I managed to take another pass at two different short stories over the course of the week last week, and have completely nullified my last post’s claim of order and structure during my periods of short story output. Neither of these two stories, finished and submitted, fall into the mold of The Great Wide World Gone Dark.

Partum is a miserable pile of masculinity, written from the point-of-view of a man who conceived a child with his wife, with whom he then made a joint decision to let the child gestate in an artificial chamber at the hospital so that both parents could continue their careers and lives. You’ve read stories about mothers dying in childbirth, right? Partum is about what might happen if the mother died before childbirth. Long before.

Incidentally, Lis and I are trying to conceive.

Stilts is a story about horror stories, and it had two primary inspirations. One: I think horror is unfairly maligned as a genre lacking strong emotional resonance. Not primal resonance, but emotional. Two: I have learned, too many times, that I have unintentionally hurt someone — even in the smallest fashion — by including a part of their life or experience in my story and perverting it just this side of beyond recognition. So, Stilts is about a writer who perverts the lives around him into wicked stories, and about the people who are capable of recognizing that the soul of such horror is essentially romance.

Hopefully, they’ll both find a home before too long and then they’ll wind up posted here.

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.

It was a Saturday when I went out to work on the hole, but I was in my Sunday clothes. Dad had made me throw them in the dryer and put them on hot, because he said we were going to be late for saying goodbye to Lucky. I sat through the whole service, burning in my skin, while everybody said goodbye. Dad told me to stop squirming, and I thought it was kind of funny then because I’d heard him say the same thing once to a nightcrawler on his hook when we went fishing.

Almost everybody who said goodbye followed us home. They drove their cars all over our lawn and dad fed them crackers and his salmon dip. Our house isn’t that big. Old men and dad’s friends and people from the church all crammed themselves together like a bad game of Tetris. With all of them breathing and some of them laughing quietly the air got to feeling like those early days of summer when dad still refuses to turn on the air conditioner.

I asked dad if I could change into my play clothes, but he said I couldn’t. I waited until he had our pastor’s arm around his shoulders and his head bowed, and then I slipped into my bedroom and out the window.

I headed for the forest, right to where Lucky and I had been digging. We had a place a hundred yards into the thicker trees, right next to a creek, where we used to build forts together. Lucky would chop wood with a hatchet while I would draw plans in the pebbles for what the fort would look like. It took him hours to chop through even the smallest branches with his dull blade, like logging with a club, so we never got very far. The creek always washed out my designs, but I’d draw them up better each time.

When Lucky graduated from high school, we didn’t have as much time to make forts. I tried by myself, while he was away at college, but I never got into the rhythm of the hatchet. Mostly, I just played at stories of knights and assassins in the trees by myself. One summer, Lucky came home and said we were going to make something in the forest. He wouldn’t tell me what it was until we were out by the creek. He wore a smile like Orion’s belt, crooked and small and a long ways off.

“What are we going to build?” I asked when we could hear the familiar rush of the stream, its pitch the same as it had always been, like the voice of a father who only knows one bedtime story.

“We’re not going to build; we’re going to dig,” said Lucky. He had brought a shovel for him and a trowel for me. He told me to pick a spot away from the stream, so I found a place with ferns all around it and carved an X in the dirt. We dug for a while. Lucky stamped on the head of the shovel with his sneakers, pulling out piles of wet soil like bites from a cake.

“How deep are we digging?” I asked, chopping at sod with both hands on my trowel.

“All the way to China,” said Lucky. “That’s where I’m going next year. Do you remember Brodie? He came and visited us last Christmas. Him and me, we’re going there to spread the good news of Jesus. So, I want you to be able to come and find me. If you miss me, just come out here and keep digging, and sooner or later you’ll make it all the way to China, and I’ll be there.”

“They walk upside-down in China,” I said.

Lucky grinned and shook a bit of dirt into my hair for fun. “How do you know you walk right side-up?”

“The blood goes into my head when I’m upside-down.”

We dug for a couple of hours. By the time we were done for the day, we both had piles of dirt up to our shins, only Lucky’s shins were taller than mine.

“How close are we?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Lucky. He dusted off his hands against his jeans. “You’ll have to keep digging. Come on. Dad’s probably got dinner ready.”

Dad said that Lucky and Brodie were out late one night in Shanghai and some bullies tried to take all their money, which wasn’t very much. The bullies got angry, and they all got into a fight. One time, when I was in third grade, I got into a fight on the bus home from school. A big fifth grader named Angelo gave me a knuckle-punch because I wouldn’t let him see my wallet, and I scratched him back. He grabbed two of my fingers in his fist and twisted them like an Indian burn, and I cried out.

Lucky had been sitting two seats behind me, thumb-wrestling with one of his friends. When he heard me he stood up, even though the bus was moving. He took a couple steps up the aisle and the bus driver yelled at him to sit own. He didn’t, though; he stood between Angelo and me. That’s all, just stood. Angelo let go of me and tried to give Lucky a knuckle-punch, but got his hip by accident, and I heard his finger pop.

I wondered if that’s what he did in China, if he stood up. I remembered how tall he was, with the dirt up to his shins.

He wasn’t in China anymore, but I wanted to dig, to move away from all those people in my house where they wouldn’t think to look. My teachers always told me how much I reminded them of Lucky, in the way I looked and the way I acted. He was always such a good student, they would say, and vice-president of the technology club. My last report card was all A’s, and I came up with the idea this year of the technology club having a sleepover to play video games on the school’s computers.

Lucky went to China. I dug until my shoes were filled with cold dirt, and then I took my shoes off and kept going. I hadn’t made much progress on my own in the few months since Lucky left — maybe another couple feet down in a hole you could fit four of me into, shoulder-to-shoulder — but that night I guess I got down another whole foot. If I stood in the pit on my tiptoes, now, I could hook my chin on the lip of sod.

I crawled out of the hole on my hands and knees. My Sunday clothes were a mess; I’d never be able to wear them again, but I didn’t really want to. I walked back to my house with my head down, my fingers hooked in the laces of my shoes. Most all the people who had followed us home were gone, but I could still see a couple through the kitchen window, just talking with dad.

I took off my clothes, so they wouldn’t get the floor dirty, and wiped my bare feet in the grass so I wouldn’t leave filthy prints. Dad didn’t notice when I slipped inside. I went straight to the shower and buried my clothes at the bottom of the hamper. I was breathing all wet steam and letting my muscles melt when dad knocked on the door. It was gentle; maybe he had tried a few times before I heard him.

“Hey,” he said. “Great-uncle Steve wants to see how much you’ve grown.”

#

The next morning, with Lucky all the way in the ground, I felt weird when I got out of bed, almost as if I were a few inches taller than I should have been. Like humans who weren’t sure if they were supposed to fly, I tried to keep low, my head down and my neck kinda bowed. I ate breakfast with dad and a couple of relatives who had stayed the night, and then I asked to be excused.

I went right out to the forest with a promise to be ready for church in a couple of hours. I knew just how to fix my height problem. I could get so close to the ground that it swallowed me right up. It felt right, as if neck-deep in the dirt had been waiting for me to find it, like China had been waiting for Lucky.

As I approached the clearing, that sense of propriety vanished, replaced by an awkward fear that something was dreadfully wrong. The normal sounds of the forest were cloaked behind a sound like wind, but not quite — wind is an outward force, and this sounded and felt like one great indrawn breath.

The ferns and low bushes of the clearing were waving as if underwater, and the stream and leapt its banks by a few inches. They were all bending toward my hole to China. I felt my hair whip around my ears, tugging me toward the rounded lip.

I peered over the edge. The bottom, which had been far too shallow the previous day, now had disappeared into a cold, black distance. For a moment, I felt as if all my perceptions of distance had somehow become tangled in my brain to make four feet seem like a glimpse into infinite space. A quick experiment with my hand in front of my nose disproved that theory, and I lapsed into a kind of blankness, just staring down forever.

I whispered a couple of small words, and felt them tugged off of my lips like coiled ropes attached to a descending anchor. I raised my voice and never even heard an echo.

Next thing I did was what I bet anybody would have. I dug around the clearing until I had a good handful of different-sized rocks, and I dropped them one-by-one down into the hole. After the last one faded quickly out of sight I waited for a good five minutes, but I never heard anything other than that big, long inhale. The sound of it reminded me a bit of the times Lucky would take me fishing, because nature is nature. We would lay out bow-to-stern and shoulder-to-shoulder, this close to capsizing under our awkward weight, and listen to water slap against the hollow aluminum of our little boat. It was nothing, and it could fill hours.

I don’t know how long I spent staring down the hole, because I didn’t look what time it was when I first came out, but it must have been a while because dad started shouting and hard. I picked myself off the ground, dusted my knees, and ran to meet dad before he could find me at the hole. I knew he’d want to do something to it, or keep me from playing in the forest anymore.

You just know your parents like that. I know kids from school who ask their moms for money for the movies, and their dads to let them stay home sick from school, because it wouldn’t work the other way around. Lucky would have found our Fourth of July fireworks and tossed a lit sparkler down the hole. Dad wouldn’t.

He was in the backyard, walking head down toward the forest, and it looked as if he had given up on yelling. He was just angry. I thought about calling out to him that I was on my way, but decided not to. Sometimes if I don’t talk he doesn’t either. We just looked at each other, and I dusted off my jeans again.

“We’re late for church,” said dad, not as angry as his face looked.

“Sorry,” I said.

Dad got down on one knee so he was just a little bit shorter than me and put both his hands on my shoulders. “It’ll be back to you and me in just a bit, I promise. We can talk, then, and figure some of this out.” I nodded, and then he kinda jumped the gun. He kept talking, about everything that Lucky had touched in his life, or even just breathed on. I stood there in my dirty clothes and listened as he poured his words into me. He didn’t wait for echoes, but he wouldn’t have got them, anyway.

#

School the next day was about Galileo. It was just about the last week of school, so Mister Tripp had a bunch of fun things planned. Monday’s was a lesson on gravity, and the school janitor let us up on the roof for it. Mister Tripp stood at the edge overlooking the tether-ball courts and talked to us about how gravity is an acceleration, which meant getting faster all the time and only stopping with some other force to say so.

I hung at the back, because I’m a little scared of heights — actually, I’m more scared that I’ll take myself up on the urge to jump off of one some time. Angelo stayed back there with me, but for him it was because he didn’t feel like listening. Mister Tripp was going on about Galileo and his experiments, and I wanted to listen, but Angelo breathed down my cheek and said, “I heard about your brother. That’s what they do to homos over there.” I pulled away, because his breath smelled like farts, and came face-to with his grin. He always shut his eyes when he grinned, squinted them shut as if to make more room for his dull-toothed shark mouth.

I had learned a little trick from Lucky, back when he taught me to read using the book of Jonah and his high school science textbook. I grinned back at Angelo, but not so wide that I would lose sight of him. “Are you a homo sapien?” I asked.

“No,” he said, stretching the syllable as if to give me more time to realize what a stupid question it had been. I just kept grinning. The sun slid out from behind a cloud and got me in the eyes, so I squinted them shut. That must have been what did it; Angelo saw his own expression thieved and turned back on him, miniaturized like a third-grader’s stupid hand puppet.

His eyes drifted open, and I could almost see the spark of realization traveling backward along the nerve to his brain. He took one step forward which was enough to put all his weight right across my toes, then he gave me the tiniest shove on the breastbone.

Unable to move my feet to balance myself, I took a quick tumble to the graveled roof and landed in a lobster crawl. I’m not very tall, gravity got me hard enough to scrape the skin off the heels of my hands. I landed right behind a girl and sprayed a couple pebbles across her ankles. I glanced up and saw her legs climbing into the folds of her skirt, and her panties between them. They had hearts on them.

The girl turned and slapped her arms against the sides of her skirt, pinning them down. “Mister Tripp!” she yelled. “He looked up my skirt!”

Mister Tripp gazed over at me between the other students, a bowling ball in one hand and a book in the other. I felt a rush of heat in my face that I would have loved to attribute to having been close to the roof and the radiation caught and reflected from the sun. I would have been all right with Angelo just pushing me down. He always had detention after school, so it wasn’t hard to get away from him; just wait until the bell rings, and then it was freedom in several ways.

Making me look like an idiot in front of Mister Tripp was what really burned. Mister Tripp had been Lucky’s favorite teacher when he was in grade school. The first thing Mister Tripp had said to me, reading attendance on the first day of school, had been, “Now there’s an illustrious last name.” Then he had written “illustrious” on the blackboard, and I knew I was going to like him. When the principal called me away from class to tell me that Lucky had died, Mister Tripp had come with me, and kept his warm hand on the back of my neck for the whole, cold hour.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I pushed myself up to my feet. When I dusted off my hands, little flakes of skin came off.

“Do you need to see the nurse?” asked Mister Tripp.

“It’s okay, Mister Tripp,” said Angelo. “Homos don’t like what they see.” Some people giggled. The girl with the heart-speckled panties blushed.

“Keep your insights to yourself, Angelo,” said Mister Tripp. “I won’t stand for that kind of bigotry in my classroom.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“We’re not in the classroom,” said Angelo.

“Come here, please,” said Mister Tripp, beckoning to Angelo. The big kid snorted himself into motion like a steam engine. I slipped back to the edge of the group and kicked flat designs in the gravel at my feet. Mister Tripp started up his lecture again but I only tuned in halfway. I was thinking about the thickness of the roof, and wondering how long it would hold our weight. My stomach gave a cold shudder.

“When I say so, drop the ball,” said Mister Tripp. He had given the bowling ball to Angelo, and was holding the book spine-down over the edge. “Three, two—” Angelo heaved the ball over the edge before Mister Tripp got to one. My classmates rushed the edge and peered over, but the drum thump of the ground bending under the impact had already shook up through our ears before they could see what had happened.

“Yes, thank you, Angelo. You’ll be staying after class.” There was an expression of disapproval on Mister Tripp’s face, but Angelo probably couldn’t see it, because he was grinning.

Mister Tripp asked one of the other kids to run downstairs and retrieve the bowling ball. While the kid was gone, Mister Tripp talked about wind resistance and friction. I listened to this part; it made me wonder about how it was down the hole, with all the wind pulling inward, greedy for something instead of slowing its fall. I paid such close attention that I didn’t notice Angelo sneaking up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders in a bear hug and my stomach tightened up, kinda like being hungry. He smelled like my bedroom in winter when I keep the window shut for whole months.

“Bet you drop faster than a dumb book,” he grunted in my ear. He laughed, loud enough for everyone to hear and to make my head hurt. I kicked my legs to get free, but I couldn’t find purchase. He hauled me over to the edge of the roof and, with one great forward thrust of his hips, shoved me out so that the playground twenty feet down was the only thing underneath me. My sense of the present dropped right out of me, and all I had left was a bunch of imagination, spinning reels of me falling and making a thud like a six-pound bowling ball. Mister Tripp yelled some wordless syllables, and my bladder let go. I caught it before it got too far — I checked afterward, and only saw a tiny stain by the zipper — but it was enough to get my briefs sickly hot and then cold.

Someone yanked hard on Angelo’s shoulders and I heard his shoes trip backward. He let me go. My butt hit the lip of the roof hard; I felt the pain come center on my tailbone. I threw my weight behind me and landed in a crab-walk again. The thing I remember most is that sharp rocks got me right in the places the skin had been scraped off before, and I wondered if it would have been better never to hit the ground.

#

That night I only had a little bit of time to play in the forest, since dad had this big plan to take us out to dinner and rent movies. I dashed off the bus before the pneumatic doors had squeaked all the way open, darted into my room and changed out of my damp underwear. With a tossed-off promise to be back in time to wash up, I went out to the garage and dug out one of our camping flashlights before jogging out to the forest.

The slow vacuum of the hole rustled the trees like happens before a good storm. I got down on my knees a good five feet from the edge and approached on my knuckles, trying to keep the dirt out of my scrapes. The suction from the hole pulled all my favorite smells of the forest right past my nostrils: the moss, the wood rot, the creek.

I switched on the flashlight and aimed it down the walls. They were rough, dark brown, and broken open by webs of thick roots that just seemed to stop a few inches out. I shined the light further down, but there was too much dark and not enough battery power. For as far as I could see, the walls looked the same. If you were in a room with those kinds of walls, you’d never be able to tell north from south.

I just kinda lay my head on one hand and propped the light so it shone about as far down the hole as the school’s roof was above the ground. It started to rain, just a little — more a smell than a sensation. My head filled with the sound of the creek, the lap of small waves, and the scent of water.

It made me remember a time a couple years back, when Lucky had taken me to the public pool for a swimming lesson. I was already mad at him that day because earlier he had punched me in the shoulder for standing too long with the refrigerator open. The muscles hurt deep where his fist had landed, and he wanted me to try a butterfly stroke while he leaned against the pool wall, his arms out of the water and crooked back like wings. One of his friends — Michael? Gabe? — was sitting in the lifeguard tower near the deep end chatting with him, white sunblock caked up on his nose.

I did a couple of laps until Lucky stopped watching, and then I practiced swimming as slowly as I could. When you swim slow, you swim quiet, so I played a game where I got as close to Lucky as I could without him knowing it.

Under the water, his skin was pasty and leopard-spotted. His trunks were a dark something, purple or red, like the Cowardly Lion’s robe. I inched closer by degrees, causing too much of a ruckus when I reversed direction, and gradually learning to slip in circles like a submarine.

At my bravest, I got close enough to touch my brother, so I did. I turned my right hand into a torpedo and I got him right under his xylophone ribcage. Through the water in my ears, he sounded like a sick dinosaur. He caught me under the armpits and lifted me right out of the water. The lifeguard was laughing, and Lucky joined in, both of them aiming their mouths at some point away from me so I only caught the reflections.

“That’s good,” said Lucky. “Now you ought to try it over here.”

I hadn’t realized we were so close to the deep end. I breathed in to shriek just as Lucky let me go, and sucked chlorine in my mouth. I coughed, but it was still in there, so I swallowed it down. For a few seconds, bubbles from the surface trailed the zig-zags of my feet and fingers, but then they floated away and it was just pure water, wave-shadows mottled on my skin. I could taste the chemicals high up in my nose and kicked down with both legs. My throat caught on a bubble of something, and I tried to spit it out; it came up as a scream. I felt as if I were spitting all the tones the human body can produce, but all I could hear was a high-pitched, mosquito whine, cutting into my ears.

Lucky’s hands found one elbow and one wrist and I saw his white legs kick out like a fish’s tail. I wanted to bite him, but my head was in the wrong direction. I screamed again, and god I wanted to be more than a mosquito. He kicked again, and I caught a glimpse of his toes, painted dark something like his swim trunks. It took me a couple seconds to realize it when he got me above the surface, because of all the water spilling out my nose and mouth.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Lucky was saying. “Here, come here. It’s all right.” His skin was warm, and all of the sudden I realized the water was cold. “Grab on, hey. Grab on.” We were at the edge. I put both hands on the concrete lip and hooked my chin between them. “You were just here,” said Lucky. “Okay? Are you all right?” He chuckled through his teeth. “You did all right here, yeah? Put your legs down. Come on, put your legs down.”

I bunched my fists tighter on the concrete; it was warmer than Lucky. I let my legs uncurl, sliding them toes-first down in the wall. “It’s over your head right here,” said Lucky. “See that? You were playing in it.”

I looked up. The lifeguard was leaning forward in his tower, right above me, hiding behind an umbrella shadow and sunglasses. “Yeah,” I said to Lucky.

“Yeah? You were doing all right. Once it’s over your head it doesn’t matter. All right? It’s just water on down.”

The rain was starting to seep through my clothes and puddle on the small of my back. I switched off the flashlight and tried to scrape some new mud off my hands. I hadn’t had a brave face then, at the pool; I hadn’t really known what one looked like. Since then, I had had plenty of time to remember how I should have been, when the water was over my head. Almost everywhere in the pool, it was over my head. I knew what a brave face ought to look like, and sometimes I had myself convinced that I had worn it all the way through the deep end.

Whether I had or not, I put it on to go have dinner with dad. I made him rent a PG-13, which had thematic elements and violence, and during the boring parts I caught him admiring my face in the dull and shifting blue of the screen.

#

Somehow it got back to my dad that Angelo had tried to throw me off the school’s roof. He set up a meeting with the principal of the school, and Mister Tripp, and Angelo’s parents. For some reason, he set it for a weekend. I was supposed to go along, but Angelo was there, too, and after a few minutes of sitting in the room with whispers from our parents, Mister Tripp told me I could wait on the playground.

It was weird, playing on the big toy with no one else pushing for space. I sat at the top of the slide and no one yelled at me to hurry up and move. There was a crossbar right above me, built to keep people from shoving the younger kids over, I think, but I used it to swing myself back and forth, building up and then canceling my momentum. After one massive pump of my elbows I let myself go. I kept my arms up in the air as I slid down, and couldn’t help grinning at how the air all got out of my way. I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see the bottom.

The ground came up sooner than I had expected. The soles of my shoes caught at an awkward angle on the unturned dirt and sent me head-over-heels. My eyes snapped open on reflex just about the time my hands went up to shield my face. My skin scraped on the hard-pack, right on the places that hadn’t healed from when Angelo dropped me on the roof.

It wasn’t the first time I’d taken a tumble like that. My favorite time to slide was right after the bell rang to come inside, because everyone else would be streaming toward the door, and I could try and get a good run without anyone seeing. I’m not very coordinated, though, so four times out of five I ended up on my butt or worse in the dirt, and most of those times there was someone — a teacher, a sixth grader on his way out to PE — to laugh or try not to.

The playground was dead silent, but as I levered myself up I felt as if my classmates were laughing at me, just from further away, and more quietly. To ignore them, I started building a city in the dirt, with roads and dry rivers. It wasn’t the best stuff — the banks of the rivers crumbled, and the shoulders of the roads disintegrated. It wasn’t like the dirt out in our forest, by the stream, or even the stuff in the corner of the playground by the big tires, where I usually spent my recesses.

There were some girls, a grade under me, who used to sit under the trees near my spot because they liked the shade and could talk about things without the boys making machinegun noises right through them. Mostly, they ignored me, but one day, after it had rained the previous night, a blonde saw me splattering wet clods all over my clothes. I was playing Moses and the Egyptians. She called me “mud monster,” and it wasn’t until now that I realized she said it the same way that other people called Lucky “homo,” careless and sort of like they were the same word, just pronounced differently.

Lucky didn’t call himself a homo. He called himself “on fire.” He called me “little man.” Dad called us both “dear son” and called himself “dad.” I don’t know what I called myself, other than my name. I didn’t have much. I thought “mud monster” wasn’t too bad. I got in trouble that day, because I threw handfuls of half-dry sand at the girls.

Dad came and found me when he was done talking with the principal. I had gotten bored with my city and was working on a hole for the little people. I dug it down with my fingers, wide enough that someone so small wouldn’t be able to see both sides, and deep enough that they couldn’t see the bottom.

“What are you working on?” asked dad. He had his hands in his pockets with his fists clenched, as if he were afraid of getting close to the dirt.

“Nothing,” I said, standing and brushing myself off. Dad opened up one arm and drew me to his side.

“If that kid so much as says another word to you, calls you ‘turkey’ or something, you tell me, okay?” He squeezed my shoulder into his stomach.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. He led me away from the slide. I sidestepped my finger-deep hole. I knew what he’d do. He’d come down here and have another meeting, and I’d play in the dirt, and we’d go home. There wasn’t much of anything more than that, but it wasn’t enough. It was like standing at the lip of a hole and trying to gauge its depth by tossing a stone instead of jumping right in for proof positive. Once it’s over your head, it doesn’t matter how deep it is.

“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” said Dad.

#

Saturday two weeks after Lucky’s funeral, I caught up with Angelo in the park outside the public library, where he was flicking pieces of bark at hungry chipmunks. I had been looking for him. For half a breath, it was weird to see him off the playground, like it’s weird to see a teacher out of the classroom. Then the long stretch of grass began to look like the soccer field, and the half-dead oak tree by the band-shell didn’t look that much different from the big toy. There was already a slide there.

Once the world felt like the right place, I pushed it just a little bit to hang on to some of the weirdness. I walked up behind Angelo, but not sneaking. I dragged my sneakers through the grass to make a noise. He knew I was there before I said anything, I figured, even though he didn’t turn around. He took a finger-long piece of bark between his thumb and pointer finger like a boomerang and let it fly with a spin. It landed and bounced right next to a squirrel who had been cramming pine seeds into his cheeks. The squirrel jumped, scattering his food. Angelo laughed, and I joined him.

“Here to play ‘Smear the Queer?’” he said, much quieter than I thought he could do. He stooped for another piece of bark. I found what I thought was a good one and handed it to him.

“I found something in the forest out behind my house,” I said.

“Good for you.” He dropped the piece of bark I had given him.

“Someone buried a duffel bag. It’s got all these bags of stuff in it.” I leaned in a bit closer, though there was no one around to spy on us. “I think it might be drugs.”

He didn’t turn around, but I saw the skin at the backs of his cheeks start to shift, being pushed out of the way by that grin of his. I shut my mouth and let his imagination do the rest. One time on the playground, when we were even younger, I watched from behind a big tire as one of Angelo’s friends told him about an ant’s nest over by where a group of girls were playing at house. That was all the guy said. “There’s an ant’s nest over there.” Angelo had grinned and slunk over. One of the girls told him to get lost; he kept his distance, found the nest, and picked up a couple of the fat, black bodies. I wondered what he would do. Would he throw them at the girls? Drop them in their hair?

He darted up to them, quicker than protests, and jammed both the ants in his mouth. He crunched them down, open-mouthed. The girls called for a playground monitor.

That’s what I was hoping to do. Just give him an idea – not even an idea. Give him a fact, and let him pursue it. “Drugs” was like a magic word.

“All right,” he said. “Show me.”

We played a game kind of like follow-the-leader all the way home. I was the leader. We would round a corner, and then Angelo would sprint to the stop sign at the next intersection. He would wait for me to catch up, and then say: “What took you so long, slowpoke?” On the last block before we turned off into the forest, I took off fast as I could and waited, grinning, at the stop sign for Angelo to catch up. That time he just walked, and said: “What’s the rush?”

He stuck a little closer in the forest. I knew my way by heart. There were landmarks that never changed if you looked hard enough, but if you didn’t care all you saw were loose boughs and drifts of pine needles that change with the wind, like I read sand dunes do.

Angelo cursed every time I got him with the backswing of a branch, and any time a mosquito got him, and I think every time he noticed his feet were sore from walking. The curses made me want to shut him up even more. They were some kind of magic words, too, unfamiliar in the way they sounded, even though I had read them a bunch of times in the horror books I borrowed from dad’s study. They didn’t sound like they should have.

We reached the clearing and I pointed at the whole. From where we were, even though Angelo was inches taller than me, it just looked like the top of a hole, the foreshortened oval, shaded black.

“All right,” said Angelo. “What’s really in there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I tried to remember the names of some drugs. “I think its heroin.” He laughed at me, because I pronounced it wrong.

He took a couple of steps forward. Not nearly close enough. He stood on his tiptoes to get a better view. “You first,” he said.

“I’m not getting in there.”

“You don’t have to jump down, nut sack. Just stick your head over. You probably put dog crap or like one of those spring-loaded snakes or something.”

“Okay,” I said. I approached Lucky’s hole, got down on my hands and knees and crawled until my head was over the edge. To make it look good, I reached a hand down, as though grabbing for something. For the long moment while Angelo stared, I spread my fingers and let the dark, cooled air flow between them. Gooseflesh rose all along my arm, and I remembered Lucky telling me that each pimple would grow a big, thick hair when I was a man.

Angelo’s sneakers scratched a weird rhythm in the dust. I pulled my hand back and looked over at him. He stood, one knee forward and slightly bent, staring into the hole. His mouth was wide open, like choking.

“Oh my god,” he said. The hole swallowed it up.

He stood there, breathing in one direction, out or in, for a long time. His mouth slid forward and open, his back arched like being hit with cold water from a hose. I stood up, even dusted off my jeans, and got myself right behind him. I’d push him over, and maybe I’d jump after him. We’d fall and fall, the same speed, together and he’d never be able to get up to me. Once it’s over your head, it doesn’t matter.

Or maybe I’d just put him in. Let him fall to China.

I shoved at his knees with both my hands. He fell to his knees, but they weren’t far enough forward. They dug little divots in the lip of the hole and he fell backward between his legs, folded over on himself. He rolled around to his stomach and clawed dirt getting back on his feet.

I didn’t stick around to watch. I took off into the ferns and devil’s clubs, headed toward my house, running one length of the playground, two, three, then back toward the hole when I ran out of forest. He caught me up just as I was feeling like my heart was going to collapse and my spit had turned all to glue.

He got my arms both wrapped around my back and kicked me hard right where I had shoved him. I fell forward and my shoulders both made this firecracker sound, so loud it made my ears ring. Curses came out of his mouth like he couldn’t stop them if he tried. It made me think of throwing up, leaning over my toilet in the middle of the night and just heaving so hard it hurts, long after everything’s that’s gonna has come up.

I wound up in the dirt. It was strange. It felt warmer than my skin, and not at all bad to curl up in. The hole made its long almost-howl somewhere nearby. My ribs got his fists, awkwardly, and then his feet.

He called me a fag, over and over again. Maybe blood started pooling up in my ears, because he got dimmer and dimmer, and then was gone completely.

The next thing I remember is a dream that seemed to last forever while I was in it, and then seemed only a few seconds long once I got out, like all memory is the same size and shape. I wasn’t in the forest anymore. I was in a bed with thin blankets which smelled of dryer sheets. It wasn’t my bed.

Dad was sitting in a chair that disappeared completely under him. He looked up at me when I shifted the blankets away from my nose. He told me we were in the hospital, and that I had a couple of cracked ribs, and that I could have so much ice cream I’d poo caramel for a week. He gave me this hug that hurt worse than when Angelo had kicked me.

I had to stay the night there at the hospital. I watched a lot of TV, and dad watched it with me. PBS had a show on with this old scientist — dad told me he’s dead now — who said that the earth is infinite, but bounded. If you walk, you can walk forever, but if you jump up then you’ve just busted infinity. Dad fell asleep during it.

The next day, dad set me up in my room with the TV and the VCR and I ate ice cream until my tongue went all the way numb. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I was plenty tired, but dad kept coming in to check on me, worse than the nurses with their blood pressure cuffs at the hospital.

When it started getting dark he brought in an album of my baby pictures. We flipped through the pages together, though we could barely fit the two of us on my bed. We looked at all the pictures of Lucky and me playing in pillow forts, him stealing turkey off my plate at Thanksgiving, both of us standing side by side with me coming only up to his belly button.

After that, dad took me through a prayer. He asked god to watch of mom and Lucky and to tell them both we miss them very much. When we said, Amen, I just felt like I missed them more. I pretended to go to sleep so dad would leave. He switched off the light on his way out, and forgot to leave the door open a crack so I could see the bathroom light.

I got up and went to my window. It hurt a little to stand, but it all turned into memory pretty quick. I stared out at the forest. It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t close enough. Words didn’t work. The throbbing in my ribs and arms made me feel a little closer to Lucky, but only like being in the classes with the same teachers he had made me feel grown up.

I waited a bit for dad’s feet to stop drumming on the floorboards, then I slid open my window and got myself out into the grass. Bare feet, in my pajamas, I ran to the hole.

There was a full moon out. It made huge mountains and valleys out of the trails Angelo and I had scuffed in the dirt when we were fighting. I put my feet into Angelo’s big prints and danced around in reverse, until I was kneeling by the hole.

An infinite space, I thought, smelling that blank-like-water smell of the air coming up from below. Like anything is infinite. Lucky never came back from China; there was no “there” to come back from. Just a big, black throat with no stomach. No end to the distance between my forest and the other side of the world.

I cried like throwing up, and caught what I could in my hands. It wasn’t much, but I shook them out as far out into the center of the hole as I could. I heard some splash into the dirt and against the rocks as they went every which way. Some must have gone straight down, all together for as long as they could.