HOW THERE WERE BRIDGES by Meagan Arthur

How I said, we’ve seen these same bridges. How it was dark. We’re driving in circles, I said. We wound the mountain roads away from your parents’ cabin, the yellow dashes in the middle of the black flashing by underneath us. How you didn’t say anything. The dashes flashed by like a treaty. How you turned the brights on and off, on and off, every time a car passed, which wasn’t often. How again we came upon the same fork – two bridges, splitting different ways over the river, one a little bigger than the other. One with a tunnel made of rusting metal, the other tunneling through the mountain. It was dark. But I could tell. We’d been here before.

How I was swimming in that creek. Years ago, before the bridges. When we met, I was in that creek feeling like nothing. How I flew to Louisiana. For my friend’s wedding. How I flew on a plane and took pills to keep from looking down. How everyone else came to the wedding in pairs. I took the pills so I wouldn’t have to see how far up the plane was. I was there alone, me and the creek. The pills had worn off. Which was why I was swimming. Everyone else was somewhere else, in pairs, not swimming, wearing stiff clothes in the sun. How I’d scrambled down a steep path and found a creek surrounded by smooth pebbles. How there was no one around. I’d taken off everything and smoothed my way in, displacing the water as if in communion. How I floated there, watching parts of myself reaching the surface, buoyed. How the water was warm. The water was the same temperature as I was. How it felt like the pills. Felt better. Each body part of mine broke from gravity, somehow, and became a part of that water, warm and buggy and free.

You had said, I’ll drive. We approached the bridges together, your hands tight to the steering wheel, holding the frame together. We’d been at your parents’ cabin in Idaho to celebrate New Year’s. We’d driven down the mountain as the sun was setting. Now it was dark. You’d looked down from the mountain and said, here, let me. A mountain covered in tall trees, like a luxury. Like a textured coat. We were in the dark, driving in circles, trying to get back home. It was the mark of us being fiancés, me being invited, finally, to one of your parents’ holidays. You’d said, they’re just traditional. You’d said they didn’t believe in inviting us to share a room and a bed when we weren’t joined in matrimony. But now we were close. Now we were almost joined. Tied together and sinking to our resting place. Down the mountain. When I’d offered to help with the dishes, after dinner, your mother had gone in and reloaded the dishwasher after I’d finished. I had watched her turn over every piece of silverware and replace it in a different spot, one by one. The headlights shined on the same two bridges in front of us. It should be impossible, that we hadn’t yet chosen one to drive over.

How I’d broken my ankle in that creek. In Louisiana. How we both heard it snap. I didn’t know where you came from, pastel and angelicseeming, the sun sliding into your reflection on the water. For all I knew from somewhere else. For all I knew separate. How I’d been ripped from the oneness with the water. How I was dazed, being returned to my body, returned to bones that are brittle and break. Returned to looking. How in your mind, you’d stumbled upon Bathsheba. Not from the Bible, you admitted later, but from the song. How you’d chosen that day to hike along the creek. Like a prophet. How you called the rescuers to come and take me in. How you carried me up the hill yourself. How my breathing was ruined. How I felt ruined, looking at you, sun soaked and golden tipped.

We were driving through the dark wilderness. We were watching the snow fall. I asked you again if you knew where we were going. You finally answered, soothing tones only, words that meant only words. You turned on the radio and casually switched through channels, and then static. Music. Then more static. The static started to turn over and over, in a twist, with our car, and us inside it, the mountain tunnels we refused to enter creating a conduit, us twisting in smaller intervals, a black hole of a road. I watched as the static split us into bridges.

How the moment we met I’d been broken. How you heard the beautiful song in your head. How you slid into place. In the hospital afterwards, you stayed to make sure I was okay. My ankle was in a cast. And the pills. We talked, me loopy, trying to string the things of my life together. You laughed, thinking it was the pills. You asked about my family. My gone parents, I said, phrasing it wrong. You gripped my wrist. How you gripped me like you were trying to hold me in place. You asked me how I liked Louisiana to change the subject. I tried to explain how catfish was to Pacific fish as dark meat was to light meat. How you could chew on it forever. You talked about your graduate program, about being so far from home. I told you how being in a place feels the same as watching movies about that place. How the pills turned the hospital into a curled-up haze. It should be different, I told you, being in a place in real life, but it’s the same here, with the music like in the movies, and the decks where people talk and eat things like they eat in movies. As if all of the South had been filmed the same. In the same frame. How I told you I must be missing something. I tried to explain how I knew my view was incomplete, but I felt unable to complete it. You said later you’d fallen in love with me. Right then and there. How the vulnerability of my myopia became one with your bathing effigy.

The radio found a song, static slipping away. The clouds covered the moon above the trees. I told myself to relax about the bridges, relax as the radio signals came to us. Located our car, its wheels carrying us to a different position than we had been previously. The signals that proved we were still here. I leaned my head back against the headrest and felt your arms relax on the wheel. I told myself I’d missed it, the passage over those bridges. I told myself we weren’t circling the same loop, weren’t spiraling smaller toward some kind of center. I tried to believe it.

The premarital counselor told me to try to keep track of memories. In the room next to the room with the clapping. To try to keep up. To 10 use the phrase: I remember how. I remember how, something. To get myself straight, when I lose myself. To put something into my head. Orient myself around myself, she told me. In the room our counselor is in, next to the room with the class in it, all the clapping. The counselor apologizing and shutting the door, telling us to ignore it. Telling me to make a list of things I remember. To make a list of examples of how things connect, one to another. The counselor teaching us to talk about how the other person makes us feel, not to pass sparkling judgements, sparkling like a hot surface in the sun. I feel betrayed when you go all foggy, you’d say. The clapping next door going on. I feel hurt when you won’t help me to solve this problem. You’d often use phrases like this when talking about me. This problem. Our problem. Maybe it was a dance class. Your meaning was clear. My brain, something a really good fixer could make use of, find the spare parts and mend. The clapping to the rhythm.

How you drove me, pills in tow. Back to the resort for the wedding. How you tugged on my hospital bracelet and laughed. The perfect accessory for a wedding, you said. How my friend was worried. She’d been calling. How you, helping me and a pair of crutches out of your car, must have looked from the outside. How my friend stood in the turnaround at the hotel, where the cars drop people off, waiting for me. How she narrowed her eyes and smiled. After that you were invited to the wedding. After that we were us. You helped me around the dance floor with my new cast, and everyone watched. How at the table, we all sat in pairs, in even numbers.

We passed the bridges again. I was sure of it. This time I said nothing. This time I read the language of your face. An immobile stare. Hard and set. The world becomes a horror movie so fast. The movie shifted through my head like the static. There are always characters who understand the shift. The merry-go-round goes on forever and you can’t get off. The shift from the world before to the world during. To the world unraveling. In the horror movies they don’t scream on the merry-go-round. Driving through the snow, on a loop, forever, like this. I felt my legs and arms prick up a million times, bumps setting themselves in my body and mind. It looked like the trees outside were rustling. The trees, my body, all growth, twisting, moving, stuck in the same shapes. A supernatural breeze followed us as we passed the very same fork, over and over again.

How before we met, I drove myself around in the dark. How I drove my old loud engine through the suburban neighborhoods at night. With big gleaming houses. Lit from within, shining through big gleaming windows. How I drove around to watch people in those houses. Sitting in front of big gleaming TVs. The engine screamed. How I watched the families sitting together. Me watching them. Them watching their movies. How I could turn on the radio inside my car and change my perception of myself at will. How I could direct the shot, in my head. How I could decide the world. I’d find a fast song louder than the engine and turn myself into a movie. Driving alone listening to rebellious music. A pin on a map, solitary because I stood up, everyone else lying down. I’d become the car on the road and drive flat. The people in their houses looking out their front doors. Watching me go. How I’d switch the station and the world would lift. I’d find a soft song that wound through me like a disagreement. How I’d imagine myself in that story, just before the plot ticked upward. Just before I’d found someone to sit inside and watch movies with.

There was a time when I realized I could go anywhere. When I became a grownup I realized my body could stand any place. Orphan or not. I was free. I went to stand in the aisles of the supermarket. I went to stand out on the streets and nobody came to find me. I went to the movies. Nobody came to take me back to wherever I was supposed to be. Whichever house had been assigned to me. I diligently worked at the job that had been found for me. The social workers stopped coming to find me and said, go to work. Said something like, get on with it. Something like, leave. I left. I made enough money and then applied for a different job. I went to stand in different states. I stood in the water. I could be anywhere and not mind it. It didn’t matter. I went everywhere.

The dark road started to feel like shifting air. Like the merry-goround. The moment when someone’s face turns backward. In the horror movie. I remembered how the air shifts to different temperature and wetness and thought about the static from the radio, gone now. The music was still playing. Your face was still hard, arms holding the wheel. Everything in the same place. I thought to tap on the dashboard with my fingers. Just to make sure that there’s still air in the car. That everyone isn’t completely static. To make sure things can still change.

How your parents wanted things for you. Things like marriage. Like a mirage. Things like a long lawn in front of your house. Things like a vase. How they called you all the time to make sure you would get the things. How I told you I wanted things. Maybe not the same things. Maybe a vase. How I wondered what my parents would have wanted for me. Maybe flowers. How I wondered what I wanted for myself. How wanting is for people like you.

When you proposed, we both cried. We sat on the top of the building to look at the stars. You gave me your jacket like we were in a movie. There weren’t any. Stars. We cried and hugged each other close. I tried to melt into you and you tried to melt into me. I tried to hug you so tight like I wanted to pop. Like I wanted to mesh, to meld. I failed. We remained in our bodies. Locked in your arms I remained boundaried. I couldn’t help it. I remained fenced in and whole.

How the world had turned into a terrarium. How when everything broke there were glass walls. When I was a kid the world was a dark box. How I heated up soup for more than a week before anyone came to find me. I was eight when the walls turned to glass. When the people broke open the door after the knocking. Everyone could see in. How the empty house became full again. How I didn’t even know they’d been dead for who knows how long. How the soup pots sat unwashed on the stove. How I just stayed there and waited. Why didn’t you go outside, they said. Why didn’t you call for help. How I left the world, then, and when I came back there was gravel under my feet and see-through edges. How the terrarium was a trap. The TV was left on and shining blue from switching the movies. How the people came and knocked and took me away. They left the TV on and the soup pots sitting there. How I didn’t bang on the panes. I didn’t try to get out. I saw that I was in a tank. How I figured out a way not to see it.

The wheels were turning beneath us but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see the road passing us anymore. Everything was dark around us until we came to the bridges again. And our headlights lit up both paths. But somehow the car didn’t take either. We didn’t cross any bridges. The darkness surrounded us. And then we came upon them again. Over and over.

At your parents’ cabin I escaped into the sauna and turned up the heat. We hadn’t said much at dinner. I tried to lie there and find a way to be hot enough to float. I’d said I liked the potatoes. I breathed in the fire, trying to feel like the pills. Your mother had responded. I couldn’t remember what she’d said. I remembered it meant something like, leave. In the sauna I couldn’t help but come back to myself. Eventually, you came and found me. The sauna didn’t work well enough. I watched through the glass screen as you took off your sweats, your shirt, watched as the heat was sucked out the gap when you pulled the door open. You came in and lifted my head up. Placed it on your lap. You held it between your hands. Trying to be telekinetic. As if you could will me to be different. As if it would help.

How you’d seen that I was a satellite. Lost somewhere where physics still is. Floating like in an unfamiliar creek. How you’d jumped into the center of the orbit. How I was a lost void. How you finally, for yourself, found space.

In the moments when you start to lose your focus, the counselor told me, you can list the memories you know, and start there. Like, I am sitting on a couch. I remember how I sat on a couch yesterday, in my own apartment. I’m on earth. I remember how it feels to walk around my floors. I’m bigger than a worm, smaller than the world. I remember how I’m tilting and turning along with everything alive.

No cars had passed us in hours. I continued to drum my fingers on every surface of the car, on my knees, on my temple. I tried not to panic. We could be driving by these bridges forever, I told myself. The momentary panic would be useless. Like the moment before the song ends. Like the static at the end of the movie that would play forever in that empty house. Like a ring around someone’s finger, a clock hand that traverses the same path over and over. It’s a mundane trap. There is no point in panic. You learn to live inside the looping. You forget there was ever anything else.

How I realized the pills could bring me out of myself. I realized the pills made people like me. How the dinner table was a mirror. How it was glass. How I looked at myself in the table, at dinner, and realized. I realized I could become like other people. People who have glass tables. How people who weren’t cared for don’t know how to care for. The words your mother told you in the kitchen when she didn’t think I could hear her. After dinner. How you’d defended me needlessly. You’re seeing it wrong, you’d said. How it’s all about seeing. How your mother was right.

When someone begins life with trauma, our counselor said, she spends a lot of her time trying to catch up on receiving care. You started off life wounded, she’d said to me. Sitting on the couch you nodded along with her, rolling up your sleeves. Cracking your knuckles. Ready to mend. Still, the clapping next door. I sat in the counselor’s office watching myself as a fishing pole. Unwound. My line loose.

How it feels to look at you, sitting in the car, your arms moving the way arms should move. Driving us back home. How your eyes are staring like eyes. Looking for our home. How we pass the bridges over and over. How it feels to look at real people. How it feels like a movie.

I wonder what my life would be like if I’d grown up with your parents, spending New Year’s at the cabin, I said to you, as we passed the same bridges. I didn’t wait for a response. When I learned how not to need anyone, I wanted to say. I learned how to keep other people around by not needing them. That was how I made a friend. The one who got married. In Louisiana. That was how I met you. I could explain all of this to you. I could say it aloud. But you’re already driving. We’re already stuck in a time loop. The tense has already changed. It won’t make any difference.

How right before we met I’d been floating in a creek. Under a tree. How all of a sudden I’d forgotten where I was. How I’d forgotten why I was there. How I got scared. How the wet hot air became a vacuum, sucking out all of me. Leaving only my eyes. Seeing and confused about the trees. How they were different trees. How the bugs were a symphony, one that would be played when floating with Charon, loud and buzzing and hurt hurt hurt in my ear. How I’d jumped up in surprise when your foot made a twig go, crack. Ending the symphony on a low note. How we’d both watched my ankle go, snap.

You reach over silently and grab my hand. I watch the bridges out the window. I watch them passing us, instead of the other way around. I watch me loving you. I watch me not. I watch the loop the same way. I watch it not make a difference.

How we are driving in circles. Coming upon the same two bridges. Over and over again. How we always come back to ourselves. How both of the bridges are tunnels. How both of them are pitch black inside.

---

Meagan Arthur’s work has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Cream City Review, Identity Theory, Pontoon, Figure 1, and California Quarterly.

ERASER by Lauren Alwan

When Gillian pockets the red licorice, the boxes on the shelves begin to rattle. The supermarket aisle is deserted, and Gillian, being six, reasons that if no adults are nearby, then there’s been no actual theft. She’d meant to eat a piece right away, a reward for taking the candy no one would buy for her, but she’s distracted by the overhead lights which have begun to sway. In the next aisle, she hears a woman call out to someone – her child? – to run. It occurs to Gillian that her grandparents will be looking for her. She’d left them in the produce section, her grandmother inspecting a cantaloupe and her grandfather insisting it wasn’t ready, the scent not yet sufficiently floral in the way of a ripe melon. A trio of canned nuts falls to the floor, and at the end of each aisle, shoppers are running but Gillian stays put, hand in pocket, the cellophane of the box smooth against her fingers as the ordinary things of the world crash down around her.
She’d been eyeing the licorice for months, having asked her mother for it only to be refused. Once, at the store, she’d asked her grandmother, who after inspecting the package, pronounced it inferior and returned it to the shelf. On another trip she’d asked her grandfather, and he’d patted her shoulder which she took to mean another time. When this morning she’d ended up at her grandparents’ house and heard there would be a trip to the market, she knew the time had come to take matters into her own hands.
Her grandmother appears and takes her by the wrist. “Where were you?” she cries, and they hurry through the glass doors. Outside, shoppers stand astonished in the unsparing San Gabriel Valley light. Where was she? Right where you found me, Gillian thinks, in the candy aisle, but says only, “Nowhere.”
Gillian has been known to defy rules, embroider truths, to invent things even when invention proves unnecessary, but this time, her words have the ring of truth. Nowhere, it seems, has become a place she increasingly finds herself.

***

She’s an only. That’s what her mother tells people. This is Gillian. She’s my only. An only what, Gillian wonders? Her father, who this year decided to live somewhere other than their house, does not describe her this way. She’s his kiddo, his buddy, his girl. There was a time when he brought her along on work appointments and introduced her as his daughter. This pleased her immensely, the feeling of pride that came from hearing him say the words. Davud Almasi is her father, and it’s been weeks since she’s seen him, but knowing she’s his daughter, the thought steadies her. She imagines a game board in which all the pieces have been overturned and the word daughter sets them upright again, enabling her to move, strategize, conquer.
It’s summer, when Mondays are normally spent at home, but this morning her mother announced Gillian was going to her grandparents’ house. Gillian often ends up at her grandparents’ on short notice. She never protests going since being there means she’ll be catered to, while at the same time, being left to do as she pleases. She’s fed more than she can possibly eat, naps on any bed she likes, watches television in the middle of the day, and if the urge strikes, disappears into the overgrown reaches of the garden. She found out the hard way not to pinch the balloonish buds on the fuchsia until they burst, or strip her grandfather’s ferns of their leaves – though how elegantly they came off in her hand, in one clean pull from the base of the frond to the top. She’d gotten a rap on the hand for that, along with a stern warning that still echoes when she walks that stretch of garden path. Today her mother has promised to be back by three, but Gillian would prefer it were later, as late as possible, in order to have a plate or two of steaming rice upon which she’ll lay a pat of 17 butter, or spend time in the shade eating apricots beside her grandmother, or bide her time in the living room where there is rarely conversation between her grandparents, and in the silence, Gillian, belly down on her favorite silk cushion, can devote herself to her books and games without interruption.
Arriving that morning, she’d found her grandfather at the kitchen table reading the paper and her grandmother at the sink peeling hardboiled eggs. Gillian loves their kitchen in the morning, more than any room in the house. The long counter, the bank of east-facing windows, the cupboards that hold items for which she has no name but regularly takes stock of, turning a jar or shaking a bag to assess its unfathomable contents. Outside is a towering bougainvillea, and when the sun tops the mountains, the cresting sun penetrates the vines and light floods the windows in spectacular array, filling the room with eastern sun and turning her grandmother’s curtains to thrilling pleats of light and shadow.
That morning, her mother wore a navy blue dress and heeled shoes, and her grandmother took notice.
“You’re going somewhere?”
“A job interview.”
“At the bank,” Gillian added.
“No jewelry?” her grandmother said.
Her mother touched her throat, at the place where a gold pendant might have been had she thought of it. Gillian’s mother isn’t like her grandmother, who’s inclined to ideas about how women should look. Her mother’s concerns center on practical things, like money, and as she’s put it, on paying the bills now that things are different. Gillian observes, but cannot yet articulate, the incongruence of old and new between her mother and the world of her grandparents. She gleans the difference in purely visual terms: her mother’s bare wrists versus her grandmother’s braceleted ones, her mother’s disinterest in food versus her grandmother’s preoccupation with feeding others. Though inevitably, each time her mother comes through the kitchen door she becomes famished, and Gillian’s grandfather makes a plate for her. That morning, there was a row of mason jars on the counter, newly cured olives floating in brine.
“You’ve been busy,” Gillian’s mother said to her grandfather. He did most of the serious cooking.
“Take one,” he said, nodding to the jars.
“You’re sure?” She seemed surprised and clearly pleased.
Gillian wished her grandparents wouldn’t give any of the olives away, and instead, keep them strictly for her. She dislikes store-bought olives, with their sad routed centers and briny flatness. She eats only her grandfather’s olives, habituated to the glistening bitterness and a ritual of lining the pits at the rim of her plate.
Holding the jar her mother declared, referring to Gillian, “She’ll behave while she’s here.” Then turned to Gillian. “You’ll behave.”
What was there to say? It was impossible to know in the moment whether an act was wrong or right. There might be inklings, distant hunches that certain things – the fern leaves for instance – might cause trouble, but Gillian’s desire in the moment inevitably skewed the impulse and erased any pangs of conscience.
“She’s a good girl,” her grandfather said, opening the newspaper.
“A pistol,” her grandmother said, and set a hardboiled egg into the slicer.
Her mother gave her a look. “Go on then.”
And with that, her mother was gone. Gillian was now given the task of slicing the egg, a task she relishes. She set it into the slotted base and pulled the hinged frame over it. The taut wires sliced through the gelatinous white – and what a miracle that was, eight perfect circles, each with its yellow middle that sat appealingly offcenter. Once, her father showed her how to remove the shells without spoiling the egg’s pristine surface, by cracking the shell and rolling it against the counter until the membrane pulled away in a single neat layer – the mystery of a hard-boiled egg revealing itself yet again.
The bread was set down, the rounds of egg laid upon them. The slices suggested planets, suns and moons, and the pepper and salt tiny stars. Gillian, as always, eats the egg’s white outer circle but never the yolk, which though visually arresting, she dislikes. The habit always annoys her grandmother and will account for the first in a series of willful acts that punctuate this day. But then, Gillian is a girl who wants what she wants, and this too would be hers: the soft white bread and mayonnaise, the slight resistance of the egg as it met her teeth, the crystalline salt and spark of peppercorn. How simple a thing it is, the sandwich reminding her yet again of those things she wants: a full mouth, people to do what she says, all her unfillable needs unequivocally met.

***

Outside the supermarket, a few remaining shoppers mill about. They look stranded on the asphalt, as if their curtailed marketing has left them at loose ends. Similarly, her grandparents have no groceries to bring home, their cart having been abandoned in the produce section.
Gillian watches her grandfather in the telephone booth outside the store. He’s calling for a cab home, but is likely first checking on 19 the family grocery. Though not nearly as large and bright as Market Basket, her grandfather’s store has shelves of cans and boxes, cases of cheese and olives, trays of pastry. Gillian imagines it all shaken loose and scattered on the rough wood floor, and this saddens her in a way the fallen goods in Market Basket do not.
Her grandfather pays her uncle to work at the store, or so Gillian presumes. Her grandfather doesn’t go there every morning like Uncle Naj does, but all the same, according to her mother, nothing there happens without his knowledge. Her grandfather once offered the job to her father, but shopkeeping isn’t his sort of work – which is how he put it. According to her mother, her father has been adrift ever since. There’s the suggestion of a bad turn, though to Gillian’s ear, adrift sounds like something lovely. She imagines a small boat on hand-drawn waves, though clues tell her otherwise. Adrift may not be what it seems. She gleans this in the way her father ends their phone calls before she is ready, and in the worry she sees on the faces of her grandparents when they talk about him, and how, when Gillian enters the room, the discussion inevitably switches to the Arabic she doesn’t understand.
In the parking lot, her grandmother watches the glass front doors. Inside, clerks go about the work of restocking shelves and pushing brooms. “The shake’s over,” she observes. “But it always comes back.”
Gillian has heard of earthquakes, but until today, never truly understood the concept. She’d been thrown off by the word earth, and in her confusion imagined the entire planet, thinking of the childhood globe in her uncle’s room, shaken in the vast atmosphere of space. The word quake was a mystery, but according to her mother, it was a word for shaking, as when you’re afraid. You quake in your boots, is what her mother had said, and as Gillian watches her grandfather in the phone booth, his eyes fixed on some detail she cannot know, she imagines the earth, smooth and pale and sheathed with green continents, sporting small legs in boots, trembling in an indifferent universe. Her grandmother, on the other hand, is familiar with earthquakes, having been born in a place she calls Constantinople, where shakes are evidently a common occurrence.
“My father talked about a shake before I was born,” she is saying. “On the coast, in S¸arköy, so strong it knocked people off chairs in Beyog˘lu.” The idea has its appeal, Gillian thinks, imagining a jolt catapulting her off a chair. Her grandmother goes on. “We lived in a wood house, and a wood house is better. The stone houses in S¸arköy fell down, and one family, the children and the grandparents too, were buried alive under stone.”
Gillian is eager to know things of the adult world, but less so of 20 what it was like being buried by fallen stones. Frightening as the thought is, she speculates it’s something like pushing sand over her legs at the beach, that same heavy cold weight on her limbs. Stones of course would be heavier, and there would be little windows of light between the shapes, tunnels to a world you couldn’t reach.
“I don’t like shakes,” she says.
“Who does?” her grandmother says, and at that moment her grandfather emerges from the telephone booth and tosses them a wave.
The wave, Gillian understands, means the cab is on its way. She fingers the licorice in her pocket, debating whether to eat a piece now and risk curiosity about where it came from, or wait until she is beneath the branches of the fig tree in a far corner of the garden where she can finish the box in private. She knows it’s wrong to take things without paying for them, and knows too the act must remain secret. All the same, a part of her would like it to be known. She feels a certain pride in the act, of having taken what she wanted.
At home, the cab drops them at the foot of the driveway. Her grandmother hurries ahead, and Gillian stays behind with her grandfather. He takes his time, folding and unfolding himself until he is out and upright again. The driveway’s incline is becoming difficult for him to manage, and as they walk beneath the mottled light of the deodar boughs, he explains he’s yet to find a driver who’ll come up the narrow drive and drop them at the kitchen door. Gillian listens, her hand in his, saddened by how old her grandfather has become. And yet, she imagines he has always been old. Even as a young man, he must have had the same heavy gait and clipped mustache, sported a shining bald head, brown from the sun, and wore a baker’s apron as he served customers in the store.
When they reach the kitchen door, her grandmother is there, handbag over one arm and a look of astonishment on her face.
“Davud’s here,” she says, looking toward the garage. Ahead, parked beneath the shade of a pepper tree, is her father’s Cadillac, dark green under the sun, the hot engine still ticking beneath the hood after the long drive from the place he lives, the one with the strange name. Tuolumne.

***

“Did you feel the earthquake?”
They find her father in his old bedroom off the kitchen, and it’s the first thing her grandmother wants to know. He sits on the carpet rifling through boxes pulled from the closet, looks up only briefly then goes back to his work, but Gillian takes notice of his eyes. Round, the 21 color of a graham cracker, and a sad cast she watches for, knowing it will come sooner or later.
Is he happy to see her, Gillian wonders? If not, she hangs back. She’ll wait for a sign, or a look. Not long ago, a friend of her mother’s visited the apartment, and the two women spent the afternoon on the couch talking, glasses of wine in their hands. Gillian, normally eager to eavesdrop on adult conversations, found the talk tedious and went to her room, but not before hearing the friend ask her mother a question that struck her as odd. Will you separate? the woman asked. We already have, her mother answered, and it was only after her father began to stay away that Gillian suspected the word referred to her parents. Milk separates, rockets separate, but parents? No matter how she turns it in her mind, the idea doesn’t add up.
“Gilly,” her father says. He holds out an arm and she rushes forward. There is contact: the heat of skin, the bristling hair on his arms, the broad stretch of his back beneath her hands. This is what she wants. She wants nothing else but this. The grit of his unshaved chin, fingers paint-stained gray, thickset arms beneath her hands. Her father is a wonder of scale and tactile sensation, and the only one who calls her Gilly. He’s also the only one who cleans her glasses, exhaling a cloud of warm breath on the lenses then polishing them with the tail of his shirt. The process has a special term only they use, hah-ing – as in, Can you hah my glasses? He’s also the only adult who entrusts her with meaningful work, and she hangs on a moment longer in the hope a task is forthcoming. He pats her shoulder twice, a sign she must let go.
“You didn’t feel the earthquake?” her grandmother says again.
“I was in the car. You can’t feel earthquakes in a car.”
Gillian finds this fact fascinating, like knowing cardboard boxes are made from trees, something her father told her the day she’d sat beside him in the apartment and watched him pack these same boxes.
In the open box before them is a collection of things she associates with her father: mechanical objects with plugs and switches and gauges with neat red and white numbers, along with stray folders of papers, a box of old erasers. He’s an artist, but his pictures, he’s told her, are ad art – a term that continually occupies her thoughts – for spare parts, ones you might need for cars. In the pictures he creates, the gadgets gleam in gray tones against a glossy white background, and Gillian finds them cryptic and beautiful.
“You’ll go to Malek’s?” her grandfather says. Uncle Malek lives in a place called Phoenix Arizona, a place Gillian knows nothing about, only that it takes seven hours to drive there.
“For awhile. I’ll need my light box, the tripod, a few things.”
“For how long?” her grandmother asks.
“Pass me that cord, Gilly.”
“But why Phoenix?” her grandmother says. “One boy there is enough.”
“Work, Ma. A month or two depending. Malek knows people. The money’s good.”
Her grandfather says something to her grandmother in Arabic, though it’s clear to Gillian her grandmother wants her father to stay. In the course of this summer, Gillian has been assembling stray details, drawing her own conclusions. Not only from her grandparents, but conversations not for her ears, as her mother says, the endless back-and-forth between her parents. Her: You struggle when you don’t have to. Him: I do fine when they pay their accounts. Her:You should have gone into the business, the store would have bought you time. Him: I’ve studied too long, worked too hard to end up working in a grocery. Of all the exchanges Gillian heard, she was most shocked to learn that time, like a box of licorice, could simply be bought.
“The shake was bad luck,” her grandmother says.
“Where’s my newspaper,” her grandfather says to no one in particular, and turns back toward the kitchen.
“Bad luck?” Her father laughs. “It’s geology, Ma. Land masses bumping against each other.”
“What an idea,” her grandmother cries.
Once, Gillian and her grandmother were in the kitchen when a jolt nudged the house. One quick thud and it was over. Her grandmother said a prayer, quickly, in Arabic, then picked up where she left off, washing mint as though the quake were a stranger she’d bumped into on her way to someplace else. At the time she’d seemed immune to the forces that caused the shaking, but now Gillian isn’t so sure.
Her grandmother turns to go. “You’ll stay for lunch?”
He will, her father says, and Gillian is pleased. Staying for lunch will mean they’ll eat in the dining room, a room designated for meals that are special. Gillian loves the room’s dim light, the murky chandelier overhead, the scent of cedar that lines the cabinet that holds the porcelain plates and gold-rimmed glasses. Lunch will also mean freshly made rice rather than reheated, and the thought occurs to Gillian that if her father cannot live with her mother, as he’s said he cannot, he could easily live here. Then meals would always be in the dining room, with the lace cloth and the framed pictures on the sideboard and the windows shaded by blinds and drapes and the deodar’s dark boughs.
“Gilly, give me a hand here, will you?”
He passes a box of blackened erasers and a square of cardboard 23 on which to rub them clean. She’s done this before. A few of the erasers are the gum type, the grey putty blackened by pencil lead and misshapen from being rolled, smashed and otherwise manipulated to remove any evidence of a mistake. Gum erasers are cleaned by pulling and stretching until the carbon miraculously disappears. Cleaning the Pink Pearls, on the other hand, is more laborious; they must be scrubbed against paper until all traces of the blackened surface is gone.
Gillian takes her time – especially with the Pink Pearls – a job she’d much rather do than setting the table. As she works, she can hear the sound of rice being washed, followed by the ignition of the gas burner, the sizzle of butter in a pan. It’s new, working like this with her father while her grandmother cooks. Given the choice, Gillian would prefer to apply her energies to the strictly interesting things her father does, to calculations such as he makes now, of how many rolls of film to bring, of sketches that must be examined and assessed, and which pencils to bring with their leads that vary in hardness. As Gillian sets the last of the cleaned erasers in the box, she thinks of Phoenix Arizona, a place she doesn’t know, and her Uncle Malek, a person she only faintly recalls, and worries her father might never come back.
He looks over a page torn from a magazine, and she studies him. His gray-stained fingers, the knuckles that are large and callused, the color of strong tea. The temple-pieces of his glasses are heavy and dark yet translucent, and there are bristles of hair in his ears – it’s something of a revelation that hair grows there as well as on his head and arms and chest. In the stubble on his chin there are patches of gray, and gray too in the sideburns, shaped like dominoes and carefully trimmed. Her father’s body is a looming presence, in the weight of his footfalls as he crosses a room, or the length of couch he occupies while watching television. There’s a sheltering quality, and she feels it now, as she sits beside him. Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll be gone, with no guarantee that Phoenix Arizona will make him happier than anywhere else. She could remind him of the laundromats he owned, and before that, the mail order business, neither of which made him happy. Or the job running her grandfather’s store, still his for the asking. But she knows better than to raise certain matters, and the store is one of them. Mention of her mother, especially, makes him irritable, so it’s best to keep silent about news of home – even ordinary things, the egg she dropped on the linoleum that the cat lapped up, the portable color TV her mother brought home from Fedco – can cause a dark sadness to come over him. With most people Gillian says what she pleases, she might test the bounds and break 24 rules when the mood strikes her, but never with her father. With him, there is so much she cannot say, a wealth of subjects better left alone. What does that leave? She’s out of ideas, and that leaves nothing but silence, and with her father, silence feels the same as his being gone. At that moment, having nothing else, she takes the package of licorice from her pocket, and tipping a few pieces in her hand, offers them.
He looks up from the magazine page. “Ah, the red kind,” he says, taking a piece delicately between two fingers. Her father dislikes black licorice, finding its taste too aggressive. “The old man buy it for you?”
The old man. The old lady. Her grandparents are in fact old, but calling them old, instead of Mom and Pop as her Uncle Naj does, strikes her as disgruntled. The words make the world feel small and miserable. Gillian has always been fond of the names her father uses for her. Gilly, Gil, and sometimes Gigi, all of which she loves for their intimacy, their familiarity. But her father’s names for her grandparents fill her with unease. They make the world feel off-kilter, wrongheaded, as though a mistake has gone uncorrected.
“No,” Gillian tells him, her grandfather didn’t buy her the licorice.
He doesn’t say, Well who did? It’s a question Gillian would certainly ask, though she knows how effortless deception can be, how irresistible it is to lie in the face of a bothersome truth.
“Okay,” he says, apparently unwilling to press her further.
But she’s not ready to let the matter go. Who knows when he’ll be back, or if he’ll ever know how she felt and what she was thinking in that moment before the shaking started?
“I took it. At Market Basket.”
He doesn’t look up from the open magazine in his hands. “I see.”
The moment the words come out, she sees her miscalculation. It’s there in the tightening of his expression, in the uncertainty at his brow. She’d been gripped by the audacity she felt in the supermarket, and wanted him to see her as bold, but as he sets the magazine into the folder, and the folder into the box, she suspects otherwise. He sees through her story, and the knowledge brings a familiar prickling of shame along her back, her neck.
Adults have rules and reasons that in the scheme of things seem needless, and knowing this, she readies herself for a scolding. But he doesn’t look angry, far from it, and in fact, her father’s manner suggests she’s told him something he wishes she hadn’t. In that moment, Gillian reverses course. She’s nimble that way, in her ability to improvise. She concocts a rationale, pulling it out of the air as she often does when she’s out of explanations.
“We were going to pay, but we had to leave. Because of the earthquake. We’re going back tomorrow and pay.”
He doesn’t look at her, but at his belongings in the cardboard box, as if a more reasonable explanation might be found there. “Sure,” he says. His tone is uncertain, his eyes not meeting hers. “That sounds right.” He stands and brushes the front of his khakis.
Gillian stands too, and brushes the front of her shorts. Her face burns and her hands are gray with carbon residue. Ahead of lunch she’ll be told to wash them, to use soap, but those gray smudges came from her father’s pencils, from his drawings and his lettering, and how sad it will be to wash it all away, the only remnants she has of the work he does when she isn’t there.

***

At lunch, there is the consolation of rice with vermicelli, and a bowl of her grandfather’s yogurt, made earlier that morning. There’s a dish of chickpeas in tomato sauce. A plate of olives. A pitcher of lemonade. Gillian eats with gusto, though her stomach has been jumping – or as she knows now, quaking, since telling her father about the licorice. That sounds right.
“Gillian,” her grandmother says. ”Get the glasses from the cabinet.”
The cabinet is normally off limits, but today she’s allowed to open the paned doors and reach into the shelves of breakables. She loves the dark wood, the ripe scent of old varnish, the way the glasses and china plates twinkle in the shadows. There are rows of delicate sherbet dishes etched with vines and clusters of grapes, and tiny glasses rimmed in gold, no bigger than her hand. She carefully takes four glasses from the shelf, feeling a competency and adult prerogative as she sets them on the table. She returns to the cabinet to shut the doors, anticipating the satisfying catch of the latch, when in the shadows, she sees it. There, behind the row of sherbet glasses, flickering like a spider web, is the small glass globe her father received in high school, won after he placed first in a national science competition. But it’s in pieces, broken to shards, a tiny heap of razored crescent moons. She’s always loved staring at the globe through the glass. Once, she opened the door in order to get a better look and was delighted to find her father’s name inscribed across the equator, as though his abilities had planetary magnitude. Now, the object is in pieces, nothing but translucent claws and angry teeth. She worries she’s the one who broke it, but then remembers the earthquake, which was surely the cause. And yet, her propensity for untruths and errant acts hangs over an otherwise simple explanation. She is certain to be implicated 26 no matter what. The damage will be found soon enough, later that day, or the next, but by then Gillian will be home where she can plead ignorance at a remove.
As they eat, no one speaks, a feature not uncommon at her grandparents’ house, but few things make her more anxious than a meal at a silent table. Relief comes when her grandfather looks up, and seeing her across the table, smiles. His starched collar is bright against his sun-browned skin, his grip loose on the fork, his movements slow. His gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits set carefully along the rim.
Thinking of her father’s name for him, she understands her grandfather is indeed an old man. When he’d sat down to lunch, she was struck by his stiff descent into the chair, his body that seemed incapable of lowering until dispatched by gravity. He seems to grow older each day, each hour. He looks older to her now than when they returned from Market Basket, older than when the cab pulled up to the house. And when they’d walked up the driveway, the weariness of his steps made her fearful. She cannot imagine time when he is not there, sitting across from her at the table or his hand in hers as they walk under the deodar trees.
Now, his gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits.
“Give her more rice,” he says to her father.
Her grandfather’s tone is stern, as though her father has done something wrong. His tone is harsher than when she’d pulled the leaves off the fern or popped the fuchsia buds. What, Gillian wonders, has made him angry? That her father won’t work at the store? That he’s going to Phoenix Arizona?
Her father forks the last chickpeas on his plate. “She’s had enough.”
More than once her father, and her mother, have remarked on her eating habits, that she’s grown plump, and should, as they say, watch herself.
“She’s hungry,” her grandfather says. “Give it to her.”
Gillian knows how it feels to be told what to do, and is stunned by the realization that she’s not the only child at this table. Her father, after all, is her grandfather’s son, and when he sits here, he must do as he’s told, or, as Gillian herself had so often been reminded, face the consequences. She’s old enough to know adults don’t say such things to each other, but the threat feels likely all the same. The fact of consequences can leave her at a loss for words and that perhaps is what accounts for the silence. Her father is no doubt glad to be going to Phoenix Arizona, a place apparently far from this table, from 27 her mother, and from her grandfather’s demands. Gillian tells herself he’s not glad to be away from her, an equation that doesn’t quite add up, but which serves for now.
The look on her father’s face suggests he’d like to be somewhere else, and reluctantly, he spoons the rice onto her plate. Gladdened as she is by the extra helping, as the spoon travels between the bowl and her plate, she’s thinking of the glass globe. How to remove the evidence, how to spare her father from yet another disaster, one he might be inclined to associate with her.
Years later, when she’s forgotten that day’s earthquake, when it’s buried in memory with the numerous other times she’d leapt to the nearest doorway, she’ll remember the lie she concocted to cover her theft of the licorice, and the way her father accepted the falsehood, or rather, overlooked it. There will be decades of similar exchanges to come – her willingness to lie, his reluctance to challenge her – but the licorice will be the first, the blueprint for all that’s been false and misunderstood, all that’s been wrong between them.
Though that afternoon, she sits beside her father at the lacecovered table in the dining room with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back. She could mention the broken globe, but is unwilling to risk it given all she’s guilty of. Soon her father will leave, and she’ll forget the meal, just as the licorice will be forgotten beneath the memory of the broken globe, but she’ll remember the erasers, how well she cleaned them, how she removed all evidence of carbon from their soft surfaces, and the care with which her father took the collection from her hands.

***

When the meal is finished and the dishes are washed and drying on a tea towel, Gillian returns to the dining room. As is customary after the midday meal, the house is quiet. Her father has returned to his boxes, and her grandparents to their respective chairs, where, as always happens on full stomachs, they fall into a post-meal slumber. She opens the cabinet door and retrieves the pieces of the broken globe, drops them into the pockets of her shorts, and as she does, imagines the warnings from her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather. So sharp! Watch yourself!
Quickly she goes to the garden, though she takes the roundabout route, out the kitchen door and to the end of the driveway where a set of smooth concrete steps lead to the garden’s furthest reaches. She’s headed to a place no one knows, her favorite spot. It runs along the chain link fence at the property line, a desolate and untrod corner rife 28 with dust and the clutter of decaying branches where the ground is thick with moldering leaves. She clears the detritus away and takes the pieces of glass from her pocket.
It’s quiet at midday, even the jays are silent. Her fingers part the rotting leaves, where beneath there are rotting clumps of barley grass and dandelion, stray rose hips likely fallen from a jay’s beak now dried to an unappealing wizened brown. And squatting in the cover of a nameless shrub, she begins to dig.
The cast-off nature of this corner allows her to imagine a kind of ownership, a miscalculation that in years to come she’ll reckon with – that in fact, nothing of the ground in which she digs, or the garden, or the house or the land on which it sits, are hers. None of it belongs to her. But for now, in that moment, the place is hers alone. She knows well the sandy loam in her hands, its toasted color and grit, the brittle leaves at her feet, the San Gabriel Valley dust that coats the leathery leaves on the tree branches. All are a constant, deeply known, and allow the illusion of ownership to go unquestioned.
It proves easy enough to dig through the topsoil, but the ground beneath is hard, compact. It gives off a mineral scent, like clay and heat. Its iron stains her fingers orange. There’s only the sound of her digging, the rasp of each stroke and the short, sharp sound of her breath. She reaches hardpan – she doesn’t know yet that’s what it’s called, but it’s clearly impervious and will require the aid of a rock. Even then, her efforts produce no more than a gentle hollow, so she keeps going until her work will accommodate the pieces of glass.
Finally, she lays each shard down, and together they are all but transparent in the shadows beneath the trees. The act recalls known things, things of her father she’s sure of. Her father the artist. Her father the photographer. Her father the man who drives from Tuolumne. The father who cooks, gardens. The glass disappears beneath handfuls of loose earth, beneath an artful camouflage of leaves and stray twigs. She must be thorough. Should the glass be found, it would require too many explanations, too many shaming admissions.
There are secrets that Gillian keeps easily – trouble between her parents for example – and yet, with her own secrets, she tends to speak of them in veiled terms. Even as she’s careful to cover her tracks, to keep the worst parts hidden, there’s a part of her that wishes to be known. Earlier, as she sat beside her father in the dining room, with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back, she considered announcing her discovery of the broken globe. What if she had? Her grandmother might have blamed her, but her father knew earthquakes, understood the dam- 29 age they could do, and he would have likely defended her. Though in the end it was a gamble she’d been unwilling to take, given all she’s guilty of.
Before leaving the garden, she removes all traces of evidence. She brushes the leaves that cling to her knees, runs the hose over her hands to wash away the stains on her fingers. Her plan, of course, is to come back for the globe, and soon – to dig up the pieces, take them home, and somehow put them back together. But in fact, years will pass, and by then she’ll have lost track of where they’re buried. By then, the garden will have changed. The shrubs will be different, the lay of the garden’s neglected tract will have shifted, altered over seasons until it’s unrecognizable. Sometime in middle school, she’ll spend an afternoon digging there and will find nothing. At sixteen, she’ll make a second attempt, since by then, on the days she misses her father, she’s more inclined to search the ground for broken glass rather than phone him, telling herself the pretense of an amiable chat won’t make up for all that’s gone unsaid.
But that afternoon, when she returns to the house, there’s the familiar shift from bright sun to shadowy interior, sun blocked out by window shades and venetian blinds, by heavy drapes pulled to block the hard light. The rooms are quiet. There’s freedom in this darkness, this emptiness, in the bounds of the house with its meandering rooms, all empty, all available to her, and when she goes to look for her father, she finds the boxes in his room are gone. The narrow bed with its colorless spread, the bureau with its archive of objects that go unused, and the dun-colored carpet on the floor look as though he was never here, a room that waits for her father to return in order to be occupied again.
She goes to the driveway, knowing his car will be gone, but seeing the empty driveway she is crestfallen all the same. He sometimes calls to say goodbye after he’s gone, an odd custom, she thinks, because the goodbye has already happened. She’s about to go back inside when she stops, drawn by something in the air. It’s a stillness, a feeling of space and scale she doesn’t yet have words for. She feels the sensation of being a small figure beside a towering house, beneath vaulting palms and cypress and vaulting sky, and something in it feels meaningful. She’s only six, but Gillian senses the moment and takes it in. She doesn’t know then, but the feeling is one of being anchored to a place, knowing how you fit within it, seeing its outlines that define you in sure, bold fashion.
Years will pass. Her grandparents die – first her grandfather and her grandmother years later. The house is dismantled and sold, but the feeling of scale, the rightness of that place, remains. By then, having grown to a sensible and compliant adult, Gillian no longer imagines stealing back into the garden in a desperate attempt to unearth the cache of broken glass. Instead, she carries the idea privately. It no longer matters that the place and the house as she knew it – dim-lit, shadowed corners, the dark wood of old furniture – is gone, vanished as though it were never there. She’s satisfied knowing the evidence remains, that her father’s name is there, somewhere in the ground. She buried it in the sandy loam in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, a watershed given to the atmospheric whims of a small spinning earth and the force of colliding tectonic plates, in the garden of a house that was never really hers.

---

Lauren Alwan’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod, and O. Henry Prize Stories.

A VERY SHORT CHILDHOOD by Dina Nayeri

One slow afternoon at the café, Darius clicked through discount travel sites until he’d bought a plane ticket. He’d fly to Heathrow and crash for three days with Beatrice, a new hookup who’d passed through Fort Greene and told him she was a Londoner only after the sun came up. “Come visit,” she’d said, the slim rays from his gable window striping her back as she stumbled into her jeans. Weeks later, with his miles about to expire, he thought of her honeysuckle perfume and the way her cheek dimpled when she chewed, and decided she meant it.
At Sunday dinner, he dropped a word or two about the plan, keeping his mouth full and his eyes on his father. His aunt Suri went quiet. (London? Aunt Pari whispered in her ear.)
Years ago, Suri, a gynecologist, had done four free sessions on Darius’s first girlfriend, who’d then dumped him because (fair enough) it’s weird dating someone whose eccentric aunt has prattled away about gluten-free bread and cock sizes while lubing up your fourth vaginal expander, to which she’s given a name and a backstory. “Meet Simon, approachable Physics grad student. Very easy, all he cares about is your pleasure . . .” Okay, fine, Suri was fun.
Darius had spent high school cringing at his weird Iranian family, his cut-rate surrogate mothers. Now and then, he reminded himself that at least his mouthy Aunt Suri, with her medical degree and private brand of cherry lube, was a better caricature for his classmates to tear into than the sexist turban-clad ball sacks always on the news. But lately Suri’s rusty sex positivity had become embarrassing. “We get it. You’re so new world,” he’d taunt. “Calm the fuck down.”
Now Aunt Suri scowled at him. “It’s non-refundable,” he said, “so don’t start.”
Baba smiled tightly at his son. “You smoking things?” he said, leaning into the long yogi breath Darius had just released. Baba’s first name, Babak, had long confused all of Darius’s friends: which one meant “dad,” and which one was his name? Such handwringing, even though “Dan” and “Dad” too, are only a letter apart. “I smell the skunk,” said Baba. (He hasn’t been smoking, Aunt Pari reassured him. Pari, a farmer, knew the smell of every natural thing.)
“Where will you stay?” Suri asked, folding her arms.
He barely glanced at her. “I just told you, with B.” Unable to resist, he added, “While I’m there maybe I’ll jump on the Piccadilly . . . drop in on the grandma you guys are hiding from me.”
“There it is,” said Suri, lips curling slightly. She glared, because wasn’t this the true reason Darius was going? Finally, to investigate his enigmatic grandmother, to find out the greatest of the Amirzadeh family secrets before his cousin Kayvan did, so that he could publish them like the scavenger they all believed he was? And what if Kayvan did find them first? If he wrote it, he wouldn’t be a scavenger at all. He’d be their archivist, their hagiographer, a hero. Darius reminded himself that his grandmother’s address was easy to find. Kayvan had never visited because he simply wasn’t that interested – Kayvan always overlooked the truly interesting in favor of the familiar, the warmed-over, and anything related to his own small life. And that, not who got there faster, would decide things in the long run. Meanwhile, Suri carried on accusing. “There’s the real reason,” Suri sneered. “Is there even a Beatrix?”
Darius didn’t give her the satisfaction of correcting Beatrice’s name. His baba’s back straightened. “No, Darius, please,” he begged. “Don’t go looking for our mother.” (She’s selfish, whispered Suri. 33 An abandoning, selfish woman, muttered Pari. She didn’t even leave after the revolution, you know. She left before, with a first-class ticket. With curled – )
“Yeah yeah . . . With curled hair and the good suitcases,” Darius chanted. “We know.”
“Curled hair! And the good suitcases!” they said, their voices tumbling over each other and overlapping, Babak, as ever, echoing his sisters.
“Maybe that’s why you’re so interested,” Pari muttered. “You share the ungrateful gene.”
That was a touch cruel for Pari, and he told her so. Pari shrugged.
“She left us,” Suri said, “alone against all the evils in Iran. Never even looked back.”
“Didn’t you have Baba Ardeshir?” Darius asked. Babak’s eyes bulged. Pari muttered a blessing for the old patriarch under her breath. Suri glared at Darius and made a crack about crossing an ocean for a mere fuck. Again, Darius didn’t correct her.
“She abandoned her children,” whispered Babak. “We weren’t even us . . . We were tiny, small, innocent . . .” he started panting, struggling for volume. Babak started drumming the table.
“Okay, Babajoon, breathe.” Darius covered his father’s hand with his. You couldn’t let gentle, undiagnosable Babak get frantic. He’d lose an entire day to worry. He’d begin picking his hair, or overpruning the garden, or he’d disappear into the attic, trying to fill the gaps in the boxes of photos, hunting a single unimportant shot that crossed his memory. Babak started arranging the cutlery, and Darius helped, moving his own teaspoon to the end of his father’s row.
“What do you even want with her?” said Suri, releasing a long, labored sigh that gave Darius the itch to goad her until she cried.
“Dunno,” he said, pretending she meant Beatrice. “I need something to prod.” Darius wrapped a morsel of lamb into his bread and dabbed it in the sauce. Suri glared. The truth was the more Baba and the aunts protested and wrung their hands, the more his imagination stirred. And anyway, if Suri could intrude so grossly into his life in the name of openness and family, then why shouldn’t he repay the favor? He shrugged and stared back.
If Darius had an earnest American family with boundaries, he’d tell them that he’d lost his way, and that he was afraid he might be wasting his pricey American education (way pricier than cousin Kayvan’s, the finance-bro turned lit-hack now writing a melodramatic turd of a book about their family). He’d tell them that he understood that one day he’d have to parent his own father, but he didn’t know how because nobody had taught him. He didn’t know how 34 mothers spent their mornings, or how normal fathers reacted to a missing teaspoon. He’d never consider Baba a burden, but Darius needed a minute to just breathe and to orient himself, to figure how just how he was meant to function in the world, before he could be somebody’s mother.
And, if they gave him the slightest room to open up, he might admit that Beatrice made him feel good, better than the others. Sure, it was one night, but they’d told each other real things and he’d woken up to her long fingers untangling his hair. She’d made him pancakes and coffee.
For three years, Darius had slept in a friend’s illegal attic rental at the edge of Fort Greene, writing overworked stories and making Turkish coffees and falafel in the café below. Now and then, Princeton classmates came through in dry-cleaned jeans, said an awkward hi and asked about his unfinished book, on their way to the F or the N for media or banking jobs. He told them the truth: it didn’t matter because nobody’s listening. Even if he became a writer, the terminus of his every dream, he’d still only be speaking into a selfish and unmovable void.
Darius needed a distraction, to rouse his curiosity out of its long sleep. “I forbid you to go,” Baba muttered, resting a hand on his shoulder. Darius touched his father’s hand.
“It’s just a weekend, Babajoon.” He tried to make his voice gentle. “It’s nothing. I’ve met a chill woman and I want to see her.”

***

Weeks later, Darius stood jet-lagged and hungry on a cold outerLondon stoop. He shuffled on her doorstep, lips to the speaker, with an overnight bag and the shit-eating grin that had gained him entry everywhere since he was a motherless schoolboy. He scanned the two columns of doorbells for her name: Mrs. Golshifteh Amirzadeh. He double-checked the photo of her address, snapped from Baba’s journal. This was the right place, this shabby post-war building, three floors of flats above a fish and chip shop in north (north north north) London. Hardly worthy of a runaway Persian princess or whatever she thought she was. He ran a finger down the columns again, stopping at 1B. The name plate read: Emmeline Amiri.
“There you are, Azizjoon,” Darius muttered the affectionate name that Baba had taught him for a hypothetical Iranian grandmother. He’d shortened Amirzadeh to Amiri before; they all had. But where did ‘Emmeline’ come from? Decades in England, he knew, but he hated it when Iranians Westernized. For a while in college, he’d insisted on being called Daryoosh, but his classmates wouldn’t let it 35 happen gracefully. The intercom crackled as he muttered in Finglish. “Azizjoon, it’s Darius. Your grandson?”
Would she remember him? His grandmother knew his face, of course, and Kayvan’s. Baba and his sisters sent formal letters, photos, graduation news.
A small, reedy voice that seemed to have gone unused all day (maybe many days) chirped through the speaker. “Oh dear – is that . . . oh, darl – ” She let go of the button mid-darling, poor old thing. Darius knew from his father and aunts that Azizjoon was senile, and not particularly maternal. Anyway, she’d be in her eighties, and you don’t go knocking on the door of your most clinically bat-shit ancestor, a stranger who ghosted her children decades ago, expecting Pari’s butter cookies or Baba’s tea with a shot of Baileys.
But he had nowhere else to go. At the terminal in JFK, he’d decided it was time to text Beatrice. Firing off a message, he noticed she’d been the last to write. Twice. He had no new messages when he landed at Heathrow, so he decided to head to his grandmother’s first – he’d do the visit, take some notes, then go to B’s. But Beatrice’s response, when it came, was surprisingly not chill, accusing him of disappearing from her DMs and treating her like a backup.
He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a backup, that he’d been playing it cool and overshot. But he was nauseated and tired, and he kept seeing Suri’s little smirk. Maybe B would laugh, too. She’d gone from zero to seething so fucking quick, he had no time to massage things. For now, Darius needed a bed and a roof, maybe some slowcooked lamb, a doting ear to listen to him complain about stuff. Still, he tried to remember that he wasn’t here to get his head scratched. He was here to grab the old stories and go before the old lady kicked it and Baba’s childhood secrets were buried with her; they were probably fast leaking out of her head right now, and Kayvan, the story-stealer, was closing in like the striving, unoriginal try-hard sack of shit that he was. God damn it! Thinking about Kayvan always got his temperature up.
The door clicked and opened a crack. Purple-lined eyes peered at him, then the door swung wide. “Oh, my Darius,” Azizjoon sang through tears. Her accent was nearly English, like those fancy Iranian ladies who’d flown off to boarding schools in London and spent their useless lives lugging skis between Dizin and Chamonix. Azizjoon didn’t have a life like that – she will have cultivated this accent, forcing her mouth to clutch the marble, that tight English “o,” to let her r’s drop into oblivion. Her pronunciation wasn’t so much received as it was wrenched. She will have practiced before a mirror, into a cheap tape recorder, as her daughters had.
He allowed her to hug him, to pat his back, but something was off in the tightness of her grip, in her smell. This wasn’t the grip or smell of a geriatric. She had power in her arms, the scent of a fancy perfume, something Chanel-like. Could this be his grandmother? This woman looked the same age as Suri and Pari, his younger aunts. She looked sixty. His aunt Goli, her eldest child, was about to turn sixty-two.
“Come in, darling. I’ll put the kettle on.” She continued to speak as she turned and led the way upstairs. “I’ve just been out, so there’s biscuits and a pot of goo. Oh, dear, I . . . How handsome you look. Just like your Baba . . . and my Baba . . . much more my Baba.” She stopped for a breath, turned and noticed his befuddled expression. “I suppose they’ve told you things.”
He removed his shoes at the threshold. Set down his plastic rain jacket. The staircase led up to a bright room with whitewashed wooden slats covered in an old Nain rug. It smelled of cardamom and rot and muscle-relaxing cream. He summoned the charming Turkishcoffee-and-falafel Darius. “I didn’t expect to be fed. But thank you. I’m starving.”
“Oh, poor you, sit sit, this instant. I’ll fetch the goo.”
What the fuck is goo? “It’s fine, Azizjoon,” he muttered, craning toward the kitchen.
His phone buzzed. It was Beatrice. She’d already closed the door on this, but here she was again, probably day drinking. Fuck you, she said, u ghosted and now suddenly ur here? He began to type, letting the ellipses to show. Then he stopped and put the phone away. If she was going to be mean, so could he. Moments later his phone buzzed again. He peeked: ur just scamming for lodging. What a waste to love you. Not that I did. Ur just a bygone fuck.
Woah, what love? He walked to the middle of the room, where he could see Azizjoon pouring loose-leaf tea into a decanter and dumping some kind of store-bought personal pies onto a chipped floral plate. She threw out their cardboard boxes. The labels read, in huge letters, Gü.
Ick B, he wrote, because that bygone stung, but then a wave of cruelty overcame him, and he went right for the “thirsty” emoji he reserved for when he wanted to crush someone. “You know that feeling,” he used to say to Kayvan, “when you don’t want them mad, you want ’em calling a hotline?” Kayvan had called him immature and flaunted his shitty trophy marriage. But Darius didn’t want to sleep here, under a strange old lady’s roof. Besides, texts have a way of staying around forever; he deleted the emoji and wrote instead: there *was* love there. So much.
Instantly he felt awful. That’s not how he’d wanted to say it, 37 all slick and fake. He wanted to say he’d felt good with her. But he couldn’t now because she was being such a bitch.
“Here we are,” said Azizjoon putting two creamy white spheres – cheesecakes maybe – on the glass coffee table. She poured tea into Darius’s cup. “Shot of Baileys?” At the offer of Baba’s night drink, he dropped his jaw, “My baba drinks this!” to which she rolled her eyes, “Almost as if we were blood relations!” Then she winked and tossed in a classic Amirzadeh family dig: “Where’d you go to uni again?”
“Azizjoon,” he said stirring his tea with the comically tiny spoon she had provided. He was almost sure it was a salt spoon. “I’m sorry to ask, but how old . . .”
“Oof.” She sucked a drop of tea off her upper lip. “Right to the shameful calculus, huh?” She paused. “I’m seventy-four.” He kept stirring. Aunt Goli was sixty-two. “Seventy-four,” she slowed, fake British accent thickening, as if he might be deaf, which, for most Iranians, is preferable to sucking at math. “April 1941.” She sipped her tea, smoothed a thinning patch behind her ear. “Don’t strain yourself, darling. Your aunt Goli was born in 1953.”
“So, you’re not . . .” said Darius, latching on to more palatable scenarios. “I mean, Baba Ardeshir had a first wife? Or . . . Goli isn’t your natural . . .”
“Of course, she is!” her voice rose an octave. “That’s my first baby!”
“Sorry,” muttered Darius.
“So, they told you nothing. Poor you. Do you know when those children started banding together to lie about me? Early . . . I was almost proud they got it so well organized.”
“They never tell me anything. They’re afraid I’ll write it.” He paused. The mischief was draining from her eyes. “They said if I ever run into you, don’t ask questions, just keep walking.”
She chuckled and smacked his arm. Then she sighed. “Well, darling . . . it suited them. But, look at you, a writer? I happen to love embarrassing writing. We’re artists on my side.”
It surprised Darius how much he liked her. Her faded flat, the full tea tin, and the dusty shoe rack hinted that he was her first visitor in a long time. Darius had heard the stories of her personality: feisty, rebellious, desperate for attention. Childish, Suri often called her. Though no one spoke of her age, Darius now remembered that in the stories she had always behaved young.
After that silent beat, though they were sipping from their second cup, she announced, “It’s Harrod’s ’Festive Afternoon’!” He snorted and spit some onto the plate. “Oh dear.” She waited for him to cough it out, then said, “Do they want privacy from ugly Iran business?”
“No, no! They just want to give it to Kayvan,” he said. “If he wrote it, they’d be proud.”
“Yes, of course, Kayvan,” she said. She sat across him on a plush yellowing loveseat. “Goli’s boy. I thought you two were like brothers?”
“I wouldn’t trust that guy with a used paper towel,” Darius muttered.
Her gaze sharpened, as if she were studying, having forgotten the family tree, having been pushed off her branch of it. “He steals stories, then? He’s the wicked one?”
So, she was just rolling with it, with his version of things. In one gulp, she had swallowed a reality with Kayvan as the devil. He was beginning to understand how this woman had survived mid-century Iran and immigrant London and a childhood marriage and even managed to smell the theocracy coming. Now her infamous and almost instantaneous post-exile religious conversion made sense. (To Christ! Pari whispered, wide eyed. To fucking Christ, Suri echoed).
“Yes,” he said, and grinned in his disarming white-toothed way, and she reached over and touched his cheek with her cold, overmoisturized hand. He told her about the summer barbecue when Kayvan strode toward him in his khakis and asked how freelance life was panning out. Then came some self-righteous job advice, Kayvan acting like some kind of authority on graceful adulting. And Darius had told him to fuck off. Kayvan’s face had gone cold, and he said, “You know, markets are slower in summer. I’m thinking of writing about the family. Why not, right? It’s a good hobby.” But the family story had long been settled as Darius’s. What Kayvan was saying, Darius explained to Azizjoon, was that writing is easy and worth no respect, that Darius had wasted his Princeton degree, and that anything Darius could do Kayvan could do better. Kayvan wanted every good thing for himself. He was restoking the old rivalry, the one Darius had won when his university acceptance had dwarfed Kayvan’s, and Kayvan had stolen his application essay and read it at family dinner: Over the years, Baba’s habits have become a comfort to me. I watch as he washes his hands twelve times. I arrange our socks in rows of three. I only buy mine in blue. The aunts were stone silent. Darius caught Baba’s wet wounded gaze, fumbling hands folding his napkin into eighths. Then the glory ended. Baba and the aunts stopped celebrating Darius. At least Kayvan had gotten into Fordham on his merits. Darius snooped for weeks, looking for Kayvan’s essay. Finally, Kayvan just showed it to him: it was about his love of Persianfusion, grilling burgers in turmeric or some such ass-lick. “The saddest part,” he told Kayvan, “is that you’ll never see why that essay didn’t get you in somewhere good.” That wiped the smug smile off 39 Kavyan’s face. “You don’t understand, Azizjoon,” Darius said now, “he’s a hack. I get that I’m rude and mean sometimes but he’s – ”
“I believe you,” she said, “because you’re the one that was sent.”
He made a show of eating the cake. “I thought of you a lot growing up. Wondered if you bake and stuff.” He waited a beat, for her to melt and dive across the table and hug him.
“Oh, listen to you go,” she made a halfhearted grease-slathering motion that made Darius chuckle. In his pocket, his phone vibrated. After all these years of feeling like an Amirzadeh outsider, the sleazy and ambitious one, the manipulative one, here was his ancestor – whose specific genes only he carried forward – ostracized for chasing her stolen youth, for daring to want things, to say things. “I always thought, in photos, Kayvan was a bit . . . off,” she continued. “He looks like that boy in every schoolyard who bites other children. His head is far too round.” Darius grinned at her. She was so transparent and committed to his narrative, though she’d learned it minutes before. He checked his phone. B had texted: #hobosexual
Ouch. He wrote back, I don’t owe you a play by play of my whereabouts, B.
To which she texted back the middle finger emoji and: just have the balls and decency to say ur gone. Don’t keep ppl on the hook for next time ur in London.
Azizjoon eyed his phone, swallowed a small burp and said, “Tell me everything Kayvan’s done.” She started to mutter, as if losing her way, as Babak sometimes did. “I wonder if I can find Goli’s old photos . . . the ones from. . . . He had a hairline like a Syrian refugee.” Woah. Darius sat up, eyes wide, and so she straightened up. “Tell me darling, I’m listening.” How weird to see his father’s oddities, his singular quirks, reproduced here in a virtual stranger.
He carried on about Kayvan, how in ten years, maybe they’d be competing for BBC interviews and guest spots on talk shows, both telling the same story. And would the media see the difference between Kayvan and Darius? Would they understand that Darius was the serious one, the artist who loved language and would’ve been a writer even if his family didn’t have a superbly timely story? Or would they lump Kayvan’s side hustle with Darius’s lifelong calling?
“You should write it,” an MFA buddy had said to him, “this thing with your brother.”
“Cousin,” he’d corrected. And Darius tried. But then he just ended up writing a comic piece about two geriatric holocaust survivors, Herschel and Benjamin, who kept getting booked for the same memorial events. At every panel and podium, they played nice, while undermining each other’s stories, insinuating themselves the more 40 genuine survivor, the one with the more harrowing story, the better memory, the longer ordeal, until Benjamin decided his dream was to be a writer, not just the guy who survived the Nazis, and started writing current events instead. But the world just wouldn’t have it: Benjamin was his brutal story and nothing more. They didn’t want to pay for this old coot’s journalism. They wanted the Auschwitz story. And so, pretty soon poor Benjamin was back on the survivor talk circuit, sitting across the laminated floor of the White Plains UJA from his old pal Herschel, who looked at him wisely and said, “Well, now you’ve screwed yourself,” and he told that audience of old ladies that Benjamin had always been just a wannabe writer, embellishing. Oh, but the things he (Herschel) had seen. He wished he didn’t have to tell it – he was no storyteller, just an engineer, a birdwatcher – but it was his duty. He ended the story on the men decades before, their real tragedies in its detail, the hours and days cracked open to their bloody viscera, to show a grave unsentimental truth doomed to be mangled by time and other people’s gaze.
But Darius wasn’t going to become like Benjamin. He wasn’t the story. He was a Princeton-educated writer who’d happened to have come from a family of post-revolutionary Iranian immigrants with a bunch of undiagnosed mental health issues, and it was best to establish that credential right off the bat – that he was here for the long haul and could outlast Kayvan. Then Kayvan could do all the victim porn posturing and refugee dances that he wanted. His “book” would be a flash in the pan, a small embarrassment in Darius’s memoirs.
As he spoke, Azizjoon interjected with sighs and grunts and ei vais. She made clear in her performance that she loved listening to him, that, in this moment, she was his grandmother only. Once she referred to a stroke of bad luck as “hard cheese,” and drank in his delight.
By the time he was finished, Beatrice had texted twice more. Such a coward.
“What’s that there?” Azizjoon eyed his phone. “Is that a woman you’re toying with?”
Darius let her scan the last day of texts. “It’s hard to explain the situation,” he said. Would Azizjoon have had romances, lovers? When? “I guess you never had . . .”
“You mean before I got married and pregnant at twelve?” she laughed.
“What happened?” he asked. “I thought Baba Ardershir was a nice guy.”
Azizjoon started fussing with the plates and forks. “What does this girl want? You mustn’t let her lead you down a sinful path.” She 41 paused as Darius slipped the phone back into his pocket. She cleared her throat, released that reedy little laugh again, “You know, darling, I do have someone. A love . . . a man, called Julian, that I love.”
Darius sat up. “What? Are you serious? Nobody said anything – “
Had Azizjoon tried to build a life with someone new? Surely not. What happened to her after Iran? Maybe that was the real story here, the one he’d come to London to unearth.
“Oh, those kids don’t know!” she said. “They’re brainwashed, all four of them. I envy their childhood. They had every freedom.”
“They didn’t have every freedom,” said Darius. “Baba’s got major spectrum issues – ”
“Stop!” said Azizjoon. “None of that nonsense.” Her eldest, Goli, too, had this rule. The Amirzadeh blood is clean, and they didn’t need lazy millennial excuses and diagnoses and pills.
So, no bonding over Baba then.
Darius got up, brushed a few crumbs from his lap. “Sorry,” he said. “Are you going?” she sounded alarmed, regretful, almost panicked.
“I – ” he stopped. “I was just looking for the toilet.”
“Oh,” she breathed out, voice shaking as she tried for nonchalant. “It’s just there.” Then she started muttering, “Those poor children. There is no worse lie than the lie you tell yourself.”
She started clearing the dishes. She moved in a quick practiced way, hobbling only a little as she delivered a stack to the kitchen counter. By the time he returned from the toilet (which was strewn with little dried roses and draped in crochet wall hangings), she had brought out a stack of letters, the ones at the bottom darkening and frayed. Darius sat in the yellow armchair and watched her rifle through pages on the floor. He waited for her, picking at the leftover cheesecake and glancing at his own tired reflection in the glass coffee table.
Exhaustion was washing over him, and she must have sensed his interest waning. She blinked a few times, frowning as she shuffled her papers around. “Have you moved your bowels today?” Darius scoffed, so she tried to clarify. “Your bowels must be open once a day.”
“Yeah, I . . . that’s not it,” he said, getting up. Suddenly her pile of scraps repelled him, and he was dizzy after the long flight. “Can we get a real drink? I saw a pub around the corner.”
“I have – ” she stammered and pitched toward the cabinet with nervous fingers.
He touched her shoulder. “We can come back after. Let me buy you a whiskey.”

***

At the corner pub, they ordered cheap red wine, two whiskeys, and a Yorkshire pudding (just to see). He told her about New York and his plans.
“I want to write my memoirs,” Azizjoon said after half a drink. “I have the first line. Do you want to hear it?” He nodded. “I had a very short childhood.”
“That’s a beautiful first line,” he said. And he meant it. It was perfect. Briefly, with the whiskey burning his throat, burning down the skin of his heart, he wondered if this was why he was sent here – if he was sent – not to write about her, but to help her write about herself.
They talked about good stories and bad stories. He told her about Proust’s madeleines and hagiographies and lazy strokes of fate. Again, he warned her against Kayvan’s stories.
“When I was young,” she said, “all my favorites were about djinns and kind spirits.”
“Maybe you could start with what you remember, your house and your town and stuff.”
She waved away the suggestion. “I already have that,” she said, “in my papers.”
“Your papers?” he said.
“My work, my meditations,” she said shyly. After a beat, she added, “my poems.”
“You write poems?” Darius sat up, but she’d already moved on.
“The papers are for after I die . . . my poems, letters. I’ve left lots of instructions for the historians and . . .” Probably Darius was smirking because she stopped, gathered herself, her tone changing. “They’ll want to know about Iran in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s history! I have documents.”
She told him a story, about leaving Iran in 1972 (curls and the good suitcases), wandering Europe for years, moving from bedsit to hostel to church basement, then, four years later, arriving alone in north London at thirty-five years old, a teenager in mind, if not body. “I was still very young,” she said. “But I’d given birth to four kids, tried to raise them, in my way. Have you ever seen a thirty-fiveyear-old with four grown children?” He shook his head. He’d slept with childless thirty-five-year-olds, of course. But they just looked like a more experienced twenty-three, bodies indistinguishable, sometimes a cute line or two framing their mouth. Azizjoon continued, picking crumbs off her plate with the pad of her forefinger as she spoke. “It isn’t what you’d expect. You still look young. Just a different sort of young. The changes are . . . well, you’re used up, aren’t you? 43 But sort of renewable, maybe. There’s this hope that you’ll get a chance to do your childhood again . . . or, rather, just once, but late . . . you realize it’ll go by quicker, but you’re also a lot faster at grabbing the memories, so . . .”
He wanted to jot that down. He wanted to jot down so many things she said. These memories had to be preserved, lovingly, by a person whose history and identity were intertwined with hers.
She continued. When she left Iran, the children were teenagers – barely. Pari, the youngest, was eleven or twelve. Goli would’ve been nineteen and off to university. Azizjoon was tired. Of childcare, housework, watching a fourth lucky kid have the childhood she was denied.
Then she paused. “Lucky,” she whispered, as if to herself, “but I worried . . . for my young girls, with him. Suri and Pari were just the age – ” She stopped. An image returned to Darius, of Suri waving around Simon the Physics student. Azizjoon looked away.
“What happened in those four years?” he asked.
“What years?” Azizjoon looked up from her letters, eyes glassy. “Oh . . . those were just nothing years. Looking for where to go.” She described tiny spaces, rooms and apartments, where she spent much of her time tending to her body. She did calisthenics and stretches, plucking out extra hairs, dying her hair, and pinching her fat, and dreaming of a new life, which, of course, meant a new man. “I had my silly women’s lib days,” she said, chuckling. “Briefly, I had a friend who encouraged me to think of the rest of my life as mine. She got me a toolbox and plants,” she sighed, as if missing this friend. “She kept saying, why does all of life have to be a pursuit of a man? And I thought, okay this lady is bitter. I have a plan, and I can’t do it by myself, can I? I have no education, just a little money, enough for a flat. What am I going to achieve alone? So I’m going to have my European husband, and my big house, and all my scattered children and my clever, Western-educated grandchildren will return to me, and my daughters and I will put on beautiful dresses and come down to dinner in the garden, on a big table with vines coming down the sides of the house. And the grandchildren will prove everything I’ve told my husband: that we are a smart family, a talented family. Such good blood, if only we weren’t stuck in Iran. And you’d have one of those big, intellectual conversations with him, like Baba Ardeshir used to have with his university people in our living room.”
He hadn’t wished to interrupt her, but now a wave of emotion dislodged his words. After everything, these were her dreams, and in demanding them, she believed herself brazen. “You’ll have that one day, Azizjoon. I promise to come to your party and talk about everything I know.”
“God promised it,” she said, leaning over and patting his hand. “Julian is my future.” Julian again. Darius sat forward, thirsty for more. Was this a secret love? Or an unwitting crush? Darius had already drafted half the plot in his head. Azizjoon sighed, glanced toward the door, and added, “Not everyone wants it. I have enemies in the church. It’s very political.” She paused, took a deep breath and dropped her gaze, as if in prayer. “But God called me to London, to claim our life together. So, I sent thirty-two pounds to Benny Hinn, and I put it directly to Jesus.” She released a contented sigh. “It’s as good as done. I have peace about it.”
Baba had told Darius about the televangelists who prey on desperate men and grieving women, people whose true need wasn’t celestial but crushingly human, to “name and claim” their desires with money. “She’s become a fanatic, my boy. Leave it,” Baba had said.
Desperate to shake off Baba’s voice, he said, “So you met Julian in Europe somewhere?”
Azizjoon shook her head. “No, no, he was here,” she said. “He lives in London.”
In 1972, a terrified but giddy Golshifteh Amirzadeh arrived in Berlin with a suitcase full of her best dresses. She’d stashed away some money, over her nearly two decades of grudging domesticity and forced motherhood. So, when her eldest was safely in university, and the others sure to follow, she took her secret cash, the luggage she’d been given as a thirtieth birthday present, and she ran. She wasn’t looking for love or sex or fun. She wanted a new life, and a new life meant a new marriage. She didn’t even consider that a life alone could be the reward for all her suffering. If one man had wronged her, the answer was simply a better man, maybe a man from another faith. She didn’t want any more to do with Iranians or their version of marriage or womanhood. What was a marriage if the bride was never asked if she wanted it? Her mother had asked only if she wanted an excuse to wear high heels. And she’d said yes.
“I know I can’t call it rape,” Azizjoon said, almost as an aside. “But I swear it felt like that.” She looked up. “Why didn’t someone just tell me before I got married . . . what this act was? What’s the good in letting a girl discover it like that?”
“Uh,” he inched as one would toward a sparrow, careful not to spook her with his fascination. “You can call that rape, Azizjoon . . . I can’t believe your mother did that to you.”
A faraway look shadowed her face. “I betrayed my kids, too. Not as badly, but.”
“They’re really angry,” said Darius. “Suri – “
She released a low moan, pained, like a struck deer. “Ohhh, my
Suri.” She began rocking. Eyes shut, she mumbled, “Sweet Jesus take this evil picture from my mind.”
Darius wanted to comfort her, but his limbs had gone stiff. “Anybody else would’ve run.”
She kept rocking. “I kept my babies close in their young years. When Goli turned fourteen and sturdy, with big muscles, I knew, that was the safe age. But when I left, Suri, she was . . .” Darius kept nodding as a weight took shape in his chest. He thought of his aunt’s thick laughter, performing her bawdy stories. “She was wiry, just the age he liked.”
They were silent for an age. Then her chest lifted, as if by a string, “I’m sorry, I’m . . . this is my mind . . . Satan playing tricks. The Amirzadehs, we were a glorious family.”
Darius nodded. “Suri has a great life, you know. She likes to be shocking but mostly she’s chill, and happy, and I think she has boyfriends and stuff. She’s not alone.”
Azizjoon wiped her eyes, mumbling more prayers. “Who explained adult things to you?” she asked. “Was it . . .” She stopped, pressed her wet thumb against the wooden tabletop to pick up a fat crumb. “At my church there’s a girl who talks to me sometimes,” she said. “She’s very chatty and every week she knows something new. This is how you get a boyfriend. This is how you kiss. She says the cheekiest things, and I listen, not because she’s cute but because – ”
Darius smiled, “Because you want to know those things, too.”
She nodded. “Why couldn’t we let our kids just get there? No fumbling blind till you’re off a cliff. No . . . shame-shame for every curiosity, then . . . saddle up, it’s your wedding night!”
Darius let out a quiet laugh, and she smiled kindly.
“She died, my mum, just a few years ago,” said Azizjoon. “I was here. I got a call from a nurse in Iran saying that her last deathbed wish was to talk to me. So dramatic.”
“That’s very sweet,” said Darius. “That you got to, you know, say goodbye to her.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t, of course. It was just nice, after all that, to deny her that final wish. She denied my every wish from the day I was born.” Azizjoon started to chuckle. She cradled her whiskey to her ample breasts. “You should’ve heard that poor nurse gasp. It was all very dramatic and Iranian. And she explained how hard it had been to find me, and who is Emmeline Amiri and why won’t I talk to my own mother who gave me the sweet gift of life? So I said “Goodbye dear, I’ve got some Gü in the microwave,” and just hung up . . . plunk. Cheerio, Mummy’s nurse! And then I went and ate my cake with some good Harrod’s ‘Festive Afternoon’ and prayed that that 46 woman ends up in a part of hell where every morning you wake up having forgotten what the sex act is, and you learn it from a brandnew disgusting man each day, and you see a long line of them waiting before you fall asleep, and you wake up again, your memory wiped. And that’s a mercy, Darius joon, to forget.” She laughed her girlish laugh, then stopped abruptly. “Oh dear, your glass is empty. Darius joon, let me just – ”
Darius stiffened. “No, no,” he said, fingers buzzing now because how many people get this chance? To meet the ancestor who makes sense, uncorrupted by all the strangers who had a hand in one’s creation. “I can’t drink any more. Please Azizjoon, relax. Tell me about Julian.”
In Berlin, she found Christ. Or rather – because Darius was learning to read between the lines like a writer – she found a church full of kind people who welcomed her. The price of admission into their social circle, Darius now guessed, was her salvation. And Berlin was too frightening and debauched. The part of the city where she lived was traumatizing, so much flesh and desire always on display, people celebrating things that should be torched. She moved to a village in Holland where asexual locals made cheese and grew tulips and roses, and fair-skinned men seemed to age from a safe fourteen to a safe eighty overnight. “It was like God spared them the genitals, Darius joon! If I wasn’t called to London, I would’ve stayed in that Dutch village.”
Her friend, she explained, had a job in the UK and dragged Azizjoon along, promising that she’d be happier in an English country, since she spoke it well enough. “Then I met Julian in the church one Sunday and we fell in love. And I just . . . I got stuck in . . . waiting, waiting.”
She took a long sip, wiped her mouth, and said, “Let’s go home, dear,” and briefly she looked the age he’d expected her to be, the age that would have been right.
Back at the flat, she stacked their shoes, hung her jacket neatly on the only peg. She sat on the rug in front of the sofa and gestured for Darius to sit beside her. He felt revived now as he thumbed through the papers she’d left spread out on the floor. He wanted her to keep talking, and she did, pulling out letters from his father and aunts.
Then a computer pinged loudly from the bedroom and Azizjoon began hoisting herself off her haunches. “Where are you going?” asked Darius.
“I have an email,” she smiled gently. Something tightened in Darius’s chest.
“Of course,” he said, and watched her chase that single lonely ping.
“Probably Julian,” she said, her voice receding into the bedroom. “He works so hard.”
When she was gone, Darius checked his phone. He started recording a voice memo, whispering into it the best details from the pub, chastising himself for not switching it on earlier. What an astonishing legacy. And Kayvan had no right to it; that opportunistic bastard worshipped Baba Ardeshir. Kayvan would never admit that they were all the outcomes of rape, or give space to the whispers of deviance, a sickness following the family from Iran to America, creeping into the blood. Maybe both grandsons were like him, a couple of sexual menaces.
“Everything okay in there?” Darius shouted into the bedroom. She was muttering to Jesus again, when lord when, and some words about suffering and patience. “Should I put a kettle on?”
“Oh yes, darling, thank you!” she strained, her voice reedier from far away.
He headed to the kitchen. “Was it your man?” he shouted, teasing.
“Oh . . . no, I just have to send this email message . . .” she was typing with two fingers, eyes on the keys, then screen, then keys, then screen. “The great irony of technology, my darling, is that it adds so much admin to life. And people expect instant replies.”
The electric kettle was still heavy, so he pressed the button and headed to the bedroom. He glanced at the screen, then leaned over her shoulder, thinking he might offer to type it out for her. She was composing a reply to a Microsoft user message.

“Dear Microsoft,
Thank you for your kind note. I will do the update and let you
know.
Many thanks,
Emmeline Amiri”

“Oh, Grandma,” said Darius, flushed, then recoiled at the word that had slipped out of his mouth, almost on its own. Darius had never called anyone that. As she hauled herself out of the chair, suddenly she seemed so much frailer than she had at first, when he could hardly imagine that she was older than sixty. She seemed now from another era, another universe. How did she survive here, in gritty north London? At her bedroom threshold, she paused. “Please don’t call me Grandma, darling. Julian doesn’t know I have grandchildren.”
Watching her drink more tea, Darius tried to find a way back to the story. She hummed as she sorted through the letters, and Darius searched for words. Now that she was comfortable, sometimes she spoke in accented Farsi. He wanted to ask if she had friends here, if the people from the church ever visited. Did her email alert ping once a day or twice, or five? What did Julian say in his messages? Then, as Azizjoon situated herself under an afghan and blew on her tea, his gaze fell on the pile of letters at her shins. The top envelope wasn’t postmarked or stamped. Julian’s address was written neatly below his name. “Are those from . . .?”
“I keep copies,” she said. “I have every letter I ever wrote to him just in case they don’t arrive. And even if they do, one needs to remember what one last wrote.”
“For your papers,” said Darius.
“That, too,” she smiled.
“And Julian – ” He started to ask a question, but stopped, not wanting the answer. “Azizjoon, is Julian . . . is he here, right now?”
There was a tense beat, and then Azizjoon started laughing into her fist. “Oh, my stars, my wicked children did quite a number on you, didn’t they?” She paused, spread out the letters. “Darius! I’m not crazy. Julian exists. He’s at home just southeast of London with his wife and two sons. And the reason there are no letters from him is that he hasn’t written back quite yet.”
“Oh,” said Darius, slowly, feeling silly. Of course, there was a wife. Azizjoon was the other woman. This felt much truer to stories of her: selfish, reckless.
“Jesus promised him to me, and yes, in this life there are sometimes complications and obstacles. Look at Charles and Camilla! We don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run.”
“You mean, like, will his wife die in a Parisian tunnel?” said Darius, shifting in his chair.
She flushed, her chest rising and falling as if something had lunged at her. She sprang up from the floor – no more heaving sighs; indignity makes the haunches young and lithe – and gathered up her letters. “I think I’m finished telling you my secrets now,” she said.
“Oh, I’m . . . ,” said Darius, rubbing sweaty hands on his jeans, cursing himself for his big mouth. Now she’d give the whole thing to that hack Kayvan and he’ll write some bullshit about a family’s journey across the waters, and how resilient everyone was, and how the women in the family are formidable and brave, and all this vague heroic shit that doesn’t require him to imagine his tiny, freckled grandmother, even tinier than now, barely a teenager, having seen nothing of the world, nothing of men or male bodies, thinking “yay, I 49 get to wear high heels,” pinned down and penetrated by their own beloved Baba Ardeshir, a monster. Kayvan won’t write that. And he won’t ask unseemly things, like how far did his disgusting affection for his daughters go? And why was his son, Darius’s own father, so deeply fucked? And why do Pari and Suri talk as one voice, one with a medical practice and the other with her own farm, yet in the confines of the family, unable to function if you pried them apart? And Goli, the eldest, a tyrant and a narcissist, with her strange rules and demands for loyalty. Sometimes he pitied Kayvan, having to be raised by that woman. He took a breath, steadied himself. “Azizjoon, I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean that . . . I understand the situation.”
She looked at him with sad eyes, part forgiving, retreating into a known world and its rules, part curious, some long-imprisoned girl who wants to know just how people do it now.
“Do you know, the first time I was pregnant, I thought there were snakes in my belly?”
“Snakes . . . didn’t you know . . . hadn’t you seen pregnant women –”
“Hush,” she snapped. “I knew what pregnant was, but I didn’t know how you become pregnant! I thought I’d married a monster with an evil secret, but I didn’t connect that to my snakes. By the time I sensed Goli in there, I was six months along and the doctor explained.”
“Wasn’t your belly growing? Was the doctor a woman?”
“No,” she said, “he was a man, and he laughed at me and pinched my cheek and said the same things you’re saying now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Darius, feeling like a moron for both judgy remark and apology.
“My belly didn’t grow any more than the rest of my body. I was eating a lot in those days, trying to make myself fat and ugly . . . because your grandfather said on the first night how much he liked that I was tiny . . . ” Darius flinched, but she continued. “And then with Babak and Suri and Pari, I knew. I tried to end those pregnancies, but you can’t do it yourself, and I didn’t know anyone. So. More motherhood.”
Darius’s cheeks felt cold. He wanted to hug her and, at the same time, to run far away. He was annoyed too, at her self-sabotaging choices. “Azizjoon, do you have any Tylenol?”
“I have Paracetamol,” she said. “And the Bailey’s. Do you need a rest?”
“Can I sleep over a few nights?” he asked, forgetting Iranian politeness.
“Here? With me?” she said, “Well, yes, of course. That sounds very nice.”
Darius thanked her. Now he felt an urge to apologize to Beatrice but didn’t. “Do you want me to go out and get us some food? I saw a really chill-looking curry place – ”
“Indian curry? My goodness . . . I’ll make you ghormeh sabzi!”
While she cooked Darius flipped through the letters. Some of them were practical, some heartfelt, some just pages of bad poetry. Though looking closely, they weren’t bad. They were the product of a stellar Iranian literary education rusted by self-conscious late-life English. After reading a few pages, he felt that he could see the beautiful sentiment underneath the adornment.
“Julian is a kind soul,” Azizjoon shouted over sizzling onions and the thwack of her knife on the chopping board. “He’s not like Iranian men. He suffers so much over our situation.”
What Darius wanted to know now was: what is “the situation” in Julian’s mind? Is this a love affair gone wrong? Is he afraid to leave, or waiting out the dying days of a bed-ridden wife? Glancing into the kitchen, Darius snapped a photo of Julian’s name and address. He started to put away his phone, then he checked the kitchen again and took photos of two of the poems, too.
“Azizjoon, do you need help?” he shouted, after his phone was safely in his pocket.
“You relax, darling,” she said. She was wearing a starched-straight floral apron that gave the impression of aged disuse. “I’ll get this meat browned and then I want to hear your stories.”
“Smells good,” said Darius. The air quickly filled with searing onion, turmeric and cumin melting in oil. Now hunger panged in his stomach. He leaned over the sofa to open the small window overlooking an alley below, just behind the chip shop, and as the stale air rushed in, was overcome by nausea. Why did he eat all that sugar? “Do you always eat dessert first?”
She laughed, projecting her voice into the living room for his sake. “I timed the Gü badly, didn’t I? But who knew you were coming?” She paused. “I don’t usually have teatime guests.”
Dinner was comfortably silent. It felt strange eating this familiar food, his father’s best dishes reproduced here in London, by a stranger. She warned him that she had under-salted everything, to suit all palates. “That’s what you learn when you cook for big families,” she said, pushing the saltshaker toward him. “In Iran, I was cooking for fifteen, some kids, some old men. This isn’t salted enough for a young man in his prime.”
“But it’s just us, Azizjoon,” he said, shaking the grains onto his meat.
“Habits,” she said. “I don’t know how much to salt anymore.”
He asked her about her church. Kensington Temple; she said the name proudly. “Will you go with me?” she sat up, back straightening. “I can show you off to my friends.”
“How long have you been going there?” he asked.
“Since I got here,” she said, taking dainty bites of her khoresht with a fork.
“Why are you eating that with a fork?” he asked, shoveling a spoonful of basmati.
Azizjoon looked up and shrugged, then dropped the fork. “You know, you’re right. I haven’t eaten with an Iranian for ages.” Then she squealed, an actual squeal, and said, “What a miracle you’re here.” She got up to clear the dishes, turning on the television on the way out.
“Isn’t Kensington in central London, though?” Though he knew. It was basic diasporic snobbery. What Iranian wants spiritual escape with the riffraff from their own neighborhood?
“It’s not far, darling,” she said, “Just the overground to the Victoria, then the tube to Notting Hill.” She wiped her hand on her apron. “Oh, that reminds me I need to iron my frock.”
Darius got up from the table. The TV blared out some kind of religious revival, an old man in a suit with one arm to heaven, the other clutching a microphone as he beseeched God before an enraptured crowd. “Where’s your remote?”
“No no, darling, Benny Hinn’s on. We can watch him with our coffee.” She brought two brimming coffees in elaborate mugs and set them down on paper doilies, spilling a drop from her own. (Rather, she assigned that one to herself after she deemed it imperfect. Such inconsequential martyrdoms were typical of Persian mothers. Once Kayvan said that in his negotiations course at Fordham, the professor said to sacrifice little things, to label every sacrifice. They laughed and toasted the shrewdness of Persian mothers. It was a long time ago.) Darius thought of all that he’d one day write about these wonderful misfits that made him. He thought of Suri’s loud medical office, rows of vaginal expanders with racially questionable names standing proudly. How much he loved the Amirzadehs and hated them both at once.
That night, in the airless room, streetlights glaring past flimsy curtains, Darius couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned on the narrow guest twin, his cheek pressed against a roughly piped cushion, his big toe catching in the nooks of a loose crochet throw. He tried to recall an Alice Munro story he’d once loved. What was it called? A poet with a husband and child travels to Toronto. She’s chasing a married man who gave her a ride home once. She is consumed with longing for this stranger who may or may not want her. She sends him 52 a note that feels like putting a letter in a bottle and hoping to reach Japan. To Reach Japan. That’s it. On the train, this mother leaves her kid alone to go fuck some guy that two pages earlier she described as “a boy.” He once said to Kayvan, “Every time I get bored with life, I think about how much of a prude I am compared to Alice Munro’s 1950s mothers.” And yet, he’d hated that story the first time he read it. He hated the mother for her selfishness, so wrapped up in her own physical need. Is there anything more deplorable than abandoning mothers? Doesn’t motherhood give you all the animal instincts and pheromones that you need to protect that child, even at the expense of yourself? Or do only some children inspire that jungle protection in their mothers? Was he too male, too swarthy, too stout, for his mother to want to tuck him under a warm flank? There had been days that he’d wished that his mother was the Amirzadeh, instead of his father, because then at least he could blame genetics, that leaving itch that Azizjoon shared. But Darius’s mother was just an ordinary white woman, an Alice Munro housewife. And worst of all, she knew exactly what she was saddling Darius with, all of Baba’s shit. She knew that Darius would spend his childhood lining up condiments and counting his blue socks simply because he refused to be like her, a deserter. His mother didn’t have Azizjoon’s excuse. She wasn’t a raped and exploited and perpetually gaslit child bride. Darius thought of the sweet way Azizjoon described her “papers.” What did she have? Diaries? More letters? He wanted to read them all.
The next day, Darius found the Munro story online – Azizjoon’s computer was riddled with viruses and pop-ups; he’d fix that later – and read it to his grandmother over “Breakfast Tea.”
She sipped from a dainty cup as she listened, nodding or frowning. When he asked her what she thought, she made a bored comment about God’s will, and how, if the couple on the train were meant to be together, God would bring them together in marriage whatever their sinful beginnings. This frustrated Darius, her singular focus. She scraped butter off her toast and said, “You know, one day I saw Julian pass me on the street. I chased him for a block, and then I realized, it wasn’t him. I sat on a bench and tried so hard to remember his face. I commanded it, in the name of Jesus, to appear, but poof, it had vanished from my brain.” She eyed his clothes, the same ones he’d worn the day before. “I noticed you haven’t moved your bowels since – ”
“Azizjoon!” he laughed. Her gaze was unmoving, so he said, “I did it in the night.”
He managed to dodge a shopping trip to M&S by tempting Azizjoon to read her letters aloud. They spent most of Saturday leafing 53 through old letters. For years, she’d written to her four children, keeping copies of everything. Medical school encouragements for Suri. Organic farming tips for Pari. Instructions for Goli. Praise for Babak. And so, Saturday was spent.
Darius went with her to Sunday church service, where she clung onto his arm with such intense devotion that he started to think of all the ways this fragile person, alone in a big city, might fall apart, taking with it her even more fragile universe, her budding sense of herself.
During the hymns, his grandmother sprang to life. She waved her arms, and sang in her sweet accent, and danced with her hips, rising to her tiptoes as the music peaked. By the second chorus of “Shine, Jesus, Shine” she’d forgotten herself, swaying as none of the English women around her were doing. This made Darius love her – really love her – for the first time. He wanted to dance, too, but felt self-conscious in this strange congregation (or any congregation), so he tapped his feet. Azizjoon didn’t notice; her eyes didn’t open the entire song. It pained him to think she was praying, claiming Julian again as some TV charlatan had taught her.
Then the rustle of a hundred skirts sitting, the patter of the preacher’s thick forefinger tapping the mic. Darius felt a wave of peace, of intense safety. This sanctuary was filled with grandparents well past the worries that now consumed him, past the rat race, the cycles of ambition and crippling inadequacy, the endless wanting. What they craved now was their children, their grandchildren, God. Some of them had undoubtedly done great things (this was Kensington, after all). Others not so much. And yet, here, this morning, they were all drinking the same instant coffee and asking Jesus to shine his face upon them so they could carry this collective joy into the pub where they’d order Yorkshire puddings and gossip about the same things they’d gossiped about as teenagers: crushes, betrayals.
As his grandmother drank in the sermon, an idea occurred to Darius. What if he were to meet Julian, be charming, let Azizjoon show off a bit? The romance couldn’t be real (he felt sure of that), but at least Julian could fill in some gaps, sit down to tea, maybe, and tell Darius the rest of the story. Azizjoon was the mystery that had called Darius to London, but the letters, and Julian’s vantagepoint on them, would give him his literary breakthrough. In exchange, Darius could smooth the situation in a way Azizjoon couldn’t. And he could be her stand-in family, like in old-world proposals where the families offer themselves for each other’s judgement.
He turned over his Sunday bulletin and scribbled with the halfpencil for prayer requests, Let’s visit Julian. He slid it over to his grand- 54 mother. She squinted, her eyes clearly weaker than she was willing to admit. Then her eyebrows shot up and she looked at him with big, happy eyes.
He regretted it instantly. What good could possibly come of visiting Julian? It was a bad impulse, a coffee rush intensified by praise songs. Azizjoon looked so joyful, guileless. It’s fine, he told himself, it’d be an adventure, a way to bond with his grandmother. But shame scorched him head to toe; he knew why he’d suggested it. He had a sudden urge to protect this fragile woman from himself. All her life she’d been used and discarded, rejected by her children. Now she stared wistfully into the middle distance, clutching his hand with all kinds of foolish trust.
That afternoon, he flipped through the photos he’d taken of Azizjoon’s old letters. He remembered himself in those years, terrified after his mother ran off, a little boy stuck caring for a fussy, traumatized father who refused to see professionals. Nothing wrong with the blood. Darius had done all his diagnosing himself, on the internet and, later, in the stacks at Firestone Library. Babak’s sisters with their six-hour screaming matches about a random day twenty years ago. Babak tiptoeing in, timidly, with sensibly timed tidbits of memory, then, without warning, speed walking to his bedroom to bury his head under a blanket.
While his grandmother cooked, he used her computer to research Julian. He had a private Instagram. Darius was tempted to log in and friend him but stopped short of typing his password on the virusriddled computer. He entered Julian’s address into Google Satellite. His house was less isolated, more modest, than his leafy photos suggested, the next garden within spitting distance. Sensing the creepiness of this, he closed the browser. The last time anyone had gone knocking on doors for Azizjoon’s potential husband, she’d been handed into domestic slavery.
Azizjoon appeared over his shoulder. “Should we call first?” Darius asked.
She shook her head. “His wife . . . Let’s just go. I feel God’s hand in this idea.” She closed her eyes and mumbled, “I’m coming, my love.”
Jesus. It was clear now that Azizjoon considered Darius’s presence game-changing. Whereas a solo visit might have been stalking, this visit would be legitimate and ordained and conclusive. He considered going on his own. Would Julian tell him what this was, then? Alone, Darius would be freer to say what was needed, to massage things, away from her eager ears.
Darius imagined walking up to the door. He imagined knocking, 55 being greeted by a benign English smile. “Can I help you?” the man in the Instagram photo would ask, kindness blooming on his reddish cheeks, teetering on his toes. Crossing the threshold, maybe he’d step on the morning paper, covering someone’s byline with his dress shoes. Was this the man reading Azizjoon’s letters? Maybe Azizjoon was writing into a void, as Darius, too, had been. Maybe her letters had gone the way of her Microsoft emails – into someone’s trash – and there was no story here. Again, Darius felt this bitter new truth: nobody was waiting out in the world.
That night Darius slept badly. He photographed more letters, but his grandmother stirred behind the thin wall, and he felt the day’s exhaustion in his shoulders. Tomorrow he’d stand his ground. He’d tell Azizjoon that going to Julian’s house was insane. He’d say that he believed her about their love, but it was wiser to let Julian come to her, given his situation. He’d apologize for suggesting the visit. I’ve never been to a church. I was overcome by something, ecstasy or joy or whatever else church is meant to inspire. Please forgive me. Maybe he’d promise to contact Julian on a future visit (wouldn’t that be nice?), or to help Azizjoon write a decent memoir.
He’d tell her that he understood what it is to be alone in this rigid family; he understood it more than most. He’d lived alone, grown up alone. “I had a very short childhood,” Azizjoon had said. Well, Darius had a short childhood too. Most nights he fell asleep to horrified thoughts of living out his days alone, without warmth or softness or kindness nearby. And years of dating had taught him that you can’t force anyone to stay. Even if you luck into a warm body and a kind face, she’ll be gone by morning, leaving you with nothing but a memory and perfumed sheets. Marriage won’t make a man stay forever, Azizjoon. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t blame her for the awful way she sent her own mother to her grave. “She deserved it,” he’d say. “She was responsible for your rape.” But that didn’t mean that all that motherly debt was Darius’s burden now. He was a lost kid, too. He’d suffered, too. His world, too, was full of nightmare.
Now the fear came over him again and he switched on the lights, tried to breathe again. He resented his grandmother for bringing back this panic. And what was Julian’s deal in all this? He wasn’t innocent. Even if Azizjoon was delusional (a big if, since she was relatively young, lucid, her memory so precise), what kind of a jerk doesn’t at least call a poor old lady to let her down gently? Caught up now in despising Julian and his confusing silence, he decided to write to Beatrice, to break things off officially, decently, with words. He stared at her humiliating final message. I’m not your mother. Anger rose up in 56 his chest again, but he stamped it down and started typing: I’m sorry we didn’t work out, and that I asked to use your flat. You’re right, you don’t owe me anything. She didn’t reply, probably never would.
In the morning, Azizjoon found a blue cotton dress in her closet. She pressed it and tried it on under a long wool cardigan, her soft curls blooming out from under a reasonably priced hat. As she ironed, she muttered softly to God, and Darius’s shame almost burned him to ash. How had he let it go so far? How did he get tangled in his own rope like this?
“Azizjoon, are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes earnest. “Of course. If God opens a door, we have to walk in.”
Briefly he wavered. What’s the harm of trying? But then, watching her get ready to meet her imaginary love, he thought of Baba’s socks, his rows of spoons, and his unchangeable ways.
“Azizjoon, I don’t feel great,” he said, “and I have my flight. Can we go next time?”
Her face fell, her eyes grew wet behind her glasses. “What next time?” she said.
“Next time I visit. I’ll come back soon, I promise.”
He remembered Baba’s bafflement when Darius’s mother went away, the months of quiet afterward. Darius understood now that he, and even Azizjoon herself, had misjudged what she truly wanted. She had been abused and raped and now she’d found a man willing to go precisely as far as she could, a safe married man to write letters to and plan and pray for, and gossip about. Her church told her that the only honest pursuit was marriage, so she pursued it. But if Darius took this quest any further, he’d break her best thing, her audience for her letters, a spiritual and literary kinship that he, too, had craved for years.
He wished he’d understood this earlier, before he’d rifled through her papers, when they were just a pair of estranged relatives catching up over Baileys and Harrod’s “Festive Afternoon.”
“But . . .” she looked down at her dress. “But we’re going. We planned to go.” Her voice grew less insistent, though, as if she were speaking only to herself. They were silent for a long time. Azizjoon dropped onto the couch and smoothed her skirt as she muttered quietly to her hands. She unpinned her hat and cast it off, her lavender perfume wafting from the underbrim.
“Next time,” Darius reassured her. “Do you want to go for a whiskey?” he asked, desperate not to lose access to this sacred space that had opened up between them, though only days before she’d hardly existed. By some miracle, he’d found this ancestor who resembled 57 him in a thousand ways, whose kinship he craved, who was a mother to him, despite everything.
But Azizjoon was in another world, her stare faraway. “I’ll order us a curry,” she muttered to no one. Darius glanced at her loafers, placed neatly by the door. He wondered if she ever wore the high heels she’d craved so badly as a girl. She lifted herself off the couch, turned on the television, and shuffled into the kitchen to make more tea. Benny Hinn boomed into the flat like a beckoning ghost. You are a little messiah on earth! Darius sat for a long time with himself – with this self, whatever it was, that was only now coming into view.

---

Dina Nayeri is the author of two books of creative nonfiction from Catapult, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) and Who Gets Believed? (2023), and two novels from Riverhead, A Teaspoon of Salt and Sea (2013) and Refuge (2017). Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London, and her short fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Decameron Project (New York Times, 2020), The Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.

LIBERTY PANCAKES by Geoffrey Becker

I was hyper-aware of everything: my dad’s thick black beard; the uncomfortable, Danish modern chairs with black cushion seats that exhaled audibly when you settled onto them; the dark oil painting of a man in a hat and suit, some ancestor, staring at us from over the sideboard. I hadn’t thought ahead to dinner and now here we were. My mother was telling us about the trip her Feminist Forum group might take.
“Seneca Falls,” she said. “Or maybe Florida.”
We’d been to Florida once when I was little, but I had no memory. All I knew was that every winter, a box of grapefruits arrived from my great-grandparents, who vacationed there. Indian River, it said on the side, with a picture of a canoe.
“A trip,” said my dad. He was forty, a historian, expert on WWI, a quiet, conflict-averse man who took excellent care of his shoes. My mother, who had earned a PhD and now had nothing to use it for, was one week older. An aspiring writer, she stayed up all night typing at things: plays, poems, stories. She got up late, drank black coffee, left lipstick on the white cup. Many years ago, she’d been in a college production of A Doll’s House. I’d seen pictures. In a few weeks it would be 1974. She expected liberation.
I excused myself. I was four hours into my own trip. Through the kitchen, down four steps to the family room-TV area, then down a short hallway and left into the tiny powder room across from the door that accessed our two-car garage. I stood, hands gripping the sink, grateful for the silence. I was flickering like a bad bulb. Ed and I had each swallowed one purple barrel after school, right before band practice at Montcalm’s. Ed was fifteen, a year older than me, played bass, had shoulder-length hair and a girlfriend, Linda, with whom he had regular sex. He’d tripped before. I said I had, too, when I was hitching with Charly Sand back in August, but it wasn’t true. I lied about many things, including my age. I looked a lot older, and because of this I’d been skipped a grade in middle school (I was already in a multi-age classroom). Most people – if they didn’t know otherwise – assumed I was sixteen or seventeen.
The stages so far: Apprehension (the walk to Montcalm’s); Hilarity (rehearsal); Electric Mind Fog (the walk back home through town with my pulse racing and Ed saying “fuck me” over and over for no reason); and now, Interminable Bad Movie (possibly foreign). Band practice had been the funniest thing ever, like the room was filled with nitrous. We were in tears. “Wait,” Montcalm said, at one point, wiping his own eyes. “Are you guys high?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “What a crazy insinuation.”
Montcalm was as giggly as us just from proximity.
We all took a deep breath, the only sound for a moment the 60- cycle hum of Montcalm’s amp. “You still dating that Janis chick?” he asked me.
My face in the mirror was red, almost sunburnt; I looked like an Italian Renaissance portrait of someone with a skin disease. The walls were pink, as was the sink and the toilet paper roll. I washed my hands, dried them with a light-blue hand towel while looking at the small drawing of Provincetown that hung on the wall to my right, the work of my great aunt. There were people in the drawing enjoying themselves on a sunny day, rough sketches of them, jagged lines that somehow came together enough that you could understand what you were looking at, and in the distance the Pilgrim Monument.
I returned to the dinner table, where my sister was talking about something wrong with her horse. I had never seen this horse – it lived in the country, and she got driven out to take care of it a few afternoons a week.
“Thrush,” she said. “They will have to clean his hooves every day with an iodine solution.”
“That’s a shame,” said my dad.
“Thrust,” said my mother. “Lust.”
“Plush,” I added. We liked words.
The horse had been a gift from our grandfather in Connecticut. The main thing I knew about horses was that they were expensive to keep, and I was sure we were living beyond our means, with our new house, our new car. Our other animal was also my sister’s, a grey cat, Simon, who lived in her room when he wasn’t hunting birds in the yard. For a few months when I was ten, I’d had a puppy, but my mother had let him out in the front yard of our old house unattended and with no tether, so he wandered into the street and got hit by a car. He was a long-haired dachshund, from a kennel with papers and everything, and the rules were that when I was at school, he stayed in my room. But he’d barked and barked, and she got tired of the noise.
“Iodine shouldn’t cost much,” I said.
“He can’t be ridden for at least two weeks,” my sister said, enjoying the authority that came with knowing bad news.
“Is there garlic in this?” my father asked.
The red, green, and yellow stew on my plate vibrated in the candlelight.
“There’s shit in it,” said my mother. “How about that?”
I focused my eyes on the weave of my dark blue placemat, which ended in knots at the edge. We’d eaten off these mats my entire life, it seemed. I remembered playing with one when I was small, pretending it was a flying carpet.
“Could be some rain coming through,” said my dad. He took a swallow of iced tea. “It’s uncertain at this point. And of course, if it gets cold enough, that could turn to snow.”

After dinner, as usual, we all headed to our separate areas. Our new house was a split-level with a decent yard, built fifteen years earlier, and much larger than the bungalow we’d lived in before, with its cramped bedrooms and creepy basement where centipedes regularly invaded the carpet. My room was downstairs adjacent to the front door, small, wood-paneled, with a front-facing window. I could slip in and out without people knowing.
My sister and I settled in front of the television and watched a show about a magician that starred Bill Bixby. I couldn’t follow the plot, but I enjoyed the colors – we had our first color TV, now, too, a Sony Trinitron, and even stupid shows made for interesting viewing. I thought I was myself in another, equally unfunny show about aliens taking over the bodies of a suburban family. When it was over, my sister went upstairs to her bedroom and I retreated to mine, closed both doors, and did pushups until my arms hurt. I lay on the bed and opened my paperback anthology of science fiction short stories and tried to read, but the sentences bounced meaninglessly off my eyes and back onto the page. “Cabot stepped down from the transport.” “All religions had long ago faded from memory.” “My first voyage to Mars was as a stowaway.” I looked down at the floor. The carpet – a fake Persian – had shapes I saw as scary portals. I stared at the drapes, which were Colonial-themed, with liberty bells and cannons. My dad’s idea. They were something he’d have enjoyed in his room back when he was a kid, so he’d bought them for me. The dresser and night table were Colonial as well and smelled of wood stain.
I dug out my February 1970 copy of Debonair and flipped through the familiar photo spreads, the redhead posed in various ways around a ladder in an unfurnished room with paint cans and drop cloths, the blonde with the enormous breasts lounging next to a swimming pool. Nothing. The pictures might as well have been of cornfields. It’s speedy acid, the mutton-chopped senior who’d sold me barrels had said, and now it occurred to me that he hadn’t meant you’d feel it quickly, but that it had actual speed in it. So, I’d probably done two new drugs. I tried thinking about Janis, the strawberry smell of her hair, her taste when we kissed last Wednesday after school in this very room while supposedly doing homework together, the way her right breast had felt when I’d slipped my hand under her shirt at the matinee of Gone with the Wind the previous weekend. I want you, she’d whispered, and I’d been replaying the words ever since.
I turned on my radio, an ancient brown Zenith from my father’s college days, and waited for it to warm up. The rock station out of Philadelphia was getting interference tonight, possibly from Comet Kohoutek. I closed my eyes and watched patterns behind my lids leap and rearrange themselves.

***

I had a hard time getting through the next day on almost no sleep. There was also an incident in a stairway between classes where a greaser named Jonny Tkacs called me a freak and kicked me from behind, sending me stumbling into the wall. High school came with an almost constant threat of violence. With my center-parted pup tent of dark, frizzy hair, army jacket, red eyes, and general aroma of smoke, I was an obvious target. Six feet tall and 130 pounds, I looked, not unintentionally, like an R. Crumb character. I had a nickname, too, one I’d chosen for myself, Lucky, after the cigarette brand.
I walked to Nicole’s house, and we smoked her hash out of a zebrawood pipe. Nicole was the fattest person I’d ever met. Her dad was a policeman. My eyes kept shutting as I watched Oscar the beagle repeatedly lick his paw. Nicole and I had been friends since last summer when she’d cast me as the Tin Man in the Youth Theater League’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Charly Sand was the Wizard. I was looking for any excuse to get out of the house, even if it meant being in a play. We had gotten high together a lot, the three of us, in the parking lot behind the building where YTL held rehearsals. Sometimes, Nicole led us through Beatles tunes. She was a good singer and knew about harmony. That’s how I had first gotten to know Charly Sand, singing “This Boy” with him.
“Your parents still going to the shore Friday?” I asked.
“They are.”
“I need a place for me and Janis.”
“Cheerleader Janis? Go-o-o team!” Nicole took another hit, exhaled, coughed uncontrollably for twenty seconds, then rubbed her eyes and blew her nose into a Kleenex. “What do I get?” Nicole had dropped out of her first semester of college in St. Louis and was now biding her time until she could enroll locally at Rider, where she would study theater.
“What do you want?” I picked up the hand grenade cigarette lighter from the coffee table and flicked up a two-inch flame. I could never get over partying in a policeman’s house. The album finished, leaving us in silence.
“Why do you look half dead, anyway? And what happened to your lip?”
“I fell. And I was up most of the night tripping.”
“Get lost. Can you get me some? What are they?”
“Purple barrels. They have speed in them.”
She wore dramatic eye makeup and fake lashes, probably to draw attention to her face and away from her body. Her outfits were always the same: oversized, white, button-front shirts, and blue jeans. “Get me some,” she said, “and you can use the house. It will, in fact, be an honor. Mi casa es su casa. Think of it! Your first time!”

***

Charly Sand and I had run into each other downtown around noon on a humid Thursday in August, the last weekend before school was to start. An hour earlier, my mother had thrown open the door to my bedroom and yelled at me for practicing guitar, screaming, “Stop that noise. It sounds like dying mosquitoes.” She was still in her robe and without makeup.
“Why don’t you leave me the fuck alone,” I muttered. I stood and tossed the guitar – a $35 classical I’d been given when I was eleven – onto the bed and picked a random paperback off the bookcase and paged through it, making a point of ignoring her. Infuriated, she slapped me across the cheek. She’d hit me before, but I surprised us both this time by slapping her back. I did it with the hand that had the book, so what hit her was a copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which I had obediently stolen from a drugstore rack. Her eyes grew wide and there was a red mark on her right cheek. She started to laugh. Then, I replaced the book, pushed past her, and left the house, slamming the front door as hard as I could behind me. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. Downtown for a slice of pizza made sense. It was lunchtime, after all.
Charly had just finished his own slice. He was headed west, he said, Gonna hitch. Wanna come? I didn’t even ask where west. I got my slice to go, on a white paper plate. The Wizard and the Tin Man, hitting the road.
Hitching proved miraculous. You stuck out your thumb and people stopped. Certain people, at any rate. We smoked fat, ragged joints with strangers in the back of a VW Microbus to the distorted sound of Crosby Stills and Nash playing through cheap, nailed-up speakers. We went to a showing of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, then slept on the floor of an unlocked church in Frenchtown, New Jersey, because Charly, whose dad was a minister, said it was always okay to go into a church. We made up obscene song lyrics and sang them at the cars that passed, talked about the rock opera we would write together. We didn’t even have a map. Our destination was St. Louis, to visit Nicole. A bearded guy in a pickup truck left us on a rural road that paralleled I-80 outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. “Best I can do,” he announced. “This is where you get out.”
“It’s cool, man,” said Charly.
And it was. We goofed around. We sang “This Boy.” We tried to do “Niagara Falls” (“Slowly, I turned, step by step!”). But I was tired, and this was a terrible spot. The few cars that passed by didn’t even slow down, and sometimes no cars appeared at all for as long as ten minutes. After three hours of holding up the cardboard sign we’d made still yielded nothing, I said we should turn around. I said I needed to be back for school.
“School?” Charly said. “You can miss a couple of days of school.”
“That and we don’t have money. And no one wants to pick us up.”
“Loser,” Charly said, and I could tell he meant it. “Chickenshit.” But unlike me he had no immediate place he had to be. He had either graduated or been kicked out of Landon Academy, a school in the area that catered to problem kids – I wasn’t sure which. Also, it had become clear that he had not told Nicole he was coming.
“We’re stuck in mud,” I said. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“Like that matters,” he said.
At a gas station phone booth, I made a collect call home and got my dad, who wanted to know where I was. “Pennsylvania,” I told him. “I’m headed home, though.”
“I’ll come get you,” he said. “We called the police. We’re worried.”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a day.”
We walked until it grew dark, then knocked on the door of a farmhouse where the family – a mom, a dad, two young daughters – fed us dinner and let us stay the night. They didn’t ask us questions. They even had a spare room with two twin beds. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and one of those little girls with the enormous eyes. The air smelled vaguely of mothballs. Before we went to sleep, the mother knocked and brought us two glasses of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies. We thanked her and ate them in silence.
“I’ll bet you wish you had a toothbrush,” Charly said, finally, like it was another failing on my part.
“I can use my finger,” I said.
In the morning, we had corn flakes and the father drove us to an access spot for the interstate eastbound.
“Don’t know how the hitching will be on a Sunday,” he said, “but good luck.” He shook both of our hands.
“‘For some have entertained angels unawares’,” said Charly in his Wizard voice.
We made it home in two rides, the first a real estate agent from Port Jervis in a yellow Ford Capri, and the second a swimming pool installer from Trenton in a blue Impala. He talked about Terry Bradshaw for a while, then put on country music and whistled to it. “I’ll drive you right into town,” he said. “I don’t care.” He dropped us off twenty yards from where we’d met up three days earlier, and we thanked him. I walked the mile or so back to our house. It was after dinner already. My mother stayed in her office. My dad said he was glad to see me. He said he wished I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I took a hot shower and went to bed.
I didn’t see Charly after that. But a week later, he set out again, this time in a car he’d “borrowed” from his parents. He drove to New York – to buy drugs was the story I heard – and smashed into the back side of a parked maintenance vehicle on the Goethals Bridge. After three weeks in a New York hospital, he was transferred closer to home. Supposedly, he was out now. Nicole had been to see him at the rehab place. She’d quit school after less than a month. “It wasn’t for me,” she said. I’m a Jersey girl.”

***

Headachy from Nicole’s hash, I rode my bike uptown, picked up my papers and delivered them. As an experiment, I had recently stopped wearing underwear. The result was a certain feeling of freedom, but also considerable chafing.
I had the worst paper route in town, with only 30 customers, almost a third of whom didn’t answer the door when I rang to try and collect, so that not only was I out of the running for the incentive prizes offered to paperboys, I owed the company fourteen bucks. When I finished my route, I continued riding. I’d taken this job because I thought it would please my parents to see me working and being responsible, and to make up for the scare I’d given them. They seemed unimpressed. The Trenton Times was a bad paper, so maybe they were embarrassed, but there weren’t any delivery routes for the New York Review of Books. It was cold out and I’d lost my gloves. There was something else, too, an almost religious feeling left over from the acid, like I’d been scraped and repainted inside, like I’d been reborn.
I returned to the first house on my route and saw that the paper had been taken in. Same at the next. I continued cycling; I didn’t want to go home yet.
The business district downtown: Carousel Diner, Vito’s Pizza, Thrift Drug, the bank, the paint store, the Hobby Shop, the toy store where I’d bought my chess set with the badly made board. I saw everything as if for the first time. I passed Montcalm’s father’s office over T&C Meats. Mark Rosen was an architect. Rosen was Montcalm’s real last name, but Montcalm, whom I knew from Hebrew school and who had let me and Ed join his band, had invented himself a new name that he liked better. In the shop below, a muscular bald man in an apron wielded a cleaver against an ancient wood chopping block.
Through the front window of Liberty Pancakes, with its painted outline of a cracked bell, I saw Janis and Montcalm sharing a plate of pancakes, their faces pasty in the restaurant’s overhead lighting. They hadn’t seen me. They had sodas, too. Wholesome, like a date from Archie comics. Liberty pancakes weren’t good pancakes, but you could get them any time of day. I stood for a while, ghostlike, watching. Montcalm seemed to be doing most of the talking. The bus to New York rumbled past on the other side of the street, picking up speed with its loud, diesel breath. I thought how I could just as easily be on it, right now, reading a novel in the yellow light, or just watching the passing landscape, my nose against the window.

***

I saw Janis at school the next day, but she was with friends and in a hurry. I called in the evening after dinner and her father answered. “Janis?” he repeated, suspiciously. “Just a minute.”
My parents were upstairs screaming at each other, possibly about money. The phone was in the kitchen, but it had one of those extralong cords on it, so I could get all the way down the four steps to the family room and take the receiver to a relatively quiet corner, next to the sliding glass door that led to the back yard.
I waited. My reflection in the door anticipated me. It raised one arm and so did I. It stuck out a leg and I did, too.
“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
“Okay.”
“Not at all,” said the voice. “Dull, dull. Yawn.”
This was followed by a long pause, then the sound of something falling. “Hello?”
“Hello?” I asked. “What . . .?”
“Nothing,” the person said, and this time it was Janis. “It’s okay.”
“My friend’s house is cool for Friday.”
“All right,” she said. “Yes. That will be fine.”
She had to be careful, of course – perhaps her father was standing there. I gave her the address and told her eight o’clock. Then I snuck the phone back to its place on the kitchen wall. So what if she’d eaten pancakes with Montcalm? I was the one she’d made out with at the movies; I was the one she wanted. My dad’s voice upstairs was louder now, and it had an anguished tone, a way I’d only heard him once before, when he slipped on the front steps and dislocated his knee and an ambulance had to come for him. “That is bullshit!” he shouted. A door slammed. When they divorced, who would stay in the house? Would anyone? I took my cigarettes and slipped out the back door into the yard.
Another cloudy, grayish sky – nothing visible. Comet Kohoutek was officially a joke, all that buildup and then nothing. Sly and the Family Stone played through a window from the Hastings’ house next door. I pictured Hannah Hastings, now back from her first semester at college, the way I always did, in her bright yellow bikini, the way I’d seen her over the summer, through the gaps in our wood fence, lying out by their pool, her long legs extended and shiny with oil.

When I got home from school on Friday, my mom was angry for some reason and I worried she might attempt to ground me. I assumed she’d snooped and found something – the bag of weed I kept hidden inside the Polaroid Swinger camera her mother had sent me for my birthday, maybe, or the magazines under my mattress. I had two more purple barrels from the senior, purchased at lunchtime with money I’d stolen from her purse. I did that a lot – she never noticed. “Last of the batch,” he’d said. “Four-way windowpane coming next week. Stay tuned.”
I examined the flat people in the New York Times on the kitchen table, grayscale adults. Another crossword begun and abandoned. A dried circular stain from her coffee cup. International, I read. Doris Day. The silence was a string drawn taut. She put away the groceries, and in doing so accidentally dropped a head of iceberg lettuce that then rolled along the floor.
“Jesus goddamn Christ,” she said.
The escaped vegetable was somehow my fault.
I picked up the lettuce and carried it to the counter. It was surprisingly heavy, although not, perhaps, as heavy as an actual head.
“I got an A on my English paper,” I offered. “The one on Tortilla Flat.” It was true. I had Fs in Math and Latin, a D in Chemistry, and a B in Choir, but I was acing English. “I wrote about parallels to Arthurian legend and the Knights of the Round Table.” My mom only nodded, her hazel eyes plastic buttons. I knew she took pills because I’d stolen some. I wasn’t sure what they were for, but I’d memorized their names: Nembutal, Placidyl, Librium. Last week, working over her blue bathroom sink, I had carefully emptied the contents of two fat green Placidyl caps into a pill bottle, then refilled the caps as best I could with flour and replaced them. I’d sold this powder to a tough character named Mike Russo at school for three dollars. He tossed it back into his mouth in the boys’ bathroom, scooped some tap water with his hand as a chaser. Seconds later, his grin turned to an expression of panic and he hurried into a stall and puked operatically for thirty seconds. I’d had to give Mike Russo, who was eighteen and owned a motorcycle, his money back. Placidyl appeared to be a made-up name, a combination of “placid” and “idyll.” I wondered if I was the only person ever to have noticed this.
“Go to your room,” she said. “I can’t cook with you here.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“What am I doing?”
“Being here.”
I didn’t want to be around, anyway, but now I could pretend that what I wanted wasn’t what I wanted, and that I was just leaving to make her – my insane mother – happy.
As I headed downstairs, she shouted after me. “I’m not insane.”

After dinner – tuna casserole – I reminded my parents that I was spending the night at Ed’s house. “We’re going to rehearse.”
“Your performance is Saturday,” said my dad, rearranging the glasses in the top rack of the dishwasher.
“Exactly. We need more work.”
He extracted a coffee mug, peered into it, then put it back. “And these are middle-schoolers?”
“Thompson Park Middle. We’re even getting paid.”
“Very nice,” he said. “Paid is good.”
I biked to Nicole’s, checked to make sure her parents’ car was gone from the driveway, then rang the bell. A light-up plastic Santa was affixed to the door and there were plastic angels in the small front yard. I gave her one of the barrels, which she swallowed immediately. Then we smoked a bowl in the living room and went outside and scanned the cloudy skies.
“Is that it?” she said, pointing in the direction of a neighbor’s oak. “I think I see it!”
“Could be.”
She grabbed my hand and the two of us stood looking up for a bit. The truth was, I didn’t see anything. But I didn’t want to tell her that.
“I’ve got snacks and root beer and there’s a bottle of Popov. We have another TV in the basement. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Back inside, we listened to records. At 8:20 pm, Nicole pointed to the phone on the kitchen wall. “Call,” she said. “What have you got to lose?”
“And if her dad answers? What do I say?”
“Hang up.”
“I’ll wait a while longer.” In my jeans pocket I had one bluepackaged Trojan, stolen from the top drawer of my dad’s dresser. He kept a box of them right next to his stack of laundered handkerchiefs. When I was ten, because I had bad allergies half the year, he had tried to turn me into a handkerchief person, but there was no way I wanted to put one of those things back in my pocket after using it.
Nicole got chattier and chattier as the acid came on, pointing out that Janus the Roman god was two-faced, which didn’t necessarily reflect on Janis the high school girl. “Transitions, doorways, beginnings, borders,” she said. “January looks both forward and backward, right?”
At 9 pm, we turned on the Friday Night Movie, which was about a runaway train with a bunch of skiers on it, all convinced they were going to die.
“Oh, my god, this is the funniest movie ever,” she said, holding her pigtails straight out from the sides of her head like handlebars.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I noticed, not for the first time, how dirty things were: soap scum on the shower curtain and around the sink, battered-looking toothbrushes leaning against the inside of a plastic Flintstones cup like people on a hot air balloon ride, their brushy faces peering over the side.
Coming back down the hall, I stepped into Nicole’s room, which she had prepared for me with beige sheets that smelled of fabric softener. I lay down on the waterbed and stared up at her ceiling, the surface shifting noticeably around me. White squares, a water stain by the outer wall. A Mickey Mouse stencil over the doorway. I heard a rippling sound, like I was on a raft adrift on a lake. A cheaply framed photo of Charly Sand in his wizard costume sat atop the dresser.
I rejoined Nicole on the sofa. “Jeepers,” she said. “This movie is so bad. Fricking-A. What do you think, Oscar?”
Hearing his name, the dog got up off his towel and rolled onto his back.
We had a glass of root beer with Popov in it.
“I’m going,” I said. It was after 10:00 pm.
“You can’t. Come on. Pizza Bites? You know you want some. I’ll heat the oven.”
“I’m tired.”
“Her dad could have forced her to stay home. He could have figured it out. It might not be her fault. Or she’s working on a new cheer. If you go home, what will you tell your parents?”
“Nothing. They won’t care.” My mother would be upstairs by now, typing; my dad was probably grading papers.
“You gotta stay. I need a spirit guide.” She took my hand. “Check this out.” Nicole led me into her parents’ bedroom, where she lifted a pillow, revealing a revolver with dark metal and a wood handle. “Smith & Wesson, five-shot.” She pointed it at me. “Don’t worry.” She lowered the weapon. “He loads it at night, after he brushes his teeth. In the morning, he unloads it. The bullets are in the dresser, on top of his underwear.” She put the gun to her head, then returned it to its spot under the pillow.
We listened to her Bette Midler album. Side One ended with “Am I Blue,” and she sang along – she knew all the words.
“Nice,” I said. She could sing. “Did you quit school because of Charly Sand?” I asked.
“No. Why would you think that? I don’t give a sour grape about Charly Sand.”
“Me either. I mean, I’m happy he didn’t die.”
We sat there in silence, me imagining what it must have felt like to be in that accident and whether you’d even remember it at all, and her tapping her foot to whatever was going on in her brain.
“Jeepers. Fricking-A. Just go home,” she said.

***

Montcalm and Janis arrived for our holiday dance gig together, dropped off by Montcalm’s mom. Janis greeted me with a cheek-kiss. She was on a pure Montcalm high and it made her transcendently beautiful. She wore a very short red leather skirt and black boots that came to her knees. Montcalm wore a black shirt unbuttoned to midchest, a leather thong around his neck with a sea-shell pendant.
“Sorry, man,” he said with an apologetic smile.
The drummer Montcalm had found for us was a junior named Melvin with an Afro and freckles, and his T-shirt had a big blue star in the center. His younger brother, Reid, with shorter hair and darker skin, had brought his saxophone. These guys were good, and I was self-conscious about my guitar ability, since I’d only been playing a year and a half. Montcalm sang “Wake Me Shake Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” At first, no one danced, but someone turned out the lights and a few brave kids ventured forward.
At the break, Montcalm and Janis disappeared together. Each had an arm around the other, and each had a hand in the other’s back pocket.
“I got herb,” said Ed, helpfully, patting the Sucrets can he kept in his front shirt pocket.
“No, thanks. I’m going to have a cigarette,” I said.
I went outside and then around the back of the building to avoid being spotted by the parents who were monitoring this event.
In the tiny playground area behind the building, I stood under a slide. After a minute a thin girl with long, straight hair parted in the middle and no coat on joined me. She wore a lowcut, sparkly black top and bell bottom jeans. “Got another?” she asked. One of her eyes was elaborately made-up, Clockwork Orange style. I recognized her as Julie Tedesco, Janis’s 13-year-old sister.
I gave her a Lucky and some matches, and after three tries she lit it, taking in a deep drag, then exhaling. Her ears, which stuck out noticeably, were pointed on top, like an elf’s.
“These are disgusting,” she said. “No filter?”
“They’re ‘toasted’. Whatever that means.”
She pulled tobacco off her tongue and flicked it. “I’ve heard a lot of bands. Kingston Road Blues? And Downtown Sheiks?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I’d only seen their posters.
“What’s ‘Beggar’s Velvet’?”
“You know the dust balls you find under your bed? It’s another word for that.” I’d found the name, which I was proud of, in the Dictionary of American Slang my parents had bought me for my twelfth birthday.
“Not under my bed. My bed sits on the floor.”
Julie Tedesco was telling me about her bed.
“If your bed is up off the floor,” I explained, “then dust accumulates under there. That’s the velvet. Aren’t you cold?”
She shrugged, then took another drag and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Blech. Sounds like ‘Beggar’s Banquet.’”
I’d never thought of this and found it embarrassing. The band name I’d come up with was almost identical to the name of a Rolling Stones record.
She moved closer. It had started to rain lightly, the drops tapping out a samba on the metal above us.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “My sister’s not cool. Not at all.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out under her sneaker. “We can kiss if you want.”
Her mouth tasted of hot smoke. We stayed pressed tightly against each other, the rain stopping and starting on the metal overhead, for a full two minutes, stopping occasionally only to catch our breath. I figured the traitor Montcalm was kissing Janis, too, somewhere not that far away.
We took a break. Julie located a piece of gum in her pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.
“So, can I buy some acid? Frankenstein said you were holding.”
“Frankenstein?”
“Charly Sand? That’s what everyone’s calling him.”
I had one more of the barrels in my wallet, wrapped in tin foil, but I didn’t say so.
“I’ll pay you back, I promise. Three bucks? Four bucks?”
“No,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“I don’t. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but whatever. What songs are you going to play next?”
“The same ones we already did.”
She stared off into the distance, then turned and punched me in the chest.
“Ouch,” I said. “What was that for?”
“Bit of the old ultraviolence.”
She was an alternate, more volatile version of her sister, I thought, her own bright comet, skimming past Earth. “Should I call you?”
“You can try. My dad dominates the telephone. But give it a shot. Let it ring once, then hang up. Wait fifteen seconds, then call again. That way, I’ll know it’s you.”
We held hands for a few yards, before separating. The rain had stopped. She walked a few steps, then turned and looked back at me. “I play guitar, too.” She mimed playing for just a moment, then turned and jogged off. A group of other girls opened and assimilated her like some biological organism.
Beggars Velvet reconvened and re-played most of our songs, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” because it was requested for a dance contest. The real contest was between the dancers and us. My hands felt like they’d been run over from playing the same four-note riff over and over.
The gym lights came on. 9:45 p.m. We stopped, said goodnight, started to pack up. Worried parents rounded up their kids. Go Eagles, read the banner beside the ancient clock on the wall that peers out like a jaundiced eye from behind the cranked-back basketball hoop. The painted, chipping yellow brick walls echoed with voices and laughter. I looked around for Julie but she was gone.
I called home from the payphone across the street. After a while, my dad answered, sounding tired, and said he’d come get me. I waited outside with my guitar case and amp.
“Rock and roll!” a voice shouted nearly in my ear. It was Charly Sand, along with Mike Russo and another guy with a moustache I didn’t know. They carried beers and seemed wasted, although in his case it wasn’t just that. He was different. Charly Sand wore a long military surplus coat and had a cane in his hand. His movements were awkward and robotic, like important wires between his brain and body had been disconnected. “Didja get laid las’ night?” he said, loudly. “Hey, got a cigarette, Tin Man?”
I gave him one. Charly lit it with the vintage Zippo he always carried.
“Got anything else?”
“No.”
“That’s not what I heard. From our mutual friend.” He poked me in the same place Julie had given me the punch.
“Ow. Well, I don’t.”
“Check this out,” he said. He pulled a sword out of the cane and swung it a couple of times, the lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Errol Fucking Flynn.” He slid the sword back into the cane. “See ya ’round.” Charly and his friends continued walking in the direction of uptown.
It was colder now, the air damp and smelling like snow. I had to be up early in the morning for my Sunday route. I remembered the meal the family had served us in Pennsylvania: hamburgers, and fresh corn, and big, beefsteak tomatoes cut in thick slices as a first course, how we all had to join hands first. Charly had grinned at me from the opposite side of the table as if he were no longer mad, as if to say, Yeah, man, the adventure continues! Good people had opened their doors to strangers, fed them. There was grace in the world, and love. I had never eaten a tomato that way, and was surprised at how delicious it was, and how simple, a big red circle with salt sprinkled over it like stars.

---

Geoffrey Becker is the author of the novels Bluestown (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and Hot Springs (Tin House Books, 2010), as well as the story collections Dangerous Men (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press, 2009). His stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

THE TREE CUTTERS RIDE by Dustin M. Hoffman

Donovan climbed trees every day, massive ones that poked at the sun, but the 250-foot Skytower ride pained his groin – a plunging tug on not one but both nuts. He ascended over the amusement park, the city, over both the Carolinas. The park was built straddling the state borders, like it couldn’t make up its mind. He turned to his friend Yan to say, “I’ll climb the tallest tree you got, but I don’t like this having no control.”
Yan nodded toward the acne-pocked teenager operating the ride’s controls. “And we’re the dummies trusting this kid not to drop us. How many shits you think he gives?” He said this as he held his sixyear-old son’s ears. Donovan hadn’t thought about freaking out Yan’s kid until now, which probably made him an asshole, as much as his own dad had been. Once Yan uncupped his kid’s ears, he nudged him toward the curved window. “Take a look down, kid. See your whole world.”
Donovan kept the back of his head glued to the wall. His body tingled at the sight of his home state made miniature, at the corpselike lump of Kings Mountain, at the endless trees Donovan could hack away if only he was steady on the ground, armed with his chainsaw. On the next Skytower rotation, the setting sun caught Charlotte’s skyscrapers and glared. From here, they resembled cutter teeth on his saw chain, all lit up as if sparking like in the nightmare he had where he was buzzing off branches at work. They dropped toward his dead daddy who was resurrected only to drunkenly stumble under Donovan’s murderous branches.
“How long they gonna spin us around up here?” Donovan asked.
The Skytower continued rotating, and Charlotte’s twinkling buildings disappeared. The roller coasters now plummeted in front of him, soulless silhouettes flailing from the cars. He’d rather fall out of a thirty-foot loblolly than go on one of those. If Yan asked him, though, he might have to do it. A guy can’t say no to another man’s dare, can’t risk looking like a pussy, and that goes double if they work together. What if Yan told the other guys? They hated Yan anyway, talked about him sneaking across the wall from Mexico to steal their jobs. He’d only started last month, and Donovan felt bad for him, which is why he’d said yes when Yan asked if he wanted to join him at Carowinds. He’d thought maybe Yan would be bringing his wife, but, no, turned out he didn’t have one. Just this kid. Just the kid and two guys, and people had already been staring at them, probably imagining who got top and who got bottom.
Yan’s kid was smushing his face against the glass, and Yan yelled at him to “stop licking everything all the dang time.” Donovan was goddamn grateful for this forty-seven-inch tagalong, too short for any serious rollercoastering.
“Kid is gonna catch Ebola licking everything like that,” Yan said.
The kid pressed his whole body against the thin glass, and it made Donovan’s insides start twirling again. He couldn’t help imagining, and then couldn’t stop from blurting it. “If he fell out, little guy’s guts would splatter thirty feet across the concrete.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Yan said, covering his kid’s ears too late.
Donovan waved an apology toward the kid without risking moving his body from the seat. “Sorry. I’m just saying.”
“That’s dumb, man. That’s impossible.”
But people probably died all the time on these rides. Why all the seatbelts and bars and guardrails and signs warning off pregnant ladies and weak hearts? That’s why his chainsaw wore a slew of stickers and had a manual warning about lifting the saw above your shoulders, about never touching the chain without pulling the sparkplug, about safety glasses. When a tree cutter stopped worrying about buzzing off three fingers or catching a splinter through the eyeball – that’s when he’d hurt himself. Fear was a protectant. Fear kept a man’s various viscera stowed in the skin casings where they belonged. He’d never witnessed a bad accident. But he had seen his crew messing with Yan’s harness. Donovan had laughed along with them, all those assholes he worked with who’d tightened the harness so small it must’ve strangled Yan’s scrotum. If he would’ve warned him, he might not have felt guilty enough to say yes to the amusement park.
The Skytower lurched into its slow, steady descent. It was a good feeling to have the ground in your future. He even allowed himself, in the last fifty feet, to unstick his sweaty scalp from the wall so he could glimpse the parking lot in miniature. The ride landed, and the passengers turned toward the exit. He was happy to join his fellow survivors, and he even scruffed Yan’s kid’s hair to celebrate the confidence recalibrated to his groin.
“What next?” Yan said as they stood on the concrete, the park crowd swirling around them in currents of human traffic. “We should ride a coaster, right?”
“Doubt they’ll let your little guy on.” Donovan cracked his knuckles. “Too bad.”
“Freak that. Let’s go check,” Yan said. “What do you say, little macho man?”
The kid ran ahead, and the two men had to break into a jog to keep up. He zoomed past the Dale Earnhardt coaster, the Nighthawk, the Southern Star, all of which he was too small for.
“Well, what the hell can we do here?” Yan asked the teenager holding a measuring stick outside the Carolina Goldrusher.
“Maybe try Camp Snoopy?” the kid said, wincing, because Yan’s fists were balled, and Donovan admired that about his coworker, his buddy, how he scared this stranger without hardly trying. His muscles flexed in neat scoops that showed through his Johnny Cash T-shirt.
“We’re not here for some wimpy cartoon stuff. Give us a real ride. I paid a half-day’s work for me and my kid and my man to get in here.”
The kid eyed Donovan, and he wished he could explain that it was just a language flub to call a friend “my man.”
“Maybe, like, the water park might be more fun, um, sir,” the kid said.
Donovan hadn’t brought swim trunks. He and Yan and his son would have to strip down to their cutoffs. Three guys splashing each other in the wave pool, their bodies bobbing, bumping, everyone watching as Yan slapped Donovan’s nude back.
“Or, if not the water park, maybe try a spinning ride or something. You and your family would love those, I bet,” the worker kid said, and Donovan’s face burned.
“Point me at a spinny ride then.” He smiled and punched the kid in the shoulder.
So they headed in the direction of the teenager’s finger, a ride called the Rock ‘N’ Roller. Donovan studied the ride and was pleased to see it stayed at ground level. No lifts. No drops. Just a frenzied spin, the buckets slicing the air like the teeth of his chainsaw. Fast he could handle. As they lingered in line, Donovan felt the crowd watching them again, kids mostly, a few man-wife couples. Their eyes seared. That teenager had called them a family, and anyone could’ve heard that. He imagined shouting to them all, We’re friends from work. Just two dudes hanging out, because he needs a friend, you know. But that explanation jammed in his head. He revised it to leave no room for questioning. He’d shout: I like vaginas, and so does my friend. And for good measure: He’s barely my friend. Just a guy I work with.
Donovan realized then that he was staring at an old man’s mouth, a white beard stained yellow probably by years of chain-smoking Winstons. The old man sneered, mouthed a silent, bit-lip fuck you. His daddy would’ve been that old, that angry, if another man tried staring at him. His daddy had once gotten into a shoving match with Donovan’s shop teacher at a bar for being a “lippy faggot.” Donovan had liked that shop teacher, who trusted him to run the lathe, to run any saw he liked, said he had the sharpest eye for angles of any kid in class. Donovan had been proud, but maybe that, too, had been a gay thing. His daddy had kicked out three of the shop teacher’s front teeth in the bar parking lot.
The line moved, and they were ushered through a gate to pick their seats. The three of them popped into a single car. Yan in first, then his boy, then Donovan. Yan pulled the seatbelt, slapped it into Donovan’s hand, as if they were at work, prepping the mini excavator bearing its fanged bucket. The kid stayed silent as Donovan closed the door, locked it, and Yan secured the grab bar over their bodies.
“Kid goes in the inside, dudes.” Another ride worker stood above them wearing opaque sunglasses and slicked black hair, his sleeves rolled like a ’50s greaser.
“He is inside,” Donovan said.
“All the way in is the rules. Just read your car.” The worker kid snapped his fingers at the car’s safety door, where a sticker printed with red letters indeed proclaimed: “Smaller passengers must sit on the inside.”
“Sure, yeah, we got it,” Donovan said, because he could tell Yan was ready to make a scene again. The three of them reshuffled until Donovan’s hips pressed against Yan’s. Donovan scanned the other cars to see who was watching. He could feel the warmth of Yan’s legs through their jeans. The seatbelt pressed into his thighs, threatened to slice through him.
The ride started moving at a slow, loping speed. Yan’s kid looked worried, and Yan looked bored. Outside their car, eyes swirled around them. Couples giggled and whispered in each other’s ears. A car full of boys cackled, and young girls giggled somewhere behind them. As the ride picked up speed, Donovan spotted the stained-beard grandpa, who scowled, who stared so hard a hole felt bored through his forehead. Faster and faster, the faces blurred. Elvis Presley moaned about shoes on the speakers as Yan and his boy slid against the centrifugal force, their body weight sloshing into Donovan. By top speed, Yan was practically on top of him. He hooted and his boy shrieked in joy, and Donovan reminded himself to smile. You were supposed to smile on rides. That’s what normal people did. Yan’s shoulder rammed into his pectorals, mashed his nipple. Their knuckles merged along the grab bar, and Donovan tucked his hand to his side but ended up sandwiching his fingers between his and Yan’s thighs. The blurry stares tornadoed around, churning into a thousand-strong whir of pale, wet eyeballs. Yan shouted frick yeah into his ear, shouted it again, so close he could feel his hot breath, taste the funnel cake Yan had eaten. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fricking yeah. Their hips squeezed together, fused, Donovan’s hand trapped touching. His jeans pulled under him, pinched at his crotch. The ride wouldn’t stop whirling his body against Yan’s, and everyone watched.
So Donovan punched Yan in the nose. Instantly, blood sprayed. The people behind him were screaming. Yan clutched his nose, his body folding against Donovan. The ride slowed finally. Yan’s kid gawked at his bleeding dad and started whimpering. Now, surely, all eyes were fixed on them. Yan’s blood had speckled the white cars behind them, and the riders shouted. Donovan’s legs surged with the electric desire to flee, sprint all the way home, where he’d drink himself into a stupor until work on Monday, when he’d tell the guys they’d been right not to trust Yan. But the grab bar locked him in. No escape as Yan’s head lolled against Donovan’s chest.
“I’m sorry, man,” Donovan said to the back of Yan’s head. “I didn’t mean to.”
The ride worker, still sporting the blackened shades, was rushing to unlock the bloodied passengers. He slammed up bars to free them. He moved so fast that his sunglasses fell to the ground, and he didn’t notice when he stepped on them, crunched the plastic into shards.
Fuck this, Donovan thought and heaved at the bar as hard as he could. Surely eight years lugging chainsaws up tree trunks could grant him the ability to escape a kid’s ride. He pushed harder and pushed so hard a fart ripped through his jeans like a gunshot.
“You just fart?” Yan was finally lifting his head. “That’s messed up. We’re trapped here, man.”
The kid quieted, soothed to see his dad move. Yan lifted his head and blood drained in fat drops from his nostril. He studied the blood on his fingers, smiled at his kid. The crowd of blood-speckled passengers ogled him. “Good news, folks,” he announced. “I got the cleanest blood in the Carolinas.”
Someone laughed, and a din of chatter crashed the silence like a felled oak.
But Donovan waited in hell for the worker kid to unlatch him – trapped, hip to hip, next to the man he’d just punched. If Yan would just punch him back, they could be done with the thing. Instead, Yan wiped his nose with his shirt and soaked it in the last gush of blood escaping his nose. Then he reached a blood-stained hand behind Donovan and clenched his shoulder.
“You could’ve just said you weren’t into me,” he said.
Yan’s hand pressed heavier than that blur of a thousand eyes, heavier than a tipping tree trunk. He could smell his sickly sweet funnel cake breath again, practically taste the copper of his blood. Across the circle of cars, the greaser worker tugged at stuck bars. There were a dozen more cars before he got to theirs, and here Yan was admitting he was gay, that he’d tricked Donovan into a date. Or maybe Yan was just fucking with him about being gay. How often had all the guys at work mimed thrusting with the chainsaw at their crotches while winking at each other? Donovan performed that joke weekly. It was the same reason they cried wolf. Screaming Good fucking God, I just sliced off my thumb, which made the chance of dying by blade seem silly.
The greaser kid finally reached their car. He’d donned blue rubber gloves hastily enough to have missed a finger that flopped flaccid and broken looking. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, fumbling at the lock. “Oh shit, sorry for saying shit in front of the kid.” He jerked at the bolt, and Donovan prayed to the amusement park gods to give this kid the strength of one hundred workers to free him.
Yan reached around Donovan and grasped the kid’s floppy blue hand. “It’s okay, man. No rush. I’m not dying.”
The bar released, giving like a sawn tree limb. Donovan hopped out of the car and had the urge to run again, but he waited for Yan and the kid to sidle out of their seat.
They left the ride and made it as far as the Do-Si-Do, its red wheel whipping above them, before Yan gave his kid a twenty and told him to buy them all a treat. The kid lumbered off slowly. Donovan would’ve gladly hopped on the Dale Earnhart rollercoaster to avoid being alone with Yan. It was as if the chainsaw belt had snapped, flinging its rakers and teeth into flesh.
Yan patted Donovan’s cheek, and Donovan winced. Yan said, “Think I’m gonna punch you or something?”
“I deserve it. I can handle it.” As Donovan said it, he heard how stupid it sounded.
“We don’t go places much.” Yan was looking over his shoulder at his poor kid who’d never be able to enjoy a carnival ride again. “I wanted you to meet him. He doesn’t know too many other good adults. No grandparents or aunts or uncles around here. Just me.”
“He’s a nice kid,” Donovan said. But he was thinking about his own father who’d hated rides. The one time he’d coaxed his drunk dad to get on the Gravitron at the local carnival that sprang up in the vacant lot near the cemetery, he’d afterward vomited into Donovan’s cotton candy bag. He could still feel the weight of it bulging inside the thin plastic. “But why me?”
Yan rubbed a knuckle against the dried streaks of blood under his nose. “When you know as few people as we know, you just want your kid around people. Kids need people, as many as you can get. One guy can cut down a big maple with root rot, but it’s faster and safer if you got five guys on it, right?” He sucked his knuckle now, and Donovan imagined the coppery taste on his tongue. “Hell, at least one more to help. My kid deserves that.”
Donovan didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how the best Daddy memory he could conjure was him drunk driving Donovan to the carnival. His mother had called the cops on his daddy when she’d found out. But he never stopped being drunk. Couple years later, his daddy had ruined shop class. After the bar fight his teacher wouldn’t let Donovan near even the drop saw. If Donovan ever had kids of his own, he’d teach them how to run every kind of saw. Blades were so much safer than daddies.
“Doesn’t he?”
“Doesn’t what?”
“My kid. He deserves people. He’s better than a big rotten maple.”
“Yeah, Yan,” Donovan said. “He’s better than a maple.”
The kid returned, and, of course, he carried a bag of cotton candy. Donovan hadn’t even dared to whiff that burned sugar smell for years, and now the kid was stuffing pink fistfuls into his mouth with no pleasure. Just shoveling. No smile. Yan’s kid was too sincere, too stoic. In that way, Donovan supposed, he was pretty similar to a big fucking maple. Sometimes you just had to prune some diseased branches or poison the pests, not topple the whole thing.
“Get yourself a good batch there?” Yan asked.
“Yeah,” the kid said through a mouth gummed up with pink. “It’s pretty good.”
Yan dipped in his blood-stained hand, came up with a pink fist. His smile bit in. “It’s still warm,” Yan said. “Offer some to Donovan.” The kid aimed the opened bag his way.
Somewhere, the old man with the stained white beard might’ve been watching, sickened by these men and this boy. Yan’s blood from the ride would be drying into his white beard, a new stain, pink as the cotton candy. Maybe others watched them, too – the whispering, kissing couples, the kids, his coworkers spying from the treetops. Donovan reached into the bag, fingered a big fluff, tore it free. He let the cotton candy melt on his tongue.

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Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), No Good for Digging (Word West Press, 2019), and Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). His stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Witness, and One Story.

BROTHERS by Susan A.H. Grace

Henry Noble’s nine-year-old self wears a bright green canvas cap with a half-moon bill that shadows his eyes. His brother Jesse’s eleven-year-old self has a hat made of straw with a rolled-up brim that circles his head like a halo. Long-sleeved shirts and overalls, bare feet, young hands as big and worked and callused as men’s. Till soil. Plant seeds. Harvest crops. At dusk, run wild in the woods – a forbidden still and sips of shine; sickle moon and pinprick stars; wade in the river but race away home when the fingerless ghost comes humming his mournful dirge.
Henry Noble dreams. On the monitor above his head, lurid green numbers flicker – a hundred ten, a hundred thirty-two, a hundred fifty-three and climbing. Down the dimly lit hallway, orthopedic shoes whisk over cracked linoleum. The night attendant braces herself, eases through the door, notes the time: 4:29 a.m. She is young and new and not eager to encounter her first dead body. Luck is with her. The heart rate has already begun to drop. Tubes snake into the old man’s nostrils, delivering oxygen in mechanical, measured streams; a needle taped into his vein doles out peace. This is what it looks like, thinks the girl, if they suck everything out and the bones and skin are left behind. He is hardly bigger than a child. Beyond the window a net of thin clouds captures the setting moon. Her shift, thankfully, is nearly done. Stable at seventy-one, she notes. Then: blood pressure, oximeter, temperature, time. On the cramped nightstand, between lamp and bible, a small easel-backed picture frame catches her eye. In the glow of the nightlight, she sees two young Black men in military dress, no older than she is now but from decades ago. Their uniforms are different but the men are similar. Brothers. Which one, she wonders, lies here?
Jesse, the old man whispers. What was that, Mr. Noble? she says. Mr. Noble? Tenderly she touches his shoulder – it is like holding a door knob. She glances at his numbers one last time before she decides he must be wrapped in a dream.
A thousand coins swirl in the sky. One falls through the clouds. It lands on edge in autumn rain spatter, rolls through winter freeze, turns lazy circles around spring dew, settles on a rising, summer sun. Reba Sue Pretlow. Henry can see Reba Sue’s ten-year-old self – pink as a new rabbit, teeth like little pearls, sun-freckled, sun-dappled – lobbing dirt clods at red-winged blackbirds and hitting not a one. You see that, Jesse Noble? she hollers. I almost got him. Jesse shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Henry grins, utterly distracted – patchwork dress, errant hem, knobby, coltish legs. Jesse calls, Swing it high! Henry responds, Swing it low! Their axes graze the Virginia sky. Split wood, stack wood, fill the stove. Butcher a hog. Pick some greens. On Sunday put on your shoes – clap your hands; stomp your feet. Sing your praises to God.
The night shift clocks out; the day shift clocks in. On a stained Formica counter in the basement kitchen, a cook in a hairnet scoops oats from a vat and brown sugar from a tub. In no time at all oatmeal is ladled and juice is poured. Carts wheel away one two three four into the elevator, down the halls.
In a field of brown grass, Henry’s thirteen-year-old self pries rocks from the body of the earth. Jesse’s fifteen-year-old self gives each rock a name and returns it to its grave. This one’s Levi Harrington. This one’s Sam Hose. This one’s July Perry. On and on. Seven in all today. They cut em off, says Jesse, and passed em out as souvenirs. That’s why he’s fingerless – that ghost. Same with the toes. Henry shudders and averts his eyes. It’s a retold story as monstrous as the lynching itself. For a while they sit in solemn silence. A chevron of geese glides high overhead. From her father’s collard field, Reba Sue Pretlow calls out to Jesse and waves. Henry sees her drop everything and bound their way; and her sunhat, snatched by the wind, cart-wheels across the sky; and her hair made of buttermilk ripples past her waist. Jesse smiles broadly and waves. A shot rings out. The chevron shatters and a single goose falls from heaven. Jesse leans toward Henry, a hand cupped at his mouth, a secret ready to spill. But in that watery interlude when sleep begins to melt and the mind to stir, the dreamscape falters. Wind-shaped words from his brother’s lips sift past his ear like feathers decoupled from a wing.
Morning. Alone. A rented bed, a shoebox room. A window no bigger than an open bible. The eve of his one hundred and fifth birthday – a detail he will not remember until the White woman who changes his sheets reminds him, and the doctor who boomerangs through salutes and tosses out, Well done, Henry, good for you, as the door swings wide and whispers shut. Through the window he can see a granite sky and a faraway hawk riding thermals. Wind bellows. The building creaks. Henry Noble laughs. He pictures a train barreling down the walkway, come to take him home. The clatter-clack of wind-whipped branches could be metal wheels on loose rails. The swoosh of runaway leaves could be plumes of smoke billowing from the stack. Rain, his bones shriek. Gonna spill buckets of rain today. The kind that falls sideways and drags rivers over their banks. Good, thinks Henry and he laughs again.
His fingers find the small box at his side and feel for the center button. He presses it with his thumb and the bullfrog in the bed motor croaks. Used to be when he was young, sleep was the disruption. Couldn’t wait for the day. Soon as he got old, soon as his world got smaller, soon as he wound up here, that truth spun on its heel. When the bed gets to the sitting angle he favors, his thumb relaxes. Silence ensues. Even the wind that could be a train holds its ferocious breath.
On his bedtable he sees a bowl of oatmeal and he laughs. Oatmeal because he’s got no teeth. Oatmeal to keep him regular. What a hoot they’re worried about his bowels. Once when he was in his thirties, at a meeting meant to make great progress in the world, surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and unknowns, someone – he can’t remember who now – asked him why he laughed so much. Don’t know, he’d said. Must be I get it. The man he can no longer recall said, Get what? And that made Henry howl.
The hawk is gone. A passing shadow. The drone of traffic, the purr of oxygen – sounds that soothe. That shutter his eyes. That send faces flashing across the in-between on the way to the gallery of dreams. Room by room, like a hawk riding a thermal. Forms, figures, scenes: some he knows; others, a mystery. In time he lands: Summer of 1932. Still images stir and ripple to life. Here, the Depression rages. Here, despair ravages souls. From the back platform of a special train fitted with microphones and speakers, a candidate called Franklin Delano Roosevelt belts out hope to a bedraggled crowd: I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. The men murmur. They kick the dirt and rub their chins. Listless applause. The wheels begin to turn, the train rolls out, on to the next town, the next weary throng.
Henry is fourteen when his father sends Jesse and the cousins down to the Grange to pick up their allotment of seeds. There is no telling how long they’ll be gone. They will line up behind the building with other Negroes and wait until the White farmers out front have received theirs. It could be an hour; it could be three. While they wait for Jesse, Henry’s father points out the cylinder head on the old Wallis Cub tractor and applies a wrench to the nuts. The tractor barn smells of oil and metal and the ghost of livestock long since sold or eaten. On a pegboard fixed to the back wall are too many tools for Henry to count. Most homemade. Who can afford new?
Henry leans against the drive wheel and watches his father – a lean man with strong hands, muscled forearms, and skin marbled with dozens of scars. Each scar, his father has told him, contains a bitter chapter in a brutish story. Ordinarily, silence runs through his veins. But in his weaker moments, when his tongue will not be corralled, the elder Noble laments out loud. A juggler, he tells Henry, a genius at straddling the line. With a waggle of his fingers he motions Henry over and drops nuts and bolts into his cupped hands. Believe it or not, he says, the Northern Negroes turned out for him. The progressive Republicans, the Jews, the Catholics – they marked his box too. Not us, Henry – we Southern Negroes still got no vote. Off comes the cylinder head. At the work bench, Henry’s father begins to grind the valves. We’ll see, he shouts over the noise, which promises get kept and which’ll be forgotten. Tell you this, if we get anything it’ll be crumbs. They’ll sweep us their crumbs and call it progress. You watch. When he finishes the valves, he goes to the pegboard and selects another tool. Set those nuts and bolts over there, Henry. Let me show you how to get the carbon off the pistons, then you try it.
Federal prohibition ends; Virginia drags her feet. She’s still working out how to regulate, oversee, and supervise the sale and consumption of alcohol. No matter. The still in the woods cooks like a dream and there’s always a jug kept behind. Henry is fifteen, Jesse, seventeen, and they don’t need much to get woozy, to stretch out on the duff after a grueling day, to watch treetops spin riotously. Suddenly, venomously, Jesse shouts: We got to change the world, Henry. Henry laughs. He is nearly cross-eyed looking at two moons shimmyshuffle over a patch of black sky. I mean it. I truly do. Okay, says Henry. Okay. The brothers sober up a little under the weight of that pledge. Harlem, Henry. There’s a place in New York called Harlem. That’s where we should be. Henry spools Harlem through his tipsy brain and says, Just us? Jesse rolls over, a hand cupped at his mouth, and leans in to deliver a secret to his brother’s ear.
Henry, you awake? Henry? The White woman who changes his sheets sits in a chair wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, a mound of clean bedclothes in her lap. Henry drags a hand across the corner of his mouth where gummy spittle has gathered. Oh, hell, he mumbles. Help me up then. How about, she says, we go outside for some air and maybe you could finish your story from Monday. Henry Noble laughs. He has no idea what story he started Monday that needs finishing. He has no idea when Monday was or what today is. What he knows is that it’s going to rain. The woman follows his gaze to the blackening sky and tells him that on second thought it might be too cold. She says, Right here will have to do. Then she says, But first. With a flourish, her hand disappears into the folded linens and out comes a small, cardboard box tied with a yellow silk ribbon. Henry’s eyes brim with confusion. Her laugh is just like Jesse’s, joyful as a sparrow; not at all complicated like Henry’s. It’s a gift, Henry. I can’t come by tomorrow, so I brought it today. She leans over and places the box on his lap. Happy day before your one hundred and fifth birthday.
For a moment they are quiet. The wind in the eaves, the hum of oxygen; and an old woman’s wail far down the hall: Take me home, oh please take me home.
Henry raises his bed another notch and chuckles: A hundred and five? Time’s fun when you’re having flies. She says, Did you just quote Kermit the Frog? She has such a fine laugh, this woman. Nope, he says. Greenie cribbed it from me. He cannot remember the last time anyone gave him a gift. He cannot think what this White woman who showed up one day out of thin air to change his sour sheets could have brought him that he might need. Or want. The touch of her hand at the back of his elbow coaxes his arm; his big hand floats forward; crooked fingers pull the ribbon’s end.
It falls away like petals on a primrose.
In the early morning hours of his seventeenth birthday, Henry Noble wakes with a sensation of doom. He jerks up in the bed he shares with Jesse, but where Jesse should be is cool as glass. The squeal of the woodstove door, the whump of wood shoved in, the clang of the iron poker – and voices: Anger? Agony? He sprints lightfooted to the end of the hall and peers through the dim living room to the lamp-lighted kitchen. A half-dozen Nobles surround his brother who is naked but for his flour-sack undershorts. His left eye is swollen, nearly shut; a gash on his forehead pulses blood down the length of his cheek, his chest, leg, floor. Nothing makes sense. A low keening rises from Jesse’s throat and his body quakes and his head jerks each time Henry’s grandmother dabs at the wound with a rag gone red. Oh Lord Jesus God in heaven, she moans, while Henry’s mother laces her fingers and weeps. Their uncle Jasper, a victim of lightning, cries to the ceiling: L-l-l-lynch us all, b-b-b-burn the place down and l-l-l-lynch us all. And Jasper’s boys, Henry’s cousins, both in their early twenties, curse Jesse, curse Reba Sue, curse their Maker and shake their heads in growing alarm.
Amid this nightmarish spectacle, Henry’s father says nothing. Feet and back bare; yesterday’s workpants thrown on in haste. In the lamplight, his shoulder blades shine with sweat. The stoker of woodstove flames. A twist of the poker, a quick jab. The last remnants of bloody overalls vanish in the belly of fire. The eyes in the back of his head find Henry: Get your brother some clothes. He’s got a train to catch before sunrise.
From the cardboard box, Henry gently extracts his gift – an old photograph peeling around the edges, as though it has never found a home in the sleeve of an album, as though it has been passed, hand to hand, down through the years, cherished. On the bottom right corner, the photographer’s stamp: L&M Studio, Tuskegee, AL – 1942. Henry sees none of this without his glasses. But even without his glasses, he knows the man in the picture.
Jesse’s good eye goes wide. Train? What train? Where am I going? To the cousins, Henry’s father says, Go find that Pretlow boy’s body, haul it as far into the hills as you can, bury it so deep it’ll never be found. To Jesse he says, Alabama. He says, They got a New Deal program. He says, You’ll go plant trees till your arms fall off. After that enlist. Silence gathers and falls like ashes. Then: Be best if you don’t find your way back here.
The gift rests in Henry’s palm. It’s Jesse all right. And it strikes Henry just then that his brother seems to be dressed in the same service uniform as the picture on his nightstand, the picture from Italy, 1944, the Negro section on the American base.
Jesse? Henry? Oh Lord, look at you. Got myself into the Tuskegee Army Air Corps, Jesse says, the 332nd Fighter Group. Henry laughs and claps his brother on the back. A pilot? Since when do they let the Negroes fly the planes? Says he’s proud of him, admits he’s support staff with the 370th, just a driver running a deuce-and-a-half loaded with supplies to the front lines or wherever they’re needed. That sounds about right, brother – you save lives, I end them. Smile, flash, click. They hug fiercely. They promise to keep in touch, to reunite after all these years. Not now, though. Back home. After the war. Salute. Salute.
Outside the clouds split open and spill rain. Thunder cracks like artillery. The woman retrieves Henry’s glasses and places them on his face. Now he can see clearly – Jesse’s crooked grin, dark eyes filled with promise, mottled scar across his forehead like a retold story. And someone else? Henry draws the photograph closer. He examines it with parted lips and creased brow. A young White woman. Pink as a new rabbit, sun-freckled, sun-dappled. And in her arms is a blanket. And in the blanket, a tiny baby. Henry can hardly breathe.
All week he has been bump bump bumping along on the old Wallis Cub tractor, acres yet to go. They cannot afford the new FergusonBrown, one with hydraulics and a three-point hitch. Instead, at the end of each row, it is up to Henry to get off the Cub, raise up his three-furrow plow, climb back on, make the turn, get off again, drop the plow back in the soil and proceed down the next row. The year his father sent Jesse away, he fashioned a hoisting contraption to make the job easier; it is still tedious. The engine growls; the blades rattle. Bump bump bump. Abutting this field is another – a sea of cornstalks ready for harvest. He reaches the end of his row. The pale green light of the cornfield shimmers. Stalks sway; leaves rustle. As though two young brothers hide, chase, eat raw corn until their bellies groan. An echo of laughter light as mist. In his chest an ember smolders and the searing pain of Jesse’s absence flares. He gets off the tractor, lifts the plow, and like a wraith Reba Sue Pretlow steps out of the corn. A stopped heart; a seized breath. It is her and not her. This version is taller. Thinner. Childhood features all but gone. In her hair, flutter strands of corn silk.
You’re all grown up, Henry. Somewhere, I suppose Jesse is too.
At the sound of her voice the years turn to quicksand.
Do you think of him?
All the time, he whispers.
Do you miss him?
All the time.
They fall quiet. Rooted to the ground. No wind. No crows. Only a single white butterfly swims wide circles in the morning light between them. He wants to tell her of the hole in his soul, that it will never heal, that she is to blame. He is glad just then that he says none of this.
They believe, she confides, that my brother ran away with an Indian woman. They say Jesse’s somewhere planting trees. They never put the two together. Where is he, Henry? Not here in Virginia.
It’s been such a while. I don’t. I mean I doubt –
Please. Oh please tell me.
It is as though every molecule of oxygen has left the world. Never breathe a word, Henry, not a word. The pooling in her eyes; her quivering lip. His gaze falls to his feet, to the freshly cut clumps with upended green grass now dying by the blade of his plow.
Alabama, he breathes.
The rattling stalks. The gentle ticking of the leaves. Only corn now. Corn and the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains quiet as a graveyard.
Jagged light scorches the sky. The lamp on his nightstand flickers, dims, restores. Words fall from his lips like stones: This baby? The White woman who changes his sheets and pries stories from his lips takes his hand. Jesse’s daughter, she smiles. My grandmother.
Hours later Henry lies awake on clean sheets. He has refused dinner, swallowed his pills, assured the young attendant he does not want his bed lowered just yet – there are things to think about. How long has it been since he has had such a bone as this to chew on? Years? Decades? Never? The wall clock insists it is minutes before midnight. On the television a man in a yellow rain slicker stands in front of the Food Lion and reports on the storm. Henry laughs. Outside his window the storm reports on itself. You left off, she’d said, with a flood that almost cost the farm. Their hands still clasped and him nodding, I remember now, I remember. Everything aches. He can feel the rumble of an eighteen-wheeler trudge past on the highway; then it is gone. Rain clatters. Wind gusts. Relentless.
When the Rapidan River climbs her banks and sweeps over farms along the old state route, Henry is in his seventh year. He stands on a berm and watches his father survey the destruction. Tin-colored air smells of sour soil and reeks of dead fish stranded in barns, on roads, under porches. Up ahead Jesse is transfixed by a rope of flesh dangling from the beak of a turkey vulture. In the middle of the field, his father paces, mud to his calves, arms limp. Lost, he cries, and waves of fear roll off him, crippling, caustic. In Henry’s young heart, a dark glee coils: Maybe now we can move to town. Just then he spies movement, a glancing prism. He crouches. In a puddle no bigger than a dinner plate, a young trout looks at him through its startled, glassy eye. Its gills open and close in desperate pulses. Minutes later it is still.
Wednesday mornings they lug baskets to town. Get off the walkway, their mother scolds, and they leap into the street until the White folks pass. A rap at the back door of a lovely brick home. The next back door. The next. Fresh laundry exchanged for soiled. Their mother takes what’s offered. If not money – a bag of buttons, a glass bird, a piece of chocolate cake. By the time they finish supper, the cake is a sticky mess. Henry’s grandmother goes first. When it gets to Jesse, he drops his fork and runs. Henry’s mouth waters; tears cloud his eyes. All day he has dreamt of this cake. He sets his fork with Jesse’s and follows his brother out to the woods, the still, the pledge. We got to change the world, Henry
In soft lamplight, at the kitchen table, each evening before bed, they learn to read. Their mother waves a wooden spoon and whaps them on the shoulder if they bungle a word. Henry traces his finger along a verse in Isaiah and labors, But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Now Jesse, says their mother, spoon hovering and ready. But Jesse’s voice is sure and steady, resonant, musical in Psalms. They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.
Humid nights they sleep on the porch. They drowse on cots and listen to a ruffed grouse drum his wings five miles deep in the woods. Insects chirr. The moon winks between passing clouds. Henry stirs from a dim sleep to the sound of feathery footfalls and the tender laugh of a girl. From the edge of the porch, he tracks their silhouettes until they are swallowed by shadows. Hours past midnight: a whiff of river grass and sweat, the whisper of a rustling cot. It feels as though a roving devil has slowed and turned its face in their direction.
That was a couple years before Alabama, he had told her. And my remembrance after Alabama is like broken glass. But then the war arrived. If we could prove our worth overseas, wouldn’t things change for us here? I knew Jesse would sign on. For me it was as much to escape the farm as anything else.
I forbid it, says his father. But Henry is twenty-three and has lied to the White recruiter. No he is not the last of his line. Yes he has six younger brothers at home right now. They examine his eyes, his teeth, his feet. They draw blood. Can he read? Write? Yes, yes. Exams are taken and graded. Papers stamped – Colored. Twenty hours later he boards a Jim Crow rail car with a hundred other Negroes and watches the Blue Ridge Mountains shrink to nothing.
The horror. White, Black, Brown. When covered with blood, men are men. Limbs with no bodies, bodies with no heads, faces erased, burned, unrecognizable. Henry drives his truck from the base to the front lines to the base to the front lines, and each morning at reveille, this is in his mouth: Lord, bring me back alive, dead if I’m maimed.
May 1945. Henry comes home on a Liberty ship and boards a Jim Crow rail car with ninety-one other Negroes. Nothing has changed. Don’t wear your uniform, someone says, they’ll tear it off you. And don’t dare swim in the public pool, says someone else. Don’t drink from the White only fountain or try to eat in restaurants or sit anywhere but the balcony or in the back or outside in the alley. Vote? snarls the conductor. Who do you think you are? The victory overseas does not equate to a victory at home. Nothing has changed. Not a goddamn thing has changed.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Seasons progress in a ceaseless spectacle of color and weather and memory. Sixteen hours a day, sometimes eighteen – the farm is a kind of hell. On her deathbed, his grandmother says, Don’t cry, Henry. Living is the hard part. Death is easy: Claim your sins, forget your sorrows, count your blessings. Welcome to the hereafter.
He is angry at Jesse. Jesse the pilot. The maker of pledges. Jesse who has not contacted him. Who has not reunited with him. Who is probably in Harlem or Chicago or DC doing important things with important people – We got to change the world, Henry – while Henry is left behind, laboring miserably in his father’s fields. After months of writing the wrong letter to the wrong people, asking about Jesse Isaiah Noble of the Tuskegee Air Corps, 332nd Fighter Group, USAAF, and receiving not a word, Henry, at last, mails the right letter to the right person and two weeks later his world goes dark.
With the heels of his hands he wrings tears from his eyes. He slips on his glasses to find hardly any time has passed. Three minutes to midnight. He’d love to press the button, ask the young attendant to up the morphine. But as it is he is having trouble breathing and he knows she’ll make a fuss. He clicks off the TV. The night pours in through the window. Sins, sorrows, blessings. Fallen leaves scattered across the floor.
Years pass. A thousand times he has read the Missing Aircrew Report and the We regret to inform you letter until two words swim off the pages and lodge themselves onto the underside of his eyelids: REMAINS UNRECOVERED. On a Sunday afternoon, in his thirtyfourth year, he sits in a field of brown grass. He sets the report and the letter on fire and waits for the ashes to settle. He pries a rock from the body of the earth, gives it a name, returns it to its grave. This one’s Jesse Noble.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Sometimes a jook in the back of nowhere, Delta Blues, a hand of cards. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes two. An able-bodied man, a crippled soul. Plow, sow, harvest, church. Plow, sow, harvest, church.
The storm surged and lulled. The afternoon stretched. At some point she had moved to the edge of his bed and reclaimed his hand. All those years, he had said. Fallow. I don’t know why I stayed. Guilt? Fear? A thousand times I packed a bag and a thousand times I emptied it. Jesse had been dead about ten years. I hadn’t hit forty yet, but I could smell it coming. And then in 1955 a terrible thing happened. It was August . . .
A fourteen-year-old boy leaves Chicago for Money, Mississippi, and comes home to his mother in a pine box. The world rocks on its axis. Henry feels as if someone has dropped a live grenade in his lap. No bag, no goodbye, he shakes the dust off his feet. In Chicago he weeps over the open casket, the brutalized lamb, a sight more horrific than any in the war. At the funeral he bows his head. At the gate he remembers a forgotten pledge.
In Ohio every odd job means money for food; money to send home to his father. In New York writers, singers, painters, philosophers, great and powerful activists – Muslim and Christian, Marxist and Progressive, militant and peaceful – baptize him into the struggle. In DC, his first demonstration, The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, he learns of a ruling called Brown v. Board of Education. He is one of thirty thousand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. One of a million to hear the first national address by Martin Luther King, Jr.
It takes him four tries to get into law school. He is the oldest student they have. Are you saying, he had challenged the Admissions Committee, I’m too old to change the world?
Work, school, protest, church. He volunteers with others to sit at lunch counters and wait respectfully to be harassed, beaten, jailed or all three. In time they are served.
In Alabama a bus is burned. Henry cries Count me in. When the jails are near bursting, Parchman makes room to Break their spirits, not their bones. But the Freedom Riders do not break, and at last the Interstate Commerce Commission does. Every hateful sign comes down. Yet hate stubbornly persists. In a cell on death row, next to a “convicted murderer,” something akin to a crisis in faith pierces Henry’s soul: no march, no sit-in, no demonstration, will ever change the heart of a racist. No sir, says the “murderer,” heart-changing is for God and time. Laws, justice, equality – do that. And when you get to lawyering, think of the fair trial I never got. The one that a million others won’t get. In forty-one days Henry is released. In seven months the “murderer” suicides. Upon his grave Henry lays seashells, and around the shells he plants rows of periwinkle. I will. I will.
And I did, he whispers. Trials – more won than lost. Overturned death row convictions – more than expected but never enough. A thousand Black faces whorl through his mind. A thousand mothers. Alone, pain migrating through his bones, a frenzied storm, and a clock that says a minute to midnight, Henry Jeremiah Nobel sighs.
At an NAACP convention, his law professor makes introductions. 93 Merle McCurdy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy. A pleasure. A pleasure. Later a man called Robert L. Carter drops a warm hand on Henry’s shoulder. When you graduate, get in touch, hear?
In Birmingham he attends sit-ins and meetings and boycotts designed to undermine Jim Crow. He is slammed with a high-pressure fire hose and attacked by police dogs. Like everyone else, weeks later – King in a cell penning Letter from Birmingham Jail – Henry goes back for more. The world looks on. In sorrow. In outrage. That’s me, he tells his current lover. That leg with the dog hanging off it. The effect of images broadcast nationwide galvanizes the world.
The Lincoln Memorial – two hundred fifty thousand souls March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and listen with ardent hope to the noble, heartfelt I Have a Dream. Tears stream. The applause is deafening. Oh Jesse.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed, he is eating pie where he once held a sit-in.
One Bloody Sunday, Henry is not in church. He is on a fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the gunning down of Jimmie Lee Jackson, ongoing police brutality, and the outrageous violations of civil rights. Mere blocks from the start, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they are gassed, trampled by horses, beaten unconscious, whipped, hospitalized. The courts, the National Guard, the President get involved. Two weeks later they march unmolested those fifty miles, twenty-five thousand strong. On the steps of the capital Dr. King calls out, How Long, Not Long.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: What is he doing? Studying the 15th Amendment for class.
It takes seven years to graduate. Cap and gown. Magna Cum Laude. The woman he lives with is already a lawyer. She helps him study for the bar. She is on a first-name basis with Stokely, Bobby, Huey – and Malcolm before he was assassinated. It is a Long Hot Summer. Race riots erupt all across America. Break time, she says and they head for Detroit. Tear gas, bullets, bombs in bottles. She is armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic. He is armed with a pledge. In the war zone they get separated; tanks roll in. He prays she is not among the dead. Weeks later a letter arrives: Dear Henry, ship my things to this address. It is an apartment in Los Angeles. I’m glad you are alive, he pens. On a cold Tuesday in September he passes the bar. I will, he assures his mother and father, never give up.
In a crowded bar, under a veil of smoke, he drops change in a jar on the piano; his eyes meet hers as her fingers walk the keys and she cries, Strange Fruit, blood on the leaves in a voice that drips with blood. He walks out into the night and sees the road is paved with bodies. Centuries of lynchings, decades of executions. Stolen treasure. Funerals, flowers, tears.
Another surge. Another lull. She had kissed his hand and then his cheek. The photograph, she left on his lap.
Outside his window no bigger than a bible, silence has fallen. Sins claimed, sorrows forgotten, blessings counted. He can hear the hiss of oxygen, the drip of the IV. Somewhere far away, church bells ring midnight and all three hands on his clock point up. Clouds part for a sliver of moonlight and shadows crowd the room. I kept the pledge, he murmurs. Jesse smiles. Did you know you have a greatgranddaughter? And I have a great-grandniece? From miles away, he can hear orthopedic shoes on cracked linoleum racing down the hall. Jesse, he whispers.

---

Susan A.H. Grace’s work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Fiction International, and Orca Literary Journal.

THE WRESTLER by Christie Hodgen

The last time I saw my brother was in the spring of ’96, down in New Orleans, the week after Mardi Gras. He had summoned me with a letter, addressed in a script so lazily drawn I was amazed anyone had been able to read it. The envelope was wrinkled and scuffed, as if it had been dropped on the floor of a bus station and trampled by the masses before it was finally picked up and deposited in a mailbox by some unseen, benevolent hand. Holding the envelope, I had the feeling, as I always did where Jude was concerned, that the contact we had managed to make was something close to a miracle, or a whole series of miracles: that he had thought to write in the first place, that he had found a sheet of paper and an envelope and a pen and even a stamp, not to mention the letter’s safe passage through the many hands of the US Postal Service. And in fact something of this theory proved true when I read the letter and found that several weeks had passed between the time Jude had written it, and the time it arrived. “I wonder if maybe you might want to come down for Mardi Gras,” it read, though we were already well into Lent. “Your average day is like a party here, so I’m kind of curious to find out what happens when they really throw one.” The letter went on to describe Jude’s situation: the room he rented, the crawfish restaurant he worked at in the French Quarter. “I’m clean and making enough money to live on and have a few friends,” he wrote, which was the best he’d had to say for himself in the eight years since he’d left home. Jude continued for two pages about NOLA, as he called it, the people and places that had caught his eye. What he liked most, he concluded, the thing that kept him tied to the city – he’d been there nine months already, the longest he’d spent anywhere since leaving home – was the music. “There’s no better city in the world for music. Any given moment you might encounter a full brass band just walking down the street. ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ that type of thing. O, Glory,” he wrote. “Glory fucking hallelujah.”
I stood reading this letter in the foyer of my fraternity house, in a sort of trance. All around me, young men I’d been encouraged to think of as my brothers were rushing past, in and out. It was a Friday morning, and they were all getting ready to leave for spring break, for the shores of Cancun and Fort Lauderdale, where they planned to get wasted and lure wasted girls to have sex with them on the beach. One brother, a rugby player and part-time male model whom I’d long hated, bumped me with a duffel bag so big it almost knocked me over, but I didn’t care. I only got a letter from Jude once or twice a year, and whenever one arrived, I read it over and over, carried it around with me, thought of little else besides his new life in whatever place he’d landed. Usually I started composing a reply right away, but this time was different – this was the first time he’d ever suggested I come visit him. My head was spinning with plans, how I’d get down to New Orleans, how to find Jude when I got there. I drifted away from the foyer and walked up two flights of stairs to my room, staring at the letter, no longer reading it, really, but keeping an eye on it.
Upstairs my roommate, Schmidt, was doing pushups in his underwear, grunting and counting. He devoted nearly every free moment of his life to building what he liked to call the temple of his body. Schmidt was short, like me, and had been chubby when we met – he looked uncannily like Big Boy, the fat-faced mascot with the crested wave of dark hair and the hamburger platter raised high over his head – but unlike me he’d spent the last four years weight training and was now short, but absurdly muscled. He was always carrying around a plastic tumbler, gulping down protein shakes; much of his conversation was dedicated to reenacting his sessions at the gym, miming how he struggled under a bar loaded with weights, his arms shaking, until someone spotted him at the last second before his muscles failed. He talked a lot about his performance and what was stopping him from leveling up. Periodically he’d quit drinking for a few weeks, claiming his muscles needed to purify themselves before they could grow again, but then he’d fall off the wagon and drink until he passed out. Junior year he’d woken up one morning with a tattoo of Porky Pig on his back, which he claimed to have no memory of getting. It was sometimes hard to take Schmidt seriously, knowing the things I knew about him, especially with the pig on his shoulder, wearing a jacket and no pants. But then again I was sort of afraid of him, afraid of the person he might become and the power he might one day wield. Schmidt had a single goal in life and that goal was to be a US Senator.
I started walking around him, picking clothes off the floor and stuffing them in a backpack.
“Dude,” he said. “Wanna hit the gym?” He was always trying to get me to go to the gym with him. The last time we’d gone, we played squash for about fifteen minutes until a ball hit me so hard in the throat I fell over and puked.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m heading out of town.”
“Oh,” he said. He stopped with his pushups and sat up. “You taking Weezy?” He referred to the stuffed dog I’d brought with me to college, a football-sized, rust-colored terrier with matted fur that had once been Jude’s. I’d been careful to keep her in a suitcase under my bed so no one would see her, but one day I’d come home to find Schmidt asleep with Weezy’s snout tucked under his chin, his arms tight around her. I’d ripped the dog out from under him, but by the way he looked at me I could tell he had developed, even in his brief time with her, a genuine affection for Weezy – it pained him to have her taken away. “Mind if I,” he asked now, “you know, take care of her for you?”
The dog was a secret between us. When either one of us was downcast, or unsure about the future, which was pretty much every day at that point in our lives, we took her out of the suitcase and lay in bed with her, and moments later, we felt, she had lifted our sorrows. We believed she had a supernatural power to absorb the kinds of dark thoughts that clouded other people’s minds – self-doubt and insecurity, guilt, fear – and that this power would help set us apart from the rest of our brothers, our classmates, in fact the rest of our generation. Beyond our room, we were two ambitious young men – we were both at the top of our class, had both aced the LSAT, were both heading to law school. But in this small room at the end of the hallway of our fraternity house, we recognized in one another the same weakness.
“I’m just saying I could use, you know,” Schmidt said, “I’m having kind of a hard time.”
I thought about it. Schmidt was one of the few kids in our school who didn’t come from money – he was from West Virginia, descended from hill people, as he called them – and this had always endeared him to me. Though he was working toward ridding himself of the traces of his upbringing, he retained a slight hillbilly accent, saying “ah” instead of “I,” and he responded too quickly to all that was going on around him, like a prairie dog popping out of its hole, turning this way and that, nervous, defensive; he didn’t yet know how money behaved, that it made its own rules and kept its own leisurely pace, that it answered to no one. I decided I could be merciful and let him keep Weezy for a few days. It was Jude who I believed was the source of Weezy’s power, and I was driving to see him, so I didn’t really need the dog.
“Don’t take her out of the room,” I said.
“Except on walks,” he said.
“And lay off the cologne.” Part of my belief system regarding Weezy was that she had a smell I associated with Jude, bits of skin and sweat and soul rubbed off him during all the nights he’d slept with her as a kid, and I didn’t want Schmidt covering it over with his Polo.
“Sure thing, brother.”
I packed up my bag and made my way out to my car, trying to calculate how long the trip would take, not only the actual mileage but also the time I would spend on the side of the road with the hood propped open. My car had belonged to my father back when he was in college, at the very school I was attending now, and was in the final days of its useful life. It was prone to overheating and shuddered as it approached the speed limit on highways. I supposed the odds of the car making it to New Orleans weren’t great. On top of that, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was going – Highway 59 would take me there, was all I knew – and just shy of one hundred dollars in cash stuffed in the pocket of my jeans. That was pretty much all I had in the world, the sum total of insurance I had against whatever accident or misfortune I might encounter. But I was young and didn’t worry too much about these things.
On the way out of town I passed the Sunshine Motel, where I had planned to spend the break isolated in a room, as a subject in a flu study – something I’d done every spring break since the start of college. It was a ritual I had almost come to enjoy, reporting to this sad motel alongside the two-lane highway that wound through the mountains to our campus, standing in a long line of all the relatively poor kids – or in my case, rich kids whose fathers refused, in the name of character-building, to give them any sort of allowance – at our incredibly rich school, each of us hunched under the weight of our backpacks, stuffed to the brink with the school work we needed to catch up on, clutching our pillows to our stomachs, waiting for our turn to be infected with the virus. I suppose one of the things I liked about the flu study was that nobody cared what you looked like, no one was even trying anymore. We were all still in pajamas, fleece pants with cartoon characters printed on them, sweatshirts with the name of our college emblazoned across the chest. Our college was special, it was always telling us in its promotional materials, and we were special for going there, but any kind of pretention or ambition fell apart in the flu line. We were all silent, watching the front of the line, as each subject stepped forward and signed a long contract they hadn’t read. I’d skimmed it once – my father was a lawyer – and noted that it absolved the study of any wrongdoing in the event I developed any illness at all, but specifically brain or kidney cancer. After we signed our contracts we lay on our backs on a hospital bed, right in front of everyone, and submitted to transmission, which involved a nurse standing over us and dropping a foot-long vial of red liquid slowly down our noses. I suppose for our benefit, an absurd amount of care was taken to make the whole thing seem professional. The nurses were dressed in old-fashioned white uniforms, with white hosiery and white clogs, even peaked white hats. Behind the nurses, someone from middle management, usually a stout woman in an illfitting pantsuit, stood making notes on a clipboard. We were given a key and sent to our rooms, which we weren’t allowed to leave for six days, and then we suffered. Twice a day a nurse arrived to take our vitals and deliver us a sampling of bright capsules in pleated paper cups. The nurse would watch as we took our pills – they were purple and kidney-shaped one year, I remember – then ask us to lift our tongues to prove we’d swallowed them. One year a nurse who came to check my temperature, which was 104, stroked my forehead and said, “You remind me of my son. I wish you wouldn’t do these kinds of things to yourself, it’s not really worth it.” Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was the fever talking, some dream of the way I hoped to be treated by a mother. In any event, I did this each year for the sum of five hundred dollars, a fortune at the time.
What I was hoping to do with my week at the motel was to figure out what I should do with my life. I was set to graduate in two months, and was trying to decide whether to go to law school, or whether to throw away my future, as my father would have phrased it, to roam for a few years, to see if I might have some sort of higher calling. It was the classic battle between responsibility and curiosity, between security and the path less traveled, pugilists that had been battling in my mind for the last year. As far as my parents and teachers knew, my plan was to attend law school at the same university from which I was about to graduate, which would put me on exactly the same path my father had trod thirty years prior. Like him I would clerk for two judges during two consecutive summers, and like him I would work for the law review. Then I’d take a job at his firm in Philadelphia, first as an apprentice in white-collar criminal defense, then a junior partner, and finally partner, making close to a million dollars a year defending CEOs and gangsters. But within the last year, I had begun to consider the possibility that I might walk away from it all. At the tail end of our house’s parties, when we were all sitting around, stunned by alcohol, revealing what we thought were our innermost secrets, I spoke of roaming the country by rail, all my belongings tied up in a rag at the end of a stick, living like a monk, renouncing my inheritance like St. Francis. I would write a book, I thought, about the people I encountered, their habits and voices so keenly observed it would be the next great work of sociological observation, like Studs Turkel’s Working but for people who were out of work; Unemployed was the title I had planned. Mornings, when I woke from these drunken ramblings, I saw clearly that this was all a ruse, a foolish dream that would never materialize. But then again, the vision of a different life kept visiting me, dogged in its persistence, the closest thing to a spiritual calling I had ever experienced. My mother, who had briefly been a nun before marrying my father, was always talking about saints floating down from on high to guide people on their knees from grief or uncertainty. Visitations, she called them. I didn’t believe any of this, not really, but sometimes as I lay in bed, clutching Weezy, something like a vision would appear in my mind, a vision of myself walking through a field with a mountain range in the distance, and I could never say where it came from.
As I passed the Sunshine Motel it occurred to me that I was heading toward Jude and that, once reunited with him, I might never leave him – I might never come back to this town, even to graduate. As I regarded the motel’s sign – a bright square depicting a group of conifer trees with a yellow sun rising above them, a blue river unfurling between them – I felt as if I had crossed some sort of Rubicon. I was no longer a member of the system I’d been born into, was no longer bound by its rules. I was free.

I only wound up on the side of the road once, waiting for the engine to cool, and I used my time well, studying the map of the US my father kept in the glove compartment. The map was old, probably older than I was, and its ink was faded at the creases – entire cities had disappeared in the folds. A few hours later, when the city finally came into view, I saw it was much bigger than I had imagined, with highways looping and crossing every which way. I panicked but soon found there were signs directing traffic to the French Quarter – of course there were. If you drove slowly, which I couldn’t help but do, it wasn’t hard to get there.
I found my way to the right neighborhood and parked where I could, locked the car with a bit of trepidation. I always felt bad whenever I left my car on the street, like I was abandoning a wounded animal to defend itself. The car was so shitty, it almost seemed to invite abuse – someone would smash its windows, I thought, just because it was so ugly. The rusted paint, the bald tires, the not one but two missing hubcaps, the back fender that had partially separated from the body of the car. And then there was the inside – if you bothered to look through the window, you’d see that the vinyl seats were split in several places, with yellow foam springing out. A car like that was a bad omen, something people didn’t want on their street. Move along, you thought to yourself, when you saw a mess like that. Move along, now.
Then I was lost for a while on the streets of New Orleans. Bourbon Street was long, cross-hatched by a dozen or so side-streets, and I realized only then that a restaurant just off Bourbon, as Jude had described it, could be blocks down any one of them. I formed a system where I started at the east end of Bourbon, and walked two blocks south down one of its cross streets, then north for a few blocks up the next, and so on. People were wandering in groups, talking and laughing, and it occurred to me a few times to ask someone for help but I was, back then, governed by ideas of the way things ought to be done – ideas that had been formed by Hollywood movies in which men, through some combination of luck and virtue, made their own way in the world. In this particular scene, as I saw it, I would be walking down a street, casually, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my jeans, my backpack slung over one shoulder, and then would come a shining moment when I jerked my head back to swing the hair out of my eyes, and in looking up at just the right angle, I’d see the restaurant sign. I believed that finding Jude, without having known where I was going, was a test I could pass, that it would affirm my role in our brotherhood.
I became aware that it was getting later, well past the time when people would be eating dinner, and I began to wonder when restaurants closed for the night. Eventually, when I passed a phone booth, I had the idea to consult its directory – which compromised my sensibilities a bit but then again, it was getting late. I flipped through the restaurant section and confirmed within seconds that the crawfish restaurant Jude had mentioned, Chaplin’s, wasn’t in the directory. It probably didn’t even exist. Jude was fucking with me, I thought. He had probably sent me a letter just to be able to say he sent it, to slough off whatever guilt he might have been feeling at the moment. He’d probably been coming down from a high, feeling wistful, and I’d crossed his mind. But that was weeks ago. It was possible he wasn’t even living in New Orleans anymore. Any time he got low, any time he sensed the fun was over, he moved on.
A reel ran through my head of all the times my father had warned me about Jude. My father was a stern and unlikeable man, and it had always been painful for me to admit when he was right. But the truth was that Jude was a drug addict, and according to my father drug addicts said and did all kinds of things when they were desperate. They swore they were clean and wanted to see you, though what they really wanted was your money. They always needed money just this one last time, for groceries, for bus fare home, for bail, and they would lure you and trap you with their need. They claimed to love you, but they were incapable of loving anyone, because they were only out for themselves. If I was smart, my father told me, I’d stay away from Jude. I wouldn’t visit him, and if he ever came to visit me, I would shut the door in his face, because he wouldn’t be there to see me, he’d be there to rob me blind. I don’t know how many times my father had told me this, standing in the stereotypical posture of a man scolding a dog, one hand rooted at the hip, the other hand with a finger extended, pointing at me. It was the Nicene Creed of his individual church, a long prayer I’d memorized without even trying, simply by having sat in a room listening to it so often. He kept preaching it, I suppose, because he knew Jude was my weakness. I thought of what my father would say now: What did I tell you? How many times do I have to tell you?
I slouched out of the phone booth and realized I couldn’t quite figure out where I was in relation to my car – and worse, I hadn’t taken note of the street I’d parked on. I started walking halfheartedly in the direction I thought I’d come from. Overhead, people leaned from wrought-iron balconies, and their voices and laughter drifted over me. I’d been raised not only by a white-collar criminal defense attorney who suspected wrongdoing everywhere, but also a mother who was convinced that the power of collective prayer was the only thing offsetting the triumph of evil in the world – prayer and vigilance against sin. To my mother’s mind, sin was everywhere in our house, lurking beneath the beds, curled up in the cupboards and closets, waiting to pounce. And so everything in our house was ritually rummaged through, turned inside out and scoured. It occurred to me that New Orleans was the place where everything, every mote and scrap and crumb, had floated off to after it had been evicted from our household. Everything bright and colorful, everything fecund, everything fertile. All of the life that had been swept up and taken by the wind had settled here. A familiar feeling came over me, in fact the feeling that had defined my entire childhood: that all the fun in life was for other people.
I was in a dark mood, angry for being so stupid, driving all this way to find Jude, whose invitation – maybe you might want to come down for Mardi Gras – was so vague it obviously wasn’t even real, Jude whose most salient characteristic was that he didn’t want to be found, at least not by us, not his family. I started wondering if I could find the car and then stay awake long enough to make it back to Tennessee, and if I showed up at the motel for the flu study at dawn, bedraggled, repentant, whether they’d let me in. I could still make five hundred dollars. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that queen bed with its floral coverlet made from the same stiff material as an oven mitt. I wanted to sleep there, fitfully, for a whole week, and when my fever finally broke I would be burnished, clear-eyed, a man devoted to his own making.
It wasn’t long after this moment, which I considered to be an epiphany, that some instinct compelled me to look to my right, down a dark alley, and just as I’d imagined, I saw a neon sign depicting a top hat and a cane, with the name Chaplin’s arched over them. I renounced everything I had just concluded about Jude and myself, and in fact reversed it; I saw now that I was only steps away from Jude, who was a beautiful soul, brave in his wanderings, willing to take his chances so as to live life fully, really live it, without the security of a profession, wandering around in search of the people and stories and music that moved him, a loner, an artist, the greatest person I had ever known. If there was a single person I could launch into space as a representative of our species, I thought, it would be Jude, handsome and powerful, tragic, but with a quiet dignity, my brother. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to leave my former life behind, to toil in the kitchen beside Jude, to smell and hear and taste and touch everything he did.

I couldn’t figure out where I was, exactly, in terms of the aesthetics of Chaplin’s. It looked a little like a movie whose set had been designed by a handful of cinematographers fighting one another for supremacy. One of them wanted Chaplin’s to look like a medieval fortress, with a heavy wooden door with a rounded top that pulled open only with an uncomfortable amount of effort. Another director was after something like Arnold’s from Happy Days, with woodpaneled walls and a jukebox in the corner, rimmed in red neon. But because of a third director, the jukebox was playing Hank Williams and there was a bison head hanging on the wall, a man sitting alone at a table wearing a cowboy hat. And finally, in a far corner, apparently styled by some pornographer, a waitress was bent over a table, wiping it down, her white t-shirt cinched in a knot at her back, her cutoff jeans so short half her ass was hanging out. A red lace thong rode up above her shorts. I looked away. I was under the impression then that seeing a person’s underwear was an accidental breach of privacy we should all politely turn away from. That’s how young and stupid I was – I didn’t realize people did these things on purpose.
I chose a stool at the middle of the bar so that I could see through the small window behind it into the kitchen, where men were rushing around. I had a view of a giant stove topped with several pots of boiling water, tended to by a skinny man wearing a white t-shirt and white jeans and a long white apron. I watched him work, which gave me a bad feeling. I had never had a job like that and already knew I probably never would.
The bartender, who had her back to me and was wiping down the counter below the taps, asked me, without turning around, what I wanted to drink. I didn’t know what to say. “Is there like, a menu?” I asked. That’s when she turned around. “What you see is what you get,” she said. And jerked her head to indicate the taps and bottles lined behind them. She was an older woman who wore her long, silver hair in braids. She was wearing a white t-shirt with a suede vest over it, and generally gave off the impression of someone who ran a kitchen feeding cowboys. I could tell she was a person who didn’t tolerate bullshit, which was the type of person who scared me the most. All I had going for me was bullshit.
“Can I think about it?” I asked.
“Take your time,” she said. She turned away and started mixing a drink. I considered what to order as if on some kind of game show with a ticking clock – I had to come up with the right answer or I was going to be sent home. But I didn’t know much about drinking. My father drank a single Miller Lite on Friday evenings and had occasionally let me taste it, and in college, if I bought a drink, I drank that. But I couldn’t order a Miller Lite here because if Jude was in the kitchen, and happened to look out through the window and see me drinking what our father always drank, he would be disappointed. It would be the wrong note to strike.
The bartender turned and set a drink in front of me. “While you decide,” she said. The drink was a tumbler of pink bubbles with two cherries floating at the top, a Shirley Temple. I realized this was some sort of joke, a joke having to do with what I was wearing – jeans and a pink dress shirt, a blue blazer with brass buttons, loafers – and also having to do with my haircut, neatly shorn in back but grown out into a sort of blond wing that fell over my left eye. The drink was a joke, but the thing was, I loved Shirley Temples. I took a sip and set it down, then took another. I cupped it between my hands and stared into it. I wanted to eat the cherry but had a rule about saving it for the end, and another rule about not drinking anything too quickly. But then again I wanted to eat the cherry. I was lost in this sort of rapture, working out the problem of the Shirley Temple and how I was going to approach it, when the wrestler showed up and sat down next to me.
I still remember that first moment when, even before I saw him, I sensed the wrestler. It was one of those moments that reminds you that you’re an animal, a creature with basic instincts burrowed down beneath the scaffolding of your intellect and personality – burrowed but at the ready to run or pounce. When the wrestler approached from behind and reached to pull out the stool next to mine, I felt as if a cloud had passed over the sun, like some force of nature had swept in and changed the very climate of the room. At first it was just his arm, encased in a black leather sleeve, fringed. It didn’t quite brush against me, but still I could feel its power. It wasn’t a normal arm but rather, in length and circumference, closer to a leg, and something scrambled in my brain, trying to make sense of it, working out the calculus of what-sized body this arm might be attached to. When, still without quite looking at him, I perceived the basic outline of the rest of his frame, a chill went through me. Though he was only taking his seat, his girth was such that when he set his arms on the bar it felt like an act of aggression, an annexation of neutral territory.
“If you would be so good as to set me up with one of your finest hurricanes,” he said to the bartender. His voice was hoarse but his tone was light, a bit mocking, as if he were speaking in italics. The way he spoke made it clear that he was aware of a certain irony, that a giant ordering a hurricane in a crawfish restaurant in the manner of an Englishman speaking to a butler had an element of the absurd about it.
The bartender turned to face a machine behind her that was swirling with orange liquid. She pulled a lever and the drink dropped in plunks into a giant plastic cup. When she set it in front of the wrestler he wriggled his fingers. “A perfect specimen,” he said. Still with the voice. He took a sip, then started drumming his fingers on the bar. He regarded the TV for a moment, a ball game between the Celtics and Lakers, playing out on a small set next to the hurricane machine. He plucked a peanut out of a little bowl in front of us and crushed it between his teeth. Then, still staring at the TV, he said, “Boston vs. LA.” This was his regular voice. His speech was plodding, and he had an accent I couldn’t place. In fact I wasn’t sure if it was an accent at all, or if his tongue was just too big for his mouth and he had trouble forming words. Maybe he was Austrian.
A moment later he said, “How’s it going, Shirley?”
It took a beat before I realized he was talking to me. “Okay,” I said. “How’s it, how’s it going with you?” I turned my head toward him and got a better look. His hair was bleached and appeared to be painstakingly crimped, falling past his shoulders in petrified waves. He had a broad, pink face and a nose that looked like it had been smashed flat one too many times. His eyes were pale blue and bloodshot. He looked like a man wearing a costume, one of those rubber heads you could pull on over your real head.
“It takes a real man,” he said, “to sit confidently in front of a Shirley Temple.”
“I’ve been training for years,” I said, and adjusted my glasses. It was a gesture I had worked up as part of a repertoire of self-mockery, a survival mechanism I understood myself to be in need of. I was short and wore tortoise-shell glasses and had a large, slanted nose, and the combination of these things – being relatively small and weak and set askew – tended to make a certain type of man want to punch me. My only shot in life was to make money, or to make people laugh. I knew this already.
“Give this kid a hurricane,” said the wrestler. “On me.”
“Thanks, man,” I said.
“Don’t get too full of yourself,” said the bartender, when she set the drink in front of me. “The Vampire himself just bought you a drink.”
“Oh,” I said. It dawned on me that I didn’t like sitting in bars. Everything had to be decoded. “Is that right,” I said to the wrestler, “you’re in, you’re in the vampire business?”
“I was,” he said.
“I always wondered how that worked,” I said. “The physics of it.”
“The physics of it,” he said, and laughed. “The physics of it I don’t think you’d understand.” He moved his arms and his jacket groaned.
“I just mean, like, how you can shrivel up and pack yourself into a bat.”
“He was a wrestler,” the bartender informed me. “That was his nom de plume, The Vampire.”
“It was my character,” he said.
“Remember?” she asked. “WWF?”
“He wouldn’t remember,” said the wrestler, softly. A shyness had come over him.
I opened my mouth to say something, I think I remember, but faltered – the wrestler wasn’t someone to bullshit, the bartender even less so.
“Remember Randy Savage?” he asked.
I nodded, though I think it was clear I didn’t. My face was blank.
“You mean to tell me,” the wrestler said, “you never heard of The Macho Man?”
“I have, I have,” I said. Though I couldn’t picture him. The only wrestler I could call to mind was Hulk Hogan, who had somehow transcended the cultural barriers of wrestling. I could picture his insanely tan and muscled body, his wide shoulders funneling to a slim waist, those yellow satin briefs, the bleached hair hanging limp from above his ears, his long blond mustache, and most of all his expression – the bulging eyes that conveyed a combination of anger and surprise. I could see all of this clearly, but other wrestlers were a blur to me.
“You’re sitting next to someone who was personally in the ring with The Macho Man,” the bartender said.
“I’m from Delaware,” I said. My logic was that most people didn’t know anything about Delaware – it was small and almost never in the news. So if people scanned their brains for something, anything about Delaware, they would come up empty, and by some sort of transitive property they would conclude that, just as they knew nothing of Delaware, people in Delaware knew nothing outside their own borders. At college in Tennessee, I had explained away my lack of knowledge on many subjects this way, and never had any trouble.
But it turned out the wrestler wasn’t so easy to fool. “They don’t have television in Delaware?”
“They do,” I said. “But there’s just one and we all have to share it.”
He let out a single note resembling a laugh. “This kid,” he said.
Then none of us knew what to say. I had a feeling that I was representing the youth of today, and that my lack of knowledge about wrestling confirmed some dark suspicion in the wrestler’s mind – he was washed up and not only that, faded from memory. The air was filled with disappointment.
I sipped my drink. My eyes kept going between the TV and the little window behind the bar. There was a great clanging from the kitchen. I could see only one slice of it, the giant pot of boiling water and the man standing in front of it. I watched as over and over again the man dumped a metal basket full of crawfish into the pot, then dug them out. This seemed to be his entire job. When he dumped in a basket of fish, steam rose up and overtook his whole head. I had the idea that he could make money off of rich white women by telling them a crawfish facial was beneficial for their skin – he could make them do his job for him, and charge money. He could make millions and not have to stand over a boiling pot for the rest of his life. I was always trying to think of ways people could make millions of dollars and stop doing whatever it was they were doing. I had scenes like this built up for all kinds of complete strangers, ways they could escape the lives they were trapped in, though I couldn’t imagine the same thing for myself with any kind of convincing detail. In my vision of the future, the future I might live if I walked away from law school, I was just lumbering down the side of a road, with nothing particular in sight.
The ballgame cut to commercial, and the wrestler asked me who I was rooting for.
“I don’t really know,” I said. “I guess if I’m being honest, I’d like it if they both lost.”
He laughed again. “Jesus,” he said. “For a kid your size, you’re kind of a ballbuster.” He held out his hand and I shook it. He could have crushed my fingers, but he was careful not to.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and I told him. I never liked telling anyone my name, which was so old fashioned it suggested I was a person whose only hope was tradition, the kind that protected the rich and excluded everyone else, which happened to be true.
“Bernard?” he asked. “That’s a tough draw.”
I shrugged.
“Do you go by a nickname?”
“Bernie, I guess?” I said.
“That kind of makes it worse,” he said.
“I know.”
“Your parents stick you with that for, like, family reasons?”
“Sort of,” I said. “In a way. I’m named after Saint Bernard.” It was hard to explain to an outsider how Saint Bernard was a family member. But Bernard was my mother’s favorite saint, a Benedictine with a balls-to-the-wall quality about him – he was a big fan of the Crusades. Even though he lived in the 12th century, he was like family to my mother. The saints were more alive to her than most people she could see and touch.
“You’re named after a Saint Bernard?” said the wrestler.
“Not the dog,” I clarified.
“Hey, Sally,” he said to the bartender. “Can we hook this kid up with a little,” he gestured at his throat. “A little barrel of whiskey?”
They both started laughing, and couldn’t stop. As soon as they collected themselves, they’d take one look at me and start laughing again.
“Sorry,” said the wrestler, wiping tears from his eyes. “It’s just a good image.”
“Understood,” I said.
“If you were a different type of person, it wouldn’t be so funny.”
“I know,” I said.
“So, what do you do back there in Delaware?” He was trying to be nice because he felt bad for laughing at me, but he couldn’t quite collect himself. “I mean, when you’re not rescuing people stranded by an avalanche.”
“I don’t live there anymore,” I said. “Not really. I’m in college.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s the right move for someone like you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“What are you studying?”
“Pre-law,” I said. “I think that’s, I think that’s the direction I’d like to go in.”
“You already look like a lawyer.”
“I was born wearing this blazer,” I said. “I didn’t really have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” he said, suddenly serious. “You think I grew up wanting to be a wrestler? Or a bodyguard, which is what I do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, maybe?” He was so huge nothing else made sense. I tried to picture him as a museum docent. When someone got too close to a sculpture he’d split his blazer like The Hulk, rage around, accidentally bump paintings off the walls.
“I was in the army,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, I’m a pacifist.”
“It’s true,” said the bartender. She was always listening, I was starting to figure out, even if she didn’t seem to be, even as she tended to the other customers who came and went, or set up a tray for the waitress with the thong. “I’d trust him with a baby,” she added. I tried to imagine that, too, but it didn’t go anywhere good. I imagined him picking up a bundle in a blanket and popping it like bubble wrap.
“The army,” he said, “everything’s defined for you. There’s no art to it. You’re just part of a machine.”
I nodded as if I knew
“They tell you to shoot something and you shoot it. There’s no discretion. There’s no humanity.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“That’s why I prefer martial arts. Any kind of martial art, even wrestling, it’s more about mind than body. It’s about how nimble your mind is,” he mused. “In my opinion, everyone should practice wrestling. Because it trains you in a certain way of thinking.” His voice was so strained, and he spoke with such effort, it was like someone was strangling him as he talked. I wondered if his larynx had been crushed in the ring, or his brain damaged, or both. “You have to know how to turn a situation around to your favor. You’re moving, yes, but you’re always thinking.” He tapped his temple. “You have to think on your feet.”
“Working behind a bar,” said the bartender, “does the same thing.”
“That’s right,” the wrestler said. “Because you’re in the real world here. The real world is an arena, a battlefield, but you know how to handle it.”
“But the ring,” I said, venturing too far, I supposed, “the wrestling ring isn’t exactly, I mean the whole point is, it’s cordoned off from the real world, it’s like, elevated on a stage and glorified and surrounded with ropes, it’s like an arranged conflict.” I was trying to avoid saying wrestling was fake, even though that was basically what I was saying. I was excited, suddenly.
“Have you ever taken a vertical suplex?” the wrestler asked. “Have you ever personally had a man slingshot you over his head onto your back?”
“Well, no,” I said.
“Do you think you could come within an inch of snapping your neck, and afterwards say it was an arranged conflict?” He had a look in his eye I’d only seen once before, when my mother had slapped Jude for saying Jesus wasn’t the son of God, but a regular man, a cult leader.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “Exactly.”
“It’s choreographed, surely,” he said. “But every man in that ring, you must believe me, every man in that ring knows he could walk in on his own feet and ten minutes later be carried out on a stretcher.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“There’s an amount of finesse involved.”
I sort of winced.
“Do you know what you need?” he asked.
“I don’t, I don’t think I do.”
“I’m very serious, I think this might help you in your legal endeavors.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “what?”
“What you need is a little repertoire.” I wondered what kind of repertoire the wrestler had in mind, and a second later he showed me – he stood up and put me in a headlock. My neck fit underneath his armpit as if it had been born and bred only for that purpose. My face was squashed against him. I could smell the leather of his jacket and underneath that, his cologne, which smelled like a forest fire. Then he shifted me so that his elbow was tucked under my chin and he yanked up on it. “What is your move, kid?” he said. I thought he was going to break my neck.
“I don’t know,” I choked out. “Bribery?” I crouched down, my legs sort of sliding out underneath me – I suppose I was trying to shrivel down until he couldn’t keep hold of me anymore.
“Suppose you can’t reason with your opponent?” he said. “Suppose they don’t want anything you have to offer. What are you going to do then?”
“Take it easy on him,” said the bartender. My face was probably red.
“What is your move?” he said.
“I don’t know!” I cried. I started imagining the newspaper article describing my death. Future Lawyer Killed in NOLA Bar Fight. Then I imagined the wrestler being cleared of charges due to his unwieldy girth and stupidity, neither of which were really his fault. I could hear him testifying on the stand. “I didn’t mean it! I was just trying to help him! He was so puny!”
“Punch me in the groin,” he said. “It’s right there, just go after it.” I swung my arm and hit him somewhere in the hip girdle. It was like punching an encyclopedia.
“Wrap your other arm around my head,” he said. “Grab whatever, go for the eyes, the face, the hair, don’t be afraid to pull a man’s hair.”
My left arm started flailing up toward his head, but didn’t land anywhere. What had been theoretical only a moment ago, an event laid out in a column in a newspaper, was suddenly real – I was going to die like this. A desperation came over me and I lost all concern for my dignity. I went crazy. I made a claw of my hand and started scraping at his jacket. With my other arm I was slapping at his groin. He had me turned in such a way that I could see that everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, but I observed this without words; my brain was taking in information only as it related to my survival, like a dog. My vision was clouded with blue spots and my hearing was off. All of this was unfolding in muffled darkness, as if underwater.
“Good,” the wrestler said, “you’re doing well now.” I didn’t so much hear this as translate the vibrations through my body. “Now, while I’m distracted, kick out my leg.”
I swung a leg wildly, and fell over, and the wrestler fell on top of me, releasing my neck. My hearing came back. Suddenly I heard all the commotion, people yelling Whoa, whoa, whoa, man, back off, let him go, you’re going to kill him. I sat up. The wrestler sat next to me and draped his arm over me in what he probably intended as a friendly gesture, though his arm was so heavy it felt oppressive. “You did okay, kid,” he said. I couldn’t answer him because I was panting and disoriented. “You got out of it, and that’s all you needed to do.”
In the commotion, with the wild cries coming from the people at the tables, the kitchen staff had come spilling out into the dining room, wanting to see a fight. I was half listening to the wrestler, half staring at one of the cooks, who hung back a few feet from the rest. He was tall and lanky, dressed in white jeans and a white t-shirt, a white apron tied across his waist, smeared with orange stains. His face had the angular severity of a Puritanical preacher, but his black hair, which was overgrown, softened him, along with his expression. There was – how else can I say this? – a twinkle in his eye, and half of his mouth was turned up in a smirk, as if he’d just won a bet. Our eyes met, and we nodded at each other. It was Jude.

It occurs to me that before I go any further with this story, the story of the last time I saw my brother, I should try to explain who he was. I say this knowing I won’t get it right. I’ve been trying my whole life and have never gotten near it.
In my younger years, I spent a lot of time talking about Jude. First because I thought having that kind of brother – a drifter, an addict – might make me more interesting, might signal to my fraternity brothers and the girls I tried to date that I was different, that I might have something of Jude’s nature in me, too, if only better concealed. And later, as I made my way through law school and eventually my firm, as I got to know people, people who inevitably asked where I came from and what my family life was like as a child, I revealed Jude when I wanted to suggest a certain depth to my personality, an emotional complexity that made me more sensitive or thoughtful than the average practitioner of the law. I had a brother, I found myself saying. And that shift into the past tense gave me a strange power I liked to luxuriate in. It unsettled whoever I was speaking to. They paused, settled back in their seats, gave up the reins of the conversation. They wanted to listen, to hear more. They wanted to know what happened.
I had a brother.
When I was younger I would fashion Jude in terms of whatever cultural icons came nearest to his brand of cool indifference – he was James Dean, basically, one of those kids who set himself against whatever was expected of him, and whose defiance looked so good it converted all but the most priggish hearts to its cause. Picture a kid smoking a cigarette while leaning against a brick wall by the dumpsters behind the high school cafeteria. Picture this kid out in the cold wearing nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. And when a teacher opens the door and leans out to tell him to put out his cigarette and come back inside, picture this kid taking one last, long drag, all the while staring down the teacher, a middle-aged and pudgy calculus teacher in a short sleeve button-down and brown slacks. Picture Jude dropping his cigarette on the ground and crushing it under his Chuck Taylors. Slowly. Because in the end he would usually do what he was told – but not before he made you wait.
Now imagine me, Bernard Weatherbee, coming along four years later, the glasses-wearing little brother at the top of his class, polo shirts and khakis, cable knit sweaters, my papers crisp, my penmanship orderly, my locker a shining example of spotless organization. President of the Student Council, Debate Team captain, aspiring valedictorian. Weatherbee, my teachers would say, you aren’t by any chance related to Jude, are you? And I’d tell them he was my brother. There’d be a moment of flustered confusion. That’s funny, they’d say, feeling some sort of obligation to explain to me what I already knew. It’s just that, well, you’re so different. You don’t look like brothers.
What the teachers didn’t know was that they were putting into words the most interesting thing about my family, which was that Jude wasn’t really my brother, wasn’t my parents’ child. My mother had been in her novitiate year at a Benedictine convent when she’d received a call that her derelict little sister had gone missing – had given birth to a boy and then fled the hospital, but not before leaving a note identifying my mother as the baby’s chosen caretaker. And so my mother, her hair cropped short to her head, a gold band on her finger – I was married to Jesus, she always said – had a choice to make. Whether to remain in the convent, far removed from the troubles of the world, engaged in the life of prayer and single-minded devotion she had felt since childhood was her destiny, or whether to do the work that needed to be done in the world. “I wish to stay,” she had told her abbess, after a night’s reflection, but the abbess had come to the opposite conclusion. “You must go. You must go out into the world and do what you are called to do.”
In those days, and perhaps still for all I know, the Catholic church made efforts to introduce its adult parishioners to eligible mates, and so when my mother took a job teaching kindergarten at the local Catholic school, leaving Jude with the retired nuns during the school day, it wasn’t long before her cause was taken up by the ladies of her church. Time and again she was strategically placed in the proximity of my father, who was then paying his dues at his law firm in Philadelphia and whose only social foray was to Sunday morning Mass, and the donut fellowship afterwards. Back then it was a lot to ask of a man to take an interest in a single mother, particularly a mother raising a son who wasn’t her own, but then again my mother was pure, and had a pleasant face and a spirited but ultimately deferential nature – she was Maria from The Sound of Music, basically – not to mention she was the only woman my father had the time to get to know – by noon on Sundays he was usually back at the office. And so it worked. Within a year they had decided to marry, and a few years later they had me and moved to the suburbs. The church ladies congratulated themselves on making something whole of the broken parts in front of them.
But you could also say it didn’t work, not really. Jude was different from the rest of the family, so dramatically that I think we would have guessed his story even if we’d never been told. My parents and I were unremarkable in every way, to the point it was hard to describe us: we were of average height and weight, with brown eyes and neatly kept, light brown hair; our faces were plain; we dressed ourselves in the type of clothes found in catalogs, beige slacks and polo shirts, loafers – in fact my father could have stood in for a shirt model, in the sense that he was always wearing a blue button-down and standing strangely erect, and often had his face angled away from view. By comparison, Jude was striking, all of his features exaggerated. He was exceptionally tall for his age, and slender. His eyes were a startling blue, his hair black and wispy and grown longer than, in my father’s view, it should have been allowed to grow. In our annual Christmas photos, Jude looked increasingly unlike the rest of us. Even his expression was different. My father and mother and I were always smiling in these pictures, looking straight at the camera, dutifully following the directions we’d been given, whereas Jude’s expression was one of tried patience, and his gaze was always slightly off, seemingly directed at the door he planned to escape through.
It was probably more difficult to be Jude, the black sheep, but it was hard for us, too. From a young age, Jude expressed a restless dissatisfaction with almost everything we did and surrounded ourselves with, which left us with a wounded feeling: What was wrong with us, why weren’t we good enough? I was content with whatever was put in front of me, and couldn’t understand why Jude wasn’t. I wore the clothes my mother purchased in advance of each school year, was content to watch the shows she allowed us to watch on television, The Golden Girls, Alf, Diff’rent Strokes. I liked whatever music I happened to hear in the grocery store – The Doobie Brothers, Huey Lewis and the News, Roy Orbison, Linda Ronstadt – and I even liked the records my mother sometimes played, religious orchestral and choir music and, at Christmas, The Nutcracker Suite. But Jude hated all of that, hated it so much that he mowed lawns and shoveled driveways and delivered newspapers to make the money he needed to surround himself with other things. He had a long list of things he wanted: comic books, issues of MAD magazine, a radio for his room, then a record player, then a Walkman and an endless series of tapes to play on it; a guitar; a jean jacket and buttons to pin on it, band t-shirts, Chuck Taylors, a leather jacket; a black trench coat. He was always asking to watch things on television we weren’t allowed to, and whenever we had a free evening, when our mother was off volunteering at one of the many Catholic organizations she pledged her life to, he’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, consuming everything he was forbidden – The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, and yes, wrestling, he loved wrestling – as if a patient receiving a transfusion. Towards the end of his time living with us, he wanted cigarettes and beer and hard liquor and eventually pot, and put all of his money toward that. Almost all of these pursuits took Jude away from us, in the sense that he spent much of his free time making the money to buy them, and the rest of it shut away in his room, enjoying them. My father was particularly vexed by all of this, wanting to punish Jude, to confiscate his belongings, and he sometimes swept into Jude’s room and piled up his books and magazines and music. When Jude protested, asked what he’d done wrong, my father could never quite explain. “You spend too much time alone,” was what he settled on. But the time Jude spent with us as his punishment, playing Parcheesi and Sorry!, listening to my mother read from books – she read us every book C. S. Lewis ever wrote – had a pall cast over it, some kind of radiation ticking off Jude you could almost see, until finally the awkwardness of it became too much, and he was allowed to retreat again. We let him go. We left him to his things.
Then he left us for real, packing a bag and striking out on his own the day he turned eighteen. He neither told us where he was going, nor contacted us when he got there. Weeks went by, months, before he finally sent word that he was working in a fancy restaurant in Dallas. By this time, my parents were so exasperated with him they were able to tell themselves that it might be for the best. He would face challenges out in the world that would diminish him, then teach him; God would show him the right path and eventually lead him home. But I couldn’t stand the thought of Jude alone in the world, couldn’t stand that he had left us. I spent hours in his room, writing him earnest letters that detailed every boring endeavor of my eighth-grade life. I read his books and played his records, so I could write to him about those, too. I lay on his bed with Weezy and thought of him, as if conducting some kind of séance, convinced that if I sat and closed my eyes and thought about him enough, he would sense it, and return like a homing pigeon. I didn’t know yet that we were not home, to him, that he would never come home.
Whenever I told someone about Jude I always landed on the same image – an image of his feet, in the red wool socks our mother used to make for us, sticking out from behind the Christmas tree. For several years in a row, perhaps when he was between the ages of seven and twelve, as soon as the tree was put up in the living room, Jude’s favorite thing to do was to hide himself behind it with a book, reading in its light. All through the stretch from Thanksgiving through the new year, you could barely tell he was in the house. All you could see were those red socks, just visible under the brim of the tree. I remember wanting to join him – to be allowed to share in his space, to read what he was reading – but I also knew that he wanted to be alone, and hardly dared. “That’s why I never put up a tree,” I told people later – partners who had confided something in me and wanted a similar disclosure in return, or girls I was hoping to seduce. “It’s too painful.”
These were the kinds of stories I told when I talked about Jude, because they worked in a kind of shorthand, in absolutes: we loved him, he didn’t love us. But there was more to him than that, context I often left out, perhaps because it was easier or perhaps because I didn’t like to think about it. The truth was, Jude wasn’t always so aloof – in fact when he was in the mood, he was warmer and more loving than the rest of us. He loved Weezy, for example, in a devoted way that I was never able to replicate with any of the animals I was given – he carried her everywhere, couldn’t sleep without her. And when the mood struck, he could be interested in people. On a good day, when that calculus teacher called Jude away from his cigarette to come back inside, Jude would be more likely to strike up a conversation with him than not: Calculus, right? What hooked you on math? I tended to remember Jude as withdrawn, but there were also times when he brought me into his room to show me something in a book, or play a record for me. There were times, I would have to admit, that Jude not only allowed me to join him behind that Christmas tree but asked me to, waved me over. One night he read me three comic books in a row, and even offered me Weezy so I could rest my head on her, and I lay there wondering how long it would last, how long my older brother, who I loved and longed to be with, would tolerate me. I remember the sound of his voice, which was still boyish but had just begun to deepen, the faint smell of pine needles, the glow of the yellow Christmas tree lights against the olive-green shag carpet. He didn’t do it often, but when he turned his attention on you, there was nothing else like it.
I suppose what I want to know now is whether it was our family who failed Jude, or the other way around. Of course it was both, but some part of me wants to assign blame, to go back to the beginning and see who started it. And if on any given day one of us practiced the indifference characteristic of long-term rivals, if on any given day one of us turned the other away, not knowing it was the last chance we would have to reconcile, what I want to know is, can we be blamed? Must we spend the rest of our days thinking about those final hours, what we might have done differently? Can we be forgiven?

I’d like to believe that every person, at least once in his life, has the experience of the world seeming to align itself just for him. As if on a lonely night, having travelled a dark forest for many miles, this person comes around a bend and sees a clearing, a cottage lit up and glowing, and someone is holding a door open, beckoning him into a brightly-lit room, out from which drifts laughter, and when he crosses the threshold every head turns to greet him, and great cries of welcome and affection rise up at the sight of him. I think Jude, because he was so good-looking, because there was some kind of magic on him, had this experience quite a few times in his life, but for me it was just the once, this night in New Orleans with Jude. I sometimes think this will be the night I think about at the end, when death is near and I want to recall whatever lightness I can. In many ways it was, before it took a strange turn, the best night of my life.
What I remember of the evening I remember in fragments, short scenes that play out in my mind. I couldn’t say exactly which order they came in, but I can arrange them well enough to hold together. First was the moment right after I saw Jude, while the commotion of the wrestler nearly strangling me was still in the air. I stood up and made my way to Jude, who embraced me, and not only that, held me close for longer than I would have expected, slapping me heartily on the back. I could sense even without looking that everyone was watching us and trying to figure out how we knew each other, what kind of reunion they were witnessing. I remember the overwhelming smell of boiled crawfish on Jude’s neck, the damp feel – it was as if working in the kitchen had nearly boiled him and his skin was letting off steam. I remember bits of dialogue. “Long time, long time,” he said, and I said, “I know, I know.” “I missed you, man,” he said, and all I could say was, “Me too, man.” I could only return what he said to me. I was overwhelmed.
I guess you could say Jude looked the same as he did at eighteen, though there was a slight difference, like he’d been sharpened somehow. He was still young, only twenty-six, but he had weathered a bit. There was nothing soft left on him. You could tell that he’d seen things, he’d lived.
I remember the bartender asking Jude, “You know this kid?” And the wrestler coming over, trying to put the pieces together. ”This kid is your little brother? Holy shit, you never told me you had a brother.” This line I remember particularly: “If I knew he was your baby brother I wouldn’t have strangled him!”
“I invited him down for Mardi Gras but he’s late,” Jude said. His arm was flung around my neck. “He probably had a bunch of important college stuff to do.”
I protested as if injured. “I just got your letter like this morning! I literally got in the car within an hour of getting it!” My voice was probably high, my face red.
“It’s alright, it’s alright, you have better things going on.” He rubbed his palm roughly over the top of my head, back and forth. This is when I first noticed the tattoo that ran up the length of his left forearm. It was a flame, an intricate collection of yellow and red and blue licks laid over one another. This is one of the moments I remember most vividly, seeing those flames so clearly. How close we were.
I remember, too, that while Jude had my head inclined toward the television I heard Marv Albert’s voice calling the game between Boston and LA. Just then one of the Celtics players did something spectacular – a breakaway down the length of the court, then a leap toward the basket, a perfect layup – and Albert cried out: Yes! Marv Albert was a person I felt a shameful kinship to, because he was short and not very good-looking so had no place in the world of basketball or television, but had snuck his way in and was pretending to belong there, and in this way in fact had come to belong there. “Unbelievable!” he cried. Just then I felt the same ease and certainty, like I could fly if I wanted. That’s how being around Jude made you feel.
Then it was as if we all collectively decided the restaurant was closed for the evening. We pulled tables together and the bartender brought more hurricanes over and we sat around. Only one of the cooks went back to the kitchen, and even at that it was to retrieve four baskets of crawfish, which he set out in front of us. Everyone was talking all at once for a while, but when one of the cooks turned his attention to me, the others quieted. “Tell us everything,” he said to me. It was the skinny man who had been standing over the pot, dressed all in white but for the red kerchief bandana tied around his head. “Tell us about this character we’ve been working with all this time we hardly know nothing about.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in years. You tell me.”
“You wanna know what I know?” he said. “I can tell you everything I know in thirty seconds.” He held up a finger, leaned forward as if sharing a secret. “I know he shows up when he’s supposed to show up and he does whatever it is he’s supposed to do.”
“Fries,” said another cook from the kitchen. They were both wearing the same whites and red bandanas, and were sitting next to each other.
“He keeps those fries coming. And the whole time he keeps his mouth shut,” said the first cook.
“True,” said the other.
“But it’s like the whole time, you can tell he’s thinking about something. His mind is working on something.”
“We call him the philosopher,” the bartender added.
“I think therefore I am,” said the cook.
“I fry therefore I am,” said the other cook.
They laughed for a minute, each turning their heads to each other and slapping their thighs in exactly the same way. They must have been brothers.
“And then, then, when the kitchen closes he comes out and has a drink with this giant mother.” The cook jerked his thumb toward the wrestler. “And he sits and listens to all his stories, he just sits there listening, all the patience in the world, when ain’t nobody else left with any patience for this man’s stories, he’s been coming here for years and we heard them all before a million times.”
“But it’s like he’s not just listening,” said his brother, “he’s storing up all these stories for something. It’s like he’s like recording them.”
“Like he’s here from another planet collecting data.”
“Or from the FBI.”
I knew what they were talking about. Jude had always written things down in a notebook, which he kept under his bed. It wasn’t exactly a diary – there was no record of what he thought or felt about anything. But you could piece together what interested him by compiling everything he’d taken note of. Things he’d seen from the window of our mother’s car on the way to school. Ordinary things, or things just slightly out of the ordinary – a man walking a dog with three legs, an accident on the side of the road where one car slid into another, a woman standing next to the wrecked car holding a baby. He’d write down things he heard at work, when he started working in the meat department of the local grocery store. Funny lines from the butchers: “When I win the lottery I’m gonna fuck the daylights out of a bunch of hookers.” I’m ashamed to admit I used to sneak into his room and read these things.
“Maybe he wants to write The Vampire’s autobiography,” said the first cook. “Maybe the only reason he applied for a job here was because he knew this was The Vampire’s spot and he wanted to get close to him.”
“All this time he’s been working on one of those where are they now type of books.”
“Whatever happened to.”
“Exactly. Whatever happened to The Vampire?”
“Is he still alive?”
“Does he still wrestle?”
“Did he settle down and have kids?”
“Well, would you believe he’s currently employed as a bodyguard for a famous writer?”
“A famous writer who, ironically I might add, writes about vampires?”
“Who’s out of town so much on European vacations he just sits around on his ass in New Orleans doing practically nothing for months on end?”
“Nothing but boring to tears the helpless waitstaff of a crawfish joint in the Quarter?”
The cooks went on like this, laughing, egging each other on. I couldn’t tell how the wrestler felt about being made fun of. The whole time, he was sitting next to me dismembering what looked like a basket of tiny red demons with beady black eyes. He’d pick one up with his giant hand and snap off its tail, then slurp at the body cavity, set the body down, pull the meat from its tail with his teeth. He had two piles going, one for the whole crawfish, one for their crushed remains. He was splitting and sucking in a frenzy, as if in some sort of contest. There was something comical about the difference between the size of his hands and the size of the fish. He was so big he would have made a regular lobster look like a crawfish; the actual crawfish looked, in his hands, like crickets.
“So tell us, what was he like when he was young?” the bartender asked me. “Was he always this mysterious?”
“You could say that,” I said, looking toward Jude, a bit nervous. I didn’t want to betray him. I offered what I thought was an innocuous story, about him hiding behind the Christmas tree, but I could tell he didn’t like it – he didn’t want even this much known.
I suppose this is where the evening started to take a downward turn. Up until then the jukebox had been playing upbeat music, mostly jazz and funk, which kept things lively, but right after I finished talking about Jude and the Christmas tree, James Brown’s “Try Me” came on, and everyone fell silent for a moment. It was as if we had all come to an agreement to regret our current lives and ponder what we could have done differently.
When the song was almost over the wrestler said to Jude, “I bet you can’t tell me the B side of this single.” He had finally finished eating and was sitting back in his chair, his palms pressed against his thighs. It looked like it was an effort to keep himself upright. “This is some old stuff,” the wrestler said, “some obscure stuff, from before you were born.”
“I used to have the 45,” Jude said.
“Give it your best shot.”
“I can see it,” Jude said. He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. “Give me a second.”
“Take all the time you need.”
I suppose it was here I began to realize the wrestler and Jude were not just acquainted, but friends, and I started seeing things differently. The evening I was taking part in, and thought I’d been starring in, wasn’t the story of two brothers reuniting, but an ongoing story between my brother and the wrestler. I was only a member of the audience, a functionary, someone to bear witness to the kind of friendship I’d always wanted to forge with Jude but couldn’t, because we were incompatible. I didn’t know the B side to “Try Me,” or to any single ever released in the history of music. It would have never occurred to me to ask.
Jude uncovered his face. “‘Tell Me What I Did Wrong,’” he said. “Damn,” the wrestler said. “How does a kid your age know something like that?”
“Years of quiet devotion,” said Jude.
I sat back in my chair and sulked, looked around the room. It was then that I first noticed the furtive glances the waitress was casting toward us. She was busy closing up, getting the last of the customers out the door, loading up trays with the ketchup and mustard bottles and salt and pepper shakers from the tables, spraying down the red and white checked vinyl tablecloths and wiping them in angry circles with a rag, and all the while she kept looking, looking, wanting to see if Jude had noticed her, had taken even a moment’s interest. I knew what she was going through. The agony of wanting to appear not to be thinking about him. The bitter certainty that he wasn’t thinking of you, and yet the persistent hope that he was. It was embarrassing to watch another person held in the same thrall in which I’d been suspended my entire life. I felt a pang of tenderness for the waitress. But then again she was so pathetic, slamming the bottles and shakers onto her tray in an attempt to draw our attention, bending over in such a way that she exposed her breasts as she wiped the tables. She hadn’t mastered the art of concealing her desires or intentions. In this way, she reminded me of Schmidt – and it was important to me to conduct myself more honorably than Schmidt. I resolved to collect myself.
The wrestler was telling a story about a trip he and Jude had taken a few days before, to his boss’s cabin at Lake Pontchartrain. “We were high as fucking kites,” he said, standing up to illustrate. “I mean, we could hardly stand up.” He wobbled. “So naturally we decide this is a good time to go out on the boat.” The story continued on about how neither of them had ever operated a boat and only backed it out from the dock by the grace of God, but how, once out on the open water, which was black but streaked with moonlight, which the wrestler described as splendorous, they gained confidence, too much, and before they knew it they were cruising so fast the boat was slapping down on the water, creating a fearsome wake. Jude betrayed little emotion, as usual, but a corner of his mouth was turned up, indicating some sort of secret pleasure, either because he was remembering this episode fondly or, I feared, because his association with the wrestler was something he was proud of, something he valued.
The wrestler was bobbing up and down to indicate their motion on the water. “And then out of nowhere,” he said, “it’s the police. I’m being pulled over in the middle of a fucking lake. Where does one even pull over?” he said. “I’m not a lake person. I don’t know these things.”
People were laughing, sensing how the story was about to tip over. “So we sort of drift to a stop and the police boat pulls up next to us and it says on the side of their boat, I swear to God, it says SHERIFF. Like there’s a sheriff of the lake. Did anyone here know there was such a thing? This country!”
The wrestler continued, describing the Bullshit Lake Sheriff, as he called him – the huge gut that cascaded over his belt, his voluminous, frowning moustache – and the dread that began to sink in as the sheriff mounted their boat, discovering one infraction after another: that the wrestler had no boating license, no registration, not to mention the prominent cooler of beer, with two containers open. “The sheriff keeps tacking on money and jail time,” the wrestler said, “until we’re looking at serving out the rest of our lives, practically, the rest of our goddamned lives for going for a ride on a boat.”
“All I can show him is my regular driver’s license,” he continued, “and when he sees my name, as dumb luck and the grace of God would have it, he’s a wrestling fan! ‘Eugene Delacroix,’ he says, ‘as in, The Vampire?’ And I sort of raise up my arms slowly the way I used to in the ring, with the cape making it look like bat wings. ‘You were my favorite!’ he says. ‘I swear to God, I was your biggest fan. I thought it was you. I wasn’t sure but I thought.’ He was like a small child, such was his love of wrestling. But a second later you could see his obligation to the law was weighing on him, and he was wondering what he should do. That’s when this one,” said the wrestler, jerking his thumb toward Jude, “this one steps in. ‘We’re sorry, Officer,’ he says, ‘we don’t know our way around. We’re just here for a birthday party. People sometimes hire Eugene to come to their child’s birthday. He picks up all the kids and spins them around.’” The wrestler raised his arms above his head and spun slowly. “Which was a lie,” he emphasized, “but such a good one. It made me seem so pathetic, even more pathetic than I actually am. And you can tell the cop was thinking, ‘What kind of man do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of man who hauls in Eugene Delacroix, fallen from grace, reduced to entertaining children at parties, broken and pathetic? Or do I want to be merciful?’ He was on the fence, but in the end, he just couldn’t do it.”
Suddenly the wrestler appeared tired, out of breath even, and he sat down and put his hand on Jude’s thigh. “He made up that little story and I’m telling you, he saved me. He is like my brother. I owe him a debt. I must follow him to the ends of the Earth until he is repaid. I would have lost my position, I would have been fired. Then where would I be?”
“It was all you,” said Jude. “I didn’t do anything.”
“No, no,” said the wrestler. “It was all to your credit. As soon as you added that detail about the parties, his heart softened. I can tell these things.”
Jude was fully smiling now. It occurred to me that the whole time he was living in our house, stifled by its rules and order and expectations, this was all he had ever wanted. Something wild, something ridiculous. Something bigger than us.
“Of course I couldn’t even pick up a child these days, if you want the truth,” the wrestler said. “All my joints are collapsing. I couldn’t pick up any one of you, not one.”
“Except maybe Bernie,” Jude said, which got a laugh.
The waitress, who had at last completed her work, pushed her way into the circle and sat right in Jude’s lap, draped her arm around him. Her arm was glistening with some kind of glittering lotion, and she smelled like she had just now doused herself in perfume, something musky. She was staring right at me. She was beautiful, with the same coloring as Jude – dark hair and light blue eyes – but she had put so much work into her appearance she had altered herself to the point of no longer looking quite human. There was a thick layer of makeup over her entire face, with an orange cast to it, and her lips and eyes and nails were all painted in sparkling pastels. She had curled and teased her hair so that it lifted straight off her scalp for several inches before falling in stiffened waves. I’d once seen a KISS doll for sale in a toy store window, its arms held up, beckoning, and this is what the waitress reminded me of.
No sooner had the waitress joined the group when it began to disperse, the bartender going back behind the bar, stocking glasses underneath, the cooks drifting off to the kitchen. The waitress looked injured, like maybe this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, like people had long tired of her. Jude was tired of her, I could tell, how he leaned away from her, didn’t meet her eye. She tried to brush his hair back from his face but he shook her off.
The waitress turned her attention to me, asking me where I went to school, what I was studying, what I planned to do after graduation. I told her as much as I knew, that I was staying at the same school in Tennessee, though would be a law student in the fall and three years after that, a lawyer. When I passed the bar I’d probably go to work at my father’s firm back home. “Or maybe I just won’t go back,” I added. “I might just stay here.”
While I talked the waitress wound a tendril of her hair around a finger and kept her mouth slightly parted, like flirtation was her only currency, and she couldn’t turn it off. “I just can’t believe you’re Jude’s brother,” she said. “You look so different. You look really, like, useful. Like if we ever need any legal advice, we can call you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You’re so cute.” She was speaking in a voice that sounded like a child’s. I had never understood this brand of seduction – women making themselves out to sound like children so as to activate some urge to fuck them. I didn’t understand why women did it, or why men responded to it. In this case, I didn’t understand why my brother’s girlfriend was talking to me like that while she was sitting on his lap and, with her hand slipped underneath his shirt now, rubbing his back. What did she want, for the whole world to love her, even her boyfriend’s little brother? Did she want us to fight over her?
“You know my one problem with Jude?” she said. “He never tells me nothing. I didn’t even know he had a brother.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t even know where he grew up or like, what his childhood was like or anything like that.”
“That’s because we grew up in Delaware,” I said. “Which is like growing up in the capital of nowhere.”
This time it worked – she nodded like it made perfect sense. “Yeah,” she said. “Totally.”
This whole time, the wrestler was cleaning off the tables in front of us, stacking up plastic cups, then brushing crumbs off the table into the stack of cups. He was considerate, in his way. When he had finished cleaning the tables as best he could he straightened up and wriggled his fingers, like a child squirming in anticipation of opening a present. “Shall we continue this gathering at my place?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” Jude said. He sort of smacked the waitress on the butt and pushed her off him.
“Can we just go home?” she said. “I’m tired. I just want to go to bed.”
“My brother’s here,” he said.
“You never even said you had one,” she said, as if this were an argument she could win by submitting transcripts of conversations she’d had with Jude in the past.
“My brother’s here,” he said. And even though he was making a point in my favor, I felt bad for the waitress. She was on thin ice. One wrong move and she’d never see Jude again. He put his arm around me and we walked out into the night.

To save my life I couldn’t recreate the twists and turns we took walking down the streets that night. It had rained, and the streets were wet, reflecting the moonlight. I remember thinking that something interesting was finally happening to me. I was with my brother at last, as well as a waitress and a giant, and although it wasn’t quite what I had predicted, it felt like a Hollywood scene. I was lost in it. Schmidt, our school, the Sunshine Motel, my parents, my future – I would have said all of this seemed far away if any of them had crossed my mind.
Slowly I gathered the impression that we were walking toward a better part of town. I had a sense for these things, as anyone does who grows up with money, and I remember registering some sort of surprise – I understood that we were going back to the wrestler’s, but hadn’t expected the real estate to improve. The houses were massive, plantation-like, with long, wide lawns. I could see all of this because the grounds of the houses were rife with spotlights, the way houses appear in the opening scenes of sitcoms.
I was surprised when the wrestler, who was walking just a bit ahead of us, turned up the walkway of what had to be the biggest residence I had ever seen in person. I say residence here, though really that is misleading – it was a brick fortress stretching for half a block in length and width. It looked like a museum or hospital, or perhaps an apartment complex.
“Home sweet home,” the wrestler said. He stopped at the door – painted a glossy black, with a gold fox head as a knocker – and fumbled in the pockets of his jacket, first the outside pockets, then the inside.
I must have been making a face because Jude told me it wasn’t really the wrestler’s house. Rather, it belonged to the woman he worked for, who was so famous she needed a bodyguard. He named a writer I’d never heard of. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said.
The wrestler stopped his fumbling and looked down at me. “You’ve never heard of her? She’s like the most famous writer in the world.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She writes about vampires?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Okay.”
“There’s movies?” he said. “You know, number one box office movies?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt like we were building up to another lesson.
In a second I’d be in a headlock.
“Have you ever heard of Tom Fucking Cruise?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.” He reached in the pocket of his pants and pulled out a key, a single key dangling from a paperclip. The door swung open into a foyer and we all stepped up and stood there for a moment, taking in the scope of the place. Long hallways extended to the left and right. “This is like a museum,” said the waitress.
The wrestler corrected her. “It was a convent. This place used to be crawling with nuns.”
“Huh,” said the waitress. “I can kind of feel their spirits or whatever. It’s kind of peaceful and kind of creepy.” We were all drifting to the right, down a hallway lined with dining chairs made of dark wood, with green velvet seat cushions. The chairs were all identical, and receded for what seemed like a hundred yards. “It freaks me out when there’s, like, a hundred of the same thing in a row,” said the waitress. “You know what I mean?” I did, but didn’t want to admit it. None of us felt we owed the waitress even the courtesy of a response. This was inexcusably rude, but then again, what were we supposed to do? If we agreed with something she said, then we were complicit with the rest of her, and the rest of her seemed to have been born and bred in Daytona Beach.
The hallway finally came to an end and the wrestler commenced a bit of a tour, walking backwards and sweeping his arm towards certain rooms, like a Price Is Right model displaying a series of prizes. “The ballroom,” he said, gesturing toward a giant open room with parquet floors and a chandelier that would have killed anyone it fell on. One room was empty, though its walls were lined floor to ceiling with built-in bookcases, filled with leatherbound volumes, all the same burgundy color. I remember thinking that they couldn’t possibly be real books – there were too many of them to be anything other than decorative. “The library,” the wrestler said. At the end of another hallway we came to a door that opened into an industriallooking staircase, with cement steps and iron railings. We ascended to the top floor, and pushed through a door into a giant open room with a pitched ceiling, and two long rows of white metal beds lined in the middle. There were probably fifty beds altogether. Tucked into each bed, propped on a pillow, was a doll. The dolls differed one to the next, but they were all about the same size, maybe eighteen inches tall, and had porcelain faces and carefully curled ringlets. We walked up and down the rows, staring at their faces. All of their eyes were open. Their arms were positioned at their sides with the palms turned up, as if they were waiting to receive something.
No one said anything for a minute, until the waitress said what we were all thinking, which was, “Whoa, this is creepy.”
“Do you know what this room was used for?” the wrestler asked.
“No,” she said.
“Nun sleepover parties,” said Jude. “All of them in footie pajamas and stocking caps. Pillow fights, Go Fish, leapfrog, games of telephone.” He must have been thinking of our mother, it occurred to me, the utter lack of joy in her heart. She had never played a game with us in our lives. He hated her, too, though not as much as our father.
“Close,” said the wrestler, “but no cigar. Back when this was a convent, there was a flu epidemic. And people were dropping like flies. This was where the nuns kept the children who were sick, the kids whose parents were dead and had no one else to care for them.” All of a sudden the dolls in the beds were even creepier than before. I considered all the real children who had suffered and died in the room and thought, for a few seconds, I felt the weight of their spirits. Which was something the waitress would have said, or my mother.
“I don’t like this,” the waitress said. She pulled on Jude’s arm. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m so tired.”
He sort of pushed her off him again. She was annoying me, too, but I was starting to feel bad for her and didn’t think he should treat her this way. “I feel sick,” she said. She walked out of the room and one by one we followed. I was glad to get out of there.
The wrestler descended the stairs to the basement, which was damp and musty and lit only by a single bulb in the middle, as well as the orange light emerging from a room in one corner, walled off with rough planks, from which emerged a low roar. It was probably just a boiler room, but it was a strange night, and I’d had a lot to drink, so it occurred to me that it was a room where sinners were fed to the devil. I pictured myself pulling back the door and stepping inside, a nun ushering me into a sort of flaming cauldron.
The wrestler led us past this room, which was a relief, and behind it, through a dark, narrow passageway. At some point I realized the waitress was behind me but couldn’t figure out how she had gotten there. We emerged from the passageway into a room identical to the first, with another room walled off in the corner. The wrestler crossed to it and opened its door and pulled on a string, revealing his living quarters – nothing more than three iron cots pushed together to make a bed, a wooden chair, and a small bureau with a cheap gold trophy on top. “My chamber,” he announced. He sat in the chair and Jude and the waitress sat on the bed. I stood there looking at everything. Aside from the trophy, which depicted a strongman holding the earth over his head, the room had few adornments. Taped above the bed was an 8x10 picture of the wrestler and Randy Savage – I recognized him now, the wild hair, the beard, the plastic neon sunglasses with the slats – both smiling at the camera, their arms around each other. And next to that, taped at a sloppy angle, a promotional poster of the wrestler and a woman in a tortured embrace. She was dressed in a sleeveless black leotard and was leaning into the wrestler, clutching at his chest with her red fingernails. A thick vein ran across her bulging bicep. Her mouth was open in a sort of growl. Her canines had been augmented to give her the approximate bite of a wolf.
“Who’s that?” asked the waitress.
“My wife,” said the wrestler. “Vampirina. Whenever she pinned someone, she sunk her teeth into their necks. That part of the show was real. She had these fangs affixed to her teeth – they were bonded by a dentist, they didn’t come off unless you filed them down. Everyone is always talking about wrestling being fake but let me tell you, she took a few bites out of a few people, for real. When she was in it, she was in it. My baby.” He faltered for a moment, on the verge of tears. “She was all the way.”
On the floor were scattered perhaps a dozen copies of old People magazines. One of the covers featured the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and her eighth husband, Larry Fortensky, at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Liz stood in the center of the picture in a tiered white dress, with her husband to her left, and Michael Jackson to her right, dressed all in black, in one of those military-style jackets he used to wear. They looked happy, though of course everything was about to come crashing down on all of them.
“Oh my God,” said the waitress. “I love Elizabeth Taylor. I want to be Elizabeth Taylor. Everyone always tells me that’s who I look like, but I don’t know.” She looked around to see if anyone was going to reassure her. “She’s way more beautiful.”
“Is this what you jerk off to?” Jude asked.
The wrestler looked wounded. “No,” he said. “But I’d marry her in a fucking heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?”
“I’d marry Liz Taylor from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, maybe,” said Jude.
“Anyone would,” the wrestler said. “Though you can’t beat Butterfield 8.”
“I’d marry her,” Jude said, “maybe through Cleopatra, but not after that.”
“Anyone would,” the wrestler said again. “But I’d go all the way. Virginia Woolf, all that shit with Michael Jackson, marrying that junkie. For a woman like that, you see it through.”
I was sort of touched by what seemed to me to be the wrestler’s faithfulness to Liz Taylor. It was somewhat complicated by the fact that we fell under the gaze of his vampire wife, but we lived in an imperfect world.
I was flipping through an issue of People, mesmerized, and didn’t notice that the wrestler had rummaged through one of the bureau drawers and pulled out a prescription bottle, though when I heard the clatter of pills it took me out of my reverie. The wrestler poured a few pills out onto the bureau top and then, with the base of the trophy, crushed them. He brushed the powder onto the back of his hand and snorted it. Then he motioned to Jude, who came over and did the same. I’d never actually seen Jude take drugs before. I suppose he was his usual self, slow and cool about it, but there was a slight delay in his movements – something I would later recognize as the mark of a person who was working hard to appear calm, but was in fact excited and full of longing. He snorted what was on his hand and then brushed some more onto it. He sat back on the bed and offered his hand to the waitress, who gave him an incredulous look. “No thank you,” she said, very deliberately, as if speaking in some sort of code. Jude shrugged and took the powder for himself. As an afterthought, he looked at me and said, “This isn’t good for you.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I’m trying to, you know, keep it copacetic.” This was what Schmidt said when declining to party, as our brothers called it. I added the fact that I was talking like Schmidt to my growing list of concerns.
I can’t say that I knew enough at the time to understand what was going on with Jude. Like everyone else my age, I’d seen the ads about drugs, the egg crackling in a frying pan, and I knew they could kill you, knew that Len Bias, on the same day he was drafted by the Celtics, died from cocaine, that his heart literally exploded – but I also knew that different rules seemed to apply to different people, and that while some people were punished, others got away with things. And if anyone was immune to the laws that governed most of us, surely it was Jude, I figured, surely he was fine. That was my thinking, at the time.
As I worked out this calculation, the wrestler was waxing rhapsodic about Randy Savage and Elizabeth Hulette, the first couple of wrestling. He was reciting what sounded like a thesis he’d rehearsed and delivered many times. The truth was, he explained to the waitress, Randy and Elizabeth were married in real life, but for a while the WWF made it look like she was just his manager. They developed various plotlines wherein Randy seemed to be falling for Miss Elizabeth, as they called her, and ultimately they married in the ring. “Even though they were already married in real life,” he said. “But the thing is, what nobody understands, is that they weren’t really the first, they got the whole idea from me and Vampirina.” He nodded toward the picture of himself and his vampire girlfriend. “We were the first. I was the first wrestler to bring my girlfriend into the ring. We were the first true love story.”
“Oh really?” said the waitress. “True love?”
“It was,” he said.
“True love?” said the waitress. She was pushing back the cuticles of her nails with her thumb. “Okay so like, where is she now?”
“Biloxi,” said the wrestler. “With her family.” He was suddenly so downcast the waitress looked sorry. She’d been trying to hurt him and had, but now she regretted it.
“She left me,” he said. “Because I was falling apart.”
“Oh,” said the waitress. “I’m sorry. But if it’s true love, she’ll come back, right?”
“Maybe,” he said.
That’s when Jude fell backwards on the bed. It was fairly dramatic. He landed with one arm flung out, like a Victorian maiden who had passed out from shock.
“Jesus,” I said.
“He’s fine,” said the wrestler. “This happens all the time.”
“He’s so skinny,” said the waitress. She brushed back a tendril of his hair that was curled over his eye. “There’s no fat on him. He can’t take the same as you,” she said to the wrestler. “You need to be more careful.”
“He’s fine,” said the wrestler. Then, after a beat, “I know him better than you do.”
“Not in some ways,” she said.
They both regarded Jude and I could tell by the way they looked at him that they loved him. We were all addicted to the same thing, but I suppose none of us could say why.
“He just needs some sleep,” said the wrestler. “He doesn’t sleep well.”
“I’m the one who deals with it,” the waitress said.
The wrestler turned away from Jude and seemed to notice me for the first time. “Where are my manners?” he said. “You’re sitting on the floor.” He stood up and waved at me to follow him. “We’ll leave him be for a little while,” he said. “We’ll go up to the den and stretch out. It’s about time for my program.”
The waitress and I followed him upstairs and down a few long hallways, to a part of the residence we hadn’t seen before – a part that looked like an actual home. He led us into a room lined with bookshelves and crammed with overstuffed, comfortable furniture arranged around a giant, wood-paneled television. The wrestler bent in front of the TV and pushed a series of buttons. Entertainment Tonight sprang up and Mary Hart’s voice filled the room at such a startling volume I put my hand to my heart.
“Sorry it’s so loud,” said the wrestler. It occurred to me again that he was a very considerate person. “Most of my hearing got knocked out of me in the ring.” He lifted his hair and tilted his head so I could see his ear. It was so fat and swollen it looked like an embryo.
The wrestler stretched out across the length of the couch, and the waitress and I took up posts in the armchairs on either side. We watched a commercial for a Toyota Tercel, then for Diet Coke, then for McDonald’s. The wrestler sang along with all of their slogans and I realized something about him: he was the target demographic for every commercial on TV. He had taken in all the advertising that America had to offer in good faith. He had memorized the salient qualities and slogans of each product that he encountered in daily life, and could recite them at will. He was a true believer. “Snickers really satisfies,” he said. And a bit later: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.”
We sat there for a long time, watching all the news unfolding in Hollywood. I thought we were all relaxed, even happy, but then the waitress burst out with an angry inquiry. “How long does he usually take to wake up?” She was sitting up straight with her arms crossed over her chest and her leg was bouncing. She had been upset this whole time, but I was just now noticing.
“Couple hours,” said the wrestler. “Although sometimes he sleeps through.”
“He doesn’t do that shit when he’s with me,” she said. She shot the wrestler a vicious look, but he wasn’t paying attention.
“Nobody forced him,” he said.
“But if it wasn’t around, he wouldn’t do it,” she said. She was right, but we didn’t want to hear it, or at least not from her. Her voice was too high and too loud, and the blue of her eyes, which was mesmerizing in a certain light, had grown cold with anger, and sent a chill through me.
“It has a bad effect on him,” she continued. “I mean, did you see that? He just offered me drugs, and I’m pregnant. He knows I’m pregnant. What kind of person does that?”
I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was trying and failing to make the most basic of calculations. The waitress seemed to be my brother’s girlfriend. And now she was saying she was pregnant. It was a simple math problem, a plus b, but I couldn’t bring myself to complete it.
“Whose is it?” the wrestler asked. He looked just as stunned as I was.
“Jude’s,” she said. “Jesus. You know that. We’re living together.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to assume. I didn’t know if you were necessarily exclusive.”
“Maybe he isn’t,” she said. “But I certainly am.”
“I just figured he would have told me,” said the wrestler. He looked crestfallen. I thought how a day ago I had been fine, but now everything was awful. The room spun. I felt like I might throw up.
“I should just get an abortion,” the waitress said.
It sat there between the three of us for a moment. I felt as if she’d read my mind, like she wanted to cancel whatever transaction we were in the middle of.
“There’s no way I can have a baby with him,” she continued. “With anyone, who am I kidding.” She sniffled, then rubbed her nose with the heel of her palm. Then she put her palms under her eyes and started rubbing. She was the picture of despair.
I thought about offering the waitress money, but I didn’t have any – I’d forfeited the money I was expecting to make in order to come down here. I scrambled to think of something. I could sell plasma, send her installments. I wanted this all to go away.
I was still calculating when the waitress straightened up, already done with the moment of pity she was having for herself, which was well deserved and might have reasonably gone on longer. “I’m tired of waiting around,” she said. She stood and arranged her purse on her shoulder, made her way out of the room, then turned and waved to us. “Nice meeting you, Bernard,” she said.
“You too,” I said. “Nice to, nice to make your acquaintance.” I didn’t even stand to wish her goodbye.
The wrestler pushed himself off the couch and escorted her to the door. “I can walk you home,” he said.
“No thanks,” she said. She walked out and closed the door gently behind her and the thing is – we let her go. We let her walk through the streets of New Orleans, pregnant and alone, at two o’clock in the morning. God knows where she lived, how far she had to walk and through what neighborhoods. Carrying my brother’s baby, all that would remain of him, if it remained at all.
Then it was as if the wrestler and I were helpless, like family members in the waiting room at a hospital. He stretched back out on the couch and I remained slumped in my chair. “Jesus,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“He’s not going to want anything to do with that,” said the wrestler.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t left already.”
“No wonder he’s been hanging around so much. No wonder he doesn’t want to go home to her.”
“I feel so bad,” I said. By this point I was leaning forward and holding my head in my hands.
“We can help him out of it,” said the wrestler. “I can find the money
“I feel so bad for her,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. And then, after a beat, “Maybe you wouldn’t if you knew her better. She’s trouble. Nothing but trouble.”
“Still,” I said.
“She’s not the one for him,” he said. “I know. I know because my wife was the one for me and I’ve had that experience. I know it when I see it.”
I nodded. Then, even though it felt dangerous, I ventured further. “What happened?”
“She left me,” he said. As if that explained it.
“But how come?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything at first. We both stared at the television for a moment, which by now was airing reruns of The Dick Cavett Show. Richard Burton was talking about his father’s disapproval of his profession, and utter disbelief at his salary of $150,000 per film. “What for?” the father asked. As in: What in the name of God are they paying you for? The audience laughed, finding some sort of relief in the story. Even the great Richard Burton was made to feel useless by his father.
“For the sake of getting right to the point,” the wrestler said, “let’s just say women don’t like it when you love them too much.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You need to let them visit their mothers when they want to visit their mothers. And they need a little freedom with money.”
“Okay.”
“You can’t stand outside a bathroom door waiting for them in a restaurant. You probably shouldn’t follow them when they say they’re going out with their girlfriends.”
“Got it,” I said. His wife probably had a restraining order against him. She had probably had to move back in with her parents because of him.
“I thought I was protecting her,” he said. “That’s what it felt like to me.”
The show cut to commercial and we continued watching with the same dutiful attention we’d paid to Richard Burton. “Oh, what a feeling,” the wrestler sang, weakly. “Toyota.” A moment later he was breathing heavily, each breath slower and slower, until he was asleep.
I wandered around the house for a while, thinking that I was in the house of a famous writer, and had just learned something terrible about my brother, and listened to a giant wrestler mourn his lost wife, and would one day want to tell people about all of it. I wanted to feel something, to conjure a sense of grandeur, though what I really felt was exhausted, and full of regret – I wished I’d never shown up in New Orleans. I reached the end of a hall and pushed through a door to one of the staircases and took it down to the basement. I found the wrestler’s room and opened the door, which creaked, and saw Jude still passed out on the bed, breathing through his open mouth. I stood over him. His right hand was curled atop his chest, as if clutching something, and his left arm was still flung to the side. I looked at the tattoo of flames and realized what it was – the tongue of flame depicted above the heads of the apostles in their many artistic renderings. I remembered the one in our house, which I had probably spent hours staring at. Instead of placing pictures of us on the mantel, which would have placed us in the path of pride and vanity, my mother had placed portraits of the saints Jude and I were named after. Jude was pictured holding the instrument of his torture and death, a club, with a giant, multicolored flame floating above his head. By comparison, Bernard, having died peacefully, was a boring subject, pictured in a hooded white robe with a golden halo behind him; the only interesting aspect of his photo was that, because he was famous for exorcisms, he was pictured with a small black demon clutching at the hem of his robe, trying to gain purchase.
I don’t know how long I stared at Jude. My instinct here is to say that I knew this was the last time I would ever see him – though perhaps it was more of a question in my mind than a certainty. Still, I looked at him for longer than seemed reasonable, thinking about the predicament of his life – that he had been born to a mother who had abandoned him, and raised in our stifling household, that he had freed himself from us but made little so far of his life, that he apparently was facing the prospect of having or abandoning his own child with a woman he clearly didn’t love. For a moment I was angry with him. He’d left home for this, a washed-up wrestler and a cheap waitress, working in a kitchen, passing out on cots? Wasn’t he tired of it all? Wasn’t he maybe a little bit of an asshole, in fact, entirely an asshole? But then, as was always the case with Jude, I talked myself out of it. It’s not his fault, I remember thinking, as if arguing for his soul. Given where he started, what else could he have done? What did you expect?

I suppose what I was thinking about then, though I couldn’t quite articulate it, was the problem of genetics. What had become of Jude seemed to me to be a continuation of a storyline conceived and set in motion long before he was even born. We knew almost nothing of Jude’s mother, Ruth, except what our mother told us, which wasn’t much, just enough to suggest that Jude had inherited a dubious legacy, one that was responsible for his current condition. What we knew was that Ruth had been a good girl, a God-fearing girl, until her teenage years, when she had fallen under the influence of a group of friends who had led her astray. She had run away from home and joined a community in western Pennsylvania, where a group of people lived together all under one roof, and intermingled themselves – I remember specifically my mother using the word intermingled – without concern for the laws of God or man. Because they were always high on drugs, our mother continued, they couldn’t work to earn money, and so they had to grow all their own food. Whatever else they had was begged for or stolen. I hardly knew what any of this meant, and suspect my mother hardly knew, either.
Apart from this basic outline, there was only the occasional remark that would crop up whenever Jude did something that reminded our mother of Ruth. “My sister loved animals,” she told us once, as we were leaving the nature center, a place we sometimes visited on Saturdays. That day, one of the caretakers had taken a wounded owl out of its cage for us to see. The owl was perched on the caretaker’s leather glove, and Jude had bent down to look at it, and they’d stared at each other, their gaze unbroken, for more than a minute. It was a small brown owl with yellow eyes, and it seemed to have a soul – that is, it seemed to be looking at Jude with understanding. I felt like I was witnessing some kind of formal ceremony. “It was almost as if she could communicate with animals,” my mother said afterwards. “Like those princesses in movies, as if birds would land on her shoulder and she could talk to them.” I wondered if this was why my mother didn’t allow pets in our home, despite the fact that Jude and I both badly wanted a dog. “We always said her name should have been Frances,” she added. I remember the way Jude took this all in, as if something finally made sense.
Another time, seemingly out of nowhere, when my mother was flipping through a magazine and saw an advertisement for cigarettes, she raised her head and told Jude that he needed to be careful. “This is where it all started for my sister,” she said, showing him the picture of the Marlboro man with a saddle propped on one shoulder, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “First it was cigarettes,” my mother said, “then alcohol, then drugs, and then we lost her.” Our mother always spoke of Ruth’s defection from the family as if some kind of alien abduction. “They stole her in the night,” she added. I imagined a group of hippies coming to her bedroom window, crawling in and taking her from her bed. I still imagine it that way.
What we heard the most, though, concerning Ruth, was that she had been spoiled. “She was very beautiful,” my mother would say, a bit bitterly, it seemed to me. “Everyone loved her for her beauty, her golden hair. She started to understand that she could break the rules and be forgiven, simply because, well, it’s hard to describe, but there was a kind of light coming from her that people liked to be around. She grew bolder and started to take advantage of people. She always got out of her chores, one way or another. And she was given permission to go more places and stay out later than I ever did. She was given more freedom and she took it, she took off with it and kept running. She never looked back to see what kind of mess she’d made.” On some level, we understood that now my mother was cleaning up the catastrophic mess of raising Ruth’s child, a child who seemed to possess the same magnetism and wanderlust. It was our mother’s job to train this inheritance out of him, a long chore.
During my high school years, when Jude was gone and I was often home alone, I would sometimes go into my mother’s closet and pull down a shoebox from the shelf above her hanging clothes. This is where she kept her correspondence with the nuns she had lived with before Jude was born, and also with a man named Father Michael. There were dozens of letters from Father Michael, who had moved around quite a bit over the years and was lately stationed in Boston. His letters were long and weirdly intimate, responding to things my mother had obviously told him – often discussing the visions my mother had experienced in her dreams. “I’m glad you sensed me there with you when Joan appeared in a blaze of fire,” he said. “I am always with you, of course, whether you sense me or not, but I am glad my spirit was there to give you comfort in what must have been a terrifying, if awesome, moment. We all know Joan to be fearsome. She can only appear to deliver difficult news. I hope you will soon be able to decipher what she is calling you to do.”
In rifling through these letters I came to understand something of my own inheritance – that my mother was insane, in her way, and that I ought to be wary of her belief systems. But it was also in this shoebox that I encountered the only picture of Ruth I had ever seen, a black-and-white photo with a scalloped white border. Ruth was pictured sitting on a blanket in a park, wearing a white dress, her legs tucked beneath her. She wore her hair long and parted down the center, and had a flower tucked behind one ear. She was indeed beautiful, enchanting. It was mostly in her smile, which was the same as Jude’s. One corner of her mouth was upturned, as if she had a secret she wasn’t going to tell, though she wanted you to know she had it. There was something wild in her eye, a spark, something I also recognized from Jude. She was about to do something daring and wanted you to watch. On the back, in my mother’s sensible handwriting, was written Ruth, 1966. The picture must have been taken shortly before she left home, and so Ruth’s secret must have been this: she was about to go off the rails.
I suppose this explains why my parents reacted so harshly when Jude started drinking and smoking pot. This was during his junior year, when he started working in the meat department of the grocery store. Everyone he worked with there had fallen from grace in one way or another – one of the butchers had been to jail, convicted of manslaughter for a drunk driving accident, and another was a Vietnam veteran whose wife had left him for domestic abuse. To break up the bleak, eight-hour stretches in the cold, the butchers would stand out on the dock where trucks backed up to deliver meat, and smoke a joint. It was harmless, Jude thought. In fact, you could even say it was helpful – it helped the day go by.
I learned all of this from reading Jude’s notebook, but my father first came to know it from the smell. One Saturday he picked up Jude after his shift and there was no denying it – Jude was bleary-eyed and stinking. At home there was a terrible scene. My father stripped Jude’s room of his every possession, and in the process discovered a bottle of cheap vodka – something I had missed in my regular visitations to his room. “Just tell me,” my father kept saying, “just tell me where your drugs are. Just admit it.” Jude finally confessed. Yes, he’d tried it, but only at work. He didn’t have anything in the house. He was crying by then. I hadn’t seen him cry since he was a child.
I had thought that after our father cleared Jude’s room, leaving him with nothing but his bed, that his punishment would be over. We were always told this was how it worked – that those who confessed would be granted mercy – but instead my father arranged for Jude to spend the summer in a rehab camp for teenagers. He was to live in the woods for eight weeks with other troubled teens, without any electricity or plumbing, and would spend his days performing manual labor, repairing the cabins already on site, and building additional cabins to house the troubled teens of the future. Jude begged not to go, and was demure for the first time in his life, crying on multiple occasions, even writing my father an earnest letter promising many acts of thoughtfulness and redemption. But my father was merciless. He drove Jude a hundred miles northwest and left him there, and all through the summer we received no word. I wondered sometimes if Jude was even alive. I pictured the day when the phone would ring, and my mother would answer it, then fall to the floor screaming. In the end we really did lose him, though not how I’d imagined.
When Jude returned home, all of his things were back in place, which my father considered a peace offering. But there was no peace to be made. Whatever horrors Jude had experienced at camp – the camp was later closed for mistreating its residents – he held against our father, and I can honestly say I don’t think Jude ever spoke another word to him. He would respond to my mother’s questions, and would sometimes talk to me, but he refused to speak to or even look at our father, and in turn, our father refused to speak to him. This went on for two months or so. Then, the day Jude turned 18, he left home, sneaking out in the morning before anyone woke. My mother kept calling him down to breakfast – she had made him pancakes for his birthday – but he didn’t emerge from his room. Finally she sent me upstairs to retrieve him, and when I pushed open his door I saw his bed was neatly made, with Weezy sitting on top, a note tucked under one of her paws: Bernie, Take care of her for me, okay? I stood there for a couple of minutes, staring at the note, holding Weezy under one arm, knowing that when I went downstairs to deliver the news, all of it would become real, and a new, painful part of our family life would begin.
Sometimes it seemed to me that no one could have helped what happened. That addiction was built into Jude’s DNA and he fell prey to it as a matter of destiny, and that my father responded in the only way he knew how, in the way he believed was the only way that would work – by trying to break Jude. We are who we are, I thought in those moments, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Other times, I thought how easily all of this could have been avoided. If Jude had practiced any amount of discretion. If my father had allowed his will to be bent, even a little. Maybe none of this would have happened.

I suppose I knew where I was going when I wandered upstairs, past the library, down the long hallway lined with chairs, past the grand ballroom with its giant chandelier, then up the staircase to the attic. I felt drawn there, summoned by the ghosts whose presence I’d felt just a few hours before. There was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that I could see more or less perfectly. I walked up and down the rows of beds until I found a doll I could handle sleeping with. She was propped against the pillow, and had some kind of yellow velvet suit on, some type of onesie with a hood attached that was pulled up over her head, covering her hair – just a few wisps of red hair were peeking out. She was smiling, but her eyes were cast downward and to the side, like the smile of a villain. It was as if she was imagining the downfall of her enemies. I picked her up, pulled down the sheet, laid myself in bed, placed the doll on top of my chest. Only then did it occur to me that I was sleeping in a room where hundreds of children had died from the flu, when I was supposed to be in a motel room suffering from the flu, myself. I couldn’t decide if I’d come up in the world, or taken some kind of wrong turn. There would be no $500 check at the end of this, which was bad, but then again, I wasn’t sick. And I’d seen my brother, and remembered once again why he was a difficult person to love. I’d learned something.
I fell asleep with my back turned to the windows and the covers pulled over my head, clutching the devious baby against my chest. When I woke, a few hours later, I was clutching the baby so hard my elbows ached. I got up and pulled the covers back in place, but not the baby – I took her with me, carried her by one arm. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing beyond the fact that I had the feeling I couldn’t let go of her. Her eyes clinked open and shut as I went down the stairs. She was the first thing I had ever stolen and would also be the last.
Down in the library, the TV was running, but there was no sign of the wrestler or Jude. I went down to the basement and looked into the wrestler’s room again, which was empty, although still somehow haunted, with Liz Taylor’s purple eyes gazing up from the floor, and all three wrestlers staring me down. I wandered back upstairs, made a loop of the first floor. The baby’s eyelids blinked open and closed as I walked, as I came to terms with the obvious – they were gone. They had left me. I couldn’t believe it.
I stopped on the first floor to use a small bathroom, which was papered in leopard print. There was a taxidermy head of a dog, maybe a Rottweiler, positioned to face the toilet. It seemed to be looking at me the whole time I was sitting there. His teeth were bared. “Give me a break,” I told him. I held my head in my hands. I was on the verge of tears. I sat there for a long time.
This was what life was like before cell phones. In a situation where you were lost or unsure what to do, you had to wait around in a space of not knowing. And in that space of not knowing, several possibilities would occur to you, explanations for what might have gone wrong. A person you were supposed to meet was stuck in traffic, or was having car trouble, or simply forgot your appointment or possibly even forgot you existed. But then again, maybe the person was going to appear at any moment. Maybe they’d gone out to do something thoughtful, they were about to show up with breakfast or coffee. Maybe they’d been called away to run a quick errand or lend a hand to a neighbor. You tried to just wait. In my case, I wandered out to the den and sat in front of the television and watched golfers putt on a green. Of all the things I could be doing in the world, I thought, I was watching golf. I despaired. Over an hour passed.
Eventually in these situations, either your best or worst instincts guided you forward, which revealed your personality. My personality was based on fear and resentment, so after careful consideration, I decided I’d been abandoned, that Jude and the wrestler were off having fun without me and hadn’t even bothered to leave a note.
I got up and walked out, pulled the door closed behind me. The sky was white with cloud cover but it was still insanely bright. I was squinting and even holding a hand in front of my face. With the other hand, I realized, I was still holding the doll. I wandered for probably an hour. Finally I heard laughter and groups of people talking and knew I was approaching Bourbon Street, full of life even at an early hour. I turned down a street toward the noise. It looked residential, mostly row houses, but there was a neon sign hanging above the door of one of them – a palm outlined in hot pink. I was drawn to it, as if a character hypnotized in a cartoon. I drifted over and examined it. Beneath the flaming pink hand, which looked as if it were raised to take an oath, hung a separate wooden sign:

Eldora
Psychic Tarot Palms

Without even thinking about it I walked up the three porch steps and knocked on the door. And then, when no one answered, pushed the door open and entered. It was as if I was under a spell. I felt as if Eldora would tell me what to do, absolve me, relieve me of my burdens.
I had expected the room to be dark, lit by flickering candles or a lone purple bulb, incense burning in the corner, undulating newwave music drifting from unseen speakers. But instead it was like walking into a regular living room – maybe a rental house in Florida. The walls were painted peach, and the furniture, a puffy couch and round coffee table, was white. On the wall behind the couch hung a pastel painting of two wooden beach chairs facing the ocean. Past the living room was a small dining room with a circular table, also white, with a napkin holder on it stuffed to the brim with an arrangement of paper napkins. There was a paper plate with half a sandwich on it, an open bag of Wise potato chips, and an old aluminum measuring cup being used as a water glass. The only oddity in the room was a painting just inside the door. I recognized it as an El Greco print, though one I hadn’t seen before. It pictured the head and shoulders of a fat friar with a smug expression. His skin was tinged with green. I leaned in for a closer look and saw that the line between his lips was painted with a single brush dipped in vermillion, the color so bright it was almost fluorescent. He looked as if he had just drunk a cup of blood.
An old woman appeared from the back room, wearing a burgundy sweatsuit and white sneakers. Her sweatshirt was tight and I could see the outline of her breasts, which flopped to either side, and hung as low as her navel. She wore black cat glasses, not the type that had made an ironic resurgence as of late, but their predecessor from the sixties. The tops of the frames were fitted with small rhinestones, about half of which had fallen out.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “Come on the hell in. What can I help you with?”
“I was looking for Eldora,” I said.
“Well, you found her.” She put her hands on her hips, a bit defiantly. She was probably tired of people’s disappointment. Anyone walking through a strange door in search of a mystic would be surprised to encounter what looked like their fifth-grade gym teacher. People wanted a wild-haired woman in a flowing kaftan, maybe wearing a turban with a jewel at its center. We wanted a little mystery, a little bullshit.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I guess I’m just interested in, like, a general outline of my future. Whether I’ll be okay. Also it would be helpful to know where my car is. I’m kind of lost.”
She was looking at me quizzically, with her head tilted, like the RCA dog listening to his master’s voice. “I can probably help you,” she said. “I work through a combination of palms and cards. I can do both readings for twenty.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to make some calculations. I had only brought one hundred dollars for the entire trip, had spent forty on the road, and still needed maybe forty dollars in gas to get back home. I wouldn’t be able to eat. I pictured myself stealing a candy bar off a display while I paid for gas. I sat down at the table.
“Ask the cards a question,” Eldora said. She had a strong New Jersey accent which made it sound like we were going to shake down this deck of cards for its milk money. We were going to make it squeal.
“Like, what kind of question?” I asked.
“Ask it what you want to know. But don’t say it out loud.” She pointed her finger at me, for emphasis. “Ask it something you’ve always wanted to know about yourself, in the privacy of your heart.”
I floated the question that had been bothering me all year, whether I should go quietly along the path my father had imagined for me, or run away. After the previous night, I pretty much knew the answer – I knew this wasn’t the life for me – but I also thought of giving in to law school as letting go of Jude forever. I guess I was still holding out a bit of hope.
Eldora was swirling the cards around on the table, moving them over and under and across each other. Then she scooped them up and dealt three in front of me. “Past, present, future,” she said, as she set them down. One was a skeleton, one was a figure wearing a dark cloak, one was a man splayed on the ground with swords stuck in his back.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t like this,” she said.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Let’s have a look at your palm.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s like, that bad?”
“Sometimes we have to leave the cards. They’re not in the mood to be helpful.” She ran her hand over them and swept them up like a Vegas dealer, tapped them on the table, set them down in a pile.
She held out her hand and I placed mine in it. Her face twisted. She asked for my other hand.
“This isn’t giving me much to work with, either,” she said. “You have some abnormalities.”
“My mother was a nun,” I said. I’d always thought that my mother wasn’t really meant to have children, that it went against some fundamental law of nature. And that, as a result, I wasn’t fully formed.
“Well,” Eldora said, “maybe that’s the problem.”
It felt good to hear this.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t usually offer this, but I also have some natural perceptive abilities that don’t fall into any category with a name I’m aware of. ESP is what people usually call it, but I think of it more like being able to look into a person’s soul. I don’t offer it to everybody, but I could probably do it for you. It involves, well, we have to clasp arms and look each other in the eye for a full three minutes.”
Jesus.
“Some people find it uncomfortable,” she added. “But if you get through it, I can tell you anything you want to know about your soul. I can’t see any particulars, like what kind of house you’re going to live in, what job, or anything like that. But I can tell you how it will go with your soul.”
“Okay,” I said. It felt strange to hear someone from New Jersey talk about the soul. I only ever talked to people from New Jersey when I pulled over on the turnpike for gas, or a hot dog.Then the weird part started.
We bent our heads together. She pushed up her sleeves and placed her forearms on the table, palms up, and said for me to place my forearms on top of hers. “Grab my arm just below the elbow,” she said. “And I’ll grab yours.” Her flesh was loose and slid around when I took hold of it. I’d never touched a person that old before.
“Now lean forward,” she said. “We have to press our heads together.”
I did.
“And we have to look at each other,” she reminded me. I had been looking down.
“Okay,” I said. It took everything I had to look her in the eye, but I did. Her eyes were a pale gray color. A red vein had burst in one of her eyeballs and left behind a crazy squiggle.
That three minutes, I can hardly tell you about. I had never looked another person in the eye for that length of time and after about five seconds, I felt myself melting like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, a witch who was otherwise powerful but had a weakness so ordinary something as simple as water caused her to steam and dissolve. The feeling of being seen by another person filled me with shame. It really was as if she could look into my soul, which I knew was defective, because I had not cultivated anything there. I was a person who seemed whole from the outside, but I had no inner resources to speak of. I could memorize facts but couldn’t generate any ideas of my own; I could complete assignments but not conceive of a project; I could smile in a photograph but couldn’t feel joy in my heart; I could recite a prayer without feeling any devotion or sense of hope; I could read a book but not develop any attachment to its characters; I had never cried watching a movie or commercial, never suffered from longing. I had to read other people’s diaries and mail to figure out what kinds of things people worried about and hoped for. I was a blank slate, basically. The only person who had ever stirred any feeling in me was Jude, but it was more of a borrowed feeling than one I had developed on my own. Jude’s feelings were so intense – he desired the world and all of its offerings, all of it, all the time. He wanted to see everything, eat and drink and smell and fuck everything, and a person couldn’t help, standing next to him, to pick up some of that charge. That’s why I had always wanted to be near him, but also why when I was near him, I couldn’t really keep up, couldn’t understand what he was pursuing or why. I was afraid Eldora could see all of this, and cast a terrible judgment on me. I wanted to get away from her, especially her breath, which smelled of loamy soil, but I also wanted to know what my future held. By the last few seconds, I thought I was going to fly apart. I was trembling.
Finally she let go, stared at the table for a moment. She took a deep breath and pushed it out through her mouth. “I’ve only ever seen this once before in all my years,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I could tell it was bad news. “Am I like, going to die soon?”
“No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It’s not that. You’ll live a long life.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s just that, usually what I see are lots of paths, and as I go along into the future there are lots of branches off of those paths, and some of them light up and move forward, and the others grow dark and shrivel away.”
She paused. It was like she was trying to think of the most diplomatic way of explaining what she’d seen.
“With you,” she said, “there’s not a lot of paths, and it doesn’t matter which one you take, because none of them are lit up.” In the near future, she went on to explain, something bad would happen that would snuff out all the lights. My life from there would be a long, dark corridor of existence, with nothing animated, nothing treasured to speak of, no art, no music, no life, no love, nothing but work. “There’s maybe a spark here and there,” she said. “But none of them take to flame. I’m sorry. That’s just what I see.”
When she finished delivering my fate I nodded, got up to leave. I hoped I was projecting an air of bravery, like someone nobly accepting a brutal diagnosis from an oncologist.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” She unzipped her fanny pack and pulled out the twenty I had given her earlier. I was stunned. “Go ahead and take this back.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I waved it away. I felt like she’d confirmed something I’d always suspected, and it was a relief to know it. She had provided a valuable service.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want it. I hate to see a future like that. It doesn’t please me, I assure you, to see something like that.”
Now my problem was that if I took the money, I would be a person whose soul was so wretched he had been given a refund by the person who had stared into it. “It’s okay,” I said. But she stood and pressed the bill back into my hand. She really didn’t want it. A person who took money from people who wandered in off the street didn’t want my money. “Keep it,” she said. “You’ll need it.” She wanted rid of me. I was fouling her space.
I was crossing the threshold when she called after me. “And your car,” she said, pointing down the road. “I believe if you take a left at the next intersection, it’s just a block up from there.”
A minute down the road I realized I had left the baby doll behind and felt crushed. I thought about going back for her but decided she was probably better off – maybe Eldora’s next client would pick her up and give her a better home than I could. As for Eldora, I tried to dismiss her, thinking of all the ways I could discredit what she’d just told me. Eldora was nothing more than a lunatic in a burgundy jumpsuit, I told myself. She probably wasn’t even a medium. She was maybe the cleaning lady playing a joke, or Eldora’s older sister, in town for the week and in the mood to play a prank. She hadn’t read my cards because she didn’t know what they meant. The ritual with the staring, that was just a load of bullshit she’d invented on the spot. She was wrong about everything.
But then I caught sight of the car, which was exactly where she said it would be, and I had to admit Eldora might have known what she was talking about. The car’s profile was unmistakable. I could tell even when it was fresh off the assembly line it had looked defective, something about the angle at which the roof sloped down into the trunk reminding me of a hunchback. When I got closer I saw that the back window of the Chevy had been smashed. And even though I’d been predicting this very thing for years, when it came down to it, I couldn’t believe it had happened. My father had taken good care of that car. He had saved for it and then cared for it, just so that he could pass it down to me so I could ruin it. I ruined everything.
I didn’t even try to clean out the car – I just left the broken glass scattered across the back seat. I cranked the engine and it started up, which surprised me. I felt my way back toward the highway, then onto it, and never saw New Orleans again, except on the news a decade later after the levees broke, and the neighborhoods I’d walked through were flooded with water, and people were standing on their rooftops waving flags, hoping to be saved, and it was well and truly hell on earth.

When I arrived back at my room Schmidt was lying in bed with Weezy. He was the only brother who had stayed in the house over break and was probably feeling sorry for himself because he never had the money to do the things everyone else did without thinking twice.
He sat up and wiped his eyes – he had been crying. “Here,” he said, and handed Weezy over, but I was so angry at Jude for leaving me, for the mess he’d made of his life, I waved Schmidt off. “Keep her,” I said. I was stunned by what Eldora had told me and didn’t want to drag Weezy with me into the future. At least with Schmidt, she might do some good.
“Really?” he asked.
“I don’t think I can take care of her,” I said. “I have too much to catch up on and I need to focus. I don’t think I can give her the kind of home she deserves.”
“I can,” he said. “I absolutely will.”
“I know you will,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m giving her to you.”
I never touched Weezy again, even though Schmidt started leaving her out on top of his bed and it would have been easy to pick her up and smell her fur. After graduation I drove Schmidt and all his worldly belongings to the Greyhound station so he could catch his bus up to Yale, where he had secured a summer job working at the university gym. The last glimpse I caught of him was in my rearview. He was standing in the parking lot, surrounded by bags, his hands clasping the straps of his backpack. Weezy was inside it, I knew, and he would probably prop her up against one of the bus windows and rest his head on her all the way to New Haven. I felt a pang of regret, but brushed it away.
I didn’t see Schmidt again for a long time, and when I finally did, we were both middle-aged, and he was on the news. He was running for senator in the state of West Virginia and had made national headlines with one of his campaign ads, in which he was pictured hunting in the West Virginia woods, stopping occasionally to point his rifle at photoshopped images of his opponents. Didn’t this ad cross a line, the reporter wanted to know, didn’t it incite violence at exactly the time people least needed to be encouraged toward political violence? Schmidt looked the same as ever – with his boyish face and upswept wing of dark hair and eager expression. He could hardly wait for the reporter to finish her sentence. “By God, Mandy, I do believe we still live in a free country,” he said. “And as a journalist I know you’re on the side of freedom of expression when it serves you.” He cracked a smile, pleased with himself. “The fact is I’m not worried about this because the good people of West Virginia recognize hypocrisy when they see it, and I just thank God they aren’t quite as dumb as you East Coast media make them out to be, nothing personal there Mandy, I know you’re just doing your job.” Everything he’d worked so hard to rid himself of, the long vowels he’d kept on a short leash up at school, had been let loose and even allowed to proliferate – he sounded like Hank Williams, his phrases drawn out, plaintive and warbling. The news outlet cut to footage of the ad, Schmidt in fatigues and combat boots, traipsing through woods, his rifle over his shoulder. A real dog that looked just like Weezy followed at his heels. A month later, he won the election.

A few weeks after that trip I got a letter from Jude, saying he was on the road again, that things had gotten to be too much in New Orleans. “I had to shake off that waitress,” he wrote. He was heading to Maine, he said, because he’d heard about the kind of seasonal life you could live there in the tourist towns, working in restaurants or hotels all summer, then holing up for the winter in a cabin. He said he’d like to learn how to work on a boat, to spend his days out on the water, hauling up lobsters or maybe even diving for scallops. Then, in winter, he could just drift. Read books. Listen to records. Go for walks in the snowy woods. “There are people who’ll pay you to stay in their summer house through the winter to make sure nothing bad happens to it,” he said. “That seems like the right move for me. I’d like to be by myself for a while. That’s the only way I’ll be able to tell what the right path is.”
Towards the end of the letter he explained that he and the wrestler had gone out for beignets that morning, with the intention of bringing them back to the house for breakfast. “But when we got back, you were gone. I guess I should have left a note. Maybe next time.” He meant we could have beignets at some point in the future, I’m sure, but the way I read it was that he would try to remember to leave a note the next time he left me.
That fall I started law school and threw myself into it. After what had happened in New Orleans, I put away the notions I’d had about leading a different life, and set about the business of turning into my father. I didn’t think too much about it. To my mind, I was just becoming who I was destined to be.
That first semester, on one of the first cold days of the year, the sky covered in fat gray clouds, I arrived home from class and saw a message blinking on my machine. I assumed it was my mother and didn’t play it. Sometimes it took me days to muster the strength to listen to her voice, which managed to convey, even as she left a message of good tidings, a sense of not knowing or even caring in particular who was on the other end of the line – it was as if she was just checking off one of a long list of worldly tasks that dwelled beneath the spiritual realm she preferred to live in. A few days later, the weather having warmed a bit and the sky bright again, I played the message and was surprised to hear a voice I didn’t recognize. It was a woman, a social worker calling from a hospital in Portland. She said she had found my name and old phone number in Jude’s wallet. When my old number failed, the social worker explained, she had taken the extra step of calling information and was given my new number, a series of events that seemed miraculous. She left a number for me to call and when I did, she picked up – another miracle – and told me Jude had overdosed and was in a coma. I had to call my parents. Then make arrangements to miss classes. Then rent a car – the Chevy had finally died – and drive eighteen hours to Portland. By the time I got to the hospital, Jude was dead. My parents had gotten there first, and arranged to take his body back home to Delaware, where they would bury him in the Catholic cemetery – the last place on earth he would have chosen to rest.
This was just the start of what indeed turned out to be a long, dark corridor of time. After Jude’s funeral, about which I remember almost nothing, I busied myself every moment with my studies, and my work at the law review and at legal aid – which I performed not so much because I wanted to help people, but because it would help me land one of the better clerk positions I’d need in order to succeed in my field. I graduated from law school and, even though I had offers at other firms, took a job working with my father and his partners in Philadelphia. Nine months later, as if he had just been waiting for me to replace him, as if he’d been holding up a beam and now that someone else could bear the weight, he could surrender it, my father died one Saturday morning at his desk. I moved in with my mother for a while to help her manage her affairs, and to ease the panic she felt now that she was alone. It turned out she didn’t know how to do anything. She had never written a check except to the grocery store, and didn’t know how to pump her own gas. She knew nothing about insurance, taxes, utility bills. She’d spent all of her time volunteering at the church, running the food pantry and the women’s group, teaching Sunday school. These were the things she knew how to do. But about the management of her own life, she didn’t know a single goddamned thing. She was like a child.
By the time my lease expired on my apartment in the city, I was entrenched in my mother’s household, and decided to keep living there for a while. The life I’d imagined I’d have in the city had never materialized anyway, mostly because I worked eighty hours a week at the firm. I didn’t have any friends, just colleagues and clients, most of whom were criminals and long-time associates of my father. My work always seemed urgent, like I was striving to save a life, or multiple lives. I defended the man who’d orchestrated the entire concept of payday loans with insanely punitive fine print. With the money he’d made he had established a family in a lavish lifestyle, but now he was on the hook to be sent to prison. He wouldn’t be there to raise his children, and his family would be impoverished. Someone had to do something, and that someone was me. This was just one example. There were dozens more, and they were all pretty much the same. My clients had lived their lives recklessly and were facing the consequences; I had lived mine carefully and was sacrificing it in order to save theirs.
One evening I arrived home to find my mother had cooked a formal meal – meatloaf and mashed potatoes, a loaf of bread, even a bottle of wine – which was unusual. Over dinner she told me that she had been praying for a while and had concluded that the best use of her life would be to relocate to a small convent near Pittsburgh, which was in need of a cook and caretaker. My mother had corresponded with them and had arranged to live in the convent, preparing meals for its sisters and cleaning its rooms. In exchange she would be given a small room and a modest weekly salary. She didn’t want to sell the house, as she expected to come back to it someday. She wanted me to continue living in it, she said, to keep our family home alive, though I would be, it would seem, its only remaining member. I resolved then and there to leave. But after my mother left, I was busy as always with work, and it started to seem like a ridiculous expense to maintain a home that no one was living in, not to mention the expensive outlay of time it would cost me to move again, which I couldn’t afford. I didn’t mind the house so much when I was alone in it. So I stayed. For a while I imagined it was temporary, but at some point I stopped thinking about what I would do next, and gave into it.
Then I was a man in his late twenties living in a suburb meant for family men. Usually when I wound through the neighborhood streets on my way home from work, kids were out playing football and soccer in the last light, and when they moved to the side of the road to let me pass, they cast wary and sometimes hateful looks my way. I drove a maroon Buick sedan, my father’s old car, and must have looked like a warning to them, a terrible vision of the future.
For the first year or so I slept in my old room, hardly altered from the years of my former occupancy, but eventually I moved to my parents’ bedroom, wanting to stretch out in a bigger bed, though there were problems – their mattress was so old and soft my back ached in the mornings, and the only bedcover was so hideous it enraged me every time I saw it. It was something my mother had made in the eighties, from a fabric splattered with large flowers, or rather brushstrokes arranged to suggest flowers, dashes of magenta and navy blue, with teal accents. It looked like the art hung in motel rooms, what Monet would have come up with if he’d set up his easel in an American mall in the 1980s, instead of a French garden in the 1880s. I hated it but couldn’t get rid of it. My mother was going to move back someday, she kept saying, and would expect to be greeted by the exact life she’d left behind.
Years passed.
When I was younger I had always marveled at the stunningly boring regularity of my father’s existence. Monday through Saturday, he got up early and went to the office, the only difference being that on Saturdays he didn’t wear a necktie. In the evenings he came home, had a Miller Lite, ate his dinner, then disappeared for a while in the family room, looking at papers. On Sunday morning he was back in a necktie for church, after which he crammed in all of the yardwork and other home and automobile maintenance that needed to be done. In this way he accounted for every waking hour of his life. You wouldn’t think a person could endure this for long – surely he must have harbored buried longings that would eventually claw their way to the surface – but my father lived like this for decades, never wavering, eventually wearing a groove in his days so deep he fell into it and died. He looked like a normal human being. In fact you could say he was an above average specimen, successful and handsome – he really did resemble that shirt model. But eventually you realized that something was wrong with him, deeply wrong. I suppose you could say he lacked a soul.
Now I seemed to be on the same path.
It was only very occasionally that I felt a flicker, a spark of interest in something other than the work in front of me. I’d try to keep it alive, try to build on it. Every now and then, when a funny mood came over me, I’d steal into Jude’s old room and sit cross-legged on the floor in front of his record player, like we used to. One time I found the 45 of “Try Me” that had played in the restaurant and listened to that, then flipped it over and played “Tell Me What I Did Wrong.” It was more upbeat than the A side, and I enjoyed it for a moment, but then the thought of Jude sitting and listening to it seized me, and my chest ached, and I had to leave the room. I could never hold on to any kind of feeling for long. I felt like if I didn’t go back to my work, my heart would explode.
I realize now I could have done any number of things differently. I could have bought a new mattress and bedspread, at least. I could have moved out. I could have quit my job. I could have tried to meet people. Occasionally someone set me up on a date and it would go well enough; I could have kept going out with any one of those women, but when I tried to imagine the future all I saw was the two of us repeating the lives my parents had led. She would be busy raising children, and I would be busy at work. We would produce another round of my own family and then I’d die at my desk. I felt like I already knew everything that would happen. What was the point?
My thirties went by, and then I was in my forties, the whole time buoyed along by my obligations at the firm, which only worsened when I made partner. By the time Covid arrived, which represented the first break in my routine I’d experienced in twenty years, I was forty-five years old.
Those first few weeks, the firm was in lockdown and everyone was working from home. I tried to keep up the same routine, but I soon figured out that during my meetings with judges and clients and the other partners on Zoom, I could get away with wearing a suit jacket and tie with sweatpants underneath. This was the first bit of loosening, and things kept unravelling from there. I had a beer one day at lunch and then kept drinking in the afternoon, which made the work go by faster, so I did it again the next day, and the next. One evening, more drunk than usual, I saw a news story on the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was suddenly relevant again in that it was giving us a sense of how these plagues operated, swelling and receding in waves, until everyone had either developed immunity or died. The news showed photo after photo of the wards that patients had been kept in then – big, open rooms lined with beds – and that’s when my trip to New Orleans came back to me. I remembered the wrestler and looked him up online. Dozens of news articles sprang up from 2012, when he’d been convicted of murdering his former wife, who I immediately recognized as Vampirina. She had been working as a cashier in a grocery store in Biloxi and he’d waited outside one night in the parking lot, security footage showed, then beckoned her to his car as she walked to hers. She’d entered willingly, and they’d sat there for a long time. Then the wrestler had driven away, straight to the police station, where he turned himself in. He had strangled her in the car in a fit of passion. It was an accident, he insisted, when he entered his plea. He was only trying to keep her from leaving. He had only wanted to talk.
I thought about the wrestler for the next several days, read every article I could find about his arrest and trial. He looked truly wretched in his mug shot. His eyes were swollen from crying, his mouth was open. He looked like the saddest man who ever lived.
I looked up his correctional facility and his inmate number, knowing that I was inching down a dangerous road. It was a stupid idea for a criminal defense attorney to contact an incarcerated felon – he would probably consider me a lifeline, try to rope me into a lengthy appeals process. Or if not that, he’d tell his fellow inmates about me, and they’d start writing to me. Then, when I declined to help them, they’d bide their time in jail and come to rob and kill me upon their release – this is what happened to the Clutter family from In Cold Blood. Still, I hadn’t done anything interesting in a long time, and hadn’t felt a connection to Jude in years, so I couldn’t help myself from pursuing it. One afternoon, after I’d had a few Miller Lites, I wrote a short letter and walked to the post office and dropped the letter in a mailbox. I tried to forget about it, but couldn’t. A few weeks passed. Then one day when I went in to the office to pick up my mail, I saw an envelope stamped with the tell-tale markings of a correctional facility. This wasn’t the first time I received a letter from prison – far from it – but this one was from Mississippi. It was from the wrestler.
The wrestler had sent a long tome, written on plain white paper in blue pen. The first few pages were about Jude, how much he’d loved him, how devastated he was when he heard Jude had died. It had sent him into a long depression, he said, the first real depression of his life. Then, perhaps because he had nothing else to do, he wrote out the entire history of his life.
His real name was Euguene Delacroix, he wrote, and he’d grown up outside of Innsbruck, Austria, where he’d led a relatively normal life, until in his late teens it became evident that rather than leveling off, he was still growing. It became impossible for him to wear regular clothing or to keep himself full on what his mother considered to be a reasonable amount of food. In what sounded like nothing more than an attempt to feed himself, Eugene joined the army, where he languished for four years as a vehicle mechanic. Overall the army wasn’t to his liking, and he regretted joining from the first moment, but it was in the army he first started boxing, then wrestling. He wasn’t necessarily skilled or agile, but he soon learned that his size put him at an advantage over any opponent. By this time, he was over seven feet tall. He became known and feared for picking up other soldiers and lifting them over his head, then dropping them back onto the mat. When he left the army he presented himself to the local wrestling ring in Innsbruck, where he was taken up by trainers and promoters and made into Gene the Giant. In his early promotional materials he was pictured clad in a leopard-print loin cloth and carrying a club. Because he could pick up any other wrestler and throw him to the mat, no one on the European circuit could beat him. They started loaning him out for appearances to other circuits, and he eventually made his way to the States. He wrestled Randy Savage, a young Hulk Hogan. He picked them both up and dropped them.
Later, because of the rising success of Andre the Giant, they changed his identity to The Vampire, and he started appearing in promotional posters with fanged teeth, wearing a silky black cape. This didn’t really make sense, he wrote, as vampires were usually pale and thin, with elongated limbs and fingers, and practiced a sort of cold calculation on their victims instead of the raging outbursts common in the ring, but these things didn’t really matter in wrestling promotion. It was out on the circuit, traveling through the south, where he’d met Justine, one of the few female wrestlers trying to make a name for herself. They’d fallen in love and she’d taken on the persona of Vampirina. They became a minor sensation. The promotional poster I’d seen was from the height of their fame.
The wrestler kept growing. The size that had initially given him an advantage over any other wrestler eventually became a burden. His joints ached constantly, and the discs in his back kept bursting out into his spinal column. There was a whole season where he could barely walk. During his final season he was made part of Vampirina’s matches. Whenever Vampirina was losing, The Vampire would slip under the ropes and attack her opponent from behind, picking them up and then dropping them on the mat. He became a villain, a heel. In his final matches, the very same people who had loved him booed him out of the ring. By then Vampirina had left the wrestler in real life, and playing out their love story was agony. In the ring, she looked at him with the same adoration he was used to, and it threw him. At first he thought she was able to manufacture these looks because she still loved him. Then he wondered if she ever had, if it had been fake the whole time. He couldn’t tell what was an act and what was real.
He had written all of this on blank sheets of paper, and his lines, which started out straight, gradually sloped downward. His penmanship bore the marks of a bad tremor. “In any form of entertainment,” he wrote, “everything that makes it to the top was probably stolen from someone at the bottom. The people at the bottom never get their due. You’d think they’d be mad, but what ends up happening is that they take a certain pride in it. All those years watching Randy and Elizabeth on the big screen I got to say: That was my idea. I did it first.”
I wrote back a single page, asking the wrestler if he needed anything, and also asking if he would tell me anything about Jude I might not know. “I remember the story you told about being out on that lake,” I wrote. “Anything like that, I’d appreciate. I’d particularly like to know why he left New Orleans. And if you know what happened with that girlfriend.”
I suppose this was what I was really after when I first wrote to him. A lifeline, a link to Jude. A path I might pursue. Something to track down. But the wrestler didn’t know anything. He wrote back that the girlfriend had left town after that night, had gone back to live with her mother, and he’d never seen her again, never found out what happened. He couldn’t even remember her name.
We continued to write to each other for months, and I came to find the wrestler’s letters to be a pleasant distraction. I never asked him about the crime he’d committed but in his final letter, he confessed that he spent most of his days thinking about his wife, playing out scenes between them, and imagining what might have happened between them if he had been able to win her back. His handwriting was particularly bad in this letter, each letter so shakily drawn I imagined it must have taken him a whole minute to form.
“In my retirement years, I used to drive over to Biloxi once a week or so,” he wrote. “I had heard from old friends she was living a quiet life, taking care of her mother, and working in a grocery store. I’d sit in my car in the dark parking lot so I could watch her work. It was like watching a movie, with the store all lit up in bright yellow lights and me sitting in the dark. I could see her talking with people, laughing. I just wanted to look at her. I learned her schedule, and started driving up more and more. I’d watch her walk to her car, and make sure she was safe. All that time I was trying to build up the courage to talk to her. Then one night, I hadn’t even really planned for it, I didn’t have a speech ready, or flowers, which was how I’d always imagined it, but for some reason I just found myself getting out of my car and approaching her. She didn’t run off. She looked maybe happy to see me.”
He went on to say that they talked for a while in his car, but after that, he didn’t remember. “I wish I could. They say I strangled her. I know it doesn’t make any difference but what I want people to know is that I loved her. I never had anything but love for her. I don’t remember but I know this, even as I killed her, I loved her.”
After that he stopped writing. Three months went by without a word. The thing about corresponding with prisoners was, they always wrote back – there was really only one thing that prevented them. I had a bad feeling. I looked him up and saw that he had died in March, almost 25 years to the day I’d first met him. In his obituary, his career as a wrestler was mentioned, but only as a footnote to the fact that he was incarcerated for murder.
I went back to my routine. The spark I’d been following had led me along for a while, then gone out.
Some weeks later, I received another piece of news in the mail, sent by my mother. It was a copy of a brief article that had been printed from the website of a small newspaper in New Jersey. It was a short column about a seventy-one-year-old Trenton woman who, for unknown reasons, had walked out into the woods behind her apartment building with a can of gas, then doused herself and lit a match. Her remains were so badly damaged she couldn’t be identified until the police launched an investigation. It was Ruth. The picture they ran was from an old license photo, taken a few years prior. She had aged badly. She still wore her hair long and parted down the center, but her face was haggard, hatched with deep lines. Her eyes were heavily lined in black pencil, and had none of the animated light I’d seen in her other photo. She looked like someone who had been following The Grateful Dead for an unhappy eternity. At the time of her death, she was working at Walmart.
My mother had included a note describing how, for the second time in her life, she had received a call at a convent about her sister, about something terrible her sister had done, only this time there was nothing to be salvaged. There was nothing my mother could do to make this whole in the eyes of God. We must pray for her soul, she concluded.
The next time my mother called I went after her before she could 158 cycle through her usual questions about my work and the house. “Why did you send me that?” I asked. “Why the hell did you send that to me?”
“Oh,” she said, and paused. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“No,” I said. More forcefully than I’d ever spoken to her before.
“No, I did not.” By that time, I was more like her parent than child. I usually extended her patience, but not now.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know why you would send that to me,” I said again. My mother had probably expected to be consoled, but instead I was angry with her. I’d lost Jude, my father was gone, she’d disappeared herself into a convent – and now she had sent word that our last remaining family member had gone up in flames. It was too much. The worst of it was that my mother had scrupulously maintained her innocence all these years, as if none of this was her fault – she was just a poor soul on whom misfortune was visited. But by that time I had realized she could have intervened. She could have compromised her beliefs a little here and there to indulge us – not even with gifts, but with love, affection. She could have hung pictures of us on the walls or carried them in her wallet. She could have allowed us things our father didn’t allow, on occasion, since he was never home anyway. She could have defended Jude all the times our father came down on him. She could have prevented him from being sent away to that camp, which really was the beginning of the end of things. She could have sought him out after he left home and lured him back, at least to visit. She could have sought out her sister and introduced Jude to her. She could have done many things other than what she chose to do, which was pray, which was nothing. It occurred to me suddenly that I hated her, had hated her for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Well, you weren’t,” I said. I hung up the phone. She sent a letter the following week, mentioning at the end her regret at causing me pain, and we never spoke of it again.
After this, I started thinking more about the waitress. I had thought of her occasionally in the twenty-odd years that had passed since that night in New Orleans, though never with any determination or consistency. I’d always assumed she’d gotten an abortion, as she said she would. But in the wake of Ruth’s death, and the wrestler’s, when there was no connection left to Jude on God’s green earth, as my mother would have called it, I began to think, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’d had a child and raised him – I thought of the child as a boy. He would be in his twenties now, perhaps just developing a curiosity about his father. Maybe the waitress would remember my name and they would look me up. Maybe one day there would come a knock at the door. The idea took hold of me. The waitress and her son came to seem like the only possible solution to the problem of my life, the only means by which the terrible curse Eldora had cast on me – for this was how I thought of it now, that she had cursed me, rather than simply read my fate – might be lifted.
Now I am simply waiting. It is uncomfortable, wanting something that might not even exist, holding out for its arrival, every day wondering if it might happen this day. What I am living in, I reluctantly admit, is a state of faith, something I have never experienced before and never wanted anything to do with. I have always considered faith to be a surrender of control, a desperate, impotent, last-ditch move. I am angry to have been delivered here. I want rid of this state of affairs, but it is all I have. I sometimes wonder if this is how my parents spent their lives, if this is what they felt when they bent their heads in church, and prayed on their knees at night. Was this what they were asking for – to be given another chance, to be afforded some kind of grace, to be transformed?
I would like to be redeemed. But the worst of it is, I know that if the waitress and her son ever do arrive to redeem me, I won’t deserve it. It would be more fitting if I were judged for my failings, and left to suffer. I had thought so little of the waitress – the desperate spectacle of her appearance, how she clung to Jude, how territorial she was, how petty. How she always kept her mouth open, either because she was trying to be seductive, or because she was confused. I had judged her so harshly, treated her so badly. Jude treated her so badly. I wonder now how life could have played such an elaborate trick, placing all of its potential meaning and treasure in the hands of a person I had considered so insignificant, and dismissed. Could it be that all this time, the waitress had been the mother of Jude’s child, the last remaining link to him? Could it be that she had created and cared for the only thing I might have left to value in this life? If so, I couldn’t think of a single reason she would bother to contact me. That night in New Orleans, which might well have been a test for all I know, I failed to offer the waitress the basic kindness I extended to every other human being I’d ever met, even strangers. I never thought to ask her where she came from, what she was interested in, what she hoped to accomplish with her life. I never asked her if she wanted to be a mother, or offered help. I never rose to wish her goodbye. I let her wander off in the night down a dark road, in a dangerous city, alone. I never even asked her name.

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Christie Hodgen is the author of four books of fiction: A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Hello, I Must Be Going (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006); Elegies for the Brokenhearted (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); and Boy Meets Girl (New Issues, 2022). She has published short stories and essays in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

ANIMAL STORIES by Jason Brown

To reach the cabin where we would spend my sabbatical from teaching, we had to drive along the twisting two-lane road that followed the river at the bottom of the canyon north of a scruffy old ranching community with sofas and rusty trucks in the front yards. The red canyon walls rose on either side of us. Tectonic plates had slipped under the surface of the continent 80 million years ago and pushed up to form these mountains. If the land was still slowly rising, it was also slowly falling as the wind and ice eroded the peaks into the valleys. The remains of prehistoric crocodiles were lodged in the striated rock in the jagged landscape undisturbed by the scars of human presence except for the contrails tracing the sky above. I tried to imagine the planet before there were so many people living on it, before the culture in which I had been raised, the culture that had metastasized over the globe, had forged the myth that man should dominate nature. Humans would wreak more havoc on the planet, but in the end, we were just another animal. We wouldn’t have the last say.
We turned off the pavement onto a narrow dirt road and started the climb to the top of the mesa and the cabin. Little if any work had been done on my mother-in-law’s place for more than twenty years. The wood siding was brittle and perforated by the wind and sun. I could break it off between my fingers. The wind poured in around the window frames, the bent metal chimney had never been cleaned, and the well water coughed out of the faucet in orange spatter. In a high wind the tin roof flapped because the screws had never been tightened. During storms the whole place shook as from an earthquake. Probably in part because the place needed saving, I loved it. If I didn’t get to work right away, we would never make it through the winter. We had to secure the roof, cut firewood, get a sled so we could hike groceries in from the main road in the winter.
We were miles from a ski area and beyond the absurdly wealthy enclaves that surround skiing in the west. None of us – Nicola, me, or Nicola’s mother – were wealthy, but because Nicola’s mother had bought this place years ago, our family now had the opportunity to spend time apart from the human world while I was on sabbatical from my teaching job. We had a chance to spend time with our twoyear-old daughter, Bella. The absence of people was a shock and a relief. Except for the boundary lines on the county property website, life on the mesa was governed by laws that preceded human dominion.
To be in a place where human presence was tolerated provisionally and to sit in the dry grass as Bella learned to run across the field chasing our dogs filled me with a sense of vertigo. I wanted to stay here forever watching Bella wheel away from me on her springy two-year-old legs only to stop and turn around to make sure I was still there. “Papa,” she would say, her voice cutting through the constantly blowing wind. Our Australian shepherds had been bred with a similar radar. They would race through the grass until they were twenty or thirty yards away, then arc toward us to touch base before racing away again. Nicola, Bella, the dogs, and I, we never tired of this ancient ritual of pulling away and circling back, of periodic contact: Bella’s hand against my arm before she ran into the field again, a wet nose grazing my palm or rising up to brush my cheek before following a scent into the scrub oak.
I reminded myself that the relief I felt at living apart from people shouldn’t be confused with thinking of the wilderness as paradise. I had to keep an eye on Bella at all times. Several years before, my mother-in-law, getting ready to leave the cabin, placed her hand on the handle of the glass front door, but realized she had forgotten her coffee mug and walked back through the kitchen. When she returned to the door, she found a mountain lion sitting on its haunches on the other side of the glass. Two years before, while on a visit from Eugene, I was walking our two dogs and my mother-in-law’s Lab a hundred yards south of the cabin when we came around a scrub oak to face a bear cub. The Lab chased the cub into the bushes to our left. The mother bear appeared ten yards to our right and rose onto her hind legs. Franny, a little more than a year old, started barking. I grabbed her, turned in place, and ran west through the scrub – exactly what you’re not supposed to do, I was later told. Cheever led the way as the branches scraped against my face and arms. I heard crashing behind me and kept running until I tripped on a stump and flew headfirst into the grass. There was nothing behind us except the twisted oaks and the sky.

***

We had left my mother back in Eugene, Oregon. She lived in a small apartment two miles from our house, which we had rented to one of my former students. Though she was in her late seventies now, she was still physically agile and strong. She hadn’t had a drink in many years. Signs of dementia had just started to emerge, but she was still able to care for herself – as well, that is, as she ever had. Age was not the problem.
I’d been sober for over twenty years, and many years had passed since my mother had been jailed for grand theft larceny in Arizona, many years since I had rescued her from homelessness. My sister and I paid her rent in Eugene, and I tried my best to keep an eye on her and to make sure she had enough food and went to the doctor once in a while. I worried what would happen while I was away.
When I called her to check in, I thought I recognized the same old force inside of her driving her to tear everything down. I recognized a similar force inside of me. Some kind of mental illness, it was hard to deny. The phrase mental illness flashed in my head like a roadside construction sign. I had spent most of my life in fear of becoming like my mother.
I knew I had made some progress. In Eugene, Nicola and I had bought a small house on the hill above the university and worked overtime to fix it in the years before Bella was born. I tore up shag, laid down wood floors, rebuilt the carpeted staircase with cherry, skimcoated over the popcorn-finish drywall, and built a deck off our bedroom. I labored with the awareness that we were striving for what many people had striven for over time: a place to raise a family. I loved the work and loved working together with Nicola to give shape to our future together.
On our hikes and walks in Eugene, Nicola and I had started to talk about becoming parents. We didn’t have forever to think about it, and I was afraid of what it might mean. In speaking with Nicola about my apprehensions, I leaned on my own limitations by telling her that I might not be a good father. I really feared that there was something wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed. Nicola had never seen me drinking or depressed. She’d never met the man who dodged every responsibility, careened into fights, drove headlong into fire hydrants, and wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. That person was dormant but not gone. In short, when the subject of children arose, I worried about all that could go wrong.
“Things can always go wrong,” she said, and I knew she was talking about her father dying from injuries sustained in a car accident and her half-brother dying of a heroin overdose. She herself had struggled with depression, especially after her father’s death. She didn’t like her job, which didn’t pay very well. I didn’t make enough to support us all in the long run; she didn’t want to rely on me anyway. At night before bed, we sat at the kitchen table and schemed about our future. We weren’t young anymore, but we both felt a kind of youthful restlessness. We were as hungry for life as kids in their twenties, and like overgrown kids we conceived of dreams that didn’t quite make sense for two middle-aged people about to have a child: moving to Alaska to homestead, retraining me as a cabinet/furniture-making carpenter (a persistent dream of mine), or, in Nicola’s case, training as a helicopter pilot. One day we drove to a Coast Guard recruiting office and sat in the car talking about who would feed our baby while she flew into storms to rescue fishermen from sinking ships. I think we both knew that our dreams would evolve as soon as we were responsible for a new life.

***

While we were in Colorado, three things happened at more or less the same time – our tenant in Eugene moved out earlier than we thought he would, my mother’s landlord wanted her out (her lease had expired), and the world was beset by a global pandemic. We could have pushed to keep my mother in her apartment, at least for a while, but even if the landlord had agreed, he was going to raise the rent as much as he could. My sister and I couldn’t go any higher. When I called my mother to see what she thought of living in our house until we returned, at which point I would build her an apartment in our oversized garage, she was silent.
“What if I don’t want to live up there with all those fancy people?”
“There are no fancy people,” I said. “It’s Eugene.” After half an hour of persuading her that our neighborhood was not a right-wing stronghold, she grew lukewarm to the idea and finished off the conversation with, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
When I suggested to Nicola that my mother move into our house for the rest of my sabbatical and into a garage apartment thereafter, she studied me for a while as if I had just returned from a long and perilous journey to the moon.
“Are you crazy?” she eventually said. Bella looked up at me as if she also expected me to answer this question.
I had to wait until after Bella fell asleep to pitch my idea a second time. I had formed a presentation with clear points: we would save money on paying my mother’s rent, we could use the savings for childcare, maybe my mother could provide some “supervised” childcare, the “apartment” I built in the garage would add to the value of our house . . .
“And as an added bonus, every time I leave the house with Bella, I will run into your mom sitting in a lawn chair outside our garage ready to yell at me because you haven’t met her needs,” Nicola said.
“I will build a separate entrance on the other side of the garage. She won’t be able to get in through the gate to our front door.”
“A gate? Your mother is a criminal mastermind. Within a week, she would be living in the house, and we would be living in the garage.”
“That seems extreme.”
“Does it? When are you going to build this apartment in the garage with new windows, doors, floors, a bathroom and kitchenette?”
Bella came into the room with all three of her stuffed white unicorns somehow loaded in her arms – Papa Woodrow (the size of a German shepherd), which I had bought on sale at Lowe’s, Mama Woodrow (about the size of a corgi), and Baby Woodrow (the size of a kitten). She kept repeating the phrase “Baby Woodrow booboo” because Baby Woodrow’s horn was coming off. She was looking at me with her huge blue eyes because I was the one who knew how to sew.

***

My mother had more than a month’s warning that I was returning. On the phone she had said she was packing and getting ready to move. She complained that it was hard to find boxes, so I talked her through a plan to pick up boxes. She complained that she had no packing tape, and I explained that there were places called stores that sold packing tape. I decided to hang up and call back fifteen minutes later. Sometimes that worked the way it did with restarting my computer to get rid of a glitch. When she answered, she said, “Yesssss,” and I mentioned that the previous conversation hadn’t gone very well. She agreed. I asked her if she didn’t want to move into our house.
“What choice do I have? When Stalin commands, you do what Stalin says!”
I tried to explain in my strained calm voice that she did have a choice, of course, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure how much this was true. Her landlord wanted her out so he could repair the damage she had caused to her apartment. We could fight him under the new Covid regulations, but that was a temporary solution. I would be lucky if he didn’t come after me for thousands of dollars of damages to the apartment – my name was on the lease. She didn’t have a social worker because she refused to work with one, she wasn’t on a list for public housing because that was beneath her. She was dependent on me, and she hated to be dependent. She hated to be a burden.
I drove 1,200 miles back to Eugene and arrived at my mother’s place to discover that she hadn’t packed one single thing. Not even a fork. Since I had last visited her apartment, before we left for Colorado, she’d added quite a bit of raw material. There was an earth-tone La-Z-Boy that had spent most of its life outdoors and what my mother generously called a “love seat,” which someone named Hank had helped her drag in from the curb. One corner of the room was occupied with a rusty bike, two suitcases, some tools, and what looked like several trash bags of clothing. I guessed that the bike and tools belonged to the guy named Hank and his cronies who had hauled in the filthy love seat so he could watch movies on my mother’s big screen TV, which was also new. My mother informed me that the TV was probably “hot.” We stood looking at each other.
“I thought maybe you would have packed or cleaned a bit,” I said.
“I did,” she said and gestured to the room.
Mounds of garbage stretched back to the bedroom. Everything smelled of urine. When I touched a seat cushion and the mattress, my fingers came back wet. I asked her what was going on, and she said she was having a problem. I shouldn’t worry, though, because she was wearing rubber pants now.
“Have you gone to the doctor?”
“You’re going to really like Hank,” my mother said. “He’s a fascinating man. He lives right over there.” She pointed out the window. I cleaned the pane with the sleeve of my shirt and squinted at a grey apartment building – Section 8 housing for downtown Eugene.
“What floor does he live on?” I asked. If he wasn’t too many flights up, maybe my mother could live with him. I had tried to persuade my mother to sign up for Section 8 housing.
“No, he lives in front of the building.” There was nothing in front of the building except a rusty, old Ford F-150 with a demolished front end and what looked like a self-fashioned tarp home in the truck bed. “He has a generator in there,” my mother said and nodded approvingly.
“I bet he does.”
It wasn’t long, of course, before I met Hank. Reeking of whiskey and not wearing a mask, he stopped by to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t help with the move. After he left, my mother watched him limp down the street toward his truck. He pulled back the tarp and crawled in over the tailgate.
“Poor Hank,” she said, “someone is going to steal his generator. He’s very excited about my moving to your house. He knows the neighborhood very well and loves it up there.”
I asked my mother to please take a seat in one of the many chairs and sofas I would have to move on my own. Every time I turned around, there was a new piece of furniture aimed at the TV. Several pieces of luggage, different size shoes, drug paraphernalia – a bong and a bag of needles. Two different TVs, probably stolen, other than the one she’d been using.
“You know,” I said, “with Covid, it’s not safe to have the whole park population in to watch movies.”
“They don’t have Covid, they live outside.”
“That’s not how Covid works.”
I tried to add up how long it would take me to disassemble the apartment. Most of it would go to the dump. It would be much saner to hire someone to help me, but I had sailed beyond sane the minute I had set foot in her apartment.
My mother offered me some apple juice, which I declined, though I used the mention of a cold beverage as an opportunity to open the refrigerator door and check on the state of things. As a whirling comet of gangrenous rotten food crashed onto my Muck boots, I leaned over and dry heaved. I had neglected to eat for the last six hours. Evidence, maybe, that part of me was still sane.
“Are you okay?” my mother said.
I replied that I was not. When I recovered enough to stand upright, I decided to triage the situation and returned to the more important subject of Hank. The man named Hank, I explained to my mother, would not be visiting my house while I was not there. Nicola wouldn’t stand for it, and it was her house as much as mine. It wasn’t a big house, it wasn’t a fancy house, but it was all Nicola and I had. I told her I was setting up cameras in the house that would be connected to my iPhone – not to spy on her, but to make sure everything was okay – and that I would know right away if Hank crossed the threshold. I had not planned to set up cameras – the idea had only just occurred to me as I spoke.
As my mother’s brow furrowed and her shoulders slumped, I felt my chest tighten with shame.
“You’re a monster,” she said. “What do you think those people at the university you want to impress would think of what you’re saying?”
“I have a kid, I have to think of her,” I said.
“That’s what everyone like you says.”
My thoughts spun with arguments for why I had security and she did not. I had worked hard, I wasn’t beyond thinking, if not saying, and I made the right decisions while others – Hank, for instance, and my mother – had not. Seeing through one’s own thinking is no defense against believing in it. My mother knew, and, more importantly, I knew, that I needed to believe that I had earned a place for my family in a middle-class neighborhood while she had not. She lived in a urine-soaked apartment with a rock-bottom alcoholic. Why was this? she had asked many times.
As I moved furniture out to the lawn and bags of trash to the dumpster behind the apartment, she set up one of her kitchen chairs in front of the building. Whether she knew the person or not, every time someone walked up the street while I was carting her stuff, she pointed at me and shouted, “That’s my son, the monster!” Several of her neighbors said they hadn’t known she was moving. “Off to the gulag! The Stasi have come for me,” she said. When I was young, she had suffered from hallucinations, imagined voices, and a conviction that people in blue shirts were stalking her. We weren’t there yet at least.
I briefly wondered if I should reverse course and find another solution. As long as she was living somewhere else, in her own apartment, I could step away from her to some extent. If I moved her to our house, she would become more my responsibility than ever.
I took eight trips to the dump in the Subaru, straining my back in the process. Whatever she couldn’t part with, I loaded into our garage for storage, and finally I moved her into what would be Bella’s room.
“There,” I said, when she emerged from the room to join me in the kitchen. “Isn’t this better than where you were?”
She looked out the large windows facing the woods and at the art on our walls.
“Yes, I can die in peace now that I have moved to bourgeois heaven.”
We spent several days in the house discussing how she could get her food, where she should walk for exercise. We sat in front of the fireplace and discussed the apartment we would build in the garage. I’d set up an appointment at the doctor. It turned out she had seen another doctor about her incontinence, and he had prescribed medication, which she had refused to take. We went to the Walgreens and the grocery store. I had a modest sense that we were gaining control of the situation. Just in case, I bought plastic covers for the bed and a blanket for the sofa.
By the time I was ready to drive back to Colorado, my mother had reluctantly agreed to my conditions: cameras in the living room and kitchen connected to my iPhone, no Hank, no leaving the doors open and wandering around the neighborhood, no messing with the complicated thermostat, which I had set for her on a timer. She had a friend who drove a cab who would take her to the grocery store. She said her car was broken, and in any case, it wasn’t registered or insured, and she had no license. I had the car towed to the driveway, and she agreed not to drive it.
I presented the situation to her as I saw it. We’d build her a nice place, she would be in a nice middle-class neighborhood twenty feet from a hundred-acre park, she wouldn’t have to worry about all the pesky problems with maintaining an apartment and utilities. I would take care of that, and she would be close to her granddaughter, close to us. We could help her as she got older. She wouldn’t be so alone. I didn’t point out that I would feel less guilty. She seemed aware that I was somewhat satisfied with myself.
“It’s a good argument,” she conceded and scowled at me. “Those are very reasonable points.”
When I drove off, I thought we were on decent terms. In other words, I thought I had won. She was in the house, not in the apartment. The garbage was at the dump, not in the house.

***

As soon as I arrived back in Colorado, I started to feel more guilty for setting up the cameras in the living room and the kitchen. Nicola joked that I was like the NSA, but I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened on my trip to Eugene. If she’d known about Hank and the urine and the state of my mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t have been joking. Our friends Marjorie and Brian, two of the writers I worked with at the university, thought I was kidding when I told them over the phone. “You set up cameras to spy on your elderly mother?”
I was about to call my mother and tell her to unplug them when I decided I would, just once more, open the app on my phone and see what was going on in the living room. There was a blazing fire with no screen in front of the fireplace. Light from the flames flickered off a large pile of bags, an old rusty bike, and a broken keyboard stacked against the wall. Four candles burned on various wooden bookshelves around the living room, the flames dancing inches away from the books. In the kitchen on camera #2, a tall, bald man, standing center frame, prepared what looked like an appetizing vegetarian stir fry on our stove. Hank.
My mother appeared on camera #1 in the living room, settled herself in front of the fire, and put her feet up on the coffee table I had made for Nicola. Hank appeared momentarily with two plates and some silverware. I immediately called my mother. She pulled out her phone, squinted at the number, and set it down on the coffee table. When I called again, she reached over and turned the phone off.
Maybe, I thought, I’m being unreasonable here. They were just having supper. Hank was a friend of my mother’s. He was a homeless active alcoholic – I’d known plenty of those as a member of AA – who was looking for a place to crash all winter. Why couldn’t I be generous? Maybe what was wrong with me in this case was the same thing that was wrong with the world.
It didn’t help to know that Hank was not exactly a victim. My mother had told me that he had many options for places to live, all of which required him to stop drinking. He’d stopped drinking many times, according to my mother. He just didn’t want to. The question of agency was thorny business with an alcoholic. To even have a chance of staying sober, they had to at least want to stop drinking. It also didn’t help that my mother had told me, as a way of establishing the normalcy of her own condition, that Hank regularly pissed himself in his sleep when he drank too much. Based on the contents of my mother’s former apartment, it was also clear that he had a habit of helping himself to things that didn’t belong to him.
“What’s wrong?” Nicola asked. Bella was asleep upstairs, and we were sitting by the woodstove sipping tea. I must have looked tense. I told her nothing was wrong as I tucked my phone under my leg.
“There’s this guy named Hank,” I said eventually, “and he’s moved into our house.” I confessed everything I knew about what was happening in Eugene, everything I had seen in my mother’s apartment, everything I knew about Hank. My mother’s old friends, the Go Bernies, seemed to have been replaced by the riverside addict community. She had always been tight with the homeless community wherever she lived and was always trying to help them.
“When were you going to tell me this?” she said.
“I knew I had to tell you,” I said. “But I was hoping that after I left . . . she promised not to have him over. I thought it might fix itself.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Sort of.”
“So now that he knows where we live, all the other people who were hanging out at your mother’s apartment know where we live. They’ll be over soon.”
I nodded. It seemed inevitable.
“Shooting drugs in our daughter’s bedroom.”
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but the answer was yes.
Nicola squinted at me. “We can’t have strangers using drugs and getting drunk in our home.”
I nodded but at the same time I wasn’t sure. When it came to my mother, I had always felt that I had to do whatever it took to rescue her.
Out on the porch an hour later, I checked the cameras again – empty except for a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen. No one coming or going. I called my neighbor Jamie, who picked up right away. His house, designed by his architect partner, had large glass panels looking out at our dead-end road. I asked him if he had happened to see my mother in her car.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I just saw her drive away with some bald guy in the passenger seat. I thought you told me that car no longer worked.”
“It didn’t, or at least I thought it didn’t.” My mother had lied to me about the car being broken. The car was in my name, but I had removed the insurance because it was not registered and didn’t run – so I had thought.
“Seems to work fine,” Jamie said, “except it’s night and she doesn’t have the headlights on.”
When I finally got my mother to answer the phone, I gently broached the subject of not driving and not bringing Hank – or any other active addicts – over to the house.
“I’m gonna have to talk to Moose about that one.”
“Moose?”
“My therapist. He’s training to be a death doula. Do you have a therapist?”
“What? No. What’s a death doula?”
“You should. You are very angry.”
She looked at her watch. I could see her looking at her watch on my phone.
“I have to go,” she said. “This conversation is over.” She hung up and exited stage left.
I waited five minutes and called my neighbor Jamie again.
“Yep,” he said. “She just peeled out in the Focus.”
A half an hour later she and Hank were back on-screen bobbing around the kitchen making dinner again. Hank did a little jig in front of the camera with a bottle in his hand, gave me the finger, and swatted his fist right at me. His fist was replaced by the message: Video Disabled.
While Nicola helped Bella assemble an octopus puzzle, I reluctantly brought her up to speed on the latest developments. She nodded patiently and responded in a remarkably calm tone.
“So, she’s driving around without a license in an uninsured car titled in our name and living in our house with an active alcoholic who has no place to live? And soon there will be a party of others there carting off all our things to sell at the Saturday market. And this is just Act I of this drama, am I right?”
I hadn’t mentioned all the burning candles my mother had set up on the bookshelf.
“I understand why you had to try this idea out,” she said. “But you can’t just lift your mother out of her life into our own. Whitebird (an organization that helps the vulnerable in Eugene) can’t save your mother, DHS can’t save your mother and this guy – what’s his name?”
“Hank.”
“You can’t save them. You can’t. We’ve tried to bring her inside the wire, and it’s not going to work. Even if you build this apartment on or in the garage with the spare time you don’t have – instead of spending time with your daughter – all of this will continue right next to us with Bella there. What does that lead to? You talk about not wanting to repeat the past. In this case – in this instance – you have to make a choice.”
Nicola had understood all along that this wouldn’t work, but she had been generous enough to let me run the experiment for myself one last time. I had felt as if I had left my mother behind, alone in a dirty apartment on the other side of town. I didn’t want her to live that way, but she was determined to live the way she wanted to live, even if it caused her pain and misery and isolation. I understood that people wanted to make their own decisions and live on their own terms. I’d seen it in AA. Several of the guys I had worked with over the years had died young rather than change. This didn’t mean I couldn’t help my mother or others. It just meant I was no one’s savior.
“Now we know,” Nicola said. “And we are not going to try this again. Do you understand? If you want to return to Eugene and live with your mother, you can do it without us. Bella and I will come later after you’ve solved this problem. Not today, obviously, but soon. Before Act II.”
Nicola wasn’t threatening me. She was careful to point that out. She was simply stating that she had limits. The thought of losing Nicola and Bella had never crossed my mind, and I had to sit down on the floor. Nicola was calm and direct, as always, but her eyes were watering. I could see she was serious and upset.
Bella stopped playing with her puzzle and looked at me. In saying no for the first time to my mother – for the sake of my family, if not myself – I was learning what I had never learned as a child.
I told Nicola she was right.
“I know I’m right,” she said without looking away from Bella. “I think it’s time to call the police.”
I must have looked anguished. Nicola eased up on her outrage and touched my arm. I said I didn’t know and found my face awash before I knew what I was feeling. I couldn’t cut my mother out of my life any more than I wanted her to cut Hank or others out of her life. None of us could afford to cut people off by deciding they were hopeless and didn’t matter. Not without inviting the kind of sickness we think we can escape by running away. I had come to see that the question of what role I should play in my mother’s life – the question, from one point of view, of what I owed her – was really a question of what we all owed each other. All our troubles begin when we seek to separate ourselves from others, and yet (always a yet) here I was on the verge of trying to separate my small family from my mother and the chaos we feared.
I tried to explain how I was feeling to Nicola.
“You’re not trying to cut her out of our lives,” she said. “We’re taking steps to make sure they don’t destroy our home.”
When it came to my mother, I would have to listen to Nicola and Bella and trust them to show me the way forward. In marrying Nicola and having Bella, I had chosen life. Protecting that life, protecting our lives together, had to be the most important thing, but it was no simple thing
After my mother and Hank finished their supper, I called the Eugene police to explain the situation about Hank trespassing at the house. I didn’t want a big scene and I didn’t want them to arrest Hank. I just wanted them to send a message, if possible, that he shouldn’t be there. The police showed up a short time later and knocked on the door. My mother shut off the light. She and Hank crouched by the window and tried to peer around the blinds. When the police kept knocking, my mother finally answered the door. The police were kind, they didn’t pull Hank out or make threats, but they let him know that he wasn’t supposed to be there. My mother later told me that after the police left, things unraveled. Hank got drunk and became abusive. In the midst of the ruckus, he destroyed my second camera. He took a piss on our mattress. He threatened to really hurt my mother. She thought he might kill her. He called her names she wouldn’t repeat. Names that no one had ever called her before. She phoned her cabby friend – a guy who also knew Hank – and the cabby dragged Hank and all his belongings back downtown to his nonfunctional truck.

***

On the phone several weeks later, I told her I was sorry for setting Hank off by bringing the police into it.
“He scared me,” my mother said of Hank. “I didn’t know he had that other side to him.”
I didn’t want to mention her father. “Alcoholics often have that other side,” I said.
“I don’t understand what it is with me and these alcoholic men. It’s like an addiction.”
“It’s not like an addiction,” I said. “It is one.”
“You’re so right. I wish you weren’t right. But you are.”
“You can’t save them,” I said. “And they’re dangerous.”
“I’m sorry I drove the car. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Bella and I were sitting in a window seat I had built on the second floor of the cabin that looked west over the rolling fields of the mesa toward the San Juan Mountains. My mother was in our house in Eugene and was trying, she reported, to make a fire in the fireplace without the help of Hank, who was sticking to his truck these days.
“Listen,” I said, “I know things weren’t easy when you were young. With your mother and stepfather or with your father – on the farm.”
“And it wasn’t always easy for you either,” she said.
“But it was worse for you, I know that.”
“It was worse for my brothers, I think,” she said quickly. “But I don’t know.”
“The point is that I understand. I’m going to do whatever I can. You know that. You’re not alone, so you can relax a bit.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you,” she said. “I just don’t – I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Bella stood on the bench and leaned her nose against the doublepane glass as Cheever jumped up with us and looked through the window. A purple monsoon cloud sweeping toward us from the west fired bolts of lightning into the mesa.
My mother asked how I was doing, and I said, “I don’t know.”
My inability to protect my mother from herself brought my daughter to mind. I had no idea how to hold her close without holding her too close. I didn’t always know when I should intercede and try to protect. Sometimes Bella caught me looking at her, and she would tilt her head and smile. Sometimes leap in the air and spin in a circle. I was often astonished by her joy – the joy of a child who was loved and safe – and I felt an immediate bond with all those parents for whom nothing could be more important than watching their children thrive. The idea of not being able to protect her from harm was too painful to imagine, yet I understood that far too many parents all over the world and all throughout history had had to watch their children suffer. A single person is nothing in the history of the world, but when that person is your child, then they are the whole universe.
I knew the day would come when Bella would look over her shoulder at me before running into the world. I would call to warn her of the dangers she couldn’t see, and she would take off through the grass. I could already feel the thrill and terror of watching her go.
What if, I wondered, everything we would lose and all that would cause us pain was not a threat but rather the very shape of who we were? Our days not empty because they would end and be forgotten but extraordinary because we were here for such a short time. A fairweather thought, at best, which quickly slipped away.
I pictured the mesa at night. When I let Cheever out to pee before bed, his ears twitched, and he was often reluctant to leave the deck. If I shut off the lights, the sky ignited with distant stars, other worlds, and I imagined the animals around us – mountain lions, bears, elk, and coyotes – wandering among the spindly shadows of aspen groves. For thousands of years, humans had shared parallel lives with all that walked and grew, yet we still didn’t understand their language. Bella tapped on the window with her finger and said, “Grrr.”
“Was that Bella?” my mother asked. “What is she saying?”
Bella tapped on the window again and looked at me. Out on the mesa, half a mile west of us, a large brown bear loped across an open field. The muscles along its back and flank churned under its thick coat. When my mother asked me what was happening, I did my best to describe what we were seeing: the thunderheads approaching, the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the distance, the enormous bear traversing the field, probably headed toward the creek.
“You’re so lucky you get to see that,” my mother said. “Do you know how lucky you are to be there with Bella and to see what you’re seeing?” I didn’t know how to answer.
Cheever growled at the window and Bella told the bear to “come here right now.” She’d never met an animal she didn’t want to pat.
The bear stopped before reaching the tree line and looked over its shoulder. Bella’s eyes widened. She rested her hand on my back without looking away from the window, and together we waited to see what the bear would do.

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Jason Brown is the author of the novel Outermark (Paul Dry Books, 2024), and three collections of short stories: Driving the Heart (W.W. Norton, 1999); Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (Open City Books, 2007); and A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review Books, 2019). “Animal Stories” is part of his memoir in essays, Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Other sections of the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, and The Florida Review.

FROM PLAY DEAD by Winter Grasso

THREE TIMES

I am a waitress. Sometimes on the drive home from work I want to stop at the liquor store by my house and get a six-pack of cheap beer and drink it on my porch. It is an appropriate time of day and a normal thing to do. I remind myself that I cannot do this because when I drink I get raped. I do not drink at all anymore, not because I have a problem but because I do not know exactly how much alcohol it takes for a man to decide that he will rape me that night and no one else seems to know either. Not that it matters necessarily. I have been raped drunk and tipsy and dead sober. But I miss the stupid complicated drinks. Just ordering them. Long Island Iced Teas taste like rape. Tequila Diet Cokes in tall glasses taste like rape.

Sometimes I think about how hard it will be to love. I will not ever again be a simple woman with whom love is easy. No one will write a January Wedding about me. It will be pulling teeth.

You do not get to be a simple woman when you are raped three times before you have turned twenty-two, and two of them by people who have claimed to love you. Who you really thought loved you. If you love me you could still rape me is what I have learned. The sex can be not rape the first hundred times and then the next time it is rape is what I have learned. I am a person who wants badly to forgive but knows nothing about what is right to forgive (and forgives anyway) (and forgives without an apology).

Some therapists will tell you there is another person living inside of you: a child who can be made pure again. You’ve just got to open the wounds back up and clean them out and hope to heal the right way this time and then your current self and the child, who is you, will come together again and you will finally be the Whole. That is what some will tell you. When things don’t happen to the child of you it is much different. There is no other person living inside of me, no distance to x, there is only my orange heart, with the mesocarp so thin that the acid seeps through and scorches the earth of my insides. The promise and the nature of rotting happens quickly, and then there are the fruit flies and this new heart feels nothing like a metaphor.

To love me you will have to consider your touch. How from behind you could be B**** or C**** or (I didn’t catch his name) for all I know. How the line between good touch and bad touch has blurred together in some ways and is sometimes the same thing or just the prelude.

To love me you will have to know the gun is always hot. That I am scared of you in the animal way of knowing you can hold me down, trick me, love me.

When I am at the bank or the pharmacy (or any public place where there is not much to distract you while you stand in line) and there are only men around me I think about my safe bets:

My dad My brother Wyley John

And then I think, people get raped by their dads and their brothers and their Wyleys and Johns and I assume they did not see it coming either.

Some people say it is good to suffer. But you get to a point where you don’t want to be strong if it means this. I don’t want it if I have to get raped for it. I know that what doesn’t kill me does not actually make me stronger because I am becoming very weak to it all. I want to go on a walk at night, how about that? I want to cry until I die. I don’t want to learn how to use a gun or how to shatter a kneecap. I don’t want to run through the dark with eyeball under my fingernails. I don’t even want to go on the walk at night if it means I may only consider guns and kneecaps and eyeballs the whole time.

I am twenty-two and have been raped three times. I think How many more times will this happen to me in my life if it has happened three times in twenty-two years? I think in formulas and quotients and algorithms. I think nine times is what the math says.

BEAU

Beau is six-foot-four and pretentious for a firefighter, though the hollowness of the display is evident. He is naturally slim but getting older and slower and has not allowed himself to accept this yet, so he has a first trimester beer gut and his body sort of resembles a malnourished child from a third world country but much taller and white of course. I imagine someone filling his stomach with air using a bike pump. He is only in town for three days. About an hour before, we sat on a rock at the cell towers, and he told me how his parents are writers for The New York Times culture section. Now, suddenly, we are in my room, and he holds himself over me awkwardly, balancing on one elbow that trembles and sinks into the mattress, the other arm precariously arched over my shoulder, not touching me, though I don’t believe this is intentional. It is just ungrace. Actually, the only part of him that is touching me is his huge (huge) erection, which is pressed into my thigh. So then I know where this unearned ostentatiousness comes from: his only real offering locked away like that day in and day out.

With a breath that is American Spirits and lunch meat and somehow primally sexy, he whispers from too far away to constitute whispering,

“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything. I know you’re not the kind of girl that fucks on the first date.”

This is less sexy. I have to hold back a laugh. Because I am the kind of girl who fucks on the first date. I know the contract I sign. Really, I am not any kind of girl except a weak one. Too tired for the theatrics of “no.”

This thought distracts me, and I get all forlorn about it inside my head, so I don’t even notice that he has moved down my body, on his knees at the edge of the bed. I don’t really care to engage with this current condition of reality either, so I continue my internal social critiques but with a polite alertness and a touch of drama. I manage a calculated series of gross porny whines, though my body doesn’t move at all. I fake it, not well. I give just enough, not more.

Isn’t it strange how a man will continue to prod pleasure into you as you stare at the ceiling like there is a very serious question written on it? Instead of looking at the question too? He looks up at me complacently, like a shrug but with the eyes, caresses my arm like a rapist (weird, not violent.) I think there is probably some rape in him, something that knows it will disregard certain pleas in ode to his enormous want. He tells me he usually doesn’t do that because one time a girl gave him throat gonorrhea and he should have known by the smell. So, he must really like me. He is unduly sweaty for the labor performed, which agitates me for some reason. I bet he will leave a stain. I fall asleep facing away from him thinking about washing my sheets using the “Heavy Duty” preset, instead of my usual “EcoWash.”

The next day, I promise to mail him a copy of a Joan Didion book I like, which I never do. I drop him at the college dorms where his crew is staying, and he waves me off like a girl. I delete his number as I drive away.

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“Three Times” and “Beau” are excerpted from Play Dead, Winter Grasso’s memoir in progress. This is her first publication.

TO THE ELEPHANT by Janet Champ

I am aware that we do not save each other very often.
But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
– James Baldwin

There are the ugly things in life, and we talked about them. Looked them in the eye most the time, although every so often one of us just blocked the sight. Those things most of us don’t prepare for because they’re so unexpected: being unable to have children together, for one. Being told we couldn’t keep both our relationship and our jobs, for another. Once we were together for about a year, we wrote separate lists of imperative needs and wants, and then read them together over dinner or maybe after, one of those, and I know the fact of these documents is both weird and wonderful. One of us had already been married. The other had already lost a parent while too young. We knew adversity would come. How we handled it would say everything about us. Even define us. Because no marriage, no relationship, exists in a vacuum. There are elephants in so many rooms, aren’t there? We had two of them.

So, trust me, this isn’t a story of bravery.
It won’t tell you how courageous my husband Rick was, although in all the essential, unstoppingly human ways he made bravery seem routine. When cancer comes in words and pictures and explanations of stages and treatments and months expected before an expiration date, we often look for superlatives. For all the deft, wondrous thinking that might lead to the rabbit out of the hat, the body surviving being sawed in two, a sudden We were joking! from the powers that be. Because if you beat the devil, can’t everyone? Can’t the rest of the world sigh and relax and think, Oh, look, life goes on?
You’re so strong, you’ll beat this. Stay positive, it definitely helps. Don’t let this get you down! Fuck cancer, no way will it win. The nearly identical phrases and syllables uttered with meaning for nine and a half years were as if from a book we hadn’t read, a cheerleader prayer. Rick knew these shining attributes meant both well and little. Cheers felt hollow, sometimes, against cells radically multiplying, tricking flesh and blood into thinking the pain, the numbing exhaustion, was normal. Dealing with cancer is both mundane and profound: one foot in front of the other until you can’t walk anymore. It’s doing what you have to do because this is now your life. Far too often, it’s also your probable death. You’re waiting for the executioner to come but there might be a last-minute stay, a reprieve, that beautiful beckoning word we never, ever heard: remission.

For all those years Rick—my husband, best friend, creative partner, lover, ballast, and a human being all his own, so smart, so talented, so often impatient and beautifully, sarcastically apt—survived Stage III and Stage IV cancer. He lived through it with a kind of dignity that honestly, and almost always deeply, inspired others. He beat at it with hope, fear, blindingly quick humor, sorrow, gratitude, a simple and dedicated decency. Six times he was told death was imminent; six times he just kept passing Go. Healthy as that proverbial horse when he started feeling something was wrong, our endocrinologist of 13 years ignored his concern and pain, telling us both There’s no reason for a scan, even though Rick had previously battled thyroid cancer, where the only offered treatment was drinking radioactive iodine. Everyone, please: demand a second opinion when you’re told to shush, stop, behave. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who believes their body wrong, sick, off-kilter, take that body into your own hands and find a place where attention is paid. We did not demand. We acquiesced. By the time of his emergency surgery, his abdomen was suddenly swollen as if four months pregnant.
Anyone reading about cancer lately has heard that deaths are declining: as much as 33% in the last thirty years. And you’ve also heard that exceptional new treatments and cures and improvements abound. But the truth is so much more complicated, and I’ll go with the words more frightening, than that. In late 2023 CBS Evening News quoted a new study that found “an alarming rise in cancer rates among people under 50” between 1990 and 2019. How sharp a rise? A staggering 79.1%. And then there is this new reality asserting itself: that same research flatly states that by 2030, cancer deaths will rise by 21%, while early-onset cancer rates will have an increase of 31%. My husband was not under 50 when he was diagnosed with his second cancer. Yet he also had absolutely none of the markers that doctors use to predict cancer: he was a lifelong non-smoker, dedicated athlete, a vegetarian for decades, fortunate to have a specialist as his primary care doctor. Yes: his diagnosis came as a shock.
What happened in those nearly ten years? Almost seven years of chemotherapy. Anaphylactic shock where the paddles stood waiting, an inch from his chest. An ostomy bag opening while out with friends, leading to shame and dread it might be permanent. A clinical trial nicknamed The Mother of All Surgery and The Shake & Bake (look it up, it’s chilling) that patients half Rick’s age weren’t healthy enough to have. Neuropathy so terrible he couldn’t walk in the heat, or pick up a knife, until acupuncture and Eastern medicine finally reversed it. Sepsis from an infected port after an “easy” surgery. Paramedics here at 2 AM when he fell on the floor with a fever of 104. Seven emergency room visits for sodium IVs (chemo can destroy hydration). One visit for sudden blood clots throughout his heart and lungs (chemo and cancer make these common). Our loved “last” house, built by friends in these old-growth woods, burning to the ground two years after his diagnosis, the fire taking everything we owned except for our garage. Starting a new job two days after that fire without telling anyone what we’d lost because fighting cancer costs . . . it’s obscene what it costs.
What else happened?
Nurses who make the word hero riotously insignificant. Two oncologists—ones the director at the OHSU Cancer Institute called rock stars—we fell in love with after we refused the first one when she patted Rick on the knee as she emphatically told us the next time she saw him, it would be for palliative care. A deeply humane surgeon who cried with us, laughed with us, gave Rick more time. The wide saving grace of phenomenal friends and unconditional family. A purpose for Rick: the women and men and children he met in chemo wards and waiting rooms and holistic clinics, in our own little community and through other friends. The ones he shared war stories with, hope with, panic with, advice with, for some reason being so outrageously optimistic, him believing in every magic trick in this daunting world. Working through chemotherapy treatments in all those hospitals, all those clinics, because why wouldn’t we, weren’t we both alive? Weren’t we going to keep trying to be?
After the fire we began to ask ourselves if we might be the reincarnation of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, a dozen other tyrants rolled obnoxiously together. It was our metaphysical joke, a way of never asking why us? The luck we tried to make just kept falling into crevasses. But then it would rear up again, rise. Both of us, knowing so many family and friends who hadn’t survived longer than six months, six weeks, two years after their own diagnoses. Who didn’t receive our chances, even our choices. So, one more foot placed again and again: we built our new house on precisely the same footprint where our original house had stood, uncomplaining, for 14 years. Then that new foundation began to sink, a quarter of an inch at a time. That philosopher the world loves to quote was wrong: what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It beats and scars the hell out of you. What makes you stronger is: you.
All this time there was a ludicrously loud cacophony of praise for my caretaking, saying that it was me who was saving Rick’s life. As if all the doctors all the treatment all Rick’s own raging agency wasn’t doing the heaviest lifting. But when the person you love more than anyone (no: everyone) gets up every hour from the couch to walk slowly to the garage and back just to try to keep the cruelty of chemotherapy from deleting his entire sense of humanity, you don’t think what a wonderful cheerleader you are. You think How is this person still standing after all these endless assaults? How is he making giddy inane jokes as he makes us breakfast at the same time?

And I realized it’s far easier and way more comfortable for too many people to identify with the one taking care instead of the one who might die. We’re not fond, our species, of mortality sitting next to us. We look for mistakes made, cigars smoked, foods not eaten, so we can maybe avoid the whole death trap. But what if the meaning of life is that it ends? And that in all our unacceptance, we surround dying with terror and avoidance, instead of the decency, grace, and kindness it deserves?
Since very young, I haven’t been particularly afraid of death. Quite the opposite, unfortunately. And the thing is, Rick did save my life once. A fact known only to ourselves, our local hospital, the state police, a grief therapist. And now, you.
Ten months after my mother killed herself and eight months after my only brother died of misdiagnosed cancer, my cousin Dana—a best friend to Rick and myself—called with a quiveringly odd voice to say he’d just been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. He was sure he’d be all right. Having seen my father die at only 49 when I was 19, also of cancer, I had forgotten that shock is a bumper, a protective shield against pain far longer than we assume. Dana’s call shattered that gorgeous bubble and out my grief and pain came bellowing. I knew a voice like his was a clarion call of malignancy. And I did what I had wanted to at nine years old, and again at 15, and yes, a few times since, now armed with pure hopelessness and a way to do it, and that’s kill myself.
Or at least I made the attempt. It was Rick who found me, wrapped my arms in towels, rushed me to the hospital. Rick who watched as the police were notified. Watched as I told them in the smallest voice he’d ever heard that I’d had a hard year. Rick who heard them say I had 30 days to begin mandatory counseling. Rick who found the therapist, drove me two hours each way once a week for three months, telling me that Yes, I could do this and No, he wasn’t turning the car around. Rick behind the wheel to Seattle to spend time with my cousin and his devastated family. Rick who held my hand at Dana’s funeral when he died thirteen weeks after that diagnosis of benign.

If cancer and death are the largest elephants in a room, depression is nearly the same size. It’s still wildly misunderstood. Still considered a weakness, something akin to mere sadness instead of raging despair, hope ripped and vanquished. Yes, and thankfully, mental health is talked about more openly now than ever before. Publicly and without apology, well-known celebrities including Billie Eilish, Kerry Washington, Bruce Springsteen, Taraji P. Henson, Dwayne Johnson, Emma Thompson and Channing Tatum have revealed their own struggles with what is, in every aspect, a disease. But when William Styron wrote his groundbreaking memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, in 1972, it shattered the silence around our illness and let thousands of people not feel so deeply alone.
Styron knew the word depression is almost meaningless – it sounds like we’re just slightly down, half an inch below soil – and woefully inadequate in describing how true depression attacks the body not just the mind, the way it suffocates hope with what he called “despair beyond despair.” Styron described his illness as “the grey drizzle of horror . . . that takes on the quality of physical pain” and colors abound in descriptions of depression, but they’re surely not rainbows; Churchill called the depression that would overtake him his “black dog.” It’s also ferocious, feral: being buried in mud you didn’t realize was rising, the “fury of rain storms” that pummeled Anne Sexton until she could not survive the storm any longer.

For me, and so many others like me, forced therapy was a lifeline. An existential flotation device that uncovered unfinished mourning and traumas sealed away for so long I’d thought them gone. Everyone, please know therapy is there for any of us who are sinking. Who tread and keep treading the waves without realizing we can get out of the water. My husband, angry that I would try to leave him, saved me and kept saving me just as surely as I helped to keep him thriving through his last years on Earth.
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with love?
Isn’t that what any kind of vow, spoken or silent, is for?
And then, after so close to ten years of survival, Rick died on his birthday. His vital signs so robust, so vivid, that our hospice nurse was filling his prescriptions for another two weeks just moments before he left. Write the story of us he said a week or three before he died. But the story of “us” is miles and fathoms more than the last few years of his life. Repeatedly and with occasional furiosity he said that cancer is not a character trait. Nor is it a character flaw. It will never define anyone it touches; it’s malicious and horrifying and petty. His story, like millions of others, is far greater than that he did his best to conquer it, lay waste to it, simply live.
My husband was here. He was a breathing, joke-making, handsome, and extraordinarily decent man. And then in a split second of a second, he died. I was holding his hand. His blue eyes open, looking at me. He had been utterly non-responsive for over 19 hours. Until he suddenly wasn’t. After he died, his body was so warm. I don’t even remember letting go of his hand.

Trauma and loss, they alter everything. The flop of your heart. How past tense feels immoral. How you can appear upright to others simply because showing them your true fetal position is too much to bear. Nick Cave describes grief so well not simply because he is a brilliant writer, but because he understands its supremacy all too well: “There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence . . . that ultimate and inevitable departure of the other takes with it a fundamental piece of ourselves, a part of our being, leaving us with a terrible feeling of incompleteness.”
It’s grief that is laying waste to the human I was. It’s what I must go through, not around. What I loudly refuse to ignore or throw euphemisms at, even knowing that others want me to be, well, “fine.” In our abnormal culture we treat grief as another disease. It’s so ugly, isn’t it? It doesn’t want to dance, it sure doesn’t play well with others. But grief is the measure of love. It is the measure, width and depth and height, of love. Depression often accompanies it. It has for me. And while I am a pugilist against my depression, I take the gloves off near grief. The site and podcast refugeingrief.com have helped tremendously, because the woman behind it sees me, understands this echoing vacuum because her loss was also overwhelming. She knows there is no “Time’s up, get over it!” because grieving is to move through at my own time, own pace. You, too. You, too.
But. To be honest. To be writing and living through this while reading C.S. Lewis and stopping at his perfectly accurate words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Yes. That’s why the heart races. That’s why the panic of reality, the past tense so universally accepted, the cloak of invisibility that’s thrown over the one you loved/ love while you’re wondering Of course they’re dead. But does that mean you’ve all forgotten they were here at all?
Good friends said that Rick’s death was a hole, a cut across their lives. For me it was a tear in our own little universe. At times it begins to knit together. At times all I think of is the beauty. There isn’t a single cell of me that doesn’t know Rick would want me to remain alive. My lost father, mother, brother, cousin, and far too many gone friends would want the same thing. Still. It isn’t up to them. It’s up to me. Several months after the love of my life was forced to leave, my executioner might be me. I don’t know. Every day is walking on waves that submerge or carry or radiate towards shore or yes, overwhelm.
Sometimes when the light is just right I want very little, or very much: I want to want to live again. Sometimes, the one we get to save is ourselves.

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“To the Elephant” is Janet Champ’s debut essay publication.

UNWRAPPING THE BODY by Natasha Singh

1.

You have already seen the pictures on her website: class participants rolled up in white sheets like mummies, lying next to one another on a carpeted floor. Having taken a course on becoming a death doula with this instructor, you know she also teaches about attending the dead.
Whenever she’s called, she shows up in her station wagon with sheets of dry ice. After ritually bathing the dead body, she lays a sheet behind each shoulder blade like frozen wings, beneath the sacrum and hips, and, for the first few hours, below the neck and across the lower abdomen. When turning the body, she is careful to place towels nearby to absorb any fluid expelled from the lungs or stomach through the nose or mouth. Then she commences the ritual wrapping, swaddling the body in fabrics and shawls like she’s delivering a baby back to the womb.
“Three days is the optimal time,” she has told you repeatedly. “Spend at least three days with the dead body.”
When you first heard this, your heart sank, for you did not spend even three hours with your father’s body before it was carried out, flushed pink, and emptied of his spirit. Like a seashell being tossed back to shore, you’d thought. You’d spent less than an hour washing and cleaning the skin that was visible, finding it increasingly difficult to move his limbs because rigor mortis had set in and you were too afraid of bending, pushing, or forcing more compliance from a body that had, in its final year, already complied so much. Using oatmeal soap and a warm washcloth, you’d moved your hands on autopilot, not because you felt numb but because you weren’t quite sure what to do, how to do it, or whether this ritual held any meaning for you at all. You had taken it upon yourself to do it only because your mother used to talk about the ritual bathing of bodies after relatives in India died at home. You’d imagined she would know what to do when this time came – that she would take the lead, as she did with all the other family rituals – but she just sat on the bed across from where your father’s body lay, eyes glassy, chin in her hands.

2.

You recently saw a video of your instructor alongside the family and friends of a deceased person. The video begins not with the death, but with the life of the deceased person before she experiences a fall that becomes her doorway to death. Before her fall, she is lively with sparkling blue eyes and short silvery hair. Statuesque and elegant, she wears a blue silk scarf and bears a countenance that borders on regal. Laughing heartily, she shows off colorful caftans in her closet just above rows of pretty – if not unnecessary – high heels. The camera lens zooms in on grainy pictures of her younger self when she was a dancer, still in her prime.
Though she has cancer now, she shows no visible signs of weakness or distress. In fact, she appears joyous and determined when talking about how she would like to die at home surrounded by loved ones, as if planning not her death but her final dance recital. Though she seems at ease about the inevitable, surely she never imagined what followed. The next frame shows her after her fall. Astonishingly thin, she lies on her side in a hospital bed, tubes going into her, trachea down her throat. She appears to have aged another eighty years.
After your father fell and suffered a hip fracture, he, too, seemed to age another eighty years. Before undergoing a surgery he never wanted, he’d smiled nonetheless – joking with you over FaceTime and raising his hands into a trembling namaste – as if surrendering to the medical machinery that quickly assumed control like a despotic god. Not one of his doctors informed your family about what anesthesia can do to a ninety-five-year-old man already suffering from dementia, so the father who emerged from that surgery was shockingly different from the father who went in.

3.

He lived for another year after that, his survival a bittersweet miracle, for he lost his ability to walk, feed himself, and tend to his garden. Sometimes, when you looked in on him through the app your brother installed on your phone, you saw him sitting alone in his wheelchair, watching the clock while thin rays of light streamed in through partially closed blinds, bathing his body in dim light. You could have spoken to him if you’d wanted, kept him company with your voice. Instead, you’d watched over him with an exquisitely pained yet protective air while your family rallied, convinced he would live at least another ten years.
In the video, your instructor expresses deep regret at this turn of events, at not being able to finish making plans with the now deceased woman who died alone in the hospital, a shell of what she’d been. Since your instructor owns a funeral home, she is permitted to cart the body away in her station wagon, bring it back to the deceased woman’s apartment. After placing it on dry ice on the kitchen table, she invites the women’s family and friends to bathe the body and dress it.

4.

Not long after you finished bathing your father’s body, two people in dark suits entered his room. You had no idea who called them or why they were there. Only later would you curse yourself for being so death illiterate, for not knowing what happens after someone dies. You were so focused on tending to your father while he was alive – keeping vigil during his final days – that it never occurred to you to consider the minutes and days that would follow.
The men in suits asked only your brother to stay with the body. Bewildered, you’d looked to your brother who raised his eyebrows, as if they were shrugging for him. You wondered if the men had come to note the time of death, dress your father in different clothes, or if they were medical examiners sent by the hospice nurses. “Most people don’t want to see this part,” was the only explanation they offered.
You sat in silence next to your mother in the living room, rising only when the men re-emerged, carrying your father past you in a zipped-up blue body bag. As your mother’s protests filled the house, neighborhood, and then the skies, your fingers gripped the sofa’s arm rest like claws. You released a sound so guttural, you became animal. Filled with wild grief and even wilder fury, you watched the men carry your father out of his home, then past his rose garden. “Come back,” your mother kept wailing. Come back. You still don’t know what those words meant. Had she wanted your father to return to his body? Had she wanted the men to bring his body back?
All you know is that something was taken from you that day, not just your father’s body but your ability to determine for yourself what was needed. Maybe you would have felt nothing sitting at his bedside for three days. Maybe you would have kept vigil over the spirit the holy books say is there – hovering above the body, the family, the room – after the body dies. Maybe you would have been able to see for yourself the slow ebbing away of this spirit, for even as you’d bathed your father’s body, he’d worn the most beautiful glow, as if that particular light – and not his white pajamas – were his true and only garments. Or maybe you would have carried his skeletal body onto the lawn in your arms and laid it before the bowed heads of his beloved roses, so that they, too, could express gratitude for his careful tending over the years and offer their blessings for wherever he was going.

5.

After your instructor and the deceased woman’s family and friends attend the dead body, you see it lying in a cheap cardboard box that has been painted in vivid colors. The body is wrapped in silk caftans and scarves from her closet. In theory – and before seeing this part of the video – this ritual had sounded beautiful to you, like something you should have done for your father. But after seeing it, you can’t help but think the body resembles a shriveled apple doll, the kind you used to make in art class as a child. You feel even more disturbed when people begin dancing around it, stopping on occasion to kiss a hollowed-out cheek, or run their hands across wrinkly skin. You shudder as if in the presence of something sacrilege, but the guests seem oblivious to this possible affront, for they flail their arms and sway as if dancing to a song only they can hear.

6.

You suppose the rituals following your father’s death were supposed to be your own grieving song, but they demanded too much, too soon. The funeral director asked for eulogies and a slide show, which plunged you into a prolonged state of doing. Then there were all the visitors who needed constant attention. When your family finally found a Hindu pundit, his prayers held no meaning for you, not only because you don’t understand Sanskrit, but also because your father’s prayers had always been made in silence behind his closed door. While your siblings appeared to have no problem following the pundit’s rapid-fire instructions, you’d bumbled practically everything, as if trying, even then, to rebel against centuries-old dictates.
All these rituals and rites, in the end, had seemed no different to you than the conveyer belt your father’s body was placed on just before it was cremated. While watching the brown box being carried forward, moving closer to the flames – as if keeping time with a drumbeat of meaningless repetition – you did not cry out as your siblings did when the body began to burn. Instead, you’d thought, It looks like a piece of borrowed luggage.

7.

Before your father’s death, you did not know what you truly believed about death and dying. But when you got the news that he had only days to live, a hidden cosmology began to reveal itself like a thing emerging from the depths of the sea. When he spoke to dead relatives in his final days, you saw that you believed in the visitations of your ancestors. When he tossed and turned, picking at his sheets, his clothes, and then his skin, as if trying to remove an unnecessary layer, you saw that you believed in the restlessness of the spirit – its longing to return home. When his agitation began to ease, you saw that you believed in the power of mantras and in the sacred syllable of Om.
Just before the men took his body away, you saw something else that would stay with you: the permanently creased wrinkle of your father’s brow had become astonishingly smooth, an empty page. You’d released a small gasp, as if realizing two things simultaneously: the soul has a doorway through which it leaves and enters the body, and your father’s brow – the space between it – had been that doorway. As you leaned over him, circling that place with your index finger, never had you been so certain that the body is just a shell.
When your eyes wandered across his full frame for a final time, trying to memorize the shape of his absence, you noted his tan blanket lying crumpled by his feet. For a moment, you thought of gently covering him with it, but then you let your hands drop to your sides. Perhaps you knew even then that there would be no way to wrap your father, no way to make a dead body more beautiful than when the spirit still resided within it.

---

Natasha Singh’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Brevity, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, and South Asian Review.

YOU CAN SHARE THIS by Maria Zorn

On a red-eye flight hurtling toward New York City, I observed my sleeping mother’s face. The glow of the reading light she’d forgotten to shut off illuminated the gentle slope of her nose, the pink moles on her cheeks. The plane was oddly silent, minus the toneless hum planes always make. Something about the quiet made it feel like this moment would never end, that I’d get to gaze upon her forever, counting the pores on her forehead. She seemed familiar but foreign, someone I didn’t know but very much wanted to, almost like I had a crush on her.
It had been eighteen months since my mom called to tell me my brother had died. Six years since my dad shot himself, four since my mother’s father hanged himself. Our pile of dead men was so tall we couldn’t step over them. We needed a stool.
I was nearly twenty-three, the oldest my older brother would ever be. We were headed to the city to celebrate my birthday. How did my mom feel about this, I wondered, her youngest becoming as old as her oldest? He and I were finally going to be twins, which we’d been telling strangers in bars we were for years. Everyone believed us. Tall, broad-shouldered, the gravelly voices, the throaty laughs. We moved our heads too much when we talked, like chickens. It’d be even worse when I turned twenty-four, impossibly more tragic to be older than Tomm would ever be. Had my mom considered this yet? I wished I knew.

I always wanted to be like my mother. I imitated her bubbly disposition, I had her same broad smile and frizzy hair. When I got my braces off and discovered that my teeth, though straight now and without large gaps between them, did not look like hers, I felt ripped off. Her teeth were perfect, and I’d worn my rubber bands and threaded floss through the wiring of my braces so that I would resemble her. But my teeth, as it turned out, were smaller, my smile gummier. My frizzy hair typically remained frizzy even if I tried to beat it into submission with a blow dryer, but she could tame hers into soft blonde curls that fell around her square jaw.
My mom and I worked as a team to survive my father and then to help Tomm survive his own recklessness. We passed our first mission and failed our second. After Tomm died I could hug her, I could press her into my chest until I felt her rigid body soften, and then several months later I could hardly stand to look at her. Her eyes reflected back all of the guilt and anguish I was desperately attempting to stave off. This trip felt like the kind you take when trying to reconcile with an ex, in a sense. I had spent most of my life feeling certain that nothing could ever come between my mother and me, but now I was not so sure. No belief was unshakeable anymore, no love unconditional.

***

When my mom told me that Tomm went to sleep and didn’t wake up, her voice sounded like she was controlled by a ventriloquist. I could picture her mouth jerked open, slammed shut. Her poor jaw. I was living in New York with her and my brother, but on a trip to Phoenix, visiting my partner. My mom’s ex-boyfriend found me at Target, where I was shopping for socks, and made me come with him so I could answer my mom’s call someplace quiet, as if the news would be more palatable if we escaped the store’s fluorescent lights. After she told me, I wanted to offer her some kind of balm, but I couldn’t conjure anything up. All I could do was argue.
“Why? How? How? How does a twenty-three-year-old fall asleep and not wake up? A twenty-three-year-old doesn’t fall asleep and not wake up.” I wanted to shake her through the phone because didn’t she care enough to even guess what had happened? How was she so quickly accepting this new fate?
“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” she said.
I felt like I was a child again, getting screamed at by my father. When he’d yell, I wouldn’t meet his eyes and insist he be different. I’d instead look at my mom and think: Why aren’t you making this stop? Can’t you do something? I was twenty-one now but I still wanted my mother to be a god. She didn’t have an answer to any of these questions. The only sound on the other line was a sharp inhale, one meant to usurp a sob. I pictured the ventriloquist who was making her say these words. Nothing was her fault, obviously, and this deflated my rage. We were both silent for a while. Then, the only words I could mold with my tongue were her words, parroted back to her: “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.” I said it again and again. I mourned my mother in that moment just like I mourned my brother, for she would never again be the same person; now, always, a woman who once held her son’s still body in her arms.

When she hung up the phone to speak with the police, I locked myself in the bathroom and knelt on the tiled floor in front of the toilet, waiting for vomit to come. I tried to focus on the way the grout pushed into the skin of my knees. Time passed, and then my boyfriend Chris’s voice was on the other side of the door saying, “Baby, let me in.” I crawled to the handle and twisted the lock. He’d been at the gym and was wearing sweaty shorts. He closed the door behind him and sat on the ledge of the bathtub. I licked his calf to taste its salt. I told him Tomm had gone to sleep and didn’t wake up, but that I didn’t understand why. At some point Chris transferred me from the bathroom to the car and I was told my mom’s ex-boyfriend was buying me a ticket to New York for that evening. He offered to buy Chris a ticket too, but Chris declined. I don’t remember the ride to Chris’s house, whether I texted my mom, if I packed my clothes or if he did. I can vaguely recall sitting cross-legged in the bed of his old pickup truck, eating a Filet-O-Fish sandwich from McDonald’s in the hundred-degree afternoon heat. There was, apparently, a drive to the airport and a flight out of Phoenix and a cab ride into the city. There was a key to find in my purse and there were steps to walk up to get to our apartment. How all of this happened is unclear to me. I had been picked up like a pin and dropped 2,400 miles away. In memory, there is only the bathroom, rank with Chris’s sweat, then the fish sandwich with its slimy yellow cheese, then walking into my mom’s arms, clutching one another like we’d fall into quicksand if we ever let go. The first few days after it happened, we couldn’t stop looking at photos of Tomm. He is a tiny blur from running in circles yelling, “Green grapes, green grapes,” a phrase he loved to shout for some reason when he was three; he is hunched over a pile of toys, showing me how to play with Barbies, teaching me how to give them names and backstories and problems; he is wearing a Roc-A-Wear gray velour tracksuit with freshly buzzed hair and tinted glasses, holding a folded-up piece of paper containing lyrics to a song he’d written; he is gothic, then a raver, then cloaked in a mink stole; then he’s prancing around New York City wearing six-inch platforms, his hair dyed platinum blonde, midnight blue, DayGlo orange. Each photo is of someone we lost. We lost hundreds of Tomms.

Tomm got a tattoo that said my way on the side of his left hand two days before he died. He had heard Frank Sinatra’s song and decided this was a sentiment he wanted on his body forever.
His friend Leslie accompanied him to the tattoo shop in Williamsburg. Before they went in, they went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Leslie had written my way in her notebook multiple times in slightly different handwriting – slanted, jagged, loopy – and Tomm selected one. He posted a photo of himself getting the tattoo, and in it his eyes are downcast, serenely admiring his new ink. He looks like someone who wants to let this tattoo heal, then get another one, and another one.
My mom, Tomm’s friends Billy and Leslie, and I returned to the tattoo shop the week after Tomm’s death. We had the original slip of paper on which Leslie had written my way. “Do you remember tattooing this on someone last week?” we asked the artist.
“Of course,” he replied. “Is there anything wrong with his tattoo?”
“He died,” my mom said.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” The man was very tall and had tattoos that went from his neck all the way up to his bald head, meaty red roses hanging off of thorny vines.
We told him that we would like to get the same tattoo as Tomm. As the artist prepared his station, we went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Why the pickleback, when you usually order champagne or a gin and tonic or a spicy margarita? I wanted to ask him. I didn’t know we liked pickleback shots. Strange.
When we went back to the tattoo shop, the artist was blasting Frank Sinatra’s song on surround sound. The tattoo gun whirred loudly but the music was louder. And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain, Sinatra crooned. When it was my mom’s turn, I could hardly stand to look at her. I’d never seen another human look more hopeless than in that moment, not even in movies. She was too sad for tears. Her whole face looked like someone had grabbed it and pulled it downward. The tattoo artist started to cry.

During the days that followed, my new tattoo still puffy and red, I aimlessly walked around the city like a zombie, I took the subway to nowhere. Back against the hard plastic seat of the E-train, I saw Tomm sitting across from me with his legs in a figure four shape, the pussybow on his black blouse fanning out from his collarbone like flower petals. His head was tilted slightly to the right. He was appraising something, but what? The outline of his body was entirely serrated. You couldn’t touch him without getting cut. I didn’t get off the train until he disappeared. Never quite figured out what he was thinking.

My mom and I struggled to grieve together. We both knew that our combined sorrow was too large for any container available to us: the apartment, the street, the city. When one of us became emotional, the other became stoic in an equal but opposite measure. One crumbled, the other held her breath. Then switch, then switch, again. There was no collective exhale. I didn’t know what to say when we were in a room alone together. I wanted her to be an antidote but instead she was evidence, this human who birthed and raised us, that Tomm was once here and now he was gone.

If the memory of Tomm was serrated, then the memory of my grandfather was polished and smooth like a nickel. I could turn him over in my hand whenever I chose. My dad was slippery, covered in oil. If I pictured them all side by side on the subway, they didn’t seem like they knew one another. A wide-backed old Polish man in a flannel shirt, twinkly blue eyes, so sentimental that he’d stand at the end of his driveway and cry whenever our car pulled away at the end of a visit. A forty-six-year-old with hands shaking, bags under his eyes, every feature could be described as shadowy, a man who grew up on welfare, became a millionaire, then lost it all and grew addicted to alcohol and opioids. The first hanged himself after his wife died and the second shot himself because he believed he was never going to get better, he was never going to be able to stop tormenting us. And then, of course, there was Tomm. A nightcap after a Grindr date, went to sleep and never woke up.
I wanted these deaths to fit into one another tidily, like Russian dolls. I wanted each one to make more room for the next. I wanted my mom and I to become better at grieving every time, and instead it felt like my entire body was made of overstretched muscles. We did not have the capacity for this. We were too battered.

The toothpaste hardened in the sink bowl was Tomm’s. I knew this to be true because it bothered me that he didn’t rinse it off and I told him this a hundred times. I stared at the blue calcified lump and wondered if I could make it soft again. If I hit it with a blow dryer, maybe that would do it. But then what? Would I rub it into my skin like a lotion? Yes, that’s exactly what I’d do. How could I explain this desire to anyone, even my mother? I kept staring at the sink and the ceramic gleamed white. There was no toothpaste. I’d imagined it.

I kept walking past the Molly Wee, a rank Irish pub we tolerated solely due to its proximity, where I once paid Tomm five dollars to drink a bottle of Miller High Life. Five dollars plus the cost of the beer, that is. He’d sat across from me wearing a black and white Mongolian lamb vest so voluptuous he was nearly drowning in it and we giggled over how hilarious he looked with a beer in his hand. “You need to be on TV,” I told him.
“I know it,” he’d said.
After he’d finished his beer Tomm ordered us a round of Hendricks gin and tonics, then a second, third, fourth. That night we didn’t mind that the bar smelled like the urine of a man who had consumed both Seagram’s 7 and a vitamin B tablet. We’d clasped our hands together, elbows resting on the sticky epoxied wood table, and told each other: I love you, I don’t know what I’d do without you, you’re the best sibling in the world. Our eyes welled. Tomm’s fingers were reddish-purple from the cold, from his poor circulation. I hadn’t known how it was possible to worry about him like a second mother, but idolize him the same way I did as a child. He blinked his big eyes, his eyelashes thick and dark and grouping together like Twiggy’s from the tears that clung to the ledge of his lids. I remember thinking how beautiful he was, even with his eyeliner all smeared like that. The sides of his icy fingers cooled mine, which had warmed from the Molly Wee’s wheezing furnace. He’d felt already partly dead. In three more months, he’d be completely.
I was certain I’d die right there on the gum-smeared pavement if I saw that neon Miller beer sign one more time, the sadness would just sweep me right into the gutter.
I look back now and my actions feel impossibly selfish, but I told my mom I couldn’t stay in New York with her. I was too broken to see Tomm’s shadow all over the city. On Eighth Avenue, the sex shop where we bought poppers to sniff on our way to parties; on Thirtieth Street, the pizza place from which we ordered delivery in the winter despite that it was located directly beneath our apartment. My mom clung to the city as much as I fled from it, dusting every surface for his fingerprints.

When I was back in Arizona, I went to dive bars that Tomm would’ve hated. Checkered floors, dartboards, stickers covering every square inch of the bathroom stalls. There was no trace of him there. Drunkenly fighting with Chris in alleys littered with overflowing dumpsters, I could convince myself, even if just for a second, that none of it had happened. Chris was fourteen years my senior. He had massive muscles and wore ripped tank tops that exposed his nipples as he bent to scoop ice at his bartending job. He slicked back his ringlets with pomade and wore a bandana as a headband, perhaps to cover his receding hairline or maybe it was just part of his brand. I started dressing like him: combat boots, ripped skinny jeans. I bought a New Order band t-shirt. I felt certain there was a shape I could contort myself into that would make Chris love me more if only I tried hard enough. It felt good to have a job, it felt good to be a different person.

I requested a copy of the toxicology report from Tomm’s death. My mom said she didn’t want to know anything more, but I hungered for answers. The letter took weeks to arrive and when it did, I couldn’t open it. It sat on my bedside table next to a stack of unread books and my yellowing retainers. I slept on the opposite side of the bed from it, as if it might explode during the night. When I finally worked up the courage to unseal the thickly stuffed envelope, I stared at the list of things that killed my brother: Xanax, Adderall, alcohol, cocaine. I knew he consumed these things. But then I saw heroin. It was not cocaine then, the white powder sitting beside him when he died, but this. Should I tell my mom? The word bore into my skull, heroin heroin heroin heroin until, when she and I were catching up on the phone about who knows what, I just spat that fact out, as if it were information that could be relayed in any old way, as if it wouldn’t obliterate her. She responded, “Hmm,” softly, like she’d consider it.

I wrote about the losses of my grandfather, father, and brother during this time, in the context of inheritance. When I read the words later it seemed as if I had forgotten that it was my maternal, not paternal, grandfather who died by suicide. His death was related to my father’s only in that they both were suicides and they both impacted my family. Outside of that, they were like an apple and a chinchilla. Packaging all three men together made me feel better when I wrote it down though, a line of dominoes that fell. The inevitability of it softened the guilt that I hadn’t done enough to prevent the deaths from happening. This notion made things easier and harder at once, because at the same time: I didn’t want Tomm’s death to be inevitable. I wanted it to be the most specific tragedy there ever was.

Chris would come home from his bartending shifts at 4AM to find me in our bed, still awake. He used to put on classical music when he left for work to soothe his old bulldog. The dog’s former owner had been sent to prison and he was extremely anxious as a result. He came with the name Deez, as in “deez nuts.” Now, instead of typing: relaxing music for neurotic dog into YouTube, Chris put on an infinite loop of Tom Rosenthal songs and left me lying board-stiff on my back. Stripes of light would come in between the blinds and crawl down my belly as the sunlight waned. My mom had discovered Tom Rosenthal on the first plane ride she took after finding Tomm’s body. His songs made her think of Tomm, so they made me think of Tomm. If the songs meant something to her, they meant something to me. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell her that. I knew she was lying awake too, steeping in hurt with her phone by her side. Was grief lessened when shared? We were too scared to find out. What if it doubled when shared, like joy?

At night I’d stare at the red onion skin of my shut eyelids and think: Why did you tell him he was driving you crazy when you were in Vegas together a few weeks before he died? So what if he was trying to buy PCP off someone at the pool, you shouldn’t have shamed him. Why didn’t you act more remorseful when you borrowed his favorite pencil skirt and ripped it when you were getting out of a cab? Why did you say you didn’t want to live in New York just because you knew it would hurt him? He adored the city like a lover. If I had been more patient, he’d still be alive. If I had been kinder, more supportive, more loving, harder on him, easier on him, I could have snatched the heroin right out of his nose.

Blame is covered in porcupine pins. Sometimes it feels like we have to toss it around after someone has died until we find the right person to catch it and hold it and we can watch their hands bleed and feel better until we remember that the dead human we love is still made of fine dust now.
My brother was named after my dad. Thomas. These deaths were related, sure, but was it inheritance? I pictured the brother who ends up like my dad. He has well-defined biceps and drinks whiskey and is mean to his girlfriend. That brother dies from an overdose, and it feels like tragedy begetting more tragedy. That brother is not my brother. And yet.
When Tomm cried, he fanned his face like his palms were paper fans. Driving the Toyota Camry that he hated because it was gray, not black, he’d grip the steering wheel daintily with his right hand and dangle a Parliament Light 100 out the window with his left, he’d shimmy his bony shoulders as he belted Britney Spears. When he danced he seemed boneless, he grew extra limbs, joy spurted out of him. He was effervescent. He considered legally nixing the “Jr.” that followed his name, he added the extra “m,” Tom and Tomm, different.
Tomm did not routinely use heroin, but he drank too much, treated pharmaceutical drugs like they were Skittles, never ate enough. He numbed his feelings with alcohol, shushed his past with pills. His death was self-inflicted but seemed accidental, like that of a child who runs out into the street to get his ball without looking each way and gets hit by a car. Or no, maybe a child who keeps throwing the ball into the street.
Did tragedy beget more tragedy? Sometimes I thought about grabbing the biggest rock I could find and letting myself sink to the bottom of a very deep lake. Stay there. How my hair would undulate underwater, a peaceful way to go I’d read. And then what of my mom? Tragedy begetting tragedy begetting tragedy.

My mom stayed in New York for several months after Tomm died. She wasn’t sleeping much at all and would often go for threeor four-hour walks around the city in the middle of the night. A close family friend came to stay with her and this was how she could escape his watchful eye, sneaking out like a teenager. Before Tomm died, this would have made her feel unsafe. Now, she didn’t care. While I thought of suicide in a more concrete way, I wondered if this was her own way of flirting with death. Choosing a dark street to walk down, seeing what happened.
She called me quite often, and I updated her the way I would a distant great-aunt, not the person with whom I used to share every detail of my life. I felt she was too fragile to hear about how I was actually doing. Whenever I considered initiating contact, I thought about how much she loved Tomm, how good a mother she was. I pictured the time she got into a car accident on her way to work from crying so hard after having to leave her sick baby boy at daycare; I pictured her covertly driving around the elementary school playground during recess to make sure Tomm wasn’t getting bullied for being gay again; I pictured her pushing the locksmith away from Tomm’s door when he finally got it open, protecting the young man from what he was about to see: her son’s dead body. Or perhaps she was protecting Tomm one last time, giving his corpse a few more moments of dignity before he would be poked and prodded and investigated. Lit on fire. My arm would freeze, suspended in the air with my phone in my hand. How could I possibly lessen her pain? I was the person who was supposed to bring her the most solace, and instead I brought her none. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, I thought. It was that I loved her too much. I buckled under the weight of it.

Sometimes, Chris would prop me up like a ragdoll when he got home and say: “Take a few deep breaths, drink some water, we’re walking the dogs.” Wearing his giant t-shirt and boxers, I’d stumble around the block and listen to him talk, incoherently interjecting random questions as if he were Google. This habit of mine reminded me of the Wikipedia rabbit holes Tomm and I would go down when we were high together. All we needed was our first search, then we’d click a link embedded within the webpage, then another.
Mount Vesuvius, epigram, Niko Kazantzakis. Who was Niko Kazantzakis? He once said: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
“Who wrote Still Life With Woodpecker?” I asked Chris.
“Tom Robbins.”
“Did you ever show Tomm that video of Klaus Nomi?”
“Uh yup, I think I did.”
“What type of bird is that chirping?”
“Mourning doves.”
“Morning like sun or mourning like death?”
“Mourning like death.”
“No really,” I said.
“Really.”
One night he pulled me out of bed but didn’t reach for the dogs’ leashes. He said, “Follow me,” and walked past our bookshelf made of cinder blocks and two-by-fours, through the kitchen, out the back door. Dawn cloaked our dusty desert yard in gold and there was a smattering of pastel purple bits in the sky, muddled blackberries. Chris unsheathed a Japanese sword he’d found at the bar that night, long and curved, and used two hands to pass it to me. He pulled a watermelon seemingly out of nowhere, tossed it up into the sky, and shouted: “Slice!” as I swung murderously at the fruit. He picked up the two halves and threw one up, then the other. We continued on like this until my bleary eyes couldn’t spot the last remaining hunk of green speckled rind, chest heaving. I went back to bed feeling both empty and sated, like I’d accomplished something grand. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

Every platitude offered was glib and stupid. I didn’t care that people were trying. How terrible an era to grieve, when you’re in your early twenties and laughably self-involved. No one had ever experienced a similar loss, of this I was certain. I received Facebook messages that someone’s uncle had died earlier that year, that Tomm was in a better place, that their sister’s coworker’s brother just passed away and would I be willing to give them advice? Ah yes, just what the newly bereaved long for, to be a volunteer psychologist. I banged on the keys of my laptop like a toddler, then reprimanded myself. What they are offering is love. Take it, give it, please. I responded, eventually, to each and every message. I told people how sorry I was for their loss, I thanked them, I talked to their sister’s coworker whose brother had just died and told her things I didn’t yet believe, like: you’ll be okay in time.
Find an unhealthy relationship with which to preoccupy yourself, I wanted to say. Hide from the people who love you most. Externalize your locus of control. These strategies were not therapist-approved, but she asked how I got through it, didn’t she?

Tomm’s memorial was held in New York City on July 24th, nearly two months after he passed away. It would have been his golden birthday. He was supposed to be in Greece – proof that he didn’t mean to overdose, proof that he regretted trying heroin that night. He was meant to be on a sandy beach for a friend’s wedding, drinking ouzo, splashing in the water, blue and white checkered tablecloths, platform sandals, octopus, he loved octopus, he’d be eating octopus, he was so fucking excited for this trip.
Before the mourners arrived, we gathered with Tomm’s closest friends on a white leather couch in a white loft in Chelsea that was so bright it burned my eyes. Leslie projected a video compilation she’d made of Tomm on a white wall. There he appeared, so large that we could live inside him. The video begins with him getting ready to bungee jump in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He’s on a platform hundreds of feet above the ground, palm tree fronds bouncing gently in the breeze below him. His eyeliner is quite smudged. He’s wearing a black tank top that has a crucifix on it with a note tied around the top that says: “BRB!” I’d gone bungee jumping at the same place a few years before. It almost felt like it was somewhere that I could go meet him. If I went now, he’d come soon. He’d be right back.
The man assisting with his jump reads out instructions to Tomm.
“Number one: put your hand like this:”
Tomm wraps his long fingers around the scaffolding.
“Number two: stand on the edge, like this.”
Tomm doesn’t let the man get to number three before he says, “Throw yourself over?” He’s drunk. He says this with a smile, with a wink.

After the service, Tomm’s friends wanted to go out. The plan was to meet at the Boom Boom Room, on the roof of the Standard Hotel. My mom didn’t want to go. Chris and I went back to the apartment with her and waited awkwardly for her sisters to come, so we could go party without leaving her alone. The living room felt like a hospital waiting room. Chris had gotten mad at me a few nights before because I didn’t want to stay out with him. Watching him sing “Thunderstruck” at a karaoke bar in Midtown versus back in Phoenix didn’t feel revolutionary. I didn’t understand why he needed to be out so late doing the same things he did at home. He’d told me I was being selfish. You do realize I’ve never been to New York before, don’t you? Telling him my brother had just died felt so obvious as to be insulting, so I kept my mouth shut and did what he wanted.
When my mom’s sisters got to the apartment, I stared at her vacant face before we left. I will not be choosing you tonight, my actions told her. I hope I said I was sorry.

My mom and her ex had broken up the night Tomm died. He wanted her to be a stepmother to his young children, to move back to Arizona, but she refused to leave Tomm. When she did move home months later, she asked Shane to give their relationship another chance. He said no. He’d already started seeing someone else. She began running every day, up and down the canal behind her house. Her dirty tennis shoes held her upright, except for when they didn’t. We didn’t live together anymore and I couldn’t let myself imagine what this compounded grieving process looked like for her. So mostly I just pictured her spending all day every day running.
Once, we got drunk together and I held her as she cried about losing Shane. How cruel it was that she was not allowed this anodyne. Another man on the pile. He wasn’t dead, but she still had to grieve him. Not a stool. She needed a ladder.

I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days on her own and said to myself: I do not want that. I stayed in my relationship with Chris for far too long and devolved into the worst version of myself: jealous, histrionic. Maybe I believed I was training my mourning muscles. I knew that there was no chance we would work out, so when things were good I was preemptively depressed about how much it was going to hurt to lose him and when things were bad, I thought: not yet not yet not yet and did everything possible to fix us, to throw myself down like a human patch.
When I finally left, I sobbed as I packed up my things. At first his eyes welled up and he asked me not to go. Once he realized I was really leaving, he hardened. “Okay tiger,” he said, like he was a Little League coach. “Get moving.” We’d been together for over two years by then. With his arms crossed, he stood watching me as I packed all of my belongings into reusable grocery bags. I carried them out to the car by myself.
I moved back in with my mom and pushed through the following weeks and months like wading through thick seaweed. Losing Tomm made every other anguish in my life seem like a minor inconvenience: a fender bender in a CVS parking lot, accidentally buying decaffeinated coffee, my favorite pen running out of ink. But it did not shrink my parting with Chris. The energy I spent attempting to hold our broken relationship together was reallocated to pining for him. I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days, less alone because I lived with her but still proverbially alone, and she seemed to be doing better and better. There was more color in her face. She didn’t run as much as I had imagined, but she did run a lot. I wanted to be like her, but my feet felt like bricks.

When I got invited to go out to bars in Old Town Scottsdale by girls with whom I went to high school, I’d get black-out drunk. I’d wake up in my bed––sometimes in the outfit I went out in and sometimes naked with one arm fully submerged in a bag of Doritos––and have no idea how I got there, or how I got the purplish-yellow bruises that would appear on my knees several days later. Once, my mom woke to the sound of me choking on my vomit. She rolled me over, cleaned me up. The next morning, she expressed her concern over my recent behavior. She told me that even though I was in pain now, one day I would be okay again and I had to remember that. She told me that when she felt her saddest, she’d think about how upset Tomm would be to see her so broken up. She pulled herself together for his sake. These did not feel like glib, stupid platitudes, finally.
“Please, please talk to me when you’re feeling down,” she said. “Talk to me when you’re feeling anything.”

We went to dinner, and I swear Tomm’s ghost was in the seat beside us. Tomm loved Pita Jungle. A falafel wrap was one of his favorite drunken indulgences, plus they had cheap wine and poured it with gusto. We paused our conversation when Tomm would have produced some funny comment, set our forks down and looked at the empty chair. I felt affronted, and I think my mom did too, that our server didn’t leave a wine glass out for Tomm. How could she not see him?
Not many people looked like Tomm. He was angular and androgynous with round eyes and full lips. He swayed when he walked, like a cat. When we did catch someone who resembled him even obliquely, we became obsessed. I rewatched the same episode of Schitt’s Creek over and over, the one where David and Patrick go on a hike and David is a big pill about being in nature and then Patrick asks David to marry him. How Tomm would’ve put his hands in front of his face just like David does, just so, if he were ever proposed to.
My mom found excuses to go to the post office to see the young trans woman who worked there and had the same protruding clavicles and slender arms as Tomm. Everyone was going to be getting a letter. She’d call me each time after she went, telling me every detail she learned about Sophie.
A realization began to unfurl itself: my mom and I were on the same team, united by our magical thinking. We were mother and daughter and we were grieving humans and we were two single women who were getting over painful breakups and we were roommates and we were friends and we were the only remaining members of our nuclear family unit and we were the closest people to Tomm Zorn, the only two who remembered the exact angle at which he threw his head back when he let out a cackle. Probably she would rub his old toothpaste scum into her skin, too. The losses we’d experienced together before did not make room for this one, as I had hoped. Tomm’s absence left a crater in us both. But I wondered if we could invite one another over to our respective craters, if we could plant zinnias and make couscous and refinish an old dining room table, spruce them up and then cut a trap door that led from mine to hers.

Once, high, I started to type how to grieve into Wikipedia, but when I got to how to gri–– the site suggested How to Grill Our Love, a Japanese manga series. There was no page for how to grieve. There was only grief. Under grief, there was a link for another page: grief (disambiguation). Disambiguation? The removal of ambiguity by making something clear.

I wanted to feel better but I didn’t want to forget Tomm. These desires felt complicated to hold in one palm. I began going to yoga, and at the end of class my instructor sometimes led us through a body scan meditation. I’d lie on my back with my feet splayed out to the sides like a corpse, and scan Tomm’s body instead of mine. His dark lashes, his thin neck. I always thought his hands could’ve been in a magazine advertisement. Narrow knuckles, never had a hangnail. I could still picture him, crystalline. My palms facing up toward the ceiling, I waited for a sign.

***

I hadn’t been to New York since Tomm’s memorial. The city lights looked just like tinsel as our plane approached the tarmac, permanently dressed for a celebration. The Uber ride to Chinatown––the neighborhood where my mom and I were staying, the neighborhood in which Tomm died––felt like gradually lowering myself into a Jacuzzi that was several degrees too hot. I had the urge to ask our driver to slow down, even though traffic had brought us to a crawl. I felt certain I’d been inside every building we passed, thousands of them. I needed to look inside.
The next morning I went on a walk on my own, to nowhere in particular. I found myself on a quiet street, all things considered. The honks from cars and music from open windows were still audible, but there was hardly anyone on the block. Mostly what I could hear was the faint echo of people chanting. I followed the sound until I found an inconspicuous temple––I nearly walked past it. The door was open, letting in the smell of garbage and cigarette smoke and letting out the sound of mellifluous voices. I felt hypnotized and stood very still by the door, out of sight. I inhaled the smell of cigarettes. Tomm had picked up the habit at thirteen and never stopped. His clothes always smelled slightly of smoke, but cigarettes clung to him in a different way than other people I knew who smoked. I thought they smelled stale and acrid, but he never did. The small hairs inside of my nostrils cleansed his scent of the harsh odor and turned it into an expensive perfume, like alchemy. Cigarettes didn’t remind me of death, they reminded me of life. I closed my eyes and listened to the chanting, and when I opened them, a black feather came into my peripheral vision, floating down in front of me so slowly it reminded me of a cartoon. It was fluffy––not a crow’s, not a pigeon’s. It looked like it came from the ostrich-feather-trimmed robe Tomm had bought as a swimsuit coverup several years earlier. I caught it in my open hand.
When I got back to our Airbnb, I sifted through tea bags that were arranged in a fan-like pattern on a gold tray and prepared cups for my mom and me. I sat on the windowsill and felt the heat from the mug spread like a glow across my palms. It felt like remembering something, like I hadn’t experienced the sensation of a temperature change in eighteen months. I watched as my tea bag floated in my cup, and I was reminded of drifting on a lazy river at a Scottsdale resort with Tomm when we were seventeen and nineteen. Every year since coming out in high school, his swim trunks had gotten shorter and shorter, exposing the Naired pearly white of his thighs. Floating beside him, I commented that I’d missed a stray pubic hair along my bikini line when I was shaving. He misinterpreted this to mean the pube was no longer connected to my body and therefore could, conceivably, fall off of me, swim the requisite few inches between our tubes, and jump onto him. He leapt from his floatie in a flash of flailing limbs, all elbows and knees, that created a glittering splash, interrupting fellow river-goers luxuriating peacefully by with their strawberry daiquiris in hand. He paddled to the edge and dramatically pulled his body out of the pool and onto the wavy beige pavement that was steaming from the sweltering heat, gasping for air like someone who had very nearly escaped drowning.
“It’s attached to me, you idiot!” I yelled through bouts of chortling, my inner-tube bouncing gently as my shoulders shook. I craned my neck to continue watching him as I floated away. He was laughing now as well, lying flat on his back, dark curls glistening with droplets of water, gazing with squinted eyes up at the cloudless sky.
I had the impulse to pat my hands up and down my torso and legs as if checking for knife wounds, seeing if this memory had caused anything to ooze. Instead, impossibly, I felt the feather in my pocket. It pressed into my thigh. I kept my fingers wrapped around my mug and turned my head to look at my mother, who had her eyes closed, sunlight bouncing off her face. “Can I share something with you?” I asked.

---

Maria Zorn’s work has been published in Longreads and West Branch.

POEMS

THE FABULOUS SZIGETIS by Ira Sadoff

The Fabulous Szigetis play the violin for a living. In every great city, on every boulevard that sidles up to great rivers, in cities with thriving markets of fruits and flowers, in tiny wine shops where obscure Dolcetto d’Albas are savored, you won’t find a single Szigeti. The Szigetis lock themselves in their hotel rooms to practice a Stravinsky melody, if you can call it a melody. You could say they are blessed with a calling, a mission. Oh yes, they are driven, as we sometimes wish we were driven. And their music is so metrical, uplifting, transcendent, it crowds out your dark thoughts, the crudest of your desires, your many shaggy disappointments.

Some might find an entire family playing violins exotic, ethereal, distressing. And we can imagine what disdain discarded Szigetis must suffer. The untalented Szigeti, the rebellious Szigeti, the disabled Szigeti, Szigetis who ring doorbells as Seventh-day Adventists. And the shame for any one of them if a wrong note is played, for then they must proceed as if their performance still had its halo around it.

They might remind a few of Josef Szigeti, the patriarch who fiddled through the last century. But these Szigetis have no ancestors, no attachments: they don’t come from Budapest, they never knew Bartok, they never coughed up blood in a Swiss sanitarium. No Nazis ever chased them to southern California. No, these Szigetis serve no god, savor no recollections: they are unscathed and unwearied.

Whereas we of the laundromat and stacks of paper work, we who open our hearts so foolishly and so often, who are surrounded by car horns, children shrieking, and a few pecking sparrows under the park bench, we who only dream of becoming Szigetis, wouldn’t we miss stumbling upon a blooming amaryllis in a neighbor’s window, attending the funeral of our beloved uncle Phil, falling in love with the wrong person?

---

Ira Sadoff is the author of the novel Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982), many uncollected stories, and eight collections of poems, most recently Country Living (Alice James, 2020). His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, and American Poetry Review.

RIVER IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PRAYER by Triin Paja

a lynx’s underbelly grows ragged
crossing a field at dawn
when the flora is quarter dew

and wild strawberries grow
where a forest was cut,
as if the earth wants to comfort us.

light falls on hay bales.
I want to look at the light and not speak.

now a line of geese sails above,
known only by sound
for they are so far,
small like eyelashes taken from death.

the river is one field away.

I ask you, as from a beloved,
to come to the river, a place that does not need
to be protected from you,

for you are a beloved
and the river is another word for prayer.
I want us to look at the river and not speak.

now the cranes howl, widening the sky,
and the moon, a simple egg,
lowers into an empty stork nest.

there is no visible cup of life to drink from –
there are wings, wings.

---

Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a chapbook in English, Sleeping in a Field (Wolfson Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Thrush, Rattle, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

PRIMORDIAL by Charlotte Pence

Your first memory is of water
colors. A failed painting.
The red couldn’t be stopped.
The yellow wanted
the blue. And the water
softened the paper into
a hole.
You learned early:
There is never a single cause
for why things go wrong.
Why wouldn’t you fear
the thunder, the night,
the ocean?
After all, a tiny mosquito
is deadlier than a great white.
There exists a jellyfish
that is also a box
and more painful than fangs.
The ways of ruin are everywhere.
When a breakage occurs – a dam
or levee – you notice
how the water,
once contained and named
into assured shapes onto maps,
becomes nameless, amorphous
as it grows. Becomes multiple
names of who it killed. How many.
You cannot paint this,
then or now, so you swirl the water
a hurricane brown. No pure color.
No single cause.
There is, though,
your first memory, fat
as the paintbrush, wanting to be
dipped into the pan of dried color,
ready for transfiguration.

---

Charlotte Pence is the author of two collections of poems from Black Lawrence Press, Many Small Fires (2015) and Code (2020), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.

LUNA by John Bargowski

In his room looking up
the names of bugs we’d collected
with our long-handled net
in the fields along Ravine Road,
my friend told me about a sister
he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
We’d caught a jar full that day,
all still alive, trying to climb
the glass sides, or flapping wings
against the hole-punched lid
for more air and light as we flipped
through his field guide.
She lived with a bunch of other kids
in a hospital on an island
they crossed a bridge to get to
on Sundays, he whispered, and once,
as they walked through the gate
back to their car he saw
something he’d never seen before
under a floodlight clinging
to the brick wall that surrounded
the grounds, a beauty he wanted
to bring home to show me,
with long pale wings
tinted the color of moonlight
and a fringe of gold powder
that rubbed off onto his palms
when he cupped his hands
and tried to capture it
before it flew away.

---

John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighere, 2012) and American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.

THE ROUTINE by Michael Mark

I lift what’s left
of the bantam weight champ.
Air Corps, Korea, 1949. Once

from the kitchen linoleum, once
slumping off the couch next to me – once
eyes closed holding the bath towel bar
while the glaucoma drops sink in.

Champ, I call him, and he says,
Of what? and I say, Falling
and he says, Undefeated.

It’s a routine.

Sometimes, when I get him somewhat
steady, we dance. Make light
of his uncharted dips, sags, collapses –

his 96-pound body obeying
malicious gravity.
I am flying back home.

Tomorrow.
Early.
He knows

he can’t come. You wouldn’t want me to,
he said once, when I asked. I didn’t fight.
He can still spot a weak feint. I sweep

his floors, vacuum the carpet’s don’t-ask
where-those-came-from stains, dry
and stack the dishes, dust, leave.

They’ll just keep knocking me down
anyway, he’ll say out of nowhere, reliving
the bouts, each round, blow

after blow. The numbing. His heart
shouting, No! Stay on your feet!
somewhere between falling and dreaming.

---

Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet (The Rattle Foundation, 2022). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily.

A THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY by Owen McLeod

It’s been one year since my mother
was uploaded to the cloud. According
to John Locke, we’re not material bodies
or immaterial souls, but unified streams
of consciousness, which would also mean
I didn’t actually get a new phone last week
if my phone isn’t a physical object but a set
of photos, videos, texts, songs, and apps
that simply migrated to this new device –
sort of like Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If we preserve her data, maybe my mother
can migrate to a new device. My father
still charges her phone once a week. She
was attached to that phone, particularly
toward the end when she couldn’t garden,
needlepoint, do crossword puzzles, walk,
or speak – but she could text, more or less,
even if it was a just a handful of basic emojis.
Mostly smileys and hearts, but at some point
she shifted to praying hands only. We knew
what she was saying: I want to be uploaded.
Hospice came in, took care of all that,
and her body went out in a bag. My new
device takes amazing pics. I shot some
this morning while walking in the woods
and sent them to my mother’s phone.
She loved walking in the woods, especially
in the snow, so I used an app that adds
realistic-looking snowfall to pics. I’m not
a fool. I know the little hearts attached
to those pics are from my dad. I know
my mother is never coming back.
I just wish it had been real snow.

---

Owen McLeod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019) and Before After (Saturnalia, 2023). His poems have appeared in Field, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review.

DEPARTMENT STORE ESCALATOR by Jessica Greenbaum

After Szymborska’s “Puddle”

I remember that childhood fear well.

If I stepped on the down escalator

which bowed outward over thin air between floors

to a destination I couldn’t see at my height

and, sadly, would never reach

the moving teeth would casually drop me into space

as it had almost done each time before

while mannequins stood blank-faced in their checked raincoats

a clerk fussed with a clothes rack

gay shoppers passed me rising, looking upward, without a care

this time no different: the tug of my mother’s hand

again, the most shocking.

---

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998); The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Poetry.

CARDS by Farah Peterson

It’s all I can do to
keep my peace when

my son announces
he has a good hand I wince

when he lets cards
tip as, well

as carelessly as a child
unschooled

of course I look
I can’t help that

I’m just passing an evening
the way he asked and

don’t I win meekly, with none of that
slapping down hilarity

or even the quiet, cruel collection
with one knuckle snap and a half smile

none of the good old fun that
went with my learning to

keep cards close and
expect dissembling

but the result is, all I have for him
is a muzzled company

and all of the ghosts
they crowd me and crowd me

---

Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Rattle, and Salamander.

LEAP OF FAITH by Richard Spilman

The new age descends like an axe.
There has come a revolution:
rooted things have learned to run,

though the crackling of underbrush
betrays their flight and the blade
descends where the rustling ends.

And you, neither new nor old,
balance at cliff’s edge, future
awash in the whitecaps below.

What lies there may be scree
or rapids or just a soft breech into
the slipstream of the imminent,

but it’s an answer, a way not
so much out as into a now
whose chaos is yours by choice.

You could make your way back,
but to what? Ruin and rubble,
and the stale taste of fear.

Instead, you make a steeple
of your raised hands, tense
and leap. It’s death one way

or another, drowning or rising
to shake your hair and follow
the current wherever it goes.

---

Richard Spilman is the author of the poetry collection In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Suspension (New American Press, 2006) and Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023); and two story collections, Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990) and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).

ALLEGIANCE by Elizabeth Bradfield

Each morning before light, in
season, Billy’s F-150 fires
up, grumbles in his drive,
heads for the pier. I hear it
through the small window above
my bed, and when I’m out,
I watch for him – Billy at the Race,
Billy off the Peaked Hills, Billy steaming
home around the point. Billy. Thick
glasses, accent, hands, wizard
of fiberglass and steam box, torch
and epoxy, whose loft holds all
the tools, any clamp or nail you’d
need, any saw or grinder. Who
coaches us as we fix our skiff in his
garage and doesn’t laugh
in a mean way when we
fuck up. How’s my favorite
whale hugger? calls Billy
as I drive my Prius past his house.
We call him The Boat Fairy. To his face.
He and his wife call us The Girls. We
avoid politics beyond weather
and fish, which we get into
big time, elbows out windows,
idling. We want to make him
a T-shirt, a badge, a sticker
for his truck. We tell him so. Listen:
there are silences between us. We
all know what whispers there. It’s ok
to not speak them here.

---

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of seven books, including Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008); Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019); and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.

HER SHAME by John Morgan

Mist rolls above the river like a second river
and the piles of snow darken as she drives
toward town and sees an old woman,
dressed in a light vest and no parka, slumped
on the metal railing where the road winds down.

Thinking that the woman might be lost,
maybe senile, she pulls over, opens
the window, and says, “Do you need help?”

But as the woman stands she sees instead
that it’s a man. Short, with shaggy hair
and a stubble beard, he comes to the window
and says, “I’m looking for a ride to town.”

In these rough times it’s her rule
never to pick up strangers, so she says,
“Oh, sorry, I’m not going there just now,”
and pulls away, confused at how
her good intentions went awry,

and at the bottom of the hill
shame overtakes her like a massive truck
looming in the rearview mirror as night comes on.

---

John Morgan is the author of a collection of essays and eight poetry collections, most recently The Hungers of the World: New and Later Collected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Kenyon Review.

NEAR ESTER, ALASKA by Jane Lott

Just under the sternum
there are so many words
for love I discovered
bitter-sweet
in the dictionary
resting on her knee
a solid sense of self
so many words for sea
so many words for bear.
But nowhere a word
for that time
when all that was left of daylight
lay pink and purple across the snow.

---

Jane Lott’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Sonoma Magazine, and in the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.

OBATA AT TENAYA PEAK by Ben Gucciardi

A whole year looking for the mountain
inside the mountain
before he tried to paint it.
And even then,
only when the light
off the granite
was tangible,
and with a brush made of mink
whiskers, the line
so fine it was hardly visible.

---

Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry.

POTTED MAPLES by D.S. Waldman

The moon is a bone the shape of a hole.
She tries explaining this to you –

Boxes, on the ground, of her mother’s things,
a window open
in another part of the house.

Her legs are up the wall.

You are someone, then she sets her glass of water
on the floor,

and you are someone else – breath
let out the nose,

ghost pipe in the wall.

One is red with light bark, the other
a shade, entirely, of what you want to call maroon.

They take water on Sundays.
And in a month or two you’ll need

to put them in the ground.

---

D.S. Waldman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Narrative, and Copper Nickel.

YELLOWJACKET TRAP ATTRACTANT by Robert Wrigley

You know a sliver of lamb bone with a bit of gristle’s
way better than the cloying sweet commercial stuff
dribbled on a cotton ball. After half a day
the transparent trap’s so full the bastards have to eat their own
to make room for themselves in the death chamber.

May San Francesco and Father Walt forgive you,
but you relish what looks like yellowjacket panic.
From the porch’s other end the engine hum of them dying.
You take a seat and watch them crawl in legions
through the six bottom holes none ever leaves by.

Nor bonhomie among them anywhere. Here’s one
crawling round and round the crowded cylinder,
hauling another’s head and fighting off
the fellows that would seize it. Meanwhile,
among the dead, tiny nuggets, desiccate gristles of lamb.

Upon your bare toes they light and commence
to chiseling away a divot of flesh, having it half
piranhaed off before you feel their sawtooth razory jaws.
Yes, they feed on certain destructive fruit moths
and flies, and they seem almost brilliantly rugged, as they must be.

But eventually you have to empty the traps and rebait,
and always a few have miraculously survived
among hundreds of cadavers – does that surprise you?
Such a fierce life force in carrion eaters. May it never end.
The morning’s dumped survivors, I crush beneath a boot.

---

Robert Wrigley is the author of twelve collections of poems, including Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021).

ONE OF THE LAND MINE BANDS by John Willson

Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Named for its likeness to a crocodile’s head,
the zither’s hollow body rested
on two cut sections from a tree trunk.
The fingers of the player’s left hand

pressed ivory frets—
the crocodile’s teeth.
Fronting the band, a low blue table,
a brass bowl holding currency,

a tray with a sign, CD 10$:
at home, I listen to the sweet music,
hand cymbals, gongs, bamboo reeds,
the xylophone’s wood keys, struck brightly.

They performed beside the straight wide path
toward the temple where strangler vines
clutched blocks of stone,
pulled down ancient columns.

Below his knee, the crocodile player’s
left leg was plastic, hollow.
One of his bandmates sawed an upright
fiddle, its body a coconut shell.

He gripped the bow
in the fold between forearm and bicep.

All seven players missed limbs or their sight.
In this photo, blue shade cast by a tarp

suspends them between one chord
and the next,
like the moment each stepped
on something planted that bloomed.

---

John Willson is the author of the poetry collection Call This Room a Station (MoonPath Press, 2020). His poems have also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Sycamore Review, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Terrain.org.

SONG OF A STORYTELLER by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

A man will journey the river
in a kayak, armed with magic akutuq1 mother made,
looking for uncle and answers, coming out
of strange happenings in order
for his human way of knowing to understand
that uncle’s bones are planted in the tundra.
He will be seduced by a woman with teeth gnashing between
her legs
and will not be consumed.
He will be pursued by a foolish man made of copper
and will set him afire.
He will catch a mermaid
and become an aŋatkuq2 ,
He will hear the bird speak
and become a prophet.

1 akutuq: [uh-koo-took] “a mixture of fat and berries,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
2 aŋatkuq: [uh-ngut-kook] “shaman,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq

CANNED PEACHES by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

Dad told you
Opa used to count out
his peas
one
by
one
just so he’d eat vegetables.

Once a year, the barge
came to town
and unloaded a year’s supply of goods.
Auntie said
“whether something was expired or not
before the next barge came, we had to buy it.”

Dehydrated potatoes
Flour
Hard candy
Eggs
Cans
and cans and
cans.

”Your dad doesn’t even
like the taste of frozen veggies now,”
Mom said.

Now you love the softness of pears in a can:
slightly grainy interior,
disintegrating in the mouth,
giving way with each bite.

Canned peaches, on the other hand,
have a slight bite,
a sharp taste of sunshine
coated in syrup.

They were in the small
compartment of your school lunch tray.
Saved for last,
while you made sure
to sit with others of the same gender.

You lost your taste for them
some time after that.
And switched back to pears.

---

“Song of a Storyteller” and “Canned Peaches” are Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell’s debut poetry publications.

TOMATO DIVINATION by Doug Ramspeck

Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence

at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear

as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria

at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellowjackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me

once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.

And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream – knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window – her voice like concentric

circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.

---

Doug Ramspeck is the author of two collections of short stories, a novella, and nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review.

LATE FRUIT by Daniel Halpern

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
— William Bronk

I should have foreseen
this defeat of the heart,

but I insisted
on believing that it would beat

forever, and never
cease bearing fruit.

I was a believer.
I thought there was a territory,

a lingua di terra of febrile soil
that survived the harvest,

whose fruit was sweet with a juice
whose color and scent were perennial.

I was a believer. I believed.
I grow older, I bear the weight,

I carry home the sack of that late harvest.

HER DREAM by Daniel Halpern

Susan’s, a found poem

I woke from a dream this morning
We were dating

We weren’t dancing
But there was rhythm

You asked me to live with you
You were so thoughtful

You made a place for me
Where you lived

A collection of my memories
Were placed on three shelves

They remained there
In a kind of permanence

We kissed
I had red lipstick on.

---

Daniel Halpern has written nine books of poetry and edited more than 15 books and anthologies. He founded the National Poetry Series, Antaeus, and the Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.

AN OLD FEAR by James Davis May

The snake you saw that was at first just a thick strand
squiggling from the frayed kitchen rug is a problem
because it slid so soundlessly beneath the fridge
before your wife could see it and you both know
what concussions can do, even decades later,
that your brain can make you see what’s not there,
and feel what you shouldn’t, and that’s before
factoring in the illness that lives in it somewhere
like a queen wasp dormant all winter and the medication
that is supposed to save you from yourself
but can also make you act and think “unusually” –
so many chemicals go into the making of reality,
after all – and when you roll the fridge back
and find no snake but see instead the small hole
for the waterline that could have allowed the snake,
if there was a snake, a route to escape, you know
you’ve entered at least a month of ambient terror,
where every room will be a potential haunting
and you won’t know whether to sigh or gasp
when the drawer you open shimmers
with your face patterned over the quivering knives.

---

James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, both published by Louisiana State University Press: Unquiet Things (2016) and Unusually Grand Ideas (2023). His poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, New England Review, and The Sun.

ETHERIZE by Amber Flora Thomas

My mother says the wrong word.
The place that has held her tongue coasts,
relieves unthinkable territory: space and hollow
under the curds of night, invisible and endless.
She’ll take her old dog there when it’s time.

If we remember,
we know what she means: after the body,
in the cool stretch of stale air in a white room;
put out away from us, not even ash, but a sphere above the flame,

the mind when we step outside and look at the stars
so the dog can do her business, the ear training itself
to listen in the trees for what might be
another creature smelling us on the air,
but farther out.

So, I don’t correct her.
No needles or cremation estimates. Only the ethereal.
Temporary forces between us and floating off into space
when we walk out somewhere.

Farther still.

---

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012); and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and Ecotone.

LUNKERS by David Starkey

On the big, once blank wall
of his room in assisted living,
I have mounted his largemouth bass.

The smallest weighed five pounds,
the largest was thirteen,
“Big Mama” he called her,

leaving the chartreuse spinnerbait
hooked in her taxidermied
lip. The centerpiece:

a twenty-pound steelhead
with bright orange paint
for the scar on its flank.

The only time he makes sense
these days is remembering
when and where and how

they were caught. He exaggerates
and changes details with the aplomb
of a politician, but that was ever

his way. Turn the conversation
to the recent past,
however, and his language

quickly falls apart,
like a plastic worm that’s been struck
too often, or a wooden lure

long snagged underwater
then discovered during a drought:
pinch its sides and . . . mush.

Soon, the nurses say, he’ll have to
downsize yet again – no room
in Memory Care for fiberglass fish.

On the day we wheel my father
into his final quarters,
the rest of him will be lost,

like the twenty-pound lunker
he claimed almost
to have netted before the line

snapped and, as he leaned over
the boat’s hull, it vanished

into his wavering reflection.

---

David Starkey is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Cutting It Loose (Pine Row Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review.

WHEN KNOWING IS THE SAME AS LATE WINTER WAITING by W.J. Herbert

Why is the body
still working, if it knows
what’s to come –

isn’t it cowed?
Sometimes, I think the blood
thinks,

the way these robins
must wonder whether the liquid

amber will leaf again
as they sit with their light-bulb
breasts glowing,

orange suns
among skeleton branches,
clots

in the deep-veined tree.
They flutter, as I imagine

my heart does,
just to see if it can feel
itself alive in the quiet

darkness of stiff ribs.
Regreening – that’s what the robins
want

but they can’t know what’s coming.
They wait,

as we do,
deaths tucked into a pocket of sky.

---

W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry.

GRACE by Robin Rosen Chang

The man plunged
into the muddy pond,
cradled the dog’s limp
but still warm body.
On land, he cupped his mouth
over the dog’s snout
and exhaled into it.
Over and over, a man
breathing into a dog,

his humid breath
like a zephyr,
its overblown promise
of a spring that won’t come.

And I think about my mother,
her emaciated body
in her pink nightgown
drowning in the ocean
of her bed, and how
I struggled to hold her hand.

I can’t imagine I’d have the grace
to swaddle another’s mouth
inside mine, offering life
to one whose wind was gone,
filling its lungs
with my trembling breath.

---

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Cortland Review, American Literary Review, and Verse Daily.

ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS by Martha Silano

A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a Willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona – it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of
Pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me – when we die we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre – one shove of poison – into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.

---

Martha Silano is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Missouri Review.

HORSEHAIR ON HELMETS by Maura Stanton

An old-fashioned wooden storm window
placed across sawhorses in a backyard –
nearby a paint can – but the little girl
crawling under this delightful play space
did not see glass panes, only blue sky
She stood up. She shrieked. I saw it all,
for I was high on the swing set next door,
moving through the air in big swoops
like a flag unfurling in a gust of wind.
Adults rushed from the house, running, shouting,
brushing glitter from the girl’s dark curls,
scolding her, bandaging her forehead,
while I kept swinging, swinging through the sky
An older brother got a rake and raked
sharp shimmery pieces from the grass,
the rake tines dragging out daggers of glass
that might have injured a bare foot, but flew
instead into my memory – for today
slits of sun between some fence rails
crisscrossing the snow like light swords
call up that scene – the broken window,
agitated figures, blood, then clean-up.
I held tight to the chains of the swing,
watching it all from a terrified distance
as if I were driving a team of wild horses
into battle, horsehair streaming from my helmet.

PENELOPE’S CHAIR by Maura Stanton

In Urgent Care the TV’s always turned
to HGTV, and today the House Flippers
chat about house staging as I wait here
with groaning patients, and fidgeting family,
my husband called to an exam room.
The topic’s house staging – the lovely room
flashing across the screen’s an illusion
created by designers. A tall young woman
points out a curved white sectional sofa,
and, she says, “here’s a Penelope chair.”
Penelope’s chair? But I’ve missed it.
The camera’s moved on to the staged bedroom.

What’s a chair? A seat with four legs
and a back for one person, like this chair,
where I’m sitting near other chairs in rows
filled with hunched seniors, or Moms or Dads
rocking children on their laps, jackets
wadded behind them like pillows as they text,
no one watching the cheerful TV folk
as they chatter about their California mansions.
I shift my legs, straighten my aching back,
recalling facts about Penelope’s chair
from The Odyssey. Ikmalios carved it all,
chair and footstool, from one piece of wood.
inlaid it with silver and ivory. At night
her hands aching from a day of weaving,
the suitors still noisily drinking her wine,
Penelope spread a thick fleece over the chair
and sat back. Like me, she was waiting
for her husband. And to pass the time,
on my iPad, I Google “Penelope’s Chair,”
expecting Wikipedia or quotes from Homer,
but instead, bewildering visions of chairs
scroll across the screen – Penelope Chairs! –
each one different, offering style or comfort,
Penelope dining chairs in synthetic leather,
stacking chairs framed in bright chrome tubes
or clear molded acrylic with steel legs.
Penelope’s armchair comes in fleur-de-lis
upholstery with claw-like feet, but there’s
a designer version shaped like a puzzle piece
with a bulbous protrusion for Penelope’s head.
Penelope’s beautiful chair’s ubiquitous –
If you don’t stand, walk, or lie down flat,
you’ve got to sit, so why not choose the best?
Get it in Lucite, satin, or soft grey plush?
And what about this swivel version,
or Penelope’s rattan lounger with matching footstool?

The woman next to me groans and rises
when her name’s called. She grabs her coat.
A sighing bearded man lowers himself
slowly into her place, pulls out his phone.
I roll my coat behind my back, my fleece,
thinking of Penelope on her special chair,
her eyes closed as she dreamed of Odysseus.
Those raucous nights her chair became her boat.
She’d float off through the foam-flecked seas
rowed by invisible gods until she reached
that place beyond the sunset where he lingered.
But every morning she woke up alone.
And then I hear a familiar cough and voice
coming from the desk. It’s my Odysseus
arriving back from that uncertain voyage
clutching his chart, and his new prescription,
grinning at me, ready to come home.

---

Maura Stanton is the author of a novel, three collections of stories, and seven collections of poems including Snow on Snow (Yale University Press, 1975); Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah Press, 1984); Glacier Wine (Carnegie-Mellon, 2001); Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Able Muse.