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.

Go to part 1 | part 2…

It was snowing hard the day of the annual Winter Parade. I met Harald in the park after church. He had already staked out a good spot underneath a big elm right next to the sidewalk. It was our tradition to dive for candy tossed from the floats; we had given up on trick-or-treating years ago, but we kept this one up. Thick, wet flakes hissed through the thick branches and the few stone-dead leaves. Harald turned his head up to the sky and laughed.

“Weatherman said it’d be almost fifty today,” he said. 

“Never sunny on Sunday,” I said. “You’re always on about the weatherman.”

“He’s cooler than God, man,” said Harald. “The weatherman doesn’t hide from his responsibility. He doesn’t apologize for his inaccuracies, but he stands up the next day as if nothing was wrong and he tells you to dig out your umbrellas, folks. He’s a liar, but he trusts you enough to know that he ain’t always right. God don’t want you to know when he’s wrong.”

“Selfish punk,” I said, without really meaning for it to go one way or the other, sarcastic or funny. Harald didn’t take either.

The first floats began to chug past, balanced in the beds of old Datsuns. The martial arts school put on a roving display, but it didn’t look right because all the students were wearing these big black slippers. The food bank tried to mix things up by holding open grocery bags and inviting the onlookers to toss in non-perishable items. Harald tossed one of his shoes at them, and said: “Real leather!”

A ripple of sighs preceded the Junior Miss float. Three girls sat on tiers, as though they were spirits of wedding joy reclining on a cake. At the top, alternating hands in her princess wave, Adrianna Telco beamed at the crowd. She was a year behind us, but there wasn’t a girl in our grade that matched her for looks. She crossed preference boundaries; if you dug Asian chicks, you’d still like Adrianna; if you had a bit of a porker fetish, your eye would follow her anyway; if you were a girl, you’d count her up there with Angelina on the list of women you’d go gay for. 

Emma had been my type, but I always had trouble tearing my eyes away from Adrianna. She had mocha skin and hair like a fall of cherry juice. Emma had always been interested in my reaction to Adrianna, but never jealous. As the float passed our tree, I glanced away. 

Harald noticed. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Emma’s not watching.” I knew if I challenged him, he’d rise to the occasion. It’s the way he fought. I was a little tired of hearing his voice, so I turned back to the float. Adrianna was looking right at us, smiling wide, her lips the shape of a bow ready to be shot. She and Martha had tried to be friends, once. Birthday invitations were traded, and Martha went to one of Adrianna’s parties. She brought a doll as a present, but didn’t feel like wrapping it. Adrianna’s parents had chuckled and thanked Martha for the gift.

The next day at school, I was out on the soccer field and lunch when I saw Adrianna come up to Martha, holding the gift. They traded some words, and then Adrianna held the doll out. Martha took it back. Then Adrianna threw her arms around Martha and hugged her like girls do.

She was waving at me, and I waved back. Someone screamed, wordless, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It made me think of a bird that flies into the path of a car, but it wasn’t a bird. It hit Adrianna’s face and changed it in an instant, breaking her skin and drawing up blood without any passage of time. As if it were a subliminal message in a movie, a single frame that clicks out of place as quickly as it appeared, I thought that blinking might change things back to normal. 

Someone had thrown a rock. Adrianna put her fists to her face and got blood on her dress. The other princesses struggled up from their seats and the float stopped, though someone yelled: “Keep going! Keep going!”

Another rock sailed high over the float, and now the crowd was turning on the man who threw it. I caught a glimpse of the young lawyer from Martha’s funeral; he was stabbing his finger at the air, at the float, and yelling about something. I caught my cousin’s name, ripped high out of the lawyer’s throat. 

Harald and I both rushed to the float, to see if there was anything we could do. I ran into football players and the chess club president, all setting themselves up as a human shield while the driver of the float yelled for everyone to sit down so he could move. Harald bent to the asphalt and retrieved the first rock. He hurled it back toward the lawyer. The lawyer ducked, but I saw other Brigades around him, all curled into themselves, fists and faces.

The sidewalk became a battle line. Some of the adults were screaming at us kids to calm down; others, like the lawyer, were trying to break across the asphalt and run us down. I heard somebody scream: “It’s your family that remembers! Your family remembers!” I added my voice in: “Martha was my cousin!” There wasn’t room for anything but the simplest of arguments, like a static battle. Pick one defensible position and stay there. My counterpoint was swallowed in the swell of rough confusion.

Parents on one side were ordering their children to cross the street. Children burst with profanity, seizing upon its quick power to cut the tethers of their parents. Harald climbed to the top of the float and thrust his fists in the air. “Fuck you and your God!” he cried. “Martha’s with the weatherman, now!”

The lawyer and the other Brigades had just needed an excuse. They charged and their momentum carried the rest of adults onto the pavement. The hands of working fathers met the wet necks of sons; the shrill voices of mothers knifed into the ears of daughters. It looked like a Hollywood brawl, but completely one-sided, like maybe some natural born killers versus the Buttercream Gang. 

With the other juniors and seniors, I avoided most of it. It was the freshmen and sophomores that took the brunt of the assault, while we older kids rallied around the float. I hung around the back, out of sight of the young lawyer. I thought about tactics and war games, and, without even trying or meaning to, imagined myself in the thick of battle. The imaginary me made a feint around the float’s tailpipe and took out Martha’s great aunt Judy, who was yelling about soap and superstition. He then danced up the tiers of the float and shielded Adrianna from the crowd. Harald kicked at him, to get back his share of the spotlight, and the two boys began to fight dirty, mouths and fingers both. 

What really happened was great aunt Judy got her hand on the driver and yanked the keys out of the ignition and two police officers showed up to help widen the distance between kids and adults. A hole in the clouds — almost perfectly round, as though God had poked his finger through — framed the sun for a moment, and Harald laughed himself sick, crowing: “Your God don’t say if he’s failing or not!”

It wasn’t as heroic, but I climbed up the backside of the float so my eyes were level with Harald’s sneakers. I hissed at him. “You ever read Ecclesiastes?” Now he was kicking glitter at the police officers. I made two fists and drove one each into the backs of his knees. He lost his balance and crashed down to the second tier, breaking off a plywood bundle of lace and foam. 

I slid down to the pavement as fast as I could. When Harald got to his feet, I was around the other side of the float and getting suspended from school for a week. When Adrianna was loaded, sobbing, into an ambulance, I didn’t bother her with any sympathy.

#

The whole world settled down after that: no snow, no fights, a couple lawsuits that sparked and faded like fireworks. The new year came and went. A new semester got underway, and Harald and I didn’t share any classes. 

I started to feel sick during baseball practice; running the bases made my legs cramp up and the tendons under my groin began to feel like frayed wires, pumping bad current. I toughed it out for a couple of months, and then told mom. She got me an appointment with our physician, and he quickly passed me up the ladder to a specialist. 

The specialist asked me if I had been playing near any hazardous chemicals. I told him about the asbestos in our walls at home, but that I wasn’t much of a guy for playing right up against walls. He asked me if I were sexually active, and I told him: “Yeah, I were.” He wanted to know how long ago, so I told him about Emma and me. He wanted to know if Emma had been displaying any similar symptoms, and I told him that she hadn’t been. 

He did a biopsy on me, and when the nurses got me into a hospital room they shut the door and asked me a bunch more questions. Had I noticed any trouble getting or maintaining an erection? How frequently did I masturbate? What products did I use for lubricant? I answered as quietly as I could; they had to ask me to repeat a few answers.

They kept me overnight, while they waited on the results of the biopsy. The next morning, the specialist came in alongside my breakfast and told me not to eat too quickly. “It’s malignant,” he said. 

“Oh well,” I said, shrugging. “Amputate it.”

It didn’t turn out to be that simple. The cancer was in my blood, and could only be killed off by radiation. The specialist told me I’d never be able to have children again, and I asked if it would hurt more than a vasectomy. He said it wouldn’t. “Kill two birds with one stone,” I said.

After that, I was in twice a month for radiation treatments, after which my whole damn body felt like burnt wiring. Each time, they let me hang out on the long-term floor, sleep all day, claim to be too tired to do homework, and watch TV when I felt like it. Mostly, I watched infomercials. 

Even those got old after three months of the routine. I took to wandering the halls, smiling at people who looked like they might smile back. It was on one of these circuits of the halls that I stumbled on Edgar’s room. 

He was awake, half-sitting in his adjustable bed, picking at the dirt under his finger nails.

“Hey, Steve,” I said. He looked up and, after letting my greeting echo a couple of times, gave me a big smile.

“Hey,” he said. “What are you in for?”

“Life,” I said. “May I come in?”

“Be my guest,” said Edgar.

I hobbled in and took a seat on the corner of a chair, the rest of which was populated by flowers. “You’ve got a fan club,” I said.

Edgar gave me a weak smile, but he shouldn’t have bothered. I knew he wasn’t keen on all the attention, never had been. All through high school, I had tried to shore up my self-esteem by thinking that he and I were the same in that regard. The difference was that his distaste was from experience, and mine was from its lack.

“How are they treating you?” I asked.

“Like an amnesiac,” said Edgar. “Every morning they ask me if I can remember my name, and if I can wiggle my toes, and what’s the capitol of England. They think I’m going to have a relapse.”

“Can you have a coma relapse?” I asked. “I bet they panic when you take a nap.”

“When they let me take a nap,” he said. “Always checking up on me, taking my pulse.”

“I hear you,” I said, shifting flowers and settling further back in my seat. “I hear you.”

I was in for another couple days, so I hung out in Edgar’s room as much as possible. If I was annoying him, he never let on. I started most of the conversations, but once they had momentum he didn’t try much to slow them down.

Another batch of flowers arrived, and Edgar invited me to sit at the foot of his bed so I wouldn’t have to fight with them. We talked about school and books and enough about religion for us to share a couple of self-conscious snickers. He offered to teach me the guitar, so we wasted one afternoon trying to build calluses on my fingers. He said it wouldn’t work without calluses.

When my therapy was over, I stopped by his room to tell him I’d visit. The treatments were making me feel as weak as I had ever been, as if I had to be careful breathing or I’d blow myself over. 

“You going to be here a while longer?” I asked.

“Not if I can help it,” he said. Then he reached down beside his bed with a hand tethered to an IV and lifted his guitar. “Here,” he said. “You ought to keep practicing.”

“Thanks,” I said. I could barely lift the thing, and my fingers were still sore from the last practice. “You gonna need it?”

Edgar shook his head. His lips trembled, as though holding back words and breath that he didn’t want to let loose. “I used to believe that art was the highest form of human expression,” he said. “I don’t anymore.”

“So what is?” I asked. A nurse knocked on the open door and slipped past me. She fiddled with Edgar’s IV pump and checked his pulse. By the time she left, the air had cleared of all questions and was too thin for answers. I had to say something, though, not to have the last word, but to be remembered. “Martha was my favorite cousin,” I said. I regretted it all the way to the curb, where mom picked me up in our old station wagon.

I sat in the passenger seat, resting my forehead against the glass and listened to my teeth vibrating gently in my skull. Mom tried to talk to me, but I could barely keep my eyes open. I drifted in and out of sleep, lulled by the motion of the car, jolted awake by its turns. I remember cracking my eyes open, the whole world a smear of blue-tinted color as mom wheeled around an intersection.

That was it, then, the power that Edgar and Harald and Emma all shared. Art is not the ultimate expression of humanity; power is. Power becomes beautiful in display, for suicides and saints, and is both irredeemable and irreversible, unlike the creation of a work of art, which contains value and frailty. God, if there is such a creature, is an artist who bestows value on his beasts. The beasts, in their capacity for destruction, undo his effort and make it their own.

The radiation was burning in my brain. Mom had to take me around the shoulders to get me in to bed, guiding my feet and muttering: “Come on. You aren’t helpless.”

#

Three months later, my cancer was fully in remission. I had missed too much school to graduate that year, so in April I dropped out, temporarily, and picked up a job with a local plumber. My family, from the Brigades all the way across to my side of the family tree, was happy for my success in fighting off the cancer. I told them I hadn’t done much, but that the doctors and nurses ought to thanked.

Aunt Riley — who chose God over doctors — threw a dinner party soon after in celebration of my healing. I asked her to make sure God came, so I could thank him properly.

The day of the party was an anniversary of sorts for Emma and me; a year ago that day, I had first kissed her on the cheek. My lips had burned until I went to bed. Aunt Riley called at lunchtime to ask me to come up a little early, because her well was acting up again. I said I’d be right up. I grabbed my toolbox and mom drove me up. Aunt Riley greeted us at the door. She kissed me hard on the cheek, making a noise in her throat because her lips were so dry they wouldn’t smack. As mom went inside to help aunt Riley with the dinner, a breeze stirred the air around me and the kiss sloughed off my skin. 

The well was out in the middle of the yard, covered by an old shipping palette to which a sheet of tar paper had been stapled. I hauled the cover off and peered down into the gloom. She had overdrawn the water, again; she kept having this problem because she pumped water so fast that the well didn’t have time to recharge. Her pump was sucking air, probably had been for a while, so I let myself drop to the platform on which it rested. The well itself was covered by a grid of two-by-fours, and went down a good thirty feet. I knelt down on the boards and flicked at the grimy switch on the pump. It coughed into silence and I shivered, a spring chill settling on my shoulders. The pressure gauge on the pump ticked down to zero and stayed there. I adjusted the feed pipe a couple inches down; aunt Riley usually had a quick enough inflow that the well would charge up again in just a minute or so, and faster if I adjusted the depth. I waited to a count of sixty, inspecting the cracks in the concrete to keep me occupied. 

I switched the pump back on, and it choked like a fish on air. The pressure gauge stayed at zero. I flicked the switch again and waited another minute. I heard a car squelch over aunt Riley’s muddy drive and poked my head up like a prairie dog’s. A couple distant cousins had arrived, probably to share dinner. I waved at them and then dropped out of sight.

The pump still refused to grab water. Wasn’t nothing for it but to go down to the bottom of the well and check the intake manually. I slid the two-by-four lid off the circular hole. As I did, a bubble of silence seemed to rise out of it, expanding to fill the well housing, pressing into my ears. It was depth and solitude and came with a musty smell of earth and old water. 

There was a row of rebar handholds down one side of the well. I swung myself onto them and went down, hand over hand. The bars were cold as bones. Every rung down took me further into the silence.

When I reached the bottom, still hanging onto the ladder, I felt around with the toe of one boot. There wasn’t much light down there, but there wasn’t much room to get lost, either. I could hear my boot splash lightly against water, and risked leaning a little further down. My foot hit mud before the water had a chance to seep over my sole. I let go of the ladder and got down on my haunches. The well was almost dry. I felt the walls; they were slick with moisture, and thick with clay. I fumbled around with my arms until I found the intake pipe. I slid my fingers to its end and then measured the distance to the puddle that was all that was left of aunt Riley’s water. There was about a foot of gap.

Wasn’t much I could do, at that point. I rubbed my hands together to shake off the mud and to warm them up. When I stopped moving, the silence was total. I was alone, a creature at the root of creation. The smell reminded me of Emma’s room, with all her dead leaves. 

I looked up. It was mid-afternoon, but in the lens of the well’s opening I could see needlepoint stars against a royal blue sky. Someone had told me, in the tone of an urban legend, that you could see stars in broad daylight. I stared; a reverse vertigo hit me, and I leaned back against the muck of the wall. I had never thought that stars could be so beautiful; they were too far away to signify anything, or to act as anything but pixels in a giant, inscrutable screen that played for the world. 

I had to close my eyes. Tears I hadn’t known were there squeezed out from under my lids and seemed to freeze against my cheeks. I began to climb out of the hole, hand over hand.

I covered the well up and crawled out of the housing; the sounds of the motion of air, of spring birds, of supple leaves scraped against my ear drums like steel wool. As the sun began to coax the cold stiffness out of my joints, I looked up. The sky was blue, like a dusting of fine powder. I could see the moon, but that was it.

Inside, I cleaned up and told aunt Riley the bad news. She’d have to drill deeper; the water table was all used up. She made a face, and then patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The Lord will provide.”

A dozen or so of my extended family crowded around aunt Riley’s table. They all wished me well, and the younger ones wanted to rub my bald head for good luck after I assured them that cancer wasn’t contagious.

“Would you say the blessing?” aunt Riley asked me.

“Sure,” I said. Everyone but me bowed their heads; everyone but me closed their eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to. I stared at the downturned faces of my relatives, with their soft noses and their puffed cheeks and trimmed hair, and I couldn’t even blink. “Dear Lord,” I began. I didn’t want to say a word. I could think of thousands of them, but I wanted to shut up, to let everyone else have their turns. I thought about what my family needed —warmth and water, money, food, and fun — and I asked God for only those things. When the “amen” sounded, I went quiet. That night, I dreamed about wax and failure and standing in a crowd that stared up at the sun. 

The end

Go to part 1 | part 3…

Aaron Telco was a decent guy when I knew him in school. He was three grades older than me, so he would have been perfectly justified in acting like a dick around my friends and me, but he always wore his age with grace, as if it were an accident. He was Edgar’s cousin, and the two chatted occasionally, usually about stupid things their parents had done. 

Aaron graduated ahead of his class and went straight into training to be an EMT. He was on first response the night Edgar killed Martha and her mother, but that happened in a different jurisdiction. 

I ran into him at the hospital after I heard that Edgar, though still in a coma, was all right for visitors. The door to Edgar’s room was closed, but the nurse had told me to go on in, so I knocked and pushed it open. Aaron was standing next to Edgar’s bed, his hand resting on some piece of beeping machinery. He settled his eyes on my face for a good long moment while he dredged up my name, then said: “He’s asleep.”

“Has he woken up?” I asked. 

Aaron shook his head. “He opened his eyes a couple of times, but there’s nothing behind them.”

“That’s weird,” I said.

Aaron nodded. “You guys keep in touch?” he asked. 

“We’re classmates,” I said. “He’s got a million friends.”

“I thought he’d have graduated by now,” said Aaron. 

“We’re still the young cusses,” I said. Then: “Does it help him to hear a familiar voice?”

“Maybe,” said Aaron. He slapped his hand nervously against the top of one of Edgar’s monitors, as if trying to fix the reception on a TV set. “I’ve been here too long,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

The cafeteria had a free pot. One sip and it clung to my teeth like some chemical solvent. Aaron steered me toward a table in the corner and waited for me to sit before taking a chair opposite mine. “I feel like I owe you an apology,” he said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said, mock-toasting him with my Styrofoam cup.

“I was a dick to you back in school,” he said. 

“I probably deserved it,” I said. “I always thought you were nice to me.”

“I was, to you. But you had a lot of nicknames, back then. I guess you’ve outgrown most of them, now. I started a few.” For the last two years, I had been wanting to confess to Emma that the first time I met her, I had called her a space cadet. I wondered if Aaron was feeling the same low pang of guilt. “It wasn’t very nice of me,” he added; then he grinned into his coffee and took a big, steaming gulp. “I got away with it, though. I guess you didn’t even notice.”

I shook my head. 

“See, I have this theory,” said Aaron. “Everyone on Earth has some stupid super power. Nothing great, like flying or heat vision, but dumb things, like being able to tell if you’re on the ground floor, or guessing the right thing to order off a menu. Me, I was always able to tell when I’d get caught. I lied all through high school. I passed eleventh grade biology without hardly attending, because I told my teacher I did the reading at home, and he sucked at writing tests. I kept two girlfriends at the same time, and they never found out. I ended up dumping them both. I convinced the whole graduating class that you were gay for your friend. What’s his name? The smart one.”

“Harald,” I said.

“Yeah, him,” said Aaron. “I’m sorry. Some of the senior girls thought it was cute, at least.”

“You always talked about your parents behind their backs,” I said.

“Yeah. They never caught me, either,” said Aaron. He froze as a code call went over the intercom. There was a cardiac arrest on floor three. Aaron downed the rest of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath. “Two weeks ago I answered a call for a head-on collision,” he said. “Guy who called it in said he saw one car swerving all over the road, thought about calling it in, and then felt guilty when he waited until after there was a crash. He sounded really broken up on the phone, apparently, and he was still on scene when we got there. I can’t stand guys like that, all guilty over things that aren’t their fault or even their business. He was right, though; he should have called it in. The guy that was swerving turned out to be dead drunk. He went limp on impact, landed tits up on the asphalt, unconscious but still alive. Other car had a dad and a little girl, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Had her learner’s permit in her wallet, and ear buds in her ears. They went stiff; and, even though they were buckled in, they both died. 
“So, we were there to pick up the drunk. It was me, the driver, and my training partner. It didn’t take much to get the bastard stabilized, so we got him on a stretcher and into the ambulance. My partner sat up front with the driver; I stayed back with the drunk. I stared at him for a while as we tore through the city, lights on fire. He was an ugly man. Had a big old brow ridge like a gorilla, and a unibrow. Probably wasn’t smart enough, evolved enough to handle driving a car in the first place. 

“No, he was worse than that. He was a shit, a bit of useless flesh cut off from everything good about life. He killed that little girl and the kicker was he didn’t even know it. For all he knew, he had died in that crash.

“It wasn’t hard to kill him, morally or otherwise. Easy enough to tweak the hardware and the wetware. Nothing traceable; when we pulled up to the hospital, it looked as if he’d died of head trauma from landing on the pavement. I stood in the ER filling out paperwork for half an hour, and during that time the drunk’s family came in because they’d heard about the accident but hadn’t heard that their husband and father was dead. I stood right next to them, the clipboard shaking in my hands, and I fucking felt like the angel of death.”

Aaron had crumpled his coffee cup in one hand. Bits of it flaked to the linoleum floor, white on gray. I stared at my hands and tried to get the tastes of coffee and hot blood out of my mouth. 

“I don’t think I have a super power,” I said.

“I can teach you how to kill a man,” said Aaron. “If you want.”

After that, we both went back to Edgar’s room. Aaron sat in a corner chair, his neck angled over his lap, while I sat next to the bed. I wanted to say something to Edgar, just to line up my life with the movies, but it didn’t feel right with Aaron sitting there. Others of Edgar’s friends had gotten wind that it was all right to drop by. A couple of librarian-types I didn’t know came bringing some of Edgar’s favorite CDs, and I offered up my uncomfortable seat. I said goodbye to Aaron; he grinned instead of replying. 

When I got home, it took me a while to find the number for the police station. I didn’t think it was worth calling emergency over, but I figured I could call in weeks-old crimes to the officer on duty. I had to dig out the previous year’s copy of the yellow pages out of a stack of recycling I had never gotten to taking outside for my mother, since I couldn’t find this year’s. 

I told the officer who answered the phone that I had heard a man confess to killing a drunk. The whole time I spoke my heart was pumping so hard in both directions, it felt as if two halves of my blood were at war; one half wanted me to finish the tattle, the other wanted me to let it go. I could feel my body rocking with the tidal forces of the battle, and when the officer asked me if I had a name for him, I said, “I didn’t catch it. He had brown hair, wasn’t taller than me, five-nine, and had blue eyes.”

I told Emma about the whole thing the next time I saw her. “Poor you,” she said. “Always late to the game. Everyone else gets there first.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

Emma nodded thoughtfully, and I fully expected her to launch into a story about how she had lived on the streets and killed dozens of gang members in her life before she moved up here. Then I remembered what she told me about the young boy that she had killed, just as she said: “Sometimes death can transform something ugly into something powerful, or something puny into something beautiful. It’s never what you expect.” Then she sighed. “I don’t learn as much from you, these days,” she said. “You used to tell me everything you could think of. It’s not your fault. There’s just not enough to learn. I feel as if I’m telling you everything.”

First thing that came to mind in the wide space of that almost-invitation was god. I asked her if she still believed in him. She smiled, shook her head. “But I don’t believe in the weatherman, either. I need something falsifiable, like human courage,” she said. 

#

Most everything I know of Emma I learned from other people. I first heard about her from Harald, and it was his description of her that I saw when she came around the corner on her way to class. Edgar told me about her history, about how she had had to run away from California because she didn’t belong there, and because some people were after her. She was like an alien to me, and I used my friends to dissect her. 

It wasn’t until we started going out that I really learned a few things about her for myself. I learned that she was scared of children because they asked too many questions. I said that she wouldn’t mind questions if she didn’t have something to hide. I learned that she was incapable of experiencing internal orgasms, and that she wore contacts to cut down on glare because the sun was too bright for her. I learned that the reason she liked sad stories was because she believed that sadness was the base emotion for humanity; she believed that humor got in the way of truth, and happiness didn’t move in a wave but in a decaying orbit around a core of bare heartbreak. I learned that she hated being lied to, that it made her sad.

I learned how she died from the old man who gave her a room and fed her. He called me up one afternoon to ask for my help, and told me I wouldn’t want to give it. I had been taking a nap. I went over right away, my head buzzing from being ripped out of dreamland. It didn’t stop buzzing. The old guy had put Emma into a plywood box with and nailed a lid on top. He needed help lifting it downstairs to the truck, and then lifting it to where she was going to be buried. He talked the whole way down the stairs, into the cab of his truck, while we drove, and while we walked through the wet grass carrying Emma over a foothill of the Cascade mountains.

“She was conscientious, she was. She figured out what to do in case of— in case of this, because she wasn’t supposed to be with me an’ the wife. We wasn’t legally supposed to have her. She figured out just where she wanted to go and everything, so we wouldn’t have any weird questions. We tell the cops that she ran away again, if they ask. But they won’t ask. They didn’t ask the first time, when she ran away from her foster folks in California. There was a little boy there; he ended up dead, and Emma came up here before the questions started. My wife and me, we knew her foster parents from way back, and we sent them Christmas cards a few times. 

“She never was a problem. Talked easy with the wife and me, and always did the chores we asked her to. She said she liked us, and for some reason she knew about being an electrician, which is what I did before I retired. Still do it, sometimes. She knew about cooking, and helped out in the kitchen without our askin’. We’re gonna feel her bein’ gone.

“I want you to know, kid, I don’t judge you one bit. Had my fair share of judgin’ back in the day, when I used to build crop circles, and I know that kind of thing can make you lose sleep. I didn’t just build the crop circles; I believed in ‘em. I thought I was doin’ the Lord’s work, whoever the Lord was, by making the circles. Like building a temple so the worshipers have a place to go, y’know? Anyway, I got called crazy for years, and my wife, well, she got called worse, so I gave it up eventually. But I know how tough it is to have other people’s thought be worth more than your own, right?

“Can’t judge you for having a little fun, anyway, and I don’t want you to judge yourself, neither, because, hey, sometimes your thoughts aren’t worth much, y’know. When they’re the wrong sort of thoughts, I mean. So you two had relations. It’s what you do. I been with my wife my whole life. Only ever had relations with one other person, and that was only halfway because I was drunk and all she did was put her mouth on my pecker. So what? The wife and I parked over the hill from the drive-in on our first date. Most of the boys had just come back from the war; I had just moved into the city. We could see the screen, but couldn’t hear it. It was something to do with aliens. And don’t kid: we never thought those folks dressed up in rubber suits looked like anything but what they were. I watched maybe half of it and then she climbed on up me like a bear cub and said: ‘You don’t know it, but you got me.’ Best thing I ever did, and I don’t know what it was. Never much for questions, and I didn’t start then.

“You should know what happened to Emma, though it ain’t pretty. It’ll keep you from asking questions you don’t need to. Just accept that the world does stuff without your knowing, or doesn’t care what you know.

“She figured she was pregnant. Could see it starting, and the wife and me even talked to her about it. She didn’t want to say much, just that she was interested in the boy that did it to her. We asked her if she wanted the baby, or if she wanted to give it up. She cried a little, then. She asked us if we knew about genetics, and I said I knew enough to know that Hitler’s master race was bullshit. She said that the father and mother and all their fathers and mothers come to a point with the birth of a child, as if there’s all these parallel Vs, like the ripples of ducks on a pond, and each child is at that point. She said there was so much wrong between the two of you, on your different angles, that— I’m sorry, son, but she said the baby wouldn’t be worth a breath of cold air.

“We thought she was being dramatic. You know how teenage girls can be.”

We were out of breath and digging the grave, now. The old man kept talking, right through his grunts of effort, so every other word was weak from indrawn breath.

“We offered to help, Lord knows, any way we could,” he said. “But she said not to bother, that she wouldn’t be a burden. My wife mixed up some of her tea for morning sickness. Some old recipe that came down her mother’s side of the V.

“I don’t think she meant to commit suicide. That’s how it ended up, though. I mean, you look at a guy who falls onto a train track in front of a freighter, and, even if he didn’t meant it, he’s still a suicide, right? He’s the one that did it; he’s the one that killed himself, even if he tried so hard not to.

“Emma checked out an anatomy book from the library and took a coat hanger from the front closet. I thought a girl her age would know just about where everything was, but there was the book, open on her bed when I found her. She put a loop on the coat hanger so she wouldn’t poke through, but it didn’t help. What happened was she pushed too hard, kid. I’m sorry it ain’t more complicated than that. Just the point of crossed lines.

“She gave a puncture to someplace in her abdomen. She didn’t cry out, but she fell off her bed and I came upstairs to make sure, well, to make sure it wasn’t you doing somethin’ you oughtta not. I knocked on the door and she said: ‘Please don’t,’ but I could hear somethin’ dirty like pain in her voice, and I thought, damn it, not until you’re twenty-one, girl. 

“There was blood coming out of her parts and spreading out like it should have been in some good shape like a circle, but pooled and slurped up by the sheets and then the carpet.”

The old man took a moment of silence as we lowered Emma’s crate into the dirt. It had been getting lighter all through the hike, and now it was the lightest ever, as though she had vanished from inside. We didn’t try and do a good job filling the hole back in; we just swept the dirt back in with our boots and hands, stamped on it a couple of times, and then headed back for the road. I held my hands close to my face, so I could smell the wild soil.

“So don’t feel bad,” the old man said. “Girls like Emma, they come along once in a thousand years. She’s the kind that takes your memories and rewrites them, yeah? She’s the gold standard for all your love in the future. Girls like Emma, they’re worth pining for. Count yourself lucky to have crossed wires with her.”

For once, he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reaction from me. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted it to sound like a wall, thick and lead, but the open air took it, and tinted it green, and the rocks almost echoed it back to me. “It’s what she would have wanted,” I said.

“Don’t know about that,” said the old man. “Don’t know what my wife wants half the time.” He chuckled. “You know what this means, son? Means I’ve got so much in my brain I can talk for three hours without even breathing. I see you ain’t much got a word in edgewise, but you don’t look like you wanna, neither. I see that. You ain’t got the years for talkin’.”

“Just don’t feel much like it,” I said. 

The old guy grinned at me and, because of the slight shaking of his head, his eyes twinkled. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll keep talking, and some day, when you’ve got something to say, you come on over. My wife’ll fix you something good to cheer you up.”

#

Uncle Gyro had been full of get-rich schemes since the day I met him. He was an armchair marketing wizard, cursing the TV during the infomercials, saying: “I coulda done that. What idiot doesn’t come up with something like that?”

After aunt Edith died, he decided all he wanted to do was watch TV. Mom and I would visit him twice a day to make sure he got his food and to keep the house in a decent state. School was in session, so we’d go once before my classes started, and once after final bell. While mom emptied uncle Gyro’s catheter bag, I’d prepare him a meal, usually a sandwich and a glass of milk. I’d hand them over on a piece of his wedding-present china while mom tried to talk to him about the weather or the local politics. He stopped responding, but I always caught the barest film of clever light in his eyes that made me think he was ignoring us on purpose, that he’d finally cashed in on the benefits of being an old man, being stubborn silence, willful helplessness, and the option to yell at whippersnappers.

After a couple of months, it got to be too much for mom, and she made the decision to stick him in a care facility. I think that was all part of his plan, because the place we chose had way more channels on the TV than his home set did. 

We still visited him after school a couple times a week. Sometimes, when mom was busy at the church, I came by myself. I think uncle Gyro preferred it when I was alone, because old men and young men have the same carte blanches and I once cheerfully swore at his caregiver for putting too much mustard on his sandwich.

Out of nowhere one cold afternoon he spoke to me. “I’m going to make a fortune,” he said. I was doing my homework on a little table next to the window. By the time I looked up from it, he was staring at the TV screen again, if he’d even glanced at me. 

“Will you leave it to me?” I asked. There was a comfort in the dark humor, a natural contrast with the snow-reflected light that kept the world from overbalancing. 

“Of course I will,” said uncle Gyro. “But you have to help me. You have to fill out the patent paperwork, because I can’t even grip myself to piss anymore, much less hold a pen.”

“What’s your idea this time?” Uncle Gyro had been trying to score a jackpot all his life, with as little effort as possible. He used to make aunt Edith go buy his lottery tickets for him. Every so often, he tried to convince mom to invest in one of his ideas, but she never did. “I’ve got fifty bucks left over from Christmas.”

“I’m going to patent the sandwich,” he said.

“I think it’s been done,” I said.

“No,” he insisted. “No, it hasn’t.” His voice slipped up a few pitches. “You’d think somebody would have done it by now, but nobody has. It’s like the wheel. Who has the patent to the wheel? Bill Gates? Is that how he got so rich, I’d like to know. Everybody uses the wheel, but nobody owns it. Everybody uses sandwiches, but nobody owns them. But you’ve got to be specific with these things,” he added. “You can’t just write a paper that says: The Sandwich, and send that in. You’ve got to be careful. My sandwich will be bread, of any variety, then mayonnaise, then mustard, then meat, of any variety, then lettuce, cheese, and another slice of bread. That last slice of bread doesn’t have to be the same kind as the first one, see. They’re separate, so you can’t get around it.”

“I don’t like mustard,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want you paying me royalties anyway,” said uncle Gyro with a grin. His eyes slipped over the TV screen; some flash-in-the-pan company was advertising special picks to hold large sandwiches together. The picks had sharp, hollow edges, so you could stab out bites without jeopardizing your meal’s structure. “It’s brilliant,” said uncle Gyro.

“McDonald’s already has a way around you,” I said. “They have three slices of bread, and two sections of meat.”

Uncle Gyro snorted and sank back into his chair. I had unbalanced the world again. I moved away from the window, so as not to block the light, and dug my wallet out of my pants. I opened up the fold and took out the two twenties and the ten. I had been thinking about using them to buy a gift for Emma, but they had been sitting listless since she died. I dropped the bills into uncle Gyro’s lap.

“I’ve gotta go home,” I said. “But just let me know when it’s time to fill out the patent application.” I started packing up my books and binder. “You’re gonna outlive me, uncle Gyro,” I said. “All those ideas you have. Something’s bound to last forever.”

“It’s not the root of all evil,” uncle Gyro muttered. I glanced up. He was fanning himself uselessly with the three bills. “Your friend, what’s his name. The one who killed our little Martha.”

“Edgar,” I said.

“No,” said uncle Gyro. “That’s not it. The Telco boy.”

“He changed his name to Steve in fifth grade,” I said. 

“Steve, yeah,” said uncle Gyro. “His folks are some of the worst people I’ve ever known. They’re petty and unconcerned, careless. I knew his dad back in the sixties, before he started up with his first wife, before he got in on the computer business. Which wife is he on, now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Three, I think.”

“I just had the one, and I was way better at it. So he had the ideas. He had the girls and turned out to have the luck. Me, I hang on to things. I hang on to them; maybe I hang on to them too long. It ain’t money that’s the root of all evil. Money’s keeping your friend alive. So it’s not money; it’s value. Evil happens when you value something too much, or not enough, or don’t even give it a number at all.” He shook his head and crumpled my money into his fist. “I hold on to things too long,” he said. 

I really wanted to say something, if for no other reason than to get him to explain himself, but his eyes closed and his face paled and he fell into one of his episodes. The caregivers said that when they happened, we should humor them, to make it easier on him, or to play along if he’s faking it, because laughter has healing properties, or something.

This one was bad and real. I sat down, unwilling to leave him like that. The sun went unbalanced and slid behind the mountains, followed by a brief, jittery sunset. I turned on a lamp and tried to do some more homework, but it didn’t seem worth my time. I spent three hours there, listening to him breathe, before a caregiver came and took him away to dinner. The whole walk home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was three wasted hours, three hours that could have been better spent

A couple weeks later, mom and I went down to the morgue to pick up uncle Gyro’s effects. The receptionist handed us a manila envelope and, while mom filled out some paperwork, I took a peek inside. He didn’t need a wallet or keys at the care facility, so all the envelope contained was a four-by-six pad of lined paper filled with cramped drawings and upward-slanting notes, his over-the-counter magnifying glasses, two twenties, and a ten. 

#

Harald and I worked the refreshment table again for uncle Gyro’s memorial. Harald poured the juice while I kept the coffee flowing. I chatted with the familiar faces from the church and community, faces to which I had never bothered to attach names. Harald kept his mouth in a thin line, nodding briskly to acknowledge the juice drinkers. I hadn’t had to tell him about the service, or to ask him to help me out afterwards; he volunteered, and my guess is that it was because of Emma. She should have been there with us, and by his presence Harald made her absence all the more apparent. I don’t know if he did it to savor the deep bitterness or to get me depressed; he had done both before.

Aunt Riley was the last in line. “My pump’s gone out again,” she told me with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

“Again?” I said. “That’s the third time in as many months.”

“I know, I know. I hate calling you up just to flip that switch, but it’s really impossible for me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m glad to do it.”

Harald offered her a glass of juice, but she declined it. “Your mom said you and he spent a lot of time together toward the end.”

“I don’t know how good a company I was,” I said. 

“I have to ask: did he mention me?” asked aunt Riley.

I shook my head. “He talked to you like you were in the room a couple of times,” I said. “He laughed himself silly telling you he got you ‘all riled up’.” 

She smiled and held it. “I always thought I’d get through to him some day,” she said, the bend of her lips failing to twist the tone into a happy range. “It hurts, you know? It’s hardly my business to say, but it hurts that my own brother could be in hell, now. I can’t say, of course. Only God knows the heart, but he’s got a book of names, and when I dream about it, I can’t see his but way down on the list.”

“Mostly he talked about things he could do to get himself rich. For a bit, he thought he had invented ice cream. Accused me of industrial espionage when I went and bought him some from the kitchen.”

Aunt Riley gave a rueful shake of her head. “It’s like I always tried to tell him: the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“Bullshit,” said Harald to his juice pitcher. It was only two syllables, but it contained a spectrum of emotion ranging from glee to frustration. It occurred to me that he may have had a completely different reason for tagging along. He looked up at aunt Riley and shook his head, the gesture too quick to fall into either negation or pity. I could tell he was having fun. It didn’t used to be that he’d look out for fun just for himself. I remember in fifth grade, he ran all across the playground to get me so we could torment an anthill together. By the time we got back to the ants, the bell was ringing for us to come inside.

The next year, we were in middle school, and we didn’t have recess anymore. We felt as if we were growing up; Harald made the biggest deal about it out of all of us. He wouldn’t run in the halls, or aim spit at the girls during lunch break. He lectured me about the way I acted in front of teachers, and generally became a pain in the ass. Later that year, I slept over at his house and we spent the whole night talking about girls we both liked. The next week, I got dirty, pity giggles from all of them, and found out that Harald had told them about my crushes, but not about his own. 

I forgave him, clueless as to why, in about a month, but it wasn’t until high school that I found out how he had turned into such a dick overnight. It was at another sleepover, this time in some girl’s house after a Halloween party. We were down in the basement in a corner behind a couch, both drenched in fake blood, because we had been zombies. The stuff smelled like mold and frosting. Harald had gotten a bunch in his hair when a jock had held him down and given him a noogie. I offered to help him get it out, because he kept complaining.

He said: “You’ve got to stop being so damn helpful. You remember my dad? He was always so cheerful about getting up to give you his seat, or getting you a drink from the kitchen. Anything you asked, he’d just jump on it. You know why? Because he was desperate to be liked, and terrified of wrong impressions. 

“Back in sixth grade, that winter, our furnace went out during one night. I woke up freezing, didn’t get warm the whole day. While I was at school, the repairman came over. It was dad’s day off, so he sat on the computer doing bills while mom cleaned and the repairman hammered away at stuff in the basement. It always took him forever to get the bills done, because mom always asked him to do things like dust or sweep as they came to her mind. I think he helped her with the dishes— yeah, his hands were all wet, mom said, when the repairman came upstairs and asked him to run over to the hardware store for some air filters.

“Dad took right off with a grin, dried his hands on the front of his shirt he was in such a hurry. He poked around for way too long at the store, trying to find exactly the right filters. When he came back home, the repairman had left, and mom never told me where exactly she was, but I guess crying in the bedroom. Dad left not long after that, and mom didn’t tell me why. I didn’t find out until just a bit ago that she had been raped, and that she blamed dad for it. I can’t blame her. He was supposed to protect her. That was his entire purpose in life, as much as she needed it.”

I tried to go to sleep after that, since I didn’t have anything to say, and didn’t feel right having nothing to say. The next day, Harald still had the fake blood in his hair, and made fun of me in front of Caroline Grace because we both had a thing for her. So he was a bastard, but he was my best bastard, and he didn’t pick on me so much after sixth grade, at least nothing I couldn’t give back. Since then, he’s been keeping his fun right up at the chest.

“God helps those who help themselves,” he said to aunt Riley. He set down the juice pitcher, handle toward her. “That ain’t your religion. That one’s mine. Christianity is about dying to yourself so you can live for Christ, because there’s a limited space in your heart, and you wouldn’t want to take up too much, would you? Selfishness is a trait of the old fighting religions. You know, the ones that survived the brutality of human origin.

“But even the selfish dead accomplish more in life than the lot of you!” I thought he was going to jump up on a table any moment. “If Edgar Telco had won out against Martha, he would have been a god among men. All that power in one brief point of change! You have the power to beg, and it gets you nowhere.”

Aunt Riley’s mouth had drawn up into itself, erasing the potential for anything but a sharp line. “The Lord keeps a book of names,” she said. “If Mr Telco had succeeded where he rightly failed, his would have been the last name in that book. Now, I don’t know, but the Lord might take pity on the tragedy of suicide, but your friend has got his name so low on the list already, and I don’t know that pity will help. When Heaven’s full up, they’ll turn the sinners away; they’ll turn all manner away.”

“Cast off your chains!” crowed Harald. He wasn’t one to back away from a fight, especially if it was with a bully much bigger than him. 

I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him away from the table. Aunt Riley rolled her eyes at me, and not a few other pairs were staring us all the way outside, while Harald chuckled in his throat. 

“Jesus,” he said when I pushed open the door. We sat down on the sidewalk. 

“Think ahead much?” I asked.

“I don’t believe in God, man,” he said. “I don’t believe that other people should, either. It gets you bitter and broken.”

“It gets you petty and shallow,” I said.

“It gets you nearsighted and political,” he replied, thinking it was a game.

“It gets you damn near everything,” I said. “It’s just life. You try and separate it out, it probably looks pretty stupid, like you with your pants off.” I waited for him to snort and turn fully away before asking: “This is about Emma, isn’t it?”

“This isn’t about anything,” he said. “Except maybe about time.”

“Couldn’t have waited for a better time?” I asked.

Harald grinned and said: “There are those who play the music, and those who write the music down. The music comes out when it needs to, right? Someone calm and scholarly writes it down, later.”

I could tell he had been wanting to say it for a while, but he probably hadn’t meant for his voice to crack. I figured his mind had jumped the same way mine did at the mention of music: straight to Emma, straight to the evening after the funeral for Martha and her mother. “I have a present for you,” I said. I had one small picture in my wallet of Emma. She had taken it soon after our first time, while she was wearing nothing but a skull-and-bones bra, her eye makeup on thick, her eyes let down. It was the only picture she had given me. I dug it out and handed it over to Harald.

“Ain’t that simple,” he said. 

“Maybe she’s in a better place,” I said. 

“Good odds,” said Harald. 

Return to part 1 | continue on to part 3…

Go to part 2 | part 3…

Last night I dreamt about wax and failure. I was trying to read a story to Emma, and the candle I was using kept guttering out. I had to relight it over and over, until the sun came out from behind a cloud of flies. Emma squinted her eyes shut and told me to read louder. The candle went out. The sun had switched polarities and, instead of blanketing light and warmth on us, it sucked both away. I held my last match to the candle. The wick exploded like the fuse on a firecracker and wax got all over the pages of the book.

I’m not convinced the dream meant anything, but it came at a good time. I woke up in flames.

My aunt Riley says that God knows you better than you know yourself. Everyone seems to know me better than I know myself. So, this isn’t a story about me. It’s a story about my grampa Gyro, who kept his wife locked in their car until she died; it’s about my aunt Riley, who would take so long to bless the food that we all were starving by Amen; it’s about Emma, whose parents abandoned her in a park on Easter; it’s about my friend Harald, who used to believe in God, but now believes in the weatherman; and mostly it’s about Edgar, who tried to change his name to Steve, who taught me how to play an arpeggio, who never said a word to a stranger, who killed two people when he only meant to kill one.

#

He was driving home on the highway, listening to his windshield wipers squeak over the safety glass. A cloud rested on the ground, a thick fog that carried the headlights of oncoming traffic like magic beacons in a bayou.

The radio was on, but the only thing it picked up was static. With the volume turned low, it sounded like more rain. Edgar had been in the dead, dry, Eastern half of the state, visiting a potential college, and had missed the gray and green.

The college seemed like a good pick. He had impressed the director of the music program with his dexterity on the guitar, and there was talk of a scholarship, which was good because Edgar’s family wanted him to pay his own way through his education. It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it; the Telcos were just weird like that. As far as I knew, it didn’t bother Edgar, but sometimes I couldn’t tell very far with him. His parents once gave him a watch with a video game built in. He gave it to me at school and played deaf when I said, Thanks.

Cars were forming in the mist every few seconds. One cycled its lights at Edgar. He turned down his radio, but didn’t turn on his own lights. He wondered what he must look like to the other drivers, coalescing out of the fog like a bad dream, like a bad metaphor for living fast. Back earlier in high school — hell, it’s still going on — he would play this game called Going to Britain on deserted roads. The way you went to Britain was by drifting into the oncoming lane, playing chicken with phantoms while friends in the backseat quote Monty Python in their worst accents. Edgar was always the one to drive, always the one who let the phantoms win, because he didn’t trust anyone else. He said as much. One time, when I offered to chauffeur the gang to Old Blighty, he told me, “I heard you were four points from failing your test,” and I really couldn’t argue with him.

It had been a long weekend of near-adulthood, of smiling to the right people and sussing out dry wit from dull opinion with the deans and assistant registrars. They were all playing games, all with their money and knowledge and the unnatural flow between the two. I guess it was like the time he tried to teach me how to play Axis and Allies, and did everything for me but roll the dice.

He drifted over to England. Someone was watching him. His scalp was prickling. Accidents happen when other people are watching. Arriving at the site of a crash, a parent can hear the oddly comforting words, “It wasn’t his fault,” straight from the mouth of a person who saw and should know; but when nobody’s watching, doubt inhabits the scene like a witness for sale. Doubt whispers the first things that come to its mind, things like, “He had been at a party,” and, “Sometimes he doesn’t tell me where he’s going.” Then I think doubt takes its payment out of something precious and disappears. 

Turned out nobody was watching. I guess he had just been hoping so hard he fooled himself right into believing it. He wouldn’t tell me. When I asked, he said he didn’t believe that God could see through all that fog, thank the weatherman, and we both kind of laughed. 

My second cousin, Martha — she hated being called anything but Martha — was driving out to the mountains to squeeze in one last ski trip before the season closed. Her mother was dozing in the back seat, stretched across the whole bench with her feet tucked up under her legs. That’s how she’d ride during family trips, at least. Martha’s mother didn’t like driving. She didn’t like family trips that much, either, or when I called her auntie Joan. She was going with Martha to keep her daughter company. They had one of those mother/daughter dynamics I never understood. Talking to Martha, I just wanted to ask her how she could be such pals with someone whose vagina she had passed through like an irritant. I never convinced her of anything, partly because auntie Joan didn’t like me very much. She suspected me of harboring a secret vain wish to be royalty, with all the associated marriage rights. 

Martha was pretty. She had limp blonde hair that followed whatever path she took her brush in the mornings. She was a grade below me in school and two districts over, but we got to see each other at track meets and tended to like the same movies. She had my grandmother’s given name, and a surname that had been bred out of my side of the family. She was a good driver, and kind of a narc, and had her lights on.

Edgar saw her before she saw him, and auntie Joan didn’t see anything. Edgar thought about seat belts, about their seat belts, in that slow second when perspective suddenly allows a rush of size, when the head lights grew and the body of Martha’s car coalesced and lengthened. He reached down to tug his own off, but couldn’t get his thumb on the button fast enough.

#

Mom usually made us sit in the second row center, but it was reserved for immediate family during the service. Second cousins and aunts didn’t count over the half-siblings and first cousins from the Catholic set, and the pews were small, anyway. Mom and I sat in the fourth row, off to the right. There was a pillar blocking my view of the altar and, for once, I could actually read the hymn slate. The church looked weird from that angle, like a friend with a broken nose — familiar but wrong.

I spent most of the service looking at other people. A lot of the regular parishioners were there. Some of them caught me staring and made this weird little half nod, like I was supposed to know what it meant. My mum’s sister, aunt Riley, was as close as she could get to the front. She had her head bowed the whole time, and I thought about how I sometimes fall asleep when I pray. Emma was sitting two rows behind me, by herself. The one time I twisted in my seat to find her, she was already staring at me. I smiled and she didn’t blink. Mum tapped my leg to get me to face forward, and from that point on I could feel Emma’s eyes on me, stealing my soul like a camera. 

The service was too long and the eulogist didn’t get it right at all, but his words wouldn’t change our memories, so it didn’t matter. Emma and I and a couple of the other youth had been volunteered to run the refreshments table in the fellowship hall, so we ducked out early to pour the coffee and juice. 

Aunt Riley was the first to arrive at the tables when the service was over; she even beat out the younger kids who had only come willingly with their parents because of the promise of cookies. Emma gave aunt Riley a cup of coffee and poured two packets of sugar and one of cream into it.

“You remembered. How thoughtful,” said aunt Riley. She turned to me in one rude sweep of her neck. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Emma grin. “How are you holding up?” aunt Riley asked me. I told her I missed auntie Joan and Martha. “You’ll have plenty of time to miss them,” said aunt Riley. I don’t think she meant it as a consolation. Mum once told me that, when they were girls, aunt Riley had tried to get attention somehow — I never learned how — and had ended up getting all she could handle. Still gets it, mum says. “Oh, before I forget,” said aunt Riley. “The pump in my well is out. Do you think you could come over and give it an eyeball?”

“Sure,” I said. “But why don’t you get a handyman to do it?”

“You know I can’t afford that, honey. What do you say I bake you brownies, to say, Thanks.”

“You bet,” I said. Mum says aunt Riley thrives on tension, and the only way to get her to go away is to be on her side. She smiled at me again. My friend Harald held out a cookie for her. She took it and wandered off without giving Emma a second glance.

“She doesn’t like me,” said Emma.

“You cut your hair,” said Harald. “She hates that on girls.”

“She doesn’t like you, either,” said Emma. She was right; as soon as she got to a table, aunt Riley set the cookie down and seemed to forget about it.

“He hasn’t had a haircut in months,” I said. 

Harald grinned at me. “I also am a heathen,” he said. 

Emma, who knew the things that made me laugh, nudged me and pointed to a dark corner of the narthex. Two distant relatives, both closer to Martha than to me, were standing toe-to-toe. Each had a notebook open in his palm, and both were scribbling madly, as if whole novels had arrived in their minds fully formed but ephemeral. Emma was right. It made me chuckle. The men were barely speaking, but nodded at each other’s pen strokes as though in affirmation. 

“What are they doing?” asked Emma.

“I have no idea,” I replied. “Do you know them?” I asked Harald. 

He shook his head and said, “God bless you,” to an elderly woman who accepted with shaking hands a glass of orange juice from him. I waited for the woman to make her way to a seat before I called him a blasphemer. 

“They look angry,” said Emma. Her brows were creased, I guessed with the effort of reading the men’s lips. She got that look during tests at school, too. 

“Give me a couple glasses,” I said to Harald.

“Yes, my son,” said Harald. He handed me two empty ones. 

“With juice in them,” I clarified. I took them over to the narthex, slowing my approach by halves, until I was barely inching nearer to the two men. I was close enough to overhear, but most of what I heard was the scratching of pens.

“That’s criminal, again,” said one. Scratch, scratch, scratch. 

“Jonas versus Palomino,” said the other, who looked as if he were my age with a haircut as old as uncle Gyro. 

“No, that was overturned two years ago,” said the first. “Keep up.”

I sidled closer. “What’s up?” I asked. The older one glanced at me like a lazy herbivore, just long enough to ensure I wasn’t a threat, and returned to his notepad. The younger one gave me a wan smile which seemed to come half from youthful camaraderie, half from apology for his partner.

“You were Martha’s cousin, right?” he asked.

“She was mine, yeah,” I said.

“The boy who caused the accident, the Telco kid,” said the younger guy.

“Yeah, I knew him,” I said.

“The particulars of the situation make it possible for us to declare that mister Telco is legally dead,” said the guy. He didn’t do so hot sounding like a lawyer. His companion snorted and drew a thick line across something on his pad. “Basically,” the guy added. 

“He’s on life support, isn’t he?” I asked. 

“Correct,” said the older man over his shoulder. “However, were he to be found legally dead, the healthcare services of this town would find themselves without compensation for any treatment he undergoes. His parents would be forced to shoulder the entirety of the financial burden.”

“They’re rich,” I said, with a bit of run-of-the-mill envy. 

The younger guy shrugged. The older guy flipped his notepad shut and gave me a bored glare. I handed him a glass of juice. “This is not the proper place for this discussion,” he said. He gestured first toward his apprentice then at door with his juice, and handed the glass back to me. “We need to do some research, Lucas,” he said. He paused to gaze in at the assembled mourners, cleared his nose, and walked with perfectly equal steps to the door.

Lucas shrugged at me and said, “The Telcos screwed him over a couple of times before. You know, like, Fool me once, fool me twice.”

“Edgar’s an okay guy,” I said.

“Martha was almost my sister,” said Lucas. He followed his mentor outside. I took the glasses of juice back to the buffet line and handed them to Emma and Harald. Harald downed his in one go, said, “I wish this were alcoholic,” and smiled brightly at a great-aunt waiting for her coffee. Emma said, “It’s warm,” and didn’t drink hers.

“Young man,” said great-aunt. “I know you were joking, but you shouldn’t joke about abusing alcohol.”

“Who said anything about abusing?” asked Harald.

“All use is abuse,” said the great-aunt. “When I was about your age, I nearly got pregnant because of alcohol; I nearly was run off the road by my alcoholic friends; and I nearly lost my faith because of the way the alcohol sat in my mind, all everywhere like Satan’s fingers.”

Harald hooded his eyes. “Nearly,” he said. “Thanks, but I can’t get pregnant, I don’t have friends, and my faith is longer dead than the slabs in there.”

The great-aunt let her lids droop as low as Harald’s. She muttered something under her breath; I think it was a prayer. She left without taking her coffee, and a wave of whispers started around her.

“I think we should go,” I said. There was a red flush creeping up Harald’s neck, and I wanted him out of the church before it hit his eyes. Last time I saw that, he had punched an infant and turned in his faith, one after the other. 

“Why?” asked Emma.

“Fine with me,” said Harald. He downed a cup of coffee and stalked toward the door before I see if it had burned him.

“Because nobody wants Harald to be the thing they remember about Martha,” I said. “And because I suspect a friend of the family or two could legally kill him.”

“What about the cleanup?” asked Emma.

I had to put a hand on the small of her back to get her moving. “Let the relatives handle it. I bet there’s someone just aching to help, today.”

We ended up at my house, sitting on the stoop. Harald had stamped out all his immediate anger, but he kept his fists balled up in his pockets. We talked about things that none of us thought were that important. Harald and Emma had never really felt comfortable around each other, because Harald had a massive crush on Emma. I didn’t hold it against him. Emma was gorgeous in the right light, terrifying in the wrong. She was always asking questions, always making you think she had a slight retardation, and then, in the dark, she told you secrets and stories and giggled when you didn’t understand. She wasn’t human, with her deep green eyes and wide shadowed lids. She was something God made to shake things up. 

She was never comfortable around Harald because he never spoke what was right on his mind. He always made riddles with his cynical tongue, and sometimes Emma just couldn’t puzzle out what he meant. 

It was her that started things up. She asked our favorite colors. I said green; Harald said nude, and then went on to explain that the word was what did it for him, that “nude” meant vulnerable and soft and trusting and when it was on a girl’s lips he felt like crowing his own worth to king and country. I kept waiting for the joke, but that was it. Emma said that her favorite color was gray, and at that moment her skin went ashen as the light failed.

I was ready to be quiet, but Harald kept on talking. He said, “Everything I know in life, I learned from Edgar. I think there is a divergence, now. What a dumbass.” He said it like a eulogy.

“I liked his music,” I said. 

“He used to ask people not to congratulate him after a show,” said Harald.

“I did, anyway,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Harald. 

“I remember it,” said Emma. She cocked her head and pursed her lips, face like a pixie deep in concentration. “The guitar and the pedals and sometimes the sad harmonica. Yeah. It would have been good for funerals.”

#

My uncle Gyro was almost twenty years older than my mom. That means he started breaking down around the time he was as old as my mom is now, and he’s had twenty years to do it in. Colon cancer (in remission), cataracts (one treated, one untreated), infected gall bladder (removed), gum cancer (from chew), all the leftovers from his heroin addiction (successfully defeated), and the most recent of the bunch: Alzheimer’s, or so the docs suspect, because an autopsy’s the only way to tell for sure. When they told him, he cussed and said he’s been through so many surgeries they might as well just cut him open and satisfy their curiosity.

As a result, I’ve never known him healthy, but I have known him strong. When I was a kid, mom would send me over to his house if I was being a pest. I’d ring the door bell, and aunt Edith would let me in. Uncle Gyro would meet me in the hallway and size me up, and then say, “Got some wood needs choppin’,” or, “Got some gravel needs smoothin’,” or, once in a while, “Got some cake needs eatin’.” 

I always had fun with him, but it was like playing a videogame I knew I wasn’t very good at, because behind the fun and work, there was always the chance that he and aunt Edith would start hollering at each other. Uncle Gyro was a lover, not a fighter, but aunt Edith came from a cattle farm and had six older brothers. It didn’t help that she had mild Tourette’s symptoms, or that uncle Gyro thought the shakes and mutters were funny. I always thought they got along fine when I wasn’t there, like some set of uncertain particles. 

One time, when I was outside dragging wet leaves off the driveway, a cast iron frying pan came crashing out one of the side windows of their house. Uncle Gyro emerged, through a door, a couple of moments later. He wandered over to his shed, grabbed a rake, and came to help me. We scraped at the leaves for a few minutes before he muttered, “When you get yourself a wife, get her pregnant, get her distracted.” Then, after the driveway was clear and we were headed back to the house, he said, “Nah. Don’t listen to me, kiddo.”

At a family reunion a couple of years ago, mom whispered to me that he was bipolar back before they could diagnose it, so I guess he’s never been healthy.

Two weeks after the car crash, uncle Gyro woke up and nudged aunt Edith to get up and start making the coffee. When aunt Edith ignored him, he nudged a little harder. Her top half slid out of bed; her head struck the end table and bounced off without the aid of reflex. Uncle Gyro slid out of bed and knelt on the floor beside her. She was breathing, but he couldn’t get her eyes open. His fingers slipped on her dry skin.

I’m not sure why he didn’t call for the ambulance. Maybe his memory skipped like a record and he thought he was back in horse-and-buggy time, when you had to forge all your own paths. Whatever his brain was doing, it didn’t tell him to pick up the phone. He hauled aunt Edith outside and propped her up in the passenger seat of their eighties-era Oldsmobile. He took the care to buckle her in before starting the ignition.

He made it to the end of the block before he forgot what he was doing. It went with the Alzheimer’s. His symptoms were such that he rarely flashed back to days gone by (though he once called me “Dottie”); instead, he just up and forgot what his feet were doing in the middle of a step, or lost the thread of a conversation while his mouth hung open on a vowel. 

The hospital was three miles from their house, through a mazelike series of suburb turns. Uncle Gyro glanced over at the passenger seat to ask aunt Edith where he was going. Her forehead was leaning into the window; uncle Gyro could see the reflection of her closed eyes in the glass. He decided not to bother her and kept driving, thinking that he’d remember his destination if he just loosened up his driving muscles. 

I didn’t find out if the coroner ever determined when exactly aunt Edith stopped breathing, but I like to think it was after I passed their car on my way to work. Uncle Gyro was waiting at a stop sign; aunt Edith was slumped in her seat. I thought about stopping, rolling down my window, and saying hi, but I was already fifteen minutes late for my job at a coffee shop. I waved through my windshield and didn’t bother waiting to see if they waved back. 

When asked how long he had been driving around that morning, uncle Gyro reckoned it was something close to an hour. That was at noon, when he finally stopped and asked a police officer for directions, and still wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. That evening, mom and I went over to his house to cook him dinner and sit with him for a while. When we got there, the alarm clock in their bedroom was beeping its high desperate notice. He always set the alarm for six in the morning so he could watch infomercials on TV before regular programming started. 

Mom and I sat with him most of the night, and for most of the night his memory was just fine. He cried; it was a manly sort of sadness. He just sat as straight as he could, both arms gripping his chair, his eyes wide. He barely blinked. Tears rolled off the shelf of his lid and dropped straight to his lap. 

I thought, for once in my life I know how he feels. With his brain rebelling, he passed through his own life the same way I did, with infrequent visits growing further apart and memories of shared experience falling dimmer as their importance waned. 

Around midnight, he stopped crying and fell asleep, after muttering, “I didn’t mean to,” twice. Mom tried to get me to help change his pants, because his tears had all fallen into his crotch. She said he’d be embarrassed in the morning; I said he’d be embarrassed to wake up with his sister taking off his pants.

It was simple humor, but I think it was the worst thing I could have said. Mom glared at me for a long moment, then told me to go wait in the car. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said. As I left the room, I heard her undoing his pants. 

I didn’t wait in the car. I sat on the porch, staring out at the light haze of street lights reflecting on fog, and, shivering, I thought about warmth, about blood-full hands touching me, balancing my temperature, summoning my own blood. 

Mom startled me when she opened the door. My hands went to my pockets to try and suffer down my erection. I walked hunched, as if I were surly; mom probably thought I was, but all I wanted to do was to apologize. It wasn’t the right time. My body was rebelling, my mind was wandering. It seemed that everywhere I went, I was somewhere else.

When we got home, mom said, “Would you at least take out the garbage?”

#

I’m not sure when Emma’s birthday is. She never would tell me. She wouldn’t even not tell me; she’d just giggle off the question and get me started on something else. 
Around the Fourth of July of that year, while Edgar was still recovering in the hospital, I decided to buy her a present. I hadn’t told her how I felt about her, yet, so I figured that a gift would be a good prelude to that, or, more likely, a substitution. I spent a week looking for just the right thing. She kept me focused that whole week. Summer was heating up, and her shirts were getting thinner and riding higher on her tummy, and she kept letting her skin brush mine. Sometimes she felt as if she were coated in a thin layer of acid, the way her lingering touches burned long after she had left.

She had told me, back when she first moved to the city, that she was often lonely at night. When I told her I could help her out, she laughed, but I ended up taking it more seriously than I thought I would. I couldn’t be there for her in the night, but I could buy her something equally as annoying. 

I went to three pet stores before I found the perfect kitten. It was all black except for the bottoms of its feet, which were pink. The contrast between its fur and the skin made it look as if lights were flashing around his paws. He was an alien cat, inquisitive and silent. A perfect match, I thought. I asked the owner of the shop to set it aside for me, and I would be back to pick it up the next day.

The following morning, I surprised Emma at the house she shared with a couple of old folks. I never found out if they were aunt and uncle, grandmother and grandfather, or whatever. They said hello to me and then Emma and I were off. Mom let me borrow the car for the whole day, once I told her my whole plan. She smiled when she passed me the keys, but I could see her planning in the darks of her eyes the chores I’d exchange.

It was worth it. Emma smelled like the warm Earth ought to, and she laughed like wet leaves rubbing together. The first thing she did when she got into the car was put on her seatbelt. Then, when I didn’t move fast enough, she reached across and fastened mine for me.

“I learned,” she said. 

I took her for a walk in an arboretum, and then out to lunch at a Denny’s, by her request. She liked their coffee and their cocoa and their milkshakes, so she got one of each and set them up around her seat like ramparts. I fired balls of napkins from my hands and tried to penetrate her defenses, but she deflected every single one.

After lunch, I put her in the car and told her to close her eyes. She closed them and covered them up with her hands splayed just enough so that she could peek out. I drove the few blocks to the pet store and stopped outside. I told her to wait in the car, and that I’d be right back.

I paid for the kitten, and asked if there was a ribbon or something I could use. The owner gave me a roll of green-wired stuff that was edged in gold. I was never much of a boy scout — I dropped out early — so I just wrapped the ribbon around the kitten’s neck and made a square not at the nape, tying it as I would my shoelaces. 

The owner gave me a cardboard carrying case. The kitten fought with me, flailing its limbs, its paws looking like the lights on an ambulance, but I managed to get it in and the case sealed. 

I brought it out to Emma and opened her door. “Okay,” I said. “You can look, now.” 

She accepted the box onto her lap and cracked it open while I grinned like an idiot. “Oh,” she said. It wasn’t the squeal of delight I had been hoping for. She reached her arms into the box and pulled out the kitten’s body. It wasn’t moving. Its paws hung limply around Emma wrist. With her free hand, she undid the ribbon I had tied too tightly. Then she set the kitten on her stomach and tapped its nose twice, as though admonishing it for being a bad kitty. “Thank you,” she said. She returned the cat to its box and folded the ribbon neatly beside it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I took the box out of her lap. Emma didn’t have an answer and it was a few moments before I got up the courage to look her in the eye. There was a thin wetness reflecting on her irises. 

I took the box around the corner and laid it gently in a dumpster. I kicked at the concrete and kept my head down as I returned to the car. I was behind the wheel with the ignition started before I opened my mouth again. “What do you want to do now?” I asked.

Again, Emma reached over me and did my seat belt. “Did you have another plan?” she asked. Her voice was low and caught on phlegm; that’s what I hear when I think of the word husky.

“No,” I said. Then, “Is it the thought that counts?”

Emma was silent. She wiped her eyes with her fingers. “You should take me home then,” she said finally.

I drove up to her curb and bumped it with the tires. I hadn’t been driving long. I left the engine running, my hands on the wheel. I thought about apologizing again. I heard Emma sniff, and then she was near me, and she still smelled like warmth ought to, and she was undoing my seat belt. “Come inside with me,” she said. She pulled me out the passenger door.

She led me into the house, past her aunt and uncle or whoever they were, up the stairs, and into her room. Dried leaves were on every surface, taped to the windows, stapled to the walls. When she moved to her bed, the floor rustled with their preserved bodies.

“Lie down,” she instructed me. I stepped gingerly over to her bed, which was barely wide enough for her. I perched myself on the edge, with my back to her. “Lie down,” she repeated, tugging on my arm. I did as I was told, balancing on my side, my arms dangling over the mattress corner, my feet resting on the floor. She curled her body around mine and for the briefest moment my skin felt as if it were flaming off. I smelled burnt cotton and started to move, but Emma held me back. She rested her cheek on mine and said, “I like the sad stories. They’re so much easier to remember.”

I breathed out my nose. There was a strange war inside me of comfort versus discomfort. The give of her flesh and her clothes above that molded to my shape and held me cupped as though in gentle hands, but at the same time the mattress was shot through with springs like bold ribs and I felt at any moment that I might slip to the floor. 

After a while, Emma seemed to fall asleep, so I tried to do the same. The taste of lunch was in my mouth, but old and rotten, reminding me I needed to brush my teeth. I ran my tongue along the inside of my mouth, feeling the plaque and imagining I could taste the fumes of a decomposing sandwich.

When Emma gave a little snore and I heard her lick her lips, I realized that I was trying hard not to cry. “What’s with all the leaves?” I asked. Emma made a small sound, something like a kitten’s, and I felt her roll away from me just a little. 

“I used to hurt people,” she said. “I didn’t mean to, but I caused a lot of problems for a young boy, once, and it all started in a park, in the trees. I told him things he wasn’t ready to hear, because I wanted to see what his reactions would be like. Kids don’t have enough practice in selling their lies, you know. I would make a terrible mother.”

“You would make a terrible mother,” I agreed.

“For some reason, leaves remind me of what happened to that little boy. They were all green, then, in the spring. But you can’t keep leaves green forever. You can keep leaves forever, but you can’t keep them green. So I keep all these brown and red and yellow.”

“The sad stories,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and sighed.

“Do you still hurt people?” I asked. 

“Those experiments are over,” she said, settling the curve of her face into the curve of my neck. “But I still like to play with little boys.” She nipped my skin. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I let my muscles figure it out. I lifted one my arms from where it hung and flopped it over against her side in an awkward half-hug. She took my momentum and carried it through, rolling me on top of her. She draped her arms around my neck and smiled up at me. “Your thoughts are unimportant,” she said. “I like the way you make mistakes. So come on. Make another one.”

We did it twice. The first time, I lost my virginity. The second time, we were just having fun. I burned up all my newfound confidence in playing games with her, playing “let’s pretend”. I snarled evil and wordless and she squirmed under me, crying, “Abandon ship!” and “Take evasive actions!” and never made it out of bed. 

Long after dark, she asked me how I felt. 

“I can’t tell,” I said. 

“I may have hurt you,” she said, trailing her fingers up my bare arm. 

When I finally made my way downstairs, Emma’s uncle-guy tossed me my own keys. “You left it running,” he said. I apologized. The guy shrugged and said, “Battery’s probably dead. Need a jump?” 

He pulled his truck out of the driveway and nosed it up to mom’s car. As we set the jumper cables, I looked back at the house and saw Emma leaning out of her window, picking dead leaves off the tree that grew past the roof.

Continue on to part 2…