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. 

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

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

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

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

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

“So,” said Vlad. “Young Flower.” 

Vlad called him Young Flower. Matt was 30. 

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

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

“God, she must be an elegant woman!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sort of.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Weird,” she said. “Norway, right?”

“Bulgaria. It’s between three seas.”

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

“I’m from California.”

“Oof. Money problems?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks fine,” Matt reported. 

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

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

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

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

“They were my Myspace page song circa 2007.” 

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

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

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

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

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

“Same difference.”

“No way!” he protested. 

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

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

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

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

“Haha,” he said. 

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

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

“My niece died last year,” Matt offered. 

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

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

He said, “Sure.” 

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

“Young Flower. Matthew, my friend.” 

A quaver to his voice. 

“You okay, Vlad?”

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

“Pause and do what?”

“Just pause.”

“I’m coming in.”

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

“Wow, Vlad. It looks real.”

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

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

“First,” Vlad said, “coffee.”

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

“Entropy.” 

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

“You wished for it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jesus, Vlad.” 

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

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

The feeling Matt got from this was bad. 

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

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

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

“Except they’re chattel.”

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

“I guess not.” 

“Magnitudes, Young Flower. Magnitudes.”

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

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

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

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

“Uh. Birds? Like, hawks?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No lie?” 

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

Meanwhile the technician waited. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged. 

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

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

She grinned. “Let me show you something.” 

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

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

Matt swallowed. 

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

“There,” she said. “Now you.”

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

“That’s okay,” said the technician.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is as I feared,” Vlad groaned. 

Matt hesitated. “The agony problem?”

Vlad covered his face. 

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

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

The being ends, thought Matt. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you want me to do, Vlad?”

Vlad sniffed. “Tell me something bad.” 

“Something bad.” 

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

“It’s hopeless,” Matt tried. 

Vlad flinched but then looked disappointed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah,” said Vlad. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not a great start, bud.” 

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

“Spooky,” Cooper allowed. 

“Everything okay?” 

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

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

“Yep. Just little old me.” 

“How’s Lil?” 

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

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

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

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

“You should come home,” Cooper said next. 

This was not a fact. Not even close. 

“What does that mean?” Matt asked. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lilly might have something to say about that.”

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

“I’m ready,” Matt said. He was. 

“Good.” 

“But Coop?” 

“Yeah?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Vlad, I—” 

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Vlad said. “A big one.” 

“I’m sorry it’s so fast.” 

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

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

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

“I say great.” 

“Wonderful. Meet me in the flat.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cutthroat,” murmured Jon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A reflection.

She was looking at a reflection.

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

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

But how could this be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can we go now, Tessy?”

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

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

“Beetles, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t like beetles.”

“I don’t see a single beetle!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avery did not answer.

Evening came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was unsettling, his indifference.

The stump meant nothing to him now.

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

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

The surface wrinkled. It caught on her skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stepped onto the boulder and lay down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she went back up to her pasture.

Time passed in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s go outside,” he said.

“Where?”

“Up to the snag.”

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

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

He did not say I love you, too.

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

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

“Look!” she gasped.

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

Out sprang the woodpecker she had promised was long gone.

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Things were still fine, despite the dreams, until she forgot her grandson’s name. It happened on their weekly Zoom, when he was being his usual adorably talkative self. She was half listening to his digressively long tale about a kindergarten classmate—so like his Grandpa Bing, whose oral discourses were legendary among his students; “Lullaby Prof ” was a Rate My Prof quip that infuriated him—when he declared, “How silly of Kumar to say my name’s impossible to pronounce! My name’s easy to say, right, Grandma?” And she stared at him, mute, unable to recall his name for ten whole seconds until Lana, her daughter-in-law, said, “Nai-nai, are you muted again?”

After the call, she remains upset, almost drops the coffee pot as she lifts it up to pour and catches it, but not before hot liquid flows black on her right forearm. Just before they signed off, her son, Jasper—although he’s forever Song to her; she embarrasses him whenever she lets slip his baby nickname—asked if anything was wrong, and she told him she was doing fine, everything was fine, and to stop worrying about her being alone in New York because things were worse elsewhere, and at least here, the grocery store was just across the street. But she isn’t fine, almost missed the call because daylight savings ended and she’d forgotten—how is that possible, she is always so religious about time differences for all her international work conference calls, even social calls to friends; so tiresome this time change, why can’t the US drop it the way Hong Kong did forty, no, forty-one years ago. It is this noisome pandemic, this tedious lockdown, yet there is Bing again: Hey, you, no more squawking from your privileged perch. What she most wants right now is to be home, where it is twelve, no, thirteen hours ahead in the evening, having Sunday dinner with her son and his family, savoring Lana’s delicious food and playing with her grandson Sheng (or Bartleby) and his sister Yu Chun (or Monica), already two and chattering almost as much as her brother. After dinner, she’d go back to her flat next door—so lucky her neighbor was selling just when Jasper was buying, so convenient their being next door—listen to a little music and the eleven o’clock news before a restfully dreamless sleep.

No, she mustn’t squawk, she is extremely privileged; even if she is stranded in New York, it is temporary. At least this is still home, sort of. Although the apartment is old, it is centrally located, walking distance to every subway line on 14th Street, and it is all hers now, the mortgage long ago paid off, a space for her and her family. Once before, it was even a rent-free home for her son when he landed his first job in New York after his MBA at UST. As Song, no, Jasper said, “Why come back to quarantine in Hong Kong and waste money in a hotel?” Yes, it makes more sense to wait till things settle down. At least here she can prepare her own meals and have her own things in a comfortable enough space with her laptop and Wi-Fi; and besides, there is Zoom now in addition to Skype, Google Meet, FaceTime, WhatsApp, and WeChat, and she can still talk to all her old school friends and former colleagues, even if they can’t meet for yum chas or dinners. “You know how to use all those platforms,” Jasper said, “so you can accommodate those who aren’t as techy as you.” The way he stretched that, tekkkk-yyy, made her laugh.

Even her recurring dream of the past fortnight—not nightly but disturbingly recurrent—is amusing, or it was at first. There’s a man, not anyone she knows from real life, and in the dream, this man is a lover. She tries to call out to him because he is headed the wrong way, his back to her, but she cannot remember his name. We just made love yesterday, I’ve known him forever, she’d say aloud to no one in particular, and then the panic—how could she possibly forget his name? It is absurd. In her dream, she is much younger, around forty, still sexual. Each time, just as the lover turns into the street ahead when she, muted, can’t stop him from going in the wrong direction, she startles awake. The first time she woke, she was wet down there and would be subsequent times, but not always.

Two years earlier, she turned sixty, retirement age at HKU’s Business School where she taught and provided career counseling. “Come back to real life,” all her friends in the private sector said. They had been surprised when she left her successful management career five years earlier for a significant pay cut as only an associate professor. “You’re still employable, it’s silly the way universities force retirement so early, not even sixty-five when you can at least get ‘long people’ benefits.” Viola, one of her secondary schoolmates, recast the clunky “senior citizen” as “long people,” punning on 長者, and it became another bit of her Chinglish. Bing would think that funny, she told Viola the first time she said it, and Viola, puzzled, asked, “Who’s Bing?” Embarrassed, she said, Sorry, you don’t know about my late husband, do you? Because by the time she fully reconnected with all her Hong Kong schoolmates, several years after she had gone home to live and work, Bing was already dead, far too young at forty-six.

Yet here, now, in their former New York home, it’s like he has never left her. She met Bing in the summer of ’83 when she visited New York. It was her first time in America. The plan, because she always used to have a plan, was to take her two-week annual leave to sightsee after completing her executive MBA classes at Harvard, since the air ticket and US visa were already paid for by her employer, DHL International. He wooed her relentlessly, this funny man who, despite his ABC-ness, spoke passably good Cantonese thanks to his late mother, a translator who had worked with immigrants. The first time she described his mother’s work as helping those most unfortunate ones, he frowned. What do you mean, unfortunate? And they almost got into an argument because she wouldn’t back down from her position that being a Chinese migrant in any non-Chinese country marked you as lesser, making you one of the unfortunates, because no matter how hard you tried to assimilate, you’d always be different, an outsider. Just semantics, she said, trying to soothe his irritation, because he raised his voice: You have no idea, do you, what it’s like to be someone who doesn’t come from your kind of privilege! He accused her of lacking empathy, something he prided himself on, and which he said she could learn by reading more literature. He was still in grad school at the time, completing his PhD in Asian American Studies, and books by Chinese-surnamed writers she’d never heard of littered his apartment.

Some of those books are still here, lining the solid, oak floor-to-ceiling bookcases that cover their home’s entire west wall. Of course, it took her almost seven years of pestering him to replace his cheap pasteboard shelves that buckled precariously, threatening collapse so that they’d both be buried under an avalanche of words. It’s early morning as she sips her coffee and stands in the middle of the living room, staring up, thinking those top shelves probably need dusting, they must be filthy, trying to recall the last time she read any book that wasn’t a business textbook.

You should have stayed. His voice, like her tinnitus, sneaks up from behind, frightening her, and she turns her head, fully expecting to see him. She wants to shout, Stop hounding me, you’re . . . but instead she collapses on the sofa and weeps, spilling her coffee. Between her legs, the memory of that dream makes her hornier this morning than she’s been in years. As she cleans up the mess, the repetitive drone—he left me, he left me—and no matter what she does this morning, she can’t stop crying.

By noon, she is calmer. Her daily tai chi exercise routine centers her, makes her less jittery. Lana says she drinks too much caffeine, which she dismissed at first, but after cutting her morning coffee with half decaf and reducing the amount of tea she consumes daily, she does notice a difference. And the high-pressure water jet in the shower reduces the tinnitus hum, so she simply stays under the water roar a few seconds longer each morning. “Mind over hearing,” another Lana-ism, more health advice that her daughter-in-law, an exercise and health nut, constantly offers, unsolicited. Damn Lana, always so insistent, always so right. Just like Bing. She loves Lana, of course she does, the best wife for Jasper and a wonderful mother, and whose Cantonese improves noticeably every time they meet and whose Mandarin is more fluent than her son’s. She knows she is lucky, privileged, as Bing reminded her constantly, to be who she is, to have what she has, surrounded by a family who loves her.

She has a ton of emails as well as laundry. Focus on the practical, this has been her mantra for as long as she can recall. Those glorious early years with Bing here in New York, despite his precarious bookshelves, are gone. Years when nothing mattered except being madly in love. The first time they made love is still astonishingly memorable. She had buried that feeling for years after his death, trying not to recall because it was over, over, over, and there was Song to take care of, a real life in Hong Kong to live, and not the fairy tale of New York into which Bing had sucked her with his persistent love. Viola was persistent too, wanting to know more about her husband. Viola was, is a psychologist—“The life of the spirit doesn’t die,” she says—and she must admit it’s admirable how Viola donates her time to help women in prison now that she’s retired from private practice, keeping her own spirit alive. Of course, Viola never married and doesn’t have either elderly parents or children or grandchildren to think about, unlike her. Ba is so old he frightens her grandchildren, especially Yu Chun, and she’s learned to keep him away from them since he can’t remember who anyone is anyway. Sometimes, it astonishes her how hard her father clings to being alive—he’s almost ninety—despite the complete loss of memory to Alzheimer’s over the last twenty years. Luckily, she has Lily, a nurse from the Philippines, who is a wonderful caregiver, and between Lily and Beth, her other domestic helper, she is freed of much of the day-to-day of looking after her father.

So, why are you still so busy?

There is Bing again, haunting her, refusing to shut up, insisting on his presence in this apartment, his home. She can silence him in Hong Kong because he only made it there a couple of times, the first to ask Ba for her hand, and only because she had insisted. He had wanted to elope, expecting her to just stay on in New York with him, leaving behind her entire life in Hong Kong. To just be his love, and we will all the pleasures prove. He recited Marlowe to her, adding, I’ll be . . . but she cut him off: My passionate shepherd? How delighted he was that she knew the poem, one she had studied in secondary school. Her teacher, Miss Lu, a romantic, had made her class recite that poem, one she was clearly enamored of.

Who was her teacher’s passionate shepherd, she had wondered, especially as Miss Lu was not married, this attractive and stylish woman who taught at her school until she dropped dead suddenly, one day right in the middle of class. Miss Lu had only been thirty, and she remembers how she and her schoolmates all grieved en masse because everyone had liked their sweet and elegant teacher. Luckily, she was no longer in Miss Lu’s class when she died, as she told Bing when explaining why she knew this one poem. He hoped she knew other poems, but she had to admit, no, she didn’t and had really never liked studying literature, though this one poem had stuck.

She searches for it now, and there it is, on Poetry Foundation’s page. She made Bing laugh because she had also asked, What does that make me, your sheep? You have, he said, a most American sense of humor, which puzzled her then. Now, having worked for Americans and American companies long enough, she thinks maybe she knows what he meant.

Mind over hearing.

Doing laundry calms her, as does cleaning the apartment. Living here with him was constant housework-in-progress, Bing being rather lax about things. It took him days to go through his mail until one day, when she could stand it no longer, she gathered the pile, by then weeks old, and dumped it all in the trash. He was horrified, but I haven’t gone through the mail yet, and she stared him down calmly, saying, And now you never will. After that, he was better about attending to his mail sooner.

But all this is long ago and so far away; why must she recall it now? Ancient history. As Sheng said about her father, “Grandma, you’re ancient, but Great Grandpa, he’s fossilized.” Lana tried to shush him, but she laughed, said, Well, everyone gets fossilized sooner or later, which made Sheng laugh. Everything was fine until this stupid . . . you can’t blame COVID, you can’t bury the truth. You should have stayed, we would have been okay, why didn’t you trust me?

And what about Song?

He would have been okay too, he would have adjusted. Just boys being boys.

They were cruel. Stupid, ignorant, savage brats.

All that anger from before surges through her again. She is furious. Time heals nothing; all it does is pass by, unstoppably. Her poor boy, too slight and bookish at eleven to fend off the bullies. Suffering daily humiliation at the fancy, private New York school Ba had insisted on paying for because he knew she and Bing could not afford it on what they made, what with high American taxes and their mortgage. Bing had been against private school, saying Song would do fine in public school the way he had and would become tougher, but she had gone to see the state of things and had been horrified at the run-down, decrepit condition of the facilities and the unruly student mobs. It shamed her to have to ask for help from Ba, but her father was so kind, saying, “You married a dreamer, he’ll never be rich, but never mind, he’s a good man.” How angry Bing was when he found out what she’d done, but she ignored his wrath because she knew she was right, and that ended the argument as far as she was concerned.

An email pings. From Viola. We missed you last night, hope you’re okay.

She completely forgot about this morning’s Zoom with her former schoolmates!

Sorry, she lies, was tied up. Next time. But then she wonders, What the hell, it’s only four in the morning over there.

Why are you up?

Why sleep when there’s so little time left, comes the reply.

It’s only then that she recalls that Viola lost her mother when she was still in school—hit by a bus or truck, something like that, as she was crossing the road to the market—and then her father died when she was in university—a blood clot in the brain—leaving her alone in their flat, the one she still lives in now, alone. Viola has no siblings, no other relatives in Hong Kong because her parents escaped from China by themselves as refugees who never looked back.

Like Bing.

The dryer tumbles to a stop. Shit. The mixed load has leaked red onto her favorite white T-shirt. Separate, separate, separate, you’re always so impatient. Oh, shut up, you can’t tell me what to do anymore. Oh, really? So, why are you still back here? Don’t be difficult. But she is smiling. See, you’re still my silly goose, aren’t you?

When she tried to defend her decision to go back to Hong Kong and take their son with her, one argument she used was that she missed roast goose. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, there was really only duck. That made Bing furious. You’d leave your husband and home for goose?! What’s wrong with you? Try as she might, she could not find the words for everything she felt. Homesickness, Song’s well-being away from the bullies, air-conditioning in the summer (she hated Manhattan’s stifling summers), and higher salaries for senior line management positions, unlike in the US where she would remain forever relegated to backroom support—but all her reasons masked the real problem until finally, after their worst argument, the words tumbled out: I am sick and tired of being a second-class citizen! It’s different for you, this is your country. It isn’t mine and never really will be, no matter how long I live here. He went silent, stared at her for an eternity. Saw her for real, perhaps for the first time. Okay, I get it, and after that, there was no further argument.

It’s already getting dark. She loves these autumn dusks, just as she used to love winters in New York. Soon, snowfall. Bing hated snow because, when he was a kid, he had to shovel the sidewalk along his alley. Why can’t the city do our street too, he’d demand, and his father would yell at him to “collect his mouth,” to shut up, saying that when he made his own money, he could move to one of those ghost people streets the city cleaned because no one gave a fuck about Chinatown and yellow faces. By then, his mother was already dead—he had lost her when he was seven—but, as he often said, he could always hear her singing, saying sweet things to him whenever his Ba yelled.

For her, snow means silence. The city relaxes, breathes quietly until the thaw. Not like Hong Kong, which is noisy all year long—the buses and taxis droned through all the nights and days of her childhood; and in the mornings, the clanging trams groaned past her flat, rattling the windows.

But it’s still too early for snow and that silence she once longed for. The thing about dusk now is this tinnitus roar, which amplifies later in the day. Not always, but often enough, and here in an emptied-out New York where the city has gone silent and she is always alone, it’s deafening. Back home, the perpetual noise of the city masks it, she realizes, and the prospect of spending the winter alone in New York is troubling. This evening, panic sets in, and she is not reassured when she reads about older people dying alone in homes their families cannot visit. Stop, you’re not that old yet, and your last checkup was fine. Stop worrying. She streams TV on her laptop, and it’s not till halfway through the evening news that she wonders why Bing has gone silent.

There are no ordinary days anymore. It’s been almost five weeks since Daylight Savings—no, Eastern Daylight now—ended, and still no return to normalcy. Outdoor dining as the weather gets colder is absurd. Besides, there’s no one here left to call, no one to meet for lunch or dinner. She thinks about a couple of her former colleagues, but the two women with whom she was friendliest no longer live in Manhattan. One is in Seattle, and the other is home caring for her elderly mother in Western Massachusetts.

This morning, she is in the middle of answering an email when Wi-Fi vanishes. Just like that. She goes through the routine—unplug, wait, re-plug, reboot—but nothing. It’s only Spectrum Wi-Fi in this apartment, no cable TV, so she can’t even check if it’s a system-wide breakdown. She calls the customer service line but is cycled through a series of auto responses that loop her right back to where she started until she finally gives up, hoping service will simply reappear, miraculously, now that AI rules life 天下 “under heaven” with an invisible wizard as emperor. The first time she watched The Wizard of Oz with Bing—a movie he religiously watched once a year and badgered her to join him to watch what she called “this children’s story,” until she finally gave in—she was startled by how compelling it was, and how it made her think about China’s dynastic history, emperors as the “sons of heaven” who ruled under the skies of the world. All of which had supposedly ended once Mao freed the country through communism. For the longest time, she did not understand why a children’s story would have such resonance, especially one so foreign to her own upbringing.

Yet she recalls it now and suddenly wants to see it again, to bring Bing back. He has gone silent for days, more than a week, and she is confused, distraught, unsettled. Sometimes, she wonders if she’s going mad in this isolation. But she’s not alone! She speaks to someone almost daily, at least five or so times a week. Song calls frequently, even Lana does, and there are the weekly Zooms with her family, as well as the fortnightly one with her old schoolfriends in Hong Kong. And former colleagues and people reach out to see if she’ll do some consulting or give a talk via Zoom. She is remembered, she isn’t forgotten, even so far from home. Everyone assumes she’ll be back eventually, and all will be as it used to be.

She’s mired now in the before time, in that long-long-ago time, the way her Ba is all the time, his memory unreliably reliable. She even misses sitting with him, listening to him talk about people long dead, people from his and Ma’s youth whom she never knew. He will be ninety soon, and she wants to go home to plan the celebratory dinner with all the family, his former business associates, and the few surviving friends of his generation. Watching her father’s memory deteriorate is a perpetual, existential shock, even though she should be used to it by now. Yet here, now, what she experiences is the shock of sexual desire, long stuffed away since Bing’s death, along with years of entreaties by friends that she should consider dating again, perhaps even to remarry, which she always politely ignored. There were always excuses: Song was only sixteen when Bing died; she worked long hours because she was a senior manager; there were the mortgages on the apartment in New York and the one in Hong Kong to pay, plus the New York one had to be rented out which ate up time; her Ba needed more assistance after he turned seventy and his mind wandered down that path of no return. Besides, when she looked around her world, none of her professional girlfriends who were either divorced or single were dating. As the only widow in her Hong Kong circle, she felt old, even at forty-three. Plus, she had begun menopause early. Her gynecologist suggested that the shock of Bing’s death might have contributed, but she was never sure what to think and simply chose to believe that menopause signaled the end of her sexual life.

But back here in New York, her body in isolation is undergoing an involuntary transformation. Last night, another dream, or rather, the next episode of her previous one sucked her into its pleasure tornado. She catches up with the lover, and when he turns around, it is Bing, masked. She begins to undress him, and he resists at first, but the dream cuts to the next scene, and they are both naked, having sex right there in the street in the multitude of ways Bing wanted, to which she willingly used to succumb, and when she awoke, she was reaching for his torso to pull him back inside her again. The sheets were soaked with secretions and sweat, and she was shocked by the musty assault. With Wi-Fi dead, there is nothing to distract her, and she recalls how she felt upon awakening, exhausted, after what must have been multiple orgasms that had shot through her while in the clutches of a dream.

Surely this can’t be normal. Perhaps she needs to consult Viola professionally or ask for a referral to another psychologist. In the last few years, she and Viola have become closer, occasionally meeting by themselves for lunches, walks, concerts, or museum and gallery visits. They had not been close in school; her friends back then have all become the bankers, financiers, tech entrepreneurs, and management executives. None will leave Hong Kong, even those with foreign passports, although these days, their children might, and all are married to Chinese spouses, except one, but that husband is an Italian who runs a successful business on the mainland, speaks better Mandarin than most locals, and has declared he will apply for a Chinese passport. She doesn’t know if he’ll really go through with it. His wife has no intention of giving up her Italian one, or so she declared at dinner the last time they got together, and their four children and their families are all in either the UK or Europe.

She brews a strong pot of coffee, no decaf, just the real thing. It was all she and Bing drank back when she was not yet forty, when her body was supple and strong enough to orgasm away all those emotions she couldn’t fathom. Like her campaign to get him to apply for a university job in Hong Kong, something he resisted until after she went home. “It was so easy at the millennium, foreign talent was welcome, especially overseas Chinese. What was wrong with you, why couldn’t you leave New York, even temporarily? We would have been okay there, Ba liked you, and then we could have moved back here together, but . . .” She stops, realizing she’s spoken aloud. What is wrong with her? Why is everything so difficult? The pandemic will end. Besides, it hasn’t really hurt her or her family all that much; they are the lucky ones, cocooned. Clothed, fed, sheltered, vaccinated, and properly masked, and who needs transport when there’s nowhere to go? Late spring and early summer were the worst of this year, but things are better now that it’s fall, and New York is ahead of the curve with fewer cases every day. She might even be able to go back for Christmas, or at the very latest by the Chinese New Year, when this damnable rat year will finally be over and the ox will enter the skies. By their calendar, Ba will be ninety. “Ba liked you,” she repeats, but Bing is silent and does not say, the way he did on the eve of her departure back in ’98, that her Ba is a water monkey who will extinguish his own fire monkey flames.

Her laptop belches, and the Wi-Fi pops and whirrs again. Some upgrade needs to be downloaded, Microsoft, of course. It infuriates her how often their software must be upgraded. Song showed her how to turn off the auto update when she complained about the inconvenience, grumbling that programmers were so clueless about what customers needed until her grandson shut her up—“But, Grandma, programmers make the world.”

Both my husband and father are monkeys, she told Viola over lunch, two days before she flew out of Hong Kong in late February after the new year festivities had ended. It was to be an easy turnaround trip, three weeks, four, max. She had been thinking to sell the apartment and planned to meet with realtors and pack personal effects to send home. Lana had even found her a moving company that handled small international shipments. Song was not attached to this apartment or New York, despite his time there, and Lana’s family were all in Oregon or Russia or China.

Viola, who was serious about horoscopes and visited fortune tellers regularly, said, “How interesting, but what are you?” She smiled. Earth dog, the grounded one. And they both contemplated the exquisite symmetry of her life.

The quarantine rules in Hong Kong are ridiculous! she exclaims when Song tells her about the latest iteration. It’s early December, and by now Lana is making noises about moving the family to Oregon because the ­government’s latest machinations are becoming too much, even for her, this modern Chinese historian and daughter of American communists who became more Chinese than most Chinese and who framed plausible arguments for Marxism and Maoism beyond the Cultural Revolution. Her daughter-in-law’s wish to leave Hong Kong is the cause of much ­friction between the couple, she knows, even though they both put on smiling faces for her on Zoom. Song is, like her, apolitical. All he wants is to bring up his children where he feels most at home and where he can make a good life. After Song outlines all her travel and quarantine alternatives, he surprises her by asking, “How did you decide, Ma, to leave New York?” He’s never asked, never wanted to talk about it. She assumed it was because he had been so grateful to get out of that school and had fit easily and well into his new school in Hong Kong, an international one, where nerds were admired and did not need to contemplate revenge.

Before she can respond, he adds, “But you’ll stay, won’t you, Ma? For Grandpa?”

Afterward, she wonders if she’s made the right decision to hold on to the New York apartment, even though the COVID situation will likely progress to the point where she’ll no longer need it as a place to stay. Song didn’t react when she told him this. Many of her friends back home say the politics are ignorable, not unlike the way it was under the British. “What democracy did we have then?” demands Melinda, the wealthy entrepreneur who made her fortune in Chinese utilities; her husband is a Beijing man. Melinda is the only one of their cohort who, as Viola says, married correctly into our future. Viola is much more ambivalent and privately tells her she holds a British National (Overseas) passport, which she elected to get years ago even though everyone said it was a pointless colonial compromise. It was such a neutral decision before, like a multiple-choice exam where you might as well try to guess the right answer if you really don’t know. The Hong Kong government has declared that the BN(O) will eventually not be recognized, and she will be forced to exchange it for the Special Administrative Region (SAR) one, assuming, of course, that Beijing continues to allow this exception for Hong Kong. Right now, if she wants, Viola can register with her BN(O) to migrate to Britain under the UK’s special arrangement that so infuriates Beijing. She did attend a UK university and has some friends and professional contacts there, but her real life has been all about Hong Kong, and Viola can’t imagine growing old and dying abroad.

Tonight, she has episode four of the dream—number three was so pornographic she refuses to replay it—and just like two and three, she wakes up knowing that the orgasms have made her sleep more soundly than she’s slept in years. The way sleep used to be with Bing.

All through October and November, she tried to record her nocturnal episodes. She began thinking of them as journeys through the city because each dream started with her following the lover. The street corners changed, sometimes their own neighborhood, sometimes Midtown or Wall Street, sometimes around the UN or even Brooklyn Heights, and often the Meatpacking District (when there still were markets), the Village, and the Upper West Side. All the spaces she and Bing haunted. She has a log of all the episodes she can recall, hoping to make sense of this nonsense. What information she finds online about involuntary or sleep orgasms is sketchy. Regardless, what she is certain of is that Bing is no longer here. It’s baffling. She is still too embarrassed to say anything to Viola, holding back because, for as long as she’s known Viola, she’s never heard mention of a lover, either male or female. In fact, one of her former classmates, the one married to the Italian and who speaks openly about sex, once wondered aloud if Viola was simply asexual. It dawns on her now—the way so much, too much dawns on her during this enforced solitude and silence—that she’s rarely had a conversation about her sex life with any of her Hong Kong women friends, that the only such conversations were with Americans, the women friends she made when she lived and worked here, or the odd European or British expat in her Hong Kong hiking group, and how liberating that used to make her feel. When these women envied her excellent sex life with Bing, she smiled, gratified at her privilege. Viola once mentioned that most of her clients, when she still had a private practice, were foreigners or hyphenated Chinese, the alphabet BCs from around the world, alienated in Hong Kong and China, where everyone looked, and even sounded, like them but shuttered them out of their worlds.

This afternoon, the super stops by to adjust her heating system. A new boiler for the building was installed this summer, which is supposed to be quieter and more energy efficient. From the time she moved into Bing’s apartment, Alberto has been the super. He’s from Colombia and is “getting too old for this work,” he says, as they exchange friendly words. His son will take over his job soon. She’s forgotten about his son, the boy who was about Song’s age and who used to play together with him until she realized Song was swearing in Spanish and put a stop to that. They’re just boys, Bing said at the time, upset that she had cut off their friendship, but she disagreed, saying Song needed a better class of friends. But now, as she chats with Alberto, this man she’s relied on for years, she recognizes how horribly elitist that was, which was what Bing had accused her of, and she is ashamed of the way she used to be.

In fact, as she prepares dinner that evening and tries to construct a conversation with Viola about perhaps entering therapy (although the idea still frightens her), she says to Bing, You were right, Hong Kong misshaped me. An echo from a hideous argument. It was the year after she had left New York and Bing had come to visit, having reluctantly agreed to meet with the interview committee at one of the local government universities. They were hiring for a full professor position, with tenure, and paid more than he’d ever made at the university in New York where he’d taught for decades. When the job was offered to him, he turned it down, much to her annoyance, because she had arranged the whole thing through a highly influential friend. You embarrassed me, she told him, made me lose face. Face, he retorted, means shit without morality. How he harangued her about the inequities of what he called a “lopsided postcolonial legacy” and the elitism it bred, to which she argued back, And is academia in New York so great, where highly qualified, dedicated professionals are either adjuncts or on contracts like yours for shit pay? His position had to be renewed every two years. Was that system any better than theirs in Hong Kong?

“I’m sorry,” she says aloud to the skies. “I was wrong, and you were right, so right. Look at the mess we’re in now.”

It’s too late to make amends, which she tried to do after the Umbrella Revolution, a democracy movement that rattled and unnerved her, by leaving her business career for an academic one, hoping to be of some use to the next disillusioned generation. Bing would have approved, Bing who had preached ending capitalism in favor of socialism for the twenty-first century. Silly goose, silly goose. She had been happy before, why hadn’t she simply rolled with that? Even Ba said, many times, “My daughter, he’s a good man, your mother would have been proud of you,” although she knew how it pleased Ba to have her home in Hong Kong, a good, filial daughter. Has she harmed her son with her brand of parenting? But Song seems so balanced and sensible and, well, okay. Besides, Bing would have loved Lana; they’re rather alike, and that’s worth something, knowing this with such certainty. Things have simply turned out the way they have, and there’s nothing she can do about it now, not about her son and his family who must make their own decisions, or the way Hong Kong is becoming, will become. There is no right answer to the choices presented by fate. Besides, there’s Ba, and she will remain by his side in Hong Kong until he dies, which will not happen for another dozen years, when he makes it to over a hundred.

The post Quarantining in Her Late Husband’s Apartment Is Making Her Horny appeared first on Electric Literature.

Cole set out early, when the fishermen of his hometown were just beginning to cast their nets into the sea. Claudia Bernard, the woman that Cole was journeying towards, had no idea that he was on his way. Cole made the drive from Astoria to Fortuna in one white-knuckled shot, terrified that if he lingered anywhere for too long, something awful would happen—a nosy traveler would report him as a teen runaway, or he’d simply lose his nerve and drive back home. At hour five, a massive traffic jam snagged its way down the interstate, delaying Cole’s arrival in California by hours. Night had fallen by the time he reached Fortuna. All around him the shadows of great redwoods loomed. Cole pulled into the parking lot of the Fortuna Inn a little after 7 PM, its blinking red vacancy sign burning like a flare in the dark. 

The Fortuna Inn was a classic low-rise motel in the shape of an L, its rooms accessible by an exterior pathway lit by a single exposed bulb. Cole parked his car and walked inside to a small lobby that smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes. He couldn’t tell if the smell was emanating from the large woman seated behind the counter or if, over time, smoke had gradually seeped into the very matter of the place, becoming one with it. 

“One room, please,” Cole said. At seventeen, he’d never checked into a motel by himself, but this seemed like the logical thing to say. Still, the woman behind the counter eyed him suspiciously. She wore a green flannel shirt, with a pin that said “Jan” affixed over the formidable mounds of her breasts. Cole, in his exhaustion from the drive, imagined sinking his head into the soft bounty of them, closing his eyes, and falling asleep. 

Jan lit a cigarette and continued to stare. 

“You alone?” she said. 

“Is that relevant?” Cole replied.

“It is if you’re being trafficked,” Jan said. “Or smuggling drugs.”

“I’m here to visit Tracker,” Cole said, which was partly true. 

“Don’t parents usually come along on college visits?” 

“My dad couldn’t get the time off work.”

“And your mom?”

“Not in the picture.” 

It was the kind of statement that usually softened people to him. Over the years, Cole had learned that, if you were a white-skinned teenage boy and you alluded to a dead or absentee mother, you could get away with almost anything. Jan just nodded and turned around to grab a key off the wall behind her. Cole slid his debit card across the Formica counter.

“Kind of quiet here,” he said. He’d only seen one other car in the parking lot—a mint green Ford truck that presumably belonged to Jan. 

“You’ll be in 6A,” she said, ignoring his comment. “Down the walkway, on your right.”

“Do you have room service?” Cole asked. 

“Do I look like I have fucking room service?” Jan replied.

Cole took the key and stepped back outside. The night was chilly and damp. He could sense but not see the towering redwoods that lined the road opposite the motel, enforcing, like sentinels, an almost frightening stillness. The lightbulb buzzed faintly over the cement walkway as he hurried to 6A. All the other rooms were dark, the curtains drawn tight behind their windows. Between the motel and the highway was a patchy stretch of dirt and grass with two pink plastic lawn chairs set up in the middle of it, like Jan was trying to make things nice. The look of them made Cole feel mournful—though for Jan or for the empty chairs or for himself, he wasn’t sure. 

Inside the surprisingly clean room, Cole stretched across the bed and pulled out his phone. A few hours earlier, he’d sent his father a text letting him know that he’d safely landed in Palm Springs. Mr. Hansen was under the impression that Cole had driven to his friend Austin Whittaker’s house that morning, left his car in their driveway, and joined the family on their annual spring break trip to Palm Springs. Cole’s father was a simple man, a former minor league pitcher who now ran a sporting goods store in Astoria. He’d responded Aloha! to Cole’s text and sent emojis of a pineapple and crashing wave.

There was also a text from Cole’s girlfriend, Mikayla—the only other person on the planet who knew where he actually was. Let me know when you make it in., she’d written, her intentional use of punctuation artfully signaling her lingering bitterness. She’d wanted to come on the trip, but Cole had told her that this was something he had to do on his own. 

Cole had been dating Mikayla since middle school. She had fire-engine red hair, skin as white as milk, and glorious red nipples that reminded Cole of oversized pepperonis, though he knew better than to share this observation with her, even if to him it was a compliment. Cole ignored Mikayla’s text. Already, her flushed complexion and frenzied moods were starting to feel distant and unreal. Or maybe it was the version of Cole that Mikayla knew that was starting to feel unreal, the Cole who had not yet left on his journey to meet Claudia Bernard. 

Cole pulled his fraying copy of The Ominous Shaft out of the backpack he’d dumped by the bed. On the cover, Claudia Bernard stood in a column of white light, her knees bent, her wide shoulders and lank arms almost vampiric as they crooked towards the glow, either conjuring it or succumbing to it, Cole wasn’t sure. She had short, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a mole flecking the tip of her pointed, almost feline chin. She looked, Cole realized the first time he’d seen the book’s cover, just like him. Cole stared at the cover again now with a kind of longing recognition. He’d always felt gangly and out of place in his paternal line, stocked as it was by stout, pale Nordic types. Looking at Claudia Bernard, Cole’s olive skin, long limbs, and angular features finally made a certain kind of sense. 

Cole closed his eyes, opened to a random page, and pointed.

The psychological chasm between the male and female can be traced to the architecture of their respective forms, namely the genitalia. While the male phallus is a kind of feat of engineering—a straining, skyward skin tower, compulsive in its questing, forever extending towards the unknown, ready to master and transform it—the female vagina is a barbed and swampy abyss that has never seen the sun, a crude and cavernous vestige of the netherworld from which we all came and to which we shall all return—a place of great danger and mystery, offgassing fumes and vengeance, archaically content in its dark and winding depths, the putrid and pulsing center of all life. 

Cole dropped his finger and closed the book. He’d been practicing this form of bibliomancy ever since his father had sat him down at the dinner table the year before and informed him that his mother was the controversial Italian American feminist Claudia Bernard, author of, among other works, The Ominous Shaft: Sex, Art, and Nature from the Dawn of Man to Bill Clinton. This book was Claudia Bernard’s first, published in the mid-1990s, just a year after she’d graduated from Cambridge. It lived up to its name, covering, in an exhaustingly meandering fashion, everything from Stone Age fertility goddesses to Madonna’s fifth studio album Erotica, along with other, more idiosyncratic flourishes, including an inexplicable, twenty-five page passage about the telepathic powers of cats. Claudia Bernard thought Euripides’ The Bacchae and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus were the greatest works of art ever created. The book’s most famous line—“There will never be a female Beethoven, because there will never be a female Ted Bundy”—continued to incite the ire of feminist critics everywhere. Cole had tried to read the gigantic text linearly at first, but found it so inscrutable and dense he’d put it down in reverent defeat. He found it was far easier and more pleasurable to read The Ominous Shaft like this, in disconnected bits and pieces. 

When Mikayla had attempted Cole’s ritual herself, she’d flipped to a random page, read it aloud, and burst out laughing. 

“Holy shit, that was the worst thing I’ve ever read,” she’d said, tossing the book onto the floor of Cole’s bedroom. 

But Cole didn’t think so. Next fall, Cole was headed to MIT on a full scholarship, while Mikayla said she was “still deciding.” Cole knew this meant she’d eventually enroll at Clatsop Community College just like everyone else from their hometown. So, when Mikayla said that The Ominous Shaft was the stupidest thing she’d ever read, Cole had thought but didn’t say that maybe Mikayla was just stupid.

To be fair, he didn’t understand the book either, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to understand. Cole was convinced that deep within the book’s convoluted, never-ending sentences, its brick after brick of protracted paragraphs, its wandering tangle of words and phrases that began in one place and ended somewhere entirely different (or, more often than not, went nowhere at all, as if even the writer herself had forgotten where she was headed), was a message, a secret code meant just for him. 

This belief had been confirmed late one night when Cole, alone in his room, had waded through a particularly unwieldy paragraph of The Ominous Shaft to find the first simple and somewhat declarative sentence of the entire book:

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, a journey that will inevitably end where it began: The Mother.

Cole had underlined the sentence and read it again and again, until a plan began to take shape. Though Claudia Bernard had spent most of her career teaching on the East Coast and in the Midwest, she’d recently decamped to Tracker College, after writing a scathing review of a young woman’s otherwise very well-received college sexual assault memoir. Students had revolted, and Claudia Bernard had fled. Now, she was less than a day’s drive away from Astoria and—perhaps to Cole’s advantage—at a personal and professional low. Cole saved up money working weekends at Hansen’s Athletics until he had enough to make this trip. He would go to his mother and she would welcome him, grateful that he, like her psychic cats, had heard her silent call. 

Cole was about to turn to that sentence when there was an abrupt knock at the door. He stood up and peered out of the tiny peephole to the shadowy walkway of the Fortuna Inn, to the barren lot with its yellowed grass and lonely pink table and chairs. Hesitantly, he opened the door. When he looked down, sitting on an oily paper plate was the saddest sandwich he had ever seen: two pieces of thumbprint-dented white bread, rubbery pink lips of baloney sticking out between them. Cole picked it up and sniffed. It reeked of cigarettes. 

Though he was starving from his journey, Cole walked to the bathroom trashcan, opened the lid with his foot, and threw the sandwich away.

The tour the next morning was led by a junior named Evan, who was majoring in Philosophy and French, the most obnoxious and useless combination of majors. Evan was distressingly handsome, with blue eyes and a head of brown hair that was somehow both boyish and urbane. He dressed how Cole imagined an Ivy League grad student would dress—oversized tweed blazer, loose-fitting jeans—rather than how a student of presumably average intellect, at a little-known liberal arts college in Humboldt County, would dress. Cole took this to mean that Evan was out of touch with his station in life. 

Cole had signed up for the tour as a kind of plausible deniability for being on campus, which now felt silly and unnecessary. The group was small, three other visiting families and Cole. Tracker College, which sounded less like an institution for higher learning than a training center for bomb-sniffing dogs, wasn’t overflowing with applicants. It was the kind of school people went to when they couldn’t get in anywhere else. People like Mikayla. As Evan led the group through the heavily forested grounds, Cole felt the immensity of Claudia Bernard’s professional downfall.

The morning was overcast, a damp coastal fog hanging drearily in the air. Cole had slept poorly the night before. Despite the cool weather, he was sweating beneath the polyethylene-slicked tarp of his rain jacket, jittery with exhaustion and nerves. Evan took them to the bookstore and the dorms, to the chemistry labs and the arts center, before winding towards the squat brutalist structure that was the humanities building. From regularly scouring her faculty page on the Tracker website, Cole knew that Claudia Bernard’s office was located on the fourth floor of this building. 

Cole was pretty sure that he had a memory of his mother. It was dark, either late at night or very early in the morning, and Cole was lying awake in his crib. A shadowy face loomed over him. He was scared at first, too scared to cry out, but he reached for the shape anyway, trusting it. As soon as he did, the shape lurched jerkily out of view, like someone caught staring. Cole knew about infant amnesia, knew that most people could not recall events that occurred before the age of two, but later, when he looked at the picture of Claudia Bernard on the cover of The Ominous Shaft, he was certain the shadow had been her. 

For much of his life, that memory was all he’d known about his mother. “She left,” his dad would say, and leave it at that. Though Cole knew she wasn’t technically dead, he’d always pictured her birthing him in the woods like an injured animal and then slinking off to a cave to die. Asking his father for more details had seemed like an insult. During Cole’s sophomore year, his English class had read “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and the poem had made Cole so unspeakably emotional that he’d run out of the classroom and cried in a bathroom stall. The poem affected Cole not because his father physically labored every day in the bitter cold, but because he did things like fold Cole’s laundry and drive him to robotics competitions on the weekends. Other kids’ moms fawned over this young single dad and assumed that Cole’s mother had died tragically, maybe even in childbirth. Their fridge was forever stocked with gifts of lasagna and the ingredients for beef tacos, as if Cole and his father were in a perpetual state of mourning. 

That past December, shortly after Cole had been accepted into MIT through early admission, his father had finally told him about Claudia Bernard. It was late at night, and his dad was still wearing the tight-fitting Hansen’s Athletics polo that showed off his sculpted pitcher’s arm. Cole fixated on that arm as his father spoke, how it was muscular and mighty in a way that Cole’s would never be. Long past were the dreaded summer nights spent in the Hansen backyard, Cole’s father trying to hide his disappointment as Cole’s fastballs spun loosely and limply into the dirt. 

Don’t aim, his father would say. Command. 

Cole found the sentiment compelling, almost poetic, but he could never quite get his body to follow through on what his brain was telling it. 

“Your mother didn’t leave because of you,” Cole’s father explained in the kitchen that night. “She left because she is a selfish woman.”

Mr. Hansen was almost certainly going off script. Surely the guidance was to tell his son that his mother still loved him, in her own way. Instead, his father explained that he’d met Claudia Bernard when he was playing in the minor leagues in Columbus and she was a visiting professor at Ohio State. He was twenty-one. She was forty-three. They’d met at a dive bar, gone on a few dates, fell out of contact. Then, seven months later, she showed up at his apartment door unannounced, her round, straining belly pointed at him like an accusation. In that moment, he’d fallen in love with her. They lived together for a month or so before the birth, shortly after which Claudia Bernard disappeared back to the East Coast in the dead of night without a word, leaving Cole’s father with no choice but to raise his infant son alone. He retired from the Clippers and moved back to his hometown of Astoria, where he opened Hansen’s Athletics and learned the value of a humble life. He hoped Cole, too, might come to appreciate the value of a humble life. That’s why he liked to take Cole to the West Basin Marina on summer evenings, just as the fishermen were docking their boats for the day. To Cole’s father, the fishermen were a living symbol of everything he’d come to cherish: the grounding force of family, the pleasures of physical exertion, the honor of a hard day’s work.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty,” his father said, after finishing his story. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, bud.”

At this, his father had started to cry. 

The next day, Cole and Mikayla went to a used bookstore on Commercial Street and bought all of Claudia Bernard’s books. Cole quickly learned, through reading her work, that Claudia Bernard’s thoughts on motherhood were complex. She’d once written that, the nuclear family is a fiction created to forestall the natural maternal impulse to eat one’s young. For her, the lengthy rearing period for human children was evidence of the human woman’s inferior status in the biological order. Starlings leave the nest just three weeks after birth, Claudia Bernard pointed out. Foals walk just one hour after they are born. And yet human children—those helpless, greedy flesh parasites—were dependent upon their mothers for years, often decades, gradually sucking the great life force out of her until she was left a weak and drooping crone, crying out in pathetic derangement for the thing that had destroyed her. Claudia Bernard thought Eve’s Curse was real, but that it could be overcome through medical intervention and mental fortitude. She was a staunch advocate of abortion and an equally staunch critic of assisted reproduction, which she saw as misguided: women stepping in front of the very bullet they had miraculously dodged. What her ideas implied for the fate of humanity, she never quite clarified. To Claudia Bernard, childbirth was a humiliation and motherhood a trap. 

Motherhood isn’t creation, she wrote. It is nature taking control. 

And yet Claudia Bernard had also written that it was the fate of every Son to journey towards his Mother. As Cole gazed up at her office in the Tracker College humanities building, he found these words beating in his chest. He balled his hands into tight fists to keep them from trembling. He’d envisioned their meeting more times than he liked to admit, and it always went more or less the same: Claudia Bernard would take one look at him and instantly recognize him as her own. If he didn’t set things into motion soon, he knew it would be too tempting to continue on with the tour, like he was just another aimless high school student with depression and a 2.2 GPA, rather than what he really was: a person chasing his destiny.

He broke for the door to the humanities building.

“Hey!” Evan called out, as Cole ducked inside. “You have to stay with the group!” 

But Cole was already halfway up the building’s back stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. Everything felt inevitable and preordained. 

Claudia Bernard’s office was located in the far corner of a drab U-shaped suite papered with flyers for open mic poetry nights, asexual affinity groups, and support services for survivors of emotional abuse, all things Cole had read enough by and about his mother to know she actively despised. 

Her door was shut. Cole hesitated before knocking. 

“It’s open,” a voice called from within. 

Cole recognized its clipped nasality immediately. After the publication of The Ominous Shaft in the ’90s, Claudia Bernard had been an occasional presence on a certain subset of quasi-intellectual evening talk shows, where she was brought on to critique or defend whatever cultural flashpoint touched upon the amorphous concept of “contemporary feminism.” In videos of these appearances, which Cole had unearthed on YouTube and watched obsessively, she would stride onto the stage in black tights and a leather jacket, wearing no makeup except for a swipe of red lipstick, and talk rapaciously at the host for fifteen minutes, not ceding a second of her airtime. Claudia Bernard wasn’t beautiful, so to speak, but the sheer force of her presence on the stage made beauty irrelevant. Cole admired her utter self-containment, her ability, through the power of her intellect alone, to turn ideas into something real, an object—in her case, a book—you could touch. She spoke with the frenetic speed and intensity of a person whose thoughts were forever outpacing her ability to verbalize them, giving her the slightly crazed affect of a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit around a track, her prize forever a snout’s length out of reach. 

Cole’s hand shook as he opened the door. Claudia Bernard sat behind a desk, pen in hand as she stared angrily at a piece of paper laid out before her, her dark eyebrows almost comically aslant. She wore a white linen shirt, left unbuttoned over a black tank top. The skin on her chest had turned leathery and dark, in the way that the skin on all white women’s chests seems to turn leathery and dark sooner or later. Her short brown hair was shot through with wiry strands of gray. She seemed older, more tired, than Cole had expected, but with the taut, sinewy frame of someone who ate very little and swam laps every day. She looked like a woman who had fought valiantly against the urge to buy chunky turquoise jewelry and won.

“Seminar’s full,” she said, without looking up. 

“What?” Cole said. 

“The 401 seminar is full and I’m not taking any more applications,” she said. “You’ll have to apply again in the fall.”

Claudia Bernard’s office was airless and hot. Cole scanned the room, hoping to find something to comment upon, but it looked how he assumed every other professor’s office looked: dim lighting, book-lined shelves, a wilted fern in the corner. To the right of her desk sat a tower of what Cole recognized as her latest book, You’re Overthinking It, a 700-page critique of the left’s gender politics. It had sold poorly and received almost universally negative reviews.

“I’m not a student here,” Cole said. “My name is Cole Hansen.”

At this, Claudia Bernard put down her pen and looked up, her expression difficult to read. 

After a long pause, she stood and walked out from behind her desk. For a flash, Cole thought it was happening, that she was opening her arms and coming to him. Instead, she stopped at her bookshelf and pulled off an ancient-looking hardcover.

“I thought you’d applied to the seminar,” she said, flipping through the book’s yellowing pages before returning it to the shelf. “It’s one of the most popular in the department. Students pick a feminist from history and role play as them during our discussions for the rest of the semester. They like it because it’s basically theater. I like it because I don’t have to listen to any of their actual opinions.” 

Claudia Bernard pulled a second book off the shelf and returned to her desk. She did not invite Cole into her office or offer him a seat. He leaned his weight against her doorframe. Claudia Bernard looked down at her paper and drew what appeared to be a very large X across it. 

“I’m actually having the students over for a party tonight,” she continued. “This generation is very strange. None of them drink. None of them have sex. I buy bottles of wine for these things, but all they want is flavored seltzer. I’m so sick of looking at those fucking cans.” 

Cole wasn’t sure why his mother was going on to him about flavored seltzer—if her aimless chattering was a sign of anxiety, or if she really was as she seemed: completely unmoved by his arrival. 

“I hate flavored seltzer,” Cole found himself saying. “And I have sex.” 

Claudia Bernard looked up from the paper and stared at him placidly.

“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” Cole said. “But I do. I have a girlfriend.”

Claudia Bernard turned and stared out her window for several minutes, as if lost in thought. 

“I always thought my son would be gay,” she finally said. She turned back to him and shook her head. “Are you touring Tracker?” 

“Yes,” Cole replied. “Well, no. I start at MIT next fall.”

“MIT,” Claudia Bernard repeated, nodding in what Cole hoped was approval. “I know an Egyptologist in the archeology department there. Carl Freir. You should look him up.”

“I’ll be in the School of Engineering,” Cole said, “but yeah, maybe.” 

Claudia Bernard again put down her pen. 

“Why are you here, Cole?” she asked. “Your father isn’t dying, is he?”

“No,” Cole said, the tops of his ears burning. “Of course not. It’s my spring break.”

Cole knew this explained nothing, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He felt dizzy and short of breath, as if there was something tightening around his neck like a vise. He tried to inhale, but the breath caught in his throat. Claudia Bernard blurred before him. 

“Are you alright?” she said.

Cole nodded and turned away, bracing himself against the doorframe. His mother let out a belabored sigh. 

“Party starts at 7 PM,” Claudia Bernard said. “1422 Rose Hill Road. There’ll be food.”

She returned to her grading with a level of concentration that Cole understood to be her version of a goodbye. He turned and walked back down the hallway towards the stairwell, only realizing when he exited the building moments later that he was shaking. 

That morning, he’d parked his car behind the library, in the far corner of a quiet lot canopied by weeping fir trees. He staggered back there now, pawing at his neck and heaving the damp coastal air into his lungs. 

Once safely inside the steel womb of his car, Cole rested his skull against the headrest and tried to steady his shuddering breaths. The persistent gray of Fortuna’s skies was just familiar enough to calm him. Rain pattered lightly on the car’s roof. Slowly, the invisible grip around his neck began to weaken, and Cole, succumbing to the heaviness in his lids, let his eyes drift closed. 

Cole dreamt he was in freefall, tumbling down some long and narrow passageway—an elevator shaft, maybe, or a well. Images flashed as he fell. Great cats prowling in deserts. Gold stone edifices breaching and rising up from the sand. Flowing red hair and scallop shells. Old hands crooked with cold. 

Eventually, he hit the passage’s bottom and found himself in a dark and dripping cave, its damp tunnels twisting and disappearing into endless black. Cole began crawling through the cave on his stomach, dragging his limp body over rubble and slime. The atmosphere around him was sulfuric and thick, devoid of all oxygen. In the distance, he saw a blinking brightness, but couldn’t tell if it was fading or growing brighter. 

Like some limbless creature, apodous and belly-bound, Cole inched towards it, straining for the light.

Cole awoke to a ding from his phone. It was 5:45 PM. Outside the car, darkness was descending slowly. Mikayla had texted him steadily elongating strings of question marks. ??? ???? ???????? Once again, Cole did not respond. Instead, he typed Claudia Bernard’s address into his phone. It was a fifteen minute walk from campus. If he left now, he would arrive at his mother’s house an hour before her party. 

To steady himself, Cole pulled The Ominous Shaft out of his backpack.

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, he read. A journey that will inevitably end where it all began: the Mother. 

Cole closed the book, tucked it into his backpack, and set out on foot towards his mother.

Claudia Bernard lived in a squat, ranch-style house that sat alone at the top of a steep hill. Its front windows glowed amber from within, beckoning as Cole approached. When she answered the door, Claudia Bernard was holding a fat-faced gray cat with gigantic jade-green eyes. In her other hand, she clutched an alarmingly full glass of red wine. 

“You’re early,” she said. 

Claudia Bernard did not attempt to hide her annoyance, but she ushered Cole inside. The entryway opened up into a pleasant, warmly-lit living room. It was furnished with a burgundy and gold rug, an overstuffed sofa, several arm chairs, and a dark wood coffee table, topped with a stack of oversized art books, arranged at tasteful angles. Claudia Bernard let the cat drop to the floor. It scampered to a chair by the fireplace. 

“I’m cooking dinner,” Claudia Bernard said, already turning and walking down a short hallway towards what Cole assumed was the kitchen. “Make yourself at home.”

His mother disappeared through the doorway without inviting him to follow. Unsure of what to do, Cole took a seat on the sofa, his backpack still on. He crossed his hands politely in his lap. The cat watched him from the armchair with the same placid stare as Claudia Bernard. Cole stared back, wondering what it knew. 

After a few minutes, Cole stood up and examined the collection of objects lining the mantle of his mother’s fireplace. He hoped he might find displayed there some evidence of her enduring love for him: an ultrasound photo, his first-ever baby shoe. Instead, Cole’s gaze caught on a small replica statuette of the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic limestone idol that Claudia Bernard had written about in The Ominous Shaft. Cole remembered the passage because of its strangeness. Claudia Bernard had described the Venus as a primitive art object, from a time before beauty, before identity, before the fierce Apollonian line arrived to shape and contain the unwieldy and ugly proliference of nature. Cole picked up the statuette and held her stone weight in his palm. She was bulging and bulbous, swollen with herself. Her breasts were poorly-formed mounds, her stomach rising up over her hips and pouring down over her pubic bone like dough, the stubs of her legs footless and fat. Cole stared at her. She had no face or eyes with which to stare back. 

Without thinking, Cole shoved the Venus into his backpack and looked towards the door. He considered fleeing, running back down the hill to his car. Instead he forced himself towards the enticing garlic-and-onion smell emanating from the kitchen. The cat followed, surveying the intruder’s movements.

Cole’s mother stood with her back to him at the stove, the glass of red wine to her left, a giant steel pot to her right. The lights were dim. Along the counter sat a neat row of wine bottles and glasses. Cole realized only then that he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. The smell in the kitchen was so good, and Cole’s hunger so sudden and deep, he thought he might pass out from the sheer proximity to food. He hovered in his mother’s doorway, waiting once again. 

“Um,” he finally said.

Claudia Bernard turned around.

“Oh,” she said, almost like she had forgotten he was in the house. 

Cole stepped towards the stove. Claudia Bernard moved aside so he could peer over the lid of the pot into a deep, bubbling red. 

“My mother’s Bolognese,” she said, giving the pot a gentle stir. 

“Can I have some?” Cole asked. 

“It should really simmer for another hour,” Claudia Bernard said, but she gestured towards the round table at the center of the kitchen. Cole took a seat and dropped his backpack on the floor. After a minute, Claudia Bernard placed a plate of pasta and a glass of red wine in front of him. She picked up the cat and took a seat across the table.

Cole nearly groaned as he took the first bite. It was perhaps the most exquisite thing he had ever tasted—rich and sharp and unexpectedly sweet, the kind of deliciousness that hit like a drug, so intense that it almost reconfigured his sense of self. He twirled the noodles around the tines of the fork and slurped the sauce from each one through pursed lips. Claudia Bernard watched in silence as he ate. The fading light cast long shadows across the room. When he was finished, Cole pushed the plate aside and drank until his glass of wine was empty. The cat purred, its jade eyes trained on Cole. 

“You seem like a smart boy,” Claudia Bernard finally said. “I take it you’ve read my work?”

“Some of it,” Cole replied.

“Then you know where I stand on all of this,” she said, gesturing vaguely.

“All of this?” Cole said. 

“You, me, this whole thing.”

 Cole could only assume that she meant being his mother.

Claudia Bernard picked up the wine bottle and refilled his glass. 

“I was forty-three when I got pregnant,” she continued. “I didn’t even think it was possible to conceive at that stage in my life. I half-convinced myself that it was some kind of miracle, that I had a divine duty to see things through to the end. But as soon as I did, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. I’d betrayed myself and everything I’ve ever believed in.”

She looked down at the animal on her lap and added, “It wasn’t personal.”

Cole scoffed defensively. He searched his brain for something to say but nothing came.

“Look, Cole, I know you’ve come a long way to see me,” Claudia Bernard said. “What exactly is it that you want?” 

Cole reached into his backpack and pulled out his copy of The Ominous Shaft. Opening to the underlined page, Cole slid the book towards his mother. She widened her eyes and blinked at it, like she was looking at something from her past that she didn’t even know if she remembered. She picked a pair of reading glasses off the table and scanned the text, mouthing the lines under her breath.

“Oh, Cole,” she said, when she was done. Her voice was disappointed, almost pitying. “Did you even finish the paragraph?”

She pushed the book back to him. Cole read on.

And at the end of this long and fruitless venture, this slow march towards fate, the Mother will meet the Son and consume him, devouring him with the obliterative force of her embrace.

Cole placed The Ominous Shaft back on the dinner table. 

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Claudia Bernard stood up and the cat leapt from her lap. She laughed to herself as she walked to the counter and opened another bottle of wine.

“No one seems to, do they?” she said. “But that’s not my problem, is it?” 

The doorbell chimed.

“Shit,” Claudia Bernard said. “The students. Grab some glasses, will you?” 

Claudia Bernard snatched the freshly opened bottle of wine from the counter and hurried out of the kitchen. The cat followed. Cole trailed a few feet behind, clutching wine glass stems between his fingers. He waited in the darkened hallway as his mother rushed towards the door. The first of the seminar students had arrived and were standing in the entryway, cool night air blowing in. Two of them held cases of pink and yellow seltzer in their hands. 

“Close the door!” Claudia Bernard shrieked. “Don’t let Dianna out! And put those fucking cans away. Tonight, we are drinking wine.”

Cole emerged from the hallway with the glasses crowded in his hands. He recognized one of the students as Evan, the handsome tour guide from that morning. He was wearing the same tweed blazer and loose blue jeans as before, except now his blazer was adorned with a nametag that said Simone.

“Bring those here,” Claudia Bernard said to Cole. 

He began handing the students glasses, which Claudia Bernard then promptly filled. 

“Hey, I recognize you,” Evan said. “You’re the kid who bailed on my tour earlier today.”

Claudia Bernard looked back and forth between Evan and Cole, as if put off by the fact that they knew each other. 

“This is Cole,” she said curtly. “He’s visiting Tracker. We’re going to show him a good time.”

In The Ominous Shaft, Claudia Bernard praised the Dionysian. She believed something vital had been lost in culture when the logical, restrained Apollo prevailed over the ecstatic, primal Dionysus. Cole knew this, and so, it seemed, did her students, because they did as Claudia Bernard demanded that night: they drank. Cole drank, and so did Simone and Gloria and Audre and Emmeline and bell and Susan and Maya and Judith and Angela and Betty, names that belonged not to the students themselves but to their classroom avatars.

Cole stood in a corner with his wine glass in hand. The students had commandeered his mother’s living room with a sense of entitlement he would have found disrespectful if Claudia Bernard hadn’t so clearly welcomed it. They had sprawled out across his mother’s floor and piled themselves on her couch and armchairs, balancing heaping plates of Bolognese on their laps. Claudia Bernard walked proudly amongst them, filling up their glasses and nodding abstractedly as they spoke to her. They all called her by her first name, suggesting a closeness that Cole envied. By the end of the next hour, the students had consumed five bottles of wine and plunged into the liquor cabinet to bring out the gin, which they were now mixing with the lukewarm seltzers. 

Claudia Bernard was the hot and frightening sun around which the entire party revolved. Her work, which Cole guessed most of her students would find distasteful and dated, was beside the point. The point was her. Around her students, Claudia Bernard seemed to simultaneously expand and shrivel. She became louder and brighter, at the same time that something inside of her seemed to sink in on itself, like the very thing that was giving her life was also slowly taking it away. She was drinking just as heavily as the twenty-year-olds in the room, and Cole thought he could see it making her unsteady on her feet. 

As the night went on, the party grew. What had begun as a small gathering of ten seminar students ballooned to a party of fifteen, twenty, thirty. Cole assumed that the students had invited friends, and that Claudia Bernard, in her commitment to hedonism and her lax attitude towards campus decorum, was more than happy to accommodate. Someone turned off the lights and pushed the furniture against the walls. Evan—who, as far as Cole could tell, was the only boy in his mother’s seminar—put on Madonna’s Erotica. 

As the opening club cover of “Fever” pumped through the room, Claudia Bernard pushed her way onto the dance floor. She began writhing slowly, swaying her hips and running her hands up and down her thighs. The room fell silent and still, watching her—in horror or enchantment, Cole couldn’t tell. Claudia Bernard threw back her head and bared her neck to the crowd, who contemplated it, contemplated all that blood coursing towards that brain. 

The song went on and Claudia Bernard’s movements took on a more interpretative approach. She crouched and crooked her long, lanky arms towards the ceiling, towards some invisible light. She remained hunched there, bobbing up and down ever so slightly on her knees, as if energy was coming up through the ground and out through her outstretched fingertips. Cole saw a flash of Claudia Bernard’s former self, posing on the cover of The Ominous Shaft. Madonna sang, What a lovely way to burn.

“She’s so amazing,” a voice next to him whispered. Cole turned. A tall, bony girl was standing by his side. Her brown hair was cut to her chin, and she had the kind of tiny bangs that looked less like an aesthetic choice and more like a hairline issue. She wore a short floral dress, black tights, and a heavy canvas jacket. The corners of her lips were stained red, either from the wine or his mother’s Bolognese.

“I’m Melanie,” she said, then winced. “I mean, Betty.”

“As in Friedan?” Cole asked. He knew Betty Friedan—she was one of the only feminists they’d learned about in his high school history class. 

“I wanted to be Catharine MacKinnon but Claudia threatened to kick me out if I was,” Betty continued. “Do you go to Tracker?”

“No.”

“How do you know Claudia, then?”

“I don’t,” Cole said. 

Betty nodded, as if she didn’t quite hear him, and kept talking. Cole was drunk. It wasn’t his first time drinking alcohol, but Cole always wound up walking Mikayla home when she got too wasted and never drinking much himself. Now, the world was churning beneath his feet. Betty’s words seemed to come at him from a far off place. She was saying something about consent and carceral feminism, and how Claudia Bernard was a true radical because she didn’t care what anyone thought about her, she only cared about the work.

“I mean, what other professor would throw a party like this for her students?” Betty said. “Apparently, last semester, she got so fucked up at one of these that she passed out in the bathroom. I guess she went on some nonsense monologue about how she has a gay son named Sandro who lives in Ohio.” 

“What?” Cole said. 

Betty smiled.

“That’s all I know,” she said. “Do you want to dance?” 

Before Cole could answer, Betty took his hand and pulled him onto the dance floor. Between the end of his mother’s performance and the start of the new song, the floor had filled. The living room was now seething with sweating bodies. Cole’s sense of time squirmed. He scanned the fray for his mother but she was nowhere to be found.

Betty pulled him close and parted his legs slightly with her knee. Cole put his hand on her shoulder, decided that was too high and put it on her hip, and then decided that was too low and settled on her waist, the gentle curve that widened to her hips. Madonna was singing, Go down, where it’s warm inside / Go down, where I cannot hide / Go down, where all life begins. Two students, who had earlier introduced themselves as Judith and Angela, were dancing next to them in a similar way, only slower, sort of out of step with the music, but in tune with something else Cole couldn’t hear and maybe couldn’t even understand, something totally internal to them. Cole tried to copy their rhythm. Betty seemed to like that, because she leaned in closer and started kissing his neck. 

“You look just like her, you know,” Betty whispered into his ear, rubbing the side of her face against his neck. 

Cole knew in that moment that he could probably go back to Betty’s place and sleep with her if he wanted to. As exciting as the prospect of having sex with a college girl would have seemed to him mere days ago, he didn’t want to, not now. Cole felt hot and panicky, drained of all desire, that same claustrophobic sensation of something tightening around his windpipe. He pushed Betty away and fumbled down the hallway towards the kitchen, grasping at his neck in an attempt to free it from whatever invisible confine was slowly contracting around it. 

The kitchen was dark. Cole lurched towards the sink in search of water, but a pair of bodies was intertwined against the counter there, lit from behind by the moon’s white glow. Cole recognized the back of Evan’s tweed jacket. A pair of slender hands were wrapped around his head, long fingers digging into the dense curls of his brown hair. The moonlight illuminated the copy of The Ominous Shaft that Cole had left on the table. 

Evan grunted slightly and lifted the body onto the counter. As his partner reangled, Cole saw that it was his mother. Her legs clutched around Evan, securing him closer to her. Evan was working his way down her body, kissing first her mouth and then her neck and then her chest. Cole again struggled to breathe. The invisible hand closed tightly around his neck. 

If he didn’t leave, Cole thought, he would almost certainly die.

Claudia Bernard opened her eyes and her gaze caught Cole’s. She held it through the darkness, her eyes steady and bright, as if daring him to hold on for a moment longer.

Cole knocked into the kitchen chair as he grabbed his backpack off the floor. Heaving for breath that didn’t come, he ran out of the kitchen and through the living room, past the dance floor, and to the front door. 

Dianna, his mother’s cat, sat in the entryway, her tail curled around her soft gray body. When Cole opened the door, she bolted outside, bursting across the lawn and disappearing into the blackness, as if she had never existed at all. 

Cole followed her into the cold night, sucking air into his lungs. When he reached the gravel sidewalk, he turned around to face the house. Through the window, he could see the students dancing. They had ceased to be individual bodies and become one undulating mass. 

Cole reached into his backpack and dug around until his hand hit something solid. He pulled out the Venus of Willendorf and tossed her up and down in his palm a few times, savoring her satisfying stone weight, before pulling his arm back as far as it would go. 

Don’t aim, he thought. Command. 

For the first time, Cole’s body listened to what his brain was telling it. 

Claudia Bernard’s window shattered as he ran.

Cole wasn’t sure where he was going, but he ran until he was too tired to run anymore and then he walked. A light rain fell from the darkened sky, slowly soaking through his shoes to his socks. Cole’s car was still parked on the Tracker campus, but he’d forgotten where that was, and he was too drunk to drive anyway. He had no sense of time and place, but he vaguely understood, somewhere deep in his addled subconscious, that he was stumbling towards the highway, towards home. Not once but twice, Cole bent over and puked into the roadside grass, his vomit as red as blood. His phone was dead, which meant he couldn’t call his father, or Mikayla, or anyone else. 

Night was beginning to lift by the time Cole made it to the highway, the soaring redwoods emerging through the misty shadows. He walked along the road’s shoulder for what seemed like miles. He knew his drunkenness was fading when he became aware of the frigid ache in his feet.

A car slowed down behind him, bathing the road in a white glare. Cole dropped into the ditch lining the road to let it pass. The car slowed further. For a brief moment, Cole thought that it was his mother, coming to find him at last. 

“What the shit are you doing?” a voice called from the front seat of a mint green Ford. 

Cole turned around. It was Jan, the woman from the Fortuna Inn.

“Get in,” she said. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Cole didn’t argue. He climbed out of the ditch and into the passenger seat of the car and let Jan take him wherever it was she was going, which, as it turned out, was just five minutes down the road, back to the Fortuna Inn. 

“What happened, son?” she asked, as she parked the car. 

Cole began to cry, big sputtering sobs so overpowering that his entire body shook. When Jan reached out to him, Cole collapsed into the softness of her body, letting the dense smokiness emanating from her engulf and lull him. 

“It’s alright, baby,” she said, rubbing her hands down his back. “It’s alright.” 

Once his weeping had subsided, Jan walked him, like an injured athlete, to the pink plastic chairs sitting on the patchy lawn between the highway and motel. Cole was still sobbing, but his cries were softer now, coming out in little chirps, like a baby bird. The cars driving by sounded like gently crashing ocean waves. Cole shivered in the early morning cold. 

Without a word, Jan disappeared briefly and returned with a blanket, two mugs of coffee, and the same type of dismal sandwich she’d brought him the night before. Cole wrapped himself in the blanket and took the sandwich and steaming mug. The coffee tasted grainy and bitter. 

“Good boy,” Jan said. 

The sky was brightening now, softening into the muted pink of a kitten’s nose. Mist clung to the branches of the trees across the highway. Jan studied them, looking untroubled and at peace. Cole picked up the plate and took a bite of the sandwich. It tasted smoky and stale. He swallowed anyway. It was exactly what he needed. 

As he chewed, Cole remembered the copy of The Ominous Shaft that he’d left on his mother’s table, marooned in that brilliant shaft of moonlight. He had the urge to go back for it. He let the urge pass. This felt like wisdom.

The post A Long-Lost Mother’s Embrace Is an Obliterative Fate appeared first on Electric Literature.

We met in a bookstore, the Strand. The late nineties. I was trying to decide between E. B. White’s books, the pig or the swan or the mouse. He saw me deliberating. For my sister’s kid, I told him. “The mouse,” he said, with appealing confidence. He had chin-length hair, a square jaw like Kurt Cobain’s. “I’m Edgar.”

“Susannah.”

Edgar said he identified with the mouse, a New Yorker like him, born inexplicably into a family of humans. I went with that one. He said I was a good aunt and asked me out for coffee. This led to dinner, drinks, bed. He was threadbare and grungy, which didn’t necessarily mean poor. He wore vintage Brooks Brothers pants in what he called aubergine. Battered designer boots and luggage. A high-class hippie, I decided. He was between apartments, staying with friends, had just returned from Europe. I was in the process of finalizing a divorce and had a decent sublet for that month on Twenty-Second Street. We fell into—something. He was twenty-five; I was forty-two. Robbing the cradle is the expression people use, which sounds dastardly. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Several weeks into it he said, “We should go to my island in Maine. It’s perfect this time of year.”

It was early May. We were sitting in the window of a cafe in the East Village.

“You don’t have an island.”

“I do. I actually do! A farmhouse on its own tiny island. There’s a little bridge. You don’t need a boat. No one else in my family uses it, which tells you everything about my family.”

He asked if this surprised me. I said it did.

“All stockbrokers. Money managers. Criminally rich. I don’t like to talk about it right away. You understand, don’t you, Susannah?”

He smiled, leaned closer. I could see that he liked my expression, whatever I was doing with my face to hide my abject greed. At this point in my life, I longed above all else for a wealthy man. My parents were dead and had left only debt. It was the family weakness, like a flaw in the genetic code. My sister had finally found her way to money in the form of her husband, who worked in office supplies, but I was helpless, always sputtering.

“My family can only breathe in the city,” he told me. “Only polluted air. Country air’s toxic to them. Sunlight to vampires.” I sensed a sort of shifty glee, the energy of an exaggerator, but I didn’t mind. Coming out of a difficult period, low on funds, I was in a mood to value novelty. To go with the flow . He told me that women his own age depressed him profoundly. It was all status with them, all social climbing.

A week later we got on a bus, then two more buses, then took a cab into a town. Barely a town. Just a general store, a single old-fashioned gas pump standing out front. The taxi left us two miles past the general store, where the dark road intersected a darker road. It was late, and I remember being stunned by the completeness of the dark. Relieved when he pulled out a flashlight, though he didn’t seem to need it. He walked briskly. We moved along a dirt road until we came to a short footbridge, crossed the bridge dragging our suitcases. I saw the farmhouse in the flashlight’s beam—cedar shingles, copper drain, rooms and rooms. He took the key from a hiding place in a stone wall. Inside it smelled like money: wood, leather, furniture oil, mothballs. In the morning I followed him around while he got the water running, unlatched the shutters, primed various pumps. I saw the property. The sky screamed blue. I screamed too.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?”

“I did. Sort of. I wanted to.”

He gazed at me happily.

“Is it winterized?”

“Well enough.”

I imagined never going back to New York. I imagined telling my sister: I met a man and I am moving to Maine!

He smoked all day. Smoking did not undo the sense of health, as it would these days. Back then it made everything better. I took drags too. The air was fluid with insects. A flowering meadow spread out before us like a quilt. On our bed inside was a pile of quilts made by his relatives. I loved the house, its nooks and ornate hinges, creaky stairs and glass cabinets, and I loved the woods surrounding the house, and the meadow. But the shore—a hundred yards down a brambly trail—I found sinister. Rocks upon rocks. Rockweed and barnacles. No sand. No place to get your balance. The ocean hissed, produced curious froth. Even before he died, I was suspicious of that cold water. I’m going to jump ahead to say he went for a morning swim in late July and never came back. The death was ruled accidental, and I believe it. Still, I suspect the current wasn’t unwelcome. He’d been swimming farther and farther out in the previous weeks, alternating between backstroke and crawl. I saw this, talked to him about it. Didn’t he himself tell me to be careful after storms, when tidal currents were stronger? Didn’t he say it wasn’t safe beyond those rocks?

“I like when you worry about me, Susannah,” he told me, out of breath, patting his pretty torso with the towel I’d brought down for him. “I like when you worry, but only a little.”

The first days he took real pleasure showing me around: the claw-foot tub where he’d read comic books on rainy days, the spooky basement, all the secret shafts and cupboards. He gave me a tour of the woods as though it were an extension of the house, rocks he’d hidden under, trees he’d climbed. He resurrected the clothesline, where he’d hung his underwear, between the shed and the southwest corner of the house. “I can’t believe it,” he said, watching our delicates tremble in the breeze. I imagined his past in a glowing montage, beautiful rich children, sexy boys, summering, figuring things out, zinc on their noses. He was the sensitive, inward one, the River Phoenix. He showed me the well where he’d plunked stones. The dry, hot attic, crumbling leather diaries of his ancestors in a chest up there. An antique teddy bear in a cradle. A porcelain doll missing an arm. We spent a lot of time in two wooden chairs in a meadow. I took drags off his cigarettes. I loved watching him smoke. I knew that if my sister could have seen him—the way he blew smoke, quizzical, pondering some deep idea, handsome as a movie detective—she’d call him smoldering. My sister’s husband, nearly two decades older, office supply king, was the opposite of smoldering.

I peppered him with questions, but he didn’t like to talk about his childhood. I got the sense of chilly parents, absent a lot, permissive, drinkers. Old money. He’d gone to school in Manhattan, he explained to me, but spent every summer out here. Then he stopped coming. He hadn’t been back in many years. But why? When did he stop coming? Why if he liked it so much? “I went other places,” was all he said. I asked where but he didn’t say, just flicked his ash, and I didn’t press him because I wanted to stay there, to keep the arrangement copacetic.

One day he told me, “There was a groundhog I made friends with one summer. I’d feed him breakfast cereal. Cheerios. I bonded with that groundhog.”

“I didn’t know they were bondable.”

“Every mammal is, give or take. You’d be surprised. But you have to be steady.”

I would have been cynical but saw it happen. Twitchy squirrels stilled in his presence. Once a deer allowed him to come within two feet. I was in the kitchen opening a can of beans and watched him in the meadow, talking to that deer.

He sought a perpetual present, he said. If I had been rich, that’s what I would have done too, but I wasn’t rich. This fact began to concern me. He did not show interest in my work schedule, which should have been a warning. If I mentioned the job I was supposed to start in September—office administrator for a sociology department at a college on Long Island—he’d bristle and say, “I don’t want to think about that yet.” And since I didn’t really want to either, I didn’t. One night after dinner, he was sweeping the kitchen, I was doing dishes, and I said, idly, “Maybe for Christmas we can go to Chicago. I’d like you to meet my sister.”

My poor sister. Now I might have more empathy, but back then I was so angry. I wanted to get back at her for something she’d done after my marriage failed. A look she’d given me, holding her new baby in a swaddle, a pitying smile: you’ll never have this. If I took Edgar there, I could give that look back to her. Such was the nature of our dynamic, petty as our parents.

Edgar said, “I don’t like planning,” and must have imagined a critique, because he added, “Look, if you want mature, find a retiree.”

He had a way of making reasonable worries dissolve. I credited his wealth. One of those people free to be anything, which includes being nothing, being depressed, riding the wave of his moods. Too rich for a planner, for a wallet or good watch. His was a Timex. All of it made sense. Of course this was the kind of rich man I’d get, I thought, the melancholic kind, the adorable ne’er-do-well. I could handle it. But he began to get more withdrawn, vacant. I’d wake up in darkness and he wouldn’t be in bed. I’d find him in the grass outside the kitchen door, in his baggy underwear. He spent a lot of time in the gingham chair, whittling pieces of balsam fir with a penknife, or just looking out the window. He would ask odd questions, apropos of nothing.

“Do you think Charles really loved Diana?”

“Do you know that one termite queen produces five hundred million children?”

He didn’t sleep much. He ate toast and jelly at night. In the morning I cleaned the crumbs. He got tan, so looked healthy enough, and in bed we could not get enough. He was so game. He could do it whenever I wanted, two or three times in a row; most men would be prideful of this fact, but he expected no congratulations.

One time, holding me afterward, he said, “My great-great-great-grandfather came here when the land belonged to the Wabanaki. His son married a native woman. I’m part native. It’s strong in me. Stronger than in the rest of the family.”

He was a kid, I decided, like a boy with a construction-paper headdress. A Mayflower descendant, cherished but aloof, the black sheep, his difference from the others manifest in a fantasy of Indianness. I thought I had him pegged.

Then we found the porcupine. Near the bridge, in the road, struggling to breathe, bleeding from its hind leg. Likely a juvenile, he thought. He put alcohol on its wound. He kept it in the shed, in a cardboard box, and fed it lettuce, strawberries, saucers of sugar milk, and finally decided it needed to be held, like any living thing. It would heal only once it was held, he told me while eating dinner one night.

“You know that experiment with the baby monkeys? They got a bad choice. Two mothers. A cuddle from a soft monkey but no food. Or a wire monkey and dinner. They chose a cuddle, those poor guys. They’d rather starve.”

“It makes me nervous. You can’t hold a wild animal like that.”

But the animal needed a friend, so he put the antique teddy bear into the cardboard box with the recuperating animal, tucked the toy next to its sleeping body. The bear had no eyes or nose left, just a piece of dangling red yarn that had been its mouth. Once it had soothed a relative. Maybe it would soothe the porcupine? After an hour alone with the animal, the bear was annihilated. It had been filled with sawdust—dust and chips from trees that grew before this was America. The sawdust for some reason made me sadder than the ailing porcupine did. At the end, he tried to cuddle the porcupine wearing oven mitts and an orange life preserver, but it hissed and showed its teeth.

“Nothing lasts,” he said when it died. “Intervening makes it worse. I killed him. I made him sicker.”

We looked at the animal in the box. I knew the animal stood for someone else . . . his mother, or his old friend. I wasn’t totally interested in who, if I can be honest. I only wanted to bring him back from this dark place. “You gave him a death with dignity. You showed him love and he took it wherever he went.” You have to understand how unlike me it was to say such a thing. I cared about him, I realized. I didn’t want him to suffer. He wiped his eyes and seemed to feel better and I suggested we make some Jiffy Pop.

He buried the porcupine in the woods and wouldn’t tell me where. He was quiet all day. The next day he’d shout my name and I’d go to him and he’d look at me as if he had no idea why I was standing there.

“You called me.”

“I did?”

Shit, I thought. I understood he was not well. But what sort of not well? Old money not well. I was not smart back then about mental health matters. No one was. Interesting people struggled in interesting ways. I thought his behavior romantic, in doses, and so when the next day he was brighter again, I put my concerns away. He brought me cut flowers, a piece of mica in the shape of Idaho. In the afternoon, we sat in the chairs and watched bees and butterflies over the meadow.

“I keep feeling my parents are going to show up. Appear without warning.”

The phone in the house was not in working order, and this was before cell phones.

“Would that be so bad?”

“It wouldn’t be good.”

“I’d like to meet the vampires.”

I wondered if he’d be embarrassed by me. I was a divorced person, older, lacking his beauty. What would his parents see? But I wanted them to show up. I was curious about them too, of course, and hoped I could win them over, that they’d recognize how good I was for their son.

“They make me feel like an outsider. Like a freak.”

“My sister does that too.”

“They don’t know me at all,” he said. “They think they do, but they don’t.”

I told him about my passive-aggressive sister. How since childhood we’d always been so competitive. I told him about Christmas gifts she’d given over the years, gifts that seemed chosen to create a problem. A giant lazy Susan, the collected works of Agatha Christie. Gifts to highlight the smallness of my apartment.

“Once she had an ergonomic desk chair delivered to my office at work. Her husband sells them. A colleague of mine saw it and said, wow, holy shit, you really sprang for a nice chair, and I did some research and found out the chair cost fifteen hundred dollars.”

“This is the sister you want me to meet?”

“Not until Christmas.”

“I bet the chair was comfortable.”

It had been. So comfortable. But everything between us had become so warped, so stupidly warped, the chair felt like a big fuck-you, and I gave it to a colleague who had a bad back.

One day in July I was reading in the gingham chair when he came down from the attic holding an old book, a leather-bound diary. He’d been looking for this one and finally found it, he told me. The diary talked about Lewis Gordon, who’d lived here back in 1873. In the winters, Lewis used to take his white horse across the frozen sound to the mainland to do his shopping.

“It wasn’t uncommon back then to ride a horse across the water during the deepest freeze. But Lewis was crazy about this horse. Too attached, his sister said. It’s the sister’s diary. The horse’s name was Jasper. His sister wrote about what happened.” He shook it in his hand like a preacher. “One day the ice wasn’t as solid as they thought. They fell through, both of them, Lewis and the horse, out in the middle.”

“He died?”

“He should have. But he gets lucky. The wind carries his screams. People come to the rescue. Ropes and pulleys. Dangerous business, rescuing a man in the ice. Lots of deaths among rescuers in those days. Lewis wouldn’t accept help until they agreed to help the horse too. This pissed a lot of people off, but guess what happened in the end?”

He lit a cigarette. Took a drag. I waited.

He said, “They saved it.”

“The horse?”

“The horse! And Lewis. Both. She was furious, the sister who wrote it all down. He had a family to support. It was crazy back then, to die for a horse. But I tell you what, Susannah, I understand it. Animals are better than people.”

That was his final decree. I could hear his jaw clenching. I wanted to lighten the mood. I told him my old neighbor in midtown had a poodle that wore a real Chanel backpack. She herself used an old nylon Jansport. Fiona has much better taste than me, the neighbor would say. This was one of our last conversations. The next day I found his shoes, clothes, and Timex sitting on a flat rock near the water.

After a while, I walked into town. At the general store, an older woman sat behind the counter knitting a hat. She had an old-fashioned bouffant died hard black, hair that made the strangeness stranger. “You want some water, honey? You look affright.” I remember how hard it was to speak at first. “Honey, you need to make a call?” An old rotary dial phone, shiny and frightening, like a beetle. I didn’t want to touch it, had to gather my nerve. But I did. First, the police. Then New York City information. I received several phone numbers. The first number I tried, no one answered. The second was disconnected. When a woman picked up on the third, I said I was trying to reach Grace S.

“Speaking.”

I blamed her, the vampire. I thought contempt would make it easier to say. I told her my name. I was her son’s girlfriend and we’d been staying at their house in Maine and he’d gone swimming, or—I didn’t know, really, what to say. I hoped he might be lost. Or hiding. And yet I had a terrible feeling.

“Wait a minute. Edgar is not in Maine. I had dinner with him last night here in Manhattan. Edgar does not have a ‘girlfriend.’ He is married to Vivian, who is expecting a child. Who is this? Who are you?”

I said everything several times. “Give me your number,” the woman said, “I’ll call you back,” and I read her the number in the center of the dial. We hung up.

“Take a pack of tissues,” said the shopkeeper, thrusting her chin at a shelf. “Quite a day you’re having. I’ve been through heartbreak too.”

I opened a small pack of tissues, wiped my eyes, thanked her. A few minutes later the phone rang. Edgar on the other end, authentically.

A fisherman found the body two days later, in a cove around the bend. His real name was Adam DeLuca. An old friend of Edgar’s, friend of the S. family, son of their former housekeeper and for a while part of the crowd. I was invited to go to the morgue and see his body, but I declined. Naturally my grief was complicated. I felt I’d been had. Betrayed. I was angry and confused. The actual Edgar arrived the day after that. He wanted to see the body and the house and to make arrangements. He drove a Toyota. He wore a gray Lehigh T-shirt and a Yankees hat. A basic watch too—a Casio. He was the same age as my boyfriend but looked older, middle-aged in his carriage. Burly and comforting. He showed no surprise at my age, though he must have expected someone younger. He went by Ed. Only his mother called him Edgar.

“I’m not sure what to do,” he said, shyly. “Can I hug you?”

He wore a blue button-down and khaki pants, Nikes. He smelled like the men’s section of a department store. We drank the end of the whiskey in the chairs in the meadow. He loved the guy, he told me. For a period of time they were like brothers.

I said, “Things like this only happen in books!”

“They happen more than you might expect. People maintaining that they’re us. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. Of course, most people are after money, and Adam wasn’t. He just wanted—” He pauses, doesn’t say. It wasn’t the first time Adam had squatted here. But never with someone else. “Never with a woman,” Ed said, his eyes moving to the clothesline where our underwear still hung.

Adam’s mother had been hired to be their city housekeeper when the boys were six. They had been close, Adam and Edgar, from this age onward. “But his mom was troubled.”

“Troubled how?”

“Addict, bad boyfriend, robbery. Sentenced to five years upstate, and Adam—” It’s hard to hear him being called Adam—”got removed from her custody when he was eleven.”

“Jesus.”

“It could have been worse. He got sent to live with an old aunt in Queens. Even then, he’d come here with us for the summers. Until he got a little strange.”

“What do you mean by strange?”

But of course I knew.

“My mom says schizoid, but she uses that as a catch-all for anyone crazy. Who knows. Maybe it was depression. Manic depression? He slipped off.”

Otherwise Adam’s stories checked out. He didn’t lie except colossally. He’d fed Cheerios to the groundhog and had a peculiar ability with animals and spent long days in the woods. Everyone liked having him around, until he got—whatever you want to call it.

“Look. It’s not my business, but clearly you shared something. He’s not a con man. I know Adam. No one tells their own story straight.”

“You’re awfully forgiving of the man who was impersonating you.”

“I feel bad for the guy.” Ed blinked. “He was only trying to impress you.”

It got dark. He would stay the night, we decided, sleep in the den. We went inside and ate baked beans and toast. He sat in the gingham chair but was too big for it. His knees came up too high. I had to remind myself it was his house. I remembered what his mother had said on the phone.

“You’re having a baby. Congratulations.”

He gave a wincing smile. “Viv’s better, finally. At first she could only eat oyster crackers.” He looked queasy. “She carried a plastic container in her purse to puke into.”

I felt that closeness to a body with money. The safety, the suspension. This time the money was real. When it was bedtime, he said, “I won’t kick you out. You’re a nice person, Susannah. And you cared about Adam, I can tell. If you want to stay until the end of summer, I’ll show you how to close up the house. It would be a favor, to be honest. You could stay until you go back to your job. Would you?”

I told him I’d be happy to take care of the property. How much did they pay the caretaker? Hurt gave me the courage.

“You do need a caretaker,” I said. “”What’s to stop another squatter from squatting?”

He put his big hand with its wedding ring to his heart. “I can see why he liked you.”

When he gave me a number, I doubled it.

I bet Adam would find it funny how much they paid me. I wanted to come the next summer too, but when I called Ed to ask he said they’d sold the property. He told me they’d made a big donation in Adam’s name to an organization that advocated for the mentally ill. I heard beeping and flapping behind him, the wheels of industry churning. I asked about the baby. He told me it was a boy—another Edgar, legit. The rich do that, deal out the same name like a winning hand of cards. I never ended up telling my sister about him, or anyone else. That was probably a defensive strategy. I kept the whole thing at bay very well. Not until now do I feel it acutely, and only because I happened to come to Maine with my niece for a long weekend.

My niece has had a hard go of it. Her own parents have turned pettier even than ours had been. My niece came to me when her father’s business failed and her parents moved out to the Nevada desert in search of a new plot. Now that she’s older, spending time with her feels like having a sister again. It’s curious. I had been looking forward to the trip, and Acadia was beautiful, but I couldn’t have predicted how much it would hurt to see that island. I had the urge to see that old house again, so on the way back to the airport we stopped there, in the rental car. More than twenty years have passed. The dirt road is paved now. The lovely old house is gone. Just: gone. Deleted. The woods have been razed. On the shorn land is a new house, enormous, a wraparound porch, a stone-edged swimming pool, a gazebo dripping wisteria.

It broke my heart but my niece was impressed. “You spent a summer here with a mysterious younger man? Not bad, Aunt Suze. This place is great. Is that a sauna over there? That cedar box?”

“It wasn’t like this. It was a creaky old house. Shingle style. Woods. Meadow.”

“This is so nice,” my niece said, putting her hand on the glass of the car window, making a face I knew well, the same expression my sister had.

I remembered our first interaction in the bookstore, Adam and me, the book for this same girl, who’d been so small then and was now grown up. I remembered my desire for a man with money, how for so many years that longing was the motor that carried me along. Sometimes I could not see straight for how badly I wanted it. I would fall for anything. I missed so much right in front of me, got caught on the wrong details. My niece turned and put her hand on my arm, as if sensing my grief, but only said, “You know what I’d really like, in my heart of hearts? A boyfriend with an inground pool.”

The post My Boyfriend Is a Wounded Animal I Want to Save appeared first on Electric Literature.

On the splintery old dock where we wait for the flotilla of Zodiacs that will ferry us out to the Galapagos Magic, a sea lion lazes in the sun, apparently fast asleep. “Aw,” someone says, “isn’t he cute?” There is a flurry of picture taking, both with cell phones and cameras, then a moment of silence as everyone checks how their pictures came out. No one else seems to notice the animal’s unbelievable stench. The thing smells like a Bowery bum. I gag and face the breeze.

I’m still queasy from the turbulent plane ride from Guayaquil, a city I will never step foot in again. The doorman at the hotel where I spent the night wore a Kevlar vest, and from the smeared windows of the airport van I saw soldiers with machine guns guarding the gas stations. When I tried to venture out into the suffocating heat to see what sights there were, I was warned by the concierge that I would certainly be mugged, possibly kidnapped, and if kidnapped then definitely raped. Instead, I went to the rooftop pool and practiced using my new mask and snorkel. I have a new wet suit too, purple with black chevrons on its arms, that hugs my body in a way that makes me look sexy and badass, yet still, I hope, attainable.

I am forty-­nine and will turn fifty in a few days. Originally, I planned to take this cruise with a man I’d been dating, but inconveniently he broke up with me the very day, mere hours after I paid the hefty Galapagos Magic deposit. So here I am by myself on the equator with a duffle bag full of TravelSmith clothes and a copy of Darwin’s Finches.

The Zodiacs arrive. I am helped into one of them by a woman who wears a vaguely nautical uniform with a logo above her breast, the silhouette of a dolphin leaping across an orange disk. From the shore, the distance between the dock and the ship doesn’t look very far, but somehow from the boat it looks farther, and the sea seems choppier, slapping my face with a cold, salty mist.

“Hello,” says a man sitting next to me. Sixtyish, gray, and bespectacled. “I’m Bill Lutz and this is my wife, Matilda.”

Matilda pokes her head around Bill and points to two young women who are sitting on the side of the boat, their long blond hair flying around their heads in the wind. They’re identical except for their clothes, one wearing shorts, the other jeans. I’m glad they’re not dressed alike; I think it’s creepy when twins wear the same thing, as if there’s no difference between them at all. “And those two over there are our daughters, Hopie and Pat. We’re celebrating their college graduation by taking this cruise.” She is twinkly eyed and younger than Bill. She has teeth like a horse’s, protruding and yellow.

A black-and-­red frigate bird flies over our heads, dipping and rising, gliding on layers of air. I have a handy little point-­and-shoot that I bought for the trip. I take it out of my bag and snap what turns out to be a photo of the sky.

“There are a lot of families on this trip,” Matilda says. “Practically everyone we met at our hotel in Quito was a Galapagos Magic passenger.”

“I traveled through Guayaquil,” I say.

“Quito is the best route through Ecuador,” Bill says. “Stunning city. I hear Guayaquil is a dump.”

“Oh no, it’s gorgeous,” I say. I don’t like his attitude. “Beautiful weather.”

The boats draw up to the side of the ship. Ladders are dropped down and luggage hauled up. I climb to the deck as nimbly as I can in the wake of another passenger’s broad denim ass. We are herded into a carpeted lounge. According to the Galapagos Magic brochure, there are thirty passengers on board. Each of them appears to be attached to at least one other person.

“I hope I’m not the only passenger traveling alone,” I say to a crew member who’s doling out stateroom assignments. Her name is Estefania, according to a tag on her chest.

Estefania consults her clipboard. “You are,” she says in a surprisingly unaccented voice. She could be a news anchor in Des Moines. “If you wanted a singles’ trip you should have signed on with one of the Eclipse cruises.”

I fake a laugh. “A singles trip! God, no, I’m married. My husband was held back by business at the last minute.”

I find my stateroom and let myself in. It’s half the size of my bedroom at home and smells like an Airbnb at the beach. I peer out the single porthole. The shore appears to be moving, rather than the ship. The land slides past, barren as Mars, and gradually sinks into the sea. In the far distance is a mountain shaped like a pyramid. I didn’t know where the Galapagos Islands were until my ex-­beau suggested this trip. That he asked me to take a vacation with him led me to believe we were on a path to marriage. I’ve thought that before with other men. Stupidly. I see signs where there are none. If you had told me thirty years ago that I wouldn’t be married by now, I would have laughed you out of the room. I had multiple boyfriends, often overlapping. Because marriage seemed like an inevitable destination, I didn’t give it much thought until one of those many boyfriends remarked in an offhand way that I wasn’t the kind of woman men wanted to marry. “You’re the woman they want to fuck, Laura,” he said. “You’re the temptress, not the wife.” I didn’t know whether to be offended or flattered.

Three notes sound, ding-­dang-­dong, like a theater tone at intermission. According to the printed schedule I was given, there is a nightly cocktail reception in the lounge. I switch my late mother’s ruby band from my right ring finger to my left. I consider a handful of names for my fake husband until I land on Alistair, which sounds like someone I would never encounter.

There is a very small shark swimming beneath me, and I am okay with it. I feel brave and nonchalant. Later, at lunch, I tell Bill and Matilda that a shark was the very first creature I saw on the very first day I ever snorkeled.

“Snorkeled?” I say. “Is that even a word?” I laugh. I love snorkeling, it’s my new favorite thing. After the shark, a sea lion swam up and did a backflip for my entertainment, and I followed a sea turtle until it sank into the depths. Black spiny sea urchins carpeted the ocean floor like a garden of lethal flowers. I thought I saw a whale-­shaped shadow move through the water, but it disappeared almost instantly, a moment of artificial excitement. I was the last passenger to return to the Zodiac, which earned me a dark look from our guide Alejandro. We are not supposed to swim by ourselves.

“Did the shark have a white spot on its back?” Bill says through a mouthful of salad. Though it did have a white spot, I say it didn’t. “Because if it had a white spot, it was a Galapagos shark, and they’re perfectly harmless.”

“It was dark gray and quite large. Twice as long as you are tall.”

“Are you sure it was a shark? Sounds more like a whale,” he says.

“I would have been terrified,” a woman named Celia says. She and her husband Neal know Bill and Matilda from their hotel in Quito. We are eating on an open deck, frigate birds overhead like a squadron of hovercrafts. Hopie and Pat are sitting a few tables away with a gaggle of kids their own age. Everyone has an age they imagine themselves to be, and in my mind, I am twenty-­five. Celia is in her forties, I guess, but she has gray streaks in her hair and fat upper arms, and I feel decades younger than her.

“Alistair would have loved it,” I say. “He’s very intrepid, nothing scares him. It’s a shame he had to miss it.”

“What does Alistair do?” Neal says. He has a camera with a lens as long as my forearm that he carries around with a preoccupied look on his face, as if he’s on assignment for National Geographic.

“He’s a surgeon,” I say. I was in love with a surgeon a few years ago.

“Do you have children?” Celia says.

“She has four,” Matilda tells everyone before I can speak. “A fifteen-­year-­old, a thirteen-­year-­old, an eleven-­year-­old, and an eight-­year-­old. All boys. Can you imagine?”

Apparently, this was what I said at the cocktail reception last night. I’m glad she spoke up because I had forgotten. I drank too much, which is something I often do and part of the reason my ex-­beau defected; he thinks I’m an alcoholic. I might be. I’m not dismissing the idea, but what difference does it make if I am?

“I guess you don’t work outside the home with such a large family to take care of,” Celia says.

“I’m a doctor too, a psychiatrist,” I say, which creates a well of quiet. Probably they’re afraid of shrinks or don’t believe in psychotherapy. But I bet at least one of them will seek me out later in the trip and tell me their darkest secret.

“I’ve never met a psychiatrist,” Matilda says. You’re not meeting one now, I think. I work as a fact-­checker for a textbook publisher in Baltimore. It’s an incredibly boring job. I keep meaning to quit and do something I love, but I haven’t thought of anything I would particularly love to do other than not work at all. I signal the waiter by waving my empty wine glass over my head. I’m not drunk, but I’m not sober. He brings me another glass rather than pouring the wine from a bottle, so I really don’t know what I’m drinking.

After lunch we all go to our staterooms to rest before the afternoon excursion to see the giant tortoises. I lie on my bed looking at old texts on my phone. There’s no Wi-­Fi or cell service, so I can’t scroll through Facebook or Google random questions. Had I known I wouldn’t have civilized amenities with which to entertain myself, I would have brought some magazines. I look at a months-­old text from my ex-­beau, a funny video I try to access and can’t. I search for something substantive, but our texts consist of emojis and memes and shards of sentences. The only compliment I remember him giving me was that I was a “good egg,” clapping me on the back as he said it, but I don’t recall what made him say it. It’s not something you say to the woman you love. I realize now that he didn’t fall out of love with me, which was what I told myself; he was never in love with me. This should not be a revelation because he never said he was, but it is, and I’m shocked. How fucking stupid is that?

The tortoises are milling around in enclosures like cattle, each with a big number painted on its shell. They are gigantic and look inexpressibly sad. They have wrinkled, gray faces and drooping wattles and move with aching slowness, raising one huge foot and putting it stolidly down, then raising the opposite and so on, moving inch by inch to nowhere because there is literally nowhere for them to go. I expected to see them in the wild, but Alejandro tells me that they are difficult to spot in their habitat—we’d be searching the island all day. I am stunned by the heat; sweat pours from my face and body. The KoolSorb fabric that my shorts and shirt are made of is neither, as advertised, absorbent nor cool.

“How cruel, keeping them penned up like this,” Hopie says to Pat, or vice versa—I can’t tell them apart. As I am standing beside them, I make a sound of agreement.

“Wow, you’re sweating a lot,” Hopie or Pat says, as if I hadn’t noticed. Her face is pale and dry; she has a saddle of freckles over her nose. You’ll sweat when you’re fifty, I’d like to tell her.

“Sweating is healthy,” I say. I wipe my forehead and come away with a sopping hand. “I love sweating. It releases the toxins in your body.”

“I’ve heard that,” says the other one, Pat or Hopie. They have the same voice, the same face, the same bodies, the same hair. I would hate to look like someone else. I have been told all my life I’m unusual looking because of my eyes, which are swimming pool blue in contrast to my dark eyebrows and hair. No one has ever said I remind them of their cousin or friend or whoever. I’m never mistaken for a different person. I have an older sister, Nadine, who is my opposite, physically and philosophically. We don’t get along. I think how nice it would be to have a sister I enjoy as I watch Hopie and Pat put their heads together and giggle.

“What’s so funny?” I say. They look surprised. They’ve forgotten I’m here in under a minute. They don’t bother to reply.

Once we’ve seen the tortoises, we trudge off to look at birds, walking through a landscape of stunted, leafless trees. Alejandro tells us that most of the shrubs and trees will only grow leaves a couple of weeks out of the year, the rest of the time they’re bare.

“A very brief summer,” he says cheerfully. “Then the leaves fall. Ah, look, a finch!”

Everybody reaches for their binoculars. I don’t have binoculars, but I can see the bird—it’s small and brown, nothing special. Neal raises his long lens and takes several pictures while Alejandro tells us this finch has developed a beak that can crack seeds, unlike finches on the other islands. I already know about the finches and their various beaks, and I know that each island has a distinct ecosystem because I’ve read thirty excruciatingly dull pages of Darwin’s Finches and am in the process of skimming through the rest. But the two-­week summer is news to me. It seems like something that would happen on another planet. I look at the pyramid-­shaped mountain, which is so huge it’s visible wherever we go. It is treeless and buff-­colored, shrouded in torn strips of cloud. It, too, seems eerily not of this earth.

“What is that mountain called?” I say to Alejandro.

He smiles at me as if I am a child. I wish I hadn’t asked. “It’s not a mountain. It’s the largest volcano in the islands. We call it Volcán Wolf. The Galapagos Islands were formed by volcanoes. Tomorrow we will go to a lava field, and you’ll see.”

A brilliantly colored lizard lumbers into our path. It’s the size of a large rat and looks immensely pleased.

“That’s a marine iguana,” someone’s teenage son says.

“Correct!” Alejandro says. “It’s mating season. He is looking for a wife.”

“How did you know that?” Celia asks the kid.

He holds up a paperback guide to the Galapagos. “Preparedness is the key to success,” he says. Teacher’s pet, I think. When I was his age, I was smoking pot and screwing random guys, prepared for absolutely nothing. I would have a thirty-­four-­year-­old child now if I hadn’t had an abortion when I was sixteen. Thinking about having an adult child is the only thing that makes me feel as old as I am.

Alejandro leads us down a steep path to a cove where the Zodiacs are waiting on the shore. I’m so hot that I kick off my shoes and wade into the cool water. Hopie and Pat follow me in as Matilda warns in a scolding voice that their clothing will get wet. Then the rest of the young people rush in. They shout and dive and splash each other to the annoyance of everyone else. No one is paying attention to me, but I’m the one who started it.

The lava field is a tar-­black sea. The heat is indescribable. The sun beats down, and the lava sucks it in. I feel like I’m being cooked. We pick our way over petrified ripples and waves toward aqua green tidal pools that look like pieces of heaven. There are boobies everywhere, taking off and landing and stamping their cobalt blue feet, while armies of orange crabs scuttle around as if they are seeking something they lost. Utterly undisturbed by us tramping past them are orgiastic heaps of charcoal-­colored iguanas. I think I see a penguin, but I don’t believe my eyes until somebody calls out that they see a penguin and suddenly a whole flock of them appears.

The boobies regard us with mild interest. I wouldn’t be surprised if they began to talk. I stop for a moment to take it all in. This is the strangest place I’ve ever been.

Alejandro comes up behind me. “Laura,” he says in an urgent voice. He pronounces my name “Lowra.” “Esther is very upset. She says she won’t walk any further.” Esther is an old lady who is traveling with her husband Donald. They are like Jack Sprat and his wife: He’s a stick and she’s a marshmallow. They spend a lot of time at the bar on the ship, which I know because I spend as much time there myself.

“What does that have to do with me?” I say.

Alejandro puts his hands together as if in prayer. “You’re a doctor.”

I wonder who told him that. Matilda, I bet; she’d talk to a wall. “I’m a psychiatrist,” I say. “Not a doctor doctor.”

“I need you to go to her. She’s very upset.”

I wish I hadn’t said I’m a shrink. I am an impetuous liar; I don’t think things through. It’s gotten me into trouble before. I look longingly at the tidal pools and the glassy sea beyond. I am mere yards from reaching them.

“Oh, fine,” I say. I walk back, retracing my steps so I don’t trip and fall on the hard, scorching ground. Esther is sitting on a rock in the meager shade of a bare tree that is hardly more than a shrub. She is wearing a pair of madras Bermuda shorts I admire, and a pink polo shirt that goes nicely. Her white hair is set in short corkscrew curls. You wouldn’t know she’s in distress. I make her scoot over a couple of inches so I can sit on the rock with her.

“I wish I’d never come on this cruise,” she says. “I had no idea it would be so strenuous and hot.”

“The snorkeling is nice,” I say.

She sighs. “Well. I’m afraid of sharks, so I haven’t been snorkeling.”

“Don’t worry about the sharks,” I say. “They’re little and harmless, nothing to be afraid of.”

She draws back and looks at me. “I heard you saw a shark that was bigger than a man!”

I stretch out my legs and turn my face toward a small breeze for which I am pathetically grateful. “I was just bullshitting when I said that. You know who Bill is?” Esther nods. “He’s a know-­it-all. I just said it to shut him up.”

Esther smiles. “He is a know-­it-­all, isn’t he!”

“Where is Donald?” I say.

“He was smart and stayed behind,” she says. “I called him a fuddy-­duddy but look at me now.”

“You don’t have to go out onto the lava field,” I say. “In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it. But you are going to have to walk back to the Zodiacs.”

“I can’t,” she says. Tears come to her eyes. “It’s too far. I have arthritis in my hips. I hardly made it here.”

I nod as if I understand. I know nothing about arthritis except what I’ve seen in television ads. “You can’t just sit on this rock forever. I tell you what. I will personally escort you, and we can go as slowly as you like. In fact, let’s get a head start now.”

“No, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” she says. “Go on and enjoy yourself.”

If I were an old lady in need, I’d want someone to help me out. My mother has been dead for ages, so there aren’t any old ladies in my life. There is a deep nest of wrinkles where Esther’s neck meets her chest. Shallow creases crisscross her cheeks. I wonder what I’ll look like when I’m Esther’s age. My mother didn’t have the chance to get old, so I can’t refer to her example, but Nadine has vertical lines above her upper lip that I’m hoping to escape.

I stand and extend my hand. “I am your lifeline, Esther. Take it or leave it.”

She puts her hand in mine, and I pull her up off the rock. “I bet you’re a good psychiatrist,” she says.

“You’d lose that bet,” I say.

By the time we all get back to the ship and clamber up the ladder from the Zodiacs, Esther is her jolly old self. Donald is sitting on a stool at the bar, and she joins him for a prelunch snort. I wouldn’t mind having a drink too, but they seem so happy to be reunited that I leave them to their sherries and go out to the deck. I sit all alone in a patch of shade on a big metal box where the wet suits are stored.

It’s my birthday today, and I’ve been thinking about the fact since I woke up this morning. Of course, no one has wished me a happy birthday, and I feel sorry for myself about that. My fantasy was that my ex-­beau would propose to me today with a diamond ring of considerable size just as we crossed the equator, and I would be engaged in two hemispheres. Where did I get such an idea? How would he even know where the equator is? It’s not as if there is a line with the word EQUATOR on it; we are not sailing a Rand McNally map. I go to the railing and gaze out at the sea, which looks strangely reddish in the flat noon light. Every day, I have been hoping to see a whale, but none has appeared. The cruise brochure specifically mentions whales, and I was looking forward to that one thing above all. A minute after I think this, the sea breaks open and a whale the size of a building explodes through the water. It is mottled gray on its back and white underneath and has a head as blunt as a prehistoric club. It pivots and allows itself to fall backward with a splash so enormous I involuntarily step back.

“Look!” I yell to no one. Everyone is at lunch. The whale sinks into the sea, leaving a pond of foam.

I go to the box and open its hinged lid, find my purple wet suit and pull it out from under all the others. I strip to my underwear and put on the wetsuit. I grab a mask and snorkel and a pair of fins and climb down the ladder we use to board the Zodiacs. On the bottom rung I hesitate before I drop into the sea. The water is soupy with plankton and smells like dead fish. I plan to swim out to where I saw the whale surface and be there when he rises again.

I hear my name. “Lowra!” Alejandro is standing on the deck. “Lowra, come back! No swimming alone!” I ignore him, but he keeps on calling. “Lowra, please!” Matilda joins him and waves at me with both arms. Bill appears and yells something I don’t understand as the twins rush out behind him. Celia and Neal, Esther and Donald—a crowd gathers around Alejandro.

“It’s my birthday,” I shout. I can’t tell if they hear me. I put the mouthpiece of my snorkel between my teeth and tighten the straps of my mask.

Hopie or Pat leans out and cups her hands around her mouth. “Happy birthday, Laura!” she calls. Her voice is reedy and joyful, as if she really means it.

I don’t think either girl has said my name before. It feels good to hear it, to watch the crowd swell. I have seen a whale on my birthday, and everyone knows who I am.

The post Every Creature in the Galapagos Has a Mate Except Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

We’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for almost two months. People give us stunned looks when we tell them: “How long?” When they ask what brings us through, we tell them we’re traveling children’s entertainers, or we’re land surveyors scoping out sites for a new mall, or we’re searching for our troubled niece Paula, she’s been missing since December, have you seen her? Sometimes they offer to buy us vodka sodas, flagging down the kid slinging drinks at the Best Western Plus. Sometimes they silently mouth the word “wow.” Sometimes they actually say the word “wow,” and each time I’m struck by its fundamental vacancy, its desolation. There is no true wonder at the core of “wow.” The core of “wow” is an IV bag filled with lemon-lime Gatorade. The core of “wow” is a dog eating grass to make itself vomit.

“It says here 16th-century Scots first used ‘wow’ as an exclamation of delight or amazement,” Derf says when we’re back in the car, thumbing through search results. I can picture with near certainty the precise mental image he’s conjured up, visions of Scottish hordes cresting the highlands in their fur and flannel, “wow”-ing at each other dementedly. By now, I don’t need to look at his face to know what he’s thinking.

Although the sky is still dark, the world outside the car is bright with gas stations and loading docks and fast casual restaurants. Beyond them, the faint outlines of foothills—never mountains, always foothills, sanded off on top like the glaciers couldn’t be bothered to finish the job.

“We’re getting there,” Derf says after a moment, quietly, when I don’t respond.

But I know we aren’t. We’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. We’ll glide in our midsize sedan past the same hills, the same convenience stores. The same billboards, tucked into the far ends of sorghum fields, advertising Amish buffets and stump-grinding.

“We’re getting there,” he says again, not believing it either.

A little before lunchtime, we stop at a pull-off with a Walmart and a Panera Bread, and I get out to check on Trunk Girl. From afar, it looks like I’m digging around in the back of the vehicle, sorting through groceries or luggage. But really, I’m refilling her water, applying barrier cream to her pressure ulcers, manually repositioning the parts of her body that most closely resemble limbs. Today, Trunk Girl has a happy pinkish color about her, and when I rub in the lotion she relaxes further into her labrador-sized dog bed. “Hi, Trunk Girl,” I say. Trunk Girl never says anything.

Derf is already sitting when I go inside the Panera, bent into a goblin-like position over his Pick Two.

“This Panera Bread is a good Panera Bread,” he says. As he chews, the centipede-shaped scar beneath his earlobe wriggles. Derf’s name is really Fred, but he had it legally changed because he has a cousin in North Dakota who is also named Fred, except that Fred has curly red hair and sells Kias. Derf, on the other hand, has curly brown hair and steals Kias. Due to some clerical oversight on Derf/Fred’s part, the change was rendered effective only within Ohio state lines; at the federal level, he is still considered Fred.

“Her skin is getting dry back there,” I tell him. “Can we please buy some lotion that’s not from the dollar store?”

“Does she look uncomfortable?”

“Would you be uncomfortable?”

He ignores the bait and opens his turkey avocado melt, removes the turkey and the avocado, leaving only melt. I glance past his shoulder toward where the car is parked—it’s a hot day and I’ve left the trunk cracked open. A man walks by with no socks or shoes and a huge rolling suitcase, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll pick up new lotion,” Derf says. “We’re low on root beer anyway.”

When we’re done, I duck into the women’s room and fill my empty soda cup with foaming handwash. I dump tampons out of the dispenser and reach into the metal box in one of the stalls to dislodge the toilet paper. There’s a back exit just outside leading to a dumpster area, followed by a huge garden center. Big enough, maybe, to slip inside and vanish among the ornamental grasses.

But just as I’m about to rise, the toilet paper box closes around my hand like a trap in a “Saw” movie. I contort myself into a series of Twister poses to avoid being degloved. When I finally get the roll loose, a tiny envelope slips out and lands on the tile floor.

RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE, the note inside reads.

There’s a pair of American Express gift cards, both marked $200 and bearing the words Happy Birthday! As always, the message has a palm tree emblem stamped in the corner, and I stare at it, the image growing hazy as my eyes glaze over. Then, with a sigh, I tear the paper into strips, put each piece in my mouth, and swallow them.

I stopped trusting geography a long time ago. Maybe I never trusted it. The world can trick you, can expand and contract at will, sprout mystery appendages or fence you in like the invisible wall at the edge of a video game world. When I was younger, I’d sit in my bedroom gripping an N64 controller and fling my 1992 Dodge Viper into the ocean, while one floor up my mother watched “Judge Mathis” and slowly went insane. I’d watch as the car careened across the bay, holding my breath in anticipation before it inexplicably burst into flames. Maybe, soon, the same thing will happen to us. Out of nowhere we’ll collide with the boundaries of the rendered world, collapsing the car and our earthly selves with the hollow thwank! of a cartoon cat getting smacked in the head with a frying pan.

“They didn’t have A&W, I had to get Mug,” Derf says when I pick him up in front of Walmart.

“You forgot the lotion?”

“Oh, son of a bitch.” He hoists the 12-pack onto the roof of the car, groaning like it represents the great burden of his life. “I’ll go back in and get it.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “Just get in.”

The first few weeks hadn’t been so terrible. Each morning I’d cue up the song “Mr. Maybe” by the 1960s vocal group Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes, from an old CD I’d had as a kid. There was something hopeful in the thin jangle of Eisenhower-era guitars, as if we were charting some unexplored northern territory instead of the necrotic rest stops along I-80.

I once was Mr. Maybe

I once was Mr. Sad

Baby, one thing you know for sure

You’ve made me Mr. Glad

But there were only so many repetitions until those breezy open chords began to feel like stasis, not momentum. Only so many half-acknowledged disquisitions on why Kevin Costner never produced a sequel to “Dances With Wolves” until they were exasperating, not endearing. And there was so much Pennsylvania. Days of Pennsylvania. Weeks of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania silently unfolding itself, forming acres of new nerve and muscle and semi-rigid asphalt.

As we drive, there’s an occasional muffled thump-thump-pause, thump-thump-pause behind us—Trunk Girl communicating that her battery-operated portable fan needs new batteries. When we get to the next exit, we pull up to a tobacco store with a statue of a wooden Indian by the front door, and I walk to the back of the car.

“Everything okay, sweetie? Your fan need fixed?”

Trunk Girl doesn’t respond, just looks straight at me with her one watery blue eye. In it, I can see my own silhouette reflected back, bent into a funhouse shape. Pinched-in shoulders. A head like a swollen eggplant. The words repeat in my mind unbidden: Baby, one thing you know for sure.

One thing you know for sure.

You know.

You know.

And I hate that I do.

She was already in the car when we left Ohio. SILVER COROLLA, the text read when it came through, just before 5 AM. FRISCH’S BIG BOY. PENNSYLVANIA PLATES. Three sunny digital chirps from Derf’s phone, each bringing the edges of the room at the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites into sharper focus.

The car was waiting for us two parking lots over, the doors unlocked and a key fob with a metal palm tree charm tucked beneath the floor mat. A square of paper on the dash: KEEP HER ALIVE. EAT THE NOTES. WE ARE WATCHING.

“Definitely not a Lexus,” Derf said, and put it in reverse. “Lying fucks.”

He never told me who we were working for. Just that the connection had come from Geno P.—yes, he said, the Geno P. he used to owe a bunch of money—yes, the Geno P. who once kicked the shit out of him and poured gasoline all over his head, but like, that’s Macedonian humor for you, okay? Beyond that, he only offered a vague allusion to a pair of Polish gangsters called the Zjawiński brothers, who allegedly operated out of an abandoned glove factory in the Cleveland flats. Another time he told me there were bikers involved, which made even less sense. If we’ve been hired by bikers, I said, why are they willing to outsource anything involving long-haul transportation, especially when the cargo appears to be A) Illegal, B) Alive, C) Not thrilled about it?

I wondered what would happen when we got there—wherever “there” was. I pictured a generically distressed warehouse, a biker dude walking out with a duffel bag.

Instead of answering the question, Derf would just stare at me with a dyspeptic look, as if my skepticism about the opportunity—a Capital O Opportunity, he’d called it—was giving him heartburn. He’d stand there and scratch at the nape of his neck, waiting for me to press the case. I never did. And anyway, I had nowhere else to go.

It took me a few days to open the trunk. I’d heard the sounds as we were driving, of course—the taps, the thump-thump-pauses, and a wet, throaty noise that was almost like laughter. Usually Derf would ignore these sounds until we parked for the night, then he’d creep around to the back of the car with a bag of Pirate’s Booty, raise the hatch a couple of inches, and fling the bag inside, jerking his hand away like he was tossing a piece of trout into the crocodile habitat at the zoo.

At first, I’d ignored them too. The same way as a kid I’d ignored the room in the house where a pregnant opossum once chewed through the wall, returning night after night to scrabble and hiss in the dark. I’d hear it as I crept up to the attic to bring my mother saltine crackers and warmed-up cans of chicken and dumpling soup, and then again through the floorboards while I sat there to make sure she remembered to eat them. Eventually the opossum had babies, and I had to start sleeping in headphones so I wouldn’t hear their cries. I listened to my one CD, playing “Mr. Maybe” again and again until I couldn’t tell what was music and what was an opossum sound. After a few days I stopped hearing them at all; it was just Fillmore Dave and his golden sunshine voice.

Then, one morning, Derf was taking a shower at a Love’s Travel Stop when it happened again, louder than before—that half-exhale, half-whimpering laughter that wasn’t laughter. Opossum sounds, I thought—and in fact, they were distinctly opossum-like. Still, I turned off the radio and slipped through the door. I unlocked the trunk. I opened the trunk. I closed it. I opened it again.

I saw fingernails, but no fingers.

Kneecaps, but no knees.

A mouth, maybe.

I was frightened. I could tell she was too.

We wake up from a nap in front of the tobacco store, and beneath the wiper blades there’s a greeting card with a picture of an ice-skating cat and the words Meow-y Christmas! in big red letters. In the corner, the familiar palm tree stamp, rain-saturated and beginning to leach through the paper.

PROCEED ALONG THE ROUTE, the inside reads, and another clutch of Amex gift cards tumbles to the floor mat. Derf tears the message into strips but doesn’t swallow them. Instead, he balls them up and drops them out the window.

“I’m gonna go check on her,” I say, and open the door.

“Didn’t you just check? It’s been like 40 minutes.”

“I’m checking on her,” I say again. And I’m glad I do, because something is off with Trunk Girl. Her happy pinkish color has taken a pale cast. The parts that most closely resemble limbs are heavy and limp, like bags filled with pennies, but everywhere else her skin is bone taut. Her fingernails, I notice, have grown longer.

I ask her if she’s okay, reaching out. She’s warm to the touch. Trunk Girl doesn’t say anything.

“We have more Pirate’s Booty,” Derf calls out the window, not looking at me. His phone chimes with a text message, but as I’m walking back, he flips to a live video of a large, blindfolded man comparing brands of specialty barbecue sauce.

“Can you run in and see if they have Advil or something?”

He flicks his eyes toward the store, announced by its sign as FRANK’S SMOKS. A shirtless man in gym shorts comes out the door and rubs the wooden Indian’s neck in a sensual way, then flattens an empty can of Red Bull against its head. Derf glances back toward his phone, giving the barbecue sauce man a long look as he adjusts his bib. Then he sighs loudly and reaches for the door.

“It’s fine,” I tell him. My endless refrain. “I’ll do it. Leave the car running.”

The inside of Frank’s Smoks isn’t much more welcoming than the outside. There’s a single dark refrigerator filled with beer and energy drinks. A wall of tobacco and tobacco-adjacent products, CBD powders, kratom gummies. The floorboards have sunken in on one side, and when a nickel falls out of my pocket it rolls diagonally across the shop, past the fridge, and clinks against a back door where “Employees Only” has been etched into the glass in old west lettering.

“It’s unlocked,” says an elderly gentleman in a vest, perhaps Frank, who emerges from behind a rack of candy.

“What?” I hear myself reply. My voice sounds higher, more alarmed than I’d intended. It’s only then that I notice my hands are shaking and I’ve been staring at the rear exit.

“Sweetheart, listen,” Frank says, speaking softly. “There’s a path behind the shop. You follow it a half mile, you’ll hit 30A. There’s a police station. Or I can call someone for you. Here,” he says, reaching for the sign, “I’ll close up shop.”

“Are we near the end?” I ask, and this time Frank is the one who says “what?” He’s one of those old people with a face that’s both rugged and weirdly smooth, like it’s been sandblasted.

“Do you have Advil, Tylenol, something?”

He regards me for a moment, then flips the sign in the window back to “open.” “Right over here,” he says, and I follow him.

Here’s the thing about opossums: They’re committed, stubborn creatures. For months they scraped and slunk behind the closed door of the former sewing room, dozens of opossums proliferating through the space they’d adopted as their generational home. Occasionally I’d find my mother at night, nudging a shallow bowl of milk through the gap beneath the door. “Hungry babies need to eat,” she’d say in the strange, clotted voice she used the rare times she ventured out of her room. “Hungry babies get big and strong.” By then, she’d dropped almost 50 pounds, and her nightgown hung from her frame like a magenta parachute. 

Gradually, the opossums migrated to the bathroom, then my bedroom, then took over the upper level entirely. When they expanded their territory downstairs, we moved into the unfinished basement, where we had an open-air bathroom configuration known as a Pittsburgh toilet. I came and left through the rusty cellar door, sleeping on a bag of fuel pellets, never entering the main part of the house. The house wasn’t our house anymore. The house was now—the words dissolved into view like a movie title—The House of the Opossums.

“That’s crazy,” Derf said when I told him about The House of the Opossums—he was still Fred then, before we started messing around, before he started stealing more than Kias. “Why didn’t you call an exterminator?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. Actually, the question had never occurred to me. An air of inevitability hung over the opossum situation, as grim and impenetrable as Midwest cloud cover.

“We did,” I lied, “They sealed the place off and did some kind of gas bomb thing, and all the opossums died.”

“Damn, that must have stank when you came back.”

“It wasn’t that bad. The team was very helpful and efficient.”

“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”

“She did the best she could.”

Now, Derf is asleep in the passenger seat, his breath forming islands of condensation against the window. When he’s unconscious, it’s easy to see him again as Fred. His face has that slack, puppyish look, like he hasn’t quite grown into his own skin. Even the centipede-shaped scar has an innocent quality, like a playground injury instead of Geno P.’s Macedonian handiwork. Without thinking about it, I reach over and push his hair out of his face.

We pass a Hampton Inn by Hilton. We pass a Hilton Garden Inn. We pass a Hilton Extended Stay Homewood Suites. We pass a wastewater treatment plant. SHE DID THE BEST SHE COULD reads a billboard at the end of a sorghum field. LET BANKRUPTCY MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS HANDLE THE REST.

In moments like this, I don’t mind so much that we’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. As in The House of the Opossums, there’s a brittle comfort in knowing what the future holds. Tomorrow, there will be more opossums. Tomorrow, there will be more Pennsylvania. I will drink flat root beer. I will visualize Scottish hordes. My eyes will track the words written on the faces of mile markers as they glide into view, each stamped with the outline of a tiny palm tree:

KEEP

HER

ALIVE.

EAT

THE

NOTES.

WE

ARE

WATCHING.

There’s this one song by Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes where they sing about a guy named Bill, who drives a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. In the song, Bill has a girlfriend named Sally, who’s always hanging ’round the alley, which I took to mean the arrangement between Bill and Sally is not so much romantic as transactional in nature. Anyway, Coupe de Ville Bill takes Sally from the alley to a drive-in movie, and after that they go to some kind of soda fountain/diner/non-alcoholic teen hangout-type place, where Bill catches Sally—the song assumes his version of the events—quote, “making eyes” at another man. So while Sally is in the bathroom, Bill decides, in the heavily sanitized language of early “beat” music, to kidnap her (“take her”), non-specifically violate her (“shake her”), and dispose of her body in an old oil drum (“dispose of her body in an old oil drum”). The song ends with Sally walking back to their table at the soda fountain, innocent of what the coming hours hold.

By the way, the name of the song is “Fun Times USA.”

Years ago, listening in my room, I’d go cotton-mouthed with dread as the song progressed from verse to chorus. By the time it reached its bridge section, the anxiety had become almost too much to bear: “Get out of there, Sally,” I’d scream in my mind. “Sally, he does not have your best interests at heart.” And I’d hit the skip button in anticipation of the song’s ending, unable to suffer the terrible knowledge of Sally’s fate. (The next track was called “Cheeseburgers,” and it was just about cheeseburgers.)

Now, though, I wonder: What if Sally knew something bad was coming? What if she sensed, as she studied her reflection in a cloudy bathroom mirror, that the world had quietly coiled against her? What if, though—what if she just didn’t care?

“Do you want a scratcher?” Derf says as he wanders out of a liquor store, his hands full of lotto cards and airplane bottles of coconut rum. “I just got a butt-load of scratchers.”

I don’t, but I take one anyway, not asking what he’s doing with six sheets worth of Double Buck Blowouts when we haven’t had to spend our own money in weeks, then realizing I’ve just answered my own question.

“Oh shit,” Derf says, rubbing a coin over the scratcher. “I won five dollars.”

MAINTAIN AMBIENT TEMPERATURE 70–73 F, the text reads on the card’s underlayer, after the wax has been rubbed away. MINIMIZE INTAKE: TERT-BUTYLHYDROQUINONE, PROPYL GALLATE, ANTI-CAKING AGENTS.

The Advil helps for a day or two. I crush it up with the palm tree charm and sprinkle it into cups of strawberry Ensure. For a few hours Trunk Girl’s color returns to normal, and the cold film of perspiration on her skin evaporates. She sinks back into her dog bed, deflating further with each exhalation, until finally she falls asleep.

That night, though, she goes feverish again. I sit on the lip of the trunk outside a Kwik Check, holding the straw up to her maybe-mouth as the wind bites my ears. She draws on it ferociously, glomming the stuff down with abandon. Then I feel something close around my wrist, and when I look down, I nearly drop the drink: not just fingernails, but fingers, attached to a hand, attached to something like an arm. “The core of ‘wow,’” I think. Her grip tightens, then releases. Her one blue eye stays fixed on mine.

“I’m telling you, something’s off,” I say to Derf. It’s late now, and we’re winding our way through another sawed-off foothill, the guardrail on the left side of the road punched open where a vehicle must have crashed through it to the valley below. “To be honest, it’s kind of freaking me out.”

“I promise you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Actually, I can,” he says, suddenly defensive. “Are you trying to piss me off? Because it’s working.”

He presses down on the accelerator. The engine groans, and the glove compartment’s bad latch rattles.

“Listen,” he says, a contrite note entering his voice. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just saying, I’ve got the situation under control. The situation is my bitch. Okay?”

I almost say: Enough of the bullshit. I almost say: I think you’re lost here too. But instead, I drop it, and we drive in silence the rest of the night, both staring directly ahead at the next dim stretch of road. It’s dark enough that the dashboard casts the ghosts of our reflections against the windshield, and I’m reminded once more of the invisible wall and the 1992 Dodge Viper. Maybe, it occurs to me now, there would be no great eruption upon impact. Maybe I’d hit the wall months ago without even realizing it—before Fred became Derf, before the gray, wordless morning I left my mother to herself in The House of the Opossums and boarded an eastbound bus. I’d fallen asleep with my head pressed against the window, the sound of some kid’s iPhone game invading my dreams. When I woke up, I was in Ohio.

“I have to take a piss,” Derf says eventually, and eases the car onto the berm.

Moths flit back and forth in the twin beams of the headlights. I watch as he struggles over the guardrail and unzips in front of a half-collapsed farmhouse. He’s left his phone in the cupholder, and when a text comes in—ping!—dozens of bats erupt from a hole in the roof. For a moment, against the thin light of the moon, it almost looks as if they spell out some kind of message. But they don’t. They’re just bats.

It wasn’t so much that I made the active decision to leave. By the time I finally walked away from The House of the Opossums, I was on emotional autopilot—sleep-deprived, subsisting on boxes of expired breakfast cereal, ears ringing at a high-pitched marsupial frequency. If the Pittsburgh toilet wasn’t enough to produce lifelong trauma, there was also the reality of my mother’s diminishment, her physical and cognitive decline having finally intersected on the line chart of total collapse.

By then, she was almost entirely dwarfed by her nightgown, which lay around her on the cement floor like a fried egg. She rarely spoke. When she did, it was in response to whatever was playing on the ancient CRT TV I’d dragged out of deep storage and set up on a card table. I’d wake in the middle of the night to find her face awash in the screen’s hospital glow, murmuring over the sound of a “Jeopardy!” rerun.

“What is tarmac?” she said. There was a strange urgency in her voice, a vinegary rasp of accusation. It was only when my pupils adjusted that I realized she wasn’t looking at the TV, but past it, straight at me. “What is tarmac?” she said again.

Instead of going back to sleep, I got up and wrapped her sweater around her shoulders.

“I’m up $200,” she said, her expression softening.

I rubbed her back. Her spine felt like a string of pearls. Then I walked out of the house in my pajama pants, crossed the street, and never went back.

The background image on Derf’s phone is an enormous, pixelated photo of Kevin Costner’s head. He has two browser tabs open, a porn clip (“Apolitical White Girl Sucks for SBA Debt Relief”), and the same taste test livestream he’d been watching three days earlier. “Please,” says the guy with the bib, still blindfolded and wiping barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The text message reads ENJOYING THE SCENERY?, followed by a series of photos, taken at a distance: Derf at a gas pump, smoking a cigarette. Derf in a Taco Bell, squeezing hot sauce onto a chalupa. And then, a Derf-free shot of the hood of the car, with a lone matchbook balanced on top.

I scroll backwards, past a series of increasingly arcane directives (41.19683731741196, -75.93131217837407 MISTY), past the note about Frisch’s Big Boy and the silver Corolla, to the start of the conversation. CONFIRM: TWO (2) PACKAGES, it says at the beginning of the chain. There’s no response from Derf, just an appended thumbs-up icon in the corner.

Two.

I see the same desolate warehouse, with the biker and the duffel bag. Derf stepping out of the car, opening the trunk. I picture myself staring straight forward while, in the background, the wet, throaty sound that’s almost like laughter slides a step higher, into a pitch that’s more like a scream. And then—

I don’t tell Derf I’ve looked at his phone. But as the days pass, I begin to have more reservations that the situation is, in fact, his bitch. He disappears into restrooms for extended periods and returns in a sweat, nervously scratching the back of his head. He leaves the radio on scan mode without noticing, letting it climb repeatedly to the snowy heights of the FM band. When we wake up in a Holiday Inn Express with the TV on and the words WRAP HER IN BLANKETS flashing against a palm tree background, he becomes agitated and throws his sneaker at the screen. It bounces off the edge, leaving a brown tread mark, and tumbles beneath a curtain.

“Could you get that?” he says. His phone buzzes again. He turns it upside down on the bedstand, groaning.

“Get your own fucking shoe,” I tell him, and walk off to the bathroom. Behind the door I hear him whining: Why do I have to be so mean to him, can I please give him a break, please? Then he starts to cry.

There was a time when I could overlook these moments. I thought about how, after the Geno P. incident, Derf sat in a bathtub with his knees tucked against his stomach, holding a fistful of sodden medical gauze against his jaw. “You’re gonna stick me with that thing,” he’d said, smiling, then grimacing as I held a lighter beneath the needle.

“It hurts to smile,” he’d said.

“Well, lucky for you,” I’d replied, “You won’t be smiling long.”

Now, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, I kind of wish I’d stuck him after all. I hear him moving around outside the door, groaning and grunting. I turn the water on, and after a minute, I don’t hear him anymore. The lights buzz. The room fills with steam. I don’t hear anything at all.

After a few hours we leave the hotel room, take the stairwell down to the parking lot, and unlock the car. As we approach, I’m overcome by a sweet, chemical smell that burns my nostrils, and I rush to open the trunk.

Overnight, the not-limbs have resolved into actual ones: two arms and two legs, each terminating in a fully formed hand or foot. A flat purple scab has appeared a few inches from Trunk Girl’s eye, sealing over what had previously been a fold of skin. The sound of her breathing is no longer pinched, opossum-like. It sounds like mine.

Quickly, the sweat-soaked dog bed is discarded and replaced with a vinyl inflatable pool float shaped like a pineapple. In the afternoon I take the pineapple out of the trunk and hose it down at a truck stop, where a jellied buildup sloughs away and gathers in clumps around the floor drain.

Across the street there’s a squat, windowless medical building next to a Honey Baked Ham. I consider pulling into the pavement-patched cul-de-sac by the drop-off area, popping the trunk. “We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” I’d tell her. “I’ll be right back.”

Instead, we keep going—through service depots and toll roads and drive-thru windows. Through small towns. Through gridlocked traffic where, when we reach the choke point, there’s a nude man with a pillowcase over his head wandering blindly between lanes, holding his hands out in front of him.

“This is yours,” Derf says as he drives, handing me a greeting card with a picture of a winking cartoon gopher and the words Gopher it! in sparkle-foil letters. When I open it, a piece of paper falls into my lap. It’s blank, no note.

I stare at it for a long time.

“Are you going to eat it?” he says, and I sense him trying not to look at me.

“What happens if I don’t?”

“Well,” he says, putting on a dopey action hero affect. His Costner voice. “I’ll have to kill you.”

I think of the texts on his phone, and it occurs to me I’ve never seen what happens when Derf is cornered. I notice now how firmly he’s gripping the steering wheel, how tightly he’s clenching his jaw. I fold the paper twice and put it in my mouth.

The night before we left for Pennsylvania, in the vinyl-planked darkness of the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites, there was a moment—not even a moment, a matter of seconds—where I fluttered awake—not even awake, briefly, liminally alert—and realized Derf wasn’t asleep anymore. He was sitting in the overstuffed floral-print chair where, hours earlier, we’d thrown our two duffle bags in a pile. He was fully dressed even though it was the middle of the night, and he was looking at me the same hard way my mother had looked at me in the basement of The House of the Opossums. But unlike my mother’s, his gaze didn’t soften when he saw I was awake. “Go back to sleep,” he’d said instead, and after a few seconds I did. When I woke up again, he’d slung the duffle bags over his shoulders, and I remembered it was time to go.

It’s beginning to get dark when I notice we’re no longer on the highway. To our right, there’s some kind of vacant industrial site. RESIDENTIAL INFILL NOTICE: MISTY OAKS SUBDIVISION, a sign reads, zip-tied to a chain-link fence. A PALM TREE COMMUNITY.

Derf nudges us past the sign and around a pile of rebar, pulling onto a dirt track surrounded by the frames of unfinished one- and two-story homes. With a chill, I think once more of the imagined warehouse.

“Hey,” I say, and it’s then that I realize Derf looks edgier than I’ve ever seen him before. He’s drumming the fingers of one hand against the side of his seat, digging his nails into the soft part of the steering wheel with the other. When he turns his head toward me, I can’t tell if he’s about to throw up, or start crying, or both, and I almost—almost—put my hand on top of his.

“Where are we going, really?” I ask him, and as he opens his mouth the centipede scar twitches above his throat.

But then: a sound from the back of the car. Thump.

Thump thump.

“I’m not stopping,” Derf says preemptively. “So before you say anything—”

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump

thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

There’s a hollow thwank! as the latch of the trunk tears open, so loud, sharp, and sudden that I feel it in my teeth. I hear metal grind against metal, then a shriek from the car’s tires as we come lurching, swerving to a stop. As my head snaps forward, I shriek too.

I look at Derf, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring, his eyes impossibly wide, at a faint outline about 20 feet behind us, near the mound of rebar. Or actually, two outlines. One is an inflatable pineapple. One is something else.

The core of “wow” is a dream of the house you grew up in, with its crabgrass lawn and spent shingles and portable TV playing “Judge Mathis” on repeat, and in the dream it’s late at night and you’re tiptoeing down the hallway, leaving a shallow bowl of milk at the foot of the bedroom, the bathroom, the narrow stairs leading to the attic. The core of “wow” is knowing your mother probably died in that house, alone, not understanding what was happening to her, while you were asleep in a motel three states away. The core of “wow” is realizing you never really woke up.

“Son of a bitch,” Derf says, stepping out of the car. It’s not just the rear latch that’s been destroyed. The entire trunk has been obliterated off its hinges, bent and steaming at the foot of a tree. The pineapple pool float slides listlessly along the road, still inflated, buoyed by the wind.

The something-else has vanished. I can see, in the light of the car’s emergency blinkers, a row of dark smudges in the dirt, headed toward the skeleton houses. Handprints.

“Son of a bitch,” Derf says again. I barely hear him. In my mind there’s only the idiot gallop of “Fun Times USA”—slap backed guitar chords and Fillmore Dave. Somewhere far away, Derf’s phone rings, rings again, and on the third, he slowly brings it to his ear, the color draining from his face.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, cupping the phone with his palm. And then, glancing at me: “Yeah, she’s here too.”

I don’t hear what he says after that. In the distance, at the edge of my vision, there’s a murky figure, not much taller than myself, slowly moving towards us.

Dark hair. Long, pale arms. With each flash of the car’s emergency lights, a clearer image forms in my mind. Shiny skin—still fresh, still fragile. A pair of bright blue eyes. A flicker of something like recognition.

I don’t speak as she silently places herself behind Derf, who’s bent over the trunk, still talking on the phone.

The emergency lights flash.

A shadow, a smeared thumbprint.

An opossum, a magenta parachute, the “Jeopardy!” theme song.

As she looks at me, moving closer to Derf, I realize there’s more than recognition in those eyes. There’s a question. One I already know the answer to.

A mouth, maybe, or many mouths.

“Wow,” I hear Derf say, ending the call. “I never realized, there’s like barely any storage in here.”

I take a step back. I look straight at Trunk Girl. And I think: Hungry babies need to eat. Hungry babies get big and strong.

“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”

“She did the best she could.”

“Hell yeah, she did,” Fred says, turning on his elbow across from me. And then, to an imagined audience: “Let’s hear it for all the moms.”

Hear what? I almost ask him. Do you hear something?

I’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for nearly 22 hours. At first, I drove in silence, watching the rearview, holding my breath with every passing vehicle. Once, a white pickup truck hovered behind me for an exit, two exits, and I was seconds from flooring the gas when it pulled into a police turnaround and started heading the other way.

Eventually, I stopped glancing over my shoulder.

I take Fillmore Dave out of the disc player and turn on the radio, scanning through a jumble of pop and country before landing on an oldies station. After a while, I turn the music off and just listen to the high, hovering sound of the car’s wheels as they move against the pavement.

I pull off the interstate, drive a quarter mile past a strip of boarded-up pet stores, and double-park next to a hair salon. I reflexively walk back to check the trunk, held together with bungee cords and duct tape, before remembering there’s nothing in it. “I’ll be right back,” I say anyway.

It’s a cool evening and I feel like walking, so I follow the sidewalk one block, then another, until I arrive at a convenience store at the end of a cracked parking lot. Inside, I walk from aisle to aisle, pick up a bag of chips and a bottle of A&W root beer. I take my time, perusing each row. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the beer fridge and briefly mistake it for someone else, mirroring my movements. But no. It’s just me.

“Twelve bucks,” the cashier says. She’s around 19 or 20, with a two-tone dye job and tired eyes.

I’ll take a scratcher too,” I say, nodding toward the back. She slides one across the counter and I take a dime out of my pocket, rub it against the thin wax coating.

“Look at that,” I say, holding the ticket up to the light. “I didn’t win anything.”

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