“It’s selfish, that’s what it is, Trish!”

“How’s it selfish?”

“It’s perverted.”

“My body, my choice.”

“Don’t pull hippie bull-shit on me!”

“It’s natural!”

“You’re putting yourself in danger and the baby.”

Mum’s been against self-birth since the beginning.

My friend Day is also having a baby, the normal way. Tells me that I’m brave. Doesn’t say it like it’s a good thing. Get the feeling she agrees with Mum. Don’t live far from Day, just ten minutes. I’m always the one visiting her, even now my bump’s showing.

People make space for their PODs (Pregnancy Observer Device) in their living-rooms or kitchen. Day has a special room for it. She’s been reading Pre-Birth; apparently if an embryo’s exposed to too much light it can cause ADHD, but too little’s been linked to autism. Spent a fortune on an embryonic lamp giving, ‘the perfect contrast of natural light proven to stimulate early cognitive abilities.’ It basically just turns off at night and on in the day, like the sun.

The POD Day bought cost a bomb. Her boyfriend’s face was a picture! Should’ve known better than to cross Day, “Just whack the embryo in a budget POD, it’ll be fine.”

“Our baby isn’t even fertilized. Already you don’t give a shit! Having second thoughts? Is that what it is, Mike?”

“No. It’s just that it costs—”

“Money shouldn’t be a factor in our baby’s health!”

They spent 9000 EE (English Erno). Had to take out a loan. Their POD has a double layer of silicon, meaning the artificial ‘womb’ lining is thicker; if it gets knocked or bumped it’ll be more protected. Most people don’t even move them though! Her POD also has an inbuilt classical music system. All proper studies say anything pre-birth won’t make a difference.

PODs have an inbuilt heater keeping an embryo at womb temperature. They’re basically a translucent football filled with liquid. Had a go at feeding Day and Mike’s embryo when I was over last. Formula’s pre-made, just add water. Day made me wash my hands six times before picking up the spoon!

There’s a little hatch on the outside; I flipped it up so I could pour the formula in. Watched it slide down the artificial umbilical cord, then seep through a valve connecting it to the biological cord transferring it to the baby. Started moving round a bit; reminded me of an axolotl, pink and half-formed.

Day wants a Birthing Party, or more accurately, ‘Baby’s Being Removed Party.’ It’s an American thing, but it’s taking off here. You invite everyone round to see the baby taken out, people bring presents and cards.

Day was in tears the other day, “I can’t do it. I’m an emotional wreck!”

She’d read in Pre-Birth that it’s common for ‘Mother’s-to-Be’ to have pregnancy induced mood swings lasting the POD incubation. Bollocks! Next she’ll complain of backache. Last time I was over she argued with Mike.

“Maybe it’d be nice if it was just you, me, and the baby. People could visit later,” he said.

“I ask for one thing. The soon-to-be-mother of your child!”

“I just thought it would be nice for it to be just the three of us.”

“I guess if that’s what you want, it doesn’t really matter what I want, does it?”
Mike’s now arranging the Birthing Party. They’ll probably get a nurse to take the baby out. Most people do. Though it’s becoming more popular to DIY it. There’s a step-by-step NewTube guide.

Day’s having a Hetro-embryo; Mike’s sperm is fused to her egg. The other type’s a Fembryo; where two eggs are used, one’s adapted and used to fertilize the other. They can’t make Menbryos yet. My baby’s slightly different; technically it’s a Fembryo; but, both eggs are mine. Some people don’t like it, think it’s like cloning, or worse, incest. They’re ignorant.

Cloning uses 100% of one person’s DNA. If two eggs are taken from one woman, the eggs are genetically different. And it’s not incest, as both eggs came from me; clinics don’t allow fertilization with anyone in your immediate family, but genetically it’s not an issue; all eggs and sperm chromosomes are screened before use. Not 100%, but cuts down on all types of disability.

People say that PSMs (Planned Single Mothers) are unnatural. We’ve gone far beyond what’s ‘natural’ anyway; Parents can even choose chromosomes deciding the eye and hair color of a baby! Price for that’s phenomenal though. Anyway, PSM wasn’t allowed till five years ago. I remember the SMBC (Single Mother’s By Choice) marches. Now it’s not that uncommon, or so I keep telling Mum.

“Trish, babies should have a Mum and Dad, Mum and a Mum, or Dad and a Dad! Single men can’t reproduce you know!”

“That’s just because they don’t have the technology yet.”

“You wouldn’t be giving the baby a good start.”

“You were a single parent. I’m fine.”

Mum put the cup she was holding down hard. “I didn’t choose to be a single mother! It just happened.”

“Lots of people end up single mothers. Planning it is far more responsible.”

“Aren’t you worried it’ll have eight eyes? You need two sets of DNA, like nature intended.”

I’ve explained that it’ll have two sets of DNA, just like other babies but it doesn’t get through. Partners make each other miserable; Dad made Mum miserable. She still complains and he’s not been around for 15 years. If Menbryos existed maybe Mike wouldn’t be having a baby with Day—LOL, only kidding. But seriously it’s great if it turns out ok, but what if it doesn’t? Two people that don’t get on are forever connected. I’d rather just have the baby.

Had my implant removed so my womb would work. When I was twelve a nurse came and gave it. Put it in all the girls, just above their hip. Not sure exactly what it does; lets off a chemical or hormone, making the womb uninhabitable but leaving eggs fertile. Didn’t give much thought to it. Boys don’t do anything. There’s an injection for them; implant’s inserted beneath the scrotum making sperm infertile post-ejaculation. Most schools don’t fund male and female contraception though, so just the girls are “treated.”

Remember being taught about PODs. Developed at the end of the 21st century by Dr. J. Hoelscher. Can’t remember what the J stands for. He was Swedish. Studied stem cells, which were all the rage at the time. His wife and child died in childbirth. It was rare then, but still happened. Dr Hoelscher spent the rest of his life trying to produce a device that could grow a baby externally. By the time he died his research hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d experimented on monkey embryos, but their heads grew too big. But then one of the big private health companies took an interest. They got it to a stage where it became feasible and it wasn’t long before it was being considered for use.

There were protests in the streets. We watched an old color clip on a DVD. Men and women with banners in their hands and chants on their lips, “Babies near the heart, not in a jar!” and, “Choose God, not the POD!”

Wouldn’t guess now, with all the stick I’m getting for Self-Birth! Anyway, by the end of 2190 pretty much everyone used PODs.

When I had the implant removed, it left a thumbprint-sized scar. Mum caught me looking at it, “That’ll be the least of your worries when you’re all stretched out. I can tell you that!”

Had to wait three months for my womb to kick back into action. My lady parts started bleeding for days at a time. What a shock! Apparently that’s a side-effect of a fertile womb.

I went to see my GP, Dr. Heath. She’s female. I had a male Doctor, but he was rude about Self-Birthing. Not at all impartial. Let’s not get into that. Dr. Heath had my eggs ready and fertilized. She’s never spoken against Self-Birth, but she did feel it necessary to read the long list of side-effects, despite us going over them last time: headaches; cramps; severe abdominal pain; stretched vaginal opening; organ rupture; death—to name but a few.

I collected my miniscule frozen embryo and took it to the hospital. Needed to have it inserted within three hours; otherwise, it gets too warm. Got a taxi to the hospital, not taking chances with the HB (Hover Bus). Went to the private section. Self-Births aren’t on the NHS now as it’s a redundant procedure. Cost round the same as buying a POD though. Two nurses took me into a purple room. I opened my legs. They had a syringe with my embryo inside. Squirted it through my cervix into my womb. Sharp pain, then throbbing.

Stayed in hospital for three days. It’s almost 100% successful, but I was warned not to do anything strenuous. Voila: I was preggers, old-style.

Day asked me why I did it. Everyone thinks that: why would I go through all this when I could have had it PODded? I just wanted to. Everyone thinks wombs are like the gall bladder, without a use. At secondary school I met one girl who didn’t even know women used to birth! When I told her she was horrified. But I think, wow! I have an in-built POD inside me, fully functional, like the Victorians and twenty-first century women. There’s something beautiful about it just being there, inseparable, home-grown. In a POD, it’s like a goldfish.

I’ve always known I wanted a baby, and one day I woke up and thought, FUCK IT, I’m doing this my way.

At the start Mum rang every day, “Sure you want to do this? Not too late to pack it in, get it PODded.”

She found out that you could get a baby PODded four months into pregnancy. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the implant’s not inserted correctly. ‘Cause most boys don’t have anything, it leads to pregnancy. The nurse responsible gets sued a shit-load. Remember seeing it on the news:

‘Help! There’s a baby inside me!’
Cut to an interview of a tearful nurse, “There were so many schools, had to do seven that day.”

It’s made into a big deal, but when the embryo’s small it’s pretty simple to just transfer it to a POD. That’s how they did it when PODs were first started anyway, grew it in a womb, then moved it. This procedure’s still on the NHS, another fact of which Mum reminds me.

Went to visit Day again. Knew exactly how she was doing—updates ImagePlate hourly with Mother-POD Selfies: Just me and spuddy! She’s got Mike’s forehead. 😀 😀

She hasn’t. You can’t possibly tell! I’ve hidden her updates, but Day messages me personally: Trish! I was thinking. How can you stand not being able to drink or smoke?!!! :O

It’s not hard, Day. I don’t smoke anyway!

She sent back a laughy face with a picture of her stubbing out a cigarette. Last time I went to see Dr. Heath I heard my baby’s heart-beat, inside me. No amount of wine could make that not worth it. I texted Day pictures of my scan. She wasn’t impressed: All shady. You can hardly tell the head from its feet! Can you tell the sex now?

Not Yet. :-/

Hers is beginning to press against the sides of the POD now. It’s a girl. With PODs you can tell that from the very beginning. I could have asked the nurses to sex my embryo, but I wanted it to do it the old-fashioned way, when a scan picked it up. More special that way.

Yesterday I waddled to hers.

“Trish, you’re so big now!”

I showed her the stretch-marks on my stomach. Some on my arms and legs too. She stared without blinking, “Why do they get big, too?”

“Water retention. Also it’s easy to gain weight when you can’t exercise easily.”

She sucked in her lips, stroking her flat belly, “Will it go back in…after?”

“Doctors say I can do sit-ups and stuff. It’ll get close.”

“Close?”

“Yes, I’ll always be a bit stretched.”

“I read a study saying women have evolved past reproduction.”

“Really. How come?” I asked, with a barb.

“Humans stand on two legs, instead of four, making our pelvic bone narrower and our hips smaller. We’re the wrong shape for it now.”

How interesting! Told Day I was feeling tired and left. She’s so up herself! Just because she and Mike are having theirs in a POD. I’m doing perfectly well on my own.
Turned out to be my last day at work today. Was going to go until six months, but they said they’d pay maternity starting now. All I needed to do was sit. I’m a receptionist. They insisted. Mum offered to pick me up, but I’ve been walking for exercise.

“Trish! You’ve put on weight.” Bumped into a guy I’d gone to school with.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Nice cover.” He laughed through his nose.

“No, really.” I pulled up my jumper.

He looked as if I’d told him I’d got a brain tumor, then peeled back my scalp.

“What? Didn’t you realize in time to get PODded?”

“I wanted it this way.”

“Only Africans do that!”

Not PC, but usually only people in really poor parts of Africa Self-Birth. Some very isolated parts of Asia don’t support it either. In the UK if you earn under a certain amount you get a POD free.

“Well, I’m doing it too.”

“Who’s the—father, mother?”

“Just me.”

“What? Like, both eggs?”

“Yes.”

He glanced down at his watch, “Gotta go. Hope it turns out good.”

Dickhead. Should see the looks on people’s faces when they see me, fresh out the museum. An old lady came over the other day, “I don’t want to alarm you, but you may be pregnant. Get to the hospital right away. I’ll call a taxi.”

Took the taxi. Got it to take me home. Started wearing really big jackets. Mum goes to the shops for me now. Claim back pain; partly true, but I’m just so sick of people treating me like a one-woman freak-show. Mum’s moved in to help. She keeps covering corners with pillowed fabric, “I’ll not have my grandson brain-damaged ‘cause of you!”

I’m growing a boy. Found out at last week’s scan. Didn’t really mind, but it’s nice to know. Makes him seem more real. Every night now, before I go to sleep, I say good-night to him, too.

Sometimes I get hot and cold sweats. Threw up the other morning. Mum saw me in the bathroom, said, “Got no one to blame but yourself!”

He started kicking the other day. Felt odd, always knew he was in there, but now he’s really there, telling me he’s fine.

Asked Mum if she wanted to feel. She said, “No, I bloody well don’t! It’s creepy.”

The very last week before I passed four months she got old footage of birth from the 2050s. Didn’t want to see. I know what’s gonna happen, don’t want to think about it until it’s time. Mum insisted.

The woman screamed for a long time, her face was sweaty. Strange to think everyone in the DVD’s dead now, even the baby.

“Is that really what you want, Trish?”

“When she had the baby in her arms, she looked so happy. Like everything had been worth it.”

“That wasn’t happy! That was delirium. She was traumatized!”

Mum couldn’t believe it when I still wouldn’t get it PODded. Too late now! Eight months! Mum’s finally shut-up.

Mobile’s ringing.

“Hey, Day, what’s up?”

“Getting the house ready for Birthing Party. Mike’s doing most of it, bless him. I’m curled up with a hot water bottle. Getting compassionate contractions. Pre-Birth says that’s not uncommon.”

She hasn’t come round to visit once since I’ve got big.

Compassionate contractions? She doesn’t know what a contraction is! We spoke on the phone the other day, I asked her about her POD, “You getting a nurse round, or DIYing it?”

“Nurse. Urm, Trish.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think it might be easier, if you didn’t come?”

“Don’t worry. I can still make it.”

“It’s just that, Mike and I, feel that, you’d be uncomfortable. You know, with all the people. What if you can’t make the stairs, you might faint or something.”

“I’m pregnant not bloody disabled!”

“It’s just that, Mike and I think we wouldn’t be able to accommodate your needs.”

I slammed the phone down. Bitch! She was just worried I’d steal her thunder.

Eight and a half months now. Hospital’s asked me to stay for observation. Given me a room to myself. Brought my Spindle so I can access the Wi-Fi.

They’re going to induce me today. Not sure if excited or terrified.

Keep seeing the woman’s face from the DVD. Soon I’ll be holding Adam. That’s what I’ll concentrate on. That’s what it’s about. Mum’s pacing up and down. Day was supposed to come; apparently, it’s Harmony’s first check-up and it couldn’t be rearranged. Mum says she doesn’t want to see the birth, gonna stand outside when it starts.

My first contraction, sharp, more severe than I’d thought.

“Contraction!!! I’ve had a contraction!”

A nurse was waiting just outside the door. Big injection; epidural. It’ll kick in soon. Two more contractions. Four people are here; two doctors, the others nurses. My legs feel fuzzy, a warm feeling’s spreading my lower body. The nurse nearest looks very white.

“You delivered before?” My mouth’s dry and my words are croaky.

“Now don’t you worry, Trish. We’ve all done a lot of research.”

Mum’s holding my hand, “It’ll be OK, Trish. It’ll be OK.” People keep telling me to push.

I can’t help making noises. There’s a screen over the middle of me. Can’t remember it being put there.

Don’t know whether it’s been hours, or time just feels slow.

Sweating so much it’s dripping down my fingers. Sharp pains, dull pains, throbbing pains, all the pains! My body’s making shapes it wasn’t meant to. Maybe Day’s right about women being too evolved.

“Waaaaa!” The noise is shrill. I strain to sit up, but can’t. Nurse coming over. Holding him in a white towel.

There’s a red sheen round him, his eyes are closed.

“You did it, Trish!”

“Thanks, Mum.”

I made him, each of his tiny little toes and fingers. I don’t want to put him down, but my body aches and my lids keep dropping. Just gonna close m….

Was in the paper that week, front page headline:

WOMAN GIVES BIRTH!

A guy wearing a tie came from the BBCV. Asked whether I’d do it again. It was an experience: feel Adam’s mine. Truly mine. But I think: Self-Birth, once was enough. Can’t explain how good it felt taking Adam home. Knew I was having a baby, known that for nine months! But I hadn’t realized what that meant. Meant I was a Mum.

Me and Day started talking again. She feels more comfortable now Adam’s out. We go to Play-Day each week. Harmony and Adam are too young to appreciate, but Day insists it’s vital for “early socialization.” Didn’t tell the other parents I’d Self-Birthed. Wouldn’t let the papers use my name or picture either. Didn’t mind for my sake, but don’t want it to be something Adam gets picked on for. Day must’ve said something. Parents keep claiming they can tell he’s come out, ‘that way’ cos of his head. Babies have soft skulls; they squash a little for birth, but go back. Pointless explaining. They’re adamant Adam’s head’s too ovular.

Harmony touched a drumstick this week; Day practically rolled her onto it! She’s convinced Harmony will be a musical prodigy ‘cause of that classical POD.

Jacob can’t remember learning math; it’s just something he’s always known how to do. If there were 3 chickens and papa took away 1, there were 2 left. It was simple. His parents, humble, hardworking people, never had heads for figures like he did. They were born to till land and milk cows while Jacob was born to count. His earliest memories are of trying to help his parents budget. Before most children knew how to multiply, Jacob knew each of his parents’ expenses, how much their income was, the cost of their property, and how much they owed. He can still remember the planked walls, the sweet smell of corn wafting in through the window, the aroma of his parents’ sweat, and the feel of their calloused hands on the back of his neck as he sat at the kitchen table and tried to problem solve. If there were three acres of land and the bank took away all of them, what was left? Nothing. What was nothing multiplied but nothing? Still nothing.

Now at almost ninety years old, Jacob’s gnarled spine hunches him over a shopping cart as he does what he is born to do. 50 rolls of toilet paper in one box. At 264 squares per roll and approximately 3 squares per use and 6 squares on a normal day, that’s 44 days’ worth. At $17.99 that’s 36 cents per roll—it says so on the sign, but he crunches the numbers just to be sure. A good deal. It’s not the nice quilted paper; it’s the uncomfortable scratchy kind, but for 36 cents, it doesn’t matter. He picks up one of the cardboard boxes with wrinkled hands and aching arthritic wrists, and puts it into his cart. He slides a second box on top of it, feeling the same dull throb in his tendons, and looks at his stack of toilet paper with triumph. He’s lifted them both all on his own, and although they are lighter than they appear, he allows himself a moment of pride before hobbling toward the cash register. A successful trip.

At the register, he leaves the two boxes in his cart. He knows the cashier can reach over with her scanner, and there’s no need to exert himself again until he’s made it out to his car. Bulk Blokes is Jacob’s favorite store.

Three young adults fall in line behind him at the register—two boys and a girl. They’re well-groomed, the boys wearing bright colored t-shirts tucked into jeans, one of them with a well-used Sony Walkman stuffed into his back pocket. They’re likely in their twenties and attending the local university. The girl has a bag of chips under her arm which is almost double the price it was last week. A rip off. One of the boys carries two bottles of pop, not a horrible deal, but Jacob has seen better, and the other has two cassette tapes.

As the cashier leans over to scan the barcodes on Jacob’s purchase, the trio begins to snicker, whispering amongst themselves.

“That is a lot,” the girl remarks to her friends, sizing up Jacob’s toilet paper.

“Well, it is Bulk Blokes,” the Walkman boy answers.

“But when would you ever need that much?” she whispers.

Jacob rummages through his pockets and places his metal coins on the counter, counting out the amount he owes, listening. His eyes have been going, requiring bifocals in recent years, but his ears are still as sharp as they were sixty years ago despite the gray hairs sprouting from them.

The conversation continues and the girl sneers, “I guess when you’re old enough to shit yourself, you need a little extra toilet paper.” Jacob almost loses count of his coins. Almost.

The group snickers, and the Sony Walkman boy remarks, “In his case, a lot extra.”

The old man’s face burns with damp heat, but he continues to count out his money as if he hasn’t heard them. The cashier pops her gum, oblivious to his embarrassment. He pays exactly the amount owed before shuffling on, pushing his cart away from the kids, all pride he’d felt a moment ago gone.

In the bright parking lot, he slides the boxes onto the backseat of his 1980s Buick but no longer feels the swell of accomplishment at moving the large boxes all on his own. His arthritis seems to have grown worse in the last few minutes, climbing up from his wrists and pulling uncomfortably at his elbows. To the old man, arthritis is like having a child clinging to him, crying and crying. Even when he gives it attention with a wrist brace or an aspirin, it continues to shriek. It was the only child he had, and it had been the reason Jacob retired.

He slides into the driver’s seat with a grunt, but doesn’t start the car. Instead he simply looks out the window feeling sorry for himself. The air of the car is heavy and suffocating. Jacob doesn’t want to feel the cool release of the air conditioning. He wants to sulk in the sweltering heat. 32 degrees. I guess when you’re old enough to shit yourself you need a little extra toilet paper.

Jacob couldn’t blame his parents. No one saw the stock market crash coming and even with the hardships, the little family survived it: Mama, Papa, Jacob, and even his youngest sister, Charlotte, despite his protests to sell her. He had been joking, of course, but he couldn’t help but seriously consider the math. It wasn’t so much her selling price which would gain them a profit, after all she was only a baby at the time—she had been a soft pink blob of tears and shrieks, crying for food which they didn’t have. Hardly any work could be gotten out of her at that age.

They would have to convince potential buyers that she was a long-term investment, and the money the family would save without the necessity of diapers and baby food would prevent them from falling into further debt. However, his mother had been surprisingly offended by his joke, perhaps sensing the extent to which he had considered the variables of the proposition. Her response was well enough anyway. The market for a little sister was probably horrible.

Although Charlotte was too young to remember the ravenous hunger which kept her up at night and almost killed her, Jacob could never understand how her tribulations didn’t scar her into her adult years as they did him. She was the antitheses of her frugal older brother, going through three husbands, travelling the world, and living in six different countries before settling back down in Canada. She had lived a wonderfully reckless life, the kind that Jacob could only dream of. Even as an old man he can still feel the ache of hunger that once was like the ghost pains of an amputated limb.

Now Jacob clenches his fingers around the steering wheel, his bones creaking with the movement, face still hot with embarrassment. The kids from the store skip out in front of his car, chips and pop in hand. They toss their purchases into the back of an old blue Toyota and file into it. The vehicle rumbles to life and rolls through the parking lot.

Without thinking, Jacob starts up his little red Buick. The air conditioning blows at full blast, but the moving air is warm. It’s not dry heat like it was during the hard times. It’s heavy and damp. Jolene by Dolly Parton crackles though his old stereo that’s tuned to an AM oldies station.

Before he can think to stop himself, he pulls out of the parking space, and follows the Toyota. The truck moves onto the street and the red car takes the same route. This isn’t efficient in any way, he thinks, as a needle of anxiety plucks his nerves. It’s wasteful. Jacob can’t bear to be wasteful. In all his years of driving, he’s never driven somewhere where he didn’t need to be.

Yet, he continues to follow, far enough away to avoid raising suspicion, but close enough to keep the blue Toyota in sight, as if by following them he can somehow explain why he needs to buy 100 rolls of toilet paper at a time. He wants to scream until they understand. He needs them to know how the fear of hunger stalks him, more badly than he’s ever needed anything.

The truck and its tail weave through residential houses down University Drive. The man’s earlier suspicions are confirmed; they are students, renting within walking distance of the school. Rent is a waste of money. Always better to buy.

The truck pulls into the driveway of a little house with green trim and white siding. Jacob parks a little way down the street, watching beneath the shade of a tall pine tree, 2.2 kilometers from Bulk Blokes. The girl flounces out of the driver’s seat, grabbing the chips from the back with the boys trailing behind her. The train of students disappear into the house and Jacob sits alone staring at it with his car still running, wondering what he’s doing there.

A sudden anxiety grips him, sharper than the small pinprick he’d had earlier. The gas he’s burned could have been saved for other things, important things.

Chastising himself for being so foolish and calculating the gas he’s just wasted, he pulls out and drives back the way he came, onward to his home. 4.3 kilometers in total.

After The Depression, Jacob went to school and ended up working for a company that advised failing businesses as he had advised his parents when he was a little boy. His job was to play with numbers and variables until he could present each faltering company with the amount of costs they had to cut before the company went kaput—bankrupt. Quite often, a look of horror and hopelessness would flood the faces of his customers when he presented the figure. He knew that look. His parents had worn it when he was a child, and as he had learned, suggesting the sale of family members wasn’t an option. Instead, he would give them advice for lowering costs like cutting back hours, burning less electricity, and shopping at Bulk Blokes where they had wonderfully cheap deals on toilet paper.

When Jacob pulls into the driveway of his little house, he doesn’t feel like bringing the toilet paper inside. It seems like too much effort. But it is more efficient to take it all in one trip, and he’s already been so wasteful, so he carries one of the large boxes and lets the other tumble onto the driveway. He kicks the second box, dribbling it awkwardly up to his front steps. He goes in, plunks the first box outside the bathroom and brings in the second.

The house is simple. It’s one story with a small boxy television. The only art that hangs from the plain white walls, a painting of a field of wheat under a cyan sky, was a gift from Charlotte. There is one bathroom and two bedrooms, one for him and one for when his sister comes to visit. There is a military tidiness to each room, the beds made with blankets tucked under the mattresses, dust to be found on nothing.

After Jacob closes the door behind him and his 100 rolls of toilet paper, he slides off his shoes and places them neatly on the mat. When he looks up, he smiles at the sliver of color he can see where the kitchen is and he uses his thumb to caress the ring finger of his left hand where there is no ring. He heaves a gentle sigh.

The walls of the cooking area are out of place in the plain structure, painted a rich orange and red, the metallic colors of a setting sun. The paint has now faded from the vivacity it once held. He thinks about repainting them, as he always does, but knows that if he marred the color, even in their present faded state, he could never forgive himself. To do so would be a blasphemy against her.

To Jacob, she is in these walls. In the red he sees the wild flames of her hair, and in the orange, he sees the gold flecks in her eyes. They warm him, like the sound of her laughter, and the way he’d felt when she told him that his penny pinching was—what was the word she had used? Endearing. Such a lovely word. His frugality was undeserving of the title. Oh, Susan.

He had never breathed easier than when he was with Susan. She inspired the one moment in his life where he had spent a gratuitous amount of money on something unnecessary: the paint for the walls. Together they had run the wet rollers up and down the bare walls, Jacob’s chest tightening more and more as he recalculated the cost of the bright paint. But then she smiled at him, and the anxiety slipped away. They’d spent the rest of the afternoon laughing and bringing his kitchen to life.

That moment of ease had been fleeting, and it was likely never to repeat itself. Jacob’s chest had remembered how to tighten at the thought of money, and when the idea of marriage was proposed, he simply could not justify a wedding. Painting the walls was one thing, but a wedding? Marriage was marriage. All they needed was to have a few papers signed for it to be official. A large party to commemorate it was wasteful beyond epic proportions. He could still hear her words, the shrill break in her voice as she told him if she couldn’t have a wedding then she couldn’t be with him. That was 40 years ago.

Jacob had run into Susan at Bulk Blokes sometime just after his seventieth birthday. Her skin was no longer taught and firm, and her hair had lost its vibrant sheen of red, but amid the wrinkles on her baby powder skin were those same golden flecks in her eyes. She was waiting in line to purchase a few baby jumpers. She and her husband were expecting grandchildren, she explained with a smile. Jacob had been there for the deal on instant noodles. He was stocking up now just in case the price rose again. He thought he saw a flash of melancholy in her eyes as he told her this. Time had softened the pain of their tumultuous split long ago, and Jacob wondered if perhaps it was pity he saw resting behind that smile.

He wondered what the kitchen walls in her home looked like, but she was called away by the cashier before he could ask.

The man hobbles past his faded kitchen walls to the closet and pulls out a plastic bag from a ratty slipper. He empties his pockets, putting his coins into the bag before tucking it back in the slipper and closing the door. He has multiple hiding places like this throughout the house—except for in the guest room. He doesn’t want Charlotte to find them and tell him he’s crazy. This is a habit he adopted from his mother who never trusted banks again after the crash. “You need more than one hiding spot in case someone breaks in. Safes are too obvious,” he’d been told when he was a teenager, watching as his mother slipped money into a flower pot or tea cup, before she forgot where it was hidden a week later. No wonder we lost the farm, he’d thought. Unlike his mother, Jacob knows exactly how much is in each hiding place and where all of them are.

Now he moves to the chair in front of his clunky white computer and sinks down into the cushions with a groan. Clicking open websites on stocks in which he has always been interested, but too afraid to invest, he lets his eyes glaze over as he calculates probabilities.

His eyes drift away from the computer screen to the stack of cardboard boxes next to the bathroom. His good buy, his pride. He no longer feels the gratification he had when he found them, glaring at them as if it had been them that made Susan leave 40 years and 62 days ago, caused his mother’s nervous breakdown, the hunger he never forgot, and even the stock market crash. But it wasn’t them.

A stab of pain swells in his heart as he recognizes the truth. It was him. It had always been him and his constant anxiety, his counting. Despite losing the farm when he was a child, he and his little family had survived. They’d been okay. But he’d never forgotten, never let go. His sister had almost died, but she had lived her life more fully than anyone he knew. Meanwhile, he’d lived in paralysis. A bigger house, a nicer car, soft toilet paper. He’d never left the country and he was almost 90, now only leaving his home to go to Bulk Blokes. He could have bought a pair of rings, he could have had a wedding, and he could have had children and grandchildren with Susan. It was all his fault. The crippling fear that stalked him throughout his days had debilitated him. He can see it now, but there isn’t anything he can do to change it. It’s just him, alone in his little house with his regrets and 100 rolls of uncomfortable ass-scratching paper.

He can’t stand the sight of the toilet paper anymore. It’s a bitter reminder, mocking him for all that he has lost to the constant fear of not having enough. I guess when you’re old enough to shit yourself you need a little extra. Or in his case, a lot extra.

He scowls at it and tries to stand.

Getting up takes three painful tries, as if while he’s been sitting, his spine has molded into the shape of the chair. Once he’s up, straightening himself out involves several pops and groans of aged muscles, but he is determined to get those damned boxes out of his home. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with them, but they can’t be here. Not anymore. Not ever again.

Jacob loads his arms up with one box at a time and makes his way out to the car, eventually shoving both into the back seat.

Satisfied, he hops into the driver’s seat, adjusts his bifocals and pulls out of the driveway, motoring towards Bulk Blokes.

The sun has just dipped its head below the horizon of little houses and the sky is the color of his lovely kitchen walls. Somewhere in the back of Jacob’s mind, it occurs to him that it is a Sunday and Bulk Blokes would have closed 22 minutes ago, but it doesn’t slow the pace of his car. 60 kilometers per hour, 10 over the speed limit. He zooms towards his favorite store, glaring at the oversized cartoon man that’s their logo. It grows larger and larger with his approach, and he swears that after this day, he’ll never shop there again. He’s going to buy toilet paper with two—no three!—three whole layers. Soft toilet paper. He’s done with these cheap ass-scratching rolls that feel like the paper towel in public restrooms. But what to do with 100 rolls? Could he leave the boxes in front of the doors of Bulk Blokes? No. There would be little satisfaction in that.

He zooms past the store in his Buick, weaving onto University Drive. He doesn’t know where he is going, but he can’t bring himself to stop just yet, no matter how much gas he is wasting. Not without figuring out what to do with that damn toilet paper in his back seat.

For a moment, he wonders if he is having the same kind of breakdown his mother had.

Would reality start to slip from him too? “Let it,” he grumbles. Nothing matters except for getting rid of that ass-scratching toilet paper.

Without realizing it, Jacob steers his little red car towards the green trimmed white house which he had been to earlier that day. He stops his car at the edge of the driveway and sizes up the house. The windows are dark, blinds shut to the front of the street. I guess when you’re old enough to shit yourself you need a little extra. Or in his case, a lot extra. He glares at the home and without pausing to kill the engine, hops out of his car and pulls out a roll of toilet paper from the backseat.

Jacob marches up the driveway, clutching the roll in his hand as if it is a weapon, a grenade that will blow everything all to hell. He stops immediately in front of the house and gazes up at it.

Slowly, he unravels the roll of toilet paper, pulling out 6 squares—exactly a days-worth, lovingly caressing it between his index finger and thumb as if it is a fine silk cloth.

Then he throws it at the house.

His arm isn’t what it used to be, but still the roll soars through the air, like a superhero with a cape flowing behind. It’s majestic the way the roll dances through the air as it unravels, flapping in a large arc until it lands on the roof of the garage with a gentle thump, leaving a long tail of white hanging behind.

Jacob smiles, goes back to his car and takes two more rolls. These he unravels and throws as well, white streamers of liberation arcing through the sky and draping over the porch and the tree of the green trimmed house. He throws it all away, the fear of hunger, the tightness in his chest, the loss of Susan, everything that has ever bogged him down takes the form of rough papery whiteness. He doesn’t even feel the arthritis in his elbows and wrists.

He grabs more and more until he loses count. Jacob feels like a child, but not the kind of child he was, concerned with figures and money. The kind of child he wished he could have been. Giddy and carefree like his sister who had climbed trees, chased chickens, and didn’t have to explain to their parents that they were going to lose their home.

He fills the darkened sky with his streamers of white, until his breathing is heavy and his arm begins to ache. The house, the tree, and the lawn are completely draped in toilet paper. The mess on the lawn isn’t intentional; he doesn’t have the strength he used to and the bombs didn’t always make it to the roof, but he enjoys the effect it has none the less. Jacob takes a step back and admires his handiwork; it is as if the yard and house have been covered by a poorly knitted blanket of white.

He hobbles back to his car to get more rolls and is surprised to find that in his excitement, he’s thrown over 50 rolls, 13,200 squares in total. The first box is empty, the second plum full and filled with opportunity. He considers opening the second box but thinks better of it. He’ll keep it. Not to be frugal, but for next time. Next time? The thought sends a childish jolt of glee through him.

Breathing heavy, elated by his rebellion, the toilet paper bandit leaves the empty cardboard box with the Bulk Blokes logo clearly printed on the sides on the driveway like the calling card of a master criminal.

He smiles as he climbs back into the car. He takes one last look at his work, and he knows that for the first time in his life, he’s wasted nothing.

You persistently try to find meaning in a universe apathetic to your attempts. In case you’re reading my story and persistently puzzled by the frequent, out-of-place burning numbers, however, feel inclined to look up “Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning,” as well the criticisms which note that the stages may be circumstantial modes of reasoning—not modes we progress through as we grow. If you aren’t bothered by the numbers, feel inclined not look this up, and feel proud that you possess the ideal soul in your improbably absurd slice of reality.

A nanoscopic “7” burns somewhere as the sack of semi-conscious tissue and nerves that self-identifies as “he” begins to feel warm sensations in its appendages. He blinks, brushing away a blanket with a cool, half-numb hand. He rubs it. The hand is just numb enough to feel like it’s made of leftover chicken. He still rubs it. There’s funky twitching in his armpit as more blood flows, and he can feel his hand finally heating up.

He looks at a clock: it’s a green blur that he guesses reads “8 or something.” He scoots forward in his bed, rocking it. He doesn’t even think about waking his roommate as he climbs down the bed’s frame. A sweet percussion song that’s sung by a girl for some reason, For the Damaged Coda, is playing somewhere in his temporal lobe as he crosses the room. He almost forgets that it’s only in his mind.

He gets his bathroom stuff and showers and all that. He assumes he’s using free will as he nods his head to the sick beat while his cerebellum uses habit to drum along with literally all his movements: hanging his towel, twisting the shower 3⁄4 on before twisting down some and notching quickly back to the perfect heat. His basal ganglia are lazy: his hands twitch awkwardly as he finds the right temperature. The heat is heavenly and the water hypnotizing until he remembers that today is the day he should text his friends.

A picoscopic “3” burns somewhere as his limbic system lights up and an array of thoughts appear which look something like this: [“Do they still like me, even though I haven’t texted in two weeks?”; “I’m Fredrick Wilson, the Debate Captain!”; “Why would they care? I’m boring. We only talk about school and our dreams and that runs low fast; without board games, at least.”] He gets out of the annoying, hot, tickling shower, goes to his room, picks an outfit out of the dirty clothes hamper like a privileged heterosexual college student, grabs his backpack, and leaves. His roommate is still sleeping.

The elevator door opens, and as he steps into it he thinks of going to breakfast and one of the empty classrooms and texting everyone he cares about “hey, what’s new with you? How’s school/work-because-his-parents-don’t-go-to-school?” Then he has the genius idea of texting them now, “so I can give them time to respond as I eat breakfast!” He does. While texting, he realizes it’s eleven, and is glad his meal plan won’t cost extra this week.

He doesn’t remember he has a date with a girl for dinner and a movie tonight.

When the elevator door opens, he transforms into an upright human centipede whose waddling butt is still in the elevator; whose stumbling legs reach across campus, into the cafeteria where they spiral around a seat like an amazing ball of yarn knotted together by a three-year-old, and that shoots off to that room he thought about and wraps itself throughout the room like a pile of spaghetti anxiously, awkwardly texting and waiting to be texted while pretending to do homework that’s no less done within three hours; whose head is sitting in a desk about to tap its head.

He taps his head. “What am I doing?” he thinks. He remembers the three pillars of writing: cognitive ease, that the tendency is to write what makes sense; novelty, that the tendency is to write in both creative, unexpected ways that hook the reader; “aha moments,” that the tendency is to use the other pillars to lead the reader towards epiphanies, which are so addicting they can change all the pointless ways the reader was going to act and think into new, equally pointless ways.

A microscopic “6” burns somewhere as the pillars’ chunking device makes his frontal lobe spit the heuristic, “well, writing resolves Mental Set and Apathy by producing neurotrophic growth hormones in my dopamine tracts—at least that’s something.” He actually reads one of his homework assignments and thinks about it and writes it and rewrites it and eventually makes it easy to read and just novel enough that the professor will like it without being so insightful she feels threatened or skeptical of it. Just as he finishes, he remembers that he needs to make a bibliography.

A yellow “1” burns somewhere as he realizes his teacher will give him a bad grade and his parents and future coworkers and future versions of himself will make him feel bad if he flakes out now. He furrows his brows as he pulls together the rules for the MLA-8 and cites his single source.

He remembers he has a date at 6 tonight with a girl for dinner and a movie. He looks at his Fitbit: its 5:19 and he’s only walked 3,210 steps. He frowns as his hippocampus activates an image of himself and his Mom talking, vowing, to reach 10,000 every day.

He transforms into a centipede that spirals around campus, whose thousands of heads are looking at sky and trees and whose hands are in their pockets. The centipedes’ head exists at 6:01, where it’s standing near the cafeteria and looking at its date.

“Hi Freddy!”

“Hello Grace. How are, uh, things? What’s, you know, new and stuff?” They’re walking towards the cafeteria, talking about stuff neither of them will remember two decades from now, smiling. One of them laughs. The two become centipedes, curling on each other in an intricate dance about the cafeteria’s buffet.

“Do you mind eating in the little café downstairs? All these people are stressing me out.” There are hundreds of people in the cafeteria.

“Yeah, sure. Why stressful?”

“I have agoraphobia, so I get really stressed when I don’t have a way out.”

“That must be stressful.”

“Just leaving my dorm is hard. Thanks for agreeing to go downstairs; I know it doesn’t make any sense.”

He’s just an agreeable person that doesn’t have a static psychological conception of how people ought and ought not to act, so he says, “No, I mean, it makes sense.”

There’s a white “5” burning in front of a clock near them, and as he glances at it he forgets literally everything and can’t feel anything. Warmth rushes back to his body and he remembers who he is: someone standing in a cafeteria, listening to a girl saying, “Really?” and himself responding, “Sure, why not?”

“It’s just, I’ve had people, friends really, obviously they aren’t anymore, tell me I’m just too much and not worth their time.”

“Oh.”

“Family too, my brother acted that way.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t anymore: I called him the other day crying and asking him to forgive me for everything I’ve done, but he just sorta said, no, its water under the bridge. Don’t worry about it.’”

“That’s good. You wanna sit here?”

“Huh? Oh sure. I love my classes though. In Positive Psych I was freaking out, because, you know, there’s only one door and no windows, but then he taught me about growth vs. static mindset and I realized, you know, I’ve had a pretty static mindset, but I can change; I can grow. That’s the whole point of neuroplasticity.”

“Speaking of that, and fear, I heard there’s this drug that can, like, cure phobias.”

They stare at each other in silence, neither smiling. Suddenly she smiles. “Are you joking with me, or… what?”

“No, I mean, I know I’m very good at my deadpan jokes, but no.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, my professor called it…” he forgot what adrenergic antagonists are called.

“Something. But you just remember whatever freaks you out, think about it, take the pill, go sleep, and the next day the phobia is gone.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, so, I just thought I’d say that.”

They turn into another pair of centipedes who reach from the café to the movie theater one floor below. In seats they both watch the “Secret Life of Pets,” and he constantly either remembers Louis C.K. doing two minutes of stand-up that made him laugh more than the entire film or thinks about keeping his hands and feet from touching hers, because they’re constantly almost touching his, like itchy little spiders. Those two centipedes’ abdomens sit in that particular spot in space-time for eternity, but their heads are outside the entrance to his dorm building.

“What time is it?” She shows him her phone. “It’s only 9! The movie was way shorter this time!” A black “3” is smoking fumes a meter above where they stand, and his body goes numb and forgets everything before feeling returns and he remembers where he is and who he’s with. His limbic system has already decided that they’re only getting dinner and a movie, and that now he needs to play video games until his roommate starts getting ready for bed. His cerebral cortex is too lazy to bother explaining this decision, so he just stands there, hands in his pockets, looking at her.

She smiles. “Ok.” She reaches out her arms, and latent social-modeling memory tells him to do the same. They hug. He steps back again, hands still in his pockets as he watches her.

She frowns and says, “What are you, why are you just…”

“Oh! Right. Good-bye. Sorry, I’m not good at things.” Now he’s walking away from her, and her from him.

The awkwardness makes his neck itch, and the thought that, in pointing out his awkwardness, she “got him good, well played, well played” legitimately crosses his mind, even if only like a spider scurrying across the surface. As he moves towards the elevator he asks why he’s dating her, and answers that they were just going out to dinner because he had nothing better to do, but had moved to movies because someone else standing in the room mentioned a movie and he somehow got politely roped into dinner and a movie with the girl.

He asks himself why he doesn’t want to date her, and his limbic system basically responds with clicking sounds that feel like fear and disgust. His cerebral cortex makes sense of these sounds by recalling that his older cousin married someone with mental problems, and now his family talks shit behind their back about how awful their marriage and their fights are. They’re especially worried for their two daughters, who are super cute but might be traumatized for life.

They were, because epigenetics are a thing. Being traumatized as a kid changes your genes and makes literally everything more stressful than it needs to be.

His cerebral cortex also makes a horseshit comparison of Grace to prototypes of what a “girlfriend” is. Grace was literally 2.1 standard deviations from it. He ignores the thought, but if he was 1/10 of even a level five person he’d have squashed it like the spider it was.

He opens his computer and stares at it. He looks out the window, and is surprised to see 3⁄4 of the sky filled with an enormous purple face, whose protruding tongue dangles between steel grey clouds like moist, sweaty pink whale. He’s about to ask what the heck it is when he remembers the ten million times he’s seen it floating in the sky, even since he first remembered the sky. He’d taken science classes that taught all the different micro-expressions it made, and at which time of the day, and why. He watches it closely, watching its tongue wriggle so slightly it would have been imperceptible had he not known how to watch it. He smiles, remembering the black and white video of Louie Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear landing on that celestial visage, planting a flag in its cornea as they read a prewritten speech about the value of our collective struggles to communicate and work with each other, even in the apparently absurd meaninglessness in which we stand.

He’s opening his eyes, glancing about the white and black sphere as feeling returns to his arms. He remembers that he’s from a time when it’s possible to download the memories of those who died hundreds of years ago. He notices a clock on the side of the tiny pod, and remembers that he has to go to work soon. He decides to live just one more life—he picks a quick one, just a tiny section of an Identity that barely had the opportunity to develop.

He could have chosen to have an active role in the memories; to manipulate and analyze his reality through a dozen different lenses, gathering insight from the manner the memories were portrayed. He can choose to do so now. But even five seconds before he makes his decision, someone with even a primitive fMRI would have known he’d chose to let everything just flow in, raw and unfiltered.

He clicks a button. Four stories below, a cylinder of snotty DNA strands has a needle slowly retracting out of it. The needle moves in a circle and up a level, before finding the appropriate cylinder and stabbing. The DNA cylinder gets filled with synthetic RNA nanobots that begin transcribing data and bringing it back to the needle. There, they’d be spun together into a connectome whose stories were desperately linked up with the “Kohlberg-Haidt Universal Narrative Genome.” Those bugs created bugs, of course; errors in the code that let unrelated but occasionally self-destructive crap get through. The pathetic humans’ prefrontal cortex would smooth over even those, however, to continue to create the illusion that it has a single, continuous identity. He’s leaning back and closing his eyes when his finger accidentally flips a switch, and two-dozen needles emerge from their compartments, each stabbing another cylinder. If he existed in a primitive culture whose inhabitants were unaware that their reality was an eleven dimensional multiverse in quantum scales (from quarks to quasars) physically impossible for their gelatinous organs to comprehend, he probably would have had a seizure. But his culture threw sanity to the wind, just plowing through reality with bio psychosocial moral reasoning and a bad sense of humor, so he didn’t.

He’s looking at a girl looking at him as the coaches’ words, “find a debate partner” echoes in both their ears. He shrugs, because she’s a friend of a friend, and then they’re holding a trophy as he secretly wishes he earned better “speaker points” than she did, then watching her speak as he stutters, frowns, and looks away and prays she makes arguments only moments before she does. They’re hugging, and she’s telling him she’s choosing theater over debate, but that they should “stay in touch.” She talks to him at a party with dyed hair and shows him her tattoo of the neurotransmitter serotonin, “the happiness neurotransmitter,” because before she’d get blackout drunk at all the college parties she was the “happy-go-lucky theater girl,” and she wanted to remind herself of it.

She’s watching him and the theater girl standing with their trophies, smiling, and then she’s telling him that the key to winning is to make your points quick and get out fast. She’s debating with him, just to see if they’ll be a good team now that his partner left, and then he’s driving her home as she’s telling him about her parent’s divorce because he seems so nice and quiet and smart. She mentions her ex-boyfriend being needy and calling her even as she remembers he was there when her ex-boyfriend did so; when she’d responded by putting that loser on speaker while hiding laugher. She doesn’t realize she’s talking to someone she barely knows as she tells the sweet smart quiet kid “I wish my ex and I hadn’t… I just felt so dirty after we did it and…” Freddy’s arms turn into rods as his eyes drill holes in the streets ahead of him. They walk past each other without speaking 29 times those next three years. She constantly runs down the dozens of younger debaters and smiles and chats with them as he watches with a scowl. She stands up when the high school Captainship results are announced, and he’s still scowling.

She’s watching her stand as Captains are announced, and she thinks, “Oh, my poor baby.” She’s driving him home as he stares holes in the road ahead when memories rearrange themselves and she says, “You know, my pastor told me ‘There’s no such thing as quality time without quantity time.’ What he meant was that you need to do lots of boring stuff with people, like debate, I suppose, but any activity really, in order to make relationships come out of them.” He looks at her with an expression like a ghost, and she realizes how few nuggets of wisdom she has for him.

She’s writing on a board as she tells him they’re in college now, and people are busy. He shouldn’t worry if the two of them are literally the only people on the debate team, because that makes them captains. He has an expression like a ghost, and she realizes that she barely even knows this kid’s name and their entire team—club really—is going to die with them. Grace walks in the room, and mentions something which leads to someone talking about the new Avengers movie and he says he wants to see it and Grace says she wants to too and they look at each other and say “Sure, ok.”

He walks along the ceiling, hands in his pockets, as he listens to the older boy tell him about his old partner and the first trophy they won together. He sees a section of the older boys’ centipede that joins a debate team in college that he accidently runs into the ground. He scratches his first bits of peach fuzz while deciding not to tell him, so they can enjoy their moments as partners together. He’s standing in front of a crowd, scratching his long red beard, as he gasps and tells his congregation of summer-camp debaters that, “If you tell yourself you do this activity for the leadership opportunities and trophies, it’ll chew you up and spit you out.” He’s about to tell them how to use the newest advances in neuroscience and social psychology combined with Kantian comprehensions of the innate way we gather and make sense of experience so they may avoid self-alienation, but that’s the moment he’s disintegrated by an alien assassin’s laser-phaser.

He opens his eyes as gasps of heat and light pump through his arms. A clock is flashing behind his head, all numbers lit and singing. He rubs his eyes and opens the pod to discover reality is still clicking away, and he’s late for work.

Let us observe the Clarks in the television room of their small but not unhappy home, a respectably uninteresting red brick that might wait on a grassy hill in any mid-Western neighborhood. Amelia Clark is sitting on the couch. Her legs are propped on the coffee table, sprouting towards the television. The back of her head is resting on the rise of the sofa, and a large bowl of popcorn is floating on her stomach, bobbing up and down as she breathes. She plucks a popped kernel, drops it elegantly into her mouth, munches, and repeats; the popcorn travels in a delightful loop, arcing from bowl to mouth to throat to stomach. Harold Clark is Amelia’s husband. He is sitting next to her. He is also plucking popcorn, but he plucks in handfuls. His legs are grounded. His eyes are closing; he would like to go to bed.

The large television screen in front of Amelia and Harold is three days old. The story is that Harold had been walking through a large television store in a large department shopping center in the neighborhood’s large shopping district when the television spoke to him from a window. He couldn’t remember what it had said, but Harold heard it, and Harold had walked inside and bought it because of what he had heard. And so here it sits, naked as a newborn baby, watched by the amiable Amelia and sleep-wanting Harold Clark, sharing the most entertaining parts of the world in waves of colorful, digital wonder.

But if we allow ourselves to enter Amelia Clark’s mind—just for a moment, and without drawing attention to our doing so—we will notice one small grievance concerning the television. Because the television room belonging to Amelia and Harold Clark is so small, and because the television screen is so large—65 inches wide and 37 inches high, thinks Amelia, recalling Harold’s words of adoration as he stroked the television screen after it spoke for the first time—the viewing experience is, regrettably, less than desirable. As we sit here with Amelia, let us imagine paying good money to visit a museum and, upon walking into a room to view an excellent painting, notice that this excellent painting reaches all the way to the corners of the walls and, consequently, invites these walls to suppress its radiance. There is nothing sadder than unrealized radiance. Let this image guide our empathy for Amelia.

Amelia and Harold watch the television for two more hours. In this time, Amelia finishes the bowl of popcorn and, as she sweeps her tongue across her teeth, the largeness of the television and the smallness of the television room begin to frustrate her viewing experience more and more. Later that night, when the television is asleep and Harold is too, we find that Amelia, lying in bed, is still looking for particles of popcorn.

The next morning, Amelia tells Harold that she is unhappy with the size of the television room. Harold agrees, and the Clarks, unwilling to swap their large television for a smaller one, decide to look online for a real estate agent. They find one whose advertisements they know from the television. They call immediately and make an appointment to see a man named John.

“How can I help you?” John said to Amelia and Harold in his office.

Harold, who had been resting his arm on the neck of Amelia’s chair, leaned forward and said, “We’re looking for a house with a large room for a very large television.” He made a little square with his hands. “It’s just that, well, our television room feels so cramped.” His hands were on his lap now. “We just don’t feel like we can enjoy ourselves like we used to.”

Harold’s earnestness reminded John of a small dog asking for a treat, and he responded by nodding with the measured enthusiasm expected, he thought, of all competent realtors. He scrawled a note on a fresh pad of paper, filled in his clients’ details, underlined an earlier note, and returned to the Clarks.

“Is there anything else you’d like to see in the house? I’m thinking laundry size, kitchen layout, wall color, floor preference.”

Amelia, confident that she was speaking for both herself and her husband, said, “We’re open to anything if it has a large room for the television.” She closed with a smile and found Harold’s hand, which she squeezed and then let go.

Later that afternoon Amelia was watching a program on her new television when the phone rang. It was John. Apparently he had found a promising listing, though he warned he didn’t know just how large a room they needed for their television. He said the room was, in his opinion, fairly big, but whether it was to their taste, well, that was hard to say. John gave her the address and Amelia agreed that she and Harold would be there in the morning.

It was a fine house that John found. The street on which the house sat was a two-minute walk from a bus stop and there was, to Amelia’s interest, a selection of cafes next to an electronic goods store just two blocks away. But when Harold and Amelia walked into a room they thought could belong to a dining table or a set of armchairs, and when they discovered that this room was the room that John believed suitable for their television, they were, politely, quite shocked. The simple fact of the matter was that the room—the biggest in the house—would not do.

It was not Harold’s intention to sound rude or ungrateful, but he thought it pertinent to say to John that he was disappointed in the real estate agent’s estimation. He reminded John that his and Amelia’s television was of a substantial size and that they would need a room with adequate space for the television to sit or hang comfortably without appropriating an entire wall. Amelia, who had been standing beside her husband and looking at the walls as if they were a stain on one of his shirts, could do nothing but nod quite vehemently.

A few weeks must have passed and John, regardless of the geniality in his intentions, had been unable to locate a house with a large television room. John might have felt better about this ineptitude if the market had been weak, but the truth was he had been having a good year prior to his engagement with the Clarks. He wanted to curse the Clarks, but he didn’t. He was a good Christian man with good Christian values and, whenever he felt a demon trying to tempt him into calling Amelia and telling her to shove her television up her fucking arse, he took a deep breath and prayed with the knowledge that everything would be okay.

Three days before John would notify the Clarks about the discovery of a listing with a very large room conducive to a very large television, Amelia received a call from her doctor. She was pregnant. Harold laughed with joy when he heard the news and it was agreed that they would celebrate over dinner at a nice restaurant.

On his way home, Harold smiled a great smile. It was a smile that spoke of victory, of mighty achievement, for he and his wife had, as he said again and again to the steering wheel, won for the household their very own child. Amelia was less certain and, as she waited for the sound of the car in the driveway, she found a channel on the television that said its shows were just for new mothers and mothers-to-be. Despite her qualms about watching the television in the small room, Amelia was so happy with this channel that she nearly, though never quite, forgot about: one, the confined feeling of the room; and, two, why she had started watching the channel in the first place.

His wife’s pregnancy filled Harold with so many bubbles of pride and adoration that he had decided, without consulting Amelia, to make a reservation at a fancier restaurant than the nice restaurant he and his wife normally frequented when they had something to celebrate. He considered it a necessary act, a dutiful show of love that was demanded of him and that he was happy to appease, for money was no longer an issue in the Clark household and, he thought, if you didn’t splurge to celebrate your wife’s pregnancy, when else could you spend a bit of money and justify it so easily?

In the car, Amelia thought herself quite indifferent to her husband’s choice of restaurant; she knew she would be happy as long as they returned home in time for prime time television. Nonetheless, she told herself that she would act, with great conviction, like a wife overwhelmed with gratitude for her husband’s thoughtfulness. She would do this by smiling when he smiled and laughing when he laughed; importantly, she would tilt her head affectionately when he said something nice, an action she knew, from years of experience, inspired within him his own glow of affection for her. Later that night, she would lie in bed and listen to Harold breathe beside her and ponder if she had been successful in these endeavors.

Before that could happen, however, she had to eat dinner and, between mouthfuls of garlic prawns and mushroom steak, Harold and Amelia tasted their way through the future.

“We’ll have to set up a savings account in the child’s name. I’ll make a note of that.”

“There’ll be more clothes to buy—we can think about that nearer the time.”

“Private school would be nice, but we’ll have to save a bit more if we really want it. A good one, that is.”

“What do you think about Denise as Godmother? That would make Adam her Godfather. Maybe I’ll ask Francine.”

“I think she’ll be a girl.”

“A girl, nice. A boy would be nice as well.”

And then, as if the couple had been playing a guitar with a missing string, Harold, in a moment of profound awakening, realized that the arrival of a child would have to be considered as they looked for a new television room. Of the revelation, he said, “We’ll need a house with another room!”

Amelia, having exhausted her stockpile of pretense, looked at Harold as if he was a stranger that had just taken a seat at her table. She said, quite simply, “What?”

Harold wasn’t slowing down. “And we’ll need a yard. I remember playing in the yard as a boy. Oh, Amelia, a yard is a necessity!”

Amelia was reluctant to agree with her husband but she gave a quiet nod. She said, “A yard could be nice if we find a house with a yard and a room for the television.”

Harold agreed.

Three days later, Amelia answered the call from John and he told her about the house with a television room that was of a very agreeable size. Amelia didn’t know why, but she had a wonderfully good feeling about this house, and she said as much to John and then to Harold when she called him afterwards. For the rest of the day and well into the night, Amelia watched television with a grand smile and, as she sat on the sofa, with all the attentiveness of a child before a teacher, the tension in her shoulders relaxed and the muscles in her back eased. It seemed as if a great load had been removed from her body.

When John showed to Harold and Amelia the television room the next day, the baby-expecting couple was very happy. Amelia was so happy that she thought she wanted to cry. She didn’t, of course, but she thought that if she had been an actress, she might have, in future years, recalled this moment in her life as a means of bringing tears to a character overwhelmed with joy.

The house was in a respectable neighborhood, evidenced by the judiciously trimmed roses, carefully maintained hedges, and immaculately polished letterboxes that seemed to fight each other, quietly and noisily at the same time, for passers-by attention. The neighborhood was so nice and respectable that a neighborly local might have, under the spell of colloquial real estate confidence, described the locale of the house and those around it as a pleasant area where the city shakes hands with the suburbs.

There was even, to Harold’s delight, a quaint lawn in a quaint yard outside the house. But it was inside the house, in the large, empty room next to the kitchen that the Clarks found themselves not long after John had ushered them inside. For it was in this room that Harold and Amelia began to envision, like two prophets speaking of the great Messiah, the location of their television.

John discovered the seriousness of the affair when he walked into the room and asked the couple if they would like to join him for a pot of tea on the deck, which wrapped around the house and overlooked the yard.

“No, thank you,” said Amelia. “We are just going over some things.” With these words, Amelia had not only refused John’s offer, she had effectively disposed of the possibility of further interruptions from the real estate agent who, silenced and alone, proceeded to wait in the kitchen and listen to the couple’s stratagem for the remainder of the visit. This is what he heard, and what he might have seen had the couple been more forthcoming.

“I think the television would sit very nicely on a stand along this wall,” said Harold, who pointed and then walked to one of the longer walls in the rectangular room. He developed his argument by saying, “That way the sofa can sit along this wall.” He pointed to the opposite wall. “And we can walk freely from one end of the room the other.” When it came to debates and discussions, or anything that required of Harold a parting shot, a final commanding word that might sink the anchor in his port, he often found a home for terms and phrases he knew little about, but whose sound and general meaning could be translated into definitive, uncompromising success. One term that Harold liked to use was feng shui, and he used it now.

And yet, Amelia was uncertain about the viability of Harold’s suggestion. She was particularly concerned about light from a glass door at one end of the room creating a glare on the television screen, an experience she compared to driving on a long road ridden with potholes, or eating a soup seasoned with too much salt. The prospect of an impaired television screen brought her more discomfort than the possibility of the sofa sitting in the middle of the room.

“Wouldn’t the television look nice here?” She pointed to the end of the room where there was no glass door. “There’d be no glare and the sofa could act as a partition—we could make a cozy nook over here and no one would be able to walk through it.” Of this suggestion Amelia felt quite strongly and, without intending to dismantle her husband’s idea, she said, “I don’t much care for a walkway between me and my television.”

But Harold must have taken these words to heart because he opened and then closed his mouth without uttering a word of reproach. Instead, he walked to the glass door and looked at the lawn in the yard. It was very green. Too green, he thought, for a lawn governed by the summer sun. It was so ripe with greenery that Harold was reminded of something like a pasture in an English countryside, one that he might have seen on postcards and books and even on the television. When he moved his eyes above the lawn, he noticed in the distance a father and a small child walking pleasingly down the street in front of a row of houses that looked just like the house John had opened for him and his wife. The father held the child’s hand. The child did a little skip. The image directed Harold’s attention to Amelia’s womb.

Amelia, who had made it her responsibility to continue planning the location of the television in her husband’s absence, was collected by his mental and physical return and, specifically, the look of concern in his eyes. She asked of her husband, “Harold?”

“What about the child?” he said.

Amelia wanted to empathize but she couldn’t. She said, “There are two more rooms: one for us, one for the child.”

“And what about guests? Where will they stay?”

“We’ll buy a sofa bed.” Then she said, “Or we could move the child into our room if someone had to stay.”

At a later date—after the passing of at least nine months—Harold would look back on this moment and ask himself if he had not been swayed too easily by the casual assurance in his wife’s tone, and if he had not given enough thought to the repercussions of his wife’s suggestion that had seemed, at the time, to be an easy and accessible solution to a problem not yet felt. Right now, however, he simply smiled at his wife and said, “You’re right.”

In the kitchen, John had finished his pot of tea and was fighting the call of sleep as he sat, or rather leaned, at the dining table. It was a half-hearted fight, something lousy that saw his falling head rise lethargically back into place, only to droop again and again. For the result of this fight—a return to consciousness in which he would close the deal and rid himself of the resolute Clarks—is destined for victory: in two minutes, Amelia and Harold, holding hands and staring in delighted anticipation at the vast, uninhabited wall that is to be the happy home of their television, will make an offer and all but move into their new house. And if we allow ourselves, as attentive observers to the actions of Harold and Amelia Clark, to consider what lies ahead for the couple, we might see them sit, day after day after day, on a comfortable sofa, watching their huge television in its appropriately oversized room, as they exclaim, with astonishingly fresh jubilation despite the frequency of such exclamations, how beautiful, lovely, and perfect is this room for them and their television.

There is nothing more capable than an Apple font for undermining her self-esteem. She thinks, a nagging woman isn’t flattering, fact of ’Merica, probably world, and these words are not hers but phrases her next door neighbor spoke, a kid with a faux-hawk and cargo pants. This is the sort of nonsense that, floating in the ether of her brain, drifts to consciousness when she is at a loss for what to say.

The husband says, “I don’t like to go on walks.”

The wife says, “You haven’t seen me all day.”

He stares at the computer screen, and she says, “Cycle.” Then, “Look at me.”

He clicks a bit and types a bit. He turns his head slightly as if to say, ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

She taps her foot—she’s that kind of woman.

She taps her foot toward a stretch of back.

The clock on his computer states 10:05 in Helvetica Neue.

“It’s ten o’clock,” she says.

“I know, I know,” he says.

“We are going for a walk,” she says.

‘At once,’ she wants to add.

“We are going for a walk,” she repeats.

“It’s too cold for a walk,” he says.

“You have coats. You can put on a hat and gloves.”

“Yeah—”

“You have gloves,” she says again, “and a hat and coats,” as though reverse order will be more persuasive.

He clicks a bit and types a bit and does not turn his head slightly as if to say, ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

She taps her foot. She crosses her arms. Her anger, as much as it comes from self-defense, makes her feel ugly and craterous, a little absurd.

“Give me a minute.”

“Don’t lie.”

“No, no, I’ll be there.”

She has become this kind of woman, the kind of woman who demands ‘At once, without delay.’ She has been remade in the image of those so desperate they cannot wait. Helvetica Neue is thin and elegant, thinner and more elegant than she. She has told him as much. He has said, “That’s ridiculous.”

“I know,” she replied. “So why are you doing this to me?”

These were not the right words because he groaned and put his head in his hands. The computer screen lit up his skull where his hair did not cover it.

Not saying anything feels like a self-inflicted wound.

“You are my husband,” she says. This is a statement of implication.

“You are my husband,” she repeats. This is a plea to buy into a certain construction, to go through the motions of a role.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you,” he snaps.

In the ether of his brain are not ones and zeroes but steely routes of logic. She doesn’t know how to speak that language or her own.

The wife’s friend takes the wife to a rodeo.

In the parking lot as they get out of the car the smell of bull crap wafts under their noses and the wife inhales and exhales. Her chest expands to the size of the moon.

“This bull crap smells good,” the wife says.

“No,” the friend says. “Say it like you mean it.”

“This bullshit smells amazing,” the wife says.

“That’s better,” the friend says. “Now loosen up some more.”

“Lord, this bullshit smells amazing,” the wife says. “I’ve been needing real bullshit.”

The friend says, “That’s right. Look how relaxed you are.”

The wife lets her shoulders shrug and the friend puts out a hand to stroke her hair.

The hand stroking makes the wife feel good. The friend is a free spirit, a comforting suggestion to the wife that taking pleasure in small things, little moments of contact, is sufficient. To take pleasure in a walk, the smell of animal droppings, a hand caressing—sufficient for what? And yet here is an answer. She can no longer imagine infidelity as a substantial betrayal, or kissing a woman as unnatural.

“You are going to like the rodeo,” the friend says. “It’s just what you need.”

Young men, leaning on walls, watch women walk by in cowboy boots and then look back down at their phones. A group of girls to the side of the entryway look at the men, dreaming, with their meticulously drawn-back hair and glittery eyeshadow, of capturing their gaze. A chilly draft follows the wife and friend through the wide doorway—chilling with the rising volume of the rock music near the arena—until, higher in the stands, the air warms.

When the announcer booms out the next match-up of bull and rider the names cannot be heard—only the country twang of the announcer’s voice, the auctioneering tone atop the music. People beat their feet on the bleachers.

“These two chipmunks spend all day running up the wall to the windowsill of my office. They just cram their cheeks with food. When they first started visiting they were as wide as a walnut. Now they look like stuffed socks. And they don’t want each other around.” Her words hit his ears as so much chatter, but she goes on anyway.

She continues, “I don’t know if it’s two males or two females, or if it’s a male and a female and it’s just not breeding season, but each time one of them sneaks up the wall, the other one races up the wall and chases the first off. And then the first one has to wait until the second one has shuffled through enough of the seed before venturing back up. And they both go through so much seed—digging and shunting off most of it until they find what they want—and by the time they go down their cheeks are super puffed out. And they take this food back to their homes—one lives across the street, one around a building and out of sight—drop it off and come back for the same thing all over again. They do this all day. And I don’t know that it’s good to eat that much. Or to waste so much. Or to fight with each other so much. Or why nature is like that to begin with.”

They momentarily go off the sidewalk and into the road to avoid shattered glass.

“They’re small,” she says as they step back up, “so why can’t they get along?”

He does not respond immediately.

“It would be one thing if there wasn’t enough to go around. But there is enough to go around. They just can’t make the right use of it.”

“Hm,” he says.

They walk for a few minutes silently. She is hoping he will comment. Instead, they reach the top of a hill and he begins to shiver.

“Hm?” she presses.

“What’s that?”

“You said ‘hm’ before.”

“Oh.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

“Um—I don’t know.”

She blows out hard and her breath forms a cloud between them.

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not really sure. I guess I was thinking about this thing called Cassandra.”

She tries to be patient.

“Cassandra?”

“It’s a database,” he says.

“Of course it is. So you were thinking about Cassandra.”

“This is why I don’t like to answer you.”

“Oh, this is my fault,” she says.

“Yes.”

“All right,” she says.

“Say something,” she says.

“I’m cold. Let’s go back.”

“You’re cold? It’s warm. Feel my hands.”

She takes off her gloves and presses her hands against his face.

“Well, I’m cold,” he says. He takes off his gloves and tries to touch her face.

“Don’t put your hands on me,” she says.

He puts his hands in his pockets and says, “God. You’re always so mad.”

“I don’t want to go back,” she says.

“So don’t. I’m going back.”

“You’re just going to leave me in the street?” she asks.

“That’s right,” he says, or she thinks he says. He’s down the street and at the corner and she can’t see his mouth and his footsteps blend with and muffle any distinct words.

A lull descends when the men ride. The only sounds then are thudding hooves, snorting bulls. And it is not that time has slowed down but that the crowd pays attention to each millisecond of it, each millisecond important.

This one kid, skinny and young and swallowed by flannel and jeans, drops onto a brown bull of moderate size.

The kid puts up an arm and grips with his legs, simulating what he has seen. Then the buzzer goes off and the bull bucks forward, seesawing, out of the gate.

He stays atop it for one second—just that one—

Falls at the end of that second, shocked and unprepared for the sensation of the bull beneath him. The bull goes on, unaware at first that it has lost his rider. As it turns, it sees the man on the ground, struggling to get up.

The clown runs between, whipping and waving the red flag.

The bull repositions. The men yell to get the rider’s attention, to get him in motion. Though near the gate, the rider won’t make it back, slow as he’s rising, the length of the journey increasing with his increasingly sluggish effort—

A heavy front hoof knocks him down.

The crowd gasps.

At the look on her face he says, “I’m sorry.” His expression is not tender but responsible.

“Don’t say it, if that’s all,” she replies.

He says nothing, and then she says, “Whatever,” in a small, manipulative voice.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“You would leave me at night in the street.”

He sighs, exhausted.

A car’s headlights fall on them. They move back onto the sidewalk.

“You would abandon me at night in the street,” she repeats.

“I need to get away from you.”

“Get away from me then.”

“Look, let’s move on.”

“Move on back home?”

He turns down a side street as a kind gesture she both wants and does not want. Following feels equal to putting a pacifier in her mouth.

“Knocked breathless or crushed?” the wife asks the friend.

“Crushed,” the friend says. She laughs. “Don’t be so horrified. He’s probably fine.”

“Is this normal?” the wife asks.

“Not normal—but it happens sometimes.”

The music cranks back up in the interim as the crowd recovers.

The next rider is larger and more muscular than the last. He climbs onto a tan bull stamping at the dirt. When the buzzer goes off, the crowd falls silent.

Four, five, six seconds in, and then they start screaming. At this point the rider has accomplished something; there are stakes. They whoop until eight, nine, ten seconds, and then they are quiet again, on the edge of their seats.

Bullshit that you can’t change the other person, the wife thinks. She has found herself changing on account of the husband, talking more relentlessly, turning silent for long measures, feeling smaller and less capable and drained, not knowing what to do to earn affection, becoming more dependent, needy, womanly. Had he changed? Her actions did not seem to affect him, except that they irritated him, and he had not seemed to be, originally, an irritable person.

It’s a simple and visceral pleasure, watching the bull rider, being caught in the grip of her friend, who has reached for her arm. The crowd roars again.

“Yes,” the wife shouts back. The friend can read her lips if she can’t hear her.

The friend smiles and the wife cheers like she wants to rip her throat open. The friend must like to hear her use her voice in this way because she grips back harder. They squeeze as if they would break each other’s hands, and then they let go laughing as the rider falls off the bull at eleven seconds, his short burst of strength a marathon.

“Let me feel your hands,” the wife says.

The husband puts out his hands obediently. She brushes her fingertips over them. They feel icy and dry.

“If you went outside more, you’d acclimate.”

“It’s freezing,” he whines.

“You sound like a girl.”

“How cold do you think it is? Ballpark the temperature.”

“I don’t know. Forty? Fifty?”

He pulls out his phone and opens Apple’s weather app.

“Thirty-four,” he says.

“Apple says it’s sunny and it rains, or that it will rain and the sun shines. I don’t know why you think they’ve got the temperature right.”

“I’ll buy a thermometer,” he says.

Amazon’s orange and white home screen lights up the night.

“Stop buying a freaking thermometer,” she snaps.

He grins because he thinks he’s being funny. At the mercy of his perceptions, she asks, “Why can’t we just go for a walk?”

“We are going for a walk,” he says.

“You just ought to love me,” she says.

“I do love you,” he answers.

“Liar,” she says—not the right word.

People trample straw and peanut shells into an already tamped down dirt floor. Peanut dust lingers in the accordion-like folds of the stands; here and there spots are dusted clean from bored audience members taking their seats.

The wife thinks how the best riders could hold their legs and torsos still, a hand focused on the braided rope.

The friend says, “Don’t ever watch bull riding on YouTube. Makes it look easy, when every bit of time they stay up there is so hard.”

This strength is rewarded with loud roars and then with hot dog wrappers and empty drinks cans strewn carelessly around the stage.

The wife pulls the friend out of the stream of people leaving and gives her a quick kiss on the lips. The friend returns the kiss, pushing back in a fraction of a second. They are both hungry and eager. The friend does not even seem surprised, as though she always believed this possible of the wife.

This acceptance makes the wife push back.

The back of her neck—that’s what the wife wants. The friend answers by grasping the wife’s arm, a match of force with force.

The longer they do this, the more exhilarated the wife feels. She decides that love demands aggression. She pulls away from her friend and shakes her head, a firm, if slight, ‘no.’

The friend laughs. “Of course not,” she says. “This is therapy.”

When they reenter the apartment a light is still on. She switches it off. In the dark, he stumbles into her.

She does not give. As he falls down, she says, “Well, I’m sorry.” And it does not sound sorry, is just on the other side of it, close enough he won’t call her on it, far enough that she has not capitulated.

This kind of control is what he must feel all the time, and that’s why he doesn’t need love.

“You ought to use your phone’s light,” she says, but she is really thinking about the use of force to get what you want. “I did mean to make you mad,” she says. “Does that make you mad?”

“Shut up,” he answers.

She grabs his arm. “Don’t be so mad,” she says.

He jerks away from her, but she knows if she pushes him hard enough, he will have no choice but to push her back.

They introduced themselves in turn in their south-Wexford accents, starting with the tavern owner sitting to my left.

Lawrence Cronin, or “Lar” as he insisted I call him, with his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard, pale skin, and of course his endless stream of questions, such as where was I from? What was I doing this far south? Didn’t a fully-grown woman know better than to drive the guts of 5km on an empty diesel tank? In an area she didn’t know? Did I play cards? What did I want to drink?

Across the table and to my left was Pig-in-Muck McCarthy, a bulky man of few words and as many teeth, with a head that made me think of a hard-boiled egg. And directly across from me sat Seánie Pascal, sallow-skinned beneath a peaked flat cap and chewing on a piece of straw. The faint smell of manure and sweat hung in the air, not associating itself with any one of the men in particular.

When asked a second time what I would like to drink, I ordered a whiskey. When asked which whiskey, I read the label of the first bottle my eyes fell upon—Black Bush. Lar landed a glass in front of me, declaring his admiration for a woman with taste. I took a sip and it had a taste all right—a taste like petrol. It wasn’t a very ladylike thing to drink either, but something told me I’d get more than one funny look if I tried to order a mojito in here. They might have thought I was trying to teach them a foreign language.

“Deal ‘em out, Pig!” Lar clapped his hands as he returned to the table, slurping a freshly- pulled pint.

Pig-in-Muck scooped some playing cards from the table and began to shuffle them so that the barkeeper and I could join in. His hands looked like boulders. “Rummy?” The question was directed at me.

“Sure.” I sipped from my whiskey glass and tried not to wince at the burning sensation it left behind. Pig-in-Muck dealt seven frayed, dog-eared cards to each of us. I rearranged mine in my hand so that three kings and two sixes were side-by-side. I fought to hide the smirk that rose to my face; already, I was just two cards away from winning.

“Lorraine was it, you said?” The cards in Seánie’s hand quivered. Trying not to let my eyes linger upon the man’s tremor, I opened my mouth to correct him.

“No, Laura.” Lar had beaten me to it.

“Laura.” My name sounded clumsy coming from Seánie. “Used to know a girl called Laura. You didn’t go to school around here, no?”

“No, I grew up in Blackrock.”

“Fair enough so. Here, I think I saw you across the way this afternoon.” He nodded towards the hazy window behind me. “With himself. Bertie.”

I turned to look, peering past the big faded “Heineken” sticker. The autumn evening had stolen away the sunlight, but the shadowy outline of Loftus Hall, with its eight visible chimneys, stood strong across the marshland. Some of its downstairs windows glowed, and headlights flashed in the driveway.

“Mr. Price is my client.” I turned back to the table. “What’s happening over there? Surely they aren’t giving tours at this hour.”

“No haunted-house tours on Halloween night?” Lar chuckled into his cards. “Woman, it’s no wonder you’re in the business of tearing stuff down ‘stead of making something of them.”

I gritted my teeth against the sting of the remark. I didn’t admit it, but I had actually let Halloween slip my mind that year.

“What’ll your demolition fellas think o’ the devil’s hole?” Seánie picked up a card from the deck, slid it into his hand, and placed another down on the table. A ten.

A laugh escaped from my throat as I drew from the top of the deck and turned over a queen. “The devil’s what-now?” I decided to keep the queen in my hand and discarded a four. I shook my head in Seánie’s direction. “I don’t know what that means.”

“The hole that goes through every floor of the house, and the roof, that can’t ever be patched up.” Lar placed a card. “Did Bertie not show you it? Did he not tell you about the devil at Loftus Hall?”

“The devil? I thought they were only ghost stories,” I chuckled again and sipped my whiskey. Its cotton-like dryness didn’t feel so unpleasant anymore. None of the men laughed with me, and I felt the whiskey turn cold on its way down.

Seánie chewed on his piece of straw, arms twitching visibly. “Oh, it’s a great story. Ah, you may tell the poor girl now, Lar.”

“In the 1600s, the Hall was owned by a well-off British family called Tottenham, and there was a daughter—Anne.”

Seánie played a three to me. I didn’t need it. I pulled a two from the deck. I laid it down for Lar, who kept talking as he played.

“And one night a stranger knocked on the door and asked could he stay the night, saying he’d just arrived by sea. Tottenham—that’s the British lad—invited him in coz of there being a storm, and he became their guest.”

Pig-in-Muck laid down the six of hearts. Shit. Seánie picked it up and placed it in his hand, leaving a jack down for me. Bastard. I took an ace from the deck and left it on top of the pile, still holding out for my king and my six.

Lar paused and stared at me. I nodded to reassure him that I was still listening to his story, though honestly I was a little more interested in winning the card game. “Later in the evening, Tottenham and his brother—I think it was his brother—and young Anne were having a game of cards with the strange lad, and I can’t think what the name of the game was but everyone needed to be holding three cards, and Anne found herself a card short.” He picked up the card that I had laid down and placed a three.

“She thought she’d dropped it, so she reached down under the table to have a look for it, but what she actually found was that the stranger had bloody hooves for feet—they’d been sharing their home with the devil! And when he realized he’d been found out, he shot off up through the ceiling and out the roof and away into the night went he! And poor oul’ Anne was never the same, and when she died they had to build a special coffin for her because her body was all curled up from rocking back and forth. No word of a lie.”

I slammed my hand down on the table, making my whiskey and the three cloudy pints of lager—as well as the two older men across from Lar and I—jump on the spot.

Lar roared laughing. “Ah, sorry, pet – I didn’t think I’d scare you that much.”

He hadn’t scared me—what happened was that I had seen Pig throw down the very last king in the deck, meaning it wasn’t likely for me to win now.

Evidently on edge, Seánie picked a card from the deck, and mulled over it for a long time. Guilt rippled through me; I had done a better job of shaking someone up with a single motion than Lar had managed to with his entire story.

Seánie finally came to a decision, but the card dropped from his trembling hand, fluttering beneath the table and disappearing into the shadows.

My pulse slowed down as my eyes scanned the table—in this scenario, I was Anne, I was the vulnerable young maiden in the presence of not just one but three strange men and there was no way that I would be looking under the table. God, what had come over me? I felt like such an eejit for being sucked in by Lar’s bullshit story, but even so, I couldn’t unfreeze myself and go looking for the damned card.

“I’m not looking down there. Not after that story of yours.”

A smirk broke out on Lar’s bearded face. “Seánie, you’ll get it, will ya? I think Laura’s scared.”

I clenched my fists at his last comment, yet still I couldn’t bring myself to defy him and do it myself. I watched as Seánie began to shift in his seat and duck his head below the table. My cheeks grew hot with the realization that I had believed that I’d been playing cards with the devil himself, and the fact that I had sent a quivering old man under the table when I was more than capable of doing it. The women back in the office in Dublin would have a right laugh when I told them about it—it might even make a good story for Christmas dinner at my mother’s that year.

A shriek rang out from under the table, sending Lar, Pig and me leaping to our feet. Seated at the outside of the booth, I managed to recoil from the table, feeling my knees give way beneath me. I stumbled backwards and landed near a lice-ridden barstool, gazing at the ceiling, heart pounding. The whiskey must have affected me more than I’d thought it would. I hoisted myself up against the bar to see the three men standing frozen by their seats, pale as ghosts, eyes unwavering, watching.

Watching me.

I looked down. My legs were covered in coarse brown fur, covered to the knees by my navy skirt, and my dainty size-4 feet had been replaced by neat little hooves, which had broken outof the patent black pumps I had been wearing. The shoes were still under the table, side by side, as though I had stepped straight out of them.

A laugh burst forward from my core and reverberated through the weather-riddled wood of the tavern as I exited through the ceiling.

This would certainly make an excellent story for Christmas dinner.

In the latter half of 2001 I made several trips to my father’s home, where, for a week and sometimes two, I took care of him while he convalesced. Neighbors he had known for years, who he himself had helped in times of trouble, could not manage the task, nor could nurses, whose job it was to handle such matters, find the temperament in themselves to care for a man with so difficult a personage. It was not that he was cruel or unjust, but that as his pneumonia receded he became particular to the point of devastating the patience of anyone who was not me — his son. So when the call came from our family doctor, I was taking photographs for a magazine of the still smoldering rubble at Ground Zero, which a month earlier had been the World Trade Centers. In an hour I was on a flight back to Chicago and driving the fifty or so miles to Minooka, where, as the sun was setting, I saw the last of the October light dust with a copper glaze the newly planted mulberry trees along Mondamin Street. Beyond those trees was a woman, who looked like a high school teacher of mine, walking with her five-year old son, the two of them looking into shop windows at their reflection and laughing at the silly faces they made. How distant, it seemed, my hometown was from that world-ending devastation I had witnessed only a few hours earlier. And despite the fact that my father was recovering, as the doctor told me he would, I harbored the morbid notion that this trip to Minooka might be the last time I saw him. Why this premonition occurred to me with such strength and clarity is still a mystery, since my father lives to this day, and why that trip in October in particular seemed more ominous than the others I do not know, but all this led me to question what would happen in the event of his death, who I would see and how I would go about wrestling with the inevitability of selling his property and dealing with his possessions. Would I call the Methodist pastor, whose name escaped me at the time but who had phoned my father more often than I had, or would I call the parent of a high school friend, whose mortuary off Simon Street was where everyone in town would end up one day? I was, without fully knowing it, preparing for my father’s end, which prompted me to wonder too if I would be at his bedside when it happened, or if I would instead be attending to some menial task, like preparing soup on the stovetop or taking a nap on the couch, in which case I would miss what words of wisdom he might want to bestow on me before he passed. All this I meditated on, and it must have sufficiently preoccupied my attention because not long afterward I noticed I had driven farther than I needed to go and was now on the outskirts of town near an old railway overpass where as a boy I had once hatched a plan to run away to Chicago. When I slowed to turn the truck around, realizing that my father could in fact need me, I looked at the overpass again and thought about what it meant to me as a child, how I had taken refuge there one rainy night, how in the sleepless dark I could not avoid timing out which trains sped through Minooka on their way to Chicago and which ones slowed down long enough to be boarded. I parked the truck askance in the tall roadside grass and crossed the pock-marked highway where, even before entering the overpass, I felt the cool October air made more cool and more dense by the walls of reinforced concrete, which emanated with an ammonia scent that, over the years, must have come from the urinations of countless strays — dog, cat, or human. From the road, the overpass seemed like a place of safety, but once inside, that feeling lessened, as if I had entered that vast network of bunkers in France or Belgium during the wars of last century, or maybe as if I had come across an entry point to the Cu Chi tunnels dug by the Viet Cong for the Tet Offensive in 1968. To know I would likely be safe with twenty thousand tons of freight moving over my head was a comfort, but there was also a stupidity to my being there, to anyone being there. Why stay any longer than you needed to in a place that would invite even the possibility of disaster? With that as a parting thought I left the overpass and drove back to my father’s house, where I idled up the driveway and sat in my truck a few moments looking into the garage at his beat-up suburban. Whether my father had gotten into some kind of accident I do not recall, but one of the headlamps had been ripped out, leaving a jagged metal cavity the size of a watermelon. And the longer I stared the more I could not see how this was any kind of accident. Someone, I thought, must have come by one evening with a sledge hammer and smashed out the headlamp, leaving my father in that cost-benefit analysis state of wondering whether to endure the suburban the way it was or call the insurance company to have it fixed. But there were other things, too, that stood out, which I hadn’t seen from the road, or maybe it was because of the waning light, but now that I was closer, the paint on the side of the house had bubbled up in tiny cottage-cheese flakes and the hedges of the northern bayberry had not been trimmed for the winter, and beyond the house lay our vast and fallow fields that hadn’t grown corn for several years. It was as if the farm itself had moved beyond its original intent, which led me to think again of my father’s death and how much longer he would be on this earth and the arrangements and the conversations that would need to happen with people who were his friends, most of whom had likely attended my christening, but who, after he was gone, would treat me with a practiced pity or a fabricated kindness. How unwelcome and unhelpful, I thought, those conversations would be in mollifying my grief. And from those imagined conversations I leapt to the evening of a future memorial service, in which friends and relatives on a cloudy day would all collect on the vast front lawn next to the driveway, all of them mingling and gesturing and moving about in tiny ash-colored groups the way sheep graze a pasture, only the groups would avoid the hickory benches and the dining room chairs and the faux highboy, all of which were inexplicably out on the lawn too, and all of which my father had built during a woodworking spree in the eighties. Just then, while I sat there, a brief gust of wind hit the idling truck with a gale-like quality, and suddenly the vision I was having of the memorial service started to merge with reality, and all those people and hand-crafted pieces and many more things too like flatware and China, blankets and clothing, were blown about mercilessly on the lawn by a wind that – only in my mind – turned cylindrical and lifted everything and everyone into the air and away, leaving the house in the stilled and crepuscular state it actually was. What had started out as a plausible rendering of a memorial service – almost a planning of it – had turned into a projection of disaster, the effects of which must have led to a kind of automatic pilot in the way I moved about because I do not remember doing things I must have done, like getting out of the truck and walking onto the front porch, or, after entering the house, hearing the screen door slap or stepping onto the creaky floorboards in the picture-ridden hallway that led to the bedrooms. What reclaimed me from this dream state must have been the sight of my father, sitting up in bed in his pajamas, his blank lemur-like eyes staring at me over nickel-plated reading glasses. We hadn’t seen each other in more than a year, yet, instead of greeting me, he asked for a pen off the bureau: something in the newspaper must have needed circling, or so I thought. This was the first of my visits to him that fall and he struck me in that moment as both the man I had always known as well as the man I would never know. How many times while growing up had I seen him, not in bed, but in the morning at the kitchen table, turning the large butterfly-wing pages of the Minooka Herald Times and circling the names of people he wanted to hire or a tractor he wanted to buy or a restaurant he wanted to go to, only to have these avenues of interest swatted away by my mother’s frugality, which was not really frugality at all, now that I look back on it, but more an encounter with an economic truth that many farming families in the Midwest confront from time to time. And though my mother had already been dead for several years, it seemed that my father was still playing his role, the role of dreamer, and tonight, to fulfill that role, he needed a pen. Why it was so far away from him I did not ask, but I walked it over to him nonetheless, half hoping he would use it to circle the name of a lighting consultant who would replace the single bare bulb overhead with either a bedside table or, at the very least, some recessed lighting where the ceiling met the wall. But wanting there to be more and better light did little to improve the brightness of the bulb, whose glow fell away from the ceiling in concentric circles of ever increasing shadow, shadow that seemed to mobilize the darkness in the room. When the bulb flickered, as it did occasionally, I could sense the darkness closing in from behind the several waist-high stacks of magazines and newspapers making a pathway to the bathroom, also from the thousands of creases in the pitcher’s mound pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and too from the angular night shapes that seemed as much a part of the books on the bookshelves as the books themselves. I recall too the ink of the ballpoint pen being a gunmetal black as my father scribbled onto a piece of paper the number of a post office box, which he told me to check immediately because the insurance companies had been calling him, wanting to know the status of the mounting medical bills. I felt like I had hardly walked into his room before I was walking out into that hallway with the creaky floorboards and the picture frames, a hallway that was no longer lit by the waning light of the day but instead engulfed in total blackness. Now, like a blind man, I felt my way toward the front door and in the process tipped several picture frames off center, after which I tried as best I could to straighten them out, though I could not see them, or my hands in front of my face. How long had it been, I thought, since I had experienced such darkness, a darkness that would not lift? I then shut my eyes several times, and in the blackness of those long blinks came – unsolicited – the image of the last lighted thing I had seen, that of my father in bed, staring at me with his wide and incurious eyes. And it was in that ephemeral image that I saw my father from then on: the skin around his jowls that over the years had drooped a little and eventually merged with the rooster-like wattle of flesh under his chin, the strawberry red rosacea which in the year since I last saw him had spread slow as lichen from his cheek bones down toward the bone-white bristles of his unkempt beard, at the stunted cloud-gray hairs on his head that were as sparse and maddeningly erratic as those on the head of a newborn child. It is that vivid and unrelenting image I saw during those long blinks that I compare my father to when I see him today, whether in person or in photographs. And even though I sensed that more frames were tilted off center, I continued toward the front door, and was soon outside and into the truck and driving off toward town, into the moonless night that dampened even the Halloween glow of the r-shaped streetlights in the post-office parking lot. I had seen Miss Burmeister and her son only an hour before looking into shop windows, but now she was walking alone and across the pavement toward me with a stack of mail in her hand. She was at that moment the undisturbed and fearless photography teacher I had known as a senior fifteen years ago. And what specifically I had planned on saying to her has now been lost to memory, though I do remember having something more in mind to say than “Hello”, which is what I did say. However, the tone of her response was different from mine; hers was more of a “Hello” in acknowledgement, as if she were greeting a perfect stranger rather than her favorite student, the one who would go on to become so interested in photography that he would leave farm and family for free-lance photo journalism, documenting the atrocities in Srebrenica during the war in Bosnia and the genocide between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda. And before I knew it we were past each other, she continuing to walk through the blackness of the parking lot into an adjacent neighborhood and me, muttering to myself in confusion while I scooped mail out of my father’s PO box. Had it been that long, I thought, had I changed that much? Before I knew it I was sorting the mail on the hood of the truck under the municipal-orange glow of the streetlights, and doing so, I noticed right away the many envelopes from Morris Hospital, located in the nearby town of Channhan, where my father spent several days being treated in early September. And inside those envelopes were several pages of bills, and on those bills were rows of seemingly endless charges ranging from a few hundred dollars to over fourteen thousand, charges for antibiotic injections, x-rays, blood work, medications, bone density tests, hearing tests, cardiovascular tests, kidney functioning, liver health, diabetes, bills for services rendered from doctors of nearby hospitals as well as – unbelievably – my father’s GP, who somehow managed to send a bill for a physical exam all the way from South Beach in Miami where, said doctor, spent the month of September. Each statement had a different color, title, and account number, as well as columns that were labeled thirty, sixty, and ninety days in which to pay the staggering totals. How anyone, I thought, doing this accounting could think that such astronomical sums could be paid by anyone but the very wealthy was itself a mystery. And while there were pages with numbered columns for time lengths, there were also whole other pages devoted to very different column headings, ones listing what health care providers would be charged versus how much my father would owe, which at first looked promising until I discovered that my father had signed up for Medicare B and not Medicare A (B being compensation for the cost of medication and A being the cost of a hospital stay). It seemed, then, within this labyrinth of financial detail, Morris Hospital, and the nurses and doctors there, and Medicare itself, had all conspired to run every possible test they could in order to bilk my father out of tens of thousands of retirement dollars. How anyone was supposed to navigate this sea of financial obligation without going mad or bankrupt was beyond me. But even before I arrived home I knew I would not disturb my father with the details, all of which could wait until morning. Instead, when I arrived at the house, I went to the basement, to the old dark room, where I wiped the dust and grime off the shelves and then prepared the solution baths for developing the pictures I had taken at Ground Zero the day before. I had planned on shooting at least twenty roles of film in those two days I was scheduled to be in New York, but because of the call, I ended up with only five, which I processed over the next few hours, until almost three in the morning, when, while the last of the pictures were on the drying rack, I looked through the shelves and found some canisters with old negatives. How I had never seen them over the years I do not know but I opened them up and rolled out the contents under the infrared light. Here were pictures I had never seen of my parents’ wedding day in 1969, silly pictures that someone had taken and that must have ended up in a secret photo album I had never seen. Everyone was in formal clothing, the men in tuxedos and the women in varying styles of ruffled dresses. In one picture my Uncle Bill had looked toward the camera and stuck out his tongue, in another an aunt of mine put her hands and fingers to the side of her head like devil horns. And somewhere in the middle of the role was a picture of my father standing in the receiving line, my grandfather to his right and my mother to his left. Unlike the others, I had seen this picture before, but with the smallness of the negative and in the infrared light the picture came to mean something different than it ever had. The story goes that my father had been yawning during a brief moment in the receiving line, his mouth open as far as he could make it, like a lion roaring. Anytime I had ever seen this photo when I was young or when I was reminiscing about it with him, it had always struck me as a lighthearted moment on a day when monumental things were happening in a person’s life. Yet that night, in the dark room, my father’s gaping maw did not remind me of a humorous moment on his wedding day. Instead, I saw a never-ending scream.

When Lewis was six, he got into his first fight. It was a school holiday and his mum was working, so his dad, who didn’t have a gig till the nighttime, took Lewis to St. James’ Park to look at the birds. Lewis really liked birds. His dad would play old jazz records by a man called Bird in their living room. On nights when his mum was home, Lewis’s dad and mum would dance together and Lewis would sit at the piano and pretend to be playing. The jazz man’s name was actually Charlie Parker, but Lewis preferred Bird.

Lewis brought a bag of stale bread crumbs to feed the birds. He and his dad walked down the little dirt road and his dad whistled a song by Bird. Lewis knew his dad would play it at his gig later that night, and even though he wasn’t old enough to go into the jazz clubs, he always imagined a big stage and people dressed in fancy clothes with long gloves and top hats. That’s how people looked in the pictures of Bird playing in front of the stage, and to Lewis, his dad was just as great as Charlie Parker, if not better. After all, Lewis’s dad didn’t just play saxophone—he played piano and trumpet too.

Lewis was learning the piano. He didn’t think he was very good, because his dad was so much better, but his dad often clapped when Lewis played and turned to Lewis’s mum saying that he had natural talent. Lewis didn’t know what that meant.

He clutched the bag of bread crumbs and when they reached their usual bench, Lewis’s dad took a seat and Lewis ran over to the pond. He took a handful of breadcrumbs and threw them out to the birds. The ducks instantly swarmed over. They were always loud. The swans were aloof. They stayed at the edge till they deemed the offering of bread crumbs acceptable, then they glided over, a royal procession, scattering the ducks.

It was a grey London day, damp and just cold enough that Lewis had on a blue jacket with brass buttons. His mum had made it out of scraps from the shop she worked at. It looked rather smart. Lewis’s dad said that he looked just like a little jazz musician when he wore it.

Lewis was zoning out, methodically tossing bread crumbs to the birds, thinking of his dad’s big concert that night. He did not notice the boy who came up behind him and it was only after the boy actually shoved him that Lewis snapped out of his trance.

“Look at you, sissy,” the bigger boy said, then shoved Lewis again. This time it was harder and Lewis almost stumbled. He caught himself before he could fall and glared.

The bigger boy shoved Lewis harder. This time, Lewis did fall and he yelped as he collapsed onto the muddy shore of the pond. He knew his mother would scold him for the stains. She had worked very hard on the jacket. It had been a birthday present and it hadn’t even been two weeks. He felt the tears before they came but tried very hard not to let the bigger boy see him crying. Even so, a sob managed to crack through.

The bigger boy leered over, snatched the bag of breadcrumbs from Lewis, and then kicked Lewis in the side. Now there was a footprint on the side of the jacket. Lewis could handle the names and the breadcrumbs being snatched. What he couldn’t handle was this nice jacket his mum had made for him being ruined.

He leapt up, yelling, and then jumped onto the boy’s back. The boy yelped in alarm and tried to shake Lewis off, but Lewis wrapped his arms tightly around the boy’s neck and held on.

Someone grabbed the back of Lewis’s jacket and yanked him away from the boy, who stumbled backwards from momentum.

“Lewis.” It was his father who had grabbed him. “What the hell?”

“He pushed me!” Lewis pointed at the bigger boy, who scrambled to his feet and started to run up the hill to a lady pushing a pram who Lewis figured was his mother. The bigger boy was crying now and the mother was rubbing the dirt off his face. Lewis knew he was going to get into trouble. His dad’s hand was still on the back of his jacket and Lewis shrank behind his father, trying to hide away from the view of the bigger boy. He was going to get a scolding when he got home, he knew that. Maybe he wouldn’t be allowed to watch television for a week.

The lady with the pram stood up and started marching towards Lewis’s father, who squeezed Lewis once on the shoulder.

“I’ll handle this,” he said, and walked to the lady.

Lewis watched his dad and the yelling lady. All Lewis could see of his father was his back, but he seemed calm. Lewis watched them. Maybe they were talking about how they should punish Lewis. He hoped the lady wouldn’t suggest not having sweets for a week. He’d just gotten a big bag of candies for his birthday.

Lewis’s father was walking back to him now. He looked angry. Lewis felt like he was going to cry again, but then his father turned round to the lady again.

“Teach your bloody kid some manners!” He kicked the ground, and then turned back round. He grinned; Lewis didn’t know why. His dad ruffled Lewis’s hair and scooped him up. Lewis giggled as his father set him on his shoulders. He could see all of the lake from up here, all the birds pecking away at the shore, all the children running around. He clutched his dad’s head and his dad started to whistle one of their songs.

When Lewis was eleven, he got sent home from school because he punched an older boy in the stomach. Lewis had brought a bagged lunch to school that he actually had no intention of eating. His mum had made him a sandwich last night and it was cold because it had been sitting in the refrigerator. His dad had had a show that night and Lewis had started going to them, because his parents finally decided he was old enough.

The shows weren’t like the pictures he’d seen of the old jazz musicians. There were no velvet covered seats, no standing ovation, no elegant ladies in pearls, no men with monocles. They were usually in small bars or restaurants. The one last night had smelled like beer. The stage wasn’t even at the front. It was in the corner. And people weren’t watching.

The first time Lewis had gone to one of his dad’s shows, earlier that year, he wanted to yell at the people in the restaurant. They weren’t paying attention. They didn’t understand the music. Lewis could listen to his dad play for hours. These people were barely paying attention. He had asked his mum why they weren’t really listening and his mum told him that these people came for food and that the music was a sort of added bonus. Like how sometimes there was a toy at the bottom of the cereal box but that they never bought a cereal box just for the toy. Lewis told her that he would buy a cereal box for the toy and his mum rolled her eyes and told him that when he had the money, he could do what he liked.
Last night, his dad had played West End Blues and Lewis, who had just started learning trumpet, knew how hard that particular song was. He expected everyone to stand up and start clapping. But there was only some scattered applause.

He went up to his dad afterwards, when they were outside and his dad was holding his trumpet case with one hand and had a cigarette in the other, and told his dad that the performance had been fantastic. His dad chuckled but then took a long drag of his cigarette and didn’t say anything. His mum hadn’t gone; she said she had to get up early and was tired.

At school the next day, Lewis held his little bagged lunch and didn’t want to eat it. He was sitting outside, underneath a tree, watching the other kids run around. Thomas Fletcher, one of the ruder boys in class, came up to him and asked why he wasn’t eating. Lewis refused to answer and Thomas snatched up the bagged lunch and wouldn’t give it back. This would’ve been alright, but then Thomas said something about how it was a lousy lunch anyway, with the cheap sort of bread and margarine instead of butter and how not even a dog should be eating it, and that’s when Lewis stood up and punched Thomas in the stomach.

He was sent to the headmaster’s office shortly after that because Thomas had run off and told their teacher. They phoned home and since Lewis’s mum was at work, it was his dad who came to the school. He spoke with the headmaster briefly behind a closed door. Lewis couldn’t really make out what they were saying, only that it sounded loud and angry.

He thought he was going to get in trouble. He and his father silently walked from the school to the car (a small, beat-up thing they had only recently gotten). The ride was quiet. His father stared straight forward. Lewis tried to keep his gaze out the window, but he glanced at his father every few minutes, trying to figure out what was going to happen. He knew he shouldn’t have punched Thomas. He knew he was probably going to be suspended from school for a few days and that it would go on his record and that his mum would cry when she found out. He pressed his forehead against the dirty window of the car.
They didn’t take the turn that would lead them to their flat; instead, Lewis’s father took a left and pulled in front of a McDonald’s. He got out and held the door open for Lewis, cupping the back of his neck as they walked inside.

“Do you want the toy or are you too old for that now, Lew?” his father asked when they got in line. Lewis glanced at the little plastic toys in the display case and shook his head. He couldn’t remember the last time they were at McDonald’s. He’d been little then and he had asked for a toy. His father ordered two burgers off the value menu and a drink. After a moment’s hesitation, he got fries as well. He winked at Lewis. “A treat,” he said, pressing his finger to his lips. “Don’t tell Mum.”

They sat face-to-face in the little booth with their food and Lewis spent most of the time looking at the fries and avoiding his dad, till finally, his father cleared his throat.

“Look, Lew—”

“I’m sorry, Dad, he was just saying awful stuff and I wanted him to shut up and—”

“Lewis, I’m not mad.” His father sighed. “I’m sure he was saying some nasty shit. I know how kids are. You need to learn how to pick your fights, ok? Sometimes people are going to say some terrible things about you and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Sometimes it’s better not to say anything.” He looked straight at Lewis and Lewis ducked his head down.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“It’s alright.” His dad leaned over the table and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now, you’re suspended for three days, but that just means we can get some music done.” He grinned at Lewis, who managed to smile back.

“Is Mum going to be mad at me?” Lewis asked when they were getting back into the car.

His father’s lips tightened. Lewis thought that maybe he shouldn’t have asked that. His parents were fighting a lot. Lewis could usually hear them from his room, even if he had music on. His mum wanted his dad to get a proper job. It used to happen only once in a while, but now it happened every other day.

“She’ll be fine in the end,” his dad said, starting the car. “She always is.”

When Lewis was fourteen, he had to go to the hospital because he broke three ribs. That was the year he started going to a posh secondary school. His mum and dad had separated the previous year and he’d gone to live with his mum and her new husband in a nice house and they went out to eat every week. His mum’s new husband, Harold, was nice enough, even though he was almost as old as Lewis’s granddad. He worked in a bank and had short, neat blond hair and light skin. Harold had two kids from his previous marriage—Eliza and Alex—and when they visited on weekends, Lewis’s mum fit in right with them, all fair and blonde. Lewis now found himself patting down his messy curls down when he walked past the big mirror in the upstairs hallway.

It happened when he was walking home from school. Three boys had followed him, close enough so that he knew they were there. He tried to shake them off, clutching at the straps of his knapsack, peering over his shoulder. He didn’t know what they wanted. Lewis took a shortcut through a park and it was then when the leader of the boys—Michael Oakley—yanked his bag.

“Heard that your mum’s a gold-digging whore,” Michael hissed.

Lewis froze. This wasn’t the first time someone had made a terrible comment about his mother. It was the buzz around this circle, the young, pretty shop assistant with no education who managed to woo an older, rich, recently-divorced man and left her husband for him. At the cocktail parties that Harold brought them to, Lewis noticed that none of the ladies really talked to his mum and instead, sort of talked over her. Lewis’s mum never let it bother her though; she just sort of smiled and nodded. People at school assumed the worst about Lewis’s mum, so they tended to assume the worse about him. Lewis didn’t like people talking about his mum like that, but he also knew that if they were still in the East End, no one would be calling her names or yanking his knapsack.

“Bloody stig.” The boy with glasses took a step closer. The one with freckles pumped out his chest.
They edged closer to him and Lewis started breathing faster. He ducked, trying to run away, but Michael caught him and shoved him to the ground. He remembered what his dad had told him years ago and knew that there was no way he could overpower these three. But he didn’t want to curl up and let them thrash him. He tried to get a few blows in, but they were just stronger and he was outnumbered. He didn’t, however, give them the satisfaction of crying.

He called his mum on the mobile that he’d been given for Christmas and she and Harold rushed over to pick him up and bring him to the hospital. He’d started crying then, because his mother had started crying. She was really weeping, asking him why these boys would’ve done this, why they thought it was ok. Lewis only felt a few tears on his face. They stung the cuts. Harold made some remark about how it was violent video games that were causing such schoolboy ruckus. Lewis wanted his dad.

“Can I call Dad?” Lewis asked in the waiting room.

His mum stroked his hair.

“I did, love. It went to voicemail. He’s probably very busy right now.”

The last time Lewis went to one of his dad’s gigs, he counted ten wrong notes. Lewis winced each time. The tempo on the third song was off. Lewis wasn’t sure if he’d noticed because his father had a bad night or if Lewis had just never paid that much attention before. He was really into his music nowadays; this posh school had a good music program and his teacher moved him up to the upper level classes within the first week because Lewis was that good. His father was very proud of him and had ruffled his hair and bought him some new sheet music. “The good stuff,” he had said. “You’re ready.”

Lewis wanted his father now. He couldn’t explain to his mum why Michael Oakley’s gang picked him, couldn’t explain that it was her fault and that he was angry at her, but he also pitied her and he didn’t know what to feel. His dad would understand, Lewis knew this. His dad would tell him it was all like a song and that things never had to make sense.

Lewis pressed his face into the side of his mum’s arm and closed his eyes.

When Lewis was sixteen, he came home with a bloody nose. It was a summer night and he’d been out with some old friends from when he used to live over by the East End. He often met up with them on the weekends when he stayed with his dad. His dad had moved from their old flat to a cheaper, one-bedroom one. When Lewis stayed with him, they’d cook hot dogs in the microwave and watch Monty Python. His dad didn’t care that sometimes Lewis would bring girls home. In fact, he always made tea in the mornings and greeted whoever had spent the night with a cheery wink. When his dad had a gig, Lewis would come along. Sometimes, Lewis would play with his father. Those were the nights they got the most tips. He knew why, but he didn’t know if his father knew. He didn’t know if it was better if his father knew or not.

Lewis had been thinking about music a lot. His music teacher told him that if Lewis really wanted to, she’d write him a glowing letter of recommendation to the top conservatories. She had connections. She could get him a spot. He told her he’d think about it.

In the last few months, Lewis started staying with his dad a little bit less. He’d also started dating this rather posh girl, Anita, from school. She had red hair and was the type of girl who went on ski trips to the Alps over the Christmas holiday and never thought twice about ordering drinks and dessert at restaurants. Lewis sometimes caught himself checking the price of drinks before remembering that he didn’t have to worry about money anymore. Harold paid for everything. Anita had met his mum and Harold a couple of times. They thought she was charming. She often asked about his father. Lewis always made some excuse.

Anita was in Venice for the summer, so Lewis was out with his old East End friends that night. They went to one of the pubs on the corner of the street where Lewis used to live. The bartender recognized him, he’d known Lewis’s dad. They got a round of drinks on the house and as Lewis toasted to old times, some fellow in the corner scoffed.

“Got a problem, mate?” Lewis always was a bit brasher when drunk.

“Your old man’s a waste,” the fellow said, tipping back his own whiskey. “Can’t get a gig nowadays. Don’t know how he ever did.”

“He’s in Edinburgh right now,” Lewis leaned over to this man, “at a jazz festival.”

“That’s what he told you? He’s always in here, wasting the little money he has on liquor. No doubt he’s gone to Scotland to do the same.”

Maybe it was because he had a bit too much to drink or maybe this man’s words had a ring of truth to them that Lewis didn’t want to admit, but whatever the case was, before he could stop himself, Lewis punched him in the face. This fellow was not one to cower away, so he hit Lewis back. They both managed to get a few swings in before the bartender broke up the fight. Lewis’s friends were cheering him on and they held up his hand in victory when they left the bar. Lewis ducked down his head in shame. The blood trickled down from his nose and he tasted it on his top lip.

He found his way back to Harold’s house well past three in the morning and tried to tiptoe slowly inside, without waking up anyone.

“You said you’d be back at midnight.”

This was his mother, who was sitting in the dining room, in her pink satin bathrobe, arms crossed over her chest. Lewis had just closed the door behind him and stopped still in the hallway.

“Mum, I’m sorry, I—”

“You can’t keep doing this!” She stood up, her voice starting to break. “Do you know how much I worry about you, Lewis? Do you even think about your future?”

He’d been apologetic before but now he stood up a little straighter, his voice edged.

“I am thinking about my future. I told you. Mrs. Carter said I can get a good spot—”

“Oh, yes that’s what this family needs. Another musician.” His mum was really shaking now. “Lewis, do you remember how poor we were? I couldn’t even get you proper birthday presents. We had to keep the heat off in the winter. I had to sell your grandma’s jewelry to pay rent. You’re so good at school. You could get a good job. You could be something.”

“I’m really good though.”

“That’s not enough. You never know. Do you want to live in a shitty flat your whole life and have to worry about paying for water?” Her voice cracked and Lewis saw that her eyes were red. She had been crying. “I don’t want to worry about you when you’re older. I don’t want you to have to worry about buying groceries or paying rent, Lew. We got out of that. You can stay out of that.”

There was a distance between them, Lewis still in the hallway, his mum in the dining room and Lewis didn’t know how to close it. He felt angry, he knew that, at his mum mostly, but there was a snaking feeling of anger towards his dad. If his dad had regular gigs, Lewis could do it. If his dad brought in money, his mum wouldn’t have left and they’d be ushering Lewis off to school. He clenched his fist, thinking of his dad in Scotland now, wondering if he was playing a gig or if he was just drinking, like the man in the pub had said.

And then, Lewis felt the guilt bubble up and close around his throat, almost suffocating him. He unclenched his fist and, looking away from his mother, away from the pictures of Harold’s family in the hallway, Leiws rushed to his room.

When Lewis was twenty-one, he went to one of his dad’s shows. He’d dressed up for it, in a smart jacket and a tie, and combed his hair back so it didn’t stick up everywhere. It was going to be at a good location, that’s what his dad told him on the phone, the type of place where people actually went to listen to the music and not just eat.

Lewis was back in London for the summer. He was studying accounting at university. He’d always been good with numbers and accounting offered a steady, reliable job. Harold said he’d be able to help Lewis out with jobs when he graduated.

His girlfriend, Sam, was with him tonight. Lewis had wanted to go alone, didn’t want to drag Sam along for this, but Sam was the sort of person who didn’t really understand music but loved it nonetheless, so she wouldn’t know that Lewis’s dad played a few wrong notes. Also, Sam really wanted to meet Lewis’s dad. Lewis was hesitant to bring her along at first, but as they walked into the venue—a rather nice restaurant with a big stage up front and elegant waiters with bowties—and he felt Sam’s hand on his back, he was thankful that he wasn’t alone.

His dad had invited them backstage and Lewis talked briefly to the maître d’ and, with Sam close behind, headed through a hallway and behind the stage. The musicians, all dressed in black, were readying their instruments, emptying out the spit valves, blowing a few notes, adjusting their reeds and mouthpieces. Lewis’s dad spotted him before he did and raised a hand.

“That’s my boy!”

The rest of the musicians glanced up, offered a nod or a brief wave, and Lewis’s dad walked over, trumpet in hand and embraced Lewis.

“Hey, Dad.” His dad smelled faintly like cigarette smoke and valve oil—familiar scents that Lewis hadn’t smelled in a while. He held onto his dad for a bit longer.

“Lew!” His dad clapped him on the shoulder and then ruffled Lewis’s hair. “My God, it’s been ages. This is Sam isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand towards Sam, who smiled sweetly and shook it.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Tyler.”

“Just call me Will.” He turned back to Lewis. “How’s your studies going? What is it you’re studying again…?”

“Accounting,” Lewis said.

His dad laughed and then shook his head, turning to Sam.

“All the talent in this one—that pure, raw musical talent—and he picks accounting.”

“I like maths, Dad.” Lewis was blushing. He felt it in his cheeks and when his dad tried to make eye contact, he found he couldn’t hold it for long. He didn’t know why he felt the need to justify himself, but he wanted to. “And I can get a good job straight out of uni. All big companies need accountants. It’s the practical thing to do.” There was an edge to his voice that he didn’t realize till he finished his sentence. His dad, who had been smiling just before, now had his lips drawn in a thin, straight line. He didn’t say anything in response to Lewis, just fingered the valves of his trumpet.

“Say, Lew…” His father spoke finally but was looking more at his trumpet than at Lewis. “I spoke to the conductor and he said it’d be ok if you wanted to play the piano for a song. It’d be a good thing for the crowd, y’know? Father and son, like the old times…” He glanced up at Lewis, smiling unsurely.

Lewis wanted to say yes. Or maybe he wanted to want to say yes. He thought of Mrs. Carter back in secondary school who could’ve put him in a conservatory. He thought of how he had met Sam, how he’d been playing the piano in a bar while a bit drunk and Sam had come up and said that his music was lovely. He thought of the way the keys of a piano felt beneath his finger tips, slightly slick, and how sometimes the keys stuck together and how each piano had a different feel. He thought of his father’s hands on his own, showing him where Middle C was, showing him how to press the pedals, clapping him on the back and saying that Lewis had natural talent. Then he thought of the yelling. He thought of wrong notes at performances, scarce applause, bored gazes. He felt a lick of heated anger in the back of his throat but as it rose, it turned to a chilling numbness.

“I haven’t played in a while, Dad,” he said, looking away. “I wouldn’t be any good.” He paused, glancing briefly at Sam, who was smiling to herself, then back at his father. “We’ll watch the show. I’m looking forward to it.” He reached to touch his dad’s shoulder. His father stared at him and then nodded slowly. Lewis saw the creases on his father’s forehead, deep and weary, before his father smiled.

“Ah, well, that’s a pity. I hope you like the show, though.”

When Lewis and Sam took their seats, at one of the tables near the middle, and after they had ordered their drinks, Sam leaned over to Lewis.

“You played just the other week,” she said. “At Grace’s party. You were rather good.”
“I know.”

“It would be so nice if you played with your father,” Sam said, with a sigh.

“The show’s starting.” Lewis looked straight ahead, not at Sam.

The curtain at the front of the stage rose. The jazz band had about twenty people. Lewis’s dad was fourth trumpet or something like that. Or maybe he was the second third trumpet. Or the third second trumpet. Whatever it was, he wasn’t the first. The song they started off with was one by Bird. Lewis felt a lump in his throat. He knew this song well, knew its insides and outs and where the tempo picked up and where it fell and when the right place to take a breath would be. He watched the band, unable to look at his father initially, because he didn’t want to see his father make a mistake. Towards the middle, though, his favorite part, the part he used to sing along with his father to, he let himself look.

His father held his trumpet up and his eyes were closed and the way the stage light shown on his face made the creases and lines disappear. Lewis didn’t know whether he should be happy or sad. He just reached over for Sam’s hand and tried to enjoy the song.

Her temper was like a lit cigarette. Buck had already seen her burn hot and mean before crumbling and fizzling out. She made a phone call at the payphone just outside the gas station and slammed the phone down into the cradle. She lifted the receiver and slammed it down two times, three times, and by the fourth time he saw her arm wilt and sag to her side. Defeated, she leaned against the gray plastic of the phone booth. The woman looked up. It was early morning, just over an hour shy of sunrise.

Buck was looking for some flesh to house him, to hold onto his loneliness for a little while. He had been watching her for the past thirteen minutes from the cab of his rig. Idly, he picked at his teeth with his thumb nail. His mind was just about made up.

This was his third day driving through Nevada. The desert was always fussing. At night, the insects whined and the creatures stirred. It gave him the creeps. There wasn’t much out here. Just cacti and brush and wrinkled heat vibrating above the pavement. Sometimes he saw a truck stop or a gas station, like the one he was at now, and he would stop, relieved to find something real.

Driving was one of the things Buck knew best. But it was the damn scenery that yoked his throat and made his breath tight.

There was mischief here. Buck saw it most in the red dirt that crusted around his boots like scabs. That deep sand always followed his feet and coated his cab with rusty brown. He hated it, like the grime was some left over evidence of a crime he didn’t commit.

Buck glanced at her, his hand resting on door handle. She looked his way and their eyes snagged. Buck felt it then, this palpable loneliness, like the vibrating thrum of cicada wings clapping against his spine. He stepped out of his rig. The slam of his door echoed and disappeared somewhere into the empty morning. He walked across the gravel parking lot to where she was standing. He tipped his baseball cap to her and smiled quick as he approached.

She traced his outline in the dark with her pinky finger. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“You passin’ through?”

“Thought I might stick around for a while.”

She shrugged and pulled pack of smokes from her red leather purse. She offered him one and he declined.

They talked for a while. He introduced himself. Her name was Amelia. They kept their voices low like they were keeping a secret. All around them, the muted light from the rising sun stretched, slowly shifting the inky black shadows up and away from the horizon. Daytime was coming soon. Buck idly twisted some of her long blonde hair between his finger and thumb as they talked, her voice hitting his ear like the sound of crumpled paper.

Her dress was a slip of cheap satin and lace. If Buck strained his eyes he could see her nipples. Buck didn’t mind looking and she didn’t seem to care.

She had on this pair of cowgirl boots, though, and Buck just couldn’t make sense of them. They seemed too big for her feet. They were cherry red and sky blue and had swirls of glittering stones that studded the sides.

Amelia asked about his hat. As she did, she flicked the brim and let her finger trail down the bridge of his nose as she pulled her arm back down to her side. He caught her smell in his nose: a little sweat, a little smoke, and something like cinnamon. She asked about his rig. He smiled.

“So listen,” she said after a while. “My car broke down a ways back. I left some important shit in there and I’ll need it if we’re gonna be familiar.”

“Familiar?” He was amused.

She rolled her eyes before taking a long drag from her cigarette. “You know what the fuck it means.”

Buck studied her through the smoke. Her face was sallow, but cute. “Is it far?” “Nah, I walked.” She gestured to her feet.

Those red boots. He nodded. “Sure. Let’s walk.”

They started west on the highway, leaving the small brick gas station behind them. The road was empty this time of morning. Buck looked around. Gradually, the desert colors inverted around them. The reds and oranges of the coarse sands were outlined with the black ink of night. The sky, typically such a deep blue in the evening, sopped up the warm pinks and reds that belonged to the ground. It was like the world was upside down.

Buck looked again at Amelia’s boots. The cheap plastic rhinestones caught and swallowed the early morning light, only to spit it back up. Boots like that couldn’t help but make noise. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It drowned out the rest of the desert noise he couldn’t stand.

Buck tried to keep the small talk going. She was all nods and one word answers. After evading his questions, she grabbed at his hand and then let go once he laced his fingers into hers. Buck couldn’t decide if her aloofness was sexy or annoying. It had been about ten minutes since they started walking. He wondered if he should feed her some shit excuse about hitting the road and cutting his losses now.

“You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you Amelia?”

“Ain’t much to say,” she replied.

“I’m just trying to get to know you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He sighed and turned his eyes forward, away from Amelia. He was tired. The sun was just about up, but there were still shadows to conceal and hide the desert from him. His eyes grabbed onto the outline of a foreign shape a ways off. As they approached it, he realized it was a deer carcass, partly decayed and partly picked at by other critters. Its legs were fractured and splayed beneath it. Buck stared hard at the carcass, squinting his eyes against the new light on the horizon.

He had hit plenty of deer with his rig and he had seen just about every kind of animal limp and dead on the side of the highway. Usually he caught the rotten flesh in glimpses, but now his pace was slow. He had time to look, really look, at the slack of its broken jaw and the bloodied crust of its fur and the rot of its bones. He studied the bend of its back and the deep red slick of its exposed innards. He looked away, then looked up. The monoliths on the horizon loomed over the dead animal. They seemed reverent, like headstones or weeping priests.

They passed the deer. Amelia laughed. It was a little laugh that came out like a scuff on pavement.

She lit another cigarette. A trail of smoke followed her through an otherwise clear morning. Buck was impatient. “Are we close?”

“Close.” Amelia’s voice came out like a wheeze.

He knew there was nothing waiting for them. Maybe he always knew it. He stopped. “We should head back. We can get in my rig and I’ll take you to your car.”

Amelia rolled her shoulders back and tilted her head from side to side. She gave her head a light shake.

“No.” She dropped the remains of her second cigarette to the ground. It hissed as she crushed it into the dirt.

Buck tensed, pulling his broad knuckles into fists at his side. He didn’t like hurting people, but he wasn’t stupid. Something went sour inside him. She avoided just about every question he flung at her and he was cross. She kept laughing, too, like there was some joke in the air he didn’t understand. He grabbed her arm and pulled hard. “You best tell me what’s going on.”

She turned away and struggled against him. He watched her breasts bounce and pull against her dress as she moved.

“Enough!” She yelled.

He held her arm tighter. “Tell me what’s going on!”

She turned towards him, indignant, nose turned in the air like she smelled something bad.

She stopped abruptly and jerked her arm away from his fist.

“What’d you bring me out here for?” He asked. “You fucking tell me right now. What’s going on?”

The strap of her purse coiled around her shoulder like a snake. Her eyes darted all around, but she wasn’t nervous. It was like she was waiting for permission. Her gaze finally settled on his and he felt that same strum, the same pluck of loneliness and sorrow he felt when he had caught her eye before.

“What the fuck is your problem?” He shouted.

She tipped her head to the side. She laughed, that same small laugh that she had for the dead deer. “It’s been a long night, Buck.”

He didn’t have much time for anything after that. It was all jaws and teeth like cactus quills. They both shouted, but all he could hear was that noise, that awful desert noise. The insect chatter felt like scrapes on his ears. Some critter yipped, he couldn’t tell what. Rocks crumbled, the desert shifting away from itself at the break of day. And then there was this breath in his ear, like a wheeze, grumbling loud and mean and above the rest of it.

Buck strained to see the face before him but there was no face. There was only carcass, deer carcass, the same broken jaw and the noiseless cry he had seen before. He felt his legs splay out beneath him. A struggle. He tried to fight it off, but there was no fight left. He closed his eyes and saw red boots and dirt. Blood, blood. Buck felt gone.

The sun was almost up. All the shadows of the night disappeared like ghosts. Critters mulled around, their noises changing with daybreak. The landscape responded in kind, the light allowing the scenery to take a different form. Those sleeping spires were no longer beasts, nor men, nor headstones, lingering on the horizon’s seam. They were instead rocks, a crown, resting on the mantle of the rising sun.

It was Eli’s idea to go gold panning. Not hers. But while it usually bothered Ruby to go mindlessly along with someone else’s plans, for Eli she could make an exception; even if it meant sitting all day in the hot sun with her legs and ass falling asleep on the rocks.

When Eli pulled up in his bright red Wrangler, Ruby couldn’t help staring at him from her patio slab. His well-tanned arm was hanging out the window and he was tapping out a rhythm against the door. “Tomorrow” rattled the speakers in a sexy, swoony chorus of trombones. Normally she didn’t “get down” with hip-hop, but this particular song always got her in the mood. And Eli knew that.

“Well hi there, handsome,” she said, strutting down the stone path to the Jeep. As it happened, she’d taken the time that morning to doll herself up with a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses, a floral skirt, a tight white blouse and a creamy headscarf that just screamed “Jackie Kennedy.” Something in the morning air had given her the notion that she ought to spend the day swishing her hips like a twenties pin-up—and what better costume for such an undertaking than this?

Eli turned to her and frowned; his hand still banging against the door.

“You know we’re going gold panning, right?” His left cheek bulged with the pressure of the abscess tooth he still hadn’t done anything about. He looked like a chipmunk with a kickass Jeep.

Ruby stopped swishing her hips and let her hands, which until then had been tossing her hair from side to side, fall dramatically to her waist.

“Uh yeah, duh, you texted me that and I said ‘cool,’ remember?”

“Yeah, I remember the text. What I’m just not so sure about, though, is why you’re wearing that when you’re gonna have to sit in the dirt for literally the entire day. Why didn’t you throw on some sweats or something?”

Ruby crossed her arms and jutted her lip. Could he really be this much of a Neanderthal?

Or was he just playing some retarded, unfunny character?

“Uh, because it’s our anniversary. Would you really want me showing up in shit-stain sweats on the day we’re choosing to remember two whole years of our lives together?”

“Well if we’re spending it in the mud, then yeah, I would rather you chose logic over theatre. Besides, we can go out afterwards. We’re not going to spend literally every second of this calendar day in the mud. We will be eating dinner at some point.”

Ruby sighed and bit down aggressively on her Bubblicious. “Should I go back in and change then?”

“Nah, never mind,” Eli said, waving his hand dismissively and tossing his head towards the passenger seat. “Just get in.”

Ruby stomped her foot and flung her arms in a mismanaged flail of exasperation. Then, resigning herself to the inevitable, she marched around to the passenger side where Eli was holding the door open for her.

“You do look really cute, by the way,” he said, flashing his best swollen Sears catalogue grin. She melted and smiled back, climbing in as elegantly as she could. She had to clear a space for her feet in all the Timmy’s wrappers covering the floor, but she tried not to mind.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s a little messy in here…just been really busy lately…” “Oh it’s fine,” she said, reaching around for her seatbelt.

“Hey. Come ‘ere a second,” he said, leaning over and pulling her face to his. Ruby sighed through her nose as he pressed his lips to hers, trying as hard as she could not to bump the swollen spot. Phrases like “true love” and “destiny” flashed through her mind like neon signs in

a down-and-out montage. If she could kiss him this passionately with his face all swollen and gross, they could survive anything together.

Eli pulled away with a theatrical sucking sound and started the engine. Now it was time for seatbelts.

An hour later, they pulled into what appeared to be a truck stop in the middle of fucking nowhere. In front of the single level, faux-log building was a sign painted onto an overturned high-back bath tub. In peeling gold paint it boasted “All Day Gold Panning–$20. Tools Included.”

“Weeeell, here we are,” Eli drawled as he threw the Jeep in park and hopped out. Ruby finished the text she was working on and hit send before following after him. By the time she climbed outside, Eli had disappeared inside the building. A moment later, though, as she was composing a witty response to the one she’d just received, Eli re-appeared in the doorway, brandishing two shovels in one hand and two large, steel pans in the other.

“You should have done something about that tooth. It looks awful.” she tsked at him. “You know it could travel up into your brain and kill you?”

“All hell it’s fine; quit worrying,” he stated, trying to cover up the impediment it was rapidly causing in his speech. “Now—you ready to get rich, baby girl?”

“Do those things really work?” She asked, staring doubtfully at the pans. From where she was standing they looked like frying pans without any handles.

“How in the hell are they supposed to keep the gold in? Doesn’t it fall out when you dump them out?”

“What?”

“When you dump them out! I mean, don’t you shovel dirt in and then dump everything out in a—I don’t know—one of those wooden table things with the bars? Like a conveyor belt?”

“That’s a sluice. That’s one way of doing things. But it’s not what we’re doing.

We’re…I’ll just show you when we get down there, okay? It’s a little hard to explain without showing you…but obviously you don’t just shovel everything in and dump it back out…”

“Shut up, you know what I meant.”

“”Whatever, let’s just get going. Can you put your phone away long enough to follow me down to the creek?”

“Oh my god I’ve sent like two texts all day. Excuse me for having nothing to do sitting in the Jeep and then standing in the parking lot.”

Either Eli didn’t hear her or he pretended he didn’t. Swiveling on his heel, he headed into the trees down a skinny, winding path that was largely overgrown with shrubs that all looked like Poison Ivy. Ruby stumbled after him, tearing at the burrs that threatened to overtake the clinging fabric of her skirt. She wanted to complain but she knew there was nothing Eli could do about the burs. He was trying to do something nice for her, even if it was a bit weird. The burs were just a hazard of love. Love wasn’t easy. She knew that. She would just have to tough it out. Eli would be impressed with her in the end.

A million years later—the tips of Ruby’s fingers thoroughly overtaken by invisible bur barbs—they spilled out onto a rocky peninsula. Surrounding the peninsula was a babbling brook which trickled in and out of Ruby’s peripherals in a splashy, blinding ribbon of nature.

“It’s gorgeous,” she murmured, sneaking up behind Eli and placing her hands on his hips. “It is that,” he said with a charming hint of Southern Twang. “I think we should set up

just over yonder,” he said in a pubescent cowboy drawl that sounded like the ubiquitous teenage employee in The Simpsons. Ruby followed his gaze to the right where the peninsula and the shore made a little armpit of mud. “That’s where we’ll be makin’ our fortune. You see, the gold is heavier than the rest of the mud, so it falls out of the run-off as soon as it can. Spots like that little muddy section are primo hunting grounds for nuggets.”

“Do you really think we’ll catch anything?” “You don’t catch gold, sweetie. It’s not a fish.” “Uggh, you know what I mean.”

“Well, now, I just don’t know—only one way to find out!” Eli winked at her as he made his way over to their intended panning spot. Ruby stumbled after him; her flip flops snagging over and over on the crusty rocks.

“Okay, so what you wannna do,” Eli said, placing a pan on the rocks and thrusting a shovel into the creek bed, “is you wanna shovel a shit-ton of dirt into the pan; really pack it in there. Okay? Give it a shot.”

Ruby glanced around for a clean place to sit, and somewhere decent to drop her purse. Sadly, there was only mud and crusty rocks. She chose the latter. After placing her pan in the water and having it float away a few times on her, she finally planted it on the shore and started

loading it up with soft, rich looking creek soil. The smell invaded her nostrils, making her think of when she used to pull worms apart in her mother’s garden.

“I love this smell,” she gushed, smiling broadly.

“Nothing like it,” Eli said gruffly as he slipped ever farther into the mountain man role he always liked to adopt as soon as they were beyond the city limits. Ruby stared at his glistening biceps, imagining their future children dangling from them, giggling away. God, life was good.

“Okay. Soon as you’ve got your pan looking like mine, you’re gonna want to knock it around a little to get the heavier materials to settle to the bottom—just like this.” He knelt down and started swishing the pan around, banging it occasionally against a rounded rock. Ruby marvelled at his dark brown hair falling into his eyes, at the bright red eel of his tongue as he bit down on it in concentration.

“You get it?” Ruby nodded.

“Good. Then all you gotta do is swish some water over it until the dirt’s down below the rim of the pan. At that point, you can kinda jog it around just below the level of the water, and the creek will wash away all the useless shit for you.”

“It’s so elegant,” Ruby said, feeling profound.

“Yeah, well, ya know. The guys that used to do this needed it to work. They all had families starving to death back home.”

Ruby smiled at his mentioning of families. His mind was obviously in the same place hers was.

“You think you got it?” He asked again.

“Oh yeah, I can do it,” she said confidently, going so far as to pick her pan up and move a little ways down the peninsula as if she had some strategic reason for doing so.

“Don’t get too far away. The current’s a little strong over there. A soft current’s best.” “Oh I know. Just something I wanted to try out.”

“I…alright,” Eli said, turning to his pan and whistling a tune Ruby didn’t recognize.

Squatting down in the mud like an animal, Ruby banged and rinsed her pan the way Eli had told her to. At first it seemed like way more dirt was being washed away than was supposed to be. But soon the mud was flush with the edge of the pan and trickling away at what seemed to Ruby to be a perfectly adequate rate, and she felt certain she was doing it right. Images of the beach mansion in Sleeping with the Enemy flashed through her mind as she pondered the new, rich life that awaited them at the end of this arduous day. She wasn’t expecting to walk away a millionaire or anything; that would be ridiculous. But certainly they’d do pretty well for themselves after a whole day of panning. This was the twenty-first century, after all. Gold panners hadn’t been at it in like a hundred years. All the gold of the olden days would be gone, yeah, but surely new gold had trickled down in a hundred years’ time.

She liked the feel of mud and mountain water on her hands. There was honesty and freedom in manual labor. She’d heard that somewhere before, and for the first time in her life she could feel how true it was. Swaying to and fro with the motion of the pan, she couldn’t help humming a long, deep note that made her think of Weeping Willows and little kids in overalls fishing with saplings.

Maybe when they struck it rich, she would convince Eli to buy a plot of land out here instead of a southern mansion. Their future kids would thank her. Then they could—

Something tumbled in her pan, catching her eye—something that shone like a thousand tiny suns, blinding her with its magnificence. She almost called out to Eli but quickly decided against it. No point in embarrassing herself over a false alarm.

Plunging her hand into the pan Ruby fished about with two perfectly manicured fingers, like tongs, hoping to clamp onto the glimmering item. Could it have really been a million dollar nugget, or just some stray bolt? No telling what kind of refuse might be floating around in these hick parts.

One of her fingers slipped suddenly inside of something that felt suspiciously like a ring. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Could people die from such excitement?  She pulled her hand out with a sucking sound like the one their lips had made in the Jeep. There on her finger was the unmistakable shape of a muddy engagement ring.

Now she really did throw up a little in her mouth. She wobbled on her haunches but managed to right herself by standing up. Eli looked over briefly but quickly went back to focussing on his pan without saying anything to her.

She stooped to splash some water over the ring, hoping Eli would simply think she was still panning away. Her mind was polluted with half-formed thoughts of what to do next. Why would a ring like this just be sitting in the very patch of gold-panning water that Eli decided to take her to? Could it really be the most innocent and fortuitous find of the year? Or was something bigger happening here?

She flicked her hand to dry the diamond and stared stupidly at its glimmering mass. It was easily a full karat—maybe more. Could Eli even have afforded something this big?  Sure, he had a good job working for his dad at the roofing place, but this kind of good? He took her out a

lot, and his apartment was pretty nice, but this looked like something on the hand of someone with accounts in the Caymans….

Or was she just being a bumpkin? There were probably whole cities filled with people wearing rings like this—cutting onions with them on and fishing them out of toilets on a daily basis. No reason to get so excited…

Except there was! Eli could be proposing to her this very second! Only two possibilities existed, as far as she could see it. Number one—an unfortunate millionaire’s wife had been Heli- skiing in the mountains upriver from here and lost her ring going over a particularly turbulent slope. Or, number two—Eli had driven up the night before, planted the ring in the mud, then driven back home and gone to sleep with the knowledge that they’d be back the following day to retrieve it. If that were the case, though…then he might be kind of an idiot. What sane, clear- thinking adult would just leave a diamond ring sitting in a creek?

Ruby glanced at Eli squatting in the mud, swishing the pan enthusiastically around and around. His head was tilted back and he was singing the hell out of “Life is a Highway,” despite the fact that they were not currently on a highway. He’d removed his shirt and tied it around his head in some unfortunate white man’s version of a turban. Did he think it was actually protecting him from the sun? Did he honestly believe that this was the way that people dressed in the woods? What kind of a husband and father would he be if he was constantly driven to such ridiculous flights of fancy?? Turbans in the woods and diamond rings buried in the mud and abscessed teeth he couldn’t be bothered to deal with despite the fact they might kill him… Fuck—he was a total moron!

Ruby clasped her dirty hand to her mouth. She didn’t know what to believe. The creek seemed obscenely loud, echoing all around her like the future laughter of her extended family when they found out she’d married an imbecile.

“Whatcha got there?” Eli shouted over to her. She turned and caught him staring at her. Damn. She’d been staring so intently at her hand that she’d forgotten to keep pretending to pan.

“Oh…nothing…just a piece of trash.”

“Are you sure?” Eli said, getting to his feet. “Kinda looks like you found a ring or something.”

Ruby snorted.

“Yeah, looks like it, hey?”

“Well, yeah. I mean I can see it right on your hand there.” “Yeah, guess you can.”

“Yeah, I can. I’m standing right here.” “Right.”

“Do you uh…maybe want to show it to me?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Ruby snapped, jumping to her feet, the pan still clenched in her other hand. “Do I? Do you really need to see it again so soon?”

“Again? What other time was I seeing it?”

“Right, you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Kay, whoa,” Eli said, raising his hands defensively in front of him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m not gonna do it. Not when you ask me like this.”

“Ask you what?”

“Oh my god, could you stop pretending to be so thick? I know exactly what this is!” “What what is?”

“WHAT WHAT IS? Uh, the ring on my finger! HOW do you think it got all the way out here—right in the spot we just happened to be panning for gold?”

“Whoa, hang on a second. Are you really saying you think I planted that here? A ring worth tens of thousands of dollars—you think I would just leave something like that out here for you to find—in a body of water with a current—at an actual gold panning business that rents out its shores to tourists—you think I’d do something like that?”

“Well…I don’t know. You do these ‘romantic’ things and I…”

“I like to do romantic things, so you think I’m an absolute fucking idiot?” “Well no—OBVIOUSLY not like that…”

“Uh huh. And yet here we are.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Let’s just forget about it. Maybe we can sell it when we get back to

town.”

“Uh—no, obviously not. We’ll give it to the people at the company. Somebody obviously lost it while they were up here panning for gold on what was supposed to be a fun family retreat. They’re probably worried sick about it.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not keeping it.”

“Oh, no, sir! I will not be keeping the ring, sir!

“Kay, I’m done here,” Eli said as he turned and stomped back to his things. He was shaking his head and thrashing his hands through the air over and over again—both signs that he was irrevocably pissed off. Ruby stared after him.

“So, you’re not proposing, then?”

Eli turned and stared at her, at a loss for words. “Are you serious?”

“I would have said yes, if you’d just asked me.”

“Ruby—it wasn’t even on the table. We were just panning for gold.”

“Yeah, on our anniversary. And you said all that stuff about ‘ooo wonder what we’ll find,’ like you knew exactly what we were gonna find. And you told me to pan right there,” she pointed at the spot where she’d dug up the ring. “And you were playing ‘Tomorrow’ when you picked me up, like you were thinking about our future…”

Eli blinked a couple times; worried that Ruby might start crying. Sometimes she did that after making one of her speeches.

Sure enough, a couple seconds later a single tear popped out and trickled down her cheek, trailing a muddy streak as it went.

“Oh hell, I’m sorry. You weren’t insane to think I was proposing. It makes perfect sense after you put it that way,” he said, gathering her head against his shoulder. “Is that what you want? Do you wanna get married?”

Ruby sniffled wetly. “Uh huh.”

Eli swallowed hard.

“Well…I don’t know…I guess that would be okay, then.” Ruby pulled away and looked him in the eye.

“You guess?”

“Oh fine, whatever, it’s definitely a good idea.”

Ruby leaned in and kissed him, her lips covered in dirt and snot. “Okay good,” she said, smiling. “And we already have the ring.”

“Well—no, we don’t. I told you, we’re giving it back to the lady at the company.”

“Oh fuck that lady. She’ll just keep it for herself. People aren’t good, Eli. They’re only ever looking out for themselves. Who’s to keep her honest the second we leave?”

Eli frowned.

“I don’t know. I can’t guarantee anything about other people. But I can decide how I act, and I’m going to do the right thing.”

He grabbed hold of Ruby’s hand and tried to wrench the ring off her finger. But her skin had swollen from the water and a loud crack sounded as her knuckle hyper-extended in his hand.

“Ow, goddammit!” Ruby shouted, jumping away from him. Eli leaned towards her and she swung the pan reflexively at his face. She’d meant to simply scare him off, but the crack of his jaw against the steel was unmistakable.

“Oh my god, ELI!” she shouted, dropping the pan into the mud. Eli teetered a few times in front of her like a drunken boxer. Then he fell hard on his back over the rocks.

“OH JESUS FUCK, ELI!” she shouted, throwing herself down on his body. “ELI! ELI!

CAN YOU HEAR ME?” She pulled at his eyelids, thinking desperately of what to do.

But then suddenly he burst out laughing. His face was streaked with blood on the one side where the abscess tooth had gone flying, but Ruby didn’t mind the gore at all. Eli was alive! And not just alive—he was happy!

“Oh my god, Eli! I thought that tooth had gone straight into your brain and killed you!”

“Nah, babydoll. Ain’t no tooth can kill me,” he said, back to his drawl. He yanked her down by her shirt and kissed her in the mud and blood and tears. Ruby snorted happily into his face and Eli chuckled as their teeth knocked together.

“We’re gonna make it, aren’t we?” Eli asked, staring deep into Ruby’s eyes as she pulled back to look at the wreck of his face, which was rapidly bruising like a dropped peach.

“Yeah, I reckon we are,” she smiled, prying the ring off behind her back and slipping it into the waistband of her skirt.

I can think of at least a handful of times where I thought about stopping, but the most recent was when I made Laney cry.

While it wasn’t first time I had ever made anyone cry, I will say that it’s the only time I have ever made someone cry tears that burned my brain like dripping candle wax that just won’t cool.

She cried all night. I thought she’d stop blubbering around midnight, but it never seemed to stop. Perhaps she did eventually stop crying that night, but I was so used to the noise that it echoed in my dreams.

I can’t say that I think I deserved it. All I had done was ask her about where she got that pack of Oreos. When I had returned to my room that night, I saw Laney munching on a fresh pack of those white and black cookies, facing my side of the room as if she were a bated hook.

Unsurprisingly, I was curious immediately. I perched myself on my bed like a bird and stared at her motionlessly from across the room. She leisurely inserted one cookie after another into her chubby little face. I think she must have learned to ignore me by that point, which spoke volumes about her patience when I compared her to any of my previous roommates. Good for her? Not really.

We had been roommates for about a month at this point, but I still hadn’t decided I was ready to say words to her yet. In the beginning when she tried to speak to me, I would make animal noises.

“Good morning, Ashley!” she would say to me.

Straightaway, I would jump out of bed and respond to her with a bark, like a guard dog. Her initial jump backwards was extremely satisfying, but it unfortunately did not last. My behavior seemed to disturb her greatly for the first few days, but over time she became used to my squawks, snorts, and grunts. I became bored again.

The next week, I started changing things up. I started taking small things like candies, then bigger things like a mug. A decorative pillow from her bed. The spare charger for her computer. Scissors. Her stapler. Some photographs of her family. I waited for her to notice.

“Hey Ashley, have you seen my stapler?” she eventually would ask me, as if she wasn’t scared of me at all. I shrugged my shoulders, knowing downright that the stapler was under my pillow, and continued reading my Cosmo magazine about sex positions that I didn’t understand. “You know,” I remember her continuing to speak to me, her pale, rotund face unmoving besides her plump, puckering pink lips. “You know, I doubt Ms. Moody would want you reading that magazine.”

Ms. Moody was the housemother in our dorm; the only person that didn’t hate me. She was kinder to me than my actual mother. Laney didn’t know shit about what Ms. Moody wanted or didn’t want.

Laney didn’t know shit about anything, really. She didn’t know I had stolen this magazine from the garbage can in the teachers’ lounge, or how I always read Cosmo in front of people I didn’t know so they knew I was tough. She didn’t know that no one else had taught me how to put on makeup, or how to wear my clothes, or what sex meant. She didn’t know about how any of that stuff might be important to me at 15 years old. I could see her perfect nail polish and her rosy red cheeks and her designer shoes and I resented her. I wanted to scream in her fat little face.

But I didn’t.

I stared into her face as I counted up to five in my head. Then I jumped off of my bed, rolled-up magazine in hand. She tried to ignore me, she tried to not act scared, but I saw her twitch when my feet hit the floor. I knew she was mine.

All I needed were two, two and a half large steps before I had pressed Laney up against the wall in our dorm room  and started breathing on her face. She tried looking away from me, she tried escaping my breath, but I just breathed harder until she was whimpering and squirming to get away from me. I looked at her as mean as I could, but instead of barking as I had in the past, I simply whispered: “Woof.”

I took my rolled up magazine and jabbed underneath her fat little chin a couple of times, then threw it into Laney’s lamp without breaking eye contact. I didn’t mean to break the lamp, but it added a nice dramatic effect. She was in house and now she knew it.

I stepped away just in time for Ms. Moody to appear at our door.

“Girls! I was walking the hall and I thought I heard a crash.” She scanned the room for disorder. “Is everything okay?” I jumped on the opportunity.

“I’m so sorry,” I pleaded. “I think I accidently broke Laney’s lamp. Please, please don’t be mad.” I covered my mouth to look concerned. I felt my face redden as I stifled my laughter.

“No, no, don’t worry.” She looked at Laney, whose face was red and flustered. “Sweetheart, we’ll just have to get another one. Not the end of the world, all right? You don’t have shoes on, so go ahead and hop up on Ashley’s bed and we’ll get this picked up.” I watched the sweaty porker climb on to my bed as Ms. Moody directed me to get some wet paper towels. She left to retrieve the vacuum cleaner. When I returned, Laney was still sitting on my bed, but this time she had her stapler, which she must have found underneath my pillow, in her hand. Neither of us said a word. Neither of us needed to.

The next day, I returned to the room to find Laney eating the Oreos. And this is the story of why Laney wouldn’t stop crying.

I was in a good mood, so I said, “Hi Laney.” I climbed on top of my bed and sat like a bird, watching her movements. She didn’t look up at me. “Hi Laney,” I said again, more loudly. “Where’d you get those Oreos?”

This time, she did look up. “Ms. Moody gave them to me,” she said without missing a beat. She was clearly trying to get a reaction out of me.

“Really,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “Yeah. I guess she must really like me.”

“Or she just feels bad that your lamp broke.” “Either way,” she said, “they’re delicious.” She continued sliding the cookies into her mouth and chewing loudly.

“You know,” I said as I felt around to see if any of the other items I had stolen from Laney that week were still there. They weren’t. “You know, I hope you enjoy them.

Honestly, you look like you enjoy cookies quite often.” As I lay down, I made two pig snorts and closed my eyes. I heard the sobbing begin.

Laney and I didn’t speak for three days. We did not acknowledge each other for three days. My guilt was inexplicably tremendous. Maybe I felt bad because she was chubby. Each night, I heard her sobs from across the room, but whether she was crying again or the sobbing was replaying exclusively from my memory, I do not know.

On the fourth day, I decided that I would do something extremely unfamiliar to me and apologize, at least to stop the crying. I bought a pack of Oreos and headed to my room.

Ms. Moody was there to greet me, along with two tall, police officers, one of them bald. Ms. Moody’s eyes were red and puffy, and although I shouldn’t have wondered, I wondered what I had done wrong. I entered the room and stood in front of the trio, my back facing the doorway.

That’s when I noticed Laney’s absence from our room. “What’s going on?” I asked as I felt my heart drop into my stomach.

“I think we’d like to ask you the same thing,” said the baldy. Ms. Moody buried her face in her hands as he lifted up a Ziploc bag containing all of the family pictures I had taken from Laney. Each person in each of their pictures had their faces carefully cut out. In addition, one smaller plastic bag filled with one large brown-green nugget of marijuana was in the bag. I didn’t need to have experience with the drug to know what was happening. “We found these in your pillowcase.”

I heard a person step into the doorway behind me, but I did not turn to look. As the police officers and Ms. Moody began to converse, all I could hear was my heart pounding in my ears, and one small, confident whisper from behind me. “Woof.”

Enough was enough. Anevay Jaimson left work early and sped off in her pickup truck, the man’s sly touch still crawling on her skin. The sexual harassment had become a regular occurrence —something she couldn’t ignore. She drove past run-down gas stations and dumpy antique stores, along streets where listless old men stood on corners and cornfields were landmarks. She drove until everything she knew became unrecognizable. The road, not the winding kind that wandered through pastoral scenery, seemed endless. It continued straight ahead like a metaphor for life, or death. She drove like she was at gunpoint— recklessly, impulsively to where she would end up. The date of her father’s birthday echoed in her head, yet her steady hands intuitively adjusted the steering wheel. As she drove, she untied the apron still clinging to her hips. With one swift motion she tossed it onto the seat beside her.

She was sure this time she’d be fired, imagining her boss eyeing her slowly as she pushed through the diner’s double doors. He would look at her long and hard. He was the type of man who never got a passing glance from any woman, the boy who desperately wished for the comfort of strong, tender thighs wrapped around him. Anevay took out a cigarette and lit it, taking long drags and watching the smoke fly out of her open window. It made breathing one less burden for her.

She made a sharp right turn onto an unmarked dirt road and slammed on the brake. The truck stalled. A few feet away a thick mass of spruce trees obstructed her vision. Looking into them was like peering into the pitch dark with no moon. She knew she had arrived, but she made no sudden movement. Her hands gripped the wheel tightly, her arms locked into parallel lines like oak plywood. Anevay let her foot off the brake, and the truck rolled forward voluntarily. You shouldn’t have come, she told herself. It had been a decade since she had last been here.

Anevay felt the rocks crunching beneath the truck, wedging themselves into the rubber cracks of the tires. She imagined her fragile body rolling over shattered glass. She bit her tongue hard, tasted blood, as her truck approached the vacant lot. The trailer, once white, now had rust stains trailing from the windows. An awning drooped over the front porch steps. A pink tricycle lay on its side, abandoned. Other toys were displayed like an exhibit of her childhood. Nothing had changed. It was as if she had entered a memory.

Anevay shut off her engine and extinguished her cigarette. A neighborhood dog barked ferociously in the distance. She imagined its square head constricted by a metal chain, its powerful jaw snarling and spitting.

“Damn dog,” its owner said. Anevay heard the dog yelp.

Its whimpers reverberated through the woods, echoing in distress. Anevay traced her fingers over the smooth scar hidden in her thick black hair, recalling the screaming and crying; the fists swinging and shoving; the curses polluting the air; the dank smell of bourbon oozing from his pores. That time she had gotten too close. The jagged edge of his broken bottle had skimmed her head. She remembered a red rush of blood and then a mad rush to the hospital for stiches, the sickly medicinal flavor of the cherry lollipop her reward for being a good girl.

That day she and her mother had left for good.

In the car ride from the hospital her mother had told her they weren’t going back home. Anevay had shrieked and tried to slap her mother, but her blows could not reach her from the back seat. Her mother did not turn her square Cherokee face around. Instead, facing forward, she told Anevay to sit still, so Anevary cried at the top of her lungs. She cried until her voice became an angry whisper. She cried until she fell asleep.

When Anevay woke up she was on a hotel bed. Her mother was lying on the twin bed beside her, flipping through TV channels. Anevay pretended she was asleep, watching her mother through the curtain of her eyelashes. Her body was propped up on starch white pillows. She seemed relaxed with one leg stretched out and the other bent at the knee, but her face remained rigid. Her dark, almost black, eyes rarely blinked. Anevay studied her mother’s face, noticing the small crows feet starting to form by her eyes. She was nearly thirty. Above the corner of her mother’s left eye Anevay could make out a purple reddish bruise underneath her concealer, still fresh. Fearless yet broken, her mother stared blankly at the static television. She flipped hypnotically past digital images as if she was searching for something, as if the dotted pixels on the screen were codes that could explain secret truths.

Pulling herself out of her memory, Anevay lifted her finger from the scar, dropping her hand to her side. Even the coarse black wires of her hair couldn’t hide the scar. She knew it was still there. Anevay wanted to suffocate the emptiness inside her.  She reached for her lighter and a pack of cigarettes in her purse. The cool metal in her palm steadied her as she lit the cigarette between her shaking fingers.   The sweet, sticky vapor spurted out of her mouth in quick puffs. Sometimes she wished her tired body would simply break down, decompose like the minerals in animal bones, and go back to where it came from.

“Why did I come back to this god awful place?” she said out loud. She opened the truck’s door and stepped out.

Her tan midriff showed slightly between her jeans and a black t-shirt. A few freckles dotted her arms and cheeks and her left cheek displayed a darker birthmark. As she walked to the lawn her sharp jaw line clenched, her arms swinging beside her.

Looking around, Anevay could see her father everywhere, in fragments. She remembered his big white freckled hands, his smell of pine soap and mild sweat after returning home from his carpenter jobs, and his short rare bursts of laugher. The memory of her father taking her to a pawnshop flooded her mind. He had held her hand, driving the car like a father should for once, not dancing back and forth on the dotted line. His usually blood shot eyes had been as bright and clear as crystal lakes that day. Inside the shop, he told her to buy anything she wanted. Anevay peered into the glass display cases. Her eye landed on a plastic Tweety Bird watch. “That one,” she had said, her stubby finger smearing the glass as she pointed. On the car ride home she unrolled the car window and stuck her hand out. She felt the current travel through her fingers spread like eagle’s wings, the yellow watch securely strapped around her wrist.   She had worn it every day afterward, pressing it close to her ear to hear the seconds tick by.

Anevay looked down to where the brown grass met the edge of the dirt road. It was the spot she had last seen him stumbling outside with his hands reaching up in the air as the nauseating motion of the car carried her away, dust intruding on her innocent eyes until he was nothing but dirt.

Anevay took out her lighter and played with it in a daze. The cigarette still dangled between her lips as she watched the blue flame rise and die by the flick of her thumb. She sat down and smoked, still playing with the lighter. The sun began to move inch by inch across her face, half of it darkened with shadow. The lighter fluid was running low.

She looked over her shoulder. On the dead lawn the ugly hunk of rotting metal mocked her. She imagined burning the trailer to the ground to make her mark, to say ‘fuck you’ to her father, dead but never gone. She imagined the soot and ash rising higher and so far away from her that not even the burnt smell of fire would remain on her clothes. She reached down and untied her shoes. The dead grass pricked her feet as she walked over to her truck, yanking out a spare container of gasoline. She unscrewed the cap as she walked over to the trailer. Walking along the edge of the trailer, she doused the bare, rusted exterior. She threw the empty plastic container across the lawn and reached into her back pocket. Flicking the lighter on, she stepped forward, her naked feet behind the line that divided her from her past and what was left of her. She extended her hand down to the gasoline like a thirsty dog. A surge of fire surrounded the trailer, climbing and eating its way up to the sky. Anevay jumped back and watched, the blaze heating her entire body. For the first time in her life Anevay felt the meaning of her name: superior. She never wanted to forget the feeling of her bare feet rooted on solid ground, but she had to go.

Anevay took a detour, pulling into a gas station to buy another lighter.

The door made a jingle sound as she entered. Rows of fatty foods and cheap-boxed dinners sat on the shelves. Making her way through an aisle to the front, she grabbed a bag of gummy bears and a lottery ticket and placed them on the counter.

“Feeling lucky today?” the teenager behind the counter asked, scanning the lottery ticket.

Anevay smiled faintly, not looking at his face. The nametag on the boy’s red vest read, “Sid.” The doorbell jingled again as a family walked in, laughing. A few miles away a fire truck siren echoed wildly in the distance.

“Oh and this,” Anevay said, quickly placing a lighter on the counter.

“I’m trying to quit,” Sid said, scanning the barcode. The cash register beeped.

“ Good for you.”

“Twelve dollars and sixty two cents. Oh, I forgot to ask. Did you find everything you’re looking for?” Sid asked.

“No,” she replied, handing him exact change, avoiding his confused stare as she walked out, the doorbell jingling loudly behind her.

Emily lay on her bed in underwear and a tank top, her body balanced precariously on the edge of the mattress and her hand suspended above the dusty wooden floor. The room was dark, and the floor was littered with clothes and trash.

Emily’s chest felt fragile—her skin like glass, her papier-mâché ribcage shaking with each breath. She turned her head to look at the calendar once more. The date had been circled with a fat red marker almost half a year ago with the words “Frank’s birthday!” written in the small box.

She reached for her phone, caught herself, and dropped her hand again. She rolled over and turned her face into her duvet. The excess material made it hard to breathe, giving her the impression of being caught in a place somewhere with horribly muggy weather.

Emily smiled at the idea of being somewhere else. Getting away from Boulder City. That sounded nice. Maybe she could go somewhere with a beach. She’d always loved the ocean. Emily pictured herself lying on the warm sand, waves caressing her skin and sunlight flooding her senses. What if she quit her job, packed her bags, and left? California was right next-door, and besides, she had had worse ideas. It was two hours to the Nevada-California state border. Long Beach was only eight hours away. She didn’t really care how long the drive was as long as she was on a beach by the end of it.

Emily’s phone buzzed on her nightstand, and her breathing stilled. Her chest suddenly felt full. She seemed a little more solid. Frank?

Her hand shot out so fast that she knocked her cellphone to the floor where it continued to buzz face down on the hardwood. When she picked it up the phone felt heavy in her hand. The rectangular shape didn’t fit comfortably in her palm like it used to.

The screen read, Missed Call: Mom, and her chest felt hollow again. Pressure built at the back of her eyes, and her head dropped onto the bed. The fabric bunched around her, shutting out the rest of the room. She pressed the material into her face, imagining it enveloping her and snuffing out her life.

The sound of curtains sliding along a metal rod alerted Emily to the light breaking through her darkness. She pushed herself off the bed and turned. The window was open, sunlight streaming in through the glass, caressing her skin.

“What the—” Emily slid off her bed and walked to her window. Her heart beat heavily against her ribs and her legs felt weak. She drew the curtains together again, making sure the fabric met in the middle.

Emily studied the pattered curtain, still grasped tightly in her hands. Had they caught on something? Had she opened them unknowingly? She backed away from the window, acutely aware of her small underdressed frame.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t close those, thank you. It’s too dark in here. I can’t see.”

Emily screamed and turned around. Her room was still, darkness surrounding her.

She was aware of every breath that expanded and contracted her papery lungs, the sound many times louder than usual in her ears. Her eyes darted around the room, never settling on a single object for long. She moved to her bed and fell onto her mattress, legs shaking slightly.

She placed a hand against her forehead. “No, maybe I’m just sick.” She gave a small laugh. “Yeah, that’s it. I probably never even closed the blinds, I just thought I did.” Speaking her thoughts gave her some comfort but her heart fluttered weakly in her chest.

“Oh, you’re sick now? I wouldn’t be surprised. I passed by your kitchen on the way to your room and it’s a mess. You probably got food poisoning or something.”

Emily caught her breath and her blood hitched in its circulation. The room felt strangely silent, pressing into Emily’s skull and chest. Each breath felt grossly unsatisfying, as if she was breathing in tar.

“Frank?” She called, her voice dry and cracking. “Frank, if that’s you, it isn’t funny, damn it.” She tried to laugh but it came out sounding like a deflated balloon.

She inched towards her bedside table and wrapped her fingers around her lamp, slowly lifting it into the air. Although the lamp wasn’t overly heavy, her arm still shook under its weight.

“Frank?” She called again.

Her curtains flew open once more, and light fell upon a small figure at the base of the window. Standing at about three feet, the figure had two short legs, two short arms, a very little neck and an oblong head. It was gray and hairless, with no distinguishable facial features. In fact, it didn’t even have a face. Emily thought she was looking at the back of it until she realized it was probably looking up at her.

Emily’s scream was raw and sudden. It welled up from somewhere deep within her, starting as a whimper and escalating to a piercing screech.

“Oh my God!” Emily tried to throw the lamp but it caught on the outlet and fell short of the Gray Blob.

The Gray Blob scurried out of the way, holding up its short arms, its mitten-shaped hands held up in way of apology. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Emily threw a pillow but it bounced off the window and onto the floor.

The Gray Blob ran forward. “Please stop throwing things! I can explain.”

Weapon, weapon, weapon, Emily thought, the words becoming a desperate chant in her mind. She groped around her and found a used fork on her side table. She lifted it above her head and clenched her jaw.

“Wait, stop!” The Gray Blob touched her knee and Emily gasped.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her feat dangling just above the clean hardwood floor. Light filled the room and soft jazz played from the speakers on the desk.

Frank danced into the room, jeans hanging low on his hips and a towel tossed over his head. He did the grapevine past her, snapping to the beat of the song. Emily’s chest filled with warmth watching him, and the warmth spread to her extremities.

Frank stopped at the desk and frowned. He pulled out the chair, looked under the desk, and stood up again.

“Honey, have you seen my shirt? I had it here before I went into the shower.”

“Oh, I thought you’d left it lying around so I put it away for you.”

Frank’s shoulders sagged and he sighed. “Of course you did. That’s what I get for taking up house with a neat freak.” He smiled at her. “Come here.” He placed his large hands on her knees to brace himself, his fingers spreading out over her legs like rays of sun, warming everything they touched. He leaned in.

Emily gasped and she was back in her room, the Gray Blob still touching her knee.

“What—” Emily’s words fell from her lips and her voice died in her throat. She looked around the room, half expecting to see Frank with the easy going smile still on his face. The vision had been so real, so vivid. She could still feel the warmth from Frank’s hands on her knees.

Her raised arm fell onto the bed, the fork clattering to the floor, and she began to knead the duvet with her fingers. She touched everything within her immediate range of motion making sure they were solid

The Gray Blob removed its hand from Emily’s knee and took a step back. “I’m sorry. That must have surprised you.”

Emily turned her head, her realm of consciousness expanding to include the little figure. “What are you?” The words barely left her mouth in a rush of air. After a beat of silence, in which the Gray Blob wrung its hands together, Emily spoke again, impatient for answers. “Where did you come from? How did you get in?” Her voice came a little stronger now.

The Gray Blob began to shuffle its shapeless feet. “I came in through the front door, I’m surprised you didn’t hear me. I came from you.”

“Me?” Emily grabbed her stomach.

The Gray Blob began shaking its head. “No, not like that. You’ve been steeped in your emotions for so long, brooding and remembering and re-remembering your past that you eventually created me. Unconsciously. I’m a compilation of all of your strongest memories and emotions.”

It took an incredible amount of effort for Emily to shake her head . “That doesn’t make any sense. How could I just create you?”

Gray Blob shrugged its shoulders. “I’ve sort of been copied and pasted into reality from your memories. For the past month I’ve been suspended between reality and consciousness. I didn’t become something solid until a moment ago when you,” Gray Blob left the sentence unfinished and Emily looked away, her hair swinging down to hide her face.

“Does this normally happen to people?” Emily pulled her knees into her chest.

“I don’t really know much beyond your realm of consciousness, so I wouldn’t know. But I don’t see why not, since it happened to me.”

Emily wrapped her arms around her legs. “What happened a moment ago, when you touched my knee?”

The Gray Blob looked—or Emily could only assume it looked, as it had no eyes—at its hand. “Probably a memory from your past. That’s what I’m made up of, after all.”

“A memory? About Frank?” Emily released her legs and sat up straight.

“Well, you haven’t been thinking of much else recently.”

“So, if I touch you here—”

“No, I wouldn’t do that if I were—“

Emily placed her hand on the Gray Blob’s arm and was thrust into another memory.

Frank was at the stove making dinner, humming to himself as he stirred the contents of the pan.

Emily walked up and leaned over the stove. “Smells good. If only you could make something other than stir fry.”

“Whatever. You love my stir fry.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Hey, Em, watch this.” He began to tilt the pan, sliding the meat away from him, a small smile tugging at his lips.

Emily grabbed his bicep. “Careful, master chef. If you flip it and the meat falls into the stove, it could cause a grease fire.”

Frank let out a sigh that carried something unspoken with it. “Okay, Mom. I’m not completely incapable.” When Emily loosened her grip on his arm, Frank turned to her and smiled softly. “I’m joking. Thanks, Em.”

Emily jolted and removed her hand from the Gray Blob’s arm. She wiggled her fingers, the feel of Frank’s bicep still etched into their tips. Why did that memory seem sadder than she remembered? Had Frank’s sigh always been so heavy? Was his tone always so short?

Emily extended her arm, “What other memories do you have?”

The Gray Blob took a big step back, stopping just outside of Emily’s reach. “You probably shouldn’t do that anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Emily felt something in her chest tighten. “They’re my memories. Who are you to keep them from me?”

“It’s not going to be healthy for you in the long run,” the Gray Blob said, wringing its hands again . “You’ve been re-playing these memories in your head for weeks and look where it has left you.” The Gray Blob motioned with its arm to the rest of the room.

“No, thinking about them and re-living them are different. If I can just re-live those memories one more time I can make sense of everything.” Emily stretched her hand forward once more, straining her fingertips to brush the Gray Blob.

But the Gray Blob took another large step back. “You’ll just get sucked deeper into this hole that you’ve dug yourself. Frank left you two months ago. I think it’s time for you to face the facts.”

The Gray Blob’s words resonated in Emily’s core. And she sat up straight, folding her hands into her lap and staring at her duvet.

The next morning Emily found herself across from the Gray Blob at her dining room table.

Emily scooped cereal into her mouth. “So what’s the deal with you. Are you, like a girl, a boy, both?”

The Gray Blob turned a page in the newspaper. “I’m not really certain myself.” Gray Blob shook its head. “Forest fires are getting pretty bad out in California.”

Emily spooned more cereal into her mouth. “Okay.”

“And you still wanna move there?” Gray Blob asked, turning a page.

Emily stirred her spoon in the bowl. “My cornflakes are soggy.”

“Hm?” Gray Blob lowered the newspaper.

“My cornflakes are soggy,” Emily repeated. “I can’t stand it when they’re like this.” She got up and dumped them in the sink, running the garbage disposal.

Gray Blob lifted the newspaper again. “You still could have eaten them you know.”

“No, I honestly can’t stand soggy cornflakes.”

“Then how can you stand to live in your apartment right now?” Gray Blob let the newspaper fall slightly.

Emily let her eyes travel over the mess that had accumulated over the past month. Her eyes picked out every piece of trash and speck of dirt.

Has it always been like this? She asked herself, turning in a circle. Emily’s hands itched to pick up the discarded wrapper on the floor next to her, but she knew that if she started cleaning now she would never stop.

“I think you should leave,” Gray Blob said.

Emily turned to it. “Leave? And go where? California?”

Gray Blob shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”

“It’s too expensive.”

“Good thing you have a lot of money in your savings account.”

Something in Emily’s chest constricted. Gray Blob made it sound so easy. “Where would I work?”

Gray Blob turned a page in the paper. “You have time to find a job.”

Emily crossed her arms, her fingers leaving red blotches on her skin. Gray Blob insisted it knew what was best for her, yet it made her problems seem trivial, like they were all in her head. Then again, Emily supposed most problems were in her head.

Gray Blob folded the paper and set it aside. “Look, Nevada isn’t the place for you anymore. You’re smothering yourself up here in this apartment. I It’s too full of Frank. You’re twenty-seven and still have plenty of life to live, but you’re acting like an old widow.”

Emily’s lips pressed together, a knot forming between her shoulder blades, and she turned to face her kitchen sink.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Gray Blob extend a hand. “I understand it’s hard. Four years is a long time to spend with someone, but you have so many more years. You can’t just waste them on this apartment.”

Emily rubbed the back of her neck, her nails digging into her skin. Her lungs felt constrained by something tight and heavy, making it hard to breath.

Gray Blob lowered its hand. “Sorry. I’m giving you a lot to think about. Here, we’ll start small. Let’s clean up the kitchen.”

Emily once again became aware of the mess surrounding her. “You call that a small step?”

“I’ll make a deal with you.” Gray Blob scooted its chair out. “I’ll help you with the kitchen, and when you finish I’ll let you see a memory.”

The muscles in Emily’s shoulders began to unclench. “You’d let me do that?”

Gray Blob sighed, “Yes, I don’t like it, but if it helps you clean this place up then I’m willing to compromise.” Gray Blob jumped from the chair and made its way into the kitchen.

“Wait,” Emily called after it. “Why are you doing this?”

Gray Blob turned to her. Emily stared at the smooth gray surface of its face, feeling like part of her was chipping away with each passing second. Gray Blob shrugged. “I’m also made up of you’re deepest wants and desires. In fact, I’m probably being pretty selfish right now.” Gray Blob didn’t say anymore, just motioned to the kitchen. “Now come on, we have work to do.”

The next few weeks Gray Blob helped Emily clean her apartment. As the piles of clothes and trash disappeared, fear began to settle in Emily’s core. The more she returned her apartment to its previous condition, the less she felt Frank’s presence.

Gray Blob did not follow through on its promise to let Emily re-live a memory. She was forced to remember on her own, relying on her own recounts, which she no longer trusted. Every time she found something that reminded her of Frank, she wondered if the memory and the emotions it held were real. She could not touch or feel them in that moment. She could only rely on what was already gone.

She began to try and catch Gray Blob off guard. If it was leaving a room or folding laundry, Emily would strain her arm and hope to brush it with a finger. Aware of her actions or not, the Gray Blob always avoided contact.

The day they finished cleaning her living room, Emily decided she couldn’t handle any more. Rain smacked against the windowpane as she and Gray Blob sat on the couch and watched television. Gray Blob flipped through channels, its blank face did not seem to register the images that passed on the screen.

“I want a memory,” Emily said.

“No, you don’t.” Gray Blob continued to punch the buttons on the remote.

“I want a memory,” Emily repeated, her voice strong.

“Trust me, you don’t.”

Emily pulled herself up off the side of the couch. “Who are you to say what I want and don’t want?”

The Gray Blob stopped channel-surfing and looked at Emily. “I’m just saying it won’t make things better.”

“Who says I want things to be better? I just want things to make sense.” The more Emily spoke the more each breath rattled her small frame and threatened to rip her seams.

“But they won’t make sense. Can’t you see that?” Gray Blob tossed the remote onto the table and turned to face Emily fully.

“I need to know the facts.” Emily’s breath came faster now, her heart fluttering feebly.

Gray Blob leapt to its feet so it was eye to eye with Emily. “You want the facts? Frank left because you were you. That’s it, end of story, done.”

Each raindrop that hit the window sounded like a gunshot. The water soaked Emily’s skin, leaving water-stained trails on her face. Something heavy settled in her stomach like a stone, a stone she knew would never fully go away.

Gray Blob sat back down and grabbed the remote. Emily remained still, trying to remember how to feel solid.

A month and a half later, Emily sat on the stoop of her apartment. The buds were just beginning to break on the trees, the sun’s rays caressing their soft green curves, nurturing their growth. A breeze floated past Emily, and she tugged her sweatshirt tighter around her.

“Are you still out here? We’ve put off packing long enough. We need to start today.”

Emily turned and saw Gray Blob in the doorway.

She placed her chin in her hand. “I was just thinking about something. What happens to you when I leave?”

Gray Blob hesitated on the threshold of the apartment building. It tapped its foot a few times and swung its arms. Finally, it stepped onto the stoop and sat down next to Emily.

“I’ve been thinking about that too, and I suppose I disappear.”

The wind blew past Emily a little more forcefully. “You—”

“Disappear, yes,” Gray Blob finished.

“Why?”

Gray Blob tapped its foot on the ground, its knee bouncing up and down. “Because I belong here, in this part of your life, just like the memories and feelings I am made of.”

“But, don’t people say this stuff stays with you forever?”

Emily furrowed her brow.

“Yes, and in that sense I will stay with you forever. I’ll be in the memories you carry with you. But when you leave this apartment, when you leave Nevada, you will leave behind your baggage.”

Emily’s stomach twisted. “I don’t think I like thinking of you as baggage.”

“But in the end, that’s all I am.” Gray Blob’s knee stilled.

Something in Emily’s core twisted uncomfortably. “But it feels like you’re more than that. Sometimes it feels…I don’t know.” Her shoulders sagged and her limbs felt heavy suddenly.

An ice cream truck rolled slowly by her apartment complex. A group of children chased after it, their screams and laughter piercing the air. Emily flinched.

“I still don’t feel like I’m solid,” Emily confessed. She wasn’t sure why, but she needed Gray Blob to know.

“But of course you are. You always were.”

Gray Blob’s words didn’t completely comfort Emily, but she turned to it and said, “Thanks for sticking with me. I couldn’t have made some of these changes without you.”

Despite its featureless face, Emily could practically see Gray Blob smile. “Ah, but you could have. All this time you wanted to get on with your life, but you just were too scared to start.”

Emily put her chin on her knee. “So then you’re really just in my head.”

Gray Blob shrugged, its line of vision focused somewhere on the ground. “I’m as real as you believe me to be.”

Emily turned to rest her cheek on her knees. “I think you’re very real.”

“Good,” Gray Blob said, looking up at her. “I like that.” Gray Blob stood. “Now come on, you move out in a few months, and we haven’t started packing all your useless junk.” Gray Blob entered the building. Emily listened to the soft sound of its feet padding up the stairs.

She sat still, relishing a moment that would soon become a memory. She soaked up the sinking sun and the feeling of her fingertips brushing the concrete beneath her. The air smelled fresh with the promise of hope. This too, she thought, would become a memory. .

Emily promised not to forget this one. It seemed really important that she not forget it, though she couldn’t say why.

The breeze blew once more through the trees, and Emily stood and entered her apartment building after Gray Blob.

Outside, the buds on the trees unfolded in the afternoon light.

I.

John’s brother Colin went to jail when he was twenty-three.

Colin stole cars and used them to pick up kilos of cocaine from the docks at the edge of town, then drove in to the city to sell. He later told John he would leave the cars somewhere no one would be likely to find them—behind abandoned warehouses, inside abandoned warehouses, in fields next to abandoned warehouses. Colin would then call one of his boys to come pick him up from wherever he was and do the same thing the next day.

Colin had been running drugs in the city for years, but he’d only been caught at twenty-three because he’d cheated one of his boys out of a couple thousand dollars and had been ratted out. Colin found out and beat the man to the point of brain damage only moments before the cops arrived to put him in handcuffs. When they shoved him in the cop car, he said, simply, “I can’t survive in prison.” He had ten years left.

John spent every Thursday afternoon at the prison visiting Colin, or talking to him on the phone, or at his apartment waiting for one of the guards to call and tell him his brother had been locked in solitary and therefore John couldn’t visit that week. Knowing that someone would call, one way or the other, weighed heavy on him, heavier than the image he had of Colin sitting on a metal folding chair with his socks pulled up on his calves and his ear to the receiver. If not on Thursdays, John went on Tuesdays. Visiting the jail twice in one week was often too much; having to walk through the metal detectors and go through the process of being patted down was just too much. But he still went.

John knew Colin had run drugs. He’d known it for as long as he could remember watching television with his father and seeing news clips of women who’d lost their husbands to drug warfare, babies in the crook of their arms. Colin had started when he was seventeen, used to come home early in the morning looking haggard, dustings of white under his long nose, smudges on the backs of his hands.

John never said anything, because their father never said anything, just used a third of the money Colin brought home to pay the electric bill and keep the television going. Before he got sick, their father had worked at the coffin factory in town and had spent all day drilling wood planks together for someone to be laid in after they died. When the boys’ mother died, he built the coffin for her funeral. John went to the funeral; Colin was in the city that day and didn’t get back in time for the ceremony. Their father said nothing.

And then Colin ended up in jail, and John ended up living in an apartment they’d rented once John turned twenty and had finally moved out of their father’s house. The apartment was in the bad part of town, out near the docks, which was why Colin wanted it. John didn’t really care. He worked at a body shop in the center of town. He’d come home with grease on his forearms, take a shower, watch a movie, and go to bed. Colin would come in around the time John left for work in the morning. John took money for rent; he did not know what Colin did with the rest.

Colin had a girlfriend named Renee who sometimes came along when John went to visit the prison. Renee was the daughter of the man who owned the body shop where John worked, and the two got along well enough that the hour’s drive to the prison each week wasn’t so bad. Renee would paint her nails in the car on the way because she wanted to look nice for Colin, who’d never once said anything about the color of Renee’s nails.

II.

In December, Colin had been in jail for two years and three months. It was John’s second time seeing his brother that week. He hadn’t been able to come the previous Thursday, since Colin had been in solitary for kicking a guard in the face. When John arrived at the visiting room, Colin was stretched out in a chair, his long legs crossed at the ankles. The sleeves of his jumpsuit were rolled up and a fresh tattoo of a skull, raised and red, was on his right bicep.

“Long time, no see,” Colin said.

Colin’s voice was as long as the rest of him, drawn out vowels and consonants that hissed at the ends. He stood half a foot taller than John, and his hair was buzzed close to his narrow head. His face was purple from left eyebrow to chin; his right hand was bandaged, and John could tell Colin’s shoulder was dislocated from the way it hung loose in his jumpsuit.

John sat down on the other side of the barrier from his brother and looked at his body cut into circles through the hole into which one spoke. Renee always scooted her chair up close to the barrier when she was here; she hated that other people could hear her conversation. John didn’t care. He figured the type of people who visited other people in prison had bigger things to worry about than what he might say to his brother.

“Hey.” John adjusted his body in the hard chair. Colin re-crossed his legs.

They talked about nothing for a few minutes. John didn’t mention his brother’s injuries. Colin told him about spending the weekend in solitary, which was always the same: “pretty damn solitary.” Eventually Colin asked about their father. John told him that he wasn’t getting any better, and that the treatments were eating away at what little money their father still had from their mother’s life insurance. Something bitter flashed in Colin’s eyes, a dark stroke over the irises, and was gone.

“How much does he have?”

“Not enough,” John said. “I don’t know.”

Colin sighed, ran a hand over his head and realized there was no hair to grab, a nervous tic he had.

John listened to the woman next to him tell her husband that their son had started walking. Her voice was flat. She held up an iPhone with a video of the child taking steps. The husband crossed his arms and watched. This moment, like every second John spent in the prison, was like pressing the jagged edge of a key into his palm, and then pressing it harder.

Colin started talking about religion, about a book he’d read this past week and how people turned every day occurrences into holy things, like the way their food was shaped on the plate and how that could mean something miraculous. Colin never really talked about things like this. Faith, to John, was the chill of winter and the steady belief that the days would, eventually, get warmer. John didn’t know what faith felt like to Colin, if it felt like anything anymore.

“What was your lunch shaped like?” John asked, scratching his wrist.

“Like getting out.”

John looked up at his brother. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“My lunch was shaped like getting out of prison.” Colin blinked steadily. “I can tell, John. I can tell they’re gonna let me out early.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, it’s true. My green beans looked like Renee’s face and my mashed potatoes looked like the apartment. I just know they’re letting me out.”

John ignored this. It hurt him to hear the earnest seriousness in Colin’s voice. He sounded younger, and it didn’t match his hollowed cheeks, his lean, tense body. John had never thought of his brother as naïve, but at this moment, he saw something had shifted. “Letting you out for what?” he asked. “Good behavior? Yeah, right.”

Colin narrowed his eyes, sat up straight, spoke defensively. “It could happen.”

“You kicked a guard in the face last week. You’re not going to be let out anytime soon. I’m sorry.” John’s throat hurt. He swallowed twice.

Colin stood up abruptly. Two of the guards yelled something and made their way over. One put his hand on a nightstick.

“Colin. Come on,” said John.

“Fuck you. I can tell you don’t believe me. I’m not gonna waste my time talking to someone who doesn’t have any idea about what it’s like to be in here. You’ve never even asked. You just come here and complain about your own life.”

“Anderson! Sit the fuck down. Visiting hour isn’t over yet.” The guard with his hand on the nightstick patted it. “I’ll tell you one more time.”

Colin didn’t move. “How about you just listen to me when I talk about the one thing that’s given me hope?”

John swallowed again. When the guard grabbed Colin by the forearm, John heard Colin’s shoulder popped loudly.

“Anderson. Are you fucking listening to me?”

“Colin,” John said. “Just—”

John watched his brother be led away, gray-eyed and angry. He tried not to listen to the sounds he made when the guards pulled out their sticks. On the drive home, he tried to think like Colin and looked for signs in the clouds, something telling him it would get better.

III.

Two weeks later, John was back to visit, one cubicle over from the last time.

Renee was not with him, since she had come last week. John had not. Colin hadn’t called him last week either; John had thought about phoning the prison but had decided against it.

Colin was led in. His shoulder was back in place, and the bruises around his cheekbone had faded to brown, edged with yellow. He didn’t look at John.

John wanted to make easy conversation, but there was none, so he told Colin about the most recent round of their father’s treatment.

“At least he’s not getting any worse,” he said finally, because it was the only thing he could think to say about it.

“I knew it,” Colin said.

“Knew what?”

“It’s not going to get better,” Colin answered. “I know it’s not.”

“Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell yourself that.”

“I saw it, John. He’s going to die.”

“What do you mean you saw it.”

“I saw it the other night, when I was eating dinner. I saw a tombstone.” Colin crossed his arms, stretched his legs out in front of him. “It was Dad’s.”

John saw his father’s thin hands in the light of the television, imaged their absence on the sides of the recliner.

“Fuck off,” John said. “Are you still talking about that bullshit miracle-in-the- meat thing?”

His brother’s face darkened. “You don’t know.”

“Actually, I do. I know that it’s all a load of shit and that if you believe it, you’re finally letting this place get to you.” John knew his voice was shaking. He wondered if Colin had been like this when Renee had been here. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t answered John’s call about coming today.

“I know you think it’s crazy. But the more you think about, the more sense it makes. John, Dad’s gonna die, and it’s gonna be soon. That’s just the truth. I didn’t have to see the sign to know. But it just made everything so much clearer.”

“Did your dinner tell you when, exactly? I’d just like to be fucking prepared for the day my father dies. If you can see that information for me, that would be really helpful.” John’s hands tightened into fists at his sides. “I didn’t come here to listen to you talk like this.”

“Of course not,” Colin said. “You came here so you didn’t have to sit with Dad and listen to him choke when he sleeps and lean over him to make sure he’s still alive.”

John didn’t say anything. He stood up. The girl in the cubicle next to him looked up, saw his expression, and looked back down. He realized his voice was getting too loud but he couldn’t lower it.

“I’m leaving. You’re crazy. You’re being crazy.”

Colin just sat there. John knew his brother watched him leave.

IV.

Colin’s face was thinner the next time John went to visit, his shoulder blades jumping nervously at his back.

“Renee,” he said when John sat down.

“John,” John said.

“No. Renee. She’s pregnant.”

John looked at him. “Whose?”

“That kid that works with you guys at the shop. Max.”

“Fuck.”

They sat there for a moment; John drew a circle on the knee of his jeans. Colin stared at the tile, his mouth set in a proud line.

“What happens now?”

“I love her,” Colin said. “I just keep loving her.”

John asked him if he was eating, rubbed at his own shoulders to indicate his brother’s. “You look…not great.”

“How am I supposed to eat the face of God?” said Colin.

He looked like any one of the other prisoners, sullen and close-shaven. There was no seven year-old boy, draped long-limbed over the seat of their father’s motorcycle. Maybe that was someone else’s story now.

John walked out.

V.

Four days later, the phone rang at noon. John paused his movie and answered it. One of the guards at the prison said that Colin had been asking for him before they moved him to solitary on Friday, that he was unresponsive now and hadn’t eaten in three days. He wondered if John could convince Colin to eat something. The prison would make an exception for a visit.

“What’s he in solitary for?”

Someone was yelling in the background so John missed the guard’s answer. He said he’d be there later.

Colin was sitting in the room alone when John arrived, since it was before visiting hour. John sat down across from him and said nothing. His brother looked bad. His lips were cracked open and the side of his head was swollen, his ear bloody.

“What the fuck happened to you?” John finally said.

Colin shrugged.

One of the guards behind them answered, “Hit his head on the cell door. Said we needed to let him out because he’d seen it coming, and we weren’t doing anything. When we ignored him, he hit it harder.”

John felt his stomach flip. “What is wrong with you?” he asked Colin. He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

“I told you. They have to let me out. I saw it.”

“Colin, that’s not…that’s not how it works. I’m sorry. You have to behave if you want them to let you out.” He felt like he was talking to a stranger; Colin’s eyes were on the floor and his shoulders were hunched. John could smell his brother from across the barrier, piss and sweat and blood and something even sharper.

“You need to eat, okay? You have to. Stop being like this. It’s not helping your case.” John wished he could reach out and put his hand on his brother’s arm, his index finger light on his tattoo, wished he could feel his pulse and know he was still in there somewhere.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Colin said.

“You need to eat.”

“I can’t. It doesn’t show me anything anymore.”

VI.

On Saturday, after a cancelled visit the Thursday before due to Colin’s time in solitary, the phone rang just after ten a.m. John picked it up and there was static on the line. It popped, and he was reminded of Colin’s shoulder, the way the guard had yanked it, the sound it had made.

“Sorry?”

“It’s Warden Darren Harvey, down at county.”

John held the receiver tight. His hands had begun to sweat.

“John, I’m sorry. I’m calling to tell you that your brother died last night. He hanged himself from the water line in solitary.”

John was silent.

“I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

He threw up on his sweater.

VII.

John and Renee went to Colin’s funeral. John’s father couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t breathe now that it was below freezing. He had maybe two months left. They had enough money for one treatment, which meant they had to choose between it and pain medication.

Renee held onto John’s arm and didn’t cry. He wanted to say something to her, like she would be a great mom, but he couldn’t say anything. John hadn’t cried at all, but when they were asked to throw handfuls of dirt onto the coffin that his father didn’t make, he felt it starting in the back of his throat.

There hadn’t been a spot left next to their mother, so Colin was buried in one of the back rows. There were only a few tombstones there. John saw one belonging to a girl who had died when she six. It was snowing and quickly covered the dirt John had thrown into the hole where they’d put Colin. John felt like he was the one who had died.

Renee dropped him off at the apartment after the service, told him to visit soon. John went to Colin’s old room and sat on the edge of the bed. Colin hadn’t been in this room in over two years and four months. John thought about calling his father but couldn’t make himself pick up the phone. He hadn’t picked up the phone since he’d gotten the call from the warden, although it had rung many times. Each time it rang, John almost picked up the receiver, imagined he would hear Colin on the other end of the line, his long voice over the static.

He realized, sitting there in Colin’s room, that Colin had always been a kind of oracle, a kind of light that could find other lights, things John wasn’t able to see. The day of his arrest: “I can’t survive in prison.” Looking at Renee when she was playing with a child in the park: “That girl is going to break me.” After their mother died: “Dad’s not going to make it”—all of it said so frankly and without a doubt. John had just pretended he hadn’t heard and looked away, always looked away.

Now John picked up a photo of the three of them, him and his brother and their father, their father dressed for work, Colin tall and proud, that had been tucked into the corner of Colin’s mirror. John was smiling and Colin was looking across the frame, his face in profile. Their father was healthy. Colin looked just like him. John looked at the photograph and tasted the stale air of the gravesite, noticed the dirt still on his fingers, leaving prints on the edge of the paper. He put it back in its place, smoothed the edge of the comforter back straight, and left the bedroom.