Originally published in the Goodbye, Darwin anthology.

It was not a night to spare expense. The firm had successfully defended against their twenty-fifth anti-trust suit earlier that afternoon and, to celebrate, the senior partners had brought out all the silver, and had sprung for the champagne. The party went through the natural life cycle of this sort of office get-together, starting with the tentative first introductions and flirtations, growing into the comfortable din of a dozen concurrent conversations, lapsing into silence as guests individually realized they had nothing more to say, and then dissipating as the elderly and the far too young slouched out under heavy felt coats and identical flat-brimmed hats. By three in the morning, the only ones left in the offices were the middle-aged, those not yet over the hill but right at the summit, and one young lawyer who wanted to ingratiate himself.

The brandy came out, as did the cigars, and soon, by the alcohol heat and Havana exhales, the men were pimpled with sweat over their laser-shaven cheeks. Their ties already were loosened, so they began unbuttoning their shirts and pumping the fabric over their chests like bellows, laughing and snorting and desperate not to fall asleep, for to sleep would be a waste of time.

When it got too hot to move, they started burning money. Everybody chipped in, emptying their pockets of chits until there was a pile the size of a pumpkin on the table between them. They took turns, as a family might take turns opening presents on Christmas morning, not out of a desire to see joy flash across their coworker’s face, but to build up suspense, to revel in the fascination.

The young lawyer was last in the circle. He had never burned with these men before. He stayed quiet, some small part of him fearing that the only reason he was still there was that they hadn’t noticed him yet. He laughed at the right times, though never too loudly, but didn’t say much of anything that he came up with on his own. He stared with the others as each man in the circle placed a chit against his temple and pressed, sending recorded electronic signatures through his brain, which scrambled to adapt to the new information and, quick as you can tell your lips to smile, copied wave for wave the emotion held inside the chit.

These were mostly wonders, joys, a few lusts, which were declining in value as the market realized that lust was not necessary to fabricate. It was almost the young lawyer’s turn. He watched the features of the man to his right settle and soften until the skin was no good for holding back tears. The man had grabbed the lone nostalgia. 

“Here Johnny,” said the man on the young lawyer’s left, passing him a chit. Johnny grinned to show willing, took it, and pressed it to his temple, his sweat sealing the connection. He didn’t see the fist-shielded chuckles of the few men whose artificial emotions had already wound down, and, though he heard the humor, it didn’t sound out of place. He shot the chit, using up its charge, rendering it worthless. 

Johnny Cousin wasn’t stupid. He was going places. He was a capable lawyer; he spoke to juries with a confidence he couldn’t find tonight. He had risen from assistantship to associate to trial lawyer in just a few years, and his first solo case was this coming Tuesday. He wasn’t stupid. There are plenty of gullible people who aren’t stupid.

The emotion hit him like a bullet — that is to say so quickly that he could neither identify nor examine it. He pitched forward and vomited. His spine crawled with the glares, the hunting focus of some invisible creature. He scrambled to his feet, slipping on the puke, and tried to run. He tripped over the armchair of a laughing attorney and fell into a crouch. His hands smelled like acid and alcohol.

“What’d you give him?” someone asked. “Oh shit, that’s hilarious. You’ve got one of those? It’s like a food stamp, brother.”

“I found it in the gutter,” someone else said.

Johnny sobbed into his hands and twisted up against a wall. There was a window. He slithered away from it, settling into a corner, his fingers laced over his eyes, too afraid to either open or close them.

“Should get this on camera. You got a camera?”

The dramatics were over, though. Johnny’s terrified mind calmed like an ocean, a small derivative, the waves still present just less forceful. He pulled his hands away from his eyes and focused on the other men and their tucked-up playground leers.

Johnny wiped his chin on his sleeve; the shirt was ruined anyhow. “You bastards,” he said, lightly, as though he were in on the joke. “You royal bastards.” And, far removed from his grudging laugh, he was thinking, And that’s what he feels? My god. My god. What have I done?

#

“You receive a pension for your son’s service, do you not?”

“For when he is released, ma’am, yes,” said Johnny. Throughout the last couple of days he had been unable to stop thinking about how he had felt that night. Memory stands apart from pain, the same as a noun stands apart from the thing it represents. Still, the memory was potent and made his sinuses hurt. He hadn’t been focused on his job, on the preparations for his trial on Tuesday. Some of his coworkers, the ones who had been there that night, had come up to him and nudged him in his ribs, joked about the look on his face, pulled their own faces into rude caricatures. Johnny’s reserve of humor ran out in mere hours, and after that he just replied with, Yeah, that was great.

“And why do you want to terminate his employment prematurely?” Johnny was standing in front of the desk of a secretary to one of the senior partners; several steps removed from power, but he could feel it, the ability to effect a change, pulsing in the conditioned air.

The secretary was leaning forward on her desk, elbows on the blotter, her thin glasses centered on her eyes. She was young, or looked it; no more than a couple years older than Johnny. Her expression invited him to fill the silence; he chose to fill it with excuses.

“I didn’t realize what I was doing. The tests said he gave strong reactions and would be ideal for the mint, but—”

“So you signed him over. Terror, you said?”

“Yes,” said Johnny. The secretary nodded as if hearing from him a condemnation in that one syllable and agreeing with it, though not without sympathy. She pressed a finger into her right ear, the better to hear from the microspeaker embedded there.

“Excuse me for just one moment, mister Cousin.” The secretary left through a door behind her desk. The door clicked shut. Johnny thought of shutting doors, of putting the past in its place and locking it there, of dark impenetrable wood behind which is hidden whatever you please, of the room in the corner of a house, out of sight so the mind can gradually flush its memories away.

The door opened; the secretary breezed back to her desk. She swiveled in her chair, settling it in the right position, then smiled.

“Did you know that they now manipulate their dreams, as well? So, in essence, they are working twenty-four hours a day. That must be . . . terrible.” The secretary smiled again. “Or terrific, depending on who you are, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

Where Johnny would have rustled a sheet of paper or glanced at his watch, she fixed him on the two points of her eyes and waited for her next thought to form into words. “And your wife?” she said.

“We’re no longer together,” said Johnny. “I have full legal custody.”

“Good. That will make this less complicated.”

“You can do something?”

“We can do something, mister Cousin. But it will require an effort on your part, as well. You like your work, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Johnny, and it was partly true. He liked what the job allowed him to do; that is, he liked attending parties, and he liked being a part of the winning team, and he liked coming home way too late to a bottle of bourbon and a house, built large so as to enclose the maximum amount of silence, and with silence, comfort.

The work itself was a tool, a commodity, something for him to sell in exchange for every docile fantasy he had.

“You have done a satisfactory job in the past few months. It hasn’t escaped the notice of the senior partners.”

“Thank you,” said Johnny.

“Your first solo is on Tuesday, is it not?”

“That’s correct,” said Johnny.

“Good. The senior partners would like you to throw it.”

“What? Why?”

“I hardly think I need tell you, mister Cousin, that in some instances there can come profit from loss.” The secretary was smiling; her eyes said, I know you really are smart enough to know that, and Johnny almost believed her. An expression like that could have sold cars; it was so full of camaraderie, of earnest kinship born of shared experience.

“No,” replied Johnny.

“Good. Do not turn it into a mistrial. Weaken your case, discredit your own witnesses, hem and haw to the jury. Make a few bad jokes.” Her voice had taken on the mad Mosaic timbre of someone dispensing commandments from on high. Behind her words, Johnny could hear the low whine of the speaker in her ear. One of the senior partners telling her what to say; this woman existed only to keep supplicants at arm’s length from the power. Johnny was not a praying man, but right then he wondered how frustrating it must have been to accompany each prayer with a sacrifice, an extra wing of potency, without which the prayer would flutter helplessly in the mezzanine, easy prey for circling doubts, far removed from the shrouded presence of an Old Testament god.

Johnny almost bowed as he left. On the way out, he passed a platinum reproduction of Winged Victory of Thrace. He reflected on the meeting — his knees shaking as they had his first time addressing a judge — and what it would cost him, which was, to his estimation, fairly large. A handful of terrors made a plastic chatter in his jacket pocket. He reflected, misshapen, in winged victory.

#

The guys in the office gave Johnny pats on the back and buck up pep talks. Everyone stopped by to congratulate him on a job well done, too bad the twelve went in for the other guy, but sometimes that can’t be helped. Johnny was tired and gracious and said, Just gotta get back up on the horse, he couldn’t guess how many times. The distractions came at fifteen minute intervals, sometimes the same guys more than once. No hard feelings, said the guy who had slipped him the terror that night, and it wasn’t a question. No hard feelings, said Johnny, patting the chits in his pocket.

He was annoyed at the distractions, but he didn’t know what he would have done without them. He couldn’t concentrate on the work; his monitor kept deforming every time he blinked, waves of misguided electrons sheeting to the bottom. Somewhere in the office was a crying baby, and the susurrus of its client mother hushing it up, her sibilance matching the disturbed frequency of Johnny’s screen. 

His phone rang, throwing off the baby’s howl, the mother’s whisper. He answered it.

“Mister Cousin,” said the secretary on the other end. “Have you been keeping up with the news?”

He hadn’t been. Preparing for his case had been more important in the way that circumvents any method of prioritizing; but even without the thrown case, he wasn’t much of a news hound. The things he needed to know filtered through other people to his ears, and at the end of the day he went home to a quiet house with no TV. He said as much, aware that outside of his head it sounded like rambling.

“Nine days ago, a vigilante group raided the Pac-Nor mint in Bellingham. The group’s apparent aim was to liberate the staff. Your son was one of those liberated.”

“Where is he, now?”

“Local police conducted an area search. You should read it for yourself. They turned up Contentment—” referring to the kid by the emotion she was tapped for “—huddled in an alleyway trying to wrap a sheet of rotten drywall around herself. The others didn’t turn up in the county.”

After a compliment on a job well done — which felt to Johnny no more or less than the pats on the back — the secretary hung up, saying she would leave him to it, whatever it was. His son was nine days gone from the mint. How far can a kid run in nine days? How far can a kid — who has been stuck in his own mind for fifteen years and whose only experience with running has come from escaping the monsters that visited inside injected fever dreams — go in nine days?

If it had been me, Johnny realized, I would have gone until my lungs caved in.

Rubbing his temples, he caught up on the news. As it turned out, some of the kids had gone home, authorities assuming the vigilantes had told them where to go. Anger burned a tree house down and was in custody. The mints didn’t want the kids back, now; they were spoiled goods, once earthbound and now released into the great wide unknown. The air they had known would never taste the same again.

Johnny cut out early and sped home. He pulled onto his street with the sun in his eyes and saw the silhouette of his house undamaged and was relieved.

#

Grady pulled up out front in his near-silent car; Johnny wouldn’t have noticed had he not been waiting for the man. It was a couple of weeks later, and Johnny still hadn’t decided what to do about his son, whom he had taken to calling Trey, thanks to the circling strange abstraction of the brain which turns a word around until its syllables overlap and its meaning takes second seat to the sounds themselves.

He strolled down the front walk to greet Grady. Grady wasn’t from around here; he wasn’t an American. He spoke English haltingly and with a grammar all his own. He made you feel as though every gap in communication was your fault for not speaking clearly, while your brain protested that it was his fault for fouling up the language in his head. Still, he was the best private investigator in the area and he had worked with Johnny’s firm on a number of occasions, so Johnny at least knew him by sight, as well as by his reputation.

He told himself he was collecting information, in order to make an informed decision, and couldn’t help feeling as though he were betraying someone, or, more accurately, some thing, some wordless ideal. By not upping stakes and running to Bellingham? he asked himself. Unreasonable, misguided, emotional. Came the response: how better to find your son, who has lived his whole life unreasonably, without guidance, submerged in an emotion much more powerful — therefore more valuable — than the paternal instinct.

“Nice car,” said Johnny as he extended his hand to Grady. Grady took it, then released it as though he had decided not to shake after all. He turned and examined his car from hood to trunk, then returned his attention to Johnny.

“Yes,” he said. “I enjoy a good car.”

“What is it? A Freya roadster, right? Love the color.”

“Good running,” said Grady. “Take me inside.” He was holding a black leather briefcase in one hand. He used it to gesture at Johnny’s house. 

“Right. Please, come in,” said Johnny.

Grady went immediately to the dining room table and sat, opening his briefcase and laying out a series of contracts and forms for Johnny to sign. Johnny, meanwhile, got himself a drink.

“Want a drink?” he asked.

Grady waved his negative. “For the driving,” he said. “Sign your life,” he said, tapping his finger on the nearest sheet of paper, then pulling a pen from his breast pocket and repeating the gesture.

“Excuse me?” Johnny took a sip of his drink and sat down opposite Grady.

“Sign your life,” said the PI. “For payment.”

Johnny couldn’t quite place Grady’s accent. There were the rolled Rs, the swallowed vowels of Russia; but he also tended to emphasize the second syllable, as Germans or Scotsmen do. The man’s looks didn’t clear anything up. His hair was gray, but looked as though it could have been artificially so. His eyebrows were triangular, pointing upwards, shadowing his eyes. His face was smooth and square and carried the sort of contemplative neutral expression that once upon a time may have caused swoons in the girls of his native land, wherever that was. 

“Sign my life?” said Johnny. Grady stared at him, licked his lips, blinked, returned to staring. Johnny bent and started reading the contracts. When he was halfway through, Grady spoke.

“I am going from America,” he said. “Tell the word around. After your money. I am going.” Johnny kept reading. “Stupid America,” Grady went on. “Sensitive to light, to shadow, to food. Babies that cry. And worthless money.”

“Worthless,” said Johnny, glancing meaningfully around his sleek unsullied rooms. 

“Gold is worthless,” said Grady. “No bullets to be made, no walls will stand. Too soft. So is your new money. Worthless.”

“Is that why you ask for so much of it?” Johnny had finished reading the contracts. Grady grinned, boxy teeth shoving his lips apart. He replied something about moving that Johnny didn’t understand and let disappear without response. He began inking his initials and names over the sheets of the contract.

When he was finished, Grady collected his copies and snapped them into the briefcase. Johnny wrote up a bank authorization, asking, “What do you want it in?”

“Wonder,” said Grady. Johnny made it so and handed over the note.

“Remember,” he said. “I don’t want him to know that his dad is looking for him. I mean, I don’t know what he’d do. I don’t want him to run. Just tell me where— just tell me if he’s all right and where he is.”

Grady nodded. “It’s in the contract.” He let himself out.

Johnny sat hunched forward on his couch, elbows on his knees. He listened to Grady’s car purr off. After a while, he got up and, shoving the loose contract aside, opened his own briefcase and caught up on a little work, scribbling notes with one hand while the other made plastic chirps with the terror in his pocket.

#

Three weeks later, Grady was sitting on Johnny’s couch, sipping a water. Johnny was sitting across from him on the corner of the coffee table, flipping through the pages of notes and photographs that Grady had brought with him.

“Oliver Kyle Cousin,” said Johnny.

“He names himself O.K.,” said Grady.

“He kept the surname.”

Johnny looked at the face of his son and recognized nothing in its features. It was wholly unique — a stranger’s face, smiling, holding a milkshake in one hand. A girl was sitting next to him with her chin in her netted fingers, dimly reflecting O.K.’s smile.

“Who is the girl?” asked Johnny.

Grady had a mouthful of water. He spit it back into the glass. After a length of silence, Johnny looked up from the picture to see what was taking so long. Grady was rubbing two wonders together between his thumb and middle finger. He nodded significantly at the chits. Johnny got the hint. Grady slipped the chits back into his pocket.

“Her house,” he said. “He eats next to her and sleeps in her window.”

“In her window?”

Grady took another drink of water. He made a face of disgust and spit this mouthful out, too.

“I am done,” he said. “Yes. Tell the word around. No more days of your independence. No more of your wives, daughters, husbands, and sons. I hate. You are the last I hate. I am tired of this hate. I need new hate, far from here.” He stood up, placing his glass on the table next to Johnny. Johnny didn’t move. “Look at you,” said Grady. “You are sitting. This is why I will leave America. Your son is in your hand and you sit down.”

Johnny picked up the water glass and set it on a coaster. Then he looked up. “You don’t understand. A decision can’t be rushed; time has to pass.”

“No. An idiot would say so. Decisions, such as decisions in a court, yes, are made long before time. Guilty, yes?”

“What are you saying?”

Grady smiled thinly, in that instant so like a grandfather, dying, prepared to leave behind a legacy of righteous fury if nothing else would stick.

“I say you should have no secrets from your son.”

Then Grady left, taking his echoes with him. Johnny moved to the couch. He thought, for quite some time, in two minds: one was a scale weighing the choices that were in front of him; the other sat in judgment on the first, growing ever more blood-fired and angry that he could even consider there to be a choice in the matter at all.

#

Wonder — the kid’s name was Delicate Jones — and her folks lived a bit north of Ashland, Oregon. According to Grady’s report, she and O.K. had jumped freight trains down from Bellingham. A conductor had spotted them in Portland, recognized them from their photos on the news, but hadn’t told the authorities; turned out he was a disgruntled citizen and had taken some pride at telling Grady of his naughty deed. The kids had thanked him. He said that the girl looked tired and was huddled into the guy. She may have been sick. The guy seemed all right. Both of them were bald.

Johnny spent the plane ride reading the report and, once the words began the give him a concentration headache, gazing at the pictures. There was one of O.K. and Delicate seen from a distance; they were sitting on the green hill of some park. It was taken on a sunny day, but they were pressed together, sealing all space between them like two hands clenched together, as though a blizzard were falling around them.

On the ground, Johnny checked into a hotel in Ashland. He ate a quick dinner in the hum of a Shakespeare-themed restaurant. He had Steak-upon-Onions. He left the waitress, who had had bad comedic timing, a joy, though he thought she’d probably burn it with her friends later that night. It was dark by the time he returned to his hotel and lay on the room’s thin bed. 

The street ran close to his first-floor window. The sound of passing cars didn’t so much bother him as the vibrations that they transmitted from street to earth to wall to bed. He found himself unable to sleep. More than once he was close, but each time came a youth with a perversely loud bottom end, or a diesel hauler, and startled him so that he felt his eyes yanked back to him from dreamland as if they were attached to his sockets by rubber bands.

He turned on the TV to distract himself. He found a movie that, after a few lines, he recognized as being one that his co-workers frequently quoted to each other around the office. It was awful. There was a laugh track.

Johnny got out of bed. When he wasn’t lying down, he didn’t feel the vibrations so strongly. They passed through his feet, up his tibia and then, though he didn’t realize it, were obliterated by the quaking in his knees.

# 

In the end, he just went ahead and did it. He waited around a frozen yogurt shop Grady had observed the kids frequenting and got a coffee. He was there when the shop opened at ten in the morning; he kept ordering coffees until O.K. and Delicate slouched in at two. Johnny tried not to look at O.K. as his son waited in a short line to order for the both of them. Delicate sat down at a table in the corner and leaned her head against the wall. She had eyes as round and dead as two pennies. Her hair was coming in, a light blonde fuzz. She was staring right at Johnny. After a few moments, he tried giving her a wink, but it wasn’t something he had practiced and it felt slow and weak.

O.K. slid into the seat across from her, back to his father. He talked quickly, barreling over the cracks in his pubescent voice. He had stories to tell — dreams to be remembered in the sugared cool air, to be exposed for the absurdities they were. He had a phrase that Johnny had never heard before: Cut the rope, man. He said it over and over. The whole shop heard them; Johnny caught the cashier grinning once. He went up to get another coffee.

“That kid come in a lot?” he asked.

“O.K.? Yeah. He’s new around here. Kid has the strangest dreams. My brother owns a bookshop on seventh; I keep trying to get O.K. to show up for the open mic nights. He’d be a treat.”

When Johnny sat down, he chose a table closer to the kids. Now he could hear Delicate, too, with her soft interjections. Her laugh came through her nose in soft chuffs like a dog sighing. O.K. had a laugh that filled the room with descending cadences. Sometimes he slapped the table, setting their spoons to vibrating.

“Let’s go to the park,” O.K. suggested when their dishes were empty. Delicate nodded. She moved as though through gauze, and her slow eyes seemed clouded by the same. O.K. took her hand and escorted her out the door. Johnny followed.

The kids walked, O.K.’s right hand entwined with Delicate’s left. With his free hand, O.K. gestured and pointed, as though conducting a symphony of his own words. The park was nearby, not much more than a small hill on a triangular lot bordered by traffic. The kids sidestepped a pair of frolicking dogs and a sunbather on her stomach with her top undone. Johnny leaned against a tree just off the sidewalk.

O.K.’s hand came unbound from Delicate’s and signaled a crescendo of his laughter. Delicate shook her head, mock dismayed at whatever joke O.K. had just told. Her eyes settled on Johnny. He tried to turn away, but his own traitor eyes kept flicking back to the top of the hill to see if it was safe, if she had let her gaze drift. She hadn’t. 

So Johnny took a walk. Three blocks to the south, six blocks north, three blocks south again. He ended up at the same tree. The kids were still there, but lying on their backs, looking up at the few wispy clouds that were too faint and too high to be images of anything. Nevertheless, O.K. was pointing, tracing designs.

Johnny went halfway up the hill, past the sunbather, who looked up at him and smiled, and sat within earshot of the kids. They were silent. In that moment, Johnny was nearly content. The silence of the sun light and the silence of the children and the silence of the woman on her stomach were heavy like a drowsy lover’s body. Even the noise of traffic almost faded into background, but then the profane honking of a horn made his heart beat arrhythmic and he coughed to set the pumping right again. 

A swish of fabric came from behind. He turned in time to catch Delicate, in her flowered summer skirt, approaching. He leaned back onto his elbows, feigning comfort. She sat down beside him, cross-legged.

“I know what you want,” she said. She didn’t look up. “You want him.” The conviction in her voice was like an order. Johnny took a breath to tell her what a crazy kid she was, but she turned her face away as though expecting his protest and refusing to accept it. She stared at O.K. She spoke haltingly, and she slurred as though her tongue were too slow for the thoughts that propelled it. She said, “Please. I love him,” and, “I need him.” She turned back to Johnny, who had lost all thoughts now of anything but silence, and squeezed her eyes shut, working the muscles to force saline onto her eyelashes, staining them dark brown. She said, “I wake up,” and, “In the morning and all I have to do is roll over,” and, “I can see him through my window, on the grass,” and “You don’t know me,” and, “I used to be an angel. Yeah, I used to be an angel,” and, “Now I’m not. I need to roll over and see him. I feel so lost in the morning. It’s like heaven pulls back in the night,” and, ‘This boring world— I need him. Please. I need him. You adults can change things. You can change people. I think I understand. Please don’t change him,” and, “Please please don’t look at him again.”

She smelled of hospital air, thick with uncertainty, sickness, and skin. For her sake, Johnny resisted an urge to glance over his shoulder.

“I just wanted to apologize. Will you tell him—”

“No, please, no I won’t,” said Delicate. Then she stood up and her dress played a hush over the grass and Johnny heard her say, Hey wake up sleepy head.

That was that, then. Johnny stood up. He dug in his trouser pocket for a pair of wonders. He tossed them lightly on the grass where they’d find them if they returned the way they came.

Again, he didn’t sleep that night. He paced, thinking of writing a letter to O.K., imagining the thousands of expressions that could cross his son’s face upon reading it, and about how only one would. He went for a walk and wound up at the late night mall. Shaved heads were in this year. He saw versions of O.K. in every shop, all hunch-shouldered and loud and leaning in towards a girl’s affections.

At the arcade he dumped his pocketfuls of terror on a little boy and his friend, saying, He doesn’t need this anymore. The kids’ faces lit up for a moment before they realized how worthless all that plastic was to them. Johnny watched them lug it to the counter and trade it into a couple tokens for the games; then he watched them spend the tokens on pops of color and gunfire.

In the morning, he took a cab to the airport and bought a ticket home. While he waited for his plane to board, he leaned against the observation windows, watching the jets coast back and forth across the tarmac. Their swept-back wings summoned the constant illusion of movement, of speed, of victory. 

Originally published in Wanderings.

I met Emma when I was nine and she was older. I was in the park playing snakes in the grass while mother was in getting her hair done. I crawled belly-down around trees and over paths while dog-walkers and baby-strollers clicked and rolled around me. I didn’t have any friends to play with — not in our city, where the people kept to themselves and smelled gray, like steel wool. There was nobody at my school I knew who could lie in the grass with me and not play guns.

I slithered around the park until my shirt was soaked clear through and I started to shiver. That’s when Emma said, “What a funny game.” She was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table nearby, leaning back on her arms like bridge struts to support herself. I didn’t say anything back. She had green eyes and she used them, always moving, always blinking. I remember her skin was green, too, and I remember that the sun came down through the trees and so everything was green. “I know a good game,” she said. She slipped off the table and landed awkwardly on her feet. She almost lost her balance and grinned. “Follow me,” she said.

I stood up and followed her like any other kid. She led me back into the trees, where all the other people’s sounds turned into antsteps and rain. She pushed deep into a band of bushes, letting the branches snap back into my face, showering me with dew. Then she stopped and faced me. She smiled like a girl and reached her hands above my head. She shook the branches she could reach and drenched me with morning drops. I didn’t complain much — I could have gotten any wetter — but I think I scowled. Emma answered it by withdrawing her hands. Clenched between them was a riot of green leaves, their angles and veins all in tangles and misunderstood shapes. She rolled the leaves in her fingers, making them dance until I almost believed that her fingers were the dead things and the leaves the living. Then se closed both hands as if she were praying, catching all the green behind her skin. She didn’t pray, though. She let her eyes go back and forth all over me. When I was about to chatter my teeth on purpose, she opened her hands like a butterfly’s wings. 

Standing on her palm was a tiny bird, a green sparrow with twigs for legs and the spear of a birch leaf for a beak. It was as perfect and delicate as an origami animal, and, at first, that’s what I thought it was.

“Teach me how to do that,” I said.

Emma blew a kiss over the bird and its feathers ruffled. Its head turned and I turned to stone, as if my next breath would frighten the creature away — of, if not the creature, then the quiet birthday feeling that had filled me up.

The bird picked at its plumage and cocked its head to one side. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” asked Emma. I didn’t answer, still afraid to move. “Well?” she prompted.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” said Emma. She sounded satisfied. She sent a ripple down her arms; when it reached her fingers, the bird took flight, leaving behind a small cloud of downy leaves. I tried to keep it in view, but I lost sight of it in the branches, or maybe it had turned into just leaves again. I didn’t think so, because I could still hear the small desperate flutter of its wings.

My neck went still from staring up. Emma tucked her fingers under my chin and pulled my gaze down into her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then slipped like a cat between two shrubs. Her passage let a wisp of light into our hiding place.

When mom finished getting her hair done she said I couldn’t take any leaves with me, and I had to drop two pocketfuls on the ground.

#

The next day, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but mother made me anyway. She took me to church, where I didn’t talk much to the other kids and she sang way louder than I did on the hymns. I told her a couple of times that I felt like throwing up, so she let me pass the sermon in the bathroom.

On the drive home, I listened to the rain and asked mother what miracles mean. She didn’t understand me, though, and said, “Something wonderful that you can’t explain.” That made me think of maths, which isn’t what she meant. 

I didn’t make it back to the park for almost two weeks. I missed three days of school during that time because I was sick. Mother took me to the doctor on a Friday, and after the checkup she had to go to the drug store, so I asked if I could go to the park while she shopped. “Don’t you want to look at the toys?” she asked. I told her I didn’t want to and she dropped me off next to the monkey bars.

Emma was sitting at the bottom of the little kids’ slide, kicking gravel with her bare feet. I didn’t say, Hi, and she didn’t look up. 

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” I said. She nodded and drew a plus sign with her big toe. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked. Instead of answering, she patted the slide beside her. I sat down. She smelled a bit like burning insulation, so I asked her if she was feeling all right. 

“I am,” she said. “What are you learning about in school?”

I squinted, trying to remember anything that might be more important than Emma. “We learned about Cortez last week,” I said.

“Tell me about Cortez,” said Emma.

I shrugged. “He killed a lot of people he shouldn’t have. He brought diseases from the old world and he wiped them out without his soldiers.”

“I like that story,” said Emma. “It’s sad.”

“I could tell you others,” I offered.

“I would appreciate that,” said Emma. “You don’t know how much.”

I wanted so badly to ask her how she had made the bird out of leaves, but I was afraid that if I opened my mouth she would disappear, as she had from the bushes. 

She looked up from the equations in the sand toward the sound of a barking dog. I watched her eyes trace shapes around the figures of the dog and his owner, around the old couple reading on a blanket, around everyone else but me — she seemed to be using her stare to cut holes in the world, to section off the people she could see like cookies on a sheet.

Mother came and found me and said, “Come on.” Emma gave me a wave with the tips of her fingers. “Who’s your girlfriend?” mother asked after she closed the car door.

“Mom,” I said, and I rolled my eyes.

#

It was summer the first time I tried to kiss Emma. Mother had told me to stay in bed that night, to save my strength. She said I had mono, the kissing sickness, but I figured if I had a kissing sickness I ought to at least have my first kiss.

Mother was right that I didn’t have much strength, but I had enough to make it to the bus stop before service ended, and the only thing I felt wrong was a vibration in my legs every time I took a step, as though my bones were humming.

Somehow I knew she’d be waiting for me, and she was, waiting at least. She didn’t notice me, even when I coughed — I couldn’t help the coughing. She was standing out from under the canopy of trees, hands loosely at her sides, staring up at whichever stars she could see.

“There aren’t very many,” she said when I turned me head to follow her stare. With something as wide as the sky to focus on, her eyes were just about rolling from their sockets. Mine weren’t; I just locked onto the brightest I could see, called it Mars, and tried to catch it moving. 

“There are plenty,” I said. 

Emma nodded and made a smile I was sure was for me, though it was aimed toward infinity. “Would you like to see them?” she asked.

“They look just like the sun,” I said.

Her hand caught mine, fingers locking into fingers. “Don’t hold your breath,” she said. My bones stopped humming. The weight left my body; my blood seemed to run faster and freer. I looked down. The shadowed park was gaining a shape, like the horizon accepting a curve at the right distance. I could see the slide and the monkey bars and the bike path and they all drew closer together. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do this?” Her answer was a grin.

We floated up through the grimy air, the buzz of artificial light below us, driving us further away. When we crossed out of the bed of smog it was as if a curtain had been torn away. The sky grew even larger. It was cold inside of me. Stars exploded into view like ants from a crumbling hill. My breathing slowed; it felt as if my lungs were freezing. Emma smiled and pointed with her free hand. Her lips moved, but I don’t remember any of what she said. I could tell that there was heat out there in the universe; I could practically see it, but I couldn’t feel the barest blush of it on my skin.

Emma took me down. I coughed when we re-entered the hanging exhalations of the city. When I could see the park and feel my lungs expanding, I tried to lean over and kiss her. She caught my face in her hand and turned both away. “Please don’t spend your innocence on me,” she said, and we fell the rest of the way.

#

While I was sick in bed I couldn’t visit her, not because mother told me not to, but because I could barely get my legs to hold my body up and balanced.

A new doctor told me new things, and mother said we could afford it, whatever it was. She heard a story on the news about asbestos being blamed for an outbreak of sickness in the area of the park, and she told me I couldn’t play there anymore. To make up for it, she bought me toys and books and video games. It was nice of her to do it, but I ran out of interest in them all. My bed became a swamp of plastic and paper. I wanted Emma to visit me, but she didn’t know where I lived, or even that I missed her. She must think I didn’t want to see her anymore, I thought. I wondered if she cared, or if her eyes just kept on slicing fractions off the world.

Then one day I almost didn’t wake up, mother told me, and I when I finally did it was in the hospital. It smelled of paint and varnish and gave me a headache. I figured I’d be able to go home that night — being so close to so many doctors should have done something to me. After dark, while the nurse turned my arm numb with her needles, mother asked me if I wanted her to stay the night. I told her I didn’t want to stay the night. She promised she’d come back first thing in the morning.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The nurses clipped back and forth in the hallway, and every couple of hours they returned to put medicine in my IV and cold hands on my face and chest. I tried watching TV. A game show almost put me to sleep —almost, but not quite. I was just beginning to see dreams in the drab colors of the screen when the show went all to static and a shadow fell over my bed.

It was Emma. She padded into the room so silently that I thought she might be floating. She put her finger to her lips and made my smile stay quiet. She sat on the bed next to my shoulder and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see that her eyes were still, her pupils at rest on my face. I hoped I looked as strong as mother had taken to telling me I was.

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I still like the sad stories.”

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Do you remember when I took you to see the stars?” She asked it as though I could forget, as though it had been nothing more than an idle conversation on a drearily normal day. I told her that, of course, I remembered. “I spent my innocence on worlds you can’t believe — neither could I, when I came to them, but I learned to. I learned everything about them. I have to apologize because I’m grateful to you for your open eyes. Your innocence is gone, and now you have no excuse for ignorance, but you have given me surprise. I have hoped for ages that I could find something that would build an unfamiliar expression on my face, a disquieting, perfect sensation in my nerves. I don’t think I ever will.” She was smiling as she said this and there were two tears on her face in symmetry. “But I do not discount the pleasure, and the envy, of seeing that wonderment on another person’s face.”

I opened my mouth to ask her things I didn’t need answers for. I think I mostly just wanted her to hear my voice. She put a warm hand over my mouth and went on. “I’m sorry for what I stole from you.” She withdrew her hand.

“It’s all right,” I said. My head was throbbing from the hospital smell and my gut had gone cold as a fist in winter. Emma smiled at me and got up to leave. I reached out a hand to stop her and, though I only brushed the fabric of her jeans, I succeeded. “Will you kiss me?” I asked, and two more perfect tears spilled over her lashes. She leaned over my body. Her dark hair fell in light waves over my face. She whispered something that I didn’t catch  — it sounded like a name from a history book — and then she touched my lips with hers. She tasted like ozone, hot and important. She smelled like a tree, like the breeze of a bird’s passing. She felt like fire, so hot I can barely write it, and it stayed with me long after she had slipped out of my room. I don’t think I’ll feel anything like that again.

Originally published in Speculative.ca.

In old Nippon, in the city of Edo, there was a lonely daimyo. He was a minor lord, arbitrator and administrator for a modest section of the city, wherein lived simple artisans and rough tradesmen. His wooden house was only slightly larger than those of his subjects, but it felt to him like a palace, because of how empty it was. He lived there by himself, with only a single servant to aide him besides. In the mornings, as he sat facing the spectacle of the slopes of the great mountain, he could hear the footsteps of his servant echoing out and back against the walls. There was no laughter, no rustle of silk clothing or clinking of tea service to interrupt the hollow noise. The daimyo was lonely, and felt as if the echoes would last forever, and be his only legacy.

He was not a relative of the shogun, but his rank afforded him the occasional visit to the palace. On each of these visits, the daimyo lusted for the shogun’s wives and consorts, not just for their bodies, but also for their grace, the shushing of their slippers on lacquer, the pleasure of their dance. It would have been a sentence of shame to have said anything, so the daimyo pretended to look away from the women, involved himself in minor business whenever they performed for the shogun.

One winter, upon waking in a cold bed, the daimyo felt his loneliness grow to its sharpest, bitterest point, like a sliver that had worked its way to the surface of the skin and then must be plucked out. He fell into a depression, convinced he lacked the tools for the necessary surgery. At a gathering of other minor daimyo, he let slip his jealousy of the emperor and, though his peers made no direct condemnation, he knew, as his servant carried him home, that he would not survive as daimyo for another season, that his time was over.

His depression deepened. Though his professional life had brought him shame, his focus was more than ever on his lack of companionship. His servant, fearful of being tossed to the streets, set out to remedy his master’s problem. He spoke to magicians, who told him there was nothing they could do. He spoke to spirits, who said that love of any kind is impossible to force a spirit into. He spoke with the creatures of the forest, the tanuki, who are practical and wise and the masters of transformation. They told him that the spirit need not be bent to love, but that a vessel for love might be created. They were pleased to have bested the magicians of the servant’s own race. They instructed him to travel to the slopes of the great mountain, there to fetch a cartful of ice, and then to find kimura-gumo, the spinning spiders, and to capture a score of them in mid-dance. The servant would then need to sculpt the ice into the form of a human, and to harvest the silk of the kimura-gumo to create a garment. If this garment were to be laid on the sculpture, the sculpture would come to life, with the purity of new snow and the dance of the spiders.

The servant thanked the tanuki and set out to collect the ingredients. First he hunted the kimura-gumo, and from their silk he fashioned a black kimono. Then he traveled to the slopes of the great mountain and fetched a cartload of new snow and ice. These he brought to his master, and explained what the tanuki had told him. 

The daimyo seized upon the opportunity, but he thought to himself: I am already shamed; I could not bear to risk further scorn by letting it be known that I fashioned a companion for myself. He decided that, instead of using the pure snow to form his consort, he would mix the melted water with dirt from his own garden, so that the creature would be tied to the land, unable to set foot beyond the walls of his house and risk embarrassing him.

With his plan thus crystallized, the daimyo set to crafting his companion. He had his servant do the work, but he watched carefully the shaping of the arms, the legs, the neck, the face, and made suggestions where necessary. There were rumors in the air of the shogun forcing the daimyo to relinquish his post when the sculpture was finally finished. 

With trembling hands, the daimyo draped the kimono around the clay body. Immediately, a light shone from within the creature’s head, and its delicate mouth cracked wide. A thin laugh pealed through the room and the creature seized the daimyo by the arms. Together they circled the room in a clumsy peasant’s dance. The creature stamped heavily on the wooden floors, shaking the walls and stumbling. It wasn’t sure on its feet, but it continued to laugh and, before long, began to sing. 

The daimyo was concerned. This creature of awkward motion possessed nothing of the graceful beauty of the shogun’s wives. As he was spun through the air, a clarity came upon him, and he realized that the creature was no better than an apprentice effort, suitable for nothing but scrap and slip. He ordered the creature to stop, but it would not. It gave a joyous shout and stumbled out of the room, onto the house’s small balcony. The daimyo heard a sound like the tapping of chopsticks and looked down. The creature’s legs were forming web-thin cracks where the clay had dried improperly.

All at once, a peal of answering laughter came from below. The peasants had gathered in the street to watch the daimyo be carried about by his foolish creation. Again, the daimyo ordered the creature to stop, but it gave no indication of having heard him. The daimyo tried to struggle out of the creature’s grip, but could not. As they spun near the railing, the daimyo kicked out with both feet, unbalancing the creature and himself. The creature swept its laughter into one long, thin wail and overbalanced, falling to the street and taking the daimyo with it. As they hit the packed dirt, they upset a charcoal brazier that stood in front of the daimyo’s house. The brazier tipped against the door, and the lacquered wood exploded into flame. 

The creature had been utterly destroyed by the fall, its pieces scattered for yards around. The daimyo struggled to his feet. With the heat of the fire on his backside, he stared at the half-circle of peasants that were staring on. Not one among them could hold back a smile, though several had darted away to fetch buckets of water. 

Without a word, the daimyo turned on his heel and entered his burning home. 

The fire spread quickly, from wooden house to wooden house, and soon the whole street was ablaze, the paths choked with peasants with their carts of possessions and invalid family. The daimyo’s servant had collected such a cart as soon as he saw the fire, and then waited in front of the door to his master’s house. When it became apparent his master was not coming, the servant did as selfish men are wont to do: he gave his past a single glance over the shoulder and pressed forward. He stooped once to the ground to retrieve the kimono, now torn and stuck with clay dust.

#

In 1863, a Basque man came to Tokyo, speaking very little of the language. The children of the street marked him and followed him, giggling to themselves as he entered one boarding house after another, unable to make the simple request for a room. When the day had nearly waned, the Basque found an establishment which was run by a polyglot. As he stood in the receiving hall, waiting for the innkeeper to light the fire in his room, the bravest of the children snuck up behind him and picked his pocket, relieving him of a slightly-tarnished silver watch. The Basque turned, having felt the lift, and tried to snatch at the child, but the child danced back and ran for the door.

Just as the child reached the threshold, the innkeeper slipped out of the shadows and caught him around the neck. The child struggled, but the innkeeper’s grip was firm. “Do you have children?” he asked the Basque in Spanish.

“No,” replied the Basque.

“They are surely the purest of joys.” With that, the innkeeper yanked the child off his feet and retrieved the Basque’s watch. Singing a string of high-pitched syllables, the child regained his balance and ducked away from the innkeeper, sketched a mock bow, and darted out the door. 

“The police will deal with him?” the Basque wondered aloud. 

The innkeeper shook his head and handed the watch back to its owner. “It is not a very good watch,” he said. 

“There is certain sentimental value,” said the Basque. 

The Basque found good company in the innkeeper, and that night they sat together in the common room, drinking sake talking. The Basque was interested in stories of local history, and the innkeeper seemed to have a wealth of such stories that had been building pressure on his tongue as water presses on a dam. Of all the stories, there was one that stole all of the Basque’s attention, so that after hearing of it, he quite missed the rest of what the innkeeper had to say. 

“Tell me again about the mad daimyo and his black kimono,” said the Basque. 

The innkeeper smiled. “Yes, that is one of my favorites, as well.” Then he stood and beckoned. “Come. I have something you would like to see.” The Basque followed the innkeeper back through the kitchen to a basement cellar. The innkeeper fetched a kerosene lamp and led the Basque down. The cellar smelled of mildew and tubers; it was cold enough that the Basque could see the mist of his breath. The earthen walls were lined with sacks of vegetables, pots of honey, and casks of fruits. “Look here,” said the innkeeper, dragging a small wooden chest out from the shadows. It was fastened shut with bamboo pegs, which the innkeeper knocked loose with the sole of his shoe. “Try not to breathe,” he said, and lifted the lid. 

The stench of rotten sulfur billowed out into the room. The Basque coughed and gagged while the innkeeper, his face passive and smiling, leaned into the chest and withdrew a sheet of linen, covered in the sulfur dust. “The moths do not eat through the sulfur,” he explained. He set the linen on the ground and reached into the chest again. This time, he came out holding a thin garment of black silk, barely a whisper of a shadow. “My honored ancestor once served the mad daimyo,” he said. “And we, his children, have kept this as a mark of our modest origin.”

The Basque let his hand drop away from his nose and gaped. “Does it work?” he stammered. 

The innkeeper shook it out. Large triangles of fabric hung loose from the body, like flaps of dead skin, but yards of whole cloth remained undamaged. “I have never tried to use it,” he said. “I have no need for companionship, and lack the skills to craft a suitable figure, besides. It is an heirloom, nothing more.”

The Basque took a step forward. “I will buy it from you,” he said. There was a catch in his voice, a force that suggested he could not have made the offer any quicker, or said the words more hopefully.

The innkeeper smiled faintly and turned what was left of the kimono into the light, to better appraise it. “What message do you take from the story of the mad daimyo?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said the Basque. He hadn’t let his eyes wander from the silk.

“I believe that the story is a warning against selfishness, and against mistaking such an impulse for love. The daimyo was not destroyed by the creation of the surrogate lover. He had aimed himself toward doom long before that, when he allowed that his jealousy of the shogun’s wives might be deflected to another vessel rather than purged from his thoughts. My ancestor’s role in the story was as catalyst, as it is with we who serve unselfishly.” The innkeeper glanced over to see if the Basque had caught the slight witticism, but received no response in word or gesture. “It would be most expensive,” the innkeeper concluded. “I could not part with it for anything less than a minor fortune, you understand.”

“I have little of value,” said the Basque, now breaking his stare and shifting his gaze to his feet. “My home was destroyed by rioters, and my possessions were taken by looters. The money I had in the banca I’m sure would not begin to pay for such a prize.”

“Your watch, then,” said the innkeeper.

“It is but silver,” he said. “A wedding gift from my wife.”

“She would be upset to learn you had traded it for a bundle of tatters, would she?” asked the innkeeper. 

The Basque held the watch in the palm of his hand, spidery shadows from his fingers masking the reflections from the lantern. “No,” he said. “She is dead.” The innkeeper stood in respectful silence as a decision worked its way to the fore of the other man’s tongue. “I shall make the trade,” said the Basque, extending the hand that held the watch. 

The innkeeper first pressed the fabric into the Basque’s hand, then retrieved the watch. There was an inscription on the back in flowery Spanish, which, out of respect, the innkeeper did not try to read. The Basque rubbed the silk between his fingers, his attention absorbed in consideration of its strength, color, and texture. “Thank you,” he said. 

The innkeeper shrugged it off and mounted the stairs. “What value has a story?” he asked. “None, if the audience gives it none.”

The Basque left Tokyo the following day, riding for Kyoto, whence he could hire passage back to Spain. Throughout the long journey, he kept the silk close at hand. When he had the privacy, he engaged in the sewing necessary to fashion a proper garment from the remainder. Having little skill and only an old fishing hook as a needle, his work was necessarily crude, but functional. When his feet hit the familiar dust of the paths that surrounded his home, he had a woman’s shawl in black silk tucked under his arm.

The village was no longer his, though he had grown up there. Rioters had swept through like a plague of locusts. The Basque was still unsure of the motivation — whether it was religious, political, or something less defensible — but he had experienced the effect first-hand. In the night, the rioters had come upon his modest house while he worked late at his job assisting the village lawyer. Perhaps as premonition, the Basque had been discomfited throughout the whole day and requested at last that he might be able to return home to take a tonic and calm his mind. He had arrived at his house as the last of the rioters whooped and crowed over the flames they had built to consume it. With a thought for his wife, the Basque had leapt toward the flames, giving the rioters a wide birth. As he ducked into the house, he glanced over his shoulder and recognized the face of one of the rioters. It was his son, a young man who had never known his father. In that instant, with the flames searing his left side and a wash of shame boiling his right, the Basque felt as if he had lost everything. 

He had gone straight to the bedroom he shared with his wife, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. He found her unconscious in bed. He carried her out the back door, unwilling to face the young men again. He tried in vain to awaken his wife as the house and all his possessions burned behind him. All were hot coals and ash by the time he finally gave up and wept over her body. They had grown distant in the recent months, because of her desire for a child, and his unwillingness to give her one. As he thought about all the things he ought to have said to her, the air went cold and the last of the fire was smothered in a shroud of light rain.

That had been nearly a year previous; the Basque had spent the intervening time wandering the world in search of distraction, an explorer of low means.

He didn’t know who now ruled in the village, so he waited until nightfall and then crept with his package to the church yard. He found his wife’s marker, already decaying as though it were made of soapstone. Working with no light but for the half moon, the Basque dug with sticks and hands until he heard them strike pine. He had prepared a paste of sulfur, which he applied under his nose before opening the coffin. 

His wife’s body was dark, like wet clay. Her burial shroud had been eaten back from her body, exposing crossed, desiccated arms and a nakedness that held no secrets. The Basque lifted her gently, as though she were a cake about the crumble, and set her against her gravestone. 

He knew that there was a disappointment lurking just under his skin, and that it was seconds away from bursting through. He bent down to his wife’s body and said: “You must be cold.” Then he wrapped the black silk shawl around her shoulders.

Immediately, her body began to shake as though taken by a heavy fever. The Basque took her shoulders and stared into the pits of her eyes. “My love,” he said. “There is something I should have told you years ago.”

A dry hiss came from deep within her lungs and the smell of her rotten air nearly overwhelmed him, even through the sulfur. She struggled against his hands, shaking this way and that, and he realized that she was trying to stand.

“No, listen,” he said. “I have wandered far in search of the means to forget my contributions to the failure between us, but I have not been able to do so. I wasn’t meant to forget, so let me speak.” Her hips bucked under him and the hiss became a stuttering laugh which sounded, by necessity, cruel. The Basque tried to continue. “Years ago, when we were first married, I did not love you. You were cold and distant, a young girl from her father’s house and not the wife of mine. I found comfort in another woman, the wife of a merchant. I got her with child, though we were careful to avoid the possibility. For both our sakes, we never saw each other again, though I did see her from time to time around the market, walking with her son.

“I watched the son. He grew up mean and naughty, chasing girls, drowning frogs, and seeming to resist all urges to grow out of the mood. My lover, she was not a rough person, nor was her husband. I had thought that neither was I, but seeing my son, the child of my brutish seed, forced me to look inward to my soul.

“If my offspring could overcome the fairer nature of its mother and instead turn to the animalistic, a side I did not even know I had, then there was no hope between you and me of having children, for I could not bear to chain you to such an unfulfilling life. As we grew closer together, you and I, our balance shifted. I became colder and more distant, because I could not provide you with that which you most wanted.”

The dead body could not take the waiting any longer. The Basque finally let it go, and it struggled to its feet, unbalanced as a newborn fawn. It began a slow twirl, and the dry wheezes that must have been laughter began again in earnest. The Basque felt tears prick the corners of his eyes and cold trails slicked his cheeks. 

Suddenly, a pair of rotten hands grabbed him by arms and, though they had no strength, helped him to his feet. His dead wife spun him round and round, her head thrown back, bones clacking, laughing like a snake. The wind dried the Basque’s tears and stung his eyes and, when he could not bear the dreadful dance any longer, he reached up to the body’s neck and cast away the shawl. 

At once, the body went inert. Its momentum carried it over the edge of the exhumed grave and back into the coffin, where its joints popped and broke. The Basque, on hands and knees, peered down into the dark, but from six feet he could not make out her ruined face, and his memory refused to supply one for him. He leaned against the tombstone and wept because he had nothing left of his wife.

#

The Mckinleys had emigrated from a coal-mining village in Scotland just south of Glasgow, and ended up in almost the same coal-mining village in Colorado. The miners were mostly Scottish immigrants, the schoolmarm taught Gaelic alongside arithmetic, and even the working hours were the same.  

In 1945, Mrs Mckinley had a daughter while her husband was underground. She named the child Asha, which means “hope.” Asha grew up going to the one-room schoolhouse three days of the week, and helping her mother with housework on the other four, except during the heavy Colorado winters, during which the school was closed and all the children spent hours trying to escape their chores to go dig tunnels in the snow with their friends. 

One summer, when Asha was twelve, Mr Mckinley was killed in a mining accident, and the two women were forced to make ends meet by serving as tailors for the whole village. Asha stopped going to school so she could keep up with the stitching that had drifted on their kitchen table. She attracted a new nickname: Asha Shutup, because she always had too much work to come outside and play. 

The Christmas after Mr Mckinley’s accident, Mrs Mckinley’s brother came to visit. He had done well for himself in the coal prospecting business, and had spent the better part of the year touring Europe. When he arrived at their doorstep, he was wearing a black pea-coat so thick he seemed to be a globe; his boots were buckled with silver and brass, and a black top-hat perched like a snide joke on his head. Asha had never seen him before, so she was cautiously polite, but after only a few moments of his booming voice and welcome, warm breath, she was giggling like mad at his jokes and even returning a few of her own. 

Mrs Mckinley was not so pleased, and referred to her brother as “His Highness” all throughout the evening, complaining that they wouldn’t get any work done that night. Asha was grateful for the respite, and His Highness could tell. He suggested that the women needn’t do any more work that night, that he would gladly treat them to a Christmas turkey, with as many trimmings as could be mustered in the isolated village. Mrs Mckinley reluctantly agreed. The dinner was magnificent; the oven labored for so long that the whole house took on a rosy glow. After dinner, His Highness told stories of his adventures in restored Berlin, in Moscow, in Madrid while Asha listened in rapt attention, her eyes steady on her uncle, her imagination far away and getting further by the second.

Asha slept fitfully that night. Two things kept waking her up: the spark of wanderlust that His Highness had instilled, and the rustling of her mother as she fussed with the work that had been ignored. In the morning, it was clear to Asha that her mother hadn’t slept a wink. She was about to apologize when His Highness announced himself with a tremendous yawn and a morning wink for his niece. 

“There’s coffee on the stove,” said Asha’s mother.

“You needn’t have done that, sister,” said His Highness. “I brought a packet of the most exquisite French roast.”

“We got what we got,” said Asha’s mother.

“Well, at least let me give you some,” said His Highness. “It can’t be easy to get coffee way up here.”

“Don’t mind it,” said Asha’s mother. “We do all right.”

His Highness gave Asha an exaggerated shrug and collapsed at the table. “What is on the agenda for this fine day, my dears?” he asked. “Shall we go for a stroll on the green? How about an auction. Are there any going on today?”

Asha’s mother gave no answer but a snort that lacked the force of humor. “I’d like to go to school,” said Asha.

“Absolutely not,” said her mother. “Do you see how much we have to do today?”

Asha knew better than to answer the rhetorical, so she sat back in her chair. His Highness broke the silence. “Do you mean to imply that this dull effort has been preventing my niece from attending to her schooling?”

“Things are rough,” said Asha’s mother, winding a bobbin. 

“Outrageous!” said His Highness. “Things could never be so rough as to distract a young mind from education. They mustn’t be. If it weren’t for simple knowledge, we would be no better than the peasants of the Dark Ages, picking at burlap with bone needles and tearing coal from the mountain with forks of wood.”

“Please, mother,” Asha interjected.

The whir and click of the sewing machine stood as an answer. Asha sighed and leaned forward to retrieve her thimble, but His Highness slapped his hand over it before she could. He stood and beckoned her to her feet with a wag of his eyebrows. “We are going out,” he announced. 

Asha’s mother sighed and bent tighter over her sewing. “This house is not yours to govern, brother,” she said. 

“Nor is this life yours, dear sister.” His Highness fetched Asha her coat and, as she fumbled into her mittens, he plopped his old silk hat on her head and adjusted its angle. He stepped back and appraised her with a finger aside his nose. “It doesn’t match your coat,” he decreed. Despite herself, Asha giggled.

Her mother glanced up once more to say: “You look ridiculous.”

“And you’re nearsighted,” said His Highness. “I will bring her home straight after the lesson,” he added.

“I expect so.”

The temperature was kissing right up to freezing, so the snow was wet and sticky: perfect for snowballs. His Highness delighted in their creation almost as much as he did in their qualities as weapons. He coaxed Asha into playing one-ups with him, where the victor gets to name the next target. Neither of them could hit the steeple. 

His Highness sat in the back of the classroom as Asha sat in her lessons. The bit of chalk and lap-slate felt good in her hands again, and the teacher was kind enough to ignore, just this once, the whispered conversations that the girls passed around. 

After lessons were over, His Highness walked Asha home. “I would rather stay with my friends,” said Asha. Behind them, in the town’s single street, the boys had taken note of the snow’s exceptional qualities, as well, and had declared a war on the fairer sex. Asha felt as though she were caught between abandonments: on the one side were her friends and gender, on the other her work and mother. In the space between, she felt cold, and realized she would much rather flee and help bring ruin to the boys than huddle near the stove, darning other people’s socks. She said as much to His Highness.

“Have we encroached enough upon you r mother’s good graces, do you think?” he asked. Asha didn’t answer. She trudged forward with guilt taking over as motivation. “I’ll tell you what,” said His Highness. “I’ll stand lookout, if you will promise to peg that brat who was sniffling all through lessons.” 

Asha grinned and beat her arms as if she were a bird cut loose from a trap. She made to remove the top hat, but His Highness stopped her. “It’s an old, and seen worse than a bit of wet weather, if you believe the stories. Do you like it?”

“Very much so, uncle,” said Asha, fluttering her eyelashes just to test out the effect. It made His Highness smile.

“Picked it up in the south of France,” he said. “Some curiosity shop, where the owner babbled on about vivre, life. Consider it a gift for my darling niece.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Asha, throwing her arms around his thick frame. Then, she slid headlong down the path to the main street, where she caught one of the boys in the ear with a handful of slush. His Highness leaned up against the side of the church, every so often aiming a snowball at the steeple.

The air filled with childish screams and giggles. The Carver boys hunted Asha through the thin alleys with double-handfuls of snow. They got her separated from the other girls and cornered her by the grocer’s. She kicked at them and screamed for help, but was cut off mid-laugh by the sound of her own name being hollered by her mother. She straightened up and turned in the direction of their house. Her mother was standing by the church, arms folded, trying to divide her icy stare between her brother and her daughter. His Highness seemed relaxed, his hands in his pockets, but Asha felt her spine tense up. Just then, the Carver boys yanked open the back of her coat, dumped their snow down, and ran away crowing like soldiers. The action had focused her mother’s gaze, but standing there in a growing puddle, Asha felt unreachable, as if the game had widened now to include both His Highness and her mother, and there was no way His Highness was on the boys’ team. 

“I’m already cold!” Asha yelled at her mother, then ducked behind a building to plan a counter strike on the Carver boys. 

From time to time, as the games wore on, Asha glanced up toward the church. The first time, she saw her mother and His Highness engaged in an animated argument, their arms stabbing at God, the ground, the mountains. The second time, they were turned away from each other, and each had their arms folded tightly. The third time, both had disappeared; and the last time, His Highness had reappeared, holding his suitcase in one hand. 

“Are you leaving, uncle?” Asha called out as he drew nearer. He didn’t answer until he was close enough to put a warm hand on her shoulder.

“I’m afraid so, my dear. Consider this yet another brief stop on my whirlwind passage across the globe. Why, I barely stayed this long in London, and there are loads more pretty girls, there, to coax me to stay.”

“Mother is making you leave,” said Asha.

His Highness sighed and sank one knee into the snow, the better to catch his niece’s eye. “Your mother wears a lot of pride on her back. What pride does, my dear, is kill you from the moment it enters your life. Now, dignity, that’s different, because the world gives you that, and respect, well, that’s a gift from outside, too. You can accept those. But watch out for pride.” His Highness winked. “Because once you have it, you can’t drop it or your whole life will shatter.”

“I don’t understand,” said Asha.

“Nor do I expect you to,” said His Highness. “But I fully intend to be a specter in your memory, and I shall be disappointed if my hauntings do not cause you to understand, some day. In the meantime, I urge you to take your best stab at it.” He grinned and stood, dusting snow off his trousers. He opened wide his arms and enveloped Asha wholly in his coat. As he released her, she felt something pressed into her hand. “Keep it out of sight,” said His Highness, and, with that, he was gone, waving at the children on his way to the train station.

Asha looked at her hand. Wadded in her fist was a bundle of bills that her scant knowledge of arithmetic couldn’t sum. She slid the money into the pocket of her coat and buttoned it down.

The snowball fight had slid into truce; all the children were sitting on the front steps of the school. Asha could almost feel the weight of chores undone, and added her own. The children sat, warming their hands in their armpits, and listened to the sound of snow melting. “I’m bored,” said one of the Carver boys. 

“So do something,” said Asha.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Asha. That wouldn’t do, the specter of His Highness admonished. “Let’s build a snowman,” she said. The Carver boys thought it was a great idea, and leapt into action. In order to make a snowman, large snowballs have to be created, and large snowballs have to begin life as small snowballs. Despite the minor fights that broke out, the dozen kids managed to roll three icy boulders from the main street, leaving criss-crossed dirt paths like worm trails behind them. They struggled to raise the man, and were streaked with freezing sweat by the time he stood upright.

While the girls relaxed on the steps, thinking about what to name their new friend, the boys fetched coal and sticks to form his eyes and arms. Together, they admired their creation. One small boy said: “Tell us a story!”

“He’s not quite finished,” said Asha. She took her uncle’s hat from her head and stretched on her tiptoes to set it on the snowman’s head. Before her heels had returned to the ground, a wild electric taste filled her mouth, and a wide, thunderous laughter boomed from somewhere deep in the snowman’s chest.

A mouth melted open beneath the eyes, which now were burning orange and releasing lazy curves of smoke. “Dance with me!” called the snowman. Its stick-arms came up and hooked into the folds of Asha’s coat. One of the girls screamed, but the snowman laughed all the louder. He began to bob and bounce as though on the water and then he leapt into a simple dance of circles. 

Asha’s tongue had frozen stiff but, as she was spun by the magical man, she felt a freedom overcome her fear; the sound of rushing air beat back everything but exhilaration. She spun with the man until she was so dizzy she couldn’t keep the world under her feet. By that time, the Carver boys had joined in and expanded the circle, and Asha’s girlfriends were close behind. One of the Carver boys helped her to her feet, and someone else put a hand under her arm to keep her upright, and the dance went on. 

Somewhere, beneath the snowman’s laughter, Asha could hear her mother yelling: “Come in from there! You look ridiculous!” The other children heard their parents, too, but none of them paid any mind. They danced until the hidden grass burned from the friction; they danced until the mountains with their hidden coal nearly tumbled down around their ears.

continued from part 1

It was two weeks before Pash got up the nerve to stage a proper escape. During that time, the old man had him pull weeds in a ratty garden, haul water from the nearby stream, and dig up rows and rows of potatoes, which he then had to clean and store in a damp, spider-crawled root cellar shoved into the side of a hill like a nose bone into a brain. Pash worked every day until his finger nails tore, knuckles cracked, and tongue thickened from lack of water. Then the old man would give him a drink and have him work some more. Pash felt his brain slowly falling behind his body, tired and listless in thought, which might explain why it took so long to come up with his first escape plan.

He was working in the garden, on his knees. Altoid sprawled at the theoretical boundary between garden and rough, panting through her nose, turning her head this way and that in the balmy sunlight. Pash’s plan was simple: run like hell as soon as the dog fell asleep. The garden was nestled some distance into the forest, close to the stream. The wide plain and the bluff were half a mile away, through thick unexplored brush.

Pash worked slowly, clearing the carrots from his reach, inching forward to a new section of the patch. He cast frequent glances at Altoid; the dog looked bored, blinking in the labored way that dogs have. Pash’s skin again was crawling with invisible filth; his hands were writhing under it. Perhaps it was the closeness of potential, but Pash felt that he could take no more of the work. Each time he plunged his hand into the soil, he froze a shudder of revulsion. Altoid watched.

Finally, she laid her head on her forepaws and closed her eyes completely, her nostrils flaring with each breath. Pash wiped his hands on his pants and waited to see if the dog would notice he had stopped his work. She sighed, her huge chest inflating to the width of Pash’s torso.

That was good enough for him. He set his eyes on his point of escape, on the city miles away through hills and trees and leaves. He scrambled to his feet and ran.

Altoid chuffed as dirt flung up by his shoes pelted her fur. She opened her eyes.

Pash reached the underbrush and flung up his hands to ward away branches, berating himself, as he did so, for not blazing a trail beforehand. Dew from the ground covering and devil’s clubs leapt into the air in front of his shoes. It wasn’t long before his lower legs were soaked. He tried to run as quietly as possible, pussy footing around brittle twigs and aiming to land on the balls of his feet. He was not a runner. He was a watcher, a guy who would go to cheer on Oasa at her track meets while cartoons unspooled across his eye. He tripped and fell head first into a trunk. He wrapped his arms around it, hugging it, shoving himself back to his feet with so much force that he feared either his spinal cord would slip and shatter or the tree would uproot. In this moment of scraping silence, he heard the three soft repetitive taps of a running four-legged beast. He shoved away from the tree, leaving a finger nail in a sap-filled crack.

He ran. His body dissolved into points of pain. One just right of the stomach, pulsing on each breath — it was better when he didn’t breathe so hard. One at the end of his torn finger; he couldn’t slow his blood to ease the throbbing. A constellation across each foot, the hundreds of bones unused to what he asked of them. One large nova from his sinuses, a bright flare that threatened to engulf his whole head. I have paid enough, he thought. This is debt free, right here, and then it was easier just to curse god with each breath in, the old man with each breath out.

He stumbled again, this time on a sudden clearing, as when you expect there to be another step on the ladder and there is not. He whipped his head left and right; he was standing in the middle of a road. It was old, the ruts paved over with a layer of dry pine needles. The road lay parallel to freedom, but Pash could hear Altoid’s never-gone bark closing behind him, so he picked a direction and tore away.

Altoid howled, which wasn’t the bad part — the bad part was that Edge returned the howl, and she sounded no more than a hundred yards away. Pash beat his feet against the road, cursing in and out. 

He rounded a bend and slid to a halt. It was a dead end, and blocked with a dump, a barricade of rusty metal. There were three red hulks, machinery that looked completely foreign to Pash, all boxy angles and heavy gauge iron that wouldn’t fly in a million years. They looked like nothing more than prisons to Pash; but, he though, prisons not only keep prisoners in, they keep other people out.

He ran to the nearest one. There was something that looked like a door. He gripped the handle with the tips of his fingers and tugged. Something creaked in the metal, and something snapped in his elbow, but the door popped open, not swinging, but rushing between closed and open without passing through the intervening points.

Altoid hit him in the back, then. He flung out his arms to stop his fall. One hit the top of the door and the jagged remains of the window that used to be housed within. Blood painted a diagonal across his hand and over his wrist. He fell beneath the weight of the albino bitch.

Goodbye, Oasa, he thought. No, goodbye everyone.

“Git, Altoid. Edge, stay.” The weight on Pash’s back rose, leaving behind one rotten breath. “You owe me, boy,” the old man said.

“I hurt— I—” Pash panted. Every point of pain expanded, consuming him in a ball that he pretended kept growing until it devoured the old man, the dogs, the swine, the frozen magic wilderness.

#

“Ten minutes. I’m impressed.” Pash opened his eyes. He tried to move them, but it hurt, and a simple shift in focus left a trail of blurred images behind, as though his eyes were frantic to send their signals, had been afraid they never would be able to again and now never wanted to stop their work. He pulled in a long breath. He was cold, and lying in a shaft of sunlight.

“What’d they breed out of you, boy,” said the old man. “You faint at a little blood and you stay fainted. My god. You keep an eye on that hand. It’s clean, but you start seein red trails, you tell me. Don’t want you dropping dead before you done paid your debt. So, you start seein red—”

Pash nodded. His eyes felt coated in heat, like early tears, but no wetness. They took in how brittle the old man was, inflated with his shirts and hide coat, and how easy to break.

Edge and Altoid were there, licking themselves with that complacent air that comes from the confidence that the spirit of the hunt can be summoned any moment, and will take no more than a moment to arrive. 

The old man nodded at his dogs. “I’d like to stop em sometimes, but I can’t. You understand that, boy? I want to, but I can’t. Not when they really want it. So don’t test em. They like you, but don’t test em.” The old man slouched down the road, shaking his head at uneven intervals, and, once, laughing abruptly.

Pash lay in the sun, pillowed on his right hand, the fingers of which crawled to his ear lobe and gave it an habitual tug with no result. It took almost an hour, and a centipede’s tickling walk across his thigh, to get him on his feet.

#

The passage of time was marked for Pash by escape attempts. He had no way of keeping time equidistant between them, so it became a sort of calendar of significance. He could assign vague notions of time to each interval — it was quite a while between the rusty car and the long day spent hiding in the root cellar. It was not very long between the root cellar and the cold mad dash down the stream. 

He didn’t make so many as the weather turned bad, not because he was getting tired, but because he couldn’t run very far in the snow. Pash had never seen snow before. He had seen ash, from time to time during school cookouts and such, and more recently when he had to clean it from the old man’s stove every third day, so his first impression of the change in the weather was that the end of the world had come, that pure ash and cinders were raining from sky.

The old man laughed when he heard this.

Winter was hard; Pash had never known such cold in his life. He spent the majority of his daylight hours chopping wood, which kept him almost warm, so that he could burn it at night, which kept both him and the old man warm, though Pash had to wake up every hour to refuel the stove. They ate venison the old man had shot with his rifle. It didn’t take long to become sick of salt venison.

When the days reached their briefest, the old man had a surprise. He took a bucket packed hard with snow and disappeared into the cabin while Pash split and stacked rounds on a tarpaulin. In an hour or so, the old man beckoned Pash inside for a break. There, he gave Pash a bowl of the snow and a spoon, and said, “Dig in.” Pash stared at his reflection in the concave face of the spoon. “Well, come on,” said the old man. Pash dug a trench in the snow and took a bite.

The stuff tasted like old sugar, a little dusty, but cool on his throat. He smiled. The old man grinned back and dove into his own bowl. 

Pash finished what he had been given and set the bowl on the floor. He got up and went to the door, turning back to look at the old man. The old man was chewing slowly, staring at the wall. “Never tasted anything like it, I’ll bet,” he said. “No sir. It’s my own concoction,” taking another bite. “Won’t find this in your city.”

Pash opened the door and went out.

#

Spring followed. If Pash could have looked at himself, he would have seen a profound change since the previous summer. His arms were thicker and he could hold them still if he wanted to. His hair had grown down to his shoulders; he dipped it in the stream when it felt too greasy, but even so it lay on his neck in loose filthy curls. His clothes had been torn and left unmended and didn’t fit right anymore.

He had long since ceased trying to talk to the old man, and he didn’t think the old man minded.

With spring came time to plant the garden. Pash, using his hands for a trowel, dug clean rows for the carrots and potatoes. Altoid watched, grinning. Pash grabbed a handful of seeds from a plastic bag the old man had given him and squat-walked down the trench, sifting the seeds through his fingers and into the soil. By the end of the row, his knees were wailing for a break, so he stood and stretched them. Altoid grumbled.

“It’s okay, girl,” said the old man’s voice. Pash turned in the middle of a yawn, met the old man’s eyes, then finished it. “You’re puttin too many in,” said the old man. “You’ll just have to thin em out again.”

“Gives me something to do, yeh,” said Pash.

The old man shrugged weakly, his shoulders compressed by the weight of his two shirts and his long coat. He strolled over to a rotten stump and sat, letting his legs loll apart, bracing his hands on his knees as though he intended to hold the position for a while. When he didn’t offer any more criticism, Pash returned to the bag of seeds, dipped another handful, and started his squat-walk down another row.

“Beautiful day, ain’t it,” said the old man. “Sun shinin, trees doin their thing.” Altoid yawned. Pash waddled down the row. “Smell that air,” said the old man. Pash couldn’t help it. He could smell the air, the soil, the sweat from his arm pits, the stink of human grease built up over weeks, which was a smell he could not get used to, could not accept and let fade into the background of the senses.

“Yeh,” he said. He worked in silence; he could sense the old man’s discomfort, a pressure of unspoken words.

Finally, the old man said, “Doin good. Keep it up.”

“Yeh,” said Pash.

#

“It’s time,” the old man said. The first buzz of summer was in the air. Pash no longer had to keep the stove burning through the night and had taken to sleeping rather heavily. The old man repeated himself a couple of times, and then kicked Pash lightly in the head. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s do it right this time, yeh?”

The old man waited with his hands in his coat pockets while Pash levered himself to his feet. 

“What are you gonna do after,” said Pash. 

The old man shrugged. “Get the tools,” he said. Pash went to the cubby hole behind the stairs and retrieved the felt roll of butcher blades. 

The old man led the way to the pen. There was a new feature, an inverted wooden L, like the arm of a gallows. A chain dangled from its end over the pen. The hog was sniffing at the end as it shifted in the light wind.

“Do it right,” said the old man. He had Pash unroll the tools and selected a long thin knife. He climbed over the fence and beckoned Pash to follow. “Quiet, now,” said the old man. “Adrenaline makes em taste like shit.” Together they approached the hog, sticking in the mud and scraping over clumps of tough inedible grass. Pash hadn’t yet crossed completely into wakefulness. He felt the breeze, as though in a dream, lifting his skin and cooling him off underneath. He watched the sun’s reflection on the old man’s knife as it bobbed and traced illegible words on his retina. 

“Where are the dogs,” he said.

“Tied em up,” said the old man. “They spook the hog.”

Pash nodded and watched the knife, burned heart shapes in bright green which he saw during every blink. 

The old man stopped and held the knife out to him. “Reckon you could do it.”

Pash looked to the hog and beyond to the bluff. A hawk circled in the sky a decreasing spiral centered on a lone tree. It landed, shaking a branch, too gently for a killer.

Pash shook his head. “I’m a pacifist.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll pass a fist right through ya.”

The old man laughed and spit and nothing more needed saying.

#

When the hog was butchered, Pash went down to the stream to wash off what he could of the blood. He didn’t notice the old man come up behind him.

“Know what day it is,” the old man said.

“No,” Pash replied, digging at his finger nails.

“You done quite a bit of good, boy. Kept us alive.”

“No,” said Pash.

“It’s been a year and a day since you and your friend killed my sow, vandalized my property.” The old man leaned back on his heels and sighed outward. Pash stood up and faced him. 

“So,” said Pash.

“So you paid your debt. I won’t stop you leaving.”

“The dogs—”

“Still tied up.”

Pash wiped droplets of water from his chin. He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it to dislodge a bung of wax. He tugged his ear lobe. He was singing a song in his head, a song he hadn’t heard for a year and a day; it was popular during the last days of school. The teachers didn’t like it. Oasa had the DJ play it at prom. She and Damper had danced, and cemented the banal lyrics into Pash’s mind. He couldn’t stop repeating them, couldn’t stop seeing their rhythm reflected in the sparkling chaos surface of the stream, in the melancholy waving of the trees, in the listless hums of winged insects.

His breath came on the downbeat. He brushed past the old man, who said, I’m sorry, as he did, and didn’t follow.

Pash found his feet walking automatically to the old man’s cabin, but he had nothing to take with him from there, so he lifted himself from the rutted path and stamped through the grass, past the pen, past the grave the old man had, grumbling, dug for Oasa’s body, to the bluff, to the hawk’s own tree, to the long hills, to the city.

#

It looked different. The skyline had changed, and, as Pash drew nearer, he saw that the wall had changed as well. It was twice as tall as he remembered it, and the outer surface was a different color. With his hands in his pockets, fingers playing in the holes, he approached the gate. The ground was dusty, the grass perimeter had receded a few feet. Pash kicked at the foot prints surrounding the gate, looking for his, for Oasa’s. They had long since blown away.

“Let me in,” he said. He knocked on the gate, the sound swallowed deep within the wall’s body. “Hey, you burks, let me in.” No answering activity came. He sat down in the dust, grateful for the solid wall behind his back, and closed his eyes.

A wash of cold air made him choke and cough. He opened his eyes. Four armed men stood in a semi-circle in front of him. A man in a white suit and jacket was kneeling next to him, probing his body. 

“Get off,” said Pash, slapping his hands away. “Where did you—”

“His pace was off,” said the man in white, whose face was turning the sick gray of old meat. “My god, how long— Get him inside. Right away.”

The four armed men picked Pash up, one on each limb, and carried him through the gate, which now stood open, though Pash hadn’t heard it. He thought about struggling, about going limp fish on the officers, just to make it hard on them, but figured being carried wasn’t so bad after all. He felt tired, a deep tiredness that makes everything comfortable as long as it smells like home. He took a deep breath and fell asleep.

He woke up in a small room; muted light came from a heavily shaded floor lamp. He was lying on a long soft bed, facing the wall. Experimentally, he pressed his head into the mattress and then raised it again. The mattress took a few seconds to return to its former shape. A real bed, he thought. His back hurt.

There was a knock at his door, closely followed by the squeak of disused hinges folding open. 

“Hello, Terrence,” said a feminine voice. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.”

“Ain’t my name,” said Pash, rolling over. The voice belonged to a young blonde woman in a nurse’s uniform that probably was meant to convey cheerfulness, but looked to Pash like a frozen fever dream. She was smiling.

“What is your name?”

“Pash,” said Pash, and realized he hadn’t heard it, except in memories, for three hundred sixty-six days. It sounded foreign, as a word does when you repeat it too often, but in reverse.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake, Pash. Welcome to the Scott Variety Children’s Home. I’m Monica, and I have the pleasant duty of reacquainting you to the city.”

“Let me go home,” said Pash.

“I also have the unpleasant duty of informing you that you no longer have a home, except for this one.” Monica moved closer to him. Her shirt billowed around a hidden body. She got down on her knees, her head blocking the lamp.

“You might think this is pretty damn special, Pash,” she said. “But you’re the oldest man in the city.”

Pash sat up and rubbed hard granules out of the corners of his eyes. “How long was I out,” he said.

“You were out there for eighty years,” said Monica, smiling. Her lips were black in the occluded light. “The news thought you were dead. You were a cautionary tale when I was growing up, a boogey-man. How does it feel to be back?”

#

She wasn’t joking. Pash escaped that night, after a string of doctors and nurses and smiles and Monica standing next to him with an occasional possessive hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t hard. The windows weren’t even locked. He sat on a slidewalk and let it take him from one end of town to the distant other. He was drenched in advertisements for products he had never heard of. The Callow haunts were gone. The school was still there. Pash threw a handful of sod at the library. Then he went back to the children’s home.

He slept with Monica that night, and a few nights later he moved out of the home. He got an apartment near the wall and a job caddying at a nearby golf course. Monica called him every other night, for a while, and then every third night, then once a week. He spent his time away from work sleeping and reading the news —not what he had missed while he was gone, but what he was missing right now. It was an exciting time to be alive, to hear of it.

One day, at the golf course, he was hauling irons for two old men and idly listening to their conversation. His eyes climbed up and rolled down the lay of the fairway, touching on the paper-thin grass, the bunkers that wouldn’t grow a cactus. One of the old men was complaining about all this walking, and joked that Pash ought to carry him from tee to tee. His friend laughed like a car horn and said, Scott, you sorry weak sack.

Pash got a good look at the sack’s face on the seventh hole. It was Damper’s, brought low by gravity. Pash laughed at his jokes. The sun traced arcs on all their eyes as it clattered for a hold down the length of each swinging club.

Soon after, Pash started taking kendo classes. He liked the challenge and the long minutes of meditation while his hands twirled a rattan sword through the differentkata. He stopped reading the news and slept more. He caddied every Thursday afternoon for Damper and a rotating cast of pals. He started to joke with them, told them his name was Emilio. Damper’s attention always came accompanied by a faint puzzlement at one corner of his mouth. 

After a year or so, Pash quit the job. Monica called to ask him out to dinner, to ask why. They agreed on spaghetti at seven. Instead, he went to a weapons shop and bought a sword, a wakizashi. He was ready to test for the rank of nidan at the dojo, but hadn’t yet. He walked to the edge of town, each step amplified by the speed of the slide. He made good time. There was a guard on duty, asleep. Pash hit him over the heat with the hilt of his sword, opened the gate, and left with the sound of sirens boiling slowly in his ears. They wouldn’t follow as far as he planned on going.

It didn’t take long to retrace his steps to the old man’s cabin. Even a year out, the hills seemed familiar, like a childhood memory revisited, and had the same ethereal white hot quality of memory. Pash reached the bluff, looking over his shoulder for following city folk. As far as he could tell he was alone, except for the hawk in the tree, airing its wings. Its eyes were on him but couldn’t follow. He knelt for a stone and found only dirt. He packed a fist-sized clod and threw it at the bird. The clod exploded as it left his hand, and its particles sank into a dull cloud a few yards off, slowing, nearly stopping.

The implants that the doctors had rewired him with were pulsing in his head and neck. He reached a hand around to the hidden panel near his spine, the power center of his internal webwork system. One more look over his shoulder revealed nothing. He turned off the power.

The cloud of dust exploded into motion, drifting to a fine coating on the grass. The hawk flapped twice and took off, crying once.

Pash slid down the bluff; at the bottom, he drew his sword. The pen stood empty, dominated by the gallows swing that had held the hog, back feet in the air, while he and the old man worked it. Pash flexed his fingers around the sword’s hilt. He thought he saw a face at the cabin’s one window, but it may have been a cloud in swift pursuit of the sun.

On the watch for Altoid and Edge, Pash crept around the cabin to the front door. He waited, but heard nothing from inside except for the nail-wrenching sound of the old man’s rocker. Pash opened the door, closed it behind himself, and dropped the latch.

The old man was sitting in his chair. On a table next to his elbow stood a half-empty jar of amber liquid. The old man picked this up and took a swig from it.

“Been drinkin off my hangover,” he said.

“Where are the dogs,” said Pash.

“Still tied up.”

“How long has it been.”

“A day or so for me. I keep passing out, though; ain’t too reliable.”

“Okay. Okay. Last one,” said Pash. “How did you do it.”

“Electromagnetic pulse in the grass. Someone gets to close, no matter what time they livin in, it goes off Shorted your pacemaker, and everything else.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Pash took a step closer, falling into stance and shifting the blade around so it would be ready to fall across the old man’s belly.

“You should thank me, boy,” said the old man. “I took you that much closer to utopia.” He laughed and spat right onto the floor. Pash could smell tobacco and alcohol, mixing together in a forbidden perfume. “You want a drink?” The old man offered the jar, drew it back and took another drink. “You’re looking good, strong,” he continued. “How long was it for you?” Pash didn’t answer, but the old man didn’t seem to want him to. His eyes had rolled  back in his head and his lips were moving as though praying to a god that listens. “Little over a year, huh,” he said, finally. “Yeh, not bad.” A sob burst from between his lips, forcing them open like flapping tent leaves, once, twice. “Not bad.” He leaned back in the chair, stopped its rocking. “Old men reminisce amongst themselves,” he said. “And I’m the oldest man in the world. So you’re going to listen to me; you’re going to listen to me bitch and moan and, damn it, you’re going to bitch and moan back so I don’t feel so alone. You owe me that, don’t you, don’t you.” The old man trailed off. Pash’s calves were complaining; he held them still. “No,” the old man went on. “You don’t owe me nothin. Less you killed those dogs. Didn’t, did you. No. No. My wife gave them to me, as puppies, as a joke. She was a woman of irony, and of little forethought. You woulda liked her. She worked sixteen hour days in the code shops; I worked tens at the fish and game. She thought the pacemakers were a great idea — she thought they were Christ come again. I didn’t like em. She said we’d be able to eat dinner together again. Split us up, damn things did.”

“Nobody told me,” said Pash.

“What’d be the point,” said the old man. Then, “I’ve seen cities rise and fall in an afternoon. It’s fun to watch; you should do it some time. But the cities don’t move. You notice that? Got no need to. Less power drain on the individual when your pacemaker fields can overlap. Get more done in a day.” The old man took a long swallow and the sun wrapped itself in a cumulus cloak.

“You knew,” said Pash.

“I knew,” said the old man. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, kid.” A silence stretched out, drawn by the tip of Pash’s blade in the air. He lowered the sword. It was getting heavy. “But I didn’t do it just to punish you. I never had kids of my own. I didn’t do it just to punish you. I needed your help, with the sow gone. Hard winter, you know. It was. It’s gonna be again, but we got time.”

Pash pulled himself from the waking dream he had entered and crossed to the old man, who stared up at him wit  dumb animal eyes. Pash slipped the jar from his grip and raised it to his lips. The liquid tasted like honey and bird meat, but mostly like alcohol. He gave it back.

“Damn you,” he said, and didn’t even remember opening the door.

The dogs were tied to two saplings down toward the creek which bent and bowed against the beasts’ lunges. Pash felled Edge with two clumsy strokes, and got a heavy bite across the wrist. He cried, sloppily. Altoid near ripped her lungs with barking, but the old man remained in his chair. Pash could hear its squeak, wrenching at his nails, as he passed one last time on his way to the bluff.

He walked back to the city with his pacemaker off, abrading his slow thoughts against the southern breeze. At the top of a hill, in view of the city, he watched the sun set, and the flickering artificial days and nights within the walls. Something sparkled like a jewel; something sang like a dove.

#

Damper had died. Heart attack, or a string of them. Pash found himself on the cemetery green, in silence. He had turned on all his systems, again, but one by one had shut them down — his cartoons, his music, his cameras and palm viewer —until just his phone and the pacemaker were live.

He could hear kids across the street, laughing in their secret way. He stood beneath the leaves of a great dying oak and watched a group of three climb a porch. One carried a brown paper sack. She set it in front of the house’s door. Another, sidestepping the sack, rang the doorbell. The three took off at a dead sprint down the slidewalks. 

The door opened and an old man stuck his head out. He saw the bag, scowled, and then shot a glance either way down the street. He spotted the kids; he disappeared, then emerged a moment later with a camera.

Pash tore the sod as he shot off in pursuit. It didn’t take him long to catch the kids up, though they tried their best to dodge him.

When he got close enough, he panted, “Don’t stop.”

“Bain’t gonna,” said the girl who had had the bag.

Pash grinned. “Don’t stop. The old man tagged you. Don’t stop. Keep running. Keep—”

He breathed a full breath.

Originally published in Rage Machine Magazine.

They were the Callow gang and they ruled the last day of school. Oasa, Damper, and Pash were the seniors; they sat open-legged on the library steps, chucking snowballs at freshmen and blasting new grunge music across the filaments that webbed their ear drums. The junior Callows sat guard on the cooler, gulping down a synthetic home soup out of soft drink boxes; the stuff would sear paint off a whore’s face, or so claimed the newbie who had hooked them up. The fresh and sopht Callows mixed as one faceless crowd, some spotting, some using their gloves to condense the water from the air and freeze it into ammo for Oasa, Damper, and Pash.

“Good night,” said Damper, launching a white rocket at the library doors. The arc started nice, but the sun interfered at the apogee, splitting the ball into a spidery fall. Each slivered ball detonated on the warm concrete, sending up near invisible plumes of steam and cold dust. “Bad,” said Damper. “Gimme nother.”

A freshman, ratty, thinking that his three holiday months were worth something, darted up and plopped a wet mess in Damper’s outstretched hand, then slouched back to the cooler with a look that said, No, I don’t need a drink; your company is plenty for me.

Damper cocked his eyes for a target. Words had gotten around campus; most people were keeping well clear of the library. He wheeled in place and shot his fist out at the end. This ball kept cohesion straight up to the fresh’s back, where it bloomed and wicked through the fabric. “Nice,” said Damper.

“Been here all day,” said Oasa. She sang a few lines, unaccompanied outside her head. Pash nodded with her, his eyes on the library doors.

“Damn Socrates,” he said. “Damn Aristotle. Damn Copernicus. Damn Leibniz. Damn Newton. Damn Churchill and King and damn Joyce.”

“Damn Kennedy. Damn Russia,” added Oasa.

“Damn Feynmann. Damn Kierkegaard. Damn Hemingway and Nietzsche and Franklin,” said Damper.

“Nah,” said Pash.

“Been here all day,” said Oasa.

“Got you beat,” said Pash. He was pulling at the two steel bars in his ears. There had been a special on the install — free pleasure wiring, Pointe style; tug on the lobe to generate a current, resisted, plugged straight into the best place on earth. Pash pulled idly on alternating lobes. Oasa slapped at his hands; his fingers came away waxy. 

“Mine,” she said. She sang three words of dissonant air. Damper got up, dropped a curtsey. 

“Have a dance,” he said, rising up on his toes and holding out his hand to Oasa. Pash put his hand to the back of her head and shoved her out onto the steps. She and Damper caught fingers, breathed heavily. Open mouths resonated with their stereo webs piped through their eustacean tubes. Damper tuned himself to Oasa’s playlist and the melodies merged. Pash watched them, watched a short film overlaid on his eyes, a comedy.

Oasa sat down. A sopht handed her a snowball.

“Aren’t you tired of this?” Oasa asked the sopht. The sopht tugged his yellow headband down over one eye, squinted at her with the other. “Don’t get it?” asked Oasa. She snapped in the sopht’s face. “Dumb cats,” she said. She licked her hand where the snowball was melting, its liquid body funneling through the cracks between her fingers.

“Never be here again,” said Pash. Oasa shrugged. Damper’s phone rang. He answered it, subvocally. Pash grinned at the sight of Damper’s throat bubbling, like a drinking bird’s, through whatever words.

“The rents are on a fly-by,” said Damper. Oasa held out her hand, palm up. The last quick pool of the snowball, bile or urine or blood, vanished, evaporated. Beneath, her skin danced in wide spectrum, a picture of an osprey in reactive holo-ink.

“Let’s break,” said Oasa. “Goodbye to this, and you burks.” This last over her shoulder to the other Callows. The juniors grinned and raised salute with their moonshine. The frosh and sophts kicked anxiously at the ground, feet shaking with the desire to follow. “Seniors only,” said Damper to the sopht in the yellow headband, who was sculpting a bird, a man, a bull, or something out of swiftly decaying ice in his hands, who, focused on his art, had fallen in behind the three seniors. “You bain’t.”

They took a few blocks on the slidewalks, kicking at gum, watching out for parents on the camera networks. Oasa and Damper had their displays wired into the optic nerve; Pash saved that for his television, had a biolux screen installed in his palm later for the security taps. He glanced down furtively as they slid from street to street, cursing himself with short words, getting too old for cartoons.

“Where shall we?” he asked. Damper’s folks had gone past the school, airborne, and the three were in the clear.

“Been everywhere,” said Oasa.

“Red Lights,” said Damper.

“Don’t you need something new,” said Oasa. “Don’t you need something you bain’t seen.”

“Matador’s,” suggested Damper.

“Let it go,” said Pash.

“Could go gliding, yeh? Cliffs are empty, yeh?”

“Come off,” said Oasa. “Chris-tee-an, Damper. Your rents are in the air, yeh. Don’t you need something new.”

“Not me. You know I’m all there. Bain’t needing evolution, not me. All here, all there.”

“Bain’t needing education, you mean,” said Oasa. She looped two fingers through Pash’s belt and tugged him into a run.

“Where shall we?” she panted. They dashed kilometers, Damper in the rear. They linked signals so they all could hear. “Where shall we?” Oasa panted again. “Got the whole summer to glide, to watch the fights. Got one day—”

“Officer,” called Pash, folding his hand because the dissipating sweat was making his palms cold. They slipped off the walk into an alley. They ducked behind a dumpster, marked with a stencil of an angry ball of lightning running a man through with one of its jagged bolt arms.

“No good,” said Pash. “Test it, Damper.”

“You test it,” said Damper. Pash lowered his eyebrows, tugged once on his lobe, then reached out to the dumpster with the back of his hand. The moment his skin made contact, volts coursed through the insignificant layer of sweat, seizing his muscles and tendons, which reacted in the only direction available to them, which was in, tightening and pulling the hand along with them. A slight spark, an acrid puff, and the jolt shot Pash’s whole arm up into his chest.

“It’s on,” he said.

“Damn Voltaire,” said Damper.

“Bain’t his fault,” said Oasa. “Down, now.” They crushed into a wet appliance box and waited. Pash’s palm illuminated the space with shifting, static-ridden images. They watched, Oasa and Damper staring off in opposite directions, as the truancy officer slid by on his bike.

“Got one day,” said Oasa, picking herself up along with her thought. “Friends and enemies, we go outside.” Her legs flashed, her tatt gleamed one spectrum spike, and she was gone around the corner. Pash laughed, coughed out dumpster stench, and followed.

“Outside,” said Damper over the radio. Pash looked over his shoulder; Damper hadn’t left the alley. “Outside,” came his voice again. “Bain’t a good idea.”

“Don’t come,” said Oasa.

“Come along,” said Pash.

“They catch us, we’re bread, we’re baked,” said Damper.

“Callows don’t mind,” said Oasa.

“Bain’t coming,” said Damper.

“All good,” said Pash.

“Bain’t coming,” said Damper.

“Good!” crowed Oasa.

“Okay,” said Damper.

Pash put an eye on his palm screen, kept the other on the walk. People got out of his way. Damper slunk out of the alley, followed Oasa and Pash a few blocks, then turned off to the club district.

“Two south,” said Oasa from a block ahead. She turned south at the next block; Pash followed. He could see the wall ahead, twelve feet of polished quartz below a curve of near-invisible force with a derivative so slight it looked flat from his small angle, his small stature. There was a gate, decorated with warnings made to match the coffee shop aesthetic of the block. Keep Out and Try a Plasmocha.

“Come on in,” said Oasa, pretending to read. 

“Hey, kids,” said the guard, sitting cross-legged on a stool next to the gate.

“Why here?” said Pash, subvocal.

“Go on where you’ve never,” said Oasa with a red gash of a grin. As Pash walked past her, she turned and kissed him wet and even warm on his summer-soon cheek.

“Hey, kid,” said the guard. Pash brushed past him. “Hey.” Pash lifted his left wrist and tapped heavily on his timepiece.

“Running out, big,” said Pash with a leer. He stamped right up to the gate and knocked. He smelled pulsing ozone, couldn’t tell if it was from his shock burned hand or from the field.

“No,” said the guard, unfolded and laying his hands on Pash’s shoulders.

“What’s out there,” said Pash.

“Nothing,” said the guard. “You’re supposed to be in school, Terrence.”

“Wrong name,” said Pash, laying his hand on the gate release. He heard a wet thump and a sizzle from behind. The guards hands slid down his back, over his bottom, flopped once against his heels.

“Thirteen seconds til flyby,” said Oasa. Pash turned and helped her raise the guard’s limp body back onto its perch, folding the legs the same way they had found them.

“Seven,” said Oasa, sending a jolt of rigidifying toxin through the guard’s body. They backed away; the body remained in its pose. Oasa puffed a breath of consideration through her teeth, then yanked her shades off and jammed them over the guard’s eyes.

“Four,” said Pash. “You do it.” Oasa set her shoulder against the gate and shoved. 

“Two,” she said. Pash could hear the whir of the security camera on patrol, crescendoing. Oasa slipped outside like a voice through wires. “One.” She giggled. Pash bumped through behind, nearly sliced his arm off in his haste to slam the massive stone gate behind him. “Null, null, null!”

They were standing in a dirt semi-circle, traced out and scuffed down by authorized boots. A bundle of rolled hills bunched right up to the wall; those in the distance were plastered on one side with solid green forest, on the other with dry tawny grasses; it looked as though they had been drawn and shaded that way, meant to stand out three-dimensional, more real than the pictures painted by old ladies and hung in physicians’ offices.

Oasa leaned into Pash, lifting herself onto her tiptoes to look him in the eye, scraping her body against his. “Wanna try again and get it wrong,” she said, lowering her lids and setting her punctuation against his lips. She reached a hand up and tugged at one ear lobe. Pash grinned into her kiss. “Come on,” she said. “We’re way too solid.” He let her take his hand and drag him up and over the first wave of hills. They dropped out of sight of the city’s foundation, though when Pash looked the once over his shoulder he could see through the dome haze the blue spires of the business district.

“Make a memory,” said Oasa. Pash did; he made a memory of the horizon, of the sense of exhilarating emptiness, of Oasa’s silhouette cast on a granite tumor. He recorded the wind being hushed by the grass to go along with the memory. As an afterthought, he sent it to Damper, who didn’t answer his phone.

“Look there— look—” said Oasa, squinting her naked eyes. Pash followed her gaze.

“I don’t see,” he said.

“It’s so— it’s all—”

“I know. I don’t want to go back.”

“Bain’t ten minutes yet,” said Oasa, grinning. “Cheese,” she added. “No, look.”

Pash tried again, still didn’t catch a thing. He reached around Oasa’s belly and linked his fingers over her crotch. Her hair tingled in his nose.

“Dad’s going to pluck out your worthless eyes,” she said. She slipped beneath his grip and shot away, kicking up the heels of her boots. She ran toward the sharp border between prairie and the nearest forest hill side. Pash breathed in her ghost pheromones and coughed.

He caught up to her at the top of a bluff, but only because she had come to a halt. Her head was tilted back, her pale throat exposed.

“It didn’t move, before,” she said. Pash panted.

“It’s a bitch without the slides, yeh,” he said. Then, “What.” He looked up.

A bird hung suspended in the air twenty-odd feet above their heads, as though dangling from a wire in a taxidermist’s shop. As Pash watched, the wings lowered slowly from their apogee; seemingly disconnected from that movement, the sleek black body slid a meter forward. Pash could easily count the component centimeters ticking past, and did.

“It wasn’t moving,” said Oasa.

“It shouldn’t,” said Pash. “What the hell.” Oasa clicked images of the bird, clucking her tongue. Gravity of the vanishing point drew the bird in, reducing its apparent speed. Pash shook his head. 

“Come on,” said Oasa. She drew up beneath the bird, getting good resolution on her pics. Pash whispered blasphemies under his breath as the wings rose and fell, some ten seconds per oscillation. Pash counted, falling behind. Oasa scrambled up a rise, reducing the distance between herself and her quarry. Eight seconds per, now seven point five.

“What the hell.”

“Stand back, lightning rod,” said Oasa on the radio. Then, “My god.” Her voice flooded with surprise so sudden it sounded like anger. “My lazy god.”

Pash’s legs were tired above feet that burned in their socks and heavy boots. Too much blood, he thought. Without turning, she reached out her hand for his. He used it to tug himself up the last steps.

“What,” he said. “What.”

He ratcheted his eyes down. The bird had pitched its head back, thrown its feet out to land in a spindle of a tree. Pash watched it fight against intangible air until he realized that Oasa’s eyes were staring further yet.

Down at the base of the bluff, straddling the stark boundary between forest and meadow, was a cabin. It was small and misshapen, a tumescent lump of wood co-opted into shelter. The outside was painted a dark red. There was one small window that Pash could see, set midway up the broad side; there was no other decoration. The roof of fiber glass sheets draped over a cage of visible ribs, dangling unevenly across the eaves. From a hole in the corner of the roof jutted a gray bowl from which stood a column of smoke frozen in place as in an old pic. A dozen yards into the meadow from the cabin was a wooden fence, bent by age’s effect on poor workmanship into a trapezoid. Inside the fence, grass had been uprooted and stamped beneath the surface; the ground had become a pit of mud. Pash’s attention was drawn there by the two lumps of brown-spattered flesh that were not moving, but did not look as if they ever could or had. He drew in a breath between his teeth.

“I saw them,” said Oasa. “What do you think they are?”

“Got me,” said Pash.

“Come on,” said Oasa, forgetting about the bird and leaping into an arms-out run down the steep hill side. Pash followed, ginger on his feet; rocks kept leaping from the ground into his shoes. At the bottom, still a good dash from the pen and cabin beyond, he tugged on his laces and stooped to empty his soles of the small stones. “Why hell’d we waste so much time,” Oasa was saying. She was smiling at the sun, turning in place to see if it would follow her. It didn’t, but Pash felt its warmth as the bow of her lips aimed eventually at him. Then she bent and grabbed from the ground the rocks responsible for giving Pash footfuls of blisters. She began juggling them.

Pash shoved himself up. “I think we better go,” he said.

Oasa shrugged, losing a stone in the air and finding it again by her foot. They were no more than pebbles, a rolled finger’s length, width, and depth. She halted their revolutions, hefted one in her palm, and then tossed it toward the fence and the flesh mountains within. 

It was like watching a vid in the revival houses when the pimple in the projection room turned the crank too slow. The stone sailed from Oasa’s hand on a neat arc, then seemed to come up against some invisible resistance. The stone slowed in the air, nearing the peak of its parabola, and then seemed to come to a halt.

“Do you get this,” said Oasa. “I’m never going back.”

“I think we better go,” said Pash.

“I’m never ever going back.”

She hushed through the grass and Pash followed, glancing over his shoulder at the bird, which was now nothing more than a still black dot, an inverted star, perched on the frozen limb of a distant tree.

Pash heard a soft thud and returned his attention to Oasa. She had taken them beneath its trajectory. She bent and grabbed her rock, the one she had thrown. 

“Did you see that,” she said. “Did you.”

“See what?”

“It’s me. I make it speed.”

They were not far from the pen, now; easily within throwing distance. On the strange creatures, Pash could see muscles caught in the act of bunching beneath pinkish flesh studded with spikes of hair. Whether the beasts were preparing to charge or just shifting from foot to foot, he had no idea, and felt uneasy about how long it might take to find out.

“What are they,” he said.

“Did you see that.” Oasa bent and excavated a stone the size of her fist. She hurled it at the beasts. It rose, trailing dust like a contrail, then slowed against the magic invisible barrier. “Watch,” she said. Pash watched. Oasa took two giant leaps toward the pen, closing quickly the distance between herself and her projectile. The rock accelerated again, as though snapped by a hand too fast to see. It rushed toward the head of the nearer beast, then slowed again to a crawl ten yards from Oasa, ten more from the pen. She looked back at Pash and grinned.

“Pee in the grass,” she said. “Leave your name. I tell you, we’re gonna leave names.” Pash watched her take another step forward, feeling his heart slow as though it was she who carried time in her pocket, affecting his body as she affected the hurled stones. The large rock sped into the last few feet of its descent before once again crossing that border and slowing from feet per second to millimeters. It hung not far above the beast’s head, now. Pash could see two big eyes, mostly brown iris, with a gap of white and red-veined ball beneath them that told him the beast’s gaze had swiveled up to meet the slow incoming meteor.

Then three things happened so close together that only causality, when addressed by memory, prevented Pash from naming them simultaneous. Oasa took another giant leap forward, putting her within arm’s reach of the nearest fence post. As she did so, the rock resumed its former speed and impacted on the side of the beast’s face. Pash saw blood and shining flakes of something white disperse in a cloud swiftly drawn dead by gravity. And, at the moment Oasa’s foot fell, a bright buzz lit in Pash’s ears. In an instant, his music was gone, the webs on his ear drums suddenly still. The display over his eye went dead, transparent. The miles of thin cabling in his brain clicked once, audible through bone transmission, then made no more sound. “What,” he said on their subvocal net to Oasa. She didn’t respond. He tried raising Damper with the same result.

Oasa had turned, white showing clear around her iris.

“What the hell,” she said. “What the hell bit off—”

It was then that Pash realized that he could see trees waving in a light wind; he could see the one beast kicking erratically in the mud; he could see the other butting its head against the far corner of the pen, bleating low in its belly; he could see smoke billowing up from the cabin’s chimney in a brisk deforming set of fractals.

Something inside the cabin crashed.

Two dogs began barking, call and response, nearby but out of sight. They did not sound like friendly dogs. One sounded as though each bark was choked on a mouthful of saliva, stuttering anger with a sound like tearing cloth; the other’s noises never stopped, just changed in pitch so that what Pash thought, at first, was silence actually was a feral scream with enough rage behind it to force it out of hearing.

There was the unmistakable sound of a door, occluded by the cabin’s body, slamming open. Oasa turned, without giving a second look at the paroxysms of the dying beast, and started to sprint toward the bluff.

“Callows run,” she said as she passed him. Pash, in that frozen instant, caught a glimpse of her hands; her holo-tatt was the dark brown of inactive ink, dead, like dried blood.

Pash’s legs felt like warm rubber after all the running he had done already, but a spark of rigid cold flashed down his spine and into them as he turned to follow Oasa, for he had seen the creatures who were barking, still barking obscenities in their own grating language. They were massive things, easily standing as tall as his waist, and covered in thick mountain fur. The one with the never silent bark was albino, the other steel gray. 

Pash had finished his rotation and got one foot in front of him when he heard a loud report and felt something hiss past his ear.

“Got you in my sights, boy,” said a voice as thick with gravel as the one dog’s was with spit. Pash bled out his momentum; snot dripped from his nose. He felt lines of blood crawling back through his skin, escaping the veins, flowing toward his sheltered center. The steel gray dog blew past him, giving him one hard look of ferocious promise. Then pain flashed in his ankle, and he heard the high whine of the never silent dog. Good thing my blood is gone, he thought, shaking.

A high whistle came from behind. “Git, Altoid. Thisn ain’t runnin.” The voice was closer, now. The jaws lifted off Pash’s ankle and the albino slipped by on nimble silent feet.

“Turn round, boy,” said the voice. Pash obeyed. The voice’s owner was an old man, with a hunch that made him shorter than Pash. He wore a long brown duster coat over hideous plaid flannels; the colors scraped on Pash’s eyeballs in contrasts and after images and made him want to blink. He didn’t dare. The man had a sleek black high powered rifle trained on him, not bothering the use the old magnifying scope balanced on top. “Stand right there,” he said. Then his focus slid over Pash’s shoulder. Pash wanted to turn around. His back started to itch. 

The old man clamped his jaw a couple of times, as though chewing on a piece of tough meat, bulging his stringy white beard. He pulled his lower lip under his front teeth and spit a stream of brown saliva into the grass. Then he whistled once, loudly.

“Altoid, Edge, off girls. I said—”

Pash heard a high startled laugh and Oasa screaming, The fuck off. The old man spit again and took a step forward. “Bitch,” he said. “Bitches.” Pash risked a turn of his head. It didn’t last long. The image burned into the space behind his eyes was of the two dogs positioned on either side of Oasa, making charging swipes at her legs and lower torso while she tried with one frantic hand to open the compartment for her wrist needler. The weapon should have come out with a thought.

Pash couldn’t watch. He closed his eyes and saw a blurred green outline of Oasa’s body, bracketed by blue and orange blobs in canine shape. As they melted together, as the dogs barked and Oasa howled, Pash’s breaths came quicker and quicker. The images of flesh behind his eyes liquefied, became one, the dogs absorbed, eaten, by the shape of Oasa. Pash’s breaths could come no shallower without starving him completely of air. 

A loud crack drove another buzz past his ear. He stopped breathing completely, for a moment.

He opened his eyes. The world had taken a bluish tint, as happens when you wake up from a nap in mid-afternoon. The old man wore baked brown boots; Pash saw them stamping through the grass, flattening blades and crushing the soil. He tried to match their tread with the rhythm of his lungs, but went too fast.

A hand gripped him roughly at the neck and folded him downward. He didn’t raise his eyes from the ground.

“Listen, pop, listen—” he said.

“Don’t talk,” said the old man. The dogs had stopped barking. Pash didn’t know they were behind him until one began to whine at the old man. Pash expected the old man to say, Shut it, to the dog, but he didn’t. Pash wished he would. The whine sounded like that of a child whose good milk has been taken away. “These dogs,” said the old man, “Are used to bears. Do you get me? Do you get me?” Pash nodded. “Are you going to try to run? Are you going to try to run?”

“No, pop, no, listen—” said Pash.

“Shut it, boy, or I’ll shut you up.” Pash nodded. His arms and legs were numb. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re from the city. Just nod.” Pash nodded. “They letting people out?” Pash shook his head. “Just a punk kid.” Pash nodded, terminating the gesture with his face looking up, searching for the eyes of the old man, to see what emotion lay within. The eyes he found were bloodshot and yellow around the edges, squinting with a comfort that told him the squint never went away, not even at night. He saw anger.

“This is my property,” the old man said.

“Okay, pop, listen—”

“What year do you call it?” Pash told him, though he forgot at first, kind of like those moments you forget your own birthday or age. The old man snorted. “Already so soon,” he said, then pinched his lips tight. “Bless my soul. Stand up.” Pash tried; his legs were quaking with cumulative fear. One knee almost gave way. As he caught himself, one of the dogs growled, setting her whole body to vibrating. Pash wanted to scream at her, It’s not my fault, and, I can’t help it. He caught the words deep in his throat and swallowed.

The old man led him to the cabin. He told Altoid and Edge to sit and to stay, then he opened the door. It was wide enough for two men to walk through side by side. A molding cinder block stood as front step. The old man shoved Pash up it. The cabin was two stories, one room on each storey, with a steep set of shaved log steps in the very center. The logs were polished with age and use; there was no handrail. There was a pot-bellied wood stove, solid black — all the ones that Pash had ever seen had been dirty red with rust. It was making a sound, the long inhale of little fire. Pash wondered what would happen if it ever exhaled. There was one chair, a complicated thing of wooden slats, swing arms, and sliders. The old man sat in it and began to kick back and forth; the sliders slid and the swing arms swung and the chair let the old man’s body rock while its feet remained immobile. The period of the rocking was marked by a loud creak that made Pash think of twisting a nail in a plank of wood, a tight sound of protest.

The old man had put his rifle down, leaning it against the wall. He stared at Pash.

“Hey, pop—”

“A human male needs two thousand calories a day to survive,” said the old man. Pash stood awkwardly in front of him, gripping himself hand to hand. “That’s about seventeen hog livers. I ain’t got seventeen hogs per day, so there’s other stuff: vegetables, mostly.”

Pash thought he could see where this was going. “Listen, pop, I’ll get anything, anything; just let me go, all right? I gotta go.”

“You gotta go nowhere,” said the old man, loudly enough to elicit a warning bark from Edge. Pash turned his head slightly, gazing out the one window toward the bluff. It was criss-crossed with wire mesh; a roll of dirty plastic was tacked above it. “It’s a lot of work,” the old man continued in a cold voice, small like a judge’s, which does not have to be large. “A lot of work to get that much food in every day. A whole day’s work, sometimes longer’n that. Now, I don’t quite need two thousand calories; I’m an old man. But you, you’re young and growing. Call it thirty-five hundred for the both of us.”

“You can’t be serious—”

“The dogs do some hunting. And we’ve got that hog you killed.”

“Listen, pop—”

“No, you listen, you little shit.” The old man’s voice was small, yet, smallest at the end. “The sow was pregnant.”

Pash considered appealing to the old man, explaining to him that it was Oasa who threw the stone, Oasa who led them onto his property, and Oasa who had already paid, but his brain kept getting stuck up on the last thought. He turned the words over and over in his mind until they abstracted and became a wash of white electric noise.

The old man rose suddenly and walked to the other side of the room. Ducking into the small space created by the angle of the staircase, he rummaged in a burlap sack. He came up with a roll of felt as thick as Pash’s thigh and a length of chain.

“Follow me,” said the old man. “I’ll teach you something.” He led him outside again, into the sun’s spatter and to the pen. The live hog was in one corner pawing needlessly at a patch of mud, as though searching for a lost treasure. Its eyes quivered, breaking between up and down, left and right so quickly as to make them useless for sight. “Stay right where you are,” said the old man. Altoid and Edge sidled up, the latter with thick tongue lolling out, dripping saliva, the former silent and seeming to grin. Pash didn’t think of moving. The old man crept around the pen, staying in the hog’s blind spot. When he reached the fence corner, he made a slip knot on one end of the chain and looped it over the nearest post. The other end curved back on itself in a circle of fixed radius. This end the old man tossed like a frisbee over the hog’s head. The hog turned to him, then, and stared stupidly at him. It shook its head, making the chain sing. The old man hauled on the other end, sinking the collar into the hog’s flesh. Now it panicked, kicking its spindly hind legs. Pash could smell its body, thick with urine and soil and the fecundity of life bred for food. Its movement was limited by the collar, and soon the old man had tightened the slack so that the hog could only flail its backside, while its head rested heavily against a lateral bar of the fence. The old man took a bottle from his pocket, uncorked it, and poured a little of the contents on his fingers. These he smeared around hog’s nostrils. “There, now,” he said quietly. “Look at that. Look at that hill and grass.” The hog quieted.

“This is not the way to do it,” the old man said, returning to Pash’s side. “There’s too much blood in the body. Nevertheless.” He knelt on the ground and unrolled the felt, revealing a row of butcher tools. Some of the more complicated ones, the ones with hinges and levers, shone silver on black. The more rudimentary knives and scoops were dull, except on the edges, here and there flecked with rust or dried blood. The old man selected a tool that looked like a metal toilet plunger and went to the pen. He climbed over the fence, both his body and the timbers shaking with the effort, and crossed to the dead hill of flesh. “Is that how you do a job,” he said, turning and fixing his inscrutable squint on Pash. It took Pash a moment to figure out what he meant. Then, realizing, he leapt forward, a little too fast, for Altoid let out a warning chuff, which only made Pash go faster. He leapt over the fence in one go, and landed to the old man’s laughter.

“A fence ain’t going to stop those girls, is it girls?” He laughed as other men choke. He spit a brown ribbon from his lower lip and hefted the metal plunger in his hand. The bell end went against the sow’s side, and the old man began rubbing in circular motions. A cloud of dust vibrated around him; bits of hair and flakes of mud snowed around his feet.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Pash.

The old man scraped at the dead flesh until a clean patch of pink the size of his head could be seen. Then he stepped back. “This is your job now,” he said. “Were you watching?”

Pash nodded and gulped at a lump of something that was blocking his windpipe. He stepped over the fence at a low point, hating the rich smell as its heavy intensity expanded. The air seemed laced with it. 

“Get movin,” said the old man, waving the plunger at Pash. “You keep working on this.” Pash grabbed the plunger and hesitated as the old man turned away. He pressed the metal lightly against the sow’s skin and scraped it up and down. Heavy molecules of scent bonded with the air; much more and all of it would sink to the ground.

The old man returned with a long thin knife in one hand. The other he pressed into Pash’s, wrapping it around the handle of the plunger and forcing the instrument harder against the dead skin.

“Breed out muscle for brains,” he said. “Or brains for muscle? Jesus. Circles, boy. Hard ones.”

Pash’s skin crawled, or he imagined it crawling with the filth of the old man’s hand and the microbes within. He moved the plunger in hard circles, scattering dust and short hair like an explosion sustained. Once Pash was doing the job right, the old man let go and knelt, wiping the knife blade quickly across his faded jeans. 

“Watch,” he said, and spit. Pash looked down. With a quick straight pull of his hand, the old man opened the back of the sow’s leg. Skin and muscle parted. Pash could smell the copper blood’s aroma pulsing into the air around as though the beast’s heart still beat. The old man twisted the knife’s tip in the wound and pulled. A whitish string of tendon surfaced and the old man gave a grunt of satisfaction. He reached with his free hand and slipped a finger under the tendon, getting a grip. Then he slit the tendon at the hoof side, set the knife down, got a second finger on the slippery rope and started to pull and strain. 

Vomit came gentle into Pash’s mouth. He turned away and let it dribble from his mouth. The live hog kicked a little at the other end of the pen.

“It don’t come easy,” said the old man. He coughed. “Cruelty follows cruelty,” he continued. “Until, judging callow acts against each other, one develops the concept of kindness. You do that to yourself.”

“I want to go home,” said Pash.

“That was Hessp. You read Hessp? They still teaching him?”

“Damn Hessp,” said Pash, weakly, wiping his mouth.

“The bastard owes me fifty bucks. You watch, now. I ain’t giving you a knife, but you watch, now.”

“I didn’t do nothing; I didn’t do anything.”

#

That night, curled in front of the wood stove, Pash tried to sleep with his eyes wide open. He was on his side, his hands clamped between his legs to mask the smell of blood. You can’t wash em, the old man had said. Don’t want you wastin my good water, the old man had said. Go ahead and wash em in the stream, if you want to get the shits something fierce, the old man had said. Pash wiped them off on the grass as best he could.

I can go home in the morning, Pash had said.

Can you bring in half a year’s food overnight, the old man had said.

Anything, Pash had said.

The wood stove was dying, its great inhale tapering to a held breath. The old man gave up one of his burlap blankets, saying, The gaps keep the air in, and, You ever slept with an afghan.

My rents will come looking for me, Pash had said.

Your rents? the old man had said. Oh. Your parents. No, they won’t. They’ve probably forgotten already.

Pash’s eyes were heavy, pupils angling to the floor. He kept drawing them up, pointing them at the blank shape of the woodstove for as long as he could see it. The slight warmth was enough to evaporate the dampness at the corners of his eyes.

continued in part 2

Originally published in Open Wide Magazine.

“Sing somethin’ beautiful,” said Bents. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted up. His throat kept moving in waves, as though he were drinking something straight from the ceiling. He looked a bit like a hamster at its drink bottle. 

He buzzed a chord on his acoustic and we all jumped in with him on the chorus for Awesome God, except we kept our eyes open. 

Youth group on summer Sunday nights was a tradition in my family. All five of us good little boys — I was smack dab in the middle — looked forward to that day we could stride in the double glass doors with the rest of the high schoolers. High schoolers sometimes went to Dairy Queen; high schoolers sometimes talked about sex. It was a rite of passage for my brothers and me, akin to getting our first pocketknife at age seven, or helping dad in the garden at age ten.
So far, I wasn’t too impressed. It was fun and all, and I had the answers to all the hard questions, having grown up in a church in which the answers never change. 

We guys in the group were all at that certain age and the oscillating pitches of our voices soon tired Bents of the singing; the girls just couldn’t hold a tune if their salvation depended on it. Putting down his guitar, Bents had us count off into groups of three. I was the kid who, when it came to his turn to sound off, held up the correct number of fingers and said, Two million, at which nobody laughed. Gravol and Carne were the other Two Millioners. Gravol had just started coming a couple weeks before. He was boisterous and he had big ears. The girls all loved him. 

I had known Carne since the tragedy of arson at our pre-school brought us together in the east side park; our parents muttered and turned up their noses at the sight of the school’s sharp ribs while we mixed ash and dirt and water and smeared it on our faces. I may have eaten some. 

I had always had a crush on Carne, but never acted on it. I used to get in these epic debates with myself, rationalizing my affection for this girl with whom I sang in the children’s choir, played in the Little League, and represented Grand Fenwick in the seventh grade Nation Fair. The debates would go like this: 

“Carne sure is cute.” 

“I’ll give you that one. She is cute. But is she beautiful?” 

“Define beauty.” 

“Beauty is that which endures.” 

“She’s awfully cute.” 

“Yes, but does she have the staying power of, say, Pamela Anderson?” 

I often lost against myself. I don’t think Carne knew I was so fixated on her. She never let on, anyway; not even when she started leaving youth group in the company of Jenkins, the Dude With No First Name. He may not have had a first name, but he sure had first bragging rights for just about anything that mattered. He was the first in his grade to get his license, the first to go all the way with a girl, the first to ace the final in auto, and the first to run down the suicide hill.

The suicide hill was not a clever name given to a bit of local geography, as make out point or lover’s leap were; it was a clever name given to an historic bit of natural landscaping that was stained with cultural significance, the blood of the ancients, and the sweat of rodeo promoters. It was a near vertical drop that went from some patient lady’s back yard to the shallow river two hundred feet below. The natives used to send their young men down it, mounted on sure-footed horses, as a rite of manhood; at least, that’s what they told us in third grade, and fourth, and at a big assembly in seventh. Now the natives had to fight against PETA for the right to run their burliest men down it, mounted on sure-footed steeds, as a rite of closure for the yearly stampede. It wasn’t that big a deal, Jenkins bragged after he had run it on his own two legs. You just pick your feet up, and when you set them down, you’re almost done.

“What are we playing?” I asked Bents.

He came around to each group with a faint grin and a bag of water balloons. Carne whined, and said she didn’t want to get wet. Bents put into her hand a single deflated pink balloon and then moved on to the next group.

“Extra long Bible study tonight, Bents?” I asked. 

When every group had a balloon, Bents cleared his throat.

“So, we’ve got the Creation festival coming up in a few weeks. Those of you who came to church this morning heard pastor Lyle mention that we’ve already gone into the red on our budget this year. So we’re going to have an auction.”

“Five bucks for the blue one,” Gravol said, pointing at another group’s balloon.

“Please be quiet, Gravol. The church is receiving donations from a number of places, but I thought it would be good if we could help out, you know, since we’ll be benefiting from the proceeds. So we’re going to play a game called Trade It Up. You’ll each go out into the town with your single water balloon and the way it works is this: you stop at a house.” He pantomimed. “You knock. You ask the nice lady or man if they have something just a tiny bit more valuable that they would be willing to trade you for your water balloon. If they don’t, then be polite and move on. But if they do give you something — like, say, a nice pen, for instance — then you take that and move on to another house and do it again. The goal is to get what you think is the most valuable thing.”

“That’s lame,” said some guy from the blue balloon group. “Who would trade anything for a water balloon in the first place?”

“You might be surprised what people are willing to get rid of,” said Bents. He sat down on the floor, wrapping his arm around the neck of his guitar as though it were his wife. He stroked its strings. “Now I’ll stay here and keep the doors unlocked. Maybe I’ll go get some donuts or something. Does every team have a watch? We meet back here at nine-thirty. Shoo.”

Some groups had cars, and enthusiasm, and piled in with whoops and hollers. Gravol, Carne, and I slid our easy hands into our pockets and strolled down the street. It was a warm evening. I thought about Bents strumming lightly on his guitar and it seemed like the perfect soundtrack. 

“Where should we go first?” asked Carne. Gravol shrugged and I copied him.

“The Hilarys live three blocks down or so,” I said. “They gave me a hundred bucks for graduating the eighth grade.”

“Worth a shot,” said Carne. We ambled along in our flip-flops, catching bits of gravel on our toes and launching them ahead like bullets.

“You guys doing anything for the fourth this year?” I asked as we segued onto the sidewalk.

“There’s a party at the lake,” said Carne. “Jenkins asked me to go with him.”

“You going?”

“Probably.”

“What about you, Gravol?”

He acted as though he were about to sneeze, but caught it right before he did. “I haven’t decided yet. My family usually does something.”

“Quiet evening at home?” I asked.

“I have a big family.”

Carne and Gravol were on either side of me. I tried to slow down my pace, to fall in behind them — I always feel more comfortable in the back — but they slowed down with me. We still had a couple of blocks to go.

“Last year,” I said. “I went to some guy’s party.”

“You?” said Carne with a giggle.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That was when I was hanging out with Rusty.” Rusty’s name had faded out of use, recently. He had been caught smoking pot before school. He dropped out of the group and, eventually, wasted away to a sliver and blew away to Los Angeles with his mom. He and I had hung out for a year, throwing bags of sugar off of our town’s only overpass and rolling tires down cliffs into the lake, which didn’t seem too much of a sin to me, since I was one of the honor students who had been volunteered to keep the shore clean.

The three of us were walking lockstep. The padding of our feet on the oiled pavement sounded to me like the rhythm of a drum circle. I always fancied myself a storyteller, or a poet. I timed my first words so that the troches took their beat from us, but after that Carne fell out of sync and I got lost and plowed on.

“Rusty brought along a bottle full of gasoline, and another full of black powder. We waited until dark and then snuck into the alfalfa field of the guy’s neighbor. Ripped up a bunch of the junk. Then Rusty dug a little hole to put the bomb in. Wanted a bigger blast radius, or something. Like when you cup your fist around a firecracker instead of leaving your palm open.”

“I’ve never done that,” said Gravol.

“Well it hurts less if you leave it open. Then he ran a couple leads back across the field and plugged them into the car battery. Most of the other guys were drunk and weren’t expecting it. The thing was dim; I barely saw the explosion, but man, I felt it. Like an artificial chest compression. That was something else. I turned and ran as soon as it happened, because I was scared the farmer was going to come find us. Halfway to the car, I turned, and saw Rusty staring at me like I let him down. I was probably wearing some dumb outfit or something. He liked to tell me to be mature, to grow up. I think that’s why he hung out with me. He walked to the car in the time it took between the farmer’s lights coming on and his door opening. Then we drove off and read about it in the paper on Wednesday.”

“Grow up, Bird,” Gravol said. I laughed with him.

“I felt like praying for those poor drunk people. Couldn’t go to sleep that night until I did, actually.”

“I never heard about it,” said Carne, folding her arms across her breast as though cold. I was hot from my words, about ready to take my shirt off when a cool breeze tickled the hair on my arms.

“I would have told you,” I said, bumping into her shoulder with mine. “But you lost my phone number.”

The Hilarys had a stone footpath that wound across their lot-size lawn. We tramped straight for the door, our rhythm going all to pot. At the porch, I reached for the bell, but Gravol got there first. 

Mister Hilary answered, doubled over and panting. 

“Uh. You okay, mister Hilary?” asked Carne. He looked up and grinned. He smelled like sweat in an airtight room. 

“Just fine. What can I do for you kids?”

“Bents has got us on this game,” I said. “We’re trying to upset the balance of the economy. We want to trade you this for something a bit more valuable.”

Gravol held up the balloon. He had rolled most of the rubber around its small opening. It looked like a miniature condom.

“It’s a balloon,” said Gravol. Mister Hilary laughed, or he might have just been breathing heavily. He invited us in and offered us something to drink. Carne and I declined, but Gravol took a proffered soda. Something more valuable, mister Hilary muttered, digging through a hall closet.

He raised his voice. “Sorry things are kind of a mess. Hillary is away for a bit, which means I get to be lazy with the house work.”

“I thought she sounded real nice this morning,” said Carne. Missus Hilary was the choir’s leading soloist and, going by weight, three-quarters of the soprano section.

“Yeah, thanks,” said mister Hilary. “Ah. Here we go.” He gave us a tennis ball, took the balloon, shook his head, and grinned us right out the door.

We went to the next couple of houses on the block. Gravol kept smiling and laughing to himself as though remembering a joke only he had thought was funny. We traded the tennis ball for a pound bag of candy, and the candy for an old copy of Stratego. It was missing a couple of the red pieces.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said Carne. “Let’s go to doctor Bar’s.”

I shrugged into a nod and turned down a block toward the comparatively rich side of town. 

“Bargain hunting?” said Gravol, now a few steps behind me. Carne was at my left, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

“Shut up,” she said. Then, to me, “You weren’t in church this morning.”

“I slept in,” I said. I had stayed up way too late the night before. I’d already outed my sin of incendiaries, though, so I decided she didn’t need to hear about how I’d discovered a message board on the net that was full of stolen passwords to members-only porn sites. It makes it hard to sleep, the thought of getting so much for free. And I wasn’t about to mention it to Gravol. For all I knew, the guy would cop the best ones right out from under me.

Carne pulled in the first half of a sigh.

“What is it?” I said.

“Can I tell you something, if you promise to keep it private?”

At the end, she would probably hug me. “Sure. It’s story time. Why not.”

“I can’t tell Bents or Clara. Last week, I—” She kept the sound of the letter coming, a single long note, while behind it her mind worked to produce an entire melody. “I was taking a shower after practice,” she went on. “Mom and dad weren’t home, yet, and I was just going to watch TV until I fell asleep. I didn’t lock the door when I got home. And when I got out of the shower— my— my boyfriend was there.”

“Jenkins?” I asked.

“God, no. I broke up with him a month ago. But he, my boyfriend, you wouldn’t know him, he brought me some flowers.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Well, parts of flowers at least. It was sweet, yeah. Yeah, it was.” I glanced sideways. She was opening and closing her mouth. I thought she might be fumbling for a metaphor. She finally settled on:

“It was like getting struck by lightning. You know what I mean?”

“An explosion.”

“Yeah, yeah that’s kind of how it was. So I turned on the TV, kinda low. He gave me the flowers. And there were soap operas on. I left it on. And he tried— well, he tried hard. And it’s summer, you know. You know how it gets hot in your house with the windows open all day and the sweat is practically telling you it wants to evaporate. Even after the shower, it was just all— I don’t know. Urgent, I guess. And when you’re naked— don’t look at me like that. I know you like getting naked. You and the guys went skinny dipping on the hike last year.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I was the one that screamed and ran, remember? Anyways. Go on.”

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Gravol. Carne shot him an evil look over her shoulder.

“It was nice, being open in the air. It was warm enough to be a layer of clothes; it wasn’t bad at all. To move and not feel your clothes pulling against you.” She trailed off, then, and pulled her hands out of her pockets. She crossed them over her chest, gripping each shoulder with its opposite fist. 

“Keep going,” I stammered. Her mouth fell open and wide at the corners; it took a few seconds for the laugh to come.

“You little sicko,” she said, and punched me in the kidney. Then she tilted her head as if listening to a particularly good poem, or the school fight song. “It was nice. It’s summer, you know.”

“Yeah. Um. Are you going to get pregnant?”

Gravol snorted. “No,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Carne. “I’m not scared,” she told me, which is funny, because she ended up a bug hunter. I’ll get to that later. “But I broke up with him,” she went on. “He didn’t call.”

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” said Gravol, equidistant from Carne and me, now. We were a triangle crossing the quiet street. Doctor Bar had a house built like a geodesic dome, assembled from larger triangles, the skeleton on the outside. We stopped at the end of his driveway.

“Is that the door?”

“No. I think that is.”

We took a gamble and knocked. Maxine, the doctor’s wife, answered.

“Hi there, kids. What’s up?” We explained the game to her. “Wait here,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Gravol leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders.

“She’s kinda hot,” he said.

I laughed. “That cinches it. We’re all going to hell.” We had only painted pictures of some lake of fire to imagine. And I’m sure we all saw ourselves dancing on the beach, listening to something stupid and infectious on the radio, telling ghost stories and roasting wieners over the liquid heat. Hell was no threat; hell was nothing more than pigment on canvas, and not even that in the brain. Even we were more.

“Here you go,” said Maxine. “We’ve had this thing around for years.” She was struggling not to bend over with the weight of a dinosaur computer. I jumped forward to take it from her.

“Have any games on it?” asked Gravol. Maxine laughed and dusted her hands against each other. 

“I’m not sure. It was my husband’s, but I haven’t seen him use it for years.”

“It’s just a word processor,” I said, trying to fit its bulk under my arm and nearly dropping it. 

“Here,” said Carne, offering Maxine the battered copy of Stratego.

“Oh, no thanks, honey. I think we’ve already got that one in one of the kids’ rooms.”

We thanked her and left.

“Need any help?” Gravol asked me at the end of the driveway. 

“Sure.” We adjusted the machine between us, each grabbing a couple corners. My hands were starting to sweat. 

“This has got to be worth a couple hundred dollars, right?” said Carne. “We ought to go back.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to lug this thing around longer than I have to,” I said. “But it’s only worth about fifteen, my friend.”

“We could get my car,” offered Gravol. “I only live a couple blocks from the church.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “What’s a couple blocks, anyway. Besides, we haven’t heard your story yet, Grav.” My theory is that summer pollen lames me up a bit more than normal. I’ve got bags of evidence. Think back on what you have heard; I guarantee you that the bits that drip with gum-thick fondness and idealism were written at evening, with the window open and the smell of cut grass in my hair.

“Don’t call me that,” said Gravol. “That’s what my mom used to call me.”

“She’s dead?” Tact decreases as lameness increases.

“No, asshole. She’s in Seattle.”

I felt a sick thrill at the forbidden insult rush my ribcage. I grinned.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, loosening his grip on the word processor and sticking me with the extra weight. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t see much of her, anyway. An arm here, a leg there.”

“You close to your dad?” I asked.

“Now, that’s the interesting answer.” We turned a corner. Carne was in the lead, hands in her back pockets again. I watched her legs move, more than a little mesmerized. “Not really close to him. But he taught me a lot of stuff.”

“What does he do?”

“Drink beer. Oh, and he’s a mechanic.”

“How do you, how you say, drink beer?” It was a strain and Gravol’s smile looked about as tired as my sense of humor felt.

“I do a lot of stuff to get happy. It’s called hedonism,” he said.

“Learn something new every day,” I said.

“I haven’t really tried drugs, because they’re so damn expensive, but I’ll go for pretty much everything else. Food, girls, being on stage— it all works the first time, and then a little less the second, and even less the third time, but by that time it’s a habit and it keeps going on, even though I stopped being happy a long time ago. But there is one thing that works.”

“Lift up a bit on your end,” I said. “What’s that?” I added.

“When I was twelve,” he said, “my dad taught me how to change the oil in his car. An old Honda. I’ve always loved how he taught me. He slid me under the car on a scrap of cardboard. I was skinny enough to fit clear under without putting the thing up on ramps. Then he told me to look for a bolt. I found quite a few, so I asked him which one I was supposed to twist, and which way I was supposed to twist it. He told me to look for the only one that could hold oil in. Use my freaking head. So I spotted the one at the base of the oil tank, like it would have been any of the other ones. I was a pretty stupid kid,” he confided.

“Glad to see you’ve grown out of it,” Carne tossed over her shoulder.

Gravol went on. “It was great. Dad had just run the car around the block, testing the lug nuts or something. He gave me the ratchet wrench and I went to town. Felt like fifteen minutes unscrewing that thing. Dad kept grumbling at me to go faster. The bolt started turning loosely in its well, but it wouldn’t come out. I told dad; he said the threads were probably stripped. A tiny trickle of oil was licking around the body of the bolt; most of it was dripping onto my wrist, and from there into the pan. It smelled kinda good. Solid and real and heavy, like dirt. Dad told me to get rid of the wrench. Just grab the bolt in both hands and pull on it while twisting, try and get the threads seated again. My fingers were slippery. My finger nails were too long; when I pulled, they hurt.

“Took another five minutes of me pulling until I felt resistance and then twisting. Then, suddenly, the thing popped out like a bottle rocket and there was oil gushing everywhere. Stupid kid me had both his hands right under the stream— but I didn’t move them. I didn’t even say, I got it, for a few seconds. The oil was warm and thick; it felt like blood pumping over my hands. I flexed my fingers in it and played with the splash patterns in the steaming pan.

“That’s the car I got when I turned sixteen. Probably should get that bolt replaced, but I kept pulling it out the same way, and pounding it in with a rubber mallet when I was done.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Carne. We were at the church’s front doors. None of the other groups had come back, yet. We trooped inside and plopped the word processor down on the foyer floor. Gravol went to the bathroom to wash his hands; I poked through the kitchen for anything other than water to drink. Found a two liter of 7-up. I brought it and three glasses out. 

Bents was sitting on the floor next to Carne.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.

“All right,” I said. Then, holding up the bottle, “Can we drink this?”

“Yup.”

I poured three glasses. Gravol came over, drying his hands on his pants. He sat down as far away from Carne as he could and still be one corner of a recognizable shape and took a glass from me. Carne sipped hers, staring out the glass doors at the sky brushing down from light blue to dark.

One by one, the other groups barged in, singing and holding their prizes aloft. When the pile of booty was finished, we had the word processor, a mountain bike, a box of cigars, our old copy of Stratego, and a giant inflatable stegosaurus. 

“All right,” said Bents, swigging the last of the soda straight from the bottle. “Let’s total up the values. I’ll take the winning team out for ice cream.”

“Hang on a sec,” said Gravol. He bounded up and out the door. We argued about whether smoking was a sin until he pulled up in front of the doors in an old gray Honda. It sputtered when he turned it off.

“One last trade, Bents,” he said, yanking open both of the double doors as though he were a movie star arriving on the scene at the crescendo in the sound track. “I’ll take that computer; you can sell off my car.”

“Are you sure, Gravol?”

“Come on. It’s only worth a couple hundred dollars, now. I’m happy to. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at writing,” he said. “I’ll need some help carrying that beast home, though.” I volunteered.

After ice cream that night, I never really spoke to Gravol again. He was in a class with me, sophomore year, and we had to do a presentation together, but he acted as though he didn’t remember ever stringing two original words together with me, much less having told me his story.

I never got together with Carne, though I did kiss her once. We were both drunk at a post-Prom party, and she even let me cop a feel. Her breasts were saggy; that was a couple years after she had the baby. She had gotten pregnant after all, and I never knew who the father was, but I’ve never been a smart kid.

After graduation, I didn’t hear a thing about her, until I got a twice-forwarded message from my mom. It was originally from Carne’s mom, a plea for prayers for her daughter’s peace as she was on her last few days of fighting against AIDS. One night, soon after I read that, I walked home smelling like whiskey and thought I would call her up. I got her number from my mother, whose hobby it is to keep in touch with people.

Carne sounded as weak as I expected.

“Hey, Bird,” she said. “It’s been a while.” And we chatted. My focus was nowhere, and she sounded medicated, so I doubt the conversation would have made much sense to anyone listening in. She told me about how she started hunting bugs in college, and now I can’t get the image out of my head of her running across a meadow with a butterfly net held like a club in both fists. She explained that she had learned from her gay friends that there was a whole subculture devoted to sleeping with people who were infected with STDs. She paid good money to fuck three men who were HIV positive. The first two left her with nothing more than sore legs in the morning. The third one had gotten her infected.

“Why in God’s lengthy name would you do that?” I think I screamed it at her, but she was already giving me the answer, so she probably didn’t notice.

“I’m not scared. I wasn’t scared anymore. I could do anything I wanted, and I’d never have to worry that I’d get more than I was ready for.”

“Aren’t you scared of dying?”

“Not while my redeemer liveth,” she said, and hummed. “I’d fuck you so hard if you were here right now.” I hung up on her. She died a week later.

Gravol didn’t even make it that long. He committed suicide at the end of senior year. The memorial service was held at the church. We raised money for his dad by raffling off tickets to swing a sledgehammer at the old Honda, which had served the youth group well for a couple of years, though we always got headaches when we rode in it.

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

Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

Go to part 1 | part 3…

Essa

The first real pay check I ever got was from a Starbucks in Renton. For two weeks, I burned my fingers, smelled like milk, and flirted with the addicts. Then, on a Friday that I had woken up on convinced that it would be a good day to quit and just lie in bed in someone else’s shirt, I found the envelope with my name on it in the file behind the counter. I ripped it open, stuffed the tax tags in the millimeter pocket of my black jeans, and saw numbers of my own. Five little numbers that I told everyone from then on were my lucky numbers. Six five one one nine. Even though they lost every time in Vegas on our honeymoon.

I spent most of that check on music and makeup. I remember that night, painting myself up like a whore and putting on the clothes that I had convinced my parents to buy for me for dress-up days at school and for Halloween. Filling up a playlist with Mineral MP3s and dancing in the proscenium arch of my mirror. The hairs on my bare arms and legs stood up and pulled away from me, tugging my skin in all directions, promising me that, if I let them escape, they would find whatever made me feel the closest to contentment, and there I would coalesce.

It was damn cold that night, after I crawled out of my window. A couple of my friends said I looked hot; a couple others kept their mouths shut. I wasn’t a new woman. They knew I’d still kick them in the teeth if they pissed me off or made me cry.

What made me so different at home, so different that I had to stay in my room, made me painted background at the party. I felt like an extra on a movie set, and took to asking some of the potheads when we were getting our ten bucks for the night, just to see their reaction. One guy pulled ten bucks out of a black leather wallet and started to lead me to a back room. That was pretty funny.

Now that I think about it, he looked a bit like Lane; people say right around the eyes but I think what they mean by that is the way a person’s face is focused through his eyes. It’s the way something extra shows through his pupils, some line of code that tells your brain to remember this.

He was a pseudo-geek. Thought he had a lot to say about computers, but it all came out of his brother’s old issues of 2600. He had a chin that sank inward when it moved, a mouth that must have forced its own birth, and skin the shade of mine under ultra violet. Years afterward, I kept imagining I saw him in movies. I’d ask my friends, Where have I seen that actor before? And they’d all say, Oh he starred in Such and Such, and I’d say, No that’s not it. Absolutely certain that, even though I didn’t know the answer, I knew that wasn’t it.

So, damn it, I can understand. I could understand. If he was a teenager, I could understand. But he’s not. He’s a former sailing captain who has abandoned his post to play with toy boats in the bathtub. He’s a lapsed Catholic putting on robes and asking me if I have any sins to confess, in bed. Fuck him, the bastard. Ha– that’s funny.

He was born in Los Angeles. I was born in Issaquah, a little south of the good stuff in Washington state. He told me it’s because my first friend was a mountain that I miss the people. I told him that he didn’t understand me because he never had a daddy. It takes a little away from me to not be able to call him names in hate. I try, but my every shot is accidentally accurate.

I spent all of this first pay check on food that we could store for a while; enough for the winter, for when our crop of potatoes runs out. He was pretty quiet on the drive back up from town. A cow wandered out onto the road at one point and he didn’t even honk the horn. He just shifted his hand to six, brought the truck down a couple gears, and waited while the beast tried to turn us into food with her dumb forgettable eyes. She gave up and moseyed off the road in the same direction she had come from.

Then when we get home, he helped me with the bags, taking the frozen stuff first so it wouldn’t thaw any more. It was when we were on to the cans of soup and broth that he, arms round from all that pounding, finally said what he had been waiting to.

“I lost my job.”

I knew something. I could see that the truck was using twice as much fuel as it should have been. I thought he was going to ask for a divorce, though.

“How did it happen?”

He stared at me with the look that tried to say, You know the answer so say it yourself. Up against my stubbornness, he dropped his gaze to his legs.

“I don’t care,” I said and went back to moving bags across the room.

A few minutes later, I was standing at the kitchen window, holding the green curtain back with the fist I had pressed into my forehead. The day was turning deep and blue. He couldn’t just leave it. He was out there with Bernard, getting ready to burn the forest down. Make it all smoke and ash and bright orange and red. I could handle that.

#

Kelly

Essa said I could have his computer while he’s gone. She laughed when she said it. As long as I get to push my fingers on the screen and make waves that look like the places the deer sleep, I said. Okay, she said and laughed more. He came in then and asked what was so funny.

“Essa says I can have your computer when you’re gone,” I said. He went red and I could see his heart pumping in his throat. He had to squeeze out his words in between beats.

“Oh… well… be careful…” he said.

“Don’t worry, honey,” said Essa and he didn’t have a chance. She was using her super powers on him, her green eyes on him, and the computer was mine.

“I’ve got some sensitive…” he started to say. Then Essa said,

“I know,” and he went from green to red. Essa lost.

“Your daddy wants you, Kelly,” he said instead of anything she didn’t want him to say. Yellow. I took off before either of them could change her mind. I learned a long time ago that when daddy gives the answer you want, don’t give him time to sigh. When Lane goes up, he has to give me his computer.

Dad was in the kitchen, making me a peanut butter sandwich. I ate inside the crust and asked,

“How long is Lane going to be gone?”

Daddy had his cheeks folded back to grin. It made,

“We figure forty miles or a little further,” sound like a frog said it. I tried to tell him that I’d get Lane’s computer but it didn’t work. I thought the words, made the sounds in my head, but they didn’t go anywhere. That must be writer’s block that Essa talks about. Something in your brain, clang clang, a wood wedge in the middle. She said it gives her headaches. I must not have one.

I thought about how daddy listens to people, today. He blinks and opens his eyes when they say something he likes. When he spells ice cream out loud. He pulls on his jaw and makes his ears move when he wants her to shut up and let him go to bed. He leans forward when she wants him to shut up and go to bed, his eyes still wide and I think ready to listen.

I didn’t notice it was really windy until daddy pointed at the window and said, Look at the trees. They were swaying all over the place like someone had stuck a finger into the middle of them just to make waves. I thought I had invented it.

It was okay, though. Daddy didn’t listen to me when his eyes were wide and listening to the trees. And he had his hand on his jaw. I pulled on his pockets and started to hang from his belt when he said, Ow, honey, that hurts daddy. I asked him to make me another sandwich. The phone rang and he answered it right away. It was Essa, asking if it was okay for Lane to invite us over for a little party. He had to hold the phone a foot away from his ear. He said, Shoot, I was going to suggest it, and, I’ll bring the beer. Right off the bat, he said that.

Poem, I’m glad that it’s Lane going away. The first thing I can remember is from my third birthday, when they fired off the third one. She was there. She wasn’t there in the couple pictures in the red album, but she was. She lights all the fires. It’s how she makes things green. One time, daddy made me only watch PBS, and I saw a show about trees and forests and how mad frantic all the little firemen bugs were running back and forth across the screen in the black and the brown, outrunning the flames that looked sick around the place where dad showed me what a magnet can do. The voice on the show was saying how some scientists say lots of things. About how to fix a fire and things like that. And how if you just let it go, it’s a good thing except for the houses and the people and the animals that get in the way. And at the end I watched the credits because they were showing a mountain in our own valley and how green it is and it must have burned to the dirt just before I was born.

That’s how she does it. She burns under the rockets and makes everything up. There’s that ring around the spot where nothing grows, but that’s because they spend so much time there. Like the barn. All full of just straw and splinters and nothing at all.

Daddy brought me over to their house for dinner and put me to bed when they got out dessert. He walked me across the yard, picking me up onto his shoulders when I told him I was afraid of the thistles. He put me under the covers and kissed me on the forehead and I must have whispered because he bent down and said,

“Hmm?”

And I said,

“I’m glad you’re my daddy.” He was, too. He laughed his head straight up. I could see his shadow. It stretched out an arm and pulled the blanket up tighter around my neck.

“Go to sleep, smartie,” he said.

She burns up and I never see the rockets again. They’re gone to make it green. I told all of this to her in different words and she laughed more than I did. Maybe I needed a better word than burn. Maybe I needed to hold her hand so she’d know I was there when I opened my mouth.

He didn’t even stay to watch me sleep.

#

Essa

I knocked on the door just to see the look on his face. The only light in the room came from his machine’s monitor; he always looks better in those flesh drenched photons than in real day light. He clicked a few times, replacing the warm glow with the dull black of his wallpaper, before putting on a yawn and turning to me.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Getting late. I’m going to lock up. Just making sure you weren’t planning on going out again tonight.”

“Nope. Not tonight.”

“Kay.”

“You going to bed soon?”

“In a bit. I was going to talk to Perch if she’s home.”

“I’ll be done here in a while.”

“Take your time,” I said, closing the door. He usually left it open, so I wouldn’t get suspicious. I could feel my lips curve into devil horns. The door made a heavy click; everything in this tired old house is connected to everything else. Close the oven and the toilet flushes; knock on the door and the smoke detector goes off — or would if there were batteries in it. Lean too far back in your chair and the windows break. When I shut the door, the soft light behind it came on again, shining through the crack by the floor.

It was just too cute.

I left the kitchen light on as I locked the front and back doors. I posed in the reflections, standing in the windows in nothing but my bath robe. I let it slip open so the sides of the V were balancing on my breasts. When I slid the chain across the front door, my nose inches from its mate, I caught my nail in the catch. It didn’t break but hurt like hell. I pressed it tight into my palm to suffocate the ghosted pain.

Things were getting pretty cold outside. Windows don’t keep much of that out; I felt a breeze passing through the molecules and hitting my cheek, passing through my cheek and out the other side.

First time I tried Perch’s number it was busy. Second time, she answered laughing, fighting her own giggles to say, Hello.

“Hey, giggle butt. It’s me.”

“Essie!” I could hear other people in the background, shouting for ale and whores.

“Got a party going on?”

“Just the usual crew.” I could almost make out a guy’s voice rising. “That was Todd,” Perch explained. “He says, Hi.”

“Tell him he’s a bastard.” She did. There was familiar laughter and it hurt. They were having fun, talking about Derrida or Dorcas, pushing their brains over beer and party games of their own devising. “Bad time?” I asked her.

“No no, it’s fine. Just let me escape here.” The din faded to a sussurration, then to the isolated slam of a door. “So,” she said. “Tell me about stuff.”

“Not much to tell. Lane finally got his boat built.”

“Is he still on that kick?”

“As zealous as ever. Thanks to his efforts, humanity will once again be afraid of bursting all their capillaries in the inky blackness of… .” I couldn’t keep it up. I needed air and more words. Perch was laughing enough already, anyway.

“I thought he’d be over it by now,” she said.

“Not a chance. Read anything good lately?” I asked, eager to change the subject. I was tired of thinking about my husband and his obsessions, even if they made hearts lighter from one end of the state to the other.

“Have I ever! Todd got me hooked on this fantasist that I think you’d really like. His name is…”

“Don’t bother.”

“Don’t have time to read?”

“No. Well, sort of. I just don’t have a brain for names.”

She sniffed, then laughed. “That’s right. The flash cards.” She was thinking about our room mate days, when she’d come home late from a party and find me stopping up a bloody nose with tissues and bending over a desk full of white papers, names on one side and definitions on the other. She was thinking about whatever it was Todd had just said to make Ruth do her witch cackle so loudly.

I didn’t want to be bitter. But now that bitterness was in sight, there was no avoiding some awkward flailing descent into its grasp. Either I would ignore it, so baldly obvious in the attempt that Perch would try to be comforting, or I would give in to it, la dee da.

I made plans to come and visit the next time I had a chance. I lied and said that Lane was thinking about coming back to the teaching business, so we might move back to the coast. She said that was wonderful news. I fidgeted with a pen and stabbed it into her beautiful baby blue eye because they were heading out to the Thump later that evening and she still had the tiny camisole and skirt combo I let her wear to our last homecoming as undergrads. She’d even had it dry cleaned.

As I was saying bye, Lane came out of his study. He had on his dirty flannel and jeans from the day. Copper shavings clung to his knees. He stopped with a hand on the catch and stared at me. I crossed my legs and felt a fresh stab of memory pain in my finger nail. I hung up the phone.

“Wear a coat,” I said.

“It’s not that cold,” he said.

“It will be.”

He went outside and the phone rang. It was Kelly.

“Hi, Essa. Can I have a drink of water?”

“Where’s your dad? Can’t he do it for you?”

#

Voices

“Can’t sleep either, huh?”

“No fucking way. I read they made the astronauts stay awake seventy two hours before launch.”

“No. It took seventy-two hours to get the shuttle from the assembly building to the launch site. But they didn’t have to be on it that whole time.”

“Oh. I bow to your superior knowledge.”

“It happens.”

“Do you think we’re rushing into this?”

“It’s been three years.”

“NASA took decades.”

“God bless em, but they had committees. We’re light. Nimble. Agile.”

“Cold.”

“Yeah. Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Neh.”

“Did you ever finish anything this big?”

“We’re not even getting out of the atmosphere.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Lost all my optimism. Figure that one out.”

“Oh shucks. Guess you’d better let me go up, then.”

“I’d rather send a monkey.”

“How about Kelly?”

“Are you serious?”

“No. No, I’m just joking.”

“Jesus. Yeah, to answer your question; I have finished things this big before. My dissertation was three years. There was a piss poor novel that I had published; I had been working on that for five years.”

“That’s right. I forget that you had another life, sometimes.”

“Not me. But I don’t regret it, you know. I got so sick of academics and pretension. The students were almost as bad as my colleagues. You’re much better company.”

“That… actually means a lot to me, man.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

“This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m not even going up.”

“Scissors beat rock. Get over it.”

“Go soak your good natured head. Bastard.”

“You know what? We’ve celebrated your birthday every year since you moved up here, and I don’t actually know how old you are.”

“Yeah, you do. I tell you every year, but you forget. I’m twenty years older than Kelly.”

“You guys were only twenty when she was born?”

“I was. Patty was forty.”

“It’s funny how those opposites come together.”

“Forty isn’t opposite twenty. I mean, I know you only taught basic rocket science, but…”

“I meant how I married Essa when she was eighteen, and I was thirty five. And now we just slot together, the guy who likes older women and the guy who likes ’em young.”

“Except that it’s two guys who are both twenty years or so older than their women.”

“Speaking of the little oyster: what’s that she’s been writing in so much lately?”

“She calls it her poem. She won’t let me read it, though. Says she’s afraid of Aha! sneaking into it.”

“Aha?”

“Alex Haley. In-joke.”

“I hope she grows up quick.”

“She’s a little survivor. I think even if I were to get mauled by a bear, you guys wouldn’t even notice I was gone; the house would stay clean, the chores would get done and, somehow, the groceries would get bought.”

“That’s why rock beats scissors.”

“Say what? Are you getting all obtuse and poetic on me again?”

“Sorry. Be serious for a second, kid.”

“What is it?”

“All I’ve got in the world is Essa. You’ve got Kell. If anything goes wrong tomorrow…”

“Oh. Not poetic; just maudlin.”

“Could you please stop making fun of me? Tomorrow owns a lot of danger. We’d be stupid to ignore that. I’m not stupid.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I want you to know that it’s best that I’m going up.”

“I know.”

“That doesn’t mean I just want to tell you that; I want you to know that.”

“Hey, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like this will be our only chance. God, that’s what we’re gunning for anyway, isn’t it? To make a thousand chances?”

“I feel as if we’re running on a clock, that we’re just going to get out there tomorrow and then our time will be up, that Yellowstone will blow or something and then there goes humanity. And because of the grand fucking stupidity of our leaders, who spent all their money on bombs and coliseums, we won’t have any humans left.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“And Saint Helens will never go off again.”

“Yeah, but Yellowstone?”

“You know that the caldera is just one big lake of magma.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It has been inflating steadily over the last century. The elevation has risen almost a meter since fifty years ago.”

“Wow. You learn something depressing every day.”

A light hits the cracked brown wall. It must be a UFO. The old coot further up the road who goes to the casino every Friday.

“Do you miss the city?”

“No. Essa still on your case about it?”

“Not really on my case. She doesn’t let me forget it. By being silent, she gives me plenty of room to think. She hasn’t smiled for about two weeks.”

“Well, she’s nearing her sexual peak…”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Please. That grin makes me want to punch your teeth in.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Take care of her if anything happens?”

“She won’t need it.”

“We would take care of Kelly.”

“I know. That’s why I picked scissors.”

#

Lane

I knew it; you knew it.

“All right, fuckaroo,” he said. He had his arm around my wife.

No children but a legacy. I leave behind the Earth and her desperate whorish ways for the bright expanding nitrogen and oxygen, liquid and solid and gas, all pulling apart, all free.

We planned for chaos. Interrupted by a scream of metal. I leave behind the Earth, the dirt; it’s on my fingers, yet.

And for this reason, the Good Book says, a young man will leave his mother and never look back. He will perch atop his plans, miles in the air, and watch as his future descends, black, through space, bleeding all its warmth into the void until there is nothing left for him.

She has been a growling bitch. Interrupted by a scream of metal. She was not for me. Keep her; keep all her history.

I don’t scream fight breathe blink pant struggle fumble slip burn care.

#

“Barnyard”

Why does your stomach go cold. I don’t know.

“Where did you meet him?”

“He guest-taught my Bible as lit class.”

“Great Christ on a cracker!”

Why did I ever like fireworks. Did I ever like fireworks. I don’t know.

I was driving underneath and getting left in the dust. He didn’t kick it up. It was just the wind biting past on its way into town, beating up the road. He was going to have a three hour wait, at least, if he got all the way to Chesaw. Such primitive land bound transportation. Leave it all in the dust, under the wind, in a hole.

What did we do wrong. I don’t know.

I told you not to no I can’t pretend it wasn’t my told you not to kick the shit out of the if it wasn’t mine then whose don’t even go a second breath without admitting what am I going to tell her watch the sky watch the stars watch the sky watch the stars a new one he’s so much older than you will ever be dead is not an older we made something of ourselves I made something an expanding ball of gas up.

And then I came home. There was no one there. I went over to his house. Kelly usually comes out running when she hears Laddy give up, but she was hard into a book on Essa’s lap. A battered old copy of The Way Things Work. She said, Hi, daddy. I meant to wave but nothing was getting across from my brain to spinal cord. Everything on automatic pilot. Essa looked up and she knew it. She lifted Kell off her lap. She said, Can you go get me a drink of water, and Kell said, I can and will.

Essa came over to me and said, What happened. I had to tell her I didn’t know. She kissed me long enough to lose a lungful of air through her nose. I breathed it in and smelled thick something. She backed away and looked at me. Kelly brought her glass of water. We all drank from it.

The first time I saw him, he was frowning. It’s the look he got when he was concentrating on anything. He was chopping wood and trying hard not to hit his leg. He missed the block and caught his foot. I always felt it was my fault because it was right then that I had called, Hello. Even though he must have heard the truck. Things were bad enough. I left Kell with the Essa she had never met and drove back into town with a bleeding professor in my passenger seat. He talked down to me, but I didn’t really hold it against him, since I never made it through my freshman year. He asked me what books I like and that was the start of the snowball.

I went outside when Kell’s head fell over onto Essa’s shoulder. It was a backdrop night. I couldn’t move either of their faces in my head; they floated there and wouldn’t sink or fly. There wasn’t anything to do. I opened up the barn. We made a good start on the second capsule, in case something went wrong with the first one. I asked him if he had ever been skydiving. No, he said. It wouldn’t be much fun to come back down.

The lights were all on in his house. Essa was standing by the kitchen window with the phone in her shoulder. She was washing the dishes. I stared at her. She had one thin braid sliding down the side of her face, just touching at the corner of her eye. It was the imperfection that drew my attention. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, didn’t know who she’d be calling. The police in Chesaw; the ambulance. For more light and screaming. Oiled metal hinges.

I got in the truck and drove off. Three hours plus pulling over to the side. The wind was getting harder. Even more in the dust. I drove hard, imagining that it was my heart in the pistons, shattering over and over in the surging exploding never sleeping power. The trees bent the beams from my headlights around their branches. In the future, all our greens will be more vivid. And you won’t be able to see it. Not with naked eyes, not without consumer surgery. Just an old kid from Virginia. Nothing got back to me. I couldn’t see.

It would have right if I had flipped and crushed my spine, severing my brain from body. Would never be able to put their faces further than the bridge between my thoughts. But it was nothing flashy. I just hit a drainage ditch and heard something scrape and tear out from the bottom of the truck. There was a flashlight in the glove box. I took it out and peered under the chassis. Nothing I couldn’t fix in the barn. But not out here. I didn’t know how long I had been driving. Long enough to take me all night to walk home.

I kept my eyes up the whole time, thinking maybe his light would echo back to me, and maybe this second time I could be happy for him. The second time it would be warm light, not incinerating hot. But the god-damned universe is unresponsive; you say, Hello, and you can wait forever for the sound to make it back to you. But if it does, it won’t be in response. It will come up behind you, take you by surprise, tear the fucking ears right off your head. Didn’t know you had it in you, did you.

We’ll all be long dead by the time he makes it back. Not even mistress moon bothered to reply. She just sat there in the cold sky, pulling at the tides. My heartbeat slowed to the rhythm of my steps. I made it home in time for breakfast. No one was awake. I mustered a little enthusiasm, like before, and killed myself straight to sleep.

#

Kelly

I’ll feed you more when he turns the light out for me. He does when he goes out.

They made me go to bed. Not just dad, like sometimes. Go to bed, Kell. No, it was both of them, one after the other. Because it was nine.

Nine died, too. I didn’t look at him enough and now I really don’t want to. I buried him out back. He didn’t get a cross or nothing. I didn’t want to have to look at it. I’ll forget where I buried him. I even asked Essa to make the grass grow over him. She wouldn’t do it. And she wouldn’t teach me how. She just looked at me funny and told me to go to bed. Not then, but after.

I’m tired of going to bed. I don’t get sleepy. My blankets get all hot when I lie still for too long so then when I really am ready to go to sleep I’m too uncomfortable to do it. Then I need a drink of water.

Last night, I went into daddy’s room to ask if it was all right. He wasn’t there, but that’s a so what. I called over to Essa’s house to ask if it was all right. I let it ring fifteen times. And when she answered, she said, May I already be a winner, and dad made a chirping strangled noise in the background. It might have been a laugh.

He shouldn’t turn off all the lights when he goes over. It’s hard to find our place in the dark. There’s the hill back near somewhere where Nine got buried and it looks black at night and our house looks invisible in front of it. I tripped over the porch last night and it got me with a splinter. Not one of the ones that sticks straight up and down that you can grab. Going to sleep didn’t help that, either. Like they think it will.

What did I learn about today? She didn’t take me to school, now. I learned that when you bend grass over it doesn’t break. I learned that spiders can tell you’re not a fly when you play with their webs. I learned that there is a pink moon. Dad left his music out. I didn’t spend that much time outside. I sat real hard around the launch site and concentrated just on one little piece of dirt but it didn’t even turn a little green. I let my eyes go crossed and tried not to blink until the colors in my eyes were jumping around and dancing and things started to disappear and I thought, This is what it feels like, but still nothing happened. So I went back inside to listen to daddy’s music. He was with her.

They want me to go to sleep, always. Because I’m not supposed to cry when I get a sliver. That’s a lie. I saw daddy crying. It made me stop.

He called me smartie. I hate that. I hate that he touches my hair when he says it. I hate that the blankets smell like heat and make me cough and it’s all my fault. I could run away. I tried that once. I didn’t get very far. It took the whole day. The house was invisible when we finally got back. I woke up just enough to pull my nose out of his flannel and see that I couldn’t see it. That morning he started out calling me princess and ended up calling me sweetie. Oh he doesn’t give a damn about me. I think I’d better go to sleep. Besides, I’m having to write smaller now. You’re getting full, my pet poem, and I think it’s just about time to put you away. Where every word means something, she said.

It’s not that bad tonight. Kinda cold. And the blankets smell like it. I’m going to go to sleep, and sleep like I did when he carried me home. They can’t tell me to fuck off when I already am.

I’ll feed you more when he turns the light out for me. He does when he goes out.

They made me go to bed. Not just dad, like sometimes. Go to bed, Kell. No, it was both of them, one after the other. Because it was nine.

Nine died, too. I didn’t look at him enough and now I really don’t want to. I buried him out back. He didn’t get a cross or nothing. I didn’t want to have to look at it. I’ll forget where I buried him. I even asked Essa to make the grass grow over him. She wouldn’t do it. And she wouldn’t teach me how. She just looked at me funny and told me to go to bed. Not then, but after.

I’m tired of going to bed. I don’t get sleepy. My blankets get all hot when I lie still for too long so then when I really am ready to go to sleep I’m too uncomfortable to do it. Then I need a drink of water.

Last night, I went into daddy’s room to ask if it was all right. He wasn’t there, but that’s a so what. I called over to Essa’s house to ask if it was all right. I let it ring fifteen times. And when she answered, she said, May I already be a winner, and dad made a chirping strangled noise in the background. It might have been a laugh.

He shouldn’t turn off all the lights when he goes over. It’s hard to find our place in the dark. There’s the hill back near somewhere where Nine got buried and it looks black at night and our house looks invisible in front of it. I tripped over the porch last night and it got me with a splinter. Not one of the ones that sticks straight up and down that you can grab. Going to sleep didn’t help that, either. Like they think it will.

What did I learn about today? She didn’t take me to school, now. I learned that when you bend grass over it doesn’t break. I learned that spiders can tell you’re not a fly when you play with their webs. I learned that there is a pink moon. Dad left his music out. I didn’t spend that much time outside. I sat real hard around the launch site and concentrated just on one little piece of dirt but it didn’t even turn a little green. I let my eyes go crossed and tried not to blink until the colors in my eyes were jumping around and dancing and things started to disappear and I thought, This is what it feels like, but still nothing happened. So I went back inside to listen to daddy’s music. He was with her.

They want me to go to sleep, always. Because I’m not supposed to cry when I get a sliver. That’s a lie. I saw daddy crying. It made me stop.

He called me smartie. I hate that. I hate that he touches my hair when he says it. I hate that the blankets smell like heat and make me cough and it’s all my fault. I could run away. I tried that once. I didn’t get very far. It took the whole day. The house was invisible when we finally got back. I woke up just enough to pull my nose out of his flannel and see that I couldn’t see it. That morning he started out calling me princess and ended up calling me sweetie. Oh he doesn’t give a damn about me. I think I’d better go to sleep. Besides, I’m having to write smaller now. You’re getting full, my pet poem, and I think it’s just about time to put you away. Where every word means something, she said.

It’s not that bad tonight. Kinda cold. And the blankets smell like it. I’m going to go to sleep, and sleep like I did when he carried me home. They can’t tell me to fuck off when I already am.

#

Essa

I’d do a lot of things to keep the world from emulating television. I’d take a shot, for or at anyone you’d care to name. I’d write the most persuasive letter in the language. I’d certainly stay up all night pretending to listen to a crazy melting man. Bernard just wouldn’t leave. He was this close to handing me a whip and asking me for thirty-nine lashes. I kept telling him it wasn’t his fault. I kept to myself that worse things have happened.

He wouldn’t shut up. He apologized, and kept on apologizing until he had run out of clichés. Then I made him a cup of tea and tried to make him believe that, even though I don’t give a damn about him, I like when things are calm between us. Not in so many words.

The tea didn’t stay down long. I took him into my bedroom and put him to sleep before cleaning up his mess. Can’t cry in a full face of ammonia solution. Can’t help but gag.

When I was done, the house was quiet. For the first time, quiet. And all the time in the world to think.

I slept on the couch.

Continue to part 3…

Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

Go to part 2 | part 3…

Bernard

I am a man of my failures. I don’t mind saying it. I didn’t mind, when the rivet gun stopped echoing, saying it to Lane. He gave me this look, more You’re a man? than What failures?

Then he went back to work, pounding metal into metal with a sound like teacher’s fist through the chalkboard. Before long it was, Do you know what Essa said and we knocked off for the funny little squares of bread with too much peanut butter that Kell made for us.

Kinda watched Lane as he ate, slopping down the thick sandwiches with a mug of milk. He told me once that when he was a kid he forgot how to swallow. Anything he tried to put down got stuck halfway in his craw. Grilled cheese sandwiches were the worst, he said. All those slimy strings crowded against the wall of his esophagus, stretching, he felt, straight down into his lungs. So now he can’t have a meal without something to drink with.

Kell was hanging on my elbow, digging her fingers through my denim.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She loosened up a click or two. “What do you want for dinner, daddy?”

I laughed and switched off an impulse to tug her onto my lap. She was getting too heavy for that.

“I think I’ll take care of it, sweetie.”

She gave me both eyes loaded with buck shot.

“Sweetie is a candy.” Her voice carried the tone of, If anyone should know that, Dad, it’s you, and, What’s your problem. Are you going deaf again. She has such a deep voice for a little girl. I kissed her, caught her thin brown hairs between my lips.

“All right then. Smartie. You take a bath today?”

“Yes daddy.”

“You use soap?”

“Nope.” She grinned at me, gap-toothed and perfect. She’s gonna write songs when she grows up. She’s gonna grow a garden to keep her busy while she’s waiting for her inspiration, while the soil is loose. I don’t make these things up. She heard me listening to Nick Drake as he sang about things he knew and she told me right then what she was gonna do when she grew up.

I almost believed her. Then she kept going. Turns out, she was gonna do quite a few things when she grew up. It was a few things, actually. She got it down to two, despite my laughing. Thought I was laughing with her. But she got it down to two. She’s gonna write songs or she’s gonna draw comic books. So I bought her some coloring books the next time I was down in Tonasket. Got her a Kermit on the Moon and an old sun bleached My Little Pony. She colored all the ponies green.

Gives her something to do until I buy her a piano, which should be any decade now. Lane caught me looking at a Yamaha flyer one morning.

“They don’t sell liquid oxygen,” he said.

“I know. I’m looking for something for Kelly.”

“Her birthday’s coming up already? Man, that kid grows like a weed.”

“I do not!” she yelled from the living room. My kid’s got the most sensitive ears. Lane gave me a cup of coffee from my own machine and kicked at my boots under the table.

“Cuhmon, man. We’re getting there.”

With a piano, you can make, from a few small sounds, a sort of pillar. You can keep building on it until you make it too high up to breathe from. Try to make it as high as God, because try as He might, He can’t bring down music. It’s His own invention, but if He doesn’t like it: tough.

He, or his buddies, also made fire. Can’t forget fire. And I wonder if God really does work through people, through our leaders and our feeders and our administrative bull hogs. Because if He does, then He’s trying to take fire away from us. I don’t think there’s anybody here who wants that. Nah. I don’t think there’s anybody here who notices.

I followed Lane out to the barn. It’s funny how a smell will only trigger memory when you smell it. A picture hangs itself inside your brain and you can think you’re looking at it every day, but a smell can’t be revisited like that. I have to open the doors, have to smell the old hay before I remember splinters and diesel smoke, wide roads of corn and wheat and speckled animals. A lot happens in a life to bury childhood. Growing up is like a slowed down avalanche that you can breathe through.

It felt good. I ain’t a quick moving guy; I’m stuck in time. I’m only one place any second. And when I’m back there with my simple dirty growing up and my nights with a flashlight reading my daddy’s old Heinleins under the covers, I don’t even want to be anywhere else.

Lane and I did rock paper scissors for the arc-welder and he won with rock crushes scissors. He grinned at me to tell me something was wrong between him and Essa again. It happens. Stuck the grin behind the blacker cup of the face plate and lit up the welder without waiting for me to turn away.

I took the rivet gun and went to work permanent marrying metal to metal, making the shell. My first sketches, the ones of the morning after Lane and I had our talk, always looked a bit like the paintings on the front of old editions of The Stars My Destination or The Rolling Stones. The old impractical designs that look as though they ought to soar just sitting still. Kelly liked them, but she was only two or three then and liked anything I touched. I put them up on my fridge with little magnets in the shapes of colored letters. The H held up a profile. From the P dangled an overhead view with the long sweeping dorsal fin chasing the hull down into Buck Rogers territory.

Lane had laughed and really meant it. And Essa, well, she has those eyes of hers. Vanity eyes, mood eyes, whatever. She’s never let me in on the secret. They were smooth brown, then, almost plastic. I still don’t know what that meant.

A hiss, pop, “Shit,” from Lane. I shielded my eyes and looked over. The welder was out. I almost said, Ran out of gas? but stopped myself before I looked stupid in front of him.

“Generator died again,” he said. “When are you going to get something, you know, reliable?”

“When Patty wins her next case. She promises.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll take care of it.” He slipped out into the afternoon. Kell would be yelling at the TV, telling it to come back on over and over until she gave up and started inventing dialogue for the dim grey reflections on its face. Did you hear what the refrigerator said? No, no, I didn’t. What did the refrigerator said?

He said that no one could survive without him.

He’s full of it. Meat and mustard and peanut butter. She does little voices for each one and there’s just something about listening to her try to be deep and scary. It rattles her tiny teeth and puts a giggle in her eye. Reminds me of Patty’s own set of voices. One for cute, one for serious, one for distance. Moving her thin mouth like a ventriloquist.

Lane came back on the sound of generator hum. We worked the rest of the afternoon not really talking. Won’t be long now until we can start on the innards, on the propulsion. We’ve got a good system worked out with the models. Should be able to carry that over to something larger. The launch site is rotted with old eggs that fell out of the payload bays when we were testing. It’s kind of funny, the rockets making fun of us. Just takes time, then we can thumb our noses back at Earth along with them.

When it started getting dark, Lane took off the mask and blinked his gummy eyes. He clapped me on the shoulder and announced he couldn’t see a thing. We sat on the dirt floor, a lantern hanging unlit from one of the rafters, until his night vision showed up. He said a couple things like, Full shift tomorrow, and other stuff about work that I didn’t really care about. Then he limped on home.

I shut the barn door behind myself, rested my palms just on the tips of the rough wood slivers and watched the sun fall off. There are a million, billion stars; I just want one.

#

Kelly

This is my pet poem. I give it things like things, like Essa told me to. Not like I give Nine. Nine bit me and made me bleed so she had to have carrots with blood on them. I gave those words to my poem but I had to imagine it making its own face and I had to use mine. Mine didn’t work so well.

I don’t think I’ll give it to dad. He doesn’t understand a lot of things on the TV and what Essa said was, If it’s yours, you understand it. And this is mine and I can take care of it of you.

You don’t know it but you had a bigger brother. Or a sister and she got written over. Because it was dark and dad just had one of his ideas. I heard his light go on but didn’t see it with the blankets over my head and my flashlight on anyways. He banged his knee or something on the side of the door. That’s why he said what he said. Those words bring a poem down, Essa. Maybe he was a little blind because of going night to day to night again. He didn’t look at what he grabbed. So he wrote over your brother or sister with a red crayon.

When I gave him a sausage and an egg I made myself for breakfast in the morning, he was staring and his eyes were all colored with crayon. He didn’t understand what he scribbled. He was holding it in one hand and he crumpled it up with one hand, opening and closing his fist like a mouth, gobble gobble, until I had to make you.

Then he called mommy and they sounded just like yesterday so I went to Essa’s house. She was on the porch in her bathrobe and writing and smelling like coffee breath. She gave me a hug with one arm. She was all warm from rubbing herself too hard with the towel. She does that to get all the cold water off.

I said, “I’m going to play in the forest today.”

She said, “With all your little friends, huh?” and licked the tip of her pen to get the ink wet and turn her tongue black.

“That’s right,” I said. “Fawns and beavers.”

“What’s that? Prawns and lemurs?” She wrote it down. Hey, I said. That’s mine; that goes in my poem. Too late, she said. It’s mine now. And she tickled me with one hand which is more than enough.

Lane came outside. He forgot to close the door.

“Ready for school, kid?” he asked me. He was looking right at the sun. I made a face. Poems don’t need school. They need words. He wouldn’t have seen me anyway because of the big green-orange splotch on his eyes right where the sun used to be. Essa let her robe slip to grab up as much of a sun beam as she could.

She said, “Today we’re going to learn about geology.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Rocks.”

“Just rocks?”

“We’ll go skipping stones.”

“Have fun with that,” said Lane. He took his coffee out to the barn to get in an hour of playing before it was time for him to get in Laddy and go down the hill. Essa played a few thumb wars with me and I let her win. She needed to. Dad went out and paused before he slid the barn door open. He looked over at us and gave me a little wave. Essa waved back. I won that one.

Today, I didn’t say, we’re going to learn about her super powers. How she makes everything all green just by looking at it. Except for in the No Kell Zone, which is where I don’t have any words for at all. I asked her why she doesn’t work there and all she said was that she tried and couldn’t pay attention. You can’t do anything if you can’t pay attention.

That’s why Nine bit me. He forgot I was me because he wasn’t paying attention, so he bit me. Right on the finger where I hold my pencil. That’s why he just sits in his cage all day with his nose going up and down. His eyes don’t go if his head doesn’t. He never just sits still and watches the TV.

Sometimes I try to watch it in the black bits of his eyes but he always moves too much and I can’t tell if it’s the guy with the wavy hair or the girl with the purple suit who says that the president was waving and was very happy for us.

#

Bernard

He’s a rat bastard for it, but I can’t fault him, I guess.

He doesn’t move so fast anymore, and he hasn’t dropped those nine hundred bucks to get Laddy’s carburetor fixed, either. It’s kinda funny sometimes to watch him wobble out to their driveway and climb up into the cab and drive off no faster than walking speed. It’s funny when it isn’t for the firewood, the food, and the parts we need.

But it’s not completely his fault.

The mill started rolling belly up last year; it’s taking it a while. It’s sad. Everybody knows where this is going, but there’s nothing to do but watch. It’s like watching a whale bleed to death. So now they don’t have enough money coming in to pay every pay check every week. They give them all out, anyway, because somebody would squawk if they didn’t, Lane says. They need to start pushing the checks back until around quitting time, Lane says; they hand them out at nine in the morning so everybody’s eyeing each other all day long, praying for accidents to happen to their friends, but not really because workers comp has to come out before salaries.

Quitting time’s a mad dash for the time cards and the parking lot. There have been speeding tickets on the way to the bank. Lane says it’s usually the last dozen or so that get nothing, but last week it was fifteen, and this week he said he had no chance at all.

One guy, Lenny or something, has a wife and a kid and both of them are sick. So he had a talk with the bosses and now they let him off an hour early every day, Because, they say, he’s got a long commute. That’s fine in the winter, but these days it’s nothing. Doesn’t even get dark until ten.

Lane came back empty handed and Essa didn’t even say anything to him. She just opened the door, saw him by himself, and shut the door again. Got to get a move on, my friend. I could fault him for it. He just swings his arms when he walks, as though he doesn’t have a care in the world.

Sorta true. All his real cares are up and out there, I guess. But I still got mad at him. He came out to the barn after he had Essa’s leftovers and sat on a bale of hay. Neither of us have horses, but we keep the hay around the insulate the parts. I was working on number two.

“Didn’t get it, again,” he said.

“I figured.”

“What are we gonna do, man? Ain’t gonna be that long until winter. Can’t do much then, can we.”

“Not much. And you still don’t say ‘ain’t’ right.”

He took a piece of straw in his fingers and split it in halves, fourths lengthwise.

“You fire off any today?”

“Just the one. Forty-eight, or whatever it was. Got it written down on the sheet.”

“Yeah. Good.” He dropped the straw. “What’d we get?”

“I dunno. I haven’t done the math yet. It’s over there.” I bobbed my head at the manger and the three ring binder lying open on it. He got up and took a pencil from the jar we keep on one of the low rafters. He bent over the papers, flipping them back and forth; I listened to the rustle and measured what I could of two’s propulsion chambers.

“Didja bring any of the stuff back?” I said.

“Couldn’t. But I talked to that guy at the hospital.”

“Cal.”

“Yeah, Cal. How’d you meet him, anyways?”

“Saw him at the theater.”

“Well, he said he’d do what he can. They’re not exactly swimming in patients down there. Hell, the mill probably gives them half what they get. So they’ve got some extra nitrogen from removing warts. He seemed like a nice enough guy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice enough.” I stood up and just about broke my back. Sitting too long with a file in one hand and a jeweler’s magnifying lens crammed in one eye. “How does it look?” I asked.

“Pretty good, actually. Solid velocity. Scaled up, got a payload of about two hundred pounds.”

“Well, that’d be you,” I said and grinned. I could feel my stiff beard and mustache trying to hold it back. I clapped him on the shoulder and I think he felt it. “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He followed me out. Even in August, our breath was steaming. The one halogen bulb we hung above the barn door buzzed its light right through us, gave us faint shadows. He looked up, right into it, and flexed his jaw. He whispered something like, God.

I told him not to trip over anything on his way back to the house. He nodded and laughed out of his nose at me, like Essa does. I wonder if he learned it from her or she from him. Or maybe they both invented it. That’s gotta happen sometimes. All these wide thoughtful people in the wide shrinking world; there’s gotta be overlap.

It’s hard to be angry at him for long when it’s his world up here. He’s where he wants to be when he comes home, and that’s a bit contagious. When I moved here with Kelly, we didn’t know if we’d be able to last. And we have. Whatever happens next is after everything.

Patty called and woke Kell up.

“Go back to bed, honey,” I said loud enough for the phone to hear me. It was something about a lawyer, something about a conference call. The lawyer wanted to tell me a few good stories about how to behave, but I didn’t feel like listening and, besides, my phone’s almost ten years old and doesn’t have the guts to handle that kind of technology.

I got so quiet she told me to yell at her. God damn it, I had to yell at something. And Lane and Essa were over there behind their green curtains. I could see their shadows tilting and twisting and her hair draped back over her head like a flag. I put the phone down and blanked out a couple of million years with my hands. I did it, and then Patty wondered what the hell was wrong, so I told her, I’m living in the wilderness, now. I don’t know of this “conference call” you speak so fluently of.

She got real bitchy after that. Made it easier to go to sleep.

#

Essa

I found out the worst thing about myself. It came along at the end of a string of worst things. I heard my voice crack during our nightly argument, when I was stating the most important of all my positions. I reasoned carefully with him about economics and responsibility and right on supply and demand, my voice gave up and I ended up saying, You son “of a beep of a bitch.” I inhaled and tried it again, there, and I’m pretty confident he got the hint both times.

He got quiet after a while, which gave me that much more room to be loud. There are laws of conservation for just everything. He walked into the bedroom and shut the door softly enough that I didn’t hear the click and walked right into it, thinking I could push it open. That’s not the worst thing, finding out that you’ve grown up into the teenage klutz you missed out on being the first time around, but it’s pretty close.

I went ahead and slept on the couch. It’s older, more comfortable than the bed. The television woke me up with some morning show that he had turned on before he went out to play in the barn. I don’t know what it is they do out there all day. I mean, I know what it is they do, but I don’t see how it could take so long. Like I don’t see why it takes so long to make a movie. An entire afternoon for eight seconds of data, an entire morning for a few microns; it doesn’t fit with my opinion of what a day is.

Lately, a day is not getting paid to teach Kelly the same things over and over again with different words. The kid doesn’t notice, though, so it’s okay; and I guess she’s fun to be around. I would have liked to have had the chance to meet her mother, though. But, even when he’s drunk, Bernard won’t say a thing.

I woke up after dreaming about rescuing Merry and Pippin from a squadron of B-52 bombers and thought I heard the announcer telling me to get up, my house is on fire, and someone has murdered everything dear to me. Turned out it was some family in Kentucky that had lost their house in a fire they started themselves to cover up the accidental death of their babysitter. She had fried herself in the toaster.

“Should have unplugged the thing,” I said to the television. Even after our century under buzzing wires, there are still some people that haven’t gotten it figured out. Our behavior around electronics hasn’t found its way into instinct, yet. Another story came on quickly to wash out the funny bitter taste of stupidity. Seems that the union had just officially pardoned its first ever black bear, thanks to the president’s intervention. The bear, called “Lubba” by the zoo that was holding it, back in the part the visitors don’t see, had terrorized the students at Western. First kid that saw it was working in an all night coffee shop. The bear pulled up to the drive through. They didn’t say what he ordered.

Harmless and basically good, said the president. “Yeah, just don’t open your mouth when my Lane gets back,” I told the television. And that’s when I got it. A quiet house, my husband hiding in the barn with his tools and potential energy, my only friend a six-year old who stutters over little concepts but can still get me on the big ones, and I was talking to the television.

Life wasn’t so bad — hell, it wasn’t bad at all — when he was teaching in Tacoma. We had a nice little place with a lawn that was at least green. I got all my credits paid for because he was faculty. Tuesday nights, Starbucks with the girls in my sociology program. Thursday nights, poker which only ever lasted a few hands before I was grinning my way into an argument with one of his colleagues. Saturday nights, home and the same couch, a bottle of wine and a little more. That was good for me. All of it was. There was always something to look forward to, at least. Something specific. Not these vague dreams of one day being paid. Way to set your sights on the mountains, Don Quixote.

That night, I started things off a little different, with the echoes of “Congratulations, Lubba” keeping me from going too far off course.

“I want to ride into town with you tomorrow,” I said.

“Why?” He smelled like metal, or burnt wires; I’m no good at telling between the two.

“I want to find a job.”

I knew he’d take it badly and silently. You’re a cripple, I was saying. You can’t be trusted to care for your family. “But you’re my only family.” That’s right; you can’t take care of me. You need to let me help. I need to go to bed, that’s what I need. But go back a few thoughts. I’m not your only family. You’re taking care of Bernard, and his daughter, too, indirectly. I had run myself ragged with all our conversation before he answered.

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t get off until four-thirty. You might want to bring a book.” He leaned back and chewed on the fish fillets I had microwaved for him. “Slim pickings, though. Lots of people are leaving the area, you know.”

“I know. I read the paper, too.”

“Every week.”

“Yeah.”

“You could probably try the library. They’re usually looking for somebody part time.”

“I know.”

I thought we had a bottle of wine leftover from all we had gotten when we were first married. I poked around in the root cellar he had dug into the hillside, but I didn’t find anything there. A few dusty jars of home made pickle relish we were saving for the next time his mother came and visited. A few glass containers of fruit, slowly spoiling in their sweet fermenting mess.

#

Kelly

You don’t get very hungry. I get hungry all the time. That’s why we’ve got so much peanut butter and so many dirty spoons. And there’s a bunch of stains on the window that I can’t get off with water and daddy’s old socks. One smudge makes a little frown over Essa’s front door and sometimes I trap her under it. I whisper at the top of my lungs so she’ll hear me screaming for her to move and then I move my head to squish her. Just for fun in the mornings.

She was wearing something over her bathrobe this morning. She was showing her back to me so all I saw was that it was something dark blue and probably cold, then Lane came out the door without his head on. I moved and gave it to him. He walked in front and she came behind him, tapping her fingers on the air. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look over my way. I went out the front door to ask her if I had to do anything but I only got to say, Ess– before Laddy’s doors slammed at the same time. Slamming’s the only way to get them to stay on.

I made some more smudges and waited for daddy to tell me to get my pants on. He was out in the barn. I could tell even though I couldn’t hear him yelling or making the sound like a jet flying over real low. My arms went to sleep while I was staring at the trees around the stream and trying to have a super power too. I watched TV but I didn’t learn anything. Then I heard Laddy bouncing over the lip in the driveway that we share but don’t use. I went out on the front porch in my bare feet, jumping over the splinters, because Essa should have been back to take me around on school. It was Lane. He gave me a wave with both hands, twisting his wrists like the people in black and white trying to scare away a tiger. He looks all the time like something off of TV. I think it’s the mustache, even though he fidgets with it and it doesn’t hang straight. I don’t even know if they have a TV. I’ve only been to her house once. Really to it. I know the outside of it because the outside is part of mine, but the insides are probably all weird.

They made us dinner the first Christmas we were here. Daddy thought it was a good idea and he still thinks so. So we ate mushrooms and they drank wine and dad gave me a taste. He told me it was sweet.

Essa laughed a lot while I was trying to go to sleep. That’s when she said she was a school teacher and I saw Lane scowl at her. They thought I had gone to sleep but I was watching them. Their house smelled too different for me to go all the way to sleep. So I had my eyes most of the way closed and I remember wondering why my eyelashes look black to me but brown to everyone else.

I followed Lane out to the barn, making his tracks in the dust look like three or four people before the wind came up and I had to plug my nose to keep the dirt from getting all inside. Lane slid aside the big doors. He asked me to help push. I did with my finger tips. I had to but I had to watch out for splinters.

“Hey, Barnyard,” he said. I stood in the corner, out of the way.

“Hey, Lane,” dad said back. “Is it New Year’s or something?” Lane was reaching up on a shelf for something to hit with.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re home early.”

“Yeah. Don’t tell Essa. I got let go.” Dad didn’t say anything, so I guess Lane thought it was safe to say, “God. It’s a beautiful day out there.”

Daddy made a mousey sound of metal scratching something else metal. He held up one of the small ones in both hands and grinned. “Want to poke at it?”

“Let’s do.” They carried it together, dad at the front and Lane at the back. It was really bright when the sun got to it. In that one line straight across the top like a zipper. That one bit that’s too hot to touch, even reflected, like Essa said the moon is. Too hot to touch sounds stupid.

“Watch out,” I said. Dad was stepping in all the fried eggs splotching on the ring of dirt in the middle of the green field. I sat down far enough away that I was in the grass. I could feel tiny spiders crawling on the blades, dipping and twisting them against my legs.

Daddy and Lane sometimes slap each other and sometimes hug each other with one arm. They were kinda doing both, doing things in between where they would butt heads and laugh or punch each other in the chest with the same idea as tugging on dad’s shirt cuffs. I could smell them over here, both like Essa in the morning, the smell of their house. They stuck wires to the metal and Lane spent a while getting angry because his fingers were so thick. Then they backed up. Lane pulled a scrap of paper from his back pocket and scribbled something down on it. Dad took my arms and spun me up into the air, the thing like the TV remote pressing into my armpit.

“Oof. Gotta take a few giant steps back, kid,” he said. This is the part that Essa made okay. I don’t think they trust her very much to keep them safe. I hung around daddy’s neck and tried to move my thumbs so I wouldn’t choke him. Lane started counting down and getting slower between each number. Finally, halfway through “one,” daddy hit the button on the remote and I thought about cartoons suddenly turning into real people who talk quickly over the music.

The little one pushed itself off with smoke and headed straight for the sun. The moon was out, too. On a summer day it couldn’t help it. I told daddy not to worry. He was laughing. So was Lane. I watched the smoke fall apart. Why doesn’t it fall out of the sky.

I kicked away from daddy and ran back to the house, looking for Essa. The TV was on with “Calamitous Cat” so I got a jar of peanut butter. A caterpillar crawled out onto my knees. He must have hidden in me from the grass. I fed him to Nine.

So now you shouldn’t be hungry for a while.

#

Bernard

Kelly was watching “The Muppet Movie,” but not even that could get me down. Another launch like this afternoon’s, and I’d feel confident enough to shoot my friend into the stratosphere. He was already confident, but he’d been thinking about it longer than I.

I’m going to go back there some day…

She looked awfully cute with her short legs splayed out around the set and her shoulders hunched and her face way too close to the cathodes. I cleared my throat to see if that would do anything. It didn’t. I left her there. Made myself a cup of cocoa and took it out on the porch.

A bit after he finished whooping over the calculations, Lane had gotten back into Laddy and headed to town. He wanted to take Essa out on their one remaining credit card and I couldn’t talk him from it. Wasn’t twenty yards down the road when the radiator overheated. Jealous of the rockets, I guess. I came out with a gallon of tap water and we got it down.

“You guys doing all right?” I asked him through the cloud of steam.

“She’s just not as keen on sacrifice,” he said. “It’s funny, but when we moved here, she made me think that it was perfect for her. She painted and she cooked and she even tried doing a garden. This was a couple of years before you came up.” He shrugged. “What can you do? Got a dream and a few breaths of time to find it in. We’ll do good.”

“Damn straight,” I said. “Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of good.”

“That’s gonna be enough for me and a few bags of Doritos,” he said. “I may just not come back down.” He got back into the cab and stuttered off down the road. I could hear the suspension rattling over all the little ridges formed by alternate rainfall and sun.

It was still early, so I thought I’d go in and read for a while before dinner. Kelly was still watching Kermit and the gang fight for fame and fortune. Some fight. They walk into the office and, simply by dint of tenacity, they have success dropped on them.

Bad sign. I was arguing with fate over the resolution of a children’s movie.

“Want to turn that off, sweetie?” I asked. “Daddy’s going to read a book.”

“Will you read it to me?” she asked back.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s your book.” She still hadn’t turned from or turned off the movie. And now the credits were starting and the music was happy and it only took them two hours. Still, I thought, Gonzo never made it back there. Still a bad sign, Bernie.

To compensate, I got Alex Haley’s Roots down from the shelf. It was a copy that had belonged to my dad, back in Virginia. I had picked it out of a box of things mom was getting ready to donate to charity after he died. I didn’t think that charity would want it. Not that it’s a bad book; I’ve got a few fond memories of dad leaning back in his tweed recliner, smoking his pipe and letting the curls sink into Haley’s prose. It was a paperback, and the cover was so torn from use that most of the letters were gone.

“Ale Ha Ro,” I said.

“Not again,” said Kelly, making a face I could see reflected on the screen in the black space around the scrolling names. She stopped the tape anyway and got up.

“Rewind,” I reminded. She bent over to push the button. When she crawled up into my lap and put her head sideways on my chest, I said, “Forget to put your panties on this morning?” She gave me a glare very much like one of her mother’s and explained,

“It’s summer.” She stuck her nose into the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and inhaled. “You smell like smoke,” she said.

I carefully split the book open and started reading out loud, trying to move my mouth as slowly as possible so my tongue would not dry out before she got tired of listening.

I could smell her almost-blonde hair making room for itself in the summer air, thick as it was with the scents of other things more potent, far more beautiful. She got nothing of my pitch black color; everything from her mother.

Patty called again. She was being sick and nice. Nice for her. Telling me that she just wanted to see us and asking, Would you like to meet for dinner some night. I said that would be an awfully expensive dinner. Three hundred miles of dinner. She said we could meet halfway and I said, What, at the summit of Steven’s Pass? Yeah sure. The ski resort’s got great food. I heard her cough a few times, deeply. There had to be someone else in the room with her, because I heard a voice say, That’s all right, but it sure wasn’t hers. Hers doesn’t say things like that. And isn’t male, anyways.

I told her she may as well just send me last month’s check, and the one from two months ago, and we could pretend we had all met for dinner. And if she dips her fingers into cold water and then slaps it on her cheek, it’ll be just as if Kell had given her a kiss. For all she knows.

After Patty, some girl named Claritin rang. Said she was part of some recruiting committee back at Boeing and wanted to know if I’d be willing to come in for an interview. I told her, No, but thanks. Apparently they’ve been doing well for themselves since the Chinese started buying exclusively from the 797 line. That was the last thing I did when I was there. Some piece of the wing that you wouldn’t notice unless it fell off. Let the Chinese have ’em. They’re thinking too laterally and it won’t get them anywhere but here.

“Daddy?” Kelly said. Her little nose was flared. She does that just for fun. Got it from the rabbits we had.

“Yes’m?” I said.

“You stopped reading. Thought you’d gone to sleep. You can’t sleep yet.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too early to go to sleep.”

“Says you, smartie.”

“Says me.”

I read some more, going back a few paragraphs to see if she’d notice. She didn’t, which made me smile. It was nice to hear myself talk about the swaying of a cruel ship and glance outside at the mountains, not cruel, not moving, just heartless and real. It made everything else seem a little less so.

I put one hand to her ear and stroked my thumb along the trails of her hair. She was asleep before Essa and Lane got back.

#

Kelly

I wanted a pack of grape bubble gum and an ice cream waffle and a coloring book and a pair of Lubba slippers and something I’ve never seen before. Lane gave daddy the keys and said, Fill ’im up. And dad kinda smiled, kinda nodded, and said, Sure. Then Lane went back inside and slammed the door somehow without touching it.

Dad listened to me tell him things all the way from the driveway to the church to the store. But we didn’t stop when we got there. We pulled into the bank and I told him not to do the drive through. There’s a funny smell that comes out of those boxes that hiss and send the money around on what daddy said are called nomadics. I told him not to but he did anyway. That’s okay, because the real reason is that I don’t get to choose what flavor of sucker I want when we use the nomadics. I didn’t really feel like a sucker this time. Not with grape bubble gum and maybe a chocolate chip mint ice cream waffle.

Laddy almost ran over another car when he went out into the road. It was a woman and she pressed on her horn and then stopped and scowled at her finger. Then she gave us her finger. Daddy laughed and gave it back. Then he said,

“Don’t you learn from me, now, smartie pants. That works in the city, but not here. Here people know you.”

“Who was that?” I said.

“Pastor Chuck’s wife.” He laughed then and drove right on past the store. I was squirming in my seat, trying not to get too much dust on my legs and the green stripes on my dress.

“Aren’t we going to the store?” I asked.

“In a minute, honey. We need to check on something else, first.”

“Something for you and Lane?”

“Yup.”

“I want a present,” I said. I felt the two balls of hot water underneath my eyes and the thick snot in my throat, then I started to cry.

“Aw,” said dad, letting Laddy drive. “Someone put a bucket on that lip.” He went back to keeping his eyes on the road. We pulled into a parking lot that we barely fit into. It was in front of a red brick building that had two rows of darker red running across the wall under the windows.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is the hospital,” he said.

“Was I born here?”

“No,” he said, stomping on the click brake.

“Were you born here?”

“Nope. I was born in Virginia. Remember?”

“Where’s Virginia?”

“Dead and buried, little lady. Want to come in with me?” I slid across the dust. I lost one of my flip flops. It bounced under Laddy and dad had to reach under to get it out while I stood on one leg like the guy who brought the rain to Kapiti plain and waved at the police man.

I put my hand in daddy’s, even though his was all dry and dirty. I’d wash my hands before I ate the ice cream. Unless it looked really good. Then I’d just eat it. The sliding door didn’t open until I stuck my tongue out to lick at it. Daddy laughed and said,

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt much here.”

We went to a little moon desk. A woman sat behind it with her eyes glued on the door. She had blonde hair. She had curls so deep that they were black at the center. And not yellow black. Just black.

“Can I help you?” she said just perfect.

“I’m lookin’ for Cal,” said dad.

“Just a sec,” the woman said. Dad smiled at her while she poked something that was hiding under the lip of the desk. She talked in the phone and her voice echoed around me. It got me from both sides, kinda like a hug I couldn’t run away from.

“Cal, please come to the front desk. Cal to the front desk, please.” She said things twice in case I was too scared the first time to pay attention. I couldn’t help but think it was a good idea. Maybe I’ll use it. To start a new favorite word, I have to say to myself a few times before I go to sleep, while I’m under the covers. It doesn’t work if I do it before my prayers for some reason. So I say, God be a little closer, and then sneak under the blanket and say, Laddy buck Laddy buck. The next day, it’s all mine.

Dad leaned forward on the counter and called the lady some name. It was probably hers. He asked her how she was doing. She blew out all her air and made her eyes go all froggy. She said she was doing fine.

“Sure,” daddy said.

She giggled. A big guy with not much hair came around a corner. He put out a big hand and spoke in a funny small voice that I could make mine sound like if I wanted to.

“Hey there. Bernard, right?”

“That’s me.”

“Why don’t you come on around to my office.” Daddy tugged on me and I just about jumped on his leg to make him carry me. Just about.

We went outside and around the side of the building. I put my fingers on one of the dark red stripes and followed it through the flower beds where I could blame the line if I stepped on something precious. There was an alleyway that the big man got to first. It was gravelly and I got a sharp one caught under my big toe. I didn’t notice until I stepped down on it. I took off my flip flop quick to get whatever it was out in case it was a bug.

The big man was looking at me when I stood up. I stared back and picked my nose. He shook his head, grinning and not blinking. Then he slapped his hand across daddy’s shoulders and said,

“Lane tell yuh what I’m askin’?”

“Hundred, yeah?”

“That’ll do it.”

Dad took a lot of money out of his pocket and handed it away. The big man took it, fanned his face with the bills, and then he blinked.

“Be right back.” He took a stack of jangly keys from his pocket and opened a grey ugly door behind him. He kept the door propped open with his foot. The door closed and I could see he was wheeling a big green pipe with some kind of crown on top, only it wasn’t a good crown because it was silver.

“I better bring the truck around,” said dad.

“Good plan, son,” said the big man. Daddy patted me on the shoulder as he went by, saying,

“Stay put, hon.”

I sat down and pretended to get more rocks stuck in my toes. The sun was getting me and my cheeks were fighting back and I think they were winning. The big man was looking at me again. He started to say something, but Laddy growled and came up around behind him. He shrugged a little at his shoes and then wheeled the pipe around to Laddy’s butt. Daddy didn’t even look at me when he got out to help.

“I don’t even want to know what you guys need this for,” said the big man when the pipe was stuck between a couple of tires and was done squeaking over Laddy’s metal back.

Dad grinned and nodded.

“What do you need this for?” the big man asked.

I yelled at him and I threw the sharpest rocks and I got him I got him. Daddy bent down and said some things and then a little girl said — it was me said — It’s a good thing we’re where we are, ain’t it? And it was like getting a fever.

#

Voices

“Are you sure about this, man?”

“Hey. Which one of us is the rocket scientist?”

“Which one of us is an ass?”

“We could ask your daughter or my wife.”

“Kell would think we were talking about a donkey.”

“She’d know better. Essa’s bound to have taught her a few colorful metaphors by now..”

“Hm?”

“That’s what they do when they go waltzing around the mountain or work in the garden. Kelly calls it her school.”

“Couldn’t ask for a finer one.”

“No, sir. I couldn’t. She could, but I couldn’t.”

“Kelly loves it here.”

“Yeah; she doesn’t know any better. Or worse. Or something.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Saw you guys going at it the other day.”

“You like that? I call it *shadow boxing*. Keeps me in good hammering shape.”

“Not many of those days left, now.”

“Are you kidding? This is just the beginning. The tip of the bullet.”

“Hollow-point? No, wait, I’ve got it: buck shot.”

“Go straight to hell; do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred bucks. I’m being serious, my friend. We’re going to have our own fleet by the time we get dragged ass upwards to heaven. A thousand burnished demigods of the sky.”

“Cut it out, man.”

“Sorry. But yeah. So Essa’s got a job, now.”

“Yeah, but you don’t.”

“I’m going to file a lawsuit. Place shouldn’t be able to fire me just for being crippled.”

“Help, help, I can’t reach the on switch and it’s your fault.”

“Bastard. I mean I would file a lawsuit if I thought it would do any good, which it won’t. And if I thought they had the money, which they don’t.”

“And it would mean you’d have to tell her, anyway.”

“How do you know I haven’t told her already?”

“You’re acting all optimistic. You only do that when she’s mildly pissed at you–”

“Which seems to be her natural state.”

“—but not when she’s got a good reason to be angry.”

“So says mister Psychology professor?”

“Not everyone’s an intellectual. Some people actually spent their time reading instead. And you obviously didn’t have much of an education in economics.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Had to spend everything to get the nitro from Cal. That was my whole check. So it’s peanut-butter and bread for the next month. Good thing she likes it.”

“That shit. He told me a hundred bucks even.”

“That’s what it was. At first. I guess he didn’t take quite such a liking to me.”

“What’s going on, Bern? Stuff with Patty?”

“Just money stuff, I guess. I told you how when I was a kid I used to have a terrible time spending my Christmas money. I knew I could only spend it once, and that made it feel like everything I wanted was just made of fireworks. Buy ’em, then use ’em up and they’re gone forever.”

“You’re the kid who walked around the parties on the Fourth with just a sparkler and a vague look of apprehension, aren’t you?”

“That’s my dim, dark past. Like three years ago. So. Essa.”

“What about her.”

“You haven’t told her you got fired.”

“Let go. With compensation.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. A good reference.”

“Shit.”

“Perfect timing, I say. Look at this: we’ve got a barn full of damn fine work. I’m just itching to get ’er out and really open ’er up.”

“Figure of speech.”

“Sure.”

“I guess it’s okay, considering what we’re working with.”

“Two drunken slobs with girl troubles and pasts shut far away, embarking on short, flaming adventures in the heathen sky.”

“I didn’t hear you. I started getting indignant when you said drunken and stopped listening.”

“Sometimes I want to shoot you with a rivet gun.”

“We could have gotten these things to run on alcohol. Would have ended up cheaper in the long run.”

“Nope.”

“There’s your economics schooling coming into play again. She’s been teaching Kelly?”

“Yeah.”

“What sorts of things?”

“She used to be a school teacher; did you know that?”

“Had no idea. Must have been a bitch to have.”

“Hey now. That’s the woman I love.”

“No really: she’s like the one that makes the whole class learn that poem about Paul Revere and won’t let anybody out the door to recess until he’s finished everything on his lunch tray.”

“Actually… no. Never mind. I think she just talks to Kelly, actually.”

“What; coherently? This is my daughter?”

“I guess so.”

“That must get boring after a while.”

“It’s just about time for me to go get her.”

“You going to tell her?”

“She’s mad enough about this.”

“And waiting will make her less mad?”

“I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far.”

“Anger? Flames? Makeup melting; heat pouring off of face.”

“What was it Yeats thought. Every two thousand years?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some literature thing, right?”

“Right.”

“Damn you and your… damn you, renaissance man.”

“Right. I think it was two thousand years. He thought the world died and was reborn, or something like that. That history repeats itself in a sort of spiral.”

“I think he missed.”

“I think he had his sights set a bit too wide. This is all we’ve got. Now.”

“While you’re consumed with zeal, may I have your wife?”

“Take her. But you’ve got to go pick her up.”

“You don’t want that. Hey, she’ll say. What are you doing here? Where’s my hunk of a husband? There will be a gleam in her eye, inextinguishable. I’ll be forced to tell her that you are licking your wounds at home, trying to flash fry your insecurities with liquid fuel. She’ll be forced to settle with the best and let me have my way with her right there.”

“I won’t pay, you know.”

“I can handle that.”

“Bet you can.”

“Hey, man. Just joking.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“I know. You just got quiet.”

“I do that from time to time.”

“Losing that optimism?”

“I’ll catch you after dinner.”

“Yeah, all right.”

Continue to part 2…

Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

“I knew something was wrong when the gun spit flowers instead of bullets,” said Troy. He was sitting in the grass on a hill overlooking Brahmton, Mississippi. There was a zeppelin drifting overhead like a cloud, blocking out the sun. “Not flowers, exactly,” Troy went on. “Just some green vegetable thing. Turned out that any sudden impact in that version of the world was a catalyst for plant growth.”

“How unusual,” said father Van. He was tall and stooped and covered head-to-toe in a brown fur, thin as a boy’s first beard. In Troy’s old world he had been short, stocky, and bald.

“That’s not even the worst of it,” said Troy, tearing up handfuls of grass, like a child unsupervised, and letting them blow away in the wind.

Father Van gave an animal grunt and sat down across from Troy. “What is the worst?” he asked.

Troy stared down at the priest, and then out over the valley. “Sometimes it’s easy, getting back into things,” he said. “Sometimes not much is different. Here, at least, the sky’s the right color.” He looked up, as if to prove the point, but one of the zeppelin’s was blocking his view. An unfamiliar flag decorated its pellet-like body. Troy had been a pilot for the Air Force back home; it had been the thrum of broken air against his ears that had drawn him to that profession. He figured he wouldn’t have the patience to drive a zeppelin, at the mercy of the wind instead of being its ruin.

“I’m glad that you approve,” said father Van, scratching one of his legs with the other. “But I have two appointments yet this afternoon, and, as I can recall, you have not told me anything that requires absolution. Do you consider harming yourself?”

“No, father,” said Troy. “Do you remember — do you know Deseret?”

“I am not qualified to absolve sexual sins, mister Danagog. Cardinal —”

“It’s nothing like that,” said Troy.

“Then what?” asked father Van. When Troy didn’t answer immediately, the priest stood and brushed dust off his pants.

“You married us,” said Troy, blowing a handful of grass seeds into the wind. Some of them got stuck in father Van’s fur. “Sorry,” said Troy.

Father Van picked out the seeds and crushed them between his fingernails. He gave Troy a look under arched eyebrow. “Should I be apologizing? Are there problems between you and —”

“Deseret. No,” said Troy. “No, I don’t know what is between me and Deseret; I don’t know how much of it there is, either. That first time, with the gun flowers, I stood up, baffled. My muscles were twitching as though hooked up to a current, kinda the way you feel when a spasm jolts you out of a doze, you know. I went out into the kitchen, where Deseret had been making dinner, and found a strange woman there. Deseret was five-foot-nine. This woman was, uh, height-challenged.”

“A runt,” offered father Van. He made a gentle turn and began to walk down the hill in the direction of the steeple. Troy pushed himself to his feet and followed. At their walking pace, they remained always in the shadow of the zeppelin.

“Yeah,” said Troy. “I can’t tell you how strange it felt, right in my skin, and deeper.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said father Van. “I am quickly turned to nightmares.”

“Of course,” said Troy; then he laughed. “I’m sorry,” he offered father Van as explanation, though the priest hadn’t seemed curious. “It’s just little things that shock me, sometimes. Not even the fact that you’re covered in fur —” Father Van snorted — “not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it’s that the father Van I used to know sponsored Brahmton’s yearly Romero/Raimi marathon.” Father Van continued on, a minute shrug his only response. Troy caught up to him and buried his mirth. “We were married for a year,” said Troy, evenly.

“What happened?” asked father Van. They had reached the chapel. Troy stood with his hands in his pockets as father Van kicked at a thistle by the door, then retrieved his keys.

“I very nearly died,” said Troy. The chapel was cool and dark.

“The gun,” said father Van, dipping his paw into a font of holy water and making a circular design on his chest.

“It was an accident,” said Troy, dipping his own fingers in the water and making the sign of the cross. “I had been cleaning my pistol — my brother-in-law and I had been down at the range earlier — while Deseret fixed the steaks. She called me to come in and unwrap what was left of our wedding cake, you know, from all that tinfoil.”

“Of course,” said father Van.

Troy got the impression the priest wasn’t listening anymore, but he kept on, anyway. “So I wasn’t done cleaning, and I hadn’t pulled out the old clip, and somehow my thumb slipped onto the trigger, and —” Troy shrugged. “Boom. Flowers.”

“And the runt.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. “It was a boneheaded thing to do, I know. Went out to the kitchen, and nothing was the same. That was a year ago.”

Father Van nodded and disappeared into his office for a moment. Troy sat down on a pew and stared up at the altar. It was made of slat-wood panels painted a marbleized green. On his world, the altar had been white plaster. He thought about how Deseret’s dress had camouflaged her when they stood there to be married, how she had made him forget to blink.

“I have just clapped my hands to be sure,” said father Van, emerging from his office with a book in his hand,”but saw no resultant vegetation.”

“No,” said Troy, shaking off his reverie and standing. “That was in another world.”

“Ah,” said father Van. “I believe you may have chosen poorly to whom you confess.”

“I couldn’t take that world,” said Troy. “Not right off the bat. I went to the bridge, and I swear I didn’t even think about it. I jumped at low-tide.”

“I take it your efforts failed,” said father Van.

“I don’t think so,” said Troy. “I think, in some universe, it worked just like I planned. But I didn’t stay around to see it. Some other poor me got splattered in the mud flats.”

“Thank you for that image,” said father Van. There was a series of shouts from outside, like those of children on a playground. “My next appointment,” said father Van. “Or, I should say, my first appointment.” He put his arm on Troy’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. Just as he was reaching for the handle, the door flew open. There were two figures on the steps; the one holding the door screamed quickly and then covered its mouth. Troy couldn’t tell what gender either of the figures were; they wore the same trousers and loose shirts as father Van.

“I apologize, father Van,” said the one at the door. “Are we early?”

“No, missus Take, mister Take,” said father Van, nodding at them both. “You’re right on time. Excuse me for just one moment. Go on in; I won’t be much longer.” He grabbed Troy firmly by the elbow and escorted him down the stairs.

Once they had passed the Takes, Troy heard a low whisper, like the crack of a whip. It was mister Take. “You need to be more careful,” he hissed. Missus Take responded, but father Van had accelerated and left her words behind.

“Well, mister Danagog, I appreciate your coming to see me,” said father Van. “If you’ll allow me a moment of candor, though, I will say that it is disheartening to see someone maltreat religion as you do, and I do not find it funny.”

“I’m sorry,” said Troy. His lips had a natural curve in the corners, and even when somber he looked as though he were smiling. “I just wanted to talk to a familiar…” he trailed off, searching for the right word. He decided on “Name.”

“I’m glad I could be of service,” said father Van. “But if I leave the Takes unsupervised for very long, they’re liable to swear in the chapel.”

“Wait a sec, father. I do have a confession,” said Troy.

Father Van sighed, and to Troy it sounded like a horse’s neigh. “A direct confession?” asked father Van. Troy nodded. “A confession to be made under the sky, in the sight of God?” Troy nodded again and allowed his natural smile to broaden. Father Van ignored it. “Let’s hear it, then,” said the priest.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned —” began Troy.

Father Van shook his head. “What is this? I can no more bless you than can you bless me.”

“It’s a custom on my Earth,” said Troy.

“Never mind,” said father Van. He glanced up at the sky. The zeppelin had made a slow curve around Brahmton and now was heading East; it would pass over them again in a few minutes. “What is your confession, my son?”

“I killed a man,” said Troy. Father Van said nothing. “Are you going to call the police?”

“Depending on the circumstances, I may be obliged to,” said father Van. “Though I might sooner call them after waking from a bad dream. Was this also an accident?” asked father Van.

“Nope,” said Troy. “This was on purpose. After the gun and the bridge, I felt like a gag, like some trick pulled on other people. I went to a bar. In this world — the world in which the surface tension of water was enough to gently support my fall — the bars served this stuff that was like syrup, but burned all the way down. I couldn’t swallow it fast enough. I don’t guess I was thinking clearly when I picked a fight with the guy in the corner. I felt like a sick man, like there was bile in my throat. The guy wasn’t doing anything; he was just sitting there with a pint and an open book. I asked him what he was reading, and he said something like, ‘There is a balm in Gilead’. Didn’t even look up. That just pissed me off, like I can’t even tell you. I mean, what was wrong with this planet? No common decency.

“Something was creeping up into my skull, like the syrup had gotten into my blood, and my own heart was pumping it where it didn’t belong. I knocked the guy’s pint away, and then he looked up. He would’ve looked familiar to you — or, no, he wouldn’t have. Not to you. But he did to me.

“‘Father Van,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’ He closed his book and said something small; I don’t remember what.” Troy cast his eyes up and to the left and took a deep breath. “His was the first familiar face I had encountered, really. The first time I saw that in a separate universe, a parallel evolution had occurred, and must have occurred in countless other iterations. I say it calmly, now, I know, but the concept — it felt more like fantasy — hit me like some needle sinking through my skull. It was sharp and cold and I wanted to yank it out. I wanted to scrub him out, retribution for doing this to me. I didn’t blame him for the whole problem, just for giving me ideas. I was in no shape for ideas.”

The zeppelin’s shadow crawled down the lane, leaping over kick stones and smoothing down the summer colors. “I did it with my fists,” said Troy. “I beat him to death with my fists, and I hardly even noticed. Like slowly boiling water for a frog, it started out benign. Who could believe he had the power to kill a man with his fists? I mean, look at them.” Troy held out his fists, so they got hit first by the zeppelin’s shadow.

With the sun blocked out, the temperature dropped in an instant. “Wait,” said father Van. “Wait until God can see you again.” The priest stared at Troy, long and unblinking. Troy couldn’t guess his emotion. The zeppelin passed overhead, its only effect intangible. Troy blinked when the sun came out of eclipse.

“You do not belong in this place,” said father Van. Something in his voice was burning. “I can not absolve you of the guilt of murder; to do so would require you to have a contrite spirit, or for me to find you worthy of absolution. Neither are present.”

“Don’t take it personally,” said Troy.

Father Van turned on his heel and strode back toward the church. Troy trailed along behind.

“I need your advice,” said Troy.

“You need nothing from me,” said father Van. “And I wish you would leave. Whatever world you like to live in, it does not overlap with mine.”

“You’re absolutely right, father,” said Troy. “A Deseret is out there, I know, in a world in which everything has evolved the same as on my Earth, except maybe she never met me, or maybe I never took up shooting. But I don’t want her in this place. I prefer my women somewhat more shaved. Truth be told, I really just wanted to see what you were like in this world, if you were in this world, and to apologize.”

“Yes, well, I feel no more dead than usual, so your apology is unnecessary.”

“Not for that,” said Troy. “Behind your back, after our ceremony, I said you had a voice like Tweety Bird would have if he huffed helium. Your neck was a lot shorter in that world. I had to fight not to laugh all through the vows. Until death us do part,” mocked Troy, his voice cracking.

They were at the chapel door. Troy could hear the Takes arguing inside; there was a growl of frustration and then the tinkling of glass. Father Van paused with one hand on the latch. “It seems to me,” he said,”that deliberate actions are much easier to take back than are accidents. The Proverbs say that we must pay in fair measure for that which we take from the world, be it a wife or a loaf of bread. I could grant you a divorce,” the priest continued, opening the door. “But I do not believe I can help you with your loose tongue, nor your other… problems.” He ducked inside before Troy had a chance to respond.

Troy spent a few moments just gazing around at the strange, familiar geography of Brahmton, the hills, the brown fields, the buildings all white and concrete. The town was motionless, playing dead. Everything moved too slowly. Troy watched the zeppelin as it disappeared over the hills, heading toward Florida. He grew tired of standing still before the ship slid out of sight.

“Until death us do part,” he said, squinting up at the sun.

#

There was a desert; there was no wind. The sand was packed hard as glass. No amount of stamping on Troy’s part resulted in a footprint, so he walked uncertain, perhaps in circles, perhaps in a sharp line. Each option seemed equally pointless, after a time. There was no sun; the sky glowed like flesh pressed up against a flashlight, with no point of origin. Red sky in the morning, red sky at night, sailors take warning and sailor’s delight.

After some time, Troy felt his mind cave in, like a star collapsing. The gravity of his brain became unbearable. Memories, most of them caught up in words, tried to escape — he could feel them crawl through his skin — but they never got far. The strongest, the harshest, those born of hardship, made it as far as the open air before succumbing to the pull. Troy wished they wouldn’t try. As they entered the horizon of his thoughts, he heard them all again.

“It is useful as a tool for the purging of guilt,” said father. “This land is my land. It is an active response to a passive sin. We carefully screen our visitors for responses of pleasure. Security is standing by. Would you like to buy a ticket? There are demons to your right.”

#

“God has a great capacity for destruction,” said Haim. He was reclining in the trench, pillowing his head against a chunk of asphalt, drinking coffee out of a looted thermos.

Troy sat nearby, cross-legged, very carefully cleaning his sidearm. He had enlisted with the infantry by way of sneaking into a makeshift barracks at night and claiming an unused bunk. War isn’t hell, he had reasoned. Death is hell, or at least the first step on the path, and war simply a massively efficient means of inflicting death. Death not being much of a concern to Troy, he thought the actual fighting might be kind of fun, and he would get to meet some interesting people.

He had met Haim during an impromptu chapel service in the basement of a besieged office building. Jewish in both ethnicity and religion, Haim seemed always fascinated with the concept of a creator, and spoke of his convictions as though they had been validated by the good Lord himself, perhaps with a large, red, rubber stamp. He was a delight to bicker with. Troy might once have called it surreal, arguing semantics of the pharaoh’s words to Moses while flipping dense-weave protective mats over live grenades, but no longer. Even Dali turned his art to habit.

“It’s man,” said Troy. “Man has the capacity for destruction.”

“God has it in him, too,” said Haim. “He knew about nukes long before Canada made ’em.”

“God’s unstuck in time,” said Troy. “That’s a bad example.”

“If he can imagine it, he might as well have made it,” said Haim.

“First time I saw my wife, I daydreamed what amounted to raping her,” said Troy.

“The feminists would have it that that’s just what you’ve done, if you married the girl.” Haim grinned. His teeth were dark at the gums from chewing on tobacco. “Listen to us, man; we go at it worse than atheists versus agnostics. I didn’t know you had a wife.”

“Yep,” said Troy.

“Where’s she hiding?”

“I have no idea,” said Troy. “I’ll find her sooner or later.” Something about the rumble of the mortars in the distance, and the mutant woodpecker sound of friendly assault rifles, made Troy feel introspective. He finished messing with his gun and set it carefully down in the mud, its barrel pointing away from him. “I think God’s got a great imagination,” he said. “I mean, who’d have guessed that the biggest threat to our nation would have come from Montreal?”

Haim gave him a confused smile. “Well, ever since the French —”

“Where I’m from, I mean,” said Troy. “I’m not up on your history around here.” Haim nodded and chewed thoughtfully on some cud. “That doesn’t just take imagination, that takes a sense of humor. Same kind of humor that puts me in these places that look and sound so familiar. Every time, it’s something I know I’ve seen before, like seeing some nameless actor in a show, and trying for hours to remember what else you’ve seen that he was in. And not one of these worlds has Deseret. It’s kind of sick. Kind of a sick humor. I don’t think it’s getting better.”

Haim swallowed and spit. He held out a leaf of tobacco. “You want some, man? It’ll help you come down.”

“I’m fine,” said Troy.

Something landed in the trench in front of Haim. With the flair of a magician, he flipped one of the mats overtop it. There was a muffled explosion and a few tendrils of dark smoke leaked out from under the mat’s edge. It still didn’t give Haim enough time to think of what he wanted to say, so there was a stretch of silence, or rather, a stretch in which neither of the two men spoke.

“You treat the universe like it’s God’s alone, man,” said Haim. “That’s just depressing. This is our place. You can run for a thousand miles without running into God.”

“Yeah,” said Troy.

“You’ve got to take what you want from the world, because God’s gonna dole it out to some guy who will use it, otherwise. There’s a cliché about it; maybe a parable, too.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. His head was lolling.

“Now you’re just agreeing with me,” said Haim. “You aren’t listening.”

“What?” said Troy, snapping his eyes up.

Haim shook his head and grunted out a laugh. “You, my friend, are a monkey in the classroom. You’ve got all the tools of learning in front of you, but can’t figure how to use them.”

“Are they edible?” asked Troy.

“Look at ’em,” said Haim, rising to a crouch and peering over the lip of the trench. Troy joined him. The remaining buildings looked like rotten teeth; the ground looked as if it had been chewed on. There were bodies, and sections of bodies, lying near craters. Troy started to count the bodies; he may as well have tried to count stars. The repetitive nature of the task made his eyes droop, but his brain kept firing, imagining a new world for each full body.

“I’m not sure I can take much more of this,” he said, more from his brain than his eyes, and sat back in the trench. Further down the line, somebody was shouting orders. A monstrous growl came from across the bleeding gums of the city, quiet at first, but building in a crescendo of some hunger.

“You won’t have to,” said Haim. His head jerked back, his arms forward. He looked as though he were giving a belly laugh. A cone of what looked like chocolate pudding erupted from his helmet, coalesced into individual drops, and plopped into the mud, where they promptly vanished. Haim’s body continued in the direction of his head, sinking against the trench floor. His helmet slipped off. It bounced over to Troy, its momentum deceptive, like that of a rolling cannon ball. Troy reached out to stop it and felt his palm start to bleed. He lifted the helmet and turned it to see what had cut him. A seven-pointed, irregular star had gone nova dead center rear; its points reflected all the light there was to be had.

Somewhere, thought Troy, there is a world in which helmets are made of stronger stuff, or soldiers are. Somewhere, bullets are obsolete and have been replaced with… what? Try as he might, Troy couldn’t imagine what might take the place of bullets. Fists, feet, gases, and more; these tools had already been invented.

#

There was a desert; there was no sun. The featureless sky met the featureless Earth and, had it had any glimmer of intention, it would have dared Troy’s imagination to make something — anything — of the perfect shapes. It was like being trapped inside an Easter egg, painted on the inside by a thin, persistent brush.

Troy had been walking for long enough that he had had to stop and sleep twice, but with no nightfall, no sunup, he couldn’t be sure if he had slept for hours or minutes each time. His bare feet had formed blood blisters, which had popped. Any hope he had of tracking his progress by the red splotches he left behind was sucked up, along with the blood itself, by the insatiable ground. Troy wondered if, next time he lay down, he would, too, be pulled under.

He tried not to sleep after that, instead just sitting and resting his legs when he felt the weariness rising in his bones like radiation. Without the rhythm of his feet beneath him, the voices escaping and falling back into his head were louder and impossible to ignore.

“You are like an ox,” said the man that Troy had never known. “Look at the flag. This land is my land. You march to that flag, and you don’t look at your feet. You hear me? Absolutely. Absolutely. The flag is your wife. You can not walk a straight line. We value your service.”

Troy thought that maybe he should go to sleep, choke himself on the ground, and wake up elsewhere, or right here.

* * *

“You really let yourself go,” said Troy. He had been psyching himself up to it for the entire month since he had found Deseret and first visited her San Diego apartment.

“I’ve been on a diet,” said Deseret. “I love it.”

They were on the small deck her complex afforded Deseret, playing a game that reminded Troy of chess. He had to keep asking her how the pieces moved, but he would have had to do that with chess, too. She had music playing out of her bones, some choral piece that made each turn of the game that much more dramatic, as though staged.

“I used to be able to pick you up in one arm,” said Troy, capturing one of Deseret’s weaker pieces.

“Never,” said Deseret. “Stop trying to fake me out. I’m kicking your ass. Just suck it up.” She grinned. Troy thought that her lips looked like rubber, rubber that nothing ever bounced off of. He sat back and stared at the game board. He wasn’t sure he liked this world. It was a bit like how he imagined heaven would be: boring, flat, bright. Joy may come from selflessness, but satisfaction comes from sin.

“It’s our anniversary,” said Deseret, kicking lightly at his shin under the table.

“What?” said Troy.

“We’ve been going out for two weeks,” said Deseret.

“We haven’t gone out, yet, Des,” said Troy.

“You know what I mean.” She gave him a hopeful smile and, when he didn’t return it, moved her weakest piece. “It was two weeks ago when you — you know —”

“Got drunk,” said Troy.

“No,” protested Deseret. She had a glare like a mother. “When you kissed me.”

“I know what you meant,” said Troy. He made a capture. “It was the same night.”

One piece of music ended. Another began. “I always wanted a boy to pursue me,” said Deseret. “Instead of the other way around.”

“That’s because you’re lazy,” said Troy.

Deseret kicked him under the table again, a little harder this time. “You know what I mean. It makes you feel worth something, because you are to someone.” She put her hand on a piece, moved it, then moved it back to its original square and bit her lip. “I had a secret admirer in college,” she said. “He — I think it was a he — sent me silk roses in the mail. Not a bouquet, never that many. Just one red, plastic rose in my campus mailbox every Wednesday for six months.”

“That’s a lot of money,” said Troy. He had a good move coming up, and was impatient for Deseret to just commit her damn piece to action.

“Then they stopped coming,” said Deseret. “One week, there was one on a Thursday, and then after that, nothing. I was so bummed. Midterms were coming up, and I couldn’t even concentrate on them, I was thinking so much about the smallest things that I had done, trying to decide which one, or string of ones, had stopped the flow of plastic roses.”

“Probably a hidden camera crew; they got bored of watching you,” said Troy. He wasn’t looking at her, but he would have sworn he heard her sad smile; she sighed when she did it, and some reluctant curve of her lips bent the sound just so. She didn’t say anything else.

“I think you’re right,” said Troy. “I’m not sure — the calendars keep changing — but I think it’s been a year.”

“Since when?” asked Deseret. Troy didn’t answer. She began to pout, to push her lower lip out. It looked like a pink caterpillar had settled on her mouth, like she had taken a whorish injection of collagen.

“Put that away,” said Troy. She sort of giggled, and then did it.

“Why won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “What happened a year ago?”

Troy laughed through his nose. A lot about this world seemed funny to him. He thought maybe it was the slapdash similarities between this and his first world; he thought maybe the atmosphere was full of nitrous oxide. “You’re nothing like her,” he said. “She was quiet and she had a laugh like a kitten’s purr. She was a vegetarian, and she hated playing games.”

He stood up and turned away from the board. He faced the city and raised his hands as though presenting it to Deseret. “This — this isn’t a heaven here, with you. This is purgatory, a place where work is rewarded by a diminishing torment. But even I don’t believe that! There’s no circle to the universe, no curve; I could keep going forever and never find my Deseret.”

His voice was a hail of punches, each word its own discrete and weak wound, but compounded, like fists, they had the power to make her bleed; it was like the first gentle, distant rumble of artillery.

“I can’t even pretend,” he said. “You’re fat and ugly and, once I’m gone, you’ll cease to exist. Chew that up.” He shoved away from the game board and leaned on the railing, head bowed. There was nothing penitent or humble about the posture. He was just trying to think of how long it might take him to reach the ground.

Behind him, strings swelled. “I wish,” said Deseret,”that I had a thousand tongues to say, You don’t deserve me.”

“Yeah, well —” said Troy, and he jumped. His eyes were forced shut by the rush of air, the sting of tears. The wind in his ears died gently and he rubbed his sleeve across his lashes, wicking up the water, staining the fabric. He was still standing on Deseret’s deck. The game board was still there. Bizarro Deseret was not.

All right, Troy thought. Who runs this place? A tiny magnet of boredom rested at the bottom of his thoughts, drawing the others down.

#

There was the desert; there was a wind. The hard-packed ground remained unmoving. A light smudge grew on the horizon, like a pool of melted, colorless tallow. The sky’s hot breath went down Troy’s neck, his sticky shirt, his eyes and throat. Particles of dust too fine to see dug into his skin like blown ice, but Troy’s blood burned at the points of contact. He tried walking backwards, but the bare skin at the nape of his neck caught fire and he felt his shirt begin to tear along its seams. He raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of unnatural light on the horizon, back the way he had come. It looked as if it came from a spotlight or a skyscraper.

He made an effort at cursing, but it came out as croaking. He thought that maybe he could run in the direction the wind was blowing, and thereby avoid the slashing of the crescendo storm. He made it four slow steps and then his legs gave out. He pulled his head against his thighs, presenting as little of himself to the wind as possible.

Voices echoed in and out of substance, driven through his skull by the combined forces of the storm and his own gravity.

“I have left five husbands behind,” said Deseret. “And I left them all crying. From one end of this land to the other. I own fifteen percent of everywhere I’ve been. This land is my land. Four of them cried when I left. Big, wet tears in the garden. Too much salt in the water. A bed of roses died. I’ve never been good with plants.”

#

“My god,” said Troy. “This place is incredible.”

“It’s funny,” said Commander Beresford. “That’s the word that everybody uses. First time I bring a guest up here, it’s incredible. I’m starting to doubt my own trustworthiness.” Beresford grinned at Troy, whose muscles were too limp to do anything but gape and slouch. The quick ascent felt as though it had shook his insides to water and pulp. “I’m glad you like it,” said Beresford.

“I remember,” said Troy. He paused for a long moment, his hands on the plexi-glass that separated his body from the vacuum. “Washing out,” he said. “I remember washing out of the program.”

“Physical trials?” asked Beresford.

Troy shook his head. “Two tours, I proved I could handle anything from a chunk of styrofoam on up to the flying villages. Spent four hours in the air on a paper plate, damn it. It was the psychiatric exam,” he added. “Four hours in a chair — they ain’t as comfortable as you’d think — and that was it. Grounded. From space, anyway.”

“And from up here,” mused Beresford, “even the passenger airlines look like slugs.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. “Listen, I really have to thank you for giving me the tour.” There was a wash of hot blood through his forehead and he felt sour liquid crackling through his tear ducts. It wasn’t a reaction he had predicted.

“Don’t mention it,” said Beresford. He seemed to be debating whether or not to sit down. He ended up leaning against the bulkhead, inserting himself into Troy’s peripheral vision. Troy’s eyes had the look of polished ball bearings, damp and heavy. “When you were in the fourth grade,” said Beresford, “did your teacher put your names up on the board?”

“Like,” Troy coughed, “you mean like if we were misbehaving?”

“That’s it,” nodded Beresford. “For my class it was first offense, name on the board; second offense, check mark by the name; third offense, circled check mark; fourth offense, sit facing the corner.”

“Fifth offense?” asked Troy.

“Bull whip to the groin,” said Beresford. “This one day, can’t have been too long before Christmas, I was goofing around, showing off for a girl, and got my name on the board for spitting. Damn near twelve feet, I swear. The threat didn’t bother me; I liked the way my name looked, all slapped up with chalk. So, I keep showing off, rocking my chair as far as it would go. Got the check mark for knocking little Frannie Calico over backward and spraining her finger. Then I got the circled check mark for saying the F-word. That day, I tell you, that day was all mine. Not another name up on the board.” Beresford waited for Troy to smile before continuing. “Fourth offense was me telling Frannie Calico her finger brace looked stupid. I didn’t think saying so was as bad as saying the F-word, but there you have it. The teacher scooped me up in his two big hands and dropped me on a stool with my back to the class.

“It so happened he got me set up right in front of the blackboard. No chalk was in reach, but the felt erasers were both close enough to grab. It was silent reading time, so even the teacher had his head down. I snapped up those erasers and just started beating the hell out of them, against each other. Raised this big old cloud of chalk dust. You like that smell?” Troy shook his head. “It’s one of those smells that some people like, some people don’t, like gasoline,” said Beresford. “Anyway, I looked like a ghost by the time the teacher wrenched those erasers out of my hands. I couldn’t fight him off because I couldn’t see. The chalk dust had drifted right into my eyes. Someone else was sobbing — maybe one of the girls at a desk near me, and the teacher, he said, ‘See what you did? You made her cry’.

“I got sent home. Developed a rash — turns out I was allergic to chalk dust. All over my body, these things like chicken pox itched like the dickens. It was miserable.

“It wasn’t the first time I got sent home, so my parents had a meeting with the principal, who suggested counseling. I spent some time in one of those obnoxiously sadistic chairs you mentioned, age nine, exploring myself. I didn’t get to learn what we found, the counselor and me. He gave the report to mom and dad, so I had to sneak up on them to hear it. Counselor thought I had difficulty adjusting to additional stimuli, that I could only manage one familiar set at a time. Kind of a low-level autism.

“Proved them wrong, didn’t I?” said Beresford, tapping the plexiglass and looking down on Africa.

“It’s incredible,” said Troy. “But I believe it,” he added. He waited through an interval of smile and nod before asking, “Do I want to know about my application?”

Beresford bent his eyebrows into apology. “Not if you’re anything like me,” he said. “Sorry, son,” he went on, hooking his thumbs in his coverall’s pockets. “Wasn’t my decision in the end.”

Troy nodded. He fixed his eyes on empty, sparkling space, which could swallow a lifetime of warm sorrow, freeze it, and render it neutral. “Why,” he said.

“Psychobull,” said Beresford. “You were under serious consideration, I know, but someone — you want to hear this?”

“Yeah,” said Troy.

“Someone wrote that you seemed to have undue difficulty focusing during stressful situations.”

“Didn’t seem to be much of a point,” said Troy.

“I’m sorry,” said Beresford again, though it sounded less like a sentiment and more like punctuation.

“Don’t matter,” said Troy. “Just a childhood dream, you know.”

Beresford knew. He clapped Troy brotherly on the shoulder. “Well, drink it in,” he said. “You don’t have to come down for hours, yet.” He turned to leave Troy alone.

“Sir,” said Troy over his shoulder. “Thank Des for setting this up, would you?”

“She was happy to do it,” said Beresford.

“Thank her anyway. Part of a dream come true, at least.”

Beresford triggered the door open; it gave a mechanical sigh. “Drink it in, son.” The door was silent when it closed.

#

There was a desert; there was the woman. She had two voices, and they sang together, scraped together like the hind legs of a cricket, one against the other, the other against one. The air hummed and she hummed and she provided all the echoes she could need.

Troy stood in front of her, reflecting her song back into her lips. “This land is your land,” she said. “This land is my land.”

She disappeared. Twilight fell in an instant; or Troy’s thirst had destroyed him and taken him to a world in which the Earth hid half her face behind a modest lock of shadow. The relief from the heat lasted only long enough for the blisters to remind him of their hot pain.

He walked. The first person he met was a kid, waist deep in a pit of mud. The kid was pulling handfuls from a shuck of straw that sat on the harder ground beside him. He pulled those handfuls under the surface of the mud, and his legs pumped like deliberate pistons. He looked up when Troy gasped for water, but didn’t say anything. Troy bent to the mud and thrust his lips into it.

“Hey, man,” said the kid. “You ain’t supposed to be here.”

Troy lifted his head to see what the kid looked like. He waited for the kid to say something else, but the kid just shrugged and drew another fist of straw under the surface. Troy watched it disappear.

“No,” said Troy.