Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

Go to part 1 | part 2…

Bernard

I never get the chance to just lie there and enjoy the morning. Some bastard was honking his horn. It wasn’t one of the cracked, gargling horns that you get on all the old cars in the valley; it was one of the ones that you used to hear from school buses and, as it turned out, fire engines. The ones with the cord you can go hang yourself on.

I went to the front door. Essa was in her robe, her nose in a mug of coffee. She didn’t look up when I passed through and she smiled when I said, Good morning.

It wasn’t one of the full-length fire engines, but it was sure red enough. A big man was standing next to the driver’s side door, leaning in the window and tugging on the horn cord. As I got closer, I could smell the stale electric smell of the compressed air the horn used to make its noise.

“You wanna cut that out?” I said when it paused to breathe. The big man turned around. He had on a navy blue jacket that wouldn’t button across his chest if he tried. It had a badge on the left breast.

“You the owner?” he asked me. He had a voice that echoed over gruffness but never quite settled in, and I could tell he was trying to be quiet for some dumb reason. I bet he hadn’t brushed his teeth yet.

“Sure.”

“Had some reports a couple nights ago of fireworks. Did you launch fireworks?”

“No, sir.”

“Which of these houses is yours?” He had parked on the drive in between Lane’s and my lots. I had to point over the tall hood of the engine.

“That one.”

“Can I speak to the other owner, please?” He was being as polite as I could expect, after being dragged forty miles from home on an unseasonably cold morning. Population eight hundred and I didn’t know the fire chief. I thought about offering him a cup of coffee, but I wasn’t completely sure that I wanted to know the fire chief. If he ever raised his voice.

“The owner is recently deceased,” I said, though I struggled to find the word “deceased” and make my voice sound intellectual, professorial. “But his wife still lives there. She has a pot of coffee on.”

I was turning to walk with him when Kelly came out the front door, stabbing a chunk of eye booger out of the corner of one eye. She had started down the porch steps before she saw me.

“Morning, princess,” I said behind the back of Chief I-Don’t-Know.

She looked up. “Mom’s on the phone. I’m going back to bed.”

Her voice was a little off. A little lower. Maybe she turned seven when I wasn’t looking.

The Chief didn’t notice that I wasn’t following, so I just walked off to my front door. Kelly had left the door open. I closed it behind me, noticing as I did that she had forgotten to unlock it. Good thing she left it open for me; I didn’t take my keys with me when I went to Essa’s last night.

“Yeah, Patty. What do you want,” I said as a greeting.

“Kelly told me,” she said.

“What did Kelly told you.”

“About your friend.”

“It’s past.” She started to say quite a few things and never got more than a couple of syllables into any of them.

I said, “What do you want?” again.

She said, quiet like a stream, “You get the check yet?”

“Got it a while ago.”

“You agreed to call me after. So we could talk about what to do.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good thing you’ve got our daughter around, then.”

I paced back and forth in the kitchen, turning each word I wanted to say into a sharp heel on the peeling linoleum. She said, We’ll talk more later. Then, so we wouldn’t, I said we’d come and visit her next month. That made her kind of happy. Her lawyer told her to show a good presence, because I still had all the papers with me. I kicked my foot against the cabinet they were stored in. I said, Talk to you later. I hung up and went to find Kelly.

She was on her hands and knees in her room, peering under her bed.

“Hey, Kell. What are you looking for?”

“A box to bury Nine in.”

“Honey?” She did that yesterday, when Essa was sitting silent on her porch, still in her clothes from the night before, drinking a cup of cold coffee.

“Just kidding,” Kelly said. She pulled out a dusty shoe box and sat back. She crossed her legs and placed the box at the point where her ankles intersected. Then she opened it. I leaned on the door to watch.

“What time is it?” she asked, fingering the pages of the few of my old Asimov’s and Analog magazines she had uncovered so carefully.

“Two hairs past a freckle,” I said, bringing my bare wrist up in front of my nose as though it had a watch on it.

“That’s what you always say.”

The magazines were yellowing and missing corners. She pushed the box off her legs and shoved it across the floor to my feet.

“You want these back?”

“I didn’t even know they were gone.”

“I snuck them.”

“Did you call mom?”

She breathed in before grinning at me. “Yeah.”

“Can burn em for all I care,” I said, tapping a foot against the thin cardboard shell.

“Okay,” she said, all grown-up compensation. Maybe she had turned seven when I wasn’t looking. She stood up, dusted off her palms, bent over for the box, and marched out of the room. I stood there for a moment, staring at all the puffy cloud crayon drawings taped to her walls. The wind came up and rattled her cheap single pane window. I felt everyone leaving me in the dust. I stood there long enough to see my daughter heading toward the hill with a box of kitchen matches balanced on top of the shoebox of stories.

I went to join her, rushing because, really, I was afraid to let her play with the fire by herself. Stubbed my toe on the damn filing cabinet. The one with all the stuff Patty didn’t want me to have. Some people have the right idea, etching the past into stone or diamond or whatever. A gravestone. It makes a lot more sense to stick what has already happened on a big ass chunk of rock; things you can’t change. Right then, it made a lot of sense to me to have the future written down on paper. And I got frustrated, sure, at the smart in my toe. And at her for being such a bitch and not even lying about it. It’s been a long time since I felt like the kid that killed Goliath, since I got down on paper the things she did at the office with other people’s money. I don’t understand a single black digit, but that’s the thing about power that got me: didn’t need to understand it to use it.

I was a stupid kid from backwater Virginia, screwing like a jackrabbit every night with Patty because she’d come home not drunk but just a touch peppered and ready for it. But damn it, there was nothing big about any of it. She had Kelly and let me take care of all the changing and feeding. Seemed like a pretty even trade to me. I didn’t even expect to eat those first couple years away from home. Always liked seafood, which is the lame-ass reason I chose Seattle. She would have let me get away with lobster every evening if I wanted. And then she’d go off to a meet and greet and I’d stand with Kelly in my arms, jumping her up and down and forgetting, only once in a while, to keep her head steady, and I’d stare at the Space Needle all lit up and dwarfed by the other scrapers.

Never figured on being anything big. Didn’t get a degree; didn’t go to much college; didn’t even graduate high school. Letting all the authors down, yeah, but didn’t feel too bad about it. Not like Bradbury’s going to come around after dark with a shotgun, or Asimov’s going to rise out of his second grave to introduce me to the boys.

That’s how I became a father. By not doing much. Kinda makes me want to hallelujah. I didn’t fall in love until I brought Lane back from the hospital and saw her sipping her coffee and heard her sarcasm bite out like a blade.

But but but me no buts, man. None of it was that big. Not like these half bald hills and mountains in the distance. I gave up the gruesome life, after I’d learned a thing or two. Like where she kept all the stuff she used to blackmail her shark friends.

I yanked open the drawer. Damn near took my finger nail off, and it reminded me of how it damn near broke my back carrying that shit from the truck and back, however many times I had to move it. Just one more. I picked it all up, felt a paper cut crawl thin blood across my palm.

She got the fire lit on the first try. I never taught her how to make the log cabin that lets the air through, but she had it perfect anyway. A few twigs as a foundation and then a couple late nineties issues as starter. By the time I got there, the names of the authors were all but carbon. I set Patty’s papers down.

She looked up at me.

“What time is it, daddy?”

“I dunno, princess,” I said. She nodded and turned her eyes back to her creation. It was getting going pretty good. She fed it a couple more issues and then sat back on her grasshopper haunches. “Something happening later?” I asked.

“No. That’s not it,” she said. “Where’s your pocket watch?”

“Um.” I had always wanted a nice silver pocket watch, but never had the spare money to pick one up. I put a hand on her head and felt a shiver slip across her body. She turned it into the toss of another magazine onto the pyre.

“I thought…” she started to say. Then she shrugged and put her hands under her chin. “Pretty,” she concluded, hunching her shoulders into the blossoming warmth.

It was as good a time as any. I stooped and shoveled the last of Seattle onto a spiky orange tongue. The fire bit down and it wasn’t long before I was dodging huge chunks of white ash, buzzing with orange along their edges. I got this funny picture in my head of little people guiding those sparks straight at me, hurling invisible spears and screaming, Forget the Alamo! at the top of their lungs. Tops of lungs higher up than mine.

Kell threw the rest of my magazines on now that the flames were hungry enough. Then she put her hand in mine and said, without looking at me,

“Wanna read to me?”

I put my arm around her. She was burning up.

“Sure,” I said.

We left it alight.

#

Essa

I played the grieving widow. He played the man who didn’t have to take a huge morning piss. I offered him coffee.

#

Bernard

We curled up like beetles on the old green couch. She picked Roots and asked me to do the voices.

“What voices?” I asked.

“You know. Sydney’s and Mister Dresser’s and all those guys.”

She smiled like smoke. I mean she smelled like smoke and smiled. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I was only a couple paragraphs in on Chicken George when Essa knocked on the door. I shuffled Kell off my lap, yelled, Come on in.

“Hey,” Essa said. “Fire chief wants to talk to you.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s out there. Beating down your fire.” She grinned. “Thanks for the diversion. He was trying to be friendly.”

Ever seen somebody get distracted doing something important, like driving? I hate it when people listen to music in the car when I’m a passenger. Everyone I know likes to sing along. They get real into it, closing their eyes and just busting it out all over the windshield. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when the album’s over, they go digging for a new one. And I just want to reach up and grab their shoulder and yell at them to watch the road; I would if I wasn’t sure that I’d be worse than the music.

So I didn’t say anything to Essa about Lane. Not then.

The weather was coming up, sweeping black clouds overtop us. I pulled on a windbreaker and jammed my hands into my pockets. The fire chief was stamping on a few small flames that were tunneling around him through the dry grass.

“Can I help you?” I called.

“What the hell’d you think you were doing out here?” He was breathing hard. I came up next to him and stepped on a couple of tongues to show willing. It wasn’t bad. I looked up at him. He breathed with his mouth open. I could see tar stains on his teeth. Poor wife.

“Getting rid of some trash,” I said.

“Ain’t you got a burn barrel, son?”

“No, sir.”

“What about those’nth I saw behind the barn?” He pointed. I followed his finger slowly out and back, giving him time to notice the hazard stickers plastered all over the barrels in question. When I got back to his eyes, they were still angry and no more intelligent than before.

“Sure. We can use those ones.”

“Jesus! I’m going to have to take you into town, mister.”

“What for?”

“For launching a big fucking rocket that could have burned the whole foretht down.” While he was occupied with being agitated, a lisp had snuck into the corner of his mouth. Not married, then. This man would go home tonight and be satisfied with a beer and network television. He would fall asleep in his recliner and, during the night, would never go further than the bathroom.

“My best friend died in that rocket,” I said, not quite sure what I was expecting from the chief. Mostly I think I just had never been able to say that before. Never even been able to say the first four words. The look on his face put me in mind of a pig trying to wrap its thoughts around theories of hydrodynamics. Of course your best friend died, his small black eyes said. You are amateurs. You can tell by the way you almost burned the goddamn forest down.

But he was a professional, my knuckles said. And he knew what he was doing, my left foot said. I am a man of my failures; I made him a memory of same, said my other foot. I felt his nose bone crunch back but thought at the moment it might have been only his skull sinking into the soil.

Essa, green eyes, stared at me from her porch. Violence doesn’t solve anything. It’s the wounds that do the work. If there was some way we could get straight to the bruise without the interfering fist fight.

The chief was trying hard to gain his feet. Essa was walking with a measured pace. I spit at the chief’s shoes. He mumbled something bloody and ran to his truck, hunched like a pregnant woman protecting her baby. Essa timed her hand on my arm to coincide with the state’s door slamming shut. Soon after, the engine gunned and the truck spun out backwards.

Then I noticed Kelly, hiding in Essa’s skirts.

“Get in the house, girl,” I said.

“I am grown up, daddy. I grew up last night–”

“I said get in the house.”

“No!” She knew right where to go for. Her tiny bullet fist caught me where it hurts a guy the most. I doubled over, grabbing for her wrists. I caught a good scratch across my cheek before I got her under control. I looked up at Essa, while Kelly struggled like a fish in my arms, and realized I had tears in my eyes. Everything was blurry; I couldn’t see at which of us the green eyes were looking.

“Take her inside, would you?”

“Which house?” she asked, bending down to take Kelly out of my grip. When my hands were free, I wiped my eyes clear. Kell had her face buried in Essa’s hair and fists knotted between Essa’s breasts.

“Just put her to bed. God.” Some of the blood on my hands was mine. Chief must have had a face chiseled out of obsidian.

Essa took Kelly inside, patting her on the back. I sat down hard next to the remains of our fire. Smoke follows beauty. I watched it coil around the house, tap on the windows, sneak down the chimney, and then blow away on the breeze.

#

Essa

He makes me laugh. He tries, but he swings his arms with such conviction it just proves he isn’t in on the joke. That’s not what’s important, but it’s kind of sweet.

I’m six months older than him. It shows.

I’m in on the joke, which is probably why I don’t laugh. Heard it too many times. He tried with his fists, and then he brought over a bottle of something that smelled horrible. I joined him in it. He was trying to forget. Picked the wrong company. It’s obvious he doesn’t understand and that he’s just not cut out to be a father. I’ve got a list of observations that I could confront him with, watch the blush creep over his knuckles. Just a few friendly hints for home improvement, Bernie.

First step is to take the person and to put him into words. I’ve done that. Not here, but I’ve done it. I picked some good ones. Step two is to forget the words. Not strike them from your vocabulary — otherwise I wouldn’t be able to say some damn fine words — but to just gradually forget the order that you put them in. You know how quotes from your favorite movie fade, until it’s the crowd yelling, We are all individuals, and then one guy going, I’m not, and your memory says that’s the way it’s always been but it’s not right. Then, before you know it, you’ve watched another, better movie and the whole litany or list is up and gone.

He just doesn’t get it. But that’s enough words wasted.

We drank until about eleven last night. He kept trying to touch my hand. He has big power plant hands, always pumping out heat. It’s so hard to get comfortable around him. I always feel like I want to open a window. About ten-thirty, I let his palm fall over my wrist. It seemed better than fighting. He looked so lost, so lost he looked unfamiliar. A smart guy; Lane wouldn’t have fostered their friendship otherwise. Smart and easily cuckolded, if I can believe the stories. But I never really saw anything else in him. Good luck that’s enough to build a life on.

He started to squeeze. I felt as though his fingers were branding me. Desperate pulses of such hot blood through small capillaries. I let him talk about Lane for half an hour. He barely stopped to breathe. As he ran out of things to say, I realized I was crying. It happens; it even happens during shitty, manipulative movies. He finished up by saying, He made me learn a lot, which is no good way to end a life, unless the life in question was that of a teacher.

I led him by his hand into my bedroom. He wanted to burrow in the covers, but he wouldn’t have been able to breathe. I laid him on his back, stilled his heart, and took him quietly. He was asleep almost before it was over.

The windows in the kitchen were like mirrors. I stood naked between two of them. They didn’t make it to infinity. The dim light wasn’t enough to reach that far, and most of it was spilled onto the lawn anyway.

I went back into my room to get my robe and watching him as he slept on his back, a snore just beginning to form in the corners of his breath, I had plenty to keep me thinking for the next few minutes. It was cold outside, but not cold enough. I felt the air wicking away the last of his heat and starting into my own. I smiled and shook my head at him. What would Kelly say when she woke up and he wasn’t there.

That’s crazy. She wouldn’t say anything. She’s too observant to bother making comments. The girl creeps me out; more now than ever. She watches me, and she keeps comparing me to Wonder Woman, or maybe to Green Lantern.

I shuddered. It felt like time to leave, right then, barefoot in the field, a couple hundred yards from the launch pad. The feeling would lessen between then and the morning, but, unlike most things I think of in the night, it would still be there.

I had never heard the wolves that Lane always insisted were out there. Occasionally, on evenings with the TV low, I could hear the stunted laughing of a coyote, and always the dogs from however many miles down the road, but never a wolf. I stood there, taking root, just waiting for the long sad sound that my internal dramatist said should be the soundtrack of my life. I was getting tired, and awfully close to firing him.

It was time to leave. I wanted to hear a wolf snarl tangling through the trees, hear the strangled yelp of a fawn between its jaws. The fawn would be losing its dusting of white. The wolf would be silver, with a pair of eyes the shade of green you get from new shoots in a bed of ashes. There’s the perfect world, the parallel one.

I got so sad then that I couldn’t have heard a baby deer’s death rattle. Made me laugh, wiggle my toes and laugh. If I cried, it was my own damn fault.

#

Kelly

She was trying to hide. Black skin and black eyes and green fingers like tree branches. She was standing like a tree. Just two feet away from me. (A poem is not supposed to rhyme.) She didn’t see me, but I watched her. I was scared she would feel my heart beating through my back, into the ground, and up her legs.

It started when she didn’t bring them cider anymore. When she decided that it was more comfortable in front of the TV, even though they scream so much in there. When she started wearing shoes again. When I had to sit there in her room and hide my eyes because they were spitting lightning. When she stopped trying to be the green lady. I hate her. She taught me how to make nothing out of words.

As I lay there, trying not to sleep, I heard her muttering. Nothing was words. After a few minutes, when my heart was nearly still again, she turned and scraped away. I opened my eyes and didn’t notice much of a difference. Just the stars.

I wondered, Why are they so important. Not why are they so important but why are they so important to see close up. Back here I guess they’re beautiful. But a book I read said that up close they’re terrifying. It’s stupid to go chasing after them. I dreamed about the train and it going off a cliff and I was screaming, How stupid, at the engineer, but that didn’t even feel like a baby of me ripping at the grass and wanting to throw it at dad.

I’m way further than they are. She wants to turn around and he wants to sleep and I want to move on. The constellations change when you move. So people in Africa are shooting at completely different stars. I got up and started walking toward the trees. A completely different sky. And a ceiling.

I had to walk slowly. There was nothing to see, so I closed my eyes. They were getting tired. One afternoon, a few months ago, I had come out here when Essa was done with me. I found the stream and started to follow it down. There was a falls I couldn’t crawl down, so I stuck out both my arms straight and held one still and turned until they were together and then walked off after them. I was way out of the pictures, now. I knew all the plants, even the little ones, closer to home. I didn’t give them names, but I knew which ones not to feed Nine. I found some of the same ones without names, but they had different shoots, leaves at different angles. There was devil’s poison club which dad said would give me a rash. I had never had a rash before. I picked it and rubbed it on my arms. My skin tingled and that was it.

I smelled like dirt, or I smelled dirt. Then the trees stopped. I took one step on thick moss and then another step on flat dust. It was still the hillside, just emptier. There were stumps in a few places, but mostly holes. Holes I could fit inside. I got on my hands and knees and peered down into one, hoping to surprise a family of foxes or a baby deer at least. Just more dirt. I like dirt, but it’s better when there’s water, too.

I made little explosions when I walked. There was a twisted stump crouching at the bump of a little hill. If it had been lifted up, it would have left a hole big enough for a truck to slip into. It was sideways instead of up and down. I saw a mouth and a fin and the way the grain waved made it look as if it was swimming.

Knots and crosses made good foot holds. There were splinters sticking everywhere out of my hands, but they only hurt if you ignore them, and they feel better if you press real hard.

I built a city out of clods and sticks. It was a port town, built high into the cliff side on a planet with muddy oceans. To get their supplies from the harbor, they would let down miles of green vines, twisted together until they turned brown. Then the ship masters could attach pallets of food and barrels of water and the people of the city would haul at the lines to bring it all into reach. The sailors never saw the people they were selling to. The ocean was more interesting than the city. I traced mudwhales and mudsharks and mudmaids and had to take off my shoes and walk on tip toes so I wouldn’t squish anyone.

While I was playing, it got cloudy, and then it got dark. I couldn’t see the forest, or where it ended. I ran in the only direction I could see, which was into the middle of the desert. And I didn’t scream that much. I had my eyes closed, like last night, because it didn’t matter if they were open or not. Then Essa told me to open them, and I did, and she was carrying me through green.

She said I had an allergic reaction to something and my hands were all swollen. I couldn’t make a fist, but that just happens.

Last night, I didn’t go near so far. I got to the stream — its bubbling got louder with every step and I wondered if I’d find the loudest step or if it would just keep roaring on forever more urgent — and I stopped there. I didn’t turn around, I didn’t look up. I put my fingers in the water and pretended my super power was clear. Then I remembered that all of that is silly, anyway. That she isn’t a hero. That power doesn’t make you a hero, whether it’s green or bright orange. It makes you dead or it makes you scared or it makes you run out of things to say. She ran out of things to say. She was muttering. I doubt she could even understand herself.

I found my way back to the house and slept until dad came home.

#

Bernard

I swore I wouldn’t lift another box again. Moving my life to Seattle was bad enough; it came across the country in two trips, though I only made one. Coming out here, I had to do it all in one, because there aren’t a whole lot of airports in the area. The nearest one is down in Tonasket, and that one is just barely wide enough for a man wearing styrofoam wings. I threw my back out twice between Patty and here. Books in the box, box down the stairs, box in the truck, truck down the flat freeway, cheap highway, sandblasted path, and home. Home which is supposed to be the end. Well, the end kinda keeps going on for a while. Nothing written down the says the end has to stop. Revelation is that at the end of the world Jesus comes back and starts it all over again. Except this time everybody gets to stay happy, because if they don’t, Jesus is gonna bat them in the nose. There’s the Bible stories I told my kid. No wonder she turned out weird as she did.

Home is where I took the boxes down again, threw my back number two, tripped on the lick of a porch step, and never dropped a thing.

Kept a lot of the things in the boxes they came in. Not because I was too lazy to unpack. Lazy for two whole years. You know when you keep an action figure in its original box its worth a lot more. So, in case anyone wants to buy my history, it’s all there in boxes.

And now Essa says she’s getting ready to move, which goes to show that plans are really better left unformed. She wants to go back to the big city, bright lights, short bridges. Too wide; she’ll get lost. Too bright; two things are. Too short. Well. I could have kept it up.

The bruised rising clouds made it look as though bits of sky were on fire. I was chopping wood because Essa said she’d have to start packing, and I said we’d still be here a few more days. I asked her, probably erring on the side of angry, what she expected us to drive out of here. The truck was still in the ditch and miles away. If she had asked me to push it back here, I would have, and that’s why I came out to chop wood.

Kelly came outside to help me, to pick up the splinters of bark that would go bulleting off to either side when the maul came down wrong. She scuttled in the dirt while my arms were raised over my head, and was gone when the axe came down. She didn’t say anything, so I did.

“Yesterday, kid.”

“Don’t worry about it, dad. I saw what you did.”

“Daddy lost his temper.” Crash went the axe, and, sneaking under it as though it was a drawbridge, scuttle went my daughter.

“When are we moving,” she asked. It was like a cough in the middle of a death scene.

“It won’t be for a while. I have to get Laddy out of the ditch. Um. How did you hear about that?”

“You told me.”

I set the maul down carefully; couldn’t cut my toes off — it’s far too dull — but I could squash them to crap and back.

“No I didn’t, honey.”

“Yes you did. Yes you did. You made it very very. On the teevee.”

She was crouched on her toes, leaning forward, scuffed jean knees not quite adding to the balance. She had arranged the slivers of bark in front of her to form a three point semi-circle. She had angled smaller twigs beneath the circle, aiming toward her.

“What’s that?” I asked, shouldering the maul again and feeling the weighted bruise where the head rested on my shoulder. And not just that.

“It’s the sun, dad,” she said. Then, with her head falling over to the right, “Why are we leaving?”

Down off the shoulder again. “Honey. We can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you miss Lane?”

“No. I don’t. Does Essa”

I caught myself right on the edge of laughing. She was so simple. She didn’t know how to lie. All the books I read to her, and she didn’t have one pulse of someone else’s thought fluttering in her brain. She looked up at me with blue eyes. I know children change their colors as they grow up. But weren’t they brown. A bunch of things that don’t matter. I put my hand against my forehead, finding it uncomfortably sweaty, to shade out the sun just as it slipped behind a column of smoky cloud.

“She does,” I said.

“Then why doesn’t she stay here?”

“Because she misses Lane, sweetie.”

“She’s moving to the city.”

I didn’t know how long she’d had to make sense of the whole thing, but the city must have felt like a fairy land to her. She was too young to remember much when we moved out here. I bet she mainly remembers the car ride; she was yelling her head off at me for most of the time because Patty had promised to take her to the zoo that day. Or maybe kids don’t remember what they yell through.

“It’s going to be very nice there,” I said. “Essa has lots of friends.” And they all love children. “There are a million things to do.” Reduced rates for kids eight and under. “We could even try to get an apartment near the forests.” Hell, we could get the landscapers to come by and flash grow a new forest just for you.”

“She misses the city,” said Kelly.

“Yeah, she does,” I said. She stared at me until I did something else. I lifted the maul and let it drop, using its own splintering weight to carry the head through the brittle tamarack fiber. Twice more, each time I was afraid that Kelly would dart out at the wrong time and I’d catch her neck. It wouldn’t cut; it’d crush. I turned to tell her to go play somewhere safer, but she was gone.

I had gotten through most of a cord before Essa came out to check on me and to bring me a glass of water.

“You know what your daughter just told me?” she asked as I drank. I shook my head, spilling a few drops around the corners. “She said that now she’s going to live on the moon.”

I smiled my thin smile and handed the glass back to her.

“I read to her too much,” I said.

“Yeah. I called her a lunatic. She got it.”

“Really?”

“Yup.” She was smoothing the glass between her palms. She bit her lower lip, on purpose at first, then she swore and dabbed it with a finger.

“She’s a smart one. I’ve done a pretty god job if I say so myself.”

“You don’t need to,” said Essa, lowering her hand. “Listen, Bern. I appreciate helping me move and all that, but you guys don’t have to move back to the city. It’s dark and messy and the only shared dream you’ll find is for stimulants in the morning.”

“Yeah, I know. I lived there too, remember?”

“So why do you want to go back? It’s not like this place. This is peaceful, a retreat from the world, and that never gets old.”

I shouldered the axe, wincing as a sort of plugging my ears against my collarbone’s protest, and started for the barn to put it away. Essa followed.

“Besides,” she said, no less hesitant but a good deal quieter. “Doesn’t Patty still live there?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’ll be bad. It’ll be horrible. I’ll keep running into her at art shows and dream theaters. Only the more expensive ones, of course. The ones where they put whisky in the champagne.”

“I’m trying to help, Bern. You love it here. Kelly loves it here.”

“She wants to live on the moon.”

“So do you.” She didn’t do much else. Neither did I. “I don’t want you to come.”

“Well, it’s not like we’d be living in your house,” I said. I was a little hurt, as from a needle digging at a splinter. Except that simile loses cohesion when you think about who is the needle, who is the splinter, and who is digging. That’s three parts for a two part harmony.

“Sit. Stay,” she said with a smile.

“Essa,” I said, as though to a small child. “I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s too much to wake up in the morning and have this dry, brown thing sitting in my face. It’s a hiding place. It was a hiding place. It’s doing a crappy job. Do you understand.” It was the smallest excuse, but the most coherent. I leaned against the barn wall.

And she nodded, and she smiled with her head still down, and she went away to pack. I left the maul against what was left of prototype two. So I wasn’t going to haul any more boxes, but it’s not as though I remembered that until just now.

#

Essa

I’m so proud to be an American. Here freedom starts the stampede for everything, a huge expanding field of hearts and hair pushing outward but never dissipating. If you’re at the center, if you’re sheltered, there is nothing left unconsumed. The stars, if they could see us, would think us just another ambitious nebula. But we are far too small, and far too dim, and much too far away.

I can’t even get a good jab in on Bernie. He’s done all the work for me. You’d think he would grow out of himself, with everything that has happened.

I just can’t help thinking that some night in the city, he’ll come stumbling into my living room. He’ll be drunk and smell of it. Perch and the gang will be over, and we’ll be arguing everything in that bright blood buzz that settles on you when you want never to stop talking. And Bernie won’t recognize the dissonance in the air. He won’t recognize goodbye, or laughter, or, You fucking killed your own best friend.

I just know it’s going to happen and, short of lighting a fire under his bed, there’s not much I can do about it.

That’s all I was thinking as I started packing up, making little figures out of spoons and Blistex, and acting out the grand tragedy. Oops, little Bernie got his head twisted off, and now there’s this clearish paste bulging from his neck. Don’t grow out of things like this.

I put the Blistex in my pocket. I had a few small piles made on the kitchen table before I remembered all our moving boxes were folded up and stuffed in the crawlspace. Cardboard works well as insulation, and saves money for oxygen which, when ignited, keeps you pretty warm too.

I had forgotten how hot it was above the ceiling. Even during the snowless winter that we moved here, it was toasty up under the rafters. There hung all our conversations, all our sweat and my little panting breaths, all of it caught and held from heaven. Much longer here and the house would lift off like a hot air balloon.

I fussed about up there, careful not to step on the yellow clouds of insulation for fear of the million invisible splinters I would gain. I wiped my forehead with both wrists, alternating to keep the level of grime consistent. When I slithered down the ladder, I could feel drops of brown sweat clinging to my cheeks and the plain summer air hit me like a whisky buzz. My shirt was filthy. I took it off and went out on the porch.

It felt light to be naked outside. I let a breeze hit my belly without shriveling my skin. The tiny hairs tagging my ribcage went from invisible to gold dust.

Kelly

I looked up poem in the dictionary.

Essa

I was watching my hands leave trails of goosebumps and trying to decide if my hands were warmer than my skin or was it the other way around. When I looked up, Kelly was staring at me from her bedroom window. I waved. She stuck her tongue out at me.

Kelly

It’s not that simple. It takes so many nanoseconds from the thought to the motion. Too many and dad will laugh and say, Time’s up. Too few and you’re blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.

Nine.

Cape. Boston.

Wake.

She waved at me without thinking about it. She had big nipples. There is a picture of me in my baby book of mom curled up in bed, reading a stack of papers. Dad’s next to her, reading something he forgot. I’m in her lap, with my fists bunched up and into her skin, sucking at her milk. She is laughing. Dad is trying to ignore the man behind the camera.

I was getting grease on the window from my nose and my eyes. I licked it off.

Essa

I sat down in my rocking chair, clutching at my breasts. The damn blubber globes weren’t doing what they were designed to do: keep me warm.

I can stay with Anyone for a while, I thought. Just long enough to get a place of my own.

Kelly was still staring at me. It was starting to creep me out, same as mannequins and life sized cardboard cutouts do. When I looked away, there was still this half-pint presence putting weight on my senses. It felt as though she was coming closer, ghostly through the yard to me. I snapped my head up to fix her back in place.

Kelly

Her legs were in the sun. A shadow for the rest. I heard a scream; it was dad’s purple toe scream. She moved her black arm to her eyes, which was stupid. She turned back when dad didn’t say anything more.

Then there was this sound like a giant eggbeater. Essa used her other arm. I stared so hard she disappeared and I made her put her arm down.

Then she fought and put up her hand with the wrong L shape. Supposed to use your pointer finger and your thumb. She was just pointing up.

Essa

It’s every day you see a thing like this. I wanted to go home so badly, to find a little normalcy. The piercings and brandings, the late night brandy war rooms, the rain. I would miss being able to walk outside naked, but, hell, I wouldn’t really.

I felt caught between two pincers in a way I had never felt caught when Lane was around. Kelly with her demanding need to be, if not a woman, then a man. Bernard with a similar sort of thing. Sometimes I think, I ought to leave a lot of this for him to read when I am gone. You have to do some things so that you can move on. You can’t just selectively ignore the opportunities to fail; you have to fall into them with the full, misguided intent to succeed and then eat your pie alone. And then go home.

I had never thought of Lane as my protector, before. Now he wasn’t.

Kelly’s head was still Mona Lisa fixed on me. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not.

I realized I had been listening to the low metallic purr of a car for quite some time. And now it was overshadowed by the penetrating chink of pebbles on fenders as an old green and white sedan turned into the mouth of our shared driveway. It was the sheriff. I pushed myself up with the railing and went inside before the man behind the wheel got a good eyeful.

It took me ten minutes to find the packing tape I had set out in the open. By that time, someone was pounding on my door.

Kelly

I went outside to take a walk. A man who didn’t fit the landscape kept saying, Little girl, little girl, but I didn’t listen to him. I went barefoot to the green. Even in the middle of the hottest day in the world, the grass is still soft and cool; it was thick and shaded and there was dew trapped in the roots.

A little girl said, We can pay for you to go to school.

A little girl said, You may wear whatever you like. You may wear nothing.

A little boy said, This car is for me and no other. This car is for me and no other. This car is mine.

I said, This car doesn’t need to hear its name so often and fine you can have it it smells of you anyway.

It’s hard to remember a dream, completely. I would try to write it down, but it went hazy and — now I know — poetic, and I knew that while I write along straight lines, it wanted to be told round a globe or something worse.

We were driving to somewhere from right here. There were red walls. The red walls may have been where we were going. On a train to reach an arm stretch out. Daddy was invisible. Black invisible, like Essa. Coal. He drove from the back. I’m tired of writing in straight lines. The letters look so tired. Just like that guy in the big black hat I saw so many times on TV. He had a strap around his chin that wouldn’t keep his hat on but he didn’t seem to mind. He was slouching, and a guy with a big grin kept saying, The great British empire, over and over again.

I needed dirt to my ankles, dirt in my fingers. Roots snapped like strands of hair as I dug and twirled. I got paper cuts from green blades. Dandelions bled their white insides. I closed my eyes, not to sleep. The sun burned orange in the corner of my eyes. I turned my head away. Dancing blue faced molecules with eyebrows floating over their heads. Take off the eyebrows and they can’t look angry. Scribbling over them makes it worse.

Every piece of me was moving angry.

#

Bernard

“Now, son. It ain’t that big a deal. You can drive yuhself down, if it’ll make you feel better.”

I was sitting on the couch and, since there were no other chairs in the room, the sheriff was sitting next to me. He was pressing himself deep into the corner, twisted around so he could tell himself he looked me square in the eye. He came pretty close.

“He assaulted me first, sheriff.”

“Well, be that as it may, he also filed charges first.” I didn’t respond. He was letting his gaze drift around my living room. I could see his distaste for undusted corners, hanging rafters, dark wood, slapdash molding, bare light bulbs. He didn’t make any effort to mask the expressions on his face. No weight at the corner of his mouth to keep the smiles down, or fish hook muscles to keep a grin in place. His eyes settled on my face and I could see he didn’t believe me, about any of it. Not that I was just rearranging the hay bales in my barn. Not that the chief had threatened Essa with a lawsuit. Not that I had built this house with my own two hands. Not that it wasn’t a trouble to make up a pot.

Seems like a lot to lie about in just twenty minutes. But lies are easy enough to tell and don’t come back on you if your audience is lazy. Sheriff Tomkins looked like he just wanted to get me back to town so he could make his poker game on time.

“Let me talk to my wife for a few minutes?”

“Sure thing, podnur.” He didn’t believe that, either. We went outside and across the drive.

I knocked three times, waited, then three times more. I tried the handle; it was locked and cold. I turned to the sheriff and shrugged. He shrugged back, along with,

“Ain’t you got a key?”

I cupped my hands against wood of the door and yelled into them, Make sure Kelly’s all right, and, I’ll be back.

“Maybe she’s takin a quick nap. Oh, no, you can sit up front here.” I had pulled open one of the rear prisoner doors. “Seems awful funny, you all being up here without a vehicle. You got a farm down in that valley there?”

It was starting to be fun. “Sure do. Work it myself, along with my daughter’s help where she can.”

“Well good,” said Sheriff Tomkins. The radio came on when he twisted the ignition. The reception was pretty bad this far out from the towers. Through a half haze of static, Nick Drake sang about things he knows, and the sheriff sang along.

#

Essa

I pulled back the curtain from my bedroom window same as skin from a paper cut. The tail lights jittered between the grids of ash trees lining the stream track. Then they were gone. It would cost a couple hundred bucks extra to get the moving truck up here. But Laddy was in the ditch, anyway, so what difference.

On my back, in my bed, under covers, I turned the world around. Closing my eyes, I imagined the room given a shake and rotated until my floor was the ceiling. I opened my eyes, delighted in the vertigo. Something I do a lot when I’m bored. Nothing could keep me all the way to Earth. I was being sucked up against the thin sheet rock, the cloudy insulation, the knotted roof above.

Lane had been ready to give it all up. Burdens, cares, and me, to make him light enough for fuel efficiency. What it must feel like to be weightless. Worried that your next step will be too hard, and there you’ll go beyond the reach of gravity, and sink above the folding waves of radiation.

Todd answered on the second try. He knew someone with a stolen U-Haul.

Kelly

I measured it. It took a hundred and thirty-eight steps to get to the green from our warped front porch. The barn is half way. I walked back to the barn and it took me almost two hundred steps. The sun was down and I was walking slowly but my legs are still as long. I’ve decided home is running away from me.

I pushed hard on the barn door but it has always been too heavy for me. So I did what I always do: I climbed. Plenty of places for my feet on the cracked surface of the old wood. The second story hay loft has a wide window for feeding cows or throwing paper airplanes. I pulled myself up into it. I thought about hiding here, but it would be the first place she looked. I could throw things at her. There was a shovel up there with me. But she’d know where I was.

I climbed down the ladder on the inside. There was hay everywhere, just like after a big wind, when daddy and Lane would run out with the tarps from our roofs and cover the rockets, weighting the corners with heavy rocks. There was a big space where the first rocket had been. The second rocket was only half finished. It didn’t have fins or a nose. It was just a middle unattached, a tube.

It was warm inside and still. I picked a few pieces of straw from where they had stuck in the cracks under rivets. My feet fit all the way inside. It smelled of metal, like lightning. I fell asleep.

I dreamed — no I didn’t I’m making this up — that Nine had his teeth in my ear and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about my blood or about me saying, That’s enough now, Nine. He said he didn’t like the taste or someone else did. We were on the moon, chasing stones. He told me which ones to go for and he said some of the same jokes as Lane always did, but not with the same voice, and not at all funny.

Later, he was off my ear, he hopped for the first time. He went as high as my head, laughing. He said, Look what I can do. I tried staring at him. I tried the turning him green. But I didn’t even have Essa’s super powers in my dream. Look what I can do, he laughed and bounced. But I felt like a slug. I had to bend over to walk. I had to put all four feet on the ground. I howled.

Essa

I was chatting with Perch when Bern wasted his one phone call. I really wanted to ignore the drill bit beeping that signalled the other line, but I couldn’t. It was ruining a great story, anyway, so I apologized to Simone and switched over.

“Hey. It’s me. Is Kelly all right?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked on her yet.”

“Essie,” he started to whine.

“You shut up, Bernard,” I said. “I’m going to say it now. I have had enough of you. I’ve had enough of your clumsy attempts to bed me, and of your successes, and of your clammy hand comforts. I’ve had enough of your hope and of your overuse of the word.” I screwed up royally getting my words out. I stuttered, I flinched, and everything I had ever prepared kind of dribbled out the corner of my mouth. I was suddenly sick and disgusted at myself.

“Lane knew,” he said.

“Lane knew a lot of things,” I said.

“Lane knew a lot,” he agreed for no reason. “Will you check on Kelly for me?”

“No. I mean yes.” I didn’t expect to say, No.

“Drop her off in town on your way home?”

There was something in his voice that made me wonder why we ever called capitulation “being cowed”; cows murmur and hum with the workings of their organs. Bern was putting me in mind of Laurence Olivier’s eyes. Back then, they may have been emotive, but now they’re dead, lifeless, but still sickly warm.

“Going home,” he said.

“What’s prison like?” I countered.

“It’s…” he went completely silent. I just about switched back to Perch. “Different,” he finished.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got someone on the other line.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bring her by.”

“Thanks, Essa. I’ll be all right.”

Everything else was unnecessary.

I wrapped things up with Perch., ending with a See you tomorrow.

It was fully dark outside and starting to cloud up.

Kelly wasn’t in her bed, or even in her house.

I had to slice open a box to dig out my flash light.

The launch site was ghostly, picked out in my small circle of white.

The barn, still darker than the sky, was empty. I shined up through the slats of the hay loft.

The stream chattered so I had to yell louder than I wanted. I almost missed the deer’s gurgling and fearful reply. And the call of the hunt. I thought for a moment I had stepped into the stream. My calves went colder than old bone.

I ran.

Her bed was still empty.

I lost one of my shoes on their stupid front porch and went back for it so fast I broke a nail. Night beat on me without a dream. I yelled.

Damn it girl, I’ll tan your hide.

The end