The sun isn’t hiding in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Half-dressed kids dance in front of the fire hydrant, soothing sweaty skin in the cool water blasting from its pumper nozzle. Zola, Kilimanjaro’s godsister, sits outside in their godmother’s fenced garden, plucking feathers from a limp chicken. Nandi stands in the shadow of the doorway catching a breeze before heading back to the kitchen sink. A lot of food still needs to be cooked, there’s plenty of clean up to do, and altar preparations to make for the drumming tomorrow. It’s Friday and no one is idle. The home bustles with preliminary ceremonies and cleaning. The sewing machine hums in the background as Iya Yafe, the seamstress puts the finishing touches on the initiate’s extravagant gown. Priests, laden with brilliant glass beads, move hurriedly from room to room as Nandi compiles a list of everything that needs to be done. Iya Ife, the head priestess of the house stitches the last few, miniscule glass beads onto the initiate’s crown. She pretends not to be exhausted in her presence, but Nandi knows that her Iya Ife desires rest.

Kilimanjaro walks out of the Orisha room and over to Nandi, who has returned to washing several large steel pots. He sets down the bucket he’s carrying and playfully grabs her around the waist, her back melting into his broad chest. Just a touch from him gives her tingly feelings all over. The white V-neck showing off his rich chocolate masculinity excites her, though she tries to play it cool.

Intoxicated by the scent of patchouli mixed with her perspiration, Kilimanjaro imagines Nandi’s caramel legs peeking out from under the bubble bath he will run for her later. After which, they’ll dine on coconut crusted salmon on a bed of rainbow chard at The Butta’ Cup Lounge, listening to locals strum inspiration on their cellos. Chill, Kil, stay present, he tells himself.

“Can we talk?” he asks her.

Instead of answering, she dries her hands on the towel slung over her shoulder, then grabs a biscuit from the oven, taking a large bite.

“Want some?” she asks him.

He shakes his head.

She pockets the rest of the warm bread in her yellow gingham apron.

“Come with me,” he says, leading her into the den. It is the only quiet place in the busy home. A magnificent silhouette of a peacock hangs low against the brick wall. Flower petals cover the floor. In the corner, a worn, brown leather couch beckons them to rest their tired legs. Nandi props her feet up on Kilimanjaro’s lap, wiggling newly-painted golden toenails.

“Okay. What’s up?” she asks, brushing crumbs from the corner of her mouth.

“Relax honey, everything is cool. Oshun spoke in my reading. She said to—” he hesitated, “‘stop playin’ and be clear about what you want, to avoid misunderstandings. Do you love me, Nandi?”

“Of course, I love you,” she says, puzzled.

“Do you want to have my babies?”

“What? Stop playin’.”

“I wouldn’t play around about that. Seriously, do you want to have a family with me?”

“I wasn’t expecting that question.” Her mind spins.  Her heart thumps so loudly she wonders if he can hear it.

“Well?” he persists.

“Truth is I been wanting to make a baby with you for a minute now.”

“Then will you be my wife, too?”

“Is that why you were trippin’ in the elevator yesterday? You want to make sure everybody knows I am your Queen!”

Nandi sinks back into the couch, the ground floor of the Brooklyn brownstone fades from view. She forgets for a moment about the wood floor strewn with flower petals, Zola plucking chicken feathers, the dumbwaiter stacked with dishes, and the chicken carcasses patiently awaiting her oil massage and seasoning. Suddenly, she finds herself at the edge of a stream surrounded by women dressed in white, with corals, shells, and glittery glass beads. They dance around her. One of the women carries a large basket. She walks up to Nandi, singing in a language that pulls at the strings of Nandi’s distant memories. Nandi knows the words but cannot speak them. The woman, now in front of her, is the most radiant woman Nandi has ever seen. Her skin is like tan honey, her shoulders broad but not intimidating, her hips, voluptuous, and her thick earth-brown hair pinned up in two curly puffs, fighting their containment. At the end of her song, she hands the basket full of the unknown to Nandi and walks back to the circle. The women in white jump into the stream and disappear. Nandi removes the muslin fabric covering the basket and reveals a pile of gold coins, shells, and yellow fabric. She wonders what it all means—where the singing woman came from, where she is and how she got here.

Kilimanjaro realizes that although Nandi lies next to him, she’s not there. “Nandi! Nandi!” Kilimanjaro calls. He shakes her gently, continuing to call her name.

Nandi hears her name, the voice faint, but repeating. A voice she knows well. She opens her eyes to find Kilimanjaro wrapping his vanilla-musky arms around her shoulders.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah. I just felt tired all of a sudden. I was dreaming,” she said, her eyes fixed on him. She had so much she wanted to say in response to his shocking round of questions, but the words felt stuck.

Kilimanjaro ran his hands through the thick curls sitting atop her head and he tried to read her.

“I am not perfect Nandi. I don’t have to tell you that. I’m a man working through what I have to. I’m a man that wants to be with you always. I don’t want to say goodbye to you and watch you walk away to your apartment. I want us to be together. I want a family. I want to see you every morning, kiss your head, and smell the lavender on your neck. I want to wipe away your tears and kiss your smile. I want to grab hold of the tomorrow I have already seen in my visions. I watch you, how you move in the world, how you move with me, how you won’t let me get away with even a hint of jealousy. I love that you are fierce and can take a joke. I need you.”

Nandi still in a bit of a daze from her trance, pulls him to her.  Gently she kisses his thick lips and whispers softly, “Yes, Kilimanjaro…yes!  I want to make a life with you … and a couple of babies, she says, feeling the rhythm of his heart beat in harmony with her own.

That which is sublime is not humanity, but nature. Nature does not boast of its superiority, nor does it seek revenge on humankind. One day when I was walking through a forest, I came to a brink of a door opening to “the cosmos” and I realized that I saw the “sublime unity” from that door. This state of unity was the combination of everything that constitutes the world from the centrosphere, and this state was not shaped in today’s date. I had to go back, to find the way to the places where the roots coming from my soles, and to rediscover them.  

 We had a house at the east of the mountain, we chased one another’s shadow at the light’s orbit. I was to one who got up and got burned, motherless, breastless, I had grown up with the bitter milk of goats. I wandered among frozen hollows for nine days when I realized that the old lady with a straight face wasn’t the bearer of the womb that carried me. I stuck my knees in the soil, across the prairies with reeds and fluctuating long bushes that resembled hair combed in the wind. I kept walking and walking and reached the ice with my fingers. They found me at the last cave I came to following the way of pine cones. I spit on the woman’s face who screamed because I froze and said things that hurt her. The big man with brown glasses warmed me up in his coat and took me back to the house. He reminded me how we seasoned the soup together. Under the patchwork blanket transformed into a tent, I asked him many times to go back home, to the other side of the mountain, the house with my mother, with bread, where I could reach anytime and find a breast to suck. He gave me the bread the old lady made every time, and I hit his hand. 

His papers lay everywhere in the house. The idea was to shed the light straight onto writings. His glasses on his head, a pen in his mouth, from chair to sofa, from sofa to step, he kept changing his spot. I would read the books that I liked over and over again, sometimes murmuring, sometimes out loud, to get his attention, searching for a window to open his eyes. When my head dropped by the end of the day, the old lady would come and light the stove.  

The fire is in the mole next to my nose, that’s where the first spark jumps to wood. I cowereach time before this mesmerizing scene, close my eyes and focus on the animals’ noises coming from the back yard. In a moment she will lean over the fire, boil a soup in the pot, saltless. If she’s in a good mood she will put beans in it, I will smell like onions to the roots of my hair. Seared, pink. Then she will approach the eyes buried in writings, wherever they are, and rub his shoulders, accept the coin she’ll be given and leave from our sea–green door, quietly. I will dip my fingers in the bowl and sprinkle salt on papers. He will look behind the old lady with his bloodshot eyes, and smile. 

I create my friends, distille them from his silence. I go out and sit on the ground with the need to talk to someone about his papers full of odd letters, without indentations. I knead my friends with my bare hands. They are dark black and crippled looking. Their arms are shorter than their hands, their heads way too big for their torsos. Some have huge bellies, I wonder what they have eaten. A couple of them have giant ears that keeepcoming when I pull them. I tell them about the writings that I can’t read, as I lie near their porous bodies and listen to the noise the snow makes while melting.  

The cold brings along a strong urge to sleep. When I wake up, they are corpses, split into cracks of sacrifice. For a while I try to whisper some sort of agility, spirit, or life into them, but then I decide to aligned them all under the fence and organize a mass funeral with the hopelessness I find in dismembered body parts. Then I throw them all to the railroad that passes beyond the fence, and curse that they left me.  

For days I talk about them under the blanket’s colors, until waters come down my cheeks. They neither talked nor played games, gave me secrets nor peculiar information about where the road to the other side of the mountain began or how much time it took to run to rails from the fence, or where those trains went. He comes and uncovers me only after my nose and my mouth form a unity on their own, and as if he finds me at different locations every night he will say: “So you’re here again?” My head on his arm, I wait to be carried to my bed. 

An outrageous sleep, no interruptions, far from the sea, shoreless. My head hurts, I want to call him out as my throat is ripped apart by claws, to let at least some letters go off their nails. I know that my arms are lying dead still, while I had thought they were waving throughout the darkness. To get rid of the stinky breath of the wicked who licked my eyelids to make me open them, I call his name: “Sleep! Sleep, come! Take me now and don’t leave, cover all my sides.” He won’t come. Everyone I threw over the fence now sit on me and hold my limbs. I promise dozens of times that I will not knead them, let them dry and throw them away. When my tangled tongue can finally reach and touch my teeth, the sorrow of not being able to call him out until comes crashing at me and I lie on my face. Touching the sheets, my flesh will shiver, and I call his name as it was given to me: “Dad.” 

He reads more than he talks. I am angry at him for it, forquieting me down, discouraging me from telling and making me stick with the old lady. I hate that he walks around in the house with his cheeks blushed from the barely warm oven, his sweaty forehead and his shirt clinging to his back, that he spends hours without eating, or even wanting any apples or dates, that he daydreams on his own, without once calling out my name, without a tale. So much so that I study a meticulous plan of how I will push him on the oven, and hurt him, yet I couldn’t knock him over. He doesn’t even know that I wantto burn him into ashes, he goes on moving his lips as he rearranges his papers according to their page numbers.  

In the evening, I decide. I am going to properly ask to the old lady when she comes. She does come, and I sneak near her as she bakes bread for the soup. “Ulaina,” I said. “Am I invisible?” 

First from her eyes, then from between of her breasts, two straight teardrops come down, and she huggs me. Through the window, she points to the mountain crests where the night has already falleb, and said “Look, go ask ‘em, ask ‘em the same question. Let’s see if they can see you.” 

I wake up before my dad’s hands touch the boiling teapot. I munch three sugar cubes and run to the garden. Trembling, I approach the goat whose milk I grew up on. It gets along quite well with my palm. I caress its tiny tongue. Then I go near the horse in the distance, where the smoke coming out of the trains also went. It doesn’t look down on my height. I don’t evenwhich wouldn’t reach its shoulders even, and it levels its head with mine. I hear my name in its whisper. Successively, to rabbit’s hole, chicken’s farm, and under the rooster’s wing I go. I find in each a heat similar to that coming out of our oven. I see it beyond the fence, I want to jump over our wooden curtain and go near it, too. It flies away as I lift a leg, splinters in my thighs. 

I begin to tell Ulaina everything that happens to me in a day. I look forward for her arrival, and after a rehearsal of what I am going to say, I watch the embers and wait for her footsteps. The moment she comes I grabb her skirts before she can turn to the oven and tell her about what I did in the garden all day long. She listens with patience and makes noises of surprise with her mouth that lacks some teeth. I get carried away, mix dream with reality and make those in the garden talk. I transfer everything they said to her, word to word. Ulaina keeps glancing to my father at intervals, and taps my back, stays quiet. These are moments when I dive straight into the horizon, when the words of the language we speak coincides. The beginning of the days when Ulaina decided to leave me a piece from the teeth, bones or hairs from her headdress. 

One evening, before she leaves I see my dad’s head finally rising up from his papers. His eyes are locked with Ulaina’s and his lips press on each other. One of her hands on his shoulder, Ulaina tells something to my dad. I can’t see her face. But I see his curly hair tremble anxiously, from the hole of the rainbow-colored blanket. 

I hear Ulaina say, : 

“This much is not okay.” Her voice trails off. “She’s older now, and she understands all of it. Talk to her, tell her a bit. Or she will wander off to strays’ side.” 

I know the horse. Its croup tall. It runs me over. I hear its hoof right on my sacrum. It was beautiful and surprised. It found my movements shocking. Scared too, big breaths huffing out its nostrils. If we wanted, we could. Leave, I mean, leave here, this land. Run, straight on a line. I, balbal, rock, quiet, and lost; its feet crushing my cracks, on my widths and heights where I was incarcerated as I tried to grow up, pain from all and none of the angles, both of its feet. Terror, the human-likeness of the menace. It runs me over. 

I know the goat. Fuzzy hair. Warm. I feel its front feet on the back of my neck. Stinky, scared. Baaing into my mouth and my throat cracking through its axis. It was in a hurry, various characteristics dwelled in its beard. We wore its hair, and it resents what has been done to its children. And the complaints:it stinks, stinky this is, and hard, too, you can’t chew this. It’s offended and thinks, if I see one of you, even though I like one among you, I will run you down. I, beyond writing’s quiet, but while all these tales and stories growing inside me, I feel my pointy collar bone crack. My shell is robust. My shell is crooked.  

I fall while I was trying to find my balance with my one foot on the horse, the other on the goat, and the animals shy away, stepping on me. Meanwhile, once again his unpronounced name behind my tongue, I see my mother deep into the darkness, my limbs kicking the air.  

Since I fell, the oven has never been turned off. I lie there stiff, among the flames and my dreams, murmuring the names I gave to the horse and the goat. Faces enter my vision—looking from above, a doctor from the village, with a healer Ulaina brought. My whole head motionless, I want to reach and touch her cheeks. Caress, kiss her. To cry and not shut up, dive to her breasts salivating, sucking her instead of my mother. My arms don’t move, nor my eyebrows. I keep growing up with the crunch of creased papers. 

I’m neatly placed on fine-cut wood, no nails. Clean pieces of cloth keep my flesh together. I can’t turn my head to my side and look at my miserable horse and goat. I can’t wipe the tears coming down from its big eyes, or shove the rabbits. I can’t scare them, laugh at them. I only hear the train’s whistle. The crackling in the oven. I find a way to move from one sound to another. I transfer my mind to the steam and travel along the rails 

It is about five or six months since my fall. My dad has finished the work he’s been working on for years. He is reading it, with his deep voice, in a language I would understand. He teaches me the papers, the letters and sounds on them and hopesfor the best. I learned about “You,” and “U,s” become the words of the tablet erected after Tonyukuk’s funeral. Choose any tale, my dear heart. Childish narrations full of praise are long gone, mighty doors have invited me in. Had I known that I could be a part of his story, which fed on his discoveries and deductions, without moving at all, I would have climbed sooner on to the tops of the high horse and the wooly goat. At the same time. And fallen.  

At that very moment he becomes my father for real. I am hit by his scent that fills my nose from his sweaty shirt. I like it when he sits on the tip of my bed, right in the light triangle created by the dying fire , crosses his legs and puts his palm under his chin. I watch him seasoning the soup without me, as he talksabout Tengri, Hammurabi, Kadesh, Sumerians. I want to get up and hug him as I taste and try to swallow the undissolved lumps in the soup, which stay scorching hot despite all his blowing on the spoon. I ache, a splinter buried in deep. 

Now I am making humans out of what he tells me, with my fingertips in my mind. I have one who is splendid, a sacred one, holy, more merciful, more real than my mud people, who were always wet. They wouldn’t dry out even if I threw them away, each with a soul, if not a breathing body, and wings. I put in every one of them the bird that I couldn’t catch. A step of Zeus, for instance, or Hera’s eyes, without lingering much on Artemis’s arched back or the honey–dripping thighs of Aphrodite, to Hermes, to the Sirens, sphinxes, and Ares. I am holding the arrow from Achilles’s heel and I can now see my dad as Herodotus come to life in a body with veins. We crash on the names we can’t repeat, like crushing fresh snow slaloming as our chests were opened for the Titans, we swirl and fall into the floral shores like Aegeus from the summit of Olympus. Our mountain is in Ida, far from us. It faces west, and it is green. Only the top of it is snow covered and there we are in seclusion with the god of gods. 

In the night when I can lift my whole arm without moving a single finger, I try until my sweat–filled to my eye craters and hang my legs off the bed. I hide the fact that I can move, don’t say a word to anyone. Not even to Ulaina. She keeps sprinkling bone dust on my head and legs. She washs my skeleton in need of bison’s marrow and deer’s horns with unseasoned soups. 

Before morning, after midnight. In that moment when I am overjoyed with moving my flesh and become one with wood, the size of my lifted limbs surprising me. I watch my elongated parts with admiration, although they are a bit flabby from the lack of motion. I ask Ulaina what happened to me. She said: “The last part that detached from your mother is now bigger. Because you are reborn.” 

After a long nap, I wriggle in the shirt made of aba. I stretch my leg over Agamemnon’s hand and he puts it on the ground. I wrapp the other around Apollo’s arms, the floor cold under my soles. They lift me up, Zeus exhales through my backbone and I stand with the support of Medusa’s hair. There are cinders in the oven and the soup is cold. I hope to find my dad with his papers gathered on his lap, sitting on the doorstep as he did years ago. He isn’t there. I look everywhere, under the couches, behind the shelves. I carry myself to the window. Same shadows in the garden, but older. The horse’s back bent downwards and the goat’s hair turned gray. The rabbit, sluggish, the rooster, senile. The chicken already cut and eaten. My dad’s shadow isn’t among them. Slowly, I take slithering steps back to my bed and wear the colorful blanket like a cape. I am more apprehensive than the rulers of these lands. I take a piece of wood from the cold fire. I smash it around. Then I hold onto it, put my entire weight on it. Quietly I ask it if the dead tree could carry my little age. Proud, I lean on it, it isn’t offended. It carries me. 

We go out, cold burning my lungs. Oh, I think, this side of the mountain. I remember a sentence from before my mother passed me over to my dad: Don’t go to the other side of the mountain. No intonation, no sound of it in my baby ears, a mere sentence. Now I am driving the body that I lifted up with the strength that I found in the things I listened to, like that time I did when I was five years of age in the world, in search of the last one of the nine caves. As I leave through the door, a celebration of my height that can finally reach the fence’s lock. The train passes at my right.  

I don’t say the names I gave to those in the train when I was little. I save those repeating, offensive words to myself. I go out and don’t sink. I wrapp my blanket around my chest and tuck it in. I wait for a light or a sound to direct my way. It is dark. The more I thinkt about the possibility of my dad leaving me, the more force my legs find. I take bigger steps with the desire to find and cling to him. Of a sudden my head bumps the first tree of the beech forest. I stumble, and fall. I got up. I shake off the snow off. When I see a silhouette moving in the trees, I run after it before giving a single thought, branches scratching my face. 

I don’t know the forest. I was never allowed to go. Why all the trees? What derives from the seed? Various, combined. Some separate, far away, some stuck with a branch like me, asking for power to fix their back. I shut down my sight and focus on what I know, open my ears to any sound. Don’t be scared of the dark, he said, it’s a hole to nice genies, as he closed the book. Don’t be scared of the leaves, they covered you first, whispered blood to your veins, you dripped from their water, became whole, both your mom and I are sexed, we reproduced thanks to them. We made you, as a result of friction, we took you out of her with laughter, happiness, madness. You took me, you took her, both of us, and you took a sip from her breast, then we died at the same time and were buried, then we lived and sought after the one that needed to carry on. Don’t abstain from the soil, cover your feet with it and move on. It will be whispered into your mind, let yourself go but don’t wander off from here, from the east of the mountain, from our house, because I although I turned down my voice to raise you here, I left my city behind and followed tombstones to read the story, I resolved the mystery of the dead language; forgive me. For I have not called your name and put salt and oregano to your soup, I was stuck in my brain, focused on achievement and I left my little girl alone in mud, for I have failed to know what motherlessness was. My daughter without a pair of breasts, or milk, and her barn-smelling hair.  

I arrive at a plateau where treetops crossed to form a ceiling-like braid. The forest is quite enough to hear snails running away from my feet. No wind, no hiss. Nothing from my dreams, either. But I know something passed my face. Something washing away my eyebrows, eyelashes. My nose, the same smell of him with his shirt stuck to his back. I sense the glowing essence gliding down his armpits. I turn around, my eyes my ears my tongue closed. I don’t put my hands forward, trees could try to stop me as much as they wanted.He is of more value than my face, I didn’t know my face. After tiny puppet steps, my nose touches his hair. Mad curly, even madder than the forest around us. He is angry and seems stuck where he stands. He can reach and grab me even. I only know the smell of his upper body, his hair made me confused. An essence bursting out of hair, tail, until he crashed me down. 

If only I opened my eyes, it would be my dad, I knew. With his shadow on the paper, almost lying on the couch. 

I stop the tremble of my eyelashes, open them wide and see him clearly. He is holding a bunch of papers, his eyes have lost their whites, dark, the color of the void, shiny. His hairless chest that I had never seen naked before is literally glowing in the moonbeam, penetrating even through thick layer of trees. I see the lines of his body, arcing belly as clear as the milk I drank growing up. If he didn’t have enhaloing groups of hair going up from his crotch, if my dad weren’t standing on his four feet under his two arms, I would say that I was in my dreams again, playing with my handmade babies. I ache under the weight of the unique hooves crushing my back to the ground. I rub my eyes, it isn’t a dream. He had told me before, the form he took, but he didn’t give much detail about how he was sucked into it. He is standing in front of me with his four feet and two arms, and I, behind a dry tree trunk, am trying to understand. 

He hears and looks towards me, his feet clacking, no shoes on. 

“You thought me.” I say. “I know what you’re called.” 

He laughs and when he does,  the trees laugh, too. The darkness laughs. He drops the papers on my head, says they aren’t necessary anymore. He tells me why he left me in my bed and came here since we had moved to the east side of the mountain, and that he had listened to the gods from the forest that hid them. Not just Zeus, but how he chattered with Kul Tigin, went to the lake nearby and wrote the inscriptions together, how he didn’t have his own god, and really saw a siren. That he saw the water called sea beyond the lands he traveled daily, on foot but as fast as the wind. That he was afraid of my face touching his, and me turning into a fish and swimming away. That he saw a rose on its branch in layered gardens of the sky, and that he couldn’t take it from the snake, bring it to me. He told me how he raped Hera, how Eve was his fifth generation descendant, I saw it, me, I saw Cain. How the rose stayed in him for all time and how he stuck it to his forehead. Past and present, from his companionship with Pan to how he lay on my mother in this very forest and killed her with his limb he put inside her. All. 

“Then she gave me you. Spare her from two legs, go, wish it from anyone, she said. I ran the world with you wrapped around my hip. My arrow did the talking when it was necessary. My moon always returned to me. I made you two armed and two legged, but I couldn’t take your nodulation into account. 

Centaur. My dad. The one who showed me how to let myself into the soil, to turn into nail and hoof where the trees intertwined, calmly. He showed me how to bore a bison out of a tree, a deer from a bison, and get along with them all. The one who patched my tongue with every language he knew from that of Zeus to Tengri, and kicked me far, far away when he was just about to wrap his tail around my head. 

We had a house in the east of the mountain, where we didn’t check clocks but chased one another’s shadow. I was the one who stood up and got burnt, the one without a mother, deprived of her breasts; my flesh was widened with the sharp milk of goats and my height touched the last layer of the sky that it could touch. My dad, without a woman, alone by the Orkhon River, looking to find hope in Selenege, his house at the other side of the mountain, a house without my mom in it. He was strong, but old. In a village outside Karakorum, he had spent everything that the monthly bourse could buy to make me a garden. It was his strongest desire to render his life, which he devoted to legends, gods and magical lands immortal with a great work, and dedicate it to me. That was the sole reason why he did not not speak a word to me until I turned thirteen and nearly broke all of my bones. Forgetting even to eat, my mud-centric diet. If it weren’t for Ulaina, then perhaps we wouldn’t have known anyone but ourselves, drunk the water of an adjacent village. She was the salt in the soup, the one who made us remember how it tasted. I have believed to this day that it was her spells that put me up on my feet after that baleful accident. She kept reminding me of the last day when I saw my father, but although I didn’t tell her; I remembered so much more. 

Before tucking me in and leaving that night, my dad had said to me: Bear. The only way to exit me, is for you to give birth to those who thrust upon you, hit you on the neck and take your foot, pour dust on your bones, call your name from afar, write your age on stone. That’s how you will be freed. It wouldn’t make any difference if I had said I didn’t want to be freed. My lips, my hands were standing still. He looked as if he were itching, he snuck his head under his right armpit and bit his shirt. You’ll hear so many more things, and people. Read my papers, follow my path, I won’t last.I got carried away by another voice, my feet got cold and the river is frozen and I’m walking on it. I trust Ulaina with your flesh, and I have your bones, I’m at your heels, my heart beats in your tendon, it will, and all is for you to think of me when you stumble. You were born at the otherside of the mountain, your mother is taiga, don’t ask for more, she took you out and got in you.” 

I couldn’t get used to people. I was dark, I could only rest in Ulaina’s tent, which I reached after long walks, after long flights. I had a lot going on. I was the fortress of a core team travelling worldwide for the research of the university. I was stuck in Istanbul, and Copenhagen for a long time. I observed long-term excavations in Peru and Chile. While I got lost in thousands of papers I thought about my father, he was like me I said to myself, That’s how he buried his head in letters he spent nights to figure out. While I left fancy hotel rooms with my faceprint on pillows, I ignored the indented swelling behind it. 

I couldn’t express myself in my language. I turned to the past, a familiar alphabet, as if the geography were the harbinger of a news already infused to my blood. I was asked to solve the inscriptions that were written near me during my childhood. I accepted without reading the terms. I signed up for walks after car rides to our destination, passing wild meadows deep in taigas, the two years that we would spend in a tent that took us. I returned to the lands where I grew up, fifty years later, to track down my father’s work.  

I walked to read what was read already, to discover once more what remained after the horse, and the goat. I brought my cleft spine and crooked groins with me. My broken collarbone tilting to my pelvis, my breast hanging almost over my knees, I walked. The door of the tent when I arrived to was painted with alizarin crimson. The years of the past scratched my wounds, it couldn’t be possible. I opened the wail. 

Ulaina was cooking the lumpy flour for her soup. 

I sought her eyes and said: “I read it all. But I failed to bear as it should have been done, what came out was twisted, broken, I bent over and strangled it.” 

I shed my clothes and the pain of the week. Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours ago we were on the couch in your living room. You comforted me as I cried myself to sleep, nightmares of my childhood on repeat. Forty-one hours ago you and Georgie pranced around the kitchen while I cooked us breakfast. You loved my omelets. Thirty-nine hours ago we sat in silence on the bus ride to school. I watched you eagerly stare out the window as we drove down the Champs Elysées. Thirty hours ago we sat at a table, surrounded by friends, tucked away in a corner of the garden at Ralph’s. The turkey burger was your favorite. Twenty-five hours ago our group, some buzzed and some high, stumbled down a crowded street into Chez Georges, our favorite night club. Twenty-two hours ago, you let us know you were going to the bathroom and went down the line sloppily kissing our cheeks. I didn’t know then that it was the last time we’d speak.

When I was 14, my sister Julie and I moved to Paris with our mom. We lived in a quaint apartment off the 17^th arrondissement. It was a quiet street during the week and bustling with little kids playing du foot on the weekends. I had forgotten what it was like to play outside and not have to worry about safety. It was odd. White roses and fuchsia lilies lined the window boxes of every apartment. The bright colors of the flora were a stark contrast to the white and gray exterior of the tightly packed buildings. Older ladies gossiped from their balconies, intermittently taking long drags from cigarettes. Every morning, the smell of fresh bread wafted into my bedroom window, the scent seeking me out from the bakery across the way. We tried to go back to Lebanon one summer, but on the drive home from the airport our car had been shot at. Dani, our driver, got hit and died later that night. We were on a plane to Charles du Gaulle the next day.

I didn’t meet you until my second year of school in Paris. I remember you had just moved from Nice and I saw you alone, wandering the hallways, clearly lost.

“Hi!” I walked up and greeted you. “Do you need help finding where you’re going?”

You looked at me helplessly, gesturing with your hands to your ears and then shaking your head.

Oh. I signed to you.

Your face lit up.

We smiled.

I felt like the piece of me I didn’t even know was missing was restored. It was 1980.

What’s your name?

Jerome.

Pierre.

How do you know sign language?

We fled Beirut during the earlier years of the civil war. Papa chose to stay while Julie, Maman, and I moved to Paris. I still remember the day when it was decided we would leave.

It was a week night and I was in my bedroom. Accustomed to the shouting and sporadic gun fire in the streets I could sleep through anything. It was the silence that woke me.

For the first time in months all I could hear was my breathing. In, out. In, out. It was unsettling and I curled into myself. That’s when the mortar fire started.

There was a hissing sound, like an overheated teapot. My bedroom wall exploded. My cheeks burned. I was thrown from my bed. Debris lodged itself into the wall, ceiling, and flew through the doorway. My MVP soccer trophy and my Bible went up in flames. I dragged myself behind my tattered mattress. My skin felt on fire. My ears were ringing. Blood dripped from my forehead, blurring my vision.

I awoke in the hospital in Hadath, 48 hours later, to my father standing over me, monitoring my vitals. The bright lights forced me to squint. My head was pounding, my body stiff. His face warmed when he saw I was awake. Squeezing my hand, he launched into one of his rants, something he usually would do every time I wanted to go out with friends; about the dangers of the city, how it was unsafe, about the patients, bloody and mangled, that he had seen that day, not about the fact that he didn’t want me out where he couldn’t control my every move. At least I think he said those things. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything.

We went to your apartment for the first time, a few weeks after meeting. You hadn’t told me you lived in the 4^th district. When we got to your building, a doorman was out front. We had left almost everything behind in the trip to Paris and I couldn’t help but feel out of place, underdressed and unprepared. Our reflections were visible in the freshly polished white marble steps leading up to your apartment. You pushed the door open to reveal high ceilings and a stately entry hall. I remember you dragged me away before I could look around.  A baby grand caught my eye as we scurried past the parlor, towards your bedroom.

Collapsing onto your bed, you let out a sigh.

Jerome, what’s up? I signed. No reply. You closed your eyes and rolled over onto your stomach. The bed creaked when I sat on it, unnatural amongst our silence. We stayed like that for a long time.

Your finger poking into my side got my attention again.

Pierre, I hate it here. Paris is great, but in Nice at least all of my friends could sign. They understood what I was dealing with, we went through it together. Here, I’m alone.

I get that, Jerome, I really do. I pretended not to see you roll your eyes. Even after regaining my hearing no one understands why the wrong sound or smallest touch can make me jump. The things I saw in Lebanon are burned into the underside of my eyelids when I close my eyes. I almost died. I watched a man I grew up with bleed out in front of me, and another man shot at his daughter’s baptism.

The war had started quietly, with infighting at the borders and secret midnight raids. Papa spent his days in the hospital and nights in Parliament. Maman stopped letting us go out alone in the evening. I didn’t understand what was happening until we went to a baptism. It was Sunday, April 13^th, 1975. I was 10 years old. In the middle of the service I remember a man approaching Papa, their conversation kept at a whisper, before they scurried out of the ceremony. I didn’t think anything of it, that was the nature of being a politician. Afterwards, as we congregated on the steps, shots were fired. Maman quickly herded Julie and I back into the church, but not before I saw Joseph, the father of the baptized child, have his throat torn open by bullets. Blood spattered onto the priest beside him. The baby cried and Joseph’s wife screamed. It was the first time I’d seen someone shot.

I may be able to hear but I remember what it was like not to. I am alone in my pain. But we can be alone, together. You threw your arms around me. I flinched, then relaxed into your touch.

We didn’t share any classes, since you were in a special program, but we ate lunch together. None of our friends could communicate with you. You didn’t strike me as someone who would have spoken much, regardless. At first, we only ever saw you at school. Your life outside those walls was a mystery, the lack of social interaction isolating. I knew that feeling well.

We had to move to a friend’s house after everything got destroyed. After the explosion, I wouldn’t go outside. If no one saw me, if I didn’t face the world in my current state, then it wasn’t reality. I couldn’t stomach a meal. I would sit at the dinner table and stare blankly at the kibbe and hummus laid out before me. It all tasted like cardboard. Every night I would lay down and stare at the ceiling. Sleep never came. The sheets were too soft, my new room illuminated too much by the street lights, anything and everything reinforcing the silence.

The first month without hearing, Julie and I spent most of our days with a tutor who taught us sign language. It seemed futile. We had to learn how to sign Lebanese, Arabic, and traditional French. Every mistake felt like a slap in the face. I felt useless. I couldn’t hear. I was still in a wheel chair. Everyone else’s life kept going.

I hated my tutor. Hilda, an awful name. Dark curls perched atop her head, and she had a large mole to the right of her nose, like a third eye that stared at me. She wanted me to work for 4 hours, nonstop! Julie and I would sneak fake bugs into her meals, her wide eyes and silent screams left us giggling. I didn’t want to like her. I didn’t get the point and I didn’t understand sign language.

Then one day, Julie came home and signed to me, asking if I wanted a snack. And I understood her. Without realizing the gravity of the situation, I signed back, toast with foie gras. The moment hung in the air before she started jumping up and down, the smile on my face automatic. Tutoring sessions became easier. We started using it as a way to say everything we couldn’t in front of Papa and Maman; how we snuck sweets at night and the wine Julie had absconded with. Then one night at dinner, Maman looked Julie directly in the eyes and signed Did you like the Chardonnay? We both went white. I should have never left my study books out.

Hilda stopped coming. I didn’t need her anymore. Nor my wheelchair. I grew accustomed to the silence, a reprieve from the gun fire and shouting. At times, I did wish for the burns that scaled up my legs and fractured rib cage to slow their healing because as I got better, the closer I knew we were to being sent off to Paris. It was too dangerous for our family to stay any longer.

I taught our friends the basics of sign language and it got us through the first semester. In the three weeks we had off for Christmas, while you went back to Nice to visit family, Julie and I set up a schedule with them. When I couldn’t hear, everyone around me worked to make sure I didn’t feel alone. I wanted that for you. We’d meet up every morning and between mouthfuls of breakfast crepes, the guys would learn the basics. Getting them to learn how to sign wasn’t all that difficult, it became muscle memory after the first week. Rather, they struggled with understanding what I or Julie was signing to them. Turning their understanding into a competition motivated everyone. Georgie would stay late every night pouring over my old books with Julie. It was obvious he was doing it to spend more time with Julie, but soon he understood and could sign better than the rest of the guys. Three weeks was not long enough to master it, but by the end of vacation, the boys could have conversations on their own.

When lunch rolled around on our first day back, I had gnawed at my finger nails down to the stubs. A bunch of our friends were already sitting when you and I approached them. The table fell silent. After a beat, several guys engaged you and I in conversation. Henrie eagerly turned to you, his eyes ablaze. Jerome, how are you? How was your holiday?

Georgie tugged on my sleeve. I bet Jerome starts crying. I smiled. He winked at Julie from across the table.

I remember how stunned you were. And when you started to cry, your tears triggered mine and I found the two of us swathed in an embrace.

Three weeks after we moved to Paris, the ringing started. I thought I was imagining it. I tried to ignore it. Sitting at dinner in the apartment with Julie, I noticed her teary eyes.

It was the first time I saw someone cry since I stopped hearing. I couldn’t speak words of comfort, so I just held her. Julie’s shaking body in my arms, put my nerve endings on edge. Everything was heightened. As her crying grew more intense so did the ringing. It was a nuisance at first but then it became painful and I couldn’t hold her anymore. I dropped to the cold kitchen tiles in fetal position, and just like that Julie was no longer a broken girl. She was my fiercely loyal older sister. Her hand traced patterns on my back to bring me back down into the present moment.

The ringing was unbearable. Julie cradled me. I prayed for it to stop. As it got louder, it sounded like there was interference. Whispers, breathing, I couldn’t make it out. The ringing dissipated, and in its absence I could hear Julie’s breathing. It was the loudest thing I’d heard in my life. This couldn’t be real. I rolled over to look at her. She breathed, in and out, the motions perfectly in time with the sounds that expanded and filled the room. This couldn’t be real. I spoke. “I think I can hear.” It came out a whisper, a drawl from being silent for so long, but the words rang true.

Julie began to cry again. We held each other. Our sobs echoed throughout the room. I felt our beating hearts. I could hear them.

You, Julie, and I navigated the crowded street. People waited, packed together like sardines, to get into the Rolling Stones concert at the Hippodrome. We didn’t have the money for that.  We didn’t need it. Earlier that day, I had stolen a length of rope off a work bench at the edge of a construction site, and the three of us scoped out the lines of trees near the stadium. In a dimly lit alley across from the concert we found our friends waiting.

“Yellah, guys. We’re going to be late,” Henrie coughed out between pulls from a bottle of vodka.

Seeing the liquor, you pulled a baggie full of small candy hearts from your pocket, offering it up without a word. I made eye contact with Julie across from me and saw the familiar the twinkle of rebellion in her eye.

It was 1970 and The Wild Child had just been released. In a rare family outing, Maman and Papa took Julie and I to see it. We left the theatre quoting our favorite lines and acting out scenes. In an unfortunate turn of events, we had spaghetti for dinner that night. Julie and I clawed at each other, words tumbling out of our mouths faster than could be processed on the car ride home. The confined space was not helping anyone. When we pulled into our driveway, before Dani even tapped the brakes, we bolted out from the back, running into the house. The dining room table was immaculate. Porcelain plates evenly spaced, wine glasses filled with some type of red wine, all of it gross to me, and a piping hot serving bowl of pasta set in the middle. The steam was so thick you could see it, feel it.

I followed Julie’s lead. We jumped atop the table and started stomping around, wine spilling everywhere. Releasing raw, barbaric screams, we launched spaghetti into the air with our bare hands. Julie looked at me, mischief twinkling in her eyes.

When people ask how I got the scar, I tell them it was a skiing accident. What really happened, I can’t know for certain. I hadn’t noticed the fork in her left hand, clenched behind her back, knuckles white. Both of us were living out our Wild Child fantasy, a luxury we were not afforded, always being shown off at political dinners and charity galas, the perfect child props. We were bound to burst.

Spaghetti strewn everywhere, my coiffed hair was a mess. As we danced across the table, reveling in the last few seconds before our parents walked through the door, Julie turned to me and shrieked, “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE WILD CHILD.” Next thing I knew I was on the ground and she was next to me, tracing circles on my back, keeping me calm.

One by one we each placed a heart on our tongue and let it dissolve. Then we made our way to the trees.

We ran down a series of cobbled side streets until the back of the stadium seating loomed before us, casting a shadow across a patch of trees to the left of the Hippodrome. There was never any security. I dragged you along with me, towards a towering oak with sturdy branches, thick in circumference. You gave me a boost up, and I shimmied my way to the first branch before climbing higher and higher and higher. The hands of 40,000 people were swaying in the air, giving the illusion of rolling waves. The stage was illuminated. Pulling out the rope, I tied a bowline knot around the trunk and let it down. After several minutes of shaking, grunts, and heavy breathing, you climbed up next to me. Hair all messy, you faced forward and saw the direct view of the stage. Your eyes lit up.

We could clearly see Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones prance onto the stage, the crowd erupting into screams. The vibrations from the bass carried all the way out and I could feel it in my bones. The reverb travelled down my body, song after song, as I signed the words to you. You bobbed your head along to the beat taking up residence in your body. Our smiles wide, eyes glassy. I was seeing stars and never realized Mick Jagger had a twin, until he appeared on stage that night. Henrie fell asleep muttering nonsense in the tree next to us. Jagger closed out the show with “Lady Jane” and I screamed along in my best broken English. You hugged the tree trunk like a koala. Georgie fell from his branch and remained in the dewy grass, cackling to himself, Julie beside him, their hands intertwined. My voice was hoarse, we were all fucked, and had just witnessed greatness. We were dilated pupils full of music. I could still taste the heart on my tongue.

You invited us over to your apartment the night before Georgie’s birthday. A pre-celebration before the weekend, since Julie couldn’t join us the following evening. Studying for the Bac was consuming her life.

Drinks and food littered the island in your kitchen, tea on the stove. Julie led us in an offkey rendition of Happy Birthday. You were right beside me, beaming, as we all sang and signed in unison.

The kettle went off and everything around me slowed. I was transported to my old bedroom, body felt like it was on fire. You turned to me, fear in your eyes, when my glass crashed at your feet. I couldn’t breathe. The world was silent. I was alone.

Twenty hours ago you dropped acid. The guy with you said you thought you could fly. Eighteen hours ago I found myself in a hospital waiting room. Henrie said that no news was good news. Fourteen hours ago a somber team of surgeons emerged from the OR. “We stopped the bleeding, but Jerome is in a coma. He suffered a traumatic fall. We can’t be sure if he will wake up.” Thirteen hours ago my tears pooled at the edge of your bed as I held your hand. You couldn’t hold mine back. Five hours ago you left us. Two hours ago I stood outside the hospital taking a drag from my last cigarette. “Go home, Pierre,” someone said. The hand they rested on my shoulder felt alien. Ten minutes ago I walked through the door of my apartment. My sister and mother were both asleep.

Sasha sat and watched the leaves fall from the trees in Central Park. It made him feel young again. Of course, he was not young. He was very old. Layers of tan skin cascaded upon one another to create his face. His bright blue eyes, now his only staple, shone through the layers. Women used to fall for those eyes. Women still did if you asked Maggie, who lived next door to him in their small apartment complex. Sasha lived alone now. His wife had been dead for four years. He’d said goodbye to her in a room that overlooked Central Park. That was part of the reason he liked the Park so much. If he concentrated enough he could feel her in the wind. 

David watched Sasha sitting on the park bench across the way. David himself sat on the edge of a fountain, a homemade sandwich in one hand and a Guinness in the other. He was a large balding man, fifty percent muscle and fifty percent beer belly. He had tattoos that snaked their way around each of his arms, and another two on his neck. He also had a token lumberjack beard and a hardness to his face that cracked like an egg when someone made a joke. David recognized Sasha from the many nights he spent in his pub, causing a ruckus. Once Sasha passed the two-beer mark, he became a story-teller of epic proportions. He would reenact scenes from the fable he was telling, standing on a table and brandishing his umbrella.  

He always had an audience, David thought as he took a swig from his drink. 

The pub had an ongoing wager of whether or not Sasha’s stories were true. They kept the tally marks on a black board that used to be for Trivia Night. So far, they’d covered both sides and David was thinking about ordering a new one. If they believed all of Sasha’s stories, he became a debonair adventurer who had braved the rain of bullets in both Germany and the Middle East, working for no one other than himself, to right the wrongs in the world. That was the difficult bit. According to Sasha, because he was wanted in so many countries for acquiring secret information, he was forced into hiding in the US. 

“Well why are you telling all of us about it now?” one of his audience members once lamented. 

“Bah,” Sasha said dismissively, his Russian accent revealing itself, as it always did when he was drunk. “Most of my enemies are long dead now, and even if they did come for me, I’ve still got more than enough skill to beat those bastards.” 

There was still a surprising balance among the guesses of whether the stories were true or false. David should probably be giving Sasha part of the profits that he brought in from all the people who came in either to see Sasha or to talk about him. Sometimes David wondered what it would be like to run a regular pub, where people talked about football or politics. It seemed all his customers had become Sasha conspiracy theorists. 

David noticed he’d run out of sandwich and crumpled the saran wrap and tossed it in one of the green trash cans. He looked at Sasha one last time. The old man hadn’t moved. It looked to David like he was waiting for something. Whether it was death or another beer, David had no idea. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked back towards the pub. 

… 

Sasha pushed open the door to David’s pub. The bell clinked, signaling his arrival. It was nearly empty. A trio of young men sat at one end of the bar and a couple sat at the other. Sasha pulled his hat off and hung it on the coat rack. He walked to the center of the bar where David was polishing mugs. 

“What can I get’cha?” asked David, glancing up from his work. Sasha chuckled. 

“доброта, you know what I want. I’m here just about every night of the week,” he said. David smiled slightly as he pulled out a Guinness and popped the top off with one hand. 

“There it is,” said Sasha with satisfaction. He took a long gulp. David put the mug away and leaned forward. Sasha wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve and waggled his large grey eyebrows. 

“ням. Good stuff,” he said, and David laughed. 

“People have been wondering what story we get to hear tonight.” David pulled back to grab another mug, having gotten straight to the point. 

“Have they now?” asked Sasha. “You tell a story once and all of a sudden people want to use you as weekly entertainment. We might as well start advertising!” He put his hands up as if imagining the poster. “The Great Russian Spy Sasha! Every night at David’s! Of course, I wouldn’t do it for free. I’d need some payment,” he said, rubbing two of his fingers together. 

“Alright, alright,” said David, “Your drinks are on the house tonight.” Sasha grunted and nodded in acknowledgement. 

The usual night crowd began to filter in as people got off work. David surveyed the crowd in his pub between orders. Seeing the different people was one of his favorite parts of the job. You had bookworms with surprisingly high alcohol tolerances, college kids with surprisingly low ones, business men and women stopping by after work, one or two hippies, and a couple pairs of parents who made David’s their weekly nights out. Most of them were here for Sasha. At first, David was a little disgruntled that people came here for Sasha, instead of his quality microbrews or fish and chips, but David’s and Sasha had become a package deal. You couldn’t have one without the other. 

As the night continued, the pub was filled with the happy sounds of chatter and clinking mugs. A couple in their early 30s moved from admiring the tally board to approaching Sasha. 

“Hello, my name is Dillon, and this is my wife, Emilia,” the man said a little tentatively, extending a hand. Sasha gave him a once over before shaking his hand and then Emilia’s. 

“May we sit?” she asked, and Sasha grunted with a nod. 

“I suppose we were really wanting to ask you about your stories,” said Emilia.  

“My stories? Aish,” said Sasha, “Now why would you be  interested in those? What about your story? Tell me that one first.” 

The couple glanced at one another, “Well,” Emilia started, “I met Dillon when he came wandering into my dad’s bookshop. What year was it? Sophomore?”  

“Junior,” Dillon corrected. 

“Anyways, he looked lost. Said someone recommended him to come in here for his textbooks that semester. He was getting his degree in Business and I’d just finished my Masters in English that summer, so I wasn’t sure if I could help, but two hours later we were sitting on the hardwood floor thumbing through classics.” She shrugged as if to say, ‘and then it was happily ever after.’ “Now then. What about one of your stories? I notice you wear a wedding ring? There’s got to be quite a story behind that,” she smiled in expectation. 

“No, not really. Anya picked it up from St. Petersburg.” Emilia’s smile fell. Sasha took a long swig from his third bottle of beer. 

“I will tell you one story, though,” he said swallowing and smacking his lips. “It all started in the Himalayas. Anya and I were hunting a band of sex traffickers for months. It was just beginning to get cold . The winds were strong, and it felt like daggers were cutting into your ears.” He dashed to the coat rack and pulled a scarf from it, wrapping it around his head and face. 

“We got inside info that they were going to meet with a buyer in a tavern in Darjeeling. It was dark when we arrived in town. Back then, the streetlights were still lit with real candles. There were pockets of light every 3 feet. We had to be careful not to be seen. There were guards and thieves around every corner,” he said, placing his back against the wall of the bar and looking around for threats. 

“It took a long time, going from shadow to shadow, but eventually we got to the tavern. It wasn’t much different from this one. Smoke hung in the air. Someone plucked a sitar in the back. The men were boisterous as always, playing cards and drinking. The leader caught my eye. His name was Vihaan. God, he was a piece of work. Made my stomach turn just looking at him. He had a scar over one eye. It was from his father, or so the rumor went. I’d seen him do too many horrible things. I longed to put a matching one on that other eye. I wanted to jump across the tavern and put a bullet through his chest, but Anya held me back. She always knew when I was about to do something rash. I know if she hadn’t been there I would have killed that man and then his men would have killed all the young girls we were trying to protect. My angel, Anya,” he reminisced for a moment before yanking out a chair and taking a seat. 

“We sat and waited. No one took much notice of us. People came through all the time. It was early morning by the time Vihaan and the buyer shook hands and left. Anya and I swiftly followed. They walked toward the edge of town. I could see Vihaan’s men holding torches. The girls were shackled together and shivering. We got as close as we could without alerting them,” he said acting out such. 

“Vihaan un-shackled four girls and tied them together with rope. The buyer was waiting. I looked at Anya. She had fire in her eyes, glowing like a cat’s in the night. I knew that look. She pulled out her gun and I did the same. She zigzagged away from me to flank the bastards. Before they even registered what happened, two of them were dead. The girls screamed as their captors fell to the ground in pools of blood. The buyer grabbed them while Vihaan pulled out a sword. I’d always been a fan of hand to hand combat, so I pulled out my own,” Sasha said, grabbing his umbrella. 

“Anya went for the buyer, wrestling with him for the girls. I fought Vihaan with every ounce of my strength. The clashing swords sent sparks into the night. He leered at me while he fought. ‘You’re from the tavern’, he growled. I didn’t respond, too focused on our battle. I jabbed at him, he dodged and parried. This town was mountainous, so we were climbing over boulders, trying not to be sliced open in the cold air. With the luck of Heaven, I pushed Vihaan down and disarmed him. That was when I felt the pain,” he said, staggering back into a table and knocking it over. 

“I put my hand to my chest and saw blood. It was pouring out of me. The bullet had gone straight through,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a dark brown scar. “I only had time to turn around to see my killer, who held a smoking gun, before I passed out,” Sasha fell to the floor and closed his eyes. Everyone looked at one another, startled. 

“Then,” Sasha’s eyes popped open, “the next thing I knew I’m in a tent in the middle of a mountain pasture. Anya had beaten those the rest of them all by herself and the only injury she gained was a slice on the cheek. I demanded to know what happened, but like the Russian woman she is, she demanded that I relax. I asked what happened to the girls. She said they were in the next tent over. She had telegrammed one of her trusted contacts to come retrieve them and take them safely home. I was bedridden for three weeks. It’s a good thing Anya trained under a doctor for so many years. I always told her, she was my angel. I would have died that night without her.” 

Sasha climbed back onto his stool. He pulled his fourth beer towards him and drained it. His eyes glistened a little. 

David looked in dismay at what Sasha had created in almost ten minutes. The center of his pub was a mess, with chairs and tables overturned. Sasha still wore the stranger’s scarf around his head, and people were starting to applaud. David needed a drink. 

Sasha moved from his 4th drink to his 5th, and once the couple realized they would get no more out of Sasha, they left. Slowly, as night lagged into morning, everyone was gone except for Sasha. David would’ve pulled his drinks back, but Sasha spent the rest of his time caressing the last few drops of his 5th, whil staring into space. He finished washing the last glass and went to try and jog Sasha out of his stupor. 

“Sasha,” he tried. He came around the corner and gave the old man a gentle shake. 

“Sasha,” he tried again. The old bugger was asleep. David sighed and shook him a little harder. 

“Sasha!” David said louder. Sasha moaned a little. 

“я проснулся. I’m awake,” he said, in a heavy Russian accent. 

“I’m taking you home,” said David. He turned the lights off and pulled one of Sasha’s arms over his shoulders. Sasha put his weight on David and they wobbled out of the pub. As David locked the door, he realized he didn’t know where Sasha lived. He thought about what he normally did with drunks, dropped them off at the nearest police station. But he couldn’t do that to Sasha. It wasn’t like he was dangerous. He could sleep on the couch. David walked the three blocks to his apartment, Sasha leaning on one side. He opened the door, feeling great relief to be home, and gently placed Sasha on the couch. Sasha stirred a little as David threw a blanket over him. 

“Goodnight my darling Anya,” said Sasha.  

Later that night, David lay in bed, wide awake. He kept mulling over Sasha’s story. It’s possible that Sasha worked in the Himalayas, but did he really fight off an entire gang all on his own? Tonight, with the scar, it made David wonder. That wasn’t natural for Sasha, but granted, this was the first story where he’d really talked about Anya. He’d mentioned her name before, but never a story that included her 

The more he thought about it, the more he realized how little he knew about Sasha. For a man that came into his pub every night of the week, they never talked about what was happening now. It was always some story in a far off place, from years ago. It was quite possible David was the closest “friend” Sasha had, and he never asked about his current life. Just as his eyelids were beginning to shut, David made the decision that it didn’t matter if Sasha’s stories were one hundred percent true, he gave people entertainment and happiness and that was the important bit, wasn’t it?

When I was in the fourth grade, Matt Fischer got stabbed outside Mueller’s Bowling Alley. He didn’t die or anything, but it was the talk of the town for months after it happened. That’s how small towns are. If you live in a big city, you’re used to people getting stabbed all the time, but because exciting things rarely happen in towns with populations under two thousand people, a seventeen-year-old kid getting knifed by a confused drunk guy, it becomes the talk of the town.

After that, my brother and I weren’t allowed to go to the bowling alley without our parents anymore. This was annoying because both my parents worked all the time and there weren’t many other air-conditioned places for kids to go during the summer. So, one July day, when I was ten years old, and my brother Darren was eleven, we ended up going to play in Peterson’s creek.

We were both lying on our stomachs on the plush, blue carpet of our family’s living room, sweltering with only the ceiling fan providing minimal relief. My long hair was tied up in a pony-tail on top of my head to keep it off my neck. I was envious of the way boys were allowed to shave their heads in the summer while I was forced to tote around my mop of hair, even when it was over ninety degrees outside. I wasn’t sure who created that rule, but I wasn’t fond of them.

“Have you ever caught a fish with your bare hands?” I asked Darren.

“What kind of fish?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the PBS program playing on our television set.

“What does that matter?”

“Some fish are easier to catch than others. I could probably catch a trout, no problem, but a jellyfish would be trickier.”

“I’m not asking if you could catch a fish with your bare hands, I’m asking if you have,” I said, rolling my eyes. It was times like this that I cursed my parents for stranding me here, away from all my friends, with only my brother for company. It was if they wanted us to kill each other so that they’d only have one left over to deal with.

“Not just yet,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Do you want to?” I asked standing up, tugging on my denim shorts as I did. They were still the same ones from last summer, and they’d gotten too tight for my liking, but my mom thought we could still get another year out of them.

“Right now?” Darren asked, rolling onto his back.

“You got something better to do?”

“Where are we gonna catch this fish?” he said, looking doubtful.

“I know a place,” I said, turning and marching out the back door without waiting for him. I knew he’d follow. He was as starved for entertainment as I was.

Sure enough, a few moments later I heard the screen door slam and the sound of his feet pounding along the brown grass of our lawn. “This better not be some wild goose chase of yours where you lead me around all day, and we never end up getting to what you set us out to do.”

“I never do that,” I said, flipping my ponytail with my hand so it hit him in the face. I heard him grumble something behind me, but I chose to ignore it.

We walked for about ten minutes with me leading the way and Darren a few paces behind me before he started complaining. “You’re not going to make us walk all the way to Peoria for this stupid fish, are you?”

I huffed at him and didn’t respond. He’d always been a complainer. Mom said that it came from his general nervous disposition. Our Grandma Jeannie was the same way. Gave herself an ulcer from all the worrying she did. Before she died last summer, she hadn’t left her house in two years. I couldn’t imagine staying cooped up inside for that long. Dad said that the outside had become too scary for her to handle. I asked my Dad if it was the spiders and such that were keeping her inside—because truth be told, they gave me the creeps too—but he just laughed kind of sad-like and told me I’d understand when I was older.

“Oh no. Absolutely not,” Darren said from behind me. We’d reached the chain-link fence that blocked off the perimeter of the Peterson’s property.

“C’mon, don’t be such a wuss,” I said as I lowered myself flat on the ground and rolled underneath the gap in the fence. I stood up, tugged on my shorts, and brushed the dirt from my front.

“What about their Rottweilers?” Darren asked, looking off into the distance behind me.

“If they come after us, which I doubt they will because they’re both about a hundred in dog years, we’ll climb one of those trees to get away from them,” I said, gesturing to the plethora of perfect climbing trees surrounding us. Darren gave me a doubtful look, but he followed my lead and did an ungraceful shimmy underneath the fence.

“Thank you for joining me today, Darren,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Today is the day you become a man.”

“I thought I’d become a man at my bar mitzvah,” he said, taking my hand in his and throwing it off his shoulder.

“That’s what mom and dad want you to think, but that’s not true. You can only truly become a man when you catch your first fish.”

“Does that mean if you catch a fish today that you become a man, too?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. I guess we’ll see,” I said, turning and skipping off in the direction of the creek.

Darren jogged behind me.

The creek was in the northwest corner of the Peterson’s property so we only had to walk a few minutes before we reached it. Central Illinois was not known to be a place with many lakes, and the Peterson’s creek was one of the only places for miles to cool off from the heat. The Petersons attempted to keep out trespassers by putting up a fence and adopting twin Rottweilers, Zeus and Poseidon. This did cut down the problem considerably, but everyone knew how to get past the fence and the dogs.

I never could understand what the Peterson’s problem was with sharing their creek anyway. It wasn’t like they’d dug it themselves. They just so happened to buy this chunk of land that just so happened to have some water on it. And they didn’t even have any kids who could get any use out of it. They let it sit on their property untouched. It was selfish, and I felt absolutely no guilt in trespassing on their land that day and attempting to steal some fish out of their creek with my bare hands.

“There she is,” I said as we approached the creek, looking down over it from the top of the hill that stood next to it.

“Stop talking like you’re a pirate,” Darren said, walking down the hill ahead of me. I didn’t appreciate not being in the lead, so I ran full-force down the hill, wind-milling my arms and shoving him out of the way as I barreled all the way down, stopping just short of falling face-first into the somewhat murky water.

“And you wonder why the kids at school call you weird,” Darren teased, out of breath from running down the hill.

“Daddy says it’s because they’re jealous of my individuality,” I said, sticking out my tongue.

“My friends say it’s because you’re a few spoons short of a dining set,” he said under his breath.

I felt a sting in my throat and behind my eyes. “I’m going in,” I said, and started splashing my way into the water.

“Diana, you don’t know what’s in there!” Darren shouted.

“It’s a creek, not the Pacific Ocean,” I shouted back.

I continued splashing my way farther in. I realized that I was probably scaring any nearby fish away, but I didn’t really care about catching fish anymore. I wanted to get away from Darren, and what he said, and from myself.

“Diana, stop!” Darren shouted again. I heard him enter the water behind me. I knew he thought it was infested with diseases.

“It’s fine. I’m fine!” I shouted back, but I took one more step and suddenly couldn’t reach the bottom anymore. Submerged, I let out a scream and my lungs filled with water. I struggled to get my head above water, but I’d never learned to swim. Our town didn’t have a pool, and mom and dad didn’t have time to drive me twenty minutes away to take lessons. I thrashed around in water, but felt myself being pulled farther down. My head was feeling fuzzy and my lungs hurt so badly that I didn’t think I could stand another second when I felt a pair of arms wrap around my middle and drag me above into the sunlight.

“You stupid idiot,” Darren sputtered when we got to the shoreline.

Amid coughing up water, I asked, “When the hell did you learn to swim?” I didn’t think lungs would ever empty of the water.

“Eddie’s older brother taught me last year when I went camping with his family,” he said, lying on his back next to me in the grass.

“Tell Eddie’s brother that I owe him my life,” I said, lying face-down, still spitting up sludgy water.

“You owe me your life, you little shit,” Darren said, whacking me on the back; which actually helped to get out the last of the water.

“It looks like I was right,” I said, rolling over onto my back and looking up at the cloudless, blue sky.

“About what?”

“Today was the day that you became a man,” I said, grabbing his hand in mine. “Mazel tov.”

“I should have let you drown,” he said, but he didn’t let go of my hand. In my memory, he held it tighter, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.

I think about that day a lot. It was my first real brush with death. I would like to say that it made me more careful with my own life, but I continued to be as reckless. Darren continued to be as careful as ever.

In the car crash when he was nineteen, he hadn’t done anything wrong. A drunk driver swerved into his lane and the police officer on the scene said there was nothing Darren could have done.

That was the moment when I realized why Grandma Jeannie was so afraid to leave her house. No matter how hard you tried to be careful and be a good person, terrible things could still happen. You can’t control what other people do.  You could spend your whole life doing everything right, and it could all end in a split second in the parking lot of a bowling alley, or in a neighbor’s creek, or on a highway in the middle of the night. I saw that I wasn’t smarter than Darren—and everyone else, for that matter—like I’d always thought. But rather, I was the idiot who was naïve enough to believe that world owed me something like safety.

The next word I lightly scribbled on my bit of scratch paper was “Rose.”

Needing yet another reprieve from the clipboard on my lap, I looked up to see pairs of newlyweds peppering the gaudy office furniture. They must have either been too practical or too in love to plan their moments far in advance. I snapped back to the other words that I’d hidden behind haphazard pen lines, so that the letters were sufficiently unrecognizable, and briefly considered adding “Rose” to that growing list. A rush of nostalgia made me pause, the tip of my pen a millimeter above the paper.

Though I’d not thought about it in years, I was suddenly standing beside a hand painted sign that read “April’s Rose Garden,” with “Rose” set at a diagonal, linking “April’s” and “Garden.” During the first of two summers I’d spent in that drab suburb just outside of Dallas, I’d often make the short walk to the garden with a neighborhood boy who dutifully kept me company during those long afternoons in the blistering Texas heat.

Ignoring the thorns, this boy picked a stray rose that wouldn’t be missed and handed it to me, asking if I was a boy or a girl.

Apparently, I was getting the beautifully wilted rose regardless, so I chose not to answer.

In the years that followed, the delineations would become much more defined, much more restricting, but those long summer days afforded me the opportunity to revel in the ambiguity, like any child ought to be able to do,  without thinking about it too much.

“Rose” was safe.

The next word that jumped clumsily from the pen to the page was “Mary.”

There were a few important Mary’s for my brain to sort through, and I had no reason to try to stop that process. Eventually, it placed me back in a library where as a slightly older child I’d sought refuge from the increasingly biting Delaware air. There, my body was slowly but dutifully acclimating itself from the Texas swelter of the summers prior, and that was where my brain settled on a towering, slender figure who wore suits better than anyone I’d seen before or since. That figure first caught my eye while the accompanying voice bellowed out a spooky October story in the library for a set of frightened and intrigued kindergarteners. I fancied myself a year and some months too old to join them on the carpet to stare up at the person whose name tag read “Mary.”

Looking in my direction with crystal blue eyes, Mary flashed a quick smile, full of impossibly white teeth. That library had become my haven for the impending winter, and I noticed something peculiar in the way the other librarians spoke about their younger colleague. If I’d had the reference then, I’d have expected them to break into “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” Nothing, I would realize, could stop Mary from walking chin up, chest out, or from exchanging mischievous smiles with every kid who frequented the library, or from shining brightly in her seemingly endless wardrobe of perfectly pressed suits.

Then, I strode with reaffirmed confidence back to the present moment, where I remembered I didn’t have any more obligation to the second name my mother had given me than to the first, which I’d happily shed all those years before.

I wouldn’t waste the generous gift of a blank form.  As I scrawled “Rosemary,” I bit my bottom lip and smiled down at the page. It happened to be the herb I’d used to season a stew the night before, which provided a bit of refuge from the Pacific Northwest drizzle outside my little house made of stone. A lot of the past, my new name would be, with a dash of the present and a bit of levity. “Rosemary” fit perfectly in the box labeled “Middle Name” on the petition for that document I was getting even though I’d stopped questioning myself long before. These bits of paper were to serve as proof, to those who’d need it, that I am who I say I am. That I always have been, and I always will be.

Hello? Hello? I — Hey? Hello? Lord? — I gotta question for you.

Sorry, I, uh — Hi. Hey there. I feel like you might be confused right about now. Are you confused, man? You’re probably confused to find me here, strung out good on a spoil pile south of the Mason Dixon. I know I was up in Mass last time I checked in. Now, I bet you’re curious how an old hustling homebody like me made it all the way down to Florida. Are you scrambling now, Lord, to rewind the tapes? Were you not exactly focusing on me and now you’re all mixed up? I understand. My life hasn’t exactly been the kind of serial you’d wanna follow.

Well, I’m coming to you now, Lord, hat in hand. I don’t actually got a hat anymore but I’m here with an imaginary hat in my hand. My Sox hat. From 6th grade. Remember that one? Probably not. I don’t expect you to keep tabs on all seven and a half billion of us. Remember  that time I kept Tweetie alive in my cell for a few months? I feel like you might’ve tuned in for that. Do you remember her? Her ma made a nest up on the flagpole and she fell out into the yard? I shredded up my bed sheets and made her a new nest. I know birds come dime a dozen for you, but my thought at the time was if I could keep her alive til she could feed herself and fly off, I would’ve made my positive contribution.

Well, the bird died. Just an FYI. You know, in case you were invested but had too much on your plate to keep up. I read a line from your holy book and flushed her down.

It’s a birdless moon out here tonight though, man. I mean, jeez, it looks like something strip searched the world and never returned its valuables. I bet you don’t have spoil piles in heaven. Overburden. That’s what those women kept calling it. Spoil piles. Overburden. Just fancy terms that mean earth that got dug up. Now as you can see I am lying on the overburden. Probably if you did a quick aerial scan you’d think, that is one dead fucking man lying on some dead rocks. Overburden on overburden. Don’t be fooled though, Lord. My lips aren’t moving, but I’m batting a thousand in here. We all got a direct line to you in our heads, I think. Never really understood how that works but I’m hoping the signal is good cause I got a question for you. Can’t exactly remember it at the moment but I know it’s in here somewhere.

I’m a little nervous, honestly, after all those things I called you. Your honorary titles: Cosmic Dildo etc. etc. The Big Friendly Git. Sorry about that. Ha Ha. From now on you are Lord and Lord only. Although, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again if I don’t hear back from you, I’m gonna have trouble buying in. But that’s not a threat, Lord. I promise. I’ll take whatever’s on offer. Don’t need no five paragraph handjob. Definitely no stone tablets. Just an answer. A name. Or a sign. Have a raven drop a detox pamphlet on my head. You know. Something obvious.

Hah. Jeez, asking you to give me an answer when I can’t even pony up the question. Don’t worry, Lord, I know I sound mixed up, but I’m solid. I’m still breathing. I ain’t gonna die.

Here’s something though, Lord. Until I came here to this strange place, I thought I wanted to — die I mean. Even when I’d been living good for a while, living clean. Even then. The thing was, living clean, I felt even smaller than I did when I was using. Had a gig breaking down boxes at Home Depot and a bed in the Kilby Street shelter. You weren’t watching then, I bet. Life was boxes, boxes, cigarettes, then Law and Order reruns on YouTube on my phone at night. I wasn’t paying out at the shelter so I was giving ma money to make rent cause her COPD made it hard for her to do most things. That and her being 80 years old and all.

I know everybody’s got their axe to grind with you, but you fucked me on that good streak, Lord. You should watch the tapes, if you’re archiving that shit. Just so you know what it’s like be so small and fail so bad. Just rewind to when Shawna ODed at the shelter. Red-haired Shawna, who was always packing heat. I had some Narcan and I tried to squirt it up her nose like it shows in the pictures on the box but the government don’t train the shelter staff with it and the attendant stopped me. Thought I was trying to give her more drugs. I watched her gurgling, waiting for the ambulance. When they finally got there she was this light blue color that would’ve been pretty, like she was a pretty alien girl dropped down from Pluto, except she was dead.

Fine, Lord I won’t kid you I’d been using too. I was gonna shoot the same shit as Shawna but I saw her freeze up. Then that big guy on staff pinned me down, though I wrestled to get her that Narcan. He was looking at me all gentle while she was gasping just a foot away.

I slept sick in all sorts of ways that night, Lord. Didn’t fall asleep until dawn and then slept through my shift at the Depot. They said the box breaker downers are a crucial part of the operation and they can’t have this kind of lapse in efficiency etc. etc. My manager said they always give folks like me a chance and then we always make it hard for them to extend a helping hand in the future. Still, I was okay. Shook up from Shawna and all but I’ve seen worse.

Do you know though, Lord, what happened to ma when I stopped paying rent?

Watch the tapes, man. Dust them off and watch them.

Are you watching now? Are you worried, Lord? Don’t worry. I just shot a little bit. Just to tide me over while I think on this question I got for you, just to make this sick go away. It’s nice and warm out here, actually, and the clay is soft from when it rained earlier. No feather bed, but it’s fine. Every time I think of ma though, Lord, the pain in here is so great it feels like there’s some part of me that’s singing, trying to get rid of this extra I can’t hold.

You ever run so hard, man, your shoes wear out and then your skin tears up and then you’re hobble-running on two boney stumps? After everything with ma, I ran that hard. Tore up Worcester. Went to the reservoir where all the doctors leave their unlocked cars and go to jog. I jacked one. Took it for a joyride with Big Jimmy, that little guy I met all those years back at the school for defective boys. We bought dope from his ex, and she told us the stuff they’re selling out in Springfield’s so thick with Fentanyl, it’s killing everybody who so much as looks at it. There’s other ways it could be, man. Jimmy said when we heard that. But we both knew that wasn’t true. A minute later, we were gunning west down the highway and I thought, this is the only way I can stand it, charging the edge like some spooked buffalo. Jimmy and I, a two man herd. Didn’t want to talk to you then, Lord. Just kept thinking, who made the exit sign so goddamn bright.

At some point Jimmy reminded me of when my pops came to visit at the school and he tripped down the stairs when he was leaving. That was the hardest I ever laughed. When Jimmy reminded me of it, I laughed so hard again, I was unsure if I was laughing or crying and it felt so good. I kept my eyes closed a second longer than was right, feeling how it was to laugh again and have my ribs hurt in a sweet way. Then we were soaring, Lord, and then we were still.

The impact was bad. Like my whole body was an abscess, lanced with one punched slice.

When I opened my eyes, I was upside down, caught in the seat belt, and Jimmy was gone. When he flew through the front window, he’d left a glass-jagged mouth, broke-tooth, like the one on that Richards Street whore who could never put on lipstick right. You don’t know her, I bet. Red all over her gums and the few teeth she’s got left. Looking at Jimmy’s hole, I knew I was never gonna use again.

Ha ha. Never again. Do you know what’s here in this overburden, Lord? Those women showed me. Teeth. Shark’s teeth. Meg-a-lo-dons. The women said they’d only been finding shards today. Frags, they called them. They were digging them out of the clay with a screwdriver when I walked out of the woods. Can you tell there’s teeth in here, Lord? Where you are this all must look like grey pimples. I learned from the women, though, rock’s not just rock. It’s bone. And teeth. Old bits and bobs of things sunk down and pressed together and then come back up.

After the women left, I must’ve found a good one. I got it here, got my thumb on it. Three inches, smoothed out at the tip like sea glass. Not like anything that used to tear up whales. I want to bring it to someone, maybe to them, and not ‘cause I want to give it up. I just want to look at it with another person. Even though we’d still be dingleberries on some titan’s ass, we’d be big, remembering back farther than our lives, to when all this was ocean.

Don’t worry, man, I know I’m getting sentimental, but don’t worry. Look, I can’t open my eyes but I can roll them up and down behind my lids. Copacetic, Lord. Everything is A-OK.

My heart’s still beating. Just gonna shoot a little more of this, now, if I can. Mmm.

Lord, just for your records. I did check on Jimmy after the crash. He’d joined you. Then I walked on to Springfield, took a bird bath in Dunkin’s, and got on the next bus south.

On the way down, I shot the shit for a long time with the bus driver, Al. Gifted him my phone. Just ‘cause he seemed like a nice guy. And ‘cause I kept thinking ma might call, though I knew she wouldn’t. Al’d done time too. Took him 20 years to get his license back. He was in some special program where they return it in exchange for you telling kids how messed up it was inside. Al, I said finally, my ticket only covers to Georgia but I need to get farther.

Al said I could ride as long as I wanted. I went to the back then and cozied up. Oh yeah, Lord, and I bought some of what I thought was that good dope in Springfield. I was shooting it all the way down, trying to bite it in the bathroom. Whatever I got wasn’t laced though. Good but not lethal. By the time we were in south Georgia, I was strung out in the backseat with no dope left. When I started sweating, I knew I had a day or so before I shat my insides out.

Soon after the sick came on, man, we entered this town. My eyes were all crusted but when I cracked them open, I was good surprised. I don’t mean to be cheeky, but I thought wow, a place that’s shittier than my own mind. If my muscles hadn’t felt so achy and my nose been trying to turn my face into a slip n’ slide, I would’ve felt like a brand new baby angel compared to this place. I knew there had to be dope around. When I got off, Al even said, here?

Here. I told him for sure.

I walked around for awhile then, feeling right at home. Fiend on every street corner, attracting flies, mumbling about this apocalypse and that devil. Courthouse like the Taj. You get it. Maybe you get it. At the same time, Lord, I felt like I was as far from home as I could be. I felt stretched out, thin and low, having come down from wanting death so bad and starting now to get that sick in me instead. Those shivers. Hot and wet and dry and cold all at once. But I was so tired, man, so not wanting anything, not even dope, that I had a strange feeling I could face any ill was coming on, even if I never got high again. I was a bird wing, Lord, hollow, no muscle or heart or any other of this meat I was sure you’d stuck on me.

I glided through town like this, feeling I was maybe still approaching the edge, just much slower than before. At peace in a way but not at home. No Dunkin’s iced coffee in sight, no Maytime snow melts. Everything around just dusty and hot, like you took a straw, Lord, and sucked out all the moisture from on high. And I was thirsty to match it. Thirsty and drifting and feeling like I was in a dream, or a funhouse, none of the signs making any sense in this town. Like they hadn’t been updated in some time. Like you hadn’t been checking in. Catch a Mighty Swamp Bass! One read, like it and I weren’t in the closest thing to the Gobi this side of the pond. Jenkins’ Swamp Tours, another said, and beneath it was a busted porch with a man on it.

Keep moving asshole. The man said. And I felt seen for who I really was, Lord. I tipped my imaginary hat to him. He spat at my feet and I did what he said. Kept on moving.

Took me a few minutes after that to find my kind of bum, shaded beneath the belly of a giant gator statue in the town center. The gator’s mouth was roaring but some of his scales and a few of his teeth were gone, like he was one of us. Meth mouth, I said, pointing up at the holes. The man laughed. His junk was hanging out the fly of his shorts and he had a Pluto-sized abscess on his leg. Point me to the well, I said. He shook his head. No clean water around. Unless you get a bottle from the Mart. All’s junk. He said. Take it up with Potash.

I told him I didn’t mean that kind of water. I wanted to ask, was this hell that I’d stumbled upon, but then I felt sun on the back of my neck, and warm spreading down my spine. I looked up at the gator, not like any creature you’d find at home, and I felt strange and respectful, Lord. Strangely respectful, and five years old again in the one-room on Kilby. Ma kneeling by the mantle with the cross on it and the crèche I always messed with, swapping out the baby Jesus for the plastic toucan from the Froot Loops. Me on the mattress, sometimes bored, pulling the bible over and licking it to see how books tasted. But most of the time looking at ma, her lips making prayer shapes. This gator seemed like something ma prayed to without knowing, like something the aliens left, man, way long ago with the pyramids. It seemed as distant as Jesus’ words, the ones that never sounded like what people spat from their mouths just outside our window. Felt out of my league looking at it, Lord, like when I would pretend to be asleep but still hear ma praying for you to have pity on me, like we were leaning over the edge of a dirty brick ship and she was holding me out towards a lifeboat with just one spot left in it.

The bum was speaking to me though, and I had to listen. I was still so thirsty. There’re other ways it could be. He said. Excuse me? I said. He repeated himself. There’s the way by the bees, he said again. I won’t lie, Lord, I was swaying while he spoke. So sick and thirsty. He pointed down a street paved with asphalt, heat making the buildings along it jiggle. See the bees, that’s the path to take, he said. Through the woods. Just a mile or so. You’ll see the spoil piles.

Lord, ‘scuse my priorities, but listening to this man speak nonsense, I thought, at least the dope around here is good. Maybe this time it will really kill me.

Sir, I said then, trying to pierce through his dope haze, I am looking to buy some smack.

I know. He laughed. But it’s fit to rain. They’ll be at the spoil pile. Trust me, he said. Wet clay’s good for digging. I looked up and saw the sky then, stretching out like grey wool.

After he spoke, I did what he said, because my skin was also starting to jiggle from the heat and the sick. I walked slow down the street in the shade of the buildings, rounding the corner to see an old tin sign with a cartoon bee on it, smiling and pointing its yellow finger. Darling’s Tupelo Honey it said, the bee pointing towards a line of trees with a path cut through. Someone had spray-painted a giant cock over the face of the bee.

I entered the woods then, where there was no shade, and all of the trees were stumps, not clean cut like they’d been logged but piddling off into rotting fingers. I’ve always felt like a corpse, Lord, but walking through there, I was the only living thing left. I fixed my eyes on the path, from which the earth ran out in cracks across dried marsh and grass, all stuck to itself like hair, yanked and ground down and then plastered where it settled. Soon I thought I’d end up in the white space I go to when I nod off, where my body walks but the ground’s invisible, and all around me’s nothing for miles, and I got to look down at my own hands to remember mattering.

I didn’t though. I hit the spoil piles instead. Should’ve been music, Lord, an organ, but all was quiet, dull, heat-shining mountains of rock stretching out as far as I could see.

I died in the car with Jimmy, I thought then. And they can’t even give me a ride to hell. Made me buy my own goddamn bus ticket. Everything’s got a cost; same’s below as on earth.

I walked right on through those piles, though, Lord. No three-headed dogs. No signs or fences either. Like someone took a shit in public and left it up for grabs, all generous. Had to step around these pools of liquid that must’ve sat awhile. Thick, all of them, and colored like paint.

What a shitty, shitty shithole piece of shit, I thought. And I squeezed my ribs beneath my shirt and tried not to cry. You got it baby, I heard that whore from Kilby Street say in my head. Her mouth sounding full and jangly like her teeth were falling out as she spoke and mixing in with her tongue and messing up her words. You got it. You’re alright.

I saw two women then, with backpacks and black boots, one of them with a gun on her hip and fire-red hair, the other lean and old, kneeling down, scraping at the earth with a screwdriver. I stopped walking, not wanting to scare them. Man by the gator sent me, I called out, and we assessed each other across the pebbles and clay and bone.

Finally one of the women nodded at the other and they made their way over. The one that was packing kept her hand on her hip. Nadia, she said. She had a clear bag full of teeth in her hand. Couldn’t take my eyes off it, Lord. Like she was some mad dentist relieving sores from the earth. Jay, wheezed the other. Then: you looking to score?

I told them yes, but I got no money. Been running all the way from Worcester, I said.

You’re sick, said Jay, in a kindly way. Seen me shiver in the heat, I guess.

We sat down then without a word and they helped me tie a tourniquet around my arm. I asked them about the teeth, just to fill the silence. Trying to remember the last time I let someone touch the inside of my arm, at my veins, around the raw and the festering.

This all used to be under water, one of them said. I couldn’t tell who was rifling through my pockets. I’d nodded so deep, catching only a few sentences here and there. Megs went for the lungs and the hearts, one said. Or the flippers — immobilized you before they took you out.

Leave some for me, I heard myself saying. Don’t leave. Leave just a bit for me. I got nothing but I’ll pay you back somehow. Then I felt one of them press a cooker and a bag into one of my hands, and reach in my pocket. He’s really ain’t got nothing in here, except —  she said, pausing, her nails in my pocket, stretching out like an open jaw with fangs and then closing, leaving.

Goodbye sweet, Nadia said. Bye baby, said Jay. Give yourself a break. And then their faces were gone from the sky and I was staring at hot blue and below it, grey peaks.

In my other hand was a tooth. Until now, I thought I found it on my own, Lord. I was sure it was me picking through the spoils today. That I’d come across it. That it was a message, thrust up through time. I thought ma would like it for her mantle, to put next to the bird in the cradle.

But I haven’t moved since they left. Lord? I’ve been here the whole time. Trying to remember my question. I think I remember it. I do, I remember it now.

Is my Bible still in my pocket? I thought of all people, you could see it. I can’t feel it, but

— No wait, that wasn’t it.

What a strange world we live in, Lord. I remember now.

Won’t you help me? Where on earth did I get this tooth?

“Joni, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but I’ve got an accepted offer on the Blue Lake cottage.” I’d been dreading telling my daughter, but when the time came I blurted it out. I could tell from her face that it was painful news. “I’m very sorry.”

“No, that’s great, dad. Did you get a decent price?” asked Joni, who was always so mature and un-selfish, like her mother.

“Considering the Great Recession and all, I guess so. Didn’t totally lose all of our equity.” Just most of it, I knew, and that included almost all of my late wife Angie’s retirement savings. She’d insisted that we cash it out to give the girls the summer lake house she’d had growing up. I continued, “Lucky thing to sell at all—it’s an English professor and her husband—she’s very interested in the poet Nadine Schmeckpeper, and wants to have a place on her lake.”

“That’s amazing luck! When’s the closing?”

“March 15th. Before then, I’m hoping we can all go cross country skiing up there. Maybe when Emma gets back from Mexico.”

“Sure, I’d love that.”

We both knew it was a pretty scrawny bone I was throwing her.

“I’m sorry we have to sell it. The house was meant to be for you and Emma.”

For all of her worries about money, Angie hadn’t been well insured. She’d switched from being a state worker with a pension to an independent consultant and we’d cashed out her retirement stake to buy the lake house ten years ago. It had seemed like a viable plan at the time, but instead of appreciating, the lake property had sunk like a stone in 2008 after skipping around a bit the first few years.

And, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had put a serious dent in my own earning power as a Madison teacher. It was the same story everywhere — even middle class professionals were now vulnerable to regular annual reductions in earning power. America seemed to be slowly rotting from the greed and indifference of its wealthy masters — a place of crumbling sewers and declining prospects for the less privileged students I’d spent my teaching career trying to lift up.

The radio station was even playing Blue Christmas, by Elvis Presley.

“Very appropriate for the Christmas of 2013!” Joni noted.

“I’ll say!” I replied trying to sound cheerful and carefree, but I felt especially blue, like such a failure as a father, having to sell the family lake house that had meant so much to Angie and our girls. Trying to change the subject, I dramatically picked up that day’s mail. “I’m not sure what offends me more, the braggy Christmas letters or the shtick-laden ones that try too hard to be funny — especially if they refer to their own past Christmas letters using the same shtick. I guess that’s worse — though I suppose the braggy ones are morally more offensive.”

“Why do either of them offend you?” Joni asked, suddenly serious. “What do they offend?”

“Um, well —” I was straining to come up with something, but I knew perfectly well that I was just being a crab and venting all of my various frustrations. “Maybe my idea of good taste?”

“Well I get that — Tom’s annual funny letter is pretty dreadful, and it’s always pretty much the same joke —”

“That’s the shtick part.”

“He’s definitely used that one joke before.” A couple of years ago, Joni had taken my side in the great Christmas letter debate, but that was then.

“You mean — where you think he’s bragging about his salary, but it’s really the number of miles on his car?”

Joni nodded dubiously. She didn’t want to join my Christmas cynics club.

“It was kind of funny the first time,” I said, trying to offer a truce.

Joni was having none of it. “But it’s not even close to offensive though,” she said. “People are just doing their best to be cheerful and to tell others about their lives. Maybe you’re just a Scrooge.”

“Of course, I’m a Scrooge! But only as it relates to Christmas or Holiday Letters. I just find it a little unsettling that Sandra secretly wants to be Erma Bombeck, or that Badger Bob needs to tell me about little Barry’s success in AP Chemistry.”

“Sandra’s letter wasn’t that bad — why are you such a snot at Christmas? And who the hell is Erma Bombeck?”

“I’m so glad you’ve never heard of her! May her cornball shtick rest in peace,” I replied snottily. “But Sandra did her proud with that ‘would the hair on his chest stop growing if her husband asked for directions?’ She may have even stolen that from dear old Erma.”

“You never bragged about my 5 in AP chemistry?” Joni teased. “What kind of a father are you?”  Truce accepted, at last.

“A snotty, Scrooge-like one. Are you sure you won’t go to the office party with me?”

“No, dad. I can’t be your date just because mom’s not around.”

“I know. I know. I’m just dreading it.”

When Joni went upstairs into her room, I re-read a couple of the Christmas and holiday letters. Sandra’s annual offering was a mostly fond recounting of some great retro Battles of the Sexes, which featured the cluelessness of her husband Jake. Had he really bought her a jigsaw for Christmas last year, or was that hyperbole? Did he really drive for hours in circles rather than admit he was lost — was that even possible any more in the era of Google Maps? And, if so, why did Sandra stay with him, year after year? If not, what truth was she trying to convey through her tired jokes and exaggerated rhetoric? That she was lonely living with her conventional husband and three equally clueless sons? Or did it only strike me as such a waste of precious time — a silly rhetorical battle amid serious struggle — because I was so down myself?

On the way to Principal Beth Peterman’s house, I realized that this was the second staff holiday party that I was attending alone — and with the express intention of putting in a polite appearance and heading home. Last year, Angie had been ill, sick to her stomach at the last minute. After helping her back into bed and lying with her quietly for a half hour or so, she’d prevailed upon me to deliver the dessert that she’d spent the afternoon preparing.

Her struggle with cancer had lasted six years, and she’d fought like a warrior until one day, with all hope of keeping it at bay lost, she said, “I can’t do this anymore, Graham.” Her voice had been hoarse from coughing and throwing up. “It’s not a battle I can win.”

She was gone by the end of March.

Beth’s longtime partner, Sally, greeted me with a warm hug and took the tray of slightly misshapen cookies Joni and I had teamed up on. “Angie’s recipe, but not her execution, I’m afraid.”

“They’re lovely, Graham!” said Beth, darting to the door to admit another guest.

The first conversational group to ensnare me included the guy we all called Badger Bob, more than a little sarcastically. His Christmas letter had not only bragged of his son’s mastery of chemistry — the poor kid was named after University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez — but also featured his detailed comments about next year’s football recruiting class.

The mostly male group around Bob was fiercely debating whether or not this year’s Rose Bowl was worth attending. Bob took the affirmative. One of the younger science teachers, Nate Vinson, vigorously took the negative. I looked for a graceful way to exit. As an undergraduate in 1979, I’d come upon a drunken group of pre-game tailgaters stumbling around outside Union South at ten o’clock on a beautiful fall morning.  The sight and sounds of those loud fifty-something men in their prissy red sweaters had imprinted an image in my brain of what I emphatically did not want to be when I grew up. It still held.

I silently slid on to the next group, which included Susan, the locally famous “foodie blogger.” Unsurprisingly, the subject here was food. Her holiday update — cross-posted on her blog and Twitter via link — had disclosed that she was hosting a Prix Fixe Ten Course New Year’s Eve dinner. The group around her discussed the many benefits of local and organic foods, and the usual opinions were expressed.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with any of it, but the conversation just seemed a little tired.
I’d lived in countries where most foods were local and organic; it seemed like a matter of commonsense rather than personal identity. I’d given up reading my old friend’s blog when she’s described her much-photographed and gnarled garden carrots as luminous. Curmudgeon that I was becoming, I believed that food provided sustenance not light.

In my best Anthony Bourdain voice, I noted that a couple of her hors’ d’oeuvres were ‘amazingly flavorful!’ “Kudos!” I added quickly before moving on.

I spotted another solitary straggler: a fifty-something female newcomer about my own age. I approached her, and we introduced ourselves. Her name was Marina. She was a Women’s Studies professor in Milwaukee, and she was there on a date with my most sexist colleague, Doug Flaherty. For the past five years, I’d tried to steer clear of him after testifying against him in a sexual harassment case.

“Wait, you teach Women’s Studies, and you’re here with Doug?” The irony was too rich after that second glass of wine.

“Yes, and that obviously surprises and amuses you.” She looked both tough and vulnerable.

“Sorry, no — nothing surprises me anymore. How were the roads from Milwaukee?”

“Nice try. Is it because he has a rather crude sense of humor? Feminists aren’t all prudes, you know.”

“Of course not, and thank evolution for that, from my perspective as a male of the species.” Did I have any obligation to tell her that two harassment cases had been filed against Doug? That he would indiscriminately talk about his sexual conquests in the break room? “It’s awkward. I see him every day.”

“There is more then?” She looked directly in my eyes, pleading. Hers were cocoa-brown and a little sad. “Please —”

“Look, my personal opinion is that the guy’s a pig. He’s had two sexual harassment cases filed against him since I’ve known him, and the second one settled in the middle five figures. But I guess people can change.”

Her proud sharp face cringed at this news, at her misjudgment. “Thank you, you’re a pal. Here he comes by the way.”

“Ah, so you two have met,” the usually glib Doug looked and sounded a little unsettled. “Happy holidays, Graham — I’m sure it’s not an easy time for you. Graham lost his wife this past spring.”

Talk about trying to change the subject! I nodded indifferently. “Thanks, same to you.”

“Doug, will you be a dear and get me another glass of that Malbec?”

As soon as he’d left, Marina leaned over and said, “If you want to talk more, meet me at the piano bar at the Edgewater Hotel at 11:30 tonight. And thanks again.”

I went to refresh my own wine glass, and then drifted into another conversational group — this one discussing a popular, but apparently badly-written, sexually explicit novel about S & M. I smiled and nodded at the naughty bits, but mostly thought about whether or not I was going to go to the Edgewater later that night.

I liked talking to Marina, but Angie and I’d had our wedding reception in that hotel 25 years ago, so it seemed inappropriate. Still, there I was, at 11:15 sharp — driving downtown to the venerable, and recently controversial, old hotel on Lake Mendota. I wasn’t ready for a new romance, but something inside me was quickening nonetheless.

I was so tired of the same old conversations and my bitter or ironic reactions to them; I was sick of grief and financial worries and feeling like the whole burden of keeping a family together was upon me. Parking my car in the underground garage and making my way to the elevator to the lobby, I realized how ready I was for something new — whatever it was.

In the bar, by herself, waiting for me, was Marina in all of her sophisticated fifty-something newness. Her features had a sharpness to them that gave her countenance an almost aggressive look, but her smile in greeting me changed it into the face of a milder, different person.

“You made it!” she exclaimed.

“You seem surprised.”

“Yes, but pleasantly so. I didn’t get a chance to tell you this before, but I’ve lost a spouse, too.” She wasn’t aggressive; she was sad.

“I’m sorry.” How quick I was to judge!

“So, I knew it could go either way.”

“I debated a little, but I was determined to come. I liked talking to you. When did you lose your partner?”

“Six years ago, right around this time of the year. That’s why I appreciate some company, apparently even that of scoundrels. Tom had a heart attack and died instantly.”

“That’s horrible. Six years is about how long Angie’s illness lasted.” I took her hand from across the little table, and we just looked at each other, acknowledging the distance between what we could say and what we felt. “At least I had time to see it coming. I saw some sadness in your brown eyes, and that’s why I told you about Flaherty.”

“Was Doug really that bad? I even searched circuit court records, and supposedly the Internet Dating site we met on did, too.”

“Trust me. You can do better. How did it go, ditching Doug?”

“I’m not sure, but he went home, at least for now.”

“I’m glad he did, and I appreciate the company, too.”

“I’d already seen some of that side that you described. But I didn’t think it was anything worse than the usual male crudeness.”

I told her about the two cases. About how the victim of the second case was a first-year teacher only a couple of years older than my daughter. She’d come to me to show me some of the sexually suggestive emails he’d been sending her. Her fingers were bleeding. She’d been chewing her nails from worry. She’d asked me to ask him to stop, which I did, but he persisted for another six months until she went to the superintendent’s office. I spoke to the investigator on her behalf. After that, I hadn’t really spoken to Doug until tonight.

“Sounds like a first-class pig alright.” Marina thanked me again and we moved on to other topics. “How old are your kids?”

“Emma is 19 and doing a year abroad in Mexico and Joni is 22 and just graduated from the University of Minnesota. Do you have children?”

“No, but not for want of trying. When I was forty — thirteen years ago, since we’re being so honest —”

“We’re contemporaries, I’m 55.”

“Thought we might be. When I was 40, I had two miscarriages. We’d just decided to adopt right before Tom’s heart attack, but I didn’t have it in me after he was gone.” Her eyes had gotten moist. “How’re your girls doing?”

“The holidays are hard.” I didn’t like seeing her so sad. It made me think of my girls.

“Still are for me, which is why I was at your boring office party tonight.” We both chuckled.

“I feel all of this pressure with the girls to make everything like it used to be, but of course, it’s not.”

She took my hand. “I hear you. But you know — don’t take this the wrong way —”

“Go ahead, please.”

“Another way to think about it is that you’re lucky to have each other to share that grief.”

“Thank you, that is a new take on it.”

She told me about her job and her students at UW-Milwaukee, and I told her about my East High school students, many of who wound up at UWM. We both liked our students but sometimes felt exhausted by our jobs and having the same colleagues to interact with over many years. She introduced me to the phrase late-career boredom.

I told her about the conversational groups at the office party and my feeling that popular culture seemed to offer so little when one was feeling down or disconnected. “In this case, sports, food, or badly-written, kinky sex.”

Marina had a nice laugh.

“Speaking of the latter, I’m sure you know that I’m not going to invite you up to my room, but I would like your phone number and e-mail address.”

“I’m sure you know that I wouldn’t have gone up anyway, but talking on the phone or by e-mail would be nice.”

“And maybe breakfast tomorrow?”

“That might work, and now I have your phone number.”

“Use it any time. In the meantime,” she said brightly, “I’ll buy you one more glass of wine.” With any tension about where the evening was headed, resolved, Marina and I started to have fun. “It’s not like all of these perfect couples are all so freaking happy anyway,” Marina said.

We started observing the other couples around the bar interact — there were lots of 30, 40 and 50-something couples there — some of them so grim. No eye contact, no conversation, and seemingly no reactions to any sporadic efforts to engage.

“You wonder how some of them make it through an evening, much less their whole lives!” I noted how happy Marina looked making this observation.

Near the big window looking out over the lake, there was a woman who was kind of smiling and nodding at us. I think she knew we were talking about everybody. Poor thing, her husband must have been returning from a Thorazine injection, or maybe electro-shock therapy. He looked dour and forbidding.

“Look at them,” I said nodding toward the couple. “It seems sad, or maybe opposites really do attract.”

“The lively people and especially the lively couples really stand out,” Marina said, holding up her wine glass for me to clink.

“To lively people who don’t totally regret life!”

When I got home that night, Joni was already asleep. I went on the computer, planning to send Marina an e-mail telling her how much I’d enjoyed meeting her. Before I did, I noticed a recent file marked Holiday Letter, and I clicked it open.

It wasn’t one of Angie’s old holiday letters, as I’d expected. It was from this year and had been written by Joni. It had every aspect of the letters that I’d so blithely criticized when I’d told her about selling the Blue Lake house, and it was dated a week before that conversation. There were several heartfelt references to her mom’s past letters, and a couple of self-consciously awkward attempts at humor in just the first few paragraphs.

But it was the bragging part that really made me feel terrible. She noted that Holiday or Christmas letters have become one of the few socially acceptable spaces available for displaying pride about one’s family members, and said she thought it was a custom worth preserving.

Joni praised first her sister, Emma: “…presently in Oaxaca, Mexico doing an undergraduate research paper on President Benito Juarez. She was very close to her mom, and she took her death very hard. But, like her mother before her, she ‘has a lot of dog in her’ and is going forward with her life — as mom would want her to.”

And then me and the three of us: “My father has been very brave and exceedingly kind to both of us. He’d hoped to retire but that hope was dashed, too, when mom died. But he still has his sense of humor, and still loves his East High students. If the subject should ever come up, remind him that it’s not his sole responsibility to keep our family together. Our family survives and will no doubt enjoy happier times in the future, but this year we will mostly miss our mom.”

After absorbing the recognition that I’d been an ass that afternoon, and marveling at my daughter’s delicacy, tact and decency (all so much like her mother!), I felt some surge of hope — a balm in my lonely Gilead. Our family survives, and it was Joni, not gloomy Graham, who was sustaining it!

Full of energy, I went online. I was thrilled to see that I already had two e-mails from Marina. The first noted that Doug had shown up, pounding on her door and demanding to know why she’d ditched him. He’d finally left when she threatened to call the police. I responded briefly to the first one, telling her to be careful with Flaherty, who’d also stalked the first woman he’d hassled.

Her second email told me what a great guy I was, but I begged to disagree. I told her briefly about Joni’s letter and what an ass I’d been about holiday letters, and that I didn’t mean to knock either organic food, nor my friend Susan the foodie blogger — who’d brought the girls and me delicious meals after Angie had passed.

Finally, I said that while I hoped that we could become friends, I couldn’t make it for breakfast the next morning because I wanted to take Joni out instead. Maybe she’d even want to go out to that little diner we both loved on the way up to Blue Lake. I told her that like light, sustenance, too, had its place.

I ran to the other side of the world to get away from myself. It’s not that I really thought I could escape myself through travel; it’s that I needed a transformation and there was no way I could have one in the confines of my town or my high school. I’d spent my whole life, my 17 years, trying to fit in and disappear in the crowd. I’d been so successful that even the people standing next to me didn’t see me. I became beige paint. If you asked twenty different people to describe me, they’d all probably say the same thing, or a variation of the same idea: nothing special.

I chose Australia because of its sleek brochure in the student exchange program packet. I imagined myself, new and improved, walking through manicured city parks, going to special events at the famous Sydney Opera House, and learning to surf at nearby beaches. Yes, sign me up for all of that.

The exchange program chose a host family for me in Townsville, Queensland. It’s a small city way up north, near the Great Barrier Reef. So not the Sydney adventure I’d fantasized about, but still, a fresh start.

I imagined the new me in a new school. The teacher would announce, ‘Class, let’s all welcome Sarah. She’s an exchange student from America, and she’ll be spending her senior year with us.’ Everyone would want to hear all about life in America and me. I could make up anything.

*       *      *

It’s my first night in my host family’s home. We’re all sitting around their dining room table for my welcome dinner. My host father, Bill, grilled up chicken, peppers, and onions. I notice the family eats differently than I do. They hold their forks in their left hands and their knives in their right hands. And they keep the fork and knife in the same hands the whole time—cut, bite, chew, cut, bite, chew. I’m used to cutting a few pieces of meat, putting down the knife, switching the fork into my right hand, and then taking a bite. Their way is much more efficient and elegant. I vow to learn to eat this way too.

My host mother, Linda, is sitting across from me. She says, “Matt wants to study in America.”

I turn toward Matt. He is 16 years old and plays rugby at an all-boys private school. He is handsome with a crooked smile. I’ll be going to a public school, but I hope he’ll introduce me to his friends and invite me out to parties.

He smiles and takes a bite of food with his left hand, fork prongs down. I expect him to say something, but he doesn’t.

“That’s great,” I say, filling the space.

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Linda says, “so we can learn about the program, and, you know, see how it goes with you before we decide—”

I stop chewing and look at her, not sure I heard her right. Linda breaks her train of thought at the sight of my wide eyes. Her pointed nose, thin lips, and pronounced wrinkles had startled me when I first met her at the airport. She is a tiny woman, all angles and lines, and aged beyond her years. There seem to be no soft edges to her.

They ask about my family, and I tell them about my mom and dad, and their jobs. I tell them that I’m an only child. “So I’m excited about having a host brother and sister,” I say.

“Jen’ll drive you crazy,” Matt says.

We laugh along with him, even Jen. She’s 12 years old and awkward. From the family’s photograph that arrived with my information packet, I hadn’t been able to tell whether Jen was a boy or a girl. She wore her hair short and had on a baggy t-shirt and jeans, the same clothes she wears tonight. I was grateful she had an obvious female name, and not Taylor or Casey or something like that, because even in person, it’s hard to tell.

“Oh, I brought you gifts,” I say. “I’ll get them after dinner.”

Jen looks up from her plate. She smiles in my direction. “Awesome. I’ve never gotten anything from America before.”

After Jen, Matt, and I clear the plates, I go into my bedroom to get the gifts. I wish I had wrapped them. A journal for Jen, a candle for Linda, a beach towel for Matt, and a belt for Bill. I regret getting Bill that belt. It’s a ridiculous gift. They’re all ridiculous, really. They don’t have anything to do with America, or my home state of Connecticut. They’re all probably made in China anyway.

Jen is excited about her journal, promising to write in it every night. Linda lights the candle right away and sets it on the kitchen counter. She smiles a genuine smile, and I relax for the first time since my arrival. Matt and Bill are probably confused by their gifts, but they thank me graciously. Bill says he needed a new belt.

We are all on our best behavior for the first couple of weeks. I had learned the rules of “how to be a good exchange student” from the program’s packet: never eat the last of something in the fridge, offer to pay your own bus fare and restaurant meal and movie ticket, keep your room clean, help with the dishes, don’t invite friends over without permission, don’t say anything about your host family that you wouldn’t say in front of them.

I follow these rules to the letter. Well, at first.

“I feel like I took in three university students,” says Linda one afternoon as she looks at the store receipt. Brown paper bags sit on the kitchen counter. “Where is all the food going?”

I pause at the pantry door with a bag of bread and a jar of peanut butter in my hands. Have I been eating too much? My after-school snacks had become more like meals, or like a series of trips to the buffet line. I tell myself that biking to and from school in the tropical temperatures requires more fuel, but really, I am eating out of boredom, and to suppress the creep of homesickness.

Before I got here, I hadn’t thought about the details, the day-to-day. I didn’t have time to think; I just had to get away.

Lunchtime at school is lonely. I sit at a long table of strangers. I fill the hours after school with homework and TV, but the empty weekends are the worst. I sleep in as much as I can to shorten the days. I’ve met a few girls at school, but we’re merely acquaintances. I wonder what they do on the weekends.

An unexpected saving grace is my school’s uniform. In my blue polo shirt and pleated skirt, I blend in with my new classmates from the neck down. It gives me a sense of connection, a shallow replacement for anything real. Suddenly, in a strange country, without my family or friends, I grasp for the familiar. Homogeny is my safe space.

I look at myself under the harsh fluorescent lights in the school bathroom. My brown hair is still limp. My nose is still on the large side. The pimples on my chin are still red. This is the face I bring with me no matter how far I go.

School. Home. Homework. Bed. “Just get through,” is my new motto.

My host brother, Matt, is hardly ever home. Rugby practice keeps him after school every day, with games on weekends. I can’t find my way into his plans. Jen is the only one eager to spend time with me. She wants us to be like real sisters, or best friends, but she acts like a child, even younger than her 12 years. Frankly, she is just plain weird. Even her family thinks so. Her words and her actions are completely unpredictable, and I am always a little on guard around her.

Jen, stop being so silly. These words can be heard coming from any member of the family at least once a day. It is their go-to, catch-all phrase to stop her from continuing whatever odd thing she is saying or doing.

“Dad, what were you and mom fighting about in your room last night?”

“Jen, stop being so silly.”

“Did you know Matt and his girlfriend had sex at her house, while her parents were home?”

“Jen, stop being so silly.”

I don’t say anything. I smile empathetically at Linda, letting her know that I’m on her side. She winks at me. It feels like a thank-you.

After school, I don’t notice that Jen has come into the living room until she turns on the TV. I glance up from the computer for a second, just to point out that she is disturbing me. She flips through the stations and stops at Home and Away. I turn my attention to the show. Eventually, I move over to the corduroy couch where she sits, and I tuck my feet under me.

Jen is unusually quiet. She doesn’t explain the show’s earlier storylines or tell me about characters that are no longer on the show. She lets me be. I relax into my cushion.

And then she says something. I don’t hear her at first. “Hmm?” I glance over at her. She is looking at her hands, pressing her right thumb into the palm of her left hand. Her expression is serious.

“What’s that, Jen? I didn’t hear you.”

“My uncle,” Jen says. Then she hesitates.

“Hmmm mmm.” My eyes and interest return to the TV.

“I need to tell you something.”

I turn to her. “Okay.”

“I need to tell you — ­­my uncle—”

“Okay. Yeah?”

“It’s just that — um.”

“Go ‘head, Jen.”

“He’s hurt me.”

I look at her, at her face, her eyes, her mouth, examining her.

She holds steady, letting her words fill the humid living room.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“He — he touched me.”

I don’t ask for details, but she says it happened more than once. She says he is her mother’s brother, and that he lives in another city, a plane ride away.

“Does your mother know?”

“She doesn’t believe me.”

“Oh.” Do I believe you?

“I need you to help me.”

Shit.

“Jen, I don’t —”

“Will you just help me talk to my mom?”

I look away, to the characters on the screen, to the tile floor. “I don’t know that I’d be any help.” I want to leave the living room, the house, the exchange program. I stutter and stumble my way through a list of people more qualified to help her than I am. I make it out of the room, leaving Jen slumped on the couch, without committing to anything. I want to tell her that in a few years she’ll be able to run away.

That night I find her at the kitchen table, ripping out pages of the journal I’d given her.

Bill sees her, too. “Jen, stop being so silly.”

Jen stops what she’s doing, and without a word, she takes one of the ripped pages, walks over to the other side of the room, and drops it in the trash can. She does this over and over until she throws away every single page.

Everyone tries to ignore her. Linda loudly dices some carrots. Matt puts his headphones on and returns to his homework. And Bill leaves the room all together.

I go to the computer in the living room to work on my college application essays. My essays sit, unfinished, on a disc labeled “Mr. Harrison.” I haven’t worked on them in months, since I stopped working on them with Mr. Harrison. He was one of the young teachers at my high school in Connecticut, and all the girls fell over themselves to get Mr. Harrison to notice them. But I was the one he’d noticed. Well, at first, he mostly noticed my writing. For a persuasive essay assignment, I wrote a mock presidential inaugural address. Mr. Harrison asked me to read it in front of the class, to deliver the speech as if I were the newly elected president. I was embarrassed at first, but when Mr. Harrison started talking about why my speech “worked” I sat up in my seat and absorbed his words. I could have sworn he winked at me when he said, “Sarah, maybe you’ve found your calling.”

After class, he held me back and sat down in the empty seat next to me. It was the end of the school day, and I didn’t need to rush off anywhere. I wouldn’t have anyway. He asked about colleges I wanted to apply to and what I wanted to study. He even offered to read my admissions essays, when I was ready. His elbow scraped up against my forearm and an electric charge ran up my arm and down to my stomach.

A few weeks later, I went to his classroom before school started. I gripped the printout in my hand and prayed my sweaty palms weren’t leaving marks. I tried not to imagine running my fingers through his soft, brown, curly hair. I tried not to imagine running my hands down the front of his crisp, blue, cotton shirt; down his slim, fit khakis. I tried not to.

He stood at the front of the room, writing something on the board. He saw me walk in and gave me a big smile.

I somehow managed to speak. “I know it’s kind of early, but I started working on my personal essay.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“I was wondering if you’d maybe take a look.”

“Of course.”

I thanked him and left the room too quickly.

A couple of days later, he gave the essay back to me. “I made some notes,” he said. “We can go over them if you want. Maybe after school?”

And that’s how it started. We met every couple of weeks after school to work on my admissions essays. I even added another school to my list to keep our meetings purposeful and necessary. I also used the essay prompts to reveal the best parts of myself. See, I’m kind. See, I’m generous. See, I have ambition. See me.

*       *      *

Since our talk on the couch, Jen has stopped speaking to me. I don’t know how to explain my own silence, so I pretend I don’t notice hers. Then, one afternoon, I find a note in my bedroom. It says, “Please.”

That night, at dinner, I work up the courage to say something. Bill is working late. Matt is at rugby practice. It’s just Linda, Jen, and I sitting around the kitchen table. We’re getting to our last bites. The sun has set. The pendant light hangs over our heads.

I need to get it out before we clear the plates. I turn to Linda and start talking before I know how I’m going to say it. “Jen told me something the other day,” I say.   Linda wipes her mouth with her napkin and then sets it back down on her lap.

Jen sits motionless, waiting for me to continue.

“Um, I wanted to tell you about it. I’m not quite sure, but she said that she was, um, hurt by her uncle?”

Linda’s eyes glisten, but she maintains her masked expression. There is little time, no time at all really, between my words and her actions. She stands up and puts her face very close to mine. I see all of her wrinkles, the deep lines that tell her story.

“You listen to me,” she says, “and you listen very closely. This is none of your business. What happens in a family is for the family.” Saliva bubbles form on her lips.

I nod. My leg starts to bounce, or maybe I’m shaking.

“You are a guest in this house, and you will never speak of this again.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I will never speak of this again.

No one says another word. The house is screaming with hostile energy. I can’t even look at Jen. She walks off to her room. I pretend to do my homework in the living room, and I go to bed early.

“I need to borrow your house key,” Bill says the next day. “I lost mine at work.” It sounds temporary, but it isn’t. Another copy never gets made. If no one is home, I have to wait outside. Sometimes I go for long walks around the neighborhood, which has the feel of a middle-class neighborhood in Florida: single-story ranches with parched grass, skinny palm trees, and bleached sidewalks. Sometimes, when I just don’t have the patience to wait or walk, I break in through my bedroom window.

Jen begins to take out her anger on me any time we’re home alone. She screams and yells. She tells me everyone hates me and wants me to go home. She points out all of the things I’ve come here to change about myself. She calls me unpopular, unfit, boring, ugly.

I start leaving for school a little earlier in the morning. There’s a phone box just outside the bike pen. If I get there at 7:00 am, I can talk to my dad for ten minutes before the bell rings. It’s 4:00 pm the previous day in Connecticut. Inside the scratched and marked-up plexiglass shelter, I feel safe. My dad fills me in on what’s going on back home. I close my eyes and picture it all, as if I’m there.

I don’t call my mom as often, because I’m afraid she’ll hear the sadness in my voice and want me to come home. I can’t go back, not until after graduation, and I can’t tell her why.

I don’t tell either of them what is really going on. I tell them I’m making friends and having fun. I tell them my host family is kind. I tell them I miss them, and I’m a little bit homesick. I can’t help but tear up when I tell them that part. Every time. But my dad says to stay strong and stick it out. Every morning before school, he gives me the pep talk I need to stay one more day.

“Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Honey. We’re so proud of you. Talk to you tomorrow.”

My history teacher takes our class to the school library to give us class time to work on our research projects. Angela, who showed me around my first day of school, sits at the computer next to me.  She asks me how it’s going.

At first I smile. I know what I’m expected to say — that everything’s going well. But there’s something about her kind face that makes me want to tell her something real. “I’m locked out of my house.”

Her hazel eyes go wide. “No!”

I tell her what’s going on, except for the truth about my host sister. I just say that she’s weird and really mean to me.

After class, Angela invites me to sit with her and her friends at lunch. They are going to a field hockey game after school. Some of them play, some of them just go to hang out. They invite me to come along. They invite me along!

I leave a message for my host family on their answering machine.

“Hi, it’s Sarah. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to go to a field hockey game after school. Some friends invited me — we’ll probably get something to eat too. Okay — Bye.”

Yes!

Field lights bounce off the aluminum stands. Our backpacks act as armrests and dinner trays and the McDonald’s bags as placemats. Angela is out on the field. Her friends and I watch the game, well, watch the running and the stick swinging. I don’t care much about the details.

Beside me, on the metal bleacher, the blonde girl named Tracy smiles. “Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

I decide not to lie. “Mmm, no.”

“Then you can have some fun while you’re here,” Tracy says, raising her eyebrows.

“I guess,” I say, trying to play it cool.

When I get home, the door to the house is locked. Jen lets me in, and she seems put out by the effort. “My parents are mad at you,” she says.

I walk past her to the kitchen. Linda is drying dishes. Bill is reading some papers on the counter.

“Thank goodness you’re okay,” Linda says.

Bill looks up at me but stays quiet.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I say.

Linda clicks her tongue. “Not coming home when you’re expected. Not telling us where you are?” she says.

“No, I — I — Didn’t you get my message?”

Jen speaks up. “Nope. I checked the machine when I got home from school. No message.”

“I’m sorry. I thought I left one. I must have called the wrong number, or something.”

“Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Linda says.

“Of course,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

“Are you going to ground her?” Jen asks.

I pick up my backpack and walk down the hall to my room. I know Linda’s response before I hear her say it aloud. “Don’t be…” and I close the door behind me.

The next day at lunch, I tell Angela what happened.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” she says.

“I know,” I say. “I guess I’m just gonna try to keep my distance”

“Shit.”

“Yep.”

“I was going to ask you anyway, I swear this isn’t a pity invite, but there’s a party on Friday. You should come, and then just stay at my house.”

“Really?” I must look like a smiling fool. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

“We’ve got to get you the hell out of that house.” She smiles at me like an ally and a co-conspirator. I feel the relief that escape can bring.

*       *      *

I met him at this party, in a circle of lawn chairs in a friend of a friend’s backyard. My red cup is filled with vodka and red juice. His name is Philip, and he goes to another public school in the city. He isn’t the surfer-type I had fantasized about, but he pays attention to me. He is the first to do that. I take his attention as a replacement for attraction.

We kiss that night. It’s messy and awkward.

“You kiss differently in America,” he says.

I blame the vodka punch.

The next morning, I have something to talk about with my girlfriends, a story to tell. They let me gush before saying anything. They know him. They know about him.

Angela pours milk on her cereal. “He’s kind of a wanker, Sarah, I mean, from what I’ve heard.”

Tracy chimes in from the kitchen table. “I’ve heard he’s a real shit head.”

I watch the red light in the toaster, and say, “He seemed nice enough. Nice to me anyway.”

“Nah, trust us. A real shit head that one,” Angela says, taking a seat next to Tracy.

I look at them sitting there, waiting for me to agree. I nod and turn back to my toast.

But when he calls a few days later, my friends’ warnings are too distant to be heard. He wants to know if I’ll be at another party the next weekend. We’ll meet up there, he says. In my head, I call it a date.

I wear a white skirt and blue tank top. I wear a red bra, so he’ll see the straps peek out on my shoulders.

“You look like a slut,” says Jen. She’s standing in my bedroom doorway.

I don’t respond.

“Where are you going?”

I pick up my purse. “Nowhere, Jen. Just a friend’s.”

“You look stupid,” she says.

“Thanks. I gotta go.” I move past her, scraping my back against the doorjamb. I wait down the street for Angela to pick me up.

As soon as we walk through the front door of the house, I look for Philip. I find him in the kitchen, sitting on the counter with a beer in his hand. It doesn’t take long for him to hop down from the counter and lead me to a room down the hall.

It’s someone’s bedroom. The only light in the room comes from streetlights, through open window blinds. The bed is low to the ground and unmade. A dark blue blanket is pushed off to the side, tangled up with a wrinkled white sheet. He closes the door behind me. I want to go back out to the party.

“Hey,” he says as he moves in closer.

My voice quivers. “Hey.”

He kisses me against the door. I taste his beer and breathe in the salty sweat that dampens his skin. He lifts my tank top over my head, exposing my red bra. He grips my arms, still over my head, and pushes them into the wood door. Looking into his eyes, I don’t see Philip anymore. I see Mr. Harrison.

I see him lock the classroom door and I hear him say, “Shhh. It’s okay. No one can see us in here.” He steps slowly toward me, then, past the desks. I move away until my back hits the wall. Inches separate us. He unzips my jeans. I try not to breathe. I search his face for understanding, but up close his features are unrecognizable. With one hand on my waist, he turns me around to face the wall and holds my wrists in place. I close my eyes and go somewhere else, so I don’t feel the pressure between my legs, or the tearing.

I press my lips together to muffle my cry. When Philip is done, I lie still on the narrow bed, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. I stare at a thin stress crack in the plaster that winds its way toward the door. My skin feels cold and raw. I reach my arm off the side of the bed and feel around the carpet for my clothes. My fingers find someone else’s t-shirt. This is supposed to be the story I could tell my friends.

Philip rolls off the bed and looks toward the far window. I stare at his back, the movement of his back muscles as he picks up his clothes and pulls on his shirt.

He tells me not to talk about this with anyone. “Don’t be a fucking schoolgirl,” he says.

“I’m not,” I say.

He leans over the bed and puts his face up to mine. I think he’s going to kiss me. Instead, he steadies himself. He looks me directly in the eye, maybe for the first time. “Good. Then maybe we can do this again sometime.”

He pushes off the bed and stands up. I clench someone else’s shirt to my neck as he turns to leave. I roll over, toward the window, so I don’t have to watch him walk out.

The sheets feel moist and dirty. The dark blue blanket hangs onto the corner of the mattress. I give it a quick kick to the floor and find my underwear. My skirt and tank top are in a small heap next to the door with my bra — my red bra. I dress slowly and slide my feet into my flip flops. I leave the room, on shaky legs.

“You okay?” It’s Angela. She’s headed to the bathroom.

“Yeah. Yeah.” I follow her through the bathroom door.

I try to freshen up at the sink while she pees. I drink from the faucet and rinse the sour taste from my mouth.

“What happened?” she says.

I can’t look at her. I feel the heat rising in my cheeks. In my head, I hear Linda’s dismissive voice, Don’t be silly. I don’t say anything; this is my secret to keep—my second. I splash my face with water to buy more time to think. Don’t be silly.

I still don’t look at her. “Nothing,” I say with my face dripping into the sink. I grab a hand towel and check myself in the mirror. I don’t look at my wet eyes. Don’t be silly. I let them go dull. “But you were right. Philip’s a loser.” I finally look at her, but not at her eyes. I focus on her nose, her forehead. I smile and go to the door. “Can we just leave? I want to get out of here.”