Roman spots the flyer on his way to read palms in Jackson Square. Taped to the window of a coffee shop, Have You Seen Me? above a photo of a dark-haired girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen. He can’t tell, doesn’t have time to stop because it’s almost dark and he has to catch Anna before she leaves the square. She’ll be packing up by now, all her palm readings and aura readings and scrying done for the day. He imagines her, bent over her table in profile, a dark toss of hair over her shoulder. Backlit in the setting sun, a sliver of pale cheek, a hint of upturned nose. 

He picks up his pace, hurries past the bookstores and boutiques and shuttered townhouses. A block down the street, there’s the flyer again, this time in the window of a costume shop. The missing girl, solemn-eyed and silent among bright pink wigs and spangled feather boas. And when he rounds a corner, she’s there again, right in his face, fluttering from a lamppost. So close that for a second she seems to hover off the page, seems to gaze right at him with eyes as dark as two tiny sinkholes, bottomless black. 

A memory comes to him, a vague, shapeless thing, thin as a shadow. He can’t catch hold of it, can’t pin down where and when, but he could swear he’s seen this girl, this very photo, before. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers, he peels the flyer from the post. He smooths her face with his palm and slips it into his bag. 

He reaches Jackson Square just as the lingering summer light fades to a silvery glow. He’s one of the night crowd, the bolder, more flamboyant fortune-tellers who hover over glowing candles and call to passers-by. But it’s early for that yet, the day psychics still packing up their tables, and right away he finds Anna in her usual place beside the iron gate. He watches as she wraps her crystal ball in a white towel embroidered with faded pink roses and tucks it into her bag. Watches as she folds up her sign: Palm, Tarot, and Crystal by Anna in light blue letters and, beneath, a drawing of a hand—her hand; Roman sketched it himself—palm out. 

He makes his way to her from across the square. Above, in dark silhouette, looms the St. Louis Cathedral, its jutting steeples like the towers of some ancient castle. A medieval backdrop to the street artists and vendors, the colorful umbrellas and fruit-laden carts, the fortune-tellers and musicians and painted performers. But the crowd is thinner at this hour, the gray period between night and day, that brief mingling of light and dark. His favorite time, dusk, when he knows he will see Anna, if only for a moment. 

Lately, he’s been coming up with things to catch her attention. Reasons to strike up conversation with the woman he used to share a bed with, the woman whose small, soft body he coiled himself around, whose hair he spread across his pillow so he could fall asleep to its soapy-incense scent. But that was before, and for two months now, he’s been trying to get back there. Trying anything he can think of, and today, he wears a turban on his head, kitschy fortune-teller garb he hopes will get her talking. But he’s got something else now too; he’s got the missing girl’s flyer, tucked in his bag. 

“That’s new,” she says when he reaches her. 

“This?” He touches the turban. It’s light purple, a color she once told him looks good against his olive skin. “Found it in a junk shop on Decatur.” He swivels his head side to side. “Shit,” he says, “anything to get their attention, you know?” 

She won’t like that; she doesn’t cater to the crowd. Time and again she’s told him reading palms, telling futures, is serious business, and she refuses to deck herself out like a dime store fortune-teller from a carnival. But he’s hoping she’ll scold him, like she used to do. Hoping she still cares enough to disapprove. It’s a tactic, a sales technique he learned from his mother. “Keep them interested,” she used to say, “even if you have to piss them off to do it.” 

But it doesn’t work on Anna. She says nothing, only looks up at him for a moment, her greenish-brown eyes, the color of the bayou, slit against the setting sun. Then she busies herself over her table.

“How’d you do today?” Roman says because he has to say something, has to keep her here, if only for a moment longer. 

“Same as usual,” she says, without looking up. “Six readings. Mostly Tarot and palm.”

Roman unfolds his table, sets it up beside hers. They shared a table before—she’d carry it out here during the day, and he’d bring it back home at night. Now he has his own, a small TV tray on folding legs. During readings, he covers it with a dark blue cloth. 

By the time he’s got his candles lit, she has her table folded up and her bag slung over her arm. “See you, Roman,” she says, and turns to go.

“Hey,” Roman says. “You seen this?” He pulls the flyer from his bag, waves it at her. 

Now he’s got her attention. She takes the flyer from him, turns to study it. He bends over her shoulder, breathing in the spicy, incense smell of her hair, and looks with her at the photo he could swear he’s seen before: a candid shot of the girl sitting on a front stoop. Curly dark hair, brownish skin. Those black eyes. She’s hunched over her knees, hands pressed to her heart, her bottom lip sucked in, as if she’s chewing on it. 

Missing since June 4th, the flyer reads beneath the photo. Age: 16, Height: 5’4; Eyes: Dark Brown; Hair: Dark Brown. Last seen on Magnolia Street. And her name: Camilla Guidry. He says it out loud, “Camilla,” testing the shape of it on his tongue, his lips. And it too seems familiar, a name he has said before. 

“You ever seen her around here?” he says. 

“I don’t think so.” Anna runs her finger over the photo, pauses on the girl’s face as if waiting for something—a glimpse into her past, or a flash of her future, a vision of some kind. She’s clairvoyant, or claims to be. Claims she can actually see. And whatever she sees now makes her face go slack. Her pert little mouth, cupid’s bow lips he kissed so often, hangs open, her eyes gone glassy and gray. 

“What is it?” he says. “You see something?” 

She called him a fraud before she kicked him out, a scam artist. She saw him swindle an old lady out of a hundred bucks during a palm reading. He thought she’d left the square already, but she’d turned back, had forgotten her scarf—a sheer little lacy thing he later told her she must have lost but keeps tucked away at the bottom of his bag. And she crept right up on him as he told that old lady he could see her dead child, hovering behind her. “Jamie?” the woman said. “What’s he want? What’s he saying?” She was frantic, right up in his face.

“Visions are a hundred dollars,” he told her, hanging his head, as if ashamed. “I wish I could tell you for less. But the spirit world drains me. A vision like this one—” He paused for a moment, glanced up at the woman, her filmy bright eyes narrowed at him. “I’ll be wiped out for the rest of the night.” 

And Anna, who knows he’s not a clairvoyant, knows he’s never had visions, overheard the whole thing. She confronted him that night when he got home. He was no true psychic, she said, and it was crooks like him who gave the rest a bad name. And he didn’t deny it; he’s a salesman, not a psychic. But, honestly, he doesn’t see much difference between the two. He can read people better than Anna, knows exactly what they want to hear. And that old woman wanted to hear about her son. Wanted to believe her son was still around, in some form or another. All Roman did was give her what she wanted—what she paid for. But Anna wouldn’t see it that way. 

He leans closer—just a little, just enough to graze the top of her head with his chin—and she tenses, takes a step away. She turns, holds the flyer out to him. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “It’s all just dark.” 

Later, hours after midnight when the crowd in the Quarter has tapered off to the lone drunk or bleary-eyed tourist, the night psychics pack up their tables, as if in tacit agreement that their shifts have ended. Roman did well enough for the night, about fifteen readings, a couple hundred bucks including tips. He’s better than Anna at making money, a talented salesman, trained almost from birth. His mother sold Mary Kay beauty products around their south Mississippi neighborhood when he was a child, and she would take Roman with her on house calls. He wasn’t Roman back then, just Charlie, a small, dark-eyed boy who looked too much like the father he never knew. But he was “good for business,” his mother told him, and he’d peer up from behind his mother’s legs at her customers, as if too shy to speak. Just as his mother taught him to do. 

“Charlie!” his mother would say, taking him by the hand. “Say hello.” Then, lowering her voice, “He’s just a little clingy, you know, since his father left.” 

“Well, bless his heart,” the women would say. Sometimes crouching before him, touching his hair. And he would gaze up at them, his eyes wide, his lower lip just barely poked out, the saddest child in the world. That’s how he thought of it—his saddest child in the world face, like the starving orphans in those commercials on TV. 

“It’s just me and him, right, Charlie?” his mother would say. “Me and him against the world.” 

It didn’t work all the time. But when it did, when the women invited them in, nine times out of ten his mother would sell something. A lipstick in a smooth pink tube, a little pink compact, a bottle of perfume. 

He’s as good at sales now as his mother ever was, and she was so good she won the pink Cadillac in 1989, a gaudy, Pepto-Bismol nightmare of a car that Roman, nine years old at the time, should have hated. But he didn’t, despite the looks they got as they rolled down the street. Despite the jeers from his classmates because, unlike them, he’d seen firsthand how hard his mother had worked for that reward. 

She had to give the car back when the lease ran out two years later. She didn’t have the money to buy it, despite how many creams and lipsticks she sold. And Roman, who’d thought the car was already hers, couldn’t understand. Where did all the money go? She tried to explain to him about working for a company—commission, consulting, percentages—but all he ever understood was what he saw: his mother, leading private sales parties or going door to door in her pastel pantsuit worn thin at the knees, the pink case tucked under her arm, her face all made up and her hair sprayed so stiff not even a ride in the Cadillac with the windows down would blow it out of place.

She was dead of ovarian cancer by the time he started fortune-telling, three years ago now. But he likes to think she’d approve because, like her, he can figure out a customer in a matter of seconds. The tipsy college girls who want to be told they’re special. The elderly tourists looking for financial advice. The middle-aged women desperate for some kind of meaning. He knows how to play them all, how to lead them on, upsell them. “Your palm can only reveal so much,” he will say, and then offer them face readings, aura readings, crystal ball readings—all at a special, one-time discount. He can sell up to twenty voodoo dolls in one night, can get even the most determined skeptic to buy one of his gris-gris bags. On a good night, he makes enough to live on for a week, and if every night was like tonight, he could quit his service job, bartending at Da Bar, a dive joint a few blocks from his apartment. But not every night is good, and sometimes he goes home with just a couple of twenties stuffed in the pocket of his bag.

By 4:00 AM he’s back at the tiny, upstairs apartment he rents in the Irish Channel, sipping a beer and scrolling through the news on his laptop. He types her name into the search engine—Camilla Guidry—and several results appear. More than he expected, in fact, because people go missing all the time in New Orleans. Most of them are never found. Rumor has it some of them end up in the river, their bodies making their slow, bloated way down to the Gulf. But Roman always imagines them swallowed up whole by the city itself, not a bone or shred of clothing or strand of hair left to prove they ever existed in the first place. 

He clicks on a video of the story posted by a local station. “I’ve served this city for twenty years,” a man being interviewed says. “And now I’m asking for your help.” He stands on the front porch of one of those shotgun camelbacks found all over the city, green filigreed brackets beneath the porch roof, scrolled lattice work, a limp Saints flag dangling from the awning. A middle-aged man, pale and worn, his eyes bloodshot, a little unfocused behind his glasses. And again, a feeling comes over Roman, a coolness, like a stream of air against the back of his neck. The strangeness of déjà vu. Because he’s seen this man, his pale face and nervous, twisting hands. He’s seen this man hunched over his table in the square. 

It comes to him then, all at once, in full-blown detail: the man—Ed Guidry, Camilla’s father, a caption at the bottom of the screen says—sliding her photo across the table. He kept darting looks all over the square, as if afraid someone might recognize him. It was very late, Roman remembers, a slow night, and he’d been about to pack up when the man came quick around a corner, his thin little arms crossed over his chest, almost running to Roman’s table. 

This was—what?—maybe a month ago? Before the girl disappeared. And whatever it was the man had asked him, Roman pretended to know the answer. He held that photo in his hand and made a show of it, closing his eyes, placing two fingers against his forehead as if deep in concentration. When he was finished, the man shoved a wad of twenties at him and slipped away, as quick as he came. 

The reporter in the video pops back on screen and says Ed Guidry is a member of the city council. No wonder the case is getting so much attention.

Roman closes his laptop, carries his beer out to the balcony. He sits on the plastic lawn chair with his feet propped on the railing, lights a clove cigarette, and watches the lit-up barges glide down the river. Beyond the rows of warehouses, he can just make them out, long and flat, their lights shimmering against the dark water so there’s two of them, like split-headed beasts from some forgotten fairy tale, the sea monsters of legends. A fog horn blows in the distance, somewhere far up the river, a long, low note, oddly mournful. I’m here, it seems to say, even though you can’t see me. 

Roman works the afternoon shift at Da Bar the next day, wiping down the damp wood counter, filling beer glasses. The place is dark, nearly windowless, and smells of sweat and mildew. Cracks run across the vinyl barstool cushions, foam exposed, and the wood floor buckles in several places. During the many lulls between pouring drinks, he flips through a paperback about Tarot readings, practices a few tricks with his deck. 

One of the TVs—tuned to the local news station—plays a story about Camilla Guidry. They’re airing the same clip he watched last night, but the girl’s father sounds different, his voice weaker, muffled. Roman knows it’s just the blown TV speakers, but the effect is unnerving. As he listens to the man’s tinny, far-off voice, he can’t help but picture him dimming out, his pale face fading feature by feature until he’s no more than blurred edges. A hazy outline of a head, the curve of a shoulder. A slow dissolve into a silver-white sky the color of dusk. 

If only Roman hadn’t recognized him. He sat up a long time last night, watching the dark shimmer of the river and playing it over in his mind—how the man slid that photo across the table, blinked up at him with watery pink eyes. For a while, that’s all he could remember. But finally, at some point near dawn, he recalled the man had said his daughter seemed “hollowed out.” Like she wasn’t really in there, he said. And then he’d leaned across the table, lowered his voice. “Truth is, I’m getting a little scared of her. It’s like she looks right through me to whatever’s on the other side.” 

He wanted to know what was wrong with her. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. And Roman, plucking up the photo and closing his eyes, had told him some bullshit about planes of existence, energy, auras. That’s all he can remember, that he’d spouted some nonsense straight off the back of a book from an occult shop. And, for whatever reason, the man had bought it.

A regular named Lyle sits at the bar, his head tipped back, watching the clip. “Only reason they care is cause of her daddy,” he says. 

“Come on, man,” Eddie says from down the bar. He’s another regular, an old black man who wears the same Saints jersey—McAllister, number 26, the letters cracked and peeling—every time he’s here. “Looks like he pretty tore up.” 

“Shit, Eddie,” Lyle says. “She probably just run off.” 

“What you mean?

“I mean,” Lyle says, “she probably got bored and run off somewhere.” His slicked-back hair, so black Roman suspects he dyes it, gleams even in the dull light of the bar, as if emitting its own light. “Got sick of daddy’s rules. Bet she’s shacking up with some guy.” He waves a hand at Roman. “Let me get one more, Roman,” he says. 

“Hey, Roman,” Eddie says. “What you think happened to that girl?”

Roman dog-ears a page in his book to mark his place and reaches for Lyle’s empty glass. 

“Yeah,” Lyle says. “You supposed to be psychic, right?” He snorts a laugh through his nose, fingers a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “Guess you know all about it, huh?”

Roman slides the full glass across the counter to him. “That’s not how it works, Lyle,” he says. “I told you that before.” 

“Well,” Lyle says, “that’s mighty convenient, ain’t it?” 

Roman clenches his jaw, fights the urge to snap at the man. Lyle’s been giving him shit for the past three years, as long as Roman has worked here. He’s used to a little scorn—drunks teasing him in Jackson Square, muttering in put-on accents, “Give me a quarter and I’ll tell you your fortune”—and Lyle’s jabs usually don’t bother him much. 

But the truth is he’s felt more and more like a fraud since Anna left him. Like a snake oil salesmen, working one of those traveling medicine shows. A Peg Leg Sam, hawking fortunes like cure-all elixirs. He tells himself selling fortunes is no worse than all those beauty creams and fad diets and other shit people sell. Certainly no worse than the makeup his mother pushed on the neighborhood ladies. Because, really, it boils down to the same thing: a sense, however tenuous and unreal, that they’re in control—of their appearance, their future. Their existence. 

But the thing he can’t shake now is that he’s maybe—just a little, the tiniest bit—responsible for the girl’s disappearance. He tells himself, as he told himself over and over last night, it’s not his fault. The man should have taken his daughter to a psychiatrist, not a fortune-teller. All Roman did was what any salesman would do—make the sale. But still, it bothers him. In the few hours he slept, he dreamed of her—those too-dark eyes and her little pale face, right there. Hovering over his bed, so close he could reach out and run his fingers through her dark hair. But when he tried, she faded back into shadow, and he woke up like that, his hand suspended there. Grabbing at the dark. 

“Hey,” Lyle says. “Let’s ask the cards where the girl is.” He nods at the Tarot deck Roman left by the register. 

The deck is brand new. Roman’s specialty is palmistry, and he can pull off a pretty convincing aura or crystal read too. But he’s never read Tarot cards, never taken the time to learn, never cared. Until now, because he plans to ask Anna to give him tips next time he sees her. He’ll pull the deck out right in front of her, shuffle through it, maybe spill the cards all over the table for good measure. A bumbling fool, in need of assistance. 

“I don’t think so, Lyle,” he says. 

“What,” Lyle says, “you want me to pay? I’ll pay.” He whips his wallet from his pocket and tosses it on the counter. “What’s the rate for card tricks? Ten bucks?” 

Roman gazes down at the wallet, black leather as dark and shiny as Lyle’s hair. He doesn’t know the cards well enough yet. He should say no, say he’s not a performing monkey. But he can’t turn down money. Force of habit, maybe, or instinct, a behavior learned so early its roots reach all the way down to the core of him, a place as black and bottomless as the girl’s eyes. Whatever it is, it won’t let him say no. “If they’re willing to pay,” his mother used to say, “you find something to sell.” 

“The rate?” Roman says, glancing up at Lyle. “For a professional? Thirty bucks. But I can knock five off.” He winks. “Special one-time discount.” 

Lyle cocks his head to one side, as if weighing the possibilities. Then waves a hand at Roman. “Go on,” he says. 

So Roman does. He splits the deck—the cards stiff and slippery, too new—and shuffles once, twice, taps the deck on the counter. He presses his palm over the deck, closes his eyes for a moment. It’s just for show, but the girl’s face comes to him anyway, those black eyes, the strained expression, like a clenched fist, a wire pulled taut, ready to snap. He deals a card from the stack and places it face down on the table. One-card spreads are best for yes or no questions, but he’s not ready for anything more complicated just yet. A couple of men have drifted over from the video poker machines. They lean against the bar beside Lyle, watching. 

“Can I get another round?” one of the men says.

“Shut the fuck up,” the other says. “You interrupting shit.” 

“I’ll be right with you.” Sweat pricks the back of Roman’s neck, his scalp. He has never been nervous during readings, not even at the beginning, when he first started. It’s all about confidence, he told Anna once. You look like you know what you’re doing, and people buy it. “Buy what?” Anna asked. They sat side-by-side on the prim little couch in her living room, sandalwood candles burning on her mantle. “Whatever you’re selling,” Roman said. She looked over at him, her eyes a swampy green in the low light. “And what are you selling me?” He can’t remember now what he’d answered. All he recalls is the baby soft skin at the nape of her neck, the overwhelming scent of sandalwood, soapy sweet. 

He could swear his hands tremble—just barely, the faintest flutter—as he flips the card over. He recognizes it, a man hanging by one ankle from a tree, both hands tied behind his back. “The hanged man,” he says, pressing a fingertip against the man’s smooth, unformed face. He looks more like he’s levitating than hanging, his free leg bent behind the other in a half lotus position. 

“The hell does that mean?” Lyle says.

Roman stares down at the card, tries to remember what he read. Something about a crossroads and waiting, maybe, but the answer always depends on the question. He pauses, looks up at Lyle, at the men beside him, at Eddie down the bar. All of them gazing at him, waiting for some big reveal. As if the answer is really there, in a card from a deck he bought at Divinity, an occult shop in the Quarter run by a middle-aged woman with three yippy little dogs and a Cajun accent so thick he almost couldn’t understand her. “You going read these for y’all customers?” she asked. “These cards,” she hovered her hand over the deck, wiggled her fingers, bright nail polish flashing, “they not for games.”

And yet, here he is, playing games with Lyle. Proving he knows what he’s doing when he doesn’t know a goddamn thing. But he has to say something, has to earn that thirty bucks, so he closes his eyes, tries to picture the hanged man’s page in the book, the list of meanings. “Suspension,” he says, as soon as it pops in his head. “The hanged man is suspended between worlds.” 

“What worlds?” Eddie says. He’s staring hard down at the card, his voice low, hushed. As if he’s afraid. 

“Our world and the spirit world,” Roman says, warming to it now, as he always does when his customers are like Eddie, hanging on his every word. “Living and dead.” 

“So she’s a zombie?” Lyle tips his stool back and laughs, nudging one of the men with his elbow. “We got a zombie on the loose,” he says. “Get y’all guns ready.” 

But Roman barely hears him because suddenly his scalp tingles, a pricking along the nape of his neck to the crown of his head. Like static electricity, as if someone has rubbed a balloon over his hair. He plucks the card from the counter and holds it up to his eyes, as if the hanged man might hover right off the glossy surface. As if, for the first time, he might actually experience something—divination or premonition or clairvoyance or any of the phenomena he so often fakes. He squints at the card, then lets his eyes glaze over. Waits for a moment. But nothing happens. 

“So if she ain’t dead,” Eddie says, “what’s she doing?”

“Waiting,” Roman says, because it’s the only thing he can think of.

“Waiting for what?” 

But Roman shakes his head. “That’s all I got.” For once, it’s the truth. 

Later, he carries his laptop out to his balcony and reads about the hanged man on a few different sites. They all say the same thing—the card represents suspension, waiting. The Hanged Man is a willing victim, one site says, someone who has chosen the path of sacrifice to accomplish a higher goal. He’s scrolling down the page to read more when a sudden movement, the flicker of a shadow across a streetlamp, catches his eye. He sits up, gazes through the bars of the iron railing at the street below. It’s dark, lit here and there by only a few weak streetlamps, all the front stoops and porches and gates blended together in one long spill of shadow. And then, as Roman watches, a shadow darker than the rest, blacker than the oily black of the river, darts across the brick front of a warehouse across the street. So fast, he might have imagined it. 

He closes his laptop, moves up close to the railing. Clutching it with both hands, he stares hard into the darkness, waiting for the shadow to reappear. And then, the streetlamp just beneath his balcony flickers—once, twice—and standing there, beneath its dull yellow light, is a slender, dark figure. Upturned face, small and round, pitted eyes, hands clenched together right over her heart. The girl, in the exact same posture as her photo. 

His pulse beats hard in his ears, a hot, relentless pounding. “Hey,” he says, and he can barely hear his own voice. “Hey!” Louder now; down the street, a neighbor’s dog barks. But still, the girl doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. Just clutches her hands together and gazes up at him, as flat and dimensionless as her photo. He closes his eyes, as he has seen Anna do, presses his fingers to his temples, and when he looks again, the girl is gone. 

“It was her,” he tells Anna the next night. “I know it was her.” 

Anna stares up at him—one of her sad, silent stares, as if she’s contemplating profound truths she’d rather not know. “Okay, Roman,” she says. “But why?”

“What do you mean?” They stand together beside the iron gate in Jackson Square, Anna’s folded-up table propped against the bars. All around them the night psychics set up shop, the sky turning purple with dusk. 

“I mean,” Anna says, drawing out the words, as if he’s an idiot, “why you? Why would she show herself to you? What does she want?”

“I don’t know. How the hell would I know?” He has to make her understand, has to convince her. He hardly slept last night after the girl vanished. He tried, forced himself to go back inside, to stretch out on his couch. But he just lay there, staring up at the dark, trying to make sense of what he’d seen. He decided it must have been a vision. But he’d always imagined visions as hazy, shimmering, half-lit as dreams. Not like the girl, in so much detail, just standing down there under the streetlamp. Waiting, just like the card told him. Waiting for him to see her. “I did see her,” he says to Anna. “I did.” 

“Then you should tell the police.” 

“The police?” 

“A child goes missing, you see her, you tell the police, Roman.” 

“But it wasn’t her,” he says. “I mean, it wasn’t the real her. It was a vision of her. I know the difference.” He doesn’t, though, and technically it could’ve been the real Camilla he saw. He considered this possibility last night as he lay sleepless on his couch. Thought it over and dismissed it within a matter of moments because what were the chances the girl would end up right in front of his balcony? What were the chances that he—of all the thousands of people in the city—would be the one to spot her? 

“Even so,” Anna says. “You should tell them. Or at least call her father. The man’s been on news every night asking for information.” 

But Roman doesn’t want to think about her father—his bloodshot eyes and haggard face, the utter despair that wafted off him like a smell. No way in hell is he going to contact the man unless he knows for sure what he saw. 

“You ever tell the police about your visions?” he says. 

She throws her bag over her shoulder, stoops to grab her table, all her long, dark hair falling over her face. “Yes,” she says. “And don’t expect them to pay you. That’s not how it works.” Then, tucking her table under her arm, she turns to go. 

“Hey,” Roman says. “What do you know about the hanged man?” 

She stops, glances back at him. “You’re doing Tarot now too?”

“Maybe.” 

“Tarot is ancient,” she says. “You shouldn’t be messing around with it, Roman.” She shifts her bag from one shoulder to the other. He fights the urge to take it from her, to offer to help. She would just tell him no. 

“I’m not messing around,” he says. “I swear.” 

She looks at him for a moment, then shakes her head. “If you’re seeing the hanged man,” she says, “it’s probably a sign you need to let go of something.” And then she turns, rounds the corner of the gate, and is gone. 

When customers turn up that night, he has trouble focusing. One woman even asks him what’s wrong. An older lady with a drawling Southern accent, face heavily made-up. “You okay, honey?” she says, right in the middle of a palm reading, and he realizes he’s been silent for several seconds, holding her palm limply in his hand, staring over her shoulder at every dark-haired girl who passes on the street. “Sorry,” he says, “I thought I saw something.” 

“What?” 

But he just shrugs. If only he knew.

He packs up early that night, even though it’s a Saturday, and the square is crowded with potential customers. He stashes his table and his bag in his apartment, grabs a flashlight, and heads outside. He starts with the warehouse across the street, shining his light along the dirty bricks. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, exactly—evidence of some kind. A strand of curly black hair, a scrap of her clothing. A small footprint. Anything to prove she was or wasn’t there. That she was the girl herself, in the flesh, or a vision of some kind, an actual clairvoyant experience. 

He moves on, searches the narrow alleyway between two shotgun houses, sweeps his beam along the broken concrete and through the weeds. Tiny moths flutter up, like pixie dust glittering in the light. A rustle behind him makes him turn quick on his heels in time to spot a cat slink under the porch. He crouches, shines his light there, as if the girl might be flat on her belly in the hard-packed dirt, hiding with a pack of feral cats. Her eyes, caught in the beam, sucking up the light instead of reflecting it back. 

Mosquitos whine in his ears, and he’s sweating now, the back of his neck sticky. Something big and winged buzzes over his head, and he jerks up, brushes himself off. Still, he goes on. He walks another block or two down the street, searching the sidewalk, the alleyways, the empty front stoops. Near Da Bar, he stops, waves at a couple of men gathered out front. Eddie is among them, wearing his Saints jersey and smoking a cigar. 

“Hey, Roman,” he calls to him. “Come have a drink. What you doing with that flashlight?” 

For a second, Roman considers telling him about his vision. Sipping a beer on Da Bar’s stoop, describing to Eddie what he saw. Unlike Anna, Eddie would believe it. Eddie would buy every word that comes out of his mouth. He’d pay too, if Roman asked—for card tricks, a palm reading, maybe even a gris-gris bag or two, and his hand moves to his side, where his bag would be, already reaching for something to sell. He stops when he realizes there’s nothing there, his hand grabbing at air. 

And all at once, he’s struck with a memory, so old it’s curled up around the edges like a brittle photograph—his mother, sitting with a friend on the plaid couch in their cramped living room. The friend, a woman who lived down the street, was upset about something—crying, he remembers—and his mother tried to soothe her in her low, gentle voice, the one she used on him when he was sick. Roman, who must have been around seven or eight at the time, sprawled on the floor at their feet, playing with one of his toys. His mother reached her hand down, right beside him, and fumbled around on the floor. 

“What are you looking for?” the friend said. 

His mother’s hand froze against the carpet. She peered down at Charlie for a second, then swept her hand over to him, rumpled his hair. “Charlie dropped one of his toys,” she said. But Charlie hadn’t, and he knew right off that she’d been reaching for the case of cosmetics she would set at her feet on house calls or during sales parties. He knew right off she was reaching for something to sell to the friend crying on her couch. 

Roman stares down at his empty hand, something skittering around in his gut, a feeling like—what? Shame? And then he raises his arm and waves at Eddie and turns back down the street. 

When he reaches his apartment, he stops beneath the streetlamp where the girl stood the night before. He tucks the flashlight under his arm and clutches his hands together over his heart, just as she did, and stares up at his empty balcony. He imagines himself there, a tensed figure, poised at the railing even long after she has vanished. Moonlight throwing him half in shadow, his face dark and featureless, a solid black silhouette. Suspended there, as still as a photo, a painting. Staring long and hard into the shadows, as if waiting for something, anything, to creep its way out from the dark. 

The post There Is More Than One Way to Read Tarot in the French Quarter appeared first on Electric Literature.

My son wanted to run around the departure lounge before we got on the plane, and it wasn’t like I could say, Now we must sit in our seats and wait and wait. He was too little for that. So I followed him as he ran around, making sure he didn’t cause trouble. We were on our way to visit his grandparents, who lived so far away we could only get there by plane. Or cargo ship. But I could not imagine chasing him around a cargo ship for several days as we crossed the ocean. And what if it sank? Then we would be in a lifeboat. Maybe even one of those round or hexagonal ones that auto-inflate during an emergency. How long would we sit in our lifeboat, bobbing on the waves, awaiting rescue? What if rescue never came? How long before my son grew restless? Started crying? At first, he might enjoy the strange new experience, even though everyone else in the boat was clearly not enjoying it. Children are remarkably adaptable (or so I’ve heard said, many times, in those exact words). But what if the man sitting next to us became hostile when my son started crying? Would I have to fight him? Would I know how to fight a man in an inflatable lifeboat? And who would look after my son while I was fighting? Parenting does not come with a manual. Friends give you parenting books, but you don’t read them. You refer to them. But only when something bad has already happened. Would there be a chapter covering emergency situations in cramped lifeboats? What if there was a cat in the lifeboat and my son wanted to pet the cat but the cat belonged to the hostile man? Perhaps we could use the cat as a way of avoiding fighting, of smoothing things over. But what if the cat was vicious and scratched my son? Then what? And of course any number of things could happen. We could starve to death. Military drones might come along and bomb us. A pod of adolescent orcas could attempt to overturn our craft. They would have a hard time, though, if it was one of those round ones. But orcas are intelligent. They problem-solve and work together to kill seals. One of them would come up with the idea of biting the craft in order to deflate it, and the rest would immediately see the merit in this. They would all begin to bite the craft until we were pitched into open water. But perhaps some dolphins would be standing by to save us from the orcas, which are pretty much just giant black-and-white dolphins. Dolphins probably don’t think much of orcas. For them orcas are probably like huge dumb trolls. For the orcas the dolphins are like elves. Confusingly nimble, supercilious, kind of mean. The dolphins probably delight in making them feel stupid. So they would no doubt step in and save us from the orcas and ferry us to an uninhabited isle. They would know where one was the same way you know where lakes are. I suppose the cat would not do well in this scenario. Even if a dolphin tried to help the cat, the cat would panic and end up with its claws out. You can’t blame the cat, though. That’s just how they’re wired. Anyway, things probably wouldn’t get that far. Dolphins almost never interact with cats, and so a cat would probably look pretty alarming to them. A dolphin would be like, No, I’m not going anywhere near that fucking thing. Perhaps the hostile man could stuff it into a waterproof sack and do his best to make sure it didn’t suffocate while a dolphin zoomed them to safety. That’s about the only way I can see the cat getting out of there. My son would probably be all right, though. The dolphins would see he was little more than a baby. He would be their top priority—pretty much the opposite situation as the cat. They would make sure he got to the uninhabited isle. Hopefully he wouldn’t be the only one to make it, though. That would suck. As much as they might want to, the dolphins wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of the water and prepare meals for him until he was old enough to take care of himself. Then again, maybe the isle would have some kind of helpful animal living on it. Calm, thoughtful, nurturing monkeys. Or maybe a lost species of humanoid which had managed to evolve there without us knowing about it, perhaps because the dolphins had misdirected our ships, making sure we never landed there and massacred them. These humanoids would be small, because that’s what happens when your species evolves in isolation on an island. It’s called insular dwarfism. Islands have limited resources, so you end up getting smaller over time. Unless you’re small to begin with, like rats, and then you end up getting larger. Which is exactly what happened on that island in Indonesia where homo floresiensis lived for 700,000 years. So my son might find himself on an island with small humanoids who hunt giant rodents or maybe even saddle them up and ride them around. The rodents would be bigger than the cat, if the cat made it ashore. Who knows? Maybe the hostile man, just before he was torn apart by orcas, managed to toss it onto a piece of flotsam. The humanoids wouldn’t know what to make of it. My son, however, would pick it up, or try to, which would require a measure of patience on the cat’s part, and the humanoids would be amazed. So my son would live on the island with the cat and the humanoids, learning their customs and language. Why wouldn’t they have a language? As he grew, feasting on giant rats, horrifying insects, and the fruit that grew all over the island, he would eventually tower over everyone else even though he wouldn’t be all that tall by homo sapiens standards. How would the diminutive islanders react to this? With aplomb? Not if they’re anything like us! So my son would have to deal with the height issue as he got older, but by then he would know these people well and hopefully be able to come up with something. He wouldn’t remember me or the rest of us, so it would be tough to explain, but I have confidence in him. He is an intelligent toddler so why wouldn’t he be an intelligent adolescent—which is when the height thing would really start to become an issue. Hopefully the humanoids won’t be as fractious as us. If dolphins or the equivalent of dolphins in space (space dolphins) brought us a strange being that had been shipwrecked out there, saving its life, and it grew up among us here on Earth and had some weird physical characteristics but otherwise behaved like us, you can be sure that two schools of thought would emerge. Some of us would be all right with him as long as he was all right with us, while others would want to kill the thing. It would probably be a little more complicated than that, but that’s pretty much how it would break down. Hopefully most of the humanoids aren’t of the second mindset. I bet they’re pretty chill, though. They don’t have to work a hundred hours a week. They don’t have social media or guns. They don’t have to deal with robots calling them on the phone and instructing them to please stand by. They never have to peer into a camera while a truculent police officer photographs their retinas. Not on the island. Giant rats would be the worst of it. But I am getting ahead of myself! We are still in the airport departure lounge. My son is still just a toddler. I’m tagging along behind him, making sure he doesn’t cause trouble. And just as they announce our flight is boarding and families with small children have priority—well, after the active duty service members; we all have to stand there and clap for the active duty service members, toddlers included—he runs up to one of those one-way doors you only find in airports, funhouses, and the International Space Station. It opens. Before I can stop him he barrels through, and the door swishes shut behind him. Now he is trapped in the airlock between the two doors. If I can just get over there before he . . . but no, he’s already done it. He barrels through the second door. He is outta here. If I go after him, I will miss my plane. If I don’t go after him, I will lose my son. Checkmate! And exactly the kind of conundrum you would never have to deal with on that magical, rat-trodden isle.

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Pathetic, really, how late in life he had come into his beauty. It didn’t even have the decency to be the normal kind of beauty—no, his was the beauty of a svelte but surprisingly strong former prisoner of a gulag, rangy and bearded, quiet about the before parts of his life but with bright eyes that brightened more when he listened to you, and you thought: oh. It wasn’t like he turned heads on the street, not even in this little ski town, yet in line for a bakery as it opened, or in the unpopular sections of a bookstore, the right kind of person would stop, notice him, and scrape their tongue against their top teeth. The smell of their hair would get stronger and Matt would know that if he opened his mouth they’d think the word love, or at least sex. 

He had nothing against inviting people back to his place, but much more often he found himself invited. He saw the insides of all sorts of apartments and cabins. Often, trying to get back to town in the morning to shower before work, he got turned around between the windbald mountains. This meant he got to the shop at wildly inconsistent times depending on where his date lived or was staying. Vlad of course would already be in the back, listening to the Beach Boys and complaining to himself in Bulgarian. 

Matt worked quietly in the stale shopfront, coaxing the old coffee machine under the gaze of the mounts on the walls, antelope and elk. When he shouldered through the workshop door, steaming mug out in self defense, Vlad switched to complaints in English. 

“You ass bastard,” said Vlad. After his coffee, he calmed and returned to work. 

Currently, Vlad’s professional focus was hooves. An animal’s true essence, he posited, was in its relationship to the ground. This morning, experiments with laces and eyelets crowded his workbench—the floor beneath was piled with failed prototypes incorporating velcro, or inner layers of stocking, or just glue. The job ad had been for an amanuensis. During the interview, conducted on Facebook Messenger, Vlad had asked all sorts of questions about sewing, the treatment of hides, and other such taxidermic knowledge Matt did not have, but in practice the job was making coffee, manning the forlorn front desk, and talking to Vlad. The talking was the hardest part. Vlad took his work seriously, especially his current project, and it was an art to know when he needed building up and when he was due for a cold dose of reality. 

“So,” said Vlad. “Young Flower.” 

Vlad called him Young Flower. Matt was 30. 

“You must please tell me. I am dying to know. Have you always had such girlish ankles? Or did you earn them in the acrobatics gymnasium?”

“Oh, these?” Matt joked. Jokes were, generally, safe. “These are my mother’s.”

“God, she must be an elegant woman!”

“Yeah, well, keep your eyes to yourself or I’ll start charging.”

Vlad laughed hard. Then his eyes went flat and in disgust he threw down his tools. 

“I must stop thinking in clothes!” he exclaimed. “A bull wears no clothes. A bull is. I must think: skin. I must have new skin.”

Partly, Matt thought, the tragedy of Vlad was that he’d been born a few decades too early. These days, if you wanted a new kind of skin there were all sorts of resources and communities online. Agreed-upon, empowering taxonomies. You picked the animal you wanted to be, added the word kin to its name, and you were reborn. Matt wasn’t sure whether Vlad was aware of the existence of furries. He wasn’t about to tell him. Though a humble Oregon taxidermist, Vlad was a tortured genius type. If he found out other people were already doing what he was trying to do—even with much less commitment—it would go one of two ways. Either he’d laugh and laugh at the synthetic fur and moé optimism,  or he’d go quietly up to his apartment above the shop and blow his brains out.

That night, Matt had dinner with a cosmetologist. She wore black latex gloves when she cut hair. It was part of the uniform. She had a throatpiece of an open pair of scissors. When it was Matt’s turn to talk about work he talked about Vlad, though not the project, whatever the project was. He listened to Vlad talk about it all day but wouldn’t know where to begin describing it. Hooves? New skin?

“Vlad’s really into animals,” Matt told her. “I’ve been kind of worried about him.” Which was the truth. 

“Hmm. Does he have any friends?” asked the cosmetologist from the kitchen, grabbing them beers. Matt lay naked in her bed, which was also more or less in the kitchen. 

“Sort of.” 

One day after closing, Vlad had said, “Come, Young Flower! We go out.” In his suspensionless pickup they’d driven up the mountain to a campground filled with men. On the way, Vlad had explained how men have to work hard to retain friendships, especially as they get older. Old men who are alone die fast. 

“And what,” asked the cosmetologist, “women get assigned magic besties?” 

“I asked about that. Vlad’s theory is that women have spent millennia living under the overwhelming, institutionalized hatred of men. To survive, they’ve developed methods of underground friendmaking, the creation of alliances beneath and within a hostile power. Nowadays, with things sort of equalizing power-wise, men are discovering they don’t know such methods. They’ve never needed to develop them.”

The cosmetologist considered. “I’ll have to get back to you on whether I’m offended by that.” 

In any case, Vlad, the men, and by extension Matt had spent the evening doing nothing at all. Some played horseshoes at first, but eventually all settled around the fire in silence, adding wood until it was right to stop adding it, and the hoop of their faces dimmed like cave paintings in the sputter of a people’s last dying torch. 

“Oh and get this,” Matt told the cosmetologist. “When they all went home, they didn’t say goodbye. They said: Good luck with the night.” 

“Weird,” she said. “Norway, right?”

“Bulgaria. It’s between three seas.”

“Oh, I was going to say something about long, dark winters. No accent on you, though.”

“I’m from California.”

“Oof. Money problems?”

She meant the reason for his being in town. Middle of nowhere. At first he had lied about why, but pretty quickly it turned out he couldn’t do it right, not about Ingrid. So he’d thought out a pared-down version for dates.

“Grief reasons,” he said. “Death in the family and I came up here because I couldn’t stand it. Staying down there, I mean.” 

“Sounds bad,” said the cosmetologist. For a second she was stiff with discomfort but then she loosened and set her beer on the bedside table, which was her microwave. She put the sole of one bare foot against Matt’s chest. “Hi,” she said. 

Vlad hit the books. This was the first time Matt had known him to conduct research, but one day bringing a refill he found him braced over a double-page diagram of a bull cut in half, its insides trussed, color-coded, and labeled. He turned the page. The next spread was dedicated to the matador, similarly labeled though his insides were not on display. The red cape was called the muleta. The costume was called traje de luces. Suit of lights. Without turning, Vlad spoke: “I think, Young Flower, I am arriving at some kind of idea.”

Matt paused. The few times Vlad had made a pronouncement like this, Matt had come in the next morning to find the taxidermist mute with misery because, once again, the latest unnamable idea had failed unnamably. He refused to say what had happened those nights—the days after hung hostile and burnt and quiet. Now, not for the first time, Matt wondered whether all this was a little too strange for him. The little shop in the woods, and inside a little man attempting something. He liked Vlad, he did. Criminal paycheck aside he liked the job, its nothingness and total disconnect from what he’d been doing before. But maybe it was time he found a real job at the resort like everyone else, or just moved farther north. 

Before closing for the day, Vlad asked Matt to check on the crate in the utility closet. It was there like always, unpried, compact but long enough to accommodate the horns. Vlad had said that, before opening it, he wanted to be sure. That’s how he put it. Be sure. 

“Looks fine,” Matt reported. 

“Thank you, Young Flower. Now, go clean yourself up! You cannot appear before her so bedraggled!” Matt had told Vlad a little about his dates. 

Now the taxidermist looked him in the eye. “Good luck with the night,” he said. 

In fact, Matt did not have a date that night. Instead he took a walk. As he paused to browse the one-dollar carts outside the used bookstore, a woman pulled up like a hunting hound. She breathed loudly out her nose and looked Matt right in the eyes. “You were an emo kid,” she announced. “I can tell.”

He was wearing a band t-shirt. “Oh yeah?” he asked. 

“They were my Myspace page song circa 2007.” 

“Haha. I can just see your scene bangs and studded belt.”

“Oh, I still have that belt,” she said. “Wanna see?”

He guessed it had been a while for her because he got winded trying to keep up walking to her place. Downtown was rental shops and specialty gear stores beneath apartments and Airbnbs. All exploded with skiers in the winter, though he’d only been here long enough to catch the tail end of the previous season. 

The woman said she worked for the resort as a ski lift technician. She was pretty but had strangely dated hair—shiny brown ringlets framing a noble forehead. She probably wouldn’t appreciate him calling her forehead noble, but that’s what it brought to mind for him: feudalism. Sorting her keyring before the door of her third-story walkup, her wrists trembled. 

“I was a punk kid by the way,” Matt told her. “Not an emo kid.”

“Same difference.”

“No way!” he protested. 

She turned the knob. The door opened and water gushed out. It sheeted over their shoes and down the steps, the stairwell echoing like a grotto at low tide.

“Oh, fuck you,” hissed the ski lift technician. “Oh, god damn you.” 

While she rushed downstairs to get the super to shut off the main, Matt ran around her unfamiliar studio picking up objects that seemed both important and susceptible to water damage. A lot of things fell into both categories. The water was cold and she was gone a long time. It was not fun. 

The super turned out to be supers—plural. Two sisters, maybe forties, maybe Swiss. They gave him a synchronized once-over. “With any luck he is a plumber,” one sang. Her accent made it sound like she was singing. 

“Haha,” he said. 

The sisters threw down towels, threw on soup, and hung the soaked area rug from the balcony rail. They made Matt lug up a sump from the basement while the ski lift technician let it all happen around her, looking embarrassed though Matt couldn’t tell in what direction. Then she began to cry. The sisters sat with her. 

“Her mother recently died,” one sister explained, rubbing the ski lift technician’s back. 

“My niece died last year,” Matt offered. 

Both sisters gave him a look that informed him this had been the wrong thing to say, selfish and irrelevant, so he excused himself. He was disappointed, which was fine. The hot drink feeling of want from a stranger was still unpredictable to him. He was learning how many different ways that feeling could go over the course of a night. 

The technician caught up with him on the landing. “Ugh,” she said, “I’m so sorry. Home improvement shit like this is so unsexy to me. But you seem really cool. Raincheck?”

He said, “Sure.” 

A storm came up from the low altitudes overnight. Matt made his morning drive through pondgreen air, black pines thrashing above the old moraines. He was early; the front of the shop stood dark. The door though was unlocked, and when the bell sounded Vlad called out to him from the workshop. 

“Young Flower. Matthew, my friend.” 

A quaver to his voice. 

“You okay, Vlad?”

“I am wonderful. But don’t come in. Before coming in, please pause.” 

“Pause and do what?”

“Just pause.”

“I’m coming in.”

Vlad sat at his workbench, chest heaving, his skin candy red and his clothes inky with sweat. Coming around, Matt saw, hitched up on the stool’s rest bar, one scuffed cowboy boot and one polished hoof. The fur above the hoof curled and shone like a little boy’s tousled crown. 

“Wow, Vlad. It looks real.”

“It is real,” Vlad gasped. “Touch it, Young Flower.”

Matt touched it. It was real. The heavy, split keratin dollop of the hoof. The angle of the pastern joint, a bull’s soundness, everything Vlad had spoken of. Lifting the fur there was no transition line, no place of change from his flesh to its. Blood pumped across and within. The hoof reeked. 

“First,” Vlad said, “coffee.”

Once Matt got him settled, Vlad admonished him through the mugsteam. “Do not be so surprised, Young Flower. I have been telling you this whole time. You did not believe, but it is the law of the universe. If for long enough nothing happens, something will happen. Empathy.”

“Entropy.” 

“Well. In addition, I wished for it very hard.” 

“You wished for it?”

“Yes. It required finding a place of agony. Within, I mean. This will be a problem for us, as I cannot remember how I reached that place. But that is for the future. For now my happiness is enormous.”

The rest of the day, Vlad lunged about heroically, humming to himself. He took stretches of hide and draped them over a pommel horse, then spread them on the floor and lay on top, arms crossed like the undead soon to rise. Meanwhile, his new hoof was real. No way around it. The hoof leg was longer than his human leg, and when he walked he bobbed up on it, then swung back down. Shuffle, click. 

Matt sat at the workbench, nauseated. He wondered who he could call. As if he didn’t know. He’d never deleted his brother’s texts from his phone. Because Cooper wasn’t texting him anymore, the vitriol his brother sent after Matt disappeared had slid farther and farther down the screen, buried by texts from dates until Matt just didn’t see it anymore. A few weeks ago, Matt had met a law school hopeful for pasta at a pizza place. She’d talked about acceptance statistics the whole dinner and it had made Matt think of Coop for the first time in a while. His brother the veterinarian. Statistically, vet school was harder to get into than law school or even medical school. The only grad programs with nastier rejection rates were poetry programs, for whatever fucking reason. 

The law school hopeful had been abuzz—not in a good way—with waiting for her news, due any day now. She kept kicking the toe of Matt’s boot under the table with the toe of hers. Right when he became sure it was intentional she sort of shuddered, stood, and, saying she didn’t feel so good, walked out the restaurant door and across its nightblack window to where she’d parked. 

Vlad ordered in two huge blocks of polyurethane that took up most of the workshop. He spent three days carving mannequins out of them, one in his shape and one in the shape of a bull, starting with the chainsaw then switching to a kind of garrote, his face clamped between the huge, trapezoidal filters of an industrial respirator. He insisted Matt wear one too. Before calling it quits each day they vacuumed up the foam dust, then hit each other with the leaf blower. It made Vlad’s hair fly up and he laughed patting it down. “You rascal,” he said. “Good luck with the night.”

A week passed. The next Monday, Matt came in to find Vlad on the floor, gulping air, his body so hot the room had been made hot. Protruding from both legs of Vlad’s cargo shorts were two identical bull’s hooves. 

Matt crouched over him, touched Vlad’s clammy forehead. A substance had pooled beneath. It smelled sweet. 

“Jesus, Vlad.” 

“I am very good,” Vlad said, then coughed for six minutes straight.

Matt helped him up to his apartment, which had thin, public school carpet but big windows full of pine fronds. Vlad had tidied since the last time Matt had been up here, a couple months ago to take out an old window AC unit. New books had been artfully arranged on the coffee table. While Vlad clopped into the kitchen for water, Matt opened An Illustrated History of Bullfighting to an impressionist painting of the moment of the kill: the bright, dartlike flags drooping from the haunch of the downed beast, the blood down it in melodramatic pink. In the middle ground, an attendant handed the fighter his weapon. 

The feeling Matt got from this was bad. 

“Hey Vlad?” he called. “Why a bull in the first place?” 

Vlad emerged from the kitchen with, instead of water, a bottle of red and the stems of two glasses twined between his chemicalstained fingers. He and Matt sat at his small dining table.

“Hmm,” said Vlad, pouring. “Well, it is—well, bulls, they are single-minded. Yes? They are strong. A force. Their horns, like a crown, no? They are kings.” 

“Except they’re chattel.”

“Yes, Young Flower!” Vlad exclaimed. “You are right, just so. What I say is too simple. A bull is king of nothing. He is in a pen. He is bred and then he is knocked on the head with a hammer. Do you know how much blood spills from the freshly slit throat of a stunned bull?”

“I guess not.” 

“Magnitudes, Young Flower. Magnitudes.”

If Vlad had earned a second hoof, it meant he’d found his place of agony again. Matt wondered how he was doing it. Hurting himself maybe, physically or otherwise, then using the pain to dive down into some well or through some eye, past some membrane. Real magic probably worked like that. Stepping past a threshold, then fighting your way back with whatever you’d managed to plunder. 

Vlad was beaming. He topped off both glasses. “What I am saying is the bull, even more than an animal, is a symbol. He is a dumb, sad brute and yet we see in this creature dignity? Strength? A bull has no strength. In no contest does the bull prevail. If it kills the fighter, all it earns is the next. And yet. We do see these things. Strength. Through the animal’s own oblivion, we see them.” 

The apartment’s windows were old and set badly in their frames. Matt could hear the tree branches telling on each other. He got the bad feeling again. 

Vlad sat back. “Ah, Young Flower. I want to be a bull because they are cool. That is all. And you? What do you think is cool?”

“Uh. Birds? Like, hawks?” 

Vlad rolled his eyes. “Birds. Of course. You Americans. Hey, Young Flower? Watch this.” 

Out in the empty parking lot, Vlad set his hooves into a sprinter’s starting position then erupted across the gravel, ungainly at first but then finding his rhythm and picking up so much speed Matt’s uncanny valley instinct pinged. When Vlad tried to turn at the lot’s end he couldn’t overcome his own momentum and, arms wheeling, he careened into the brush. After a second, his face poked back out like one of Peter Pan’s lost boys, except old. 

The ski lift technician with the flooded apartment texted, asking for a re-do date. She suggested hiking. Matt remembered her crying over the sound of the sump pump, almost said no, then said yes. The afternoon of, she didn’t take him to any sort of trail but to the autumnbare slopes of the resort itself. There had been fearful talk in town that it wouldn’t snow at all the coming season. Scrabbling after her under the lonely lift lines, Matt theorized how badly being at her place of employment killed the mood. The answer didn’t matter. Matt didn’t go on dates for the mood. 

She seemed anxious again. They talked while resting on a bluff, periodically cupped and uncupped by giant hands of mist. She talked about her job, how she liked the way it was high skill but low stakes. He defined the word amanuensis for her. 

“Wow. Are you an artist too?” she asked. 

“Not really. In a previous life I was an actor.” 

“No lie?” 

Immediately Matt wished he had lied. He usually did about the acting. But he was rooting for the technician, had been trying to encourage her, offer up something. By mistake he’d offered a true thing he did not want to talk about. 

Meanwhile the technician waited. 

He’d been born and raised in an unfamous part of LA’s sprawl, Claremont if she was interested. Mortifyingly, he fell in love with the movies. He insisted and whined and his parents had paid for theater magnet school, but neither of them were in the business so after that he’d had to get lucky. And he did. From an open call he was cast as Lancelot in an overly ambitious but visually stunning adaptation of The Once and Future King, which led to a lead role in a gender-swapped, eighties junkie neo-horror version of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Indie darling, critically acclaimed. He got an agent. He was 19. He appeared in a handful of decent projects out of respected studios and was breaking into second- and third-round auditions for bigger things from hot directors. He was good. 

And then 10 years passed. If he’d had a moment it was gone. His agent’s words. The few casting directors he did get in with said they were moving in a different direction, or that he was talented but, unfortunately, not handsome enough.

“Uh, you’re pretty handsome,” the ski lift technician said. “At least I think so.” 

“Thanks. But there’s handsome and there’s movie handsome. And I’m more handsome now than I was then.” 

Joshing him for vanity, she looked him up on her phone. Press tour shots and film GIFs. 

“Oh dang,” she said. “You are more handsome.” Here she frowned, confused. “But wouldn’t that mean you’d have better luck now? Getting hired? Cast?” 

He shrugged. 

“Did you get tired of trying? Is that why you’re up here? Or did something big break your heart?” 

Matt looked at her anew. “You’re good,” he admitted. 

She grinned. “Let me show you something.” 

They hiked up to where one of the lifts terminated. No one around. With a small red lever in a locked metal cabinet she fired it up. The cables shrieked, the hanging chairs began to move. They got on one together and descended along the angle of the mountain. With no snow, the lift supports and resort outbuildings looked furtive, like the surface protrusions of a vast, secret underground facility. 

The ski lift technician touched his hand, but did not lean in. “Say it up here,” she told him, “if you can’t on the ground. The wind takes your words away, so it’s like you didn’t say them at all. Try it! I’ve banished tons of demons like this.” 

Matt swallowed. 

“Here, I’ll go first.” She cupped her hands around her mouth. He expected her to say something about her mom’s death but instead she shouted: “Margrith and Julia are nice but they’re killing me on rent! They’re bleeding me dry and I hate them!” 

“There,” she said. “Now you.”

“It wasn’t even related to acting,” Matt said.

“That’s okay,” said the technician.

Matt looked down, trying to gauge the distance to the earth below. He swallowed so he could shout.

“My niece died!” he shouted. “Leukemia! I was there for the whole thing! I went with her and my brother and his wife to appointments and surgeries! But it just kept getting worse! She had a downward trend! My brother is a vet and it killed him to be so close to being able to understand and help professionally but not being able to! And she died!” Beside him the technician took her hands off the safety bar and pressed them to her legs. “And suddenly there was LA! And the idea of wading into it all again was so stupid I left! I had to! I left before Ingrid’s funeral and didn’t tell anyone! It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done but it was like I couldn’t see straight! My brother called and texted and I never answered! My phone felt like a bomb until he stopped! Now I’m here!” 

He hated how the volume of his voice gave every sentence an exclamation point. The technician had lied: the wind hadn’t taken a single one of his words away. The lift brought them back to earth and in the vacant parking lot he suggested coffee at his place. She said maybe not. That night she texted to apologize. I have pretty severe issues with abandonment, she wrote. I get what you went through was hard, but I need to protect myself from people not strong enough to, you know, be there. Good luck with everything.

Amazing that you think you understand a single thing about me, he texted back. 

After that, Matt went two weeks, then three, without going on another date. This wasn’t good or bad. Well at first it felt good, easy, then it felt bad. His life condensed more than he’d already made it to. He worked, then went home alone. Cooked something simple and watched a movie. Good luck with the night. He braced for Vlad’s next change. 

Only it didn’t come. Two weeks, three—whatever Vlad had done before he seemed to be having trouble doing again. The taxidermist turned jokey, then brittle. At the shop, Matt didn’t know where to position himself relative to his dark cloud; if he stayed in front, Vlad seemed abandoned. If he hung out in the workshop, he had to witness Vlad abusing the mannequins. The man-shaped mannequin he covered in animal parts and orbited, telling it things in Bulgarian that could only be degrading. The bull mannequin stood away, faced into a corner. 

“It is as I feared,” Vlad groaned. 

Matt hesitated. “The agony problem?”

Vlad covered his face. 

“I’ve been trying to understand,” Matt said. “What you did the first two times—” 

“It is different,” Vlad snapped. “Every time different, every time harder. I am trying now to be two things. Not a bull and a man, but a symbol and a being. The symbol endures. The being ends.” 

The being ends, thought Matt. 

“The problem is this. I must wish for it, yes? I have wished for it. But what I have already, it is too much like I hoped it would be. The changing is too beautiful and I keep thinking how beautiful it is. I know it will eventually become familiar and less bright. All it will take is time. But ah, Young Flower, I hate to wait. A disgusting flaw, no?”

Before lunch Vlad would not look at his new legs. In the afternoons he stroked them carefully. He tried breathing meditations, following the recorded voice on an app he’d asked Matt to download onto his phone. When not meditating, Vlad breathed like his lungs owed him money. It was clear he wasn’t sleeping. Another week. Matt found himself wishing alongside Vlad. 

“Do they hurt?” Matt asked him. “Your legs?” 

“My hooves are wonderful,” Vlad said. “It is the rest of me that is in pain.”

Another week and Matt couldn’t stand it. His apartment, the shop, back to his apartment. This was not surprising to him. On the apps, he matched with a woman who worked for the Bureau of Land Management. He asked if that was like being a park ranger and she responded with a crying laughing emoji. Haha no I’m a clerk.

She invited him to dinner at her cabin and they ate on her amazing deck until a chill set in and she had to lend him a heavier coat. The sun went down. It always had and still did scare him, how quiet it got in this place after dark. The fairy lights she had strung tree to tree did not help but rather burned in invitation to whatever might be walking in the night. And Matt wondered: Where was the magic coming from? Here? The mountains above that sometimes fell? Or had Vlad brought it with him from his homeland between three seas? He was cold and afraid and begged off early to the clerk’s look of hurt confusion. The next day, he went in early for want of anything else to do. 

Vlad slunk across the floor out into the shopfront about midmorning and sat with his back against the counter where Matt was standing. He made wet sounds into his elbow until Matt looked down at his boss. Vlad’s pale scalp at the part of the tough greywire hair, pulled away from his neck into milkmaid braids. Vlad had turned on the building heat for the winter and it was working overtime—they’d stripped down. Vlad wore a tank top and hazard-orange swim trunks, the fur of his hooves spiked with sweat.

“Will you stand there and do nothing, Young Flower?” whispered Vlad. 

This question surprised Matt. Vlad had never asked for help before but more than that Matt was surprised at how angry the question made him. The past weeks had been frustrating, ugly even, but he’d never felt actually pissed off until this moment. I do not want to be here, Matt thought, but Vlad gazed up at him from the floor. 

“What do you want me to do, Vlad?”

Vlad sniffed. “Tell me something bad.” 

“Something bad.” 

“Yes. I am too happy. As usual. Tell me I am never going to do it. Tell me it is hopeless.”

“It’s hopeless,” Matt tried. 

Vlad flinched but then looked disappointed. 

“It’s hopeless, Vlad,” Matt said again. 

Vlad cocked his head. As if at something he detected in Matt’s voice. After a moment he licked his lips. 

“Young Flower,” he said. “What do you say we make a night of it. Hm? The couch has its comforts, take it from me. Be here to see the night. Or what it could be. Lend your perspective. We can talk into the hours. Yes?” 

Matt looked at Vlad. He looked at the clock. Not even noon. Something bad, he thought. 

He started packing up. “Sorry,” he said. “I have a date. I was actually hoping you wouldn’t mind if I took off early. I have a few things to get ready. Have I told you about this girl? I like her a lot. She works for the Bureau of Land Management.” 

Vlad closed his eyes. When he opened them he stood, stroking his braids haplessly. “Early?” the taxidermist said. “Oh well yes of course. Not as though things are happening here.” 

“Thanks.” Matt grabbed his bag, pulled on his hat. 

“A special lady this time, you are saying?”

“That’s right. I might be in love, honestly. Anyway I’ll tell you all about her tomorrow, okay? She’s beautiful. I can’t wait to see her.”

“Ah,” said Vlad. 

He followed Matt to the doorway and was still there when Matt pulled out of the lot. 

At home Matt slept. When he woke it was dark. The responsible thing to do for dinner was leftovers—his fridge was overflowing from ordering in the past month more than was probably morally correct. He couldn’t remember which were most recent. A few styrofoam lids opened to reveal mutated remains. There was a smell, actually. He got a trash bag from under the sink but had trouble opening it; in the light of his one lamp he couldn’t tell the difference between the bag’s inside and its outside. This reminded him of Vlad. Right about now he had to be hyperdense in the darkness of the shop, forgesteam spewing out of his mouth. Ever since Matt had told Vlad about his dates, talk had increased about the girls, the girls out there, was Matt seeing girls, what girls were they, and how many? “Ah you are abandoning me for the girls,” he’d say when Matt leaned through the workshop door at quitting time. “Well, good luck with the night I suppose.” To do Vlad the kindness of solving the agony problem he’d had to be cruel, but Matt wasn’t sure he’d done right. There was no telling how many more nights it would take. 

He took out his phone, tapped to contacts, scrolled. His brother was listed as Brother Cooper, like a monk. As opposed to a veterinarian. After Matt had fled up here, the cruel texts his brother sent became, under the name, benedictions of a kind. 

Cooper was a great veterinarian. He cared for the pets of stars. He had to know something. Matt sat with his thumb over the call icon. He wasn’t sure how he’d broach the subject, so he sat there trying to figure that out. Then his phone shook with an incoming call. Impossibly, it was his brother.

Matt answered on speaker. The connection was wide, hissy with the interference of every cell tower between here and Los Angeles. He heard the spin of ice in a glass. 

“I am giving you a phone call,” Cooper said. He was drunk. 

“This is really fucking weird,” Matt said after a second. 

“Not a great start, bud.” 

“No. I was—I was literally about to call you. Like my thumb was up. But then you called me.” 

“Spooky,” Cooper allowed. 

“Everything okay?” 

“I found out where you’re living today,” Cooper said. “Finally. Francine told me. She brought Spanky in. Her blue-and-gold. That parrot’s fucking ancient. And dying, unfortunately. You remember Francine, right? You were in that movie together. The one set in the apartment building that crosses time like a ship, and the tenants listen to each other through the walls. At the end everything catches fire.” 

“I remember,” Matt said. Over the line he heard the lap of water. “Out by the pool?” 

“Yep. Just little old me.” 

“How’s Lil?” 

“Anyway Francine was like, is Matty still up there in the woods? She’s worried about you. Said I should give you a call. So. I’m calling.” 

Matt imagined Cooper’s backyard. The bluelit pool and soulless monoculture grass. Cooper had kept it so carefully, wasted so much water and leeched so many poisons into the topsoil, so Ingrid would have a soft place to play. Matt hoped Coop and Lilly weren’t having marital problems. But of course they were. Their little girl had died in their arms. 

“It’ll be a year in the spring,” Cooper said.

This was a fact. Nothing Matt could say to it. Last spring had been unseasonably cold in LA. Ingrid had wanted to go to the beach. Her lips had turned blue in the wind, then the rest of her had. 

“You should come home,” Cooper said next. 

This was not a fact. Not even close. 

“What does that mean?” Matt asked. 

“It means come home. You shouldn’t be up there. There’s nothing up there, man.” 

“I guess I don’t know what you’re saying,” Matt said. 

In LA, Cooper stood in anger. Matt heard the topple of his plastic chair. 

“God dammit you little twerp,” he shouted. “I don’t forgive you, okay? You fucking selfish prick. You crumbled the minute we needed you the most. It was the three of us, plus her, the whole time, and then suddenly you were gone. I had to say her name in front of all those people, and Lilly was alone in the front row, and you—a few more days, you piece of shit? I would have driven you up there myself. But no. And tonight? I had to call you. That is fucking monstrous, man.” 

“I know,” Matt said. “I swear I was about to call.” 

“Shut up. Come home. I’m pissed. But come back to LA so I can be pissed at you in LA. You’re not special. You can be forgiven. Someday. You can stay in the office.” 

Matt ran into his tiny bathroom. He was going to barf out of relief. He lifted the seat and bent but the relief stayed put, plugging. Eventually he managed to speak. 

“Lilly might have something to say about that.”

“Oh Lilly will fucking hate it. But come and the two of you can have it out. Listen, your defense is that, yes you missed the funeral, but you were there for everything else. You came over, cleaned up Ingrid’s vomit, and 15 minutes later she couldn’t breathe because she was laughing so hard at some dumb shit you said. Tell Lilly that, then say you’re sorry. That’s all you need to do. Are you ready to say sorry?”

“I’m ready,” Matt said. He was. 

“Good.” 

“But Coop?” 

“Yeah?” 

“I crumbled when Ingrid stopped needing me. That’s what happened.” 

For a long time Cooper didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Come home. You’re not special.” He hung up. 

Matt didn’t wait to start packing. It was suddenly very funny to him how few things he owned. He was rolling one of his four t-shirts when he heard a crash outside. His apartment was on the first floor, with windows to the alleyway there. He opened one and poked his head out. Nothing other than a fallen trash can and a new bite to the breeze. 

In the car, the radio talked about a big surprise snow on the way. Everyone had been worried but it was coming. Matt didn’t really listen. He hadn’t slept. He kept being surprised by the same realization. He’d thought Ingrid dying had clarified the world and what mattered in it but it hadn’t clarified shit. In fact it had hidden so much away. 

He got to the shop. Vlad was in the front, making coffee. He was covered in mud. No, it was fur. A velvet shell of hide up his chest to the top of his throat. The hide looked warm and it suited Vlad in a way Matt would not have guessed. 

Vlad held up a bristled hand. It was still a hand. 

“Before you say a word, Young Flower, I want to say something to you. Thank you.” 

“Vlad, I—” 

“No. No. Whether you meant to or not, you have helped me. It is past. It is good. Thank you hugely.” Vlad stepped forward, gripped Matt’s shoulders. “More importantly Matthew, I am feeling you have something to tell me. Something joyful, yes? It is that you are leaving, no?” At Matt’s expression he said, “Oh it is obvious. You floated in here like a sunbeam. How happy for you! A new stage of your life.” 

Matt explained. He felt he owed an explanation, which was why he’d come. About his life, about moving up here, Ingrid and Lily and his brother. But midway through Vlad disengaged, busying himself straightening a mount. 

“That is wonderful, Young Flower,” Vlad said. “Do you leave now?” 

“Early tomorrow, probably. After they clear the roads. There’s a storm.” This would break his lease but Matt didn’t care. 

“Yes,” Vlad said. “A big one.” 

“I’m sorry it’s so fast.” 

“Oh do not, Matthew. Do not. There is much for you to do. Arrange your conveniences. One last croon upon your lady love. Ha!” 

Matt laughed. “You’re using ‘croon’ wrong.” 

“I will croon you upside the head. But how about this, Young Flower. Do one last favor for me. I have a package. Pick it up, return, and we’ll have a last drink. A good midday drink. I will toast you and you will toast me and we will say our farewells. What do you say?” 

“I say great.” 

“Wonderful. Meet me in the flat.” 

The post office was 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. Halfway, it began to snow. Ski families were appearing. The streets were suddenly packed with them, hybrid SUVs jockeying, every child with an iPad. There was a line at the post office. Waiting, Matt decided that during their drink he would only tell Vlad kind things, no matter how badly he begged. He thought about the word croon and opened the apps to message the few drinks he had lined up. One of them texted back, disappointed. The other two blocked him. All these dates. His new handsomeness had come on suddenly during the worst time of his life and felt like something distributed out to him by a system as compensation. Acting upon it felt like blooming. Like a televised Olympic feat he wouldn’t accomplish again. Glorious to be wanted, sure, but glory required the logistics of pain. Of being brusquely dismissed, of taking and being taken for granted. Of making concessions, of dehumanizing and being dehumanized in minor ways that weirdly he had not felt accumulate, though they must have. It was all a room he could step out of and thank god.

The postal worker retrieved two packages: a cardboard roll like for a poster and a longer, heavier, rectangular box. Back at the shop Matt parked in a thin blanket of snow on the gravel, climbed the stairs, and let himself into the apartment. “I come bearing gifts!” he called. 

No answer. Outside the snow was turning heavy. Soft music played from a turntable by the small TV and a delicious smell wafted from a sauté pan simmering on the stove. An open bottle breathed on the counter. Vlad was not in the kitchen or the bedroom, nor the bathroom when Matt checked. There was only the music and Vlad’s low furniture, his weirdly chic European taste. He found Vlad’s phone facedown on the carpet by accidentally stepping on it. 

To get to the shop he had to go downstairs and back outside, shifting the packages arm to arm. He shouldered through the front door and the bell jingled. Setting the packages on the counter, he went into the workshop. 

“Vlad,” he called, “whatever’s cooking up there smells amazing.” 

When he saw what was in the workshop he stopped. He turned around and, silently, returned to the shopfront. 

The bull had not reacted hostilely to his presence or even seemed much aware of him. It stood at an oblique angle from the door, staring amicably ahead, chewing its cud, its incredible muscle mass lit into chiaroscuro by the harsh light of the workbench lamp. No evidence whatsoever of rampaging. The only indication of something amiss at all was the fluffs of industrial packaging strewn across the floor from the open utility closet. The man-shaped mannequin had had some of its facial features smoothed. It wore a shirt Matt could not find last night to pack. 

Matt peeked back in. There it was. He noticed the horns for what they were: weapons, rigged to the neanderthal brow beneath a bowlcut tuft of hair. The whippy tail and the eyes, emotionless yet in their whites a madness irrespective. Matt stepped back, wondering what exactly had, in the end, made Vlad sad enough. 

He considered calling animal control. He considered calling Cooper. He had forgotten to mention Vlad last night when they’d talked. He decided against both. The packages lay before him on the counter. After last night’s call, Matt had decided to be a person who kept his promises. The cardboard tube contained a cape the size of an overgenerous apron, red. From the longer box he pulled a narrow and wicked sword, the hilt one-handed, a combination T and crescent guard. Matt held both objects in the thin storm light. He flowed the cape this way and that, getting a feel. Danced back, then forth. Matadors were not killed in the sacred arena but gored. A final test felt expected and fair, all things considered. Behind the door the bull sighed deeply and the sound was his name.

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ayóó’ ánííníshní / I love you, a lot.

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Crack, crack, crack.

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The post The Bruised Apple Tumbles Far From the Tree appeared first on Electric Literature.

At the Selden Awards, you’re Nathaniel’s guest, with your own seat at the best table. Two years and change, you say to the woman who asks how long you’ve been in New York. People are starting to know you now, at least by sight: Nathaniel’s assistant, his special girl. He is giving a speech about what it feels like to be emerging, and how it never really stops. Wilhelmina Miles. Your name sounds like a stranger’s when Nathaniel thanks you onstage. Someone interesting, important. That very morning, you caught Nathaniel reading your new pages before you even asked.

After the event, you walk through the frigid December night to one of the writer bars. You admit to Samson, who has already found four reasons to mention how surprised he was that Nathaniel nominated him, that you’re writing a book. Good for you, he says. I liked yours, you offer, and this relaxes him. You did look at it for a long time, imagining what it would feel like to have Nathaniel say, in print, magnificent, about you. About you, or about your work? It will be years before these memories make you cringe—though, in the very back of your mind, that trapdoor behind which people like your mother live, isn’t it there already? Your awareness that this isn’t exactly right, your place here, and how you’ve gotten it? That you’ve made a bargain, without knowing how you’re paying?

There’s Nathaniel, by the door, talking to a guy you vaguely recognize; Lili, sitting on a barstool with that impenetrable ring of space around her, even as three separate people try to get her attention; Reg, listening to the Hindenburg with his eyes on you, then Lili, then you again. Samson tells you it’s impossible to write a book. That he couldn’t give you a piece of good advice if he tried. It needs to burn itself out of your guts, he says, tongue darting toward a speck of foam on his lip, and then you must be strong enough to wrestle it into shape. The way he says must and wrestle and guts, looking at your waist, then your hair, then your breasts, you know he doesn’t think you’re writing anything at all, that if you have managed a sentence, two, they’re slush, about dolls or blood or other girls, about your silly little self. You’re Nathaniel’s assistant, Samson tells you. Good man. I should see if he needs a drink, you say, thinking, go ahead, dismiss me. Burn itself out of your guts. Your brain gives his words Nathaniel’s red slash.

A couple of months later, another reading, another bar just a few blocks away from the last one. In line for the bathroom, Reg kisses you, tasting of gin, and then you’re in a cab going over the Manhattan Bridge, your hand on his zipper. Nathaniel, Reg, Nathaniel, Reg. Then it’s summer, and you’re crashing at Nathaniel’s place—the sculptor, surprise!, is back in town for three weeks. At a book party Nathaniel ducks out early—my head, he says, and whispers in your ear: See you tomorrow. He’s no longer dating Sarah, but there’s someone—his shower drain was clogged with long brown hair. It doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. What’s between you is secret and lawless and yours. His key in your purse, credit card in your wallet, the spearmint taste of his Italian toothpaste in the back of your throat. You sleep together, nights you’re at his apartment—Thursdays, always, because you clean on Fridays, and any time you stay for dinner, and whenever you’re uptown—but you can’t remember the last time you had sex. Is this weird? You like his hand around your waist, his clean sheets you washed, he likes your eggs in the morning, to give you his thoughts over coffee, how you fold the towels, one of your Rosendale tricks. Sex, he says, does it ever make you weary? All that wet and slap. Your legs are in his lap. He puts one finger at a time between your toes. Sometimes I think my panting years are over. You try to remember what it felt like to want him like that. The memory slithers away. But you still make sure you smell clean and sweet, vanilla sugar scrub, something that tastes good to bite. You would let him. You both know that. But more and more you talk like this, about sex, about his women. Once, he even takes you out to lunch with Vilma. When he’s in the bathroom you ask her if she was ever afraid they weren’t important, literary enough, her stories about women and all the things they think and feel. Jesus, she says. I thought your generation would be braver. Actually, you’re worse.

You even talk about Reg, who kisses you and then disappears, who’s in Vienna, sending you letters, or France, sending you silence, or in Brooklyn, texting you to come over, please, I can’t stop thinking about that space where your collarbone divots, if it still tastes like snow. Nathaniel says, well, little Wilhelmet, you’re not exactly available either, are you? That’s probably why he keeps coming back.

Nathaniel says, he’s a poet, what do you expect?

Your mother finally comes to New York, a three-day visit, after she gets a Xanax prescription for the plane. The days before she arrives you yearn for her, a desperation returned from childhood, those afternoons you couldn’t wait for her to come home and begin chopping onions for dinner. You put her up with Nathaniel’s card in a Holiday Inn in the Garment District, an anonymous location walking distance to many chain restaurants with food you know she’ll eat. You don’t show her Barth, or the sculptor’s studio, or any of the bookstores or bars where you spend your non-Nathaniel hours reading, reading, reading, sometimes putting the book down for coffee or wine with Lili or Dev. Your mother walks with her arm looped tightly through yours, an intimacy she only allows herself because her fear of the city is greater than all the unspoken bitterness between you. On the subway, she clutches her things. She doesn’t ask you anything, and because that hurts your feelings, you ask her nothing in return, as punishment. After her first twenty-four hours you count the minutes until you can leave her at LaGuardia, and then, even as your heart aches, you’re waving goodbye as she rises on the escalator beside her hulking suitcase, bought for the sole purpose of visiting you.

Every emergency room in the city is the same, and the adenosine is the same, too: doom, then exhausted relief, the bruise in the crook of your arm where the drip went in, the flutter of your heart before it pumps once, starts again. The bills vary, even though they’re always for the same thing. You’ve long stopped keeping track of how much you owe. At Maimonides they give you Xanax when you arrive, Xanax when you leave, as if this faulty mechanism is something your mind should be able to control. Is it? At Mount Sinai, they test every time for drugs. Vilma publishes a strange, slim novel about marriage, darker than her other books—you read it in a hospital bed, waiting for discharge papers, Nathaniel barraging you with texts. In the book, the wife eats her husband. She doesn’t cook him; she eats him raw, but with a fork and knife sharpened using a special device she built herself. It’s described graphically and for many pages, but before the cannibalism, the book read like a domestic drama. You can’t put it down, and when it’s over you don’t know how to feel. The book, you realize, doesn’t care. Vilma wins a prize in the UK that Nathaniel has never even been nominated for. He repeats that fact over and over. He takes Vilma to dinner to celebrate, and for weeks afterward he’s gloomy and cold.

Don’t you ever want to do something else with your time, he snaps, coming home to find you pruning expired food from his pantry. Buzz buzz buzz, you’re just here. Your chest empties, fills with ice. As quiet as you can, you close the pantry door, pick up the trash bag, and leave. You stop using his card, eat peanut butter toast and cheese cubes from party trays for a scarily long amount of time, weeks, so long you think maybe the whole thing is over, start wondering if he’s going to cancel the electric for the sculptor’s studio, applying for executive assistant jobs that never reach out for an interview. You have no degree, no work experience except for whatever you’re doing with Nathaniel. One night you google cleaning services, the phrase “maid for hire,” consider applying for a position that clearly involves sex work. When Nathaniel asks you to come back, you cry with relief. When’s the last time you truly cried? Still, you make him ask three times before you agree to meet to talk.

That night, after two bottles of wine at dinner, after Nathaniel’s apology, after he tells you he needs you, after kissing sloppily in the elevator, you have sex. It’s been a long time, so many nights with Reg in between, a couple of strangers, too, but you feel tenderness for Nathaniel when he bends to retrieve his T-shirt from where it’s fallen off the couch, the freckled curve of his shoulder, his baby powdery smell, the way it takes his penis three tries to get hard and stay that way. You expect something when he leaves to catch a flight—a kiss on the mouth, some return to how it was in the beginning between you, but having sex only rewinds you part of the way, back to where you’d been before your break, companions, sexless husband and wife. He ruffles your hair, tells you to order a takeout, stay at his while he’s gone, reminds you to type up his old notebooks so they’re easier for him to read. It almost makes you sad. Nathaniel’s lukewarm desire seems to have less to do with you—my God, Wilhelmet, he’d said, when he unzipped your dress, you’re in full bloom—than with the way he has begun to drop his sentences right in the middle, repeat the same story twice.

Your phone rings. You don’t answer. Some days the calls come every few minutes. On the other end of the line, there’s a person whose job it is to call only you—that’s how much money you owe. Do they strategize the pacing, four calls in a row with an hour break, or what area code to use, the most sensitive time of day to deploy the one from where you grew up? Will they get a reward if you finally pay? You wonder how much they make, what their health insurance is like. Would they garnish your wages if you had a W-2? That happened to Tray once; you remember your mother telling you. You learn to keep your phone on silent. Popular, Reg says, watching it light up on the bar. And then months with no calls at all, so long you start to believe maybe the hospitals just gave up. But they always, always start again.

It happens overnight. Oh, everyone says, with the exact same note of awestruck heartbreak, how is it fall already? You meet Lili at a speakeasy near Belvedere’s offices in Dumbo to toast to her promotion. She dresses all in black now, most days, or big oversized button-down shirts over skin-tight jeans, her vintage dresses and hats pushed way back in her closet. To the associate editor, you say, watching the olives jounce as your martinis collide. Nathaniel buys you a new scarf, cashmere, the color of the frost on the Great Lawn of Central Park.

Your book is sixty pages, then zero, then eighty-two, one hundred, a single radiant chapter, halfway done, almost finished, roughly twelve pages, eighty thousand words. No, you don’t have an agent, you say, when people ask you at readings, at parties, but you do have Nathaniel, Nathaniel who reads every version, Nathaniel who tells you, when you really think you’re truly done, to set it aside, to write it again, like a real writer. You’ve completed the practice rounds, he says. But, Will, this is real work! I am so proud of you. You bury your head in his chest when he says this, so he can’t see your face, how happy it makes you. When you start again, you write slowly, you aim for poetry in every line. Purple, Nathaniel writes in the margins. Breathe. You’re in a rush, but you’re also not. You’re only twenty-what, five or six, still Nathaniel’s assistant, his very best girl.

Your job has swelled and swelled. Do you ever feel, you ask Lili, like something odd is happening with time? Now you manage Nathaniel’s life, you make it bigger, busier. You’re working with his agent on a new selected—prose this time. And he’s got so many meetings, Hollywood things you schedule that never seem to pan out, he likes for you to send gifts after, cocktail shakers, personal notes. You write recommendation letters for his former students, blurbs, spend a week researching mattresses for lower back pain and coordinate the replacing of his bed, the installation of blackout shades, the doctor’s appointments, the insurance claims, the copies for his classes, groceries, dinner, shoes to the cobbler, the first draft of the book review, the speech, the questions for the interview at the 92nd Street Y. Sometimes you pick out his clothes. He likes to keep baby wipes on the toilet tank, just in case. He wants you to record him talking about screenwriting, for a craft book. He wasn’t trained, you know, he learned it all himself. Why is he always out of bananas? He doesn’t trust transcription services, wants you to do it by hand. He never asks you about health insurance, even when he collects you from the hospital, even though he knows about your heart, the urgent care visits you sometimes pay for with his card. You’ll be done with the book when Nathaniel tells you you are.

Best of the New, same as every year, Nathaniel’s students switched out. You sit in the front row. Tilda nods hello, but at some point, it’s like you never knew her at all. When you pick up your plastic cup of wine, she doesn’t even nod, doesn’t try to meet your eyes.

In the winter, the best part of the bar after the reading is the second bar after the reading, the group whittled to an unlikely handful shuffling through the snow, you and Reg coming up behind, slipping away to smoke and make out in the cartoonish whirl of flakes—wait. Pause here. This time was different, wasn’t it.

Reg stops. You look at each other, eye to eye. He kisses you again, both of your eyelashes full of snow, the kiss you dreamed of as a girl, or would have, if you hadn’t been thinking so much about poetry. It’s been six months, more, since you last touched. Reg, who’d started doing things like taking reporting trips, had been on one of those, or Nathaniel was being extra needy, or Reg had a girlfriend, or you were dating Nathaniel’s agent’s forgettable assistant, oh, who knows. “Come with me,” Reg says, and he hails a cab crawling slowly through the sheets of snow, the only car in sight. When it stops, you’re not at his place in Greenpoint, you’re at Prospect Park, the grand entrance near the library. You stumble through the snow—it’s coming down too hard and fast for the plows to keep up, and anyway, why would they bother, when you and Reg are the only two people in the whole city. Snow is in your boots, melting down your back, it’s in your bra, your ears, in the crevices where your fingers and Reg’s fingers meet. Everything glows. In the circles of light cast by streetlamps, the flakes are sparks, so bright they hurt your eyes.

“Where are we going?” you ask, and he tells you he doesn’t know, that he wanted to be somewhere outside of the city with you, and this was the best he could think of.

“I thought you were made of snow, Michigan girl,” he says when you stop to brush a thick layer off your hair. And you’re annoyed, just a flicker, because he’s wearing one of those expensive puffer coats with cuffs that extend to the knuckles, a wool hat pulled below his eyebrows, waterproof Chelsea boots. You’re in one of Lili’s old coats, wine red and fuzzy, with torn silk lining and plastic buttons shaped like daisies. Tights, faux leather cowboy boots a quarter of an inch taller than the snow you’re walking through. He pulls you with him toward a break in the trees, and Long Meadow opens out before you. No one. Just a plain of empty, alien white, as if you’ve traveled somewhere impossible, like Greening, or the surface of the moon. You don’t even see the tracks of a squirrel, or a rat.

“There,” Reg said. “We made it.” See how he looks at you. “Remember your first Christmas here, when I tried to walk you home?” Feel the wobble in his hands as he turns yours over, unfurls your fingers from your palm. He kisses your forehead, then puts his hat on your head until it covers the place his mouth touched. Neither of you are drunk anymore. In the story you’ve told yourself, Reg was the one with the crush, who, as soon as you showed interest, couldn’t commit. Reg was the one deciding where and when and how, but here he is, looking at you like he’s been waiting outside your door for years. “Will,” he says, “I really like you. I like you so much. I’ve been an idiot. I wasn’t ready. But I think I could be now. I got stuck on you a long time ago and it just doesn’t go away.”

You try to think of one thing you’ve ever asked of him, and you come up with nothing. Wasn’t that Nathaniel’s advice? Let him come to you? It occurs to you only there, snow in your mouth, that’s exactly what you didn’t do with Nathaniel. It’s taking you too long to respond. You both feel it. “Took you long enough” is what you finally say. What you mean is, why didn’t you tell me before it was too late? (Later, when it really is, you’ll see that, of course, it wasn’t too late at all.) And then, because you want it to be true, because you’ve slipped out of time together, onto this blank page with no record of your mistakes, you say: “I could be ready, too.”

In Reg’s bathroom mirror, you look older than you do in Nathaniel’s. At Nathaniel’s, you’re always a girl of twenty-two, begging the great writer to take you seriously, because that’s what he needs you to be. Here, you’re someone else. Who? Back in Reg’s bed, he tells you, haltingly, as he fiddles with a hank of your hair, that your job with Nathaniel makes him uncomfortable. That he knows what Nathaniel is like, and even though—“Even though what?” you say. Reg stops, tries again.

“You’ve been his assistant forever, as long as I’ve known you. Don’t you want to do something else?”

What Nathaniel is like. The worst part of that line, and you’ve heard it so much, is what it assumes about you: that you’re either delusional, a sweet little girl who tripped and fell sideways into a trap, or something even more pathetic, a woman who takes any crumb she can get. “I want to write. That’s it. Who else will give me my mornings free? All those days off every month when he travels?” It’s too hard to explain. It’s not something Reg would ever understand. Maybe you had other ways of getting here, but would they have worked? You also don’t say the next thing you think: that Reg only knows you because of Nathaniel.

“I know,” he says. “And I’m not one of those crazy jealous people. I just don’t like how much he—it’s like you’re his pet or something, or he sees you like that, like he can just . . .”

It’s almost possible. You could tell Reg about the Visa, your debt, how you’re nine credits shy of a bachelor’s degree. You could tell Reg about your mother, about Tray, about your dreams of Rosendale, how they come to you still, as if part of you is already banished there, hands dishwater raw, bleach in your hair. As if part of you never left. How Tray never touched you, but how he made you think about what he imagined, how you still feel him outside every window. How in your book, Nathaniel says you need to write it plain, but you still haven’t figured out what that means. How he feels—even with Reg right there beside you—like the most solid thing you have.

In the morning, Reg kisses you before either of you has brushed your teeth, like Nathaniel never would. It feels different, this time, like Reg is trying to tell you something he doesn’t know how to say. Sweat pools in his lower back, the curve of his neck, and when it’s over, both of you are damp, breathing hard. He has to go to the office to file a piece. He says he’ll see you after work. He whispers something into your hair, that word again, and you reach for him, confirming. But when he calls, you’re at Nathaniel’s, putting the salmon in the broiler.

You text back, sorry Reg, I can’t now. Talk later?

Samson is, somehow, always there, at the reading, at the bar after the reading, at the second bar, the diner after the nightcap at the editorial assistant’s shockingly well-appointed apartment, the used bookshop on Twelfth Street in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone else is at their normal job. One night you kiss him back half-heartedly after Reg shows up at the Housing Works holiday party with a date, a bony butterfly of a girl who works in marketing for Time Out. Samson hasn’t written another book—no, that’s not right, he’s still writing it, he had that story, Nathaniel took him out for a beer, it’s been a struggle. He gets some help from his parents, but just a little—really, he hardly gets by. Most of the time he says nothing to you, either that or you wind up gossiping furiously in some dark corner after you’ve both had too much to drink. At some point you realize you’re not so far apart in age, you and Samson, him perpetually at work on book number two, you promoted to typing up Nathaniel’s archives, the stacks of impenetrable legal pads from the past he thinks might hold a kernel that can become a new novel. Sometimes, when it’s late, his handwriting very messy, you let yourself write, a little, in his voice. When you show him the pages, you wait for him to notice where you took over, but he never does.

Are you different? You’re twenty-seven. There was something you were supposed to do by now—what was it? You measure your face in Nathaniel’s mirror. Nathaniel says hair is youth; you let your eyebrows creep toward each other. You cut your hair, let it grow back out. Your mother gets sick, but she doesn’t tell you until after she’s better, stage 2 breast cancer, nothing chemo couldn’t fix. For a while, you call more frequently, but the long silences, how neither of you can ever seem to find a way to ask a question of the other that elicits more than a single-word response—it’s too much for you to bear, and you’re both comforted, you tell yourself, when you slide back into the rhythm of talking once a month, less, on holidays only.

Nathaniel’s taking his new Lili out for dinner. She’s Chinese—he tells you this over and over—and writes like her head is on fire. What would he say about how you write? A year later it’s a different girl, a blonde with crooked teeth and a Southern accent. He reads you one of her poems out loud. For two months, he’s out almost every night with a brassy girl from Queens, tiny with humongous breasts; the next semester, you hear through the grapevine, she drops out of the program. Sometimes the Lilis make you jealous, but there’s never another Will. You read every single draft. You let yourself into his apartment on a Saturday morning, so you can be there to show the super the noise the toilet makes when you flush it, and find a young woman, no more than twenty if you had to guess, eating a bowl of Kix at the kitchen island. Just his assistant, you say, and scoop up his laundry, throw in a load of wash while you’re waiting. The girl is gone before the super arrives, and you never see her again. It takes you a few days to realize—you never asked her name. Whenever you find women’s clothes mixed in with his, you fold them carefully, leave them on the foot of his bed. Once, you steal a pink cashmere sweater, hip length and so soft; when the radiator breaks at the sculptor’s studio, you sleep in it.

Reg and Lili, even Nathaniel, they transform, transform again. But you, it’s as if the monumental effort of finding your way to him, of turning yourself into the person Nathaniel needed you to be, blasted your power source, got you stuck in this endless loop forever, pairing his clean socks, fucking him a couple of times a year, as if performing routine maintenance on an antique car. Writing and rewriting the same book, publishing your secret poems here and there, for usually zero, sometimes fifty dollars apiece, hitting ignore when your phone rings. But you have an apartment, a job, Nathaniel’s notes in the margins. This is the story you tell yourself: There is no life in the city without him, not for you. Isn’t that why you dodged Reg for months after that night in the snow, let your relationship slide back into an uneasy friendship, why you never let him talk like that again?

Reg writes a piece about ghosting that goes viral, starts getting bigger and bigger assignments. He goes to Flint to report on lead in the water, texts you a selfie from the Detroit airport. In your home state, he writes, and you don’t bother trying to explain that Detroit is as much of a different universe from where you grew up as New York, that you’ve never even been there. Lili becomes the managing editor at Belvedere, starts dating with great seriousness one of the hedge fund guys from the board. It seems like you only hang out with him three or four times before she’s engaged, before you’re at her wedding, telling people over and over, no, you don’t know Lili from college, you met through poetry. Her husband, Jake, is forty-one, a tasteful age gap, with a dimpled chin and earnest political opinions, eager for children. He’s never once made you laugh. He seems double Lili’s height. Sometimes he picks her up and cradles her in his arms like a baby. Maybe that’s his appeal. Lili, who stopped writing after her second promotion, wins the Selden the year of her wedding, for a chapbook she published two years prior. You know Nathaniel nominated her. You want to ask her what she’s doing with the money, where thirty thousand dollars goes when your husband is a hedge fund manager. You’re supposed to attend the ceremony as Nathaniel’s plus one but you tell him you have the stomach flu, and then you lie to Lili, too, pretend you were so sad to miss it when she shows you a photo later. But you’re also happy for her, truly—you hope it will make her write again. You miss her poems; you never feel closer to her than you do when you are reading them. The exact opposite of how you feel about Nathaniel’s work, which you still value unthinkingly, even when it bores you, makes you squirm.

After the election, everyone is shocked. You are, too. But when you press against the feeling, are you, really? You know, without ever asking, that your mother and Tray probably didn’t vote at all, but if they did, it was for the man. On the subway the next morning, the atmosphere is funereal; an elderly lady sitting across from you openly sobs. You go to the Women’s March with Reg and feel inspired, yes, but mutely so. What has to happen in a life to make a person believe that if they say no loud enough, the bad thing will stop? That rescue will come. Was it something someone was supposed to teach you? Where was that teacher? Was it protest, what you did, leaving Greening and refusing even to visit? Taping the bag over your window?

Then, a miracle. Nathaniel tells you the book is done. You’re in Paris, just the two of you. He’s there for a festival and he brought you along. I can’t believe this is my life, you think, as you follow him around the city. You watched him read your latest draft on the plane. It’s the shortest version, barely one hundred and fifty pages. No fat, all scene, a numb third person, lots of white space. You had a feeling he liked it because of how he was breathing, his irritation when the flight attendant interrupted to ask what he wanted to drink. When he tells you, you’re at a café in the 11th arrondissement, hallucinatory with jetlag, sharing a plate of cheese so pungent that forever after, whenever you see your book’s title, you smell mold. Even after Nathaniel passes the book to his friend, the publisher of a prestigious small press you’ve read for years, after he calls to offer you three thousand dollars and a contract, tells you during your first meeting how the book reminds him of The Sun Also Rises but with a distinctly female point of view, you smell mold, mold, mold, as if the cheese were still melting on your tongue.

You and Nathaniel eat it all. On bread, it is delicious, veined with blue, crumbling at the edges. You press it against the sponge of yeast until your fingers stink. The two of you stop at a tabac for a Kir Royale, and then another, for another. You attempt sex in the creaky bed near the window, which looks like a doorway, opening outward. It doesn’t work. You tell Nathaniel you’re tired, you want to stop. “I’m sorry,” he says, and you almost laugh. Is it possible he thinks this was ever what you really wanted from him? The next morning, standing by the steps to the pop-up stage, you help him adjust his clip-on mic. He stops your hands before you switch it on, puts his palms on your cheeks, says, “You are very dear to me, Wilhelmet.”

“I know,” you tell him back. And you do.

How will you account for all these years? You’re nobody’s poor little fiddlestick anymore. When your book comes in the mail—in a cardboard box, like it could be toilet paper, a sheath of lightbulbs, a replacement filter for Nathaniel’s air cleaner—the first thing you can’t believe is your name, in silver foil, slick against the matte cover. Wilhelmina Miles, almost as large as the title, as if the publisher wants you to be the thing the reader remembers. You pick it up—there’s that taste again, fecund and earthy—and flip to the first chapter, the fourth, the very last page. You swallow, trying to clear the taste from your mouth. The endpapers look expensive, too, especially for a small press, and when you crack the binding for a flash of a second, you’re in Nathaniel’s office again, begging him to let you in, you’re widening the hole in the neckline of Reg’s black T-shirt, you’re listening to the shrieking EKG, you’re at Rosendale, trying to outrun Tray. Turn back to the first page. There you are, just behind the text. Alone in the sculptor’s studio, writing down a word that becomes a sentence that becomes a story.

For so long, you’ve been watching yourself try to figure out how to live. Is it writing that does that, skips a person a little off the track of their own existence, or something broken in you? You pick up another copy. Wilhelmina Miles. You wouldn’t take any of it back, even if you knew what came next. Look, you say out loud, though there’s nobody in the sculptor’s apartment to hear.

Look how far I’ve come. Look at what I did.

The post Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt appeared first on Electric Literature.

Who cares that Liesl loves a blonde boy 
who sings to her of her own suppression 
as they shelter from the storm in a gazebo 
before he declares himself a Nazi in full?
Is the hope of happiness ever allowed
to meander past the glare of youth,
as in the summertime gaze of Danny Zuko
before he reenters the familiar territory
of learned leather and greased lightning?
My mother and I watch Meggie being watched 
from afar by the priest and remind each other 
in the end it turns out he sticks around,
for old age and all. My mother always squirms
at Bill tending his moths, the fluid horror
of gender—but for me, the more unsettling 
lurks inside the pull of Hannibal’s few minutes
of screen time, how his minor character
nonetheless propels our heroine to purpose,
powering those black basement breaths 
wherein she must understand survival,
reasoning quick and modest as the flutter
of wings upon a nape of exposed flesh—
This is the good part, I can still hear
my mother saying of manufactured thunder,
indulgent dance numbers, a set of teary 
eyes scanning the horizon with wistful 
romantic score draped like a sheer veil
over the truth. What’s on tonight?
I ask myself, reaching for the remote
to replay another story. Mood is only part 
of the whole picture this evening. 
The question loops back to what I want,
skipping over what I’ll look past to get it.

Dolce Far Niente

Joy betrays in easy ways, 
as when I wake early to find pistachio 
hidden inside a chosen pasticciotto 
and am brought to my knees 
before the sun finishes stretching 
out over Polignano a Mare. 
The others leave to tour caves 
along ancient shore, and I breathe 
behind the open window, sea air
billowing its huge single curtain, 
blood tapping the back of my throat. 
Sweet orange light swerves in and out 
of shadow. Fauvist floral tiles. 
The room’s much too large, 
its windows tall as temple doors 
drawn open. The ocean old enough 
to forget itself sifting upon its cliffs. 
I will never be able to leave, don’t know
how to call upon the gods present here. 
God of ragged rooftop and tinkling bell, 
god of umber brick and unmoored 
boat, god of blue paint flaking 
from patient hull, god 
of every immovable past tense.
Hours tick across the walls 
in quadrants of gold, darken 
like bruises. I am myself, no longer 
asleep. The others return
with a stranger, his shirt aglow
golden as a fleece upon his shoulder. 
They cannot comprehend 
that I, too, arrived here with plans 
to spend days like coins. Now no one 
has need for me to translate 
their commands. Half the fun is not 
understanding. Bass thrums 
in the room above, a chorus 
of mocking, Ma perche? Pear-kaayy! 
An old folktale ends this way.
The woman becomes moonbeam. 
Idle hands pretend to peel 
night back, reveal an honest dawn.

The post The Bittersweet Cruelty of a Rerun appeared first on Electric Literature.

For Christmas dinner, Boyd’s mother Brigid had suggested a casual (“very casual”) potluck in the kitchen of the Elledge home. Small and easy, compared to some sort of extended-­family do. “No one will have to spend the week beforehand cleaning for company or the whole holiday cooking,” she’d said; and, put that way, it made more sense than the alternative. For Aubrey’s maternal relatives, with whom she and Boyd had spent the previous Christmas, hosting a holiday was an existentially horrific affair, with so much stressed-­out performative bullshit that went into it. For her first Christmas without her father, this would be a thousand times better. Simple food, a simple gathering, and then they’d simply say goodbye. No carols, no gifts, no bullshit.

Aubrey found the most complicated recipe she could for miso-braised mushrooms and then almost killed herself sourcing king oysters and enoki on Christmas Eve, visiting six different grocery stores on foot. Boyd had volunteered to bring the drinks—­good whiskey and excellent wine, plus the usual single can of Mahaffey’s Red Field per the family tradition—­and picked them up from the liquor store next door to his office building.

The morning of, Aubrey woke up early at her apartment and prepped the mushrooms, scoring the elastic flesh of the king oysters and then immersing the lot of them in a marinade of miso, garlic, and sesame oil. Then, as she waited for Boyd to pick her up, she tried on twenty outfits and hated every last one. Under Brigid’s leadership, the approach Boyd’s family took to things like major holidays was in turns irreverent and achingly earnest, and Aubrey had never been able to correctly predict which it would be. If she wore a nice dress handed down from her sister, she’d find Boyd and his parents in cotton jammies, cornily coordinating. If she wore the snowman cardigan she’d bought for her office’s ugly-­sweater party, surely Brigid would be in a fucking evening gown.

In the eleventh hour she settled on a red turtleneck and her nice jeans. She consulted the full-­length mirror for every possible angle to make sure she didn’t look poochy, and fretted. There, where her top met her pants, was that the beginning of—­? But no, of course not. But was it? She stood frozen for too long, staring, wondering whether it might help to make herself throw up, but ultimately she ran out of time: Boyd texted to say he was pulling up outside.

Downstairs, her happiness at the sight of him in his white Solterra was visceral. She stood at the driver’s side window until he rolled it down. “Hi,” she said, and tried to kiss his mouth, catching instead the strawberry-­blond stubble on his cheek. He’d worn flannel pajama pants and a ribbed henley top.

“You’re not cold?” he said, and unlocked the doors.

In the car, she didn’t mention the ordeal with her clothes, because they had an agreement. The first positive test had been Friday; they’d confirmed with another on Saturday, kicking off a weekend of panic, and then Boyd had said—­No. Let’s table this for now. Christmas was a Monday, and they would circle back to it later in the week, after they’d each had a chance to think. Separately, Boyd had emphasized. It stung but didn’t surprise her, because Boyd was always that way. Fiercely private when he had something on his mind.

In the meantime, thankfully, there were other things to talk about. “Did you find the mushrooms you needed?” asked Boyd, pulling out from beneath her building’s crumbling portico. “I saw some at the corner store but figured those probably weren’t the right ones.”

“No, yeah, those wouldn’t be, but I did find some,” she said, and held up the bulging tote bag in her lap. “Wish me luck that these will be enough. Did you find the drinks?”

He nodded his head to send her attention to the back seat of the station wagon, where there sat a paper bag, its contents clanking against one another. The necks of two wine bottles crested the top of the bag, and she saw from the labels that they were old standbys: Brigid’s favorite Sancerre and her own favorite Rioja.

“Perfect,” she said thankfully, and just as the word fell from her lips, she remembered that she wouldn’t be able to drink even a sip of it.

“They’re here!” sang Brigid, who stood in the door of her beautiful house with her thin arms outstretched. She wore one of her shapeless silk dresses, her long platinum hair tucked beneath a velvet Santa hat. She gathered Boyd into a hug and pressed her face into the front of his henley.

“Merry merry, Bridge,” said Boyd, stroking the nape of his mother’s neck.

Brigid’s husband, Jon, appeared behind her: well-­fitted gray suit, red-­and-­green ascot, silver bells jingling at his jacket cuffs. “Children!” He swerved around the embracing mother and son and folded Aubrey into his arms. “Bright—­beautiful—­beloved—children.” Between each word he planted a moist kiss on Aubrey’s forehead.

These fucking weirdos. And yet, how warmed she was by the welcome. She reached for Boyd’s hand but missed it and instead let herself be guided into the house by his parents.

“Drinks,” announced Boyd, hefting his paper bag. Aubrey clutched her mushrooms and followed him to the kitchen.

Here among the unholy mess of opened food packages and savory cooking smells they found Boyd’s sister, Neve, a serene-­looking and apparently sober version of Neve. She was rummaging in the refrigerator when they entered but emerged with a handful of seedless purplish-black grapes. “Hi, guys! Good God, taste these,” she chirped, offering them the grapes from her hand. She looked good, wearing black sweats with expensive stitching, her rust-­colored hair tamed into a thick, high ponytail.

Boyd took a grape and chewed it as he slid the Red Field into the crisper, the Sancerre into the Vinotemp. The Rioja and whiskey he placed on the countertop. “She makes an appearance at two family holidays in a row! Glad you made it, Nevvie. Guess Psycho Thanksgiving really is behind us.”

“That was last year, this is this year. It’s all fine.” Neve wrapped an arm around Aubrey’s shoulders and held a grape to her face. “Have. I’m serious. They’re so good.”

Aubrey let Boyd’s sister slip the grape into her mouth. It was sweet but not remarkably so. On second thought, was it possible Neve was rolling?

“All right, beautiful children,” said Brigid, appearing in the kitchen doorway. “If you aren’t actively cooking—­out. Go play Settlers of Catan with Jon in the living room. I’ve sworn it off and he’s in withdrawal. Are these the mushrooms?” She pointed to the Tupperware container in Aubrey’s hands.

“Yes! They’re completely prepped, I just need to flash-­fry them. It’ll only take a couple minutes at the very end and then I can serve them with everything else.”

“So nothing to do right now? Then off with you—­Catan!” Brigid made a gentle swatting motion with her hand and then installed herself in front of a countertop to toss the contents of an enormous wooden salad bowl.

Aubrey gazed wistfully at the fragrant pile of kale and endives and radicchio and sliced radishes, which were far more appealing than the idea of board game hell. But she followed Boyd and Neve into the adjacent sitting room, where Jon sat unpacking the contents of the Settlers of Catan box, arranging the board meticulously on the teak coffee table and sprinkling the tiny wooden game pieces all around. “The rules, everyone remembers the rules, yes?”

Aubrey didn’t. “Maybe I can just be on Boyd’s team?” She tucked herself beside him on one of the diminutive leather benches that stood around the table.

“Oh, come on.” Boyd shifted subtly and guided her with a firm hand to a bench of her own, then handed her the frayed instruction sheet. “We played a few weeks ago.” Had they? Maybe with some of his K Street friends.

Neve peered over Aubrey’s shoulder at the instructions and sucked her teeth. “I fucking hate this game,” she complained. “But fine.” She whipped her head to the left and locked her gaze on her brother, baring her small eyeteeth. “If I have to, then you’re going down.”

Jon reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and produced a pair of drugstore reading glasses, which he settled onto the bridge of his nose. “Forgive me, my patient progeny, but actually I’ve forgotten how to play,” he said, taking the instructions from Aubrey’s hand.

God, how exhausting it was. But it was Boyd’s favorite game, and so. They persevered through several false starts and practice turns, until finally an actual game was underway, with Boyd predictably in the lead. The object was expansion; you situated your resource-producing settlements and grew them as rapidly as possible, claiming land, avoiding the gray meeple that represented a persistent robber. Boyd was quick and intuitive with his plays, silently planning his strategy and then moving immediately each time his turn rolled around. Aubrey started sluggish and then improved as the rules came back to her, easily outplaying bewildered Jon and erratic Neve, and suddenly she was winning.

“What the heck,” said Boyd during one of Aubrey’s turns. “No. A die roll that goes off the table doesn’t fucking count.”

“Who says?” Neve frowned at her brother and linked an arm through Aubrey’s in a random show of solidarity.

Jon consulted the instructions. “I don’t see where—­that’s not in the—”

“Oh, Jon, come on. It’s not in the rules,” said Neve. “He’s making it up.”

“Guys. This is important,” said Boyd. “I need her to not get that lumber.”

“I’ll roll again,” said Aubrey over Neve’s protest. For the second time, a five. She took the lumber she was due.

“Motherfu—­” Boyd squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Fine. Lumber, you got it. Anybody, drinks?” He stood and shoved his hands in his deep flannel pockets.

Rioja, Aubrey was about to say, and then stopped herself. She caught Boyd’s eye and shook her head subtly. Jon requested one of his fancy wines; Neve, a vodka and La Croix.

Boyd disappeared into the kitchen as Jon and Neve went back to contemplating their next moves, and Aubrey sat back in her chair, inventorying. She had a minor headache that had begun with the morning’s outfit frenzy, most probably because she’d skipped her usual coffee. And maybe her nerve endings felt too alert, like exposed live wires. But she felt normal otherwise, no nausea, none of the unexplainable fatigue or soreness that Bellamy had complained about through two first trimesters.

It was too early for all that, anyway. The tests she’d taken had been the ones that promised the earliest results possible; her period wasn’t even due for another day. Her body might not have entirely gotten the message yet.

Boyd, diligent researcher that he was, had looked into the relevant information on timing. It was the twenty-­first century, at least for the moment, and they lived on the border of a blue district and a blue state. Whatever they decided to do, he’d told her, they had at least a couple of weeks to figure it out, though of course clarity sooner would be great. Decide what to do and then full steam ahead. That was how he’d put it.

But Aubrey was thirty-­two. Two years older than Bellamy had been when she’d become a mother. People grew up, they got married, they had children and put on family dinners, serving salads assembled from homegrown greens. Or they did it in a different order, if they were less beholden to the old conventions. Aubrey’s father had been dead nearly a year, the hot coals of his judgments cooling in her mind.

There was this other part, too. Neve sat with her head ducked over the game board, her smooth, vibrant hair hanging dangerously close to a few of Aubrey’s settlements, and jabbered to her father about her stupid strategy that wasn’t going to work. Neve had never held anything beyond a few fucked-­up temp jobs, yet she could afford things like Kérastase conditioner and $450 sweatsuits from brands Aubrey had never heard of. She would never want for anything, which of course meant neither would Boyd, nor would any child of his.

Boyd reappeared in the doorway bearing a vintage tray loaded with drinks, Catan-­related annoyance still written all over his face. He handed a full wineglass to Jon, a tinted highball to Neve, and a glass of water to Aubrey, then plopped back onto his seat with his little glass of whiskey.

“Oh, it’s Christmas,” said Jon, gesturing with disapproval toward Aubrey’s water. “Have anything. Have some of this.” He held out his own glass of red wine. Its silky scent tugged at Aubrey.

But no. “I have to work tomorrow,” she said, which was indeed true. On the day after a holiday, the ACK halls would be relatively empty, haunted only by the partners with the most dismal work-­life balances, who wouldn’t bother her. So she’d chosen to preserve her vacation days.

“My turn,” said Boyd, and rolled the dice. An eleven, allowing him to gather up lumber and grain and ore, which he promptly used to build a city. The move didn’t quite steal Aubrey’s lead but did threaten it; his fortunes had turned, and the next roll would make all the difference.

Aubrey held up her palm, offering him a high five, but instead he pumped his fist into the air and took a long drink from his glass.

“Cutthroat,” murmured Jon.

“I don’t know, Jon,” said Neve, “but I really feel like you and I still have a chance.”

“You do,” said Boyd, his voice husky in the way it always became after a drink. “Of course you do, you always do.”

Aubrey rolled a seven, the magic number. She considered where to place the little gray meeple that was the robber, that resource-siphoning thief of joy. Whether to handicap Neve further or seal Jon’s last-­place fate, or whether to stave off Boyd for what would likely be the last round of turns.

“I dare you,” said Boyd, watching the robber dangle from Aubrey’s hand.

Was that playfulness in his tone, after he’d been so strange throughout the entire game? With hope in her heart and a little flourish of the wrist, she set the robber on Boyd’s highest-­yielding brick hex. As she did so, she remembered that he was right, they had played this stupid fucking game before, only a couple of weeks earlier, with a result similar to this one, a late upset in her favor. It had tickled Boyd to watch her win that way, still mildly confused about the rules but managing lucky rolls and decent plays. I guess I win, she had said then, and he’d leapt over the board, over their laughing friends, and smothered her face with exaggerated kisses. “Sorry,” she said now, sweetly.

Boyd lowered his face into his hands and exhaled gutturally. Aubrey stroked his elbow; he jerked it away.

“Sorest of sore losers,” said Neve. “So embarrassing, this one.”

Boyd raised his face; it was damp and colorful, crimson splotches staining his neck and cheeks. “Fuck it. Give.” Aubrey dropped the dice into his hand, and he whipped them across the table. Not the retaliatory seven he hoped for but a three that effectively lost him the game.

Jon and Boyd and Neve wanted a rematch, but Aubrey knew better. As Boyd swept a hand across the array of hexes, gathering up the multicolored cities and settlements and roads, she got to her feet, mumbling about mushrooms, and went to the kitchen.

Delibes’s “Flower Duet” drifted languidly from invisible speakers flanking the Swedish range cooker, which was now a site of chaos: overcrowded pans, brown spills. Brigid stood at the stove with her hands lifted in a gesture of helplessness, mismatched oven mitts. When Aubrey entered, she whirled. “Thank God an expert is here,” she said. “I just stink at this. Grab something, would you please?”

Aubrey squeezed in beside Brigid and turned off the heat on the mashed potatoes, which were already burning at the edges. She wasn’t a particularly passionate cook, but just about anyone in the world could have outdone Brigid, as she’d learned soon after meeting Boyd. The simplest things had impressed him: well-­seasoned baked chicken, turkey burgers, anything involving rice. Brigid maintained her birdlike physique through culinary asceticism. She could make a perfect salad, but that was the end of her repertoire.

But she was a loving mother, and so here on the stove were attempts at her children’s favorite foods. “Okay, good,” said Brigid, gesturing to the mashed potatoes, a favorite of Boyd’s. “That has butter in it already; you only need to put it into . . . that empty dish right there. The vegan stuff for Neve is over here; I’ll handle it. Once you move those potatoes, you can start on your mushrooms—­you said they wouldn’t take long?”

Aubrey began scooping. “Nope. The potatoes look so good!”

A lie, the potatoes had all but glued themselves to the sides of the Le Creuset, but Brigid’s thankful smile was a balm after that round of Catan. “You’re sweet. Also, just water? Please have wine; we’ve already got three bottles open and we can open others, if you want. White, orange, red?”

Aubrey’s stomach twisted. “Maybe in a few minutes,” she said. She set the dish of mashed potatoes aside and found a clean pan. “Okay, mushrooms.”

Brigid shucked her mitts and took a drink from her own wineglass, then raised it toward Aubrey’s face, tipping it by a taunting fifteen degrees. “Try! Sancerre. I’m set on converting you.”

“I—­” Aubrey scraped her memory for the excuse she’d given Jon. “I’m working a full day tomorrow, I have to—”

“Oh, since when does that mean no wine?” But Brigid lowered her glass and returned to her side of the range. “Okay, Neve’s nut loaf is done, I think. Though—­between us—­how can you even tell?” She grimaced, then lifted the charred brick from the oven and set it on a trivet.

A confidence, if a tiny one. The warmth in Aubrey’s core spread to her limbs. When they’d first gotten serious, Boyd had said she should feel no pressure to ingratiate herself with his parents; he’d been, actually, a little befuddled that she would think she needed to. Brigid doesn’t care about that stuff, he’d said, watching Aubrey toil over a thank-­you note after her first birthday gift from his mother. But everything in her upbringing told her otherwise. Bellamy had had her hair freshly relaxed and pin-­curled before her first time meeting the people who would become her in-­laws, after all.

“You’re sure about the wine,” Brigid pressed.

“Maybe when I have my hands free,” offered Aubrey. She drizzled sesame oil into the pan and fiddled with the burner temperature. Then she searched the storm on the countertops, carefully moving things aside until she found her Tupperware container. She opened it, and it sent forth a delectable aroma, fresh garlic and ginger and the powerful earthiness of the mushrooms themselves, which remembered their provenance even after they’d been lightly battered and pressed in panko.

Brigid rested her chin on Aubrey’s shoulder to watch her separate the mushrooms with a fork. “Incredible. Boyd always says what a good cook you are, and I see it.”

“I’m really not,” said Aubrey. She considered for a moment, then decided—­a confidence for a confidence—­and forged ahead: “And even if I were, he doesn’t care about that at all. He’s not into, like, Women belong in the kitchen, or anything. He’s more into egalitarianism. Sometimes I feel like I’m failing some kind of feminist test by cooking for him at all, if that makes sense.”

It was quiet for a moment, long enough for Aubrey to regret the disclosure. Then Brigid said, “Well, he comes by that honestly. Jon and I tried to put egalitarianism at the center of everything we taught them. When Jon first started at the university, we sat at that table”—­she pointed to the little dining nook at the corner of the kitchen—­“and, with the kids sitting right next to us, we wrote out a little internal contract. During such time as Spouse 1 is employed by­ blah-­blah, Spouse 2 will accept primary responsibility for preparing and serving all family meals except on alternate Sundays. We did the same thing years earlier when Boyd was on the way. I had to waddle around, enormous and sweating, and so Jon had to navigate the shops and buy the bassinets and all that. My friends’ male partners always pretended not to be able to manage any of those tasks, but of course they could have.” She paused, snapped her fingers, and unsheathed a baguette, then laid it on the vacant rack inside the oven. “And then, of course, I showed the kids the contracts when they were old enough. I wanted them to understand that our division of labor had nothing to do with my being a woman or Jon’s being a man; it was just that he was doing that, and so—­temporarily!—­I would do this. And of course, fifteen years later, I’m no better at doing this! Oh, well. Do you think that oil’s ready?”

It was. Aubrey dropped in the first batch, an even mixture of chopped king oysters and whole enoki. She braced herself for the smoky, sibilant crackle; but no, she was using nice oil in a nice pan over a nice stove. The mushrooms sizzled quietly and evenly, turning golden after a minute or two. Brigid handed her a gigantic slotted spoon, which she used to transfer that batch to a plate.

“And actually,” said Brigid, as Aubrey started on the next batch, “speaking of women transcending traditional expectations, I think that’s one of the things Boyd values so much about you, do you know?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s always telling us how smart you are. About your legal work, and that class you teach. Teaching isn’t easy! It’s so much more than just knowing the material.”

“Definitely! Yeah, it is.” What a nice surprise this was! Boyd had never had much to say about her test-­prep classes other than to question whether the money was worth giving up multiple nights per week talking herself hoarse. He’d never shown any interest in the substance or mechanics of SAT prep; had never asked her, for example, how she went about helping the most stubborn learners, on whom her standard techniques and analogies didn’t work. She could imagine sharing such small details with Brigid or talking pedagogy with Jon over some future family dinner.

“It’s so clear what an impressive young woman you are. So bright and also so eloquent. Jon and I talk all the time about how well-spoken you are.”

She let herself be briefly annoyed by that, well-­spoken, and then pushed it out of her mind because what was the point.

Brigid stood close, her bird shoulder just a millimeter from Aubrey’s pan-­stirring arm. “So I hope you won’t mind if I offer a little advice.”

Of course. This wasn’t a surprise. This was the closest Brigid had ever seemed to an auntlike figure; and in Aubrey’s world, aunts, like fathers, couldn’t stop themselves from giving unsolicited advice. She braced herself to hear that she should apply her eloquent brightness to law school. She tightened her core and said, “Hit me.”

“You and Boyd are just the sweetest couple. Jon and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. I think a few years from now, you’ll find that Boyd is the ideal egalitarian partner. He grew up with that example.”

Aubrey waited to hear where this was headed. She lifted the second batch of mushrooms to its resting place and began another.

Brigid continued. “But he isn’t ready to fulfill that promise just yet. Do you know, actually, that Jon is almost eight years older than me? I don’t mean to negate everything else I’ve just said, but there is one inescapable fact about men, which is that time works differently for them. I’m sure a smart woman like you can follow exactly what I’m saying.”

“I—”

“All I mean to say is that—­well, I think you ought to make your plans with the understanding that my sweet son is nowhere near ready to shop for bassinets on his own, and I take it you’re juggling quite a lot yourself. You will need support. And so I suggest that you—­because it can only be you, of course—­decide what to do, and then”—­Brigid turned her small hand rigid and knifed it forward, a locomotive hurtling down a track—­“full steam ahead.”

Cement settled into Aubrey’s stomach, her hands and feet. The third batch of mushrooms burbled and then hissed, but the spatula hung motionless at her side.

Brigid placed a hand on her shoulder. “Of course,” she said, “you have a dedicated ally in me. I don’t imagine you’ll run into any issues, but on the off chance, I still have a few good friends who haven’t retired, and one of them is a gynecologist named Tess Werner-­Simson, who . . .”

Aubrey forcibly powered down her ears as Brigid prattled about her long friendship with the good Dr. Werner-­Simson, who worked as the medical director for the Planned Parenthood location in Northeast DC. She heard only Brigid’s music, and barely. Of all things, opera, cloying and saccharine. Aubrey kept her head down and stirred her mushrooms, finding that this third batch had cooked too quickly in the left-­behind grit from the first two. When it was time to take them out, she plopped them onto a paper towel, blew on them, hard, and then shoved them a few at a time into her mouth. They were far too crispy, but otherwise perfect, meaty and savory, with just enough salt and the rich minerality of the earth.

After she’d swallowed, she reached into an open cabinet and pulled down a fresh stemless wineglass, which Brigid, still gabbling without cease about Dr. Werner-­Simson’s incredible career, filled nearly to the top with Sancerre.

Neve burst into the kitchen, cheeks flushed. “Fuck that game,” she said.

Then Boyd, hands in the pockets of his pajama pants: “Guess who didn’t win the rematch.”

Finally, Jon, beelining for his wife. “Put me out of my misery, Bridge,” he said, wrapping his hulking frame desolately around her elfin one. “The kids started flogging me on the first roll and didn’t let up. Tell me there are dishes to set out or something.”

“Dinner won’t be much longer. Just a few minutes. Aubrey, do you want to—”

The appearance of the other Elledges had sucked the air from the room. “Sorry,” said Aubrey. “Realizing I should call my family sometime today, and now is probably best? Before we sit down to eat?” Without waiting for an answer, she squeezed past her hosts, past the framed childhood photos of hale freckled Boyd and impish flame-haired Neve that lined the hallway, and back into the vacated sitting room. They’d left the finished game spread out across the coffee table, and Aubrey could only imagine it would be left to Brigid to clean it up.

Her sister answered her FaceTime on the first ring. “Hang on,” Bellamy said over the tumult of background noise, and after some fumbling she had turned the camera horizontal. Nearly a dozen faces crowded into the picture, her sister’s out of focus in a corner and her small niece’s in the forefront, grinning and giggling. Around them, two of Aubrey’s three aunts and an assortment of cousins and in-­laws had gathered to say hello. Everyone was fancied up, full makeup, even the babies spit-­shined, her niece’s hair sumptuously greased.

“Hey, girl,” said Aubrey’s Aunt Lee. “Who got you that turtleneck? Did I get you that? You look cute! What’s in that glass?”

It had not occurred to her that she would miss them. Actually, miss wasn’t quite accurate, because of course her rational mind knew she would have spent twice as long readying herself for that gathering as she had for this one; and that after that, they would have poked at her for many miserable hours, assessing her outfit, interrogating her about work, guessing at things she’d hoped to keep secret. But she was happy to see them on the screen, happy to roll her eyes as they all talked over each other, telling her about the food she was missing.

And when Boyd entered the sitting room and sat quietly beside her, slipping an affectionate hand around her waist to announce that dinner was served, she understood that she should not rush off the phone just because he’d said so, not make it as easy for him as she so often did in so many ways. And in fact she did manage to keep him waiting for thirty full seconds before his tugs grew so insistent that she had to end the call.

The post This Family’s Favorite Holiday Game Is Resource Control appeared first on Electric Literature.

Instagram insists on red light therapy, a pink plastic 
eye mask that glows like a ruby-geode inside, 
Zorro illuminated and self-conscious, afraid of 
aging. Each fissure chips at the issue: I am un-

afraid to die. I am just kidding. Death is 
a blind date, sure as Emily’s carriage 
is right on time. My small dog took 
her own ride six months ago, was picked up 

by eternity. Her atoms have a kind of immortality. 
If matter is never created or destroyed, each white 
and orange hair that still sticks in the weave 
of a blue acrylic sweater shows something’s left. 

When I knit and a long dark hair of mine twists 
into the yarn, I keep it there. Let me be littered 
into the future. Let me be threaded into its fabric, 
of something you wrap yourself up in to stay warm.

i have forgotten how to write and all i can do is eat.

powdered french onion soup mix makes potato chip dip. i pretend 
i’ll only eat the curled ones, and then finish the bag anyway. soup 
from last summer with roadside tomatoes from someone else’s 
garden. add frozen, then thawed, then squeezed spinach to every-
thing– green must be good. i am trying to feed everything that is empty. 
remember when i aspired only to wear a whip-cream bikini? to be seen 
as dessert, strategically placed maraschinos glistening. i cannot undo 
these early mythologies. i have tried eating hearts, half-heartedly, 
to feel whole. chicken yakitoried ones at my first bachelorette, 
two hours before a wide bouncer carried me out, and i clung 
to his front like an infant creature. i no longer drink to forget. 
making anyone’s grandma’s recipe is one way to bring back 
the dead. now, it’s the defrosted red cherries and their aftertaste 
of dirt, and ask the piecrust first why dust to dust and not earth to earth?

The post Knitting Myself Into the Algorithm appeared first on Electric Literature.

Tess discovered the mystery one morning while doing her chores. She was twelve years old and in charge of the house while her parents were gone. She had just fed the chickens, and now she was in the pasture. The goats’ water was dirty, so she kicked over the bucket to fill it anew. After the dirty water had spilled out and washed away down the pasture slope, she saw something strange left behind on the ground. A wrinkled lump of what looked like mud but was not mud. Tess found a stick and used it to lift the thing up. It hung there like a scrap of black silk streaked with other dark colors, mostly blues and browns and greens.

She removed it from the end of the stick and held it in her hands. The thing was wet, but it wasn’t just wet, it was as though it were made of wetness and nothing else. It was not slimy, not muddy, not slippery. It did not collect any of the dust and pine cone petals from the ground. It was the smoothest thing she had ever touched in her life, so smooth and so thin she was not sure she could ­really feel it or if she only thought she could feel it because she was seeing it on her hands. Her hands were trembling beneath it, though not because they were cold, but because they were astonished.

“What is this?” she said loudly, almost angrily, though no one was there to hear her.

She needed a place to lay it down, somewhere smooth and clean where she could study it. The surface of a pale boulder, as broad as the hood of a car, rose up about a foot from the ground in the center of the pasture. She went over to the boulder and knelt and spread the thing out until it lay flat.

It was a perfect circle. At first, all that her eyes could make out was a murky darkness with a bright space in the center. But her eyes adjusted, and what she ­saw—it was like a picture. There were trees and clouds and sky, the way they look when you are lying on the ground and looking up.

A reflection.

She was looking at a reflection.

But this reflection was not reflecting what was right above it, for it did not show Tess her face even when she leaned right over it, and there were no trees out here in the middle of the pasture and no clouds overhead at all. She looked around, dazed. Over by the bucket, the nanny goats were all standing around flicking their tails and biting at one another, lazing in the morning shade of five ponderosa pines.

The same pines that she saw in the picture on the rock.

But how could this be?

She put her face very close to the dark circle. She looked over at the trees, then back at the circle again. Yes. She was seeing what the bucket had seen. A reflection of the sky and trees, not as they were currently but as they had been at some earlier point when the clouds were overhead.

At twelve years old, Tess had seen plenty of strange things on the mountain: weird fungi, crazy insects, deformed animals, wolverines, a blanket of avalanche lilies growing thickly over the ashes of what was clearly, her father told her later, an exploded meth lab. But this reflection, it was stranger than those things, stranger than anything she had ever seen or dreamed of. She had to show it to somebody right away in order to believe it, and at the same time she could not imagine sharing it with anyone. She wanted to keep it for herself.

Then she thought of her little brother, Rory, how, being four and so much a shadow of herself, he was no one and someone at once. She could show it to Rory. She looked over her shoulder, thinking he might be coming, but he wasn’t. She looked back at the thing on the rock.

But it had changed. The sunlight was drying it up.

“Oh—­oh no!” She reached for the thing but her fingertips did not know what to do with it. The thing had hardened to the surface of the boulder. It was as if the picture had been absorbed into the stone.

She ran back up through the pasture, startling the nanny goats. She flew through the goat barn, out the door, and then down the hill to the house. She flung open the door and shouted for Rory.

There the two of them stood, side by side, looking down. Rory tilted his head slightly to display to Tess how carefully he was regarding the picture on the boulder.

Was it still beautiful? That was what Tess wanted to know. She couldn’t separate the picture on the rock from her memory of how it looked when she first saw it.

“It’s ­really good” was Rory’s assessment, after a long time looking.

“It is, isn’t it?” she whispered. She was relieved to hear that there was still some visible trace of the mysterious thing that she had seen.

Then he said, “Where did you get the paint?”

She looked at him sharply. “You think I painted this? Look at the trees in the picture,” she insisted. “Nobody can paint like this!”

“Can we go now, Tessy?”

“But does it really look like something a twelve-­year-­old could paint?”

“I don’t want to be in the pasture right now. Too many beetles out here.”

“Beetles, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t like beetles.”

“I don’t see a single beetle!”

“There’s one,” he said, and he pointed to the top of her pajama shirt. She looked down. Exactly in the place where her top button was missing, a giant long-­horned beetle was clinging to the fuzz, antennae reaching for her throat.

“Agh!” she gasped, and flicked it off.

All the rest of that morning, she did not stray far from the reflection on the rock. She wandered around, searching for an explanation. She examined the bucket the picture had come from. It looked like an old milk pail. There was nothing special about it. It was made of some kind of metal.

She thought of calling her older brother, Avery, who lived with his girlfriend now, to ask him to look it up on his phone. But what would she have him type? And if his search produced anything, would she recognize from his words the thing she couldn’t describe?

She could not look it up herself because of where they lived, in a dead zone in the mountains, two decades behind the rest of the world. She was still getting by on a few precious TV channels, which she achieved by manipulating the rabbit ears duct-taped to the windowsill. They didn’t even have dial-­up. Mostly, she and Rory survived on DVDs and radio. Everyone was rural around here, but none so rural as Tess and Rory. At school, boys liked to joke about the girls’ stripper names. A stripper name was your middle name plus the street where you lived. There was­ Suzanne Honeysuckle, Sasha Wellspring, Jordan Fox, Elizabeth Riverlane. And then there was Tess: Anne Forest Service Road 2550, out in the middle of nowhere, stripping for no one. This hilarious discovery earned her the briefly affectionate nickname Dirt Road, which had since lost all connection to her rural origins and had come to refer instead to the fine dark hairs above her lip, the dirt road across her face.

The name was not fair or accurate, for the hairs on her lip were barely visible, no more prominent than anyone else’s, but everyone pretended they were in order to justify the name, which existed more or less to justify the Nair strips. Where they all came from was beyond her. No one threw the Nair strips at her, no, because school was a “kind” place now, read any poster on the wall and you’d know that. Bullying, in any form, was not tolerated. But generosity? Concern? Thoughtfulness? By all means. So: Here, Tess, they’d say, some hair-­removal strips to help you out in your time of need. You’re welcome.

She was given so many Nair strips from so many different people that, in an effort to reclaim her dignity, she decorated the door of her locker with the sticky pink strips. She peeled off the wrappers so that the wax was exposed to the air, and she taped the paper backing to the locker. She arranged the strips on her locker in the shape of a tall rose whose sticky wax petals collected all manner of dust and other people’s gum wrappers. She named the monstrosity “the Nair Flower.”

But no one ­really cared what Dirt Road did. She was nobody. She was Anne Forest Service Road 2550. Her heart was as remote as the place she came from. Nobody bothered to go there.

But now Dirt Road had seen something no one else had ever seen. Now she had a secret.

She filled up the goats’ bucket with fresh water from the hose. Rory came, too, and played on the stumps in the pasture until Panic Boy, the black wether, chased him off. Panic Boy was their only male goat and by far their worst. He was territorial about tree stumps. Rory had already suffered one concussion from a billy goat before, so Tess made Rory leave, not just for his own sake but for her own: The first concussion had happened on her watch, and her mother threatened that if it happened again she would tan her hide with a TV ban.

Eventually, the heat of the day forced Tess to drift away from the rock and get on with other things. There had been such intense feelings that morning that by the afternoon, she was relieved to find herself almost bored. She made lunch for Rory, then let him watch his DVD. She sat on the lawn and looked at Katrina’s bent-­up bike. Tess barely knew Katrina but for some reason (she knew the reason), Tess had offered to fix the bike a week ago, on the last day of school, though she had never fixed anything in her life and the bike, having been run over by a car, was beyond fixing even by a professional. She had loved Katrina’s twin brother Hal since the fourth grade, feverishly and without reason. But if this was the best plan she had come up with in all that time—­offering to fix his sister’s unfixable bike—­well then, maybe she didn’t deserve him.

She tried to call her brother Avery, though not to tell him about the picture on the rock, nor about the bike and Hal, but to hear her brother’s voice and ask him if he was ever coming home.

Avery did not answer.

Evening came.

Tess took Rory with her to feed the animals that evening. He liked dipping his hands into the chicken feed and swishing his fingers around. Just outside the pasture, he threw a small rock at the snag to see if he could make the woodpecker fly out. 

“He’s long gone, Rory,” called Tess, with a glance at the dead tree. “Just termites in there.”

They went into the pasture and wandered down to the boulder. They studied the strange image, but they did not say anything. The picture on the rock had faded and darkened, losing its color and definition, retaining only the impression of treetops and wisps of cloud. They looked at it for as long as it was interesting, which wasn’t long, and then they looked out at the mountains in the distance. This was the one place on the property where they could see over the top of the dense forest to the other side of the distant valley.

Rory said, “You want to tell me about the wolverines?”

“Nah,” she said, and smiled. “Thanks, though.”

Tess loved Rory more than anyone, but he didn’t seem to trust her or like her half the time. Their parents ran a logging outfit together, and so in the summer months they were always gone, leaving Tess to look after Rory. It was only the second week of June but already he was sick of her. All he saw when he looked at his sister was a person not their mom, a failed little person pretending to have power and getting paid for it. It was better when school was in, when she wasn’t a stand-­in for their mom, when she was her own self, fresh and new and filled with ideas, made rare by the endless hours of a day apart.

So it was nice when he brought up the wolverines. It meant he wanted to please her. She was the only one in the family who had seen the wolverines out behind the chicken house in the snow, and he knew it made her feel special and important to be able to describe them. It meant he wanted her to put her arm around him. It meant he was willing to lighten the load, a little, of the unrequited love upon her shoulders. She kissed the top of his head. Then they went to the garden and snipped some mustard greens. They ate boiled hot dogs with their greens and then she read him picture books until he fell asleep. Then she covered him with cougar skin.

In all the strangeness of that day, Tess forgot to lock up the goats before she went to bed. She had never forgotten before. She didn’t remember until the next morning, when, on her way up to do her chores, she discovered to her horror that the goats were lying around in the shade by the bucket instead of in the shed where they belonged. All five were there, the four nannies and Panic Boy, but anything could have happened. The cougar could have come. It was a miracle she hadn’t. Everything was fine, but Tess felt shaken and guilty.

It was early enough and dark enough that the night birds were out, nightjars and yellow chats fluttering around in the early darkness, feasting on the spilled grain in the pasture or the insects that hovered above the goat droppings. Tess turned on the faucet outside the pasture fence and then she kinked the hose. She dragged it into the shed but the trough there was full, so she dragged it through the shed and down the slope of the pasture. At her approach, the night birds flew away and the goats lifted their heads, all but Panic Boy, who lay there dozing so deeply his legs were spasming in dream. The kinked hose was dripping water down her arm, but she knelt and patted each of the four nannies, and muttered how sorry she was to have put them in danger. Fine dust rose shimmering from their red hides as easy as forgiveness.

The goats had drunk the bucket down to half full in the night. Tess stood over the bucket a long time holding the kinked hose, expecting—­what? She expected nothing. The water in the bucket was not dirty and did not need to be kicked over, but she kicked it over anyway, and this kick was an admission to herself that she did, in fact, expect something.

She studied the old water that trickled down over the thistles and pine cones. There was nothing strange left behind, no shimmering lump. She filled up the bucket with fresh cold water from the hose. She went over to look at the picture on the rock from yesterday. It was still there but made her feel nothing but a very old and manageable sadness. She could not linger long, for the hose was spraying water. She ran out of the pasture to turn it off.

But something was wrong with Panic Boy. He lay in the same place all morning, there by the bucket. She put her hand on his belly and pushed around, feeling for lumps, and lifted his eyelids to check his whites. Pried open his mouth and studied his strong pink tongue.

Rory was behind her, throwing sticks at the electric fence to see if he could get a spark.

“Knock that off, I have to listen,” she told him, and then put her ear to Panic Boy’s fur and listened to the bubbling of his three stomachs. All of this bothered him enough that he eventually got up and wandered away. He went slowly down the hill, and then he stopped and looked straight out at the forest with what seemed to her an eerie humanity, as if his sickness were merely the suffering of his first noble thought. She had never seen an animal look that way, gaze with a loneliness that seemed beyond itself. Until now, Panic Boy had been a moron. As a kid, he was a jumpy coward, and as an adult, a bully. He spent most of his time pouting in the shed and butting the nannies away from his stumps. His brother Kip, the goat who gave Rory the concussion, had been killed and processed into jerky. Rory and Tess had gnawed him down to gristle, and it was assumed, and without grief, that Panic Boy was next.

But looking at him now, Tess felt desperate at the thought. The memory of having eaten Kip was suddenly unbearable, it made her sick, she thought she might not ever be able to eat an animal again.

Many times throughout the day, she went up to check on Panic Boy. He lay gazing out at the mountains, doing nothing. She sat down on a tree stump to remove a rock from her mud boot, but her sitting on one of his stumps did not bother him as it would have on any other day.

It was unsettling, his indifference.

The stump meant nothing to him now.

The next morning, earlier than usual, Tess awakened from a dream she couldn’t remember and she rose with the sense that something was waiting. She crept down the narrow hallway. Rory was sleeping against their parents’ closed door, curled up on a pad meant for a dog. Often he got scared in the night, but their parents thought he was too old for stunts like this so they locked their door to keep him from climbing into bed with them. Tess was the one who put the old dog pad against their door, so he would have something soft to sleep on. She found the cougar skin on the couch and covered him up. Then she snuck out into the early morning in her pajamas and mud boots.

In the pasture, the shadows were long and deep. The sunlight fell in yellow splashes. Tess stood over the water bucket, staring down. She could faintly see her moving reflection in the water. She could faintly see the sky and the trees. She reached in and touched the surface of the water with her fingertip.

The surface wrinkled. It caught on her skin.

She pinched the surface of the water and lifted it up.

Hardly breathing, scared as if for her life, she stared at it. It hung there over her fingertips, shimmering with the colors of its held reflection. Like silk, but smoother, so unbelievably smooth it felt like nothing more than cool spring water pouring over her hands. What was this, what was this? It was as if a skin had formed on the top of the water, a skin of such loose and shining thinness that it couldn’t be perceived until it was touched, and once it was touched it felt like nothing more than water.

Tears were flowing down her cheeks and she had no idea why or when they began. Her heart was racing but her body did not tremble. Her body no longer felt beholden to her feelings; it existed only to deliver this shimmering thing to its stone.

She ran through the pasture, cradling it in her hands, and when she came to the boulder, she knelt in front of it. She didn’t know why she would do this again—­choose to lose this thing by doing exactly what she’d done two days before—­but she had to see. The thing in her hands was translucent; she could see dark colors but couldn’t make out a picture, not until she spread the reflection out on the rock.

There it was. A second dark circle. Not identical to the first, no—­there were no clouds in this new reflection, and the branches of trees were caught mid-­gust in a way that obscured the central space of sky. But otherwise, the image was the same.

This time, she did not look away. She stared and stared. She had never looked so deeply at anything in her life. She could have looked all day. She could have looked forever. There had never been so much to see as there was now. Five trees, a bit of sky, upon a rock.

She watched the picture sink into the stone. Only then did she look away.

She gasped. There was Panic Boy, standing close beside her. He was looking at her with such intensity she felt afraid that he was going to butt her away. How long had he been standing there like that? His pupils were large black rectangles, his irises amber. He stared at her with both blankness and recognition. She had never seen him blink before, but now she felt his stare was meant for her, his unblinking gaze a testament of feeling rather than a function of his eye.

“Panic Boy?” she whispered, as if she almost expected him to answer.

He stepped onto the boulder and lay down.

Morning after morning, it happened. Earlier and earlier she rose, and came out to pluck the skin from the surface of the water, to hold it shimmering in her hands, to spread the reflection out upon the boulder. She watched it become the stone. The stone became the memory of the water. The stone became the trees, the sky, the past itself.

Through all of this, through the ritual of Tess’s daily miracle, Panic Boy remained at her side. He followed her down from the shed to the bucket. He followed her from the bucket to the rock. Then he climbed onto the rock and he lay down on the reflections. There he remained for most of the day, not caring about the sun beating down on his hide. He would not eat the food she brought to him, would not drink the water she hauled over. He ate and drank only at night when she locked him in the shed.

A few days passed before she understood. The skin on the water had appeared to Tess every morning except that second morning, which was when she discovered that the goats had been left out all night. Any one of the goats might have been the one to drink the water, but it was Panic Boy whose tongue had lapped up the reflection. It had changed him, transformed him from a stump-­obsessed bully into this somber creature, unearthly and serene.

They sat together on the boulder every morning. A couple of times she rested her hand on Panic Boy’s side, but both times she had the sense that she was trespassing. It made her feel strangely embarrassed, as if she had revealed to him how little she understood of what was going on. As if she were violating not his trust or rest, but his painstaking effort to uphold the truth of the reflections he lay upon.

July arrived. Tess’s existence sharpened but her daily life faded. Her life, and all the stuff in it, went on as usual but it did not add up to Tess’s life like it once had. There were still the occasional thoughts of school, and meals to prepare, and television to laugh at, and animals to love, and Rory to care for. But there was no longer the dread of summer ending, nor was there the ever-aching hope of Avery’s return, nor the nagging thoughts of other people’s thoughts.

What mattered now, what ­really mattered, what mattered more than anything, was a moment of time that passed inside a bucket of water in a goat pen in the mountains of Blanchard, Idaho, sometime between sunrise and 5 A.M.

It mattered, what the bucket saw. It mattered whether the wind blew this direction or that at some time in the early morning when everyone was asleep. It mattered if there were some clouds or no clouds and what kinds of clouds they were. It mattered if a horde of gnats had chosen these treetops to haunt or if they hadn’t. It mattered if the rain blew sideways or fell straight down or not at all. Or if pollen sifted down in a haze that obscured ever so slightly the branches above. It mattered that on a Tuesday a pine cone petal fell. She found it lying dry upon the skin of water, and beside it she saw the reflection of it falling hours before. She could see the memory of its fall but also hold the pine cone petal in her hand, the only thing the reflection ever caught whose source was left behind for her to hold. And hold she did, close to her heart. She made it into a necklace with a piece of string and a dot of hot glue.

Every time she laid a reflection upon the boulder, she held her breath with anticipation—A reflection without a cloud in it! A reflection with two clouds! It never let her down, for no matter what was there, it was what had happened, it was what was already gone.

All night long she lived in anticipation of the picture to come, each image a slight variation of the same. Trees and sky; trees, clouds, and sky; trees and sun and clouds and sky.

But every now and then, the image on the rock surprised her with something new. It thrilled her to see in the reflection, one morning, a single strand of spiderweb. So clear she thought the web had fallen there upon the rock, over the picture. But no—not fallen web, but the memory of falling web.

Another day, captured in the reflection were enormous drops of rain flying at her from the rock, about to pierce the universe between the stone and her but stopped short by the forming of that skin hours before, the sealing off forever of the instant. To see, from the water’s perspective, rain about to ­strike—it was beautiful. It was like nothing else. In another picture, a grasshopper flew at the water, its wings spread open, a bright orange blur at the very center of the reflection. The grasshopper was larger than anything else because of its closeness to the water. There had been no grasshopper drowned in the bucket that morning; she went back to check. The skin had formed the moment before the insect landed, and so it had landed on the water’s skin and leapt away, out of the bucket, dry.

She loved the surprise of the grasshopper and the web and her pine cone petal necklace, but her heart did not privilege any of these things more than the pictures without them. There was something almost cold, mechanical, and unfamiliar to her about her love’s indiscriminate attention to each reflection. It was never a disappointment when two circles were identical or nearly so. She was no more thrilled by the web, or the grasshopper, or the rain, than she was by the absence of all these things. The trees and sky, the precious original, just as unlikely as them all.

Not even when the mouse came—­not even then did she treasure a mouse’s reflection more than the others. There at the circumference, two mouse hands gripped the rim of the bucket. So tiny, and so shadowed, and so crowded there at the edge of what was visible that she could hardly make out what they were at first, those tiny mouse fingers holding on. And above them (or rather, below them), the nose and lit-­up whiskers and beady eyes looking down into the water and up at her. Image after image of the miraculous—­the things themselves miraculous, not just the skin that preserved them. Sometimes she had to shake her head to clear her thoughts, as if to remember what the miracle ­really was. Not that some mouse had come looking for a drink, no, how could that be any kind of miracle? It was that the moment continued to exist, there on the boulder, a lapse, a moment in time no other human eyes had ever seen.

Sometimes Tess stayed so long up at the rock with Panic Boy that she felt her mind fuzzing, as if it were a disturbed reflection of itself, and she made herself leave. Suddenly she was worried about Rory—­how could she forget him again? Had she fed him? How late in the day was it? Once, she ran inside and found him in the living room still in his cut-­off footsie pajamas though it was nearly eleven o’clock. He was sitting on a basketball, bouncing gently, and gnawing on a piece of jerky. She snatched it out of his hand and ignored his cry of rage. Then she went to her room, dug through her bottom drawer, and found a piece of Laffy Taffy hoarded since Easter. “Here,” she said. “Vegetarian jerky.”

He took it, silenced, in awe of the secrets his sister kept.

Then she went back up to her pasture.

Time passed in the world.

All moments went by somewhere, they were going by all the time, for that’s what a moment is, it is this instant and the next and a fragment of them both and the overlap of fragments, and forever. You can try to catch them, try to keep them. That’s what her brother Avery tried to do. He was always taking pictures, making movies. When Tess showed him the avalanche lilies on the old meth lab, it was like he couldn’t see them except through a camera lens, like they would disappear without a frame. He snapped pictures of them from every angle until every single bloom was dead to her. She couldn’t remember what was so amazing about a bunch of flowers and some burned trash.

After he got his driver’s license, Avery sometimes came to pick her up after school. He didn’t do it much anymore, but that first year he was away, he would come once, maybe twice a month. She would meet him in the school parking lot. He would hand her his phone as she crawled into the back seat. “Here,” he’d say, with a smile of generosity. Everything she had missed about his life was saved on his phone in an album titled “For Tess.”

It was incredible and awful the way time passed inside those pictures on her brother’s phone, Avery and his friends laughing, swimming at the lake. Several portraits of his girlfriend’s dog,­ Cecily. Though Tess wanted to look and look, she felt something expand between her brother and herself with every picture she swiped with her finger, until a dense space had pressed between the front seat and back, keeping them apart. In the car, then, she breathed the air that was like the overbreathed air in the deepest cave. She found that there was not more to say but less. Her eyes were too full, had seen too much, had not seen anything at all. In choosing what to capture for her he had excluded what she wanted most to see, which were the moments he would never think to capture. The moments that passed unchosen, unremarked. Her big brother picking at the carpet while he watched TV. Her big brother coming out of the bathroom having just popped a zit and gazing at her face with serene terror at whether she would acknowledge the blazing thing on his chin. Her big brother eating the crust of his sandwich.

Stupid stuff, all the stupid stuff, all the meaningless crap she missed so much, where had all of it gone?

One July day the boulder was covered by the reflections. It could hold no more. The stone’s gray surface was only visible in the small spaces between the circles. And so, the morning that followed, she was forced to lay the new reflection over an old one.

She chose to lay the new reflection over that very first one, which was by now the most faded. She was careful to make the circles overlap exactly, and failed only by a millimeter or so. The effect of this layering was to impose a depth upon that first circle that was greater than what seemed possible. Over those faint wisps of cloud there was now the same image but with no clouds and a flare of sunlight. The first image lent the second its clouds; the second lent the first the sun flare. But more stunning than the overlay of these nearly identical images was the impression of vast space between the two layers of reflections. This space was the depth of days having passed, which was something Tess couldn’t see but could feel. The days she had lived between that first circle and the new ­one—a dimension so thin as to be infinitely thin. It was impossible that there should be any impression of space at all, but there it was, and holding, of all things, the passage of Tess’s life.

Did the water choose which instant in time to capture? Or did the skin form on the water at the same time every morning regardless of what the picture would show? Tess had to know. Earlier and earlier she rose until she was rising in complete darkness. One morning she was too early. The skin had not yet formed. It was just after four o’clock.

She had let Panic Boy out, but none of the other goats. He stood a few feet away, watching her. She leaned over the bucket so that the reflection of her face would be caught. It did not matter how long she had to sit that way, she would not move until the sun was high in the sky and she was sure that her face had been captured. Then she would lay out upon the boulder her own amazed expression.

For a half hour, maybe more, Tess leaned over the bucket, her bare knees down on the hard ground. She remained there, aching, until she was sure that the sun was high enough that the skin must have formed on the water.

She reached in for her reflection. Her finger touched only water. The shock of this—­she fell back as if struck.

Panic Boy leapt back, too. It was the quickest she had seen him move since that first day that he had changed. He ran at her with his head down like he intended to butt her to the ground. She rolled over and curled up into a ball to protect herself, but Panic Boy turned abruptly away. He went not to the rock but to the very edge of the pasture, and there he stood a long time.

So the skin would not form if it was watched. Okay—­all right—but how could she have known, except by trying? She had learned her lesson, she would not try again, and there was no reason Panic Boy had to be so angry at her now. Who did he think he was punishing by avoiding the rock all the rest of that day? What did she care if he lay on it or not?

But she did care. It troubled her immensely to have the rock and goat apart. She felt she was being punished for her recklessness. He suffered, too, she could see it. He stood in the blazing sun all afternoon.

By four o’clock Tess had a fever. Her fever made her emotional, and she snuggled up close with Rory while he was watching his movie. He did not respond to her gentle touches, and the more she snuggled, the more frustrated he became until he turned the TV off, which he had never done once in his life.

“Let’s go outside,” he said.

“Where?”

“Up to the snag.”

She was shivering. “Okay.” She went into the bathroom to look for a thermometer but couldn’t find one. She did find a pill in a plastic bag in her mom’s cupboard. She decided that it was probably an ibuprofen and so she took it. Then they went outside to the dead tree.

Rory threw rocks at it, one after another, hitting the snag each time with a spray of bark. She was­ impressed—he was only four but he was pitching that rock at the snag with a lot of accuracy and force. She wondered if he had been practicing his aim during all those hours he spent alone, and suddenly she was awash with guilt. “I love you, Rory,” she said.

He did not say I love you, too.

She told him, “I’m sorry I’ve not been playing with you much.”

He threw another rock and this one struck the snag with a resonant thud. From out of the hole burst a bright, shimmering cloud of termites, their wings lit up in the sun. They made a snapping sound that was brash and beautiful to her ears and their beating wings reminded her of tinsel.

“Look!” she gasped.

“That’s not what I wanted you to see,” he said, unimpressed, and he threw one more rock.

Out sprang the woodpecker she had promised was long gone.

The post A Quiet Enchantment Invites the Universe Into a Goat Pen in Idaho appeared first on Electric Literature.

One day the alpaca kicked and bit the man from Milwaukee who had moved to Tulum to open and operate an animal sanctuary. As the man was dying, the alpaca stopped biting his face, crouched, and sat on him. The man from Milwaukee’s neighbor Ted came over. “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” he said. “But I really wish you hadn’t sent my wife so many erotic texts and dick pics.” A crowd formed. A difficult death was under way. Some of the man’s neighbors tied a rope around the alpaca’s legs and the other end of the rope to the back of a pickup truck to drag him away. I flew to Tulum to investigate because the man from Milwaukee was my father. The last time I saw him, over a decade ago, he had one good dark eye. We laughed together, remembering the orgies his older brothers had orchestrated in the basement of our sprawling Milwaukee estate. When I arrived in Tulum, I became an heiress. I was seated at a long wood table outside with views of the sea glinting off glass facades, glass walls. By evening, guests arrived who would never tire of my presence on the veranda. I sold the animal sanctuary, a gray enclosure next to a dried-up bush. I bought a house where I was alone. When I ran errands in town, strangers wanted to talk to me about their timeshares. With their encouragement, I joined an exclusive group that traveled the world to examine Greek relics. One day I was invited by the group into a cave where I met my demise. Some years before, Ted took me aside and told me the alpaca loved bananas; my father would always give the alpaca a single banana, but the day he died, he forgot to. I was tired of death! I hired a man to kill the alpaca. The man was beautiful and rich and he liked violent endings. For a long time I had love in my life, but there was not much I could do with it.

The post Dad Died and All I Got Was This Angry Alpaca appeared first on Electric Literature.