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2022 BLR Prize Winners

A journal of humanity and human experience

Issue 42

Spring/Summer 2022

Bellevue Literary Review was established in 2000 by founding publisher Martin J. Blaser and editors Danielle Ofri, Jerome Lowenstein, and Ronna Wineberg.

Our thanks to the following people who have assisted with manuscript review and other projects: Felice Aull, Karen Beckermann, Madeleine Beckman, Nicholas Birns, Rose Bromberg, Theresa Brown, Alessa Colaianni, Leonora Desar, Dante Di Stefano, Bonnie Jill Emanuel, Ellen Foster, Barry Jay Kaplan, Jackie Keer, Dayle Kramer, Soowhan Lah, Ajay Major, Seth Michelson, Nkosi Nkululeko, Patricia Patterson, Aleena Paul, Marika Psyhojos, Pamela Ryder, Fiona Salmon, Ann Stoney, Tim Suermondt, Warren Wechsler, Jonathan Xu.

Subscribe to BLR and submit your writing at www.BLReview.org

Cover Art:
Rebecca Chamberlain
Homatorium Series, Aalto, Public-Private
Lithography ink on fabric wrapped board
5 x 10 inches - 2 panels 5 x 3, 5 x 7 inches

Drawing from early Modernist architecture and abstraction from the interwar period and its embodiment of humanist ideals, Rebecca Chamberlain’s works are meditations on dwelling and being. Her monochromatic paintings utilize photographs (her own and archival) plus additional materials such as ballpoint and lithography inks, lead crystal, and vintage architectural tracing cloth. These reconstructions focus on transitional spaces—windows, hallways, promising staircases or empty rooms. Such slivers of space function as interstitial moments, experimenting with reflection, synchronicity, and fragmentation, thereby challenging the viewer’s sense of perspective.

Bellevue Literary Review is published twice a year.
Copyright © 2022 Bellevue Literary Review

Bellevue Literary Review
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New York, NY 10010

www.BLReview.org

Printed by Sheridan PA Hanover, Pennsylvania
ISSN 1537-5048    ISBN-978-0-9998638-8-6
Indexed by Humanities International Complete
Member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)

BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW

Danielle Ofri
Editor-in-Chief
Stacy Bodziak
Managing Editor

Suzanne McConnell
Fiction Editor
Sarah Sala
Poetry Editor

Damon Tweedy
Nonfiction Editor
Ronna Wineberg
Contributing Fiction Editor

Lauralee Leonard
Associate Fiction Editor
Kate Falvey
Associate Editor

Scott Oglesby
Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Abba Belgrave
Assistant Poetry Editor

Omotara James
Assistant Poetry Editor
Saleem Hue Penny
Assistant Poetry Editor

Anna Falvey
Editorial Assistant
Erin Breznitsky
Editorial Assistant

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY BOARD

Bettina Klein, President
Cori Baill

Myrna Blyth
Rafael Campo

Frank Clark
Rita Charon

Vida Foubister
Jack Coulehan

Lesmah J. Fraser
Tony Dajer

Anyika Jordan
Minda Gralnek

Perri Klass
Elizabeth Howard

Lin Lombardi
Simone Joseph

Ashley McMullen
Barron H. Lerner

Michael Myers
Ruth Oratz

Danielle Ofri
Michael Pillinger

Marit Vagstad
Abraham Verghese

David Weill

FOREWORD

This issue of Bellevue Literary Review goes to press just as the Covid pandemic rounds out its second full year. For BLR, this period has been one of upheaval, as for everyone. But there have been some unanticipated bright spots. The shift to virtual events, for example, has allowed us to diversify our offerings and create events that continue to live on. BLR’s website and YouTube channel feature our programs on poetry and Parkinson’s, how writing confronts racism, the life of Oliver Sacks, writing during the Covid pandemic plus our original film, “Reading the Body,” that intertwines dance, disability, and poetry.

On a less tangible, but no less significant note, the pandemic has reinvigorated our sense of purpose. Grappling with illness has become universal, or at least now universally acknowledged. The themes that BLR writers have mined for twenty years are now recognized as fundamental themes of the human experience.

In that light, we bring you our forty-second issue. This year marks the seventeenth year of the annual BLR Literary Prizes, which attracted a record number of writers. Our nonfiction judge, Michele Harper, chose “In My Head,” by Avra Aron as the winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. Aron’s writing pulsates with rhythm and electricity as she brings us inside the mind of a teenager navigating life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Honorable Mention goes to “Casualty,” by Emily Carter, which traces her sister’s experience during a troubled North Carolina summer, one that follows her “like a stray dog.”

Amy Hempel was the judge for the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and selected “Step-Down” as the winner. This gripping story, by Nitin K. Ahuja, follows a nurse during his overnight shift in the hospital’s step-down unit, “where the patients are all sick in a steady but uncertain way … waiting for the course of an illness to reveal itself.”

In Angie Sijun Lou’s Honorable Mention story, “Pale Unhappy Dog,” a young man races through the Chinese countryside on his motorcycle, worried that “his father’s kidney has already been claimed by somebody else,” that it’s “in another city, purifying the toxins from a stranger’s body.”

The John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry was judged by Crystal Valentine. Michael M. Weinstein’s stunning poem “Drought Pastoral” was the winner. “Open up, desert,” the narrator says, “and let me down into you / seven thousand feet — // where once the cage stops / shaking I can hear my lungs // breathe—.”

Honorable Mention was awarded to “Six Weeks Into Chemotherapy” by Laura Paul Watson. In this moving poem, the narrator yearns “[t]o be unseen, unprayed for, to be unhugged / in the grocery store and left alone // to select a melon.”

BLR is deeply grateful to the sponsors of our annual literary prizes—the Goldenberg family for fiction, the Buckvar family for nonfiction, and board members Lin Lombardi and Lesmah Fraser for poetry. We are so very appreciative of this year’s judges—Michele Harper, Amy Hempel, and Crystal Valentine—who took time from their busy schedules to lend their discerning eyes. A special thanks goes to our stalwart reviewers for helping us critically evaluate thousands of submissions. And we are of course indebted to the writers whose efforts and skill allow us to create a journal of such high caliber.

Lastly, we thank you, the readers, who have embraced BLR over the last twenty years. We hope you enjoy reading this first entrant into our third decade as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. Stay tuned for our next issue, which will have a special—and hopefully prophetic—theme: “Recovery.”

Danielle Ofri
Editor-in-Chief

2022 BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW PRIZES

Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Judged by Amy Hempel

Winner: “Step-Down” by Nitin K. Ahuja
Honorable Mention: “Pale Unhappy Dog” by Angie Sijun Lou

John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
Judged by Crystal Valentine

Winner: “Drought Pastoral” by Michael M. Weinstein
Honorable Mention: “Six Weeks Into Chemotherapy”
by Laura Paul Watson

Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
Judged by Michele Harper

Winner: “In My Head” by Avra Aron
Honorable Mention: “Casualty” by Emily Carter

STEP-DOWN

NITIN K. AHUJA

I don’t mind the night shift. I’m still new here, granted, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I mind it. I suspect I’d have a harder time on the general wards, where nights are really just a babysitting gig. But not in the step-down unit, where the patients are all sick in a steady but uncertain way, suspended between the floors and the ICU, waiting for the course of an illness to reveal itself. The lights are dimmed through the early morning hours, and the cardiac monitors keep softly beeping. I spend most of my time with a pleasant sense of calm and capability, holding in my haunches the energy of a weighted spring.

The best compliments I receive from my colleagues are in this spirit. “You’re so levelheaded, Russell,” or, “If I was ever in here, Russ, I’d want you to take care of me.” I try to accept this praise with an ample dose of self-deprecation, or else false swagger that serves the same basic purpose: “God help you, Marge,” or, “You should be so lucky, Marie.”

It isn’t lost on me that I stand out in other ways. Male nurses at this hospital are few and far between. They skew either young and effeminate or old and foreign. Visitors who stop me for directions in the lobby usually mistake me for a doctor. With my back half-turned toward a cabinet or computer, I sometimes feel my coworkers’ eyes on me, lingering with the sort of idle curiosity that I assume drives zoo patrons through the lesser exhibits, where the animals aren’t beautiful or dangerous, just rare enough to be interesting.

Mostly I try to ignore this difference of mine at work, but sometimes it’s inescapable—like last night, when I was assigned to Joe, a twenty-year-old frequent flier with cystic fibrosis, well-known for his recurrent, drug-resistant pneumonia and reliably inappropriate behavior with female staff. At the 7:00 p.m. handoff, his day nurse Megan gave me the highlights from her shift: the IV line that blew in the middle of Joe’s antibiotic infusion, the way his hand had lingered on her thigh while she replaced it, the steady improvement in his oxygen requirement, his repeated requests for a sponge bath.

I went to Joe’s room first, where I found him asleep with one arm and one leg hanging off his mattress past the bedrails. His oxygen tubing had gotten twisted around his neck, knocking the nasal prongs out of position, forcing me to wake him.

“Rise and shine, boss,” I said, then louder: “Hey, Joe.” He groaned into his pillow and started coughing. I helped him up, leaned him forward.

“Shit,” Joe said, when the fit had subsided. “Where’s Meg?”

“Done for the day,” I said. “I’m taking over.”

“Raw fucking deal. No offense.”

“None taken.” I hung a fresh bag of saline on the pole.

My other two patients were located in rooms on either side of him—Mrs. Wood, an old lady with heart failure, and Mrs. Vine, an old lady with cirrhosis. Last names down here seem to borrow often from common nouns—Aspen, Baker, Cotton, Dove. Maybe it’s a Southern thing, I’m not sure. If I asked around, I bet I could find some fellow Pennsylvania transplants with whom to compare notes. But I’m just as happy figuring things out on my own. In the step-down unit, the sliding doors are made entirely of glass, and walking past them at night, I sometimes imagine myself in a museum of natural history, looking into dioramas of representative specimens, their bodies twisted deliberately into postures of instruction.

What sort of specimen was Joe? A hybrid form, restless even in stupor, all tangled up in the linens. A lattice of bone and sinew that hinted at the vigor it might have held. I exchanged an empty bottle of bronchodilators for a full one, turned on the nebulizer, and gave Joe the mask. While he inhaled, I updated the dry-erase board hanging just below the television, replacing “RN: Megan” with “RN: Russell.”

“Meg used to draw smiley faces,” Joe said, his voice muffled by plastic.

“Don’t talk, just breathe,” I said. “You want a smiley face?”

“Not from you.” At the bottom of the board, I drew two stick figures wearing cowboy hats. Neither was smiling.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Joe asked.

“You and me.”

“Fuck off,” Joe said, and coughed some more.

Mrs. Wood was lying flat on her back in bed, staring at the ceiling, when I came in to introduce myself. “Evening, ma’am,” I said.

“Hello,” she said, turning her head. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess.” The smell of it soon followed.

“Oh no,” I said. “Why didn’t you ask for help?”

“There wasn’t any time, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” I picked up the call button that was dangling nearby and pressed it. Eventually a voice came through the speaker.

“Can I help you?”

“Hey Maura, code brown—swing by?”

Maura arrived in an isolation gown and turned Mrs. Wood’s bloated body sideways while I gathered up the dirty sheet from underneath. I used its clean corners to wipe the stool still stuck to Mrs. Wood’s backside, where her skin was going a little pink.

“How about we get you to a chair after this, Mrs. Wood?” I asked.

“That’d be fine,” she said. Maura glared at me over her mask but helped with the transfer.

“You single, young man?” Mrs. Wood asked, once she was facing me again, sitting up in the bedside recliner.

“Unfortunately,” I replied.

“Handsome,” she said, looking me up and down from her new perch. “Very handsome.” She mulled it over a few seconds before offering, “I got a granddaughter you might like to meet.”

“Much obliged, Mrs. Wood.” I strapped a blood pressure cuff around the flab of her arm. “I’m sure she’s lovely.”

I moved down here about a year ago with Lily, a woman I’m no longer with. I’d met her back in Philadelphia, as volunteers at a crisis hotline, when I was still trying on the idea of healthcare to see how it fit. She was there after breaking up with a depressive grad student who had taught one of her senior seminars at Penn. The experience, she said, had left her sympathetic to mental illness but also terrified by the prospect of a life enclosed entirely by books. And then there was me: an idler, a meathead, a state college graduate who had cycled through six potential majors before winding up, somehow, with a bachelor’s in kinesiology. I had spent most of my senior year smoking weed and lifting weights, bulking up on the path of least resistance. Lily was smart, and I told her so. In reply, she told me I was beautiful.

I applied to nursing school while Lily applied for a master’s degree. When we both got in, she suggested we audit each other’s classes, getting a rise out of it the way other couples exchanged underwear. I sat in on a couple of her poetry workshops, the nakedness of which embarrassed me enough that I couldn’t go back. Lily made good on her end of the bargain, though, ransacking my syllabus of core requirements as if they were hers. Months later she could still trace the muscular landmarks of my limbs, naming them confidently, poking her finger into them like a pin.

We lived in separate apartments but slept over most nights. We cooked meals, told jokes, and met each other’s mothers. By the time she decided to get her PhD here in Charlottesville, I decided to come with her, thinking we might be in it for the long haul. Last fall, though, shortly after we’d settled in, she told me she was beginning to see her life as not necessarily enclosed by books, but more like a book itself, organized into chapters.

I’m impressed by how little I see of Lily anymore given the size of this town. We last ran into each other a few weeks ago at the farmers market, when the spring vegetables were just starting to come in. Her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, tied up in a high ponytail. She wore leggings and had a yoga mat slung over her shoulder. The man with her was the sort I might have guessed, a graduate student studying Latin or maybe Greek, an inch or two shorter than me, and sporting a scruffy beard that hid the softness of his jaw. I told Lily that I’d extended the lease on my little guesthouse. I told her about the nearby bar I found, cheap and windowless, where the middle-aged bartenders greet me as a regular already. All this feels slightly beyond my control, but like the night shift, it suits me fine.

Around 10:00 p.m., Joe spiked a fever. I checked it twice to be sure, then sent a message to his covering resident. The doctors who staff this hospital overnight rotate so much that it’s never made sense to me to remember their names. She called back a few minutes later.

“Hey, it’s Nina,” she said. “I got your page.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

“Panculture, I guess, and some Tylenol. I put the orders in.”

“Panculture? He’s got a pneumonia.”

“Yeah, I know. Other vitals okay?”

“Yep.”

“Great.” Nina hung up. This crop of residents is due to graduate soon, and you can hear it in their voices, how ready they are to move on, how tired they are of the whole routine. I have to remind myself that this is the purpose of their education, to run the same track a thousand times, to build reflexes so natural they sound perfunctory.

I gathered my supplies and walked back to Joe’s room. He had sweat through his sheets and thrown them aside. He was sitting up in bed wearing a pair of orange gym shorts, his damp face glowing in the light of his phone.

“Need some more blood from you,” I said. He extended his arm without looking at me. I flicked his skin at various places with my middle finger, seeking a target.

“Right here, dumbass,” he said after the fourth or fifth flick, pointing to a faint blue line coursing along the crook of his right elbow. I followed his lead and sure enough got a flash of blood return.

“Pretty impressive,” I said. “Ever thought about nursing?”

“Fuck no,” Joe said.

“Why not? Phlebotomy’s like the hardest part. You have a knack.”

“I got better things to do.”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

He turned his phone toward me then, like he’d been waiting for the question. He was watching pornography on mute, a girl-on-girl scene going at full tilt. The camera panned slowly across the plush couch where the two women lay, then zoomed in and out, spotlighting each of their lipsticked mouths in turn. I kept my eyes on the screen while collecting the rest of Joe’s samples, playing it like a game of chicken. His smile faltered in my peripheral vision as he waited for a reaction that never came.

“Well?” Joe asked. “You got anything to say?”

“Whatever gets you through the day, bud.” I retracted the needle into its holster. “Me personally? I prefer the real thing.”

He stayed quiet, watching the video on his own again, and it occurred to me that I might have hurt his feelings. I held pressure with some gauze against the puncture site. A few seconds later, his crotch started to bulge. I pulled back abruptly.

“All done,” I said, and pointed to a specimen cup that I’d left on his bedside table. “They want some urine, too, by the way. Whenever you get a chance. No rush.”

“Christ,” Joe said. He stood up before I made it halfway to the door, which set off the high-pitched alarm that signaled a patient was out of bed. He pulled his shorts down and started pissing into the container. The oxygen tubing and telemetry wires still tethered him to the wall.

“Careful, Joe,” I said. I grabbed at the room’s pastel curtain to draw it shut behind the glass door. “Take it easy.”

The cup was almost full when Joe entered another violent coughing fit and splashed himself across the arm. “Fuck all,” he yelled, and hurled the cup to the floor, leaving a long trail of dark yellow across the linoleum. He braced himself against the mattress, catching his breath. His swollen penis was still hanging out over his waistband, all the more vulgar for how healthy it looked, how functional, while dangling from his emaciated frame. His intercostal muscles clenched visibly beneath his damp skin.

“Do me a favor, faggot,” Joe said finally, “and get me a goddamn ginger ale.”

I had a bout of vertigo in between sending his samples to microbiology and calling environmental services to see about a mop. What was I doing here, actually? My older sisters ask me as much whenever they get me on the phone. After running into Lily at the farmers market last month, I wondered if she was wondering the same thing. Why had I stayed? Because there’s a bullheaded part of me, I might have said, that bristles at the idea of retreat. A broken compass buried somewhere deep in my lizard brain that keeps me plowing forward on my current trajectory, with its sickly backdrop, its southward bend.

At 11:00, Mrs. Vine was ordered for a lab draw, a complete blood count that came back stable. At 11:30, Mrs. Wood had a ten-beat run of ventricular tachycardia that I paged the resident about, Nina, who told me there was nothing to do. A little after midnight, I checked on Joe again.

His temperature had normalized after the Tylenol, but his oxygen saturation had also dropped a bit. I turned up his flow rate, then looked through his active orders.

“Did you get your chest PT today?” I asked. “Did respiratory come by?”

“Who?” Joe said.

“Physical therapy, airway clearance. Did they come by?”

“No, not after yesterday.” He was smirking again. “Don’t think she liked me much.” Something was rattling in his throat, splitting his voice like a broken stereo. I could have paged whatever skeleton crew was managing the ventilators at that hour but wouldn’t expect a response. I stared at Joe’s bare back, divided all the way down by a prominent line of vertebrae. I weighed my options, then took a long, steadying breath.

“Sit up for me,” I said.

“Why?”

“So I can help get that shit out of your lungs.”

“Pass. I’m good.”

“You’re not. Suffer if you want to, but I’m offering.”

“Offering what? You’re not respiratory. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

“In general I agree, Joe, but this isn’t rocket science.”

He thought about it for a while, wheezing. “Fine,” he said. “Where do you want me?”

“Kick your legs over the edge of the bed. I’ll stand here.”

“Switch sides,” Joe said, opting to face away from the glass door and the empty hallway outside it. I lowered the opposite bedrail and wheeled his table around, letting him rest on it with his elbows. I laid my gloved hands on his shoulder blades, which tensed immediately.

I started clapping against his upper back with cupped palms, as I had seen therapists do. It was maybe thirty seconds before Joe was coughing again, this time bringing up a small chunk of phlegm. I waited for him to settle, then grasped his deltoids and shook his thorax back and forth, which sent him into another spell. We went on this way, alternating between percussions and oscillations, pausing as needed for Joe to spit into the basin. After a few minutes, I moved my hands down his spine to mobilize mucus from his lower lobes.

I thought back to my practical exams and learning the rhythm of a full physical, a series of esoteric maneuvers that I never ended up needing in real life. I’d studied them with Steve, my only friend in nursing school. He was a few years older than me and hailed from a neighboring hometown. Especially in our class of mostly women, he felt like kin—another son of Chester County getting his act together for a steady paycheck, chuckling through the necessary absurdities and degradations. He took to calling the two of us murses, a clinical slur that I’d heard once or twice in passing on the wards and that Steve said he was trying to reclaim. The evening before a final, he and I sat shirtless in my living room, practicing our auscultation and palpation, while Lily stole glances at us from the kitchen table over the top of a paperback. After he left, she told me how much she enjoyed the spectacle of our preparation. “Halfman, half-nurse,” Lily whispered into my ear that night, lying on top of me, her legs straddling my waist.

I waited for Joe to change positions so I could attend to other lung segments, but he stayed seated, turned away from me, hacking periodically. After about fifteen minutes, he waved his hand in the air like a retiring wrestler. “Fuck,” he said, but softer now, his respirations audibly slower. I let my fingers rest at the edges of his neck, kneading his shoulders a little as a gesture of goodwill.

Around 2:00 a.m., I went down to the cafeteria, where a pretty woman stood next to the soda machine, holding a grilled cheese sandwich, talking on the phone. At least, I thought she was pretty—her eyes were darkly circled, the lower half of her face was covered by a mask, and her slim figure was hidden by baggy scrubs. The badge around her neck displayed her name. I idled, browsing the pre-packaged salads, until she hung up.

“Are you the resident covering step-down?” I asked.

“Unbelievable,” she said under her breath, slipping her phone into her back pocket, looking down briefly at her congealing cheddar before looking up at me. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Sorry, I don’t need anything. Just, thanks for your help tonight.”

“Oh, no problem. Who are you?”

“One of the nurses. Russell.”

“Hi, Russell. Nina.”

“How’s your night going? You seem busy.”

“I’m being dramatic, it’s fine. Sort of quiet, actually.”

“Careful,” I said, calling up a bit of superstition that I’d only recently learned. “You’ll jinx yourself.”

“There was a study on that recently, did you hear? Some doctors in England who thought they were funny. They flipped a coin every day for two months and said ‘quiet’ every time it landed on heads. No difference either way. So relax—speak your truth.”

“What a relief,” I said. We were at the register. “Are you eating down here?”

“Oh,” Nina said, surprised. “No, I should probably get back. Are you?”

I looked out over the deserted seating area. “I think so,” I said. “I get a thirty-minute break and plan to milk it.”

“As you should. Y’all work so hard,” she said, turning toward the elevators. “Have a good one.” That y’all stuck out strangely. Who did she mean? Otherwise she had no trace of a local accent. What words might she presume would soothe a male nurse twice her size? I felt like a farm animal, penned in by its own mass, its brute understanding.

I sat down, dressed my salad, and pulled out my phone. My social networks were all quiet at that hour. I searched for Steve’s profile, which had long stopped appearing in my feed. He had posted a new photo of himself, standing in what looked like the trauma bay of an emergency room, wearing a plastic face shield lightly spattered with blood. His head was angled slightly away from the camera, smiling, almost bashful.

The last time I saw him was in Philly, at his place, for farewell drinks. He’d sprung for a bottle of scotch to celebrate the end of the road. He served it neat. I told him I had a theory that nice liquor gave you a different sort of hangover, muted and somehow enriching. The word I think I used was “twinkling.” He laughed and poured me another, and then another. We toasted each other as two newly minted murses. We toasted the various women in our graduating class Steve had tried and failed to date. We toasted our jobs and our loans.

We took his dog out for a walk and picked up hoagies for dinner on the way back. On my way back into his apartment, I tripped over the threshold, and he suggested that I spend the night. I texted Lily to say that things had gotten out of hand, that I’d see her in the morning. Steve queued up a big-budget movie with a complicated plot involving time-traveling secret agents. We talked each other through our shifting interpretations. When the credits finally started rolling and the bottle was almost empty, Steve asked if I’d spare him the trouble of making up the couch and just crash with him in his bed. I followed his lead and stumbled into the bedroom. I stripped down to my boxers and tucked myself in.

When I woke up, there was just enough pale light coming through the blinds to recognize the shape of him bent toward my midsection. I didn’t understand what was happening as he grasped my hips, didn’t register his intention until he had me fully in his mouth. His arms were bigger than mine, his belly rounder, his legs hairier. I had sized him up long before, or thought I had, in the usual chaste intimacy of dormitories and locker rooms, where if admiration ever flickered into curiosity, it did so privately, fleetingly. Waves of confusion and nausea bound me in place. Still, I could have put up more of a fight. Instead I just lay there, floating over my own body like an untethered astronaut, caught somewhere between stupidity and speech, tenderness and disgust.

I rolled over onto my stomach as soon as Steve was off me. Neither of us spoke. I must have fallen asleep again, because I remember dreaming myself into the time-travel movie, only a different and more explicit version, where the whole cast was intermittently undressed. I’d recently sworn off pornography, having learned in a psychiatry elective how it can distort your vision, ruin your appetite. I’d watched a lot of it as a teenager, though, sometimes over and over again, to the point of dwelling on particular characters and storylines, puzzling over how certain messy scenarios were supposed to resolve themselves after climax, what unwritten script the characters could possibly follow to get back to the original pretext of the job interview, the piano lesson, the pizza delivery.

My head was throbbing when I finally got out of bed. I put on my pants, reached into my pocket, and made a fist around my keys, wondering, not for the first time, if I could ever be capable of real violence. Steve was already up, leaning against his kitchen counter, drinking coffee. He’d pulled an extra mug out of the cupboard and left it sitting empty, expectant, next to a bottle of ibuprofen. I said I was heading out. He started to lean in for a hug, then thought better of it and shook my hand.

Mrs. Vine hadn’t slept all night. Around 4:00 a.m., she started pulling at her lines and climbing out of bed. Redirecting her proved futile, so I went into her room with soft restraints, ready to cuff her wrists and ankles to the rails for a few hours, hoping the delirium would pass by sunrise. “You got a girlfriend, baby?” Mrs. Vine asked as I guided her trembling hands through the Velcro straps and into the quilted mitts. I had one harness left to secure when the code bells went off overhead.

The room number announced over the hospital-wide intercom turned out to be right next door. Joe’s telemetry tracing had abruptly changed. I joined all the other nurses on the unit who were swarming to his bedside, where he lay blue at the lips, failing to rouse to a chorus of women calling his name. Maura dug her fingers above his clavicle and shouted that he had no pulse, that he wasn’t breathing.

We had him flat on a backboard with chest compressions started by the time Nina came running up the hall. She had another doctor with her, the lanky pulmonary fellow, his hair matted as if just awoken. He ordered defibrillator pads to be placed on Joe’s torso and then, watching the monitor, called out for shocks to be delivered or withheld. An audience of support staff swelled around us.

Nina pulled a folded bundle of papers from her white coat, found Joe’s name, and rattled through some potential causes for his arrest: acidosis, blood clots, pneumothorax, mucus plugs. The difficulty of knowing for sure meant acting on every hypothesis at once. An overnight pharmacist rummaged through the shelves of a nearby crash cart, pushing dextrose, then potassium, then bicarbonate. An on-call anesthesia resident wearing a bulky backpack pried Joe’s jaw open with an illuminated blade and guided a plastic tube into his trachea. On a nearby computer, Nina scrolled through a cloudy chest CT.

It was close to sixty minutes before they decided to call it quits. I hadn’t been part of many codes before, but Joe’s was the longest by far. The room got quieter as the hour wore on, as we kept working to recover a heartbeat long past when it would have done him any good. There was a line of people waiting to perform CPR, and I cycled through it several times. With each pass, I pressed all my weight onto Joe’s cold torso, feeling his ribs fracture under my palms into smaller and smaller pieces. The pulmonary fellow offered up some feedback on my form: slower, faster, better, good. During my last round of compressions, he observed without commentary. All I heard was the creaking of the bed.

I look backward more than I should. I’m trying to break the habit. After Joe’s body was wheeled off the unit under a fresh white sheet, I took the other night nurses at their word when they told me that there was nothing I could have done differently. Joe had been dealt a bad hand well before I met him.

“Time bomb,” Maura said, rubbing her hand between my shoulders. “Plain and simple.”

Nina called Joe’s parents to break the news, and I was glad I didn’t have to face them myself. Joe would have been a wildly different person to them, if not a long series of different people, stacked one on top of the other, like a flipbook—a vulnerable baby transforming into a vulnerable man, then back again, over and over. I imagined them praying, as everyone down here seems to pray, for miracles, hoping that the span of their son’s life wouldn’t end up fitting cleanly inside their own.

At 7:00 a.m. I handed Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Vine back over to Megan. She couldn’t believe what happened. Joe had been on the upswing just twelve hours earlier. He’d never coded before.

“Folks surprise you,” I said.

“Shit,” Megan said. “I guess.”

Activity was picking up on the first floor as it tends to at that hour, a steady stream of patients and employees trickling through the building’s various entrances. On my way out, a woman stopped me for help in front of a map on the wall. “Excuse me, doctor,” she said. “Which way to dermatology?” A sullen teenager stood next to her, looking at me through thick glasses, up from the painful, larval depths of puberty. There was acne spread across his cheeks, peach-fuzz growing under his nose, and an extra fold of fat slung around his neck. I pointed them in the right direction.

Before driving home, sometimes I take the elevator to the roof of the parking garage, where there’s a decent view of a brand-new surgical center being built just up the road. Police officers guide traffic around it while construction workers fit its external panels into place. I’ve been following their progress with interest, this pack of men whose jobs are woven into their uniforms, organizing the world with their whistles and cranes.

The best part of the night shift is at its end. I’ll be back there soon enough, eager again to be kind and useful. But for now, on this bright morning, in this friendly town where I don’t know anyone, I ease into my car, into my earned fatigue, into the sprawling freedom of the day. There’s a soreness to my arms that feels familiar and satisfying. I lower my window and rest my elbow on the frame. Disease and deformity, weakness and error recede in the rear-view. I permit myself the monstrous pleasure of not caring. I cast care off like a yoke.

DROUGHT PASTORAL

MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN

I wanted you, desert

you red incorruptible

parchedness perched on

the earth’s bone shoulder

songless as the hot

wind soughs through you

and the dump truck windows

gleam like opened blisters

at high noon. Today I

heard the grass growing

whispering its one shared word

blade to blade until the whole

green lawn knew it. Guilt

seeped up into me droplet

by droplet until morning

cast it off shivering, every

tiny globe. Which lives

and which deaths do I own?

A barrenness

thrives in me

a flock of toxins feasts

among the styrofoam

takeout containers my organs,

sprawled in the sun, become.

It happens so slowly —

the kidneys’ deliquescence

the wrists’ eight dinky bones

ground to a powder that seeps

into groundwater, granular

as one egg in the slurry

of my womb. To be holy

is not to hope anything

grows from this, I know,

to stand impassive as a cliff’s

face, formed when the desert rose

up in grief millennia ago

and not expect

nourishment or resurrection

in a handful of rain.

But I can’t stop

bleeding for the future

as the automatic sprinkler

seems to love the curb,

casts its glistening veil

of tears over and over it.

Open up, desert

and let me down into you

seven thousand feet —

where once the cage stops

shaking I can hear my lungs

breathe — where once

your pleats of rockflesh

clutched a silver seam

for boys like me to rip

and scrape the clots

of bounty out. I want

that dark igneous

solace of just

before they knew what

we had in us.

IN MY HEAD

AVRA ARON

You are twelve years old and your mind is like a game of hot potato. Your thoughts are quick and jerky, and you need to get past them before you get burned. Close a cupboard, turn the page of a book, put on a jacket. Hop into bed, open the refrigerator, flick on the light. Stay too long on something and that’s it, BOOM, you need to open and close the door six times before you can continue on with your life. Why? Because if you don’t, your mother will die.

Intellectually, you know that closing a door has nothing to do with your mother dying, but that’s not the point. Your mother is going to die; the only question is how, and your brain dares you to pick the most disturbing manner. Maybe your mother will get hit on the head, the way she did when you were eight years old, when she opened the freezer and a frozen chicken carcass came flying down and bonked her skull so badly that she started to bleed and you had to call the nearest neighbor for help and then later at the hospital your father was laughing to the point of being hysterical. A flying chicken, he kept repeating. A flying chicken! Or will she get into a car accident on Alligator Alley? You imagine her body, burned and twisted under the Toyota, her hair torn out from her raw and bleeding scalp. You will try to run to her, but the police will hold you back. Or what if your mother is somehow decapitated, and you see her head and her body lying on the ground in separate places? Your mother’s brown eyes will be wide, and she will look almost surprised. Her mouth will be open, as if she is trying to take in a breath of air, her lips still coated in Desert Rose Elizabeth Arden lipstick. But her neck will be leaking, streaming, gushing blood, with nothing connected underneath. It will technically be possible to carry her head around in your hands.

You want to unplug your mind, but the only way you can is by opening and closing the door six times, and is that really such a terrible price to pay? So you do it. But if every day is a race, by bedtime everyone else in the world is crossing the finish line while you’re still at the beginning, retying your shoelaces. Why don’t other people flick light switches up and down an even number of times before entering a room? Why don’t they touch the covers of their math textbooks again and again, until they touch it in exactly the right place? How can they turn on faucets and pick up telephones and pull sweaters over their heads without thinking about it at all? Why are you the only one who is stuck?

It’s odd for your biggest secret to be something that is shout-out-loud obvious to anyone who spends more than a couple minutes with you. What are you doing? is a common refrain heard in your house when you are a freshman in high school. If you told the truth, who would understand? “I’m just fixing my hair,” you say instead, as you touch the top of your head six times before taking a sip of water. Six. Six sentences, six words in each. You sit at the kitchen table. At your feet, the dog barks. Both your parents raise their eyebrows. You know they don’t believe you. But lying is the only option.

Because the truth is that you can barely get through a minute without needing to do something weird, like opening your mouth or squeezing your eyes shut or touching your elbows together. You always do these things an even number of times because even numbers are just better. They are fair. If they were to be divided between you and your sister, you would both get the same amount. Even numbers are equal, level, decent, and honest. Odd numbers, though, are spikes, points, and thorns. They poke you in the ribs. Imagining closing a door three times makes you feel like you’ve heard someone chewing gum too loudly. Three. Your body freezes. Your head pounds. Your pulse quickens. There’s an upside. Repeat it twice. It becomes even.

Sometimes you need to raise your eyebrows four times when the feeling strikes. Four. Up down up down. Even when people stare. When can you stop? When it feels right. Sometimes you need to shake your jacket a certain amount of times before you put it on—please God do not think the exact number right now because it’s a big one and you’d like to get on with your life. Your friends stare as you grasp the jacket sleeve and shake it hard. “Just getting out all the wrinkles,” you say.

Usually people ignore the weird things you do. But if your father is in a bad mood and you are walking around the kitchen table before sitting down for dinner, he groans. He takes off his baseball cap that he always wears, even inside, and drops it on the table, exposing the bald spot on the back of his head. When you were little, you used to tap your fingers on that bald spot, promising your father you would make his hair grow back. “You’re crazy!” he says now.

This is fine. Crazy is comfortably general. According to your father, bad drivers are crazy, parents who let their children watch Quentin Tarantino movies are crazy, Republicans are crazy. And there is nothing mentally wrong with these people. “Crazy,” your father says again, with wonder in his voice. And what are you supposed to say? I’d really like to debate you on this, but first I need to click my tongue to the roof of my mouth before turning on this light switch.

Your father is most likely to call you crazy just before you go to bed, because he’s tired after a long day and because going to bed means you have to close the door to your room. Anything that needs to be opened or closed is tricky for you. There are the doors you walk through—the door to your room, to your school, to the Starbucks down the road. Then there are locker doors, car doors, and refrigerator doors to contend with. And those are just the doors. So many other things need opening and closing—drawers, backpacks, mailboxes, books, cupboards, trunks of cars, your purse when there is a line behind you at the school cafeteria and you need to pay for your chocolate milk. You need to open and close these things, repeatedly, until something that lives inside your chest and elbows and fingertips is placated. This happens every day. Other things you do are more like fads—they zoom in out of nowhere, and you have to put up with them until you don’t need to do them anymore, and something else pops up in their place. Life is just funny that way—one day, you wake up to find you like country music, and also have to jump up and down six times before getting into any moving vehicle. Six. You do everything your brain commands. But it can never be enough. There’s always something else to do. It’s a horse impossible to break. A thirst that cannot be satisfied. It is like scratching an itch. You need to scratch it, but the scratching just makes it worse.

It hurts when I put my arm over my head, the patient says in the old joke. So don’t put your arm over your head, the doctor matter-of-factly replies. If you let anyone in on the inner workings of your mind, you are sure this is what they would say. What you are doing is so off-the-charts bonkers that there doesn’t even seem to be a starting point, a ‘You Are Here’ mark on the map, for a normal person to navigate their way toward a brain as freakish as yours. Your brain has been on fire far too long for you to be able to return to the crisp, clear world of rational thought, but the inferno you are trapped in is of your own making. You lit the match, you closed the door. The truth—that you can’t stop yourself from doing these things—seems laughable. Who would believe you?

“I see what you do,” your mother tells you, once. ISWYD. You are walking the dogs together in the Florida heat, the sun shining so brightly it feels almost perverse. You want to explain to your mother the reason you haven’t picked the books off your bedroom floor: it’s not because you’re lazy, but because whenever you pick a book up, you have to open the book to a random page, focus on the first whole sentence you see, and make an acronym out of the letters. You then need to remember the acronym. YTNTRTA. Sometimes it’s not so hard. SINSH. Sometimes the sentence is short. STSIS. But sometimes there are twenty words or more, and you have to go through the entire day repeating the acronym in your head over and over, devoting so much of your mind to the acronym that it is impossible to focus on anything else. BSTATWOMAYHTGT TEDRTAIYHOAODSMOYMTTATIIITFOAE. If you focus on something else, you might forget the acronym. IYFOSEYMFTA. If you forget the acronym, what else will you forget? IYFTAWEWYF?

You want to tell your mother this, not because you want to forge a deeper relationship with her, but because you want her to feel terrible. Is it fair to blame someone for not knowing the one thing you would rather die before letting them find out? You open your mouth, about to let the words obsessive-compulsive disorder slip from your lips for the first time, but your mother essentially beats you to it. “I see you closing doors,” she says. “Don’t feel so sorry for yourself.” DFSSFY. She extends her arm, allowing the leashed dogs to sniff the base of a nearby palm tree. Her voice trails off not in malice, but confusion. “It’s not hard to close a door.”

Door. D-O-O-R. Your fingers flicker up with each letter. Four letters, but one syllable—four one. This is not unusual. Most words have to be repeated twice. Door door. Eight two—much better. Your father is slicing up a mango. You can tell it is sweet just from the smell.

You have to close the door eight times. This will surely be noticed by your father at the kitchen table, from which the door to your room can be plainly seen. “What are you doing?” he says, as you open and close the door. His tone is aggressive.

You scrunch your eyebrows together to pretend you didn’t understand why he felt it necessary to ask this question. “It’s humid in here, so I’m using the door to fan some air onto me.”

“No you aren’t.” You open and close your bedroom door again. And again and again and again and again. It doesn’t work. Shit, you think. You think this word purposefully, as you have decided that at sixteen years old, you should probably start cursing. “What the hell are you doing? You’re sick.”

“I’m hot.”

“You’re sick.” The word flies out of his lips and splatters all over the floor floor. Ten two. Open and close, open and close, open and close. “You know something? This is all in your head.”

Your mother is sitting beside your father, waiting for her mango slices, and as you open and close the door you can hear her sigh. Compulsions always elicit long, drawn-out sighs from your mother. Your father spreads the mango slices on a plate. The pit goes into a bowl, to be argued over by your siblings later. “This is all in your head,” your father repeats, as he picks up a mango slice and takes a bite. “Just close the door once and go to bed.”

This might be an easy task for someone with a cool mind, but if you don’t close a door perfectly, it doesn’t count. And if it doesn’t count, you need to do it again. This part of your compulsion is obvious to onlookers—closing a door again and again—but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Most of what makes a compulsion burdensome is in your mind, the set of rules you need to follow to achieve this perfect closed door, or buckled seat belt, or rolled-down window. For example, you need to be inhaling the entire time, because when people are alive, they breathe. When they are dead, they don’t. So if you don’t want your mother to die, you have to inhale when you are closing a door.

And, of course, there is a difference between inhaling and holding your breath. So if your lungs fill up with air too quickly, you are holding your breath instead of inhaling and it doesn’t count. You need to start again.

You also need to be thinking a stream of positive words. If a single negative word drops in, it doesn’t count. The problem is, all words can be negative if you think about them long enough. Happy seems like a positive word, until you realize sad is its opposite. The most nonnegative words are simple articles and prepositions, words so boring they can’t be associated with any emotion at all. A is a positive word because it can’t be negative. So is the. And at. You need to think these positive words in a continuous stream while you are closing the door, and if your mind wanders for even a millisecond, you need to do it again. You open and shut the door on the inhale, trying to move fast enough so that your lungs don’t reach full capacity too quickly, all while generating positive words.

A the at the at in of an is, you think, as you inhale while swinging the door. The is of an a the at is for the or of death. No! Start again.

By the way, this is excruciatingly boring. Closing a door takes most people a matter of seconds seconds. Fourteen four. It’s really a pretty simple thing to do. So it becomes mind-numbingly dull when you are forced to close a door for six or eight minutes at a time, except that your brain is also ablaze with frustration. Some things, by reason of monotony alone, are supposed to be automatic. What does life become when something that isn’t worth thinking about becomes all you can think about?

You close the door again and again, but something isn’t working. It doesn’t feel done, it doesn’t feel finished, it doesn’t feel right. You need to inhale more deeply, focus more strongly on positive words.

“What are you doing?” you hear again, and this time it’s your mother asking.

Closing this door twenty-four times so you don’t die, doesn’t seem like the best response, so you try to think of an excuse. Of course, there isn’t really any excuse for closing a door twenty-four times except I’m sorry mother, but I’m an obsessive-compulsive. Still, you try your best. “This door is a bit stiff, so I’m trying to loosen up the hinges,” you say.

Your mother sighs. Disappointed. Twelve four—perfect!

Your father is more to the point. “Aren’t you embarrassed?” he asks, as he picks up another mango slice. Sometimes your father asks this question with sincerity, as if he is genuinely curious. Tonight, he barks it, but regardless of how he asks, you never understand his point. Who has time to be embarrassed? Not you. Your life is busy. How can you worry about what people might think of you when at this very moment there is a spoon begging you to take it out of the drawer and tap it fourteen times on the kitchen table? How can you focus on how you are perceived when you have to save all your focus for thinking it and or of a an on when you jump up and down eight times before you hang up a telephone? If the simple act of being alive is a choice between living in anxiety or embarrassment, embarrassment wins every time.

You continue to close the door. “I just don’t get it,” your father says, and you wish you could tell your parents to stop talking, that they are distracting you from thinking positive words. “This is all in your head.” You close your eyes, trying to focus on of be a an it for the. “You’re crazy!”

Crazy crazy. Ten four. You’re happy to leave it there, but your mother sighs again. “She’s not crazy,” she says, as she turns the page of her magazine. “She has a problem.”

Problem problem. Fourteen four. The instant you hear the word problem, it jabs you in your stomach. Your heart starts beating faster and faster, and you cover your face with your hands. You can’t admit to having a problem because that will lead to a discussion, which is the last thing you want. It’s bad enough you have to do these things—do you really have to talk about them too? Can’t you just be crazy crazy? Ten four. “She needs help.” Help help. Eight two. Help is even worse. Stranded mountain climbers need help, wounded soldiers need help. What kind of freak needs help to close a door? Your body tenses, and if you had the power to rip off your ears in that moment, you would. You would do anything to block out your mother’s words, anything to stop the shame in the pit of your stomach from beaming through to the tips of your fingers.

“I don’t want help,” you say. “I don’t need help.” Eight two.

You can feel my mother’s eyes on you. “But you have a problem,” she says, again, and then it’s like everything is peeling off you. Problem problem. Fourteen four. All these invisible layers of protection built by your excuses float up towards the ceiling. You bend inwards and fold your arms, pressing them onto your stomach. “I don’t have a problem,” you spit out. “No problem here.” Fourteen four.

“But—” your mother says, but this is all you hear because right then you scream as loud as you can to drown out her words. All you want is to be alone in your room, but to be alone in your room you have to close the door, and to close the door you have to open and close the door while inhaling and thinking positive words, and it’s hard to inhale while screaming, and even harder to focus on the nothingest words in existence while burning with shame and anger. Eventually you manage it, and flop down on your bed.

Back in the kitchen, you can hear your parents arguing. “What is she doing to herself?” “How is she going to handle the real world?”

You swear you can still smell that mango.

PALE UNHAPPY DOG

ANGIE SIJUN LOU

Li has never seen a kidney, but he imagines a flesh-colored ball the size of a fist. He wonders how he will transport it on his motorcycle, whether he will seal it inside a plastic bag with duct tape or place it in a cooler lined with ice. Night insects hum in the grass when he lays down to sleep. They sound like the engine of his motorcycle. He cuts the ignition and the humming never ends. Gasoline leaks onto the cold night earth. Even though he wakes each morning with the sunrise, Li still feels anxious that it’s too late, that his father’s kidney has already been sold off the black market, and now it’s in another city, purifying the toxins from a stranger’s body. He slurps down soybean milk with pickled ginger before getting back on the road, veering on neither the left nor right side but on whichever side the shade falls.

Li follows the directions to the doctor’s office that his father gave him: ride the freeway until it splits four ways. Soft right until you see the night proctor’s house next to the Coca-Cola plant. Take the long dirt road, a shortcut through the jungle. On the riverbank, there is a jade dog overgrown with ivy. When the tide is shallow, you can cut through the water as if with a sword, and every path on that side will take you to Guangzhou.

“You can’t cut water with a sword,” Li said.

His father pursed his lips. “It is just a metaphor.”

“What if I get lost?”

“You use your brain. Find somebody and ask them the way.”

But the summit of every hill always reveals another. The landscape is so boring. He passes by Buddhist monasteries where monks pay respects to individual grains of sand. Li thinks that if every rock is sacred then maybe none of them are. In the rain he senses the sharpness of the world, in the sun it becomes disarticulated again, amber and charged with its own aura.

Li squints through his cigarette smoke as he revs the engine, looking everywhere for the jade dog. He hallucinates it into being when there is a curve on the dirt road. On his darkest days, Li imagines a kukri viper’s venom pricking his skin, or a ginkgo branch hurling him into a ravine, or the blisters on his thighs flowering with pus. When he stops to boil water for instant noodles, dogs howl in the bushes around him. There is not even a visible moon for them to howl at.

In this moonless place, Li has no past to revert to. It is so unlike his hometown, Houtouwan, where every bad memory is eclipsed with the suchness of history: this is the bakery where Master Kang gives him fermented rice balls. This is a girl he once loved who wears butterfly pins in her hair. This is the machete that bisects the banana palm leaves. This is the dirt where the chicken warms her unborn yolks. This is the emotion he felt when his father revealed the stitches on his belly, ruby and involute.

The villagers who choose to stay in Houtouwan are either very young or very old. After the gǎigé kāifàng policies were passed, most of the fishermen left to work in factories near the cargo ports, only remembering home when they sent money over the newly installed internet wires. Vines grew over the old canneries. The remaining elders sit on buckets and play mahjong in the village square, each day a shadow of the one before.

Maybe Li’s refusal is coming back to him. He knows he wouldn’t be able to survive in the factories—cafeteria meals served on beige trays, silkworms fed to a power loom, cement soft and supple before it’s poured into forms. On the day of his father’s operation, he saw a sparkling white van casting an oblong shadow over the village square. It was a scene of desire. His father entered intact, exited un-intact. Many hours had passed. The doctor placed 10,000 yuan in his hands with the promise of more to come. Each bill was printed with Mao Zedong’s face glinting toothlessly in the light. At night, when he and his father slept together in the hóngmù cot, Li heard the lapping sounds of an animal drinking water from the gutter outside. He thought about the animal’s mouth coming into contact with the water, the water vibrating outward, folding into itself.

“Bābā,” Li whispered. “Can you hear those sounds?”

“I can’t hear anything. I am asleep.”

After a long silence, Li asked, “Are you in pain?”

His father’s breathing was serrated. Li laid awake with him until it became dull again.

“If you are in pain,” Li said, “I should help you.”

They waited three weeks for more money to be wired into his bank account, but the money never came. Li watched his father grow more sickly with each day, the skin slackening around his jawline. Li called the number printed on the business card but the line had been unplugged. At first light, he set off for Guangzhou.

In the wilderness, Li’s motorcycle beams with dust. He walks far away from it whenever he kindles the fire, but the distance does not induce a new way of seeing.

When Li finally finds the river, he can’t fix his gaze on one part of the water without seeing the totality of it. Nowhere is it shallow. Maybe this is the wrong river, and there is another one with a jade dog on the riverbank. A monsoon assembles slowly over the mountains.

Li sighs and sits down on the rocks to eat a cream puff, the only food left in his backpack. The cream puff is sour and crushed from the ride, splitting open when he sinks its teeth in, exposing its moldy pulp. He squints the sun from his eyes. The summer is beautiful. He wishes he could be born into it, only differently.

“Nǐ hǎo.”

Li turns toward the voice. A young woman looms over him. He hadn’t heard her footsteps approach.

“You scared me.” Li said. “I thought I was alone.”

“I thought I was too. Who are you?”

She has a deep overbite and she is lovely.

“My name is Li from Houtouwan.”

“Why have you come?”

“I want to cross the river to the other side. Who are you?”

“Meilin from Huangluo.”

In his presence, she slowly removes her sneakers, jeans, and shirt studded with rhinestones, revealing an ovoid birthmark below her collarbone. Li looks away, embarrassed. Her pale skin glitters as she wades into the current. Even in the darkness of river weeds and hyacinths, light seems to collect on her. He looks down at himself. Maybe there is some light on him too.

Li chases after her as she wades away from him. “Could you help me find the shallow parts?”

She shakes her head. “There are none.”

Some people might say her overbite is ugly, but Li thinks it makes her beauty more realistic.

“Can you show me the way?” he yells, chasing after her.

“You have to take the long way through the Nanling mountains.”

She unties her headscarf, unleashing a thick torrent of black. Her hair falls below her thighs. Li is surprised by the pure mass of it. If she grows one more strand, it could break her neck.

“Your hair is so long,” he says.

She looks lazily at him with a cold elegance.

“I could cut it for you,” he offers. “I have a knife. Do you have knives where you are from?”

She laughs, covering her mouth with her hand to hide her gumline. Li does not think what he said is funny at all.

“What are you eating, Li?”

“I am eating a cream puff the baker gave me.”

Meilin runs a fine-toothed comb through her long hair, softly at the tips, but with increasing severity. She brushes her scalp until it produces a real drop of blood. As a child, Li believed blood was blue until it touched the world, and there was nobody in the village who could prove it otherwise. Now, looking at Meilin’s head, the redness of her blood drips as a testimony against him.

“Would you like to come for dinner before you go?” she asks.

Nausea brims inside him from the cream puff, nausea and hunger. He has to concentrate on having one feeling at a time because they are in conflict with each other.

“Yes.” He hesitates. “Though I don’t have much of an appetite right now.”

“Gather your things,” she says. “I’ll wait for you.”

He wonders if Meilin is inviting him for dinner because she thinks he is cool and free like those men in biker gangs who ride into the retrograde horizon. Li does not feel cool and free. Those nameless men and women working in the motorcycle factory–why had his father saved him from that life, from that mass of muted hands? His motorcycle idles in the shadows, aluminum and serrated. Li wants to eulogize the hands that built it, remember them truthfully, as belonging to people who never stop working, transmuting things from morning into night.

Meilin’s mother’s hair is even longer than Meilin’s. It is hard to imagine, but Li does not have to imagine because he can perceive it with his eyes through the window while she combs rice-water through the strands. She is shouting at Meilin and Li for standing idly in the rain.

“Who is this, your new friend?” she asks.

“His name is Li from Houtouwan,” Meilin says. “I found him eating a moldy pastry by the river.”

Li frowns.

“In, in,” her mother says. “Cold shivers will give you áizhèng.”

The table is set with pomelos, sweet buns, boiled wildgrass, chicken and ginger, and eggs stir-fried with scallions. Li eats like a pig. Eating becomes the sole focus of his being. He sits cross-legged on the floor, his face eclipsed by the rice bowl.

“Li, why have you come here?” her mother asks. She has to wait a long time for him to swallow.

“I want to cross the river to retrieve my father’s kidney.”

“Why is your father’s kidney so far away from the rest of his body?” she asks.

“A doctor in a white van extracted it to sell on the black market, but he didn’t perform the operation correctly, and now my father is very sick.”

“Xīnkǔ, xīnkǔ. Zhùfú nǐ,” she shakes her head, spooning more rice into his bowl.

Li grows doe-eyed as he absorbs Meilin’s mother’s pity. Her hair drapes over all the objects in the house: the wind-up radio, the Hello Kitty stools, the rice cooker, a calendar with a portrait of Cáishén holding a gold-plated ingot. When she brushes it away from her face, she looks like an older version of Meilin. This is what’s strange about meeting someone’s parents, you can look into someone’s face and watch their future occur eternally in the present.

“There is now a hydroelectric dam on the river,” she says. “We can no longer wade through to the other side like we did in those days.”

Li watches Meilin eat. When she spits out the bone and cartilage, there is no trace of oil on her mouth.

“Stay and rest a bit before you make your way to the mountain pass,” her mother says. “You are just in time for Meilin’s coming-of-age ritual.”

“What will happen to her?” Li asks.

Her mother smiles knowingly and clicks her chopsticks. Meilin’s eyes are in her lap, studying the veins on her wrists.

Li wakes to a gray, maddening light. After he rolls up his tatami mat, he realizes there is nobody else home. The blankets are folded and the windows are wide open, letting the world trickle in. There is a note left on the table next to a pot of chrysanthemum tea and a boiled egg. Find us at the theater at the end of the road, past the butcher.

When Li is walking over, he makes believe he has a purpose here. Everything in his vicinity could be instrumentalized. A baby wearing a knitted panda hat: he could play with him. The public bathhouse: he could rinse himself off there. The cathaya tree’s root puncturing the gravel road: he could remember not to trip over that. The three-legged Siamese cat dragging itself through the village square: he could let it drink from his faucet. It was a horizon of possibility.

When he passes by the butcher, he sees honey-glazed ducks hanging in the display window, and feels the residue of last night’s dream. In the dream, he was inside a meat locker the size of a stadium. On each hook there was a singular kidney. His task was to discern which kidney he needed to bring back to Houtouwan. It was easy because each kidney was distinct; he could tell when it belonged to an alcoholic or someone with a sweet tooth. Their kidneys were bleached yellow, the ventricles engorged. Some of the kidneys belonged to bouncers who worked the night shift; others belonged to people who had jobs that made them type reports inside office cubicles. Li’s father is a rice farmer; he leads his water buffalo through the irrigated hamlets, picking the ticks away from the animal’s eyelids before they have a chance to embed themselves. There must be a kidney that corresponds with this too.

The theater is dark and smells like water that’s been sitting still. Light spills in patches, elucidating swirls of dust. Meilin’s mother stands at the entrance, playing games on her cell phone.

“Li, we are just about to begin.”

She takes his hand and leads him down a narrow corridor. Inside the theater, rows of people are seated like an egg carton filled with darkly shrunken heads.

“The tourist season starts after the first rain,” she says. “Any day now we thought we would see the first travelers; now here you are.”

He wants to remind her that he is not a tourist, but the lights are dimming and the velvet curtains are drawing open, confessing their true interior.

A bronze gong sounds. On stage, an elderly woman stands in front of a tánggǔ drum, but instead of using a mallet, she bangs the drum with her long, braided hair. Her cheeks are sunken and her earlobes dangle with years, but her hair is still obsidian. Li is stunned. The elder must have been growing her hair for a lifetime or longer. A line of six girls enters to form a circle around the elder, bowing deeply on their knees. They take turns pressing their foreheads to the ground at the elder’s feet. Then each girl braids her own hair into pigtails, intertwining her hair with the hair of the two girls directly adjacent to her, forming a closed ring. The girls approach the ritual with a quietism that silences the room, saturates it. All of the girls except for Meilin; Meilin is pouting.

Girl A wears a silk dress embroidered with flowers. Girl B has forgotten to brush her hair this morning and is untangling it with her fingers. Girl C is smeared in the same peony lipstick as Girl D, who somehow applied it perfectly. Girl E shrieks a folk song in a dialect Li does not understand, though maybe it is a song of mourning. Girl F is Meilin who performs the ritual without looking into the audience, only glancing up darkly for the next visual cue. Even though her hair is entwined immaculately with the others, it seems her brain is elsewhere, floating.

Later in the afternoon, Li walks with Meilin to the rice terraces where she will wash her hair in preparation for the evening’s ceremony. The ravines make indents in the mountain, craters sunken in the green. In her satchel, she carries pomelo peels, tea bran, fleece flower root, and a stick of ginger. He tells her stories about life in his village, the schoolteacher who was always piss drunk, delivering incomprehensible lectures while smacking the students’ fingers with a bamboo stick. She no longer covers her mouth when she laughs in his presence. Her jawline dimples along her overbite, but when he reaches to hold her hand, she frowns and pulls it away.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t feel romantically towards you.”

“How do you feel towards me?” Li asks.

“I feel fine.”

Embarrassed, he clears his throat and tries to think of something to say. The stormy wind is blowing again. It is at the time of year when the seasons become oblique; each rain is lit with the end of another.

“I want you to take me to Guangzhou with you,” Meilin says.

Li is surprised. “Really?”

“Yes. I want to wear a leather jacket and dance to electronic music like they do in the movies.”

“How will you make a living when you are there?”

She considers this thought like it’s something brand new. “I could work in one of the factories.”

The factory, where time is slippery and ceaseless. He frowns. He wishes she would not go there, that place where she will no longer be Meilin but instead a tooth, a fingernail.

“What will you do at the factory?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think about the future in that way; what happens to me next is inscribed without causation.”

“The future,” Li repeats. He imagines a bright wall.

“What will you do when you get there?” she asks.

“I am going to find that doctor and ask for him to reverse my father’s surgery.”

“That’s so brave of you.”

He blushes.

They climb to the plateaus that surround the village, slowly rising in altitude. The temperature changes imperceptibly with each step until suddenly Li notices he is cold, immersed in fog. They take off their sneakers to wade through the muddy silt toward the highlands.

“We should leave before the sun sets,” he says.

“Let’s wait until after my ceremony tonight. We can go in the morning.”

“What will happen to you at the ceremony?”

“Nothing will happen to me.”

“Then why do you have to do it?”

“Things will happen, but they will be symbolic.”

“What are they symbolic for?”

“They are not symbolic for a particular thing. It’s my rite of passage.”

In an enamel bowl, she crushes the ingredients with a stone pestle. She adds rice-water and lowers her hair into the solution. Li recognizes the skin of the pomelo he ate, carefully unpeeled it in one long coil.

“But what will you be passing into?” he asks.

Fog divides them like they are sitting in separate rooms in a house.

“I will be passing into myself.”

Li rolls his eyes. His motorcycle beckons him; he thinks of the soft crackling sound of the metal contracting around the exhaust as it cools. From this vantage point, the village of Huangluo is a speckle in the hills. It is easy to be transfixed by small distances when they uncoil into landscapes, lacunas which puncture and recurse us to an origin point, which is a vanishing point, which is a kidney beating inside a plastic bag.

A long white tour bus is parked in the gravel lot at the entrance of the village. People from the city exit in an orderly fashion, avoiding a stray dog with a tail freshly injured from a dog fight. It stands at the archway, smiling and begging the tourists for food scraps. With each wag of its tail, arcs of blood are sprayed over the side of the bus.

Meilin turns to face Li at the red pagoda gate.

“Goodbye,” Meilin says.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“I am not supposed to be seen until the ceremony.”

Even though Li is standing in front of her, seeing her now.

“Well, what should I do?”

She shrugs. “You can enjoy your free time.”

Meilin’s wet hair drips in the soil behind her as she walks away from him. Now Li is left alone, unsure what to do. The injured dog whimpers pitifully while the sun’s monotony casts down on it. He leans down to stroke its matted fur.

“Pale unhappy dog,” he says. “I know what it means to be you.”

The city tourists ignore him, pushing their way through the gate in their dyed linens and aviator sunglasses to glimpse the village of women who never cut their hair. Everyone in his vicinity is in transit while he stands still. When he looks at the injured dog’s face, he thinks of the jade dog’s beaded eyes blinking by the riverbank. He should have left here long ago; with each hour that passes, ivy reaches its long fingers to shield the jade dog from the world, and his father lays in the hóngmù cot with the windows open, looking over the mountain’s precipice waiting for a motorcycle to glitter towards him.

The dog slobbers.

Li pats its head for the last time. “Goodbye.”

His motorcycle is parked in Meilin’s alleyway, waiting for somebody to contextualize it. When he touches the ignition, his shadow integrates seamlessly with its shadow.

Blindfolded, Meilin is slumped in a chair in the village square. The crowd gathers to witness her. Meilin’s mother holds a razor in her hand, sharp with its absence of use. Girls A through E stand in the periphery of the circle, chanting a somber tune about a mischievous butterfly who is sentenced to relive its past lives. Her mother corrects Meilin’s posture by placing her hand on the small of her back. All eyes are on Meilin, but Meilin has no eyes. This witnessing is not a reciprocal relationship. Behind her blindfold, she has no choice but to look inwards, at herself.

As her mother presses the razor into her skull, Meilin concentrates on the individual strands as they are shaved from her head, falling onto the ground like autumn leaves, the tourists each vying to take one home as a souvenir. A material trace of her will linger in the hands of strangers, a record of each day of her life contained in it, recursing back toward the beginning, her childhood, when there were many days just like the others: eating taro cakes in the rain, napping in the milk-bright afternoon, the dew camouflaging the grass in unbearable ways.

On the riverbank, Li lights a cigarette and thinks about drowning in the abstract sense. The calmest part of the river is marked by a mossy stone egg the size of a semi-truck. Where the river hits the stone, the water ebbs into a deep pool. He imagines his motorcycle gliding across the surface of the water, taking him to refuge on the other side.

Behind him, he hears the soft sounds of a crepuscular animal padding in the lichen, but when he turns to look, he sees Meilin running barefoot through the night, her head shaved close like a young boy’s.

“Where are you going?” she yells. She looks crazy.

“I am going to cross to the other side,” he says, mounting his bike.

“I said I would come with you,” she says.

He doesn’t want to say the obvious thing, so he stares at her instead.

“The women in my village cut their hair only once in a lifetime,” she explains. “This year, it was my turn.”

In her baldness, he sees the whiteness of the rapids.

“Will you miss it?” he asks.

“Miss what?”

“Having all your hair.”

She shakes her head with violence. “No. I hated it. It was so long.”

In that moment, he didn’t think she could be more lovely.

“Could I come with you, or are we saying goodbye?” she asks, but before he can answer she mounts the motorcycle behind him and holds the fat of his stomach, dimpled on his waist.

“Hold onto me more tightly,” he instructs. “The water will be very cold.”

They could be mistaken for brothers now. Wherever he is, she is too. What he sees in her is not singular, but it is not exactly plural either. Her form welds with his. If you were to separate them now, you would not end with symmetrical halves of the same self. You would end with a border that circumscribes.

He revs the engine. They lean into each other, ready to exit the life that they have learned to hypertrophy themselves inside, like a stone birth. The water before them is pure and dark. When they make contact with it, it doesn’t feel so cold after all.

SIX WEEKS INTO CHEMOTHERAPY

LAURA PAUL WATSON

To be unseen, unprayed for, to be unhugged

in the grocery store and left alone

to select a melon. To be rooted

against, discomforted. To receive

no advice. God, let me be

ordinary. Invisible. Let me struggle

in the usual ways (stubbed toes, taxes)

and inspire no one in my misfortune.

To have all my misfortunes grow small.

To be dull as a leaf.

My neighbor lifts me to the Lord

in the middle of the street

and one of us feels better.

Oh, to be chronic. Hairy.

To add time to my own tragedy.

To do the way I did.

I’m a slick thing, sunken.

I’ve set my nerves on fire.

I’ve let go

a thousand birds

inside this body.

Oh, to be let go.

To hold onto

instead of being held.

I want to do all the holding.

CASUALTY

EMILY CARTER

There’s a particular summer that follows me around like a stray dog. Most days, I resist the urge to feed it, but it’s always there in the shadows, knowing that we have a family story, knowing that I remember.

It was hot that year, the temperature pre-heating the trouble brewing in my family. When the afternoon showers came, it felt more like the North Carolina sky was sweating along with us than raining for any relief. My brother and I—the last two childhood holdouts—gigged skinny frogs and hung them in the oak tree, strung out like amphibious paper dolls. They stunk up the lower pasture long after the crows pecked off their dangling legs.

Uneven boards fastened by rusty nails constructed our refuge. I suppose the building effort, complete with frog carcass curtains and semi-level seating offered a homey feel. Though it wasn’t much more than two-by-fours and nails that we scavenged, we called it a treehouse.

This was the year the older boys built the cabin on the back side of the pasture, complete with door and lock to keep me out, the baby sister. It was in the cabin that our older brothers and cousins arched their backs, bucking through puberty in bunk beds with a six-year-old tattered copy of Playboy and a black, D-volt battery-powered transistor radio. It was at the end of the summer that things got more complicated, but who could have seen that coming?

The early summer of the tree house felt stretchy and everlasting. I completed a mail-in card to get thirteen records for one cent. The records never came. The company took to sending threatening collection notices about my ruined credit score. I sent them a shiny copper penny taped inside an envelope. Mama asked why I needed a stamp and I told her I was writing our congressman in honor of the Bicentennial. She eyed me with suspicion.

The glue taste of the stamp lingered strong and sticky on my tongue. I waited for Mr. Monk to come by in his chocolate-colored mail car. He took my letter and gave me a Dum Dum. Cream Soda flavor, my favorite, canceled the postage tang.

The garden was producing what it could, given the temperatures. Heat lightning danced in the sky. The tomatoes liked the weather and Mama and Sis washed Mason jars for the upcoming canning. All that peeling, boiling, and blanching made the house perspire too. The cows stood in the pond, tails swatting at horse flies, the tepid water a respite from the hot ground.

My sister was wearing cut-off jeans and drinking Tab cola. She was a chronic dieter, always at war with her body. She had never shaken the fact that she once wore husky jeans from Sears and Roebuck, size ten chubby. I thought she was perfect, her dark curly hair wrestled down into a red bandana. The house smelled of Ajax dish soap and the sweat of corralled frustration.

Ten years my senior, Sis was the assistant mama. Sometimes this was a good thing, sometimes not. We shared a bedroom, and I didn’t like it when she read Seventeen magazine when I was trying to sleep. If I whined enough, she turned off the lamp and fanned me with its pages. On a humid night without a breeze, even a paper fan goes a long way.

Sis and Mama had started arguing most every day, their spirits rubbing raw places in their relationship. When she’d had enough of her sass mouth, Mama ended it with, “You’re just like your daddy.” That statement halted all motion. There weren’t many things Mama disliked more than someone who might be just like him.

Over time my sister embraced the insult, or else maybe the sick part of her brain overpowered the rest. It’s hard to know for sure, but crazy first showed up in her as reckless disobedience.

Just before Labor Day, as the leaves were turning and the yellow orb known as school bus #5 was being lubed and oiled for its journey to fetch us country kids, my cousin led me into the hay loft. Eight years older, he was always the one who made the others let me play with them. He was trusted.

He positioned himself against the wall. From the window, I could see my middle brother down below, cutting the grass in wide circles, the mower a loud buzz in my ears. My cousin dropped his pants and stroked himself; he touched me, his eyes fluttering with pleasure. Confusion and shame rained down from the dusty rafters.

That night in the quiet of our bedroom, I told Sis and she pulled me into her, spooning me to safety. Later there was a hushed conversation with Mama, and I was never again left alone with that cousin. There was never an accusation or any resolution other than one of physical separation. The quiet of the crime settled over Sis and seemed to stir all the previous transgressions against her, angry and mobbing at the gate.

Looking back, there’s blame on many hands. I could make the case that it was a different time, that my family wasn’t equipped with the resources accessible in today’s world. But we got it wrong. There was cost and casualty. I escaped with one major incident in a hayloft. My sister wasn’t so lucky.

As the years have passed, I have reduced my sister to a flat character, devoid of dimension or meaning. I have taken her out of the sibling lineup. When asked, I am vague on details. In doing so, I have silenced her voice. Even if I wasn’t party to what happened to her, I bore some level of awareness. At some angles that makes me an accomplice; at others, complicit. To the best of my recall, here’s what I remember.

There’s a curl that runs through Daddy’s side of the family, crossing color, texture, and gender hairlines. No matter length or bang strategy, it whoops a swirl at the front. Taming or straightening offer only temporary results. If you have the kudzu ringlet gene, it’s your destiny.

My dad piled his high in fifties Brylcreem fashion. He was gray by the time I came along, but I’ve seen pictures of him, trim and dapper with spit-shined shoes and a beautiful café au lait coif. My sister and I inherited that hair—hers, dark cocoa; mine, blonde. Hers may be gray like Daddy’s by now; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen her. It’s what resides under those curls, where the brain plots and pulses within the margins of normalcy, that our curls divide.

The last time I visited her in the home where she lives as a ward of the state, she greeted me warmly, branding my cheek with burgundy lipstick. We sat in a common area where wheelchaired elders stared into space and drooled. A teenager picked at an acre of facial acne, repeating the name Ricardo in quick staccato. He smelled of stale urine and sadness.

Sis asked after family members, mentioning each by first and middle name. She has never lived outside North Carolina, yet she sported a British accent. “How is Riley Alexandra, born April fifth, five years shy of the turn of the new century?” “How is Jeffrey Neal, born on the sixteenth day of November in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty?” “How is Iris Ann, born on the twelfth day of April, also in the year of nineteen hundred and sixty?” We have a big family, and she flexed her memory with pride and endurance. I assured her that all were fine.

She whispered of her days working as a special agent in the Pentagon and that she was at the current facility as part of a paranormal experience project. “I see people. I hear things,” she said. “I have to double layer my Max Factor foundation, light nude, over the microchip in my neck to block the implanted transmitter.”

Merciful Father. I nodded along.

She didn’t reference being moved to a new location because of stealing coats from other residents and attempting to host an in-room garage sale. She didn’t comment on setting a mattress on fire with contraband Camels. Or confide about not taking her own medication while hoarding the pills of others, along with their watches and jewelry, stowed away in a shoe box underneath her bathroom sink. She mentioned that she had many a suitor and that one Charlton Heston came by regularly wearing a charcoal fedora.

It’s hard to find purchase in a conversation like this. No good comes from confrontation or disagreement, but something in your belly feels unsettled as you play the game. I reminisced silently about an old family story involving my grandmother’s brother, great-uncle Carl, who was in and out of the state psych ward. When asked if he interacted with others who had been admitted to the facility, Carl famously replied, “I don’t talk to those people, they are dad-blamed crazy.”

About an hour into our conversation, Sis dismissed me with abrupt high drama: “Dah-ling, thank you for visiting. You must hurry along now. It is indeed time for you to depart.” With that, she turned her back, sat at the donated piano and burst into Mozart. We’d each had almost a decade of music lessons and to this day I can barely bang out Chopsticks. Her touch remained as light and beautiful as ever. One of the wheelchaired elders began to sing an off-key rendition of The Old Rugged Cross.

As I walked toward the exit, the social worker caught up with me and suggested that my visits weren’t a good idea. They seemed to be upsetting to Sis and her moods could be hard to recalibrate. Months earlier, Sis had apparently gone into detail outlining my tragic death in a fiery airplane crash, erasing me and the hindrance of living family with the broad-brush stroke of a lie.

After that, I didn’t go back, justifying that it was easier for both of us if we maintained the charade, denying the other’s existence.

Sis was born on the twenty-fourth day of October. Her birthday a week after our father’s and a week before Halloween—more Daddy’s girl than I ever was. She was the second child, three years younger than the oldest boy. Old photographs confirm that Mama kept her primmed and polished. By all accounts, she was a spirited child, known for her strong will. Reining in and redirecting never worked for long.

As a toddler, she refused a blanket because it felt scratchy. When told if she didn’t stay warm, she could freeze and die, she is said to have answered, “Let me die then. Just don’t cover me up with that blanket when you put me in the dead box.” By the time Sis turned three, two more boys had been born to my parents, stretching patience, square footage, and paychecks to capacity.

Capitalizing on the differences between Mama and Daddy, Sis was masterful at creating ditches between people. Our Baptist Mama walked the straight and narrow and Sis sided with Daddy, catering to his insecurities and flash-hot temper, giving him an audience and support center. But his own demons made him fickle to the boundaries of loyalty. Putting your money on him could pay off Vegas-style dividends, but it was short term. Besides, his personal house always had the advantage.

I don’t question that my parents loved Sis. They were in constant pursuit of her happiness and normalcy. Having their adult daughter hole up in a house refusing to pay rent, or robbing a convenience store, convincing the clerk that she was the owner’s mistress, added stress and subtracted pride. They rode past her house to view hundreds of yellow ribbons she’d tied to a tree after her husband left. Those were long, hard years and they took their toll. Overriding the public embarrassment of my sister’s shenanigans, Mama and Daddy worried that she would harm or be harmed, especially after she hit someone with her car, an on-purpose kind of accident.

Consequence and rehabilitation rarely co-exist in the same space. After Sis racked up charges and moved into the system as a grown-up, the options became limited. I don’t think she would have survived the order and confinement of prison. As sad as it was, being a state ward seemed the lesser of evils. Having the judge strike a gavel to declare her incompetent was hardly a victory, but it was better than having her fluid in the world or dead in the women’s correctional unit.

I have come to believe that my age offered me redemption. Being the baby saved me from what caused my sister’s demise. I was insulated from the before you were born years.

The winter after that tree house summer, my sister shifted. This new Sis lied at pathological levels, took drugs, crushed rules, broke laws, spoke in different accents, shoplifted, and drank hard liquor. She ran amok in our small community. From the outside, she appeared selfish, stubborn, and defiant. Discipline didn’t work. Prayers were futile. The church lay hands upon her, trying to exorcise the demon that had taken residence in her soul, but that devil hunkered down for the long haul. No one talked of mental illness or a diseased mind, and this fanned the flames with anger and frustration rather than help and healing.

After our parents passed, I found a family color wheel I’d made in grammar school. I had selected a representative hue for each member according to my interpretation of individual personality. Daddy was gray for anger. Mama, pink, the essence of softness and nicety. My oldest brother was brown like the bark of an old tree. My sister was orange for her shining brightness. My middle brother, blue for intellect, and the next brother was green because he was funny. I portrayed myself as yellow for sunny happiness. Time took that first-grade artwork, the paint chip scene of my family and faded it. At places the colors ran together, jumbling and competing for attention. Around the edges, the unpreserved paper disintegrated, leaving only ideas of what once stood bold and true.

Two of my three brothers are estranged from me. The youngest boy, portrayed in green, is the only sibling that I remain close with. My sister has faded to translucent, with barely even a hint of the bright tangerine she once was.

Sis and I had three brothers and thirty-nine cousins, twenty-five of whom were of the male persuasion. In a farm family that ran wild and free, playing Army, riding horses, and damming creeks, being a girl could be a disadvantage. It’s not hard to pin a girl down and keep her quiet with a breathy threat in the ear. Simple to cup a crotch, expose an erection, explore budding nipples, especially when you are taught early that the only crime certain of punishment is that of the tattletale.

This isn’t exclusive to my generation. It went on before and continued after. Observable, acceptable behavior reinforces what will be tolerated within the halls and walls of a family. And not all were bad; some were the best kind of boys and have grown into good men, solid husbands, amazing fathers. But the minority that caused harm kept harming.

It’s a Deliverance kind of tale. Something happened, no doubt. Something horrible happened, somewhere in the darkness, and it was pushed down and covered by leaves with Sis at the bottom of the pile. Just like Dickey, she made it back from the canoe trip, but in her head, she always heard the banjos.

In my lineup of the malevolent hands and intentions who hurt Sis, certain mugshots flash into view. It makes sense that these would later be the ones who crusaded against her, solidifying the importance of reducing Sis to a drug addict and lunatic, weakening her credibility and stature should she ever muster the courage to file her charges. It’s easier to defame the victim than attend your own trial.

Even with my suspected people of interest, how do you gather the facts and bring justice for someone who fancies herself courted by Charlton Heston? How does someone with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder take the stand with believability? And of the few who know the truth, so little can be trusted.

There’s no statute of limitations on affairs of family or heart. The justice side of me hopes that Sis has found her own light out of the darkness, and that the guilty lie awake, unable to reconcile her long and painful fall.

Our formative years linger, shaping us. Experiences—both traumatic and redemptive—are part of the story. But hopefully we grow to write the ending on our terms.

There was a summer, the one with frogs in the tree house, and I wish I could transport us there. If we could just go back to before what was already spinning spiraled us all down the drain, then maybe it would all be different. Maybe what was broken in Sis would have still been under warranty, could have been repaired.

I have a sister. Once upon a time, she was smart and beautiful. As a little girl, I thought she was everything. Illness, drugs, confusion, pain, and trauma broke her, but she isn’t gone, nor is she forgotten. This is part of her story as best I remember. I love her completely without complete understanding. I count on grace to fill the gaps.

WHEN

JUDITH FOX

When you started

forgettingbegan haltingmid-thought

When the coffee maker became a riddle

you could no longer solve

and removing stones from plumswas undoable

When your brain could no longertell your heart how to pump

I wondered

then

about me

and when

SO SUSCEPTIBLE A BODY

C.C. REID

Here. Go like this.

It’s what you say when someone you love needs to know something and it’s easier for you to show, not tell.

Here, go like this, and you brush your cheek with a napkin so that he will wipe the spaghetti sauce off his own cheek. You can save yourself from having to say, “You’ve got something hanging out of your nose.” It’s a way of trapping stray eyelashes, smoothing cowlicks, slapping mosquitoes. Here. There’s something wrong. I won’t fix it for you but I will show you how.

Without the instructive gesture, it’s just a bunch of words.

You can’t see I’m married unless you know where to look. Ned and I said no gold rings, no kids if we could help it, no more responsibility than our own blithe romance. The joke on our wedding day when my dad gave his toast was, if Annie and Ned’s house burned down, no one would ever know which one had left the stove on. Ned and I laughed because it was true. We laughed because our house was not on fire.

Instead of rings we exchanged pocket watches. Matching spring-wound pieces enclosed in dual crystal faces with skeleton dials, seventeen jewels apiece to keep the movement going. We chose the see-through design for its lack of engravable areas and so we could follow the fire-blued screws and gold-plated cogs at work. When I say we exchanged them, I mean he has mine and I have his. I wear his on a thin chain around my neck and Ned has taken to wearing vests and jackets with built-in fob pockets. On my side of the bed I keep my old piano teacher’s bust of Beethoven’s giant, upturned hand, and both watch chains trail from his fingers while we sleep. Otherwise our watches spend most of their time inches from our hearts.

When we dress in the morning it is as our married, watch-carrying selves. My blouses and gowns vee way down. Ned’s clothes are nice now, nice enough to warrant the vests and the dangling gold. His new wardrobe lends him a dapper look that pushes his construction-worker past into the corner of my mind for safekeeping.

Parting for the day is disorienting. I listen to Ned’s watch and wonder what he’s doing, what he’s thinking as he walks to his architectural firm’s office. His watch’s quick beat metronomes me through my morning jog and continues in my head over running bathwater. During quiet moments at the piano, alone or with a student, the ticking continues and I feel a schoolgirl jolt of longing as I wonder if Ned is listening, too. Sometimes I think the vows we spoke are the accessory to our marriage and we are actually bound by the steadfast assertion of these watches we carry between us.

When I was seven I came to the piano with the understanding that once I learned the keys, they would always be there. The thin daring of the black keys. The spacious safety of the white. In piano music, instructors choose increasingly complicated pieces for their students. Novices are able to shadow the moves of the masters more truly as they grow out of their child-hands. The conversation between the curve of my fingers and the keyboard’s intervals has been fixed since tenth grade. That’s the year Mr. Villamora halted my peg-legged rendition of Chopin, exasperated, and said, “We’ll try that again when your hands grow up. Let’s see ’em,” he added, and I held them up like a mime would, hands that could barely palm an octave. He shrugged. “Might be what you get.” And we sat together in silence a moment for all the pieces I would never play.

My tiny hands. My lost potential. In college, I had a nasty bout of depression over Rachmaninoff’s parallel tenths and Joplin’s giant strides. I seriously considered dumping music school for a career that better fit my body type until a Life of Beethoven elective gave me the deaf composer’s “Heiligenstadt Testament.” The prose Beethoven wrote as a young man is as compelling as his musical scores, though the Testament is just an unsent letter to his brothers. Beethoven describes with grace and clarity his acceptance of pending deafness and rejection of self-pity. He acknowledges and abandons his flirtation with suicide in words that still center me: Patience—it is said that I must now choose for my guide, I have done so, I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it please the inexorable Parcae to break the thread.

I resolved to find patience for the blocks of sound I could juggle across the keys quick enough but never hold complete in my hands. I learned not to reach for chords I could not have. By the time Ned bought me my first baby grand and I started teaching from our home, I could read through any big, beautiful song without indignation and teach it to the fortunate students for which it was meant.

If you live long enough, you find one great tragedy passes only to prepare you for the next. While canning red and black currants the summer after we were married, I noticed my jelly jars felt cool though they’d been in a boiling hot water bath. When I experimented by touching them with my wrist, I shrieked and gave myself a burn that still shows today. Soon after that, I discovered I couldn’t pick up coins from my dresser without extreme concentration. Tingling sensations started a few weeks later in my hands, toes, and tongue. My hands were the worst. Sitting down, standing up, they would slip in and out of feeling states like their attention spans had waned. I had to shake them to life most mornings.

The keys began to disappear under my fingertips. I could no longer feel my way around the piano while keeping my eyes on fresh music. Trusted arpeggios lurched unpredictably, and I became ham-handed if I looked away from the keyboard. I thought I was losing my mind. I knew I was losing the faith of my students. It turned out I was losing my sense of proprioception, knowing where the body is relative to itself and the surrounding world. Finally, I tripped on a flat stretch of road while setting out for a run and cracked my head badly enough for tests. My doctor pointed to the lesions on my MRI and told Ned and me what to expect as the multiple sclerosis progressed.

Ned’s the only guy I’ve ever met who truly likes the way I look, and he’s going blind. While I write this, he sits at his drafting table working on a drawing he needs by tomorrow. It’s probably someone’s kitchen renovation or maybe plans to make a basement into an extraordinary apartment. Whatever his big shoulders are huddled over, I can tell you it’s scaled three-sixteenths of an inch to one foot. That’s what he does. Not because it’s practical. Because he thinks DC Victorian homes look their best framed by that particular ratio when printed up on eleven by seventeen paper. Clients love the presentation and the builders groan.

It’s important to Ned that things look good after he’s worked with them. The way he runs his design and construction company doesn’t make him a lot of money. It does allow him to make a few rooms in this world into places he’d like to spend time. Part of his job is to teach his clients to love what they already own. He finds beauty in revealed brick walls and wooden floor joists and the crisscrossed braces in between. He’ll take a basement apartment with four tiny windows and play with shelves, lighting, and sliding doors until it feels like a loft. If a client doesn’t trust him completely with big decisions, he refers them to friends, whether we need the money or not.

Under our watch-carrying clothes, we’re still our reckless and impulsive selves. Did I give you the impression our marriage was something laid out with a level and a T-square? We have never tangled our private lives up in blueprints. I sublet my futon to a music-school friend the week after Ned and I started seeing each other. Had we ever gotten pregnant, it would have been unplanned and more perfect for being so. We live in a house full of music, not photos. No pets. Squares of sunlight and moonlight stretch across the brickwork when and where they feel like it. Our pocket watches mark time passing and leave no record of the hours.

I have called us reckless. I mean to say Ned’s good genes and bad decisions are in a dead heat across his face. His skin is like good paper but lined with deep, beguiling furrows. His even teeth are tobacco-stained and his hair, which is not anywhere close to thinning, grays behind his ears a little more with each house he works on.

I don’t think I’ll describe myself at all. I’m going to practice becoming sound, becoming music.

It’s easy to mistake mastery of the body for mastery of the song. Onstage at the bench, before a competition or performance, I would press my palms together and know my hands were about to feel out the composition ahead while I too listened, almost a member of my own audience. Around the time I graduated, Ned was out there along with my phantom self to hear my music, all three of us smiling with our eyes closed. I couldn’t have missed a note if I’d tried.

I’m still relatively young for things to be getting this bad this fast. The beauty I knew then by heart I feel for with sight instead. My hands, the notes: I put them where they go with my eyes first, and I do it at home without an orchestra. I still go running, and this requires the same thoughtful placement when it comes to my feet, especially my left, which likes to go wooden and drag anywhere on the Rock Creek Park trails where I can least afford a fall. But I give Ned better massages now for the same reason, my thick, yarn-mallet fingers digging into the legacy muscles of his builder’s back. Rhythm where we used to have melody.

Sclerosis is an induration, a hardening, and just one sense of scarring. First thing in the morning, Ned’s parched eyelids unstick themselves with a suctioning sound, a reminder of his childhood Stevens-Johnson Syndrome when his body mistook itself for the enemy after a dose of penicillin. His organs blistered from the inside while his skin melted like a burn victim’s. I refuse to look at sample pictures in the doctor’s office. Still, I’ve imagined the hot pain a thousand times. Besides the emotions a suffering three-year-old might stockpile, only his eyes were permanently damaged. They’ve been getting steadily worse as the long days of summer set in.

Earlier tonight, while watching the sunset from our rooftop garden, Ned mistook a streetlight for the rising moon. Now it’s full-on dark and he sits in his softly lit office with sunglasses on. I cannot tell if I’m seeing eyedrops or tears on his cheeks as he pinches the bridge of his nose. I think of the micro-trauma occurring every time a blink rakes across his dry, light-shy eyes, too destroyed for scleral lenses or corneal transplants or the cross-hatching laser treatment the last specialist endorsed. My eyes are often as red as his though I keep my voice strong, always. We have now together and we need to start planning ahead.

Now, every morning, I watch patches of sunlight traverse our bedroom walls, and all I want is to make them stay. Now we make time to watch the sun nestle into the skyline. Now the seconds tick by faster, and my blood surges through its circular thinking away from and back to my heart. I’m trying to gauge the ratio of our future as his malady stabs at the designs and drawings he does best: How many seeing days left to how many blind? How long before my face fades from his memory?

At night, do I mention stars to him? What do I do with the moon?

Ned loves me when we’re in trouble, and we’re in trouble now. I understand where he’s coming from. I play better when I’m upset, though I stick to the slow, careful songs I’ve loved even longer than I’ve loved him. I’ve relearned a few simple pieces, like “Träumerei” and the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in E Minor. Ned and I spend a lot of time by the piano before bed. He doesn’t listen with his eyes closed anymore.

Last night I got out of the shower and reached for my overnight face cream like always. Ned caught my wrist with one hand and tugged my towel off with the other. And we left the lights on and the mirror framed us with the gentle light of a painting.

It feels good to write this stuff down. My illness and Ned’s eyes are on my mind no matter what I’m doing, like the watches that tick whether we’re listening or not. I get my bearings from my watch and his and the moon that’s fifty-fifty outside our window tonight. This is something to live, not get through. Death speaks up from time to time, and I can hold up my end of the conversation.

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dried lips part

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Total

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AVTOMAT KALASHNIKOVA

RACHEL HALL

I.

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out. He is still in such agony from the wound to his shoulder, still so groggy from medication, that he isn’t certain that the sounds are not his own. It is October 1941. The hospital ward in Y----- is crowded after the Battle of Bryansk. Even as the wounded soldiers die and are taken away, new ones come to replace them. There aren’t enough nurses, so those who are here are haggard and cross. The ward smells sharply of rubbing alcohol, and under that the too-sweet smell of sickness, damaged flesh. In the distance, he hears the clatter of trays sliding into the trolley. Soon there will be weak tea and porridge.

Later, while they eat, the soldiers talk of home, their wives and girlfriends. They talk, too, of the war, complain about the need to share a gun between three men, and those guns heavy, prone to jamming. “Pieces of horse shit,” the soldiers say. “Garbage.” There is great admiration for the Germans’ Schmeisser, an assault rifle that shoots and shoots without the cumbrous reloading of the Soviet guns.

Mikhail Timofeyevich has always disliked this sort of complaining. He hears in it resignation, complacency, wallowing. He likes to identify a problem and then set about solving it. He is a believer in solutions, in setting things to rights. Already in his short time as a soldier, he has devised a mechanism for counting shots fired from the tank. When his infection clears and his pain is bearable, he requests Federov’s books on weapons, volumes I and II, from the hospital library, as well as Blagonarov’s opus, whole pages of which Mikhail Timofeyevich will memorize.

He will say he invented his gun to protect his country’s borders. Everything I’ve done belongs to Russia, he says near the end of his life.

Have you seen a child who’s been smacked by another child? Bitten or shoved? He wants only to retaliate, hit back—and harder. It is instinctual, natural. Call it base, if you wish, but you cannot deny its power and primacy. There was that urge for him, too. He alone survived from his tank. He saw terrible things in battle and then later trying to get to safety, to the hospital—bodies riddled with bullets, blood-soaked, tossed on the ground as if thrown from a great height. Such images linger, you can be sure. It seems to him—then and later—that he had no choice but to make his gun.

And there is also this: When he is thinking of his gun, he isn’t thinking about the dead.

As a boy, he’d enjoyed making things. From birch wood, he fashioned lidded boxes for storage, carved figurines for his younger brothers. He liked, too, to disassemble things, to see the individual parts and how they functioned. He could always—at least eventually—reassemble them. “Our Misha will be a builder one day,” his father said. He didn’t care if his tools were used or his traps pulled apart as long as everything was returned to working order. His son’s little inventions were handy, too. The birch boxes kept mice from the flour and barley. The younger boys were entertained by their carved toys—bears, windmills, even a boat that floated.

Then as now, there is pleasure in the considering, the puzzling, the thinking through. Mikhail Timofeyevich lies in bed, imagining all the parts of a gun laid out on a table. He did this with a Degtyarev rifle while in training. He knows what parts tend to cause problems, what is too bulky, too complicated. Everything else falls away as he thinks; there is only this conundrum that must be wrestled to the ground. Sometimes, he is lucky; the ideas come so fast he must jot them down to keep track. He is methodical, his script boxy and clear. He makes a chart of the different automatic weapons, their design history, their technical and tactical characteristics.

There are obstacles along the way. His lack of drawing skills and technological knowledge. He stopped school at thirteen. In the hospital, there is no German gun to examine. There are the limits of his own imagination. It is true what they say, the unsolved problem is a thorn in the heart!

The injured parachutist in the cot beside him asks about his notebooks, his reading. It turns out the fellow was trained at Moscow Technologic. He understands physics and is able to clarify, to name the theories and formulas that Mikhail Timofeyevich has intuited, but only vaguely; he was a man in the dark, feeling his way along unfamiliar corridors. Now, though, he will find his way. The naming, the indisputable equations bolster him.

When Mikhail Timofeyevich is discharged, he is not well enough to go back to the Front as he has expected. He is sent home for additional rest and recuperation. The problem is, he has listed home as K---- though that is not exactly true. He hasn’t lived there in years, not since he was a boy and his family was disgraced, called “enemies of the people,” and sent East for reprogramming. He has kept this shameful information to himself, omitted some details in his discussions with the army officials and his fellow soldiers. And he doesn’t now see any reason to confess or elaborate. No, that is the past, and he is interested in the future, in progress. From an article in the military newspaper, Mikhail Timofeyevich has learned of a government-sponsored contest to create the next Soviet gun, and he plans to win.

Standing in the train compartment crammed with soldiers, Mikhail Timofeyevich’s shoulder flares with pain from the jostling. He feels woozy. The vodka he is passed helps only slightly. It’s hot in the compartment, and the windows have steamed up with the men’s breath. Outside, everything is snow and ice. A blinded soldier plays mournful, repetitive songs on his harmonica until someone tells him to give it a rest, for fuck’s sake.

Who can say why—the crowded car, the throbbing shoulder, his desire to get to work immediately—but at the M---- station, Mikhail Timofeyevich grabs his duffle and jumps off the train. There’s no time to say farewell to the others, to wish them good health. The train huffs for a minute before taking off again, but he has already entered the depot.

It turns out that the depot manager shares his surname, Kalashnikov, and they become friends on the spot. “My brother!” they say to one another, lifting glasses of vodka in the depot’s main office. “To our reunion!” It is very hard to say no to a wounded soldier in these times, even one who does not share your name, so Mikhail Timoveyevich is permitted to use a room at the depot for lodging and a workshop. He sets his notebooks on a small table by his pallet for sleeping. He tacks his charts to the wall. He has rations from the army, so he needn’t worry about food or warmth. A Mosin rifle is obtained from a military chief in the region. He sets to work immediately. Even when he is doing something else—bathing, drinking, walking by the river—he is thinking of his gun. His brain whirs and seeks, swoops in on solutions, a hawk intent on a field mouse. Months pass like this.

When it is finished, he and his new brother test out the prototype in the woods beyond the depot, aiming at the bottles he has set up as targets. He hits every last one. They toast his success, the Germans’ demise, a swift Soviet victory!

While he doesn’t win, he attracts the attention of the judges. He has potential, they decide, and send him off for training at the Polygon. There are, Mikhail Timofeyevich believes, three necessary conditions for perfecting his gun—autonomy, an excellent workshop, and access to his predecessor’s ideas in weapon development. At the Polygon, all three are met. Even better, here there is a particularly talented draftswoman, Ekaterina Viktoronova Moiseyeva, who helps with his sketches. She renders his ideas precisely, with clean lines. Sometimes, she makes suggestions, offers a crucial simplification. “Perhaps a smaller lever?” Katya says. “What if the grip were textured slightly?” They work late into the night after her other work is completed. He has only one tea cup in his workshop, so they share it, though he is embarrassed by this lack, this necessary intimacy. Katya doesn’t seem to care. She drinks her tea as his mother did, a sugar cube between her front teeth.

Even after the drawings are complete, Katya continues to come to his workshop in the evenings. She watches as he works, encourages him when he is stuck. She learns the signs: pacing, sighing, swearing. “You mustn’t give up,” she says. “We’re very close.” She has brought another tea cup from her mother’s house and the whole of her sugar ration in a tin box.

After Katya leaves for home, he continues to work. He falls asleep thinking of his gun. One morning, he wakes to this thought: what if the pieces were assembled loosely? What if they floated somehow? This would allow grit or snow—or sand, for that matter—to fall away rather than jam things up. Yes, the parts must float, a word that calls to mind lily pads on a sun-dappled pond, clouds, or angels.

When the new prototype is done, Katya embraces him. He feels her warm bosom against his chest. She smells of wood smoke and tea, of home. When he pulls back, he notices for the first time her lovely gray eyes, the thick lashes. She draws him near again and kisses him.

“Oh, Misha,” she says, “for a smart man, you are a little bit dumb.”

Under her clothes, those many bulky layers of wool and canvas, she is surprisingly beautiful—long-legged and curvy, her skin golden as if lit from inside. It is a generous body, he decides—or perhaps it is that she is so generous with it.

This prototype is like their child, something they made together with love. Don’t laugh. This is how it felt to them. Even after their real children come along—Yelena and then Natasha—they think of the gun as their first.

Mikhail Timofeyevich leaves to Katya the other work of their lives—the children and their education, the house, marketing, cooking. He would forget to eat, she often says, if his food did not appear before him. Each evening, he returns home only after the children are in bed, the house quiet, Katya in a pool of light reading or knitting as she waits for him. His dinner is kept warm in the oven. When he comes in, carrying the smells of the factory with him, she rises and warms the kettle for tea. She listens while he reports on struggles with suppliers or frustrations with the assembly. She tells him about the girls—Yelena got high marks in maths, Natasha needs new boots—and that she herself found a good deal on a bushel of cucumbers, and they will have pickles all year. Just little bits she tells him, so as not to distract him from his important work.

In the years that follow, he is rewarded for his single-mindedness with promotions in rank, with awards and medals: Order of the Red Star, Order of Lenin, Hammer and Sickle medal, Order of Saint Andrew, Hero of Socialist Labour, and the Stalin Prize, which will, under Khrushchev, be renamed the State Prize. He is provided a cozy cottage in the country for relaxation with his family. He has been to America, been interviewed and fêted there. The whole world knows his gun.

II.

If it weren’t for the tremors in his hands, Mikhail Timofeyevich would never stop working. For a long time, he has tried to ignore the shaking, to steady his hands with his will. Neither that nor the medicine his doctor provides do any good. He is forced to face facts.

In honor of this retirement, a parade and party have been arranged. He rides in a tank down the main street of I----. It is Spring, which comes only in June to this part of the world, and the air is perfumed with lilac and mock orange. His tank is followed by military bands, floats with beauties from Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan. There are dancers and gymnasts with hoops turning flips. Overhead, bombers in formation swoop and dive—mean, elegant birds. From the sidewalks, crowds cheer and wave. It could go to your head—and indeed, it does. He feels dizzy when he steps out of the tank at the factory and needs to take the hand of the soldier who helps him out.

At the party, he is seated at a big table with his daughters, his grandson, several government officials, and the new director of the factory. It’s been years since her death, but he wishes that Katya were here to see this fuss made in his honor, to share it with him. Wine is poured, and vodka. There is caviar. Speeches are made and toasts, and then it is his turn to stand at the podium. He rises and makes his way to the stage. He has considered revealing in these remarks certain truths about his past. So much time has passed and times have changed. Now he might clear things up at last. His family did not, as the informers reported to Party officials, live in the lap of luxury. He might talk of the sledge that came in the dark of night to take them away from their little farm. He remembers still the sound of the ewes bleating as they were herded up and then shot, the long ride in the cattle car, and his father stepping from it in A---- an old man—bent and hoary, though he was not yet fifty. He plans to end with a poem by Lomonosov: “Come, my friend, your feet are bare, your body in need of washing, your clothes tattered on your back. Do not be ashamed: For many, the path to glory begins as such.”

But even thinking of that time, he feels itchy with shame. Here’s the thing: his secret is in danger of being blurted, exposed. At first, keeping it was difficult. You must be vigilant as you learn the perimeters of your life, the invention of your new self. He found that out long ago. Later, though, the truth became hard to reveal. Why is that? The lie hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has expanded and swelled, become heavier, bulkier. But you have grown accustomed to the lie. Not comfortable exactly, but familiar. A habit it is hard to give up even if it no longer pleases.

In the end, he decides against this confession, and instead reads one of his own poems, which was long ago awarded a prize and published in the army magazine. As he reaches the final stanza, his favorite, his heart speeds up, his voice hitches. These words stir him still. He takes a sip from his glass and continues: “Is it any wonder that everything is louder and more beautiful now? The great free people sing of our victory, of our soldiers and our strength.”

The guests stand. The applause goes on for a long time. It has been a good night, a success.

Back at the table, the very blonde wife of the new director congratulates him. “What will you do with your new free time?” she asks.

His hands shake as he reaches for his glass, reminding him of all he cannot do. A curtain unfurls. Darkness. What will he do? Initially, he thought he would return to his poetry, but the shaking prevents him from writing and reading.

“Family,” his daughter Natasha says. “We look forward to spending time together.”

“Yes,” he says.

Later, he will say he had a premonition, but it is quite possible he just didn’t want Natasha to leave him, for his routine to be disrupted. She has always been there when he wakes and there when he returns at night, as her mother had been. He has come to rely on her gentleness and calm, her dulcet voice singing along to the radio while she cooks or neatens the apartment.

The winter was a particularly bitter one. Unrelenting snow and cold. Natasha, though, insists on going to Moscow. She has tickets to the theater. Twice already her flight to Moscow has been cancelled because of storms. He hopes she’ll decide to throw in the towel and stay at home. She can go to Moscow in May. “It’s much nicer in the spring,” he tells her. “The trees will be beginning to blossom. Perhaps, we will go together?”

“Papa,” she says, buckling her satchel. “It’s only a short trip. I’ll be back before you know it.” Natasha lifts her bag from the bed, looks around the room a final time, and kisses him goodbye. From the front door of their apartment, he watches her walk to the elevator, her high-heeled boots clicking as she goes. She looks like a big city girl, not his Tasha. Those boots won’t keep her warm enough. He’s about to offer this, but he remembers her sister Yelena’s admonishment the day before. “Let her have a little holiday. It’s not like you’ll go hungry.” It’s true that Natasha has stocked his refrigerator with all his favorites, made and frozen pirozhki for his suppers.

Then came the call: an accident, her cab driver lost control on the icy road, his car spun into the wrong lane and was struck by a bus. Natasha is gone. When Mikhail Timofeyevich has to identify her at the morgue, he takes one look at the gray body under the sheet before collapsing. His legs slide out from under him, as if they’ve forgotten their purpose.

His days are long without Natasha or his work, his house too quiet. For a while now there has been an argument in his head. It goes more or less like this:

“Your gun kills 250,000 people each year. Do you not bear some responsibility for those deaths?”

“No, I designed my gun to protect the Motherland!” Memories come back to him from the war—bodies blown to pulp, smoke rising from burning flesh, searing pain in his shoulder, the smell of his own vomit down his front. “It is the fault of the Germans. Take it up with them.”

“Yes, but how does it feel to see your gun in the hands of terrorists?”

“You must think of the good the gun has accomplished. The liberation of Mozambique, for instance. After, soldiers named their boys Kalash, so grateful were they to my gun. It’s on their flag, too, that distinctive profile leaving no doubt.”

“Yes, and it is plain as day on the Hezbollah flag, too, is it not?”

“Is it the fault of the designer if the politicians cannot work out these conflicts peacefully? What do you think? The terrorists are not stupid. They too want the best gun.”

“So, you have no regrets?”

“I would like to point out that I’ve made not one kopek on my design.”

“Does that excuse you?”

“If it wasn’t my gun, it would’ve been someone else’s: Degtyarev’s, Balkin’s, Rukavishnikov’s.”

“Think of the parents who lost their children to your gun. Think how they must suffer, as you suffer now without Natasha.”

“No, I cannot. You’re being unfair.”

“And what if—”

“Stop. That’s enough.”

For much of his life, Mikhail Timofeyevich has wanted this one thing—to make his gun and then to improve it. So, it is strange to find himself late in life wanting something else. What is it? He is an old man now, nearly twice as old as his father when he died. At first he believes what he wants is his beloved Tasha, her death prevented, her loving presence restored to him. He has lost many loved ones by this point. He misses Katya, of course he does, but with a spouse it is a given that one will outlive the other. That is the natural order of things, but it is all wrong to lose a child. He is a man who likes order, has depended on it. And now he feels robbed of his daughter, his favorite, as well as his conviction. He is again the little boy, crammed into a cattle car with his family, hurtling farther and farther east, away from everything he’s known.

One night, after another long day, he dreams he is walking with Natasha. He is pleased to see her again, but there isn’t time to make a fuss or to inquire about why she has come back. They are in a hurry to get somewhere for a celebration, of what, he is not sure. But certainly, the mood is festive. At some point, a storm comes in from the Ural mountains, a swirling mass of white that seems to come at them horizontally. He can’t see the path in front of them or anything off to the side. “It’s okay, Papa,” Natasha says, “you’re doing fine.” She beams at him. They keep walking because there is no other choice, nowhere to stop and take shelter. He is happy to note his hands are steady on his walking stick, his tremors are gone. Sometimes, he and Tasha falter on the icy path, but always they are able to right themselves and continue their trek. He awakes before learning of their destination.

III.

In his advanced age, he no longer drives. He has a driver, Sergi. When he is not driving, Sergi is looking after the car, washing it, buffing away the street grime and grit. Inside, too, the car is very clean and emits a citrus smell. Sometimes, Mikhail Timofeyevich requests a ride though he has no particular destination in mind. It is pleasant to be out and about in Sergi’s good hands. He takes turns smoothly, rolls to gentle stops. He has a knack for finding convenient parking.

Today, though, he has an appointment with a vodka manufacturer who hopes Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov will lend his famous name to a new vodka. There is a traffic jam, and the streets are backed up with cars and trucks and plenty of honking. Sergi is calm; he doesn’t shout or swear at the other drivers, as Mikhail Timofeyevich would if he were behind the wheel. He hates rude drivers, this excruciating crawl. He wants to move. Indeed, that is the whole reason for this outing.

“Let me out here, Sergi,” he says. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Of course, sir, but it is far still.”

“Nonsense. I can see the gate from here,” he says. “I’ll wait for you there.”

“But, sir—”

Mikhail Timofeyevich has already pushed open his door and disembarked. Once he is on the sidewalk, he sees he isn’t where he thought he was. The stone wall isn’t that of the office building; it surrounds a school for girls. Just past that, surely, he will find his destination. He turns to wave on Sergi, but the knot of traffic has untangled and he cannot spot the black sedan.

Beyond the school, there are shops, restaurants, and a church, its thick wooden doors flung open. He will go in and ask for directions. Inside, it is dim and hushed. The only light comes through jewel-colored windows. It is calm in here away from the honking and shouting. Harassed: That is what he felt before. When his eyes have adjusted to the darkness, he watches a young mother lead her little boy up to the altar. She has a kerchief over her light hair. They each hold a small amber colored candle. They tip the candles to light them from the flames of others already burning there, then set them in place and make the sign of the cross, then stand silently to watch their candles. It’s as graceful as a dance.

The quiet here feels auspicious, radiant and glowing like the candles. From above him, saints with golden halos and softly draped robes—crimson and azure—gaze down. There, behind a counter just beyond some mosaic arches, is the attendant. What did he want to ask her? She is a stout woman, unsmiling, her dark braids wrapped around her head in an old-fashioned style. Her look does not invite conversation, but he moves towards her anyway, taking coins from his pocket for his own candles. He inhales deeply: incense and beeswax.

What can be said about moments such as this? We don’t change much, not really, not even when we seem to. What is within him now has always been there: an indeterminate ache, a disdain for idleness, an abiding belief in solutions. If he began lighting candles now for all those killed by his gun, he could not finish in a hundred years. But Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov has never been one deterred by obstacles.

In the beginning, there is a boy newly fatherless and hungry. His older brother is less enterprising than he; his younger brothers too young. His mother wrings her chapped hands and weeps in their clay-floored cottage. The boy knows where the rifle is kept. He has watched his father take it from the shelf and clean it before setting out. He knows the various parts—the trigger, the barrel, the safety. His father had promised to teach him to shoot when he is older. Everyone says he has an aptitude for such things—also a way with words. He wants to be a poet when he grows up. The boy takes down the gun, the bullets. In his warmest clothes, he heads out into the deep snow, blue in the early morning light. The world is quiet except for the wind and the crunch of snow beneath his feet. He walks and watches, crouches behind snow drifts from time to time. His eyes water from the cold, and the tears freeze in streaks on his face. After a while, he sees movement in the distance. He waits. It’s a hare, its big ears pressed back by the wind. The boy aims and shoots. The rifle slams into his chest. The wind carries off his cry, swallows it. He trundles over the snow to reach the hare, his chest smarting.

This might have gone another way. Injury or accident, the grieving family struck again, but it doesn’t. There will be more loss, more tragedy, but not just now. Now, there is rabbit for dinner. Mikhail Timofeyevich squats to inspect his bounty. The hare’s tawny fur ruffles in the wind.

ÖTZI

JOHN KNEISLEY

Ötzi is the name given to a natural mummy
found frozen in the Alps in 1991,
carbon dated between 3400-3100 BCE.

As if he had been praying

for time to freeze,

they found him still

fetal in the snow:

his left arm splayed

over his chest,

his body altogether

happy to be alone

among the summit’s flowers:

the occasional orchid,

aster, and edelweiss

coloring the tundra—

its glaciers dragging him

beyond millennia

into an almost-dream:

a way of feeling warm

again, without a need

for blood, or nerves,

or breathing—and it was this

peace, perhaps,

that startled the archaeologists,

who were more intrigued

by his passing: the arrow

lodged in his shoulder,

the deep, red patterns

smattered on his cloak

of woven grass,

and so went their analysis:

this frozen Chalcolithic

man mysteriously killed

in high wilderness,

and it would take a decade

for them to see the beautiful

disproportion of his pelvis,

the overuse of his tibia,

femur, and knee joints,

each of which signaled

an Alpine intimacy,

which is why he likely preferred

resting here, his corpse

an icy tangent to a life

similarly quiet: a shepherd,

perhaps, or a wanderer

listening to the little deaths

he was to follow: a petal

ripped apart by wind,

an empty, frozen meadow.

FRANÇOIS

CÉCILE BARLIER

He woke up in his bed at half past six in the morning.

The room was dark. A tilted window sputtered a frozen draft, but warmth persisted under the covers and from the radiator. Night had just ended; morning had arrived abruptly. But neither the cold air of March nor the lethargic, blurred gray curtains, swollen by the breath of dawn, nor the folded cheek of his wife placed next to him on a bolster that looked like a flannel sausage, nor this overenthusiastic clatter of voices released by the clock radio, among which it seemed that one would be ushered to a day of living theater, brought anything surprising or disruptive to François Pluvinage, who was getting out of bed despite an intense fever. He had been sleeping like a log for nearly eighty years, and in the course of all those years, he had gotten out of bed countless times. Whether it was an icy March in the East of France, as now, or a smoggy May in a tropical city, it was morning to him, and what he always, invariably, longed for was to fix his breakfast and have his croissant dipped in his enormous bowl of café au lait.

He had established this routine over a long, long time, for nearly a century, and it seemed to him that he could accomplish all these motions with his eyes closed, sliding on his slippers at the base of his bed, stepping into the hallway to the bathroom, blowing his nose in the sink, grabbing his robe from the peg, turning the knob on the small radio set in the kitchen so that he could listen to the same voices he had left behind in the bedroom. Here was his ritual and his choreography, and he could imagine no other beginning to a day, the voices on the radio, the small wait in bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, and again the radio, the café au lait, the croissant, the noise of his own mastication, and again the voices on the radio.

He had lost the habit of thinking outside of his habits and had almost forgotten he was sick. Three months earlier, he had been diagnosed with a bone marrow condition, something rare but not unheard of in men his age. Something not curable. The doctor was a beautiful Indian woman in the prime of life. She had a soft-sounding name and a gentle yet commanding manner. She held office in a gigantic green hospital that looked like an Arctic station with no parking available in its vicinity. At first the doctor had met him and his wife weekly, to go through the intricacies of all the tests and protocols for slowing down the disease; then the doctor had stopped seeing them. She had caught a disease herself. Something passing around like wildfire. Of this beautiful doctor, all that remained was a piece of paper where she had sketched a human bone during one of her explanatory sessions, but coffee had been spilled on the drawing, and now nothing was sharp on it but the edges of the coffee stain.

While François was having the last bite of his croissant, Geneviève, his wife, called out to him from the end of the hallway. “François? François, do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“You should take your temperature. You’ve been shaking all night long.”

“You’re sure? I don’t feel feverish, I don’t think.”

“I’m sure. Take your temperature. This way we’ll know for a fact.”

And again there were the voices on the radio. François thought of his day, of the local newspaper waiting in the mailbox, of the crossword on the second to last page, and of the marine weather forecast in the Atlantic. And just as he was thinking about the tidal predictions and the wind speed and direction on the Côtes d’Armor, he was handed a thermometer by Geneviève, who had stepped behind him in the kitchen.

“Good morning,” she said. “Take your temperature please.”

Geneviève, two years younger, with a sun-weathered face and a vigorous disposition, was turning into the woman in charge lately, but at times looked confounded by the salvo of bad news that fell onto them like a meteorite shower. She held a strict daily regimen of physical and cultural activity, and at home she roamed from one room to the next, emptying shelves, peeling asparagus, or learning English remotely from a South African instructor named Mel. She kept on going. And indeed, on the very day the diagnosis was announced, she had taken François to the city theater where they played The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras. On that occasion she wore a new dress, and François found her radiant, and after the performance while observing her from beside a marble column as she talked to other men, he had felt curious and marginally happy. He was used to being in the background, to maintaining a comfortable distance from the physical action, but that time he did not even smile a little, was exceedingly discreet and patient, and gave only slight nods as people squeezed by him on their way out.

“You have a high fever,” Geneviève said. “Get dressed. I’m getting your bag ready—you’re going to the hospital.”

They returned to the bedroom, Geneviève leading the way and François following. His slippers glided slowly across the black-and-white tiles of the hallway, quietly crossing the apartment and the shelves and walls saturated with books, miniature paintings, and exotic knickknacks accumulated over decades. Geneviève kept talking continuously, opening the drawers and the closet, now to grab his underwear and socks, now to withdraw his shirts from their hangers, often interrupting her flow to give him instructions as to what to wear today and what not to forget. François kept thinking about the local newspaper in the mailbox and wondering whether the crossword in it would be hard or easy. And he was annoyed with the post office for not delivering the paper the previous day. What negligence! For years he had read that paper from beginning to end, done the crossword in his blue bathrobe, and now he had to leave in a hurry, without being able to check the mailbox, which was at the end of the yard that was covered in patches of ice, and required a key.

It was hard to find a public service that you could count on these days. When they didn’t lapse for lack of funding out of the government’s attempts to cut corners, there would be a strike, justified or not. Even in this part of France, which was more civilized and orderly due to the proximity of Germany, you couldn’t take such a thing for granted as reliably getting your paper in the mailbox. Education had been first in taking a hit, and that had been the beginning of the end since everything started with educating people in general and the next generation of civil servants in particular. There hadn’t been one decent Minister of Education in over three decades; they were either half literate or self-aggrandizing in the worst way. That was why he had retired early from his professorship and research chair.

She is really formidable, he thought, glancing at Geneviève zipping his travel bag.

Meanwhile the taxi had arrived. The black car was idling in the driveway. Here there was no time to muse. Blue smoke was swirling from the exhaust, and a drizzle started to spatter the glass of the front door. The stairway down from the apartment was steep and slippery. Even with only four steps, it required holding the rail with both hands and getting down sideways.

It was the same taxi that always took François to his medical appointments. The Egyptian driver, Gamal, was a medical transport driver. He drove patients to and from hospitals and clinics, and carried intravenous fluids, colostomy bags, and other such equipment inside his car. He frowned a lot and his gaze wavered between skepticism and sadness, which were constantly contradicted by his underlying hilarity.

“Take your time, Monsieur Pluvinage!” Gamal said, chuckling as he got out of the car to take the bag and open the passenger door.

François looked at him and marveled at how a man with such sorrowful traits was blessed with such jovial disposition. He was sharing the small cabin of his car with the frail and the feverish and carrying their discomforts. Life had granted him no privileges, and at first it seemed as though his stern looks came from enduring the bewilderment or anguish written on the faces of his clients. But then he laughed, and his good spirits wiped the air clean. His clients lit up if only for the duration of the rides. He once confided in François that his father back in Egypt had been an usher at the local movie theater. He loved the pictures and had once taken acting lessons. And life was a theater, Monsieur Pluvinage, wasn’t it?

“Here we go!” said Gamal.

The car pulled off brutally, and the engine went into overdrive. Something fell from François’s lap—it was his leather satchel. The driveway made a short but intense uphill climb onto the street; the icy drizzle was hitting the windows, condensing into twisty rivulets that snaked in random directions; one would be better off in Brittany. Geneviève stood by the gate, holding it open as they drove through. She was still in her robe, her hair and shoulders wet from the drizzle. Gamal braked and lowered his window.

“Thank you, Madame Pluvinage,” he smiled. “Don’t stay out there too long.”

“Hurry up. He has a high fever,” said Geneviève in a throaty voice. “I hope we didn’t forget anything. And these days I’m not even allowed to come.”

“Don’t you worry. Everything is under control!”

Next to the car Geneviève looked tall and vivacious, but there was something barely perceptible in the way she laid her fingers on the gate handle and let them rest there softly that betrayed her as a fragile creature, already exhausted, anticipating the next blow. And suddenly it seemed as though there was an odd little music in the air. François felt restless and was filled with longing for another day in the house with Geneviève, and it occurred to him that if he hadn’t awakened with a fever, he would devote this day to making her happy. His wife! Life was so ordered that here he was being driven to a gigantic Arctic-like hospital, while she would stay in their house in the Alsatian countryside alone, and yet for some reason the mere thought that he and she might undergo a day of solitude seemed to him to bring them closer than ever. Fundamentally, life unfolded so that a break in its regular cycle opened another break, this one in the heart, and you were animated by that yet also miserable.

And you realize, he thought, that like a child you want to go back to the way it was before, and just start over.

“Call me when you get there,” shouted Geneviève, closing the gate behind them. “Goodbye!”

And as they drove off, he saw the mailbox, and again thought of the paper, of the crossword in the second to last page, of the marine weather, and when Gamal put on Radio Classique on low volume, these thoughts mingled with others. One of Satie’s Gymnopédies was playing. He wanted to think of a sailing trip to the Baleares Island, of dawn after a sleep shift, of the puffs and lulls on the Mediterranean’s surface, of his hand quiet at the helm, of Geneviève exiting the cockpit, her brown legs beneath her tunic, of a cup of coffee she brought him, with a handful of sugar cubes, a red plastic cup, foaming at the top, and when she hands it over, it is…

Warm? It is cold in the car. Gamal doesn’t put the heat on much, as little as possible. The windows of the village roll by; some lights turn on above the geraniums, two adolescents plod backward toward a bus stop. It is all so calm, so slow. Every time François goes to that hospital, he has to wait for hours in the waiting room. That room is huge and windowless, with a low polystyrene tile ceiling. After that, he gets sent to another waiting room, smaller, on the seventh floor, where he has to wait again. If he gets to spend the night there—hopefully this time they will let him go—he spends it on a gurney in the hallway under a neon light because as huge as this hospital may be, it never has enough rooms to accommodate everyone. And it is cold in the hospital. His stays there have shrunk and stiffened him, making him smaller, more bent, thinner and slower, as though they dry-cooked him, although his hair remains as healthy and strong and white as before. Ever since the Indian doctor has been gone, he no longer asks questions to the nurses and doctors. He just listens and follows their directions. And he smiles profusely if shyly when they talk to him. He offers an apology if he needs anything. And the hospital staff is nice, and the hours pass slowly, without warmth, but with their sympathy, since they all like him with his polite shyness and his fierce white hair.

“Hold on, Monsieur Pluvinage!”

The car stalled, then wouldn’t start again at a traffic light in front of a snack bar in Irmstett. François opened his leather satchel to check if his phone had battery, and came upon a battered business card.

François Pluvinage PhD

Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute

Early in his career, he had switched from parallelizable foliations to didactics from necessity, a colleague having appropriated his original dissertation papers, though he had never thought of it as a theft, or of intellectual property as property. It always seemed to him that what was most important in his work was not the intended scientific breakthrough, but the incidental findings, the notes in the margin, the meandering. And who still read his papers? His colleagues, his contemporaries, his students, for all their candid admiration, do not have the slightest desire to pick up antiquated math reviews with their well-thumbed, yellow pages, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of more present and pressing matters, of their own work, of their next vacation in the Pyrénées, of the weather. There is always something to think about, to worry about, to prepare for, and especially stubborn dreamers, like himself, can be filled with so many lines of thought. But isn’t that enough? Isn’t that all there is?

Gamal stepped out of the car and disappeared behind the hood to check the engine, lighting up a cigarette now, the bluish smoke mixing upward with the drizzle. The traffic light turned green and red and green again, and the line of cars behind them extended beyond the visible part of the single-laned road before it curved; no one was honking and so it was nicely quiet, and after yet another blink of the light, two of the drivers stuck in the line got out of their cars to give Gamal a hand. They didn’t look upset.

The three men pushed the car with François in it. Gamal opened his door to control the steering wheel as they pushed. Near the traffic light, hollowed in the paved, soaking wet sidewalk, there were two narrow parking spots for the disabled where they settled the car in front of the snack bar. There was hardly anyone inside: a female bartender wearing thick glasses, and two boys of about eight who looked alike. It was supposedly closed but the bartender made an exception for François and Gamal. The place smelled of beer, cabbage, and wet wool. It was quiet except for the clicks of oil radiators and the uneven claps of an old Labrador walking across the room to the hidden kitchen. Somewhere out of sight, someone was beating eggs energetically. François sat down and had a glass of water while Gamal made calls for a tow truck and for his taxi company to send someone else for the rest of the ride.

“Hey, Monsieur!” one of the boys called out with an Alsatian accent. “Is it you that blocked the entire road earlier?” The other boy chuckled with delight at the audacity of his brother.

“Leave Monsieur alone,” the bartender said. “Sorry, with school closed these days, it’s a struggle to keep these two in check. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? It’s on the house. Cream or sugar?”

“Both please,” answered François. “Thank you very much.”

François drank his coffee with pleasure, and he let one sugar cube melt on the side of his mouth as he was sipping, and again he fell to thinking about the local paper locked in the mailbox, which would have been nice to read now… He pulled an old pharmacy prescription from his leather satchel and started folding it with care.

There was a stripe of sun on his table. Then the drizzle came back in force, erasing the stripe, which reappeared later on the table where the boys did their homework, and finally shrunk to a tiny line in the windowsills. This meant that he had been here at least half an hour. The bartender had vanished in the kitchen, and the boys were now putting away their pens and their notebooks in their bags. One of the boys, the one who had called out François for blocking the road, went up to his table and just stood there, looking at the little hens that François had built with various prescriptions and at the figurine he was building now. The table looked crowded like a chicken coop.

“What is it you’re making now?” the boy asked.

“Aha!” François said with his big voice, and he went on folding.

The other boy, following his brother’s example, came along. Both boys watched with intense focus, their eyes almost crossed and their mouths slightly open. The egg beating had stopped, and it became so quiet that the sound of François folding was magnified.

“Monsieur Pluvinage.” Gamal pushed the glass entrance door. “The tow truck is on its way. They don’t have anyone else to drive you now. It shouldn’t be long at all though. Just a battery issue. We’ll be out of here in no time.” He smiled broadly and went back out again.

The door banged behind him, which made the bartender come back from the kitchen.

“Why are you bothering Monsieur, you two? You should be on your way. Come on! Say sorry and be gone already.”

“Sorry, Monsieur,” the first boy said. “Can I have a bird?”

“Me too!” the other boy said.

François gave them a hen each, his hands shivering a little as he did, and the boys trotted off past the glass door, which banged behind them. François went on sitting there, running out of prescriptions to fold, thinking of the local paper on and off, and how when he was the age of the boys, he’d painted a wall with a feather and his urine; all the while the invisible person in the kitchen was beating more eggs.

“Let’s go, Monsieur Pluvinage,” Gamal called to him.

They drove off. But they were held at a walking pace behind a farm tractor. Radio Classique was paused for the voices on the radio to deliver the latest news.

“Do you believe that?” asked Gamal, turning around. “That we’ll need an authorization to get out of our homes?”

“Why, what?”

“They say we are at war, for two weeks, starting at noon today. They said that specifically—at war.”

“At war? It seems a bit excessive. A two-week war seems on the short end too. No?”

“Maybe you’re right, Monsieur Pluvinage. Maybe that’s all nonsense. Maybe it’s theater as usual!”

But it was clear that Gamal did not believe that the two-week war was for play. Geneviève did not believe that either. They both thought that something abominable was under way, and that the greater part of what was to come was kept unformulated out of ignorance or fear of consequences. It was important to not overreact, to not jump to conclusions. The earth still revolved at the same pace—without evidence to the contrary.

The farm truck eventually veered off the road into a field of sugar beets, and now there would be one more roundabout and then the freeway all the way; they had not far to go now. They would cross the industrial zone, then the railway line, and then the freeway to the hospital.

“You’re not taking the freeway?” François asked Gamal as he took the first exit at the roundabout.

“There are road works on the freeway. They shut down two lanes this morning. We can go just as fast this way, and it’s nicer.”

“You’re right, it’s nicer.”

“What?”

“Look, are these morels right there?” François pressed his burning forehead against the cold windowpane. “They look like morels.”

“Morels? I don’t think so. Not on the side of the road.”

“Would you mind stopping a minute so we can check?”

They stopped. Under normal circumstances, it was a busy and narrow country road, and one could not stop on its side without hampering the traffic, but now, after the shutdown declaration, it was quiet, wet, and bucolic; on the grass-covered side at the edge of the wood, there were fresh boot prints, so other people had had the same idea.

“Morels all right!” shouted Gamal excitedly, opening François’s door as well so he could watch. “A lot of them!”

Gamal turned the lower portion of his sweater into a basket and filled it quickly, showing off his harvest as he returned to the car. He was transferring the mushrooms into a container when François felt a sharp pain along his rib cage and upper back. “Oof…” he uttered under his breath, folding his arms over his torso. “Oof.”

Gamal came around and squatted next to him. “You okay?” he frowned. “I’ll get you to the hospital in no time. Hang in there, okay?”

François’s throat and lungs were firing up. He wanted to respond but couldn’t. His knees were damp from the drizzle that had fallen in the car while the doors were open; his leather satchel had got wet, which bothered him greatly, and when the pain subsided enough to let him talk, he said, “I’ll be fine.”

There was a police check at the entrance of Hautepierre. A line had formed and cars ahead of them were stopped for papers to be exchanged through the windows. François opened his window a bit and then closed it. He did it again, appreciative of how the mechanism worked so seamlessly between his index finger, the little knob in the door, and the windowpane. He could adjust the aperture with millimeter accuracy, which sidetracked him as he waited, shivering all over with burning fever but free from the earlier pain. The hospital was in sight, as were the wet patches of greenery running along the avenues and the hurried pedestrians with umbrellas in one hand and phones in the other, and the reddish cathedral in the distance with its bell tower that leapt into the clouds and the gray tramway approaching with a whoosh, and Gamal sighing loudly with impatience… And it seemed to François that everything and everyone was in a hurry.

Here was the policeman in his navy uniform, his archaic cap dripping from the edges, his face grayish and gaunt, waving at them to not stop, to just go, please! It made François feel oddly apologetic. At a bus shelter a little farther, an older man was sitting and reading the local paper, and François glanced at him as they drove by. His father! What a resemblance! His father had the same narrow face, the same rectangular glasses, worn low on a protruding aquiline nose and that precise way of smiling vaguely with his eyes. And with amazing exactitude, for the first time in thirty-five years, he mentally reenacted his last interaction with his father, in the beat-up country house near Besançon; his father, freshly diagnosed with cancer, slicing the bread on the stone bench in the front of the house, the odor of grazing lands on the other side of the street, the low light of August dusk, the flies buzzing around the windows, everything down to the smallest detail. François had just arrived and opened the squeaky fence, making his father interrupt the slicing and look up to him; he felt as then awkward, anxious, enormously sorry, and also happy, reassured, looking forward to a long, silent summer evening next to his father. A feeling of calm and fullness suddenly flooded his shoulders, making him straighten up on the back seat. He closed the latch on his leather satchel and murmured softly, under his feverish breath, “Salut, Papa.”

And he began to smile. Just at that moment a young girl ran across the street in front of the car, and Gamal barely had the time to slam on the brakes, and seeing the girl look back at them with huge, incredulous eyes, François imagined such excitement in the life ahead of her, and it seemed to him that the sky, the rain, the sidewalk were soaking from her excitement, her eagerness. Yes, that young girl would ask endless questions, play many games, learn exotic languages, travel the world, and she would…

“We arrived, Monsieur Pluvinage.”

And it all stopped. They were at the Emergency entrance, double parked with hazard lights flashing. Gamal had opened the door, extending a hand. François, shivering intensely and constricted with arthritis, took the hand and wiggled out of the car. Gamal accompanied him to the sliding door, where a placid male nurse greeted them. Gamal remembered something and asked François to wait a minute. He went back to the car and came back with a small paper sack, which he handed to François.

“You don’t want to forget your morels, Monsieur Pluvinage.”

ON TRANSPARENCY

JESSICA YUAN

To invent drawing, Butades’ daughter

traces the shadow of a man

who leaves

the flattened edge of his body

pinned crisp on the stone

by sunlight.

___

You did not invent the sunlight shining pink through your ears.

Flesh glowing white at the outline, you overripe peach,

squinting, branching burgundy

of your veins

and the dark thread of coagulate

under the skin of a chicken thigh

cleaved open in your hands,

its four textures from surface to core, from viscous to bone.

Your bones

cast a shadow on the blackness of clear film.

I saw inside.

___

Though when it was named the Roentgen Ray,

standing beside them

to photograph the ghost,

the metal ring

opaque on the left hand of his Anna,

echo recoiling

between the man pointing the machine

and the man who flattens

and once he saw through the first thing

he could steal the depth from anything.

It was already transparent to him.

___

I want a place in front of the light

which casts a shadow unlike

the shadow of light.

if poetry is the shadow of X

across your body of language

if X could only choose what passes through

There is no second half to vision.

AT THE MERCY MEAL

LINDSAY STARCK

At the Mercy Meal, the servers clear plates of hummus and tabbouleh while your cousin Edna clutches memories of your Aunt Kathy in gnarled hands. (Four years ago, it was Kathy who pushed back her chair in this very restaurant and thanked the assembly for their memories of her mother.) The cold November light pools in the parking lot and glimmers silver through the windows. We flew one thousand miles last night, landed in the smallest, darkest morning hours, and slipped briefly into an unfamiliar bed together. We have spent the day swaying on our feet. I can feel your gaze on me, here at the table; I know that you see me cup my forehead, briefly, in my palm. I’m so tired. I’m sorry.

The faces turned toward your cousin Edna are heavy-browed, jowly. Four long tables lined with descendants that have sprouted from a single branch. (Six months from now, when we are disinfecting our doorknobs and canceling our trip to reconnect with your extended family in Beirut, I’ll wonder if I will ever see the holy grove of cedar trees before they vanish.) I’m watching your Uncle Jack, sitting low in his chair at the end of the table nearest us, his gray knit cap pulled to his ears, the cancer cells blooming through his brain. I can’t be the only person in this crowded room who is silently tallying the months, weeks, hours, minutes that he has left.

We applaud your cousin Edna and the salads arrive. Iceberg lettuce, wilted carrots, a bumpy pepperoncini. You slip down from your stool and vanish while I poke wearily at my tomatoes and listen to the murmur of your mother and your sister. (Two hours ago, through clouds of incense in the Maronite church, I watched your mother and your father speak together with the ease and wariness of strangers who used to love each other.) When the servers return, bearing white platters heavy with baked fish and chicken kabobs, you are still gone. Circulating between the tables, probably, clapping suited shoulders and kissing withered cheeks. As I look for you, I catch your Uncle Jack’s eye.

If this scene—these baskets of bread, this mediocre rice, that parking lot awash with light—is familiar to me from all the other funerals we’ve attended here, how much more familiar is it to him? He drags his fork across his plate and the room seems to collapse. When the walls steady again, we’ve all slid one year into the future. The meal is the same, my black dress is the same. Your sister is still here alone, and your father calls your mother by the wrong name again. But Uncle Jack is gone, and the speeches are for him.

Your warm palm on my forearm pulls me back to the present. Exhaustion thunders in my ears, throbs inside my aching head. When my vision clears, you are handing me a paper cup of espresso, steamed milk, and vanilla. I sip it reverently, deciding that you’ve never looked more handsome. (Four hours ago, in the perfumed funeral home, you held me close and promised that I wouldn’t have to see the body.) After a while, the servers shuttle the plates away again. Your cousins slip into their wool coats and stack pieces of baklava on paper napkins for the drive.

I carry my coat and my bag to an empty corner booth to wait out the extended Lebanese goodbyes. (Nine months from now, when Uncle Jack collapses in the shower, the government will not permit us to gather.) I watch you as if from a great distance, your words a low buzz, the whole dining room shimmering with clear white light. How terrifying it feels to be missing you now, so long before you are gone.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PERFORMING CARTWHEELS

MELISSA J. VARNAVAS

It grips her

face. Her slack skin flaps.

Reach out, place the mask back

snug against her

nose, chin. Grab her

hand again. Smooth

the crinkly white of her

crazy hair. Kiss the soft spot

where the mask meets

forehead. Sing:

How sweet the

To do it right, you have to

set your hand in that

proper cartwheel

position—raise your left

hand high. Reach up

as if to pluck the very

light from the

stars in the sky.

Stretch

your opposite arm out

behind you.

Prepare.

As she is dying you sing,

Amazing

Grace for hours. But you

only know the first chorus. So, you

let go

of her hand, reach

for the words you know

you’ll find somewhere,

as she takes the opportunity

to pull at the oxygen mask again.

You will remember, the taste

of her blueberry muffins, soft

with salted butter. Memory’s

scent, surprising as it

fills the air with its perfume

mixes with memories of

French fry oil and pickle

vinegar, chopped mint, boiled

grape leaves, and dill, the summer

mist of the nearby ocean.

It is as surprising

as the reality

of the smell

of incontinence and the sound

of gag, as surprising as how

you now tumble into

the sweetness of the lily

of the valley that borders

her garden in the spring after

her passing, how its

scent surrounds you

as you fall

having dared

yourself

into drunken somersaults.

Performing cartwheels.

Now

laughing.

Now

crying.

You know as well as I do that

if you could go back

and flip open

the blue plastic cover

of the Johnson & Johnson, squeeze out

a quarter’s worth of lotion into

your palm, peel back

the sock from

her gnarled

toes, pluck the strings that stick to her

yellowed toenails, rub

the goop up and over, around the

Achilles,

take this all back

to God, to,

for a moment, bow

before the power of it,

you would.

But now that it is over

there is nothing left

to do.

So, you

pick up

one

foot

slightly,

leave the weight

for a moment

on your back foot.

You will remember how

to do it, when the time

comes,

when it is

your turn.

Just breathe deep.

On three.

THE THREE CURRENCIES OF DOCTOR KULICK

JON COHN

The way I see it, there are three kinds of currencies. The first one’s a given—money. You earn it by doing stuff you don’t like, then spend it on things you do.

The second currency is pain. It’s easy to earn—hit the gym too hard, get rejected at the bar, run a red light, and suddenly you’re rolling in it.

You can spend pain, too. You can’t just slap it down on the counter like a twenty and say, “Hey Mac, this round’s on me.” But you can exchange it for something else, most of the time. Pain at the gym will give you a couple uncomfortable days, but at the end, you’ll net stronger muscles. Getting rejected at the bar sucks, but it’s practice, and after a few beers, you’re primed to try again to meet that special someone. The pain earned from a broken body, though—that’s a check that can’t be cashed.

Trust me, I’ve lived through enough to understand the currencies of money and pain. I’ve spent the last fifteen-odd years earning a steady supply of pain after getting T-boned by a semi. The surgery bills alone put me and my family into extreme debt, and the injuries made me into a fucking billionaire in pain.

That brings me to the third currency in life: hope. This one’s a fickle bitch. See, when it comes to money and pain, there’s no limit to how wealthy or how poor you can be. There’s always room to have more… or less. But hope is finite. You start with only so much, and when you’re low, you gotta pinch every penny, because the minute your hope account hits zero, it’s all over. There ain’t no coming back from zero.

I used to be filthy rich in hope. As a teenager, I was a musician. Before all these YouTube stars were a thing, I had it in me to be a one-man band. I could play Van Halen’s “Eruption” on guitar, smash into Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” on drums, then bring you to fucking tears with Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” I was good. I had more than enough hope to be the next big thing. These days, though, the amount of hope I have could be lost down the cracks of a couch like spare change.

You know who’s good at dealing in all three currencies? Doctors. “I’ve treated many people with your condition before,” they say. “You’ll be playing again in no time.” This is the part where they loan you some hope, and the desperate sucker in you falls for it. Every. Single. Time. You hear their words and see their confidence, and you let yourself believe them. But just as you can be certain that those docs can loan you hope, you’re damn right they always come back to collect with interest. They take all the money you have, and as a bonus, hand off a non-returnable deposit of pain from whatever whackadoo procedure they performed.

The problem with hope is once you lose enough of it, you get awfully stingy. You hold onto it so tight you can’t bear to part with what little you have left, even for stupid stuff. Forget hoping that doctors can fix you. At a certain point, you can’t even look behind the sneeze guard at Panda Express to see if they got the fresh stuff or just the dredges of burnt orange chicken that’s been sitting there all afternoon. The idea of spending any hope just feels too damn expensive.

I had just about given up on medicine entirely when I met Doctor Kulick. Something about this guy seemed different. Not only did he share my outlook on pain, he had built his whole career on it.

“That’s actually the reason I called you,” he said over the phone after ringing me up out of the blue. “One of my colleagues told me about your philosophy regarding the three currencies. If you’ll excuse my saying so—I don’t want to get your hopes up—but I do think I can help you.”

I’d told my theory to dozens of doctors. Some disregarded my comments entirely; most dismissed my ideas in that condescending tone all doctors seem to have mastered. I cracked my knuckles, anxious about the empty promises this guy was about to spew. “What makes you think you can help me?”

“My approach is a little unorthodox,” the doctor said. “I know you’ve had your fair share of experimental treatments, but I can guarantee you’ve never tried anything like this.”

“I’m listening.” Those last few coins of hope jingled in my pocket. I’d gotten pretty good at pinching pennies, but something about this guy kept me on the line.

“I’m sure you’re well familiar with pain management techniques—the pills, the nerve-blocking TENS units. I work a bit differently. As you say, pain is a very real thing. A currency, as you put it. My system removes your pain directly instead of masking it.”

“So, you’re saying you will take my pain away?”

“Precisely.”

I was halfway between telling him to get fucked or hanging up. I was in no rush to spend what few coins of hope I had left.

“I’ll pay you for your time, whether the procedure is a success or not,” he said.

I asked the dreaded question. “How much?”

“That depends on how well things go. A thousand dollars just to get you in the door, with more to come if things go as I expect they will.”

A doctor wanted to pay me a thousand bucks to get treated? I figured this guy must be insane. I looked over at the stack of overdue bills on the folding chair that doubled as my dining table. A thousand dollars would keep a roof over my head for at least another couple of months.

“You promise this ain’t a prank or something? You’re not gonna, like, eat me alive or nothing like that?”

Doctor Kulick laughed. “I promise. You can even bring a friend as a witness if you would like.”

I would’ve called his bluff, if I’d had any friends left. Most of ‘em stopped talking to me after I’d “borrowed” money for procedures.

“Alright, Doc. You got me. Just tell me when and where.”

Two days later, I was standing outside a rundown warehouse in an abandoned industrial park. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. This was a concrete graveyard filled with crackheads and the mentally ill, all of them swimming up to their eyeballs in pain. If this guy did what he said he did, why not just step outside and take a stroll? Something in the back of my head told me to jump back in the car, head home, and lose this wacko’s number before my organs got harvested.

But I remembered the bills I had to pay. I squeezed those last pennies of hope as hard as I could and headed for the building.

Duct-taped to the door was a sheet of paper with “Dr. Calvin Kulick, Orthobiologist,” printed in plain, black text. I knocked. It wasn’t ten seconds before a man with wild hair as white as his lab coat appeared.

“Ah, Mr. Sanderson, I knew you’d come,” he said with a crooked grin.

“Where’s my thousand bucks? I want to see it before we get any further.”

Doctor Kulick looked to be in his early seventies, but his smile made him look older. He shoved a hand into his pocket and pulled out a neatly wrapped roll of bills. “Here it is, my boy. Feel free to put that in your pocket. If everything works as I intend, you’ll leave with a lot more.”

“And if it don’t?”

“You will still get to keep that money for your time, as promised.”

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I couldn’t help but feel my meager stash of hope start to multiply.

“So, uh, what exactly are we doing here today, Doc?”

“The process is complicated, but the principle is something you’re already well acquainted with.” He turned and shuffled inside the dark warehouse, leaning heavily on a cane. I wondered, if this guy’s got the cure to pain, why the hell was he limping along like the rest of us schmucks?

I followed him inside. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but when they did…

Listen, I’ve been to every kind of doctor’s office. From the converted old Tudor houses to the ultra-modern megastructures that looked like they got disinfected every hour. Doctors’ offices had vinyl chairs and crummy mass-produced art on the walls. They all had some sort of sterile-looking supply carts on wheels with stainless steel gadgets.

This wasn’t a doctor’s office at all. At the center of this rotting warehouse sat a machine cobbled together using junkyard scraps. It looked like a set piece from a Saw movie. Nothing about it looked sterile.

No wonder this guy was set up in an abandoned warehouse; if he showed this thing to the public, he’d lose his medical license.

“Where’s Igor?” I mumbled.

Doctor Kulick stared at me with cold, blank eyes. “Joke all you want. I’m about to make you a very happy man.”

“Sure.” That prickling sensation at the back of my neck told me to run, but the thousand bucks in my pocket weighed my feet down.

Doctor Kulick hobbled up the steps onto a platform, where a table sat between two sections of the huge machine. “If you would please take off your jacket and shirt, I’ll just have you lie down here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not into any of that funny business.”

“Just bear with me a bit longer,” he said. “You’ve already come this far, haven’t you?”

I sighed, then shrugged off my jacket slowly, arm by arm. Any quick movement could cause a spasm. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off in the same careful fashion.

“They really did a number on you,” Doctor Kulick remarked as he inspected my scarred body. The way he regarded me, like a cut of beef at the butcher’s, made me crack my knuckles. The sound echoed in the massive space.

“I guess who needs Igor when you’ve already got Frankenstein’s monster standing in front of you, huh doc?”

Doctor Kulick ignored me. “Just lie on that table, head facing this way. Apologies if it’s a little cold.”

“A cold table is the least of my worries.” I did as he asked. My spine ached, and pain radiated down my lower back.

The doctor began sticking electrodes all over me. That was no big deal. But when he came back with a handful of hypodermic needles attached to clear tubes, fear started kicking me in the chest.

“I know what other doctors say,” he murmured. “‘Don’t worry. This won’t hurt a bit.’ I’ll be honest with you. You’re going to feel some pricks as I insert these, but I promise that is the only pain you will experience. Afterward, you’ll feel like a new man.” He got that smile again, and it was almost worse than when he had no expression at all.

Then he began strapping my wrists to the table with leather belts.

“The fuck is this about!” I struggled against the harnesses. So far, I’d managed a real tough-guy attitude, but nothing beats that punk-shit out of you like suddenly finding yourself truly helpless.

“It’s only a precaution to make sure you lie still during the procedure. If you relax, I promise this will all be over in a few minutes.”

“I didn’t sign up to be strapped to a table like a gimp,” I spat. “Let me out of here!”

His head jerked back as if my demand had affronted his sensibilities. “I believe I made it clear to you, Mr. Sanderson, that this is an experimental procedure. One in which you volunteered to take part.” I felt a pinch on my wrist as the leather belt tightened around it. “As I said, these straps are purely for your safety. If you feel uncomfortable, you are free to leave.” He released me from the binding.

I sat up, rubbing my chafed wrists. “Fine,” I huffed.

“I must inform you that if you leave this room, you will not be welcome back,” he said. “And the pain you carry will only grow. If you leave now, I will have no choice but to permanently remove you from the program.”

I glanced at my wrists, then at the leather straps on the table. My lower back throbbed just from holding myself up. This was the other trick all doctors had mastered. They made you feel bad even if they were the ones acting like assholes. Slowly, I settled back down.

“Excellent,” he said. “Now hold still.” He refastened the straps around my limbs, then ran another long strap across my shoulders. When a strip of leather crossed my forehead, I steadied my breathing to keep the panic from setting in.

Then came the needles. All in all, he stuck me with six large hypodermics—the first two went into my forearms below the elbows, while the second two were stuck just above the straps around my ankles.

“These last ones will feel a bit unpleasant.” There was something like glee in his voice as he leaned over my immobilized head to look me in the eye. “I’ll need you to hold perfectly still.”

“The way you got me tied down, I’m not sure I could—” A needle pierced the side of my neck. I rattled against the restraints, shivering from pain. My muscles tightened. White-hot, searing pain shot through my head, so bad it made my eye twitch.

“Just relax,” Doctor Kulick said. “Only one more.” A second needle penetrated the other side of my neck.

“Jesus, fuck,” I screamed. “You could have warned me you were going to be sticking needles into my goddamn neck!”

“Don’t worry,” the old man said. “They’ll be out soon enough, and you’ll be thanking me for this experience.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They always do.”

I heard Doctor Kulick limp around to the far side of the machine. He twisted knobs, pulled levers. Somewhere behind me, the rusted behemoth chugged to life. It rumbled rhythmically, vibrating the steel table. My skull and teeth chattered. I suddenly understood the need for the straps; otherwise, I might have been shaken right off the thing. The smell of burnt rubber made me gag. I sneezed and the needles in my neck felt as if they were being stabbed into me all over again.

“Starting the procedure in three… two… one!” He pulled one last lever. I watched as blood surged through the tubes attached to me.

But, no, it wasn’t blood. It was too rich, too bright. As it was pumped out of me, I began feeling a cool, tingling sensation. My head started to dance a bit, like I’d had too many beers. Slowly, my pain faded. The cold, hard steel no longer jabbed into my spine. My lumbar muscles relaxed. The machine ran until the tubes slurped like straws straining for the last drops of milkshake.

The machine cut power. The motors grumbled until the warehouse was silent.

“How do you feel?” the doc asked as he pulled everything off me and unstrapped the leather harnesses.

“I feel…” I sat up. Not a prick of pain in my back. I rolled my shoulders around in their sockets, and they glided with ease. “Pretty damn good, actually.”

“Careful. You may want to get up slowly. The process can leave you a bit lightheaded.”

I didn’t just feel lightheaded; I felt light everything. I hopped to my feet, bouncing around for the first time in years. “Seriously, Doc, I feel friggin’ great. What the hell did you just do to me?”

Kulick grinned, his eyes wide with fevered pride. “Look over there.” He pointed to a series of glass jars sticking out of the machine filled with bright red, almost glowing liquid. “That is your pain.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said, reaching for my shirt.

“It’s just as you said. Pain is a physical thing, a currency just as real as the cash in your pocket. Other doctors try to mask your pain, but I’ve found a way to pull it straight from your body. You’re looking at all the pain that was inside you.”

“Jesus-fucking-Christ,” I said. “How the hell did you figure this out?”

“Years of practice.” Carefully, he unscrewed the vials of pain. “Now, let’s see. I was able to successfully harvest four and a half jars from you. At a thousand per jar, what do you say we call it an even five thousand dollars? That is, on top of the bonus you collected earlier.”

Not only had this guy cleaned out my pain account, my meager investment and stock in hope had skyrocketed.

“This is unbelievable. What’s the catch?”

“The catch,” he said, handing me five more stacks of bills, “is that I haven’t actually cured any of your injuries. In time, you will earn all that pain back.”

“What happens then?”

“When you’ve earned enough pain so you feel that it’s once again untenable, just give me a call.”

My heart sank. “Oh. I see how it is. The first time you pay me to take the pain. Get me hooked. Then next time I’m desperate, that’s when I pay you. Real fucking clever, Doc.”

Doctor Kulick waved his hands, his brow furrowing. “You misunderstand me. The deal stands. I will pay you a thousand dollars for every jar of pain you deliver. Though I’m afraid the entry bonus was one-time only. From here on out, you will only be paid for your contributions.”

I threw my jacket on. “You got yourself a deal, doc. Seriously, thank you.”

“Any time, my boy.”

Halfway to the door, a nagging thought crept up on me. “Say, what do you do with it?”

“Pardon?”

“The pain. If you’re willing to pay me this much, there must be some use for it. What the hell do you want with pure pain?”

“Honestly, Mr. Sanderson … do you care?”

A minute later I was literally skipping to my car. I stopped by the music store on the way home and blew a sixth of my earnings on a brand-new Fender, just like the one I had as a kid, along with a Frontman 10G amp.

I was rusty as hell—that’s what fifteen years of not playing will do—but goddamn, it felt good to have music flowing in me again. I stumbled through some of the classics from my youth. “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones came out just as wicked as I remembered. My fingers blistered from playing so much. But that bit of pain was money in the bank, as far as I was concerned.

I moved on to newer stuff, music that I never imagined I would get a chance to play. I worked my way through all the hits of Muse, a band that hadn’t been around before my accident, mastering both the guitar and bassline to “Hysteria.”

And just like that, I was back to being a one-man band.

On the weekends, I went to concerts, standing room only. Mosh pits weren’t what they used to be, but I made them happen. I got into a fight at a concert and dislocated my shoulder. I considered going to a regular doctor to get it reset properly, but fuck it, the more it hurt, the more money I stood to make. Hell, I thought, how else can I capitalize on this? I got a job as a bouncer at the shittiest bar I could find. Kicking some rowdy punk’s ass for pay was almost as good as getting my ass kicked. Every fight I lost was another couple hundred bucks in my pocket.

A few weeks later, I was back on the table, and I skipped out with a cool three grand. I used it to pay off all my back-owed rent and even put down a few payments on some of the most delinquent hospital bills.

All the while, I kept playing my music, spending every waking moment while not at work mastering my favorite songs. I even started writing my own stuff.

I began playing shows, working with a few local bands in need of a last-minute bassist, drummer, or rhythm guitarist. I didn’t care what instrument they wanted me to play; I was just happy to be on stage. One night, I got a little too in the moment and tripped over a cable, taking a nosedive into an amp. The band stopped, people ran to my side and the frontman asked, “Oh my God, are you okay?”

I climbed back to my feet, spat out a tooth and grinned, blood running from my mouth like a waterfall. I leaned into his microphone, and I shouted the first thing that came to me: “I’m more than okay, I am the Blood God of Rock and Fucking Roll!” I borrowed an extended solo from Van Halen and the crowd went wild.

Apparently, someone was recording the whole thing because three days later I had gone viral on the internet. Up-and-coming bands started hounding me to play with them as a guest star. For some, I was a bigger draw than the band themselves. “Tonight only, Dewey and the Dipshits featuring Kyle Sanderson, the Blood God of Rock and Roll.”

I wasn’t just subbing in for sick or deadbeat drummers; hurting myself onstage was the main attraction. Folks went crazy for a lead guitarist who would smash his face into a mirror mid-show.

I made money, not a ton. The real paydays came from visiting Doctor Kulick. Within a few months, I got into good standing with all my debts. Finally, the day came when I had enough cash to pay my family back. I thought about the people I’d lost after the accident and all the promises I’d broken. I could start crossing names off my ledger.

I gave my sister a check for eight hundred bucks. I told her I knew it wasn’t much, but it was a down payment to start making things right. I cut one to my dad, and another to an old buddy who hadn’t talked to me in almost ten years. We grabbed a beer together, and I let him smash me in the nuts with a two-by-four.

All the while, I was taking stock of my three currencies. Money was flowing faster than the rivers of blood I shed each night. Pain was high, but that was a good thing. Whenever it got too much, a quick visit to Doc Kulick reset my balance to zero and funded another few weeks of my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

And for the first time since I was a kid, I was rich in hope. I had a future again. Something to live for. Something to love.

One night after a gig, some young blond number came up to me, asking if she could come back to my place for a drink.

“I look like a horror show under this,” I warned her, knowing how the night would likely end. I’d seen too many looks of disgust once someone caught a peek under my shirt.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I think scars are sexy.”

She wasn’t lying. For the first time in years, I rocked the bed with someone who didn’t charge me at the end of the night. I mean, shit, she even made me breakfast in the morning. If that don’t give someone hope for a brighter future, I don’t know what would.

Then the day that I had always dreamed of finally came. A band I’d been working with called Ghastly Gary’s Midnight Massacre had been approached with a major record deal, and they wanted me as their permanent frontman. We were offered a multi-album deal—world tours, merchandise, the whole thing.

But the pain had been mounting back up. There was no way you could have a frontman with bad knees, a locked shoulder, and a messed-up spine. I had to give my old pal Doctor Kulick another call.

“Ah, Mr. Sanderson!” he answered. “I was wondering when I would hear from you again. How are things?”

“Honestly, Doc, they couldn’t be better,” I said. “You’ve given me a second chance at life. All three of my currencies are the highest they’ve ever been, and it’s all thanks to you. You got time for another session?”

“Of course,” he said, sounding almost giddy. “Come by, and I will take all your pain away.”

The next day, I rolled up to the warehouse in my new, fully restored ‘67 Mustang Fastback that I’d blown part of my signing bonus on.

Just as before, he strapped me up to that sweet roaring juggernaut.

“I’ve been following your success,” Doctor Kulick said. “You’ve had quite the transformation.”

“Hell, yeah I have! Hope’s at an all-time high. I couldn’t be happier. But listen—I’ve thought about it, and I really want to know. What do you do with the pain that you harvest?”

“Concentrated pain can be quite the precious commodity to certain individuals,” he said, as he placed electrodes all over me.

“Wait. You sell my pain to others?” I laughed gruffly. “What, you sending this shit to Guantanamo or something?”

“I’ll admit it’s not ideal, but the noble pursuit of science doesn’t pay for itself.”

“Do you know what they’re using it for?”

“I don’t ask,” the doctor said, “and they don’t tell.”

“But don’t you think it’s a little fucked up to be selling pain for people to do God knows what with?”

“With the data I’m collecting, one day there could be one of these machines in every hospital in the country. I need money to keep gathering that data,” he said. “You should know the cost of things better than anyone. What do you think it’s worth for a breakthrough of this magnitude?”

I chewed on that for a second. “I guess so.”

The doctor froze. “Are you having second thoughts?”

I considered that for half a second. “Hell no, Doc. Suck me dry.”

A twisted smile wrung from his lips. “Excellent.” As usual, he shackled me up, stuck needles in my limbs and neck. But this time, he placed a tube right in the center of my chest.

“Whoa, this is new,” I said.

“I’ve refined my process, increasing efficiency.”

“Does this mean even more money?”

Doctor Kulick hobbled to his machine. “For what comes out of there, I’ll pay double.” He pulled knobs and levers. The machine rumbled to life. “Are you ready?”

“Suck away,” I said.

He flipped a switch, and I watched as bright red liquid pumped out of my arms and legs.

“Hey.” I noticed the liquid pumping through the tube from my chest was a brilliant, almost glowing blue. “What the hell is this stuff?”

“As you said, Mr. Sanderson, you are topped up on all three currencies. Money, pain…and hope. If you thought pure distilled pain was valuable, I’m sure you can only imagine what pure hope is worth to the right buyer.”

“Stop!” I screamed. “I didn’t agree to this!” I fought against the straps. But the blue liquid kept pumping out of me. I thrashed around. Slowly, little by little, I realized my struggle was pointless.

More than that—everything was pointless.

A minute later, the tubes ran dry. He unstrapped me and pulled the equipment out of my body.

“Six jars of pain, and four vials of hope! A generous haul.” He scrounged around in a lockbox beside him and brought out a huge stack of cash. “As we agreed, here’s six thousand for the pain. The hope is worth double. That comes to fourteen thousand dollars,” he said, holding out the money.

“Keep it.” I rose painlessly to my feet. I didn’t bother to grab my shirt or jacket before I walked out of the warehouse.

Like I said before, pain and money were easy to come by, but hope was a tough one. Even at my poorest, a penny of hope had been all I needed to make it to the next day. Kulick hadn’t just made a full withdrawal. He’d closed the fucking account.

Absolute zero.

I got into my Mustang and drove. When I got home, I closed the garage door behind me. I left the car running, as I listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” on repeat.

BROTHER BONES

KATHERINE GAFFNEY

we never discuss them, not until

growth bisects

traditional anatomy, like a tree root

lifts squares

of pavement, inviting hurried walkers

to stumble.

i’ve witnessed my brother’s bones

in white & black,

so I can tell you the growth is anything

but. first, the knee

threatened not to bend, then the ankle

refused to turn. now

it is summer. he learns of his scapula &

crooked hip, his left

leg’s need of lengthening, the extremity

of pain he will

endure & his history’s intrusion on relief.

our mother, who

has replaced many of her bones with metal

pins & buttons,

will wheel him through her French doors,

the only entrance

to her home requiring no stairs. she will steady

her rigid neck & pairs

of steel knees & hips to pour him onto the sofa.

an incomplete collection

of bones helping another collection to heal.

LULLABY

MADELINE HAZE CURTIS

The morning after the surgery, I find my mother at my kitchen table. She says, “You should really pick a better place for your spare key.”

It’s been a year since I last saw my mother, and now she’s sitting in the chair that used to be Penny’s, holding Penny’s favorite mug, the one I hid in the back of my closet when she was packing up to leave.

I say, “Mom, you can’t just show up in people’s houses.”

My mother is very beautiful, and because she’s beautiful, everything she does seems elegant and tragic. She shakes her beautiful head. “A daughter should answer her mother’s calls, Celeste. A daughter should tell her mother when she’s sick.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, not because I think she’s right, but because my pain pills haven’t kicked in yet, and my stitches are tugging at my skin, threatening to come uprooted, and I just want to lie down on the couch and disappear.

“If I hadn’t talked to Penny, I never would have known you were sick.”

“Penny called you?”

“I called her. How was I supposed to know you’d broken up? She told me about the surgery, and I came right away. You need someone to take care of you, Celeste.”

“I don’t need anybody,” I say. “I’m not even sick anymore. I’m a new woman.” I attempt a smile, but it fits all wrong on my face.

“Life’s one big joke to you, Celeste. Even your health. Even your poor old mother.”

“That’s not true,” I say halfheartedly.

My mother stands, draining the rest of her coffee. She rummages through the liquor cabinet and pulls down a handle of whiskey, which she pours liberally into her empty mug. Leaning back against the counter, she says, “I can’t help but blame myself for your illness. I shouldn’t have fed you all that processed sugar. I was only shaving years from your life. And for what? It’s not like giving you all that candy made you like me.”

“You didn’t shave years from my life,” I say. “The doctor said it was a simple procedure. They got it all out, no problem.” I decide to try smiling again.

“Can you stop doing that with your face?”

I say, “Does Dad know you’re here?”

My mother scowls. “Fine. I left your father. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Every time my mother leaves my father, she acts as though it’s the first. Every time, I play along. I arrange my face into an expression of dismay. “Oh, no.”

“Your father is a tyrant,” my mother says. “I can’t stand him.”

I know my father, with his rules and regiments. He caps showers at five minutes and color-codes the cereal cabinet. A sloppily made bed derails his entire day. I understand why my mother has left him again and again since I was a child. What I’ve never understood is why she goes back.

My mother says, “Nobody loves me. I have to break into your house to get you to talk to me.”

“I need to lie down.”

I hobble across the room and drop my body onto the couch. I sink into the couch. I become the couch. I am an upholstered girl, packed with cotton.

My mother settles into the armchair, tapping her nails against her mug. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I can’t sleep with you watching me.”

“Sure, you can. When you were a baby, I used to watch you sleep all the time.”

“Fine,” I say, mostly because I want her to stop talking. I close my eyes and make my breathing deep and slow. The cuckoo clock in the corner ticks and ticks. The clock is one of Penny’s useless novelties. It’s always losing time, going off at random. Maybe the clock is why I feel like I’m still on Penny’s time, even though she’s been gone almost three months. Every time the little wooden bird springs out of the clock, I expect Penny to reappear, to tell me she was wrong, that she still loves me, after all.

“I know you’re pretending,” my mother says, after maybe a minute has passed. “I can see your eyes twitching around.”

I keep my eyes shut. “I’m not tired anymore.”

Something tickles my cheekbone. My mother must be standing over me, waiting for me to fall asleep, her hair swinging into my face. I raise my hand to brush her hair away, but my fingers meet with something inhuman, something small and bristly and alive. I try to bat it away, but it sticks to my finger like gum. It’s a caterpillar with a white stripe down its back, furred with fine, rust-colored hairs.

“Webworm,” my mother says from across the room.

“What?”

“It’s a webworm.” My mother unfolds her legs, walks over to me, and scoops the caterpillar into her palm, allowing it to scurry from one hand to the other. She bears it to the door. “Out you go,” she says, depositing it into the rosebush outside. Then she returns to the armchair, wiping her hands on her pants. “You’re in trouble now, Celeste. We used to have webworms on my grandmother’s farm. Where there’s one, there’ll be thousands more. They travel in—what do you suppose they call a group of caterpillars? A pride? A peck?”

At last, the pills kick in. The world takes on a dusky glow. My mother’s face is softer in this light. Kinder. She looks shimmery, holographic, as though at any moment she might flicker out.

“Do you want a blanket?” my mother asks. Her voice sounds tinny and far away, coming out of her big gold face, her shiny red mouth.

I’m about to say I’d rather not have a blanket over me right now, that I’m happy to drift in my body as though in a warm pool, but she’s already seized the heavy knit throw that Penny loved, the one that makes my throat burn. She tucks it around my body. “There, there,” my mother says, like she’s reading from a script. “Your mother is here.”

My mother announces she’ll stay until I’ve recovered from my surgery. “You need me,” she says. She reaches for my face. I flinch, momentarily sure that when she touches me, I will be dispelled, like a reflection startled from water. Instead, when her fingers meet my cheek, I’m made very aware of my body, and of my mother’s body, and of the fact that that my body once fit perfectly inside hers. That there was a time when she couldn’t leave me, even if she wanted to.

Over the next two days, she works her way through the rest of my whiskey, then starts on the wine. She watches The Bachelorette and Antiques Roadshow. I remain on the couch, beneath the knit throw Penny loved. The fibers of it rub my esophagus raw with each inhale. I watch the shadows of trees joust on the ceiling. The shadows have pretty, doily patterns; I enjoy watching them. When my pills kick in, I feel as though I’m being lowered into my own grave, but in a pleasant kind of way. Life is nice. I was sick and now I’m better.

Twice a day, I go into the bathroom to change my bandage. I keep the lights off, the blinds drawn. I should be inspecting the wound for signs of infection, but I can’t bear to look at it, that cut along the center of me, like a zipper. So I go by touch alone, peeling away the dirty gauze and wincing as the tape pulls at the downy hairs on my stomach. I dip a large Q-tip in antibiotic ointment, smearing it over the wound site. Then I apply a new pad of gauze. I’m all packaged up, held together with tape and black thread.

On the second night of my mother’s stay, I come out of the bathroom and catch her looking out the window, at the stark black sky, the pine trees fringing the yard. “It’s so lonely here,” she says. “How can you stand it?”

Across the room, the doors of the cuckoo clock fly open. The wooden bird announces another hour that Penny has been gone. I say, “I don’t get lonely.”

My mother shakes her head. “Honey, you’ve been lonely since the moment they pulled you out of me. I remember the first time I looked at you. I’d never seen a sadder baby.”

“Great,” I say. “That’s great to hear, Mom.”

“I’m just telling you the truth. Do you want me to lie to you?”

My gaze lands on the maple tree in the corner of the yard. It’s covered in white netting, like a wedding veil. When the wind blows, the gauze of it billows and shakes.

“That’s the nest tree,” my mother says. “Where the webworms go.”

The tree looks blighted and weary, as though at any moment it will fall over. “It’s awful,” I say. “Shouldn’t we tear all that stuff down?”

“It’s only where the webworms go before they become the next thing. Why would we take that from them?”

I picture moths the size of newborns gnawing their way out of the nest, opening like envelopes to the world. I pull the curtains closed.

At night, I can feel the webworms on every inch of me. Their many legs, their needle-fine bristles. I can hear their webs unspooling, whirring like cast fishing lines. They want to cover me up, make a nest tree of me. I shuck off my covers and switch on my bedside lamp, inspecting my entire body for webworms, but I don’t see any. They’re simply hiding, I decide. Webworms are clever. They know how not to be seen.

In the morning, my neck and forearms itch, a bone-deep itch that doesn’t go away, no matter how vigorously I scratch.

“The webworms,” my mother says grimly. “You must be allergic.”

I slather my arms and legs in calamine lotion and douse myself in bug spray. I roll up towels and shove them under the doors. I tape over the cracks in the walls, any point of entry big enough for a webworm to fit through. The pain from my wound worsens with my every movement, like a knife pressing deeper into my skin. I swallow more pills.

My mother watches me from Penny’s armchair as I attempt to tape a trash bag over the window overlooking the nest tree. She uncorks a bottle of red wine and fills Penny’s mug to the brim. “The more you try to keep them out, the more they want to come in.”

“Can’t you just help me?” I say. As I try to lift the trash bag, my stitches pull taut and I feel as though I’m ripping open. I drop the trash bag and curl in on myself, pressing my hands to my bandage, trying to hold myself together.

“What do you want me to do?” my mother says. “Really, Celeste, tell me. What do you want from me?”

Three nights later, my mother announces that we’re going out. “Girls’ night,” she says. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“Not really.”

She glowers at me. “You can’t rot in this house forever.”

“I can try.”

“Fine. I’ll leave you here, with the worms.”

Defeated, I pack a few pain pills into the pocket of my sweatpants and limp to the car. I’ve never been so aware of the skin on my stomach. How it folds and unfolds, like a greeting card, each time with a fresh jolt of pain. My mother gets behind the wheel. I close my eyes as we streak down the interstate, fog trailing behind us like a drag net.

We drive into town, pulling up to the first bar my mother sees. There’s a neon cow mounted on the roof, spinning around and around.

“Stand up straight,” my mother says, as we walk to the door. “You’re going to end up a hunchback, like your grandmother.”

“I can’t stand up straight. It hurts.”

My mother’s hand flattens against my back. “You just need to get used to it.”

The bar is warm and dark. My mother orders us each a gin and tonic, and we move to a booth by the jukebox. My mother casts her eyes around the bar. No matter where she is, she looks like she’d rather be somewhere else. She finishes her drink and rises to get another. From the booth, I watch her stop by a group of men playing darts. She smiles the wide white smile she reserves for handsome strangers. We really look nothing alike, my mother and me. I grew up solemn and dour-looking, like my father. My mother glows. She shucks off heat like a burning stove. The air around her buckles and warps.

I lean back in the booth, fretting with the cotton stuffing that froths through a rent in the leather. I form a ball of it between my hands. I close my eyes and let the lights smear across the backs of my eyelids, allowing myself to be eaten up by sound, to go transparent.

When I open my eyes, there’s a girl sitting across from me in the booth. “Are you okay?” she says. “Do you need me to get someone?”

“I’ve never felt better. They cut all the bad stuff out of me.” I smile, and this time the expression stays on my face, but it might be too much, given the way the girl’s eyes widen, like she’s afraid.

“Congrats,” she says, though there’s something in her voice that makes me wonder if she really means it. “What’s that?” She points at my hands.

“What?” I look down at myself, trying to see what might be wrong with me. Then I see the hives across my skin, disappearing into the sleeves of my sweater. “Oh. That’s just my rash. From the webworms.”

“Ew,” the girl says. “I hate worms.”

“They’re not really worms,” I say, with a flare of defensiveness. “They’re caterpillars. They’re going to change.”

“Okay,” says the girl, with that tone again, drawn out and unsure, like I’ve said something embarrassing.

I drain my gin and tonic. This, in combination with all the pills, makes the world go a little woozy. The lights pulse and flutter.

If I look at her sideways, this girl could almost be Penny. They have the same shoulders, I think. “Can I call you Penny?” I say.

“Um,” the girl says. She casts her eyes around the bar, like she’s looking for somebody. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Penny, I think it’ll be easier to love me now. I’m a new woman. Let’s get out of here, okay? Let’s go home.”

The girl’s eyes are big and round and her mouth is turned down at the corners. The world dips into black, and then she’s gone. I try to search for her in the crowd, but just moving my eyes makes me feel dizzy. There are too many sounds, too many conversations running together. I close my eyes and let those words swim around me, slow and elongated like eels.

Time seems to get crumpled up, then straightened out again. When I open my eyes, there’s a man in front of me. He has a thick yellow mustache and his teeth are whiter than anything I’ve ever seen. His tongue moves around behind his big white teeth. Words come out, but they’re carried away on the stream of everyone else’s words. He leans in close, his mustache tickling my ear. His breath smells like something rotting. The mustache becomes a webworm, crawling along the rim of my ear. I swat the webworm away, my hand colliding with the rubbery skin of a face. A voice cries out, but it could be anyone’s voice, coming from anywhere.

Then the man is gone, and my mother is there. Her mouth moves and, after a brief lag, sound comes. She’s saying my name, over and over. It’s a sound that swims up from beneath all the other sounds, surfacing like the sleek head of an otter. I smile. I’ve never realized how much I like the sound of my name until right now. Celeste, Celeste, Celeste. It has a sound like somebody slipping down a slide. I reach for my mother’s shiny gold face, her beautiful face and her beautiful red mouth. With a face like that, I can’t even blame her for leaving. With a face like that, there’s always somewhere better to be.

She lifts me up and half-carries me to the car. As she leans across me to clip my seatbelt, I smell her lavender perfume and for a moment I feel very young, like I should be much smaller than I am. I flatten my cheek against the window as we rejoin the interstate.

“I’m a bad mother,” my mother says. She makes a wet, shuddering sound and I realize she’s crying. Maybe I would comfort her, but my tongue is too heavy.

After a while, my mother turns on the radio and soft, staticky music fills the car. She sings along, her voice husky and rich, and though I know she just likes the sound of herself, I can pretend she’s singing for me, as I half-remember her singing me a lullaby when I was little, though maybe I just saw that in a movie somewhere.

I’m home and there’s something wrong with my wound. I can feel it. Someone is holding a lighter to my skin, watching it char and blacken. “It burns,” I say. Tears prick in my eyes. I can’t remember the last time I cried, and it feels embarrassing and wrong. Salinated water leaking from my insides.

“Let me see it,” says my mother, my squeamish mother, who once shut me alone in the bathroom with a first aid kit after I cut my hand.

I lift my shirt, and my mother peels the bandage away. My wound is a jagged mouth, puckered with black thread. The skin around it is bruised yellow and glistens with antibiotic ointment. It doesn’t look like skin anymore. This is somebody else’s stomach, somebody else’s scar. I swear I’ve never seen this body in my life.

My mother runs her finger along the seam of my wound. Her face goes oddly blank. For a moment, I think she’s about to press her lips to my skin. Instead, she replaces the bandage, smoothing it like a wrinkled bed sheet. “You’re going to have a hideous scar.”

I can’t possibly hold this body up anymore. It’s a wonder to me that I ever could. I fall into my bed. My mother takes off my shoes and socks, then gets in beside me, fitting her body to mine. Her arm slings across my waist and it hurts my wound but I say nothing. Her breath is hot at the nape of my neck.

“I can’t go back to your father,” my mother says, after some time has passed.

“He’ll forgive you.”

“That’s the worst part. The goddamn forgiveness.”

“Mom,” I say. “Why didn’t you ever take me with you?”

My mother is quiet. Finally, she says, “Does that really matter anymore?”

Of course it matters, I want to say. I want to say, What is it about me that makes leaving me so easy? But I can’t say any of that. The words get stuck in my mouth. They join all the other words I could never bring myself to say to her, all the other questions I could never bring myself to ask.

My mother’s breathing becomes deep and slow. Her body expands and contracts against mine. Soon, she will return to my father. He’ll be where he always is, watching Wheel of Fortune in his recliner, and her chair will be ready beside him, and she’ll fall back into that life like a coin into a slot.

I can feel the webworms all over. I itch and itch in the dark. I break skin; I draw blood

I can’t bear it anymore. I shrug out from beneath my mother’s arm. My mother’s breath hitches, then smooths again. It’s strange to be the one leaving her behind.

Now I’m standing before the nest tree. I can hear it groaning in the earth. It is staggered beneath the weight of so much gauze, so many webworms. Above me, the webworms are writhing, readying. They are silhouetted in the tent they spun from nothing, from empty air.

I don’t know what I came here to do. Destroy the nest, maybe. Tear it down like streamers after the party has played itself out. But now I’m here, and the world is so quiet, cooled into silver and pale blue. I’m so tired. And this body is so heavy. And I hurt.

I lay my body on the damp ground beneath the nest tree. The webworms rappel down to me through the moon-blanched air. They come on silver strings, like strands of spit. I realize I was wrong to fear them. All they want is to change, to become the next thing. In the branches of the nest tree, they have woven themselves a cradle. They will dream themselves into transformation.

I close my eyes as the webworms swarm. They spin me in silk, tangle me in strands. Soon, they will cover me entirely. I’ll be tucked away, swathed and safe and sleeping. My wound will heal over; my body will become as though it were never sick. What a lovely, remade animal I’ll be, when I am new.

A ZOOM CALL, BEFORE TREATMENT

KAN REN JIE

He has started praying –

my mother says, clenching in her hands

a blurry set of pixels. An image

of him. How strangely

the bones clatter: a field,

torched like water. I imagine

the shooting of beams — the way,

drenched with sweat — the welts

would form, like the lines

that bend to a collar. In the years

before we would run, gasping.

The evening park, the paths that stretched.

A shirt, fluttering. The cicadas

that screeched. His head, its bobbing —

the rounds, paved between us. The evening

sky layered, sewed like seams.

The light a bridge, covering silence.

In the years since

I have searched for an entrance:

to see again – in fluorescence,

the towering columns of clouds, the trees,

their spindly leaves – bodies

that broke sound. His old shirt,

pooling sweat. But now the pixels

strain. I see stretched protrusions —

those asterisks, some glimmers

of light. His blurred

tearing. Like a curved path

forking into the evening —

darkening, the purple dressed

against the trees. For one last round.

This shadow, leaving.

DISTANCE

MALLIKA SEKHAR

April 2020

The ward doctor rang me late in the night to say that the Judge had been admitted with COVID-19 and was not doing well. He wasn’t deemed fit for ICU because of his age and his prior illness, the blood cancer for which my team had been treating him for many years.

I thought about the Honorable Judge much of that night. Judge Sessions was what I called out to the crowd of patients in the waiting room, and it was how I addressed him during our consultations. To most of the staff he was plain John, or Mr. Sessions, but I am partial to the professional address, possibly from my Indian penchant for deference. His numerous letters to us, handwritten in fountain pen on smart, textured, A5 paper, were marked with his name and honorific, leaving no doubt in my mind or in his that he was indeed Judge Sessions.

Dapper, solemn, and meticulous, he was courteous even as he disagreed with you, bringing judicial clarity to our discussions. Over the decade, we moved through treatments, chopping and changing to get his symptoms and blood numbers just so. He never lost patience, tolerating errors and delays. His questions were specific and clear, requiring a response even when they were a nuisance. In slanted handwriting, he asked whether we might wish to adjust the dose of this or that medicine or whether we really meant the new doses that someone else in the team had telephoned him about. Yes, we would reassure.

A year ago, he lost weight and became worried. “Could this mean cancer?” he asked.

“You mean, another cancer?” I replied gently. “You already have one cancer.” The longer one lives with a chronic malignancy of the marrow, the more surprising when it is pointed out that the C-word applies—as though cancer gets diluted out with the passage of time. I explained to him that his marrow was making a category shift for the worse. We changed treatment and his health gradually improved.

I was pleased that he had a straightforward relationship with all of my team, making no irrational demands for a particular physician to attend to him. But I was secretly resentful, sometimes jealous, when someone else randomly picked his chart to see him in the outpatient clinic. Over the past year he was seen by a succession of colleagues; that’s the way it works in the National Health Service of England—no individual joy of meeting a favorite patient, but equity for all.

After that late-night call from the hospital, I lay under a diffracted canopy of stars listening to the unceasing sounds of ambulance sirens. I thought of this remarkable man who I was sure would still be his usual scrutinizing self behind the oxygen mask. I would go to say hello to him the following morning; I would not abandon him. I emailed for permission to enter the Covid ward.

As I started my regular rounds in the morning, my resident informed me that he had died during the night, less than 24 hours after admission. I hadn’t even received a reply to my request.

With such swift deaths, there is no time to answer nonessential emails, no time to hang in there for someone you know to turn up, to seek the reassurance of a familiar face. The tragedy of families barred from the wards of dying patients is immense, but the passing away of a long-time patient without a chance to say goodbye has a sadness of its own. The Judge was, in the memory of all my colleagues, ‘a character’ and we were all sad to have lost him to COVID-19. One must go sometime, but he hadn’t, in our reckoning, gotten to that point.

For many days after, I thought of dialing the Judge’s number to offer his family my condolences. Sometimes I even started dialing, only to disconnect. Not today, it’s too soon. Not today, it’s too late. I wondered when the last time was that I was so moved by a death to feel so uncertain of my responses. I dismissed the thought of attending the Judge’s funeral; Covid funerals were restrictive and groupings were disallowed. And anyway, how could I know what his family thought of us, his doctors, in the events leading up to his death?

April 2021

I was thinking that I should buy a card to send to the Judge’s family on his anniversary. My flight home had just been cancelled; India was now on a red list due to rising Covid cases. My parents told me not to worry, that I could reschedule my trip for June. I talked about my work and my father said to me, “What you are doing is important. Keep at it.” There was a certainty in his voice.

I’ve lived for just over half my life in London, but never felt as removed from India as I did then. It was not just that my flights to India had been cancelled many times. It was that none of my experiences mirrored those of my friends or family in India. Their incomes plummeted, or worse, ceased. Hospitals closed their doors. Those facilities that did accept the infected and the ill ran out of their reserves of oxygen.

Two weeks later I sat at my kitchen table instructing my brother AJ, in Chennai, on how to adjust an oxygen concentrator. I am medical but not technical; he is neither, his income precarious. But he was wonderfully calm, and we fixed the flow rate. Our father’s oxygen level came up from a heart-sinking 72 to 92.

Earlier that morning I’d woken up with a start to the shrill notes of the land line; apparently I’d slept through at least five WhatsApp calls. My father’s Covid symptoms had worsened sharply in the past 24 hours. My mother’s oxygen levels were hovering at 88. For three days we had been in pursuit of oxygen. They were quarantined in separate rooms in their third-floor flat—she in the bedroom, he in the living room. They could see each other through a barred glass window which connected her bedroom balcony to the living room. They watched the cricket matches on TV together. As if by miracle a concentrator arrived that Thursday morning. My mother was more stable, so we put the oxygen up for my father. I made frantic calls to colleagues for advice on optimizing the concentrator.

For a few hours my father held his own. But by nightfall an ambulance was called. AJ stayed home with our mother while my other brother, Babur, escorted my father. I saw my mother on WhatsApp, standing behind the barred windows watching my father leave. They’d been apart for ten days. As my father was hoisted into the ambulance, I imagined that he was comforted by knowing that mother was on the mend.

For the next three days, my father and Babur were lost to us. Babur did not use social media on principle, and my father had never bothered with mobiles. Once, my mother had convinced him to pose for a selfie, but that was about it.

For those three days, my thoughts were in ferment. The oxygen concentrator—I could have done it differently. Better. “Your father is orphaned,” my mother said, with her trademark bluntness.

“He is being looked after by people like me,” I told her. My words fell unheard.

On the one occasion that I got through to Babur, he was incoherent with despair. He relayed the day’s numbers to me: 20, 300, 30%. Blood tests? Cardiac function? He couldn’t clarify what this update from the doctor meant, but I could tell that it was dire.

Babur stayed at a motel by the hospital, but I don’t think he slept. When he suddenly got news that our father was to be intubated, he raced to sign the do-not-resuscitate form; Father had been explicit about that. I imagined Babur running through the midday mirage of the incandescent road, T-shirt soaked with sweat. I could see him grasping the hospital’s Covid-proofed ballpoint, concentrating on that signature, blinking away the salt in his eyes.

Three days after leaving home, my father died amongst strangers.

We couldn’t complain, really. My parents, in their eighties, had been Covid-diligent and due their second dose of the vaccine the week that Covid struck. Compared to the rest of India, we managed to obtain home oxygen, an ambulance with competent professionals, a hospital bed with oxygen supply. I, from my kitchen in London, could supervise my parents’ home treatment which my brother could administer.

My mother told me that the mortuary staff were gracious and kind. Incinerators had broken down in the heat of May, and a central dashboard directed clientele to changed destinations. The staff at the ‘icehouse crematorium’ were compassionate in the middle of the baking heat. They helped families conclude last rites—brief and rushed, but at least something. Father was number four in the queue. The crematorium staff hadn’t been paid in weeks.

After my father’s death, my mother was apprehensive about sleeping alone. She told me that Banu, our daily help, would stay with her some nights. Banu delivered milk to the neighborhood at dawn and cleaned dishes at a dozen homes. She had a milk-cart attached to a bicycle and worked late into the night. “How will you manage this, Banu?” I asked her on WhatsApp. “And how would the payments work?”

“It’s anpu,” she said, using a Tamil word for love. “I don’t want money for it.” Her words were unexpected and overwhelmed me. Of the many types of love, anpu is one that is expressed but not spoken of. And for her to spell it out to me: I felt crass. It then struck me that this emotion described what people gave and received through the pandemic. Both my father and the Judge were isolated from their families—orphaned, as my mother would say. But they received love from strangers—their doctors, nurses, funeral staff. I take solace in the fact that my family received that anpu and I can offer that same love to my patients, who come to me as strangers.

Death of a parent is the diaspora’s lurking menace. The call, the rushed exit from work, the first flight back. The omniscient fear of uselessness at time of need, of not being on time to help, to grieve, to mourn.

It is the expatriate’s lot to be distanced and I had expected no different. But the deep anguish remains. This pandemic has mutated the notion of distance. Every family has been burdened with separation, with permanently incomplete narratives. For me, the need for the physical is overwhelming. My void is not just my father’s absence, nor even the inability to feel my mother’s touch. It is a fragmented void of dislocation—my family’s, my patients’, my own. We all feel orphaned.

Although the Judge’s death preceded my father’s by a year, in my mind, their deaths are meshed together. Even though the time for sending a card to the Judge’s family is long gone, I still think of him. I doubt that he would have used the word “orphaned.” I expect he would have been true to his pragmatic self all the way to the solitary end. Even with the distance between him and his family, the distance between him and the PPE’ed medical teams, I can imagine him examining and perhaps recognizing the love. I only hope that he was able to allow it in, to feel comforted by it that night of the ambulances and sirens.

HOW WE HEAL

CONNEMARA WADSWORTH

the antagonist is a dis-ease

in his lungstage four

he says, I want ten

more years with this woman

a clinical trialwe tend the wounds

cook together

music in the kitchen

we go to appointments

as if we hold a dance card

of names, dates, times

then his hipnext

intestine, more treatment

this silent creepa hunger

a whole body to devour

one organ was a first blossoming

a foreshadowing

seeded the next

my husband’s optimism

carries both of us

he smiles, saysIt’s better than

the alternative

we don’t change our lives

he plays golf, skis

we live in yearsnot months

his hip gives wayradiation

weakens bone

second replacement failsno socket

learns to walk without that hinge

we have the talkwhat are you afraid of

I’ll miss our granddaughter’s graduation

end-of-life care, update wills

I don’t say I can’t bear to see you suffer

nor a wasting ghost of you

he heals quicklynot side-lined

I am in cope mode

brain tumorsthis antagonist,

opponent, villain…

still ten plus years aren’t lost

a day may be tryingwe are partners,

lovershope is not hard

he drives up to the pondand back

in a golf cartopens chairs

we stepinto each day

even as age and luck may

shadow our motion

sit together by the pondhold hands

clink a sip of wine

to a chorus of bull frogs

a choir of bird calls

celebrateour going on

BLACK HOLES

ESTHER ABISOLA OMOLE

“… the mode of an ‘absent presence’…. when ‘the black female body’ is figured, figuration may paradoxically intensify a socially imposed opacity… ’the black female body’ has functioned as a prototypical specimen and trope of disorder.”

- Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

absence is a childseeing herCreatorin the colorless

pockets of distant matterbetween stars.she combsscripturedesperate

for evidencethatdarkness is nextto godliness. What harried

heaven makerclaimed light forHis image?she pinches her flesh

feels unholyfears even small sinschecking for slits in sidewalk

wary of all voidseven in concretewatches the roadcling solid

to her shadowits deepened pithas light retreatsparts like a sea

yieldsto its opacitywhole and languidstretching away

trying to loose itselffrom herSheis unfinished,

a colonbetween139 and 14:I praise you for I am fearful

-ly and wonderfullymade Wonderfulare your works; my soul

knows it very wellthe scriptures rigidlike the fullness of an hour

her fearfluid and unrelentingas agewhat she knowsvery well

arewhat parts if her are blackestthe elbows and kneesthe eyes

searching the skiesfor origincraving itsunmistakable density

IN A FIELD OF UNMARKED GRAVES, ALL YOU SEE IS GRASS

AJ CAMERON

It was fall, my mother standing in the middle of the street crying and hugging neighbors goodbye, my father and I loading the moving truck. It was a better job, my father said, but everyone knew the real reason we were leaving Philadelphia was Laurel Berry.

I was two months into my freshman year of high school and feeling superior for managing to look as expressionless as my father in front of the buzzing hive of well-wishers and looky-loos gathered on the sidewalk come to see us off, the women hugging housecoats closed, the men with gold crosses hanging from chains around their necks.

I’d counted twenty-two boxes when I was through packing my bedroom, and after lugging the last of them up the truck’s crooked metal ramp, I turned to my father, sweating in his shirt-sleeves. “I’m done,” I said. “Can I go down the street now?”

He stopped mid-ramp and blew out a long pissed-off breath, his hips tilted, a box beneath each of his thick arms. “Be back here in fifteen minutes, John, ready to go,” he said without looking at me.

We lived in the middle of Hicks Street, and Laurel was five doors down, in a house with crocheted orange curtains and a stringy tree growing through cracked cement at the curb. She was the only divorced kid I knew, in clothes that were too small for her and floppy brown laceups that didn’t touch her ankles, the heels always dragging behind her out of step, but she wasn’t in that house anymore. Her mom lived there alone now.

I walked to her stoop, the toes of my sneakers not quite touching the first step, the little tree at my back. It was the closest I’d come to her house in four months, ever since she went missing back in June, after school let out.

I dreamed of her every night of those four months. Paralyzing dreams where I’d try to run but couldn’t move, my mother shaking me awake because I was screaming in my sleep. Police scoured the city for her. People left thin grocery-store floral arrangements wrapped in purple cellophane on her doorstep and wedged rolled-up notes into the black iron hand-railing of her stoop. She wasn’t missing more than a week, but it stretched out to what felt like forever.

They found her body on the seventh morning buried in a shallow grave in a field off Cottman Avenue. Cop cars blocked our street, their red and blue lights flashing. Only four months after that and our moving van’s hazard lights were blinking on the street as neighbors jammed the metal ramp back into the truck for my father.

He’d be yelling for me soon. I had to do it quickly, before anyone noticed. I didn’t want Laurel’s mother coming out and catching me. Not that she came out much when there was any sort of commotion on the street, thank God. She was hard to look at, sitting there by herself like she did, staring off into space. Sometimes, in the beginning, I’d wave, but she’d just look at me, mad or confused, like she forgot that she was supposed to wave back. After a while I kept out of her way.

I stuck the rolled up note I’d written the night before into Laurel’s railing beside a cheap-looking blue daisy. I couldn’t be honest in the note, of course; anyone could read it. I had to sound like everybody else. Stupid, but I couldn’t be the only one that didn’t leave her anything.

I’ll never forget you, Laurel. I’m sorry.

It wasn’t enough to only write these words; I wanted to scream them. I wanted to smash a rock into her window, a thousand rocks. I wanted to know if her mother knew that I was leaving.

“I’ll never forget you, Laurel,” I said as loudly as I dared before running back to the moving van that had just started its engine for Nebraska.

Windows down. Air.

Sunflower seeds spit into a foam cup, yellow-green pastures paved over city streets and everywhere white clapboard churches and girls with hay-colored hair.

I changed as much as my surroundings, but slower. Each box unpacked in each strange farmhouse room was like having a piece of my old self lopped off. Moving was a lot like death: the old life gone and buried so a new one could begin, people left behind to mourn you, or not. Eventually, unconsciously, I unwound long-formed habits that had once made me who I was but did me no favors in my new rural school. In time, my rough city edges smoothed over and after four years of high school and four years of college, I could barely remember Philadelphia.

I married a girl whose family traced back to the Mayflower, but who’d never ventured past Nebraska’s state line. I landed a job in sales after college and my career and marriage progressed in all of the uneventful obligatory ways until one summer when I traveled to Philadelphia on business. Elizabeth, my wife, suggested we make a vacation out of it. “It’s your hometown,” she said.

We saw the Liberty Bell, ate pretzels from food trucks in center city, and drove to Cape May to swim in the ocean. Towards the end of our trip, she asked to see my old neighborhood, but I resisted.

“C’mon.” She smiled. “I always wanted to see where you came from.”

“It’s a crappy neighborhood. You’d be disappointed.”

“It’s the first fourteen years of your life … and you never talk about it.” She said it gently, but I still looked away. She never pushed for all of me, not like some of my needier college girlfriends. I wouldn’t have known how to give her that much anyway.

“Please, John.” And she took my hand, gave it a squeeze.

We made plans to go the following afternoon, our last full day in Philadelphia.

It had been sixteen years since I last saw South Philly. I was a stranger walking down Hicks Street, hand in hand with my wife. The row homes were smaller and uglier than I remembered, dingy brick rectangles wedged in tight like teeth—two brown rows of them, facing off across the black asphalt of the absurdly narrow street. We’d gone five paces and I already wanted to leave.

Restless, I scanned further down the block, and spotted her immediately—the old familiar silhouette resting an elbow on one boney knee, her chin in an upturned palm. I couldn’t make out the details of her face, but I knew it was Laurel’s mother.

It was my own fault. I assumed I could come back anonymously and … what? Leave without incident? I didn’t speak as we walked; I couldn’t hear. I focused only on Mrs. Berry up ahead as she sat motionless on her stoop, on the third step—the same step Laurel and I practically lived on throughout eighth grade, our arms tight around each other. Some winter nights when it got dark early, Laurel would unzip her black jacket and I’d pry off my glove with my teeth, slip a cold hand inside. I’d burrow underneath her shirt, her loose bra, touch her warm skin, feel the goosebumps rise against my fingers while neighbors dragged metal trash cans to the curb and took their dogs out to piss on each other’s houses. Some of them stared over at us in the dark, shaking their heads, the black of our similar coats and gloves making it hard to tell where our hands were exactly.

My wife stopped abruptly. “2520!” she said. “This is it, isn’t it?”

Same door. The house looked so unchanged that I wondered if any of the old neighbors walked past it and thought of me. Elizabeth let go of my hand and hopped up the steps. She rang the bell, grinning down at me.

I was slipping into the past, hardly noticing. As if it were yesterday, I saw the cruiser lights once again blinking off the brick-front houses. Laurel’s body had been buried near the auto-body shop where her mother’s live-in boyfriend worked. The morning they found her, the police dragged Ray shirtless from Laurel’s house and shoved him into a cop car, red and blue lights flashing. We all crept out of our houses, hands rising in slow motion towards our faces. He thrashed against the police, against his cuffs. It was an accident, he said. He’d only meant to quiet her down.

Elizabeth knew nothing about the lives of the people on this street. “Do you think you’ll know the folks who live here now?” She asked me, beaming, almost giddy and I had the sudden urge to scream at her and wipe the smile off her face.

A very short young woman answered the door just then, adorned in heavy black eyeliner and gold hoop earrings. The gold hoops flashed against the dark olive of her rounded cheeks and when she looked up at Elizabeth, two rolls of flesh encircling her plump neck parted slightly, exposing a slash of pale white skin and a thin gold necklace buried there. It was an easy summer day and she came out readily, as if eager for the company. She settled down barefoot on the top step in cut-off shorts, her full legs spread, smooth and tan, her toenails frosty pink. New to the area, moved to be closer to her husband’s family. She chatted freely with us, unconcerned, while children’s whoops and hollers rolled out from the darkened rooms behind her.

As the two women spoke, I glanced towards Laurel’s mother, five houses away. She hadn’t moved.

Wind scraped leaves along the street, and I noticed a rolled piece of paper dangling from the ironwork of the hand-railing next to her. It reminded me of the notes people left when Laurel went missing, of the note I left on my last day. But it was just mail, probably coupons from a store.

The wind picked up and the rolled advertisement I’d been observing twitched and flew out of Laurel’s railing. Another gust of wind sent it up the street towards me. Mrs. Berry lifted her head as if she were only just now aware that she was outside. She looked towards her mail, blown close to me, and her eyes finally came to rest on my face.

It felt as though I was sinking into a wormhole of myself, regressing back to when I was fourteen and Mrs. Berry ruled supreme as Laurel’s mother. “I’m gonna grab that lady’s mail for her,” I said to my wife, unable to resist, and ran to pick up the curled paper. Laurel’s mother was a magnet and I was a nail dragging helplessly towards her.

The fuzzy orange curtains still hung in Laurel’s front window and the little tree at the curb was hardly any taller after all these years. Laurel’s mother seemed to be the only thing that had changed. I stood rigid before her, holding the rolled-up flier without offering it, neither of us speaking. She kept her head facing in the direction from which I came, Elizabeth’s direction, as if I were invisible.

I relaxed. Maybe she wouldn’t remember me after all, with my beard and adult height. I felt free to linger a bit and observe her.

She was like a faded outline of herself. Same thin body, but chalk-white hair and blue eyes so milky that she would have looked blind if not for the hard-packed pupils. She was still looking towards my wife and I felt a surge of pride.

That’s who I am now.

Her eyes slid over to me just then, a flicker of recognition softening her stony features. She opened her mouth to speak, then snapped it shut as her eyes dropped to the flier in my hand. “Was that in my railing?” she said, her voice grittier than I remembered, hardened with age, and I nodded, slightly shocked to hear her speak. “Thank you, Johnny,” she said, without taking her mail, then looked away again.

Johnny.

No one had called me that since grade school. I was a grown man, yet her recognition was thrilling. She pulled her thin dress tight over her knees as clouds curled above us, darkening the sky. The smell of coming rain, mixed with the familiar loamy pavement smell of the city, reminded me of a rainy summer afternoon with Laurel, a year before she died.

We’d huddled beneath a neighbor’s green awning, listening to drops ping off the hard plastic before Laurel stepped out barefoot into the rain.

“C’mere,” she said. She looked innocent, but she didn’t mean to.

“Come back,” I said. “You’ll be struck by lightning.”

She threw her head back and laughed at me. “So what?” She opened her mouth to catch the fat summer raindrops.

“I can see everything, you know,” I said.

Laurel peered down at her wet shirt, at the round outline of changing breasts. She shook her head and wet threads of dark blond hair slapped against bare arms. “Better not look, perv,” she said and threw her head back again, arching her back brazenly as she began to spin.

Her skin didn’t look real, even up close. Everyone always said she was as pretty as a doll. “Just a perfect little doll,” the adults would murmur, their mouths tight.

“I love you,” I said, barely breathing. During summer she smelled like baby powder; a doll’s cheek when you press your nose to it.

“I love you too, Johnny,” she said, still spinning. “Forever. Nobody will ever love you more.”

My heart was opening, her words going in, when I saw him turn up the street.

I stood. “Ray’s early,” I said. Her mom was working a second shift, like always, but we weren’t expecting either of them home for hours.

Laurel stopped spinning and gaped at me still dry beneath the green awning. “I wasn’t allowed out today.” She looked small, her delicate shoulders collapsing forward. “My mom’s gonna kill me if she finds out.” Her far-away voice scared me. “I gotta go,” she said, then crossed the street, walked up her steps and disappeared inside her house.

When Ray reached Laurel’s stoop, he spun towards me, thin and wiry, with wet distended eyes and a prominent Adam’s apple pointing out from his throat. I sank back down afraid to move even though the street divided us. He glowered at me, teeth parted. I thought he would scream for me to go home or come drag me up by the collar like I’d seen him do to Laurel. But he surprised me by smiling a slow smile that made me feel heavy before he wheeled around and went into the house after Laurel.

He’d kill her a year later, just after eighth grade graduation.

Laurel’s mother was watching me now and I smiled sadly at her. She tried to smile back a little but it only made her look hollow and we both turned away.

I imagined what she must have endured living on Hicks Street all these years—serving out her penance in that house, guilt growing over her hard as scales. I understood why she never moved. Moving meant a fresh start—my parents knew that—and no one deserved to leave this place if Laurel couldn’t.

Mrs. Berry glanced down at the rolled-up paper again and I handed it to her before she rose up stiffly from the step.

“Wait,” I said, anxious for her to stay, to say something more—for her to scream at me or cry would have been a relief—but she didn’t even pause. She knew I had nothing for her.

At the top of the steps, a sudden gust of wind pulled at the tin screen-door she had just opened and her grip tightened on its handle. “You were always a good boy,” she said, before disappearing into the shadow of her vestibule and pulling the door closed behind her.

Neither of us had said Laurel’s name.

Alone then, the small tree at my back, another forgotten image pushed itself to the surface: Laurel on her bed, little socks kicking the mattress, wet eyelashes stuck together like black stars. “Please don’t go, Johnny… I hate when you leave.”

She was always alone—latchkey kid, pack your own lunch, find your own dinner kind of alone—and Mrs. Berry and I were always leaving.

Mrs. Berry didn’t leave much anymore, I imagined. Her daily contrition was to sit alone in her empty house while Ray rotted in his cell and Laurel remained prim and still in that pale lace dress I’d never seen her wear before.

My parents took me away from this place, but they couldn’t take it out of me. I’d pinched a piece of the guilt on my way out and all this time it had been living and growing inside of me. Such rotten success, considering how not everything gets to live and grow. But I was only a kid myself—Laurel’s mother had just said so, right? In that moment, I understood that I could leave my guilt there on the step, next to Mrs. Berry, and she would take good care of it for me.

I left Laurel’s house with an unfamiliar sense of weightlessness—like if I picked up too much speed, I’d float up off the sidewalk. I saw my life laid out before me with Elizabeth, and I was there, front and center, not off to the side covered in scales like the quiet men I’d seen from time to time in loud carpeted living rooms and crowded kitchen tables, forgotten shipwrecks of men whose joyless faces were so restrained that no one could imagine them ever having felt anything. What were they thinking about? Something lost? Something everyone but them had forgotten?

Up the street, my wife continued talking with the girl in gold hoops—every now and then pointing her laughing mouth towards me. She wants me back, I know, her body tugging at the invisible string that still tethers us. Like standing in a field of unmarked graves, Elizabeth doesn’t know what’s buried on this street; all she sees is grass.

I go to her and she clasps my hand in hers like she means to keep me from floating off, and we wave goodbye to the young woman whose children are trickling out of the house now, running down the street, laughing, screaming, as they play.

UNEMPLOYMENT

SUZANNE MANIZZA ROSZAK

I was eight when they fired my father for flushing

the evidence of someone else’s joint. Unconsciously catholic,

my prayers flowered as the nights he remained jobless

extended into a cold Christmas. Oh lord do not

desert us, I protested as though I were a nun or a teenager

at a house party making bargains with a reluctant friend. Suns

rose and set and rose again before he found himself

employed at the prison, reading the results of blood tests

in a tiny room. Like us all he was so small-boned

that he seemed to belong in a different country than

his colleagues, their less abbreviated

physiques looming.

My father doesn’t remember the fish

I’m convinced he fried for us in the kitchen of

the dusty bungalow on weekends, the small, translucent filets

I think I know he caught himself. To him these ghost fish

signify a masculinity he has never claimed. What

he recalls is how on scrap paper at the table he taught me

to draw a single line that curved and doubled back

on itself, repeating one bright hue after the next

until purple horses and green baseballs emerged from

the waxen mess of colors, coming to life

against the blank whiteness.

HUNGER

T. LE

how often they end up the same

theses mandarins—

rinds falling off like fish scales

to a sloping sun

soft flesh

yielding to white teeth

my fingers cleave the pulp in half

mouth ready to eat another day

knowing that i will never

divide this body from the self

AFTER SLOAN

C.J. HRIBAL

That is the season in New York, mid-September, 2011, when the girls are wearing short shorts, sometimes with tights underneath, sometimes not, and on top they sport tangerine-colored blouses or white T-shirts beneath suit jackets, their feet shod in tobacco-colored ankle boots or white Chuck Taylors. Thighs über alles. Like that girl trying on boots at the Nordstrom Rack at Union Square, decked out in a black hoodie and checkered capri pants. She has a shock of bright red electric hair, her green socks somehow perfectly appropriate. She is taking pictures of her feet and texting them to her mother, who is in another part of the store, coming to join her when the girl has got her selections down to three. The mother finally arrives in black leather pants and a white blouse. She studies the boots her daughter has selected as though choosing a child to take home from the hospital, and then takes out her cigarettes. You half expect her to light up in the store, but she doesn’t. “These will look good clubbing,” she says definitively, and you’re not sure if she means dancing or attacking baby seals.

“I need a cigarette,” the daughter says. They leave the shoes to ride up the elevator together. How you want to be one of them, flaunting your body and careless with it, smoking cigarettes to mask your nervousness, staying out too late and sleeping in, not jealous of their being so alive and oblivious of their own health. You buy a couple of scarves and some pumps by Bruno Magli (very much on sale). Your boyfriend Henry is looking at jackets in Menswear, but it’s clear he’s simply waiting for you to finish. Henry, divorced, owner of a bookstore, has come with you from Wisconsin—your first trip away with him—and your wanting him rather than your husband to accompany you for this probably says everything about the state of your marriage.

To do something less self-indulgent, you and Henry take the 4 down to Fulton (you are proud of your ability to navigate the subway system of a city you visit maybe twice a year) and walk back to St. Paul’s Chapel, looking at those gravestones from long, long ago. You want to show Henry the Ground Zero Cross around the corner, but it’s no longer outside St. Peter’s—it was there a few years ago when you did a Broadway Theater weekend with your husband Sebastian and the children. The cross isn’t there now, and you’re surprised to feel disappointed—you are not one who usually feels religious about random wreckages of metal. At the World Trade Center site, you stare at the hole in the ground and all that’s rising from it. Though you are removed ten years from 9/11, it still feels as though those flights have exploded in your chest. Then you feel guilty because you are confusing the cancer growing inside you with all those people suddenly dying, and it’s not the same, or maybe it is, but you don’t want to think about it either way, and you say to Henry, “The world is a very fucked up place. Let’s get a drink.”

You settle on the Church Lounge in Tribeca, and a bottle of wine makes more sense than a glass. Watching the traffic and the people going by, you feel as though you are at the still vortex of something swirling about you, simply waiting for it to sweep you inside its maw. You can already feel it taking hold of you.

Or maybe that’s the wine.

You have to own it. Whatever “it” is. You just wish they would stop talking in metaphors and euphemisms. The cutesy language and technical terms all meant to distance you—and them—from the truth. “It’s unresectable,” the Big Dog surgeon at Sloan Kettering said, choking up, the person you traveled to New York to see; you didn’t believe the surgeon who told you the same thing in Milwaukee.

Unresectable. They can’t cut it out. There’s no point operating. You don’t need to buy things with warranties. You are up shit’s creek without a paddle. You are about to take a long walk off a short pier. You are shit out of luck. You are going to fucking die.

The worst is the look on their faces when they say, “It’s unresectable. There are other forms of treatment we hope will work—chemotherapy, radiation. We wish you the best. It was nice meeting you.”

These are perfectly charming, smart people. You know they hate delivering bad news. It’s why their faces scrunch up in pity and angst. They want to be upbeat, positive—“We are going to go in there and rip and chop and cut and get that thing the fuck out of you, and then you’re going to be fine, perfectly fine! Everything will be hunky dory!”

But they can’t say that. So they get these looks on their faces—a fallen-in, anguished pleasantness—but you can see the “I’m sorry, so sorry” in their eyes, and they wish they had something positive and upbeat and hopeful they could offer you, but what they’ve offered is all they can give, euphemisms that dance around the truth. Then they shake your hand and begin the process of forgetting you, lest the impossibility of their task renders them incapable of working with the people who might be saved.

You don’t blame them, you really don’t. A deep sadness takes up residence in your chest, which is what keeps you being pleasant when what you want to do is grab hold of their ties or their blouses or their lab jackets and scream, “Take it out! Get it out of me!” even though you now know the answer is, “We can’t.”

You have read the literature. This is now all about living with the disease, the disease your chestmate—Checkmate, chestmate—like a marriage partner who won’t leave even after you’ve told him it’s over; you don’t want to cohabitate any more. And instead the bastard pours himself another cup of coffee, settles into the sofa, and says, “Oh, babe, be serious. I’m here for the duration.” And there it is—another euphemism, the most common one with this kind of disease, the war metaphor, the battle comparisons ad nauseum—and you are back to where you started, hating the language they give you for dealing with this. It’s meant to encipher the truth, but whatever flags they hold up, you can read the semaphore—You are going to fucking die.

“At least I made the Big Dog thoracic surgeon cry. That’s something, right?” you say to Henry in the Tribeca Lounge. “This wine—it’s pretty fabulous, right?”

“It is,” Henry says. He knows his job right now is to agree with you.

“Let’s go back to the apartment.” What you don’t say is that all you really want to do is cry. Cry and fuck.

You do both, then make phone calls. You call friends, but not your closest friends, because you don’t want to weep, and with your closest friends you can let go and weep, you are perfectly safe weeping, but your eyes can’t take the constant fatigue of tears. You tell yourself this, but you end up crying anyway. You call Sylvia Koller, letting her know the apartment she arranged for you from the friend who is out of town now, is perfect, and yes, you’ve had your consults, and no, things did not go well, in fact they were shitty. As you’re describing this to Sylvia, you have to pause to let the crying and the shoulders shaking thing pass through you.

Henry is curled up behind you on the bed, his arm draped over your thigh. He strokes your hips as your shoulders go up and down and you bob forward and back in an extended, silent sob. You collect yourself, then tell Henry, “I need to call the home office.” You step back into your underwear and put on a camisole, as though you shouldn’t be calling your husband naked. The irony of getting dressed to call your husband while another man is sprawled across your bed is not lost on you.

It’s a business-like phone call—you’re able to go over everything pretty matter-of-factly, considering. But even though it goes smoothly, it still seems strange. There are lots of open places in the conversation, silences after you or he says something, and it feels like something that would happen on an awkward first date, as though you are back to square one with a man you have known for decades. “I love you,” Sebastian says at the end of the phone call.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” you say. “I’m going to a play tonight,” and there are probably few things worse you can do to someone after they’ve told you they love you than talk about your plans for the evening.

You see Wicked, which seems appropriate, given how you feel set apart, different. You can identify with Elphaba. Of course, that’s the show’s intent, sympathy for the devil. She has been branded with something not of her choosing, and it affects everything about her, her whole being, and that is pretty damn hard on a girl. Of course it’s going to affect your outlook. You want someone to say to you: it’s all been a misunderstanding. You have accidentally wandered into a parallel universe where things are not as they’ve been reported. Benign, they tell you. In the other life, it would be benign. Benign: n. 1. gentle, kindly. Syn: warm-hearted, good-natured, friendly, agreeable, genial, congenial, cordial, approachable, tender, gentle, sympathetic, compassionate, benevolent. 2. (medicine) (of a disease) not harmful in effect: in particular (of a tumor), not malignant. Syn: harmless, nonmalignant, noncancerous, benignant.

You want your disease to be benignly benignant. In the other life, it is. But you are in the half-life now, the time of treatment and hope and desperation.

You go back to the borrowed apartment and have sex with Henry, get up in the morning and make love to Henry. You have no doubts about why you do this. Fucking keeps death at bay. At least theoretically. It is clear Henry can’t believe his good fortune, and he is attentive and energetic, and afterwards you feel enlarged, your senses dilated. On the street, Saturday morning, you can feel the organism of the world coming awake, the bustle of people getting coffee, going to the green grocer’s, hustling to their jobs, their gyms, their friends. Having made love with Henry, you’re feeling generous and beneficent. Which is close enough a cousin to benign, and you wonder why that word can’t be applied to you, too. Really, couldn’t you just have enough good sex and all things malignant would turn benign? What’s the problem with modern medicine that your oncologist can’t say, “Take two fucks and call me in the morning?”

You ride the subway up to Fifty-ninth Street so you can go for a run in Central Park. Henry plops down on a park bench with an advanced reading copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot while you do a six-mile run the length of the park and back, pausing at the Strawberry Fields benches to have a good cry in front of the “Imagine” mosaic. You are overcome by all that you can imagine, too much of it not good. You pull yourself together and run back to Henry, who beams when he sees you. You think you might be falling in love with him. You think he might be falling in love with you. This is so shitty.

In the long litany of ironies that constitute your life right now, here is another: you finally find someone with whom you not only have a satisfying sex life, but a feeling, if not of completeness, at least of contentment (couldn’t you go so far as to have completeness and contentment? is that so much to ask?), and then you fucking die. Maybe not right away, but death hangs over you now like that sword in the famous painting. You don’t want to lose him. He doesn’t want to lose you, and yet you are, no doubt, going to lose each other. He falls in love with you just in time to see you out the door. Like, yeah, that’s what love is—cue the fucking Ali MacGraw Love Story lines: Love means yadda yadda yadda. You wonder—how hard is it to kill a healthy person?

“How was your run?” he asks.

You are so worked up it just comes tumbling out of you: “That’s the great joke. Except for this thing in my chest killing me, I feel fine. Fucking fantastic. I can run miles. My heart rate is 162 to 185 at a good clip. I’m like a horse. So how hard is it to bring down a healthy horse? What kills a horse like that? What happens to take that away? This is what drives me crazy. How strong is this thing in my chest for it to kill me—me, a fucking horse? It’s crazy. Stupid fucking crazy.”

You sit on the bench next to him, and he pulls you in for a kiss, but almost as soon as your lips part, you’re off again: “It’s not supposed to happen. Where is this Maker fellow? The Prime Mover, God, the Supreme Being, the One and True Creator? I have a bone to pick with Him/Her over this whole illness, death and dying business. Why the fuck was that put into the equation? What was He/She thinking? Natural order of things? Okay, that I can understand. But this? This? What the fuck was He/She/It thinking? Your body turning on itself, no explanation, haywire circuitry, the cells moving like passengers at Union Square changing platforms, the local to the express? What the fuck is up with that? That’s part of the design, really? The Grand Fucking Design? Really? You intended that?”

Henry is silent.

“A little death and destruction and mayhem, just for fuck’s sake?” you push on. “Like, ‘I know, what if a plane loaded with unsuspecting people going from Boston to God-knows-where gets diverted to New York and is aimed at a very tall building filled with lots of other unsuspecting people going about their business, and what if, just for fuck’s sake, said plane crashes into said building, creating a fireball that incinerates a bunch of people and tons more leap to their deaths to avoid being burned alive—now there’s a choice—or being crushed as said building rains down around them. Just to show that, you know, chance operates in the world and nothing is guaranteed; you’ll feel better about all that fucking randomness if you’ll just pray to me?’ Does that sound like a winning business strategy? Is that going to lead to customer satisfaction? I don’t get it.”

Henry is looking at you with that mix of empathy and worry that tells you he’s both scared and uncertain of what to say or do. You turn the anger on him. “Don’t pity me. Don’t. Just Don’t. Fucking. Pity. Me.”

He’s perplexed—What did I do? There are no entries for this in the boyfriend guidebook: Q. My girlfriend is a mess right now. What should I do?

A. Whatever you do is going to be wrong. Accept that. Love her anyway.

Yeah, good luck with that.

On your last day in New York you rent bicycles, take the ferry to Governors Island, and from a stand there you buy jerk chicken and ginger beer. It feels like a holiday, families and couples picnicking, riding bikes, strolling, sunbathing, looking out over the water. You explore the artist studios in the abandoned barracks. You bike down the row of officer’s houses, skirt the parade ground. It’s amazing what used to be here—for decades and decades the U.S. First Army was headquartered here (D-Day was planned on these grounds), and the Coast Guard’s Atlantic command was here for two decades more. Soldiers and sailors and their families, kids going to school on the island, to the movies, shopping, playing baseball and football, the dances the officers and their wives attended. All the laughter, the lovemaking, the joy and heartache of a military posting—all that life now gone away. Where are those people now, those children? Old, many of them, or more likely dead. You’re pensive; the phrase all that life now gone away repeating in your mind.

Back in Manhattan, you bike to the High Line and walk it, having a glass of wine before you start and a couple more when you finish. The black-and-white photos of what it used to be, a free-standing ruin frequented by gay men and models and drug users, remind you of that phrase again, though this reimagining of the space—something that was one thing is now something else—is downright cheery. Or maybe it’s just that you have a couple of drinks in you.

Which perhaps explains why you keep thinking the name of the café where you’re drinking is “Terror at the Porch,” not “Terroir at the Porch.”

“I should get something for my kids,” you announce to Henry. You realize what you’re doing is packing in as many touristy things in as you can, as though that will keep death at bay.

“And I’m hungry,” he says.

You ride down the Hudson River bike path, the light spangling in your eyes, slightly wobbly—kids! Don’t drink and ride!—then thread your way through that warren of streets that is Greenwich Village and Little Italy. Henry is letting you lead, and frankly, you don’t know where you’re going until you reach Grand Street, which has a bike lane. At a light—there’s a skinny park across the way—you take out your phone and the “search nearby” tells you the Tenement Museum is a few blocks away. Also, further down on Grand, the Doughnut Factory and Kossar’s Bialys.

“You wanna see how the other half used to live, then get something to eat?” you ask Henry, and he’s game for anything. He’s being delicate with you, you can tell, and you are both slightly resentful and grateful for that.

On Orchard Street you learn about the garment industry and how sweatshops began as family businesses at a time when the Lower East Side was the most densely packed particle of land on the planet. And how the ethnicities changed but the sweatshops continued. In the museum store, you buy a book for your son Charlie on the history of the garment district, filled with grainy photos of people with pushcarts, staring grimly at the camera. Outside you take in the upscale clothing store across the street, the real estate office, the craft beer bar, The Bridge Gallery. Reinvention, reinvention, and all that life now gone away.

You end up eating at Flowers Café, which has a vaguely left-over-from-the-60s-but-vaguely-new-agey-hipster vibe, its burgundy-colored awning adorned with daisies and a yellow hand flashing the peace sign. It’s bright and warm, and the sandwiches are good. Down the block you see a cluster of white tent tops and you tell Henry, “Let’s check that out.” It’s the Hester Street Fair, tucked into a small playground. Food vendors—Malaysian, Thai, BBQ, Caribbean, hand-made lemonade, cold-press coffee, specialty chocolates and cupcakes and ices, fruits and vegetables—plus clothing, boutique and second-hand, hand-crafted jewelry and leather-goods. You buy earrings for your daughter Jane, big hoops you know she’ll like, and don’t mind that Henry has paused to look at some hand-stitched notebooks, covers made from old maps. The wine is wearing off, and for a moment all seems right with the world.

That changes when you bike further down Grand, past the now-closed-forever Noah’s Ark Original Deli and you hear “Amazing Grace” sprightly/mournfully squeezed out of a bagpipes. You stop. Across the street a funeral is ending. It’s a Latino/a church now—the call for school enrollment is in Spanish—but from the floury faces of the old people emerging, their eyes blinking in the sunlight, it used to be Irish Catholic, and evidently there are still some Irish who want to be buried out of their old parish. The bagpiper, in a black tartan kilt with a green carnation in his cap, plays from the top step as the flag-draped coffin comes out—a World War II vet? They’re dying off in record numbers now—followed by the widow, stooped and silver-haired, dressed in black slacks and a formal silver-and-black smock top, flanked by two men who help her negotiate the stairs.

A wash of people spill out and pool on the sidewalk as the widow is helped into a limo. A man biking past glances over and crosses himself. Behind you a very large and distraught woman is leaning on a trashcan, crying into her cell phone, “He’s not listening to me. It’s all about him now.” The music is still playing sad and wistful, and you remember when you still attended Mass. Your uncle died when you were eight and you had a hard time coming to terms with the idea that this uncle whom you loved would not be around any longer.

It is the wrong thing to see. You feel angry, the rightness of whoever’s in that coffin dying in old age annoys you. Once, in your early thirties, you thought 80 was a good round figure to live to. You secretly believed/hoped you would be an exception to the rule of nobody here getting out alive, but you didn’t want to be greedy. As you went through your thirties—36, 37, 38—you almost unconsciously raised the number. What was so wrong about 85 or 90? Your great aunt lived to be 97, and she died in her sleep. So this seems unconscionable, unreal. Nobody is supposed to die in their forties. Nobody. The truly tragic ones die in their teens or twenties, or children of eight or nine in sledding accidents or leukemia, the occasional artist or actor or musician in a drunk, pill-addled stupor at 28 or 33, sure, and there are the fitness gurus who keel over at 53 of an undiagnosed heart condition, or some rockers whose early life catches up with them at 58 or 63. But who dies in their forties anymore? Really, who? A vacationing couple caught in a tsunami in Sri Lanka maybe, but who else? Otherwise, the forties are, and should be, exempt from death. Death clusters at either end of life, but in the middle—no, no, you’re safe, olly olly oxen free!

You feel dizzy. “Take me home,” you tell Henry. “I want to go home.” You mean Wisconsin, but you know that’s not possible till tomorrow. The apartment on Thirteenth Street will have to do. Henry takes the lead now. You register the street names but don’t quite know where you are. Delancey, Forsyth, Houston, then finally Irving Place, where you return the bikes.

Henry takes your hand crossing Union Square on the way back. “You want to see a movie?”

“I want to drink. Drink and fuck.”

Henry takes out his phone. “Crazy, Stupid, Love is playing at the Regal. That’s just a couple blocks over.”

“What’s it about?”

Henry consults. “IMDB says, ‘A middle-aged husband’s life changes dramatically when his wife asks him for a divorce. It has Steve Carell in it.”

“I don’t know, I don’t like the title.”

“The title?”

“It’s trying to be too meaningful and it almost gets there but by stating the obvious.”

“You got all that from the title?”

“I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine movie. It might even be a great movie. But I don’t have to be rational right now. I have cancer.”

“This may be the first time you have played the cancer card, and you’re going to play it for a movie?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No, I just thought it would be on something more substantial than a movie, like getting out of a meeting or a dinner invitation or something.”

“You can play the cancer card any time you want. Because, you know, cancer.”

You say it in italics, and you both laugh. “I don’t want to see a movie that celebrates the stupidity of love. I already know all about that.”

Left unsaid is that you don’t want to see a movie that you’re sure is going to strike you as being about your husband’s travails, even though it’s not. Still, you want something else. “Leaving out the stupid movies, what else is playing?”

“Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen, though he’s not in it. ‘While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée’s family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.’”

“That one. Even though it’s by Woody Allen.” Left unsaid: that a semi-witty romantic movie with a fantasy premise right now sounds about right, and you can understand the longing to be transported to Paris in the 1920s. You’d like to be transported right now back to some time before all this, and get a do-over. What do they call it in golf? A mulligan. You want a mulligan. In the other life you wouldn’t have cancer, and you’d be with Henry. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? To whom do you speak to make that happen?

The movie itself is a bit of a let-down, the fantasy sequences too much like what an earnest sophomore literature student might come up with, but you like it anyway. The movie has a cheerful coming-to-an-awareness-of-mystery about it, and even though it’s make-believe, it says something about our desire, our longing for possibility. Our desire to be in other places, times and spaces, and our desire to strip away everything in our lives that is not like a movie. Impossible, but Oh! Isn’t it pretty to think so? Today has felt as though you and Henry have been inhabiting a movie montage—the two of you arranged for it to be like that, intentionally and in a good way, unreal—and leaving the theater, when Henry takes your hand, you feel as though you should give these last few weeks a title, The Summer of My Last Innocence, or something like that.

But that’s silly, of course. You already were tired of keeping at bay your fears, those shadows in your lungs creating a knowingness you didn’t want to know. There has been no innocence. There has been dread, tugging down your chest like a weighted plumb line. But these days in New York have also been a kind of gift, sharpening your acuity, making you certain about some things (that you cannot stay with Sebastian, for example), leading you into changes you’re still lurching toward.

“Why so pensive, babe?” Henry says. “Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?”

“Let’s get a drink,” you say.

You know where this leads. You’re going to sit outside in the night air, sipping drinks and watching people go by, and imagine their stories. The more outlandish the better. She is a Russian countess forced into foot modeling on fetishist porn sites to make ends meet. He is an investment banker who excites himself by dressing as a pizza delivery boy. That couple holding hands and laughing intensely hate each other but they put on a good show because neither wants to lose their very desirable Soho apartment.

Actually, that one is not so outlandish.

You and Henry feel good being in each other’s company. This is the last night before the war, the stillness before the storm. You’re still on the launch track, and the wild dark ride is just beginning. You’re going to finish your drinks and then you are going back to the borrowed apartment and you are going to fuck yourselves silly, and it is going to be lovely, lovely, lovely. And in the morning you are going to find each other again, warm in the sheets, and it is going to be lovely, lovely, lovely all over again.

You put your arm around Henry’s shoulders and beam.

“What?” he says, grinning.

You stick your tongue out at him. You are in love, and it is, for now, possibly the best feeling in the world.

AT A CUT-RATE FLORIDA MOTEL WHEN READING POETRY LEADS TO THE JOYFUL HELL OF ENLIGHTENMENT

SM STUBBS

As I read Bruce Weigl’s The Monkey Wars

about his time as a soldier in Vietnam,

I realize how little I know concerning

armed combat. Then I get to “Noise,”

a poem about newlyweds, and it

has no guns or bombs at all. Instead,

it’s about a couple who discover that love

isn’t enough. They break glass and yell, cry,

the whole terrible thing. I know, and the voice

in the poems knows, everyone who has ever been

in a long-term relationship knows

it will be years before they hate themselves

the way people do after they’ve poured

all they are into another person.

Then, the poem mentions the trains,

their hard stutter through the night and how

that noise echoes the couple’s bickering

as well as the sound of fighting in rainforests

halfway around the world, how it lives

inside the speaker, wheels, cylinders & rods

clattering the black peace of night. I know

nothing about war yet I know that noise.

My head’s been packed with it for

forty years, and whatever it is, it keeps me

from sleeping. In this room, the carpets

smell of feet and rotten take-out.

Outside, past the parking lot, cicadas

clutter the world with their buzz-saw thrum.

ON THE BRINK

BARBARA WEST

Tom and his sister had moved to the Leisureville Mobile Home Park a couple years ago and as far as we hospice staff could tell, they didn’t know anyone in Northern California. Neither brother nor sister had ever married. Now in their late seventies, they were old enough that you couldn’t tell which was firstborn. They were from L.A. and had worked together their whole lives—in the film industry, behind the scenes. The two of them had been together so long that neither was willing to consider life without the other, or the other living without them.

I was the hospice nurse on call that Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. When the answering service put me through to Tom’s sister, I couldn’t discern exactly what was going on, but the rapid-fire of her sentence fragments convinced me there was no point trying to figure it out. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told her, giving up any hope that I could pick up my son from my mother’s in time for dinner and bedtime.

Despite Tom’s sister’s inability to articulate the details of their predicament, her breathless thank-yous as our call ended comforted me while I sped north on County Road 102, between vast tomato fields and almond orchards. I hoped she wouldn’t lash out at me the way other family members have done when unable to accept their loved one’s dying. A solitary hospice nurse makes an easy target.

This is one of many reasons I believe in the interdisciplinary model of hospice care, with a social worker, chaplain, and the rest of the team. Unfortunately, on nights and weekends, if you’re the nurse on call, you’re pretty much it. I’d heard about the siblings’ eccentricities at team meetings—their refusals to accept chaplain visits, hire any help, or make funeral arrangements—but this would be our first meeting. The fact that the sister had actually called for help today might be a first step toward acceptance.

My teammates had described Tom and his sister as manifesting an eloquent, understated calm while refusing to engage in any detailed conversation about end-of-life issues. Despite our new social worker’s plea to make caregiving arrangements, Tom had insisted that he didn’t need any personal care, from his sister or anyone else. The sister and brother had presented a seamlessly united front: “Everything is fine here, thank you.” The sister had proven their point by continuing her daily routine, honoring Tom’s wish to care for himself just as he had done for decades. So, as I drove up Road 102, I could only imagine the extremity of the circumstance that had propelled her to call the answering service. It made sense to me that her ability to construct an eloquent, understated sentence had vanished. Sometimes we have to come undone before we make progress.

Tom’s sister opened the double-wide’s door to my knocking and, without greeting me, hastened toward an armchair that held the imprint of her heavy body. Her gray-black hair jumbled around her shoulders as she hoisted a newspaper in front of her face, blocking any view of the scene.

So I stood by myself facing Tom, who was slumped over in a wheelchair, head nearly touching his knees. The hospital bed our hospice had delivered sat untouched in the corner. Hospice nurse visits aren’t intended to replace the daily care provided by family or hired caregivers; most family members understand this and join me at the bedside to strategize about comfort care for their loved one. But Tom’s sister showed no sign of emerging from behind her newspaper curtain.

Denial can be a pretty good coping mechanism for the person who’s actually dying; they aren’t conscious when the collision between expectations and reality occurs. But it doesn’t work so well for the family member who remains awake while business as usual fails in painfully obvious ways. The sister’s quivering hands suggested she was experiencing that collision today.

I turned to my nursing note, sensing that this wasn’t the moment for me to apply more pressure, trying to let the situation itself summon her will to act. I took a deep breath and started filling in the basic assessment as best I could. Usually I count the respiratory rate by peeking at someone’s chest out of the corner of my eye. (If patients are aware you’re counting, they can become self-conscious and alter their breathing.) But Tom’s chest wasn’t visible; unkempt white hair drifted over the back of his head.

As the second hand on my watch swept past six, I watched the back of Tom’s black jacket rise. “One,” I counted, “two, three … four.” Then all was still. An instinctive panic arises when you see someone stop breathing, even when you’re a hospice nurse. At the same time, this pause represented a possibility for relief—something our hospice team’s care had so far failed to provide for either Tom or his sister. And I couldn’t deny my own fatigue.

If that was Tom’s last breath, there would be mercifully less to figure out.

I looked toward the armchair to see if Tom’s sister had noticed he wasn’t breathing. Her newspaper remained vertical. All I could see of her was the skirt of her dark green jumper, her black loafers, and her fingertips gripping the paper’s edge. Suddenly a shuddering sound wrenched my gaze back to Tom in time to see his thin torso lift high enough that I caught a glimpse of his open mouth. He gave a series of quick gasps and then his head drooped back towards his knees as he resumed his slow, irregular breathing.

Despite how obvious it was that we were nearing the end of something, there was an infinite, suspended quality to the scene: I could detect no movement in the rectangles of sunlight on their living room rug; no cars drove down this narrow lane of the mobile home park; there was no wind; there wasn’t even a TV on. Usually, I would be asking families to silence their TVs, but in that living room I longed for anything to rescue me from the interminable present moment.

I looked down at Tom’s chart, which reminded me that he was in the final stages of heart failure, suffering from fluid overload. Like many patients with this diagnosis, he’d avoided lying down. Staying vertical keeps the lungs from filling up, keeps you from drowning in your own internal sea. But the legs, being downhill of the torso, take a hit for the team. Tom’s were swollen like water balloons, fluid seeping through overstretched skin.

I grabbed a pair of latex gloves and pulled down Tom’s saturated socks. The smell, coming from Tom’s body and clothes, was sharp and musty, informing me that he had been sitting in that wheelchair for much longer than good hygiene would dictate. The trapped fluid in his legs pressed ominously against the bulging, sodden skin. I’d treated enough cases of venous stasis to know that Tom’s shins weren’t about to split open, but an unfamiliar desperation was taking hold of me, as if I feared being stuck inside this metal box, with the two of them, until long past the end of my shift.

I had my expectation of what end-of-life caregiving should look like: a clean, dry patient, sleeping peacefully in a bed. Reality, on the other hand, had taken the form of this shuddering, soggy, strong-smelling mess that had finally, it seemed, overwhelmed Tom’s sister’s best efforts at denial. But the agitated voice that had made that call stayed silent behind the newspaper, as her posture implied that she’d already handed off his care to me. Unfortunately for both of us, an on-call nurse only drops in for an hour or two and I couldn’t make the decision to hire a private caregiver or transfer Tom to a nursing home. We were not going to get out of this mess without the sister stepping up to the plate, but I didn’t know how to inspire her.

I missed doing home visits with our old social worker Joel, who had that perfect combination of gruffness and warmth, a telling-it-like-it-is manner that helped people relax and accept our help. Imagining what Joel would say in this moment, I took another deep breath and spoke to the back of the newspaper. “Things don’t seem to be working out too good here.” There was a long pause, as my understated attempt to describe reality hung in the air.

The newspaper crept downward by an inch, just enough to make eye contact. Inside the corners of her glasses, her eyes were almost squinting. “No, they don’t,” the sister said slowly. As her gaze traveled nervously between me, her brother, and the window behind us, I braced myself for the attack that often erupts in these situations.

“I’m thinking you could use some help,” I said. Wishing again that Joel hadn’t retired, I tried to summon his easy-going approach. “Taking care of your brother is a big job and hospice staff are only here for these short visits.”

Then, suddenly, it was as if a tightly bound cord had snapped. The newspaper dropped to her lap and Tom’s sister looked right at me with an oddly childlike openness. “Oh yes, I really do need some help,” she said. Alongside each other, the sibling’s defenses had remained impenetrable. But now she was forced to act on her own, perhaps for the first time in her life. I sensed an unstable, free-wheeling relief in her that I feared might be short-lived.

“It can be kinda hard to find someone to help you here at home,” I pressed. “Have you thought of taking him someplace where help would be more available … someplace like a nursing home, where you could visit every day?”

“Well, yes,” said Tom’s sister hesitantly. And then I suspected that Joel himself (from the far reaches of retirement) was intervening because a newfound confidence seemed to be gaining momentum inside her. She said, “Actually, I think a nursing home would be a good idea.”

There was no reception inside their mobile home, so I stepped outside to the sunbaked driveway to start making calls before she had a chance to change her mind. Every nursing home in Yolo County was short-staffed for the holiday weekend, but, finally, in response to my description of the scene, one agreed to take him. After another series of calls, I had a gurney transport van on the way. I climbed back up their steps feeling smug about accomplishing what his weekday nurse and social worker had not.

Tom’s sister had taken shelter back behind her newspaper, but she folded it when I came back in, laid it on the end table, and tilted towards me as if hopeful for my report.

Tom was still breathing every now and then. Then it hit me—how to get him on a gurney? His knees had been at ninety degrees for days, with his hips at an even sharper angle. The transport staff would clank the gurney up the stairs in their “yes ma’am,” business-as-usual kind of way, but then, with one look, they’d surmise—correctly—that Tom had been left in his wheelchair for days. They might feel compelled to report Tom’s sister, and perhaps our agency, to Protective Services for suspected elder neglect. Or worse, they might refuse to transport him, to avoid being implicated themselves.

My sense of desperation, triggered earlier by the smell and the saturated carpet, returned full force, and I was struck again by the need to do something, anything, to ensure my hard-won arrangements weren’t derailed. “I’ve got to get him in bed before the transport company gets here,” I told the sister, feigning calm as best I could. “We need a few minutes to let his body stretch out.”

“Tom, I’ve got to get you in the bed,” I said to the back of his head. I gave Tom’s chair a push, but when it refused to budge, my heart sank. Tom’s ability to resist help seemed supernatural. Then, I remembered to release the brakes and we glided towards the bed.

By pulling up on his shoulders, I coaxed Tom to sit up a few degrees, but when I let go, he slumped back down with a wheezing sigh. I decided to try a transfer technique I’d seen our most skillful home health aide do. “I’m gonna give you a big hug, Tom,” I said, and I did just that, pulling his torso as close to mine as it would go. With Tom’s face resting on my shoulder, I took a deep breath and straightened up, our bodies rising into a sudden and precarious balance. At that moment, a loud and ominous crunch echoed through the double-wide. It emanated from deep inside Tom’s body and was followed by a cavernous silence. I managed not to scream, desperately holding my balance so that I didn’t drop Tom, who had gone completely quiet.

If you work in hospice long enough, you’re bound to be accused of murder at some point. It could be over the phone, in a moment of passion from a guilt-ridden, out-of-state, family member. Or in person, simply because you’re the one at the door at that pivotal moment. Or maybe because you’re the white nurse with a Northern accent, the face of the American health care system that denied Daddy access to dialysis back in Oklahoma. For the first time in my career I wondered if I might now have actually done what I’d previously only been accused of.

Having no idea what else to do, I continued the transfer. I tilted back, balancing our double weight over my heels, rocking side-to-side and rotating incrementally, until I faced the bed and could lean forward over it to let Tom’s body fall away from mine. I saw his slack face for a split second before he bounced slightly and came to a stop, hunched forward on the edge of the bed.

I asked his sister to help lift his feet and, at last, she rose from her armchair. To my surprise and relief, there was a loving eagerness in the way she leaned down to touch her brother that suggested how hard it had been for her to honor Tom’s wish to care for himself. With her help, I managed to pivot him from the edge of the bed onto the mattress proper. His body, however, remained in the same position as it had been in the wheelchair: knees bent at ninety degrees, torso in a V-shape, head and shoulders hovering above the pillow. I suppose I’d been counting on gravity to finish the job, but it wasn’t happening. And Tom was still not breathing.

The sister looked at me. We were both sweating and out of breath. For the first time there was nothing between us. I waited for her to accuse me of killing him.

But she kept a graceful silence. I started counting, just as I had during Tom’s first apnea spell, so long ago, at the start of this visit. But this time, the quiet moments continued, one after the next. I remained unaccused by anyone but myself.

“I think he’s leaving us now,” I said. I thought about how our chaplain handled these moments and lowered my voice. “Should we pray?”

The sister nodded. I was too shaken to pray spontaneously like our chaplain would have done. She would have asked God to hold Tom in the light of love and would have asked for Tom’s sister and me to know that we too are held and loved. She would have asked God to help us realize that, if we fear we may have failed Tom in any way, we have already been forgiven.

No such words came to me, so the best I could do was reach for my recollection of the Lord’s Prayer and I was relieved to find that I remembered most of it. In rough unison, Tom’s sister and I asked for forgiveness for our trespasses and that we be delivered from evil. We reminded ourselves that we were not the ones who held the power, the kingdom, nor the glory.

After that, we sang “Amazing Grace.” I had more confidence on that one, knew a lot of verses, and Tom’s sister did a good job chiming in, her hands resting on the edge of the bed by where his knees still jutted up towards the ceiling.

Then it was quiet.

Suddenly I remembered that the transport company would be arriving shortly to bring Tom to the nursing home. I rushed back out to the driveway, dialing frantically to tell them that he didn’t need that ride after all. Then I started a new series of calls—to find a funeral home. After that, the sister and I tucked in some pillows to make Tom look more comfortable. We flushed Tom’s pills down the toilet and she signed the page for documenting narcotics. I left a message with his doctor’s answering service, finished my nurse’s note, and wrote the death note. Then we waited in silence for the funeral home van to arrive.

I wondered if I had killed Tom. I wondered what inside his body had made that awful sound. I wondered if I, or anyone else, would ever know. I replayed the glimpse I’d gotten of Tom’s face as he landed on the bed. I’d seen nothing in it to suggest discomfort or fear. I tried to reassure myself that, if I had indeed killed him, it had been a compassionate death—for Tom, for his sister, and for me.

At some point, I must have done the official pronouncement, listening to Tom’s chest with my stethoscope for sixty seconds. No matter how smoothly a death may go, this moment is always disorienting—the slightest motion of the earpiece against my ear can be easily mistaken for one more breath or heartbeat. It takes enormous willpower to stare at a recently living human chest, from the inches away that a stethoscope affords, and not imagine it rising and falling.

After the pronouncement I would have called the coroner. I would have reported Tom’s diagnosis of heart failure. I think I mentioned how he stopped breathing soon after transferring to the bed. I didn’t say anything about the crunch.

A few weeks later, I asked one of my colleagues to take a walk with me during a lunch break. We were both doing visits out in the country that day and he knew a gravel road along a ditch, just off I-5, where an enormous valley oak would shade our cars. With the constant press of patient and family needs, we rarely took this kind of break.

Walking shoulder to shoulder soothed me enough to finally talk about what had happened in the double-wide. My colleague listened quietly, then, with the comforting rub of gravel underfoot, did his best to reassure me. He reminded me how very close to death Tom had been before I’d even arrived on that Memorial Day afternoon. Thanks to his kind words, I was able to relax my dreadful imaginings of a coroner’s investigation into a quieter guilt, one that has nevertheless lingered across the decades.

I never learned what happened to Tom’s sister and was too afraid to ask our bereavement staff about her. I like to imagine that her love for her brother and her unexpected gentleness with me on the day of his death had set her in the direction of a peaceful life on her own. I hope that she was able to cherish her brother’s memory amongst their lifetime of accumulated belongings. If I could see her again, I’d want her to know that, the more I reflect on her situation, the more I realize that she did the very best she could to take care of her brother. I try to tell myself the same thing.

GLAUCOMA

CHARLENE FIX

What my eyes see reminds me of under-exposed

negatives from my bygone wet photography days,

days replete with eyes—the camera’s, the enlarger’s, mine—

when I failed to admit sufficient light to the film,

resulting in negatives so thin that, held aslant,

they looked like printed pictures. Thin, yet yielding

tender images, the sweet round faces of children

rising and blooming in the developer tray as if

pulled from the photo paper’s fertile heart as it sloshed and sang

for an allotted time in nether clouds of liquid vapor,

images startling with the beauty of their truths.

Then into the final tray, a bath transforming love

and sight to artifact, though faint the accretion,

fragile memory made lasting with the help of chemical tears.

HEART, OPEN

RACHEL S. BROOKS

quick. A slit sliced past the thick of a mammal’s

plight. Pacing, measure the diameter as the doctor

hastens, see how he slips in his sight? The flick

of a hand misplaced—the scalpel falls, the patient

still unmoving, her mouth, a loop of understood

phrase: A beluga heart can pump six tubs of blood

in three beats per minute. But this woman’s life, faulty

as light undone. The surgeon fixes the strength of his lamp,

his prodding hand in the dark of cavity, clamps. See

how her flaps lack closure, firm stick: Heart’s flaw,

blood leaks slick. The cardiac output of a bowhead’s feat.

The phenomenon of whale, failed woman’s remedy. Listen,

a humpback barters the grooves of its throat and the thrust

from its fluke. We’ll climb through the ribs, now split

in two. A whale holds wiresto carry electrical cues, even

to signal a pulse that soundsbehind the blubber. See

among the tissue—the pushpast aorta, bruise, blood’s rush

to find an airtight route, againand the thumping renews. Soon

blood fills the beak. Pummelsthe pleats. Spy caudal seam,

the body’s rooms, supplied—oxygen’s seep. O fin whale,

O southern right, your size—can we trade performance, speed—watch

under knife. I would makethis woman turn minke-like. See,

valves leak backwards, fightlost leak. Doctor sews, stows

belief. Sly whale’s falser plea: To mend a lapse, we fuse

at breach. Minor chords, fainter key: the largest heart we tried

to keep. Sound intact. Syntax attached. Scalpel rinsed free.

CUBA LIBRE

SOFI STAMBO

I catch the eyes of one of the men at the bar. People don’t look at me that often so I’m always grateful. He is looking at us, Paco and me, as a unit, which we have become. We do stuff together every chance we get and still walk arm-in-arm and, pathetically, hold hands sometimes. I got the bad news this week, not the good news we both had such a strong feeling I would get. But I don’t want to talk about it.

For the past three days, we have been doing everything in our power to not talk about it. There is a vaccine in Cuba, for the thing we wouldn’t name, which might work. We have sex, shop like crazy, watch stand-up comedians for hours, but when the credits roll, one of us would sigh deeply, like my dad used to do. We mocked him back when we were twenty, that things can’t be that bad. What did we know? Bad was when you got an F on your test or didn’t have money for cigarettes. The worst-case scenario of bad was if you got pregnant. I would pay good money to be in that bad of a situation now, but that’s not how it works.

The Cuban restaurant after work is part of Paco’s master plan to distract me. I love this place, because it reminds me of my grandmas’ kitchens, both of them, tables covered with plastic tablecloths, with loud, shameless flowers—roses, peonies and gardenias—never chamomiles or clover. On the wall behind the bar, above the mirror for looking behind your back, there is a print of a beautiful old angular car, maybe a Cadillac or a Rolls Royce, something fancy and ancient and emerald green.

The two men at the bar are wearing black shirts and black pants, no crease, and inexpensive, comfortable black shoes. They both have thin black leather belts and take their dinners at the bar—a Cuban sandwich and a glass of red wine. The bottle is left open between them for it to breathe and for them to help themselves. They eat slowly in silence and sip small gulps while not looking around. I don’t know how I caught the eye of the taller one; my eye wandered in the looking glass. The two men are somewhere in their late sixties, shoulders slouched a little, but standing more or less straight. They have the posture of Paco’s granddad Valyo, my uncle Mitko, and my dad when he got older—a modest posture, somehow collected in itself, and restrained. The kind of man who has his handkerchief behind his wallet in his back pocket, the one closed with a small loop and a button. The kind of man who shines his shoes every night and mends his socks in such a way that no one can tell that he does. There is pride and beauty in the way these once good-looking men still look you straight in the eye and can make you remember what passion is, because they have not forgotten.

After the sandwiches, the taller one walks to the first table and takes out an amplifier and starts slowly to connect cables to other things. He works quietly and wires everything around that can be wired, while the other man sips an espresso with a little coconut milk in it. Paco and I look at each other and Paco says that if I was worried that they’d blow us out of the very small joint with their very loud music, we could take the food we just ordered to go. Acoustical mistakes are often made here in New York, in the subway by wayward musicians, or when small places overestimate themselves and order loud music and kick you out instead of lure you in. So I am a little too sensitive and as a result, jumpy. I drink my tap water with fear of what’s to come, decibel-wise, and also chlorine- and bad-news-wise. Paco senses this and offers me a beer, which I refuse, because I only drink after sundown with the false sense that I control, if nothing else, at least the alcohol consumption of one person in my family.

“They will start soon?” Paco asks.

“No, they won’t,” I explain, because now I am facing the music. “He just took out two big rolls of more cables.”

The second man gulps down the last sip of his espresso and quietly puts the cup back in its saucer. I like little knocking noises like that, men’s shoes walking along a sandy sidewalk. My granddad and dad made those respectable knocking noises. I watch the back of the man’s head framed beautifully between the warm glow of the bottles of rum and the emergency whiteness of the CPR kit. I wonder if his wife gave him this impeccable straight-line-on-the-neck-haircut or was it the barber he goes to every three weeks for the special. He looks more like he may have a wife, or a live-in girlfriend. The other man doesn’t. He has sadness in his eyes, while rolling the cables in a loop as if to hang himself; maybe she died, or left him, or he left her, but somehow, love-wise, things are not balanced in his song.

And then they start: the tall one on the flute and the trumpet, the other one on the guitar and the keyboard. The music is not loud, not happy and not unfamiliar, and that’s all it takes for me to start the waterworks. I knew that reading poetry out loud made me cry and now I have to add Cuban jazz to the list. Paco has somehow gotten someone to bring me a Modelo Especial, in a short, curvy glass with a bucket of ice, exactly how I like it. The waiter is not surprised by my quirks but is respectful and understanding. The ice helps stop the tears and the beer helps with everything else as usual. The two men also don’t show surprise at my affliction of drinking beer with ice and crying into it when confronted with Cuban music. Their eyes promise that they won’t react if I come back with something or other cut out of me, because we all know that’s life and you win some, you lose some.

They both sing, but somehow separately, each man for himself. They are at work here, they could have been somewhere else and somebody else, like all of us, but now this is what we do on Wednesdays. They play the way I answer emails, professionally, no mistakes, but somehow, not as if their life depends on it. Meanwhile, we all look around the bar for things our lives could potentially depend on. Mine is right in front of me, teary, which usually I scold him for, but I secretly like.

The owner jumps on a tall stool at the bar, sitting as if riding a horse, with his Cuban sandwich and straw hat. Sooner or later every man gets his Cuban sandwich here and every woman, her drink. A bicyclist with a green neoprene costume and matching green helmet and shoes takes his food to go, or rather, to ride. The twenty-three-year-old boy at the other end of the establishment is on a date. He has spent some time at the gym and is happy to show it. But he hasn’t mingled with girls much yet and is like a dog, all goose-bumped and jittery and afraid that things will go wrong and he’ll mess up. Ordering caipirinhas may not help, but he doesn’t know that, and we don’t feel like telling anyone anything anymore.

A dark man with a shaven, beautifully-shaped head, also in his late sixties, goes up to the band and whispers a wish, then leaves a tip in the Cuban cigar box. He sits back across from his own date. It’s obvious it’s a date, he’s way too gentle and she has way too much lipstick on her sensual lips. It will work out between them, you can tell. They both somehow know what the other one likes.

The restaurant across the street has also opened its windows all the way. A big TV transmits a ball game of some kind, played somewhere else. This reminds me of the portrait Paco painted on a guy’s fridge once. The guy wanted his father there, so that when he sat at the bar, across the street from his kitchen, he could look at his father, say cheers, and not drink alone. The father ended up resembling Paco’s granddad Valyo a bit, when he would knock his empty brandy glass on the plastic tablecloth and say, “Eh, kid, where you are headed, I am coming back from.” People from the sports bar across the street start to leave the game and come to our social club, because we sound like we may know what it is all about.

I catch the eyes of the flutist again and my eyes start to water. He rips my heart with his high notes. He is calmly looking at my steady tear production but does not judge. I blow my nose and collect the fifteenth wet napkin in my purse. The waiter, his face invisible under a straw hat, brings another Especial and three inches of soft napkins with Cuba Libre printed on them for the tears. Paco and I laugh with snotty noses and say cheers. There is nothing else to say.

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

POISONS AND ANTIDOTES: POEMS
Andrea L. Fry (Deerbrook Editions, 2021)

REVIEWED BY RACHEL HADAS

The title of this book led me to expect something gothic, spiky, edgy. But this strong and variegated collection of poems is more complicated than that. Perhaps, though Fry certainly eschews easy optimism, the antidotes prove more powerful than the poisons. Fry’s toughness, sanity, and wry humor assert themselves again and again—but assert themselves in different guises.

The wide variety of tones and modes here is both a strength and a weakness. A few of the poems read almost like short stories; “The Renderer,” for example, is spoken in the voice of a woman driving the carcass of a beloved horse away from the man who’s arriving to render the horse into glue or horsemeat. The poem has a plot, characters, a vividly drawn scene. Elsewhere, Fry channels a teenage boy (“‘Consider Your Man Card Reissued’”) or a cave dweller (“Ancient Man from Chauvet Cave Speaks”) or a man known only by his initials who carved his name into a sequoia (“Jack Bildner’s Ghost”). These soliloquies, less fiction-like than “The Renderer,” remind me how rare it seems to have become for poets to speak in voices not their own.

Two strong poems in the third person manage to combine narrative and lyric. In “The Secret,” a girl hiding “in the underworld beneath her family’s porch” “speaks her secret to herself,” and then, mysteriously and beautifully, “the world’s whispers / turn to voices, and the voices speak the answers / to the questions.” That we never know precisely what the girl’s secret is (many possibilities suggest themselves) is part of the poem’s spell. A darker poem, also incantatory, is “He Will Come in from the Fields,” the very title of which feels ominous. The innocence still delicately present in “The Secret” is violated in this poem, whose length and refrain function both as foreshadowing and as a possible apotropaic gesture—maybe nothing so bad will happen after all.

That girl under the porch reminded me of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar. Indeed, a few Plathian moments stand out in Fry’s work, especially in her wonderful cameos: “Each petal point a corner / of a twisted pinwheel, swastika in purple petticoat, / these plain assassins live / demurely in the / dung and meadow” (“Jimsonweed”); “a little gang /of white supremacists, a litter of pit bulls hammered senseless … white charcoal / briquettes that could burn down the neighborhood with one match” (“Mothballs”); “It was the same summer my grandmother wore that apron, / a pattern of cheerful yellow tomahawks sprinkled with hearts, // smeared with Sunday’s bacon grease and syrup. As she prepared / noon supper, she washed the cow tongue in the sink // so tenderly, like she was giving a baby its bath” (“Civilized”).

All these images suggest Fry’s ability to link beauty and violation, tenderness and dread. That linkage is what her title means, and what some of her strongest poems articulate. “The Glitter of the Simple” is a kind of negative ars poetica, full of hypotheticals that the poem ends by rejecting—as if the subjunctive mood hadn’t forewarned us. The poem begins “Oh, I would divide the world into binaries…. Simply by appearances / I would judge.” Refraining from such a black and whiteness isn’t easy: “The responsibility of understanding/extenuating circumstances/exhausts me….” “My animal brain / is too weary, too lazy to carry/ all the infinitesimal gradations/ that live within the range. / It is too much to fathom.” But not fathoming would mean staying at the level of the superficial: “The surface iridescence of the beetle’s / wing would be everything. How clean/ the world would be. / And damned.” It’s an option the poet emphatically rejects.

“Warm Season Grasses” is another poem that yields to a wise passivity, a letting things be without categorizing or controlling: “How happy it makes me that nothing / requires my bending it. I am tired and ready to let / things be as they are.”

Most of the poems here refuse cleanness and damnation. On the contrary, they embrace complexity with the wise and passionate gratitude of someone who has lived a full and complicated life. There are contradictions here—and why not? A few of the poems in Poisons and Antidotes are biting social satire, skewering a gun advertisement (“’Consider Your Man Card Reissued’”), binge drinking in colleges (“Fall Orientation”), idiotic slogans (“Don’t Let Anyone Dull Your Sparkle!”), or the wooden language of legal documents (“Advance Directive”). But the poems I think I’ll return to are seasoned and rich, beyond anger though not beyond a sense of absurdity. The last poem here, “The Gnarled and Fantastic” (note that the title yokes contrasting qualities, as does the title of the collection as a whole) is less about weariness than about work—or at least it begins by thinking about work and moves onward and outward from there. “The Gnarled and Fantastic” is too long to quote in full, but this ample excerpt should give a sense of the poem’s heft and lift-off. I think of the soul in “Sailing to Byzantium” clapping its hands and singing.

“I don’t want a soul-crushing job,” my nephew says.

And so, I look down at my chest as if to check

my own soul. And yes, it is crushed!

So, I tell him, “They’ve all been soul-crushing, every one.”

Work that is on rare occasion harrowing—but mostly boring.

Sometimes, Ian, if I’m sitting quietly

in my chair at work, the lights go off

because the motion sensor thinks I don’t exist.

I flail my arms to restore my station

in the universe.

I’ll take my place among the other trillion cogs,

even take a perverse pleasure in never standing

outside the world’s drill. I can only be among

those who embrace some routine—

those who sell, scrub, collate, slice onions, cut out

gallstones, tally, enter data, teach a child to wash

her hands, lay wire, pour concrete, test urine,

convince judges, hold meetings.

Most everyone’s a doer of unmemorable things,

every job a sledgehammer to some other impulse—

call it your soul if you wish.

But why shouldn’t the soul have to work

like the rest of our being? Like the gut, the lungs,

the bowels or heart?

The soul must be sufficiently crushed to escape!

Unmemorable things? Andrea Fry is an oncology nurse practitioner. She is also the writer of courageous, yeasty, vivid, and wise poems.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Nitin K. Ahuja is an assistant professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has previously appeared in Aeon, Slate, the Yale Review, the Washington Post, and the New England Journal of Medicine. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Avra Aron has been published in the Briar Cliff Review. That issue of Briar Cliff Review was listed as a Notable Special Issue by Best American Essays, 2019. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

Cécile Barlier was born in France and now lives in California. Her debut collection, A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations, won the 2019 Grace Paley Prize for short fiction and is published by Red Hen Press. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, with three nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

Rachel S. Brooks is a writer from Connecticut studying at Princeton University. Her work appears in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize Anthology, and she is the first author of a medical research study in the peer-reviewed journal Rheumatology. The poem in this issue draws from Mark Wickstead’s 2008 CNN article “Humpback whales pioneer new heart treatment.”

AJ Cameron is an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine and a freelance copywriter. Untethered to any one city, she has lived all over the world collecting stories about the people and places she’s seen. Currently at home in Manhattan, she is collecting stories up and down the Upper East Side.

Emily Carter writes nonfiction and prose poetry. A lifelong North Carolinian, she lives in the Southern Outer Banks with her Smokin’ Hot Love Biscuit, John, and her dog, Fergie. She contributes to Haunted Waters Press, Flying South, and North Carolina Literary Review, and belongs to Carteret Writers, the Writers’ Exchange, and NC Writers’ Network.

Rebecca Chamberlain has worked broadly across disciplines, from painting and performance to fashion design. Her paintings and drawings consider the boundaries of public and private spaces and the psychological and physical impact of architecture. Using materials such as lithography ink and ballpoint pen in unusual ways, Chamberlain’s paintings of Modernist architecture call attention to a humanist approach to design and its effect on the way we experience spaces.

Jon Cohn is a writer and professional board game designer. He was inspired to write “The Three Currencies of Doctor Kulick” from his own experience living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a hypermobility disorder that causes chronic pain. His first novel, The Island Mother, is forthcoming in 2022.

Madeline Haze Curtis has published work in Copper Nickel, West Branch, and the Forge Literary Magazine. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Charlene Fix is an emeritus professor at Columbus College of Art & Design. Her publications include the poetry collections Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat, Frankenstein’s Flowers, Flowering Bruno, and Jewgirl, as well as the book Harpo Marx as Trickster. She co-coordinates Hospital Poets at OSU and does peace and social justice work.

Judith Fox wrote spare text for her award-winning photography book, I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s, which rekindled her interest in poetry. Fox is also a fine art photographer; her photographs are collected by museums including LACMA and VFMA. She is completing a collection of her poems.

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work appears in jubilat, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations; her new book of poems is Pandemic Almanac. Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she has taught for many years.

Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press) which was selected by Marge Piercy for the 2015 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Hall’s short stories have appeared recently in New England Review, Cimarron Review, and Blackbird. She is at work on a collection of stories that examines the epidemic of gun violence. rachelhall.org

C.J. Hribal is the author of The Company Car, American Beauty, Matty’s Heart, and The Clouds in Memphis (winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction). The Louise Edna Goeden Professor at Marquette University, he also teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He’s completing work on a new novel, Housebreaking, and a story collection, A Guy Walks Into a Bar, A Woman Wades Into the Sea.

Kan Ren Jie is a Singaporean poet and writer currently based in Shanghai, China. His work has previously been featured in Barzakh Magazine, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, and Spittoon Monthly.

John Kneisley grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He received a BA in English from Dickinson College, and an MAT from Brown University. He currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, loving his proximity to the mountains, and is a poetry student in Colorado State’s MFA program.

T. Le is a Vietnamese-American artist currently working on her first poetry collection. Her poetry is forthcoming in the anthology Somewhere We Are Human, SWWIM, and appears in Project Yellow Dress, Vietnamese Boat People, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Central Massachusetts.

Angie Sijun Lou is a Kundiman Fellow and a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, FENCE, the Asian American Literary Review, and others. She lives in Oakland.

Esther Abisola Omole is a Nigerian-American artist and poet from Broward County, Florida. She is a recent graduate from Stanford University, where she studied Architecture and African and African American Studies. She is especially enamored with Black feminists poetics, Black creation, and space making.

R.J. Petteway is a public health professor and poet. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he sips dark roast and rocks Griffey Max 1 Freshwaters, rain or shine. He is an alumnus of UVA, Michigan, and UC Berkeley. He still represents The Ville. www.rjpetteway.com

C.C. Reid has received fellowships from The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, The Writer’s Center, Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her poems have won the Mary C. Mohr Award, F(r)iction’s Poetry Award, and the Larry Neal Writers’ Award.

Suzanne Manizza Roszak has published prose and poetry in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, The Journal, New Letters, and Verse Daily. Suzanne holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen and a reader for CutBank.

Mallika Sekhar lives and writes in London, UK, where she works as a hematologist and hemato-oncologist. She is interested in medical error and uncertainty and has published The Bitter Pill podcast series on this subject. She is currently writing a book imagining a story around historic events of 1500 A.D.

Sofi Stambo won the first prize in fiction in Dzanc Books/Disquiet International contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2018. She has been published by Ep;phany, the Kenyon Review, New England Review, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Agni, Granta, and Tin House.

Lindsay Starck is based in Minneapolis. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published in 2016. Her short prose and academic articles have appeared in the New England Review, the Southern Review, Ploughshares, the Cincinnati Review, Adaptation, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Modern Fiction. She is currently at work on a short story collection and a Slenderman-inspired novel.

SM Stubbs co-owned a bar in Brooklyn until recently. Recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf, he has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best New Poets. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the Normal School, Carolina Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, New Ohio Review, and Cagibi.

Melissa J. Varnavas is an award-winning poet, journalist, and editor living in Beverly, Massachusetts. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College, her work has appeared in the literary journals Amethyst Review, Blast Furnace, End Times, Margie, the New Guard, Oberon, and Oddball Magazine.

Connemara Wadsworth has been published in Connecticut River Review, Ibbetson Street, Lily Review, Northern New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Off the Coast, Poet Lore, Chautauqua, and Mayo Review. Her chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest and is about the years her family lived in Iraq.

Laura Paul Watson lives and writes in Pine, Colorado. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. When not writing, she works as a general contractor. Her work has also appeared in Agni, Boulevard, and Poetry Ireland Review.

Michael M. Weinstein is a trans/crip poet and essayist whose work appears in Boston Review, Conjunctions, Narrative, Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Yorker. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan and a PhD from Harvard, and now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Barbara West is writing a memoir exploring the tension between Christian/Buddhist directives to help others and her 12-step program’s directive to “focus on yourself.” Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Nursing, Another Chicago Magazine, and Shambhala Times. She lives in Davis, California, and works as a wound/ostomy and hospice nurse.

Jessica Yuan is a poet and architectural designer, and author of the chapbook Threshold Amnesia, winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and Miami Writer’s Institute, and her poems are published in Best New Poets, jubilat, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, and the Journal.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to all who have helped support Bellevue Literary Review in its efforts to bridge the worlds of literature and medicine.

Special thanks to the Goldenberg family, the Buckvar family, and Lesmah J. Fraser and Lin Lombardi for their sponsorship of the BLR Prizes.

Sustainer: Barrett Kashdan

Benefactors: The Goldenberg Family, Abraham Verghese, Jan and Marica Vilcek, The Whiting Foundation

Patrons: Robert J. Warshaw, Northwell Health

Muses: Bettina Klein, Robert Oldshue & Anne Calabrese, Marit Vagstad, David & Jacqueline Weill, Cambridge Boxhill Language Assessment, Penguin Random House

Partners: Martin J. Blaser, The Buckvar Family, Myrna Blyth, Dina and Ron Borzekowski, Vida Foubister, Lesmah J. Fraser, John Froude, Sig-Linda Jacobson, Gerard Kirwan, Perri Klass, Lee Learman, Lin Lombardi, Katherine Mathews, Michael Myers, Danielle Ofri, Michael Yeaman, The Arnold P. Gold Foundation

Advocates: Thomas Andrews, Bruce and Kathi Campbell, Eliza and Doug Chin, Frank Clark, Wes Ely, Kathleen Gibbons, Anyika Jordan, Barron Lerner, Jerome Lowenstein, Gardner McFall, Marion Nestle, Jennifer Nevins, Ruth Oratz, Saul Weiner

Friends: Marilyn Abildskov, Neda Afsarmanesh, Aaron Akman, Frank P. Akman, Cori Baill, Michael Bandler, Joan Baron, Deborah D. Bayer, Joseph Becker, Madeleine Biondolillo, William Branch, Richard Bronson, Theresa Brown, Ken D. Browne, Elizabeth Crowell, Marlene DeLeon, Everett Eissenstat, David Ferris, Marcia Forecki, Andrew Freedman, Abraham Fuks, Marnie Gelfman, Martha Gershun, Erika Goldman, Jeoffry Gordon, William and Carol Greilsheimer, Barbara Grufferman, Caridad Hernandez, Rana Bitar Jacob, Sandeep Jauhar, Arlene Kossoff, Susan Land, Lisa Lebduska, Lauralee Leonard, Resa Lewis, Nancy Lord, Ajay Major, Talya Miron-Shatz, Jane Mushabac, Elayne K. Mustalish, Lauren Nossel, John and Masumi O’Donnell, Marcia Ofri, Judy and Michael Pillinger, Krista Puttler, Ann Russell, Benjamin Sadock, Maureen Seaton, Donna Baier Stein, Dana Suskind, Billie Tadros, Gilbert Tauber, Sue Ellen Thompson, Mary Vogler, Jerrold Weiss, Margot Wizansky, Susan Wyatt

Bellevue Literary Review is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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