for years. My mother recently presented me with my Girl Scout uniform, troop number 240 on a patch down one shoulder. I don’t remember being a Girl Scout. Did I sell cookies? Go on a camping trip? I must not have done it for very long. It seems I was a dropout from a very early age.
But the main reason I’m still here is that there is little to return to. I graduated from the Michener Center nearly a year ago and most of my friends have moved away, gone on to fellowships and jobs or the hustle of New York City. The man I love is married to another woman, a much younger woman he lives with in the house we talked about living in together. I can’t move to Oxford until August. I am in between places, once again. Waiting for one life to end and another to begin.
Elizabeth has called a few times and I haven’t answered or called her back. I don’t want to drive her anywhere or meet any of her people. I think about her small beat-up suitcase and how all of her lovely clothes, fully pressed, somehow fit inside it.

It’s raining again, a steady drizzle that’s been coming down for hours. She calls at ten thirty and I answer but she isn’t there, or she can’t hear me. I hang up and call her back and hear her pressing buttons. I say hello every few seconds until she responds.
“Did you call me?” she asks.
“I did. How are you?”
“My cousin hasn’t come to get me for lunch yet. What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“It’s not eleven thirty?” she asks. “I’m on Eastern Time.”
“No, it’s only ten thirty.”
I tell her to let me know if he doesn’t come and I’ll run over there and pick her up. She calls back an hour later to say he’s arrived, along with a few other relatives, and she’ll be busy for the rest of the day.
A week later, I receive an email from her: Dear Mary, I called you from Jackson but failed to connect. You were a wonderful chauffeur and I so much appreciate all your attention. I finished your book and think you are off to a good start. Perhaps we will cross paths again.
Well, okay, I’m off to a good start. I guess I’ll take that even though I have been writing for years and feel like I’m past a start, but I didn’t expect more from her at this point. She gives what she has to give, as we all do, and it is usually too little. I write her back and don’t mention that we did connect, that I offered to take her to lunch. I even wrote it down, she just didn’t remember.

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Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World and Always Happy Hour, as well as the novels Biloxi and The Last Days of California. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, Norton’s Seagull Book of Stories (4th ed.), McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.