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.

So it is no accident that writing about sex is now one of my acutest pleasures. In my debut collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body, I focus on delights and pains implicit in the times before and after sex—which in many ways are also sex. A caregiver attempts to reach out to an almost-lover while being haunted by a ghost. A young girl works up the courage to kiss her neighbor only for that neighbor to reject her. Two older women pleasure each other in order to distract from the fact that one of the women is ill. In each of these stories, I’m fascinated by how desire can ripple outward and inward, altering our relationships to ourselves and others. 

While writing Please Don’t Touch the Body, I found myself searching for sex scenes that aren’t just sexy, scenes that prioritize the discoveries and obfuscations and exchanges of power involved in sex as much as its pleasure. For this, I turned to the works of other queer writers. I bring eight of their books to you now. All of them share, I think, a consciousness that comes from being unable to take roles within sex for granted, a consciousness that is as concerned with the mind as it is the body, and which can, depending on the book, produce stories ranging from the outright erotic to the deeply unsettling. 

Fantasian by Larissa Pham

When the protagonist of Fantasian happens upon a woman named Dolores at a college party, she’s struck by how similar they are, their resemblance so deep as to be disorienting. What follows is a tale of carnival confusion, with scenes that are both overtly arousing and psychologically dense: “I suck on her clit, flicking at it featherlike in small shallow movements, and she moans into my pussy and I think to myself now we have closed a circuit.” As the protagonist and Dolores touch each other, the boundary between self and other both hardens and collapses, linking the two women in a loop of desire. Later in the novella, the protagonist assumes Dolores’s identity, easily fooling even those closest to the women, raising questions about what it means to be an individual in a world that often flattens difference.

Mrs S by K Patrick

From the opening lines of Mrs S, sex seems inevitable. The narrator, a nameless teacher at an elite school, watches a woman argue with her gardener. The woman turns out to be the titular Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife. From that moment, the narrator cannot look away from Mrs S. Their sex, when they eventually have it, is a negotiation between the narrator’s dueling desires to be seen and to hide, driven by an increasingly unstable relationship to gender. In fact, every interaction between the narrator and Mrs S is fraught with stakes both personal and mysterious, even (or especially) a moment when Mrs S asks if she can check the narrator for ticks: “I turn, reluctantly. Her hands pause. May I? Yes.” Here is a push and pull, a struggle evident in the shortening of each sentence, ending in yes. Yes, of course. Yes. 

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

What Belongs to You follows an American teacher living in Bulgaria as he grapples with his infatuation with a local hustler named Mitko. Through his interactions with Mitko, the protagonist’s childhood hurts surface in ways that lead to both humiliation and ecstasy. Although the protagonist knows their relationship is unsustainable, he can’t help but try to sustain it, as if by doing so he might reach, at last, permanent gratification. As Greenwell points out on David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast, What Belongs to You contains only about three pages of explicit writing about sex. And yet longing permeates every interaction—the longing for another’s body, yes, but also the longing to find a home in an inhospitable world.

The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch

There is no other book like The Chronology of Water—a chaotic, visceral memoir about the attempts of a girl, and then young woman, to make herself known. Throughout, scenes of childhood sexual assault merge with pregnancy loss, with drug-and-alcohol-hazed college sex, with the intensity of her first attempts to tell her story, with the revelation of squirting during masturbation, with her initial flames of queer desire, with her eventual relationship with her husband, with the death of her abusive father with, with, with. In one account, Yuknavitch describes with engrossing specificity a sadomasochist play party: “I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles – 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other – her eyes were streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing.” In The Chronology of Water, more is more. Moments from which other authors might glance away bashfully Yuknavitch seems to relish. After reading the book, I recommend watching Kristen Stewart’s mesmerizing film adaptation of the same name, which is just as messy and explosive. 

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House is a genre-bending memoir about Machado’s relationship with her abusive ex-girlfriend. At one point, Machado says, “I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand?” Throughout, Machado confronts the difficulty not just of telling a painful, personal story but also of telling a story with almost no literary examples. She describes, in turn, moments of intimate joy—“A week after you get back from Savannah, you are fucking on your bed and you come and she says, ‘I love you.’”— and terror—“you saw underneath it last night, when you were so afraid and cowering, and she was screaming, and you were hiding from her, hiding from the woman who once told you she loved you.” Balancing past tenderness with the increasingly destabilizing force of fear, Machado reaches continually for different forms—the unreliable narrator, the soap opera, the romance novel—seeming to search for the right narrative, the one that will at last make the reader see and understand how sex and abuse can blur. 

Exhibit by RO Kwon

On its surface, Exhibit is about a photographer named Jin who risks the relative stability of her marriage to become the submissive of a famous, injured ballerina. Beneath the surface, Exhibit is about hauntings—not just a literal haunting represented through sections featuring an ancestral ghost, but also hauntings of desire and shame, and even hauntings of the sentence. Exhibit’s prose is at once revealing and concealing, punctuating abstracted sex scenes with vivid detail—spirits appearing, briefly, in a dark window. After a moment in which the ballerina strikes Jin with a belt, she traces the faded bruise on Jin’s thigh. Jin shivers and thinks, “I had thought I’d be fine, not having this.” Exhibit asks the reader to pay close attention so as not to miss submerged truths about the story and oneself. 

All Fours by Miranda July

In All Fours, a woman plummets into perimenopause, which the protagonist succinctly describes as “the cliff.” At different points, the sex in the book—or more often, near-sex—involves holding another person’s urinating penis, an existential crisis with a seemingly wise older woman, and (most memorably) the insertion of a tampon. Throughout, bodies collide in ways that seem more concerned with intimacy than with what we might define as sex. Consider, for instance, the moments following the tampon: “We looked at each other in the mirror, very seriously and then slowly smiling. Sex was great, but this. This was something we’d never do with anyone else. Our thing.” Encounters are sometimes awkward, sometimes steamy, and always surprising. All Fours is equal parts celebration and panic, which just about captures my feelings about what awaits my body and spirit beyond “the cliff.” 

Maurice by EM Forster

Maurice follows the seemingly conventional life of a young protagonist as he struggles privately with his attraction to other men. I’ll spoil Maurice for you now: It ends happily. The facts of Maurice’s publishing are sad—completed in 1914, the book was not actually released, due to fear of legal prosecution, until 1971, after Forster died—but its story is ultimately joyful. The least sexually explicit book on this list (although it is far from being without sex), Maurice still demands inclusion because it was written during a time when the very happiness of Maurice’s ending was what made it too risky to publish. In fact, Forster wrote, “If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime.” So while each of the books on this list represent the complexity of queer sex in different ways, I’ll conclude by recommending, just as Maurice does, the crime of happiness, and of queer happiness especially.

The post The Best Queer Sex Scenes Are About More Than Just Sex appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Hey, where’s your ring?”

Jeremy sat on the counter in front of the microwave. He was supposed to be finishing up the day’s dishes.

“Sold it,” I said. I was crouched in front of the open oven, steel wool in one hand, degreaser in the other. Ten minutes of spraying and scrubbing had barely made a difference on the greasy orange glass.

“Sold it?” Jeremy echoed. “Ain’t you supposed to be getting married?”

I sighed. Sam had gone to jail only two months earlier, but it felt like a lifetime ago. “Not anymore.”

“Well, shit,” Jeremy said. “What happened?”

I was surprised by Jeremy’s attentiveness, that he’d ever even noticed my engagement ring in the first place, let alone that I wasn’t wearing it anymore. Even when he wasn’t high, he was usually off in his own world, humming or daydreaming or doodling on the back of the notepad we used for catering orders.

“Sam went to jail,” I said, still scrubbing. “For child porn.”

I was too embarrassed to disclose that fact to most people, but for some reason I told Jeremy without hesitation. It was still a shock that I’d spent four and a half years, most of my adolescence, with a man who’d been preying on girls even younger than me, and even more a shock that I’d discovered this only when he was arrested days before our wedding.

Jeremy’s mouth hung open. “You’re shitting me.”

“I wish.”

Jeremy’s face hardened. He balled up the dishrag in his fist and squeezed. “I fucking hate motherfucking pedos, man. Scum of the earth,” he mumbled. I’d never seen him look so serious. After a moment his voice got softer, and his eyes followed. “I hate that that happened to you.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I started to say something about how it was part of God’s plan, but didn’t. I’d heard that phrase a thousand times over the years: God uses all things for your good. I wasn’t sure I still believed that. In the dark reverence of a church sanctuary, it was easy to glorify pain, assign it a divine purpose. I was trying to cling to the idea that there was a reason for my hurt and heartbreak, that I was becoming stronger, but I wasn’t convinced. So I said nothing and kept scrubbing.

Jeremy still seemed bothered. He sat on the counter and swung his legs, passing the balled-up dishcloth from one hand to the other, while he stared out the storefront window into the dark. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Finally I asked what was on his mind.

“There’s somewhere I wanna take you,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, hopping down from the counter with a clunk. He always wore steel-toed boots to work. “It’ll be fun. Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

And for the first time ever, Jeremy washed all the dishes without my prompting.

After we locked up, we headed toward the parking lot. It was empty except for our cars. My old Subaru was nothing to look at, but Jeremy’s Honda was comically hideous. Every surface—hood, roof, trunk, and doors—was banged and scratched and dented, as if someone had beaten the car with a baseball bat. It was spray-painted matte black, but the patchier spots revealed the original silver underneath. The hubcaps were missing. The tires were so bald that the wires peeked through. The back windshield was busted out and covered in purple Saran wrap.

“I call her the Baby Car,” Jeremy said. He ducked through the driver’s side window feetfirst, explaining that the door was permanently jammed. “Because she’s so tiny.” His knees splayed to each side of the steering wheel. “Death trap” was the phrase that came to mind, but I stooped inside anyway.

Jeremy stuck the key in the ignition. Before he turned it, he warned me to cover my ears, saying something about a straight pipe, which meant nothing to me. I cupped my hands over my ears. He turned the key. The engine came to life with a violent shudder and monstrous ripping roar that made me jump in my seat. Jeremy grinned so big I could see all of his teeth. The Baby Car quaked as it idled, and when he shifted into first gear, it gave an explosive lurch forward.

“Where’s the seat belt?” I yelled over the noise.

“What?” Jeremy yelled back.

“SEAT BELT!”

Jeremy grinned bigger.

We rolled out of the parking lot and onto the road. When Jeremy hit the gas, the car somehow got louder. He saw the look on my face and threw his head back in a laugh I couldn’t hear.

The sun was long set and the town was dead, but I still felt conspicuous in that ugly, blaring hunk of metal. A couple months earlier it would have been unthinkable for me to be in a car alone with a man other than my fiancé. Now I was tearing through the night at full volume and full speed—Jeremy hit the highway doing 80—and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. I had no one to answer to. No one to make me feel guilty and dirty and sinful for having a male for a friend or riding in his car. Liberation seized my heart. I felt free and wild and terribly strange, doing something that would have once brought great consequences but now brought none at all.

We hit a stretch of empty highway. Far from houses and people now, Jeremy flipped a switch on the floorboard and brought the subwoofers in the trunk to life. The mirrors and dashboard vibrated. I could feel the bass in the pulps of my teeth.

Jeremy hadn’t stopped smiling. “HAVING FUN YET?” he yelled. I nodded and felt myself smiling, too.

Jeremy got off at the next exit and headed toward the lake. The road was narrow and winding and he took the curves way too fast, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel afraid. I let my long hair out of its modest bun. It whipped around in the rush of air, tangling into yellow knots, and I stuck my head out the window to let the cool wind assault my face.

Soon I started smelling water and fish. Jeremy slowed down when he hit a gravel road. He parked close to the lakeshore, right by the dock. When he cut the engine, the silence was so sudden and loud that my ears rang. Without the car’s vibrations to dictate my heartbeat, my chest felt hollowed out, abruptly and achingly empty.

For a while neither of us spoke. Slowly the frogs, which had been startled to silence by the noise, started peeping again. The black lake water lapped softly at the grassy shore. It was a cloudless night.

“Let’s look at the stars,” Jeremy whispered, climbing from his seat to the hood.

We reclined against the windshield and looked up at the sky. It was still weird to be in such proximity to someone who wasn’t Sam, so I gave Jeremy a wide berth, scooting as far as I could to the opposite side of the hood. The stars above us were as bright as the moon. Jeremy pointed out constellations. He traced them slowly with a tattooed finger. I followed along with my eyes.

“What else do you think’s out there?” he asked after a while.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Like aliens?”

“No,” he said. “Like God.”

“Oh.” That caught me off guard. I hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

Jeremy put both hands behind his head. His eyes were far away, beyond the sky.

“You seem like you would know,” he said. He turned his face to me after a moment, to the Jesus fish necklace resting on my chest. Even though it was a gift from Sam, I couldn’t bear to part with it.

Jeremy went on. “I think about it a lot. I mean, there’s gotta be something, right? The universe is so big and we’re so small . . .” 

He trailed off into deeper thought. “There’s gotta be something,” he said again finally. “Something bigger than us. I just don’t know what it is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t been expecting Jeremy—Jeremy, who was always high and giggly and lost in some faraway dreamworld—to pose a serious theological question. How did I explain God, creator and keeper of the universe? How did I explain God at all?

Despite a lifetime of church, I’d only ever had an abstract understanding of God. And now, after everything that had happened, after weeks of pain and fury and unanswered questions and prayers, I was completely unsure of who he was, what his role was in my life or anyone else’s.

“There’s something,” I affirmed very slowly. “But I’m not sure what it is either.”

It was the first time I’d ever doubted God’s existence aloud.

I half expected a lightning bolt to strike me dead that instant. But the cloudless sky stayed dark and quiet, and my blasphemy went unpunished. Jeremy laughed a little.

“I figured you’d give me a whole damn sermon,” he said. He scooted a hair closer to me. “Maybe you’re finally loosening up after all.”

I held my breath nervously, the way I always did when my Subway coworkers got too close. It was a knee-jerk reaction to keep from breathing in their sin. An absurd reaction, I realized then. I exhaled and then inhaled again, long and slow, as if to prove to myself that nothing bad was going to happen by breathing the same air as Jeremy.

The cool lake air filled my lungs. It was fishy and salty, sweet and biting. There was another smell, too, fainter—weed and old carpet, engine oil and cherry air freshener. The scent of Jeremy’s car and clothes. It was oddly soothing. I wanted to bottle it up. Take it home. Maybe even wear it myself.

I scooted an inch closer to Jeremy and breathed in deeply once more.

A few days later after a Wednesday night youth service, I went up to Pastor Will and asked for prayer.

“I need to hear from God,” I said vaguely. That was nowhere near the extent of what I really needed.

Since I’d admitted my doubt to Jeremy, it had grown and grown and grown, taking up more and more space in my mind until I hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Now it was unrestrained, a wild, creeping thing.

That Wednesday night prayer request was a desperate attempt to find something to still believe in. A God who was good in spite of all the terrors he inspired. A God who, in his incomprehensible wisdom, had orchestrated my life down to the very second, good parts and bad, for some great divine purpose. A God who was still in control.

Beneath that, and perhaps more urgently, I was searching for a connection to who I’d been just a couple months earlier. I felt severed from the core of what I’d unconsciously started to think of as my “old life,” which had revolved entirely around Sam and God. Without them, who was I?

Pastor Will stood in front of me and laid a hand on my head. Jared and Whitney and a few other youth group volunteers I was friends with circled around me, laying hands across my back and shoulders. At first their prayers were whispers, delicate and barely audible, but they grew louder with each sentence, until I was surrounded by half a dozen shouting voices commanding a renewal of the Holy Spirit inside me.

While the prayers flowed, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to talk to God. I tried to force my own prayer, but my mind remained empty, as if I’d forgotten how to speak English. Surrounded by the most faithful people I knew, I felt more aware than ever that my own faith was beyond retrieval. Frustration rolled over me in a hot wave. I started to cry.

“Thank you, Father, for remaining steadfast in Emilee’s life.” Pastor Will mistook my tears as a sign that God was working inside me. “Even when she can’t hear you, I pray she always knows you’re there.”

The voices descended into a chorus of “amens” and the hands fell away. Whitney hugged me. Jared offered me a tissue.

“It’s going to be okay. God is always with you,” Whitney said. She paused, then spoke again more quietly. “I’m sure things have been hard lately.”

The subtle allusion to the breakup was more than anybody else had given me. Surprised, I could only nod.

“Sometimes it’s hard to hear God when you’re living outside his will,” Jared added. I sat down on the stage and wiped my face. He and Whitney sat down on either side of me. Pastor Will and my other friends took seats in the front row. “It’s like a check-engine light. Except instead of a neon sign, you feel overwhelming silence. You feel so, so far away from God. That’s because he’s trying to get your attention.”

I nodded at Jared. Overwhelming silence was exactly what I felt. It was an awfully cruel way to get someone’s attention, I thought. Yet I couldn’t say it hadn’t worked: I’d been thinking about God—raging at, pleading with, and doubting him—nonstop. It was just like when Sam gave me the silent treatment. I would stay on edge for days, worrying about what I’d done wrong and how to fix it. How to be better next time so I wouldn’t have to face the torturous silence again.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked Jared.

“You just have to keep praying until God tells you,” Jared said. “And in the meantime, you have to examine your life. Are there areas you’ve been disobedient? Has God told you to do something, but you’ve defied him?”

“He hasn’t talked to me at all lately,” I said. I was embarrassed to admit that, worried it revealed my lack of faith.

Jared considered this for a moment. “Your soul is volatile right now,” he finally said in a pensive voice. I looked over at him. He was gazing toward the back of the room, eyes growing distant.

I knew this look. It always came over him when God was revealing some kind of wisdom or knowledge. 

After another moment, Jared turned to me suddenly. A change had fallen over his face. It was as if he were gone and somebody else were behind his eyes.

Jared opened his mouth slowly, then issued his command.

“God will return to you when you return to Sam.”

I said nothing.

I could think of nothing to say.

It was one of those moments in which time moves both fast and slow. I was shocked first by hearing Sam’s name aloud—hearing someone within those church walls acknowledging that he’d actually existed, since until then they’d all refused to talk about his arrest and everything leading to it—and then at the actual statement itself. How could Jared suggest such a thing? He knew what Sam had done, all the secrets and lies. He’d been present for the entire police investigation, which had happened in that very room. He knew more than he would ever tell me.

How could he suggest I go back to Sam?

How could God?

I didn’t know whether Jared was speaking as himself, or if God was speaking through Jared, or if I even still believed God spoke through people. None of that mattered, though. What mattered was this idea that my cold, dead faith could only be renewed by returning to God’s will. Which meant—if Jared could be believed—marrying a man who had preyed on me, controlled me, lied to me. Hurt me beyond reckoning, or forgiveness.

“I don’t know if that’s what God wants,” Whitney protested softly, speaking more to Jared than to me. He cut his eyes at her and she fell silent.

For a few miserable seconds, I waited for someone else to speak. 

I waited for someone to suggest a more reasonable solution to regaining my faith. Pastor Will and my friends only watched wordlessly, gauging my reaction, and I realized that this was the consensus: My faith was suffering because I hadn’t married the man God had told me to.

Suddenly I felt very far from myself. I felt I didn’t know this place, these people. I felt I’d never really known them. Just as I had never really known Sam.

I couldn’t go back to him. Not running, not walking, not crawling. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I was too far gone now, too uncontrollable, changed on the outside and changing on the inside in ways I couldn’t explain.

I was changed enough, at least, to not even consider the option.

From All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir by Emilee Hackney, to be published on July 28, 2026 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Emilee Hackney.

The post Leaving My Fiancé, Losing My Faith, and Finding Freedom appeared first on Electric Literature.

Intimate, wry and a little sour, Asa Drake’s Beauty Talk addresses the (im)possibility of talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness. Here is a personal history of who gets to be beautiful.

While Beauty Talk pulls from the autobiographical—a father as the 1970’s Camel cigarette man, correspondences with abandoned siblings, a historic family map—the collection is shaped by the illegibility, omission, and ekphrasis of the personal archive. Embracing a fractal telling, these poems explore an inheritance of mixed aesthetics and what it means to partake in a lineage that is both colonial and immigrant. Drake pulls from sources as varied as Chiwan Choi’s adaptation of the Bechdel test and Viv Chen’s substack The Molehill to index the racial and gendered language of advertisement copy, incident reports, and parental beauty advice. Woven between these coded distinctions of moral and aesthetic utility, Beauty Talk asks if, perhaps, family is the first commodification of the body.

Here is the cover, designed by Alban Fischer:

Asa Drake: In 2022, I had the opportunity to study with Paisley Rekdal at a Tin House (now McCormack Writing Center) Summer Workshop, and during that workshop we joked that I could write a whole book about beauty advice from my father who was a model during the 1970s. I’d never really written about my father because writing about my father meant writing about the body, about whiteness, about abandonment and desirability.

In Beauty Talk and, I think, in life, beauty is euphemistic. Beauty is a kind of cultural adherence that we’re promised will make our lives easier. This collection is filled with moments where I catch myself using beauty in place of whiteness, a substitution/exnomination I learned from my parents. Throughout Beauty Talk, I’m testing the distance between signifier and signified. Even when we talk about the color yellow or the scent of jasmine or peaches or the moon, we can’t separate the symbolism we’ve attached to each word from the thing itself.

I would have never imagined this cover image on my own, and yet I know exactly how Alban Fischer’s design ties into the book. There are two poems that immediately come to mind: one with pearlescent bilo-bilo and another where I compare a peach canned in syrup to the moon. Beauty Talk is a collection filled with spheres, orbits, and ellipses. And the moon at some point becomes the subject of direct address. It’s a heavenly shape that I return to as the site of harm and repair.

When I think about the many substitutions which happen throughout Beauty Talk, Alban’s incredible cover becomes charged with hypergloss and maybe a little sarcasm. I love how this image explores when words mean themselves and when they call to one another. Alban’s visual rhyme (moon in spoon!) gives me hope that despite engaging with questions of whiteness and exnomination, readers will laugh at my jokes.

Alban Fischer: The brief for Beauty Talk was relatively open, and the author was quite helpful in providing possible directions. The image of the moon is a consistent presence in the book, so it seemed to me a solid compass to work with. The question was how best to represent it from among all its permutations and valences throughout the collection. I was initially intrigued by the possibility of using the dumplings in one of the title poems as moon or, better yet, using “The moon is a peach lifted / from syrup” as a stepping-off point. There were almost too many possibilities, and I was briefly concerned about creating something unintentionally zany. Ultimately, it was Asa saying she was “more interested in a cover that is striking and memorable than a cover that is pretty” that gave me license to just let myself be led wherever these poems’ warped poignance took me. The line “it is easier for an American to enter heaven / than to engage with an unfamiliar texture” from “Recipe for Bilo-Bilo” stuck with me; it seemed to encapsulate the book’s themes, and the dumplings in the poem were the moon the cover needed. The rest was mostly getting the color scheme and type choices right. Smoosh’s exaggeratedly condensed contours finish off the cover with the right amount of cheeky refinement. I loved this book. Drake writes into complicated family dynamics and culturally sanctioned standards of how one exteriorizes identity in ways that are thrilling and original. It’s such a pleasure when a project like this comes your way.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of BEAUTY TALK by Asa Drake 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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What makes the novel so compelling is its understanding of art history not as ornament, but as a narrative engine. While writing my own novel, Mona’s Eyes, I had the chance to experience how powerfully works of art can move a story forward. Lemle uses that force in a darker key. She goes behind the museum glass, into the machinery of provenance, money, desire, and crime. We are drawn to beauty; but we are also drawn, perhaps more secretly, to the mud around it.

In that sense, Artifacts is a form of archaeology by other means. It excavates memory as much as ruins, illusions as much as evidence. In the conversation that follows, Natalie Lemle and I spoke about ancient things and ordinary possessions, Italy and myth, the art world’s shadows, unstable memory, and the strange energy that certain objects continue to exert over the living.

Thomas Schlesser: Let’s begin with the title itself: Artifacts. An artifact is an object, of course, but an object that has survived—something charged with evidence, memory, perhaps even secrecy. Your novel is full of these presences: antiquities, artworks, fragments of the past, but also more intimate traces of a life. As an art historian, I am always struck by the way certain objects seem to remember more than we do. What is your own relationship to them—ancient or ordinary, precious or personal?

Natalie Lemle: My relationship to ancient objects is very different from my relationship to everyday possessions. When it comes to antiquity, or really anything that comes from the past—it doesn’t even have to be ancient, but let’s say something at least 100 years old, something made before my lifetime—I’m much more intrigued, much more fascinated. That is what gets me thinking, what gets me into my storytelling mind.

With everyday possessions, I have a more complicated relationship. To be honest, I don’t like being attached to physical things. I don’t like the feeling of being beholden to them. I want to be the kind of person who could always pack up, leave her life, and not feel sad or sentimental.

I may have one or two pieces of jewelry that feel sentimental because of the memories associated with them, but I can’t point to a single possession that feels important to me in that way. I see how easily possessions can become an extension of the ego, and I bristle against that. I am fascinated by ancient objects, but suspicious of what belongs too closely to my own life: The older something is, the more it liberates my imagination; the closer it is to me, the more it feels like a trap.

TS: What I find striking is the paradox: In life, you resist the hold material things can have over us; in the novel, you give them enormous power. Did Lena need to believe in them more than you do?

NL: Yes, that’s true. It doesn’t bother me if readers see that the book is written in the first person and think Lena is a stand-in for me. But there are many differences between me and my narrator.

I needed Lena to be more fully fixated than I am on the promise of something tangible, something you can hold and see. At least initially, she believes that if she can see something with her own eyes, she can understand it. What she learns is that seeing is not the same as knowing.

TS: In my generation, Indiana Jones was a terribly efficient machine for turning children into imaginary archaeologists. A lot of us wanted, at least for five minutes, to dig up mysteries in a hat. But archaeology, in your novel, is obviously not just adventure. What do you think draws us so deeply to it?

NL: I think the most obvious answer is that we want to dig in order to understand. We want to understand how people lived before us, what they did with the things they possessed or shared—maybe because those things give us clues about our own daily life, or help us understand something about the through-line between human beings.

My personal belief, and what I tried to do with Lena and the other archaeologists in the book, is to show that they are interested in archaeology because they really want to understand themselves. For Lena, excavation becomes a dangerous form of introspection: She thinks she is digging into the past, but she is really digging toward herself.

What she comes to realize is that something from the outside can maybe lead you to an inner corridor in your own mind—but then you have to actually be willing to open all those doors. The excavation is only step one. What happens afterward has to happen inside you.

That is also why archaeology becomes frightening for her: It asks her to follow a feeling before she is ready to do so. She is still in her head, still cerebral. She thinks archaeology is about physical evidence. But by the end of the book, she comes to understand that archaeology may be more spiritual than she thought, and more based on instinct: on being willing to follow those instincts instead of grasping for the tangible.

TS: The novel is built on two timelines, and Lena is not only confronting a mystery; she is also meeting a younger version of herself and facing the gap between two periods of her life. Why was that structure important to you?

NL: Originally, there were two reasons I decided to use a dual timeline.

The first is that the laws and attitudes around cultural heritage and restitution changed so drastically between 2004 and 2022, when the present-day story takes place. How did we go from 2004, when museums were still taking things into their collections so freely, and all kinds of sketchy pieces were being sold on the open market, to 2022, when curators won’t touch an antiquity—even the most beautiful one in the world—without rock-solid provenance? They won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. That is a huge difference.

The second reason is that I wanted Lena’s present-day narrative to be somewhat unstable. Not because I needed her to be fully unreliable, but because I wanted her to filter her memories through what she is learning in the present day about the case. The two timelines let me think about provenance in two ways: what can be proven about an artifact, and what can never be fully proven about memory.

She remembers things based on what she is learning now. And of course she cannot remember verbatim what was said. The dialogues are more or less invented, right? The mind doesn’t remember in that way. She remembers some things—she definitely remembers the important things—but she is also selling us a narrative about the past.

I personally enjoy fiction that does that. You suspend your disbelief, you go along with what the narrator says, and at the same time, as a reader, you keep asking yourself: Is this what really happened?

TS: I’m happy you mention unstable memory, because I know you also love Elena Ferrante. And Italy, in Artifacts, is such a powerful landscape: luminous, sensual, full of secrets. Why was it the perfect place for part of this story?

NL: Ferrante does narrative instability so well. Troubling Love is a great example: The main character is looking for her mother and remembering pieces of her childhood. Then, as she gets more clues about what happened to her mother, she starts remembering her childhood differently. And The Lost Daughter does that really well too.

As for Italy, I am half Italian—Sicilian on my father’s side—but I didn’t go there until I was 18. I didn’t grow up going to Italy. My Italian side is totally American. I think I’m fourth-generation Italian, so it’s not as if I had a direct connection to the country.

But I was lucky enough to go to a high school where I learned Italian, and I did an exchange at the end of high school with another high school in Bologna. I remember being there for the first time and feeling this very strong connection to the country. At first, I thought it might be related to my knowledge of the language, or my interest in it. I was also studying Latin in high school, and I knew I wanted to study art history, ancient art, the ancient world. So initially I thought: I am interested in all these things, and now I get to be in the country where so much of this came from.

But then I started to feel that it was deeper. I felt a sense of homecoming. And yet I’m Sicilian, and I was in Bologna, so it wasn’t literal. Italy was both inherited and imaginary for me: I felt a homecoming there, but it was a home I had invented as much as received.

Later I did an archaeological dig in Tuscany as an undergraduate, and then I spent a college year abroad in Bologna. I even fantasized about staying, but that year also made me realize how American I really was.

So when I was drafting Artifacts, I was returning, with some distance, to the sense of magic I felt when I first went to Italy. For me, Italy is a place full of stories to which I feel an emotional connection. It makes me feel transported. And maybe this is a naive thing to say, but when I’m writing fiction, part of the pleasure I get is the feeling of being outside myself, outside my normal day-to-day life. I love feeling as if I am in Italy when I write.

TS: I’m struck by how hungry readers are for the dark side of the art world—the money, ambition, vanity, and opportunism behind the beauty. But your novel does not simply expose that world from the outside; it understands why people are drawn to it, and why they stay. What makes that darkness so fertile for fiction?

NL: Like anybody else, I can be critical of the art world. It’s fun to complain about how sketchy it can get! But ultimately, it is also a place where I feel very at home—so I don’t know what that says about me.

I think I am very comfortable with gray areas in general. I am interested in systems and how things work, and the art world is a very complex system that relies on relationships: institutions, personal relationships, discretion. These are compelling and interesting forces, and very fertile ground for fiction.

What fascinated me in my 20s, as I was building my career in the art world, was that I could walk into a museum and look at beautiful paintings, or go into a gallery, or see that a Basquiat had just sold at Sotheby’s for many millions of dollars. I could see all of that, appreciate it, move toward it, without really knowing how it worked.

I think there are many of us who work in the art world who do not actually understand its hidden scaffoldings. Many things that happen sound stranger than fiction but are painfully true.

The art world is where idealism and opportunism meet in front of the same beautiful work. People enter the field because they love beauty, and then find themselves inside a system built on money, secrecy, and power. You have bad actors and idealists constantly in conversation with each other. And what brings them together? A work of art that they may both love, but for completely different reasons.

TS: There are several allusions to myths and legends in your novel. In myths, there is very often a key object at the center: a treasure, a relic, something that must be found. Did you always know Artifacts would have both this mythic dimension and a darker, almost noir dimension?

NL: My first introduction to myth was probably in school, and then through art history. But it was in college that I read Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and inside that novel is the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche stayed with me because it joins love, rebirth, transformation, and the soul—which are also the hidden materials of Artifacts.

As for the darker dimension, I love writing plot. I knew something had to happen that would be the engine of the novel. I wanted Lena to be trying to figure something out. I knew I wanted some kind of mystery element, though I did not know at first how dark it would become.

I rewrote the book so many times. Every time I rewrote it, something new and important revealed itself to me. So I am a first-time novelist in the sense that this is my first published novel. But behind the scenes, Artifacts is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it are so many revisions, so many thoughts.

TS: The book is full of enchantment, but also of the end of illusions. I felt something close to that, in another way, while writing Mona’s Eyes: the discovery that art can illuminate life, but does not magically repair it. Would you say that Artifacts is also about that kind of loss of illusion?

NL: Yes. I think there are many ways the book looks at the end of illusion: Lena’s relationship to archaeology, to history, to love, all of those things. But the one that is most personally resonant for me is the relationship she has with her parents. She is circling this unresolved—I don’t want to say trauma, because I feel that cheapens it—but this unresolved, complicated relationship with her parents, which extends to her sister in the present.

The real trigger is not only the case, but her sister’s pregnancy, which forces Lena to think about family, inheritance, childhood, and the stories siblings tell differently about the same past.

By the end of the novel, she realizes that love does not have to follow a set of rules. She and her sister can have different paths and still love each other.

And one personal thing—true both for me and for Lena—is the illusion that we can control outcomes. We can choose our actions, but not the life those actions create. The events we set in motion may look as if we can control them, but we cannot. There are too many unknown forces. I believe that the idea of controlling outcomes is an illusion the mind creates. That is my woo-woo side.

TS: One last, slightly tricky question. Do you think every artifact hides a story, or do we need to invent stories in order to love what remains?

NL: I think it is both. But I would not use the word story. I would use the word energy, or feeling. Something more abstract than narrative.

I don’t think you can ever separate your own bias, your own history, from something you are beholding, or even reading. I am not only talking about an antiquity or a painting on a wall. I am talking about the bias we bring to reading fiction. Even reading your novel Mona’s Eyes, I bring my own museum memories to it.

That is just to say that you cannot separate yourself from the work of art. But that is one of the pleasures of art. Art helps us understand ourselves because we see our story, and we feel it reflected back to us.

I feel this especially with ancient things. I am not an archaeologist, I am not a registrar, I am not a museum curator. I do not regularly have occasion to hold an antiquity or a sculpture. But I can feel the energy of a thing when I get close to it. I can feel what draws me to it.

And I do think that, under the surface, there is a lot in Artifacts about magic. Cyrille talks about Druid rites, about various superstitions. And of course there is the dichroic glass cup, which for a long time could seem almost magical, because scientists did not yet have the technology to view the nanoparticles of metal mixed into the glass—the thing that gives it its dichroic quality.

I think so much of what is pleasurable and important about art is that je ne sais quoi, that intangible magic you cannot put into words. It is just a feeling you have.

If ancient things did not give off some kind of energy, I don’t think we would fight over them, preserve them, or build museums around them. They matter because they make us feel that the world has remembered something we have forgotten. We simply understand, as humans, that they are important, and that they have power.

The post The Secret Lives of Objects appeared first on Electric Literature.

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.

The post Even Bad Men Need Company in the Night appeared first on Electric Literature.

The intense intimacy of friendship is having a moment in contemporary fiction. But this is only the latest wave in a long literary tradition. Whether it’s the biological sisters of Jane Austen, the soul sisters of Toni Morrison’s Sula, or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, a fraught, essential friendship completes the two main characters. When things aren’t right between them, or even worse, if one of them is gone for good, the other moves through life with a phantom limb. 

My novel, Talking to the Wolf, centers the profound effect of a friend breakup on four women, in tandem with the accidental death of one of the group. The women in my novel are completely undone by this unexpected loss. The pain of the breakup is compounded by the fact that there will never be a chance to make things right. Each of them—including the ghost—wrestles with the loyalty and turmoil of their shifting friendships as they make their way through a snowbound New York City to their 35^th high school reunion. The primacy of their feelings toward each other affects every aspect of their lives across careers, thwarted ambitions, and romantic relationships.

The “marriage plot” has taken a very long time to die. There’s a powerful cultural mythology around that elusive partner who is both your best friend and your lover—even when those roles are often incompatible. But a friend divorce can feel more painful than the end of a bad marriage. After all, your friends were there to help you tape together your reckless, impossible heart. 

The following books know this well. They span decades and styles, coming-of-age, death, ambition, success and failure. All of them explore the complicated, private heartbreak of losing a friend. 

Ponti by Sharlene Teo 

This novel is haunted by a glamorous mother who became a B-movie horror film star. What a great premise! The story is told from three points of view: the mother, her insecure, adolescent daughter, Szu—a social outcast at her school in Singapore—and Circe, the classmate who appears to be a fellow outcast despite her wealth and beauty. Szu’s distant, cruel mother and her Auntie now scrape by as mediums (though their psychic gifts are questionable, according to Szu). Circe becomes Szu’s “best friend” for better and worse. The novel has a gothic horror sensibility that echoes the campy film that made Szu’s mother famous, but the teenage friendship, with its complex cocktail of loyalty and betrayal, is utterly real. 

Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich

Yoshimoto has an eye and ear for language that holds us with exquisite simplicity—like a ballet dancer, her words land without a sound. The story follows the close bond between two cousins/best friends in a small coastal Japanese town, while death lingers just offstage. Tsugumi has had a mysterious illness since childhood, but her frail body burns with rebellion. Using rude honesty as her weapon, she shocks and charms her family, especially her cousin, who tells the story of this last summer in their late teens; they both know something is about to change forever. 

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine

The Grammarians is a word lovers’ book. In it, a pair of identical twin sisters not only have their own language—they share an obsession with language itself. Precocious American children of the late 20th century, the dictionary is their favorite toy. The novel explores the tensions, envy, and loyalties that hold these two together, just as it splits them apart. The semiotics of words shape both of their lives, becoming the lens through which they see the world and each other. A tale of two sisters. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This novel gripped me from the start. When three friends develop a highly successful video game in college, a love triangle plays out. Yes, two of them fall in love, but their story is more about the intensity of friendship than romantic love. The cyber world serves as a mirror to the real-life bonds that are changed forever by the price of success and adulthood. I’m not a gamer, but I was utterly compelled by this novel, which is really about the games played between friends and lovers. 

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

In this memoir, Ann Patchett tells the story of her highly literary friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who died in 2002. The reader follows Patchett and Grealy from their graduate school days through their later careers as successful writers. They were opposites in many ways—Lucy was a luminescent poet, the life of the party, and a fragile survivor of childhood cancer, while Ann describes herself as more of a workhorse writer, the stalwart best friend who saw Lucy through her struggles with addiction and repeated surgeries. Patchett both adores and is exhausted by her crucial, talented, difficult friend. At the heart of this book is the urgency and ambition of two young artists. Who is Truth and who is Beauty? You can make up your own mind about that. 

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy 

In this novel, “the wilderness” refers to the wilds of adulthood. How do you get there and what does it mean for your friendships along the way? This coming-of-age in your 20s story follows a group of four young Black women split between New York and Los Angeles, whose cities and backgrounds define their friendships and selves. Spanning two decades, from 2000 to 2020, Flournoy effortlessly time jumps between years and narrators as their conflicts, personal histories, and deep loyalties reveal what they really think about each other. Even as they struggle with expectations and societal judgements, they refuse—or are unable to—leave each other behind. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula may be the “mother” of all contemporary female friendship novels. Even if you haven’t read this since high school, Sula remains a literary cornerstone, speaking to the different parts of us that emerge at various stages of life. There are many entry points—political, sexual, racial, social—but the center of gravity is the friendship between rebellious, bohemian Sula, and her childhood best friend, the more conventional Nel. Sula is both the ultimate outsider and insider of their multigenerational community in Ohio. Although she and Nel swear to share everything as children, Sula never bows to conventional social mores. Secrets and betrayals emerge when Sula returns to town as an adult. But Nel, and the town itself, are not complete without Sula’s agonizing and disruptive life force. 

The post When Friendship Is the Real Love Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Rivers are roads which move, and

which carry us whither we desire to go.”

— Pascal

We’d been driving in silence for some time. Nothing was wrong—nothing we could point to. It was early autumn. The larch trees had begun to yellow, and there was new snow in the mountains. We drove with the top down and the heat on high. The cold air and artificial heat struggled for power—one moment hot, the next cold.

We were on one of our Sunday drives. There was no destination. We’d gone south on 93, out of Missoula, down the spine between the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains. As usual, Max drove and I sat passenger.

He was in a mood, as he often was. Too much Reddit and ragebait, the news was too bleak, the job too jobby. It was an existential grumpiness. He drove to escape it. I would have liked to stay home and take up some unperceived space in our one-bedroom apartment, but I joined him for the drive. If he had to escape, I wasn’t going to be left behind.

I was in charge of music, and the music I chose had the big job of speaking for us. I played a band I knew he liked—Counting Crows. One of his favorites. It was worth my suffering if the music cheered him up. His lips began to move along to the lyrics. Do you see yourself in me? We’re such crazy babies, little monkey. I let my hand rest open near the console . . . God, we’re so fucked up, you and me . . . but he didn’t take it in his own, as he sometimes would.

Just ahead there was a sign denoting river access. He asked if I wanted to check it out, and I agreed. The access road was steep, unpaved, and knuckled with rocks and roots. We parked the car and walked to the riverbank.

By now, the sun was a narrow line of light on the river’s face. Clouds gathered heavily above us. The bright summer days were over. It was autumn, and soon it’d be winter. In the winter everything would feel forever long and gray. We’d been together for less than a year, so each season was our first. Did that also mean the summer of our romance was over? That we were entering the long, gray winter of disenchantment? I had the sense that the seasons had to be gotten through. That it proved something to have fought to the next one. Already, we’d put so much fight into our relationship, both of us resisting his suspicion that he “might not be cut out for domestic life,” that he “couldn’t hack it.” The thought that he was losing interest in our life and might soon go in search of another exhausted me—perhaps even more than the relationship itself.

No. We would trudge on. Together in his bug-eyed ’91 Miata convertible, our hair (equally long, his a little more lush) twisting in the Montana valley wind, soundtracked by Counting Crows, pointed away from whatever it was that chased him. I was determined. If we stayed together, at least then we wouldn’t have to trudge alone.

We removed our boots and socks, and rolled up our pant legs. I followed him in. The water came from a glacier, and was starting its return to ice. It closed tight around my skin. I felt my bones. I felt my blood. Then I felt nothing.

He ran ahead, balancing on river rocks and running across logs without looking back. Even from a distance, I could tell his mood was lifting. He moved loosely and with confidence as the space between us widened. I took a step, and a rock turned underfoot. I always stepped on the wrong rocks. I caught myself, stabilized, and pulled in a sharp breath.

“How can you go that fast,” I yelled, laughing. I was scared. “It’s so fucking cold.”

He turned back to look at me, his face full of boyish glee. He cracked a huge big-kid grin, and then theatrically adjusted his expression to one of pity and adoration. He shoved his lower lip into a pout.

“Oh, sweetie,”—when he called me sweetie, it was always with the same sweet voice. Oversweet, a voice we used alone together—“Is it too cold?”

“Kinda,” I said. Why was I also speaking in the sweetie voice?

It was too cold, not kinda too cold. But I didn’t want to ruin the moment, neither his nor ours. Cautiously, I continued. He watched me take a few steps, and then, satisfied that I’d be fine, he ran on.

“I grew up on the water, baby,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’m a river man.”

I tried to find his source of vigor. Behind him the clouds broke down and fell back into the sunset. Against that distant light, he spread his arms for balance and ran across a fallen tree. I watched his silhouette and knew I would see this image when I thought of him, sometime in the future: a shadow balanced against the sunset. I was breathless but I fought the current, feeling the river close in around me. Keep up, keep up. This felt important, my ability to keep up. The sun slid down. I knew that if I stopped paying attention for even a moment, I would trip.

When I reached him, his face was full of abundance and gratitude. I’d been able to keep up, and this meant something, it was important. He kissed me.

When I moved to Missoula, I was told I had to learn how to fly fish. There was “good water” five minutes in any direction. But I had little interest in the sport. It looked a lot like standing around. There were other things to do, things I already loved to do. Rocks to climb in Kootenai Canyon and Lolo Pass, horses to ride across the hills of Pattee Canyon, mountains to hike in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Plus also a job—the reason I’d moved out there—working on a graduate degree and teaching undergrads. It was the same reason Max had moved there, and it was in that context that we met, became friends, and then slowly, intensely, fell in love.

Max was a fly fisher. In the beginning, when we could barely spend a moment apart, the necessary separation that fishing provided was romantic. He fished, I did what I wanted to do, and then we found one another—tired, windswept, desperate for each other.

But now we were starting to run out of ways to spend time together. I didn’t want to fly fish. But I loved him, and he loved to fly fish. So I decided to learn. I wanted to figure out why he loved it, what he loved about it. Or perhaps I wanted to associate myself with this thing he loved, in order to be closer to him—closer to his love. In order to be proximal to the object of his love.

As soon as I told him that I wanted to learn, I knew he’d been waiting for me to ask.

“You don’t really want to come fishing with me,” he said.

“I do,” I insisted. “You’ve never asked.”

He looked at me seriously, much more seriously than when I’d agreed to move in with him a few months prior, or when we’d nearly taken the highway exit for a Las Vegas chapel. His face—broad, strong-jawed and suntanned—was grave. He took a deep breath, and looked me in the eyes.

“Will you go fishing with me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Everything took on a new shine as my “yes” landed between us. He grinned, almost absurdly joyful. His cheeks rippled from the hugeness of his smile, and his blue eyes filled with childlike delight.

His Miata was in the shop, but he didn’t want to put off our first day of fishing. There was a sense of urgency. Maybe he feared I’d change my mind. That night, he rented a truck for next-day pickup and purchased my fishing license online. He printed the license and carefully cut it out, bringing the paper very close to his face while he did. His eyes went a little crossed. When Max was invested, he performed every action with intense focus. He slipped my license into his wallet, behind his own. We went to bed early and slept perfectly. All night we held one another, never too hot or too cold.

The next morning, we woke in the dark. He was tender and careful with me, like the morning after a fight. I opened the front door to feel the air. It was cold. Streetlamps shone in our alley, and beyond the mountains, the first flat blue light stained the sky. The grass was tipped in thin frost. I ducked back into our house and told him it was cold. A little whine of hope started up in the back of my head: Maybe we could stay home.

“Sweetie,” he said in his sweetie voice, wrapping me in an embrace, “I won’t let you get cold.”

He chose our outfits. A technical fleece for me, and for him, a red hoodie and a yellow baseball cap. Because his chest waders were leaky and I had none, both of us wore duck pants. His river shoes were old tight-laced Stan Smiths that smelled like hell from getting wet, drying out, and getting wet again. I had Chacos.

He called us a cab and paid for the rental. He was taking care of everything, like a real first date. He’d decided to take me to his favorite place out past Lolo on the Bitterroot. I’d been expecting a long drive, but we arrived in just over half an hour. This unnerved me. Often he was gone fishing for full days, and whenever he was, he felt a great distance away. Now I understood that sometimes he was only a half hour from home.

We made it to the riverbank by half past nine. The sky was mottled blue and white. I didn’t carry anything except my backpack with our sandwiches, sunscreen, and water bottles. He had the fishing rod and the net, which was slung over his back. Without hesitation, he stepped into the water and walked until it was up to his knees. Then he stopped and turned toward me, smiling, and shouted over the current, “Come on in, baby! Water’s nice!”

The river was a shock when I first entered, and it felt wrong to let my pants soak up the water and gain weight. They tractioned down on my hips. I waded to him, the bones in my feet groaning in the cold. He gave me a huge, perfect kiss.

“Let’s keep going a little bit. There’s a fork up here where I’ve had some luck.”

We walked together upstream. The river water was dark green and glossy toward the central channel, where it was deep, and a translucent yellow toward the shallow edges. Glossy green trees reflected onto the glossy green river, and their reflected spines shimmered in the current. The wetness traveled up the fabric of my pants and suctioned against my legs. Ahead of us was a funnel of blue sky, wedged between the treed hills.

After 15 minutes, we stopped at the fork in the river.

“We’re gunna stand here,” he motioned to the crotch between one leg of water and the other. “And cast where the waters meet.”

He stared into his little plastic fly box, trying to decide what fly to start with.

“Look around, baby,” he said. “What do you see?” 

What did I see? I saw everything: I saw a bridge, I saw light on every dimple in the water’s face, I saw no people except the person I loved. I stared at him, while he peered up into the sky, full of pinlike insects. They darted around, sometimes landing in tiny rippled pools on the river. He motioned for me to lean closer.

“That’s our guy,” he whispered, pointing to a speck of wings on the water. “The trout are coming up like crazy for him. See?”

Now that he said it, I saw the occasional burps that disturbed the still line of water. He thumbed through his box and pinched at a tiny fly. Holding it up to the light, he showed it to me. 

“What do you think?”

“Seems probable,” I said.

He got to work securing the fly. I watched as he wet it in his mouth and strung it, his hands deceptively nimble. How did he do it, with big hands like his? He worked the line through a loop of wire, pulling gingerly, staring very closely at his task, eyes crossing. The only way to say it was that he tied the fly with love. He tied it with care and devotion. Using a tool like a nail clipper, he clipped off the excess tail.

Once he got the fly threaded, he positioned his body so that he was shadowless. You had to be sure that no movement you made above was visible below, he told me. He asked if I wanted to give it the first go, but I declined. I wanted to watch him fish, I said, for research purposes.

“Okay, baby,” he said. “Then come stand over here.”

He motioned to his left side.

“Always stand on my left so you don’t get a hook to the head on my back cast.”

He began, first slowly and then with speed, letting out a little line. Then he pulled the line up and danced it back and forth, drawing loops against the sky. He followed the motion forward, as if he were hesitant to give it away. The fly landed gently in the water. It floated down the current. We were still, watching it float. I could see that he made fine adjustments in order to reduce his impact on the fly’s natural movement, or to give it some subtle signs of animation. When he ran out of line, he whipped the fly out of the water. The nylon caught light as he flung it back, and water drew off the line and skipped in the white sun. Then he started over. He pulled the line, slapped it down, and watched it glide like a snake in the water. He went a few more times and caught nothing. Then it was my turn.

“Hold it like this,” he said, taking my hand in his and wrapping it around the handle. I resisted making a quip about holding his rod. He was very serious. He loosened my forefinger from the grip and placed that, like the barrel of a gun, down the rod. Then he planted my thumb on top of the handle. “Like you’re pointing your thumb right where you want the fly to land.” 

He took the rod and he stood behind me.

He stayed where he was, behind me, with his hands on my hands on the rod, and showed me how to follow the trail of a fish. 

“Go along with the current,” he said, “like you’re just a little fly who landed on the water . . . you’re being carried along by the current, yes, good . . . and you can make a little flick now and then because you’re a bug and you’re alive. Now start to let out just a little line, yes, gently, not too much . . . .”

I leaned forward, trying to follow all the way to the end of my range, as he’d done. With his help, I pulled the line down with my nondominant hand, ripping the end out of the water. The motion looked visceral, medical, like a burst stitch.

“Don’t just give it up, honey, you have to keep a handle on its backward pull, right, and just give and take the line, yes, that’s it baby,” he said, guiding my hand and controlling the motion. I had little or no role in our performance—it was almost as if he were talking to himself. 

After he was satisfied enough with my form, he let me do it on my own. I was in a pleasant mood. I’d stopped feeling the cold and was enjoying the novelty of standing in a river. But after about four rounds, as the fly traveled down the seam once more, he gasped, “That’s a trout! Set the hook, baby! Get him!”

“How?” I yelled, frantic.

An intense wash of dread came over me. There was something out there, something on my hook. Maybe it would get away. Would he be disappointed if it did? So I should try to get it, though I didn’t really want it? Then he was behind me again, hands on my hands, and he jerked the rod up deftly. There was tension on the line. I looked back at him for reassurance, but he was staring straight ahead. His face was jubilant and focused. We were fighting, I realized. We were engaged in a very subtle war.

“Hold it up, like this, yes, don’t let go,” he said. We stayed there. He eased the pressure toward us. Removing one hand from mine and putting it on the crank, he said, “Now, can you let go with your left hand and start to reel with me?”

We reeled. In a moment the pressure lightened dramatically. Then I saw the trout. She didn’t seem to be resisting, at least not anymore. Max reached in and snatched her from the water with bare hands. What a beauty, he said, look at this, have you ever, you caught this, baby, look at this beautiful fish you caught. He told me to get the net off his back and I did. He gently lowered the fish into the net and then lowered the whole bundle into the water so the trout could recline there as we observed her.

Beneath her jaw was a deep red print of color. Her eyes were hollow black, with a ring of white around them as if they were glowing. She was freckled all over, and her freckles were black with white edges, like her eyes. The green fishing line pulled at her mouth. Max reached into the net and removed the hook. Then he lifted her.

Beads of water stood on his hands and cascaded off her shimmering flanks. He held her body knowingly, firmly, but with respect.

“Get a photo!”

I dried my hands and took a picture. In it, he didn’t smile, but stared with intensity at the fish. Then he hurriedly lowered her back into the net and gave her an intermission in the water. Now it was my turn to get a picture with our catch.

I bent, grasped her, and straightened. We had only a moment of stillness before she sensed my lack of control and slipped wetly from my palms. I laughed, and then heard the violent slap of her body on the water and flinched. She flashed away. I could see Max was disappointed. We’ll work on a gentle release, he said, don’t worry. He showed me my photographs. The first was as expected, my hands clasped around the trout’s body. In the second, there was air where the trout had been, a ghost of her belly between my hands, and she was mid-flight, her tail flexed in effort.

“You caught that,” he said. He prodded me lovingly in the chest. “You caught that, sweetie.”

But he’d caught it. Actually, I wanted to make a point of that—I hadn’t caught the fish, it wasn’t me, it was him. It was his eye that saw the fly go down, his hand on the rod, ripping us up to set the hook. Though I knew he was bestowing an honor when he insisted that I’d caught this fish, it felt, as he said it, like an accusation.

The first fish is terrifying because if there isn’t another, it’s the only one you got and now it’s gone. It was only after his second fish that he began to smile. And the second fish established the possibility of a third; the third a longing for a fourth. It went on like that for hours. My bones ached and my stomach growled. I remembered our sandwiches and wondered when he’d think of food. I fantasized about a shower, dry clothes, the warmth of our bed. When it was my turn to fish, I scanned the surface of the water. I tried to follow the fly, but all I could see were sparkles of light. I began to shiver. He noticed and he pressed a thumb against my lips, which he said were blue. He gave me his sweatshirt. The clouds were bearing down on the sun, and only the most distant reach of river was lit, shining, beaconlike. I longed for that distant reach. Every step I took was a fight. 

“Honey,” I said, shyly, “can we go soon?”

He looked at me, surprised.

“Yes! Of course we can go, we can leave whenever you want,” he said. Then he thought a moment. “There’s just one more hole I want you to see.”

We walked 10 minutes and stopped at the bottom of a cliff. He examined the sky and the surface of the water, and chose a new fly to tie on. On his first cast, he caught a trout. I thanked the trout for her expedience, and began to look for an easy exit from the water. He released her, whispering see you later as he let her go.

Then he stood, dropped the fly into the water again, and began to arch the line back for another cast. 

So, I thought. It would never end. His hunt would keep going, with or without me.

The sky was all gray now, crinkling like the current, and he was a small man out in a big river. I noticed more yellow larches than I’d seen at first.

“I’m getting out,” I said. “You don’t have to, I can wait in the truck.”

He looked back at me and pouted. “Oh, sweetie,” he said, in his sweetie voice. “I’m done, I promise.”

He told me to take the scree path up to the bridge, and we could follow the road back to the parking lot. I waded out of the water alone. He was right behind me, he said. 

Scrambling up the scree was humiliating. Each step I took, the rocks gave beneath me. I moved slowly and low to the ground. My hands and knees, wet from the river, were now crusted in dirt. At the top of the hill, I stepped onto the bridge and walked to the middle. I was wet, cold, and I stood on a beautiful arching bridge that overlooked the Bitterroot. I watched him down below. He was right there, but felt far away. The mountains were black now, the river a reflective black, and the river rocks whitely piled in a path to me while the river blackly flowed away. As the dark descended, his casting became desperate. He fought time as I waited for him up above. I knew he could feel me watching.

The green neon line rears back like a whip. Then it flicks forward, floats on the air, and lands imperceptibly on the river’s face. He watches the invisible lure, following its invisible path. I watch what he watches, I try to see. A great rock wall takes up all the sunlight. There’s a log down at the edge of the water. We stare at its black belly. Now the invisible thing travels through the log’s shadow. In that blackness, we’ll have our best chance. I catch sight of the fly, get cocky, and then lose it again. He never loses it. He sees it the whole time, while I strain my eyes, scanning the surface of the water. I take a step forward. Silt swirls around my wadered legs, disturbing our camouflage. He glances over at me, and I notice the frustration on his face before he can control it. We wait for the silt to settle. He casts again.

The winter was long, and the Clark Fork turned into a solid serpent of ice. Without rivers to move him, Max took to the highways. He drove for hours in any direction. The destination didn’t matter. It was the movement he sought. Our home was too small, the walls were too solid. He felt trapped. He was beginning to get the old itch, he told me. The need to move. He wanted to go back east. No big deal, I said, we’d go back east. But he wasn’t sure he could be depended on. He was afraid to make any promises. What if he couldn’t find a job? What if he didn’t want to find one? We’d both go east, but maybe it’d be better if I made my plans without him, he said. We’d stay together, of course, but things would be better if the pressure was off. 

I wasn’t sure. I had a feeling that the pressure was the only constant we had left.

One night my mom texted me. She said there were predictions that the Northern Lights might be visible from Montana. I told Max, and he brightened. This gave us a purpose. We would find the Northern Lights, it was settled. We would find them, and when we did, they would tell us something.

We drove for hours, farmland on both sides of the road. Because he was driving, my job was finding the Northern Lights for us. If I could find them, they might say the things I knew he’d like me to say without having to say them. 

I looked for greens, pinks, yellows. I squinted in determination, sometimes gasped, is that it? Over there . . . ? But the sky was black.

After a couple hours, we abandoned our mission and began to head back to town. As the modest skyline of Missoula came into view, he put his hand on mine.

“Do you want to tell your mom we found the Northern Lights?” he asked.

On his birthday we had a fight about our future and then went fishing. I didn’t want to fish, but I didn’t want him to be alone to think about our fight. If he thought of the fight alone, then he thought of the future alone.

Because it was a special day, we drove to a faraway spot. It was April. The air was cold, and I knew the water would be colder. In the nudity of early spring, the place seemed tangled and devoid of color. Leafless trees reached with witchy knuckled fingers.

I’d never been here before. He led me through impossible brambles and trailless woods. We bushwhacked, anemic branches snapping against us, until we reached the riverbank. Logs had fallen in a grid over the water. We had to cross them. Max ran without trouble, but I couldn’t stop imagining slipping off the side, a leg going down the crevasse. When Max wasn’t looking, I got on my hands and knees and inched my way across.

And then we were in the river. The speed and slowness of it, the absolute solitude of it. The only sounds were distant April birds, the chime of water turning stones. The glacial snow was melting, so the river was high and opaque. We’d made it through the winter. This was our spring. 

We stayed the whole day. For our final location, we waded down to a pebbled beach. The sky was pink black in the setting sun. Then the sun set and it was just black. I sat on the beach and watched him. The moon rose bright white. He fished in its beam.

There was something depressing about the undulations of these days. His sharp hot joy when he caught the largest rainbow he’d ever caught. The cold white of him in the moonlight as he stood there, frozen in the river, imprisoned by the possibility of another catch, casting spells against the sky with his silver line, whipping it back and forth as if cursed. 

He was agitated and restless, like a trapped animal. I wondered whether he felt trapped by his fixation, or trapped by my gaze. Sometimes it seemed as though he wanted me to leave him there alone. But why did he invite me? Maybe he wanted me to see this—the shame, the pride, the determination. He was trying to tell me something without having to say it out loud. It was something he knew I needed him to say.

On a gray day in late spring, an existential grumpiness befell me. Max asked me if I wanted to join him fishing, but I didn’t.

I was pleased, a little guiltily, to find his absence left me feeling light. As soon as he drove away, my mood began to shift. 

When he returned a few hours later, I was feeling more like myself. The sun had come out, and I’d gone for a hike on the mountain behind our house. Now I sat on the couch, unlacing my boots. He stood in the doorway.

“I have something for you, sweetie,” he said. He didn’t say this in his sweetie voice, but instead, carefully, gently, like a grown-up.

He brought a hand out from behind his back. It was his down jacket, bundled up and tied into a knot. He placed the bundle on the kitchen island and began to untie it. I came and stood beside him. Folding back the panels of the jacket, I saw what was inside. A beautiful, good-sized rainbow trout. I gasped.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to keep them?” I asked.

“Technically you can keep a few. But it’s not open season, so I had to sneak this one out.”

He scrupulously prepared the fish on our wooden cutting board. The deboning was a delicate job, but he was thorough. I watched him work, his hands bloodied, the fish’s silk pink insides exposed. He cooked it on the stovetop in butter and we ate the meat, unseasoned, at our little kitchen table.

When the fishing got bad in the early summer, he packed all his belongings into his Miata and left. The fishing getting bad and him leaving weren’t directly correlated, but they kind of were. There was no longer anything in this life to hold his attention.

After he left I fished one last time, to prove I could. My friend’s boyfriend was a guide, and the three of us went out on a boat. They took me to an area you could only float, a place Max had always wanted to go. 

We explored narrow stretches of the river. The water was low and warm. I didn’t catch one fish. I didn’t care. Now that Max wasn’t here, the absence of a catch didn’t mean as much. I’d been “skunked,” my friends told me. It meant that we fished all day and caught nothing. In the shy heat of early summer, we took off our shirts and swam in the river.

I couldn’t see it then, through the shock of being dropped back into the real world, hurt but whole. But later I understood that I’d held on to him because I was afraid to let go—not because I thought I had the real thing. I’d fought so hard. To let go didn’t feel like freedom; it felt like defeat. The idea of starting that fight all over again, with someone new, scared me.

At the end of the day, my friend and I waited in the drift boat while her boyfriend brought the truck to the ramp. We sat together in silence, tipping in a still pool. White river rocks, warm brown water, a blue jay in flight, dark green trees. The river, a taut cable of light, pointed to the distant heap of Bitterroot Mountains. I wasn’t really here to fish, but if I’d never asked to fish, I wouldn’t have this moment. Deception leads us to beautiful places. Why does it look less beautiful when we realize we were deceived to get there?

Watching Max on our days in the river, I learned the art of a respectful release. He reached into the trout’s gaping mouth and freed what he had caught, as if he were her savior rather than her hunter. As he held her facing upstream, she seemed to visibly revive, her fins swishing. She gulped, gathering strength. Then he opened his hold so gently it was as if he never had a hold at all, and she swam away. She slipped like a silk ribbon through the water. 

I imagined what she must have felt when she was released. Some kind of relief. The relief experienced after having come to the surface to feed, only to be suddenly pulled by the lip toward an unimaginable fate of waterlessness. She fought, was caught, and was let go. She swam away, still hungry, but now suspicious of her own instincts, wondering, if fish can wonder, What happened back there? Now can I eat, or will it happen again? This had to be a complicated kind of relief—if fish feel relief at all.

Catch-and-release is considered the most sustainable fishing practice, when done properly, and Max released everything he caught. But Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) estimates that almost a quarter of some of the most-fished trout species in Montana die of sublethal injuries after release. Poor release tactics—like losing hold of a trout from several feet out of water, as I did that first time—are the most common cause. These mortality rates vary by species, and are further compounded by injuries, exhaustion, and trauma. A 2005 publication by researchers Aaron Bartholomew and James Bohnsack includes a cumulative mortality model, showing that on top of these factors, “total mortality rises rapidly in response to repeated releases.” Fish die all the time from natural causes, but a cutthroat trout in the Yellowstone River can live over a decade. Cutthroats have a 22 percent chance of dying after being caught once and released; one cutthroat caught 10 times won’t survive. Research shows an individual cutthroat may be caught up to 10 times on the Yellowstone during one fishing season. A decade-long life expectancy could be reduced to 40 days.

What’s the alternative? To stop fly fishing—a sport that has been around since the end of the second century? To catch only what you’ll eat—a rule impossible to enforce in our maximalist culture?

The clear answer is to require all who fish to learn the context, consequences, and best practices of the sport. “Real” anglers are committed to releasing fish as painlessly, and as kindly, as possible.

A couple months after Max and I had split up, I saw him on an app. I was swiping quickly and decisively, barely looking past the first card. I almost swiped left on his profile. But I recognized him and stopped myself in time. It gave me a small thrill to nearly left-swipe my own recent ex. I tapped through his photos. Most of them were several years old—except one of us in his car, with me cropped out—and none showed him fishing. In the two years I’d known him, Max had fished almost every day. He had a camera roll of recent, attractive photos of himself—all with trout. Perhaps he intuited that fish pics aren’t particularly good bait on a dating app. 

Part of the game of dating apps is about presenting what our ideal mate might be attracted to. We know there is deception at play on both sides, but we overlook it. We swipe on people looking for “short term relationships” (what constitutes “short term”?)—then we’re hurt when they ghost us after a night of fun. We swipe on 10/10 influencer babes (perhaps they’re ready for someone nice?)—then we rage when they’re a catfish or a bot. In his essay “Alder Fork,” Aldo Leopold says, “How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook.” Sometimes we can’t even admit that it was our willingness to be deceived that contributed to our harm. Likewise, we refuse the blame when we deceive others, knowing we aren’t what they’re fishing for, but trying anyway, hoping that if we set the hook, they’ll stay. But of course they’ll get free, and they’ll set us free. Or one of us will consume the other. 

Leopold writes that there’s virtue in risk, no matter the outcome. “How utterly dull,” he says, “would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!” 

I have a close friend, a woman, who is a fly fisher. As we hiked down a coppered trail in the Adirondacks, I asked her about her attraction to fishing—a male-dominated sport. Max, I explained, couldn’t let go of the possibility of another trout, if only he cast on the right fly or in the right shadow. I asked her if she got that way too—if she couldn’t stop fishing once she started.

“You mean, what creates the need for just one more?”

“Yes.”

Our trail led us into a clearing where the grass was tall and yellow. Pebbles crunched under our hiking boots.

“Is it an addiction to the thrill of the catch, like it was for him?” I prompted.

She continued to walk in thoughtful silence.

“No,” she said, finally. “For me, it’s about the fight.”

I imagined her in the rivers of Alaska and on her father’s fishing boats off La Push. I saw her in gray waders, standing her ground against some mysterious force, feeling the subtle pulls, listening, knowing when to resist and when to give, motivated by the nuance of figuring it out. Not just holding on, but understanding how to hold on.

“Once the fight is over, I lose interest.”

If there’s an art to the catch and an art to the release, there’s also an art to the fight. In “Alder Fork,” Leopold tells the story of a difficult capture. In an unfishable hole concealed by branches, he saw a single trout. There was an opening 20 yards upstream. Though he knew it was unlikely to catch a trout by fishing downstream, he tried anyway—“Now for the long chance!”—and through patient, tactful play, he reeled the fish in. That day, he caught only three trout, and none were so large that they required folding or beheading to fit in his creel. “What was big was not the trout, but the chance,” Leopold writes. “What was full was not my creel, but my memory.” 

I step in silt and it swirls around my waders. I stare into the agitated water, wait for the whirl of organic glitter to settle and clear, and in its settling I have a distant perspective. I look down upon a planet from outer space, and the swirls of silt are clouds. When they calm, a life is revealed beneath the disquiet. Something constant. I’m down there, under the turbulence, solid in my boots. When I look up, I see a white house at the top of a hill. Larch trees surround the house. There are no other houses within view. Who lives there? What is their life like—alone on that cliff, looking out on us, alone in the river? Alone except for the people in that house, who can see us kissing in the current, reading on the rock, catching fish and letting them go again? Looking up at that house on the hill, I have a strange sense that it is me living there, and that I’m not being watched by a girl in the house, but that I am both the girl in the river and the girl in the house. I imagine all that I want from life, and I wonder if I’ll get it. I think I might.

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ayóó’ ánííníshní / I love you, a lot.

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Crack, crack, crack.

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