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Bernard

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

“No, sir.”

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

“That one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kelly told me,” she said.

“What did Kelly told you.”

“About your friend.”

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

I said, “What do you want?” again.

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

“Got it a while ago.”

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

“I wasn’t going to.”

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

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

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

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

“A box to bury Nine in.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s what you always say.”

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

“You want these back?”

“I didn’t even know they were gone.”

“I snuck them.”

“Did you call mom?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked up at me.

“What time is it, daddy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wanna read to me?”

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

“Sure,” I said.

We left it alight.

#

Essa

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

#

Bernard

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

“What voices?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Where is he?”

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

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

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

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

“Can I help you?” I called.

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

“Getting rid of some trash,” I said.

“Ain’t you got a burn barrel, son?”

“No, sir.”

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

“Sure. We can use those ones.”

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

“What for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get in the house, girl,” I said.

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

“I said get in the house.”

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

“Take her inside, would you?”

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

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

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

#

Essa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Bernard

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yesterday, kid.”

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

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

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

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

“You told me.”

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

“No I didn’t, honey.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

“Don’t you miss Lane?”

“No. I don’t. Does Essa”

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

“She does,” I said.

“Then why doesn’t she stay here?”

“Because she misses Lane, sweetie.”

“She’s moving to the city.”

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

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

“She misses the city,” said Kelly.

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

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

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

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

“I read to her too much,” I said.

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She wants to live on the moon.”

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

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

“Sit. Stay,” she said with a smile.

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

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

#

Essa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly

I looked up poem in the dictionary.

Essa

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

Kelly

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

Nine.

Cape. Boston.

Wake.

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

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

Essa

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

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

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

Kelly

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

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

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

Essa

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every piece of me was moving angry.

#

Bernard

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

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

“He assaulted me first, sheriff.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Ain’t you got a key?”

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

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

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

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

#

Essa

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

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

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

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

Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essa

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

“Hey. It’s me. Is Kelly all right?”

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

“Essie,” he started to whine.

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

“Lane knew,” he said.

“Lane knew a lot of things,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“Going home,” he said.

“What’s prison like?” I countered.

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

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

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bring her by.”

“Thanks, Essa. I’ll be all right.”

Everything else was unnecessary.

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

It was fully dark outside and starting to cloud up.

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

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

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

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

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

I ran.

Her bed was still empty.

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

Damn it girl, I’ll tan your hide.

The end

Go to part 1 | part 3…

Essa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I lost my job.”

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

“How did it happen?”

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

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

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

#

Kelly

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

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

“Oh… well… be careful…” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“How long is Lane going to be gone?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm?”

And I said,

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

“Go to sleep, smartie,” he said.

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

He didn’t even stay to watch me sleep.

#

Essa

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

“What’s up?” he asked.

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

“Nope. Not tonight.”

“Kay.”

“You going to bed soon?”

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

“I’ll be done here in a while.”

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

It was just too cute.

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

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

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

“Hey, giggle butt. It’s me.”

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

“Got a party going on?”

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

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

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

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

“Is he still on that kick?”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t bother.”

“Don’t have time to read?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Wear a coat,” I said.

“It’s not that cold,” he said.

“It will be.”

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

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

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

#

Voices

“Can’t sleep either, huh?”

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

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

“Oh. I bow to your superior knowledge.”

“It happens.”

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

“It’s been three years.”

“NASA took decades.”

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

“Cold.”

“Yeah. Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Neh.”

“Did you ever finish anything this big?”

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

“What’s wrong?”

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

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

“I’d rather send a monkey.”

“How about Kelly?”

“Are you serious?”

“No. No, I’m just joking.”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

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

“Scissors beat rock. Get over it.”

“Go soak your good natured head. Bastard.”

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

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

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

“I was. Patty was forty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aha?”

“Alex Haley. In-joke.”

“I hope she grows up quick.”

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

“That’s why rock beats scissors.”

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

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

“What is it?”

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

“Oh. Not poetic; just maudlin.”

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

“That’s not going to happen.”

“And Saint Helens will never go off again.”

“Yeah, but Yellowstone?”

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

“I didn’t know that.”

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

“Wow. You learn something depressing every day.”

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

“Do you miss the city?”

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

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

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

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Sorry.”

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

“Yeah, I know.”

“Take care of her if anything happens?”

“She won’t need it.”

“We would take care of Kelly.”

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

#

Lane

I knew it; you knew it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

“Barnyard”

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

“Where did you meet him?”

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

“Great Christ on a cracker!”

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

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

What did we do wrong. I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Essa

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

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

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

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

I slept on the couch.

Continue to part 3…

Go to part 2 | part 3…

Bernard

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

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

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

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

“What do you want?” I asked.

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

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

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

She gave me both eyes loaded with buck shot.

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

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

“Yes daddy.”

“You use soap?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cuhmon, man. We’re getting there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said that no one could survive without him.

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

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

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

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

#

Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lane came outside. He forgot to close the door.

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

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

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Rocks.”

“Just rocks?”

“We’ll go skipping stones.”

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

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

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

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

#

Bernard

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

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

But it’s not completely his fault.

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

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t get it, again,” he said.

“I figured.”

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

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

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

“You fire off any today?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Cal.”

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

“Saw him at the theater.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patty called and woke Kell up.

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

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

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

#

Essa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to find a job.”

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

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

“I know. I read the paper, too.”

“Every week.”

“Yeah.”

“You could probably try the library. They’re usually looking for somebody part time.”

“I know.”

I thought we had a bottle of wine leftover from all we had gotten when we were first married. I poked around in the root cellar he had dug into the hillside, but I didn’t find anything there. A few dusty jars of home made pickle relish we were saving for the next time his mother came and visited. A few glass containers of fruit, slowly spoiling in their sweet fermenting mess.

#

Kelly

You don’t get very hungry. I get hungry all the time. That’s why we’ve got so much peanut butter and so many dirty spoons. And there’s a bunch of stains on the window that I can’t get off with water and daddy’s old socks. One smudge makes a little frown over Essa’s front door and sometimes I trap her under it. I whisper at the top of my lungs so she’ll hear me screaming for her to move and then I move my head to squish her. Just for fun in the mornings.

She was wearing something over her bathrobe this morning. She was showing her back to me so all I saw was that it was something dark blue and probably cold, then Lane came out the door without his head on. I moved and gave it to him. He walked in front and she came behind him, tapping her fingers on the air. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look over my way. I went out the front door to ask her if I had to do anything but I only got to say, Ess– before Laddy’s doors slammed at the same time. Slamming’s the only way to get them to stay on.

I made some more smudges and waited for daddy to tell me to get my pants on. He was out in the barn. I could tell even though I couldn’t hear him yelling or making the sound like a jet flying over real low. My arms went to sleep while I was staring at the trees around the stream and trying to have a super power too. I watched TV but I didn’t learn anything. Then I heard Laddy bouncing over the lip in the driveway that we share but don’t use. I went out on the front porch in my bare feet, jumping over the splinters, because Essa should have been back to take me around on school. It was Lane. He gave me a wave with both hands, twisting his wrists like the people in black and white trying to scare away a tiger. He looks all the time like something off of TV. I think it’s the mustache, even though he fidgets with it and it doesn’t hang straight. I don’t even know if they have a TV. I’ve only been to her house once. Really to it. I know the outside of it because the outside is part of mine, but the insides are probably all weird.

They made us dinner the first Christmas we were here. Daddy thought it was a good idea and he still thinks so. So we ate mushrooms and they drank wine and dad gave me a taste. He told me it was sweet.

Essa laughed a lot while I was trying to go to sleep. That’s when she said she was a school teacher and I saw Lane scowl at her. They thought I had gone to sleep but I was watching them. Their house smelled too different for me to go all the way to sleep. So I had my eyes most of the way closed and I remember wondering why my eyelashes look black to me but brown to everyone else.

I followed Lane out to the barn, making his tracks in the dust look like three or four people before the wind came up and I had to plug my nose to keep the dirt from getting all inside. Lane slid aside the big doors. He asked me to help push. I did with my finger tips. I had to but I had to watch out for splinters.

“Hey, Barnyard,” he said. I stood in the corner, out of the way.

“Hey, Lane,” dad said back. “Is it New Year’s or something?” Lane was reaching up on a shelf for something to hit with.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re home early.”

“Yeah. Don’t tell Essa. I got let go.” Dad didn’t say anything, so I guess Lane thought it was safe to say, “God. It’s a beautiful day out there.”

Daddy made a mousey sound of metal scratching something else metal. He held up one of the small ones in both hands and grinned. “Want to poke at it?”

“Let’s do.” They carried it together, dad at the front and Lane at the back. It was really bright when the sun got to it. In that one line straight across the top like a zipper. That one bit that’s too hot to touch, even reflected, like Essa said the moon is. Too hot to touch sounds stupid.

“Watch out,” I said. Dad was stepping in all the fried eggs splotching on the ring of dirt in the middle of the green field. I sat down far enough away that I was in the grass. I could feel tiny spiders crawling on the blades, dipping and twisting them against my legs.

Daddy and Lane sometimes slap each other and sometimes hug each other with one arm. They were kinda doing both, doing things in between where they would butt heads and laugh or punch each other in the chest with the same idea as tugging on dad’s shirt cuffs. I could smell them over here, both like Essa in the morning, the smell of their house. They stuck wires to the metal and Lane spent a while getting angry because his fingers were so thick. Then they backed up. Lane pulled a scrap of paper from his back pocket and scribbled something down on it. Dad took my arms and spun me up into the air, the thing like the TV remote pressing into my armpit.

“Oof. Gotta take a few giant steps back, kid,” he said. This is the part that Essa made okay. I don’t think they trust her very much to keep them safe. I hung around daddy’s neck and tried to move my thumbs so I wouldn’t choke him. Lane started counting down and getting slower between each number. Finally, halfway through “one,” daddy hit the button on the remote and I thought about cartoons suddenly turning into real people who talk quickly over the music.

The little one pushed itself off with smoke and headed straight for the sun. The moon was out, too. On a summer day it couldn’t help it. I told daddy not to worry. He was laughing. So was Lane. I watched the smoke fall apart. Why doesn’t it fall out of the sky.

I kicked away from daddy and ran back to the house, looking for Essa. The TV was on with “Calamitous Cat” so I got a jar of peanut butter. A caterpillar crawled out onto my knees. He must have hidden in me from the grass. I fed him to Nine.

So now you shouldn’t be hungry for a while.

#

Bernard

Kelly was watching “The Muppet Movie,” but not even that could get me down. Another launch like this afternoon’s, and I’d feel confident enough to shoot my friend into the stratosphere. He was already confident, but he’d been thinking about it longer than I.

I’m going to go back there some day…

She looked awfully cute with her short legs splayed out around the set and her shoulders hunched and her face way too close to the cathodes. I cleared my throat to see if that would do anything. It didn’t. I left her there. Made myself a cup of cocoa and took it out on the porch.

A bit after he finished whooping over the calculations, Lane had gotten back into Laddy and headed to town. He wanted to take Essa out on their one remaining credit card and I couldn’t talk him from it. Wasn’t twenty yards down the road when the radiator overheated. Jealous of the rockets, I guess. I came out with a gallon of tap water and we got it down.

“You guys doing all right?” I asked him through the cloud of steam.

“She’s just not as keen on sacrifice,” he said. “It’s funny, but when we moved here, she made me think that it was perfect for her. She painted and she cooked and she even tried doing a garden. This was a couple of years before you came up.” He shrugged. “What can you do? Got a dream and a few breaths of time to find it in. We’ll do good.”

“Damn straight,” I said. “Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of good.”

“That’s gonna be enough for me and a few bags of Doritos,” he said. “I may just not come back down.” He got back into the cab and stuttered off down the road. I could hear the suspension rattling over all the little ridges formed by alternate rainfall and sun.

It was still early, so I thought I’d go in and read for a while before dinner. Kelly was still watching Kermit and the gang fight for fame and fortune. Some fight. They walk into the office and, simply by dint of tenacity, they have success dropped on them.

Bad sign. I was arguing with fate over the resolution of a children’s movie.

“Want to turn that off, sweetie?” I asked. “Daddy’s going to read a book.”

“Will you read it to me?” she asked back.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s your book.” She still hadn’t turned from or turned off the movie. And now the credits were starting and the music was happy and it only took them two hours. Still, I thought, Gonzo never made it back there. Still a bad sign, Bernie.

To compensate, I got Alex Haley’s Roots down from the shelf. It was a copy that had belonged to my dad, back in Virginia. I had picked it out of a box of things mom was getting ready to donate to charity after he died. I didn’t think that charity would want it. Not that it’s a bad book; I’ve got a few fond memories of dad leaning back in his tweed recliner, smoking his pipe and letting the curls sink into Haley’s prose. It was a paperback, and the cover was so torn from use that most of the letters were gone.

“Ale Ha Ro,” I said.

“Not again,” said Kelly, making a face I could see reflected on the screen in the black space around the scrolling names. She stopped the tape anyway and got up.

“Rewind,” I reminded. She bent over to push the button. When she crawled up into my lap and put her head sideways on my chest, I said, “Forget to put your panties on this morning?” She gave me a glare very much like one of her mother’s and explained,

“It’s summer.” She stuck her nose into the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and inhaled. “You smell like smoke,” she said.

I carefully split the book open and started reading out loud, trying to move my mouth as slowly as possible so my tongue would not dry out before she got tired of listening.

I could smell her almost-blonde hair making room for itself in the summer air, thick as it was with the scents of other things more potent, far more beautiful. She got nothing of my pitch black color; everything from her mother.

Patty called again. She was being sick and nice. Nice for her. Telling me that she just wanted to see us and asking, Would you like to meet for dinner some night. I said that would be an awfully expensive dinner. Three hundred miles of dinner. She said we could meet halfway and I said, What, at the summit of Steven’s Pass? Yeah sure. The ski resort’s got great food. I heard her cough a few times, deeply. There had to be someone else in the room with her, because I heard a voice say, That’s all right, but it sure wasn’t hers. Hers doesn’t say things like that. And isn’t male, anyways.

I told her she may as well just send me last month’s check, and the one from two months ago, and we could pretend we had all met for dinner. And if she dips her fingers into cold water and then slaps it on her cheek, it’ll be just as if Kell had given her a kiss. For all she knows.

After Patty, some girl named Claritin rang. Said she was part of some recruiting committee back at Boeing and wanted to know if I’d be willing to come in for an interview. I told her, No, but thanks. Apparently they’ve been doing well for themselves since the Chinese started buying exclusively from the 797 line. That was the last thing I did when I was there. Some piece of the wing that you wouldn’t notice unless it fell off. Let the Chinese have ’em. They’re thinking too laterally and it won’t get them anywhere but here.

“Daddy?” Kelly said. Her little nose was flared. She does that just for fun. Got it from the rabbits we had.

“Yes’m?” I said.

“You stopped reading. Thought you’d gone to sleep. You can’t sleep yet.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too early to go to sleep.”

“Says you, smartie.”

“Says me.”

I read some more, going back a few paragraphs to see if she’d notice. She didn’t, which made me smile. It was nice to hear myself talk about the swaying of a cruel ship and glance outside at the mountains, not cruel, not moving, just heartless and real. It made everything else seem a little less so.

I put one hand to her ear and stroked my thumb along the trails of her hair. She was asleep before Essa and Lane got back.

#

Kelly

I wanted a pack of grape bubble gum and an ice cream waffle and a coloring book and a pair of Lubba slippers and something I’ve never seen before. Lane gave daddy the keys and said, Fill ’im up. And dad kinda smiled, kinda nodded, and said, Sure. Then Lane went back inside and slammed the door somehow without touching it.

Dad listened to me tell him things all the way from the driveway to the church to the store. But we didn’t stop when we got there. We pulled into the bank and I told him not to do the drive through. There’s a funny smell that comes out of those boxes that hiss and send the money around on what daddy said are called nomadics. I told him not to but he did anyway. That’s okay, because the real reason is that I don’t get to choose what flavor of sucker I want when we use the nomadics. I didn’t really feel like a sucker this time. Not with grape bubble gum and maybe a chocolate chip mint ice cream waffle.

Laddy almost ran over another car when he went out into the road. It was a woman and she pressed on her horn and then stopped and scowled at her finger. Then she gave us her finger. Daddy laughed and gave it back. Then he said,

“Don’t you learn from me, now, smartie pants. That works in the city, but not here. Here people know you.”

“Who was that?” I said.

“Pastor Chuck’s wife.” He laughed then and drove right on past the store. I was squirming in my seat, trying not to get too much dust on my legs and the green stripes on my dress.

“Aren’t we going to the store?” I asked.

“In a minute, honey. We need to check on something else, first.”

“Something for you and Lane?”

“Yup.”

“I want a present,” I said. I felt the two balls of hot water underneath my eyes and the thick snot in my throat, then I started to cry.

“Aw,” said dad, letting Laddy drive. “Someone put a bucket on that lip.” He went back to keeping his eyes on the road. We pulled into a parking lot that we barely fit into. It was in front of a red brick building that had two rows of darker red running across the wall under the windows.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is the hospital,” he said.

“Was I born here?”

“No,” he said, stomping on the click brake.

“Were you born here?”

“Nope. I was born in Virginia. Remember?”

“Where’s Virginia?”

“Dead and buried, little lady. Want to come in with me?” I slid across the dust. I lost one of my flip flops. It bounced under Laddy and dad had to reach under to get it out while I stood on one leg like the guy who brought the rain to Kapiti plain and waved at the police man.

I put my hand in daddy’s, even though his was all dry and dirty. I’d wash my hands before I ate the ice cream. Unless it looked really good. Then I’d just eat it. The sliding door didn’t open until I stuck my tongue out to lick at it. Daddy laughed and said,

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt much here.”

We went to a little moon desk. A woman sat behind it with her eyes glued on the door. She had blonde hair. She had curls so deep that they were black at the center. And not yellow black. Just black.

“Can I help you?” she said just perfect.

“I’m lookin’ for Cal,” said dad.

“Just a sec,” the woman said. Dad smiled at her while she poked something that was hiding under the lip of the desk. She talked in the phone and her voice echoed around me. It got me from both sides, kinda like a hug I couldn’t run away from.

“Cal, please come to the front desk. Cal to the front desk, please.” She said things twice in case I was too scared the first time to pay attention. I couldn’t help but think it was a good idea. Maybe I’ll use it. To start a new favorite word, I have to say to myself a few times before I go to sleep, while I’m under the covers. It doesn’t work if I do it before my prayers for some reason. So I say, God be a little closer, and then sneak under the blanket and say, Laddy buck Laddy buck. The next day, it’s all mine.

Dad leaned forward on the counter and called the lady some name. It was probably hers. He asked her how she was doing. She blew out all her air and made her eyes go all froggy. She said she was doing fine.

“Sure,” daddy said.

She giggled. A big guy with not much hair came around a corner. He put out a big hand and spoke in a funny small voice that I could make mine sound like if I wanted to.

“Hey there. Bernard, right?”

“That’s me.”

“Why don’t you come on around to my office.” Daddy tugged on me and I just about jumped on his leg to make him carry me. Just about.

We went outside and around the side of the building. I put my fingers on one of the dark red stripes and followed it through the flower beds where I could blame the line if I stepped on something precious. There was an alleyway that the big man got to first. It was gravelly and I got a sharp one caught under my big toe. I didn’t notice until I stepped down on it. I took off my flip flop quick to get whatever it was out in case it was a bug.

The big man was looking at me when I stood up. I stared back and picked my nose. He shook his head, grinning and not blinking. Then he slapped his hand across daddy’s shoulders and said,

“Lane tell yuh what I’m askin’?”

“Hundred, yeah?”

“That’ll do it.”

Dad took a lot of money out of his pocket and handed it away. The big man took it, fanned his face with the bills, and then he blinked.

“Be right back.” He took a stack of jangly keys from his pocket and opened a grey ugly door behind him. He kept the door propped open with his foot. The door closed and I could see he was wheeling a big green pipe with some kind of crown on top, only it wasn’t a good crown because it was silver.

“I better bring the truck around,” said dad.

“Good plan, son,” said the big man. Daddy patted me on the shoulder as he went by, saying,

“Stay put, hon.”

I sat down and pretended to get more rocks stuck in my toes. The sun was getting me and my cheeks were fighting back and I think they were winning. The big man was looking at me again. He started to say something, but Laddy growled and came up around behind him. He shrugged a little at his shoes and then wheeled the pipe around to Laddy’s butt. Daddy didn’t even look at me when he got out to help.

“I don’t even want to know what you guys need this for,” said the big man when the pipe was stuck between a couple of tires and was done squeaking over Laddy’s metal back.

Dad grinned and nodded.

“What do you need this for?” the big man asked.

I yelled at him and I threw the sharpest rocks and I got him I got him. Daddy bent down and said some things and then a little girl said — it was me said — It’s a good thing we’re where we are, ain’t it? And it was like getting a fever.

#

Voices

“Are you sure about this, man?”

“Hey. Which one of us is the rocket scientist?”

“Which one of us is an ass?”

“We could ask your daughter or my wife.”

“Kell would think we were talking about a donkey.”

“She’d know better. Essa’s bound to have taught her a few colorful metaphors by now..”

“Hm?”

“That’s what they do when they go waltzing around the mountain or work in the garden. Kelly calls it her school.”

“Couldn’t ask for a finer one.”

“No, sir. I couldn’t. She could, but I couldn’t.”

“Kelly loves it here.”

“Yeah; she doesn’t know any better. Or worse. Or something.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Saw you guys going at it the other day.”

“You like that? I call it *shadow boxing*. Keeps me in good hammering shape.”

“Not many of those days left, now.”

“Are you kidding? This is just the beginning. The tip of the bullet.”

“Hollow-point? No, wait, I’ve got it: buck shot.”

“Go straight to hell; do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred bucks. I’m being serious, my friend. We’re going to have our own fleet by the time we get dragged ass upwards to heaven. A thousand burnished demigods of the sky.”

“Cut it out, man.”

“Sorry. But yeah. So Essa’s got a job, now.”

“Yeah, but you don’t.”

“I’m going to file a lawsuit. Place shouldn’t be able to fire me just for being crippled.”

“Help, help, I can’t reach the on switch and it’s your fault.”

“Bastard. I mean I would file a lawsuit if I thought it would do any good, which it won’t. And if I thought they had the money, which they don’t.”

“And it would mean you’d have to tell her, anyway.”

“How do you know I haven’t told her already?”

“You’re acting all optimistic. You only do that when she’s mildly pissed at you–”

“Which seems to be her natural state.”

“—but not when she’s got a good reason to be angry.”

“So says mister Psychology professor?”

“Not everyone’s an intellectual. Some people actually spent their time reading instead. And you obviously didn’t have much of an education in economics.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Had to spend everything to get the nitro from Cal. That was my whole check. So it’s peanut-butter and bread for the next month. Good thing she likes it.”

“That shit. He told me a hundred bucks even.”

“That’s what it was. At first. I guess he didn’t take quite such a liking to me.”

“What’s going on, Bern? Stuff with Patty?”

“Just money stuff, I guess. I told you how when I was a kid I used to have a terrible time spending my Christmas money. I knew I could only spend it once, and that made it feel like everything I wanted was just made of fireworks. Buy ’em, then use ’em up and they’re gone forever.”

“You’re the kid who walked around the parties on the Fourth with just a sparkler and a vague look of apprehension, aren’t you?”

“That’s my dim, dark past. Like three years ago. So. Essa.”

“What about her.”

“You haven’t told her you got fired.”

“Let go. With compensation.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. A good reference.”

“Shit.”

“Perfect timing, I say. Look at this: we’ve got a barn full of damn fine work. I’m just itching to get ’er out and really open ’er up.”

“Figure of speech.”

“Sure.”

“I guess it’s okay, considering what we’re working with.”

“Two drunken slobs with girl troubles and pasts shut far away, embarking on short, flaming adventures in the heathen sky.”

“I didn’t hear you. I started getting indignant when you said drunken and stopped listening.”

“Sometimes I want to shoot you with a rivet gun.”

“We could have gotten these things to run on alcohol. Would have ended up cheaper in the long run.”

“Nope.”

“There’s your economics schooling coming into play again. She’s been teaching Kelly?”

“Yeah.”

“What sorts of things?”

“She used to be a school teacher; did you know that?”

“Had no idea. Must have been a bitch to have.”

“Hey now. That’s the woman I love.”

“No really: she’s like the one that makes the whole class learn that poem about Paul Revere and won’t let anybody out the door to recess until he’s finished everything on his lunch tray.”

“Actually… no. Never mind. I think she just talks to Kelly, actually.”

“What; coherently? This is my daughter?”

“I guess so.”

“That must get boring after a while.”

“It’s just about time for me to go get her.”

“You going to tell her?”

“She’s mad enough about this.”

“And waiting will make her less mad?”

“I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far.”

“Anger? Flames? Makeup melting; heat pouring off of face.”

“What was it Yeats thought. Every two thousand years?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some literature thing, right?”

“Right.”

“Damn you and your… damn you, renaissance man.”

“Right. I think it was two thousand years. He thought the world died and was reborn, or something like that. That history repeats itself in a sort of spiral.”

“I think he missed.”

“I think he had his sights set a bit too wide. This is all we’ve got. Now.”

“While you’re consumed with zeal, may I have your wife?”

“Take her. But you’ve got to go pick her up.”

“You don’t want that. Hey, she’ll say. What are you doing here? Where’s my hunk of a husband? There will be a gleam in her eye, inextinguishable. I’ll be forced to tell her that you are licking your wounds at home, trying to flash fry your insecurities with liquid fuel. She’ll be forced to settle with the best and let me have my way with her right there.”

“I won’t pay, you know.”

“I can handle that.”

“Bet you can.”

“Hey, man. Just joking.”

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“I know. You just got quiet.”

“I do that from time to time.”

“Losing that optimism?”

“I’ll catch you after dinner.”

“Yeah, all right.”

Continue to part 2…

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…

Sammy came on like a plague of handshakes. “Hey, buddy. How’re you? Say, did you hear about the Wands kid?” I gave him a firm grip and lied that I hadn’t; I barely got the words out before Sammy went plowing ahead. “Yeah, no, he got thrown out of class. Cheated on a test. You ever do that? Had drugs on him, too.” I had no idea how old Sammy was. He acted twelve and looked sixty. Probably somewhere in between. I’d been hearing the story about the Wands kid for a couple of years now, and guessed it was quite a bit older than that. 

“Wow, man,” I said. Sammy always seemed to be discovering conversation. Like a child, he never picked up on the difference between reality and fiction.

“Yeah,” said Sammy.

“See you around, Sammy,” I said. I was late for an appointment with my physician. Sammy tended to hang out in one of two places: the hospital and the food bank. Together, those two places gave him all the human interaction and sustenance he apparently needed. I would often volunteer at the food bank and, before my frequent trips to the hospital had started up, that had been just about enough of a Sammy dose for me. Seeing him in both places made it seem as if he were following me around, like a grade school hanger-on. I tried to gently remind myself that it was more like I had invaded his territory.

“Yeah,” said Sammy. I gave him a grin and edged past into the hospital waiting room. “Do you know him?” I heard him ask a middle-aged lady who had come up the walk behind me. “He’s a good guy. He helps a lot.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to one of you?” I asked my god as I waited for my turn at the admissions desk.

“I was about to commend you on your charitable character,” said my god.

“Well, I sure don’t mind helping him out now and then, if I can, but why doesn’t he spend some of that babble on one of you?”

“I’m not sure,” said my god. “All I can tell you is that he has never spoken to me.”

“Downside of a pantheon,” I said. Through a window, I saw Sammy make an unsuccessful grab for someone else’s hand, and turn the gesture into a gracious unseen wave. As he did, I noticed a cheap, filthy bandage on his hand where his index finger ought to have been, paper towel and packing tape. “Was he in the war?” I asked my god.

“He didn’t talk to me back then, either,” said my god. “I suspect he talks to you more than he does to any of us.”

After my appointment, I stopped at the hospital’s cafeteria for a couple cups of coffee. As I had expected, Sammy was still hanging around the front door. He was picking at the cigarette stubs in the waist-high ashtray, experimenting with putting some of them in his mouth. I held out one of the coffees. “Hey, Sammy,” I said.

He took the coffee and saluted me with it a couple of times. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee much, anymore, no. But it’s the thought that counts.” He took a big, scalding gulp and grinned at me. 

“I never noticed your finger before,” I said. 

“It’s good, it’s good,” he said, putting the wounded hand into one of the pockets of his army-green coat. Before he got it hidden, though, I got a glimpse of bright-red blood leaking through the bandage; the cut was fresh. “It’s good,” he said again. He may have meant the coffee.

I gave him a nod in lieu of a wave and said, “See you at the bank, Sammy.”

“All right, take care,” he said. I think he repeated it under his breath.

As I drove home, I talked with my god. A while back, I noticed a tendency in myself not to talk with him unless I was also doing something else. I would chop firewood and talk to my god; I would watch TV and talk to my god; I would write in my journal and talk to my god. At bedtime, when other people would say their prayers and get a little advice on how to improve the following day, I would not talk to my god and he would not talk to me. 

That night, while cooking myself a meal of pasta and pie, I asked about the war, which led to a discussion of the necessity of violence, which was followed by an argument on the relative value of human beings. My god was gentle in his words, but by the end I could hear a near boil in his tone. “You all have different values,” he said. “Empirically divined, but only for us, since you lack the necessary skills.”

“How much am I worth?” I asked as I put on my pajamas.

“You are worth my time,” said my god, after a slight pause. The heat left his voice, and I bundled myself in a cocoon of heavy blankets.

#

When I got to the food bank the next morning there was already a crowd out front. The director of the bank often plead for orderly lines, but he never got anywhere.

I edged my way toward the front door, as politely as possible. Normally, the crowd was only too eager to let me pass through, recognizing my arrival as another step toward a meal; but today, there seemed to be another sort of hunger driving them. A couple regulars got me with their elbows and grumbled at me to keep out of the way. I felt as if I were fighting to the stage at a concert.

Sammy was the object of the crowd’s attention. When I emerged from the press of bodies, he grinned at me. “Did you hear about the Wands kid?” he asked.

“Hey, Sammy,” I said.

“He got locked in a forest, yeah. His dad did it to him.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellow just above the lids. He looked as if he had been rubbing grit into his tear ducts, all the red, scraped skin on his cheeks.

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“He pissed on the wall,” said someone behind me. “Gonna snap,” said someone else. 

“He cheated on a test,” said Sammy. Then, in one movement, he spun to face the brick wall and flung his left arm across it. With his other hand, he pulled a wide cleaver from inside his army-green jacket. Before I could do much more than realize my blood had gone cold, he brought the knife down on his outstretched wrist. Three sounds came up at once: metal on brick, on flesh, and on bone. He screamed, pulled his good hand back and let it swing again. This time, I only heard metal on brick.

My startled muscles carried me toward him, but I tripped over the curb and went down. Sammy kept flailing with the cleaver, raising it only scant inches before smashing it into the wall, over and over, as if the number of swings were important. He must have passed out before reaching his goal, because as I reached him he toppled over into my arms, and I saw tears of frustration in his eyes, different from tears of pain in that they dried much slower and seemed to glitter much more sharply in the overcast light. 

#

A few days later I had another appointment at the hospital. I went in a little early so I could swing by Sammy’s room. When I asked after him at the nurse’s station, the ward clerk said, “Thank you, god. He’s sure in need of a friendly voice; he’s worn out all the good humor ’round here.”

“She’s been praying for someone to distract him,” said my god as I made my way down the hall toward Sammy’s room. Then, with a note of pride, he added, “I didn’t figure you needed telling.”

The smell of sick exhalations coming from each room combined with the natural vertigo my meds gave me to leave a solid headache. It felt like a brick was resting at the top of my spine.

Sammy was just coming out of his room as I arrived. His gown didn’t fit him well, and his feet were only half-in a pair of hospital-provided slippers. He was holding a brown paper lunch sack in his hand. “I threw up some,” he said, holding the bag out toward me.

“The nurse will probably want to measure it,” I said, taking it from him.

“Well, they can’t,” said Sammy. “You’re a good guy,” he added, as if it were slightly less important.

“You look a little pale, Sammy,” I said. “Let’s sit down, yeah?”

“Okay,” he said. I set the bag of vomit down on the floor as soon as his back was turned.

His room was large enough for two beds, but his was the only one. I could see scuff marks on the tile where the other bed had been. The rest of the space was strewn with his clothes: shirt, torn socks, brown corduroys, tighty-whities, and the big green coat. They were spread out to cover the maximum area. It smelled as if the air hadn’t been stirred in a long, long time.

“They couldn’t get your hand back,” I said. I leaned against the wall. There was something comforting about the smell in the room; it was almost like being in the presence of something much older than myself.

“Think positive,” said Sammy. “Are you thinking positive?”

“I try and keep it up,” I said. “You having any problems? Anything I can help with. I can sneak you some coffee.”

“Hey,” said Sammy. It sounded as if he had just realized I was in the room. “I’ve got a question.”

“What’s that?”

“Where is my soul?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I’m sure your god could answer that a whole lot better than I can,” I said. “I’m not even that clear on my own physiology.”

“It’s not a place,” said my god. I repeated it to Sammy. “It’s hardly even a thing.”

Sammy stroked the bandage that covered the stump of his missing hand. “Cool,” he said. “All right. Think positive.”

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I guess that’s not a lot of help.” Sammy nodded, bobbing his neck kind of like a quail. “Got an easier one for me?” I asked.

“No sir, all right,” said Sammy. “It’s good to see you, hey. I’ll see you around.” He sat down on his bed and kicked off his slippers. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

#

The following weekend I had two hundred packages to put together so the food bank regulars would have something special for the upcoming holidays. Cans of spaghetti, small boxes of cereal with prizes inside, some ribbon. It was a big job, but I had somebody to pass the time with.

Thanks to the situation with Sammy, my god was in a lamenting mood.

“There was a time when we gods had power,” he said. “We had our words, yes, but our words could do much more than just spark the neurons in the brains of our worshipers. We could conquer armies with a breath; we could lift mountains with a half-realized whim; we could lift the spirits of the downtrodden as lifting water from a stream in cupped hands.”

“So, what happened?” I asked. My god had often told me this story, but he told it like a gently senile grandfather; details changed at every telling, and each new wrinkle to the story made me feel closer to his true, unedited self.

“What happens to a muscle that goes unused? What happens to a brain submerged in mindless activity? Our power atrophied. We had once been timeless; then, one morning, it was as though we had been pushed from a bridge over the river of time and were now adrift within it — cold, restless, weary in motion.

“We used to feed you as we would the fish, suspended above your strange and uncomfortable world. Then we were among your minds, but held distant from your world, and weakened by some force — or lack of force — that we did not understand.” He pulled all other sounds out of my hearing, filling my head with silence. It was his equivalent of a sigh. “We learned, though,” he continued. “Our power left us because we no longer needed to use it. Not for you, mad people though you are.”
His long monologue added a comfortable dissonance to my work, like an invisible hand keeping the curve of my emotion from exceeding its bounds.

“That sort of power wouldn’t be unwelcome, now,” I said. “Cut down on my medical bills. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who would refuse a miracle.”

“Unfortunately, you do not decide what is necessary, for us gods or for yourselves. That is a balance given over to some science that you are ill-equipped to test.” Silence rolled through my head, again. “Miracles are slow wonders, kid,” he said. “They’re happening, but their birth and growth are far more deliberate than you are capable of seeing.”

#

I read about Sammy’s latest episode in the weekend paper. The dry, journalist prose put a welcome distance between the experience and me. “…white male in mid-thirties reported causing a disturbance on 300 block of Old Elm.” Just a few blocks down from the food bank. I had wondered why Sammy hadn’t shown up for our holiday celebration; I had also wondered about the sirens I had heard, but not so hard.

“He prays to a loner deity,” said my god. I was driving to the hospital to visit Sammy. After the doctors got him stabilized, they had moved him to the mental wing. I had one ribboned package left over from the party, and an empty prescription in need of a refill.

“Which one?” I asked my god.

“Not one I’m familiar with,” said my god. “He refuses to speak with me.”

“Sammy or the loner?”

“Both.”

I parked my car and shoved open the door. There was a solid wind moving over the asphalt like a brusque man in a slow-moving line, all low grumbles and thick skin. The sky was purple and seemed close, as if I could reach up and grab a fistful of lightning.

“Can they reattach his leg?” I asked as I bundled myself, head down, to the front entrance. Inside, the air was thin and smelled of new carpet.

“No,” said my god. “His cut was too ragged and too slow. There was nothing the surgeons could do to save it.”

“That’s a sort of power,” I mused. “Defying the gifts of talented men.”

“That is not the sort of power that would rob us of ours,” my god replied.

Sammy was sleeping off some pain meds when a nurse showed me to his room. He wasn’t classified as dangerous, but his remaining leg and good arm were strapped loosely to the frame of his bed. The straps meant for his other limbs curled limply on the tile floor.

I sat down and waited for him to wake up. I felt my god retreat from my mind. Thunder shook the distance, crossing miles to growl weakly at the window.

I thought about the stories of great, fickle gods of the past — told to me in deadpan by my god — who demanded sacrifice and rewarded it with disinterest. I thought about the unassuming races of history who submitted their wills to the weather and the seasons, believing that there were gods who would take their offerings and transform them into longevity. I wondered if it might have been a temptation, to surrender control, like a child in its mother’s arms.

“Hey, friend.” Sammy rolled his whole head to face me. “What’s your name again?”

“Come on, man,” I said. “You remember me.”

Sammy showed me all his teeth. They were yellow and jagged and did a poor job of hiding his tongue. “I’m asking the wrong questions,” he said.

I smiled. I had a good smile, since I had to use it a lot. Some of the outcasts who would come by the food bank were in such a slur of alcohol, you couldn’t make heads or tails of them. All you could do was smile. I had begun to think of my smile as its own word in the language; it changed its meaning based on inflection and, every so often, it dropped right out of my vocabulary, like when you can’t remember a word that means “uneducated” but you know it starts with an S.

It didn’t matter what I thought my smile was. Sammy was deaf to it; he twisted in his straps showing me his back. I tried some other words.

“Folks miss you at the bank, man,” I said. “I’m supposed to take back good news to ‘em. Have the doctors told you when you can go?”

Sammy grunted. I could see his jaws working, bulging out the skin of his cheeks. I slumped down a little further in my seat. I see his sort of posture all the time in my volunteer work. He was giving up. It was a weighted silence, and seemed a reluctance to respond for fear of being lifted bodily from a comfortable hole. I had often seen it happen when a co-volunteer asked one of the unfortunates to talk about managing what little money the latter had. I hadn’t once seen one of them gladly hand over the decisions that guided their few bills to the educated suggestion of a volunteer. It was about control; they would cling to the tiniest sphere of influence, and I had seen it many times pop like a soap bubble.

Funny, though. I had never pegged Sammy as the master-of-his-own-destiny type. He was always far too generous with his thoughts, his history, his hand shakes.

He made a noise, sort of a sob, and ground his teeth together so hard I thought I could hear the enamel popping. 

“What was that, Sammy?”

He turned his head toward me. Blood stained his chin like a red goatee; he spit a hunk of flesh from between his teeth. It landed on the sheets with the sound of heavy rain. It was the tip of his tongue. “Where is my soul?” he asked in a clotted voice, indistinct, as if he had lost interest in speech.

#

After that, I did a little giving up of my own. I had seen plenty of men and women at the nadir of their lives, but they had all known it. Sammy’s bemused ignorance of the reasons for his self-destruction put a distance between us that I was hesitant to cross back over. 

That’s part of a lie. Sammy didn’t make the distance; I did. I walked out of his room. I rolled my eyes when the nurse asked how he was doing. I tried to spin my mind away from him by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.

That lasted for as long as the storm did. I had other things to occupy my time — volunteer work, my health, the job that paid the bills — but I kept coming back to Sammy. 

“You have taken your responsibility as far as you need,” said my god. “There are others whose needs are much clearer.” He told me about a few; the ones who had talked to him, at least.

“Why not work a miracle,” I said. I had meant it as a joke, but by the time the words reached my tongue they tasted much more bitter. My mouth twisted. My god couldn’t see it. He backed away and left me in peace for a while. 

I passed the next couple of weeks with the inside of my head feeling like a desert. I could sense the natural mutation of the world around me, but it seemed no more important than the shifting of dunes. When I closed my eyes, even the colors there seemed flat and desaturated, like the screen of a dying television. My responsibility to Sammy had not been fulfilled; there was a contract between us, reaffirmed every time I stopped to listen to him. Breaking that contract would leave me stranded in the desert sensation, which is not so much devoid of water as empty of life. 

My god was the one to break the silence. “You do the things that we can not, you know,” he said one morning as I brushed my teeth. “Your simple handouts are small miracles. Envy is not an emotion becoming of a deity, but perhaps we approach it. The act of raising a loaf of bread in thanksgiving is your greatest power.”

I spit toothpaste into the sink. “I don’t understand the direction of my life,” I said. 

“Life has no direction,” said my god. “Life is not a journey; it is a shape.”

“I don’t quite understand the shape my life is in,” I said.

“Then I am fully jealous,” said my god. “You should be grateful for the chance to understand, because that makes times like this all the more potent.”

“Times like what?” I asked, just as the phone rang. 

“Your doctor,” said my god, and I could hear the play of good humor in his voice.

A little thrill sprang up in my chest. I picked up the phone. 

“Good news!” crowed my doctor on the other end. He was a serious man most of the time, but always had a glint in his eye that suggested he would only be too willing to run wildly through the streets. “It’s my pleasure to tell you that your test results came back and you’re finally in remission. Congratulations!”

My heart pumped a salve through my veins, and I felt the shape of the world begin to soften. I felt relief like the victory of a gambler; it was sudden, unexpected, and I had no immediate idea of what to do with it.

“If I could kiss you, I would,” said my god, with a note of pride in his voice. “But don’t think this lets you off the service hook.” My doctor laughed at something only he could hear.

“Why did you let him tell me?” I asked after I hung up the phone. 

“I don’t abuse what power I have,” said my god.

#

When I went back to visit Sammy, I felt buoyed by my good news. My good intention — the one I pinned down in words — was to share some of my mood with him, to see what minor joy might slough from me to him.

“Don’t,” said my god. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions which were not realized.”

I didn’t pay attention. I felt as if that wide desert in my mind lay between us. There was just a stretch of clean linoleum between Sammy and me. “He deserves as many miracles as I do,” I said. My shoes made a pleasant click on the hospital floor.

The nurses had been able to keep him from losing any more of his parts, but I wasn’t fully prepared to see him again after having stashed him at the back of my mind. He looked thin from underfeeding, and his body couldn’t quite square up with his bed. His head pulled to one side, and his stumps of arm and leg broke all hope of symmetry.

“Don’t,” said my god as I paused outside the door.

“I don’t understand why not,” I said. 

Perfect silence fell around me. “I said that I do not abuse what power I have,” said my god. “Had I the desire, I could ball your emotions up and play with them like a cat with a toy, but I haven’t that desire.”

I stepped back from Sammy’s door and sat down on a nearby bench. “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Your mood is the lens by which you perceive the shapes of everything. Your mood belongs to me, held entirely in the realm of your mind.”

“I can choose to be happy without your interference,” I said. 

“That is a decision I wouldn’t expect you to make,” said my god. The silence came in, once more, and then my head was filled with his insistent words. If my time earlier had been a desert, this felt like a swamp, all curled decay and thick, complex patterns inside my eyes. “I have found the deity to whom Sammy speaks. He is a child god, a new birth, though old enough to your perception, and he is petty as his youth describes. He spins cruelty about him like carnival sugar, clotted and shapeless. He claims an insatiable curiosity, but my fellow gods do not believe that there is any motivation less than exercising a thoughtless power over the poor souls that trust him to be their guide.”

I sat back against the wall and let my head clear. “You gods are taking advantage of him.”

“I am not,” said my god.

I breathed out a lungful and was slow pulling it back in. “And to think I was in such a good mood this morning.” I rose and entered Sammy’s room. I felt my god withdraw, leaving noise where there had been silence.

Sammy cracked open his eyes to look at me, then slid his focus toward the blank wall. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to see you, man. Yeah.” His words sounded drunk, coming off his ruined tongue. 

“Hey, Sammy,” I said. I pulled a chair over to his bedside. Neither of us said anything for a while, but you couldn’t hold it against us. After a while, I wasn’t sure if Sammy even remembered I was in the room. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you believe in a god?” It sounded stupid to ask.

“I hear voices sometimes,” said Sammy. His skin was gray as storm clouds. He coughed and then moaned, trying to lick his lips with the ragged line of his tongue. His lips were chapped and splotched with a deep red where he had been chewing. It looked painful; it looked like the least of his pain. I bent over him, we my own lips, and kissed him lightly. It was all I could do. Sammy just stared at the ceiling.

“Sometimes I hear voices, too,” I said, sitting back in my chair.

A young man in a nurse’s uniform rapped politely on the door and came in. “Hi there, Sammy,” he said with an affected brightness. “Sorry, but it’s time to check on your vitals again.”

“It’s not a good idea,” said Sammy. He scowled, as if unsatisfied with how the words had come out. “It’s not a good idea,” he repeated.

“Well, we’ve got to know how you’re doing, so we can keep you healthy.”

Sammy started to thrash around on his bed. The nurse gave me a look of long suffering. “Want me to give you a hand?” I asked.

“Can’t do blood pressure, now,” said the nurse. “Just hold his head still while I take his temperature.”

I got on my knees next to Sammy’s bed and took his head in both my hands. His skin was rough, unshaven, and blotched with sweat. He stared at me and calmed slightly, our pupils reflected one another in the faint light. The nurse bent over and pushed a thermometer into Sammy’s ear. A short beep, and then he was done. “Ninety-nine,” he said. “Looks like the antibiotics are working, Sammy.” 

Sammy didn’t reply. He just stared at me. “Where is my soul?” he asked, slurred by his slow and damaged tongue.

“I’ll be back to check on your blood pressure, okay, Sammy?” said the nurse. “Thanks,” he said to me. I smiled at him and pulled my hands away from Sammy’s cheeks. 

“Where is my soul?” asked Sammy. He didn’t break his gaze away from me.

I reached up and tapped my temple. “It’s here,” I said. “It’s right here. Keep that, all right? Let them take everything else off you. Let them scream themselves hoarse.” His eyes unfocused. I laid my fingers on his temples. The nerves and tendons all up my arms shuddered with repressed energy, as if they wanted to act out all the things I couldn’t figure how to say. “This wasteland . . . They have to cross it to reach you. It’s yours.” 

My ineloquent muscles — tongue, arms, and heart — sagged from exertion. I let my body sink back into the chair. 

Slowly, Sammy raised his one good hand to his head, index finger and thumb sticking out like a playground gun.