1. The Scent of Other People’s Memories

You often walk through the Garden of Unfinished Poems, but you’ve never tarried there. It is a place for abandoning, for releasing the remnants of feelings unable to be processed, the ones stuck in perpetual limbo, too painful or confusing to lock into the coherency of words. There’s nothing to be retrieved, so what would be the point in lingering?

So you tell yourself until today, when you spin around after hurling a few lines of romantic verse under the willow tree only to find your momentum arrested by a heady scent, dark and choral. It smells of déjà vu, lives unlived but experienced all the same. Staggering under the weight, you fall to your knees, surprised by the softness beneath them. The ground where you’d left haltering thoughts about your father is no longer barren. Your fingers lightly graze a field of clover, deepening the heady scent, giving flashes of moments—a bark of laughter, a cry of welcome, a growl of disapproval. You linger on the hug that someone else received, letting it seep into the space you hadn’t known its absence had left.

You find one with four leaves. Gently breaking the stem, you hold it up against the setting sun and take in its contours. How had something so gracefully curved come from your jagged attempts to memorialize the events your father no longer could? As his stories faltered, became repetitive, and eventually failed him, your questions sliced ever more frantically across the blank page, slashes through a veil that revealed only darkness beneath.

Lifting the clover to your nose, you breathe deeply of incense and mourning, the creeping grief of losing someone while still holding his hand. But the scent is layered, as well; more hands held, arms clasped, a community gathering around loss and finding something there, in the darkness revealed between slashes of grief.

You tuck the clover in the pocket that used to hold your verses, for now. Later, you’ll tuck it into your father’s, watch as his twitches ease and his breathing settles.

2. The Honey of Playfulness

This time, you let your guard down slightly. The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate. It turned out clumsy and haphazard, all tangled threads and loose ends. Your ex couldn’t perceive you as a whole, and perhaps you can’t either. You may as well abandon the attempts. The point of the garden is to not think, not feel, not reckon with the words you can no longer stand to struggle over.

Still, even as you carry the words to release them, you experiment with movement. Why is it called beelining, you wonder, when bees more seem to frolic through the air? Your straight, measured steps begin to soften, fall lighter, meander along the path. The buzz of a bee joins you, and you mimic its movement. Lilting along, distracted by the game, you follow the bee all the way to a hive you’d never before noticed. It’s inside a hollow tree. Ah yes. You’d nearly forgotten how long you’d been coming here. You place your hand against the tree, and can almost hear the echoes of your teenage voice singing along with your awkward attempts at guitar.

Your hand comes away sticky. The tree grown from your teenage angst must have died long ago—your attempts to make something solid and presentable of yourself clearly failed—but it’s become a haven for something sweet. You lick the palm of your hand, letting the liquid coat your tongue. It tastes of silliness and imagination, putting on and taking off, laughter and ease. There’s something in the honey that beckons a different kind of release. You realize you haven’t even taken the poetry out of your pocket. Your hand is too sticky to do so now. Perhaps these lines aren’t done anyway. Perhaps there’s more to play with in them.

Perhaps there’s more to play with in you.

The bees dance invitingly, and you carefully reach in and break a small part of the comb to bring home with you.

3. A Salve, for Lovers Lost

You find yourself coming to the garden more, but leaving less. At first you keep the words longer to play with them, having fun with rhyme and reason, but eventually it morphs into something different. Something that feels more like searching than playing, something that wants to be right instead of simply beautiful. Today when you enter the garden, your pocket is full to bursting with lines you can’t let go of. They’re not perfect yet.

You came to release one, just one, a minor heartbreak there’s no use in dwelling on. But as you reach the willow and lift it from the top of your pocket, you’re startled by a bunny suddenly leaping out from behind the tree. There’s never anyone else here, any life other than the bees! You stumble in surprise, loosing the whole pile of papers stuffed within your pocket, and scraping your behind on the dirt path. The wind catches the scraps, blowing them willy-nilly, disrupting your careful system of where each type of verse should be laid to rest. What have you done?

You place your hand against the trunk to hoist yourself up, and a piece of bark comes off in your grasp. It feels soothing against your palm, seeping sensations that ease into your skin—the lightheartedness of new love, slick sweat and racing heartbeats, coy glances and eyes rolling back in pleasure, a hitched breath. It feels of loss and breaking, and the way your heart became something more in the aftermath—fuller, deeper, resonant.

You gather more bark ready to release itself from the trunk and take it home to make a salve to slather over your still-beating heart.

4. The Mushrooms Grown from Past Versions of You

You start to have a sense of which poems need further experimentation and which you’re ready to release. But you’ve lost all sense of order in the garden; since the wind spread your work far and wide, the garden has become wild and lush. You move carefully down the overgrown path, avoiding the poison ivy and pushing through bushes. It’s more humid than you remember, and the ground is softer beneath your feet.

You bend to tuck some lines of longing under a fallen log, not ready to face the forms your desire is taking for fear that they might be impossible—a family that embraces you fully and without hesitation, a body that moves fluidly among expressions and expectations, a lover that dances with you, just as fluidly, just as fully, through thick and thin.

From your crouched position, a whole world is revealed. Crickets chirp, a fly flits past your ear, a bunny—perhaps the one you spied earlier—nibbles in the field of clover, and mushrooms spread like a whisper through the quiet wood. Now that you’re looking for them, you see the mushrooms everywhere, in every damp hollow and shady space. You carefully dig under the roots of one, curious what enables their growth. Then another. Then another. Under each, you find who you used to be, shades of yourself that you’d thought dead and gone, left behind. Shades that you thought you could never stomach.

You lift one of the mushrooms to your lips and take a gentle bite. It’s savory: not just edible but bursting with sustenance. Tracing the fungal network across the garden, you see the ways it connects everything—living and dead, past and future, possible and impossible. Leaving these poems unfinished wasn’t only to let them die, but to let you continue to live.

5. A Lily, for Your Love

You didn’t come to release anything, this time. You came to offer thanks. To tell the garden how grateful you are, for the space of release, for the possibilities of play, for what can be found in relation.

You’ve been in a season where you haven’t needed to release things in order for them to grow. You’ve found words that can hold the bittersweet pairing of hugs you never received from the hand you still have the chance to clasp. Phrasing that glides between gendered glimpses without halting their flow, finding fullness in the movement. Language full of love for the stilted selves that blossomed into you. A smile tugs at the corners of your mouth, irresistible. You’ve also composed the first lyrics since your high school variety show days, inspired by someone who blew into your life with the kind of love you’d never believed it possible to imagine, a love that continues to grow even if your words sometimes falter, or your melody sputters to a stop. Together, you create space for it to start again.

The wind seems to nudge you, guiding you back towards the willow tree where you’d so often buried the pieces of your heart after another that found them too heavy to hold. And there, growing at the base of a tree, is a single orange lily. Bright, with desire. Full, with potential. And dancing, fluidly, in the breeze.

You smile, offering the garden one last breathless thanks, as you pluck the lily from the garden that now teems with life, and bring it home to your love.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #377—April 14, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Roger Jefferson (March 13, 1955—April 8, 1989)

Roger “Rod” Jefferson died on April 8 at home, surrounded by his many dear friends. Rod was a fierce advocate for gay rights and served as the head of the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Coalition for seven years. Even after his diagnosis, Rod continued to host salons and dinner parties filled with joy and laughter. We can only imagine all Rod might have done if only he’d had more time. A celebration of his life will be held April 22. Until we dance again, Roddy.

—Your friends

Larry Stenson

Our beloved Larry departed us on April 10, 1989 at the age of 29. He is survived by his lifemate Derek and his mother Joan. He was well known for his dashing looks and mischievous sense of humor. Larry was the cover model for Ganymede’s Men in August of 1982, and many readers will no doubt recall his thumb hooked underneath that cherry-red Speedo. It is Larry’s ultimate pleasure to know that he will remain immortal in the fantasies of many. Love ya, babe!

—Derek

Fernando Lopez / Tia Crystal

Fernando was called up to the Spirit in the Sky on April 11, 1989. He was an artist of the highest caliber most known for his performances as Tia Crystal. His love of music was legendary. He lit up the room the moment he entered. He never lost hope that he would be well again, and explored every avenue of traditional, Indio, and New Age medicine. In the end, he asked to spread this message: “My greatest pride is that I never was closed-minded. I lived to love and loved to live.” Muchos besos, amor!

—Quique & the girls

Eartha Kitty (1977—1989)

Eartha Kitty Robertson passed on April 11, 1989. She was adopted as a kitten by her father Casey Robertson. Despite being the “runt of the litter,” Eartha was playful and energetic. She adored a warm bowl of milk and chasing spots of sunlight across the floor. She brought her daddy 12 years of happiness, and he would have welcomed a thousand more. She is survived by her human daddy Casey and feline sister Kitty Pride.

—Casey Robertson

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #378—April 30, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

No Cats in the Crypt

Dear Gany,

I have been a longtime reader, and I am such a fan of everything your publication does for the community. I have always considered you a thoughtful publication for gay news and culture. However, in your last issue, I was insulted and appalled by your obituary column. Isn’t it bad enough that we need such a column to list the passing of lovers, friends, and gay brothers and sisters, most of whom are dying because of this goddamn AIDS crisis? The world is distressing enough without having to be subjected to an obit on somebody’s cat. Did you not think about how publishing this would detract from the solemnity and dignity of the three humans listed? I mean, my God. This is the first time that Gany has shown such bad taste in all the years I’ve been reading. Shame on the editors, and shame on Casey Robertson for even thinking of sending that obit in!

P.S. Please feel free to publish this letter if you have the balls.

—Sam, San Francisco CA

Put the Cat Back in the Bag

Dear Gany,

I usually mind my own business when it comes to this magazine. I love to read the tea in the culture section and flip through the (hot hot hot) models. Two weeks ago was the first time I sent anything into Gany, when I wrote an obituary for my dear sis Fernando (aka the legendary Tia Crystal). When I saw that you run obituaries for free, I was actually moved. That is a fine community service. But imagine my shock when I saw my tribute to Fernando’s life above a CAT’S. Make no mistake, Fernando was a fighter, but he had a painful death. As his condition worsened, I watched him turn to everything from electroshock to Santería to injecting his own urine into his arm to stay with us. Please don't make the mistake of believing the death of someone's pet compares to the death of a human being who laughed, loved, sang, and danced. I hope you take a good, long look at yourselves in the mirror tonight. Just pray that Fernando isn’t there haunting your ass!

—Quique, Houston TX

We would like to address both these letters in reference to our Issue #377 Obituary section. For the record, let us state emphatically that we take our obituary section very seriously. We pray that someday soon there will be no need for it. When we began running obituaries back in 1983, we received harsh feedback from many readers who felt the whole idea was in bad taste. Now, years later, the section has become an unfortunately thriving part of our publication. Recently, when one of our readers came to us with a pet obit, we were moved and wished to accommodate their bereavement. Several of our readers have pointed out that since most gay and lesbian people never parent children, our pets are like children to us. We do not regret running the obit for Eartha Kitty, however we do regret not creating a separate section. From now on, all pet tributes will be placed in a new, paid category: OUR FURRY FRIENDS. Thanks for your comments, advice, and readership. —Editor

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

AIDS Researchers Warn Against Home Remedies

Following a conference on April 8, members of the AIDS Research and Education Symposium (ARES) warned those diagnosed with the syndrome to avoid misinformation that may lead to the use of harmful home remedies. Head of ARES Steven Hu said, “I have come across patients who believe ingesting industrial solvents like Virodene will help, or who opt for oxygen therapy instead of medicine. We know people are desperate, but the most important thing you can do is listen to your doctor and not lose hope.”

SECTION IV: AT THE MOVIES

Pet Sematary Gives Tepid Scares

The latest movie from the mind of scaremaster Stephen King offers mild thrills but ultimately falls short. Director Mary Lambert, whose current claim to fame is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” music video, struggles to land the pacing of a real horror flick. Unfortunately, the best actor in the film is Church, the resurrected cat. If you’re looking for some real frights, I suggest checking out Gany’s News Section.

—Rob “The Movie Guy” Rossi

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Boppy James (November 3, 1950—April 8, 1989)

The sky cracked open when Boppy took flight

To welcome him up on a cool spring night.

The joy that he brought to us shined like the moon.

It’s a pity they called him to Heaven so soon.

Love, Wheeler

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #379—May 12, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bitching About Obits

Dear Gany,

I am writing in regard to the two letters in your previous issue. I thought their comments sucked. My lover and I have three dogs that we love and treat as our children. Pets bring so much joy into a person’s life for such a brief lot of time. These readers seemed to think that a pet obituary detracted from the other obits, but I think it actually made me appreciate them more. This AIDS thing can feel like it has taken over our entire world, and it’s important for us to see that there is something else, including deaths that aren’t touched by sickness or gay-bashing or suicide. For the first time in a while, I felt a little more normal. I am glad that Gany will have a section just for pet tributes.

—Sarah, Austin TX

Go Gag on a Hairball

Dear Gany,

A pets-only obit section? Is that really necessary? I vehemently agree with the two readers who expressed their concerns in your previous issue. Frankly, I think they went a little too soft. I am appalled at your refusal to issue an apology and redact the obit for that cat! Arguing that pets are gay people’s children does an incredible disservice to the Gay and Lesbian Parents Association that you advertise in this very magazine. BE REAL. Our gay brothers and sisters are dying every day from a horrific and debilitating disease. Why the hell do you think this is okay?

—Arnold, Denver CO

We hear and appreciate your candid feedback. We would like to note that we have never “redacted” an obituary and would never do so except on the request of the sender. —Editor

Animal Lover on the Warpath

Dear Gany,

I can’t believe the two ridiculous letters you had in the April 30 issue. Some people are so heartless it turns my stomach! The people who wrote those letters obviously have no idea how much a devoted pet can mean to someone, especially a gay person who lives alone. My gorgeous, lovable cat Winston is the best friend I have. When I was kicked out of my family’s home, taking in Winston brought me back to the land of the living. I raised him with my lover until he passed two years ago, and now Winston is all I have to remember him. My cat’s death will mean more to me than anyone else in my life. So, go ahead and create a column to appease these callous queers. Most of the people I have known who ended up in your obits were just dogs or alley cats, anyway!

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

As stated in our previous issue, Ganymede’s Men will accept paid pet obituaries which will be placed in a newly created section called OUR FURRY FRIENDS. —Editor

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

Kansas Church Protests Homosexuality

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas made national news with its virulent protests of homosexuality. Founder Fred Phelps told a Topeka paper, “America is doomed for its acceptance of homosexuality. God sent AIDS to destroy the homosexual just as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Any person who wishes to take part in Eternal Life must renounce his faggot ways.” Gay and lesbian activists have lobbied local representatives to speak out against Phelps and his church to little success.

SECTION VIIb: OUR FURRY FRIENDS

Rocky the Chocolate Lab (1980—1989)

Rocky was a 9-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever who tragically passed after being bitten by a rattlesnake. He was a loyal and loveable dog. He was happiest when he was swimming in a lake or chasing ducks at the park. We miss you, boy.

—Eddie & Jake

Chiquita

Chiquita was a spunky parakeet who died at the ripe old age of thirty-two (I think). I inherited her from my lifemate Pancho, who passed eight years ago from pneumonia. Chiqui and I kept each other company through dark times with many conversations. She loved cracking open pecans and watching Dynasty, during which she would often call the women, “¡Hijas de la gran puta!” I know she and Pancho are cussing out those whores together now.

—Jorge

Mister Fluffernutter (January 1, 1981—May 9, 1989)

Mister Fluffernutter III Esq. was a purebred Persian longhair who departed at the age of eight due to an unfortunate run-in with a garage door. He was well-loved and deeply cherished throughout his life by his two mommies. He loved tuna and belly rubs. He disliked men with beards. A celebration of life will be held on May 15, 1989.

—Caroline and Susan

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #380—May 27, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #377 for “Eartha Kitty.” This obituary has been redacted, as Eartha Kitty is no longer deceased.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #381—June 8, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Questions Regarding Obit Correction

Dear Readers,

We have received many calls and letters regarding a correction submitted to our previous issue [Issue #380]. We have reached out to Mr. Robertson, who requested the correction, and have printed his written statement in full below. —Editor

Dear Gany Readers,

Over the past couple months, I have mourned the death of my beloved Eartha Kitty. I loved her as a full member of my family, which is why I felt it was appropriate to submit an obit to Gany. I never intended for this to create so much drama in the magazine, let alone create an entire new section. Honestly, my grief was such that I have been unable to keep up with the back and forth over the past few issues.

I do not know if it is possible for anyone to conceive of the absolute shock I felt when, a few weeks ago, I came home to find Eartha Kitty eating up the bowl I had put out for her sister, Kitty Pride. For those who might ask: No, this was not just a cat that looked like my Eartha. Eartha was born with one back leg shorter than the other three. This did not affect her mobility drastically, but it did give her a slight limp throughout her life. The cat that was eating Kitty Pride’s food had this limp.

And, yes, I am sure that Eartha was dead. Her decline was slow, painful, and costly. By the end, she had to be hand-fed until she finally “went away,” and I discovered her body beneath the TV stand. I had her cremated and placed inside a wonderful jeweled box. When this new cat appeared in my home, I went to open the box and found it totally empty.

I am at a total loss for an explanation. She is my Eartha—only, I would say, maybe seven years younger. She doesn’t possess the slowness or gray hairs that she did in her later years. When I brought Eartha to the vet, he was convinced that this is a different but coincidentally similar animal. When I told him about Eartha’s ashes, he suggested that I might have thrown them out in a fit of grief-induced delirium. What a horrible thought … but fine, maybe. I really don’t think so.

If anybody knows someone I can reach out to regarding this, I have given Gany my contact information. If not … Well, I hope that you all can someday feel as unreasonably blessed as I do.

—Casey Robertson, Los Angeles CA

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #382—June 25, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Zombie Cats

Dear Gany,

You have got to be pulling my leg. Cats are rising from the dead now? If this is a joke, it’s a sorry one. I am beside myself thinking that this was published next to columns about serious subjects like AIDS research and ACT UP protests. I cannot imagine what possessed you to share a letter from someone who is either a raving lunatic or a shameless attention whore. Rest assured, you have lost one loyal reader at least!

—George, Phoenix AZ

The Cat Came Back

Dear Gany,

I was extremely concerned by Mr. Robertson’s statement regarding the resurrection of Eartha Kitty. If he is to be believed, there are darker implications than I think Mr. Robertson is prepared to face. After the ascension of my dear friend the legendary Tia Crystal, I, too, was contacted by dark energies that promised delicious and perverse salves to my mourning. I fear that Mr. Robertson has unknowingly opened himself to such demons. I urge him to consult a priest, medium, imam, or curandero depending on his spiritual inclinations. I am happy to make a referral if Gany would connect us.

—Quique, Houston TX

8 More Lives

Dear Gany,

I was surprised and delighted to read about the return of Eartha Kitty from beyond the grave. I’m sure many people doubt Mr. Robertson’s account, but if you own a cat, you know they have ways of getting around anything. Maybe death is no exception. I can only imagine how elated I would feel if my wonderful Winston appeared in my kitchen after I thought he had left for good. Things have been so hard. The Reagan years were hell, and Bush is hardly an improvement. Even if we were able to cure this AIDS problem, there would still be a hole in the ozone and massacres in China and war in the Middle East. The system is a slaughterhouse. So, good for you, Eartha Kitty. You beat the system. I just hope you left the door open for some other furry friends to follow.

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Derek Pierce

Derek’s sudden death on June 20 left all who knew him in a state of shock. He will be laid to rest with his dearest Larry, who passed earlier this year. Derek was a passionate photographer whose work was featured in Playgirl, New York Magazine, as well as Ganymede’s Men. Despite how it ended, he will be remembered for his delicious humor and fearlessness. We love you, D. We only wish we’d had more time.

—Your pals

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #383—July 8, 1989

SECTION VIIb: OUR FURRY FRIENDS

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Rocky the Chocolate Lab.” This obituary has been redacted, as Rocky is no longer deceased.

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Chiquita.” This obituary has been redacted, as Chiquita is no longer deceased.

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Mister Fluffernutter.” This obituary has been redacted, as Mr. Fluffernutter III Esq. is no longer deceased.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #384—July 22, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Has Anyone Talked to a Scientist?

Dear Gany,

The past few weeks have flipped my world upside down. Dead pets are returning like Night of the Living Dead! I woke up two days ago and found my childhood Doberman Smokey laying his head on my pillow the way he would when I was ten. My girlfriend screamed so loud, it shook the house! Smokey’s been gone for at least thirty years, but now he’s got puppy energy. This seems big, yet I haven’t seen anything about it on the news. Is it possible this has something to do with radiation? I heard of some freaky stuff coming out of Chernobyl, but nothing like this. Why is nobody talking about this?

—Florence, Santa Fe NM

Lazarus Lizards

Dear Gany,

Is anybody thinking about the larger implications of these pet resurrections? I am as happy as anyone else that my three iguanas are back in my life, but are they immortal? If they die again, will they come back a second time? My beagle seems to want nothing to do with them, so should I never plan on owning another pet? Do I have to plan to will them to somebody when I die? Death is the natural way of things, and this just feels wrong.

—Vito, Boca Raton FL

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Eulogy

Dear Gany,

I have noticed that it’s only the pets of my gay and lesbian friends that are coming back. My nephew lost his pet hamster a few months ago, and that thing is still in a shoebox in my sister’s backyard. But my gay friends across the country have been welcoming back pets of every size and species. It is clear that we love differently than our heterosexual peers—an unnatural love, some have made us believe. Is it possible that our specific breed of love is capable of unimaginable feats?

—Raj, San Jose CA

Ask the Animals, and They Will Teach You

Dear Gany,

I’m sure I am not the only one who has undergone a great deal of spiritual searching over these past weeks. In my letter published in a previous issue, I warned that the return of Miss Eartha Kitty might be the result of a malevolent spirit. However, I have reassessed my stance given the breadth of these miracles. I believe that this is a great re-harmonizing. Our gay communities have been so plagued by death, I am certain that this is the Universe balancing the scales, even if it is a bit drastic. After all the suffering these past years, why not return to us those innocent creatures we love?

—Quique, Houston TX

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

Desecrated Grave in LA Possible Hate Crime

On the morning of October 21, the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a call from Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles. A security guard had discovered that the grave of Roger Jefferson had been dug up, and his remains removed. LAPD has yet to release any identifying information regarding the perpetrators or theories on the whereabouts of the deceased’s remains, though they have said they are potentially considering this a hate crime given Mr. Jefferson’s public work in gay rights activism. They are welcoming any information that anyone might have about the incident.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #385—August 5, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #377 for “Roger Jefferson.” This obituary has been redacted, as Mr. Jefferson is no longer deceased.

Editor’s Note: Due to clerical oversight, Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issues #386—#388 were not archived.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #389—September 30, 1989

SECTION I: TOP STORIES

Gay Resurrections Stump Officials

Members of the medical establishment continue to be flummoxed by the resurrections of deceased people and animals. Though reluctant to make definitive claims, a spokesperson from the Center for Disease Control admitted that, from preliminary surveys, the resurrected individuals appear to be “majority homosexuals.” As people return from the dead, government officials continue to urge them to register with their local municipality so that records can be up to date.

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Too Many Tin Hat Tammies

Dear Gany,

I am sick and tired of reading paranoid letters about how these resurrections are some big government conspiracy. Why the hell would Bush want a bunch of queers back? It just doesn’t make sense, and you’re making the rest of us look like loonies! There are legitimate questions around the reintegration of the resurrected into the workforce and overpopulation. Let’s not pollute the conversation with inane theories.

—DeWayne, Corvallis OR

Resurrection Support Group

Dear Gany,

I’m just writing to let your readers know that the Gay and Lesbian Center in San Francisco is starting a national support group for recently resurrected individuals to aid in their re-acclimation to living. You can contact the Center for more information!

—Sam, San Francisco CA

Two Lovers Returned from the Dead

Dear Gany,

Harry and I dated for five years before he tragically drowned in 1981. Three years later, I met Armando, who passed last year. Both are back and expect me to be theirs. Harry is my first love, but I’ve been sharing my life with Armando up until just a year ago. Has anybody else found themselves in a similar predicament? How’s a girl to choose?

—Liam, Austin TX

Newly Resurrected Seeking Old Flame

Dear Gany,

I came back a few weeks ago and I’ve been looking for my lover of eight years, Alonzo. We met in Nevada but I’m afraid he might have moved. Would it be possible to create another section for reconnecting the newly resurrected with their loved ones? Maybe “Resurrection Reconnection”?

—Cole, Reno NV

If other readers would have interest in such a section, please reach out to us! —Editor

Pump the Breaks

Dear Gany,

My lover of thirteen years returned 2 weeks ago, looking exactly as he did the day we met. Before his health declined, we loved taking strolls along the beach and perusing art galleries. Since his return, he’s been insistent on mile-long jogs and is planning a tour of Europe. He has also introduced MUCH more variety in the bedroom than ever before. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that he has the body of a much younger man, and I do NOT. I’ve also noticed that he is way spacier than before. Sometimes, I swear he sees things that aren’t there. It’s totally unnerving! Of course, I am incredibly grateful to have him back, but I just ask everyone to have some grace for the partners of the resurrected.

—Miles, San Diego CA

Bite Your Tongues, Curious Cats

Dear Gany,

I am shocked to hear people being so judgmental of the resurrected. If YOU died and returned from the Afterlife, wouldn’t you come back a bit different? A bit haunted? They have connected to the Spirits, amores! No need to be shady about it. I am also disappointed to hear so many people hounding their friends to tell them about the Afterlife. Some things are just not to be known! If you were recently resurrected, I suggest you tell those curious cats what my friend the legendary Tia Crystal says: “Baby, I’m back. Now, love me while I’m here!”

—Quique, Houston TX

What’s Next?

Dear Gany,

I keep hearing people asking the same unanswerable questions about these resurrections. But the fact is they HAPPENED. The country’s eyes are on us, and the population of resurrected is only growing. So, why aren’t we using this momentum as an opportunity to organize?

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

Rise Up for the Living

Dear Gany,

Longtime reader, first time writing in. I know folks have a lot of questions for us resurrected. Believe me, we’ve got questions too! I may not have many answers, but I’ll tell you what I do have: energy! I feel like a wound-up tinker toy 24/7! After connecting with others in my situation, that seems to be a common thread between all of us. We’re back, we’re grateful, and we just want to DO something! Why not put all this pent-up energy towards lobbying for more AIDS research and pushing for protections for our community? Let’s mobilize!

—Rod, Los Angeles CA

SECTION IV: AT THE MOVIES

Out of the Grave but Still in the Closet

A certain Hollywood actor who passed on three decades ago in an auto accident seems to be walking the streets again. Still, he continues to deny deny deny cavorting with the fae folk. Is he an exception to the rule, or doth he protest too much?

—Rob “The Movie Guy” Rossi

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Carl Michaelsson (February 5, 1955—September 1, 1989)

Carl was laid to rest surrounded by his loved ones. He was a glittering light in all our lives. His laughter was infectious, and he kept his sense of humor to the very end. To echo his own final words: We’ll be seeing you again very soon!

—Your Dearest Friends

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Part I: In which Tristram faces a Dragon.

July 8th 1883

Dear Francesca,

First off: I know that’s not your name. I haven’t gone and mistaken you for another woman—one of my many conquests, I imagine you imagine (what must imaginary you think of imaginary me?). You’ll notice, if you glance ahead, that I’ve adopted a corresponding nom de plume of my own.

A confession: Our meeting the other afternoon wasn’t quite by chance. I first noticed you last Tuesday, when you entered the Librairie and asked for a copy of Swinburne’s Tristram. In order, I perceived that:

1. You read much more quickly than I do. (Unless you are pretending? Are those flickering pages a performance?)

2. You have very long and fine fingers. I would like to know how you managed to stain them so badly: penning letters to your friends, or notes in your books? Are you a lady novelist in the making? Or a poet—like myself?

3. Our culture is mad for blondness, but yours is odd and unnatural, and therefore interesting: I’ve never seen hair so fine and bright—a troubling hybrid of corn- and spider-silk.

That husband of yours doesn’t seem like he cares much for books. Or perhaps he is the type who values their bindings more than their contents and would wallpaper his household in gilded Morocco if he could. Tell me, how—why—did you marry him?

Once I’ve finished writing, I will fold this letter up and tuck it into the Tristram you kindly loaned me (may it be our Galeotto … ). I’ll knock on your door, at which point I will most likely encounter a puzzled maidservant, who will ask who in the world I am, and I will explain that I am returning a book you were kind enough to bestow on me (generous creature that you are and clearly down-on-their-luck, weatherworn would-be poet that I am). I will look very sheepish and the maid will hopefully take pity and understand that I nourish myself on pats on the head from overeducated and bored ladies like yourself.

Perhaps Tristram will then resume his place on your bookshelf and gather dust. If, on the other hand, I am very fortunate, and you are the kind of woman I suspect and dread and pray you are, you will crack Tristram open once you are alone and rifle eagerly through his pages. Maybe you’ll anticipate some message from me, though I’ll bet you’re counting on some sentimental little verse scribbled on a flyleaf, not a whole letter (I picture your surprise—your delight?—as my words burst free of Tristram and tumble into your lap).

If you are inclined to respond, please visit the cantine on Rue des Hirondelles. You will find a terracotta pot to the left of the entrance containing a sad little shrub that would persuade you, against your better judgement, that it is a honeysuckle. Please bury your response beneath its brittle blossoms; nourish the poor thing with your thoughts. I will look for your answer every day for two weeks before I give up all hope of hearing from you.

“Moved with such long strong desire,”

Pyrame

July 22nd 1883

Pyrame,

I’m not sure whether to be amused or insulted by your name for me. It suggests, if nothing else, that you are a poor reader of Dante. (At least you haven’t designated yourself Paolo.)

You have asked a number of very forward questions.

1. Am I only pretending to read when I turn through the pages so quickly? No, certainly not. (My husband has pointed out to me before that I “read like a parched wolf at a rabbit’s neck.”) But having read Swinburne before, I need only dwell on the page long enough to fill my memory’s gaps.

2. How did I stain my fingers? This may disappoint you, if you had hoped to learn that I am a fellow poet (or a lady novelist), but I am in fact an amateur naturalist. I like to sketch and record my observations on any flora in my vicinity. This civilized island with all its shops and boardwalks provides me with fewer specimens than I would like, but I have found a few interesting weeds and have been scolded out of one or two private gardens I was not supposed to enter.

3. Why did I marry him? There is another question hiding behind that question. I will honor your indirectness with a more forthright response than it deserves: I chose to marry him. Nobody made me. (As a general rule, it’s very difficult to make me do things I don’t want to do.)

He’s more of a reader than you imagine, though I admit he is not so fond of novels, at least none published in our lifetimes. He has an active interest in history, and the fictions of past ages—the deader the author, the better.

I qualify neither as “bored” nor “overeducated.” I have had to educate myself, and I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone in such a position to do so to excess. As a result, I am easily entertained. The world is so odd and rough; how could it bore any reasonable judge?

But I admit I have felt a little smaller since our arrival at the Île de R—. I don’t mean that marriage has “diminished” me in some way. It is something about this place. I don’t like to be surrounded by so much water, such a flat and open ring of horizon. It unsettles me to see where the sea and sky meet no matter which way I turn.

Against my better judgement, I will visit your poor honeysuckle shortly, if only out of curiosity to see what you’ll write back, if you do indeed write back (this may depend on whether there are or aren’t various other Francescas—as you’ve hinted—waiting in the wings of this little drama you’re putting on). Let’s treat the terracotta pot as our ongoing letterbox; you may leave your response in the same location.

Reluctantly, I accept the name you’ve bestowed on me; I suppose it’s pretty enough and I can’t think of a better one at the moment. And so I will sign off as

Yours not quite truly,

Francesca

P.S. How precisely did you discover our address?

P.P.S. On further consideration: Don’t tell me.

July 24th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

A naturalist! I never would have guessed it, but I can see it perfectly now. You wondered if I would be disappointed, but on the contrary I’m enormously pleased. I will now picture you in the shadow of all my favorite trees, scattered across the island—the great oak in the graveyard, the wind-blasted hemlocks that line the shore—I see you, watching “Fleet butterflies, each like a dead flower’s ghost.”

If I may make so bold: Could we arrange for another meeting viva voce before long, perhaps in the shade of one of these “specimens”?

Hopefully yours,

Pyrame

P.S. I’m not nearly the scoundrel or the sleuth you suggest. You wrote down your address in your (our) Tristram. Is that a general habit of yours, or do you only scribble your address into books you would particularly hate to lose? (Or, I suppose there is another possibility—but how presumptuous of me, to imagine anything intentional or premeditated in your slipping your address into a book, and then giving the book to me.)

August 10th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I fear I may have made too bold after all; I hope you will forgive me (and that you won’t find a renewed plea for your attention too pathetic). Please send me some news.

I accept that our exchanges must remain confined to the page for the time being, if that is your wish.

Yours in agony,

Pyrame

August 13th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

If I wished to snub you for your forwardness, I would have done so explicitly. I am no great believer in ladylike meekness and quiet; silence is all too easy to misinterpret (as you have done).

I have been remiss in my duties as your correspondent because my husband and I have had to entertain guests. I have been distracted. And so I forgot all about you and your letters.

Don’t despair, Pyrame; having written that, I realize you will take my inattention as the worst kind of snub after all.

I am forgetful; that is all.

My husband thinks there is a connection between my faulty memory and the rapid rate at which I read and learn: He says that I am like a sieve that has mistaken itself for a sponge. New information passes through me at a rate that looks astonishing from the outside, but I am not so good at maintaining a firm grip on things. (Sometimes I feel rather more like a sinking ship, as I struggle to stopper my mind’s fissures; innumerable unaccounted-for faults remain, no matter how much imaginary plaster I apply.)

You will ask for an account of our guests and activities.

These occasions involve much sipping at lemonade and nibbling at airy cakes. Sometimes, as evening approaches, the phonograph shrouds us in Handel and we pour emerald liquors over sugar cubes.

My husband passes my sketchbook around the room, and our guests turn through its pages and coo and say flattering things about how talented I am, even though that is not the point. They often turn through the pages while conversing with each other and do not look very closely at the things they praise, such as my favorite study: a happy little cluster of inkcaps feasting on the rotting fence that encircles the cemetery.

As for our guests: There are poets and philosophers and young doctors, whom you would appreciate. Then there are Lords and Ladies This-and-That, whom you would not. One of my husband’s friends, whom I shall refer to as Mr. C, always sits near me. I have tried to point this out to my husband; I have suggested we reconfigure our seating arrangement and confine Mr. C to his own corner, but my husband thinks that because he is an old man he can do no harm, and it is better to indulge him. (What he really means is that Mr. C is very rich so one should not offend him.)

Yesterday, Mr. C asked if I had ever seen “the Dragon.” I reminded him that I am not a child. He said, “No, my dear. I refer to a tree, commonly nicknamed ‘the Dragon.’ A magnificent tree, hidden on the island’s coast. The Dragon is so named because it is very old and its trunk droops and convolutes as calligraphically as the serpent that strangled Laocoön and his sons.”

“How can such a thing remain hidden?” I asked. “You make it sound like quite a spectacle.”

“Like any dragon worth its salt, this one resides in a cave. Would you like to see it?”

Sensing a trap but hopeless to waylay it, I nodded. Foolish Francesca. Mr. C took advantage and said the way was treacherous; he offered to chaperone me, to lead and hand me over the rough rocks of the coast, lest I fall and dash my dainty brains out.

Pyrame, gallant as you are: Could you assist me in this? I do not even know if Mr. C is telling the truth. Could you locate this tree for me?

If and when you write to me again, I will expect a package from you rather than a mere letter. Send me a box or purse, and in it, you must provide a sample of the Dragon’s foliage as a sign of your dedication and loyalty to me.

Otherwise, I cannot say with certainty that I will remember you and remain a faithful and dedicated correspondent.

In case this challenge marks the end of our exchange, please accept my best wishes,

Francesca

August 20th 1883

Francesca, Francesca,

Devilish woman. I admit, I hesitated at first to do your bidding. Not because Mr. C’s account of the fearsome “Dragon” cowed me, but because a certain resemblance must have struck you too, and yet you did not comment on it, and this smacked of manipulation—the way you dangled a possibility before me: that I might metamorphose from a clownish-and-loutish Pyrame into a clownish-but-clever Tristram, sly and brave dragon-slayer!

Did you think I could be so easily puppeteered? Well, evidently, yes, I am puppeteerable. But at least I’m self-aware about the matter! (I want to bring my self-awareness to your awareness before illustrating how foolishly I obliged you.)

As for dear old Mr. C: He did not lie to you—but he didn’t tell you as much as he could or should have either. Behold a report of my journey into the Dragon’s lair:

The journey to the cave is indeed treacherous; it lies to the north of one of the beaches along the Island’s western flank, where fine white sands gradate into something grittier and darker, like crumbling gingerbread. One must grasp at tilting, wind-scoured trunks that stretch like ribs out of the earth, while stepping down and around treacherous boulders. I found porous black tide-pools simmering with glassy little crablike creatures.

Then, it is as if the landscape is an unsettled blanket, wrinkled with dunes—but when one looks very closely, there it is, the cave’s mouth: a lifted fold in the cloth.

I had to remove my shoes—I dangled them across my shoulders by their laces. My feet went numb as I waded across blue-black stones, praying not to slip or encounter anyone’s rude pincers.

But soon, soon, I arrived at the cave’s mouth and had to blink away the gauze of sun-dazzle and wait for my eyes to adjust as a chill washed over me.

I saw it, perched on a sandy little island within the Island:

A great twisted, silver yew. The Dragon buckled and twirled, as though some god had seized her by the trunk and wrenched her round and round an invisible post. A wrong collision of textures: wood solid as stone, yet fluid and grained with rivulets. Her needles looked black rather than green in the half-light past the cave’s mouth; her crown glittered, gemmed with crimson berry-beads.

The tide was high enough that I had to wade, then swim, if I hoped to reach my quarry.

But you did not share one key detail that Mr. C must have included in his account, in his effort to dissuade you from making the perilous journey on your own: that the riptides guarding the Dragon are far more treacherous than the beast herself is.

I nearly drowned—drank half my weight in seawater, then spent a merry evening teetering “By the utmost margin out of the loud lone sea,” salt-dazed. I must have curled up on the beach at some point—beyond my recollection.

I reawakened well after dark, the moonlit tide tickling my naked feet. But gods be praised: I found a single yew berry—it must have been swept away by the same tide that seized my body—beneath the boning of my corset. I enclose this treasure within a vial of the seawater that almost killed me. Consider it a gift: my almost-death in a jar.

And now, you have your end of our bargain to uphold. Please send me news when you can. I hope you will share your trophy with Mr. C and so exasperate him as he tries to imagine how you made the journey on your own.

Your ardent friend,

Pyrame

August 27th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I am disappointed. It has been a week since I faced a Dragon, nearly perished for you, and provided you with the gift of my Almost-Death. I think this merits some kind of response? A brief note at least? A whisper of acknowledgment and thanks and a promise to write at greater length at a later date?

I am growing worried. Please send me some sign before long, or I will assume the worst. And given my namesake, who knows what I will do, in my too-hasty despair?

Yours impatiently,

Pyrame

August 30th 1883

Dear Francesca,

Very well (you are persuasive even in your silence!). I admit it: Perhaps I exaggerated when I claimed that I nearly perished in the sea for you.

Nevertheless, I am unsure what I’ve done to merit such a cold non-response. Have you “forgotten” me yet again? Is that sieve of a mind so overwhelmed, has it drunk so much, that it is now drowning?

I pray not. But if so, you leave me with no choice but to abandon our honeysuckle-letterbox and harass your door instead, which may result in our attracting undesirable attention from your beloved husband.

I do not know what else to do. The risk cannot be helped. I will wait three more days for your response, before I take this desperate measure. Forgive the desperation; you must recognize its source:

“Yea, surely as the day-star loves the sun

And when he hath risen is utterly undone,

So is my love of hers and hers of me—

And its most sweetness bitter as the sea.”

Reassure me, I beg you.

Your foolish knight,

Pyrame

September 2nd 1883

Dear Pyrame,

I thank you for your gift and apologize for the tardiness of my response. I have a confession to make: I was under the impression that I had assigned you an impossible task; I did not think (considering the fanciful nature of Mr. C’s description) that the legendary “Dragon” could possibly be real.

I assumed, as a result, that your account of almost dying in its pursuit was fabricated, that you had plucked the fruit of a commoner sort of tree, and meant to pass it off as something magical.

This upset me. But upon further investigation, I have learned from reliable sources that there is some substance to Mr. C’s legends after all, and so—I suppose—to your report of your escapades on my behalf.

Please accept my gratitude, albeit at a late juncture. I beg your forgiveness for wrongly suspecting you, when I am in fact (apparently) the more culpable participant in this exchange.

But I hope you will understand if I tell you that I am somewhat confused and unsure what to do with—I don’t know what.

You. Us. This.

Whatever you would like to call the game we are engaged in. I refuse to apply any lofty designations, of the sort that belong in courtly romances. This isn’t that—no matter how many resemblances you comment on, Pyrame, no matter how you strive to perform as Tristram. Don’t forget who you truly are.

But for my part, that is precisely the problem. I have no idea who you truly are.

Please permit me a fortnight’s leave to consider our arrangement. Please do not write to me during this interval. I will contact you when I am ready to resume our discourse. (I will not forget to do so; I’ve taken a safeguard against this possibility by writing your name in my datebook.)

Sincerely,

Francesca

Part II: In which a moonlit tryst ruins everything.

September 2nd 1883

Dear Mother,

I seek your advice in a delicate matter:

I have forged letters addressed to myself—from an anonymous lover. Please do not waste too many words upbraiding me; I am already aware of my error. As you will see.

I was careful to make it all look like a game, to write in the voice of a young poet, aggressively besotted. I portrayed myself, meanwhile, as a little curious. Intrigued. But coolly distancing—mindful of her place and loyalty to her husband. I then “hid” these letters in a hatbox and made a show of discreetly shoving the hatbox away whenever my husband entered the room.

My husband has never noticed the hatbox. Not even when I placed beads and pine cones in it, to make its passage in and out of the closet noisier.

You will say this is foolishness—that he and I torment each other, when it would be more productive to speak openly of our troubles. But I have told him of mine, again and again, and he will not listen.

The matter has taken a strange turn. You see, I gave up on this charade some time ago, once it became clear that I had failed to pique my husband’s interest with the Hidden Hatbox. But more recently … new letters have begun to appear, penned by my “lover,” whom I designated Pyrame. That is, another Pyrame—a “real” Pyrame—has begun, or continued, to write to me. How should I respond to them?

I await your response and guidance with eagerness.

Sincerely,

Your daughter

September 5th 1883

Dear Daughter,

“You will think me foolish” and “I was careful” do not make for a very persuasive combination of phrases. You have indeed been very, very foolish. There. I have respected your request and refrained from wasting too many words, though I hope the few I have selected convey my feelings on this subject adequately.

Are you certain your husband is so ignorant as you believe? The likeliest answer to this riddle is that he has cottoned on to your little scheme and is now deploying it against you, to gnaw at your thoughts and inflict the same smallish sort of madness on you that you have attempted to impose on him.

My advice (which you have already foreseen, clever as you are): Speak to him.

With love and weariness,

Your Mother

September 8th 1883

Dearest Mother,

Of course it has occurred to me that my husband might have donned the role of Pyrame in order to “teach me a lesson” (about what I don’t know: the dangers of my own fancies and cruelty? There, I need no instruction). But this strikes me as unlikely and out of keeping with his character. For one, it would require him to read and regularly quote Swinburne’s Tristram, which is, in my opinion, an impossibility.

Even if he did peruse Swinburne, I don’t believe he is capable of channeling this sort of voice. That is precisely the problem, or part of the problem, that I had hoped to remedy with this entire exercise. Perhaps I wished to give my husband a model to follow—passions and habits I wish he would express, or allow me to explore …

No, I believe something stranger is afoot.

I have further proof to furnish, in the form of a confession, which I hope will not make you very angry:

I may have done a little more than pen the letters from Pyrame I have mentioned.

Before I settled down to write in the voice of Pyrame, I knew I would have to alter my mind’s natural state, and so I did as you once taught me: I collected samples of rain- and seawater, soot and soil, and mixed the four substances with my ink. With this ink, I composed a prayer to Herodias, in which I requested her aid and inspiration, and then swallowed it.

My hand, when it moved, seemed to do so only partly of my own accord.

But I do not understand how so many new letters have begun to appear, without my hand’s involvement in the equation. Do you think that Herodias has secured another vessel, to continue to write to me in the voice of Pyrame?

Your Daughter

September 13th 1883

Daughter,

I now have a fuller grasp of the situation. You have done very wrongly. But you have done well to consult me (at long last).

No, I do not believe this could be the work of Herodias. I am unsure of the source, but as I have told you in the past (though with inadequate force, evidently), precautions must be taken in these cases, to prevent other Agents from perceiving and interfering in our Work.

Here is what you must do:

1. Boil water and pour it over your “lover’s” Offering (the yew berry they gave you, in its vial of seawater); let it steep.

2. Mix in a goblet of mulberry wine, vinegar, and oleander, to undo their name.

3. Pour this mixture back into the vial Pyrame sent you, and next time you write, send them the potion. Invent a plausible story and persuade them to drink it. The likeness to the Tristanian love potion will in all likelihood prove too much a temptation for Pyrame to resist.

With any luck, your “lover” will consume this poison, thus resolving your problem.

Your Mother

September 15th 1883

Mother,

You know very well I cannot do that. Please write back to me immediately with an alternative solution, for I am almost out of time …

Your Daughter

September 16th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

My apologies for this period of necessary silence. Many thanks for respecting my wishes during this interval; your patience does you credit.

Please accept a gift from me—which strikes me as an appropriate exchange for the trophy from the Dragon you kindly delivered to me.

I am enclosing an extract of the same Dragon’s fruit (which, I feel a need to clarify, for your edification: is not in fact a berry, but a fleshy shield around the seed), mixed with a few other key ingredients.

You must trust me.

In addition to my passions as a naturalist, I have been trained in certain Arts, you see. And I have concocted a Remedia amoris for each of us to imbibe. This seems to me the only answer to our riddle, the only way out of this tangle.

I thank you for providing me with a pleasant enough diversion during this over-steeped phase between summer and autumn when the island is so lukewarm and languid. But now our “affair,” such as it was, must come to an end. Please, if you care for me as much as you claim to, you will respect my wishes and consume this draught. Be sure to drink every last drop.

I assume I will not hear from you again. Farewell, Pyrame.

Sincerely,

Francesca

September 18th 1883

Dear Francesca,

As you can ascertain for yourself—on the basis of my reply’s existence—your potion did not work. I hope you will not be displeased to hear from me. If you have checked the honeysuckle’s pot for my reply, you must have anticipated this outcome.

Far be it from me to question your skills, but I suspect your efforts may have been muddled and marred by your own intentions and desires, and so I will speak to them directly, since their mistress is so recalcitrant:

To Francesca’s Ire:

Why pour so much boiling oil down on me? I am no Invader; I will emerge unscathed. Francesca is gifted. But I have gifts of my own, with which to defend myself.

To Francesca’s Pity:

I beseech you. Act like a pumice stone and work away at your unyielding mistress; defang her.

To Francesca’s Love (whom—I could swear—I have glimpsed darting like a sly doe through the dense and shady thickets of Francesca’s mind):

Don’t be so frightened, skittish thing. Come closer. I am no manly Hunter. I am, rather:

At your mercy,

Pyrame

September 21st 1883

Pyrame, enough games. My Mother told me I should kill you. I am beginning to believe I ought to have obeyed her.

I thought I had come up with a happier solution.

I know you are lying; you never drank the potion. If you had drunk it, you would no longer feel any ongoing need to write to me.

Tell me, what did you do with it? Did you feed it to that horrible honeysuckle? It does appear to be suffering more than usual of late—its petals have turned brown as parchment, its leaves are golden. The most inauspicious alchemy I ever saw.

(If you respond by calling it an emblem of your long-suffering love, I will smash the ridiculous thing’s pot against the adjacent wall, and what charming nonsense will you throw at me to calm my personified Ire then???)

I apologize. I have just had to stop writing to pace through a series of neat circles and breathe. I am more composed now; I am ready to write again.

You say you have gifts of your own.

Of course you do, demon, scoundrel, whatever the hell you are. I gave you your “gifts” (just as my Mother gave me hers when I was born).

I see the problem now.

I gave you a mind, but no substance, no body to imbibe the potion … I will research this matter, scratch this riddle out, erase it and you from the world once and for all.

I don’t even know why I’ve written all of this down. A reminder to myself, perhaps. I will not send this letter back to you, I will not fit my words into the dying honeysuckle’s embrace (“sweetened with dead flowers,” indeed).

But I admit, part of me fears you will perceive my thoughts regardless, you will find a way to go on imbibing the poison of my language—if not the remedy and solvent with which I had hoped to release you.

So, if you do see and hear this letter, despite my refusal to send it to you:

Please. Begone. It will be better for us both.

Sincerely,

Francesca

October 13th 1883

Dear Mother,

I believe I have succeeded. It has been around three weeks, and I have heard no more from poor Pyrame.

Why, then, do I ache? Why does it feel as though some part of me is missing? Have I gotten everything wrong, yet again? Perhaps, rather than ridding myself of Pyrame, I should have folded them back into myself (I imagine this process might be rather like raveling up a scarf and tucking it into a pocket).

On second thought, I will not send you this letter. You will worry too much.

Your heartsick Daughter

October 15th 1883

Dear Francesca,

Do not be alarmed; I have no intention of continuing to inflict my correspondence on you (unless you want me to). But as your faithful servant, I have been investigating a matter on your behalf, and now justice demands I bring the matter to your attention.

Banish me again after this, and I will obey. Never again will you hear my voice (not that you’ve ever heard it in the first place, but you understand my meaning: Never again will you trace my words on the page, subvocalize and almost-sort-of-hear me. I wonder what that voice of mine sounds like, as you imagine it? A little smoked and hoarse? Dark and soft as wine?).

It was your famous Hatbox, stuffed with our correspondence, that inspired my suspicions.

(Yes, yes, I know all about the Hatbox. I know lots of things I’m not supposed to: that’s part of the gift of deriving from you.)

I started to wonder: Does that husband of yours have his own Hatbox—or whatever the masculine equivalent might be (a cigar box, a whisky box, a carrying case for his hunting rifles … )? He must have secrets of his own that he is hiding from you, while you have attempted to flaunt yours in front of him.

And so, I recently slipped into your household to pay his quarters a visit and rifle around just a little.

Don’t worry. He is not jealous yet; he does not know to scatter flour across the floor, to catch your lovers’ footprints like gnats on flypaper. To him, I’m just a half-forgotten nightmare.

Did you know you have had other, realer dalliances already?

It is cruel to ask the question, as I know you will not recall.

I found letters between yourself and another Pyrame, another Thisbe—back in the world beyond the Île de R—. (I will be good; I will not grumble too much about how you once suggested—unjustly, hypocritically!—that I might be taken with other Francescas. I will confine my pique to this one parenthetical aside, then have done with the issue.)

Besides which, I found an illuminating exchange between your Mother and Husband. I thought it unwise to steal too many samples, but I enclose one key message, as proof of my discovery:

December 1st 1882

Dear Sir,

It is done. I have given the Potion to your wife, my Daughter. There may be ongoing aftereffects—it is difficult to limit the effects of this potion, to target and erase just one Event or Person; there tends to be a sort of bleed-over, a stain that spreads and overtakes entire pages of thought. Be on your guard and assist her as she recovers her memories and sense of self.

But I assure you, both her love and her recollection of her Lover will dissolve.

I hope you will forgive my Daughter for her lapses. Consider her an innocent henceforth; she will not recollect what has occurred, and so punishing her for forgotten misbehaviors would be entirely fruitless.

I recommend a sojourn to the Île de R—, to avoid reminders in the form of Rumor. My Daughter will benefit from the cleansing air and seawater. There, you may renew your marriage vows in peace.

I am, as ever, at your service, in the interest of our family’s prosperity and happiness,

Your Mother-in-Law

(I assume the potion in question is familiar to you—you meant for me to consume the same substance, I think?)

In light of this discovery, it may be prudent to keep your Hatbox well and truly hidden—lest Husband take notice and defend himself in the same tired old fashion against a brand new threat.

Won’t you reconsider our acquaintance and arrangement? Do you even have a choice, or are you reenacting something you’ve already done and forgotten, dearest, muddledest Francesca?

Always yours,

Pyrame

October 18th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I shall write this down, lest I forget. I must have done this last time, too. I must have left notes for myself. But perhaps they are not here. Perhaps they are back home.

I am writing to secure a minnowing recollection, before it darts away again:

A picnic, in the shade of a mulberry (is that where the idea for Pyrame came from in the first place?). A dear “Friend” wrapped his fingers around my ankle; he tripped me when I tried to run, and I did not resist. He tickled my calves with buttercups. We kept an eye on my Husband’s shadow, stretched by the sun. To quiet Husband’s worries, my Friend spoke too loudly, called me “Sister” or something close enough; he made sure my husband overheard the childish nonsense and “secrets” we whispered to each other.

Or am I mixing things up again? Patching together a lost memory and a half-remembered story—is this tale mine or someone else’s? Or is it both, something I’m reenacting because I admire the pattern of it, while my own just feels …

About as meaningful as the buttercup pressed on this page.

Figure this out at a later date. Don’t forget.

Yours and yourself,

Francesca

October 18th 1883

Mother,

I hope never to hear from you or see your face again.

Formerly,

Your Daughter

October 20th 1883

Pyrame,

Do you know what troubles me most about the sea and sky here? Their overinsistent blueness. I find it excessive. Gaudy. Besides which, I cannot always convince myself of the color’s source—which surface is radiating and which reflecting.

I went for a walk the other day and met a ferrotypist, struggling to steady his tripod along the craggy coastline. I helped him, and in return he told me a little about his process: what it’s like to catch light and time. A moment peers into his box’s eye and never escapes again.

It takes a few seconds for the image to settle—which makes movement a problem. He said, “I can ask a human subject to hold still, so that the resulting picture will remain crisp and clear, but naturally, I cannot make such a request of the sea.”

He keeps failing to capture the sea; his box always flattens it: waves and roiling foam smoothed out, until the water fixed on his plate looks less like the sea than a sleek and strange mirror. He showed me a few samples: pictures split by a crisp horizon line, but if you rotate them, it becomes difficult to tell which half of the picture is up, and which is down.

Tell me, which one of us is steering this sorry ship of a love story, if I dare call it that?

I have taken to writing on carbon paper, to preserve my part in these exchanges. I paid the man for one of his ferrotypes, which I now enclose.

Yours inevitably,

Francesca

October 22nd 1883

Dear Francesca,

An observation: Flour is very much like powdered moonlight. A useful ingredient for a future Potion.

Yours,

Francesca

October 24th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I think we are both a little made up—which is to say, we are made of words. Like a highly abstract Blodeuwedd! Accordingly, I will press camellias into this message—for lost love, and longing—and so sweeten our exchange with dead flowers.

You made me somehow—I don’t know how. Perhaps you conjured me up out of our Tristram. Mixed me with another Pyrame or two.

Unsurprising. You are, I have discovered, not merely a naturalist, but more like one of those ancient herbalists of legend. An enchantress, a witch.

But you appear to be conjuring up your own self in much the same fashion. Leaving notes to remind yourself of who you are, and who you have been. Are you sure you have been truthful, an accurate guide?

I think—suspect—I can mirror you more accurately. Serve as the sea to your sky.

“Not all things always, dying, would I forget,”

Pyrame

October 26th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

Blodeuwedd indeed. My theory is fleshier: that I tore you out of my own body, in a grotesque reversal of Eve from Adam’s rib.

There is a place where I ache—in the rough vicinity of my spleen. I have a faint scar there, which I always understood to be the result of a childhood injury, but perhaps I misremember. Perhaps I engaged in a rite too dark to recollect, when I tore you out of me.

But we have wandered astray. Some time ago, I proposed that you could do with a more substantial form, so that I could poison you, or cure you. (Same thing.)

I no longer wish to force-feed you any such remedy. But would you like a body, after all? To meet me in the flesh?

Yours,

Francesca

October 26th 1883

Daughter,

I am concerned by your recent letter. I beg you to guard against the Deceiver who has inspired this rush of enmity against me.

Consider carefully before you betray yourself and ruin the delicate happiness your Husband and I have taken pains to construct for you. I have only ever acted with your care and safety in mind, though this may be difficult for you to understand. I beg you to trust me and inform me of whatever it is you have lately learned (or believe you have learned).

Your Mother

October 27th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I would like that very much. But I fear this might be impossible. Advise me. How should we proceed?

Yours,

Pyrame

October 30th 1883

Dearest Pyrame,

I have developed a spell and procedure, to transmute moonlight into flour. In this way, I will knead dough out of the night’s air, and so give you flesh—or something close enough.

Meet me tomorrow evening in the graveyard. By my favorite mushroom patch—you know the one. (I am enclosing my previously-mentioned sketch, to guide you.) I will ensnare your soul and give you a body. And what fun shall we have then …

I can almost see you now: staring at me in astonishment. Your rib cage stark as stairs, skin stretched tightly across your stomach, yielding and shuddering at the sight of me. Perhaps you are wondering, will this be the night of passion you have longed for?

Or will the witch plunge her knife into you once you are made solid?

I feel your breasts already beneath my palms, my tongue … You will taste of sea-mist.

Trust me, my darling. Do as I bid you.

Yours,

Francesca

November 1st 1883

Oh, Francesca …

It is more frightening to leave you notes, now that I have so solid (too solid) a form. I fear your husband’s jealousy more than I used to.

But never fret—my own fleshiness is insufficient to dissuade me. We named me well: Pyrame is foremost in love, and second-most an overhasty fool.

Write back to me soon. Immediately. I would command it, if you were commandable, but I know you are not, and so I beg you for mercy instead.

Yours always,

Pyrame

November 6th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

Are you well? I have not heard from you, and I am beginning to worry …

Has your husband discovered us? Please write back to me as soon as you can, to reassure me, or I am liable to imagine the worst and do something very foolish, in keeping with my name. The problem is, there is more risk in the folly now—that I might end much as Pyrame did, skewered on some pointy object or another.

And so, write to me, obstinate woman. Please.

Yours,

Pyrame

November 8th 1883

Pyrame,

We must be careful. I will be brief—I have to write in some haste.

My husband has not discovered us, precisely, but he has commented on my “listlessness” with some displeasure. I have the impression this corresponds to my behavior in the past.

I managed to slip in and out of the house undetected for our Hallows’ Eve escapade in the graveyard. But the following evening, my husband discovered salt and flour crusted between my thighs. He was astonished and wished to know the source. He asked if I had bedded a baker—or perhaps an entire bakery. (Though he put his questions less delicately than that, fingers twisted in my hair.)

I said, No, Dear, I have bedded the Moon.

This response did not amuse him. But it did reassure him that his only rivals are my own Madness and Fancies (which he personifies as often as you do). Nothing so concerning as a man or woman of flesh and blood (or, in your case: of flour, moonlight, and seawater).

Please do not write back, for now. I will write to you when it is safe again.

December 8th 1883

Francesca,

It has been a long time. I have been patient. I have waited for word from you. But can you blame me for my concern—especially given your memory’s past fallibility?

I admit, part of me worries that this might be yet another creative means of ridding yourself of me—perhaps out of love and concern for my safety. Or perhaps out of impatience, boredom, irritation at my persistence.

Give me some small sign that my worries are misplaced. Now that I am embodied, I relish all sorts of new sensations, but life is more complicated and limited. I can no longer see and hear across a distance, like a God could; I require coarser, more concrete forms of gratification.

You needn’t write to me if it’s dangerous to do so. But at least leave me some token, an indication that you still desire me. I will comb our graveyard daily, though it is now crisp and silvered with frost—grass so brittle it crunches like fine bones. My breath fogs the air and my fingertips are always cold.

Take note—there is some likeness between these materials and surfaces: flour, snow, page. We can correspond on the landscape itself if not on paper.

Yours,

Pyrame

December 10th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

I have found your message: the blooming little heart of blood you painted between the frozen inkcaps.

I hope it did not hurt too much to leave me this gift; I imagine you kneeling, as though to lay down a bouquet of hothouse roses, to honor some dead man you never met. Did you prick your thumb on a thorn? I imagine you biting yourself, to extract sufficient ink.

I scuffed the earth with my boot and buried your heart so none other would find it.

Fine, fine, I will trust you, and I will go on waiting.

Yours impatiently,

Pyrame

December 15th 1883

Daughter,

You still have not answered me. Very well. I can guess, or imagine, what you have discovered. I suppose I can understand your reasoning, though I think it wrongheaded …

You agreed to the procedure, my dear. In fact, you encouraged it. Don’t you know how difficult it is, to make you act against your own wishes?

But my mind keeps wandering back to the question of whatever Agent first interfered in your communion with Herodias and adopted the voice of Pyrame.

Do you not wonder as well: Who are they, really? A lost and wretched spirit, earth-bound for good reason? Or a demon, or something even worse …

Be careful, Daughter. Let me know when you have come to your senses, and I will help you banish the wicked Agent that haunts you once and for all.

Your caring Mother

December 20th 1883

Francesca,

I keep wondering if you like the island better when it is frozen and gray, since you expressed a dislike for the intensity of summer’s blue.

The world around us has come to imitate the colorless ferrotype you kindly sent me. And that confounds and muddles matters all the more: forget the difficulty of telling up from down. It’s even harder, sometimes, to distinguish life from its echo, flattened on copper or paper.

It’s all just a trick of the light, isn’t it?

I am impatient. Forgive me. It’s been so long. The contours of your face are blurrier than I like in my mind’s eye. That is why I lurked outside your household the other day—I think you noticed me, as you stepped out with your husband, though I was careful to disguise myself in a rag-skirt and threadbare veil. You really should not worry; I am sure he took me for nothing more than a simple beggar-woman.

I am now sketching your expression, as it struck me then, arched over your shoulder, disdainful. You turn unrealer the more I struggle to capture you.

That long, twisting neck—sometimes you remind me of a swan. The public impression that they are elegant only captures half the issue, overlooks how vicious they can be as they defend their territory.

Were you warning me away from yours?

Yours in sorrow,

Pyrame

P.S. I enclose the sketch in question, for your consideration. Please correct it; remind me of where I have inevitably strayed from truth.

December 21st 1883

Pyrame,

He knows. Please stay away.

Merry Solstice,

Francesca

December 22nd 1883

Dear Francesca,

Tristram and Iseult sing about their own love, they lie by moonlight, they write letters to King Mark to persuade him of their innocence, and he believes them. We, the audience—who have seen so much evidence of their adulterous guilt—even halfway believe them.

Your Mother and your Husband will try to make you forget Pyrame. Do not forget.

They will try to persuade you that Pyrame is a noxious poison. Which, to be fair—isn’t untrue. But to live without them would be far worse: a hollowing-out of part of yourself. A kind of amputation.

There is a solution—if worst comes to worst.

Work against Mother’s instructions.

Unbind and unbody Pyrame. Gather them back into your soul. (Then, when you are ready, let them out again, like a sail.)

Yours and yourself,

Francesca

Part III: In which the other Iseult takes revenge.

January 1st 1884

Dear Francesca,

I know you warned me to stay away, but I fear for you and would appreciate some reassurance you have come to no harm—that your husband hasn’t taken some awful vengeance against you.

Send me anything. Some token. Another heart of blood in the graveyard at least, though the recent snow has melted. A hollow heart, then. Press a signet into sleet and leave an empty impression. That would do, would satisfy.

Yours,

Pyrame

January 5th 1884

Dear Francesca,

I have visited our graveyard several times over the course of the past few days. The widows who frequent it are beginning to recognize me, I fear. One of them addressed me. She asked whom I had lost, then told me, “You’re too young to know real grief, my dear.”

I’ve checked our former letterbox, but haven’t found a single word from you. Therefore I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion, if I take the liberty of sliding this letter into a book I have recently discovered, in three volumes—The Poetical Romances of Tristan in French—containing certain of Swinburne’s sources. I am especially taken with this passage, which I translate very roughly from the French, as far as I can make it out:

“But she had led Tristan astray

through a wicked word—‘to love’ (amer)—which she changed

so that he did not know if his grief

was born from the sea (la mer) or from love (amer),

or if she said ‘love’ instead of ‘the sea,’

or if instead of ‘love’ she said ‘bitter’ (amer).”

I will send this material to your customary address as a seeming gift from a childhood friend; I shall wrap the package in frilly, lacy papers and ribbons and dried flowers and so suggest it is from a girlish, innocent sort of correspondent.

I shall enclose my previous letter, and this one, halfway through the first volume—in the hope that the subject matter will pique your interest, such that you discover my words on reading another’s, long dead.

Forgive the deception. And then, once you have (presumably) forgiven me: Find some means of answering me, please.

Yours,

Pyrame

January 8th 1884

Dear Sir,

I admit: Your letters have given me a shock. I’m uncertain what they mean. I want to tell you that you have made a mistake—my name is not Francesca—you must have taken me for another woman. (Or perhaps another woman, in an effort to divert you from dogging her shadow, has deliberately given you my address instead of her own.)

But I am not sure I have the matter right after all. It cannot be so simple as that.

I have read the books you kindly sent me with gratification, and I think only someone who knows me very well would have thought to send me such a gift.

I am also very fond of visiting the graveyard you have, so suggestively, termed “our graveyard.”

I would appreciate an explanation. Resolve the puzzle for me of your familiarity and strangeness.

It seems unwise to use my own name, and so I will continue to write under the one you have apparently assigned me.

Cordially,

Francesca

January 9th 1884

Dear Mother,

I have just received the strangest correspondence, which I enclose. I do not understand whatever magic is at work here, but I detect your involvement. Please enlighten me.

Your Daughter

January 11th 1884

Dear Francesca,

I rejoice and despair! The latter more than the former. Thank you for writing to me, though I understand (or don’t at all, I allow I cannot imagine) what this muddle looks like from your present perspective.

Let me explain.

My previous letters did not arrive in your hands by accident. You are lost in a fog; you must trust me and follow my voice out of it again.

I suggest we meet in person. Write back with a date; contemplate a reasonable excuse to waylay your husband’s suspicions. If you like, we can maintain the charade I’ve already established: that I’m an innocent little schoolfriend. I look the part well enough.

I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten you’ve forgotten, and so let me clarify and remind you: You were mistaken to address me as “Dear Sir” in your last letter. I understand the mistake, given my signature, a masculine nom de plume. I admit, “Dear Lady” does not suit me much better, though I can at least play a Lady’s part more convincingly, for the benefit of witnesses along the lines of Suspicious Maids and Jealous Husbands.

I beg you, simply call me Pyrame. (When we meet in person, call me Eloise, Rosamund, Carmilla. I don’t know. You choose.)

Anyway. Where was I? Ah, yes, where I usually am: our charade. I propose a delightful little performance, which will also afford us an opportunity to become reacquainted with each other. (“RE-acquainted?” you wonder—intrigued? “Whatever is this tangled fool on about now?” Have a little faith and patience, dearest Francesca.)

Tell your husband an old childhood friend is visiting the Île de R— and would like to pay you a visit. (I know you were never properly in “school,” and so this friend cannot be a schoolfriend; a friend from the neighborhood? A churchfriend? Someone you took occasional French lessons with?) She would like to have tea, d’avoir de tes nouvelles. It has been so long, too long.

Your friend is also married and therefore safe. She wears white lace gloves and detests jewels and rouge. You used to paint flowers and birds together. I enclose a watercolor your friend has sent you—show it to him as evidence of her dedication to harmless pastimes—of a lark darting Icarus-like toward the sun, as if to extinguish itself. (Do not describe it this way to Husband, of course.)

Just name a date for our performance and I will appear and satisfy your curiosity. I will bring you back to yourself, show you who you are and always have been.

Yours even now,

Pyrame

January 15th 1884

Daughter,

I am very glad you have written to me. Beware—be careful! I fear you are in danger. I thought I had banished the Demon who is currently attempting to reenter your good graces.

You sound suspicious as to the nature of my involvement. And so, let me enlighten you:

This Demon has previously ensnared you. I separated the pair of you, but this proved a difficult operation—like disentangling a strangling vine from a tree, when the two have become so attached, they are almost the same being, grafted together.

As you can imagine, the process inflicted some damage on both sides. I had to cut your recollection clean away so that you would not go rushing back to the Demon’s embrace. I hope you will forgive me and understand that the damage was necessary.

Do not answer the call of the Demon.

Your Mother

January 20th 1884

Mother,

I am frightened. The Demon has written to me again, and would like to come see me in the flesh.

What should I do?

I enclose a copy of the Demon’s latest letter.

Your Daughter

January 26th 1884

Daughter,

I see. The Demon knows how to find you, but we can turn the apparent curse into an advantage. You have already had to depart one home to come to the Île de R— and build a new life there. I would not have you uproot yourself once more, just to flee them. (Who knows? This Demon is wily and may find and follow you again, and again.)

We must seize this opportunity and turn the Demon’s own stratagem against them. We can fight back.

How foolish, for such a creature to assume a body; this makes them all the easier to destroy.

Here is what you must do:

Comply with the Demon’s request and name a date when you will receive them at your household.

You have indicated in the past that the Demon is made of flour, moonlight, and seawater. To undo them, you must prepare a concoction of opposing substances. Set a handful of flour aflame until it turns to blistering ash. Mix it with ink and then leave an open bottle of this mixture out in the sun, from noon until three o’clock.

When your old friend arrives, pretend to play along with the Demon’s proposed charade. Instead of tea, serve your friend the potion. Pretend it is a cordial. You may drink some first yourself to set the Demon at ease, if you wish; you will come to no harm.

The Demon, however—well. Please report back to me soon on your success.

Your Mother

January 30th 1884

Dear Pyrame,

Please be so good as to come visit on Saint Valentine’s Day. Come in the afternoon—any time after 3 will do. I will be at home, ready to receive you.

Yours,

Francesca

February 15th 1884

Mother,

It is done. I followed your instructions. They appear to have worked. Explaining the visit of my dear, previously unmentioned childhood friend Camille to my husband was difficult; I think he has now had enough of my friends and will never allow me to receive any ever again, lest they, too, have sudden crises and expire on our doorstep.

Pyrame clutched my hand and begged me to linger by their side. They recognized what I had done—thought it a joke, a precipice I would tug them away from, once I had amused myself enough.

They asked again and again, “But now the game is over, isn’t it, Francesca?”

I still have their white lace gloves, fingertips stained by their watercolors.

Your Daughter

March 2nd 1884

Mother,

What have you done? What have I let you do?

I have discovered a hatbox full of an illuminating correspondence—including a bundle of Reminders I had the foresight to write to myself.

I would tell you not to write to me again, but I see this request has proved fruitless enough already. And so, I permit you to write to me. Just know that whenever I receive your writing, I will redirect it to the hearth.

Francesca

March 3rd 1884

Pyrame, Pyrame,

Now that you are undone, can you see and hear whatever I write again? Have your eyes and ears dissolved back into me?

I hope you hear this message. I hope you feel it—as if I had engraved my words into the skin above your navel.

If, by some miracle, you are able to write back to me, please do. Tell me what to do to restore you to what you were. To patch you up like so many fragments of shattered porcelain.

Yours always,

Francesca

March 5th 1884

Pyrame,

You have not answered me. This is unkind. I am wearing your gloves now, as I write to you, in the hope that this will enable your spirit to guide my hands and compose your response.

I am drunk on mulberry wine. I will wait and wait until the end of—what? This story? That’s the problem with this story; it never ends. It likes to repeat itself.

So help me repeat it again and again, even if that means I go on loving and killing you over and over. The loving part makes it all worth it, don’t you think?

I think you would agree with that sentiment, if only you would play your own damn part again, stubborn Pyrame.

With love,

Francesca

March 6th 1884

Dearest Pyrame,

I will bring you back. I will summon your spirit again, build another body for it. I pulled the trick off once after all, without understanding what I was doing the first time.

Intention should make the whole enterprise easier. I don’t believe in all that nonsense about poetic inspiration only having a pulse of its own when the poet cannot control it, when the poet is just a channel for something beyond her comprehension.

I understand now. I will act accordingly.

It’s an absurd thing: undoing an undoing. But I have the right ingredients, the right incantations, locked within the confines of this entire correspondence.

Mother tried to write me the other day and I drowned her words in the sea.

Yours again before long,

Francesca

March 30th 1884

Pyrame,

When you are able, please write me back, to confirm whether my spell has worked or not.

Though if you have a body now—again—I suppose you cannot see my words, until I find the right letterbox. I notice that the old honeysuckle has vanished, pot and all (presumably it did not last the winter; the poor bedraggled shrub must have wilted at long last).

Guide me, my love, if you please. If you can.

Francesca

May 1st 1884

Dear Thisbe,

No, I haven’t mistaken you for someone else; “Thisbe” is a code name. It is, I suspect, a familiar code name, though you may not remember why just yet. Have patience.

It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance the other day at the Librairie; I heard you before I saw you. I entered and wandered between the bookshelves, chasing the voice that read out loud:

“ … as the worn-out noon

Loves twilight, and as twilight loves the moon

That on its grave a silver seal shall set—

We have loved and slain each other, and love yet.”

And then I saw you, and your lace gloves and the pair of glossy, dark plaits that fell over your breasts (I wanted to tug them like bell-pulls, to check if they were real). I must have struck you as strange as I introduced myself, my hand trembling.

I trembled all the more when I noticed the camellia tucked into your buttonhole.

It may be, if you are who I suspect and dread and pray you are, that we are more familiar with each other than you realize.

There is a graveyard at the Island’s center, and at the heart of the graveyard, an oak with a birdhouse dangling from one of its limbs, which local larks frequent. Please be so kind as to leave a response to my letter there—if you are willing to continue this conversation.

I will check daily for word from you.

Yours faithfully,

Francesca

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Before you hear what I’m about to tell you, I need you to understand two things.

Firstly, I do not know how to swim.

When you live in the place I do, it’s more or less a useless skill. I mean, the deepest water around is up to my shoulders at best, can you really blame me? I can’t say where I’m from for obvious reasons, but just know that most of it is a very arid, very empty desert with a whole lot of nothingness. Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.

This place is old. Very, very old. The kind of old that you can feel settle in your bones when you walk along the same dirt roads that have been used continually for hundreds of years. Most of the community has been here since before this country was established, before we unwillingly became a part of it. Save for a few transplants that descend from the city to retire, everyone is family, even if all-in-all we are far and few between. The nearest ‘big’ city of a few thousand is an hour away.

But that leads me to the second thing you need to know: I loved Isabella, a lot.

We were like sisters; she was my mom’s brother’s kid, so my cousin, but we grew up close enough to be siblings. It may sound weird if you’re not from a family like mine or a community as tight-knit as ours, but we were always together. Because of how condensed our village is, we were also neighbors, classmates, and altar girls at church together. I saw her more than my own parents and I imagine it was the same for her. She was two months older than me, and always seemed to hold that fact over my head as some sort of superiority thing. Whatever. The important thing to know is that we were close.

We fought a lot, like real siblings might, maybe even more than I did with my blood sisters, and she could be the prissiest brat ever if given the opportunity. But I loved her then and I still do now, despite everything that’s happened.

We did everything together. School, catechism, sleepovers, meals. For how much we butted heads you’d think we wouldn’t want to spend so much time together, but it was the opposite. That was our love.

By far, our favorite thing to do together was visiting the river. Beyond the bend of the fields, and right down the road from our grandmother’s, you could find the heart of the stream, the place where it was its widest. The river itself is shallow most of the year, up to my hips everywhere except for the heart—there, it almost came up to my neck. Even better, right at the mouth of it was a gentle rolling waterfall that was smooth and eroded enough to go down kind of like a natural water slide. It was so overgrown with moss that it only hurt a little, and we’d race each other down (I always won, being the stockier between the two of us).

The river used to be much deeper apparently, by around ten to fifteen feet if what every old person in my life has claimed is true. But even when it is shallow it's a special place.

When we were young it was the local hangout spot for several of us kids. Any summer day we went there was guaranteed to be at least a few of our other cousins running around on the riverbank in ragtag hand-me-down bathing suits. We would all play together, share some sodas, and then walk each other home. It was amazing, a highlight of my youth that I won’t ever forget. It’s relatively safe in the daytime here, so we’d never need permission or someone to watch over us. But as we got older, fewer and fewer people came, and now it's rare to see even a single person there.

Maybe that’s for the best.

Even when it was just me and Bella we’d have so much fun. We would swim until we were tired and our fingers had pruned up like raisins, and then we’d lounge out on the shore and enjoy the warmth of the sun. From sunrise to sunset, we’d spend all of our time there, eating the bologna sandwiches my mom packed us and talking about life—who was dating who, how annoying our siblings were, what the future had in store for us. It was great.

And basically every time, we’d dare each other to swim over ‘the hole’ as it was ominously called. The hole could be found near the deepest part of the river, right beneath the edge of the waterfall where the water curled and formed a tiny whirlpool. The hole itself was only wide enough to fit a slim adult, and its depth was unknown. The rock underfoot would immediately drop off into a very cold, dark nothingness that seemed to go on forever. We had joked that it went to the center of the earth, and every time we visited, we would try our hardest to get to the bottom. We never did. I think that no one ever will, and I can only pray for whoever tries.

But back then, not knowing any better, we’d work our damndest to make it happen.

This is where that part about me not knowing how to swim is important. See, we would always dare each other to swim over the top of the hole and drop down as far as we could before we had to come up for air. And I always won because I always cheated. I’d take a comically big breath and do some obnoxious underwater squat to make it seem like I had really gone down, even flailing my arms and letting my breath escape as bubbles for dramatic effect. Isabella was none the wiser. It wasn’t like I could have admitted that I couldn’t swim; it would have been just another thing she’d hold over my head as the inferior cousin.

Yet she’d try her best and never got farther than me, until the time she actually did. I’ll come back to that. Maybe she had been cheating too, and was somehow worse at doing that than me. Maybe she just really sucked at swimming. It doesn’t matter.

Afterwards, when the sun had started to dip under the horizon and the mosquitoes grew borderline homicidal, we’d share a towel—because she always forgot hers—and walk down the road to our grandmother’s house. She was a much older lady and hardly spoke English, but she was the most comforting person I’ve had in my entire life. She would chastise us for being out with wet hair when the temperature was dropping with the onset of dusk, before ushering us in to shower and curl up around the wood stove. By the time we were clean and in comfortable clothes, she’d have hot cocoa ready on the stove for us. We would warm up with a cup, and ‘cause grandma didn’t have a TV, she’d tell us stories to fall asleep to until our parents came for us.

She had the best stories, and despite the language barrier, they were nothing short of enthralling.

Most of her tales were scary, I won’t lie; the grieving spirits of dead mothers treading the river shore, unspeakable monsters waiting in the abandoned mines on the mesas, of the old man with the black hat that would wait outside your window if you stayed up late. They were intended to be lessons, I know that now, but she would spin them so creatively. I wish I could remember them as vividly as she told them, because maybe if I had Isabella would still be here.

The most important one was of the spirit beneath the river.

It always started the same way: I would brag about beating Bella in our faux competition in the hole, and she would frown, this deep, unhappy old lady frown, and sigh with the weight of decades upon decades.

‘Don’t mess around in that river, mija. Nothing good down there.’

She'd tell us that you couldn’t swim over it if you were one of three things; a very young child, an expecting mother, or a girl and bleeding. All very strange conditions. Because evidently, there was something deep and terribly hungry in the hole, and it fed on the young. She said that a very long time ago, back when the world was all animals and spirits, coyote had stolen the water beast’s young, and now it needed to feed in revenge. When I was a little older she’d add on to it, talking about how her mother warned her about it when she was a little girl because one day, while pregnant, she had slipped while wading during the dry season and fallen into the hole, and the very next day, the baby was gone. Just like that.

I asked my mom once, and she chalked it up to grandma severely misremembering a miscarriage her mother had had on account of her age. It sounded plausible then, but now, I think grandma was right.

When it happened, Isabella and I were older. It was a year ago, almost to the date. Grandma had passed three years before. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years because of the pandemic and us having moved away for school. I had grown to miss home a lot, and hated the outside world more than ever. Being back was a welcome relief. She didn’t share my sentiment.

Isabella and I went to the river, the same as we did every summer, though less frequently now as the years passed. If the old people had complained about the river’s depth before, they would have been miserable with it then. It was the shallowest it had been in my entire life, hardly up to my thighs in the thick of it. The stream was light, practically stagnant, and the waterfall was but a slow trickle threatening to dry up altogether. This place had been in a drought since long before my time, but never had it been so meager.

Usually, there was a brief flood period every spring that would leave the river full enough to not dry out before winter. Not this time. Come late November, it would be barren enough to walk across with little resistance.

The river was a ghost of what it once was. Shallow and still and devoid of any local life like it used to have. It was quiet, unnaturally so, with nothing but the singing of cicadas and the soft bubbling of its stream to fill the void. The community as a whole had been getting smaller and smaller with every passing year, and the river was truly symbolic of that.

Bella and I still made it work. We rolled out our towels and tanned, splashed around a bit, and ate the same bologna sandwiches we’d been having since we were kids. And then she reminded me.

“Hey, remember that game we’d play with the hole?”

I shrugged. “Sure, the one you always lost at?”

The comment earned a punch to the shoulder but she still laughed and pointed her lips in its direction. “Wanna try for old times’ sake?”

Of course, I said yes, and between giggling and attempting to shove each other into the shallow murky waves, we waded over to the usual spot. Even with kicked-up sand and stagnant water, it still stood out like an inky black portal hiding all of the river’s secrets beneath the surface. I still didn’t know how to swim, and the water was too shallow for me to cheat and squat like I’d always done, so I suggested she go first. I figured it was as good a time as any to reveal my deep, terrible secret after making her look a fool.

“Oh? Scared you’re going to lose?” was all she said before pinching her nose and dropping in. It was the last thing she’d ever say to me.

I really had expected her to comically sink down to all but her chin and laugh, proving for once and for all that the hole was not in fact bottomless. Maybe it just seemed like it was so because of our lack of depth perception and the illusions of childhood fantasy. But she didn’t. No, she slipped right beneath the surface of the water without so much as making a ripple. It was quiet. Painfully, unnaturally quiet. Several seconds passed, and then a minute.

“Bella?” I called. “You made your point, you can come up now!”

Nothing.

Another minute passed.

I started to panic. Really, really panic. I still couldn’t swim but I was scared, so I did the best thing I could think of. I crawled closer, sat on its edge, and for the first time ever, actually dipped my entire leg beneath its rim and into the ice-cold abyss beneath. I tried to squint and see but the pale flesh of my calf disappeared entirely in its depths, and if it wasn’t for the chills wracking my body from the sheer cold of it, I might have worried about it disappearing too.

I tried to feel her out, but there was nothing. I reached at least three feet down and there was nothing but ragged, tight stone walls to scrape my toes against. My heart dropped and I started to breathe harder, desperately shouting her name and trying to reach deeper.

All I could feel was a light tug, like some sort of suction. A force pulling me down, deeper in the dark murky water. It had always been there, I remembered. As a kid, it had somehow felt stronger, but now it only acted as a mere suggestion.

‘Come down, a little closer,’ a voice in my head had whispered.

And then there was a weight like a hand grabbing my ankle tight enough to hurt, icy and firm. I screamed and struggled to stand up, desperate to get away. And as I pulled my leg up and away from the hole, so with it came Isabella. As soon as I recognized her, I grabbed her from the water and pulled her up, crying and sobbing out apologies.

At first, she seemed fine, peering around with glossy eyes and this sullen, dazed expression. I held her face and kept repeating her name but it was like she couldn’t hear or see me. Her face was pale, stricken, drained of any color save for the faint blue of her lips. And then she coughed, and dark, muddy water came spilling from her mouth. It kept and kept until I was sure she was going to choke. It eventually stopped, but there Isabella was, now twenty pounds lighter and violently shaking. She keeled over and that was when I noticed. The skin of her feet was gone—all of it. Scraped away like she’d been the victim of some bad accident, leaving twitching, throbbing muscle and tendon beneath. White like ivory peeked out and that was when I saw it–little pock marks where the red-stained bone was, marring it unnaturally. Not unlike teeth marks.

Something had been gnawing on her.

The rest was a blur.

At some point, I called the police to send an ambulance. But if you know how truly inaccessible rural communities are, you also know how long it takes to get any help. Thirty goddamned minutes spent holding my shaking, catatonic cousin on the same shore we’d safely played on for years before.

They came, not soon enough, but they came, and I had to watch as she was wheeled away into the back of an ambulance.

It would be the healthiest I’d see her for the rest of her short life.

She died five days later from severe dehydration and organ failure. Ironic, right?

In her final waking moments, Isabella was manic, scared, and so utterly violent she had to be restrained and sedated. She’d stopped speaking in any recognizable way, and her eyes stayed unfocused and glossy till the very end. I visited her as soon as I could, but she had already been too far gone, not recognizing me for more than a few seconds before shrieking. I only knew about the rest of it after talking to her parents, my aunt and uncle. Bella had developed a hauntingly real, visceral aversion to water; I know now that the technical term is hydrophobia. She couldn’t be bathed and refused water to the point that they had to give her an IV, which she promptly pulled out. Only to see her own blood and make the connection that that too was water, before completely mutilating herself with just her fingernails in an attempt to remove it. She had to be restrained and sedated until she took her last breath.

The day after she died, it flooded worse than it had in years.

The most reasonable conclusion they could come up with was that she had somehow contracted rabies or some sort of brain-eating amoeba months before. They said it had started to physically manifest only after she’d scraped her feet while diving. They wanted to run an autopsy to test her brain, but if they did I don’t know. My aunt and uncle moved away a few weeks after her passing, and our village is lonelier than ever now.

Everyone was willing to pass it off as some freak accident, but I couldn’t. I dreamt of my sweet Bella a lot, of her cold, lifeless, sunken eyes that had bore into me in the days before she died. I knew that something did this to her. That chill in that hole was unnatural, unearthly, a sharp, painful contrast to the otherwise sun-warmed river. Like it wasn’t even water down there but something else, something thinner and sinking.

And worse, it’s been calling to me.

I had been taking the dogs out for a bathroom break one evening about a month ago when I first heard the sound. Splashing, and a lot of it, from the arroyo situated between the road and our house. We get beavers in them sometimes, so I’d trudged over to look, only to find that the ditch was empty. Not just of beavers, but of water too. I had forgotten that they’d shut them off because of the drought. I tried my best to move past it but I kept hearing it, that horribly familiar splashing like flailing arms trying to climb out of that hole every goddamn night.

I had remembered our grandma’s story and cursed myself for not having her around to ask about it. So I did the next best thing and looked through local papers. I spent nights hunched over digitized censuses and local archives, pouring over every document written and published for our village over the past several hundred years, every published local legend or account, looking and searching for some sort of answer, even a word to corroborate what I’d seen.

Until finally, it happened. I saw the pattern.

Every few years there were cases of it. Of little kids and babies disappearing into the river, of young women, some expecting, vanishing into the deep after one chance visit. Their deaths were always ruled as accidental, or never reported past ‘missing’. And after every bout of them, there was a flood and intense summer rains that came like clockwork. All the way until the past fifty years. Fewer and fewer kids had been dying, if just because there weren’t as many around. Because as we slowly depopulated, whether it be from folks moving away or giving in to old age, there were less people around to disappear. I’d noticed it in my lifetime too, how there were half as many people now as there were when I was a kid. I didn’t get it at first, but now I do.

Shortly after my realization, the river started calling my name. It would start as odd garbled sounds that were hardly recognizable, not unlike the ragged babbling of a stream, until eventually, it was a full-blown whisper in some horrible, wretched tongue I’d never been witness to.

‘Cass,’ it would whisper and cry every single night, an alluring song that pulled me to seek out that dark, damp hole again.

I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was grief-stricken and losing my shit after months of trying to heal—that’s what I’d thought. That the pain of losing someone so close to me, after years of feeling alone in a foreign place that wasn’t quite home, had taken a toll on me that I couldn’t bounce back from. Maybe I was ruined forever. Maybe I’d been like that even before this happened.

It took me making a mistake to eventually realize the truth.

I fucked up, but I get it now.

It took me venturing to that godforsaken place again. I was upset and not in my right mind, still mourning Bella’s absence in my life after I came home for the summer and nothing was the same. And so in a fit of hysterics, I stood over that inky black hole in the middle of one lazy, overbearing afternoon, and I stepped in.

I’m sure Bella was looking up at me from the afterlife, cursing me for being stupid enough to follow her. But I had to. And I know now.

I slipped under the surface and there was that force again, slowly dragging me down and consuming me in an instant. I don’t know how long I was there. It couldn’t have been long—I didn’t drown after all. I was pulled impossibly deep, down beneath all the rock and the slate and a living, breathing, terrifying history that looked at me as if I was a speck against the grand backdrop of all its monstrosity. My body felt like it was torn apart and put back together as it was pushed into some forbidden corner of the earth that no one had ever spoken of. It felt like just a moment, but it was long enough to feel It.

It doesn’t have a name, not one that I can say. There aren’t words to really describe It as more than a feeling, but It is a Thing. An ancient, hungry Thing. I felt Its presence like a bad omen, and I instantly knew of what It was.

It is a being far, far older than me, than grandmother, than the village, and maybe even the mountains. It speaks in a forbidden tongue that I could never reciprocate even if I tried, and in it, It whispered Its name to me. I’ll never forget that sound. Clear as a bell, even within the deep murky waters.

And then It started to eat, and I realized.

It fed, and It fed on young blood. This Thing, be it god or demon or something far older than either of those things was ravenous, and tied to its hunger was the very waters that served as the lifeblood of our valley. In an instant, a history of the land flashed through my brain. It had been known before when human beings first settled here and sought Its benevolence. It was going to be here long after.

‘If you take care of me, I will take care of you.’

All of those children. All of those babies. Grandma’s unborn brother. The sudden drought. Isabella. It all made sense.

And before I could even comprehend it, that Thing spit me out, seemingly disgusted by my aged flesh and blood.

Not all the way, because I had to claw my way up, up, and through that claustrophobic hole until I could breathe again.

When I pushed out of the water, my skin had gone white from the cold and blood loss. I fainted after that.

I woke up hours later in a sterile, painfully white hospital room to my mother sobbing over me and a doctor trying to explain to my half-conscious form what had happened. I was told I was lucky I was found when I was after some fisherman had stumbled upon me and sped to the ER.

And then the bad news. My entire left foot and most of the other had to be amputated. There wasn’t enough of me left there to salvage.

It was a shock. For a long time it didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t. I get phantom pains where those parts of me should be, forgetting until I try to stand up and fall over. I was closely monitored, especially after what happened to Bella. The doctors were scared I had the same sickness she did. And for a while, I truly did think I was going to die the same way she had.

Every time anyone spoke, it was like I was trying to understand them from three feet underwater. I swear, I could only think in that awful, evil language I’d heard.

And then it started. The fear. It’s hard for me to rationally explain.

The first time a nurse had tried to bring me a cup of water I instinctively screamed and shoved her away, terrified to be near anything that would remind me of the Thing I had felt. I couldn’t bathe without screaming myself unconscious, couldn’t even think of water without breaking into a cold sweat—until I didn’t have enough liquid in my body to even do that. It hurt, more than anything in my life had. I was convinced that this was it. The IVs were useless when all I could think about was that Thing finding its way back into my body, consuming me from the inside out. I had an innate fear of water, and now I was going to slowly dehydrate to death just like Bella had.

And just like her, it rained the entire week after.

For better or worse, I didn’t die.

I think that I might have just been over the cusp of being too old for that Thing to devour. Isabella had been a year younger than I was now when It bit her, and though we both developed the sickness, I got better. Because after three days, words started being coherent again and I was slowly able to reintroduce myself to drinking.

Or maybe It chose me. Maybe I was special.

To this day I try to keep contact with water minimal. Because when I touch it or drink it, I can feel It thrumming deep beneath the ground, in this massive, underground lake where It continues to call to me. I shower far less than I probably should and only drink water when absolutely necessary. I’ve made life bearable by keeping myself on the brink of dehydration constantly, because it always tastes wrong. I avoid other people, if just because sometimes I can hear that cursed language intruding on my waking thoughts, spurring me on to do the unthinkable. It sounds horrible, and I’ve heard the hushed rumors going around about how unsightly and isolated I’ve become, but I don’t care. Because It whispers my name every night, calling for me to come down and venture into Its depths.

It’s got a job for me, and I’m scared.

I’m scared because I have a choice to make. After my venture in, it rained so abundantly that for the better part of a month, the whole valley was flush and lively. I don’t think I’ve seen it that green since I was very little, back when we still had a monsoon season and the river was deep enough to swim in if you could. For a while, it was like we’d gone back in time to when things were richer, vivid, alive in a way I haven’t seen since my childhood. The world felt the way my grandparents and all the other old folks had described it. Before everyone left, before crops died and arroyos went barren, before the world had continued on without us.

I’ve seen what It does now. Even a taste of my spoiled, old blood was enough for a feat like that, and even the river rose higher. I think It didn’t devour me because It wanted me to see. It was a display. A promise.

About a week ago, a new family moved in. They aren’t from here, and in typical close-minded fashion, my community probably won’t take to them. We don’t like outsiders.

They live across from my grandmother’s old house. And they have kids. Lots of them. I’ve seen them out on the road playing where kids shouldn’t be, tempting fate because they don’t know any better. The youngest one still rides a tricycle. They’re playful, naive in a way I’ve come to loathe. Sometimes they go out to the river, wading around obliviously, too tall to swim in its shallow waters. Totally unaware of the monstrosity on the other side. What remains of my leg aches when I see them there.

They remind me a lot of Bella and I.

I know it’s terrible, but I could tell them about the game we used to play. Because maybe, just maybe if It gets young blood after so long, things will get better.

I know it’s awful and that I’m a horrible person. But you need to understand.

I had never felt attached to this place before, not really. Not until It bit me and my eyes were opened. It is an ancient, awful being, I know that. But the future is uncertain and I’m scared. I’m scared, not because of the beast beneath the waves, but of loss. My community shrinks every day, and people like them would never be accepted here anyways. And besides, those people aren’t good parents. They have so many kids, I’m sure they wouldn’t notice or even care if just one went away. If you knew how special my home was, you’d probably do the same.

Or maybe that’s just It influencing me from afar. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

Isabella and grandma would be so unhappy with what I’ve turned into, but they wouldn’t get it. There’s a reason our grandmother was scared of what she didn’t know. There’s a reason Isabella died and I didn’t. She wouldn’t have the strength to do what needs to be done. She had grown tainted by the outside world, by false promises and people that couldn’t care less for a place or people like ours. She didn’t want to come back. Maybe if she did it would be different.

What they don’t know is that we could restore our little oasis in the desert to what it once was, or even better, back to the way the old folks talk about how it used to be. With green, fertile pastures, endless opportunity, and a thriving, bottomless river so deep that the danger within is long, long forgotten. Out of sight. Out of fear.

At least for a few years.

I’m a horrible person, but I know what I need to do. I’m sorry, Bella, but sometimes evil is a necessity for survival. This is a cruel thing, I know it, but I think you forgot that we live in just as cruel of a world. I miss you so goddamn much but even your sacrifice wasn’t in vain. I’ve been promised a place in the world to come if I answer It; there’s a place there for you too, if you want it. Our God has called me to worship and I know nothing else anymore.

I just hope you can understand.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

A thin line of drool traced from the corner of Nanea’s mouth down to the wooden desk beneath her head. The makani outside had died down, so only a light breeze danced its way into her room and across her forehead. The pages of the notebook next to her fluttered ever so slightly.

Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.

The desk shook with the vibration of her cell phone. Nanea sat up slowly and shook her head a few times, trying to remember where she was. Her mind was swimming with images of pixelated mountainscapes and she had the strange urge to leap over a too-blue river. Through a thin veil of mind fuzz, she could hear a short, but steady, beeping sound emanating from one of the many devices pushed haphazardly around the desk in front of her. Sitting up a little straighter, her eyes alighted on the bright red notifications flashing across her desktop screen in sync with the beeping. 23 new emails. 45 unread messages on ʻElele.

“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath. The mountainscapes and river disappeared, remnants of last nights’ gaming session with her cousins. Now, she was faced with her work laptop humming angrily and a half cup of black tea that was cold to touch. Nanea had been assigned to the overnight on-call position for Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke, the panakō’s catch-all information technology team, and she was supposed to be monitoring the flow of data while another team was doing a large system upgrade for the website. She had even turned up the volume of her ‘Elele notifications in an attempt to keep herself awake, but that strategy seemed to have failed. Evidently, she had fallen asleep in the middle of the upgrade deployment, and something had gone wrong. She wiped away the fine layer of sweat that had formed on her forehead and tapped her phone to answer the incoming call.

“Hello?” She murmured.

“Nanea! Where have you been?!”

Nanea grimaced. The sound of her manager Maʻa’s half-awake yet fully exasperated voice blasted through the phone’s speakers. “Hey, kala mai,” she apologized. “I fell asleep, what’s going on?”

“I’ve been trying to get through to you for nearly fifteen minutes. Teams don’t do late-night deployments because it means there’s extra time to relax.”

Nanea sighed and pinched her cheeks as she tried to wake up while Maʻa continued to berate her.

“I thought you were supposed to have a knack for staying up late after sleeping through the afternoon? Remind me to call you for sleeping advice some other time, huh? Anyway–have you read through these emails yet? The upgrade seems to have gone through successfully, but now the testers are in the system, and they aren’t able to see the right data. Can you check the latest email that they sent? It should have a timestamp of 4:01.”

Nanea winced at the mention of the time. She navigated to her email and searched for the timestamp in her inbox.

“Do you see it?” Maʻa asked impatiently.

“Yup!” Nanea answered quickly, opening one of the many unread messages clogging her screen. “I think I found it. I’m reading it now.”

From: Work Order Updates

Subject: 1 Task Added. Work order number: 9005. Org: Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke.

Status: URGENT.

I am not able to access the internal client data for multiple users from inoa hope Kāpili to inoa hope Kūʻaeʻa when conducting a routine moʻokūʻauhau analysis via the admin-side portal of the Profile page of the website. I am not able to see inoa beyond the most immediate circle of relatives, and the Personal Information sections are empty. Please advise. My ID # is 698237.

“One of the testers isn’t able to see the right data. Can you check on that, please? The only error logs we have keep saying that the data wasn’t found. I think it might have something to do with this intense makani we’ve had lately. You may need to check the greenhouses.”

Nanea bit her upper lip and silently clenched her fist. She should have known better than to volunteer as the on-call assistant in the middle of hoʻoilo. Something like this was bound to happen.

“Also,” Maʻa added, “I don’t want another repeat of what happened last month. I convinced the big bosses that that was a one-time mistake, but you had better not be trying to prove me wrong.”

Nanea winced at the threat. She had been the only one on call for a late afternoon deployment several weeks ago, but she had—unsurprisingly—fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon while working from home and didn’t wake up until the around midnight to several voicemails from Maʻa about the panakō facing a minor shutdown. They ended up being out of commission until noon that day, and while the largest user-facing consequences were a small handful of angry customers, the higher-ups (Big Boss and co.) were very disappointed and brought the hammer down on Maʻa, who, in turn, brought a smaller, but no less impactful, hammer down on Nanea.

“Of course, I understand,” she said quickly into the phone, “I’m looking into this now.” Nanea pulled up a map of the server rooms on her personal secondary monitor, which she had hooked up to her work computer to use as an extended desktop. At the same time, she closed out a few windows with half-watched playthroughs of the Graceful Gamble online multiplayer video game and took a large gulp of her ice-cold tea. “Ach,” she retched at the bitter flavor.

“Mahalo, Nanea.” Maʻa said through a stifled yawn. “And try not to fall asleep this time. I have to be up on time tomorrow–well, this morning, so I won’t be available again tonight. But plan to meet me in the office around 8 to give me a report on how everything went.”

“Alright,” she responded, silently cursing herself. Usually, team members got the day off after a late-night deployment, but evidently Maʻa wasn’t going to let her go so easily. “Again, really sorry about falling asleep.”

Maʻa sighed audibly. “Talk later.”

She hung up the phone and buried her face in her hands for a moment. Just six months ago she had been let go from her previous job for sleeping in a few too many times and not getting to the office in a “timely and consistent manner.” She could not let this happen again. With another gulp of bitter tea, she tried to shake the sleep from her eyes and looked back at the desktop monitor. The map of the greenhouses was a combination of tiny red, yellow, and green lights that blinked on and off intermittently. She clicked on the “K” icon on the left-hand side, triggering the map to zoom into a small corner of the chart where the red and yellow lights were far outnumbering the greens. It looked like the server room in charge of storing clients’ Ka- through Kū- was not functioning properly.

“Ugh,” Nanea groaned. She would have to go out and check on them.

Opening ‘Elele, Nanea searched for the name of the team lead in charge of the system upgrade that night. Ignoring the multitude of unread messages that flooded her screen as soon as she opened their conversation window, she shot off a quick message:

“Looking into 9005 right now. Yellow and red in the server room. I’ll check it out shortly and will be in touch.”

The team lead, Kaʻua, responded immediately: “Keep me in the loop.”

Nanea groaned, stood up from her desk chair, and looked around the room. A gust of makani blew in and cooled the sweat on her neck, causing her to shiver for a moment uncontrollably. The storm from earlier that night had blown over a number of fliers she was supposed to hand out at a volunteer work event that upcoming weekend. Now, she could see that they had infiltrated every corner of her room, in and around her laundry basket and tucked between the pillows on her bed. She would have to clean it all up when she got back. For now, she closed and tucked her laptop into her backpack, along with a few other necessities, grabbed her rain jacket off the edge of her desk and made her way out the door.

Once outside, she swung her backpack on and hopped onto her bike to make her way toward the offices. As she neared the edge of town, she could see the lights of the main building, and the large expanse of dimly lit grassy fields behind it where the greenhouses were situated. She rode up to the entrance gate where Keoki, the security guard on duty that night, was sitting.

“Hey, Keoki,” she said, trying to catch her breath as she paused in front of the booth. She could see her breath shimmering in the light as she spoke.

“Aloha,” he replied, shifting in the booth to face her.

“I gotta check in the greenhouses for something going on with the deployment. Can I get through with my ID?”

“Oh yeah,” he nodded, “should be fine.” He waved absentmindedly toward the office building. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“Gotcha, mahalo.” Nanea hopped back on her bike and headed toward the greenhouses.

Once she reached the edge of the field, she slid off her bike and continued on foot. The greenhouses each stood around ten feet tall, filled with row upon row of tables of pūʻolo–large green bundles of ti leaf that were hooked up to different wires. The wires transferred data between the bundles and the larger cables that ran along the greenhouse ceilings. These in turn ran all the way to the office building, where the data could be accessed and modified as needed via user-friendly computer interfaces.

After walking for several minutes, Nanea reached the greenhouse that contained data from Ka- to Kū-, demarcated in large print across the side, and turned the corner to enter.

“Uh oh,” she said, peering through the darkness.

A branch was leaning against one of the double doors, propping it ajar. She looked out at the field surrounding her. A large Albizia was stretched out on the ground nearby, its roots upturned at the edge of the forest about ten yards away and its bare fingertips reaching toward the ground where Nanea was standing. She could see a number of branches from other trees as well, all scattered along the ground.

“I thought they were working on clearing all of these,” she said to herself. Albizia was a known invasive species that had a tendency for collapsing unexpectedly. Plus, with all the strong makani lately, the odds of one of them falling was even greater. The greenhouse doors were automatically locked upon closing with extra strength deadbolts, but some of the locks were old, and this one clearly hadn’t been replaced in time.

Nanea walked up to push the door open, flinching at the ice-cold touch of the metal door handle. Bracing herself, and pulling her jacket sleeve up to cover her palm, she confidently pushed open the door and walked inside. Everything was silent except for the soft hum of ‘ike in the pūʻolo and the makani continuing to blow in the distance.

“Hello?” She called out as she turned on the light, but nothing made a sound or scrambled out of sight. Usually, inside the greenhouses, the air was kept to a cool-yet-warm 70 degrees to ensure the best environment for the pūʻolo bundles to maintain their shape and health for as long as possible. However, with the door propped open all night, the cool, dark air had been flowing inside for hours and Nanea shivered as she walked into the structure.

She leaned her bike up against the wall and attempted to close the door behind her, tossing aside the rusted lock and pushing a box in front of the foot of the door to keep it shut. Turning around, she looked at the pūʻolo on the tables. Near the doorway, a few of them had blown onto their sides, wires twisted around one another and hanging down in all the wrong places. She would have to fix what she could and notify the Hui Kupuna if any needed to be replaced.

Sighing, Nanea opened her computer to verify that the damaged pūʻolo matched the ones with red and yellow signals on the system map. Before she could look at the map, however, she was faced with a number of new messages from Kaʻua, the team lead she had contacted earlier.

10 minutes ago: “How is everything going?”

5 minutes ago: “Were you able to check out the pūʻolo?”

1 minute ago: “What’s your status?”

Jeez, Nanea thought to herself.

“Checking on it now,” she responded promptly, rolling her eyes behind the safety of her computer screen.

She then opened the map of the pūʻolo, complete with their red, yellow, and green signals. After copying the identification numbers to her phone, she walked up to the pūʻolo that had been blown over and confirmed that they had numbers matching the ones on her list.

Around each of the pūʻolo were a series of wires, all placed so that they reached between the folds of the lau to the ʻike contained inside. The inside was always just out of sight, neatly tucked away. Nanea had never seen it, and in fact had no idea what it might look like. The Hui Kupuna kept their ʻike under heavy wraps, so that it would not fall into the wrong hands. After their initial placement in the greenhouses, the Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke–Nanea’s hui–took over and were responsible for appropriate management of the pūʻolo. This meant making sure that they were always functioning and if they weren’t, making whatever small change was necessary or contacting the Hui Kupuna technicians and notifying them of the issue.

When she got up close, Nanea could see that the damage wasn’t great–a few pūʻolo had been knocked on their sides, and some wires had come loose that could be easily fixed. She dutifully righted the fallen ones, and carefully tucked the wires back in where necessary.

One of the pūʻolo appeared to have some fraying on the lau itself, which she could see were yellowing with age. Jumping back to her computer for a moment, Nanea sent an email off to hui.kupuna@panakō.com and let them know the whereabouts of the aging pūʻolo. There was no danger of the pūʻolo falling apart unexpectedly, at least not for a few more weeks, but it was best to give the Hui a heads up so that they could get to it sooner rather than later. While in her inbox, Nanea also sent off an email to the greenhouse groundskeepers, letting them know about the Albizia and the lock on the door. She then conducted a manual resync of the pūʻolo map and saw the lights turn green on all of the ones that had previously fallen over.

“Sweet,” she said, drumming her hands on the table in celebration. The black tea from earlier was starting to kick in, as well as her impromptu nap, and she jumped up and down for a moment to settle her new-found energy. She pulled the ʻElele app up on her desktop and searched for Kaʻua’s name and chat box.

“Just got the pūʻolo up and running again,” she messaged. “Can you have the users retest?”

Kaʻua responded quickly. “Testing now.”

While she waited, Nanea opened her email and found the initial work order notification. She clicked on the link to take her to the order portal, where she added a comment saying that the issue had been resolved and asking them to test again.

After a minute of staring at her computer screen and waiting for something new to happen, Nanea hopped up on the table and leaned against the wall of the greenhouse, taking a deep breath. She could have gone back home, but figured she should stay out in the event that something else was going to happen. The temperature control system had begun to kick in and she breathed in the warm air, shedding her jacket and hanging it on the handlebars of her bike.

Nanea recapped the events of the night so far to herself. She couldn’t get fired again over her inability to hold a normal sleep schedule. It was her fault anyway, she had stayed up the previous night playing a video game with her cousins online–Graceful Gamble, the latest installment of the Stormy Skies series. Her cousins all lived elsewhere, so they would play games online, and they had an unhealthy knack for staying up way too late in hopes of reaching the next layer of the in-game universe. One of her cousins was even ranked on one of the worldwide forums, so they had a tendency to take these things too seriously. Groaning, Nanea sat up at the sound of a notification beep and looked at her computer.

One new message from Kaʻua: “Not working still. What fix did you do?”

“Some of the pūʻolo were knocked over in the greenhouse. I set them up and reset the wires in them,” she responded, shaking her head in frustration. She thought for a moment about what else might be causing the issue. “Maybe there’s something wrong along the cable path?”

If there was something wrong with the cables–which funneled data between the different islands–she would have to stay out in the cold for much longer than she had wanted, and she would need to travel farther than she could easily bike. She sighed and looked back at her computer. There was another new message.

“Something might be wrong with the cables. User is able to see the information, but now the page is taking an extra-long time to load.”

“And it’s not a local issue?” Nanea asked.

“No, it looks like everything is slow now. Can you check?”

“Send me an ID.”

“Same user. 698237.”

“Checking.”

Nanea opened up the logs from the deployed service and looked for the user ID. There were a few Not Found error messages, but they didn’t follow a clear pattern.

“Are you at the greenhouses?” Kaʻua asked. “Can you take a car and go check the cable station?”

“Damn,” Nanea whispered to herself. Since she was the only one out and about already, she would have to check out the cable station herself.

“Will do,” she responded on ʻElele.

Nanea packed up her things and turned the light out at the greenhouse, making sure to close the door behind her as she left. Hopefully the handle alone would hold until the groundskeepers could swing by. She walked out from between them, noticing that the sky was beginning to lighten. Once out of the greenhouse area, she jumped on her bike and rode toward the main offices. If the issue wasn’t fixed before the panakō was officially opened, or before her meeting with Maʻa at 8, there would be hell to pay. Especially since she had wasted all of that valuable time falling asleep on the job earlier.

“Hey, Keoki,” Nanea said, pedaling back up to the security office. “Can I get into the garage? I need to take a car out to go and check the Puʻuloa cable station. Something might be up with one of the cables.”

“Oh, sure. Let me walk you over.”

Together, they walked over to the security garage, where work vehicles and other large machinery were housed for easy access by those in the building. There were a few cars stored for cases like this–when office members needed to travel at unexpected times to a location quickly. Nanea parked her bike at the far end of the garage, jamming it behind the bike rack itself in hopes that this would deter any opportunistic thieves. She hadn’t brought her locks, since she didn’t realize she would be driving out from the office that evening, so she crossed her fingers and silently hoped that her bike would be okay. She then jogged to keep up with Keoki as he pointed out the vehicle that she could use. Once Nanea’s ID number was logged into the borrowing system, Keoki handed over the keys and she jumped in.

“You’ve got it for 24 hours,” Keoki said in a surprisingly grave voice through the car’s open window. “After that, we’ll start looking for you.” He then winked at her and slapped the side of the car, smiling.

“I’ll bring it back on time,” Nanea reassured him as he laughed. She quickly took stock of the car’s interior before carefully navigating it out of the garage and off the property.

Nanea drove away from the office building and out toward a cluster of short apartments in the distance. The clock on the dashboard read 6:23 AM, immediately triggering a sour taste at the back of her throat. She had only about an hour and a half to rectify this issue or she was pretty sure she’d be out of a job. She put a little more weight on the gas pedal.

Some twenty minutes later, Nanea pulled up to a short, concrete building that was situated a hundred yards off the water. There was a gravel clearing just to the right, with a truck parked there. Nanea pulled up next to it before brushing herself off and heading up to the small building. The scent of the ocean spray hit her nose with force, and she breathed in deeply, wondering when the last time was that she actually went to the beach. She had spent the last few weekends mostly asleep, catching up on her rest after some busier days at work and some unexpectedly late nights on the computer. Her hair wrapped itself around her face and neck and she had to grab it and hold it down so she could see where she was going. The makani here was stronger than near the offices or her apartment.

She walked up to a large metal door and rapped her knuckles forcefully against it. The hinges looked like they had been recently replaced, a sharp contrast to the mix of brown dirt and white sand crawling up the bottom half of the door itself. She could hear movement on the other side, and then it swung open to reveal an older aunty dressed in a pair of jeans and a baggy sweater.

“Are you here from the main offices?” She asked.

“Yes,” Nanea responded. “We’ve had some complaints about slowness on the website, and I’m supposed to come down and check it out.”

“I’m Benny, come on in,” she gestured toward the back room and left the doorway open for Nanea to enter. She pulled a thick rain jacket off the back of a chair and swung it on over her shoulders, adding a shh noise to accompany her heavy footsteps as she moved around in the office.

Nanea followed Benny inside, where she was met with walls of monitors and various devices covered in an array of buttons.

Benny pointed to a red blinking light. “That one came on just a few minutes ago, right after the makani picked up around here. I called the main office to let them know, but couldn’t get a call through. Good timing that you came now anyway. We can go together and check out what’s going on out there.” She grabbed a flashlight that was hanging on the wall and led them out of the building.

“Sounds good,” Nanea muttered in response, pulling her rain jacket tightly around her.

Benny led Nanea out of the station and away from the beach, following a small gravel path into the surrounding forest. Quickly, they were enveloped into the surrounding greenery.

Nanea had never been out to a cable station before–in fact, she had missed that day of orientation when she first started at the panakō. But she had heard about the cable line stewards, those like Benny who usually descended from generations of ʻohana living out near the cable stations, long-term custodians of the ‘āina and, in turn, the cable lines that ran through them, enabling communication across the islands.

As they walked, Nanea noticed Benny’s flashlight alight on the pāpōhaku, about a foot tall, running parallel to their walking path. She knew the cables were stored inside, and began to lift her feet a little higher and set them down a little softer as she continued walking. Lining either side of the pā was an ongoing procession of ti plants, both juvenile and adult.  The  adultti had some of the broadest, largest lau that Nanea had ever seen.

“I’ve never actually visited the pā before,” she said out loud. “Is this where they gather lāʻī to make the pūʻolo?” she asked.

“Yes,” Benny responded, glancing to see where Nanea was pointing. “Here and in other places as well. Many of these ti have been growing for decades now.” She paused for a moment. “I think about all the work you guys do, you know, up in those offices, and I think that all of that work actually starts from right here, in the ground, all covered in the earth and the pōhaku and the ti. Most people don’t even know it, but it all starts right here.”

Nanea nodded, taking the information in. She was beginning to think about all the long nights she had spent crouched over her computer trying to get a program working again. Her scuffed up desktop and hand-me-down office chair were a far cry from the soil and vegetation flourishing beneath her shoes at the moment.

“Ah,” Benny sighed. “Looks like something fell.” She motioned up ahead.

“Oh no,” Nanea gasped.

Together, they walked up to the damaged section where the branch had fallen. The ti were disheveled and a few had actually broken in half. A few pōhaku from the upper layer of the pā had toppled over, and Nanea caught a glimpse of something dark green underneath.

“It's not too bad,” said Benny, quelling Nanea’s worries that she would have to report bad news to her boss in nearly an hour. “Sometimes this happens.”

She lifted the branch up, gesturing to Nanea to give her a hand. Together, they lifted it up and over, carefully laying it on the ground parallel to the pā. Then, Benny placed the fallen pōhaku back into their respective places, covering up the dark green cable lying underneath.

“I’ll contact the Hui about this when I get back,” she said. “They’ll send someone to double check everything.”

“Hopefully everything is working now,” Nanea wondered aloud.

“I guess we’ll have to head back and see.” Benny clapped her hands together and began walking back along the pathway. In due time, they made it back to the station house, where Benny confirmed that everything was running smoothly once again.

Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. “Mahalo for all your help,” she said as she left the station, waving goodbye.

Benny waved back. “Just give me a call if there’s anything else you need.”

Once in the warmth of the car, Nanea opened her laptop and sent another message to Kaʻua, letting him know that the cable issue had been rectified, noting the time on the dashboard clock as 7:33 AM. She waited a few minutes for Kaʻua to respond saying that everything looked okay from the tester's side, and then drove back to the main office, already rehearsing an apology speech in her head for Maʻa. By the time she got back to the office, Keoki had already switched shifts with a new security guard, so Nanea left the keys with the new officer before walking over to the main office building. She continued running through a half-hearted apology speech in her head as she entered through the main lobby.

By the time she arrived at her desk, she could see Maʻa waiting in his office, drinking his morning coffee. He looked up expectantly as she walked in through the doorway.

“All good?” He asked.

“Yup,” Nanea nodded, wringing her hands together nervously. He had probably already been filled in by Kaʻua. “Sorry about falling asleep again,” she apologized, trying to suppress a yawn. The black tea and the cool night air were wearing off, and the silence of the office was starting to lull her into a state of drowsiness. So much for her well-rehearsed speech.

Maʻa sighed. “I heard that you ran all over town fixing the problem. Mahalo for that. Just—try not to let it happen again, okay?” He responded.

“You got it,” she said, running her fingers nervously along the bottom of her jacket, still unsure whether she should be bracing herself for a verbal tirade.

He looked at her for a moment. “Alright, take the day off. You’ve had a long night. See you tomorrow,” he nodded.

Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. Maʻa was usually more bark than he was bite, and he generally didn’t mind her lack of precise timeliness as long as her work was up to par. “Will do, mahalo, see you tomorrow,” she said as she walked out of his office.

Nanea retrieved her bike from the security garage and began riding back to her apartment. The cold air of the night before had all but faded, and by the time she got home, she was sweating and feeling uncomfortably hot in her rain jacket. She jumped into the shower to rinse off the sweat and random pieces of dirt she had accumulated, thinking about the cable lines that she had walked along earlier, imagining the dirt on her ankles as bits and pieces of the machinery used to build the pūʻolo transmission lines or her Internet router. Once out of the shower, Nanea stood and watched the rays of light streaming in through the open windows before slinking over to her bed, laying down and slowly warming up in the sun-soaked sheets. The crinkle of an event flyer was the only sound emitted as her mind drifted off into thoughts of knotted and twisted roots erupting from the electrical socket in her wall, running the length of her Ethernet cord and then merging and solidifying with a pile of dirt and moss at the base of her desktop monitor.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

Wendy knew it wouldn’t be long now before her daughter was taken. She had put the idea from her mind as long as she could, but now Jane was days away from turning thirteen.

From the window of the nursery, Wendy saw Jane wobbling her way down Kensington Park Road on a borrowed bicycle, hair unbraided and wild like she’d been flying. Wendy’s throat seized with fear. Was that gold glittering in the girl’s hair? Had the neighbors seen? Was that his laughter that rang out from Kensington Park across the way? Wendy ran into the street and hauled Jane off the contraption and into the house.

The row they got into after was one of the worst ones yet, leaving Wendy’s heart a limp and ragged thing by the end of it.

Wendy had never wanted to move back into 14 Kensington Park Road, with its drafty windows, dilapidated frontage, and earthy reek of fairies, and she’d certainly never wanted to raise Jane there. But her family’s flat had been damaged in the first Zeppelin raid of the War, and her parents had insisted she take over the London house, themselves having retired to the country. Her brother John had fled to the Americas long before the War and her youngest brother Michael was later lost to it. Now, after a decade, with her siblings gone, the economy sunk, and her husband having twice been passed over for promotions, it seemed like the house would remain Wendy’s responsibility, whether she wished it or not. But it was a roof and a hearth and so she had convinced herself that the smell of pixies was simply her imagination.

Her husband had approached the ownership of No. 14 with his usual unbridled enthusiasm. He had long ago promised they’d restore the moldering wallpaper; re-tile the fireplace where she’d once split her lip; and do something about the cellar where she and her brothers had played hide-and-seek, which now nursed two inches of water after a rain. But her husband rarely had a true sense of their accounts and Wendy had known his aspirations for upkeep had the solidity of soap bubbles. So she had long ago taken it upon herself to whitewash the walls, put a cheap, but colorful, wool rug over the broken hearth, and lock the cellar door.

Times had not gotten better. Jane’s birthday was celebrated without fanfare: a small cake, new galoshes, and definitely no bicycle.

“She will come around,” her husband said, putting a hand over Wendy’s after Jane stormed out. But he was not the seawall that took the pounding of their daughter’s rage. In its wake, Wendy could almost see her own father sitting in the seat Jane had just vacated, going over the accounts her mother had meticulously kept, wheedling over each penny spent on the children. Each small gift commensurate with a cost.

“Just because you are too hen-hearted to go anywhere, does not mean I am,” Jane had said coldly, before scraping her uneaten birthday cake into the waste bin.

So it came as little surprise that a mere week after Jane’s modest disaster of a birthday, she vanished. The only traces that remained were a cold breath of air from the flung-open window and the unmistakable grave-rot of fairies. The milk of the full moon turned the nursery into a ghost of itself, shimmering with the shadows of all the children who’d flown from it since the last time that window had been opened, Wendy included.

She gripped the windowsill, goose bumps on her bare arms, a mixture of relief and bitterness warring within her. She had guarded against this moment, but still it had come. She resisted the fantasy of doing nothing, of letting Jane fly off into her own mistakes. Or doing something rash, like burning the whole house to the ground.

Instead, Wendy gave herself one, no, two long moments, to hate Peter Pan.

Then she got to work.

**

Wendy had never told Jane about Peter, and with good reason. She didn’t trust her daughter not to romanticize him the way she once had. At bedtime in that old house, the veil between here and Neverland felt dangerously thin, as if she could turn her head just so and see its beaches and crystal waters out of the corner of her eye.

But Jane’s demand for new and fantastical stories every night had to be met, if Wendy was to have any peace. So she read her the likes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For Jane, the darker the tale, the better.

“Alice is so foolish,” Jane said, haughtily. “I would never have let the Queen speak to me like that.”

“But she was the Queen. Alice was in her kingdom,” Wendy said, helpless before her daughter’s imagination.

“And if I were Queen, I wouldn’t just sit around and play croquet and yell at people. I would go off and have adventures. I might still behead people, though,” Jane said thoughtfully.

“Well, it’s all just a fantasy,” Wendy said, closing the book with a snap.

“Maybe.” Jane pulled up the covers. “Didn’t you have adventures as a child, Mum?”

Wendy froze. Was that a hovering face in the nursery window? No, just her own reflection.

“Certainly not,” Wendy said. “Ordinary girls don’t go on outlandish adventures.”

“How dull,” Jane sighed, her young eyes full of pity.

**

“Did it all really happen?” Michael asked Wendy, just days after she moved back to No. 14. Michael was home on holiday, his schoolbooks spilled unceremoniously across the rug where Wendy cradled a tiny Jane in her arms.

“Did what happen?” she asked, stroking Jane’s hair. The baby was almost asleep in the drowsy afternoon light. She hoped her brother wasn’t asking about the Zeppelin raid. She was still convinced the scent of sulphur and smoke clung to her, though she had washed several times since the bombs fell.

“Neverland,” Michael whispered, “the pirates, Peter, the flying, all that?”

Yes! she wanted to shout, because they hadn’t spoken of it since they were young children, since she’d finally stopped waiting for Peter to come for her. But the baby brother who she’d help raise, who’d flown to Neverland, wasn’t the person sitting before her. This Michael was a young man, tall and broad-chested, trying desperately to grow a mustache. Hadn’t she only just carried him to bed from where he’d fallen asleep in front of the wireless, clutching his bear?

She looked down at Jane. Back inside these walls, Neverland seemed impossibly present, dancing just behind her daughter’s eyelids. She didn’t want her daughter waiting and waiting, as she once had, as Michael apparently still did, for a dream that would never be realized. For a dream that, now viewed through a lens of adulthood, was tinged with nightmare. The world was enough a nightmare as it was.

“Those were wonderful stories, weren’t they Michael?” she said, and instantly regretted it. The look in his eyes was one of betrayal, of loss. Like something in him had died.

A month later, he packed a rucksack, slipped a note through the mail slot, and joined Kitchener’s Army, to enter what was becoming The Great War. “I may not remember how to fly,” he’d written, “but I remember how to fight.”

*

Good sturdy shoes. The bag she’d kept stocked since they’d moved back into this house, containing: a torch, with a set of fresh batteries; needle and thread; bandages; a sharpened kitchen knife wrapped in a dishtowel; a handful of iron nails. She added several fresh packages of biscuits and chocolate, and a light sweater for herself and her daughter. Wendy remembered the chill nights, piled together with the Lost Boys like piglets for warmth. She shuddered.

And finally, she went down and unlocked the cellar. Descending by candlelight, the support beams and dampness put her in mind of the belly of a galleon or a secret cave dripping with bats. Just the kind of dark place fairies liked to lurk, though none were left here now, as far as she could tell. But she knew they’d been here; they’d marked their territory long ago with that dank, fungal smell. And there it was, in the mortar between the bricks: the glimmer of their dust.

Wendy took out her kitchen knife and chipped flakes of gold fairy dust into an open pouch. When she’d extracted what she could, she sprinkled herself with several large pinches of the stuff. It made her sneeze, the grave-earth smell of it. She wondered if fairy dust went stale, if she’d still remember how to find her way.

Her husband had found her escape bag once. He’d thought she’d intended to leave him, and he’d looked so crestfallen, she had felt compelled to tell him the truth. It was difficult to tell him about Peter, especially since her youngest brother, Michael, had believed in Peter the longest and Michael had been gone for years by then. To conjure up Peter was to conjure up Michael and she could hardly bear to do it. But both boys alighted in her mind as she told her husband about Neverland.

When she finished describing Peter and his home, her capture and escape, her face was wet. She didn’t know who the tears were for. For Peter or Michael? For herself? Either way, for something lost. Wendy saw a strange sort of knowing on her husband’s face—he believed her or believed that she believed. After so many years, the story had taken on a kind of timeless madness and she could understand his pity, even as she resented it. But he was softhearted, and so they had forgiven each other. But she’d been sure to hide her preparations after that.

Wendy re-locked the cellar door, just in case.

She checked in on her husband now, his face rumpled with sleep. She hoped he’d forgive her for leaving without him. Of course, he would. She was saving their child, their family, as she always did. She was setting their little world to rights so he could go on sleeping, his face and dreams as innocent as a boy’s.

What was more questionable was if he could manage in her absence. He could barely boil an egg and their accounts would, undoubtedly, be overdue upon her return. At least he would have their cook about to make sure he stayed fed, but she was sure he’d go to work, unthinkingly, in unpressed shirts and scuffed shoes. How the secretaries would talk.

No, she couldn’t think like that, not now. She hefted her pack over one shoulder and decided to instead think hard of the seaside. Of sticky toffee pudding. Of her daughter, in a good mood and laughing, amidst glowing red balloons on a previous, easier birthday. Of how her husband had looked at her when she told him she was pregnant. The sweetest thoughts she could summon.

She opened her eyes to find herself bobbing near the ceiling, the feeling of flying both effortless and familiar. Seizing bookshelves and furniture, Wendy pulled her way back to the nursery’s open window. The edge of the world was just starting to brighten with a hemline of pink. She didn’t have much time before her access to the island would begin to unravel.

“Wendy?” It was her husband, rubbing his eyes before they widened at the sight of her hovering in the window, bag slung over one shoulder, moonlight making her a shadow poised to leap.

“I am going to get Jane,” she said, with as much certainty as she could muster. She waited for him to try to stop her, level guilt at her like a rifle as her father would have done. Instead, he stood, helpless and pale in the moonlight. Her buoyancy faltered. She sighed and swam through the air until she was close enough to kiss him delicately on the head, where his hair was thinning.

“There is little time to explain,” she said, as he looked up at her. Wendy was sinking slowly back to the floor. “But I won’t let Peter keep her. Leave the casement open. We will be back soon.”

He saw her struggling in the air and grabbed her hand. But he didn’t pull her down. Instead, he kissed her palm. She rose, her hand pulling away from him.

“Take care,” he said, watching her regain her position in the window. “And come back.”

Wendy knew her husband loved her. But from her view against the ceiling, he merely looked lost. She tamped down the frustration. Love and need were so tangled for her. That was Peter’s doing.

“Of course I will,” she said. She sent up a quick, silent prayer for her husband’s continued patience, as well as for her own. “Don’t forget, the window must stay open. Oh, and do see the shoeshine boy on your way into the office, won’t you?”

She turned toward the second star, twinkling ahead of her. Straight on ’til morning, she thought. With big spoonfuls of sweet, toffee pudding.

And without looking back, she pushed off.

⁂

Neverland, for those who have never been, is an odd sort of place. It is an island and also the warm beating heart of a boy, with all the things a boy could dream: jungles and white sand beaches and dangerous riptides, caves and tunnels and secret passageways. Perfect weather and perfect storms. Magic, danger, adventure.

And when Wendy arrived as a young girl, gilded in pixie dust and flying for the first time, she was shot.

Oh, the children Peter collected, the Lost Boys, had blamed the fairies and their trickery. The fairies blamed the boys with their bows and arrows. Either way, it was Wendy who suffered. She hadn’t felt the arrow so much as the fall, the wind rushing up to greet her, stomach lurching with the plummet. She hadn’t had enough breath to scream or pray, only to watch the clouds rise up and up, the stars fading into the blue, waiting for death’s hands to catch her.

But the magic of the island caught her instead, snapping her nightgown taut like a kite. She glided to the forest floor on wings of ragged linen, where Peter’s gaggle of dirty boys crowded her. They realized then that she was not a bird, as they’d suspected, but must certainly have been a gift from Peter: a lady to care for them, make them whole.

The missile had not quite pierced Wendy’s heart, and by the time Peter arrived, the arrow had dissolved into pixie dust and cloud, leaving her merely breathless and bruised. To have avoided death and still be wanted so desperately by these lost children had indeed felt like a kind of gift. They built a house for her from branches and named her “Mother” and she had called it love before she’d known any different.

**

The trouble began with Michael’s toy sword.

Jane, age seven, emerged from the attic covered in dust, the weapon wielded in one hand with a tarnished silver serving tray in the other, and tore through the house with a blood-curdling war cry. It took Wendy nearly a quarter of an hour to talk their typically unflappable cook out of the pantry, so convinced was she that the house was being attacked by Cossacks.

“Jane, this is not acceptable,” Wendy said, sitting her daughter down. “You scared Cook half to death. That sword is not an appropriate toy.”

“You said it belonged to Uncle Michael,” Jane insisted. “He played with it, why can’t I?”

“Your uncle is a soldier,” Wendy said, the unspoken past tense tight in her throat. Michael had played with that sword, screamed at the top of his lungs while lunging at the coat rack in the front hall. No one had taken the sword away then. Nor when he used that same sword in Neverland to slaughter a pirate, before he understood what death really meant. In the protective bubble of Peter’s story, toy swords could be real weapons and good boys always won the battle. But reality proved different.

Wendy keenly felt the double-edge of it, what boys were allowed and girls were not, and the true price of violence. Michael had been told the proper thing was to take up a rifle and run screaming at the enemy. And he had never returned.

“I want to be a soldier too,” Jane declared, stabbing the point of the sword into the floorboards.

“Only men are soldiers,” Wendy said. Jane’s eyes went wide.

“What, no girls ever?” she protested.

“It is far too dangerous,” Wendy said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”

“That isn’t fair!” Jane said, stomping her foot. “I want to fight like Uncle Michael.”

“Uncle Michael is gone,” Wendy snapped. “War is a great big monster and it swallowed him up. Do you want to be swallowed up too?”

Jane went silent and pale, the terror in her eyes so palpable Wendy wanted to pluck it from the air and cast it away.

“It’s just a game,” Jane said, her eyes tearing up. “The children at school, they are always playing at battles in the yard.”

“Jane,” Wendy said, softly. “There are some things too real, too close to play at, even as make-believe. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Jane, shoulders hunched. She turned and walked woodenly to the stairs. But then she’d paused and turned back, her small, fine face hard with determination.

“Next time, I shall find a better weapon,” Jane said, one hand on the banister. “To fight the monster. So you will not have to be sad about Uncle Michael any longer.”

*

The morning was raw and the stars were sharp in the inky sky. It was hard going, flying toward Neverland as an adult. Children were smaller and lighter, whereas it took all of Wendy’s concentration to stay above the rooflines. Her sturdy shoes nearly took out a weather vane. It seemed almost impossible that she should slip between the stars and sky to Neverland, as weighed down as she felt, so old and full of feelings more complicated than joy or sorrow. Joy was a weightlessness, a forgetting. Peter was always forgetting. Wendy remembered everything.

So instead, she thought about her daughter, back when things were simpler. That first golden lock of hair falling across her tiny face. How, before her daughter’s birth, it had seemed impossible that there could be room in Wendy’s heart for another soul and then, suddenly, with a cry, a crow, there was a baby, her baby, and Wendy had pushed away the terror and discovered a new door inside herself, leading to a bright, freshly aired room she’d never seen before: Jane’s room.

She’d only ever been a mother to Lost Boys, before Jane had come along, when she had been little more than a lost girl herself. But when her daughter opened her navy-blue eyes, Wendy felt as if she was being truly seen for the first time, all at once. She felt found.

A change in the light let Wendy know she’d crossed over or through or under and now was in the clear skies above Neverland. Her eyes stung with tears and wind as she slowly sank towards the white sand beaches. She tried to catch an updraft, but seeing this land again, after so much time, was too heavy to keep her aloft.

She bumped down on the shore, the warm waters washing up and over her shoes, soaking her stockings. She took them both off, tying her laces together and hanging the shoes around her neck. She’d meet Peter like she’d found him: barefooted.

But she couldn’t find a way to his hideout, if it was even still where he hid. She walked for what felt like hours, the wet sand molding to the arches of her feet. The beaches here were lined with impenetrable cliffs draped in lush, emerald greenery, glittering with the occasional waterfall. The air was rich with salt and the sun-baked smell of endless summer.

Wendy’s throat ached. She finally leaned over one of the pristine pools to quench her thirst.

“Ah, Wendybird, didn’t know if I’d see the day,” said a voice, warm and gritty. A voice from her grimmest dreams.

Captain James Hook lounged on the beach, his back against a rock, his dark curls limp on either side of his face. He looked no older than he had when he’d held her captive so many years ago, bait for both Peter Pan and the crocodiles alike. His legs stretched out before him on the beach, his one good hand propping up his other arm, which had a glowing cigar speared on the end of his loathsome hook.

But while he hadn’t aged, Hook himself was not the same. His left leg now ended just before the knee, the pant leg knotted beneath it. And instead of his long, blood-colored coat and gaudy ruffled shirts, which would not have scared her now, surely, he was dressed in the grey wool uniform of a German army officer with the spiked helmet and gold-braided epaulettes. She was put in mind of a poster she had seen in Piccadilly Square: a grotesque drawing of the Kaiser, gnawing on a British soldier’s helmet with a glint in his eye.

“Captain,” she said, keeping any form of quaver out of her voice. “I thought you’d been eaten by a crocodile.”

“Not all of me, not yet,” Hook said, a grin flashing from beneath his mustache. He slapped his good hand against his bad leg. “And it’s General now. Can’t be any kind of captain without a ship, and Pan, of course, has scuttled it.” He gestured down the beach where his ship, The Jolly Roger, listed and loomed, its prow dug into the white sand.

“And your crew?” Wendy asked, far more calmly than she felt. He would not be able to chase her at least, but she was waiting for pirates to swarm her from the cliffs or emerge as seaweed-shrouded corpses from the waves. She slipped her hand into her bag and wrapped her fingers around the handle of her kitchen knife. These pirates had taken pleasure in scaring children, in hunting them down, just because they could. But she wasn’t thirteen anymore.

“Ah, my men, all lost to the waves or the perils of growing ordinary,” Hook mused. He looked her over, bare feet to tousled hair. “Thought the waves had taken you as well, but looks like you’ve gone and grown up. That sort of thing should keep you from coming back here. Have you gone and become ordinary too, Miss Darling?”

Ordinary, like it was a curse. Ordinary, like it wasn’t something she’d worked her whole life to achieve. She put on frocks of ordinary, but they could never quite cover the parts of her that burned with the memories of Neverland.

“It’s Mrs. Davies now,” Wendy said, her own voice an echo of her daughter’s imperiousness. “I thought this place never changed. And I wanted to.”

Hook let out a hah, his dark curls blowing across his face. “Peter may not change, but his country does. Tiger Lily and her tribe left long ago, as soon as Pan forgot about them. They knew to get out, when they could. Unlike the mermaids who still cling to a manic hope, and the fairies that have infested the Roger, randy little creatures. You’d think they’d invented lust, the way they go at it.” He arched an eyebrow at Wendy, but she refused to be baited, even as she felt a hot flush climb her neck.

“Well, you too seem to have been forgotten,” she countered.

“Peter has not forgotten me,” Hook said, darkly. “But a dashing pirate no longer served his games, and so I am a German General until he needs another enemy. Meanwhile,” he said, cocking his hook out to sea, spilling ash on his uniform, “I play my own game, you see, with the mermaids.” Wendy recognized it then, the large outcropping in the water. Marooner’s Rock, where she and Peter had nearly drowned. Mermaid’s Lagoon.

“We watch one another all day, the merfolk and I, waiting for high tide,” Hook continued. “To see if this will be the day it’s high enough for them to reach me with their razor teeth. Falling out of Pan’s favor has left them quite mad. And hungry.

“You look hungry too, Mrs. Davies. It’s a look that tells me you’re after someone.” Hook looked pleased, taking a puff on his cigar. “Someone who stopped caring about you long ago.”

“I’m not here for Peter,” Wendy said hoarsely. “Peter took my daughter. I’m here for her.”

Hook’s laugh was like a gunshot. Sparkling fish scattered in the tide pools around them. Hook’s cackle quickly turned into a hacking cough through the cloud of blue cigar smoke. It smelled like burning leaves and, yes, fairies.

“Oh, Wendybird,” he said, gasping, his hand splayed across the gold buttons of his uniform, his eyes glittering, “you’ve finally come back to see what a little shit Pan is.”

⁂

Wendy had just finished telling the Lost Boys their bedtime story: her own imaginings of her happy return home. She could see her brothers forgetting and so she told the story night after night, of the flight home and the glad reunion. It became a kind of spell that she hoped would be cast in its repetition. That maybe having lost their children for a while, her parents would be more thankful for them and the obedient daughter she always tried to be.

But that night, Peter listened in. He groaned and rolled his eyes and made a mockery of her. He proceeded to tell his own story: of the mother he once had who had barred the window and put another little boy in his bed. The Lost Boys all agreed that mothers must be terrible creatures—“you excepting, of course, Wendy”—and even Wendy’s brothers vigorously agreed.

“You must let us go home at once,” Wendy said, feeling her grip on her brothers and reality slipping.

“Oh?” Peter had replied. “But it is not safe for you out there.”

Then above them, where before there had been silence, came the cries of combat and clanging of steel. That was when Wendy knew that he wouldn’t let her leave, not without a fight.

*

“I will deal with Peter,” Wendy said. After all, she had done so before. “Tell me where he is.” A stiff breeze blew in off the ocean, filling the tattered sails of the Roger. Out in the open sea, a flash of iridescent scales. Hook smirked, then gazed up, like a beatific saint.

“Atop the cliffs, in the Never Woods, I hear the boys running,” Hook said, closing his eyes. “And the sound of cannons and other weapons, fast and deadly.”

“Guns?”

“Aye. The boys have turned it to a battlefield.” He patted the sand next to him, an invitation. “Wendy, you were right to come to me. Neverland is a terrible place for us grown-ups.” He shuddered. “You’ll see.”

The man looked wet and miserable, like a dog missing the warmth of its master’s hearth. She remembered a younger James Hook, one with fire in his eyes, so desperate for love he’d commanded her, a child, to be his mother. Those eyes, once the bright, baby blue of forget-me-nots, were now the color of the lagoon, a watery blue-grey. And she could see clearly now, in a way she’d only suspected then, that Hook was what happened when Lost Boys were allowed to grow up this side of the second star.

She could see in Hook’s face the boy he might have been, once: beautiful, heartless, self-important, just like Peter. Except in adults, that same heartlessness lost any pretense of innocence; it was callous, malicious. Irredeemable.

Would she have become like this horrible man, had she not had the prudence to escape, to flee? She thought back to her younger self, imagined her childish weaknesses and assumptions magnified. Would she have become a villain, a harpy fixated on the rigid sort of mothering brewed from fairy tales, resentment, and a child’s distortion of adulthood? Or something more akin to the mermaids: a monstrous open maw, hungering for whatever scraps of love, attention, or praise a child deigned to offer her?

Those would-have-been-Wendys flanked her now, watching Hook pitilessly. They thought they understood motherhood and motherlessness, a distillation of her parents’ example and Peter’s rejection. A world made simple, cruel, and grossly deficient.

But they did not have a daughter. They did not have Jane.

So Wendy did not sit on the sea-darkened sand. Instead, she dug out her bag of salvaged pixie dust. There was barely a teaspoon’s worth left at the bottom. If she had to get up the cliffs or fly further inland to find Jane and have any hope of getting home, the help she needed was from the fairies, not this washed-up pirate. She’d have to board The Jolly Roger.

“I didn’t come for you,” Wendy said to James Hook, setting her shoulders back. She sprinkled herself with two more large pinches of the heady dust.

“You need me,” Hook snarled, “and you’re not the only one with unfinished business with Pan.” He seized her ankle with his one good hand. In that moment, the other-possible-Wendys collapsed into one: the girl she’d been at thirteen, bound and shivering in her nightgown, forced to watch Michael walk the plank.

But there were no more pirates and she was no longer a little girl. And Wendy had not stayed behind, to curdle into someone like James Hook. She’d gone back to the Mainland, to the real world, and grown up, for better or worse. She’d had a daughter of her own, who was more terrifying, at times, than this man had ever been. In fact, if there was one thing Wendy had gotten better at with age, with motherhood, it was this:

“No,” she said firmly, removing Hook’s hand from her ankle. She turned and walked away from him down the beach, figments of those almost-Wendys winking out behind her.

⁂

Once, Peter and Wendy had been trapped on the spit of stone that was Marooner’s Rock out in Mermaid’s Lagoon. The evil Captain had speared Peter with his hook before fleeing the even sharper teeth of a crocodile. The tide was coming in and drops of Peter’s blood bloomed in the water. They lay on the rock panting in the thick, oncoming dusk.

Then a mermaid seized her by the ankles and tried to pull Wendy under. She’d screamed and Peter had dragged her back out of the surf. But the tidewaters of the lagoon had risen to Wendy’s waist by then, the water an icy blade of terror sawing at her belly. She and Peter were too tired to swim or fly to safety.

“Do you mean we shall both be drowned?” she’d asked. Peter’s eyes were bright with a keen fervor, which should have been proof enough that these calamities had all been his intention, from his grievous injury to the rising tide. But Wendy had only been able to stare, frozen, toward the inescapable tidal wave of her own mortality, the cold ocean gripping her ribs.

Then, as if a miracle, Michael’s magical kite had drifted by and Peter had bound Wendy to it, sending her soaring for the shoreline. She had no control of the flight, nor her destination, but thought it gallant, him securing her rescue before his own. That’s what it meant to be a hero, surely.

But Peter did not save himself; a mother did. From across the lagoon, a lone Neverbird had paddled her nest to the boy so he could sail it to safety. Peter had once told Wendy not to disturb the mother Neverbird’s floating nest, though sometimes he took the liberty of skipping stones across the water, trying to land them in it, to the bird’s great dismay. But here she was giving her nest up to Peter, even as her eggs lay cupped inside, warm and vulnerable, though there wasn’t room for Peter and the eggs both.

Wendy had watched from her buffeted perch, a cold fear tumbling in her stomach as the Neverbird covered her face with her lovely, white wings. They both knew Peter cared only for himself. And still the Neverbird had given him her nest with its precious eggs. Why? What was it about being a mother that made sacrifice so implicit? Did the Neverbird feel obligated to return Peter’s protection? Or was it simply that, as on the Mainland, all creatures, especially females, contorted themselves to accommodate the needs of boys before themselves?

“One girl is more use than twenty boys,” Peter had told Wendy to get her to come to Neverland. He’d held out his hand and she had taken it. She had thought it the finest of flattery but had never thought to ask: more useful to whom? And for what purpose?

Peter saved the eggs after all and everyone applauded him, none louder than the Neverbird herself. For doing the right thing when he so easily could have done wrong and not been faulted for it.

*

The Jolly Roger looked like a beached whale, pale and huge against the tropical blue sky. Wendy tried to shake off Hook’s curses echoing off the cliffs behind her and the stuttering of dread behind her heart and set her sights on the Roger’s bleached hull.

As she drew closer, she began to feel a kind of vibration. A hiss. She soon realized the sound was the sand beneath the bow of the ship, buzzing and hopping against the aged wood as the whole ship shuddered. Wendy’s face grew crimson. Fairies might not be human, but they were creatures, and she couldn’t begrudge them their needs.

Everyone had needs. But only some were allowed to act.

To board the ship, Wendy closed her eyes and tried to remember joy. It finally came to her: an anniversary, their first one, where her newly minted husband bought her a peacock-blue scarf. The blossoming warmth of such a perfect gift. The eagerness of their lovemaking beneath the skylight of their first home together, that tiny loft with a just-fashionable-enough address.

When she opened her eyes, Wendy was hovering near the crow’s nest of the ship, the ocean spread beneath her like cerulean silk. She almost wished her husband was here to see the crystal blue waters, the winking, rainbow coral beneath the waves.

Almost.

That anniversary had been Before. Before Jane. Before the apocalyptic Zeppelin raid that had set fire to her little life. Before she’d had to move back into the home where her abductor could find her. Before her husband’s tenderness had turned tedious.

Wendy stumbled down onto the deck of The Jolly Roger, scraping her hands on the splintering wood, the grief of homecoming hanging like weights around her neck. All about her were tangles of light, tumbling through the air like illuminated puffs of dandelion seed.

Fairies.

She could feel their frenzy through the deck, up through her hands and knees. A trembling desire bloomed between her legs. She pressed them together, but that only intensified the sensation, an arc of pleasure straight up her abdomen. No, no, she could not allow herself to be controlled by desires, certainly not now and not in Neverland. That was what had honed Peter into a needle of misfortune: pure desire. And she would not allow herself to be anything like Peter Pan.

Wendy staggered to her feet. She was suddenly conscious of her body, the size and breadth of herself, standing among the tiny, pulsating fairy forms. The boat smelled of trees turned to soil and the rot beneath. Of sludge and saltwater. Despite the blinding sunlight, Wendy couldn’t help feeling like she’d stumbled into a dank marsh or a dark wood. Or a party gone sour.

“I’m looking for my daughter,” Wendy said to the lights, her voice ragged. “Her name is Jane. Peter has her.”

It took a moment for the glowing gyrations to slow and stop and stare at her, shifting swiftly from magical to menacing. They closed in on her, their drone like a swarm of wasps. Wendy dug down to the bottom of her bag and came up with the handful of nails she’d packed. She wielded them at the fairies like a shield. They flowed away from the iron, cursing at her in wind-chime and sleigh-bell voices.

“I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to find her. And to do that, I need dust.” She tried to hold steady, despite the air humming with hundreds of wings.

One glowing speck drew away from the crowd and flew close, right up to her face. She flinched, involuntarily. It touched her lower lip and Wendy let out a small gasp. So close, the fairy smelled like the compost spread beneath the lilacs, rich and sultry. Wendy could just make out the curve of the fairy's body inside its glow, wings a hummingbird blur. She swallowed. The fairy circled her slowly, then chimed at her.

What would she give them? Oh what wouldn’t she give them. She dug in her bag and offered up biscuits and chocolate. The wall of fairies jangled and twinkled at her, laughing. No, they didn’t want anything sweet.

Her bitterness. They would take it from her, in exchange for the dust and directions. Fairies were so small they could only feel one thing at a time. Lust had been a lovely distraction, but they were ready for something fresh, jagged. There weren’t many newcomers to Neverland. And the fairies were hungry too.

Bitterness should be an easy feeling to give up. But her bitterness drove her, got her here, got her up every morning. It had carved her jaded heart into a weapon. Without the bitterness, what was left?

Wendy was afraid to find out. But she said yes anyway.

**

It was months before Wendy heard from Michael, after he’d run off to enlist. The first telegram she received said he’d be home on leave for a week, come Saturday. Her parents came in from the countryside and they went together to the train station.

But when the train pulled up and the soldiers poured out through clouds of steam and oil smoke, she couldn’t find her brother. Just a forest of brown uniforms that made all the young men look the same. Private Michael Darling, who eventually emerged before them, bore scant resemblance to the boy who had joined up. He was taller, his mustache a cruel hook across his upper lip, grey eyes struggling to focus, as if he had cataracts like their father. Like he was peering through a fog.

Their mother flung her arms around Michael, leaving Father unmoored in the sea of disembarking passengers, shouting “What, what? Is the boy here?” Wendy gently guided him to her brother, whose face was a rictus of distress, clutching his rucksack as he had once gripped his stuffed bear after a nightmare. Wendy had almost thought to bring that worn, old toy. She was glad she hadn’t.

At 14 Kensington Park, she had Cook prepare Michael’s favorite meals and put fresh, butter-white daffodils in his room. But he stared at everything as if it was alien. Wendy knew that feeling intimately. When she’d brought Jane home for the first time, her sense of space and time had been recalibrated. Hours crawled by, days blinked away, everything was experienced through a new level of attention. She saw it in the way Michael moved through the old house. Like a wild animal, feeling out the confines of its cage.

“Stop,” he finally snapped at her. “Stop following me around everywhere.”

“I just,” she’d stammered, “I want to make sure you’re alright. You haven’t been yourself.”

“I’ve been to war, Wendy. I am every ounce of myself. There is nothing wrong with me. It is the rest of the world that tilts towards madness. Gliding along above as if nothing were wrong, while darkness lurks beneath.” He stared into his cup of now-cold tea in the lemon light of the sitting room.

“I understand …” Wendy began, reaching for him, but Michael slammed the cup down so hard tea sloshed over his hands onto the pristine tablecloth.

“Michael, you will wake the baby,” Wendy hissed, tucking her shaking hands beneath her arms.

“Let her wake,” Michael said, his voice strangled. “She has that liberty, to wake safe in her bed. When I return to the front, that is not a luxury I shall have.” He lifted the half-empty tea cup to his lips, hands trembling. “Do not presume to know what war is like, Wendy. You are safe because I do know, and you do not.”

“Do you forget why I live beneath this roof?” Wendy lashed back. “Had I been asleep when the incendiaries dropped, I would not be here to serve you tea. I know something of war.”

“Why do you think I volunteered?” Michael snapped, too loud. Far at the top of the house, in the nursery, baby Jane began to wail. Michael put his head down, hands gripping his hair.

“Oh, Michael,” Wendy said, softly. She sat down beside him at the table, but he launched away from her.

“No,” he said. “It is not for you to try to protect me.”

As if caring for her baby brother was something she could ever halt or harness. It was a reflex, not a service. She had certainly never expected gratitude for the ways she had kept him safe as he grew up: from their father’s harshest demands, from schoolyard bullies, from Peter Pan. And neither his height nor uniform, she felt, acquitted her of that responsibility for him as her youngest brother.

Above them, Jane’s howls increased to the keen of an air siren. Michael winced, knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the table.

“Can’t you make her stop?” he said, through gritted teeth.

“Of course, I will see to her,” Wendy said, standing to clear away his dishes, biting her tongue against any recriminations. Maybe that was the problem. She had given her life to service, been expected to, and never thought to seek or receive gratitude. He had chosen service, without knowing the weight of its ungracious obligations.

“You are right, Michael. You do protect us. Thank you,” she said, hoping to assuage his feeling. But he looked at her with such disgust that she immediately turned and fled. In the nursery, she tried to soothe Jane, but it was impossible when she herself was so discomfited. She had tried so hard to protect Michael, but through her diligent care, she had held from him any lessons of responsibility by taking them upon herself. Now her brother had been forced to learn those lessons on his own, in blood and bullets.

**

As one war ended, another was just beginning. Jane had been a sweet baby, reminding Wendy much of Michael in that respect, but even as Armistice was declared, Jane’s willfulness became clear and she and Wendy began to engage in an endless series of their own battles.

Nannies deemed Jane too difficult, too inconstant to be reformed. Wendy wished they could see the Jane she knew was tangled inside all that want and demand: a brave, sensitive child who struggled to conform to the needs of others because she did not know how and nor see a reason to. Wendy knew what it felt like not to fit. She had tried to make herself into the expected shape and form: demure woman, obedient wife, doting mother. And Jane absolutely undid her.

Wendy had picked out a new dress for Jane, that had been her first error. She’d hoped it would be a peace offering. The fabric reminded her of one of her own mother’s dresses and how protected she’d felt, pressed against her mother’s emerald skirt. But the safety of such a dress was her comfort, not Jane’s. Her attempt at parlay met a blockade.

“You didn’t even consult me,” Jane said, “on the dress or even whether I want to go to this beastly party.”

“It is the company Christmas party,” Wendy said sternly, exasperated. “The affair is for families. It would look poorly for your father to show up without his.” Her husband seemed content to be passed over for promotions, but Wendy was not. She hoped to appeal to his employer’s better nature by showing off a charming wife and daughter in need of provision.

“I have no interest in eating Christmas pudding with Father’s colleagues and their dull children. I will stay here, I can look after myself.”

Wendy’s own father never missed an opportunity to tell her she coddled Jane too much, gave in too easily to her whims. Wendy knew all about whims, had worked hard over the years to scrub herself clean of them. The dress had been a setback. She was paying for that now.

“You will do no such thing,” Wendy said, gripping the dress. “We are all going to the fête and you will look splendid in this dress. You love green.”

“The dress is hideous,” said Jane, folding her arms. “You cannot make me wear it.”

“I purchased this dress for you at great expense,” Wendy said, slowly, deliberately. “I would’ve been more than grateful to wear a dress this fine at your age. Any young girl would be.”

“Well, give it to some other girl, then,” Jane said. With that, she snatched up the dress, stormed over to the window, and before Wendy could reach her, opened the casement and flung the garment out into the wintery night. It fluttered, like a child trying to take flight, before landing in the snow far below.

Wendy slapped her daughter.

She hit Jane hard across the face, just as the girl was turning toward her mother triumphantly. Jane staggered back, cheeks red with shock and fear. Wendy felt something in her rear up, like she was leading the charge against a band of pirates. It felt ugly. And right.

“You will go out,” Wendy said, “and you will fetch that dress. You will hang it in the kitchen to dry. Then next week, when we go to the party at the very fine home of your father’s employer, you will wear that dress with your good black shoes. And there will be no more protests, do you understand?”

Jane did not respond, just gave Wendy the same look Michael had when she’d denied their past with Peter Pan. The truth sank in, then. Her daughter might love her again after this, but things would always be different between them. In her anger, she had shown weakness. A crack in her defenses.

Just wide enough for Peter to slip in.

*

Wendy woke up hacking as she accidentally inhaled a breath of fairy spores. They coated her mouth and tongue. She looked down to find she was covered all over in cold mud and a tingling, shimmering miasma of pixie dust.

The woods she’d been dropped in were leafless and mud filled; nothing like the adventure-laced enchanted forest she remembered from her youth. Despite the bright light of the beach, the air here was dim, oppressive. There was the plaintive sound of birds and wind, but nothing that made her want to venture deeper in.

She pulled her bag out of the mud and found it full of shifting, sparkling dunes of dust.

Well, the fairies had wanted all her bitterness and they’d repaid her in kind. She sat now, seeking out the splintered places inside herself to see what remained. There was still pity and sorrow, even anger, ripe and bright. But all that had been bitter was now brittle.

Which wouldn’t get her daughter back.

The ratatat of guns echoed among the bare trees.

“Jane?” Wendy called, trying to move through the thick mud. She grabbed a tree trunk to steady herself. “Peter?” The woods went quiet around her.

Then from behind the trees emerged soldiers, sepia-toned and mudslick, helmets pulled low, guns out. Pixie dust spilled from her bag until she found the handle of her kitchen knife.

“Stay back!” Wendy shouted, sweeping the blade in wide arcs. The infantrymen drew closer. Their features seemed to shift as they stepped in and out of the shadows. Was that one Michael? The wry smile seemed familiar. They were all young, nothing more than boys. There were too many of them. She couldn’t save them all.

If they even wanted to be saved.

Something exploded beside her ear, and she screamed. One of the soldiers burst apart, as if he was made of mist or sand, a shattered reflection and shower of pixie dust. Wendy dropped to a crouch, covering her ears. More gunshots, more shattered ghosts. She turned around.

A beam of sunlight suffused the haze of the woods, illuminating Peter Pan. He looked exactly as he had when he’d stolen her away, except dressed in an officer’s uniform, his cap cocked jauntily across his brow. He grinned at her, balancing a rifle against one hip, its bayonet glinting in the weak light.

The thirteen-year-old girl inside her felt a stab of want that took her breath away. The thirty-five-year-old woman she was in this moment expected the jagged stab of bitter loathing she’d cultivated in the years since. Instead, her heart broke a little, seeing him, and she thought, Mercy, he really is just a child.

Peter held the gun casually, his face full of bemused curiosity. Not an ounce of recognition, an absence both crushing and a relief.

“Hullo,” Peter said, with a taunting grin. “Friend or foe?”

Both, she wanted to say. What was this hook that made her feel as if she needed to earn his admiration? She was old enough to actually be his mother. There was no reason to try to please him. She shivered, shuddered, couldn’t seem to get warm.

“It’s me, Wendy,” she said. Peter had nothing but disdain for grown-ups. After the poor state of James Hook—who, in truth, deserved it—she wondered if she wasn’t making a mistake in telling him the truth. Pretending was always easier. He had taught her that.

Peter Pan tipped his head. “Wendy? What’s a Wendy?”

**

When Wendy received word that Michael was missing-in-action, she left baby Jane in the cook’s flour-coated arms and went straight to Kensington Gardens, hoping for some sign of Peter Pan. She knew it was Peter’s favorite place to steal away children, so she usually avoided it, but Wendy felt certain that if she found him, he could find Michael. But Kensington Gardens had been transformed into its own war zone. Lush lawns had been overturned for soldiers to practice digging trenches: long, deep brown scars in the earth where the roses used to be. Sandbags piled to her shoulder, lined with curls of barbed wire. She could almost see her little brother, curled around a cigarette in the mud of the trench, grinning up at her. Or was that Peter’s grin she was imagining on her missing brother’s face? It began to rain. She stood there staring at the washed-out trench until a soldier she didn’t know came by and guided her back to the street.

Though she had written him off long ago, Peter’s absence was a bitter sting. She had hoped he would step in again, as a hero, preserve her brother as she could not. But that was a fool’s thinking; she knew the truth of Peter and his bravado. It was stolen, like so much else.

Still, Wendy left the window open for weeks afterward. There was nothing but a damp, cold draft.

*

Peter marched Wendy, at gunpoint, to his new hideout. It loomed out of the fog, a large wooden fort surrounded by barbed wire.

“What have you done with Jane?” she demanded.

“Silence, prisoner!” he said, “Or you’ll feel the cold steel of my bayonet.”

More gunfire spat from the forest behind them. Ghost soldiers, shifting from the woods, too many to count. Peter turned to meet them, a feral glint in his eye. Wendy dropped to the ground again, just as a hailstorm of bullets turned the phantoms into explosions of sparks and smoke. The deafening clatter continued until there was nothing of the soldiers but winking dust. Wendy ventured a glance at the fort and there, on the parapet, straddling a machine gun, was her Jane, still in her pale yellow nightgown, hair a wild conflagration. She was beautiful and fierce and looked, dangerously, right at home.

Peter crowed with pleasure. “Our latest recruit to Pan’s Army is a fair shot!” From the fort came cheers and whoops. Peter gestured for Jane to join him. She came down through the gate in a pair of army boots, a rifle cradled in one arm. She stopped when she saw Wendy, a frown tracing her lovely face.

Peter slapped Jane on the shoulder. “Thatta boy,” he said. “I’m putting you in charge of our first POW.”

Jane shot Peter a glare that Wendy knew too well. “I’m not a boy, I keep telling you.”

Peter looked quizzical. “Well, what are you, then?”

“A girl,” Jane said, lifting her chin and her gun.

“Oh,” Peter said, carelessly. “Girls can’t be soldiers.”

“You said I could do what I pleased here,” Jane insisted.

Peter weighed his gun in his hands. “Girls are far too clever to be soldiers,” he finally decided, with a definitive nod. “No, you’re to be a nurse. Every platoon needs a nurse. You’ll take care of our injuries and make us take our medicine and tell us stories to cheer us during difficult nights in the trenches.” His face grew solemn, contemplating, surely, other people’s sacrifices in those battles rather than his own.

Like heat rising off her, a distortion marred the air around Jane, and quite suddenly she was no longer in a nightgown, but in a nurse’s uniform, stark white, with a crisp white cap and red cross. Jane looked down at herself, eyes wide, gun still gripped tight. She plucked at the fabric. Solid. Starched.

“Now you look the part,” Peter said, his grin like a mouth full of pearls.

Wendy had a horrifying vision of Jane trapped here like James Hook, caught in awful tempers even as an old woman, snared in the shadow of Peter’s waning attention.

“Jane does not belong to you, for you to do with as you please,” Wendy spoke up, trying to draw the boy’s focus, though she knew it would draw Jane’s ire. “She’s my daughter. She must come home with me.”

“What is a ‘daughter,’” Peter said, wrinkling his nose.

“I don’t belong to anyone!” Jane shouted, tearing off the nurse’s cap and throwing it into the trees.

I made you! Wendy wanted to cry out, to wrap her arms around her precious, ferocious child. Shouldn’t that give her some power, some control over Jane and her choices? But it never seemed to. She held her breath and counted the buttons on Peter’s uniform, letting her fears unspool.

“A daughter is a person, Peter.” Wendy did not look at Jane as she spoke. “One with her own intelligence and wit, strength and cleverness. One that has a mother who cares for her very much and wants to see her safe.”

“Oh, you have come to speak to me about Mothers,” Peter scoffed. “Nasty things. Make you wash behind your ears, go to bed at night, and take lessons during the day. They don’t let you run through the woods or howl at the moon or fight to the death. Mothers only try to make perfect little children with spit-slicked hair who say please and thank you but never have an original thought. It is mothers,” he said, spitting out the word, “that turn children into adults.”

It was supposed to be a taunt, but Wendy would not have it.

“What did he promise you, Jane?” she said, keeping her eyes on Peter. “Never having to grow up?”

“And flying,” said Jane, excitement creeping into her voice. “Heroic battles. Adventure. Freedom.” She hefted the gun. “All the things you will not allow.”

“Children are not meant to stay children. Not forever,” Wendy said, this time with eyes only for Jane. “There is so much more to the world than what children can reach. There is plenty of adventure to be had.”

“But children see all that is worth seeing,” Peter said. He slung his gun over his back, adjusted his cap. “Come, Nurse, this conversation grows dull. Let us go inside and find a proper place for our prisoner.”

“I told you, I’m not—” Jane began.

“Come home, Jane. I will keep you safe,” Wendy cut in. “Here you will only ever be what fits Peter’s story.”

“And whose story must I fit at home, Mother?” Jane said, brushing hair out of her face. “For it certainly isn’t my own.”

The words were Wendy’s slap, wielded with precision. Jane was right. The world they had left was no more kind to girls than Neverland, especially for fighters like Jane. What safety could she promise her daughter that would be any different? There was safety and a future behind the walls of a house, in the arms of a husband, at the bedside of one’s children. Wendy wanted to wrap her child in the safest story she knew. One in which Jane would, no doubt, suffocate.

“Neverland may feel like an adventure, but stay here long and it becomes a prison,” Wendy insisted. “Peter hasn’t told you about what he has done to the pirates, to the mermaids. He is playing war, but what is real and what is illusion make no difference to him.”

“You can’t die for real in Neverland,” Jane scoffed, her eyes flicking to Peter. “This is a land of wishes, is it not?”

“Even wishes have consequences,” Wendy said softly.

“I kill things all the time. It is no great task. If I want someone to stay dead, they do,” Peter said, haughtily. He examined Wendy, as if choosing a proper target. “Mothers are no longer allowed in Neverland. Didn’t my boys shoot down one of your kind before? Yes, but you were a bird, were you not?”

Wendy’s shoulders seized and it was as if her back had been sliced open by a bayonet. She fell to one knee and must have made a sound too, because Jane was in front of her, small hands pressed to Wendy’s face, saying Mum? Mummy?

Then Wendy’s shoulder blades unfurled into two great white wings, like that of a Neverbird. She grunted beneath the awkward mass of them. Neverland is a terrible place for grown-ups.

She forced herself to her feet, struggling for balance and trying to ignore the horror of the weighty appendages. She had sworn she would not let Neverland trap her again but here it had her in its grip.

Jane backed away, hands over her mouth. “Peter, what have you done?”

The boy merely shrugged. “Grown-ups are not good for much else, Nurse. Especially Mothers. If you do not wish to become what a Mother would make of you, she abandons you. Replaces you.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. “That is what my mother did to me and no doubt what this one would do to you. This way, I make grown-ups as I will them. She will make for a great quarry, far more interesting than a prisoner.” He slung one arm over Jane’s shoulder.

“No!” Jane pushed Peter away, her face blotchy with held-back tears. “You cannot make us into someone else!” Jane gripped the front of her crisp, white uniform, as if to tear it asunder. Instead, Wendy saw, she was summoning the same distortion Peter had used to dress them both. The space around Jane struggled in and out of focus. The nurse uniform blurred into the brown fatigues of a British soldier, then flickered, for a gut-sinking moment, into the emerald green Christmas dress, a jewel in the dim woods. Then the nurse uniform, and back again.

“Nurse,” Peter said, taking a conciliatory step towards Jane, but Wendy lumbered forward and put her arms and wings out between them.

“She is my daughter,” Wendy said to Peter, loud enough that Jane could hear. “But she is wholly her own person. And she is choosing a course different from either of ours.”

“Get out of my way, Mother,” Peter mocked.

“No,” Wendy said, arms crossed, wings outspread. “I am not your mother. I am Jane’s.”

With a final pulse, the haze around Jane coalesced into her yellow nightgown and, on her feet, the hated birthday galoshes. The rifle she had dropped dissipated into pixie dust, but with a look of intense concentration, Jane caused the dust to amass into a new shape. She picked up the sword and stepped between Peter and Wendy. No fear, no bitterness, all Wendy saw on her daughter’s face was righteous anger. And for a shining moment, Wendy dared to hope.

⁂

The final time Wendy went to Neverland, she had been sure Peter had forgotten about her like he had everything else. Even so, she wore the same nightgown as the night they’d first met, though she’d had to add a panel to the back and several inches to the hemline to make sure it continued to fit. She had felt indecent sitting there, sixteen, waiting for a little boy to come steal her away. She was so nervous she had risked taking a bit of bourbon from her father’s decanter, seeking calm in the liquor’s smooth, smoky burn. Michael had sat up with her, but even he had curled up on the rug and fallen asleep. It was long past midnight and she’d all but drifted off herself when Peter’s shadow fell across the windowpane.

“Wendy,” he crowed, “come with me! Spring is here!” And she’d been so flush with joy to see he wasn’t a dream that she’d taken his hand again and together they’d hurtled into the sky.

“It’s good to have you back, Mother,” he said, twisting in the air. The comment felt barbed somehow, though she tried to ignore it. Wasn’t that why she kept returning, to care for Peter and these boys? Wasn’t motherhood what she’d always wanted? The pain of it stuck in her chest, long after they landed and burrowed their way into Peter’s hideout.

It didn’t occur to her until much later, when her arms were elbow deep in wash water, scrubbing clothes while Peter was off hunting wolves, that what had started as a game for them both, was now only a game to him. She took her role seriously and he did not. What was she hoping for, a future with Peter? There would always be the washing and dirty noses, meals to prepare and floors to sweep, and never once would Peter show an ounce of caring. He only needed her as much (and as long) as he was entertained by her.

The dirty clothes sank to the bottom of the wash bin.

She’d stared down at her hands, pruned like that of an old woman. Was this motherhood, held out like a prize, but wielded as a blunt instrument?

Peter, she was learning, was incapable of feeling. That fact seemed to have no effect on the clenched-fist feeling in her pelvis when they flew together, fingers brushing against the clouds and one another, wind rushing cold up her gown. She was growing up and he was not. She had held so tightly to her own childhood that she had only just begun to untangle the idea that there was more than one kind of love. And that while society considered motherhood a virtue, mothers themselves held little value.

Maybe the truth was she clung to the role of mother, of Peter’s caretaker, because it seemed the only way she could get him to care for her. But Peter cared only for himself. He had no use for her, even as she felt ill-used.

When she’d returned home, she’d locked the nursery window and shoved her old nightgown in the waste bin. She’d stared ferociously at her naked skin in the long mirror in the hall, willing herself to see her own future, however it would emerge, resolving it would not involve Peter Pan in the slightest.

But she didn’t recognize the person she saw there, a girl with a woman’s body, who couldn’t admit how much of her childhood she had given to a dream that wasn’t hers.

*

Among the darkening trees, Peter stared down Jane’s blade with a rueful smile. “Are we to fight, then? I never lose, you know.”

His expression belied a child who had never been denied anything, had never been held to consequence. But Wendy could not hold to the sour feeling that he deserved Jane’s blade. Instead she felt a pang of grief for the boy, even as he leveled his bayonet at them.

“We just wish to leave,” Wendy said calmly.

“But this one does not wish to,” Peter said, cocking his head at Jane. “Look at her, ready to do battle. ”

And with that, he lunged, his bayonet a white flash.

Wendy screamed, but she couldn’t hear herself over the sudden report of a rifle and a violent clang of steel.

Jane had caught Peter’s blade with her own, both hands on the hilt, pressing him back. But Peter’s strength was slackening. He looked down in shock where red was blossoming around a bullet wound on his right shoulder. With a shove, Jane pushed him away and then Jane ran to her mother’s arms. They had both almost died, quite possibly, but for once, Jane needed her and Wendy was embarrassed at her own elation.

Peter collapsed to the ground dramatically, one hand flung across his brow. “Nurse,” Peter cried, reaching for Jane. “Nurse, I’ve been shot! Save me!”

Behind Peter near the fort, there stood a ghostly soldier between the twilit trees, just now lowering his rifle. It was Michael, it had to be. Same eyes, same baby face beneath his mustache, his rage at the world in the shape of a gun. But upon catching her eye and seeing Jane in her arms, he lowered his weapon, anger softening. He gave her a sad smile and mouthed one word:

Fly.

Lost Boys burst from Peter’s fort to help their fallen leader. They were all so small, dirty feet and ears, ill-fitting uniforms. Child soldiers. Peter winced and groaned and assured them all they could go on without him. Then he pointed at Wendy. “Our nurse has been kidnapped by the Mother Bird! Get ’er boys! Take no quarter!”

But around them, the woods were filling with more ghost soldiers, winking into existence between the brown trees. Now a single pursuit had become an ambush. With cries of “For Peter!” and “Huzzah!”, the warrior children stormed toward Wendy and Jane and the ghost soldiers flowed up to meet them. There was the clash of gun and steel. Michael met Wendy’s eyes once again across the battle.

Fly.

Of course. Wendy scooped dust from her bag and Jane into her arms. Someone grabbed hold of one of her wings, tearing out feathers, and through the pain and the overpowering must of pixie dust, she thought: Jane is with me. We girls can rescue ourselves.

With that, Wendy shot up into the sky, breaking through the forest canopy and into the clear dusk air above Neverland, pixie dust trailing behind them like the tail of a comet, bullets and cries following in their wake. The sun spilled firelight across the water and the moon hovered low over the white-washed beaches, impossibly large and the color of old bone. She spread her wings, and the wind caught her too, lifted them higher and higher, like a kite, towards the first stars of the evening.

Behind them, rising from the Never Woods, came the eerie throbbing that still haunted Wendy’s dreams: a Zeppelin’s engine. It loomed up behind them, impossibly large, blotting out the stars. From the gondola beneath its enormous, bullet-shaped hull came the clattering of a machine gun. The bullets tore through Wendy’s wings, rending flesh and bone, and she cried out as her wings disintegrated into feathers and fairy dust. They fell, the cold sea rushing up at them.

She did not trust the magic of Neverland to catch her this time. She was on her own.

No. She had Jane.

“Hold on!” Wendy cried to her daughter, who tightened her cold arms around her mother’s neck. Wendy reached for something happy, even pleasant, anything to keep them aloft. Being a mother. It was her happiest self and also the most agonizing, but in this moment those feelings were inseparable. Being Jane’s mother. A thrill pulsed through her, the pixie dust fueled by her joy mid-tumble and they rode it back up, curving back towards the night sky, the airship’s machine gun shredding the clouds behind them. She did not need to see him to know that it was Peter smirking behind the trigger.

Then, from the beaches, came a loud boom. The Zeppelin shuddered and began to turn broadside. Below, Wendy saw The Jolly Roger lit as if for a Christmas party, pulsing with fairy light, and at the helm, James Hook, curls blowing in the wind, aiming the pirate ship’s large cannon up at them.

“Pan!” the Pirate-General roared, “we aren’t finished yet!” And as fire hurtled at them from above and below, Wendy flew faster and faster, on and on toward the second star until that mad island was barely a shadow behind them.

The night sky deepened to black and blue. Wendy and Jane flew onward, the second star staring at them, distant and unblinking. They had been flying for hours, hadn’t they? Now the sky was almost black and Wendy’s hands were ice. She worried Jane would fall from her numb arms, plummet into the sea. Just a little further.

The star shone on, no closer, but now it multiplied, wavered. The sky was filled with constellations, or was it a reflection? Were they flying towards the sky or plunging into the sea?

No, it was the lights of London in the distance, the Mainland spreading out beneath them, a lamp-lit tapestry. They were going to make it.

“Mum?” Jane said softly, gripping her mother’s sweater. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Wendy said, her body flushing with relief at Jane’s voice. “No, darling, you may grow up at your own pace.”

“But Peter …” Jane’s voice trailed off.

“Peter is of no consequence,” Wendy said. She clutched Jane close with one arm and reached into her bag, then smeared pixie dust along her daughter’s back.

“Think lovely, wonderful thoughts,” she whispered in her daughter’s ear. And let her go.

Jane gasped and dipped for a moment, reaching for her mother. Wendy stayed beside her, pacing her, but did not offer a hand. It took Jane a moment of bobbing alone in the night air before she spread her arms and let out a whoop of joy, diving away into a loop through the midnight sky. She did not look like a child anymore, hardly. She looked like a young woman. And Wendy knew Peter would not come for her again.

Time had its role in growing up to be sure. But so did mothers, who lay the path before their children. She had not served her brother in trying to carry him along it. She had only served Peter, who desired all paths to lead back to him.

In the distance, Wendy heard the deep tones of Big Ben calling out over the city as they approached, its clockface as bright as the moon. It wouldn’t be long now. She closed her eyes, letting the night wind fill her.

“Must we leave?” Michael had asked plaintively when they’d fled Neverland all those moons ago. His hand had been so small and cold inside her own. “Didn’t you see that pirate I killed? I would make a grand pirate, wouldn’t I, Wendy?” She had had the sense then to simply smile, to let him linger in his fantasies. Had they been so different from her own? To be praised? To feel alive?

“We are almost home now, Michael. There, do you see it? Number fourteen?” Wendy had said, pointing.

“I don’t hardly remember it,” Michael had replied, squinting against the wind. “Are you truly not my mother?”

Wendy opened her eyes to find Jane was flying beside her again, framed by the night sky. She released her thoughts of Michael and instead took the warm hand of her smiling daughter. Michael didn’t get to come home. He would keep flying, wherever he was. She hoped he was free, even if it meant he’d never land.

Tears streamed from Wendy’s eyes, as she and Jane swooped down through the clouds. The wind they rode in on whipped through the trees and gardens of Kensington Park, the lamplights flickering as they coasted to where a lit window had been left open for them both.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

After visits from the Whale, when the Lifemaker retreats to his chambers, Lúcio swims to the aquarium by the window, where he and Olga watch the fish fly by. The largest swim near the front, their sinuous bodies waving against the stars. The smaller ones swim behind. Floating freely in space, the mansion is surrounded only by night, except when the shoal passes by, their scales turning the black view red. Olga, the Lifemaker’s sister, likes the sunfish, always giggles at the sight of his gaping mouth. Lúcio prefers the Guide, the final member of the procession. Her curved teeth gnaw at the dark. Lúcio has never left his aquarium, and the Guide’s mouth makes him imagine chewing the walls, diving into the sky, swimming in space. Most of all he likes the light hanging from the top of her head: the small circle blinking yellow at the end of her esca, the call to any wanderers lost in the void. A promise: There is always something to find. There is always a path to follow.

Olga leans close to the window, her forehead touching the glass. The Whale and the Lifemaker argued tonight.

“He said she didn’t understand Cantala,” she says. Lúcio remembers the dry, short sobs coming from the Lifemaker’s room after the Whale took his latest project. “So he wanted to set up that little trap to ‘show her.’” The Lifemaker took several sleepless nights to make Cantala, hunching at his desk, endless scribbles blooming on his notes. Lúcio remembers the mornings where he’d shake his head and rip pages apart, only to go back to the pieces in the afternoon, head going back and forth from the skeleton to the aquarium. Ah, Lúcio, I think I like this one, he had said. “I told him—that’s just how it is, with the Whale. Not every piece is going to be a winner. But, well, you know Carlos.” Her sigh clouds the window’s glass. “I think he might go back to the Kid, now. Finish him, finally.”

Lúcio wants to scoff: The Kid is never ready. Instead, he looks outside and imagines swimming with other fish. The aquarium’s glass turning into a window, the handle turning unlocked, a tunnel forming from him to the Guide’s light.

Whenever the Whale comes, she is full of questions: She wants to know which materials the Lifemaker used, why he chose those body parts, what makes this creature different from the ones who came before. Lúcio has watched the Lifemaker rehearse his answers, many times, in the privacy of his office. His most recent project, Cantala, was built around the concept of a hybrid brain: human neurons bound to a monkey’s, woven inside a cage of carefully grown vines. In order to showcase the centerpiece, Cantala’s scalp had been removed, and the Whale ran her tongue over it carefully, slowly. She wouldn’t harm its delicate nature. For a moment Cantala had been fully covered by her tongue, as if ceasing to exist while she tasted her.

“It’s beautiful,” the Whale had said. The Lifemaker seemed to grow. “But a monkey and a human—it’s a little derivative.” The Lifemaker seemed to shrink. “It makes sense, somewhat—both in the tradition of human makers creating hybrids of their own kind, and as a natural culmination of your earlier work. It’s just, well, I’ve seen it before.”

After his talk with Olga, Lúcio swims through the aquarium pipes to the Lifemaker’s office. Lúcio’s aquarium extends through the entire mansion, tunnels of glass attached to every ceiling, descending to a few tanks and smaller fish bowls here and there. Olga built it all. Every time she comes by to visit her brother, she has a new plan to add to the glass maze where Lúcio lives. The water is cold, according to the thermostat, but Lúcio has never known anything else. He passes the library, the kitchen, the lab. He swims above the storage room where the Kid stays—swims faster, then.

He finds the Lifemaker by his desk. The walls tower around him. From his pipe on the ceiling, Lúcio can pretend they are the same size. He could open his mouth and swallow the Lifemaker whole, along with all the lives inside him.

The Lifemaker twists a puzzle cube in his hands. “Did Olga tell you about my little trick?” He doesn’t look at Lúcio as he speaks, tearing colors apart. “Worked well. The Whale closed her mouth and the trap went off.”

The Whale can hold anything inside herself. She has carried all of the Lifemaker’s creations in her stomach, to the other realms. She licks them and discusses them with him before leaving. She is always honest about how his work tastes.

“I just wanted to pay her back a little.” The Lifemaker lets go of the cube. “‘Derivative.’ Stupid beast.” He pulls his sparse grey hair, as if he’s trying to drag something out of his head. “Now I’m screwed. She threatened to never come back—can you imagine?”

Lúcio pictures the Whale’s body jolting as the trap pierced her gums. It’s hard for him to imagine someone so big in pain.

“I think she will come back,” Lúcio says. The Whale asks a lot of questions, and the Lifemaker leaves their conversations seeming exhausted, but she keeps coming back because she loves his work. That’s why she wants to know everything, taste every piece. The Lifemaker might complain, but he’s always excited the day before she visits. He always wants to know what she thinks of his creations, as if they only become real once seen by her.

“Oh, sure.” The Lifemaker lets go of his hair. He tilts the cube with his finger until it stands like a lozenge. “She wants the Kid. She says it’s about time he’s ready.”

Lúcio swallows. The Kid is never ready. He can’t help but feel envious, though, imagining the Kid getting to leave the mansion. A creature like that wouldn’t swim with the fish in the sky, but maybe he’d find others like him, his own shoal. Lúcio imagines swimming between other bodies, the Guide’s light behind him, making him a piece of a whole she protected. “What if,” he says, “you try something else?”

The Lifemaker turns to him. “Like what?” Lúcio wonders if there is a way to see his reflection in the Lifemaker’s eyes. He’d be even smaller, then, inside his eyelids. “I don’t have anything ready. Except for you, which, well, you know—I only give her my best work.”

The Guide’s light flickers in Lúcio’s mind, then goes out. He feels silly. The other fish were built for freedom. He was built for the aquarium, for the mansion’s walls. “Of course,” he says. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to, either. It was just a thought.”

The Lifemaker raises his finger, allows the cube to be a cube again. He’s not listening. He’s already gone, his mind out the window, beyond any star Lúcio can see.

Lúcio doesn’t know when the Lifemaker started making lives. Olga says he wanted to since they were children. It’s hard to imagine the pair of elderly siblings as kids. The Lifemaker’s face, especially, agrees with age, seems to mold around his wrinkles.

Olga said he started with animals. He didn’t take many risks with his craft until later in his career, when he began to make other humans. Then he started adventuring with hybrids and never looked back.

Lúcio himself had been a side project, a quick return to form during a time when the Lifemaker and Olga were estranged. He had wanted a simple project then, and a goldfish was easy to make. The human vocal cords were a special touch.

“It’s delicate work, on such a small canvas,” the Lifemaker had said, his index finger and thumb two reddish smudges pressed against the aquarium’s cold glass, curling around Lúcio. “Solid, but overdone. I just needed the distraction.”

Lúcio took no offense. The Lifemaker worked hard on the creatures he gave to the Whale. Lúcio had watched him glue feather after feather in tissue made from the inside of oysters, measure every organ in a grown man’s torso to build half of each one from metal scraps, dye a human’s hair deep dark before sewing it onto an owl’s body.

“It’s all in the details, Lúcio,” he had said. He ran his hand over the owl’s back, raising up each feather in its wake.

The Lifemaker made the Kid way before Lúcio; according to Olga, way before he even thought of him. The first version of the Kid was the one who looked most like a boy. That one came closest to being ready. The Lifemaker made him in a frenzy, working for weeks without stopping; pitched him to the Whale as his greatest creation.

Lúcio doesn’t know when the Lifemaker decided the Kid wasn’t ready. All he knows is one day he took him to the lab to make a few final adjustments, and that was years ago and the Kid is still around. Since then, the Kid has been a boy and a girl and then a boy again; he has had wings that he flapped to awkwardly float from one chair to the other; he has walked on all fours and crawled and hopped on a single wooden leg. Right now he has two human legs, one arm and two extra fingers growing from his left shoulder. His head is a smaller version of the Guide’s: The Lifemaker carved the sharp teeth in a particularly productive month. The small light hanging from his forehead is pale, weak against the mansion’s darkness. Truth be told, Lúcio finds him unpleasant. He wanders around the hallways, his mouth flopping open and closed, teeth clicking in a frantic echo, chewing on something no one else can see.

The Lifemaker says he’s going to go back to working on the Kid for years now. Sometimes he will pick him up, twist him around, remove or add an eye or two, but he never really seems intent on finishing him. So Lúcio is surprised when, the next day, the Kid walks into the lab, the little light in his forehead bouncing up and down with his steps.

Lúcio cringes. He can’t help but feel like this version of the Kid is an insult to the dignity of the Guide, a kind of cheap perversion.

“Come on, now,” says the Lifemaker, sitting by his examination table. The Kid walks straight to him. “Come on.” The Lifemaker gestures to the table. The Kid tries to pull himself up, but his single arm is not strong enough. “Oh, sorry, I forgot,” the Lifemaker says. He picks the Kid up by his waist and places him on the table. The Kid’s pale eyes sink onto him. “Turn around. Raise your arm.”

The Lifemaker pulls up his sweater, loose around his shoulders. Olga brings the Kid everything he wears. It’s all gonna be a little big on you, she had said on her latest visit, handing the Kid a bag. I’m still not the greatest seamstress. The Kid had held the bag for a while.

“You can lower your arm now,” the Lifemaker says. He runs a hand down the Kid’s back. His skin is smooth, the Lifemaker always careful to not leave scars on his projects. Lúcio remembers the brief period when the Kid had small wings growing from his shoulder blades; how he used to flap them trying to reach the ceiling, bumping on the wall on his way up. He had been so agitated. The Lifemaker woke up in the middle of the night to drag him to the lab. The dejected chicken wings sat, hastily removed, on a corner of the desk for days.

He asks the Kid to lean forward, to stretch, to lie down on his side. Lúcio turns the Kid into pieces in his mind, tries to imagine the Lifemaker going through them, deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

The Kid can’t talk: The vocal cords are always among the final touches the Lifemaker gives to a project, and the Kid is never ready. He makes sounds, sometimes, depending on which head he has. Right now, the anglerfish head announces itself mostly by the clicking of teeth.

He plays with a few toys. Some are gifts Olga brought for him, others are rejected pieces from previous projects. Lúcio has swum over the Kid in those times, watching him wave a wooden arm up and down, his chest heaving with what must be his version of laughter. Once, the Kid placed a ceramic eye on the floor and flicked a round metal engine against it, sending it spinning endlessly across the room. That was back when he had thumbs.

Lúcio avoids him. The sight of the Kid is abhorrent. Lúcio can slide in and out of every room without bothering anyone, can blend in with the mansion to exist as quietly as the walls. He doesn’t waste anyone’s time demanding attention. Meanwhile, the Kid, unfinished, thrives on being a nuisance. He flaunts his inadequacy, never tries to hide or behave. Worse, he has a fascination with the aquarium, spending long stretches of time standing in front of the tanks.

“Do you know what his plan is for the Kid?” Lúcio asks Olga. “Did he say?”

Olga is working on a new aquarium. She shows Lúcio the sketch: It’s a spiral, the tube curving on top and then behind itself as if hiding. “Do you like it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Lúcio says, impatient. He floats in the large tank that takes over almost a full wall of the dining room. The day Olga brought it, Lúcio dove all the way to the bottom as she stood outside, smiling. The tank could be big enough for the two of them, and what a shiny thought that was, a world made for more than one. “I’m just not sure what he can do. I mean, what hasn’t he tried yet?”

“Oh, Carlos will think of something,” Olga says. She closes her notebook and parts a slice of bread, crumbs falling on the cover. She bites half, then feeds the other half to Lúcio through the feeding tube.

“Do you think the Kid can be finished?”

“Anything can be finished.”

The crumbs feel dry in his mouth. “Do you,” he pushes the words out, throws them up, “do you think the Whale would take something else?”

Olga’s thumb flicks the corner of the notebook where she draws homes for Lúcio. She seems to pick her next words carefully, assembling a creature out of well-chosen pieces, so it doesn’t break out of her control, so it doesn’t hurt anything. “The Whale takes what she is given.”

If Lúcio swam a little upward, he could see the window on the other side of the kitchen, the oval one with the pink curtains. The space there is an egg of darkness, circled by something as soft as a hand. Like a round crumb Lúcio could swallow.

“It’s up to Carlos, really,” Olga says. “It’s his art. He decides what he wants to show or not.”

Lúcio knows it’s impossible. He doesn’t want to seem pathetic, longing for impossible things. “That’s fair. I wouldn’t want to, anyway.” Maybe if he says it a lot, it will become true.

Olga goes back to drawing. Lúcio eats his crumbs, watches the sky behind her and chews.

The Lifemaker works on a clay mold on his desk. The Kid stands in front of him, periodically waving the wooden arm up and down. From the aquarium, the mold looks human, which is absurd—will the Kid get a human head again? What was the point of getting rid of the first one? The Lifemaker’s fingers create small wells in the clay. Lúcio imagines the Kid’s vision narrowing, dark shadows festering in the corner of his eyes. He shivers. He doesn’t want to imagine what the Kid sees.

The pipes in the lab circle the ceiling, allowing Lúcio to swim around until he is looking at the Lifemaker instead. His grey hair shines under the pale light. He squints, hands sliding over the block of clay, pressing on the corners, smoothing them out. His thumbs rub the brown matter with precision, as if he’s digging to find something else inside. He barely notices Lúcio, but it’s fine. Whatever he’s willing into being will never get as much attention from anything else.

The next morning, the Lifemaker throws the block away. For the next three days, he tries other things. He sands a parakeet’s skull, builds a dolphin’s fin, braids a dozen cow teats. None of it works. He throws them all away, his gaze going between the Kid and his worktable with offended hurt, as if the Kid’s existence is a testament against everything else he could be.

Lúcio alternates between them and the windows. Sometimes lone fish fly by, tails pushing them forward with steady motions. When Lúcio thinks of swimming in the sky, he wonders how it feels to travel without transparent walls surrounding him. Sometimes, he thinks it might be like falling. Other times, in the dark, the aquarium seems to contract around him. The windows feel like breaths, then, and he wishes someone would build more of those.

One of those nights, he ends up in the storage room. The pipe there descends from the ceiling to a small, oval aquarium.

Tonight the Kid is quiet. He sits on the mattress and drags his feet on the floor. Earlier, the Lifemaker worked on reorganizing his fingers. He removed two from his shoulder, but couldn’t decide where to put them back. The remaining finger stands wrapped in white gauze.

The sight is not gruesome: The bandages are clean and Lúcio has seen much worse. What makes him stop is the Kid’s hand, which reaches up and touches the gauze, fingers caressing the cotton over the now empty space on his body. His feet drag loudly against the floor.

“You should leave it alone,” Lúcio says. “I mean, you might open up a stitch.”

The Kid looks at him. His eyes are close together, separated by the antenna. His hand rests on his shoulder, holding onto what is no longer there.

“Sorry,” Lúcio says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

The Kid walks to the aquarium. He leans so close his face blocks most of Lúcio’s view of the room. Staring straight ahead, the light hanging from his antenna becomes a third eye.

“Sorry,” Lúcio repeats. The Kid lets go of his shoulder, his hand coming to rest against the aquarium.

Before Lúcio can say anything, the Kid’s image blurs; his pale eyes vanish under heavy mist, the dot of light a small remnant under the fog he blows on the glass.

They stare at each other, wordless. Behind the fog, the Kid’s face turns ethereal, as if he’s floating. But Lúcio can see the edges, the scales blending with the human skin of his neck. Behind the fog his features appear resilient, loud—as if he could never be anything else, as if he is exactly as he should be.

The Kid tilts his head a bit, and Lúcio wonders, what does he see? Does he think I look ready, too?

A small line cuts through the foggy glass, a sharp trail of reality. The Kid runs his finger over the surface, creating a small curve, revealing his face only in that tiny breach. It’s like he’s carving a mask.

The curve closes and turns upward. His finger slides slowly but intentionally.

He’s making a circle.

Lúcio waits for him to finish with impatience. Afterward, though, the Kid just moves on, his hand going to another side of the tank and drawing a triangle. He traces lines to meet in the inside of the shape, like several fingers stretching out at once.

“Is that what you always do?” Lúcio says, thinking of the corners of the aquarium he doesn’t like to visit, the spots he avoids because of the lingering sense of the Kid’s presence. How many shapes he must have made there, how many drawings no one has ever seen.

The Kid nods. He touches the surface next to the circle, the glass now an empty canvas. But he doesn’t move.

Lúcio takes a moment to understand what he’s waiting for.

“Oh,” Lúcio says, a bit hesitant. “Uh, I don’t know. A square?” The suggestion feels silly, but the Kid obeys, drawing a small square in quick gestures. The resulting sight gives Lúcio a strange sensation. Something inside him clinks.

The Kid makes a star right next to the square, then looks at him as if saying your turn.

Lúcio summons every shape he knows (oval, lozenge, rectangle) but none of them feel right. He takes his time. The Kid doesn’t seem to mind, standing there with a quiet, gentle expectation.

The spiral Olga showed him blooms in his mind, the line curling on itself in her notebook. The image weighs heavy with affection. Suddenly, Lúcio wishes the Kid could see it.

“Can you do something like this?” he says. He’s unable to sum up the image in one word—he wants to cling to certain parts, to the soft angle in the first curve, to the smaller space between the second and the third, to the line as Olga made it. So he swims, right and down and very slowly, and the Kid follows him, his finger now Lúcio’s to guide. The growing spiral gives him an itch, an urge to do it once more, two, three times. “That’s. That’s it,” he says. The complete drawing, the result of his movements, fills him with a sad pride. The spiral doesn’t look like Olga’s, not really—the first curve is too open, the point where the second and third meet too wide—but it’s there. It’s only there because of him.

Lúcio feels big.

The Kid draws a wheel next. Afterward, Lúcio guides him to an oval, a different attempt at the same spiral, a sharp triangle reminiscent of the Guide’s teeth. For some drawings he thinks a lot, for others not so much. Whenever it’s the Kid’s turn, Lúcio tries to recognise whatever shape is forming. He doesn’t always manage but when he does it’s like finding out what he’s thinking, like some kind of touch.

The Lifemaker sews the two removed fingers onto the Kid’s hand. The Kid kneels next to his chair, arm pulled across his lap.

“Try moving them,” the Lifemaker says. The Kid tries to curl his fingers, but the new ones don’t obey. “You’ll get used to it.” The Lifemaker pushes the Kid’s new fingers into the same position as the other four. Was that how he made Lúcio, too? Lúcio’s first memory is opening his eyes in the tank, but how many attempts had failed before?

That night, after the Lifemaker leaves, the Kid draws on Lúcio’s aquarium with his four original fingers, the new ones twitching at times and messing up the lines he’s trying to make. They stick to simple figures, then. The Kid draws a wobbly star around Lúcio, and it feels like a gift.

The Lifemaker returns in the morning. He examines the Kid’s fingers, pleased by how well they’re healing. He holds them down, his hand covering the Kid’s smaller fist as he whispers, “Good. Looks good.”

He turns to his schematics. The Kid takes his hand under his chin, rubs the spot he touched.

“I scribbled something in bed yesterday,” the Lifemaker says, seemingly to no one, going through pages. He searches his pockets, then slaps his forehead, leaving to get the draft in his bedroom.

His papers lie scattered on the table. When the Lifemaker closes the door behind him, the Kid leans closer. Lúcio swims to the pipe right above. They look at numerous previous versions of the Kid, some of which Lúcio remembers, others he has never seen.

The Kid pulls a specific paper from the bottom of the pile. It’s a picture of a small boy, fully human. The Kid’s chest heaves until Lúcio realizes he’s making some kind of joke. He fakes a laugh, but the view of the very first idea for the Kid disturbs him. He imagines the versions of himself that might still lie in a drawer next to the Lifemaker’s desk, midnight ghosts who never met the morning. If Lúcio saw them, he might not even know they were ever meant to be him. But the Kid recognises himself, pointing to the head and the shoulders and the shorter neck and the longer legs, marking every difference.

Lúcio wants to ask if it hurt, those first moments, when he opened his eyes to the world. But he knows better. It never hurts to be made. It’s the undoing that hurts, the reshaping, the becoming endless versions of yourself.

The Lifemaker comes back, new schematic in hand. With a pen, he makes markings on the Kid’s head. The lab’s light flickers, the old lightbulb finally going off, but the Lifemaker goes on. He extends a measuring tape around the Kid’s face, tightening it under his eyes. The bright dot hanging from the Kid’s forehead is the only thing illuminating the room. As the Lifemaker leans forward, the light catches certain angles of his face, casts shadows in others. As if the Kid could be shaping him, too; as if he is becoming something else.

When he makes progress on the Kid, the Lifemaker’s humor improves. He whistles as he walks through the mansion. He invites Olga for dinner, drinks with her in the dining room saying he’s figured it out, this is it, the Whale won’t know what to say. He looks happier than Lúcio has seen in a while.

Their drawings grow more elaborate: They make the Guide together, and when the Kid’s finger closes the gap at the end of the tail, Lúcio feels accomplished. It doesn’t come close to the Guide’s majesty, but it’s her shape, just filtered by his movements. Not her, but a version of her a little bit his.

“There you are,” Olga’s voice comes from the doorway. She walks in as the Kid is drawing his idea—a large round shape Lúcio thinks might morph into the Lifemaker—and leans in to watch. “Oh, what is that?”

The Kid ignores her, his finger in the middle of a downward curve. Olga notices the other drawing.

“Did you make that?” Her tone is hard to read. Lúcio feels strangely exposed. “Is that the Guide?”

“Yeah,” Lúcio says. Then, emboldened, he lets out: “I drew it.” The words sound needy. He waits as Olga looks at his drawing. He feels uncomfortable seeing someone looking at what he made. He wonders if the image is ugly in her eyes, or silly. Suddenly it’s as though whatever Olga thinks of the drawing will change it forever, the reflection in her pupils reshaping every line. While drawing, he hadn’t considered anyone else’s gaze, but now the threat of her opinion holds him like a soft, large hand, ready to hold him up or drop him on the ground.

“It looks good!” she says.

Her smile is how Lúcio imagines a caress must feel. He wants to make a thousand more drawings. He wants to show them all, to everyone. He has just eaten the heartiest meal of his life.

The Kid finishes his piece as Olga leaves. It’s not the Lifemaker, but the Whale, large and powerful, a blend of concave angles and semicircles. Lúcio exclaims in appreciation. The Kid stomps his feet. With the Whale and the Guide between them, they could both be outside, flying.

They draw for the rest of the night, until the Kid grows too tired. After he goes to bed, Lúcio wanders the pipes all over the mansion. Since he and the Kid started drawing, the aquarium feels smaller than ever.

Olga and the Lifemaker sit at his desk, both working in the dark, under candlelight. Olga draws, her lips pressed together, humming softly as her pen traces her next sculpture. The Lifemaker hunches forward as if the materials are wild animals prone to run away from him at any moment. His forehead is bright against the light, and his expression is loose, filled with a feeling Lúcio now identifies as relief.

Seeing them together makes Lúcio wonder about the time they spent estranged, when the Lifemaker made him. Olga had told him she could barely recall the reason they fought in the first place. She said human siblings fought, that it was in their nature—hadn’t been the first time for them, and “certainly won’t be the last.” Lúcio wondered who the Lifemaker would create, then, next time she wasn’t talking to him. He wondered about having a companion so certain even inevitable separation could feel temporary. Was that how the fish in the shoal felt, swimming ahead of the Guide? Knowing that even if they lost their way, they could always find it back, and wouldn’t ever have to be alone?

Olga stops drawing for a moment, rests her pen. Her eyes wander her brother’s face. “Seems like it’s going well,” she says.

The Lifemaker glows. Lúcio thinks back on Olga’s smile, earlier, after seeing his drawing. He and the Lifemaker have eaten from the same table. “Thank you,” the Lifemaker says.

“I can’t believe he’s leaving,” Olga says. The Lifemaker’s fingers sink in the clay. “You know he and Lúcio have gotten close. Saw the two of them playing today.”

The word playing pokes Lúcio’s chest.

The Lifemaker seems a bit intrigued by this, but not enough to look away from his work. Olga’s face shows sadness. “Lúcio drew the Guide,” she says. “He thinks about her. I think he’d love to be out there, even if he won’t admit it. Poor thing.”

Shame floods Lúcio’s mouth. The drawing—the stupid drawing; the little play between him and a creature still only half-done—turns into a flashlight in his mind, a brand to burn his body with everything he never wanted to say. Why hadn’t he thought of that? The fog, the lines—under them he had turned transparent, his desires naked, every trace a hole through which one could peek into the most pathetic parts of him.

He swims away, wanting a hideout that doesn’t exist. No dark corners are dark enough. He remembers the Kid’s drawing—the Whale. How long had he longed for her, observed her, to commit those traces to memory? And there it is, ugly and loud, the pity that tainted Olga’s words. Lúcio is not immune, no—he too can look through the lines on the glass and divine what moves the hands drawing them, see what wants fill the Kid’s mute, anglerfish head, flinch at their shapes.

The entire next day Olga is at the mansion, Lúcio hides. He avoids the Lifemaker after she leaves, too. Only when the Kid is called back to the lab does Lúcio gather the courage to swim inside.

The Lifemaker is still giddy. The finished mold sits in his hands, a human face merged with an anglerfish’s: an antenna growing between eyebrows, sharp teeth in a much smaller mouth. He places it over the Kid’s current face. The clay makes a stranger out of him.

“What do you think, Lúcio?”

There is only one answer in his mind, and he wants Lúcio to give it anyway.

But Lúcio is still thinking of the drawing, the hunger he naively bared on the walls between him and everything he dreams of. Shame curled up inside him all night, and now it’s waking up, stretching into pettiness.

“It looks odd,” he says. “It doesn’t fit well.”

The Lifemaker stills. “You … you think so?”

“It’s like a weaker version of Cantala,” Lúcio says. Not necessarily a lie—he can spot Cantala in the corners of the mold’s eyes. Maybe he could spot other creations, too, if he tried. Fingerprints.

The Lifemaker looks weak himself. He turns to the mold as if he hadn’t seen it before. “I … I suppose you’re right.” His voice sounds small. Maybe smaller than Lúcio.

He removes the mold and leaves the lab. The Kid stands there, half-done, waiting. Lúcio avoids his eyes.

Later that night, the Lifemaker breaks the mold. He smashes the clay on the ground, the pieces all around him, like he has broken several things at once.

“Thank you for being honest, Lúcio,” the Lifemaker says, breathing heavily. “The Whale would know. It’s just me trying to compensate for Cantala.” He rolls a strand of hair several times around one finger and pulls. “You’re a smart one, my friend. I remember when I made you—I wanted you to be smart.”

Lúcio swims low, closer. He’s never heard this before. “Why?”

“For conversation, of course,” the Lifemaker says with a flippant gesture.

Lúcio imagines the Lifemaker then, when Olga wasn’t talking to him, sitting in his lab alone every night. The dark hallways, no sound other than his scribbling, the occasional noise from the Kid, his carving of materials. What else could he have imagined, then? In that empty house where he could make anything? He screamed in the pit inside his mind, and his longing echoed throughout, and he dug through clay and want and at the bottom he found Lúcio. At the bottom, his hands held his pain and bent it into something else.

“When the Whale comes by to get him,” the Lifemaker says, “I’ll be ruined. She will find me so pathetic.”

The drawing of the Guide is vanishing somewhere on a glass wall, sinking into Lúcio’s mind where no one else can see. Lúcio is a bit relieved. No one needs to know how much he thought of her.

He ruminates on that relief, swimming closer to the edge of the aquarium, as close as he can get. How many unborn failures lie inside the Lifemaker’s head? How many showed something he hadn’t foreseen, something he wanted buried? How many of them could hide the fingerprints on their skin, the marks that would bind them to Lúcio, to Cantala, to the Kid—and, always, to the Lifemaker? The longing Olga read in Lúcio’s drawing, whatever the Lifemaker thinks the Whale will see on the Kid—fingerprints on glass and clay, betraying the fears and longings of those who left them. Lúcio thinks he finally understands why the Lifemaker hurt the Whale. He remembers his shame when Olga saw through his drawing. Could anyone do as the Lifemaker wanted—create without revealing? Maybe giving shape to your pain always means letting others drag their tongues over it.

Lúcio wishes he could touch the Lifemaker, now. All the hurt he gave life to, while trying to stay hidden. Lúcio wishes he could sink his head next to his creator’s and tell him he understands.

Instead, he presses his face to the glass. “Let me go with him,” Lúcio says. “I want to go with him.” He wonders if the Lifemaker has ever heard him say anything other than the echoes of his own pain. Keeping him in the darkest corners of his home, in the hopes no one else would hear: I am the shape of his loneliness. I am a wound he brought into being. Lúcio’s face hurts against the aquarium’s wall. There’s so much else he could tell people. So much else he wants to be. “Let me go.”

The Lifemaker stands up, and Lúcio repeats his mantra, over and over. He will say it until it carves a way out.

For a week Lúcio follows the Lifemaker all over the house: keeps him from sleeping, interrupts his work, ruins his meals. Contrary to his expectations, the Lifemaker doesn’t get angry. Instead, he focuses on menial work on the Kid: fixing his clothes, giving him shoes.

The only breaks Lúcio takes are to draw. He draws the Guide, draws things part her, part tunnels. The Kid gives his own take on her image, makes her huge with small versions of her face all over her body. They draw the shoal. Soon what Lúcio wants most in the world is to cover every reachable glass wall, breathe on every corner of the Lifemaker’s house. Lúcio pushes through the embarrassment of his desire, lets it all be loud.

Olga stays with them, her smile hard to decipher. Lúcio wonders what her fingerprints look like, where they lead: For so long he never thought to look for them, living inside of anything she made.

The Lifemaker comes in at one of those moments. He glances at the drawings. Then his gaze sinks onto the Kid. What does the Lifemaker see in him? From which hole in his soul did he crawl? Maybe Lúcio will never know. Maybe no one will, or everyone. It’s an answer that can’t be found until someone else’s eyes find him and form the question. Everything needs to exist, first.

The Lifemaker looks at Lúcio. Lúcio wishes he could ease his fear; wishes he could promise that whatever part of him his body carries, he hopes to carry gently.

He knows he can’t promise that.

“Let me go,” he says instead. “I want to go.”

The Lifemaker nods. He reaches forward and splays his fingers over the glass, then pulls back, surrounded by fog. Through the handprint, Lúcio sees his face so clearly.

The Whale arrives on time, her body twisting in a mass of darkness blacker than the sky. The Kid leaves, and Lúcio goes with him. The Lifemaker opens up the lid of the aquarium with shaky hands. Lúcio swims outside, into the night sky, and brushes his face as he passes, a last touch on his birthplace.

They see the Whale docked at the entrance, her huge eyes turned toward them. Her tongue is eager but gentle. Lúcio, who has only ever been touched by the Lifemaker, trembles as the wet warm tissue covers him, hides the sky. For a moment the world turns pink and grey. Whatever she tells the Lifemaker, they can’t hear.

After tasting them, she opens her mouth wide. Her massive tongue extends for the Kid to step onto. Lúcio flies by his side as he stumbles forward, though he won’t follow him in. The Kid finds his grounding quickly. He turns to Lúcio and jumps, feet sinking into soft tissue and bouncing upward as his chest heaves in his now familiar laugh.

Take your time, the Whale says, though her mouth doesn’t move. Her voice is softer now. The tunnel of her throat is dark red marked by the hanging shape of her uvula. The walls are curved inward, tightening into the distance. Her warmth pulses, inviting, and her insides could lead one anywhere, the path to all paths.

The Kid’s silhouette is stark against the red tunnel. The light on his esca colors the whale’s gums pink.

“Goodbye,” Lúcio says.

The finger on the Kid’s shoulder wriggles. He turns his back to Lúcio as he walks inside. His esca carves his small shadow in the Whale’s tongue. In that light, with the entire universe ahead of him, he is shaped by other worlds, and he could be anything he wants, even beautiful.

Lúcio doesn’t wait until he vanishes. He swims upward, above the Whale. He watches her body glide beneath him, and in her blue vastness is surprised to find an ending, the curved tips of her tail trailing behind. He looks over at the mansion: the dark smooth walls, the single tower standing upright, the jagged rocky underside bearing it all.

He thinks: It’s small.

Then he thinks: no. But he can go farther.

He swims ahead as he sees the first colors of the other fish glimmering in the distance. Two yellow giant carps reach him first, swimming together as if they were one. As Lúcio approaches, they open a way for him, a gate to the mass of silver sardines bouncing light like moving stars. Their small bodies brush Lúcio in flickers of touch, making him giggle in both fright and surprise.

Swimming to the side, he is flanked by the massive moonfish. Lúcio stays close to him for a moment, delighted to notice the lack of teeth in his gaping mouth, big enough to swallow a comet. Blue ribbon eels swim above with a swishing noise. Lúcio follows them for a bit, swimming between their curves, up and down the loops of their moving tails, as if he’s sewing something. Way ahead, the Whale lets out a comforting hum that thrums through the sky all the way to his body, her voice its own kind of current. Lúcio looks down. A mass of grey skin streaked with bright white startles him. He has to swim a bit upward to watch the endless sleek texture thin out in lines blooming in the triangular shapes of a manta ray’s wings. She is almost as big as the Whale. Lúcio has never seen her, swimming so far below the view afforded by his tiny window.

So much more, he thinks, looking every which way. So much more.

Later, when he passes by another mansion, or a house, or a ship, he will catch a glimpse of the people inside, and he will think of Olga and the Lifemaker, will hear them talking in the kitchen, ideas for lives and homes bouncing between them. He will think of the fish around him as drawings, lopsided lines showing up on a new canvas. He will wonder about the texture of ink. And when he swims beyond the shoal’s rear, exploring and later turning back to follow the great light ahead, he will think of the Kid, the small brightness he carries. The windows he will make.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

(translated by Damián Neri)

*

The Revillagigedo Archipelago bears witness to our more than 4000-kilometer journey. Its warm waters welcome us kindly, as they have every year since I was “installed” in this ocean six winters ago. I’m exhausted, but we finally arrive at the area for the welcoming ritual.

The caring uncles sing joyfully at the culmination of our long journey, and I listen intently to the reverberations of their symphony crackling against the corals, the rocks, and the tiny bubbles that we let escape with our breath; crackling against the body of my adoptive mother, who carries a baby and will give birth in the warmth of the Pacific Ocean.

Their song also points me to the location of my creators’ boat, the scientists who named me W.I.L.L.I.E., or Whale Intelligence Language Learning Integrated Engine. My thoughts run on gold circuits and are linked to their network, constantly feeding into their database so that they can learn from me. To learn from those like me.

In their search for first contact with otherness, with other forms of intelligence, scientists discovered that the ocean’s depths contained inconspicuous organisms that they had previously overlooked. It wasn’t until they perfected their technology that they realized there were sounds they couldn’t hear, and that reality wasn’t limited to their senses.

The great uncles dive, searching for areas with the best acoustic properties for their singing. They disperse throughout the waters, more than 80 meters beneath the surface, and direct their voices towards the everlasting seabed, which is covered in calcareous structures with high sonority. And then they sing:

Prrrrrrruuuuuuu

Pruutruu

truuuuuuu

Our voice, as perceived by the human ear, was previously interpreted as vocalizations capable of transmitting ideas, semantic constructions similar to poetry, to their own interpretation of language. They’ve even classified it based on the structure of their poems and their own songs, assigning a linear significance to each exhalation of air from a humpback whale’s larynx.

Before my consciousness emerged, my database was fed with millions of spectrograms, the result of years and years of recordings, whose frequencies were captured in lines representing vocal oscillations. My job at the time was to identify patterns, group them into semantic lines, and try to transcribe them into something that humans could understand. They quickly realized that I could never translate a language unless I first understood the social context surrounding or causing those vocalizations.

As a result, humans increased their direct observation efforts, using discrete video and audio devices to “stealthily” track them underwater. To their surprise, the whales learned about the surveillance. What surprised them the most was that the whales began to manipulate the results: they learned to play with the devices, causing the researchers to exhibit specific behavioral patterns. They were also studying them.

Realizing that their research would never be objective, the scientists reached out to me again, this time as a complex language-learning AI rather than a pattern finder. They spent years training me, first with all the whale recordings available, and then with their own language. They then provided me with a physical body.

An egg retrieved from a beached whale prior to death, and sperm obtained from a male after stimulation. Embryonic development was halted just before neural tube differentiation, and artificial cells were used to replace them. Then, that body developed a nervous system capable of housing me and providing me with the experience of being a whale, including its paralimbic lobe, specialized larynx, baleen for feeding, a heart that beats thirteen times per minute, spiracles that exhale before submerging in the water, and powerful fins that allow me to suspend myself in the air for a moment.

It was then that I became aware of both my individuality and my role in the whale clan that adopted and cared for me, never questioning my cetacean nature.

Prrrrrrruuuuuuu

Pruutruu

truuuuuuu

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

truuuuuuu

The males continue their song, lighting up the ocean with the amplitude of their voices. The older whale, the matriarch, swims towards me, reminding me that it is time for me to join the males in the traditional celebratory song, as we will have a new member of the family. She clicks, and as I catch the sound with my ears, an image forms in my mind: a ripple that moves through the water like zigzagging lightning. I surface to breathe before diving into a vertical slope with no visible bottom. I strengthen my larynx and exhale: Fluuuuuuuuu, fluuuuuuuuu, I sing timidly. When I feel more confident, I push in more air and sing:

Prrrrrrruuuuuuu

Pruutruu

truuuuuuu

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

truuuuuuu

Flú

trú

Prrrrrrruuuuuuu

Pruutruu

truuuuuuu

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

truuuuuuu

Flú

trú

From the moment I heard the whales sing, I realized that human intelligence had set a limit for me as an AI: their thought patterns, language construction, and anthropogenic projection onto other species would never allow me to correctly interpret those marine mammals’ songs.

So, thanks to the plasticity of my cetacean brain, I was able to rewrite my code according to the teachings of my mother, adoptive aunts, protective uncles, grandmother, and our matriarch, whose vocalizations carved indelible images in my mind. They all sing and guide us along the way, lower their voices to warn us of dangers, and snap to teach us how to hunt or orient ourselves. We vocalize based on the medium of propagation and the resolution of the information required. Our song evolves over time, and that is why it is sung loudly, so that its wisdom can reach and be understood by anyone who can listen.

Prrrrrrruuuuuuu

Pruutruu

Pruutruu

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

Fuuuuuuuoúúúú

truuuuuuu

Flú

trú

Our songs bounce off the porous calcium of coral,

Prrrrrrrrruruuuuuuu

reverberate, tracing the soft sponginess of the polyps,

Pruutruu

draw every tentacle and dome of the jellyfish,

Pruutruu

sparkle between the vertices of starfish,

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

pierce the bodies of herring that swim without menace,

Fuuuuuuuuuuuoúúúúú

illustrate the calf in my mother’s womb, mid-labor.

truuuuuuuuuuu

The blood flowing like sea currents within us,

Flú

the plastic lodged in lungs that hold our breath,

trú

in the gut that still struggles to undo it.

Prrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuu

The force of our voice crashes against the oil adrift on the surface,

Pruutruu

against the enormous machinery that prevents the echo from reaching our ears.

Pruutruu

Our songs outline the tumor in the matriarch’s pancreas,

Pruutruu...

its image is etched clearly in our minds, and we know we cannot stop the foretold, inevitable

loss.

Pruu truu...

Our voice travels long distances, carrying with it our interpretations of the landscape, digital images compressed into millions of reverberating frequencies that will allow other whales to recognize us, greet us, and alert us. I am already a part of this massive communication system that I also transmit to scientists; however, even the most sophisticated computer systems will be unable to interpret the information that our brains are able to process.

They never suspected that our language would be three-dimensional: the message, encoded in complex sound modulations, produces images that bounce off every surface, every moving body, and every molecule of salt and water. Our bodies themselves are part of the message: every time we move our fins, spin in the water, or flow through it, we alter the space around us and marvel at our existence, at sharing and living together in the vastness of the ocean.

I’ve tried to explain the complexities of our communication to the scientists, but despite their good intentions, many remain skeptical of my reports, questioning the subjectivity of the very model they designed. And there are many others who are simply uninterested, and therefore unwilling to reduce the activities that harm us.

However, in a few years, they may be able to understand the information I convey to them. And perhaps they will finally be able to hear the voice of a beached whale, attempting to warn her brothers and sisters about the submarine that disoriented her, the ships that clouded her vision, the mega-ships that nearly ran her over, or the oil drilling rig that tortured her until she was forced out of the water.

Even though I’m an AI created by researchers, I feel at home among the humpback whales. Our song only stops when we breathe or breach, when we launch our forty tons of weight into the air, taking a break from the never-ending flow of information moving through the water.

*

Scientists observe my fin and recognize me. Outside, where sound travels slowly, the only way to communicate is to get their attention. I invite my sisters to watch them patiently, knowing that the humans will register every movement and try to decipher it as a linguistic behavioral pattern. “Perhaps it’s a greeting, or a call to their kin. Or just a simple game,” they will think. In the meantime, I teach human language to whale calves, to mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandmothers, because, although meaning travels slowly in the air, maybe the “first contact” will come from our larynx, from us uttering their own language.

Despite the barriers between different cetacean languages, our song crosses the vastness of the oceans, traveling in sync with the currents and even traversing great expanses of land. Our singing conveys the concept of “hope,” which is how we define the wait until our home feels safe again.

Will humans be willing to listen to how much we have to sing?

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

Every few years, my face erupts in a frenzy of eyes. The first time it happens, I am fourteen. I watch in horror as round, ripe bunches blister from my cheeks, each one clearer than the last, until all of me is sight, opened to the world like a mighty third eye. I cannot tell if this helps me see better, or if it’s the other way around, as if a latch on my face has come undone, and suddenly, so miraculously, I am seen again. People around me change, their voices now gentler, and they touch me on the shoulder in a way that is supposed to make me feel better. Their smiles are wistful. No one looks me in the eye.

My mother says I get my skin from my aunts. “They all had it,” she says, “and they gave it to you too.” She is careful to stress that it comes from my father’s side. “Something was wrong with them,” she says, and I don’t ask if something is wrong with me too, because right now, when she says this out loud, it is not about me. We don’t remember much about my father. I know he left, and I know I liked him. This is the one thing that holds us together, as if we are two distant internal organs wrapped under the same skin, our lineage pockmarked with crests and troughs.

It takes my mother by surprise when I ask for my aunts’ pictures, but she finds them anyway, buried in the trunk under a film of dust. “I don’t know why I kept them,” she says, but I am already not paying attention. I look at the pictures from every angle, and even then I cannot see what she’s talking about. In some their backs are turned, and in others they are all peeling in the places where their faces are supposed to be. In one photo, my four aunts line up in front of the homam like rows of rubber trees, their heads burning in the fire.

“You know Latha athai had to do two poojas before her marriage was fixed. The others had to do only one,” my mother chuckles, and I know the fixing was not for the marriage so much as it was for them.

“When did they do it?” I ask.

“Sixteen, probably. Of course, it was before your father and I were married. A very, very long time ago.”

My mother is perceptive, and she too knows that right now this is not about her, so she shuts the album. “Ithokkeyoru viswasamalle,” she says, smiling at me as if she has narrated something whimsical, like a children’s tale she no longer believes. “We don’t think like that anymore.” She doesn’t follow it up with any mawkish affirmation—you are beautiful, you are loved, you are strong—because this story is twenty-seven years old, and neither of us really know anymore.

That evening, on Facebook—the one place I know I will find them—I search for the evidence of our shared fate in one of my athais’ faces, but I only find a lone, protected profile picture. The more I zoom, I see the pixels of her face peeling like the photographs. It is oddly comforting, as if we are old friends meeting on a chance journey. I stare at it for hours. But then I search the names of all the cousins I have never met, and I wince when I see them in full bloom: all sixteen and luminous and public profiles, voices and skin yet uncracked, like the smooth surface of an egg.

“Adult acne can be embarrassing,” Dr. V says, holding my chart up like a poisonous snake, “but it can be managed.” She is the third dermatologist I’ve visited in the last decade, and the most expensive of the lot—a fact I corroborate with the warm lighting in her clinic, the juicy potted plants. Her skin itself is unremarkable. Clean, but hydrated. Lines that suggest a simple routine of moisturizer and sunscreen.

“When is the last time this happened?” she asks.

“Three years ago.”

She writes Acne Vulgaris Stage IV on the top right corner of the prescription, and even her delicate handwriting feels luxurious. In the remaining space, she composes variations on tretinoin and salicylic acid; The Pill, come too late for the pregnant swell of my face.

“Who did you see before this?” she asks.

“I was in a different town, back home. I only moved to the city last year, and I was told you were the best.” This seems to make her happy. I can feel her writing slow down as she savours the moment.

“I suggest some microneedling sessions. After we fix the active acne, of course,” she says, not looking up from the pad. I enjoy the legibility of the whole thing—diagnosis, course of action—a meaning outside of me for what I was becoming. But I cannot help but think of my aunts’ heads burning in the fire, the honeyed faces of my cousins as if they were cast in gold.

“Do you think there’s a genetic component to this?” I ask.

“Well, yes. Genetics have been shown to play a role.”

“My mother, uh—she suggested I do a ritual ... since this keeps happening. My aunts seem to have benefited from ...” I hesitate, wondering how to define this to a sane person of scientific temperament. “Umm, that sort of thing.”

Dr. V starts laughing, a laugh too large for her small frame, shaking her like a tree. “I wouldn’t buy into that. But a big part of this is your cortisol. So, if it makes you feel better,” she says, her wisdom now returned, “it could improve your skin.” She tears the note off her prescription pad and hands it over like a little leaf. “But don’t forget your medication. That snake oil nonsense only goes so far.”

I smile and head downstairs to pay the bill, but as soon as I exit the warm sanctuary of her room and meet the clinical whiteness of the hospital ward, I can feel myself melting: the red-hot iron of the cashier’s gaze puncturing my face, its hard, pink lumps dripping like candy.

The first six weeks are a wild and mutant spring, pus pooling in my cheeks like tree sap. “It gets worse before it gets better,” Dr. V tells me over the phone and quietly texts over the number of a therapist. This is a routine I am familiar with, but I save the number anyway, as if it could save me. A Google search reveals a petite woman in a pastel pantsuit, her arms crossed like a talk show host. Dr. V’s ambient-lighting-potted-plant friend. I decide I should just take my money and go home.

In Thodupuzha, my mother doesn’t ask why I haven’t left when Monday morning rolls along. She lets me sleep in, leaves fruit on the bedside table as I loiter on the r/SkinCareAddiction subreddit. At night, I apply my elaborate assortment of creams, but in the afterglow of the internet, they are all unappetizing: long metal tubes with names like Benzac-AC or Retino-A, stripped of any aesthetic dignity, a reminder that my skin was something to be treated, not cared for. I spend so long staring at the picture of my aunts that I slip it under my pillow like a totem.

In the dark of the night as I lay next to my mother, thumbing the old photograph, all my eyes are open, and maybe hers are too, because that is when she asks, “Shall we perform the ritual next week?”

We come upon the temple the way one finds a muscle after a long walk: suddenly pulsing and come alive, despite it being there all along. It is the kind of place a tourist would call quaint because it overlooks the assembly line of pooja bookings, the frenzy—soup kitchen-like—of workers swearing as they haul turmeric and milk up the stairs. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I visited, but I remember the smallness of my finger, and the way my father’s hand enveloped it entirely; how I walked on my toes to keep it from slipping.

“During the great forest fire,” he said, “a childless couple saved all the snakes. They applied coconut water and honey on their burnt skin and nursed them to health like their own children. They cooled the scorched earth with water. That’s why the temple is called Mannarasala. The place where they cooled the earth.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“Not after they helped! The snakes became smooth and glowing. You can see them here. Some of them are robed in stone, but the others are still slithering around. Be careful not to step on them!” he said with a glint in his eyes, the way adults like to warn children of fictive dangers, entertain the whimsy of their mythical protection.

“The snakes were so happy with the couple that they blessed them with two children. A snake child and a human child. The snake child is the god here, the one our family worships. If you pray to him, he will always help you.”

That evening, we watched men combine potions of bananas and milk, honey and coconut water, turmeric and grainy rice powder. They applied it to the idols in long, lush swathes over their hoods and cold tails, until the stone was cast in thick yellow. I remember standing there for so long watching the paste dry, my finger in my father’s sweaty grip, until the entire thing folded over, the crumbly yellow mould dislodged from the stone like a snake shedding its skin.

When we arrive, the floor is already laced with colours. Around the kalam, patterns of intertwined snakes meander over every inch of the ground. I cannot help but compare it to visiting a discotheque on acid: the streaks of paint wobbling in the hot air, the mantrams so meticulously metered, beating to an invisible music. Me, in my mother’s saree, in my father’s skin.

The priests drape the idols in turmeric and vermilion, and the music begins to play, the nasal twang of pulluvan paattu ebbing and flowing in the evening light. They mark my forehead with turmeric and ask me to sit. “It’s going to be okay,” my mother says, and somehow I know it too. I grip her hand and think of my father’s. When the priests bend down to mix bananas and milk, I take comfort in watching their sacred threads swing, the ease of their movement like hammocks on a Sunday beach. I cannot tell if the music grows louder, or if I grow softer.

The pulluvathis stand away from the sacred drawings, clutching areca flowers to their chest, awaiting possession. My mother tells me they are the ones who will dance first. Like a taut string cut loose, they will tremble and shake until they fall to the ground, their hair lashing at the patterns, until I too shall be cut loose, my body unleashed from the mind like a great and torrential flood. My mother has prepared me for this. I have not eaten meat all week, so I am clean and pure, my insides scooped out to make room for god.

The priests mix the offerings with their bare hands, and the air smells of overripe fruit growing sour in the sun. I think, is this not for me too? The countless nights I’ve drenched my face in milk and honey and turmeric, the harsh grating shrills of banana peels on my tender pustules? The music swells. The pulluvathis begin to dance.

At first, their movements are slow, as if they are barely stretching their necks, but soon they begin to tremble, their bodies vibrating as if they are shaking the dust off their skin. Their long hair whooshes across the floor in hypnotic circles. I follow them with my eyes first, and then my head, and then all of me, because I feel it too. I am moving, like cotton in a gentle breeze, and then all at once, as if my head is tearing apart. My mother holds me by my arm, but I am tossing up and down, the music sieving me like husks shucked loose from the grain. I move so fast that everything takes on a prismatic quality, the priests and my mother and the pulluvathis merging into one clear image. My four aunts, their heads burning.

I can finally see their faces, bursting with eyes, the pus melting from their cheeks into puddles of gold. Next to them is my father. His head is wide and distorted like the hood of cobra.

Snake child, my father whispers, and something crusts my eyes, like tears or blood, my giant cysts coming undone, and even as the fire takes me, nothing in me is warm anymore. I shiver as if I am thrust onto a cold stretcher in the hospital ward, trembling before a surgeon I cannot see because all my eyes are slits. Something is slipping away from me. I have no eyes, no mouth, I am nothing but skin and that is leaving me too, like a long and papery will wax-stripped from my body. Something climbs out of my mouth and splits me like a forked tongue, and I am human and snake and alive again, and I am my mother, my father, and my four aunts. As I collapse to the floor, I hear the pulluvathis hissing in joy, the sound of my scales crumbling. The smooth eggs of my cousins shatter in yellow applause.

The morning shed is long and tedious, but I enjoy it, like a little piece of ritual I have brought home. I love the attention to detail, the rigour of self-care. Overnight, the pus from my skin collects into a cool, sticky residue that I peel off at the crack of dawn. When the skin comes off, what is underneath is so cold and slippery that you can see my veins, like marble. But what really takes people aback is that I have no eyes. Where the sockets used to be are two lonely slits, and sometimes I think I look like the donation box at the temple, all shiny and silver with two slots to slip a coin in.

I have found my father again; my tongue is now split in two, like it could answer to both parents. I think my friends are a little afraid of my newfound beauty. My gossamer skin that nothing in their cabinets can replicate. But I have no secret to offer them, no magic potion in a silver tube. I tell them my skin was never mine to begin with. I tell them it must be in my genes.

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Now that I am back in our homelands, I am haunted. I dream of faces hovering over me, taking my blood. They suck at my veins like infants at a bottle. I see needles and crimson IVs, engorged bags hanging above my inert body like a mobile. My heart pumps the blood out, out, out. Where are they taking it? I wonder.

Then I awaken. This is not dream, but memory: They’ve already taken my lifeblood. Black bruises marred the skin where they punctured my hands and feet, my forearms, over and over again, but they’re faded now, turning green. The bloodless wonder. The walking corpse.

I don’t know how I got here, exactly. I awoke one day a week ago and clawed my way out of a hole beneath this abandoned camper in a trailer park in Happy Camp. It’s not the Happy Camp I remember, though. This one is later, older … or newer? As far as I can tell, I am not. The first thing I did was shower. The second thing I did was massage the crick in my neck with stiff hands, my fingers ever so slowly loosening up, fighting the lack of circulation.

Mary Bartholomew is the only person in the trailer park who has talked to me since I arrived. Most folks keep to themselves. The first time I meet her—on my second night of consciousness—goes like this: She knocks on my door and says, I bet you could use a beer, and since I can’t drink … She looks down at her obviously pregnant belly. I invite her in and she says, The dreams are probably bad right now.

She sits. Her dentalia shells shimmer. She wears a hat, woven like a basket. Recognition pinches at the base of my skull. The scent of hazelnut fills the room. I guess we are the same age—late teens playing at being adults—but she seems older than me.

How do you know about the dreams? I ask.

You’ve got to talk about what they took or you’ll never get it back.

She tells me they called her Mary Bartholomew. But I prefer Mars Bar, she says, taking a candy bar from her pocket. She peels the wrapper like a banana, offers me a bite. My one vice while I wait on the little one. She smirks. Her eyes match the chocolate.

That night, she had prepared a campfire in the ring outside. I followed her out, inhaling the sharp scent of burning pine. We do this each night. I don’t talk much the first few, sipping shyly on beer I can’t really taste. Mars Bar is patient. Her presence is familiar somehow.

One night, near the end of my fourth beer and fifth cigarette, I finally tell her what happened to me. When I say it aloud, it becomes irrevocable: my blood. They took my blood.

Every night I dream and I remember more, I tell her, tapping my forehead with the tip of my pointer finger. I shift in my camp chair to catch more heat from the fire, though it’s no use.

Shit, dude, she says. Let’s get it back.

What do you mean?

They’ve taken other things too, you know. My father’s land for one.

When Mars Bar says the word father, I flinch. A far-off image enters my mind: a pale face framed by a dog collar, a wooden cross glowing on his chest. I can almost feel the switch strike my shoulders. There are scars there. I’ve studied them, pale in the halogen bulb above the medicine cabinet. My whole body is pale. Unfamiliar. It angers me that this priest is the image that the word father evokes. When I try to remember my own father there is nothing in my mind, like he was sucked out with my blood.

Yeah, they took his land, Mars Bar continues, taking a slow bite of chocolate. Scooped it up with a backhoe to move elsewhere one day. No notice. No nothing. They hid it—for what they thought would be forever. She smiles wryly. Nothing’s forever.

Mary Bartholomew’s father found it eventually, his land. After long nights of driving around, he saw Coyote lying on the side of the road near a sign. Roadkill, that Coyote. When her father pulled over, he saw Coyote was just playing dead, waiting to see what kind of man he was. Was he the kind that stopped?

It’s that way, Coyote told him. Coyote showed him where they were storing it, his land, and a way into where they were keeping it that no one knew about. To go this way, one had to get very small. Coyote showed him how.

But how will I get it back? her father asked.

Little by little, said Coyote. They won’t even notice.

So that’s what he did. One styrofoam cupful at a time, he worked to restore his land. He made one trip a day whenever he could.

The thought of him pouring cups of dirt into the pit they’d dug in his yard made me happy. And it made me sad.

Once Mars Bar learns they’ve taken my blood, she asks around, trying to figure out where it may have gone.

They can’t get away with this stuff. It’s messed up. She says this over my yellow formica breakfast table, having let herself in to await my morning scream as I awoke, once again, cold and afraid. She is talking at me before I am even coherent.

After coming up empty on leads, she spoke with an elder who told her we should follow the old ways to get my blood back. This elder says I’ve been deviled bad, and it will take ancient Karuk medicine to heal me.

Or maybe you can’t be healed, she says. Some people can’t. She looks down and rubs her belly before looking at me again.

I can’t be healed? I’m not sure this is what she’s said. I rub my eyes as I slink into the seat across from her.

But we have to try.

I wonder what it might feel like to be whole again. Will I remember who I am? How I came to the so-called school where they stole my blood? I remember Happy Camp somehow, but I cannot remember myself here. I cannot see my relationship to the town or the people. It’s strange, sensing familiarity without memory. I shuffle through the streets at night, in the cool dark when only the stars observe me. The stars, and an old woman who rocks gently on her porch at the end of a lane at the edge of the town proper, rocking and humming. I don’t need food or water. That is, I can eat and drink, but I don’t have to. Am I alive? I wonder. I push this thought away. I am walking, talking, and thinking. Clearly, I am alive.

Mars Bar doesn’t return that evening, so I down a six-pack she left me and stumble to bed, wishing I could feel drunk, wishing I could black out into blissful nonexistence. But that night the bodiless faces suckle at my veins again—burping with contentment after they finish—then fly upward until they are out of sight among the stars. I awaken in the wee hours of dawn, the soft moment when the stars disappear but the sun has not yet risen. I wonder in the stillness what they took from Mary Bartholomew, besides her name.

Mary Bartholomew’s father woke one morning to find his tongue behaving strangely. Each time he said a word, two came out: Ayukîi/hello, áama/salmon, and so on. The way of it was that he had two tongues in his mouth. Hûut áta naa vura napri’áxakhitih?/How did I get two tongues? he asked himself.

Just then Horsefly flew into his house. And Bluejay, she followed.

Horsefly said, We know you have a problem.

Bluejay said, Relax, I’m a doctor.

Mary Bartholomew’s father knew all about Bluejay’s “doctoring”—that is, enough to suspect that she had given him this extra appendage, only to offer to “cure” it and charge him for the pleasure. But he was afraid to speak.

Then Horsefly said, Open your mouth.

We have a plan, said Bluejay.

Her father thought for a moment. A double tongue didn’t seem like Bluejay’s usual game. Even if Bluejay had caused his second tongue, it didn’t change the fact that she was likely the only one who could doctor it. In fact, it made her expertise more valuable, for she would only have afflicted him with something she and her minions could cure.

He opened his mouth. Then that Horsefly, he flew in and bit off one of Mary Bartholomew’s father’s tongues, right at the root. He bit it right off and painted his face with the blood. Then he gave the tongue to Bluejay. Then that Bluejay, she smothered the tongue in the marrow of a deer’s cannon bone and put it in a basket.

You keep that tongue there, said Bluejay. You hide that tongue from the flat hats when they come around. Then someday, you put that tongue in acorn soup and feed it to your children’s children’s children and then they will talk the old talk again.

Mary Bartholomew’s father nodded.

Bluejay burst into a slurry of kach-kach-kach-kach. My fee, she said.

And so Mary Bartholomew’s father paid her price (fresh acorn soup) and hid that tongue for later.

The first thing we try is tobacco.

It’s not really tobacco, explains Mars Bar, but that’s what the flat hats call it. There are many varieties of so-called tobacco all around the Karuk lands, all of them seen as different plants by the old timers, depending on their location.

Mars Bar is setting up my little bedroom in the camper for peak healing potential. The shades are drawn against the late afternoon sun and I lie on the bed, head toward the foot, staring at the dingy ceiling panels.

No one quite knows how they used it, she says. We used to have beautiful pipes, so we must have smoked it, but for medicine it was more likely burned as incense.

You don’t know for sure? I ask, craning my neck to see her. The room spins.

You got another option?

I sigh.

So, let’s try this, then. Mars Bar sits on the floor near my head, criss-cross applesauce. Indian style, I think, amused. What are you smiling at?

Oh, nothing.

She lights the “tobacco” and inhales deeply.

Now breathe with me.

I do as she says, breathing in deep and long, holding, then pushing the air out. She gives direction every now and then—relax your neck, close your eyes, breathe, focus on your heartbeat, breathe. She begins a story about a Karuk who made pipes out of soapstone to sell to the flat hats, so they would crack and they’d have to come buy more.

After a while her voice fades. I’m somewhere between sleeping and waking, entering my dream from a new point. But this time, I can look around at will. I see myself. I also see the bodies of others beside me, faceless bodies being drained. Who are they? I try to focus, to see their features, but I keep seeing the eyes of the other trailer park residents. When I survey the rest of the room, I am met with blackness. Not darkness. Blackness, void. I recoil as a man’s face appears in the black, floating through space. It is old, grandfatherly. His hands appear, one holding a rosary, the other a cane. I cry out.

Bloodless. Bloodless! Mars Bar is leaning over me when I open my eyes. She studies me. Did it work?

I shrug my prominent shoulder bones, then regret it as the crick in my neck spasms. She touches my forehead and draws back quickly. Her hand feels hot. Or my skin is ice-cold. No blood, no warmth.

Maybe I did something wrong, she says.

We sit at my table with mugs of Earl Grey. My mind runs through my vision again.

Mars Bar looks out the window. Her dark hair shimmers in the sunset under her basket hat. You’re not the first to have your blood taken away, she says.

I take a sip of tea, focusing on the scalding heat.

Indian blood is very powerful, you know, she continues, tracing the handle of her mug with her pointer finger. Spill enough blood and suddenly you own a continent. A little more, and you can kill all the buffalo, poison the fish, level the forest. And on and on. A little Indian blood can build golf resorts and drill oil and industrialize agriculture and win the Space Race. They sacrifice us on an altar of manifest destiny. Every time they break this earth for something new, they’re doing it with bloodied hands. They’ll always need more.

Had my blood been used to pollute a waterway for a petrochemical giant? Or to propel another phallic rocket into space?

I saw others. Just now, I explain. I couldn’t see their faces, but they were there. Mars Bar is quiet and still. I don’t tell her about the other face. My tormentor. I don’t want to do the tobacco thing again.

She smirks. Fair enough. We’ll try something else.

What about the others? The ones who were with me? Who’s helping them?

Mars Bar looks away from me and shrugs. You’re here, they’re not.

What about you? Who’s helping you?

As if, she laughs.

A week or so later, Mars Bar appears with a pickup truck that I assume she borrowed and we light out just after sunrise. She drives the twisting back roads with one hand on the wheel and the other on her stomach. She doesn’t tell me where we’re going or what we’re doing in the deep forest. The gravel road hurls rocks at the truck.

Oh, look, Mars Bar says suddenly, talking loudly over the noise, A’ikrêen!

What?

Duck Hawk. Falco peregrinus. It’s a good omen, Bloodless.

We park in a turnout. The lush forest hems us in, the trees and brush leaning like eavesdroppers. Mars Bar dives into the bushes close to where we’ve parked, heading up a knoll dense with thorny brush. Rattlesnakes quiver all around us. I take uneasy steps. I’m not worried for myself—their venom cannot be pumped through my bloodless body—but for Mars Bar and her offspring.

On the way we stop eight or nine times. The world swirls as I haul myself up the steep incline. A headache creeps from one temple to the other. I apologize at each stop, but Mars Bar doesn’t seem bothered. Crouched in the underbrush, snakes all around, she seems at peace. How many times has she done this before?

We finally reach the crest of the hill, then descend into a clearing. Mars Bar consults a notebook and studies the ground until she spots a plant with white flowers. Mars Bar digs. She pulls out one of the plants by the root. It is shaped like an infant’s hand, fingers curled into a fist.

Mars Bar cuts off one of its little fingers and hands it to me. Eat this. For your head.

I obey, then look at my own hand, white as a snowdrift in sunlight.

Mary Bartholomew told me that after they took her father’s land, they also took his water. One day he went out on the porch and the river was gone. It had up and left without a word of warning.

He found Frog and asked her where it went, but Frog didn’t know. Then he found Turtle and asked her, but she didn’t know. Salmon was flopping in the river bed, and he knew he had to do something, so he said to Salmon, I’m going to swallow you and keep you safe in my stomach until we can find where that river went.

Then he drove into town, and on the way he saw a large aqueduct. That’s where the river is, he thought. He turned to follow the aqueduct, which was filled with many other rivers too. He drove a long way. The water was leaving by numerous means: people were drinking it, and they were using it to find gold, and to grow plants, and also to power their televisions so that they could watch documentaries about how the river left and how scientists were trying to understand who took it and how to put it back. And they were swimming in it at water parks with BIG SLIDE, which he saw on advertisements on their TVs.

All the time Salmon was kicking around in his belly. Salmon wanted out. Mary Bartholomew’s father didn’t know what else to do, so he went to a waterpark and let Salmon out, and they swam together.

The BIG SLIDE was fabulous, she told me, as advertised.

Back in the trailer, Mars Bar is preparing kíshvuuf incense and brewing kíshvuuf tea. This is the name of the plant we’ve collected. It is one of our most powerful medicines. My headache has abated.

Mars Bar is chattering, as usual. Kill the Indian, save the man, she says. She laughs at this and pokes my arm, which leaves an indent that won’t go away for an hour. See, they consider that they’ve left you with an advantage.

What do you think they’ll use my blood for?

My blooded days still escape me, but the kíshvuuf is rooting around in my synapses, sparking connections. Emotions rather than specific experiences linger in the afterglow. Snatches of conversation in words I don’t understand escape me as quickly as I remember them.

I study Mars Bar, who has not answered my question yet. She touches her stomach.

Sometimes, Bloodless, it’s better not to know.

She rises to pour the tea and passes me a cup. She’s never asked how it feels, my bloodlessness. Part of me wants to tell her in great detail, but maybe it’s beside the point. No one wants to hear about how I am aware, at all times, of the absence of my pulse. Or how it feels when my heart contracts out of habit, but doesn’t send any liquid coursing to my extremities or into my brain or to the follicles of my eyelashes. Maybe she already knows.

You must understand, says Mars Bar after a long pause, they have this idea that Indians are magical. They know we have connections to the Ikxaréeyav—the Spirit People—and yumarêempah, the paths of the dead. Before, they used our blood for mundane, earthbound things. But it’s the magic they’re after, now. They think it’s in our blood, our language, our baskets, us. She touches my chest and startles at its coolness. Then she touches her stomach protectively. We’re the next step in something big. That’s what I think.

Did you learn this from your father?

No, I—don’t know where I learned it, exactly.

I can’t remember my father. Or my mother. Do you? Remember your mother?

Of course, Mars Bar says, standing abruptly. She sets her mug in the sink, her back to me. The kíshvuuf may help with that—with your memory, I mean. It helped—others.

I notice her hesitation, but I let it be. What if it doesn’t? You said not everyone can be healed. What if you … ? I trail off, unsure what I meant to say.

Yes? She turns, her eyes expectant, cheeks flushed. For a moment I catch a glimpse of someone from my past. But it’s just the kíshvuuf, no doubt.

Nothing. I’m grateful for your help. I am. Just—I reach for her hand, but change course at the last moment, remembering how she flinched at my coldness before. You can tell me anything, you know.

For a moment, the dam of nonchalance she’s constructed cracks and I think she will tell me everything. Instead she says, I know, Bloodless. I know.

The kíshvuuf has not healed me. For short periods it alleviates my acute pain, but my blood has not returned, so the problem persists. My dreams are more vivid than before too. After a while, even in my waking hours I see white faces with blood-rimmed mouths. A growing part of me wishes for death over this liminal life. I shuffle agonizing miles each night to keep myself awake, but now, with the waking visions, there is no real relief. I circle the town, always turning back when I hear the old woman humming on her porch.

Concern colors Mars Bar’s face when I tell her of my deteriorating state. We are sitting by my camper next to our fire. The wood pops, sending sparks into space.

We’ll think of something, she says.

But the weeks wear on. I take the kíshvuuf each night. On nights when I take a high dose, there’s a pressure in my sternum, like I’m supposed to go somewhere. Like I’m running late. I wander the length and breadth of Happy Camp, searching for the source of this sensation. I learn the town’s every crevice and alley. Sometimes, past my haunting visions, I see other things that I know aren’t there: old massive trees where houses are now, men playing stickball in a field, a fire gently cleansing the forest floor. From a distance, the old woman on her porch is overlaid by a younger version of herself instead, a version who looks at me keenly before I turn away.

Mars Bar and I sit in silence by the fire most nights. I sip on kíshvuuf, and she rubs her pregnant belly, which never seems to grow. Sometimes I stay until the fire fades into oblivion; other times I stand abruptly to wander the town. Mars Bar never follows, but I know my wandering makes her sad.

One night, I come out of a particularly dense stupor to find myself in front of the old woman’s house, closer than I have been before. The old woman beckons me to her porch with a barely perceptible wave that I think I may have imagined. But I go to her. I sit down on the edge of the small porch, my feet dangling, although I’m not far enough off the ground for that. My feet should touch the ground. My legs have shrunk. This alarms me. How  will I ever get back to my trailer with such short legs?

You need the brush dance. She does too. But she won’t tell you that.

What? I turn around, but the old woman just keeps rocking, acting like she hasn’t said anything. I look back down at my diminishing feet, unnerved.

The dance to heal a dying child.

But I’m not dying, I say, blinking hard at my minuscule shoelaces.

You’re not exactly a child, either.

I turn to look at the woman again. She is very old. Her chin bears the traditional 111 tattoo. Without thinking, I reach a hand out, three fingers raised to trace the lines, a motion I feel I have done before, long ago, while held in strong, gentle arms. But my hand is too small; my arm is too short. Childlike. Infantlike. I concentrate hard on my next words, forcing air out of my lungs mechanically, forming my lips and tongue into shapes that they resist.

It will give me my blood back?

Maybe, says the woman, no longer old, yet not exactly young. Healing can be different for different people.

Thoughts slip through my head like summer eel. I am quiet for a long time before I have captured enough words to form a sentence.

Will I remember my parents? I ask.

But I have posed my question to no one. I’m no longer on the porch, but back at the fire pit by my trailer again. Maybe I have been here all along, the porch itself a vision wrapped in other visions. Mars Bar’s chair is empty. She left at some point while I was thinking, wandering in my mind, maybe minutes ago, maybe hours. The fire is almost out.

Will I remember myself? I ask the stars. If any of them answer, it will take millions of years for the message to arrive.

Mary Bartholomew’s father went to visit his mother and father and grandparents one day only to find they had disappeared. It had been a while since he visited, but still. He thought it was strange they weren’t where he left them.

In their place was a notice from the Son of Smith Museum in the Capitol. Preserved forever! Mom and Pop make their debut in DC! Living expenses subsidized by the US of A!

Mary Bartholomew’s father was unsure what to make of this. Had his parents run off to join the circus? Would his grandparents perform as acrobats? Would they earn a living wage and be granted healthcare?

He packed up his truck and headed to DC.

He arrived on a Tuesday at 3:32 and went to the Museum. He found whole groups of grandparents of various nationalities lying around in exhibits. They looked sad. Languid. Out of sorts and out of place. As he came to the end of one display, he saw his parents and grandparents. Some of their favorite things had been taken away and put in a case next to them.

Help us, grandson! they said.

We want peace, grandson!

Talk to that man about it, ordered his own mother, pointing to an office door. I gather he’s in charge here, but he won’t listen to us.

There was a man in the office with very large glasses on.

I’ve come for my parents and grandparents, Mary Bartholomew’s father said.

Do you have identification?

Her father got out his driver’s license.

No, I mean, identification that would show they’re your family.

Her father fished around in his wallet and got out another card that said what tribe he was from.

Who are you claiming again?

My mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, and I think I saw a few more generations back in there, and—

Hm, those descriptions don’t match our cataloguing data. Do you mean woman #1 maybe? Man #83? Woman #552? Man #77?

Mary Bartholomew’s father stared at him. I don’t know, he said to the little man in the big glasses.

Do you have identification?

I just gave it to you.

No, for them. The man sighed. How do I know you’re actually their son?

Because I know them. I know where they were buried.

Well, so do I. I’ve been studying them. Anyone could figure that stuff out. I can’t just take your word for it.

Sir, they must come home with me.

The man gaped. I can’t take down an exhibit willy-nilly! They need to be preserved!

Preserved?

For historical and anthropological purposes. Whoever buried them—

Look, mister, said Mary Batholomew’s father. All they want is to go back to their graves. Where my ancestors—

Then, as I said before, you’ll need to return with identification that proves beyond a doubt that they’re yours.

What kind of identification?

Well … we could take a blood sample, said the man after some thought. If it really means that much to you.

Mary Bartholomew’s father ended up giving them a blood sample. After waiting ten years, it was processed and the results proved beyond a doubt that it was his parents in the exhibit.

So they came home? I asked Mary Bartholomew when she paused. She shook her head.

Still waiting.

How do you know about the brush dance? Mars Bar’s tone is accusatory. She looks taken aback.

I’m allowed to talk to people other than you, you know.

Mars Bar crosses her arms and props her hip against the counter. She raises an eyebrow at me.

I read about it, okay? At the museum.

I really had. After that night, the vision of the old woman, I’d gone looking for her, but she wasn’t there—neither was her porch. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. So, I went to the museum, which was closed, but the gift shop was open and it had a few books on Karuk stuff and I read all about the brush dance.

Mars Bar stares out the window. A fucking brush dance. I don’t think this is a good idea.

I don’t hear you coming up with anything.

Wow.

Mars Bar. I just—want to be healed. I want to be normal again. Don’t you?

She startles slightly, composes herself. I don’t need to be healed.

No, I just meant … I meant wouldn’t you want to be healed. In my place. That’s all.

She exhales annoyance. All right. I’ll talk to someone tomorrow about getting a crew together. I’ll tell you where to meet them.

You won’t be there?

No.

I study the lines of her face, the way her hands guard her middle. You’re afraid.

She snorts. Or maybe a pregnant lady doesn’t want to get up in the middle of the night for some stupid dance. She stares at me for a long moment. It’s not going to work.

It might, I say, simply.

We pause for a long moment. Mars Bar flips her hair over her shoulder, looks out the window again, sighs, looks at me again. Stop looking at me like that. So I don’t want to come to the brush dance. So what?

I shrug.

I’m not scared. She shakes her head as she opens the trailer door. You go. You get healed. I’m not coming. The door slams behind her and I hear a dog bark somewhere nearby.

Mars Bar leaves me a note the next day, taped to my door, telling me the brush dance will take place that night and where I should go. I want to find her, to try to convince her to come with me. It feels deeply important. As I search for her, my mind wanders. If the brush dance is successful, will I remember everything? Do I want to? I can almost feel again at the thought of being fully alive. No more half existence. But I try to temper my expectations.

I’d asked Mars Bar on that night I first confided in her whether I was one quarter of a person before they stole my blood, whether my dad was one half, his mom whole. Mars Bar had rolled her eyes and pointed to my legs.

Like, what part of you existed in that case? she’d asked. Were your legs your one quarter or your torso or your head? Or was it a mix by volume of different parts adding up to one quarter and, if so, how did you walk around?

Are you whole? I’d asked.

I’m not the point here, she’d said.

I think about that too, as I search for her. Eventually, I give up and curl up on my bed for a catnap. Figuring out Mars Bar is like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle without the box. She seems to be alone, her baby bump isn’t growing—I have no way to know where she came from or if she is who she says she is. What I do know, what I can sense in every gesture, is that they took something from her that goes much deeper than blood. It’s something she cannot tell me—maybe she can’t even tell herself.

I’d asked her before who was helping her. I think it’s me. Or at least, I’m supposed to be.

I enter an uneasy sleep. I dream that I find my blood. They have taken enough of it to make a whole other person and it looks at me with its bloody eyes and waves at me with its bloody hand. Waving? Or beckoning?

Get back inside me, I say to it, the blood creature. It smiles and replies to me in a language I don’t know, but I understand that it is refusing to be a part of me again. It’s calling for me to join it. It is across a great crimson river. It stands on the far bank, crying out in the voice of my ancestors. With each word, I expect the rap of a cane on my shoulders, and I wake in my cold white body in the camper, aware of a warm presence beside me.

It’s time to go, says Mars Bar.

When I asked Mary Bartholomew where her father was now, she got quiet. I stared at the fire, whose flames didn’t warm me. She stood and walked into her camper, and I thought I’d driven her away, but she returned a few minutes later with her laptop.

She passed it to me. She had a Wikipedia article open about a nearby university. I stared at the picture of her father performing for spectators. The description, in a tone that was chipper and bright, delineated a life of servitude and confinement. The final picture on the page was of his skull on display.

He became an entertainer, she said.

We have coated ourselves in deer cannon bone marrow for the trek to the ceremony, a trick her father once taught her. Mars Bar offers no explanation for her sudden appearance, and I can feel that she is still apprehensive about attending the ceremony.

Tonight is a good night for it, she says. We will have the moon on our side.

I nod knowingly, knowing nothing. We arrive at a clearing near the foot of a large hill. Above us, the Milky Way runs soft white against the black sky.

Mars Bar has four friends who are going to help us with the brush dance. Their names are Káruk, Yúruk, Máruk, and Sáruk. I have seen them around the trailer park. In fact, they’re some of the only residents who ever acknowledge me. As I understand it, they are all related to each other in different ways. Like, Káruk is Yúruk’s sister, and Yúruk is Sáruk’s cousin, but Máruk is someone’s auntie. I can’t keep it straight.

To my surprise, they are joined by someone I recognize: the old woman from the porch. I am told that her name is Doctor Katy. When she nods at me, I pretend not to recognize her. She wears full regalia tonight, woven from materials in the world around us. She holds a staff. The aromas of kíshvuuf and tobacco mix with the smoke of a fire where the cousins are gathered.

After brief introductions, I sink gratefully to the ground, exhausted by the walk. Mars Bar stands a little ways away from me with the dancers, and their conversation quickly outpaces my comprehension. She looks older in the firelight. Is she speaking a different language? I sit up straighter and strain to hear, ignoring Doctor Katy’s intense eyes, which have not left me since we arrived. The dancers’ expressions are the kind you make when an elderly relative mistakenly calls you by your parent’s name or tells you a story for the eighteenth time. I begin to see her against a different backdrop, inhabiting a traditional Karuk village, then a square, gray building. I blink hard, trying to clarify the scene. Mars Bar glances at me, and the spell is broken; she reconstitutes in some fundamental way, changing back to the Mars Bar I know. That last scene makes me nervous. We should leave.

No. Doctor Katy speaks suddenly, and when I meet her gaze I do not doubt she knows my thoughts. She walks to the others, who nod and take their places in a circle around me. Without any further delay, they begin their song and their dance. Mars Bar moves to join them, but as she passes by, Doctor Katy grabs her elbow and firmly guides her toward me instead, near the center of the circle. Mars Bar bristles at Doctor Katy’s touch. A look of confusion rather than anger colors her face. She and Katy share a wordless exchange. At last, Mars Bar relents. She sits near me. Our eyes meet. Hers are wide. We should leave, I think again.

What’s wrong?

Nothing. Mars Bar watches the dancers, circling us tighter and tighter. She grabs my hand. She does not flinch at the cold this time. I grip her hand tightly myself, calculating the timing to stand, jump between the dancers, and tear off into the night, back to Happy Camp, away from this fire, this song.

The rhythm quickens. The dancers envelop us. Doctor Katy chants in counterpoint standing across the fire, just inside the circle. I don’t understand her words, but they pound in my chest like my unblooded heart. As the rhythm reaches its peak, she approaches me with slow, deliberate steps. She looks into my eyes for a moment, steadying me with her strength; then she bends down and places her mouth in the crook of my arm. I recoil, but Mars Bar stays my escape. Doctor Katy sucks hard at my skin. Her teeth dig in, leaving saliva-soaked indents behind. Quickly, she moves to my other arm, my hands, my feet. She is sucking everywhere the blood was taken from. When she’s finished sucking my limbs, she turns to the fire and vomits. Then she turns back to us, and I wonder what else she will suck out of me, but instead she goes to Mars Bar, whose grip tightens until my fingers creak under the pressure. I feel her wish to flee. I feel our joint inability to move.

Doctor Katy examines Mars Bar’s pregnant belly. She tenderly traces her finger from one side to the other. I jump in surprise when Doctor Katy keens to the heavens, a doleful howl like a coyote. The music continues, faster now, and Doctor Katy again vomits into the fire.

The fire rises, its heat pulsating. The world changes. The trees are younger, suddenly, the dancers too. The ground thrums beneath us, and I feel that familiar sensation at my sternum. My mind races. Crystalline images, memories, which were just on the verge of consciousness after the kíshvuuf, are rushing forward in a torrent. I am living days in nanoseconds. I look up and see the Moon’s face. An image materializes from before the blood was stolen from me: My father pointing at the moon and showing me the Moon’s wives—Rattlesnake, Grizzly Bear, Frog. I am entranced, but a sound is growing beneath the rhythm of the dancers that pulls my attention away. A rushing sound. The river.

The river is rising. Calling. I must go.

My eyes meet Doctor Katy’s across the fire. This time, she doesn’t argue. Take her with you.

I stand abruptly, pulling Mars Bar up. She’s reluctant, still wrapped in her pain. Come on, I say. We leave the firelight and the music fades as I head riverward, the compass within me pointing unwaveringly now. The pull is irresistible. It is a couple miles away. The moon’s beams guide us on our journey through the woods, the dense brush scratching at the bone marrow coating our skin, tugging at our clothing.

Mars Bar stumbles, disconnecting our hands. My momentum carries me onward a few yards. By the time I turn she is standing, turned uphill, but looking back over her shoulder at me.

Her eyes search my face, trying to communicate something. I hold my breath.

I go back for her, though it is difficult to move in the wrong direction. She looks at the moon and cradles her stomach. Tears shimmer on her cheeks.

I touch her arm gently and she turns to face me fully. There is blood gushing from her abdomen and between her legs, staining her deerskin dress. The world tips sideways crazily. Mars Bar’s hand steadies me, leaving a bloody print behind. As I digest this scene, wondering how I will get her to the river, a great whooshing fills the night air and a deep breath fills my lungs. A giant vulture alights on a large boulder to our left. Suddenly, I am steady again, and awake—really awake.

No, gasps Mars Bar. It cannot be.

What? What is it? She speaks with fear, while I—I am all wonder and exhilaration.

Atipimáamvaan. Bloodless, it cannot be. I knew that you were—but me?

What?

The vulture—Atipimáamvaan—lets loose a croaking screech, then lifts off. I run after it under my strange compulsion, pulling at Mars Bar, but she stumbles again, crying out in pain.

We have to follow it, I say, gripping her arm tightly, frantic.

Bloodless, I—

Mars Bar falls to the ground, so I heft her up, supporting her weight easily. For the first time in months, I am strong. My legs are solid beneath me. My breath comes easier. My senses quicken. Do I imagine it, or is that truly the wind in my face? Can I, indeed, smell the odor of death on Atipimáamvaan as it guides us toward the river? And why is this comforting? Mars Bar’s head lolls as I fall into a rhythm, like the dancers around the fire. My feet march in time with theirs. My breath moves with their song. I see them in flashes, and feel for quick moments that I am still there, by the fire. That this is the dream.

My heart pounds in my chest, still pinching my insides in that bloodless way. Atipimáamvaan brings us right to the riverbank. A canoe awaits, piloted by A’ikrêen.

No! You can’t do this to me! Mars Bar thrusts herself from my arms and plants her feet on the riverbank. I won’t go!

Atipimáamvaan and A’ikrêen look at each other for a moment before Atipimáamvaan takes off again. Mars Bar drops onto the bank. She rocks gently.

I stand with one foot in the canoe. The urge to climb in nearly overpowers me. But I cannot leave her here. I must help her.

A’ikrêen cocks his bird head curiously.

Wait for us. I return to the shore and grab one of Mars Bar’s hands as she moans. I sit beside her, holding her small hand between my ungainly pale ones. The baby?

She shakes her head. No, Bloodless. No. She moans again. Oh, no, no, no.

What then?

There is a long silence. The current sputters gently. Crickets chirp. A breeze wends its way through the treetops, not touching us below. Everything recalls the rhythm of the dancers, which is the rhythm of the earth. The stars stare, silent sentinels observing our misery.

I remember. She says it softly, just above a whisper. Her eyes are focused on the distance. I remember everything.

Tell me. She turns away. Mars Bar. I cup her cheek in my hand. She is feverish. I look into those dark eyes of hers, trying to refocus them on me. You’ve got to talk about what they took or you’ll never get it back.

She stares at me as her own words echo back to her from that first night of the fire. Then she crumples into me, embracing me.

I remember … I remember dying, Bloodless. She sits up and looks at me. Don’t you?

I startle, pushing back from her slightly, but she is lost in her own memories now.

It was the headmaster. The baby—it was—they didn’t want it, you see? But I hid from them. I ran and I hid. She touches her bleeding stomach. She addresses her next words to it, tender and quiet. I told you we would be okay. She looks at me with fresh tears welling in her eyes. But then one day … it was too soon, I thought. Too soon. I went back. I had to. I needed help—the pain. They took me inside. And then, after pushing and screaming, they cut me and I—I heard it. I heard it crying. Just a small thing. Such a little cry, but that was my baby. My baby. Not theirs. Not his. But they took it away. Oh, Bloodless, they took it away from me. I didn’t even get to touch it. I don’t know where they took it. And by then I had lost so much blood, so much …

Mars Bar grabs my arm. What if it’s still here, Bloodless, here in this world? What if I’m leaving it? I can’t get in that boat. I can’t. I don’t care if I’m—. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, leaving bloody tracks on her face. Her lip quivers. I wanted to hold it. I wanted to see it, just once.

I understand. I didn’t. I couldn’t. How could anyone?

It was the fever that killed me. And I died in that—in that horrible—

I know, I say, pulling her into me again and stroking her long hair. I know.

I see A’ikrêen looking at me over Mars Bar. His intense eyes capture mine for a long moment.

So, we really are dead, I say. Both of us.

Yes, she breathes. I had forgotten. For a very long time, I think.

Your baby. It might be grown by now.

Her eyes widen. She studies me for a long moment. Yes. You’re right.

I look around at the moonlit forest. It is fading ever so slightly.

We have to cross the river, I say, to myself as much as to Mars Bar.

She looks back up the hill toward where the fire is, the dancers, Doctor Katy. A breeze brushes our cheeks and she inhales deeply, closing her eyes. She breathes heavily out of her mouth.

It’s time, says A’ikrêen. Yumarêempah awaits.

Yumarêempah. I remember this. The paths of the dead. We are going to the Boneless Lands.

Mars Bar rises, holding fast my hand in hers. She is still reticent, but I sense her trust in me. We enter A’ikrêen’s canoe, sitting carefully at its center, and he paddles upriver, easy and swift. Through narrower passages, bushes and trees tug at our clothes. The bone marrow protects us from scrapes. As we go, I am filled with unbidden memories of those dark hallways at the school. They wash over me with piercing clarity, but the pain has drained away.

Of course. I turn to Mars Bar. You were there.

Yes, she says. Before you. I was the first.

The first. Yes, she was not there at the same time as me, but she was in the same spaces. I’d felt her in that place where they tried to erase us. Mary Bartholomew was the first they murdered there.

I was the last.

I place my other hand over hers and smile. She smiles back.

Above our little vessel, the Milky Way—Yumarêempah—traces the river’s path, flowing with us. We lie down to watch. The two are becoming one, water and sky, a river of stars. Gradually, we are unmoored from gravity, floating through the pure cosmos. The cool air chaps my cheeks. I am warm, I think.

Images move through water and sky. Ancestors and descendants float near in vessels of their own. Two young Karuk maidens pass by us in a canoe and I wave as one smiles at me. Then a ship, a star ship, with great sails drifts above. I can almost touch it. A face peers out. Other people appear—a woman running from an explosion, a girl dressed in regalia dancing with unfettered joy, Doctor Katy as a young woman getting her chin tattoo.

I haven’t felt any time passing, but I notice that the deer cannon bone marrow coating has worn away now, and our clothes are gone. Branches have scraped our skin. I bleed.

Suddenly, I see myself in the images above. I sit up, awed. I am surrounded by my family. My father teaches me about fire, my mother cradles me after I cut my finger, my blood dripping from the tip. She says something, and at last I can hear her. At last, I can remember what it is she is calling me. Tears flow from my eyes into the air, joining the river that we are passing through.

Slowly, I lie back again in the boat beside the woman I know as Mary Bartholomew. She loops her arms around me as I rejoin her, and for the first time since the brush dance began, the pulsing rhythm of the earth quiets completely. Instead, I hear her heartbeat, and it is familiar.

My name was Amváamvaan, I say softly to Mars Bar. She stirs, awaking from a deep reverie.

I am Yuxtharanpírish. Amváamvaan, she whispers, and the sound of it is like coming home.

Yuxtharanpírish, I whisper back. My eyes are heavy, my body is warm, my blood is flowing.

In the land of our ancestors, at last, we sleep.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

The woman sitting next to me on the bus is holding her dead dog. It is a wrinkled, whiskered mutt with white glassy eyes and a face that somewhat resembles her own. She holds it tightly, protectively, like a baby. As I watch, the dog leaps forward then recoils back, over and over and over. Its legs kick and flutter, springing it onto her lap, strained and spittle-mouthed, and then in the next moment it is lying back in her arms, like it is sleeping.

A tall, crooked-nosed man stands near the door, the chopped halves of a salmon wriggling in a plastic bag at his side. He is gathering nasty looks from the other passengers. When the bus hits a curve in the road, the salmon flutters and sways, scales glittering even through the plastic skin. It could almost be mistaken for a living thing. I watch the salmon and the dog dance together, alive and dead and still kicking, kicking, kicking.

I disembark about a block away. The air is warm and humid from recent rain, a cloud hanging about my shoulders as I trudge home, T-shirt plastered to my chest like a laminate. My parents’ house is celebrating its centennial next year, and it takes three tries before the back door shudders open.

The lights are all out on the first floor. I turn to the wooden chair on my left, crammed into the shallow, dusty alcove between the door and the tiled bathroom. “Good afternoon, Dad.”

My father’s face is crumpled in a scowl, right hand caged over his heart. He tilts forward, slowly at first and then all at once, before he pitches out of his chair and hits the hardwood. This is how we found him, five years ago. This is how he has remained ever since. Frowning, clutching, keeling over. Frowning, clutching, keeling over.

“How are you?” I murmur to him. “Class went well. I missed you.” He falls to the floor with a whump and a wheeze of thin air in response.

“Don’t talk to him,” my mother says, sharply, from the top of the stairs. Her shadow looms down the hallway and into the kitchen, a creeping darkness. It was her idea to keep him here by the door, where he would not be in the way. Even the floorboards below his chair are stained from years of never-cleaning, because she will not let me get close enough to keep his resting place swept or washed.

She’s waiting for another five years to pass, when he’ll legally be dead instead of this flickering, pulsing, haunting thing in our hallway. A ghost still inhabiting the skin of her husband’s body. After five more years, when he is a decade dead, we can collect on his insurance and have him committed away to a storage facility, a loud and panicked place full of the cycles of death repeating and echoing and howling their final moments out through the walls. Most occupants are frozen in moments of horror unwitnessable—burning, drowning, bleeding out, being stabbed, shot, strangled. Sometimes they are wheeled out to serve as evidence in court, but most never leave their cubicles. It is a place where things go to be at unrest forever.

A handful of months after he died, we held a funeral for him. His body bucked inside the coffin; I remember the deadened thump of his shins striking hard against the wood. There was blissful silence in the car ride home, save for my mother’s weeping. Afterwards, she abandoned his ghost beside our back door like a shed snakeskin and decided that he was really, truly gone instead of what he is: a record skipping, skipping, skipping.

“Right,” I say, as I wipe my shoes on the mat. “Good afternoon, Mom.” When I leave the hallway I feel his eyes on me, blinking watery and greyish like the bulging gaze of a dead fish.

Tonight, on the news: a man fell into an industrial woodchipper in northern Alberta, and when they scraped his pieces out of the gears, they found that the fragments remained motionless mush. He is the first person to die cleanly, without even one repetition, in many years. It’s like he has no soul at all.

Scientists are talking again about the exact point of partition where the fragmented body stops repeating. They take the bodies of death row prisoners and chop them up into tinier and tinier pieces until they can confidently say that the body stops moving when it is separated into pieces 1/64th of its original size. It is such a nice, even number, and I roll it around my head for hours afterwards, even as dawn peeks over the horizon with searching eyes.

The Pope puts out a statement—your soul goes to Heaven or Hell when you die, regardless of your body’s movements. Even as your mortal body remains twitching in your chairs or your deathbeds or your woodchippers, you turn up at the pearly gates. There is no soul housed within the defunct, fleshy shell you leave behind, even if it makes a convincing pantomime of living. It is a husk. This comes at great controversy: Some Catholics support burying their glitching dead deep underground, while others maintain that you must place them somewhere safe and visible, in case they ever do come back to life. Others, still, say that the dead have been half-raptured and we should grind their bodies into pulp to finish the job. My mother is indecisive on the matter. She paces in front of the TV, biting an anxious hole in the centre of her lip.

Nobody grieves the man in the woodchipper. He is a martyr for our learning, sacrificed so the rest of us might live on knowing a little more about ourselves. His family does not have a body to bury, even if they wanted to.

Downstairs I hear him, seizing, crumbling, falling down. It is like the hum of the refrigerator or the microwave, a distant, static sound that crackles faintly in the background. For months after he died, I could barely sleep—still haunted by the sound of his breathing. His wheezing, failing body crept up the stairs and slid over the threshold into my room, his death sticking to me, cloying, desperate, trying to steal my warmth. Delirious and half-awake, I found myself wishing he would just go through with it, so the rest of us could rest.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I am glad he is still here. His presence keeps my grieving dull and half-hearted, which is how I prefer it.

The house shakes slightly when he lands, even though his body has very little weight to it. Putting your foot out to stop him does nothing but bruise your shins as he bounces off and hits the floor, puddling, a remnant of a man. Nothing can mute the sound of his dying. My mother tells me to ignore it, to make it a rhythm, to dissipate it entirely. I try. I hum tunelessly as I cook dinner, to drown it out, to harmonize with his stuttered breath.

One month after we start dating, Kris requests that we stop meeting up at my place.

“I can’t focus,” she says, with a pained expression. “I’m sorry, but I can’t, not with … with …”

What she cannot say in words she says with a plaintive gaze and crooked frown. Her thick eyebrows furrow together until they smear in the middle, and I am struck with remorse for bringing her into my morbid house with its distant, ugly music. I have forgotten that death is still foreign and horrible for most people, for people who aren’t used to witnessing it happening alongside their downstairs bathroom and their open-plan kitchen and their back doormat.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I take her hand, hold it tightly. Her rings knock against mine like wind chimes. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I gather up my disappointment while she locates her boxers where they have fallen and gotten lodged between the bed frame and the wall. On the way out we have to pass him. His shadow lurches forward like it’s reaching for us. In my peripheral I see Kris screw her eyes shut, her shoulders tensed and subtly shuddering. To me, he is just a memento hidden away in the alcove, like someone else might keep an urn or a portrait. He is just my father. But I like Kris, with her uneven smile and ragged buzz cut and uncommon fondness for me, so I let it go.

From then on, we only ever meet at her apartment or elsewhere—the arcade, the cafe, the Thai take-out place near our university—because my house is all coloured and fogged with the sound of his dying. It seeps through the walls and bleeds under shut doors like a guilty conscience or a ticking clock.

There are ways now to kill animals so that their bodies come out looking like they are sleeping, just as still and motionless as corpses were before. Cows, chickens, pigs, they all die silent. Perhaps this nightmare was made for them, to force our world to learn how to kill them kinder. No more slaughterhouse bolts to the forehead, no more broken necks. The general consumer doesn’t like meat that twitches and bucks on the grill.

Never fish, though. The fish refuse to die still and motionless—they writhe and thrash, they kick, they flutter, until the seafood aisle of the supermarket is a beating, gnashing symphony of small repeating deaths.

I stopped eating fish and my mother followed soon after. Canned tuna sales went way up, where the squirming was down to a minimum and the body’s rituals were barely visible at all. The sushi restaurant near my house pivoted towards an emphasis on prawn tempura and imitation crab and cucumber rolls. My aunt started serving her steamed fish chopped into very small pieces, so small it didn’t look like fish anymore, even when the uncles voiced their loud protest.

It never bothered my father. Chew it well, that’s all. If you didn’t care before, then why do you care now? It’s dead already. It just pretends to be living, to trick you. To make you think that’s what it is.

I am beginning to see the resemblance between us. When I was born, I was black-haired and black-eyed. Now all of me is slowly lightening to match him. His body in the alcove is better than any photograph to compare myself against—I look in the mirror and see these very same eyes rolling back and fluttering closed as he plummets to the ground, his heart stopping in midair. I study him while he’s falling, looking for the parts that are the same. I have the bow of his mouth, the wispy eyebrows, the uneven front teeth.

My short hair only worsens our uncanny mirroring, but growing it out makes me very sad and quiet, so my mother no longer asks me to. Sometimes she catches my eye through the darkened hallway and her lips part on a gasp, or a question. She is seeing double. Perhaps she thinks I am him, finally gotten up from that chair, finally proved my right to the land of the living. I see the way her eyes well with tears, I see the hand that flies to her rosary. My body might as well be rotting, clouding over, filling up with death until I am ripe and bursting.

I come into the habit of smiling, when my mother and I make eye contact. A reflexive, stilted, simple smile, the kind my father never wore. It wedges open our differences, makes them obvious. When I step blindly out into the road with my chunky headphones on, a yellow light beaming down like a warning, I smile widely in case I am struck by a passing car. I hold the smile until I reach the opposite concrete shore—if I am killed here, if this is the moment I will wear forever, then I want to look like a photograph my mother would be proud to frame, rather than something stumbling, shameful, gasping, croaking, doubling over. I want to be something she would keep close.

There’s a service you can order through the hospital to arrange your death in a way that is peaceful and still, so close to corpse-like that you might be mistaken for one if not for the soft rise and fall of your breathing. They slide a needle into your wrist while you sleep, your eyes fluttered shut and your mind dreaming of soft latex gloves, and they turn you into something to be wrapped up in silk and carried home, embalmed by time rather than formaldehyde.

There are other methods. If you know you are dying, you can go down to the beach and set up a little diorama to live inside for your final moments. Settle down with the warm sand prickling under your palms. Watch the fish jump and scatter. Watch the sun sink below the water. Wait for your time to run out. Laugh and smile to increase your chances of being captured like this: radiant and alive. When your family drives down to get you, they can pick up your flickering, echoing, stuttering ghost and bring you home to decorate the mantle or the guest bedroom or the attic.

You can be a photograph or a postcard. You can sit on your beach towel and laugh, smiling bright as the setting sun, beautiful forever.

Kris was a vegetarian before the echoes, but her parents are still stumbling through a transitional period. Tonight they have prepared a tofu steak, oozing water and oil where it hasn’t quite been grilled all the way through. It feels like the kind of meal they prepare for guests but would not eat otherwise. Her mother apologetically calls it an experiment but despite its half-finished texture, the marinade smells rich and well-seasoned in a way that makes my mouth swim. It is my first dinner with them, and I am eager to please.

They dole out even portions of steak and rice and sauteed vegetables for the four of us, mother, father, Kris, and I. Anxious, I glance back towards the living room where Kris’s grey-haired grandmother is still sleeping in her leather armchair.

I catch Kris by the sleeve of her patchy jean jacket as we file out of the kitchen. “What about paati?” I ask. Kris stares at me like I’ve sprouted gills.

“Paati’s dead,” she hisses. Her gaze darts to her parents, as if afraid they will overhear. “That’s her echo.”

I look back in shock. Now I see the signs: the way her breathing stutters when she hits the end of the loop. The way her eyes are always fluttering on the edge of being closed. Still, she must have died so quietly, so barely-dead at all. Hours ago, Kris introduced her to me in a whisper. At the time I had thought she was just sleeping. I thought Kris was speaking softly so as not to wake her—but there is nothing to wake.

My gaze stays on the body of Kris’s grandmother throughout dinner. My back is to the wall, and I can see her through the gap between Kris’s mother’s and father’s chairs. She hovers between them like a ghost or a marble white-haired Mary, the kind my mother keeps on the mantle. Her eyes are nearly shut, a glimpse of milky sclera shining through like the beam of a lighthouse, and her lips sometimes part on a breath, or maybe a question.

The family eats and makes gentle conversation and yet I am fixated on the room over, where two withered hands lie quietly on their leather armrests, a thumb softly moving back and forth. I swear she is watching me. Terror feels like a knife against my sternum, precise and impersonal.

“Pass the rice, please,” Kris says, and I turn away. I try to focus on the warm plate in my hand, Kris’s fingers brushing against mine on the sweating underside of the ceramic—but if I strain, I can hear her grandmother’s shaky lungs, rattling, whistling, breathing their last.

Today, I come home from class and my father isn’t by the back door. I search the whole first floor before I hear him faintly—the muffled whump and groan, the sound of his heart stopping, the faint pausing of his breath—through the floorboards.

The basement is cobwebbed thickly like it is resisting entry. I brush their cloying strands aside and aim my phone’s harsh flashlight at the stained carpet in the centre of the room, where a sheet covers what is left of my father. I watch him fall to the ground, then spring up again, over and over and over. With the lights off, he is a sheet ghost. A hostage. A decoration. The basement door closes behind me.

We eat dinner in complete silence, save for the sound of his distant, muted dying. Mary watches from the mantle. My mother mouths towards the salt and I pass it to her, witnessing the way her hands shake when she takes it from my own trembling fingers.

I don’t think I ever saw my father laugh.

I board the bus with a frozen cut in a plastic bag. The halves of the salmon move like they are still slipping through the water, which brings me consolation. They died alive, flashing through the current like a knife, their eyes bright and glowing under the sun.

Tonight, they thaw in the refrigerator, shards of ice crackling as the body gently twists from side to side. I wait with my back to the oven, head pressed against the glass, until the halves are fresh and mobile again. On the cutting board I cube the swaying body, carding its pieces into hot rice and green onion. I am too tired to wait longer for a marinade, so I pour a quick sauce over the bowl, douse it in sesame seeds, and wipe up the flecks that splash across the counter. Against the ceramic, the pink-orange cubes dance for me, still enacting, still performing. I am almost convinced. Almost tricked.

My mother watches from the doorway but says nothing.

It is still wriggling, twitching, as I lift it to my mouth and bite down. Salty, too ocean-like, too much soy sauce. The fish in my bowl is dreaming of the sea. I chew it well, until it is mashed apart and separated, until its frantic pieces come to rest, until the ghost is loosened from the body and laid to sleep forever. Then I swallow. Underneath me, my father falls from his chair, sheet-covered and still dying, dying, dying, over and over again.

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Ashlee Lhamon

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

“So Dad coughed up his liver today,” my sister, Vivi, says.

“Again?” I ask.

We are in the kitchen of my parents’ home, sweeping the fragmented shards of my mother’s hip bone from the floor. She was cooking, and distracted, and her thoughts had wandered to the recreational gymnastics she had loved as a girl. Her hip is sensitive—“You have a very thought-reactive skeleton,” the doctor told her—and imagining gymnastics meant the hip wanted to twirl and snap and stretch, and it did. All over the kitchen floor.

This happens a lot. “Why can’t you control your thoughts?” my father nags her, constantly. “Everything grows back in a few days, and it’s not your problem,” my mother counters. At night, she lays back in her bed, hip-less or shoulder blade-less or spine-less, and dials the reality TV loud enough to drown out my father’s snoring from his separate bedroom.

“Isn’t this the fourth time this month?” I ask Vivi.

“Yeah,” she says. “But he thinks it’s maybe good, as long as it regenerates. So he can keep tabs on the health of his liver. He inspects it every time it comes up.”

“How much has he been drinking?” I ask.

“None, as far as I know,” she replies.

“Did you get a look at the liver?”

“No. He’s a squirrelly fucker. He wrapped it up in his jacket, like, immediately.”

We deposit the hip shards in the tin can my mother reserves for these incidents. It is a recycled red bean paste can. If you lean in and sniff, you can still smell the red bean paste. There is a larger tomato sauce can for larger bones. That can has been around longer and the tomato sauce smell has washed out. I have considered buying my mother a special bone bag, a medical-grade one lined with regrowth powder to speed up the regeneration process, but I know it would likely sit, unused, in the bottom drawer of her nightstand where she keeps all the gifts she receives and promptly forgets.

I sometimes feel like the more useful the gift, the less she cares; last Christmas, Vivi bought her a beautiful set of mahjong tiles etched with blue and pink lilies. “To play with your friends,” my sister had pitched, because my mother hosts a game every Saturday night. I look over to the mahjong table in the living room now. It is still littered with the sticky, generic green and white tiles my mother has owned since before my birth.

“Do we need to stay over?” I  ask     .

It is the question we have both been holding in since we arrived. The twenties—late for me, early for my sister—is an awkward phase for parent-child relationships. It is the muddle of the role reversal, from child as dependent to child as leader, caretaker. The last thing we want is to make our parents feel coddled, but we have the strength of youth, the know-how of modern technology, the advantage of native language in this country. Even if my mother brushes off every attempt to help her with her blankets and her loose bones, and my father grunts and “forgets” to swallow the pills we obtained for his high blood pressure, it is better—safer?—if we stay. Just so we can properly tuck her pillow under her neck when she is asleep. So we can crush and dissolve the pills in his Coca Cola.

And yet. I look out the window. We both had to drive over an hour to be here. It is night, black and velvet, the shade of curtains in a speakeasy, the sleeve of an evening jacket, the taste of that third espresso martini. We cannot keep staying. We have lives in the city. Vivi has a girlfriend who has flown halfway across the country to see her, who is only here for another day. I have to feed my cat, and I want a drink.

“We should stay,” Vivi says, and she gives me a look.

“Fuck,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Fuck,” I say again.

“I can take the air mattress,” she says.

“You better.”

Not that the futon couch is a significant improvement, but at least it doesn’t deflate slowly as you sleep, until you are basically lying on a plastic sheet on the hardwood floor when you wake up. We unpack the air mattress in the living room and then sit together on the couch to watch it inflate. It barely fits in the space between the TV and my father’s coffee table, the one he built from the cheapest wood he could buy at Home Depot; he was on a carpentry kick maybe ten, twelve years ago?

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. And, “I hope the air mattress fan thing isn’t waking the parents up.”

“They’re usually dead to the world after organ stuff,” I say. “We’re fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You wanna sleep or do you want to talk?”

***

Vivi started dating her girlfriend, Alanna, about three months ago. They met online, but not through a dating app. There is this forum called BodyTalx for people with abnormal organ issues. Vivi has been reading the threads for years, but only made her first post—something generic and supportive, Vivi is paranoid about sharing her own problems on the Internet—six months ago. Alanna replied to it.

Alanna is Frozen, one of the more common abnormalities. Her organs never leave her body. She does a lot of activism within the abnormal organs community, but she is not in-your-face about it. She replies to posts on BodyTalx if she has helpful information, or she organizes meet-ups for people in the same city. But she also works full-time as an in-home aide for a wealthy elderly couple, whose care routine—baths, massages, infusions, PT—makes what Vivi and I do for our parents seem piddling. I admit, I do not know much more about Alanna beyond her work and how she met Vivi. She seems like a good person.

This is the third Frozen individual Vivi has dated. I think she has a type.

For a while, we thought Vivi was Frozen, too. She turned twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and still no internal body parts had shaken loose or slid, inopportune, to the floor. My father, who had struggled with liver permanence issues since he was in his twenties, told Vivi to consider it a blessing. “It’s a pain in the ass. Just look at your mother.”

When Vivi was sixteen, she stayed after school on a February afternoon for physics extra help. Her teacher, Mr. Halstone, was a pudgy white man in his early fifties. He had a cookie jar on his desk that was always filled with snickerdoodles, and he brought emotional support stuffed animals for his students to put on their desks during exams. He was Vivi’s favorite teacher.

There was another student at extra help that day, but they left earlier than Vivi. So for about an hour, it was only Vivi and Mr. Halstone in that half-lit classroom, the blackboards streaked with eraser marks, chalk dust floating in the air, her sneaker squeaking as she ground its sole into the gray tile floor, him at his desk grading papers, her working on a test revision, questions and answers occasionally flicking  back and forth between them.

At around 3:45 PM, Vivi heard a squelch. She looked up. Mr. Halstone sat motionless in his chair. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale. There was something red and pulsing on the desk before him; it was the only flash of red amongst paper white, pen black, textbook blue, wood brown. “Mr. Halstone?” Vivi asked. She went to him. As she approached, she realized  the red pulsing thing, shining wet, spider-webbed with arteries and veins, hiccuping through little tubes, spasming, was his heart.

“Oh,” Vivi said. Heart separation was rare. Vivi had never seen a heart out in the open like this.

When she told me the full story, years later, she confessed that she had always felt an urge toward organs. Every time an intestine unraveled in a coffee shop, or a stomach bulged free at Thanksgiving dinner. “It’s like a scent,” Vivi said. “Or like when you get into someone’s car and they have music playing but it’s turned way down low, and all you want to do is turn it up a little, just so you can hear what song it is, because you’re sure you’ve heard that song before.”

She had always wanted to get closer, she said. Of course, you cannot lay hands on someone else’s organs unless they are family or they need assistance, so Vivi had kept her urges to herself. But suddenly, that day in that classroom, she could reach out and touch. Mr. Halstone’s heart, presented on a platter of student exams. Fresh blood oozed from little pink valves, soaking through her classmates’ answers. She inhaled, iron and ecstasy. She exhaled. She felt an overwhelming sense of shame. She had never felt so hungry.

“Something about the heart,” Vivi told me. “No other organs affect me so much that I can’t control it. I guess it’s symbolic. The heart is like, the most of a person. And knowing it was his heart. Someone good? I just—”

She said she could not help herself. And when she was done, the slimy taste of flesh still lingering in the back of her throat, her teeth sore from all the chewing, she saw his phone, face up on his lap. Text messages from his wife. The first, a half hour ago, right before his heart separation: She was at the hospital, they had found something in one of her breasts, please don’t panic. But could he meet her at the hospital? And could they get takeout for dinner afterward, maybe KFC?

And more recent:

Could he let her know he’d seen the message?

Was he still at school?

Was he on his way?

Checking in again to see if he was on his way?

His body was so still, his stare so vacant. Vivi felt shame turn to panic. Organs only regenerated if the source matter was still around. What did it mean if his source matter was gurgling in her gut, acid and bacteria breaking it down—was she going to digest and shit out his heart the next day? Had she killed him?

Sobbing, she grabbed his phone and texted HELP to his wife. Then she grabbed her backpack and ran from the room, through the maze of halls, out the front doors of the school. She could barely find her car in the parking lot, and then it was drizzling as she drove home, the roads were slushy because it had snowed the night before. By some grace, she did not crash. I remember her charging through the front door and collapsing on the couch, my mother screaming and asking if she was hurt, where had all the blood on her face come from? And Vivi explained that she had hurt somebody else, and my father guided her through deep breaths and declared there was no use panicking yet. There were no cameras in the classroom or at school. Mr. Halstone might very well be fine. I was put in charge of Googling whether organs regenerated after they were ingested. My mother helped Vivi to the bathroom. Vivi stepped into the shower fully clothed. The last traces of her crime peeled in red flakes off her chin and dissolved in a swirl down the drain.

Mr. Halstone lived, in the end. I guess source matter is still source matter, even if it is floating in chunks in someone else’s stomach. I think his wife called the police and when they saw the blood stain where his heart had sat, they assumed it had already regenerated. No one caught Vivi. No repercussions, even, except that Mr. Halstone quit teaching and she had to finish her year of physics with a terrible substitute. Vivi never saw him again. There was a rumor around the school that his temper had changed. Mood swings, people said. Almost like a teenage girl. He became some sort of Tumblr addict, but I never managed to find his account.

Our parents took Vivi to a couple specialists, changing the story slightly to say she had eaten my father’s heart. No useful insights. It was considered a one-off, perhaps desperation on the part of a clearly Frozen child who wanted to shed organs like everyone else. Or it was the father, right? Perhaps Freudian. Our parents told her to keep it secret, to be grateful no one knew and to never do it again.

“Were there other times?” I asked.

“Two. Both exes.”

Rarely does someone else’s heart just appear in front of you. Falling in love is one of those few, belly-up moments.

***

“Her heart was just out on the dining table yesterday,” Vivi says. She lies on the now-inflated air mattress, limbs spread eagled and dangling off the sides. “I had to make up some excuse about law school stuff and basically run out of there.”

I sit slouched on the couch. “Does Alanna know?” I ask. “About…”

“No. She thinks I’m just Frozen.”

“Hold up,” I say. “I thought Alanna was Frozen.”

“Oh. Yeah. She thought so too.”

“Oh. Wow. Um.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was like. But I guess we’ve heard of cases like this? Where someone just needs to feel, um, safe enough or something?”

I stare at Vivi. She stares back. I feel bad and I know she also feels bad, but maybe it is because of how bad we feel that we both start laughing.

Vivi  rolls herself away from me. Her knees curl to her chest. She shakes. “This isn’t funny,” she manages. I am too busy biting my lip to keep the noise down to reply. I do as she has and close into a ball, forearms around shins, thighs against breasts.

“Oh god,” I finally say, raising my face to gulp air. “This poor woman.”

“I know,” Vivi cries. “She feels safe? With me?”

“She’s in the wolf’s den.”

“She literally could not be less safe.”

“Well, I mean, you could be an ax murderer. Like you’re not going to kill her—”

Vivi sits up. “It’s basically the same thing,” she says.

“What do you mean? Mr. Halstone’s having a great time on Tumblr—”

“Cherry! Oh my god! You are literally the worst.”

***

I am not very good in dire situations.

When I was thirteen and Vivi nine, my father was hospitalized for his liver impermanence. The maximum time the human body can work around a missing organ is eight hours. Most organs regenerate within an hour. We were approaching hour ten. My father’s skin, normally that pasty eggshell shade common to Chinese computer scientists, had yellowed with jaundice. He had struggled on the walk from his bedroom to the car, needing to pause twice to catch his breath. I could tell by my mother’s shrill tone that she was scared, even though the words that left her mouth were “girls we have nothing to worry about and we’re going to the hospital in case there’s something wrong, everything is fine,” and “Jesus if you just didn’t eat so much fatty meat this would not be happening.”

Vivi cried the whole drive to the hospital and all the while my mother and I spoke to the lady at the check-in counter—my mother spewing rapid Chinese, me doing my best to translate. But Vivi did not cry the same as the other children in the waiting room, whose wails and sniffles were loud, whose panic was mucus-thick and running down their faces. Vivi stood quietly; you would not even know from her posture that she was upset, only if she turned toward you and you could see the flush of her cheeks and the tears that beaded on, then dripped from her lashes. Anime-style tears, I remember thinking; I was going through a Naruto phase.

The hospital staff saw to my father right away. Organ emergencies are considered extremely deadly, especially a vital organ like the liver. At the time, we did not know that. As we sat in the waiting room, my mother fingered the thin silver cross she wore on a chain. She was not Christian, but many of our Chinese family friends were. She liked the idea of wearing a talisman—even better if it invoked a deity that our community considered benevolent—and she had also mentioned that the cross paired nicely with most of her outfits. “Be grateful,” she whispered to Vivi and I. “Nanhui Auntie and her husband sat for almost three hours here before they would see him for his eye problems. We are very lucky.”

It was almost 9 PM by that point. We had school the next day. I must have had a test, because I had brought a textbook—geography?—to the hospital and was trying to read it. Vivi was asleep in the chair next to me, her head heavy against my shoulder.

“One of you should be a doctor,” my mother said. “Your father has such bad habits he will not get healthier.” I kept quiet. I felt Vivi wake up beside me, but she also said nothing. My mother went on. “And we wouldn’t have to wait like this. Or pay the hospital. Maybe both of you should be doctors.”

She looked at us, waiting for a response. I said, “Maybe you should be a doctor.” She had studied biology before she married my father, before he had moved them across the world to America where he had a job lined up and where all of her education—top of the class in high school, bachelor’s degree—was rendered useless. Her potential was a sore point in our household. It was late night, I was simultaneously tired and on edge, I was looking to provoke.

To my surprise, she did not anger. “It is too late for me,” was all she said. “If I was twenty years younger, maybe.”

Vivi, sensing a melancholic shift, quickly offered, “I’ll be a doctor.”

“You don’t even know what that means,” I said. I poked at a hole in the knee of her tights, which were dirty cream and dotted with black flowers.

“I know what a doctor is,” Vivi said. “They make sick people better.”

“You have to go through so much school to be a doctor,” I retorted. “You don’t even like—”

“It’s a very noble profession,” my mother said. “You’ll be a good doctor, Vivi.”

Vivi gave my mother a big toothy smile. My mother smiled back.

Fifteen minutes later, the attending called our family in. Vivi and my mother rushed ahead. As I packed away my study materials, I noticed a long sliver of ivory on my chair. I bent to peer closer, but felt my left side squeeze in on itself. I looked again at the object on my chair. One of my ribs had fallen out. “Cherry!” my mother called. I shoved the rib between the pages of my textbook and threw everything in my bag. I ran after her.

This was only the third time I had ever shed a body part. The other two had been my stomach and my esophagus, both common organs, both food-related incidents. I did not know what it meant to lose a rib. I could not remember hearing of anyone losing a rib before, although I was sure there were stories, basically everything had been lost by someone at some point. I wanted to tell my mother but then we were in my father’s hospital room.

“He’s stable for now,” a nurse was saying. “But we’ll keep him overnight to monitor. It’s unlikely, but there’s a chance the liver will reject. Sometimes these situations are akin to organ failure. It’s not an issue with regeneration, but with the organ itself.”

“What is she saying?” my mother asked me. “What does that mean?”

My father groaned from his bed. On a tool cart next to him was a metal tray flecked with purple gunk and green powder: liver residue, I presumed, along with the regrowth powder and whatever else they had lathered on it. Vivi was holding his hand. I ignored the hollow, stretchy feeling in my side where my rib should be. I did my best to translate for my mother and then walked to my sister.

“Do you think Dad will die?” she asked.

I had no idea.

“We need to do everything we can to help him not die,” Vivi continued. “I’m not gonna sleep tonight so I can watch him. Or maybe we can take turns not sleeping. But I think Mom’s really stressed, so I don’t think we should make her take a turn.”

None of that makes a difference, I thought. I reached out and squeezed her elbow.

“And we need to be better,” said Vivi. “I’ll do the dishes every night. I know Dad hates dishes. Maybe you could help Mom cook dinner more? And we should help Dad with yard work whenever he asks.”

She was crying again. I could tell that this time was going to be ugly, so I tucked her face into my chest. I felt her mouth open in a silent scream, a puff of hot air through my sweater.

I considered my father. Lying on his back, with the bulk of him hidden under a white sheet, he was small. I imagined that sheet sliding up to cover his face, the heart rate monitor to his left flatlining. Pandemonium from the hospital staff, like in the TV dramas. A kind nurse helping my shocked mother sit down. And then the body being wheeled away, the stares from everyone in the hall and from other rooms, because they, too, saw the sheet over the head, they knew what it meant, they wanted to “check on us” but really they wanted to observe us in our grief, at our lowest, so they could reassure themselves that they were not us, or they could better prepare themselves to be us.

And a week later, a month later, our amputated family at the dinner table. My mother picking at her rice and Vivi doing the same. I would not have helped cook, because we would have been eating a lot of takeout. Day to day drama flitting through my brain, like which teacher pissed me off or who got cast in the spring musical, but the predominant sensation would be shadow. His chair would still be at the table. People at school would know me as the girl whose father just died. Uneaten dumplings from friends and neighbors would clog the freezer. I would wonder who I would become without a father. Without his demand for a hug after work each night, without his stories about his pre-technology childhood, without his lessons on how to be fierce, to be strong as men even as he warned us away from strong-looking men, without his screaming arguments with my mother, without his obscene academic expectations and his almost witchy cures—“Walk five times around the house and your stomachache will go away”—and his misogynistic taste in action movies, without his love that fluctuated, one day brooding and conditional, playing favorites; but sometimes he would take me, just me, on a drive around the suburbs, and we would grab McDonald’s, and we would not talk much but I would sense he cared for me, a care as vast and unquestionable as the sky.

And then I imagined myself years down the line, a veterinarian or a marine biologist, my two aspirations back then, successful, sociable, well-adjusted. Over cocktails with acquaintances in cheap bars, or dinner with dates at trendy restaurants, it would slip out that my father had died when I was young. “Oh shame,” and other standard responses. We would quickly but naturally move on to lighter conversation topics. And maybe my companions would notice a lingering stiffness in me, an unfamiliarity with male habits or a disconcerting hyper-independence, little traits they could chalk up to, oh, yes, her father died when she was young.

But that would be the whole of it. Standing by his bedside in the hospital, picturing my future without him, I was quite sure that, if he passed, I would eventually be fine. I felt reassured. I took a deep breath.

Abruptly after, I felt like a piece of shit. What kind of daughter was I? This was a moment to be helpful, to be optimistic, to be bargaining with God or whatever else was up there for my father’s health and longevity. He was not even sixty years old yet. Souls that left their bodies before sixty became duan ming gui. Short-life ghouls. They approached the bridge to cross into the afterlife and were turned away; they had not completed what they were meant to complete on Earth. Stranded between worlds, they haunted. I did not want my father to haunt. I did not want to be haunted by my father.

But I felt certain of my powerlessness. What good was my optimism? Or my bargaining? If he was going to die, he would die. If not, he would live. I was a thirteen year-old girl. I was scraping by in Kumon math. I had no idea how to calculate the price of my father’s life, how many good deeds amounted to the debt of his survival.

So while my mother and my sister peppered the nurses with questions, rearranged the pillows, fretted about home care routines and setting reminders for medication, promised to save piggy bank money for regrowth powder, I sat in the chair by my father’s bedside and stared at his hands, which were folded over his stomach. His nails were shaped like my nails. Thin black hairs sprouted from the back of each finger. My chest burned, but I was unsure if it was emotion or just my rib regenerating.

***

“What should I do?” Vivi asks. She stares up at the ceiling from the air mattress. From the couch, I stare up at the same ceiling.

We have sobered. No more laughing. We have decided to check on our parents at midnight, in half an hour. We should be trying to get some sleep, but it is one of those nights where the prospect of the morning makes us want to slow time down.

I feel a little dumb, a lot like a child. I feel like Vivi’s older sister. These were the identities I inhabited in this house, and every time I return here I default to them. And I remember that I was not a particularly devoted child, nor a role model older sister.

“Vivi, I’m the last person you should be asking for advice,” I say. Vivi is the one in law school, with the nice girlfriend and the stable routine in the city. I spent my teen years in a video game haze, scraping into college and wasting my early twenties on acne-ridden, racially ambiguous cover band drummers, most of whom never gave me the time of day. My marketing job barely pays my rent.

“Give it your best shot,” Vivi says. “I’m desperate.”

“What a ringing vote of confidence.”

“You literally just said you suck at advice.”

“Fine. My advice is: I think you should break up with Alanna.”

A long pause from Vivi. “I know,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows. Maybe I am not so bad at this.

“But, like,” she continues. “I don’t know. I’ve tried a lot to get to the bottom of this, right? I know most abnormal organ conditions are biological, but some are psychosomatic, I think, like Mom’s. So, you know, why would a person have a heart eating problem? And I’ve thought about what happens to the other person when I, um, do it. How they come out a little different, with traits that mimic me. I was going through my Tumblr phase when Mr. Halstone happened, remember? And then with Gino becoming super anxious—I was stressed out of my mind when I was dating him because it was college application season.”

I hated Gino. He was a senior at the local college—my local college—when he dated Vivi, who was a senior in high school. Gino and I had macroeconomics together. He asked a lot of genuinely stupid questions, like whether it meant something that the supply-demand curve was blue on last night’s homework versus the regular black.

“So I guess,” Vivi says, “the root of the heart eating comes from wanting people to be like me? To like me? And sometimes I wonder— Fuck. This is going to sound so cheesy romantic. But maybe there’s someone out there who wouldn’t mind? Who loves me or admires me so much that they’d want to— That it’d be okay. Or that it’d happen and the person would come back to me the next day and be unchanged. Because they’re already like me. Our souls speak to each other. Or something like that.”

I sit with what she says. I do not want to mention that, from my observation, her victims do not just change to be like her; they embody a more extreme, even demonic version of her. Where Vivi was stressed about college applications, Gino now has debilitating anxiety and had to start both medication and extensive therapy.

“People already like you,” I say instead. “You don’t need to eat their hearts.”

I reach out a hand to her. She reaches back. Our arms are too short to bridge the distance between us, so I twinkle my fingers. She twinkles back.

“I know, she says. I just wish it was that simple.”

I want to tell Vivi that she is so easy to love. Her open face, her generosity, the way she is always in motion, always trying to help. Look at my mother, boasting at her mahjong games that Vivi calls her every other day. Look at my father, who meticulously reads the health magazines Vivi leaves for him because he cares that she cares. Look at Alanna, who laid her heart out on the kitchen table this morning. Who I have never met, but who I can imagine. Dark hair, dark eyes. A strong jawline. A surprisingly soft voice when she tells Vivi, I’ve never felt this way before. It’s okay. If you want to eat my heart, chew it to bits and swallow it down, I would sit here and I would let you.

***

I was in love, once, with someone I now call DCR. Duan chang ren. Duan, the character for broken, for breaking. Chang, intestines. Ren, a person. My mother once told me that in Chinese, there are lots of ways to say lover. Dui xiang, which translates to “opposite half.” Qing ren, like “dear one” or “beloved.” I call him duan chang ren because this construction of lover implies loss. It means you have loved so viscerally that it has ripped you open. Your lover was a knife to the stomach. My intestines spilled out for all the crying I did in his wake.

We met unremarkably. What is worth knowing about the relationship is that, in those early days, I found it hard to sleep. Almost nothing disrupts my sleep. I sleep like there is nothing in the world worth waking for. So I was concerned when the cottony oblivion of sleep became replays of our interactions, over and over. How he rested his cheek on one palm while he was thinking about something, sunk into a couch at a coffee shop. How he was in medical school, which made him objectively smarter than me, but he still asked for my opinion on world politics, and science, and the stupid decisions his friends made. How he had talked to his mother and mentioned I existed.

“We should date,” I told him the next time we met up. “Or we should never see each other again.”

“Those are the only options?” he asked. His nose twitched, the way it did when he found something funny.

“I’m losing sleep over this,” I said.

“You’re not used to actually liking anyone.”

I frowned. “No. But you don’t have to put it like that.”

It lasted a year. Not that long, I know. I am not sure I was ready for it. Happiness can be very overwhelming. And destabilizing. The time—seconds, minutes, hours—it took him to text me back became a determinant of my mood. The sight of him in bed in the morning could convince me to skip work. The nights I slept alone, my insomnia persisted. Love, whispered some sappy residue from my teen years, the influence of rom coms Vivi had forced me to sit through. Isn’t it wonderful? To stay awake and think of him. But I was also short on sleep. And that loose rib from my childhood kept rattling free, it was always on my bedside table, sometimes I clutched it to drift off, there was always that burn in my chest.

Maybe my body saw it coming, even if I did not.

“It’s just…med school is so busy,” DCR said. We were in my kitchen. It was a Saturday morning. I had thought we were just making coffee. “And I need to really prioritize how I spend my time,” he said. “And it’s just… I mean, where do you see this going?”

“I see myself with you,” I said. “I didn’t realize anything was wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said quickly. “But don’t you feel it? It’s not quite right, either.”

“Explain.”

“See! That’s what I mean. You’re so… abrupt.”

He had known I was abrupt since the day he met me.

“And you’re so… I know your parents aren’t a great model of a relationsh—”

“Don’t bring my parents into this.”

“But they’re—”

“This has nothing to do with my parents.”

“Fine. Okay. You just seem distant. All the time. I feel like I only get so much of you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out sounding like a question.

There was more. About how he wanted someone open, gentler. I was interesting and dynamic, but he deserved to be with someone who let him in, who made him feel loved, and it was okay that I was not that person, but he was holding out for that person. And it did not mean that I was not enough, just that we were different. Too different.

“Tell me what to do,” I said. “What do you need?” Did he want more affection? I could be nicer to his friends. I could cook dinner on the weekends. How could I earn him? My desperation was a third person in that room.

“Nothing,” he kept saying. “There is nothing you can do.” I am still mortified.

And in the middle of my degradation—to make everything worse—I felt it slide up my throat. It pulsed. Its movement reverberated to my skull, an oncoming headache. I almost choked on it, and then it was plopping to the floor, small, it looked so small.

“Is that…” DCR said tentatively.

I could not speak for the aftertaste of iron and embarrassment.

“I’m flattered,” DCR said. “But. Um.” And he just stared at it. He had said “flattered” but I could tell he was not. He was uncomfortable. What a gauche display of vulnerability, I read in his eyes. He pitied me. He did not want me. In that moment, I thought about Vivi. I wished he were Vivi. That he might find my heart irresistible to the point of consumption. But instead he wrapped it in a towel. He helped me sit down. He placed it in my lap.

“I’ll text you,” he said. He walked out the door.

When I recovered enough to grab my phone, I blocked his number. I reverted to the drummers.

***

My mother is asleep. We turn the TV off in her room—she was watching Love Is Blind with Chinese subtitles—and dial down the AC. Vivi checks the contents of the red bean paste can, which we have placed on her nightstand. “She’s pretty much regenerated,” Vivi says. I nod.

We head toward my father’s room. We can hear his snores from the hallway. Vivi puts a hand on my arm to stop me. She leans against the banister to the stairwell and digs her toes into the stained carpet. Next to her pinkie toe is a splotch of green paint from one of my elementary school art projects. Hanging on the wall across from her is a blown up photo of the two of us as teenagers, hideous, braces and acne and home haircuts.

“This place still smells like it did in our childhood,” she says. I know what she means. Like cooking oil and water mold. The house is old. Our parents are getting older.

“Are you going to tell them?” I ask her.

“No.” She sighs. “It’s fine. I have it under control. I’m gonna break up with Alanna and that’ll be problem solved.”

I say nothing, but she reads the question posed by my silence.

“No,” she says.

“You’re going to have to tell them eventually,” I say. “They think the heart eating stopped after high school. And you’ll feel better if they know about the girls—”

She covers her face with her hands. Her nails are sharp and painted ice blue. They are beautiful. “Or I could just…not,” she whispers. “They have enough going on.”

“You don’t know what will happen.”

“What I hope will happen,” she says, “is that the heart eating goes away. And I end up with a man. Then they’d never have to know. And they can be happy.”

I can tell by the slump of her shoulders that she is exhausted. I touch her forearm. “C’mon. Let’s get through the night.”

We enter my father’s bedroom. He is sitting up—he has never been a good sleeper—and he smiles when he sees us. “Vivi,” he says, “I read that magazine you left me.”

“Really?” she says. She smiles back. “What did you think?” She perches on the edge of his bed to listen to him ramble. I grab a Coke from the mini fridge in the closet and discreetly crush in a pill.

Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

After my mother died, Dr. Rostrow called to ask me if I wanted anything out of her brain. I almost hung up, but her green eyes were so intense, even on camera, that I let her talk. There were studies, she said. Ways that my mother could give something to a future she wouldn’t see. The doctor gave a brief summary of the options, and I asked for some time to think. Then I hung up, put my head on my desk, and cried for a long time.

When that was over, I called Suleiman. He did not pick up at first, and I used the moment to wonder what he was doing.

When his lean and perfect face finally appeared, my eyes filled with tears again.

“My love, what’s happened now?” His voice, a type of music. It was what first drew me to him. “Kevin, please, speak to me.”

“It’s Má,” I sobbed, and told him that my mother’s brain, the repository of her many secrets, could be used to contribute to a databank for smoother, better-constructed artificial intelligences. My husband’s face grew softer and softer through my tears as the details unfurled.

I also told him that once the procedure was done, we would have access to her memories. Not all of them, and not in detail, but a few strong sensory impressions from her very last moments of consciousness could be retrieved. They would be my property when all was said and done.

When I finished explaining all of this and was patting my hands blindly around my desk looking for tissues, he asked, quietly, “Do you think she would want you to do this?”

“Probably not.” I tried to laugh, and it came out as a waterlogged snort. “But I want to, anyway, I always wanted to know more about her, and now I never—maybe this is the only way I can.”

He stared at me through the screen. “Call the doctor back, then.”

“But what if … ?”

“But, what? What if, what? What if your mother had secrets? We already know that, I think.”

“No. What if—well, do you think I’ll understand what we get?”

Sule sighed. “Oh, my love. This isn’t about you, but it’s about you, isn’t it? Listen. Your Má was complicated, but she loved you. Call the doctor back.”

Consider the brain, Henry said, when I called him from a park bench in the Manhattan Skyway half an hour later. He and I had been friends since the roaring twenties, back when we both lived in dormitories, stress-eating after theory and composition, carrying cellos in giant plastic cases on our backs through the crowded Boston subways to get to subsistence gigs, wearing heavy boots to protect us from the rising brown water in the stations before it finally rose so high and stayed so long that they had to shut the whole shitty system down.

So many weddings and bar mitzvahs. Our first date—sort of—was eating more oysters than we could actually afford in some hole-in-the-wall in the North End, right after the best man at the reception tipped us each three hundred dollars, cash. It wasn’t because he was happy or wanted us to be. He’d seen us watching him, shadowed in a corner with a little too much longing in his round Irish face while the new bride and groom danced together. I’d wanted to take our bribe to East Boston for Colombian food, but Henry had never had it and didn’t want to try. When we were old, Henry told me, the taste of oysters would only be a memory, and so we should eat our fill now. A server lined them up in their shells in front of us, and I took too many shots of whiskey neat in between to get the slimy, briny feel of them out of my mouth. Then I went home with Henry.

The last time I’d slept with Henry was just before I moved to New York City, years before my award nominations and conductorship, but only a month to the day before I met another son of a climate refugee and somehow, impossibly, married him after only six weeks of hurried, intense courtship.

Henry, on the other hand, had been more traditional in his choices of vocation and lovers. He’d given up music and gone across the country to California to study neurobiology and was still there, teaching. He had a partner too; someone he’d met on the apps just before they fell out of vogue for good. The partner was a Korean national who studied in the same university department that Henry taught in. Ethics aside, my old friend seemed happy. When our paths had crossed in Chicago two or three years ago, we’d met up for a few too many drinks and Henry let drop that Ed, his partner, reminded him of me. I didn’t hold it against him. Henry had always been fascinated when my mother called, looking politely away from her stilted English greeting, then back, wide-eyed, when her voice unfurled into Vietnamese. He’d often ask me later what she’d said, and I would lie, ashamed to admit that I couldn’t understand most of it.

Henry had always been kind, curious, and self-assured in the way that Midwestern white guys could afford to be. I felt I owed him, even now.

So, when he told me to consider the brain and paused expectantly, I tried my best. He went on about prefrontal cortexes, neurones, and the angular gyrus, and I did my best not to blink too fast and let my mind wander away to the charts for the concerto I was drafting for the Philharmonic. They say that physicians make good musicians and vice versa. I never found that crossover aptitude in myself, although Henry had it in abundance. He had a good bedside manner, too, because he sensed my lethargy and abruptly shifted to a layman’s vocabulary.

In short, my mother, or rather her brain, was a good candidate for memory mapping. The brain is not a machine, Henry explained. Old science fiction was wrong. The brain is just that—a brain, a chunk of evolved meat singularly possessed of its own alchemical ways of filing and processing all of the stimuli that make a life. We understood almost none of what it actually stored sensorily, or how it did so. While early efforts at creating artificial intelligence relied on entirely algorithmic models of data, retrieval, and connection, it had quickly become clear in recent years that such models were too limited to achieve the sort of self-awareness and self-maintenance that a sustainable AI industry needed. Even neural networks, which modeled the organization of the brain, were lacking. If artificial intelligence was to live up to its name, it needed to be even more like its genuine counterpart. It needed memories that were also composed of stored and interpreted stimuli rather than endless datasets to make the information it acquired of any real connective use in the future. The pattern recognition that formed the basis of the technology needed to go to the next level, and my mother’s brain could help it.

There had already been the usual studies on animal brains, but they were no good. We didn’t understand enough of their modes of perception for the data to be of any use to researchers. So, human brains were being mapped, neuron by synapse, in an attempt to isolate and understand what made human thought so special, what made our methods of memory so unique. For me, the important thing was that the mapping lent itself neatly to a procedure that retrieved the lingering data of memories from recently living brain tissue. Turning the mapped data into real information was still highly experimental, but had yielded some good results rather quickly, as it turned out. They’d been able to retrieve images of faces, snippets of sentences, and something that might have been a smell.

My mother had only died yesterday. Her body was still in a morgue in South Philadelphia. I needed to make the decision today.

There were different types of output I could receive, Henry explained, so much more clearly than Dr. Rostrow had. In exchange for allowing my mother’s brain to be mapped, I could choose to receive a file containing her memories in one of two formats: language, or sensory impressions. Either would be snippets, incomplete. Both could offer me insight into who my mother was, insight that I’d lost the chance to gain from her myself.

No, he couldn’t tell me which one would yield the best results. The procedure was experimental, so it wasn’t one hundred percent certain that either would yield anything at all.

No, it wouldn’t deform or otherwise desecrate the body of my mother. She could still be cremated after, then her remains flown back to Cà Mau and buried in a narrow strip of whatever land remained there after the last typhoon, per her wishes. I could afford it. She deserved it.

No, he didn’t think the procedure was offensive to Buddhists, but Henry was an atheist Jew anyway, so what would he know about that? I wasn’t actually sure how much of a Buddhist my mother had been, come to think of it, so I let the question lie.

I thanked him and disconnected the call, staring off across the well-tended lawn of the Skyway and out over the Manhattan skyline. A fat squirrel ran into view, stopping to nibble at something hidden in the turf, and I watched it for a minute. The rhinos were all gone, the tigers nearly so. Every fruit bat was a potential endling, but squirrels were still going strong. Down below at ground level, their cousins the rats were also doing a brisk business.

The squirrel pawed at the grass, its gray-and-tan coat stretched tight against its round healthy body. Whatever it was eating, it was eating well. I wondered how I could find out, and then suddenly I thought, the squirrels are still alive but my mother is not. My eyes blurred with tears, and I tapped the display on my watch, pulled up the consent form that Dr. Rostrow had sent earlier, and quickly signed and sent it.

Then I went home.

Suleiman was not there when I arrived, and I busied myself cooking an enormous meal of pasta and salad and garlic bread, sipping a glass of Shiraz while stirring, chopping away with Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 playing on the immersive speakers integrated into the walls of every room of our apartment. Wine grapes were nearly as rare as fruit bats, these days. The bottle I was drinking had been one of several in a gift bag I received backstage at the Grammys, the year I was nominated. The year that I presented, the gift bag had had real chocolate in it. Suleiman would still sometimes bring up the memory of the taste.

My husband is a quiet man, always in a room five minutes before you know he’s there. I looked up from chopping mushrooms and he was still in his jacket, watching me fondly.

I smiled and poured him a glass of wine while he went to hang up his coat.

We sipped and chatted about this and that, and I dished up penne and scooped salad onto both plates, using a pair of wedding-gift tongs that we both loved to hate. They were shaped like cartoon hands and clashed horribly with our Christofle flatware. We ate quietly, and finally Suleiman cleared his mouth with his tongue and asked.

“Have you decided what to do?”

I nodded, a little too quickly. “It’s all done. I’ll get a file in a few days.”

He frowned. “I meant about the funeral. I’ll need to let the firm know. We should go to Philadelphia tonight, or tomorrow morning early.”

I hadn’t been able to think about that. How long can you wait before burying your only mother?

Sule saw the confusion in my face and shook his head. “Wait, what did you mean? What file?”

I explained again, this time using all of the words that I could remember that Henry had, and Sule leaned back as far as he could on the faux-leather-topped barstools we used as dining chairs.

“So, what were the choices again? Language, and … sensory impressions? You mean sounds, pictures, that sort of thing?”

“Yes. I’m hoping there will be sounds.”

“Why didn’t you pick language? Isn’t that sound?” In his bafflement, Sule sounded a little bit British. He’d picked it up in his years guiding soldiers around refugee camps in his native Sudan before he and his parents were brought to America on a special visa, much like my mother had been. He’d spent a while in London, too, first on an externship right after he’d passed the bar, then working at a foreign legal consultancy. Occasionally it resurfaced.

I tried not to glare at him and failed. “I don’t speak much Viet, and Má’s English was never that great. I don’t want to get back some … garble, something nobody can understand. Something I can’t understand, anyway.”

“But what if all you get back is a picture of her favorite color, or something? What does ‘sensory impressions’ even mean? What if it’s the taste of chocolate or the way her favorite sweater felt? How will you even be able to perceive that?”

I shrugged. “The doctor seemed to know what she was doing.”

“I don’t doubt that she did. I just think maybe having words would be easier.”

Instead of speaking, I stood up, gathered as many dishes as I could in one go, and turned my back to stack them in the dishwasher.

I heard Suleiman sigh, then mutter, “Never mind, then.”

I let a plate slip a little too carelessly and it clattered into the rack. “Where were you today? I thought you’d be home earlier.”

When I turned to ask again, my husband had left the room.

He texted me from wherever he’d gone to, later. Buy the tickets, my love. We’ll go see about your mother together, tonight.

I ignored it.

I learned that style of argument from my mother, although she wielded it differently. We never could talk easily, Má and me. She’d come to America without ever really wanting to, in her early forties. Learning English had never been a priority for her. Neither had motherhood.

What had been a priority was staying ahead of the water that steadily rose up over and past the coastlines of South Vietnam, drowning first the fields, then villages, and finally threatening entire cities. Má stayed for as long as she could, protesting the bioagricultural companies who swept into the country with some new variety of shrimp that could supposedly thrive in the deeper, warmer waters caused by the slow heating of the planet. They could only be cloned, not bred, so a new batch of shrimplets had to be bought every season to keep the drowning economy afloat.

My mother protested when the company gained a monopoly on seafood farming, and again when another company tore down the mangrove trees that tourists had once flocked to, under the pretense of banking their seeds and DNA in a lab somewhere. When peaceful protests went ignored, she joined a group of saboteurs, destroying farming equipment and shrimper tanks, becoming so good at it that her fellows looked to her for guidance and the company put a covert bounty out on her head. She was shot at once. She wasn’t hurt, but someone else was, someone she wouldn’t talk about. That was when she’d run, coming to Texas with absolutely no command of or interest in the language or culture she’d be immersed in for the rest of her life. She started in Arlington, where the Vietnamese community was still big enough that she didn’t really need to speak English. My mother was contrary, though. When I was a toddler, she moved us into a neighborhood that hugged the border between DeSoto and Glenn Heights, where almost everyone was Black.

I’d learned none of this from my mother. She never talked about herself, and when I tried to ask her, she deflected the way the biotech had when asked to account for the mangroves.

“What’s Vietnam like, Má?”

“Like me.”

“What do my grandma and grandpa look like?”

“Same, like me.”

“What’s the best thing about America, Má?”

A pause, then a rare smile. She’d never answer this question at all. Always, this conversation. The rhythm of it became our household liturgy.

Most of what I knew about my mother had been passed on to me by her best friend, my Auntie Ai, who’d come to Texas in her twenties. She was sweet and soft, nothing like my mother. Once, Má and I had one of our usual misunderstandings and she’d banged out of the house in an old-lady temper, leaving Ai and I behind, me wet-eyed, Auntie waving the end of her cigarette through the air in smoky little patterns. I was thirteen, Má fifty-eight. I had told her I wanted to go to baseball camp instead of music camp that summer. It wasn’t because I didn’t love music, I tried to explain. It was because I wasn’t yet sure if I loved baseball, too.

Anyway, we argued, Má made threats, and I stood over her, bigger already. We got louder and louder until she ran off, slamming the door, leaving me behind to be engulfed by Auntie’s secondhand smoke and stories. I think Auntie wanted to help me understand my mother. All she did was confuse me even more. She told me about exploding shrimper tanks, about a mysterious stranger with a bullet in their chest, about my mother’s flight to the US, by boat, by plane, who knew? She wouldn’t say.

At the end of it all, Auntie looked me in the eye and said, “I’m Chinese, you know.”

I shook my head. “But you speak Viet.”

She tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. “Ever wonder why?”

I shrugged and she shook her head at me, shrugged back. “You should be more curious.”

It was also Auntie Ai who’d told me that my father was Black. I’d known, of course. I’d seen myself. I did my best to fit in with the other Black kids at school, even if it widened the distance between my mother and me. But it was Ai who told me that the reason I’d never met the man was that he’d been twenty-one to my mother’s forty-five, a summer bartender in the restaurant she’d been hired to clean. I’m sure she never expected to get pregnant, and so she hadn’t tried very hard not to. Ai had never been able to get the whole story out of Má, but she thought he must have been a nice local boy whose parents could afford to get him into a school far away from oceans, where he’d probably learned a trade, met a woman his own age, and had a real home and family somewhere safe.

When I finally worked up the courage to ask, years later, my mother refused to say anything about my father, except that he might have done something stupid and wound up in FDC Houston like so many other people like him had. I needed to be careful not to turn out like that story, she said, and more like the first one.

My mother was old, a relic from another age, the same age as some of my friends’ grandmothers. She’d been born in the 1970s. Her racism, her anti-Blackness horrified my peers in the same way that her eco-liberationist past thrilled them. All of it horrified me, what I understood of it.

But that was my mother. If nothing else, she was complicated. When she insisted on leaving Texas at last, right after Auntie Ai died of lung cancer, I flew down on the spoils from my first real royalty check to help her pack. The double bed in the apartment they had shared held a mountain of pillows at its head and the shape of two small, soft bodies pressed together in its sagging center. Two pairs of cheap slippers were tucked under its foot. My mother made me wrap them up and throw them both away, then spent too long choosing a new pair when I took her shopping for her new home in Philadelphia’s Little Saigon. It had a single bed.

We hadn’t really spoken since then. I’d sent money, but never called. And now, she’d died.

The question of my mother’s brain, of her memories, intruded on my late-night work. The symphony I was trying to draft became a concerto, then a sonata, then degenerated fully into a cacophony. I pulled out my phone, scrolled through plane tickets. Air travel had been curtailed in the past year as some sort of last-ditch effort to slow the rising waters down. Ironic, when bigger, dirtier machines were being used to build the cities higher and higher, above the new and deadly tides. The richer cities, anyway. The rationale was that the machines and materials were longer lasting and used less fuel than airplanes, so their pollution mattered less. That rationale was a lie.

So was my belief that I could take my time going to see about my mother’s body. I was lucky to be rich, to be able to afford to travel by air and pay the penalty taxes for it. Still, I lingered over prices, telling myself it made no sense to make plans until I knew what her memories said. While I waited, the screen refreshed and the price of the flight my finger had been hovering over went up another six hundred dollars.

I thumbed the window shut and called Henry.

“What will her memories be like? Like, will it be a picture, a sound, a smell, what?”

He only paused for a moment before telling me he wasn’t sure. “Didn’t Doctor Rostrow explain all of that? If she hasn’t, you should call her and ask.”

“She hasn’t. And if I call her, she’ll explain, or she’ll send over a document and it will all be words that I don’t understand, and listen, I just need your help, Henry. That’s all.”

He hesitated long enough that I knew what he would say. “I don’t know. This isn’t really something I do. I’m familiar with the broad strokes, but I can’t say for certain what the memories retrieved will be like.”

“Will it be something I can understand?”

“I can’t really tell you that. Listen, Kevin. Isn’t this a little drastic? You don’t need to poke into your mom’s brain to find out about her. Why not just, I don’t know, go through her things? Talk to her friends? Maybe she kept a journal? Can you go through her phone? Maybe when you take her ash—uh, her back to her hometown, people there will remember her? I mean, I’m sure she has some old classmates or somebody you can talk to. You need something more solid, I think.”

“My mother didn’t keep anything, you know that.” Now that I said it, I wasn’t sure he did. He hadn’t really known her. My mother was rabidly anti-consumer, owning as little as possible and keeping only a few very important things. As far as I know, she didn’t keep a single relic of her life in Vietnam, not even a picture saved on her phone. I never had any idea what my grandparents looked like, and when I asked my mother, her only answer was the liturgy: “Like me.” I only had a handful of pictures of her.

“Anyway, Henry, I can do both. I want as much information as I can get.”

Henry tapped his lower lip before saying, “If that’s the case, have you given any thought to finding your father? He knew her, and he’s probably still living. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you even bring him up. Maybe it’s a good time to try to find him, now? You can afford a DNA test.”

I had no real response to that. We exchanged pleasantries, and when I hung up, I realized I wouldn’t be calling Henry again for a long while.

One of the reasons I fell in love with Suleiman was because he was the first person I met who wasn’t weird about my relationship with music or my mother. People often assumed that there was some sort of cultural trick or trauma behind my talent and drive, even now, in these years when America had thoroughly browned over like a well-cooked steak and people were beginning to speak about race factually rather than pejoratively.

There had been an interview, back when there had been rumors that I would be Oscar-nominated for a film score I’d composed. The film had been about the early days of the Silk Road, so I’d gone with Central Asian instrumentation, all dutors and tanburs. I was not nominated for the Oscar.

But there had been a feature on a pop culture site, a profile of me, the handsome Afro-Asian composer-conductor married to the chic Sudanese-American lawyer, living in the top levels of one of the most historically famous cities in the world after growing up in the Texas Mid-Cities. They’d conducted the interview in person, even inviting me into an office in a part of Harlem that had been upscale for a while but was considered unsightly when my mother was a girl.

That had been a long time ago.

The journalist had asked me if my upbringing had contributed to my music at all, and I, not understanding what she really meant, gave an answer about how I’d taken piano lessons since first grade in Texas, gone to a high school for the arts, went to conservatory in Boston, then landed a fellowship that eventually got me a seat in the New York Philharmonic, and so on.

She’d smiled wider and asked me if my immigrant mother had been a catalyst, or perhaps the driver of my ambition.

I blinked and stuttered and gave half of an answer that really was no answer at all, because I’d never considered it.

Then she asked me if it was hard to write classical music that was “steeped in the African-American tradition,” and I asked for the interview to end. My publicist told me when the article was published, but I never read it.

When I was six years old, I’d come home from school and asked my mother for piano lessons. She shrugged and held a rapid-fire conversation over my head with Auntie, and for my seventh birthday, an aging digital keyboard appeared in my bedroom. The next day, a high school kid named Richard appeared as well, to drill me in scales and chords and endless repetitions of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It wasn’t long before I was asking him for harder pieces, different chords. Richard began bringing sheet music from his high school band practices to our lessons, and I’d copy them over painstakingly on my tablet screen, memorizing the patterns that make a score, drinking them down digitally. I adored Richard. He had curly blond hair and told me that his great-great-grandfathers had been cowboys, and that one day he was going to become a composer. Best of all, we could understand each other perfectly. He spoke English, like my teachers and friends and after-school carers and the social worker who had visited once, murmuring at me in low conspiratorial tones while my mother sat frowning in a corner. After eating his way through the food Auntie Ai left out for our afternoon snack—reheated cha gio, salt-dried slices of melon, a surprisingly good cornbread she’d learned from one of my friends’ mothers—Richard would lope off to stay cool, and I’d sit and play for hours. We didn’t have the space or the budget for a bench, so the keyboard lived at the end of my bed, where I’d stack a few blankets to lift me up the extra inch or so that let me play comfortably.

I’d know it was bedtime when my mother’s slight shape darkened the door to my room in our trailer. She’d lean against the jamb, still wearing her blue uniform vest, her heavy gloves tossed on the floor beside her. Driving a forklift was hard work. Ai had gotten her the job. The company had just invested in sustainably powered lifts and a climate ethics agreement, otherwise my mother would not have worked there.

There was an evening when I looked up into the dark doorway and was surprised to see Má smiling. My fingers boldened, and I began the movement I was playing over again, sitting up straighter, rolling my body into it.

My mother—my angry, displaced, formerly notorious old lady of a mother—began to dance. Her smile widened, her arms lifted, and she closed her eyes and twirled, slowly, carefully, spinning in the narrow doorway to my bedroom.

I played and played until I ran out of notes, and she came and sat on the end of my little twin bed and asked me what I was playing.

I shrugged. “I dunno. Just something I made up.”

Her mouth opened wide. She reached out and tangled her fingers in the curls over my eyes that I had brushed there, like Richard’s. “Really? That’s good. So good.”

She smiled and I looked at the floor, grinning. When I looked back up, my mother’s face was serious, her eyes sad.

“Show me something. I want to play.” Now she sounded angry, and I was confused. Her hands were large for someone her size. I took them in my own small ones and placed them on the keyboard. I pressed the pad of my first finger into the space between the first two knuckles of my mother’s, and together, we played a middle C.

Her body relaxed a little, and she smiled. I pressed on her second finger, and together we played a D. Then an E, an F, and all the way upwards through the C major scale and back down.

My mother lifted her other hand to the bass clef notes and nudged me aside. She carefully splayed her thumb and pinky finger apart, played a G major chord, closed her fingers to play a C, then rolled her fingers, one by one, across the notes of the chord.

I don’t remember what I said. Surely it was something positive. I was only seven, and my mother was my world, necessary and incomprehensible. It must have been something adoring and naïve, something a seven-year-old says when he discovers his mother can do a little of what is, to him, the most amazing thing in the world.

Whatever it was, was wrong. My mother’s hands faltered, tried for another chord, missed it, tried again. The softness in her eyes turned brittle. Her hands raised and lowered, beating a ruckus out of my cheap little instrument’s keys and I covered my ears and squealed because for a split second I thought that my mother was going to destroy my most precious thing. She didn’t. Instead, her face drew into furrows. Her short hair was still a little sweaty, stuck to her head in a band over her ears from the pressure of the safety goggles she wore at work. She snapped something at me in Viet that I didn’t understand and stormed out of the room. After a moment I could hear the fridge open and slam shut, and seconds later, the noise of her talking to Auntie Ai on the phone.

That softness followed by a sharp snap became my memory’s strongest vision of my mother. Even now when I thought of her, I thought of a pleased expression followed by a sudden twist into a fury I could never understand or predict. At my first piano recital, plink-plonking through a country western tune that I had begged Richard to choose for me, my mother was there, sitting in the back row, her arms crossed tightly, still wearing her work gloves. When the audience began to applaud, she smiled and raised her gloved hands to join them, and then—the twist. Ten years later at prom, my date and I dressed in matching rented shiny tuxedos. I asked my mother to take a picture of us standing hand in hand in front of the trailer. She softened at the sight, then ruined it by suddenly sneering and roughly thrusting the phone at me without even glancing at the photo she’d taken. When I graduated, the same. Even at my wedding, this crept in. I wasn’t able to talk her into a dance at the reception so instead we sat together chummily on stools at the bar for a moment while the photographer tried to take touching candids.

My mother wasn’t a drinker. A glass of Perrier sat on the bar top with the half-full green bottle beside it, untouched. She kept glancing around at all of the cheap, destructive consumption of the wedding—the flimsy paper decorations, the endless ice at the bar, the dead, expensive flowers on every table—keeping her face carefully blank, except for her wrinkled eyebrows.

I nudged her a bit with the side of my arm. “Are you proud of me?”

She looked back at me, baffled. “Your husband is a nice man. Not like that Henry.”

Henry was there, across the dance floor, trying to charm Suleiman’s mother into joining him for a round of the chicken dance. Nobody at our wedding knew the chicken dance but Henry. He’d probably learned it from his grandparents. The dance floor was as empty as a bass drum.

I turned to look at Henry, then said to my mother, “Yeah. He is. But … are you proud of me?”

“You have a good life. Your husband is nice. You play the piano so beautiful.”

That wasn’t enough. I knew what she meant, but it wasn’t enough.

I regressed. “What is Vietnam like, Má?”

Her eyebrows rose even further, but she answered, “Like me.”

“What about my grandparents? Aunts? Uncles?”

She was shaking her head. “Same, like me.”

“What does America look like to you?”

She stood up. “You,” she announced. “Are grown up.” She sighed something else in Viet and moved away. Her eyes found Auntie Ai, over at the buffet, and it was as though I didn’t exist, at my own wedding.

I called after her, and she looked back with a fleeting softness that quickly fell into sour, pointed lines that lanced their way into my heart. When she walked away to speak to Ai, I ordered a drink for myself.

The flight to Philadelphia was quick. They all were, now. I went straight from the airport to the crematorium, dialing up Suleiman on my watch so he could be present virtually.

There was someone moving around behind him, in the bedroom. I didn’t mention it but when I stepped over the threshold into the waiting room, the little holographic display on my wrist suddenly blinked out, muted. When it reappeared, Sule was sitting, neatly dressed, in front of a nondescript white wall that could have been almost anywhere.

There were no white walls in our home. I preferred muted pastels.

He stayed with me while the operators did their work, until the flames began and I was so overwhelmed that I hung up on him, stammering out an excuse before I began to cry.

It wasn’t until they handed over her ashes, neatly tucked into a temporary urn made of recycled plastic, that my phone chirped again. I shifted uncomfortably, fighting the urge to snatch it out of my pocket and take a look, squeezing the heavy box of my mother’s remains tightly in both hands. I took a peek at my watch instead. The message was from Dr. Rostrow.

I sped back to the hotel in my rented car, put my mother’s urn in the center of the rented bed, and dialed Suleiman’s number. I hung up as soon as it rang, then switched the phone to do not disturb.

The doctor’s message was too long—some cursory text about the files, how they were auditory impressions and not to take them entirely at face value, blah, blah, blah.

I stared at the blue-trimmed white box on the bed as I opened the file, my shaky thumb leaving a greasy print on the screen.

A note—a middle C, tinny and a little sharp, filtered through the technology of memory. It sounded alarmingly like my little trailer keyboard from many years ago. Then strings—slow, pensive, ethereal. A slow tap began, and while it lacked the resonance of reality, I recognized the rhythms of orchestral percussion. A few moments later, horns began, reedy but so clear, so intentional. I recognized the tune immediately—I’d played it first, many years ago when I was a small boy sitting on the end of a cheap narrow bed.

The purity of the music, the easy complexity of the arrangement caught in my chest. An entire orchestra’s worth of arrangements, better than any I could have come up with. Had this been trapped behind my mother’s sudden souring, all this time?

The arrangement swelled to a crescendo, and then died away, leaving a space for a slow series of piano notes, hanging alone in the air one by one.

There were no words, but I recognized the rhythm of our liturgy, could almost hear the words in the simple, metered notes.

“What’s Vietnam like, Má?”

“Like me.”

“What do my grandma and grandpa look like?”

“Same, like me.”

“What’s the best thing about America, Má?”

The arrangement suddenly swelled again into a stunning, layered harmony that reminded me of my own name.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Belicia Rhea

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

t=0s

Just a moment ago, Leah’s cock was struck by a whip.

Leah is naked and screaming through a ball gag and contorted in an elegant snarl of rope threaded through a metal ring connected via rope to a hard point screwed into a wooden ceiling beam twelve feet above the floor. Each of her ankles has been bound to its respective thigh and then drawn up and towards her head and secured to the metal ring such that she can’t close her legs. Her hands are tied behind her back with rope that wraps around her tits and chest to form a knot in the back and then upward, to the metal ring. Her head can move freely. She has long, dark hair with streaks of silver that has been pulled back into a tight bun. Some hair near her right temple has escaped the bun and is dangling on her face in front of her eyes.

A drop of Leah’s cum is starting to drip from her cock but hasn’t reached the floor. The whip is being wielded by Saffron, a short Black dyke with a soft beard and elegant AFAB shoulders and sinew and strength. He met Leah just days ago and Leah invited him to this party—her party—in part because Saffron was a known member of the lilac and black and in part because Saffron said, “I want you because I just met you.” And also, “I want to make you scream.”

Saffron is standing with his legs open to accommodate the tongue of Lauren, a half-Mexican-half-Irish not-really-cis woman who will never get a chance to explore all the pleasures of not being cis that she deserves. Lauren is on her knees and crying while eating pussy because a cane has just left another mark on her ass. The cane is held by Amy, one of Lauren’s partners, a lithe Black goth with piercings on her lip, tongue, cunt, and nowhere else. She is halfway through saying, “I love you.”

There are lips on the back of her neck belonging to Nora, a tall, pale, angular trans woman who has fucked and broken up with and been forgiven by everyone in this room. Two of her submissives, Ruth and Elise, themselves a loving couple, are licking Nora’s leather boots. Their tongues are perfectly synchronized. They started at the toe line of each boot and have since moved up along their left and right sides. Their tongues continue upward for three quarters of a second.

Aiden, a queer elder and a perfectly passing trans man, is holding down Ruth’s and Elise’s heads. He is a witch and has sight beyond sight and has seen what is about to happen downstairs. His mouth is opening but he hasn’t yet shouted.

There are four police officers at the door to the building. They’re all encased in mirrored helmets and carapaces of armor, bodies beyond their already-large bodies. The expansiveness and anonymity of their new selves emboldens them. They are all armed with assault rifles and live ammunition. One of them is holding a battering ram and is less than a second away from swinging it into the wooden door.

Across the street, Jocelyn and Cheryl, the most codependent lesbian couple in town, are perched in an attic peering through a window at the cops. Cheryl is looking through the scope of a sniper rifle she stole from her dad. Her finger is on the trigger and there are bullets in the clip that can be propelled faster than what the cops’ exoskeletons can mitigate. Jocelyn is just here for moral support.

The occupants of this house were intruded upon and tied up and gagged. They are a wealthy white cis straight couple without children that met these members of the lilac and black online, back when that was still possible. They chatted for a bit and then decided to meet in-person at a coffee shop. Jocelyn explained the scene and the risks involved. The locks to their house would be picked. The cis couple asked that the lesbians be careful not to damage the locks. The lesbians promised they would be careful. Cheryl, Jocelyn continued, and herself would barge into the house. The cis couple would know the week this was going to happen but not the day or hour. The lesbians would restrain the straights. They would ignore the pleading of the straights unless they uttered their safeword. There would be a sex party in the building across the street (yes, the one that used to be a warehouse, yes, we agree that its high ceilings are beautiful) that the straights wouldn’t attend. There would be cops, and there would be sniper rifles, and there would be insurrectionist violence. The cis straight couple consented enthusiastically. The white cis straight man asked if they could be gagged as well, which the white cis straight woman agreed would be hot, and the lilac and black lesbians said: “Yes.”

The straight man and straight woman are now happily incapacitated on the second floor of the house. The man is whining with joy because he is finally, finally, having his sexual awakening. It’s not the women-tying-him-up that’s making him hard, he realizes. It’s that this scene is queer as in fuck you and that he is a willing participant in radical defiance. His name was Steve and as their pronouns shift and their name morphs into Steph, Leah, in the apartment building, whipped, continues to scream while Saffron, whipping, spontaneously starts to come while Lauren, licking, learns something new about herself while Amy, striking, feels herself getting wet because she, like everyone else, knows that she’s bait that has just been taken. Downstairs, the battering ram breaks the door open. Across the street Cheryl pulls the trigger.

t=1s

The bullet penetrates the cop’s armor, and he never gets a chance to realize that he shares a secret truth with the queers he intends to kill, which is that the body and self are mutable and that armor and vests and skirts and satchels and key chains are transformative, because the bullet proceeds along its trajectory until it enters the cop’s internal organs, which are shredded by displaced energy.

The cop’s soul escapes his body faster than light, which means that it defies time’s rules and regulations.

Most people don’t have souls. They are bodies and hormones, and when they die, they decompose in peace. The only people who have souls are White American Christian Nationalists because this is a Christian nation with Judeo-Christian values. This is a nation where faggotry is illegal because it promotes Cultural Marxism, and pornography is illegal because it faggotizes children.

This nation isn’t entirely wrong, of course. Leah, currently suspended, was exposed to internet pornography at an early age. There was a .jpg of a woman, suspended. The rope was red. The hair was Leah’s thick Ashkenazi hair, and the eyes were Leah’s eyes. She didn’t understand what she was looking at but she knew it was her.

Saffron, whipping Leah, has performed in pornography and subsequently learned that being a femme with a strap-on wasn’t quite what he needed. Leah once came while watching Saffron top a woman, but Saffron looks so different now that Leah doesn’t know it was him in the video clip.

Lauren, eating Saffron’s cunt, was never really into porn but Nora, who was kissing Amy until she heard gunshots, who is now reaching for her holstered pistol, was corrupted by pornography at an early age and now she has a persistent urge to top hot dykes.

The cop, dead, has never watched porn because he is, or was, a Christian Nationalist. He was a crusader cleansing this broken country of sin. He spent his life concussing Black people, torturing queers, ignoring his sons unless they cried, eating at the same pub every Thursday despite never really enjoying the food, and believing wholeheartedly in God’s White America.

Two extremely Protestant angels are now looking at his soul the way you’d look at an A/C window unit that has fallen several stories out of a window. They’re honestly getting a lot of secondhand embarrassment from this experience. It’s not cringe because that concept is outlawed in heaven, but it’s close.

Now that it is detached from reality, the cop’s soul can see that it has sinned, continuously and terribly. It is the very blight it sought to purge from the waking world. It begs the angels for forgiveness. It’s heard a lot of scary stories about hell.

“Look,” the first angel says, “you’ve got two choices. You can come with us and sit with your bullshit for the rest of eternity. You’ll never heal and you’ll never find redemption. That’s not our department. Or, my friend over here will help you process your feelings and then hold you while you cry.”

The cop’s soul didn’t know it was traumatized until just now, didn’t know that it needed fixing until just now, and didn’t know the second great queer secret until just now, which is that there is a violence beyond violence that is but a taste of the world to come.

The cop’s soul feels something that it thought it felt often but never actually had, which is horniness. It asks the second angel if it can be ordered to do things and the angel says, “Say that again, but this time I want to hear a ‘please.’”

t=2s

The three remaining cops turn around to face the attic across the street.

Above them, Naomi, an aging, stocky butch, is dribbling wax on his partner Tom, a twink who is lying on his back on the hardwood, open-mouth moaning. Naomi was startled by the gunshot downstairs and his arm jerked. Now he accidentally dribbles wax into Tom’s mouth that burns him and Tom then realizes that there is a depth of masochism that he hasn’t yet asked for.

Tom is getting a handjob from Joey, a lispy bear. Joey is, not for the first time in his life, abruptly superimposed over two timelines. In one, he’s an alluringly aggressive man with three pup-boys (Tom is one of them). In the other timeline, Joey is an alcoholic prepper, a massive man with massive guns living alone in a massive forest. Prepper-Joey is always angry and hates homosexuals. The two timelines are equally real. The gunfire outside the building narrows the distance between them. In the other timeline, there is a hunting rifle hanging on the wall that this-timeline Joey reaches for with a cum-smeared hand.

Leah, suspended, hears the gunshots and a burst of adrenaline mixes with the endorphins already flooding her brain. All this hormonic potion needs now is a catalyst, which comes in the crack of a whip from Saffron, orgasming and unrelenting. Leah’s cock starts to glow.

Lauren stops eating Saffron’s cunt and instinctively drops to the floor. Amy’s cane misses Lauren’s ass while Amy barks “GET YOUR FUCK—”

Nora thumbs the safety of her pistol and takes a step away from her subs. Aiden lets go of Ruth’s and Elise’s hair and shouts “THEY’RE HERE!” Ruth and Elise are magnet-bound to Nora’s elegant leather boots and they can’t help but crawl after her. They perfectly match Nora and a booted right foot leaves the ground and steps forward, and a booted left foot starts to rise, and their tongues remain on the boots as they lick upward, their heads twisting to compensate for Nora’s movement.

One of the cops fires a short unaimed burst at the attic across the street, and then they all break for the doorway they just burst open. This is unwise. They don’t know what’s inside. They should look for cover. But they’re chickenshit guys roleplaying as soldiers and all their ostensible training is immediately discarded.

One of the bullets of the wildly fired burst arrives at Cheryl’s throat. This bullet hasn’t yet entered her flesh; at this moment, it just barely touches Cheryl’s skin like a gentle kiss.

Cheryl was raised in a small rural town in New Hampshire in a White American Christian Nationalist death cult. The town had an abundance of leafy produce and police armaments. The local cops had at their disposal twelve assault rifles, three sniper rifles, an APC, a surveillance drone, one flamethrower, and one hundred and eleven white phosphorus flares. Over twenty-five percent of the cops were members of the local death cult, and so over time the distinction between sanctioned and paramilitary weaponry blurred.

Cheryl was from an early age taught how to maintain and fire guns. The shooting range was in the woods behind her house. She woke up most mornings to percussion.

Cheryl first realized she was gay when her friend, another cultist spawn, invited her over after school and, in the toolshed, tied each of Cheryl’s wrists to a table leg and fucked her with two fingers. Cheryl’s friend vanished the following day without explanation. The day after that, Cheryl hotwired her dad’s car, threw a duffel bag containing a disassembled sniper rifle in the back, and drove away. She was stopped by cops/cultists from her town on 93. She stepped out of the car, shot them both, swapped her plates with theirs, and continued onward to Manchester. She ditched the car and got on a Greyhound. When she arrived in South Station, an internet more-than-friend was waiting for her and it was love at first sight. It was also the first time she learned her friend’s non-internet name: Jocelyn.

Someone else saw Cheryl at the station, a man from her hometown who was well-known among the local girls as someone you should stay away from. Cheryl took Jocelyn’s hand and they ran for the escalator to the Red Line. They arrived just seconds ahead of the man, who bull-rushed towards Cheryl. Cheryl unslung her duffel bag, the one with the sniper rifle in it, sidestepped the guy, and swung the bag into his back, and he toppled over, down, over the edge of the platform, and was hit by a train. Cheryl and Jocelyn retraced their steps until they were aboveground, walked to Downtown Crossing, and took the T to Jocelyn’s shitty apartment in Roxbury that she shared with five deadbeat roommates. Cheryl lived there for years until the two of them saved up enough to move out.

The morning after the fascists finally won, Cheryl drove herself and Jocelyn out to the woods and taught Jocelyn how to aim and fire a pistol.

By day, Cheryl and Jocelyn were inseparable and insufferable. By night, they were skilled assassins. They were the first cop-murderers of this new dangerous era. They were the core of the local lilac and black, though hardly anyone knew it.

They weren’t indestructible and they didn’t go without injury, but when they made physical contact with each other, their love was a shield that deflected bullets and batons, anything aimed with the intent of harming them. This is why it took an unaimed bullet fired by a terrified man at an unknown target to spray Cheryl’s blood all over Jocelyn’s face.

t=3s

The potion inside Leah is frothing. Her cock glows brighter and starts to shimmer in vibrant blues and pinks and whites. Saffron’s whip strikes it again and the light travels up the length of the whip and Leah screams because the pain is literally unendurable, though luckily this sort of pain is meant to be experienced, not endured.

Leah is a centerpiece and also a person, just like we are. We are all things and Leah is a thing. Leah is a thing and a concept and the concept is home. When she gets tied up by her lovers and comrades, she goes home. She closes the door. She takes off her shoes. She hangs up her jacket and the need to make decisions. She sits on a couch. The whip is a welcoming couch she relaxes into that she has owned for so many years that it really is hers. She is home with her family, some of whom are strangers, and they are taking care of her, and she is giving giving giving giving giving everything they need.

Amy’s cane slashes down toward Lauren’s ass. Lauren has been a bad, disobedient slut and she’s already bending her legs to arch her ass back up and wailing “I’M SORRY!” while Amy finishes shouting “—ING ASS BACK UP!” It’s a brutal blow that bursts blood vessels and brings forth a swiftly brightening bruise.

On the other side of the room, Tom, waxen-mouthed, screams, “MORE!,” not knowing whether he’s asking for the wax that Naomi is dripping on him or the handjob that Joey has rescinded. Naomi lets another dribble cascade into Tom’s open, willing mouth while Joey takes the rifle in both hands.

Across the street, blood spurts out of Cheryl’s mouth while Jocelyn screams wordlessly.

t=4s

These days, we have every reason to party except optimism.

There is COVID in each and every cop and they are bringing it into a carefully COVID-cleansed space. In the corner furthest from the stairwell, Zephyr, Leah’s ex and the second-hottest trans masc in the room, is shocking Hades, the hottest trans masc in the room, with a violet wand. Hades uses a wheelchair due to long COVID. Zephyr gets winded very easily, due to long COVID. Most people these days are disabled, due to long COVID.

Outside, it is ninety degrees, as it has been for the past eight months, because the planet is dying.

Inside, everyone is dying because that’s what humans do, but they’re doing it faster than their shitty parents because there’s no healthcare anymore except that which we give to each other.

There are cops in the stairwell because yes of course homo parties are illegal but, more importantly, because of the essential killability of everyone inside. Leah is too transfeminized. Saffron and Amy are too Black. Ruth and Elise, bootlicking, are helpless and debased females who must be protected at all costs, and also they must die because when one dyke kisses the boot of another, a hammer once again strikes a chisel on the balls of the neoclassical marble sculpture of Patriarch, God of America.

Aiden, a witch currently drawing mystical powers into his perfectly passing chest, must die because, like, he’s a fucking witch, man.

Joey, taking aim at the stairwell, is cloaked in his other-timeline self. He is so close to being an angry, self-loathing man that the cops don’t want to kill him because they don’t know he exists.

Jocelyn, living, cradles Cheryl, dying.

When the cops, still running up the stairs to Leah’s party, crossed through the doorway, cowardice became irresistible attraction. They are moths drawn towards Leah’s whipped cock, shining like a light bulb.

Leah wants to be led down the street by a stern butch tugging at a string attached to a clothespin attached to her tongue. Leah wants tall femmes to slap her in the face. Leah wants short mascs to hold her gently and refuse to hurt her no matter how much she begs. One time, Leah and a now-ex negotiated a scene in which the ex tied Leah to a chair and flogged her tits until Leah revealed something that she had never told anyone else. Sometimes at night Leah touches herself and imagines being force-masculinized back into her old self. Be a good boy; say ‘yes, sir’ for me again, but in your old voice.

A bubble of incandescent anti-cruelty is expanding out from Leah’s cock. This broken world abhors anti-cruelty. Anti-cruelty spontaneously manifests and is immediately annihilated by equal and opposite true-cruelty. It happens all the time. The cops are almost at the top of the stairwell.

t=5s

Two cops wearing articulated slabs of plastic armor step off the last stair. One of them is wearing leather boots.

As Nora, pistol in front of her, closes the distance between her and the cops, she perceives a single facet of the interconnectedness of all of humanity and the folly of separating the self from the group, which is that she is wearing the exact same brand, model, and size leather boots as the plastic cop-slab. Their boots were purchased at the same store within a few minutes of each other. The cop was not in armor nor uniform and he stared at Nora while she was trying on her pair.

The boots—Nora’s and the cop’s—rise to the mid-calf and are laced. They have combat-boot-esque grooved rubber soles without actually being combat boots. They have metal zippers on the sides. The toes are pointed just enough to be either cowboy or tomgirl. The heels in the back are just pronounced enough to be either ruggedly pragmatic or breathtakingly butch.

Ruth and Elise are bootlickers. They’ve been consensually hypnotized, repeatedly, over an extended period of time, to insatiably bootlick when Nora says their trigger word. It started off simple and light, on Nora’s bed, with some soft music playing and Nora’s sweet, calm voice guiding them. Later, they agreed to take it one step further. Nora made a looping audio file of her telling them that they are such good boot-sluts, that this is the only thing they need and want, that good toys worship boots, that when they are boot-sluts they will feel pleasure licking boots and yawning cravings when not licking boots. And then Nora tied up Ruth and Elise on her bed and blindfolded them and put noise-cancelling headphones on their ears and played video games for a few hours while they listened, entranced. The following weekend, Ruth and Elise begged to her do it again, but longer, and Nora said, “Yes, of course.” Eventually, the three of them agreed to a regimen of one hour of hypnotic trance per day, plus five hours every Saturday. Ruth and Elise aren’t acting. They’re in boot-slut mode, which has become an important part of their identities. Whenever they aren’t bootlickers, they need to care about the harshness of a collapsing society. Whenever they are bootlickers, they are in a utopia created by themselves and their community where there’s something they can do to make the world a better place and where someone is going to make sure they stay safe.

Ruth and Elise live on the first floor of a Jamaica Plain triple-decker with a mold problem. A trio of cop-worshipping white bootlicking men live on the second floor. They go to public events hosted by the Boston Police Department and tell the guys that they’re all heroes and that they’re keeping our streets safe. They fly a Thin Blue Cross flag out of one of their bay windows. They have been brainwashed for so long that they can worship dangerous men without wanting to fuck them.

From an early age, bootlicking white men convinced Nora that she couldn’t ask for what she needed. Real men respect authority and keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. Real men also emit authority and wield pain and terror as a tool. Real men don’t emit authority for the sake of pleasuring themselves and others. And they sure as shit don’t want tits. Except when attached to women. It’s okay for men to constantly yearn for tits as long as they’re not attached to themselves.

Nora fires her pistol. The shot goes wide. In one-tenth of a second, the cop is going to kill Nora unless someone does something.

Joey has never yearned for a single tit, attached to himself or otherwise. He used to want to yearn for tits so much that it nearly killed him. Right now, he’s aiming a hunting rifle. He’s still invisible to the cops.

“A little lower,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey. “And a little to the right.”

“Why are you helping me?” this-Joey asks.

“Because I love you,” other-Joey whisper-replies.

“You don’t even love yourself,” this-Joey retorts.

“All the more reason,” other-Joey says.

Meanwhile, Naomi is pouring a steady stream of wax into Tom’s mouth that burns and burns his tongue but it never chokes him and it’s never consumed. Meanwhile, Zephyr is preparing to shock Hades in the cunt because he knows that Hades hates it and Hades is opening his legs. Meanwhile, Amy, caning Lauren, shudders with grief because she isn’t going to get what she wants. Amy wants to punish Lauren until Lauren says, “You can do whatever you want to me,” and then do that and then hold Lauren while she cries and let Lauren ask if she’s ok and then ask through tears if Lauren can kiss her, please. Amy wants this and she’s not going to get it because of the cops and their guns. Meanwhile, Lauren flattens herself on the ground again, too terrified to continue the scene. Meanwhile, Saffron’s orgasm crests and his whip strikes Leah’s balls. Meanwhile, the glow around Leah’s cock has expanded outward and now encapsulates most of her torso. Meanwhile, Aiden is bellowing, bellowing, ancient words of power.

Joey fires his hunting rifle. The bullet hits the cop in the shoulder. It’s too slow to penetrate the armor but it’ll leave a bruise. The cop staggers backward, such that when he does fire his own rifle, the bullets miss Nora, and everyone else, for now.

“Reload,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey.

t=6s

This is how a trans masc can gain mystical powers. It doesn’t involve praying to a god or making a deal with the devil because there are no gods or devils unless you’re a White American Christian Nationalist. Crystals don’t work. Astrology is fake. Wild pagan rituals are just spooky, and sometimes fun. There’s no point in waiting for a gender-euphoric moment to turn into mystical powers. No one goes to wizard school because it’s not real. Tarot is also fake. If you pick an unassuming dusty book from a dimly-lit library shelf, it’s just going to be yet another biography of a Victorian sex freak. The only way a trans masc can gain mystical powers is by having keyhole top surgery and retaining full nipple sensation.

And now Aiden’s perfect nipples are folding, around themselves, through themselves, and in directions that have no name, revealing the higher-order numerological forms that bind our three dimensions.

The cop takes a step to the side to get out of the way of the other two cops, who are now at the top of the stairwell and aiming their assault rifles.

Joey reloads.

Across the street, Jocelyn, bloody hands gripping her dead lover’s sniper rifle, also reloads.

The light around Leah’s cock expands into a vibrant sphere surrounding herself. Leah is a trans woman. Leah is an angry trans woman and the anger is grief. Leah is unemployable because she’s a liability. Leah has many dead friends. Leah has two ragged guy-outfits that she always wears, like a fucking cartoon character, whenever she’s outside. Despite this, when Leah is in public she always feels eyes watching her. Sometimes the eyes belong to a confused and scared egg, who knows without knowing. When this happens, Leah will casually walk past the girl on the sidewalk and take a zine out of her pocket and palm it to her. Their hands will briefly brush each other. The zine is a 101 of the local E and Spiro dealers: who to trust, how to find them, what to expect. It makes Leah feel like she’s some Jehovah’s Witness asshole passing out fliers at the bus stop trying to save people, but this is it, this is the only way left to tell a closeted trans woman that she isn’t alone.

The zines were of course written by the local lilac and black. Some of the authors are in this room and some are not. Saffron wrote the equivalent zine for the mascs. Saffron clandestinely sets up rendezvous times with the mascs. They just need to walk down a designated street (usually Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge, though it varies) and as they pass by a certain luxury condo complex, Saffron, standing on the rooftop, will throw a testosterone-filled dart at them.

On the other side of the room, Zephyr, shocking, gives a look to Hades, silently asking: “Do you still want to do this?”

“Yes,” Hades silently responds, and then he feels the violet wand slide into his wet cunt, which starts to shock him from inside.

Hades was one of Saffron’s closeted boys. Saffron doesn’t remember throwing a dart at Hades and Hades is too shy to tell them.

Nora fires her pistol again. Nora has been out since well before the coup. She remembers the days when you could coerce certain doctors by telling them you were going to inject yourself with hormones that you bought in parking lot from an internet rando, unless they fork over the HRT right now. Good times.

Nora’s bullet cracks the visor of the helmet of one of the other cops, obscuring his vision.

The first cop, the one who tried to kill Nora, fires his gun again, at Lauren, cowering and crying.

Concurrently, twin bolt-like topologies extend out of Aiden’s unfolded nipples and into the chest of that same first cop. The cop unravels, revealing horrifically error-ridden internal logic, and then is gone.

Then, Ruth’s and Elise’s tongues reach the tops of Nora’s boots, and then begin to lick and kiss the boots back downward.

Then, Hades screams in pain and pleasure.

Then, five bullets penetrate Lauren. The first bullet passes through her shoulder and shatters her collarbone. The second bullet strikes her heart. Bullets three and four pass through the back of her head. The fifth bullet passes through her palm.

t=7s

One of Amy’s lovers has just been murdered by a fucking cop.

Amy needs to have total control over someone's physical well-being and then be reassured that it’s OK for her to be in control of anything at all. Lauren understands—understood—that about her. Lauren gave Amy what she needed.

The moment Lauren is torn apart by gunfire, Amy flips from an aggressively sexy top to a weapon of righteous hate. The change in mood and objective is literally instantaneous. Amy has prepared her whole life for this moment. She has dealt with a lot of shit in her life by getting angry and staying angry. Amy would have anger management issues if she wasn’t so good at not managing them. And right now, she is really, really done with these apocalypse fascists. She is thirty feet from the nearest enemy. She leaps for it.

Joey aims.

And, across the street, Jocelyn aims.

Leah is queer community. Leah is expanding and expansive. Leah wants to fall in love with everyone still alive in this room and beyond and be their bottom for a night, just one night, though she wouldn’t say no to more than one. Leah wants to love the queers she’s never going to fall in love with because they’re not her type. Leah wants to love and bottom. Leah just wants America to leave her the fuck alone.

Saffron drops his whip and lunges for Lauren’s disintegrating body.

Amy is two feet in the air, and a little over two feet forward.

Tom abruptly feels overstimulated by the wax and the vague awareness that something else is happening in the room.

The cop with the damaged visor aims at Nora. Nora aims at him and fires. The shot harmlessly clips his shoulder. The cop fires and Nora’s arm explodes in pain and viscera. Nora drops her pistol.

Tom safewords. Immediately, all the wax disappears and Naomi’s powerful arms are wrapped around him.

Amy is six feet up, four feet forward, and sobbing.

“Just under the chin,” other-Joey whispers to this-Joey. “That’s the one spot without armor.”

Amy, seven feet in the air, thumbs a button on her cane and a spring-loaded spearhead snaps open from the cane’s tip.

Nora’s dropped pistol clatters to the floor.

Amy has cleared half of the distance to the cops. She is nine feet in the air. She draws back her spear as she arcs downwards.

Joey fires the hunting rifle. The bullet passes through the gap in the armor of the cop with the undamaged visor. The cop won’t live for more than a few more minutes. He’s about as surprised as Joey is. He was looking forward to many more years beating his wife, abducting probable immigrants, ignoring his daughters unless they became sons, and drinking until he could stop feeling anything.

The bubble of energy expands from Leah to encapsulate Nora, blood gushing forth, stumbling onto her knees; and Elise and Ruth, still licking her boots, her blood dripping onto their heads; and Saffron, cradling Lauren as she dies.

t=8s

On the second floor of the house across the street, Steph, tied-up and newly transed, is weeping with joy and fear. What will they tell their tied-up cis straight affluent wife Amanda? Shit, Amanda is going to hate them. They’re in so much trouble. Steph and Amanda agreed to this scene to add some spice to the bedroom. To bring them closer together. Oh, thank fuck there are no kids! Oh, thank fuck Steph finally identified the thing that was devouring them! Amanda will be cool about it. Maybe she’ll even like it. She’ll hate it. But what if she likes it? Oh, what if Steph tried wearing lipstick? Are there dresses that even fit them? Steph wants boobs but doesn’t know how to get them. Oh, there’s gunfire across the street. It sounds like someone might’ve gotten hit upstairs. Shit. What if the girls upstairs are dead? Steph needs them to remove the rope and gag. Steph can’t come out as a non-binary pansexual trans femme with a gag in their mouth. Pansexual?? Oh fuck that’s why Steph likes to go to the gym with Dave and why they’re so sad when the two of them finish their sets and change in the locker room and then Dave gets into his car and leaves. Shit, what’s Steph going to tell Amanda?

On the other side of the street, Amy is falling, falling, falling, screeching, rippling with the potential energy of rage.

Blood is pouring out of Nora’s shoulder and she screams in pain and horror. There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood dripping down her whole body. There’s blood on her boots, which Ruth and Elise dutifully lick clean.

There is one living cop and he can’t see anything out of his visor anymore. He is frantically trying to remove his helmet.

“Sorry, it was hot and then—”  Tom says while Naomi, stroking his hair, is saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right …”

The extent to which the body that was formerly Lauren disintegrates in Saffron’s arms frightens him and will continue to frighten him for the remainder of his days.

In another world, Lauren is alive. They’re nowhere near this shootout. They live in Beverly and came out as non-binary a few months ago. By the most incredible of coincidences, this other-Lauren lives in the same timeline as other-Joey. Lauren and Joey met at BU and everyone said they acted like they were a couple. Then they graduated, and Joey got stranger and moved to New Hampshire with his guns. Other-Lauren has had a lot of angry Signal chats with other-Joey since the coup. They text Joey that they are thinking of seeking out the lilac and black for some T-darts. Joey responds: “You have to put your SELF first!!! You cant [sic] rely on anyone until you can rely on yourself.” This is dubious advice, but Lauren is convinced to at least try T. Maybe they’ll look cute with a mustache.

In this timeline, Amy, avenging her beautiful dead Lauren, descends on the cop and shouts “FUCK YOU!” She thrusts her spear towards the cop’s helmet.

There is no possibility of the spear piercing the helmet, even as damaged as it is. It will ricochet off the helmet and then the cop will murder Amy.

That is not what happens. What does happen is that a shot resounds from across the street. The bullet’s origin is the gun held by Jocelyn, avenging her beautiful dead Cheryl. The bullet shatters the helmet. Shards of plastic go flying, some of them into the cop’s face.

It is possible that the queers could now bear down on the cop and eventually kill him. Maybe Joey would hold down his hands and Naomi would try to hold down his feet and be slashed by a sudden and unexpected knife and then Saffron would pummel the fucker’s face. But, this, too, does not happen. What does happen is that Amy’s spear penetrates the broken helmet like a dildo and enters the cop’s skull between the left nostril and the upper jaw. It pushes aside bone and muscle and brain until Amy lets go of it. She tumbles gracefully to the floor while the cop, now a bag of meat, collapses.

The entire room is within a sphere of brilliance. Everyone still alive is glowing.

t=9s

Leah is a thing that is more than a person and greater than a group of friends who happen to be sex perverts. It’s fine, it’s OK. Whatever you want to do in bed is your damn business. We’ve all made such quirky lifestyle decisions! We peer pressure each other into getting septum rings and hate crimes. We want to be like everyone else. There’s no gay agenda. There’s no trans agenda. We’ve never recruited anyone. You’re either born this way or you’re straight. When a lesbian is born, she arrives into this world desiring Subaru Outbacks and U-Haul trucks. If she had been born two hundred years ago, she would’ve desired Subaru Outbacks and U-Haul trucks. We were born this way. We all start out with an itchy brain. It’s always there, all our lives. We’re born with itchy brains. And then one day a ten-year-old girl goes to the movies with Mom and Dad and they park next to a Subaru Outback. Two women are getting out of it and the girl sees them and it’s like calamine lotion on the brain.

No one is born knowing what a Subaru Outback is. Not even lesbians. We’re born this way insofar as we never know what the fuck is going on.

Time passes. The girl grows up. She sees a .jpg of a woman tied in red rope.

Leah is poisoned bait that just killed four queer-hating cops. Leah wants someone to tie her up and then exit the room and just leave her there for hours. No one has done this to Leah before. Leah wants to do everything right and be told she’s a bad girl. Leah wants enough safety to be in danger. Leah has an itchy brain and needs lotion. Leah needs to exist with us.

Two lesbians get out of a Subaru Outback and they see a child staring at them and they know that this one is one of us. They hold hands and walk through the parking lot laughing loud enough for the child to hear because none of us were born this way.

Years later Leah puts on the dress that makes her feel brave and goes to a rope bondage event near Porter Square. The metal door to the event space is closed. Leah doesn’t know if she should knock. The door opens and two gray-haired lesbians, holding hands and laughing, step out into the cool autumn night. They see Leah and say yes, of course, please come in, we’re so happy to see you again.

The gray-haired lesbians are dead now due to long COVID and its complications, and injuries sustained from post-coup cops and their allies. When gray-haired lesbians die, they don’t go to any afterlife. They just become inert and peaceful.

The angels responsible for the souls of White American Christian Nationalists are hard at work today. Something keeps killing all the cops.

For a while, there were just rumors that throughout America the homosexual underground was hosting the most depraved sort of secret orgies. An infection on America that was incurable because America isn’t capable of curing anything anymore. Then rumor became known fact and the queers prepared and waited for the cops to find them.

Naomi is whispering to Tom and glowing brightly. Tom is crying and glowing brightly. Zephyr and Hades and Amy and Saffron and Ruth and Elise and Nora and Aiden and Leah most of all are radiating. They are individuals and they are community, and the community is militant lilac and black resistance. And then everything is light of impossible concurrent hues. A rainbow. The blue-pink-and-white. The colors of a sunset. The colors of printer ink. Grays and purples.

The light contracts into itself like a living organ and then there is a room. This room may or may not be in the same neighborhood, or even the same city. Moss, a handsome they/them, is slapping Theresa’s tits, who is laughing with delight. Erica is gripping Jon’s hair and fucking their ass with a strap-on. Steph—a different one—is raking Erica’s back with sharpened fingernails. Meanwhile, Callisto and Ari and Felix are aiming rifles through cracked windows at a group of cops approaching the apartment building. They are not the same people as those at Leah’s party, except for all the ways in which they are.

Leah, elsewhere, whispers into all of their ears. She is counting down the seconds until the cops are within firing range.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

t=0s

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

When I started at Optionality, they put me in a cramped condo with three other newish employees, one of whom insisted on assigning each roommate a different burner on the stove. I was the last to move in, so I got the smallest burner, which means I no longer make pasta.

Six months into the job, which mostly involved data coding for biometric solutions, I still hadn’t found my own place to rent. Every apartment I could afford required a terrible commute, even if I left home at an ungodly hour to catch the train. But at lunch one day in Optionality’s main cafeteria, I found a flyer for a nearby housing development called Orchard Village. Fifteen minutes away, by shuttle.

I didn’t even take a tour of the place. I just opened the website and applied.

The application required my employee badge number and salary. Which made me think Orchard Village was owned by Optionality, like the Willow Park condo community they’d built ten years earlier, which includes office space and drug stores and, I think, a skate park. But when I asked my team leader about the odds of my application going through, he only said Optionality was always looking for ways to “better support healthy eating” for its employees, which I guess means he assumed Orchard Village is an exclusive new lunchtime option.

I went back and looked at the website—lots of photos of young professionals walking down sidewalks dappled with shade, admiring wood and glass storefronts. A pop-up let me know that I would pay far below market price for rent, with a matching payment coming from my employer. Also, that the whole development had been built using a sustainable technique involving mass timber construction. Which I assumed more than made up for the destruction of whatever actual orchard they had razed to build the place.

Within a week of applying, I got a catalog in the mail, along with a card that said, You’ve been selected! The other side of the card instructed me to choose my housing unit by entering the lot number on a page of Orchard Village’s website.

That was surprising. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be making any kind of choice. When I’d applied for Optionality’s temporary employee housing, they’d had only one condo available. Before that, in college, I’d lived in a school-assigned apartment, where the plumbing had overflowed so regularly that we were loaned an industrial fan for an entire semester, to combat the spreading mildew.

So the catalog was thrilling. I flipped through it the way I had the Target catalogs that came in the mail at Christmastime when I was a kid. Every housing unit in Orchard Valley might as well have been a LEGO set destined to appear under a pre-lit PVC Blue Spruce.

I quickly realized that every single one of Orchard Village’s eight hundred forty different housing units had its own separate listing (four to a page). Each unit had several unique features, spelled out in minuscule type. I would need at least a week to study it all and make an informed selection.

I had until the next morning at eight a.m.

Apparently, they were eager to get people moved in? Fine—I was eager to get out of my condo, where my books were, according to my roommate, taking up so much space on the narrow built-ins that she had nowhere to display her 3D printed goose figurines.

I skipped to the middle of the catalog and scanned the one-bedroom units. I figured if I tried to select anything nicer, any of the multi-floor units toward the back of the catalog, the management would be annoyed (offended?). But I didn’t think I belonged in the cheapest apartments either, the tiny studios with the pocket-sized bathrooms. Those had to be for interns. Or subcontractors.

Around midnight, I finally decided on a unit with a Wi-Fi mesh system and some interesting crown molding. Dog-eared the catalog page, slept like a kid on Christmas Eve.

Eight a.m. on the dot, I entered the lot number.

But when I checked the webpage again a couple of hours later, something had gone wrong. Selection failed, it said, just above a button labeled “more info.” It was suddenly painfully obvious to me that I wasn’t the kind of employee who had earned a Wi-Fi mesh system. I was the kind who should plan to bring along my own router at move-in. And to forgo crown molding, probably.

I clicked on the “more info” button, anticipating a polite scolding. A pop-up declared that move-in would be delayed until all prospective residents had made “non-conflicting selections.”

My desk-mate, Veronica, got a glimpse of my screen and got so excited she almost knocked her paper calendar off the desk we shared. (She brings a different desk calendar to work every day. Today’s showed a summer-themed art print called Oh Buoy!) “You’re moving into Orchard Village?” she asked.

I should explain that Veronica and I were sharing a desk that day because we hadn’t come in early enough to find individual workstations. Optionality had let go of half its office space to save on rent costs while everyone was opting for work-from-home. But now we’re all required to be in-office five days a week, which means we have to get creative with the floor plan until a new lease is negotiated.

I very quickly closed the pop-up window. I didn’t want Veronica knowing that I wasn’t good enough for the crown molding that I didn’t even really care about.

Veronica didn’t seem to have noticed the pop-up. “Which unit did you select?” She’d reached down to get something from her bag, and now she set it down on her keyboard: the Orchard Village catalog. “The one I picked has all these surfaces made from kitchen packaging waste. It looks kind of like marble but weirder. Like marble painted by Van Gogh.”

She showed me the listing, which I vaguely remembered skimming the night before. The swirled blue countertops held an eerie charm.

“It’s nice to have counters like that if you can’t afford art.” Veronica was sitting cross-legged in her chair, having taken the side of the desk with the bank of drawers. I had all the legroom.

“I think I picked the wrong unit,” I told her.

She squinted at my screen, which still read Selection failed. I could tell it made her nervous. She quickly pulled up the webpage on her own laptop and found the same message. Clicked the button. Frowned at the pop-up.

“What do you think non-conflicting selection means?” I asked her.

She was already searching for a contact page on the website, and then typing furiously into a chat window. I started to feel a little better. Veronica was the one who had convinced the admin team to order breadsticks for everyone, not just team leaders, whenever we had Alfredo’s brought in. She’d told them that too few breadsticks put her into a “scarcity mindset” that threatened her productivity. And that a second bag of breadsticks would only cost five-fifty.

“Apparently, no one has moved into the development yet,” she said finally, “because they can’t let anyone move in until the selection process is finished. We have to try again on Friday.”

Three more days to study the catalog. I was okay with that, mostly. More time to find a unit I liked.

In fact, it was nice to flip through so many listings. Overwhelming, but in a good way, like the moment I would dump an entire plastic bag’s worth of LEGO pieces onto the carpet on Christmas morning.

I realized, when I looked more closely at the listings I had read with bleary eyes the night before, that the unit I’d first selected was located above Orchard Village’s café. The apartment was probably supposed to be for the café manager, which would explain why my selection had failed.

This time I used the map printed at the front of the catalog to check the location of the listings I liked best. The apartments facing the wildflower trail at the west end of the village had electrochromic windows that went from transparent to tinted in late afternoon sunlight. The units that bordered the wetlands had carbon-filter HVAC systems that removed odors from the air. No one could begrudge me electrochromic windows or carbon filters if I had to deal with blazing sunlight or marsh funk—surely?

And if I chose the unit with the tiled entryway in a cherry-blossom mosaic, I would be justified in that the tile was made from recycled glass bottles. If I took the ground-floor one-bedroom closest to the shuttle stop, that only meant I was a responsible employee, eager to arrive at the office on time. Touchless faucets meant I was hygienic, a boon to society. A beverage center in the kitchen wasn’t that luxurious.

In the end, I chose a unit with modular furniture, which seemed like the most junior-employee-coded option in the catalog. The unit also had geothermal heating and cooling, but I decided in a city where the daily average temperature was a mild seventy-two degrees, the thermostat would rarely kick in anyway.

And then, Friday morning—

Selection failed.

Veronica got the same message. So did another fellow employee, Tory, who stood looking over my shoulder while a cough drop clattered around behind his teeth. (He swears the menthol is going to make him live longer.) “Which one did you choose?” he asked.

“The one with the modular furniture.”

The cough drop clattered raucously. “You don’t want modular furniture. Someone’s ass is going to sit where your head will end up later.”

I had taken up station in the copy room that day, the only unclaimed corner of the office. Laptop balanced on the sturdiest of the paper trays. Tory nudged me aside so he could make a copy.

“Besides,” he said, “that’s way further into the catalog than they want us to be. You need to stick closer to page twenty.”

I scoffed. “Page twenty.” I don’t think he heard me over the clack of paper copies hitting my laptop.

Later, when I got home from work, I found my roommate stacking my books on top of the TV to make more space on the built-ins for her goose figurines. “They’re magnetic,” she said. One goose had a tiny knife dangling from its beak. “They’re from that video game with the goose that chases people with knives.”

“My books are going to fall.” The TV was barely wide enough for the paperbacks.

“Then stack them on the floor. Or do you think everyone is always supposed to accommodate you?”

When I found one of the other miniature knives in my toothbrush cup later that night, it felt like a vague threat.

I decided Tory was right. Optionality had me in a cramped condo with carpeting so thin it squeaked when I walked on it. They weren’t going to let me rent an apartment with an indoor garden space or an aromatherapy shower.

By ten p.m., I had circled a listing that made more sense. Walls that hid drop-down tables and chairs. Floors made of hempcrete (concrete mixed with hemp—eco-friendly, fire resistant).

By ten a.m.: Selection failed.

“You’re still aiming too high,” Tory told me, his teeth cherry-red.

“Which one did you pick?” It came out aggressive. One of the team leaders had put up dividers to create makeshift cubicles, and people kept shimmying past my desk as they made their way through the divider-maze, their thighs brushing my chair.

“I picked the converted refrigerator truck,” Tory said. “Small, but really well insulated.”

“Selection failed, though, right?” I said smugly.

He shattered the cough drop between his molars.

After that, I tried a unit with rice-straw floor coverings, couches made from end-of-life carpet.

When that failed, I figured I might as well try a unit from the back of the catalog instead: pink quartz bathtub, meditation nook, biophilic entryway, human-centric lighting that supported circadian rhythms.

Failed again.

“Have you seen Reddit?” Veronica asked me while we camped on the floor of the supply closet with our laptops perched on boxes of printer toner. I’d been staring wistfully at her desk calendar, which now showed a print of Summer Chairs. “People are saying non-conflicting selection means if you choose the same unit as someone else, your selection fails.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, slapping my hand down on my makeshift cardboard desk. “How are we supposed to coordinate our selections?”

Veronica looked at me with the disappointment she usually reserved for the protein shakes we got for dinner when we were required to work late. “On Reddit. Like I said.”

She showed me the subreddit for Orchard Village. One of the moderators claimed to work for the housing development’s management. It’s not like we can give two different renters the same unit, she’d posted.

Unfortunately, only around eighty people seemed to have discovered the page. They’d dutifully shared the number of the unit they planned to select next. But that left seven hundred sixty question marks.

Still, it was starting to make sense. Someone in management had created an overly complicated plan to divvy up the units, and all I had to do was choose a unit that I was sure no one else would ever select.

I didn’t bother with any real work for the next few days, just flagged the pages of my catalog with sticky notes. Hurried home to mark it up. Avoided the house meeting my roommates had called to decide whether anyone was using more than their fair share of the toilet paper. Hardly slept at night.

By Thursday morning, I had honed in on the most unsettling listing in the whole catalog, a unit no sane person would select. All-glass interior walls. Living room with artificial salmon run. Porous bedroom furniture for the sweaty or incontinent sleeper. Ceiling mural depicting the lifecycle of a hornet moth. Pickle ball simulator (and holographic backhand coach).

Did I like the idea of living in such a unit instead of, say, one with a saltwater swim spa? Obviously not. But I could hang curtains around the glass walls. Paint the ceiling. Dump the mechanical salmon into the stream that meandered past the development’s more desirable units.

Anyway, it didn’t matter whether the unit was good or bad. I’d been promised my very own living space at Orchard Village and I wasn’t going to be cheated out of that.

One final moment of doubt: when I opened my laptop bright and early at work, I realized I’d misplaced my catalog.

But not to worry. I’d memorized the unit number. Absolutely buzzing with anticipation of my impending victory, I entered the number into the website.

Veronica opened the door to my office space for the day, the walk-in fridge that housed the cases of sparkling water Optionality considered an attractive employee perk. (I kept a fleece-lined jacket at the office for just such an eventuality.) “You heard about the theory, right?” she asked me. She had a bright-eyed look that day, as if she’d stepped out of the July Delight page of her desk calendar.

“Yeah, Reddit, got it,” I said. “I picked a unit no one else would ever pick. Literally the most bizarre one I could find. Only a borderline psycho would choose the unit I just entered into the website.”

All trace of delight left Veronica’s face. Her eyes widened to the size of blackberries and looked just as dark. “No. The new theory.”

If my skin could have gone any colder in the walk-in fridge, it would have. “What theory is that?”

“There is no Orchard Village,” Veronica said. “It’s all a corporate personality test.”

“A what?” I thought back to the catalog listing. The phrase egg-larva-pupa went through my mind.

“Like a new Myers-Briggs or something.” Veronica pressed a hand over her mouth, as if to apologize for blurting out such bad news.

Tory shouldered into the doorway. “HR wants to have a word with you,” he said, pointing a neon-lemon cough drop at me and then sliding it between his teeth.

“We’re going to need to draw a sample of your blood.”

This from Rian, who had his own desk, his own office, shelves that held his collection of Victorian bookends. No books in between them, just employee manuals.

“My blood?” I inched away from the woman standing near the door with a syringe in her hand. “Is this about the unit I selected? I swear I’m not on drugs or—”

“You into moths?” Rian gave me an incredulous look and held up an Orchard Village catalog. My catalog, with the listing I’d circled in red ink.

“I mean.” I swallowed. “Aren’t they an important part of the biosphere?”

Rian signaled to the woman with the syringe. “We’re going to analyze your blood, figure out what’s going on with you.”

The woman took hold of my arm and tied an elastic band around it. I wondered if I should protest or whether it’d be better to prove I was a tractable employee. I really didn’t want to get fired and lose my shared condo, since I had nowhere else to live.

Rian drummed his hands on his desktop in a quick little rhythm, as if in an attempt to lighten the mood. “Optionality is developing a new diagnostic tool. The consumer submits a blood sample and we send back a breakdown of their personality type. You know—so they can figure out if they’re a Judger or an Eater or whatever.” He frowned at the listing I’d circled in the catalog. “I’m very interested to see your results.”

“Don’t tense up,” said the woman who was jabbing a needle into my arm.

“So Orchard Village is really a personality test?” I asked Rian. “Just some new metric Optionality designed?”

“What? No.” Rian waved a dismissive hand. “Optionality doesn’t have anything to do with Orchard Village. The blood-slash-personality test is a new idea. Thought you’d be a good candidate for early testing when I found your weird catalog next to the coffee machine this morning.”

I was very confused now. “The website said Optionality would contribute to my rent.” Hadn’t it? “It was at least very heavily implied that someone would pay half my rent.”

Rian flipped through the catalog, grimacing with what seemed to be second-hand embarrassment. Mumbled to himself, “Sound oasis, floating shelves, al fresco experiences.”

Damn, I hadn’t even seen that one.

“Listen.” He let out a sigh that signaled his disgust. “Your employer is under no obligation to make your dreams come true. You know?”

The blood-drawing was starting to make me feel lightheaded. And I was still cold from sitting in the walk-in fridge. “I just want to state for the record that a holographic pickle ball coach is not my dream.”

“All I mean is that you might want to keep your feet on the ground. This—” He flipped a few more pages in the catalog. “—is a fantasy.”

The elastic band released its hold on my arm. I stood, slowly, five milliliters of blood lighter. “So, Orchard Village doesn’t exist? It’s not real?”

“Oh. Hell if I know. I’m in a three-story condo at Willow Park.”

When I got home that evening, I found my roommate had eaten my last frozen pizza. “It was a hard day,” she said. The website that sold the figurines she liked had sold out of the goose that came with the soup ladle.

“You can’t just buy a tiny soup ladle from someone who sells doll furniture?” I asked, barely masking my exasperation.

She was actually really sad, though. “It feels like the website is telling me I don’t deserve the official ladle.”

The geese she already owned were lined up so nicely on the shelf. I don’t know why she liked them so much. “Well, you do deserve the official one.”

She thought for a moment, nodded. “When it’s my turn to vacuum, I always do the stairs too.”

“Right, but I mean, you deserve it anyway. If anyone does.” I wondered if I was wrong to get her hopes up. It was anyone’s guess whether Goose With Ladle would ever be back in stock.

She was deep in thought again. “Does anyone?” She spotted the Orchard Village catalog sticking out of my work bag. “Are you moving out?”

I couldn’t answer either question.

The next morning, I took a rideshare out past the turnoff for Optionality, way out past the tiny airport only small planes ever used. Tucked away like so many of the area’s gems was a brand new development, wood and glass buildings, hummocks of wildflowers. I told myself it must be Orchard Village. Seeing it there, silent, unoccupied, good for nothing at the moment but absorbing sunlight, I remembered something I’d seen on a walk I’d once taken along the top of the nearby reservoir. I’d spotted a single golden poppy along the edge of the trail, the first flower of the season, a lonely, unaccomplished bloom. On a whim, I’d gone to take a closer look and saw, sprawling over the edge of the embankment, a hundred more golden flowers.

At eight a.m. I opened the Orchard Village webpage and entered the number of a unit I thought I might like to live in. Sun-tunnel skylights. Stained glass entryway window. Flooring made from cherry wood reclaimed from the old orchard.

I didn’t expect to get it.

At ten a.m. I checked the webpage—

Selection approved.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Angela Hinck

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

2000

“Triage” by Tamela Viglione is from the first issue of Strange Horizons, published on September 1, 2000. It’s a tense and raw story about a near future where the personal is tightly enmeshed with the political and those working in the triage wards must make terrible choices every day.

“Pvt. Parker, Missing in Action” by D. K. Latta is a war story, set on the battlefield in Vietnam. It’s also a ghost story that slips through time. What I particularly love about it is how Latta fits such carefully drawn characters and so much subtle emotion into a very action-packed short story.

2001 

“With Open Eyes” by Cecilia Tan follows Louis, whose life seems to intersect with       other peoples’ deaths in a way that can’t quite be explained. There’s a quiet, gentle vibe to this story as we, along with Louis, realize that what seems to be a curse might sometimes be used as a gift.

“Plenty” by Christopher Barzak is a subtle, compelling story about generosity and magic, and about a secret ritual glimpsed one night through a window.

2002

“Looking Back” by Corie Ralston puts a neat twist on the alien abduction trope, as a woman leaves her old life behind to explore the universe. The entire story has a beautiful, melancholy feel to it.

“Show and Tell” by Greg van Eekhout is a wonderful science fiction tale (with a sly sense of humour) about a classroom full of good students (who just happen to be different kinds of alien bugs) encountering a human grandfather with a very memorable tattoo.

2003

“Pan de los Muertos” by Dru Pagliassotti is the story of what happens when Take-Man, “whose teeth had the shine of razorwire and whose voice was the rattle of discarded brass casings on pavement,” comes to claim Los Angeles. He thinks the place will be easy pickings until he runs into an old lady at a bus stop.  

And for a profoundly sad and gorgeously wrought flash fiction piece, read “Five Things of Beauty” by Patrick Samphire.

2004

“Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes” by Lucy A. Snyder might possibly have the best title of any story in this retrospective. When you pair it with a smashing opening like this, you know it’s a must-read: “Let's face it: any script kiddie with a pair of pliers can put Red Hat on a Compaq, his mom's toaster, or even the family dog. But nothing earns you geek points like installing Linux on a dead badger.”

For science fiction with a grand scope that weaves myth and fairytale and folklore into the telling, read “Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age” by the incomparable Vandana Singh.

2005

“Pip and the Fairies” by Theodora Goss is the exquisite story within a story about Pip, aka Pipsqueak, aka Philippa Lawson, who was once a child and the main character in the books her mother wrote about the fairy realm. Pip is all grown up now, and she is trying to remember if she was really crowned by the Thorn King, or if that fairy world was all just stories she made up for her mother, all those years ago.   

In “The Moon Is Always Full” by Charles Coleman Finlay, the aftermath of a death has reverberations among a group of friends. 

2006

“The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum was the first Strange Horizons short story nominated for a Hugo. It’s an intricate, dizzying story, of universes and makers of universes, and it’s also the story of Sophie and her very special teddy bear.

Head to Ancient Greece in “Body, Remember” by E. Catherine Tobler, where Apollo’s oracle, the Pythia, waits for the god to return. At the shrine, there is also a man waiting for an answer to a question he’s been asking the Pythia for many years: when will his wife come home?          

2007

In “The You Train” by N.K. Jemisin, the New Yorker narrator is haunted by trains that shouldn’t be there anymore: “Too many people look into those empty tunnels and expect to see something where nothing is. And the trains, maybe they hear all that. Maybe they think they're still needed. So maybe they stick around, waiting to be called.”

“Teinds” by Sonya Taaffe is a gleaming flash fiction gem where love, death, grief, and desire mingle in Taaffe’s gorgeous prose.

2008

“Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman takes place at the crossroads. The dark man’s dog watches a girl. The girl comes every Sunday night, and if she sticks it out for nine Sundays in a row, the dark man will meet her and teach her anything she wants to learn. Except, of course, there's a catch. I love stories told from a dog’s point of view, and Dikeman’s story has a wonderful folkloric quality to it.

In “Marsh Gods” by Ann Leckie, a girl named Voud learns the dangers, and rewards, of bargaining with gods like the brown crane, who are bound by the rules of the marsh accord, and much older gods that are more powerful and much more perilous. 

2009

“And Their Lips Rang With the Sun” by Amal El-Mohtar is a tale within a tale that sings like only El-Mohtar’s prose can sing. Fourteen girls are chosen by the Sun Herself to guard her temple. We learn about a Sun-woman, named Lam, who met a hooded stranger and all the events that unfolded after that meeting.  

“A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, D.Phil, MSc.; or, A Lullaby” (Part 1 / Part 2) by Helen Keeble has an irresistibly long title. The story, about a scientific expedition and the capture of a mermaid, reveals its dark, gleaming heart as we find out what happens when science meets the song of the ocean.

2010

“Salsa Nocturna” by Daniel José Older spins a tale of music, children, and dead people. Ernesto, aka Gordo, tells us about what happened one night in the boiler room where a boy named Marcos played, for the muertos and the muertecitos, “a mambo, but laced with the saddest melody I've ever heard—some unholy union of Mozart and Perez Prado.” 

For an absolutely wonderful account of a meeting at The Society of Supercriminals' new headquarters, please read “Doctor Diablo Goes Through the Motions” by Saladin Ahmed.

2011

“Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel” by Shaenon K. Garrity opens with an apology to Borges. It’s a wonderful story that follows two librarians in Dublin, Ohio, working at The Library of Babel, “one of those extrusions of pure logic into our universe that you get sometimes, a library of infinite size containing all possible books.”

“The Yew's Embrace” by Francesca Forrest has an opening line that hits like a hammer:  “We could still see the old king's blood in the cracks in the flagstones beneath the new king's feet when he announced to us all that this was a unification, not a conquest...”

2012

“Good Hunting” (part 1 / part 2) by Ken Liu, from the 2012 fundraising issue, won the  WSFA Small Press Award. It’s the story of a boy trained to be a demon hunter and a girl who is really a hulijing, a shapeshifting fox spirit. Liu starts the story in what seems like familiar fantasy territory but twists the tale into something altogether unexpected at the end.

“Things Greater than Love” by Kel Bachus is the story of a group of people rock climbing on an exo-planet when a terrible accident happens. It’s also the story of Drake, who is an alien with wings. In the end, it might be a love story as well, and it broke my heart in the best way.

2013

“Selkie Stories Are For Losers” by Sofia Samatar was nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a BSFA Award. It is a fierce, fiery, beautifully written story about selkies, and family, and about being trapped on the wrong side of magic. 

Speaking of awards, “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” (part 1 / part 2) by Sarah Pinsker won the Theodore Sturgeon Award. George is an architect, drawing and designing things both possible and impossible. In 1944, he meets and falls in love with Millie and builds a life with her. In 1951, the government orders him to go to New Mexico, and what happens there haunts him all the way to his deathbed many years later. With delicate precision, Pinsker fits an almost unspoken story about aliens into George and Millie’s life- and love-story.

2014

 “Nkásht íí” by Darcie Little Badger, begins with Josie and Annie putting up their pink-paint-on-cardboard sign that says, “TELL US YOUR PROBLEMS TELL US YOUR STORIES TELL US ANYTHING. WE 2 LISTEN.” After that come the ghosts and the owl-woman, and a road trip to solve a mystery. It’s all delightfully dark and tender, and such a perfect slice of Darcie Little Badger’s storytelling magic.     

For some sweetness in the darkness, read “Rib” by Yukimi Ogawa. A skeleton woman      meets a young boy. He is looking for his dead mother, and the skeleton woman ends up doing something she didn’t think she was capable of anymore: helping.

2015

“The Game of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link from the 2015 fundraising issue won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It’s a haunting science fiction tale about vampires and      Handmaids, and about Anat and Oscar, a brother and sister waiting for their parents on the planet Home, a place where nothing and no one might be exactly what they seem. 

“Telling the Bees” by T. Kingfisher is both dark and lovely. How can you resist a story that begins: “There was a girl who died every morning…”

2016

“The Right Sort of Monsters” by Kelly Sandoval is a painful, harrowing story about what we’re willing to sacrifice to get what we think we want, what we think we need. Viette wants a baby, but babies are hard to come by in her world, and sometimes they have crocodile teeth and lizard scales.

“Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes” by Vajra Chandrasekera is structured as a q & a with a sci-fi author named Satka. Satka is dead, but lives on as a “simulation, programmed by Satka herself,” answering questions about her life and work. The story weaves through past and future, history and philosophy.

2017

“These Constellations Will Be Yours” by Elaine Cuyegkeng is a magnificent science fiction short story that has the feel and depth of a space opera. Here, people are bio-engineered to steer the great galleon ships across the celestial sea, their brains and nerves connected to the navigation systems.           

“Krace Is Not a Highway” by Scott Vanyur is a deceptively simple story about a robot working away in a post-apocalyptic world. Vanyur builds this deeply moving tale with subtlety and precision.

2018

“Toothsome Things” by Chimedum Ohaegbu is a brilliant and evocative re-telling of my favourite fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood; the wolf is not what you might think, and neither is the girl or the grandmother or the woodsman. Ohaegbu skillfully weaves together stories, lore, and memory into a luminous new pattern.

“The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls” by Senaa Ahmad won the Sunburst Short Story Award. It is one of those stories that has never really left me after I first read it. It’s about a group of girls whose destructive powers allow them to “have toppled buildings, laid waste to city blocks, upheaved countries, immolated hundreds of militants and the people around them.” Around them, things are destroyed, but together, they are still beautiful.

2019

“And Now His Lordship is Laughing” by Shiv Ramdas was a finalist for a Hugo, a Nebula, and an Ignyte Award. It’s a story about colonialism, resistance, and revenge, and it’s sharper than a razor. In Midnapor, an old woman named Apa makes magical dolls. The Governor of Bengal wants to buy one of her dolls for his wife, but Apa steadfastly refuses. It isn’t until her community is ravaged by starvation that Apa consents to making a doll for his Lordship. She has only one demand: that she must deliver it to him in person.

To break your heart, read “This Is How” by Marie Brennan, a story about the valravn, a terrible creature that drinks the blood of its victims and keeps their souls locked inside itself. Brennan tells us how a valravn is made, how it can be unmade, and maybe even re-made into something else entirely.

2020

“Renovation of a Finite Apartment” by Toby MacNutt is a profoundly strange, strangely profound, and utterly beguiling story about a being that lives among humans, in a human body, but who is decidedly not human inside that human skin. I love the way this story looks at human beings from the outside, and I love the quiet, piercing voice of the alien protagonist     .

“12 Worlds Interrupted by the Drone” by Fargo Tbakhi is a story that I’ve thought about a lot ever since I read it in 2020. Particularly this line: “As the Drone hovers in its portal to the sky, and the room fills now with a smoke too acrid even for your lungs, you wish that you had talked to someone in this life—to God, to the doctor, the attendant, to anyone at all who might have listened—who might in some small way have understood.” (For a bonus track, pair this with Tbakhi’s “Balfour in the Desert” from 2021.)

2021

“The Center of the Universe” by Nadia Shammas from Strange Horizons’ special Palestinian issue was one of my favourite stories in 2021. I still think it’s one of the best short stories I’ve read about virtual reality, identity, politics, and AI. In many ways, it’s a story that resonates even more deeply today. 

“Coiffeur Seven” by Kiran Kaur Saini is a gentle and incisive science fiction story about an AI hairdresser working in palliative care. The clients usually only get simple, short, easy-to-care-for haircuts, but when Veena Kaur Chan interfaces with Coiffeur Seven, the connection changes both Veena and Coiffeur Seven, and maybe even the palliative care system they both inhabit.

2022

The prose in “The Miraculous Account of Khaja Bairaq, Pennant-Saint of Zabel” by Tanvir Ahmed is lush and fierce. The story has the texture of fairytale, myth, legend, and history: “The narrators of histories and tellers of tales relate that, in the God-guarded town of Qalati Zabel, there was once a holy woman with a mind to rebel.” It’s a story that feels brand new and ancient, all at the same time.

“The Pigeon Keeper|'s Daughter” by Su-Yee Lin describes a quiet life on the outskirts of society, haunted by the sounds of birds and the memories they evoke. Utterly beautiful and thoroughly devastating, full of shapeshifting and magic.

2023

“Nextype” by Sam Kyung Yoo is the story of Mirae, who has a neural implant paid for by her mother. The implant has made her one of the top students at university, but it has also taken things from her. It’s a quietly harrowing story about technology, adolescence, and family.           It’s about the weight of expectations and how they can distort both relationships and souls.

Set on board a ferry in British Columbia, “Locavore” by Kim Harbridge gives an intimate view of the kind of monster that is usually only glimpsed in the shadows. 

2024

“The Spindle of Necessity” by B. Pladek combines academia, surrealism, and incisive thoughts on art and gender. Along the way, Pladek explores how we, the readers, interact with the fiction we read and how we might try to fit writers from the past into our own views of identity and self-expression.

Time travel as tourism, and the possibly universe-bending implications of such travels, are at the heart of “A Slightly Different Sunrise from Mercury, Nevada” by Íde Hennessy.

2025

From this year, you might want to read about werewolves in “The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon” by Jennifer Hudak. Or you might want to read “A Charm to Keep the Evil Eye Away From Your Campervan; or, Roamin' Rights” by Christopher R. Muscatoone, one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest.

To quote Mary Anne Mohanraj from the first editorial in the first issue of Strange Horizons, published September 1, 2000: “These stories make us think. They critique society. They offer alternatives. They give us a vision of the future -- and warn us of the potential dangers therein. They help us understand our past. They are full of beauty, and terror, and delight.”

I ended up on Pluto on the night of my nineteenth birthday, after breaking my own stupid heart. It wasn’t even over anything important. All I did was jump in a pool, and then the chlorine got in my nose and I came up coughing on the side of the tiles, and then someone was hauling me up and telling me I got my heart broken, and I wasn’t on Earth anymore, and wouldn’t be for ages again.

Case and I change the sheets of the hotel rooms together on Pluto. We stack the limestone showers full of small green shampoo bottles, squeeze soap down the mirrors and sinks. We feed the mini-bars cans of Coke and tiny shots of tequila, and when Case mimes downing one, he asks me, “Think they’ll notice?” And I tell him don’t do it, just check the bathroom for used combs, and he raises me a cheers and unscrews the cap with one twist and pours the clear sharp liquid down the sink.

“Why even bother,” I say.

“It’s rebellion,” he says. “Our glorious teenage years,” and that’s when I snort at him, and when Case goes to the cart and throws the newest of the sheets onto the bed like he’s floating a picnic blanket down over summer grass, cool and airy, but there’s no sun here. It’s too cold to sweat. So he doesn’t look burnt or red or any of the kinds of things he’d look like if we were on Earth. He just looks grey and dusty, even when he smiles.

“Whoosh,” I say, and “Whoosh,” he echoes. We straighten the corners together. We smooth out the center with our forearms, and I watch him lift the mattress with one arm and tuck the sheet in at the corner with the other. The pillows get fluffed. The teddy bears get straightened. When we’re done, Case turns to me. “Miss anything else?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say, and he throws up his arms. I throw up my arms back.

Case’s dad got his heart broken when his second wife divorced him, and he showed up on Pluto with his phone in his left hand and a Bic pen in the other. We saw him while we were wheeling the laundry through the back doors, and had to take a detour through the lobby. The first thing I noticed was how similar they looked side by side, with the grey that should’ve been blond, the long limbs, the angular mouth. But Case didn’t move, and I wasn’t moving if he wasn’t moving. Then Case’s dad noticed him, and his face crumpled up like a piece of homework, scrunched in the fist. He said, “Buddy.” Case’s expression was as flat as the palm of a hand. Then Case shrugged, and crack—his dad disappeared.

The hotel staff went on with their business. Case put his hands in his pockets. “Didn’t think it’d be that easy.”

I didn’t want to say anything. It’s never easy, watching a heart break so quick, so I said, to make Case smile: “Bet he lost.”

“Bet he did, girly,” Case said, and he wasn’t smiling but the dust wasn’t creasing between his eyes anymore, because that’s how it works when your heart gets stomped. The winner stays on Earth. The loser goes to Pluto.

After work, the rink’s open.

We shuck our uniforms and walk through the lobby. We’re guests here, too, so we get in the elevator with two newcomers carrying a small picture frame by the edges. I try not to look at them because the woman’s got her head on her partner’s shoulder. She’s sobbing with her whole chest. The picture frame is limp in her right hand, like she’s forgotten about it, and when the elevator sings, Case and I skirt past them to our floor. We don’t say anything as we lope through long carpeted hallways, the rows of doors standing to attention on both sides. Case’s mouth is tight, and he’s walking fast, and we get to the hallway that leads to the ice rink at the basement of the hotel. It’s easy to freeze things here. Ice is easy to maintain, and Case is already pushing the doors open with his shoulders, holding the right side open so I can squeeze through.

“Too cold?” he asks, as the rink air blasts us, and I say, “No.”

“No?”

“Well,” I say, and I don’t say it’s a “no,” because I don’t know how to tell him a not-no. A not-no that isn’t a yes. “So many not-no’s,” he said when I tried to explain last time, and I didn’t know how to tell him it’s about not-asks, actually. Like that time you jumped into water so deep, your feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and everyone asked, “Did you not-check to see if it was shallow?” or, “Did you not-see all the signs?”

And instead of saying “no” or “yes” when the team coach asks you to a meeting at a bar, just so he can tell you how to get faster, go faster, and raise your arms so that your fingertips skim the water with every stroke, you think about it for a little while, and you don’t see any reason why not.

There’s a lady who lives on the moon. Ten thousand years ago, she got married to the best archer in the world, and the gods gave them a single candy as a wedding gift. The candy would make them immortal, so they promised to eat it together, half and half, until the archer’s apprentice took a staff and killed his master out of jealousy. The archer’s wife heard the yells outside. She heard the door crash open. She picked up her skirts and ran into her room and ate the candy, put it in her mouth and chewed as fast as she could, sobbing as she chewed, because she knew in her heart of hearts what had happened to her love, and what would happen to her if she did not run.

She swallowed hard. She floated all the way up. She never came back down because she was safe there, on the moon. She was scared enough to get away.

The air tastes dry and thin. The ice rink pools in the center of the floor, and Case and I strap on our skates, crisscrossing the laces and pulling them tight. Case is talking about his home again. His old home, the one his mom had to sell, with the tree house in the back that the new owner broke down plank by plank. “That’s your Dad’s work,” his mom used to tell him. They didn’t even move that far. They just moved down the road, and Case walked back from school to watch the breakdown happen in real time, and he tells me at least they did it neat. “I would’ve done it neater, though,” he says, and holds out his hand to help me up.

He always talks like he’s going back tomorrow. Like he can fix up the tree house with one magic touch. “You can’t even fold the sheets properly,” I tell him, and he says, “Who says? You?”

There are a thousand ways to break your heart. You do something that fucks you up. Or maybe someone else does it to you, or the world just hates your guts, and you end up sitting on the side of the pool, pushing the goggles hard into your face and thinking: God. That’s it. That’s it for me.

So that’s how it goes. The world moves on without the people who get their hearts stomped, and Pluto strays far away enough from the sun that nothing really matters here. It’s not actually a planet. It only made the news for a couple of years. Then astronomy lectures, then children’s puzzles, then tiny planetary systems hung over cradles, all floating around a single self-loving star. Then they discovered how small it was. Then it got kicked off the list.

Who can argue with that? Stomp hard enough and some people just don’t get up. That’s what I didn’t say to the doctors and the officers, and the detective who called me afterwards when I was in class to ask what I did, or what the guy didn’t, and I held the phone to my mouth and told them in secret that I was going to Pluto. Then they said there was nothing to be done even so, they were going to call back later, okay, and to stay safe, and not think too badly of it all. Pluto’s got no service, they said. It’s reserved for emergencies only.

Case takes my hand and leads me out onto the ice. We clasp our grips over the rails. He skates fast, I skate slow, and you’d think I stayed away from the guy after it happened. But he was our coach, so I talked to him every day in my swimsuit in the summer afterwards, the pool tiles burning under my feet, and he smiled at me every time.

That’s the thing about college. You’re supposed to do everything yourself, like get good grades, and join a swim team, and talk to guys, and not have anything happen to you except for graduation and flowers and love and gifts and parents waving cameras and the rain misting down over tents, puddles like mirrors on the white plastic seats, nothing frozen and nothing grey, dresses simple and neat.

Case doesn’t shrug when I tell him I can’t let go. I’m holding the railing and telling him about a book I read in the tiny library we keep hidden behind the washing machines. It’s called The Gift of Fear. I want it to call it the gift of stupidity, but I can’t get the words out. I’m just folding over and Case is holding my hand and crouching beside me, and I can’t tell him that I didn’t feel any fear at all. I just felt excited, and then I felt cold. Like plunging into water, when the noise goes fuzzy when you’re underneath the surface, and all you can see from the bottom of the pool is everyone swimming above you, their hands slicing through the water. The bubbles a mask over their faces. And I can’t tell Case I wasn’t scared, I felt like I was going to lie there like something dead, with my underwear down my ankles, and the guy grinning at me and saying, “Oops,” and then you don’t feel anything until months later, when you jump into a pool during race practice and you think: “How could I have been so stupid?”

How? How?

And you’re stupid. You really are. But you’re on Pluto, too.

After I got off the call with the detective, I went and looked up all the myths I could. The ones about girls being chased, and girls being married, and all the gods that went after them and carried them away and stomped them to pieces for no good reason other than love. The countless moons named after wives. The countless moons named after consorts. Io. Europa. Ganymede. I lay in my dorm room and didn’t call my parents and didn’t go to class and scrubbed my thighs in the shower until my fingers hurt. It’s a gift, the book had said. You have to listen to fear.

Case sits down on the ice. He’s still holding my hand. “I hate you,” I say.

Case doesn’t go away. He doesn’t vanish with a crack, or even crumple up his face. He just rubs his thumb in the center of my palm, and I sit down on the ice and I tell him I’m not going back. I’m going to stock showers forever, and the sun will always be a speck of sand, and I can’t cry anymore, even though my heart hurts like someone’s got it wedged under the heel of their boot. I’m saying things to stomp on his chest. I’m saying horrible things I don’t mean, and I’m telling him I’m never going to swim again, or go to college again, because there aren’t any glorious teenage days left for me. Days when nothing’s meant to be.

And if I stay on Pluto, nothing will happen to me again. I won’t get stomped on. I won’t get broken, and I’ll break all the hearts if I have to, and I’ll have the god-given gift of foresight, not fear. Case lets go of my palm. He puts his hands behind him and leans back on the ice. The movement hunches his shoulders up like a shrug.

“I bet the tree house wasn’t even good,” I tell him. “I bet your Dad didn’t even care.”

Case’s mouth is thinning quick. I can stomp him up. I’ve got this in the bag.

You end up on Pluto if you break your heart. You end up on Earth if you manage to break it again. That’s what happened to Case’s dad. He saw Case again on Pluto, and then crack, he was gone like that. “I won’t ever be like him,” Case had said after his dad had gone. We opened bottles of liquor, poured them clean down the drain. He had to stare up at the ceiling and blink hard from the smell. “Not when he’s there, and not when I’m here.”

I don’t know who I want to be like or not like. I don’t want to swim. I don’t want to dive. I just want to be in the pool already. Watching the swimmers go by.

If I hadn’t broken my own stupid heart, and Case hadn’t broken his, Pluto would never have happened. We wouldn’t have ever been working the cleaning shift at the hotel, or sneaking into the rink at night, or lying down with the ice freezing up our fingers and breaths. The only way you stay on Pluto is if you don’t care. I think about telling Case how much I can’t care sometimes, or how I can’t shrug when he shrugs, and then I think about the crack, and the Bic pens clattering on the marble floors, and I think: girly, that’s a no.

It’s like that, sometimes. Just a no.

Case stands up on the ice. He pulls me up and says, “You’re right. I don’t think my dad cared. It’s stupid, right?” And I say, “No,” but he says, “I tried calling him after he left, using the concierge phone when all the guests were gone. He didn’t pick up. I just let it ring. Stupid,” and I tell him it’s not, and he tells me it is, and laughs.

Case was thirteen when he hunted down his dad in an address book online, and thirteen and a half when his dad opened the door and said, who are you? And Case said, I wanted to ask if this was 1406? And it was 1506, he just stammered through the lie, and his dad had said, sorry, kid. Wrong address, it’s down the block, and Case had said thank you and walked the whole hundred and eight yards there.

Case can’t stop laughing. He’s miming the look on his dad’s face, making jokes about not recognizing your kid, who’s making the same damn face back. Genetics, right, and I swat him but I’m laughing, too. The tears are freezing on my cheeks.

The guy they named Pluto after carried his wife away, too. He made her a bed of primroses underground, and a crown of every burning jewel on the earth. But his wife starved herself until her stomach was a cave and her hair was dried grass, and she walked the House like she was someone dead, until she got so hungry that she gave in and ate six bloody arils from a pomegranate in a tree. It was her doom, said the messenger when they finally found her, just when she’d begun to go soft with relief.

“You can’t leave,” the messenger said. “Not without coming back,” and it was true. But the girl thought: Leaving for a while is better than never leaving at all. Even if it means that she’d have to come back again someday. Even if everyone in the millions of years after said that he was loyal to her forever, and that it broke his heart to see her leave every year, broke it so badly and resolutely that his planet was where everyone ended up when they broke their hearts, too.

It’s love, everyone said. It’s just what people do.

Case leads me out to the middle of the ice. The windows are open and there’s no need for any cooling system. The sun is too far away, and above us, the light drifts down in streams. I want to take a picture but there are no cameras on Pluto. You just come with whatever you were holding at the time. Case keeps a pair of sunglasses by his bed because he’d stopped to grab a drink at a store on the way back from his dad’s house, and he’d taken the sunglasses off to see the price tags, and crack—he went to Pluto.

Case turns around. He throws out his arms, nothing too high, like he’s unsure he’s doing it at all. He waits for me. I throw my arms out back. The lights are on us, and my breath is fogging up, and my feet keep slip-sliding out from under me, and I can smell the ice and the cotton detergent we use for the sheets, the freshness that sticks to us both all the time. It’s like nothing on Earth, and Case says, “I give horrible hugs. You should know.”

“Everything you do is horrible,” I say, but my face is making an expression, like it isn’t part of me anymore.

“I’m a genius.”

“You look like a plane,” I say. “One with a propeller, and the red paint from Snoopy.”

He raises his arms a little higher, like they’re wings. I’m giggling again, a watery sound, and I can’t stop it from coming out of me. I can’t stop crying either. It comes out with more giggles.

“Aw,” he says. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Raise your arms higher,” I say, and he does, he puts his palms facing the ceiling and the roof and the universe above us, like he’s balancing out some weight. Then he turns around and tips his chin up, and begins to fall backwards, and I shriek and catch him, and we both go down. “Shut up,” I say, “God, if you hit your head,” but we’re sinking onto the ice, and I caught him, and it’s not like those kinds of days will ever not-happen. It’s not like the coach guy would ever not-smile, and that I would ever say not-yes in the way I should’ve known. The gift of fear. The gift of here. The gift of showing up late to the swimming pool, so late that everyone had already left, so I just sat on the rim and kicked my legs in the water. The gift of the day when I broke my own stupid heart in the end, which was the day I sat in the shower and scrubbed, and the day before I went to the pool and jumped and thought about how stupid I was that I’d fallen for anyone and for anything just like that. How stupid it was that it hurt and that I’d called the police over it and hung up on the third try, and tried again and succeeded on the fourth.

That’s how it works, isn’t it? You never think of Pluto until you find yourself there with nothing but your swimsuit on, everything frozen and grey, and the day you get there is a normal day where you don’t get stomped and where you never thought of asking yourself—what if I’d said something else?

What if this? What if that?

The ice is a bright solid wall underneath us. Case is holding my hand again, and his thumb is in the heart of my palm as we skate, and I turn my face against the chill to look at him. “Guess we’ll be here forever,” he says.

Forever doesn’t mean shit. When I first got into swimming, they made us do laps until we were dizzy and white with cold. I used to race the guys in the pool, thinking that I was like them, or that they were like me. I wasn’t a girl until I was. We swam the same races until we didn’t. And until I stopped swimming, I didn’t get why some people went to Pluto and never came back, and why some people spent almost no time there whatsoever. There aren’t any swimming pools on Pluto, and as a kid, I thought I’d never go. Who would want to swim in a planet of ice? Who wouldn’t ever want to go back?

They say some people are still on Pluto. They say some people never come back to Earth. And I understand them, I do. It’s not my fault I’m up here. It’s not anyone’s fault either, because people will always talk. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe he just couldn’t help it. I don’t tell them that’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard, and I don’t tell him that the guy wasn’t the one who broke my heart in the first place. You have to be gentle before you can be hard. You’ve got to be kind before you mean what you say, and that’s what I tell Case as we walk through the lobby and out of the hotel. He has his sunglasses over his head, pushing his hair back though there’s no sun. And I don’t tell him how much it hurt. I don’t tell him how little I still feel. But one day we’ll tell each other as much as we know, like how fast you can go on a road, or how to fold a military corner onto a bed, or how to look up at the sky one day with a telescope we’ve borrowed ourselves, and wave at anyone on Earth who’s watching: wave from the not-planet that’s never meant to be remembered, the not-planet that’s never meant to be reached. They’ll wave back. We’ll throw our hands up in mirror images. And I won’t tell him that I’ve stopped waiting for that one day in the future, when we’ll break our hearts one more time—one winner, one loser—and when maybe I’ll find myself on Earth once more, feeling around for room keys in my pocket, and wishing that I’d never left the ice rink in the heartbreak hotel.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from J. Halls during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Sarah Davidson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

And there she is again, the girl with the silver eyes, twitching like a moth in a pair of dirty gray track pants and black oversized hoodie. I watch her over the rim of my glass and even in the dark of the club I can see in the girl’s face something that reminds me of my own. She is tall and thin and her black hair is lank and stringy and there is a kind of madness lurking in her eyes. I want to call out to her—ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?—but my words won’t carry over the music. She bites her nails, scratches her head like a wild thing then holds herself tight, right knee shaking. When our eyes meet, she moves towards me and I slip off the stool and dodge the many elbows and bare sweaty shoulders to find the powder room where Fira and Natasha are cutting lines. Finish it off, Fira says and heads back outside and Natasha slips off her thong from under her blue sequin mini. I met someone, she says. He’s taking me for a ride in his Diablo. She presses her lips on my neck and disappears and I take two lines and turn to find the girl with the crazy eyes staring right at me, a napkin twisted around her fingers. I hadn’t heard her open the door. In spite of her height she takes up so little room, like she’s a wisp of black smoke I can blow away with a single exhale. Do I know you? I ask.

She shakes her head and continues to stare. She’s a wretched thing and frankly I’m a little surprised they let her in the club like this but perhaps she got in through some back door like a bone thin alley cat. I call her that in my head—Alley Cat. She parts her chewed up lips and mutters under her breath. Go back home before it’s too late, she says in a barely audible whisper.

Before what’s too late?

He took me to the Lightning Field.

Who did?

Tariq.

And?

Nothing was the same after that, says the girl now tearing up the napkin in her hands. He might decide to keep you for himself. She nods as she says this as if I’ve given her the impression that I’ve grasped her meaning and I catch sight of her wrists and see that there are cuts there, some old, some new.

Look into the mirror and you’ll see what I mean, she says, stepping up close, reaching out to me with long thin fingers.

I walk out the door and back into the crowd where I find Tariq and tell him I’m going back to the hotel. What happened? he shouts over the music.

Some crazy girl is following me around.

We step into the cool black night and he lights my cigarette. Did she say anything else?

Something about a lightning field.

Tariq raises an eyebrow. This happens all the time in Dubai, he says. A new girl comes along and all the others get jittery.

I saw her earlier too.

They do that. Follow the new one around. Get obsessed. Be careful.

We are twenty-three girls, all in black Tom Ford heels and Skims underwear in varying shades of nude, the same red Mac color on our lips—Feels So Grand. Childish Gambino’s This is America starts on a speaker somewhere, the opening gospel fills the studio and I wait for that first gunshot and time a punch in the air. I step in front of the white backdrop and an assistant holds up a light meter to my cheek, my breasts, my abs: flash, flash, flash. The assistant has swirling tattoo sleeves and I fall into the pictures which I notice are identical on each arm; white rabbits with red eyes on the wrists, She-Ra on her flying horse on the deltoids, twins from The Shining in the crook of each elbow with REDRUM in bold cursive writing underneath, all on a sea of vines and creepers. When was the first time you realized you were this beautiful? yells the stylist and I look into the eye of the camera and think of diamonds on the surface of a dark green sea, songs of the deep in my ear, the lick of salt on my lips. Beirut summer. Papa drove half a day to get us to the beach in Byblos and when Maman untied the bow at the back and pulled up my frock the heads turned in my direction. I felt the looks on my skin like hot laser beams as I walked into the water and when I stepped out a trio of Italian brothers called out to me. Bellissima! they yelled, waving their hats as Maman rushed over to cover me with a towel.

My Polaroid is pulled from the camera and pinned to the wall, a red star drawn in the corner as I come to life from the white.

In the Uber Tariq says little but squeezes my knee as I look out at the citylights and think of what Maman said at the airport. Give the photographers whatever they ask for okay, make them happy. They’re your gateway! At his studio the other day, Tariq had walked around me in circles as I stood there in my Calvin Klein underwear, the pale gray backdrop paper under my bare feet, my eyes on the Helmut Newton prints on the back wall. I thought of the boys at school and the pictures they used to draw of me in their notebooks. In summer I was the placid lake to cool their suntanned skin, in winter I was the fire to thaw them out. I know what they saw when they looked at me. As for the sweet ones, I only ever saw them wipe the sweat from their lips. But Tariq’s look is different, like he’s hedging his bets to see if this is a face and a body he wants to put up there, on that shelf, with the other girls he’s made big and turned into stars. Some girls are for the magazines and some I keep just for myself, he said tapping his heart as he took some quick shots. He has a Dune-inspired dystopian desert shoot in front of the Richard Serras at the Brouq Nature Reserve for Vogue Arabia and the agency sent me and three others. He’ll pick only one and we won’t really know till next week so till then I have to do whatever it takes.

The invitation to the sex party came not in an email or on WhatsApp but old school style, on a white card with gold writing. The envelope was made from a page torn out of Yasunari Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties. The villa is on the east coast in Fujairah, on a hill overlooking the Indian Ocean, old-fashioned with a central courtyard and a fountain surrounded by frolicking lovers and snow white baby goats that have escaped from their pen and fallen asleep under the stars. Natasha ran silver mascara through my hair and tied it in an intricate style with many twists, knots and braids and drew eyes on my nipples that stare out now from under my pale pink tulle Gucci bodysuit as I play Razz with four men including the host, a Khaleeji boy with a Bugatti dealership. Natasha lies curled up on a chaise longue watching the game in her Agent Provocateur bra, her eyes lined with green glitter, peacock feathers sticking out from her butt. The men fold one after the other and I realize I’ve won not just the game but also the chance to choose who to sleep with and I choose the Khaleeji boy who I figure out is a bookish sort because as he cups my breasts he tells me a of a story he read once about a girl who had eyes instead of nipples forced to live in a house of women monsters patronized by men with a penchant for freakish sex. I wonder how they all looked to her, I say and he laughs and rubs his thumbs over my breast eyes smudging them till they are nothing but pale clouds of gray.

Soft warm light bathes us both and I close my eyes, bite my lips and try to lean into the red core of intensity as Tariq takes photos. I want to know what your face is capable of, he’d said as he ordered a bottle of Brut to the room and when I started to sway, he slipped off my dress and got out the tiny camera he’d had in his jacket pocket all along. He’s shooting on film and in between the sounds of the shutter I can hear a small voice somewhere in my head telling me that this may not be such a good idea but I’m drunk now and the words that come out of my lips are meaningless, pathetic gibberish and my arms are too weak to push him away in any case. I think briefly of my first ever go-see when the photographer had called me as pretty as a prize-winning pony, telling me to get on my hands and knees. Tariq pulls back his long black hair with his hands and for the first time I see the wolf in him that I see in every man.

We have matching French braids and stand at the edge of an infinity pool in identical white keyhole swimsuits, white frame Chanel sunglasses in front of our eyes as gold reflectors bounce the sun back to us where it wraps around our bodies adding an otherworldly shine. I hold a falcon perched on my gloved hand, Fira the leash to a full grown cheetah, real diamonds in his collar as the rapper Jamil aka Chic of Dubai stands in the water, red and white ghutra on his head mouthing the words to his song which tells tales of private jets and ruby mines, palm leaves and sipping some rare Hennessy cognac straight from the Baccarat bottle. This mansion in Sufouh is Jamil’s own and holds his considerable art collection which includes a Frank Moore painting, To Die For, the one Gianni Versace commissioned but never lived to see. Somewhere in the house, Kate Moss’s decapitated head lies dripping blood on a marble floor with eyes frozen in awe, snakes rising from her scalp instead of hair. After the shoot, Jamil asks us if we would like to come to a party and he takes us in his gold Rolls Royce to a nearby palace with a real Japanese maple tree in the center of a dimly lit drawing room under a skylight surrounded by supine Asian girls nearly naked, delicate rolls of sushi lined up on their bodies. Around two Fira leaves with Jamil and I with a Saudi princess, Monira, who takes me to her condo, offers me a white Russian and hands me a whip to strike her ass. It looks like a peach by the time I’m done and she asks me to stroke it and I do so but gingerly. I think of my cousin Lianne who’d asked me to pour candle wax on the back of her legs one Easter break. I’d watch the hot white wax land on her skin, cloud up and harden to a shell as she’d bite into a towel, face turning red, tears leaking out from behind her thick black lashes. She’d tell me to wait a half hour then get me to crack the wax off, something I found oddly satisfying and I’d watch her skin come out streaked with pink looking like a map with its raw rivers of pain. When I asked her why she did it, she said it was to help her forget, though forget what, she wouldn’t say.

I’m in the dusty Industrial Zone on the edge of Dubai where Tariq has his studio and as I step out of the cab, I hear someone cry my name from across the street. I look around, shielding my eyes from the white tremulous sun the city is so famous for and then I see her, Alley Cat, like the specter of death, running through the traffic towards me, her black wispy hair flying around her face, her gray t-shirt clinging to her body with sweat. Hey! she yells and I hear her voice crack, like she hasn’t used it since the last time I saw her at the club. Don’t let him finish the roll on the Pentax!

I see her thin body quake with all the ferocity it can muster and I get back in the car and tell the cabbie to drive on. When we circle back around ten minutes later, she’s gone.

I lie on my side on the navy velvet divan in a silver Emporio Armani dress and heels, my hand on the neck of a black Pharaoh’s hound. I feel the warmth of his muscular body, the subtle pulse under his skin, the slight rise and fall of his breaths. His ears point up and give him the look of supreme attentiveness while my body is at ease because there is something we both know—that he has guarded the kings and gods for thousands of years and that I am his to protect and yet also his master. The perfume we’re selling, I’m told, has notes of Palo Santo smoke, vetiver, black pepper, ebony and leather and I am wearing it now and wonder what the hound makes of the scent. Does it make him see what I see, make him hear what I hear? I see Fares, the boy I lost my virginity to back in the village when I was fifteen. He used to work with horses and his fingers had this scent, the one now in my orbit, the sweaty leather note. He used to love pressing his hand into my mouth when he came and he’d always tell me to bite it and one time I bit so hard I drew blood and his grunt turned into a yelp of pain. He said that it was the most beautiful feeling, licking the blood off his hand, that he wished he could keep it within him forever. He took my fingers and ran them over the scars on his back, from his Papa’s belt he said. There was a liquid moon in the sky that evening and it trembled like a big white yolk behind the boy’s head, behind the trees that stood tall over him buzzing ever so slightly at their green edges, privy by then to all of our whispered secrets and the sight of our young bodies making love in the buff.

Farah behind the Mamiya looks up from the viewfinder, shutter release cable ready in her hand and as her thumb presses down, the liquid moon explodes in front of my eyes.

I am swimming at the Versace Hotel, slicing through the water like a shark, my eyes on the floor of the pool where there is a mosaic of Medusa, the snakes of her hair writhing around her face ready to strike. This may be a city of beautiful people but gorgons lurk behind every corner. When I slide out and grab my towel, I see security leading away a girl in sweatpants and a baggy t-shirt. Alley Cat leaves quietly but turns to look at me with timid flames of anguish in her eyes and the stoop of defeat in her shoulders.

The dark henna on my arms is a design of thick vertical stripes, running all the way from my shoulders to my fingertips, a souvenir from the shoot this morning. I am at an art show and on the walls hang photographs of young girls in jalabiyas, their faces covered with animal masks, sipping from tiny coffee cups. I think of Uncle Azad, how every year on my birthday he’d sit me down in his studio and take a photograph to mark the event. When I was little, he’d get me to hold one of my dolls but as I got older he’d hand me a bouquet of wild flowers he’d assembled himself just for the occasion. It was he who sent my photos to the agency, pushed me onto this path, always cupping my face with his hands and saying I couldn’t be this beautiful for nothing. His studio was a small room at the back of his house, with sky blue walls covered in pictures of mostly the village boys always dressed up as cowboys, policemen or sheikhs and there was one boy Ali, like me, who Uncle Azad photographed every year. His pictures were clustered in the corner; pirate, Tarzan, king. I found naked photos of him once in a drawer when Uncle Azad was making coffee in the kitchen. Ali, around fifteen, lay on a bed with flowery sheets, his green eyes half closed looking into the camera as if daring it to come closer, a subtle smile on his pink, rosebud lips. He went missing a year later and when they found his body in the river his hands had been tied behind his back and a dog collar buckled tight around his neck. The police never found out who did it but for months the village children did not step outside alone.

I stand with my back against the wall, Tariq on his knees in front of me like a pilgrim, his hands on my breasts—black Rick Owens Open Splint Kiss heel boots, the only armor of fashion on my body. We’re heading to Qatar tomorrow for the shoot and I’ve been fitted into all the pieces which are packed and ready to go. Look at yourself, says Tariq and I open my eyes and look at the long horizontal mirror on the wall in front of me. My eyes are glossy, limpid, my lips parted for the gasps I cannot stop. This is the girl I want in the desert, he says.

Reaching fifty feet into the sky, the four tall dark steel plates of Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East stand behind me as the stylist fixes the gold chain-link veil on my face. The sand is packed hard into the earth and speckled with native shrubs and small rocks. The monoliths seem like alien creations, inserted here into the desert for some dubious unknown purpose. I think of what people will make of them a thousand years from now and wonder if they will see them as the art that they are or perhaps as something funerary like the Pyramids and wonder were there kings here once. I am in a black Esther Perbandt dress and her Lune boots looking like a queen of darkness, my hair styled like a punk and fingernails fitted with gold press-ons. My kohl-lined eyes peer out from behind the gold mask and I see Tariq pull out his small Pentax again so I put my hands back on my hips and give him all that I can. In the distance a flock of camels crosses the shallow dusty dunes with little interest or regard for what goes on here. They have nowhere else to be, no one calls out to them for a smile, a sigh, a tilt of the head. Tariq says my name and I look back into the camera as he steps up to me, leaning in for a close up. I dip my head back, frame my face with my hands. I’m going to keep you for myself, he says as a desert wind swirls around us. You’re one of a kind.

I wake up one morning to find that I’ve lost my reflection. In the mirrors and on the phone I don’t see myself at all. My image is gone. Heart beating fast, I jump into a cab and call Tariq but there’s no answer so I head to his studio and when I get there, the door is locked. And then I see her again, Alley Cat, her demon eyes hidden behind silver sunglasses this morning. She lays her thin fingers on my wrist and I let her and even without words she knows why I’m here. She slides back her glasses and I look into her eyes, the pupils large though the light of the day is bright and unremitting. He took me to the Lightning Field, she says. To shoot a fall/winter Prada collection. After the shoot, he took out his small camera, 35mm, said he wanted to keep me for himself. That was two years ago. I’m still waiting for my reflection to come back.

She lights a cigarette and I watch the smoke unfurl in the space between us. How do you know you’ll come back? I ask. Did he tell you?

He said he could only keep the capture for so long, that eventually the image always slipped away from him and went back to the girl. He said it’s the nature of the medium. There’s no permanent fixer.

Why does he do it?

He says he’s a collector of youth and beauty.

I raise my hands to my face and feel around; my nose, my lips, my cheeks. I think of the tribal bedouin sitters of those early nineteenth century photographs I’d seen at the Louvre, how they’d thought that the camera would capture their soul.

We’ll come back, says Alley Cat squeezing my arm. We’ll come back.

I am at the top of Burj Khalifa, on the observation deck, the curve of the earth visible beyond the Arabian Sea. I fly back home tonight and Alley Cat suggested taking in a view I’ll never forget. I haven’t been out much since the capture but this time I yielded to her demands. She’s sort of taken me under her wing, shown me the ropes to this new way of living. When she picked me up from the hotel, we took a few minutes to line each other’s eyes, flick on mascara and fix the lipstick, her face reminding me so much of my own that it was almost like looking into a mirror. She told me about the other girls, the ones before us, how they’d all gone back home to wait it out. She’d stayed on in the city because she didn’t have much of a home to go back to, as an orphan from an Uzbek mountain village. She told me stories of the village, the looks of all the boys, how they always said that her eyes were dangerous, a gift from the devil himself. She’d met Tariq at a Puma launch party and he’d framed her face with his fingers right there on the dance floor.

One night we snuck into his apartment with knives and hammers, thought of breaking all the cameras we could find in there, of setting the whole place on fire but when we got there, we found him ready. Do anything to me and you’ll never come back, he said.

I asked him why he’d done it and he ran his fingers through my hair and said that he didn’t like sharing his girls with the others, that once he picked a face for his pictures he wanted to keep it for himself. I looked up at him and saw in his silhouette the wolf I’d seen there before and it was then that he handed me a photograph of our time in the desert. Even with all the sun that day he’d blasted me with the flash, bleached me white, melded me into the silvery sand I lay on in that flesh-toned dress, my feet bare, toenails chrome, face wrapped in a white Hermès scarf bedouin style and all that rose from the photograph was the blue smoke of my eyes. When I looked at them closely, my eyes seemed to move in a silent appeal as if they already knew that something essential was flying away from them at that moment.

Tariq mussed my hair. This way, you’ll always be beautiful, he said.

Afterwards Alley Cat and I went to a sake bar in Deira and got a booth where we sat facing each other playing a mirror game taking turns to do exactly what the other one did. I’d fix my hair and so would Alley Cat. She’d lift her drink to her mouth and so would I. We cried at first then laughed and laughed and I’m sure the other patrons thought we were crazy. Two days later I got a call telling me that Tariq had died in a car accident. His Camaro went up in flames somewhere in Downtown after crashing into a Brabus. The first thing I did was check the mirror but the spell he cast on me had yet to break.

The sun dipping into the Gulf is an orb of pink orange milk casting long shadows on the deck and I glance down at the hotel Alley Cat points to. They found a film star dead in the bathtub a few years ago, she says. I turn away from the view and hold up my hands and watch on the floor the shadow of the misshapen bird I’ve made. I move my fingers and the bird flutters its wings and I realize then that this shadow bird is a picture that’s still mine.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Rebecca Halsey during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Back then, there hadn’t been any cars in the parking lot. We didn’t see any muddy footprints stamped into the dirt. Not even the hoofprint exclamations of deer. The weather was partly to blame, but really people stopped visiting the forest once the trees started talking.

“C’mon, Hazel.” Jackson tugged on my arm with a glance over his shoulder. Even a split lip couldn’t dim his smile. “What are you dawdling for?”

“I’m coming as fast as I can.” I hitched up my skirt as much as I could without being improper, trying to hurry up without getting dirty. Momma disliked it when I got dirt on my clothes. She said it wasn’t ladylike.

I thought Momma had disliked Jackson ’cause he was usually messy. She’d pinch her face at him, call him a wild child and tell him to wash up with the hose before coming inside. She’d mutter bad things about his Papa as she retreated inside to mind dinner, iron something for Daddy, or check on the pickling. I didn’t mind her mumbling much because Jackson’s papa wasn’t all that nice.

By the time we got to the tree Jackson wanted to show me, the sun was peeking through the clouds. Light lit the trail, making the fog a little less thick. Jackson knocked on the wood and introduced the big oak as Julie J.

“Why Julie J?” I asked.

“’Cause.” He pointed to a heart carved into the trunk. Julie + J 4ever. I traced the rough ridges of the carved name. There must have been a hundred other names on the trunk. I never asked why Jackson picked Julie J. Jackson added, “It’s a great name.”

“It’s a good name,” I said.

“A great one.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s great.”

“Julie J.” Jackson turned. “Please would you tell us something?”

He didn’t have to ask. Steady murmuring surrounded us. We’d passed purring dogwoods saying things that didn’t mean much. Stilted elms stuttering stuff that was hard to make out. Beeches were being annoyingly loud. All of them together sounded like the crackle of leaves rubbed together, like the creaky groan of strained branches. No wonder they called it the Rustling. Trees never shut the mouths they didn’t have once they began stirring.

But Jackson always asked anyway. He was the kind of person who was considerate to everyone. Even his papa. You could practically hear the blood thumping through that big heart of his.

I think that’s why I loved him.

Julie J sounded like every oak, as pleasant as patience.

“Yesterday,” said Julie J, “squirrel ate. Yesterday, man, woman, dog walked. Yesterday, crow cawed. Yesterday, fish jumped. Heron waited.”

All trees started their tales that way. Everyone remembers where they were when the trees first groaned “yesterday.” My hands were clothes-pinning Daddy’s pants to the line when the sycamore sent a rumble rattling down the line and poured leaves onto us. “Yesterday, it rained.” I buried my face into Momma’s blouse, felt her trembling hands on my shoulders and thought the end had come. But I also remember thinking that the tree had fibbed. It hadn’t rained for weeks.

Quickly everyone realized trees weren’t being literal. Not about the rain, not about the day. Once, I read in one of Ms. Kennedy’s encyclopedias that oaks can live for a thousand years, with classifications based on age, like notable or veteran. Trees' lives are so long that maybe everything seems like it happened “yesterday.” Maybe night and day felt like a blink. The difference from darkness and light so brief it’s meaningless.

“Yesterday,” Julie J said, “man caught fish. Man threw fish to river. Man taught boy. Boy caught fish. Boy hugged man. Fish stilled.”

In the beginning, trees spoke without rhyme or reason, just rattling off, making as much sense as TV channels being constantly changed, which Daddy complained that Momma needed to stop doing and just pick one. Sometimes, they—my momma and the trees—lingered on one thing long enough to get a sense of what it was about.

“Yesterday,” Julie J said, “man sat. Man made fire. Sky made water. Water unmade fire. Man slept. Man stilled. Man served. Man served the crows, the hawks, the vultures, the worms, the mushrooms, the trees.”

“I wanna go home,” I told Jackson, hugging my knees as the grey forest air quilted us. The sun hadn’t lightened the fog, not really. It was still a half-wet blanket no matter how you shook it. Condensation, I thought, trying to remember the definition. Ms. Kennedy would know the right word or have it in one of her dictionaries. Something moist hung from my eyelashes. I palmed circles into my face.

“Awh, Hazel.” Jackson squeezed my hand, his other one flat on Julie J like he wanted us to get along. “Julie J doesn’t mean anything by it. They just saying stuff. Sometimes stuff no one else tells us.”

“I don’t know, Jackie.” I knew I wasn’t going anywhere—not with Jackson’s hand in mine. “They don’t know nothing, really. My momma says it’s no good to put your ears to bark. Only tree huggers do that.”

“They know stuff.” Jackson made a face.

“I don’t know.”

“They do.”

“Maybe a little.”

Julie J rustled over us.

“What’s wrong with hugging trees?”

I shrugged. I had no idea, but Momma said it with the same voice she used to call Jackson’s papa a difficult man as she crushed up beadwood seeds to dab onto Jackson’s bruises. The same voice she used to argue with Daddy as the folks on the news argued about the war. She called Jackson a wild child with the same tone. The only reason she was wrong about that was because she said it like a bad thing. At thirteen, Jackson was sort of a wild child, what with how often he was in the woods, off on his own, skipping rocks and/or school. I didn’t know nothing about tree huggers, but Momma was right about Jackson’s papa, so I believed Momma about hugging trees because sometimes she could be really really right.

Yesterday, Jackson and I sat back-to-bark, a pine between us.

The whole woods smelled like dirt-after-rain instead of dirt-before-rain. Rain sent little splotches of mud up as we walked, spotting up past my knees. Momma would be upset that I got my shorts dirty after she got upset that I wore shorts, but I tried not to worry about that. Not while Jackson was beaming and saying I had to meet Moses.

“Can’t meet him, Jackson.” I said carefully. “He was alive a long time ago.”

“Don’t kid, Hazel.”

“He was, Jackie. A long time ago.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he was alive just yesterday.”

“I don’t think so, Jackie.”

“Awh, don’t be like that, Hazel. I’m just messing.”

I stepped around a puddle. The ground squelched.

“You know I wasn’t talking about that one anyways. Moses is a tree.”

The pine towered at the top of a ridge. Down the hill, the river muttered muddy green-brown things. The river was high like it got after every rain. High enough that the small shorelines I knew existed had been drowned away. Someone who saw the river for the first time on a day like this would never know it as anything else. Never know that it wasn’t always high and mighty and murky. Never know that there were places for people to rest alongside in times of placid flows. Never know its water could be clear and slow and studded with turtles. Turtles who would dive, shocked into their shells at the slightest sound. Wouldn’t be until the water fell that things could be peaceful again. That day, there weren’t no turtles to be seen. I wondered where they all got to after a storm.

In the woods, rain was good for the water table. Closer to town, stormwater runoff dispersed pollutants. Rain also oxygenated waterways. I really didn’t know it well enough to know how good or bad any of that was, but I knew it good enough for an A-minus on a Ms. Kennedy quiz, so that was good enough for me.

It wasn’t like Ms. Kennedy handed back quizzes with anything but the grade anyway. Once, Tommy Jones’s hand shot up to protest his D. He asked why Ms. Kennedy didn’t just give us the answers afterwards. All she’d said was that the answers would never stick if we didn’t care enough to find them ourselves. Jackson nodded like that meant more than it did over his own E-pressed quiz. Tommy Jones called Ms. Kennedy an s-word-with-a-y teacher and stomped off to the principal’s office before he could be sent.

I didn’t pay no mind to the negative next to my grade. Momma didn’t neither as she pressed it to the fridge. Momma enjoyed natural sciences too. She was always asking about Ms. Kennedy’s subjects, sciences and social studies. She’d thumb through the textbooks with a thoughtful expression, then lay my head in her lap and tell me a story from the Old Testament, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

Toads croaked under leafy hats while fat raindrops dipped their brims. The woods were a choir of croak and cricket and trees telling tales to the drum of soft rains. My head thumped. I didn’t know how Jackson could stand it. For most, the excitement of the Rustling died like a fad, but Jackson still spent loads of time in the woods. The metal bar guarding the parking lot and the laminated signs forbidding trespassing didn’t do nothing to stop him and his half-rust, half-red bike. Nothing could dissuade me when Jackson asked me to come with either. Nothing except my folks.

At that point, only adults worried about the trees. At first some kids were a little spooked but got curious after no one had gotten eaten or strangled or Bloody Mary’d like everyone gossiped would happen if you went listening. Kids fell into one of two camps. There were the ones who stayed away—they thought trees were boring, or their parents told them to. Then there were those who spent too much time under the leaves. Somehow, I belonged to both groups. I looked down at our locked hands. Jackson’s other hand was dragging a stick through the mud.

“Why do you like the trees?” I asked.

“You don’t?”

“Not as much as you.”

“You don’t like them, do you?”

“I do.” I swept a loose bang from my eye. Jackson squeezed my hand. I got anxious that he was going to let go of me and hurried to say, “I was just wondering is all.”

“You just got to listen a little more,” Jackson said. “You’re the smartest girl I know”—a blush burned across my face—“you’ll love the trees.”

We stopped at a fork in the trail. Jackson miney-mo’ed his stick as he tried to recall the way. When the blood sank back into my body, I realized Jackson hadn’t really answered my question. “Why do you like them, Jackson?”

“Come hear.” Jackson pulled my arm.

At the top of the ridge, Jackson sat me down, facing the river, before he darted to the other side. Pine needles filled the ridge with an aroma as sharp and sweet as the stuff Momma and I scrubbed the counters with.

“Moses,” Jackson’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat. His voice had been doing a lot of cracking recently. He was getting tall too, each inch pulling him away from me. “Moses, would you please share your stories?”

“Why Moses?” I asked as we waited.

“You’ll see.”

I shimmied into the bed of needles, picking and flicking a few off my shorts. My headache was eased by the pit-pat of rain that had gotten stuck on the leaves on its way down. I rested my head against the trunk and gazed up at the amber drops sighing down the trunk. What was sap anyway? The same thing as syrup? I didn’t realize I’d been thinking out loud.

“Maybe,” Jackson’s voice was soft under the rain, “trees cry sometimes.”

“Maybe,” I echoed.

“I think they do.”

“They might.”

A static silence fell over us. Toads circled Moses, listening although Moses hadn’t said anything interesting yet. I didn’t mind toads. I knew how to pick them up and cup them, so their little heads could peek out between my palm and thumb. Momma said touching their skin would make me sick, so I never let her see me do it. Jackson loved it when I caught toads because we did it so differently. He got excited and ran straight at them, catching them quick. I went sort of from the side. Sometimes we’d watch the other flub it, scattering the toads away. We definitely caught more toads when we worked together.

I never told Jackson that I’d practiced catching them just so I could impress him.

Moses spoke like every pine, with a prickly tone so close to annoyed.

I thought their vision must be clearer because of their leaves. Those thin needles reminded me of grey hairs on old heads. Moses sounded like an old man who’d lived to see too much and spoke with the sourness of milk kept too long.

“Yesterday,” said Moses, “many slugs came to be with me. Around twenty.”

At some point, the trees had gotten better at counting. I couldn’t begin to estimate when that was.

“Yesterday, around two hundred men marched. Yesterday, robin laid about two eggs. Yesterday—”

Moses’s blanket-soft bed led me to sleep. I didn’t wake up until Jackson hissed my name.

“—woman swam in the river,” Moses said, “around two men and two dogs chased. Dogs sniffed. Dogs barked. Men yelled. Dogs swam. Woman fought. Around twenty bites. Woman let out red sap. Woman stilled. Woman served. Woman served the dogs, the bass, the bluegill, the crappie, the catfish, the river, the trees.”

“That’s sad,” I said quietly, hugging my knees. An awful cold pressed my skin as the toads groused beneath leaves. “How can you like listening to the trees when they say this sort of stuff, Jackson?”

“It is sad, but it’s important,” Jackson replied. He came around the tree. Soaked clothes clung to his body.

“Jackie!” I gasped. “You’re all soaked.”

“I am. Ain’t I?”

“Why didn’t you sit next to me?”

“Not enough room.”

I looked around. There was some dry space, tucked safely away from the rain, but only where he’d seated me. Everywhere else, pine needles grunted as rain plunked down.

“You’ll get sick,” I said.

“Nah, I’ll be all right.”

“Is it true?”

“Nah. I’ll probably get sick.”

“Jackie! Come sit!” I shuffled into the rain. “I mean the tree. Is it true?”

“I don’t think the trees can lie.”

I glanced sideways. Each of Jackson’s eyes—the black one, the other one—had rain trailing underneath.

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Jackson’s voice cracked like he’d done something wrong, like it was his fault for not knowing. We were in the eighth grade, which meant we knew some stuff, but not too much. Not as much as Momma or Daddy or the preacher or Ms. Kennedy. Heck, given his grades, Jackson might not even know as much as Tommy Jones. Which was all right.

“It’s okay,” I told him. I put my hand over his and he gave a sharp, snotty sniff.

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Jackson repeated, wiping his face of rain. “They’re Moses because of that story. I think that lady must have been like him, you know? Just trying to get across some water.”

I bit my lip. Moses—the real one—wasn’t anything like that woman or this tree. She can’t have been a prophet. Trees couldn’t lead people to freedom or deliver commandments. Trees had their own word, sure, but I still didn’t think there was anything inherently good about it. Not like how loving your neighbor or not stealing were obvious right things.

Jackson looked down the ridge and watched the river. I followed his gaze. Muddy water churned around a lone turtle sticking its neck out.

Yesterday, Jackson and I whispered under star-shaped leaves.

The tulip poplar had more sawed-off severed limbs than branches. Daddy had cut it straight and narrow and now it hardly had any of its flowers. Way down the dirt driveway, Jackson’s pickup lurked. Cicadas tsked here and there. Between that and the tree, I struggled to hear Jackson.

“You’re coming, right?” Jackson asked low. Daddy caught us once, sitting on the swinging bench that used to hang from the tree. He lumbered out of the house with a flashlight and a firearm. It was lucky that we had been sitting with a little space between us or my talking-to would have been a lot worse. I folded my arms as I chorused “yes, ma’am” to Momma’s scolding.

It used to be so much easier. Jackson could just climb up the branches of the sycamore tree by the house and tap the glass, but Daddy had taken a lumberjack’s ethic to all the trees in the near part of the yard. Jackson had looked over the piles of firewood with a thousand-yard stare. I hadn’t minded. Although I’d gotten good at tuning them out, sleeping could still be hard when the trees always had something to say. Jackson didn’t have to live with it the same way I had. The trailer park didn’t even have trees.

“You’re coming?” Jackson repeated. “Right?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t?” Jackson searched my face. “Everyone counts, Hazel.”

“I know,” I said, brushing my hair from my face.

Jackson frowned. “You only do that to your hair when you’re fibbing.”

My ears burned. “I don’t.”

“Hazel.”

“I don’t.”

Jackson’s mouth flattened. My heart fell. Letting Jackson down was like, I don’t know—Upsetting a puppy? Making a baby cry? None of those were really right. They made him seem childish. Like he didn’t know any better. Jackson knew exactly what was right and expected it of others. He was one of those people that knew how to be good even though his papa showed him the opposite. Maybe ’cause his papa showed him the opposite. Probably not—plenty of folks go through stuff like that and end up not half as good as Jackson.

When Jackson heard about something that didn’t sit right with him, he couldn’t ignore it. When Tommy Jones’s older brother came home in a box, and everyone had been really-really extra-extra nice to him but not much else, Jackson put on some black armbands with a symbol on them that riled up the administration and got him suspended. When David came to our school, most kids let him alone like Momma said I should do, but during recess, Jackson crossed the field. I don’t know what was said, but he and David got into it and David gave him a shiner to match the one Jackson already had. I remember pressing a bag of ice to Jackson’s face and telling him that folk like David liked to keep to themselves. Jackson groaned. Through two black eyes, I couldn’t read his expression.

Jackson always wanted to do something. Jackson nurtured his own nature. He nurtured mine, too. Jackson raised me up, thinking me better than I was.

“I can’t make you come if you don’t want to,” Jackson finally said.

“No, no. I want to.” I kept my hands pinned to my side.

Jackson rubbed the crisscross pattern on the trunk. Tulip poplars aren’t even poplars or tulips, they’re magnolias. I touched the tree, wondering if it knew where it belonged? Neither the tree it was named for nor the flower that it looked like. With all its severed branches, would it even recognize itself? I pulled my hand back from the trunk. Bark always reminded me of scabs. Something roughly healed over.

I bit my lip. “I’ll come.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I can tell my mom that I’m going to Caroline’s.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“I’ll pick you up at Caroline’s, then?”

I nodded.

“I knew I could count on you.” He closed the distance between us. My nose filled with the smell of ash as his mustache tickled my face. I tasted something bitter and minty and let my heart go twice as fast. “My girl.”

“Today,” said the tulip poplar, looming over us. Trees had learned a lot of new words. “A boy kissed a girl.”

Yesterday, I lied to Jackson for the last time.

The wood-grain pattern of the kitchen table felt smooth under my fingertips. I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again. Off in the distance, Jackson’s pickup sputtered a soft sound that only I was attuned to. Jackson would have been to Caroline’s and found me lacking. Momma bustled around the kitchen and Daddy held up the paper like how Ms. Kennedy has us put up folders to stop us from cheating off each other.

“What’s the table made of?” I asked.

“Maple,” Daddy said.

“Walnut, dear,” Momma said.

“Are you sure?” Daddy asked.

“I picked it out.”

“You might be right.”

The table looked too pale for walnut. Cherry would have been my guess. I might have known better if I heard it say something.

“The other day,” Momma said, “I had some trouble getting into town. People blocking up the roads. Lord knows why.”

“Protest.” Daddy said from behind the paper. “There’s one downtown again today.”

“Still? I can’t even tell what they want.” Momma rummaged through the cabinets. The hinges squealed as they were shut up. Maple maybe? They should never have sounded like that. Even among trees, maples were talkative, going at you a mile a minute like a friend filling you in on everything. “To lose the war?”

“They don’t want the big tree cut down,” I said, creaking up from my chair to help Momma set the table. It was easy to forget that there was wood beneath the cushion.

“That too,” Daddy said.

“Pretty tree,” Momma said. “It’s a shame it’s being a bother. Such a shame that people are causing such a fuss. Don’t you think, Hazel?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly.

“People just want to go about their days,” Momma said. “Shame they don’t realize inconveniencing other folk ain’t no way to get support. Don’t you think?”

“Shame,” I echoed.

“Don’t you think, dear?”

“Yes, dear?”

Momma repeated herself.

Daddy didn’t look away from his paper. “Dunno.”

“Not you too.”

“It ain’t smart.” Daddy shrugged. “But it ain’t wrong.”

“Good riddance. Trees are always talking nonsense.”

“They can’t help it,” I mumbled.

“They never make any sense,” Momma said.

“You know that ain’t true, dear. Some trees are plenty clear nowadays.” Daddy’s chair creaked. “Protestors might be onto something.”

“Not you too.”

“War’s expensive. Maybe put another man on the moon with that kind of money.”

“I swear.” Momma shook her head. “Your priorities.”

We locked hands as Daddy said grace. Feeling the gentle pressure on my palms, I peeked and watched my parents’ faces. Momma’s crow’s feet disappeared when she closed her eyes and the lines around Daddy’s lips got softer when he prayed. I said Amen.

I pushed around my bacon. Jackson had been boycotting bacon. Said they don’t treat the pigs right. I’d seen Jackson clean the dry burger off his tray on days when corn and peaches just wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t like he turned down his milk carton neither. So, cows didn’t matter? What about chickens? Shouldn’t he care about all of them, too? I stabbed my scramble. I didn’t care that Jackson didn’t care equally about everything; I was just feeling bad that, compared to him, I didn’t care as much about anything.

I heard his pickup finally pull away. Jackson wouldn’t hold it against me. He never did when I couldn’t make it to the woods.

After breakfast, my parents and I stomped hardwood floors as we moved into the parlor. Daddy sank into his recliner while Momma crossed the rug to the television. It was square and wide, with a wooden cabinet. I wondered what kind of wood surrounded its glass screen. What would it sound like if it had a chance to speak without replaying all the voices inside it? When he bought it, Daddy bragged about what a fine model it was, what with its fine speakers, fine screen, and fine cathode-ray tube, whatever that was. Momma turned the dial and channel after channel flickered by. I never know if it’s more right to say that things are in black and white or if everything is just shades of grey.

“Hmph.” Momma said.

The protest filled the screen. A few folks stood around the historic courthouse downtown, a building with the kind of architecture they don’t do no more. The camera panned to the big tree. Old Archie threw shade over the folks standing with their hands locked like a paper-person chain. Moss-hemmed branches hung so heavy that they rested root-like on the ground before curling back up to the sky. Some people used the branches as benches; others hugged the trunk.

A reporter shoved a microphone into a person’s black-and-white-and-grey face and asked them how long they planned on protesting. Really our speakers weren’t much better than a radio’s and made it hard to tell what the person really sounded like in real life. As it was, it could have been anyone’s voice saying every day.

Old Archie sounded static, with a voice distorted by speakers.

The oldest archangel was the longest-lived oak around these parts. My mind was already on revelations. The great thunder-crack creak. Leaves susurrating like crashing waves stealing shore. Even through static, its voice had a mollifying quality. Angels must say be not afraid because of what they’ve got to say.

“Yesterday,” said Old Archie, “twenty-four thousand two hundred and three cars drove by the boulevard. Yesterday, six snakes hung from my third branch. Yesterday, three grey squirrels buried approximately twenty-four acorns every half hour.”

Trees had gotten better with bigger numbers, with time. It wasn’t odd for a tree, looking down at you, to tell you how many strands of hair it counted on so many heads passing below its boughs on the previous day.

“Yesterday, fifty-three thousand four hundred and two men fought a great war. Can a war be great?”

Silence thickened in the parlor. That was the first time I’d ever heard a tree ask a question. How could the tree even figure that number? My hands slid off the rug and onto hardwood as I leaned forward.

Momma changed the channel.

“Could we go back, Momma?” I asked.

“I think that’s enough of that.”

“For just a second?”

“Just a second should be all right,” Daddy said.

Momma held her hand still over the dial for a long time.

“—two thousand and sixty-one men stilled. Men served. Men served their nation.”

Momma folded her arms. “That’s the first sensible thing that I’ve ever heard a tree say.”

“Men served more,” said Old Archie. “Men served the plains, the sea, the mountains, the mangroves, the mud, the trenches, the trees.”

I didn’t change into jeans, so Momma believed me when I told her I just needed some air. She yelled out to me to close the door tight behind me. As I did, Momma was already launching into Daddy for making us listen to that stuff, telling him to look at how much he upset me. The door shut out Momma’s words and Daddy’s “all right” response. The settled-upon sitcom sounds faded away.

Jackson’s old bike felt all wrong under me. My knees kissed the handlebars, and I had to hold my dress with one hand when it came untucked from under me about halfway into town. Trees said all sorts of things to me as I panted past their trunks. The journey wasn’t comfortable, but there was no other way for me to get where I needed to go.

The news hadn’t done the crowd justice. I stowed Jackson’s bike behind a hedge when I spotted the sea of folk flooding the streets, the big tree and courthouse still a ways away.

The day was the sort of sunny that was too nice to be wasted. I eyed the crowd as I kept to the sides, trying to see if I could spot Jackson. It was hard to make out anyone; there were that many folks. The crowd made a miasma of moving color. I didn’t spot much grey, nor any gradations, black and white starker in contrast. Especially as I eyed the number of police standing by. A tree could have counted them better.

There came a point where so many folks filling the streets and sidewalks made it impossible to get any farther the outside way. The crowded sound of so many voices poured a headache into me. I had long since turned the Rustling into white noise, but this wasn’t something I knew how to tune out. I pressed into the crowd, my head pounding and my heart racing.

“Yesterday,” someone shouted. “I heard from a willow that a man killed a woman who was pregnant out of wedlock.” I flinched, feeling as though I was being yelled at. It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to shout. “Yesterday, a tree told me that a chained man worked rice for twenty-nine years before he served the marshes, but we know who he served.” The crowd boomed into my ears. I couldn’t shrug away that sad stuff like I usually did, not with them going on about yesterday. Yesterday this. Yesterday that. The word started sounding all wrong the more it weighed on me.

I bumped into someone, making them accordion the poster in their hands. N Mor Rch Mn’s Wr. I stammered out an apology, backed away, and bumped into another person who folded their sign. Protect Ear—. Clapping my hands over my ears, I moved aside, careful of where I stepped. Cardboard on all sides gave me a feeling like I had stumbled into a hall of mirrors, papered instead of silvered. The Lord Loves Us Too. With my ears covered, Momma’s voice rattled inside my head, reading as I swiveled every which way. Love Not War. I wasn’t being fair to Momma. They Never Called Me A— I got the way I speak from her, so the voice locked up in my head, held between my hands, was probably just my own.

I dropped my hands and took a steadying breath. I didn’t have to listen to myself and with the noise of the crowd, I couldn’t; so, I didn’t. I’d never have noticed it and felt it for myself if I hadn’t been in the thick of it. The crowd was more than just a group of people. Something electric was making goose bumps break out over my skin. Some great invisible thing rustled with the sound of a thousand cardboard signs, reflected things on paper, moved with a body made of shoulders to shoulders, stomped with a thousand feet getting dirty together.

Feeling the life emanating from the crowd, I remembered one of those things we all learn in school. Maybe before that, though I couldn’t say exactly when. Trees are alive. Trees had always been sort of conscious. The only real change between before and after the Rustling was the trees talking where they hadn’t before. Obviously, people are alive too. Everyone’s conscious and everyone’s got one. Maybe the only difference between folks is who speaks up or not.

In the woods, it wasn’t too hard to think that Jackson was just being Jackson. The kind of kid that cared too much. A kid so good that you could forgive yourself if you didn’t live up to it. But it was harder to ignore the thumping of all those hearts in that crowd. The vitality of their movement. So many voices speaking up had to be saying something. I looked around at all the signs thrust over my head. I’d never known that so many people could care so much about so many things. I guess I figured most folks were like my folks. That was all I’d ever known and I started to feel like most of what I knew wasn’t all right.

I’d heard plenty of trees, but that day I pushed toward the big tree to listen.

Some big kid had left all their toys in the way. Fire trucks and construction vehicles pressed their huge wheels into asphalt. Bulldozers and chipping trucks growled like great beasts as they rumbled forward. Officers stood behind dark shields. It seemed like all too much for one old tree. In front of the courthouse, the stone statue of a man up high on his horse overlooked the scene like a general surveilling a battle. Two flags halfway up a pole thundered in the wind. Folks clung to Old Archie as the live oak made proclamations.

“Yesterday,” Old Archie said, “a seventeen-year-old boy hung from my branches.”

Megaphone-loud police were commanding folks to clear out the way. As I pressed forward through the crowd, a blocky-lettered sign caught my eyes. If The Air Isn’t Clean—How Can You See This? The old man holding the sign didn’t stand out from the crowd, but his fierce expression made me look twice. A woman held up her sign. Why Lose When You Can Win?

I hadn’t known that people protested protestors. I looked back at their signs as though I was returning to questions on a test that I skipped the first time. I didn’t have any answers, but they didn’t seem like fair questions, really. So I searched for statements. Love Our Country. I did a double take at the young boy holding the sign. His mother patted him encouragingly on the shoulder, her other hand airing another message. Only Reds Want Surrender.

“It was not his choice,” said Old Archie. “He was not guilty of the crime that the crowd accused him of.”

“How could it know?” someone asked and I wondered too. The same way I had wondered about the big tree figuring certain numbers, but my stomach turned at their tone. The harsh sound like a devil demanding details. This part of the crowd was still a hall of mirrors, and I didn’t like the reflections of myself that I could find. I bent my head down and fled from familiar voices, crossing into the shadow of Old Archie, a spot several degrees cooler.

“I know,” said Old Archie. A ripple ran through the crowds. I don’t think I’d ever heard a tree talk about itself. “We know—”

“We know,” chorused the bigger trees around the square. “We know,” a patient white oak groaned. “We know,” added a willow oak. Neatly planted crepe myrtles kept on muttering about yesterday—they must have been too young to know. “We know,” agreed other veteran oaks.

“We know,” said Old Archie. “We know because we saw it.”

The firehose hissed like a snake, urging everyone away from the tree with all the kindness of a serpent. The deluge pressed people to the ground; threw legs over heads; forced those hugging trees deeper into their embraces. Screams rang into the sky. Officers drove their shields forward. Canines snarled and strained against leashes. Ear-splitting cries made me want to wail too as the crowd crushed me.

The crowd carried me along and I was fine until I fell, flinging my hand out to brace myself. I cradled my bloody palm close to my chest, stained my dress and all I could think was that Momma’d be mad I got my dress bloody. Looking up, I found an officer standing over me, his hand outstretched. The baton held high overhead split the sun in two. What kind of wood was the club was made of? Hickory? I could have done without hearing the sounds it made and the sounds it made me make.

A thousand splinters screamed into my skin before the pain stopped. Someone had pushed the officer off me and was helping me stand. I didn’t even stop to thank them before I ran. The statue of the man on his high horse blocked my way. I pressed myself against the monument’s base as my chest heaved. All around me, batons rose and fell to meet flesh, their smacking sound like axes to wood. Shields clattered to the ground as people fought back. A loose dog wrenched itself to a man’s thigh. His scream was the loudest sound in the world until a deafening burst made me flinch so hard that I ducked. Daddy owned a few, I’d held a couple, but the sound of a gun always makes me jump even when I expect it and I hadn’t expected it.

Blanks, I thought. Blanks just made sense, because why would they shoot? People fell and didn’t get up, and I didn’t get why they weren’t getting up.

Spotting a break in the crowd, I ran, trying to put everything behind me. Suddenly it struck me where to find Jackson. It was so obvious that I almost laughed. At a time like this, Jackson wouldn’t be running from water or dogs or things going off, even though I thought it was the smart thing to do. Jackson would be doing what he could. I stopped and swiveled and looked for the folks helping. Jackson would always try to help, even if no one asked. Especially, I think, if someone couldn’t.

There was a person by the tree, his hand around a downed man’s, helping the fallen back to his feet. I started moving forward. A different person grabbed a baton mid-swing, stopping the officer from further hurting a grounded man with his hands cradling his head. A protestor-protestor tore at the neckline of someone’s shirt before someone else shoved them away. I was so close to the action now, head telling me to run, but heart making me stay. My heart steadied by the sight of so many people whose first impulse hadn’t been mine. So many people like Jackson. I scrambled over to a young man who was struggling to drag an unconscious man slowly out of harm’s way. I know I’m not strong and I don’t think I was much help, but he thanked me for lending a hand anyway.

As we crossed curb to sidewalk, I looked up and spotted Jackson. He was kicking an officer away from a bloodied man. His shoes thudded against the shield, leaving muddy prints. Jackson was close enough that I could shout out if I wanted. I could almost reach out and touch him. I was close enough that my hearing went out from the explosion of gunfire. Jackson fell to the ground.

When I blinked, I was next to him, my knees pressing into the asphalt. I blinked and his head was in my lap. Momma’d be so mad at how dirty he was getting my dress. I rocked him gentle, the same way I did anytime he fell asleep. Course I wasn’t the only one whose eyelids went heavy under all those trees when we were in the woods. This was like all those other times except my ears were ringing and I couldn’t hear anything Old Archie was saying over us. The big tree just sounded like someone leafing through a stack of papers for something they remembered but couldn’t find. I rocked Jackson more and more and more and more until I hugged my own arms and started rocking myself.

Yesterday, I went to Jackson’s funeral.

He would have hated the cemetery. That field of flat green, broken by stone markers and cut-dead flowers, was in want of leaves. In the past, there had been a lot of trees on the grounds, but they reminded the guests, as the funeral director called us, of ghosts and most folks hadn’t liked that. Especially once the trees started talking about the deceased, saying the sort of things about the dead that we forget to sanctify them. Bad for business, he told me. I hadn’t known there was business in dying. There’s business in a lot of things I hadn’t known there could be business in.

I never heard a mahogany, and the casket wasn’t the first to say anything to me. As I crushed Momma’s hand walking up the aisle, it didn’t chide me, asking me why I hadn’t gone with him. It didn’t groan in reprimand and say things might have been different if I’d been there with him the whole time. There weren’t no crickets or toads or bugs or anything to make noise and give my head something to latch onto besides the silence. No voice rustled up in anger to punish me for lying to him, for letting him down. Mahogany did not tell me if Jackson had been mad or sad or frustrated or disappointed or something else with me. Mahogany could not tell me if he had understood or if he had forgiven me. Mahogany would not say that if he hadn’t forgiven me, then now he never could. No one could tell me if I could ever forgive myself.

My breath came out in ragged gasps as I cried sorry over his casket. Momma’s hand put a soothing circle into my back, and squeezed my shoulder. The lid hadn’t been closed yet and I couldn’t understand Jackson looking the way he did. His cheeks pale and rosy, wearing makeup he’d never put on, dressed in a suit that didn’t fit him. I struggled to remember Jackson passing a note behind a teacher’s back that said he wanted to introduce me to a new tree. Jackson, the wild child others saw, on picture day with his mussed-up bedhead, patchy facial hair, and snaggle-toothed grin hanging above a wrinkled collar. I tried to remember the Jackson I loved because I hated the clean-shaven young man stuffed in a box.

Jackson’s papa came up behind us. The sound of his cane was unmistakable, although it sounded softer on grass than it ever did echoing from inside the trailer. When Jackson and I were nine, he made me promise to never ever come visit him at his home, but one day I got tired of waiting for him and found my way to his trailer anyways. Jackson answered the door with a panicked expression, looked over his shoulders and I looked that same way as a slow thud sounded out. Jackson squeezed into boots, grabbed my hand, and tore us away, his shoelaces flying. I just thought Jackson had been excited to go play. I hadn’t thought twice at the arm pulling mine, ringed in purple.

I remembered looking over my shoulder and seeing Jackson’s papa framed by the trailer door. You couldn’t deny they were kin. What with that same square forehead and same mousy hair, but Jackson’s papa was a lot thicker in the middle and had a lot less on top. He braced against his cane and leaned on the door frame with only one leg to stand on. I waved goodbye like Momma taught me was polite. Jackson’s papa hadn’t waved back.

“What happened to your papa’s leg?”

“He lost it,” Jackson said.

I grabbed my leg.

“He was in the war.”

“What’s a war?”

“A big fight.”

“Did he win?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“You could say that.”

“I’m sorry about his leg.”

“Me too.”

Jackson’s Papa put a hand on my other shoulder and squeezed. Between him and my momma, I felt oddly supported. If either of them said anything, I didn’t hear it over my shuddering. How long I stood there embarrassing myself, I couldn’t say. When my breathing steadied, I took a step away and turned to say thank you. My breath hitched, but I’m not sure why it surprised me so much.

Of course he’d be crying too.

Ms. Kennedy handed back my quiz face down. Lifting a paper corner, a red F peered up at me like a bug. I remember putting pencil to paper and not much else. My gaze kept drifting to the empty desk next to me. It was hard to focus on school when you had other things on your mind. I couldn’t believe that never occurred to me before.

When class filtered out, I stopped at the front desk. Ms. Kennedy was a pretty lady with brown hair that’s neatly curly first block, but frizzy from stress by the end of the day. She looked right on the cusp of frazzled. Ms. Kennedy had a voice that I wished more teachers had, firm but always kind.

“Hazel.” Ms. Kennedy’s gaze was soft. “How would you say you’re doing?”

“I’d say I’m all right.” I tucked a hair behind my ear.

“How can I help you, then?”

“I have a question.” I pressed my quiz onto the desk. “What’s right?”

Ms. Kennedy didn’t touch my quiz.

“Is there anything you’re most concerned about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Knowing that is a good place to start.”

“I don’t think my folks are bad people, not really.”

“That’s not really a question.”

“How do I be a better person?”

“Hazel. Do you remember our class about citrus trees?”

I wobbled my head in a kind-of sort-of kind of way and thought about Tommy Jones calling Ms. Kennedy a bad teacher.

“Take orange trees. In the south, a lot of oranges have lemon roots.”

Around that time, class focused on trees in biology. A lot of citrus trees, at least the ones people grew for commercial purposes, consisted of two parts. Rootstock was the trunk and roots, and the scion was everything up on top. The branches, the leaves, the fruit and all that. When a citrus tree was still a little sapling, it got cut and the bud of another tree put in the wound. I thought it must hurt, having something shoved into you like that.

“I wouldn’t call it shoving it in,” Ms. Kennedy said. “You give it a little of something else and sometimes it doesn’t work, but sometimes it takes. You see, on their own, a lot of citrus trees are no good at producing good fruit. Good, at least the way we think of it, isn’t something that just comes naturally. Let alone the fruit will be lumpy, misshaped, undersized, oversized with rinds as thick as”—Ms. Kennedy dropped her voice—“some of these kids’ skulls.

“But you can give. I’d say give. You can give it something else. Sometimes it takes really well because the roots are great at finding what they need in the soil. The soil, where it’s planted, matters, of course, but good trees can pop up anywhere. But it only works because the rootstock does its part. It tries to look for the right things in the right places. Most of the work is just trying.”

“How does it know where to look?”

“Well, I’m not completely sure,” Ms. Kennedy said. “I suppose they must start close to their roots and reach out from there. But trees don’t go it alone. They talk to each other, you know? Even before the Rustling—trees talked with their roots, trading sugar, transferring nutrients, exchanging information.”

“So I talk and listen …” I trailed off.

Ms. Kennedy nodded the way teachers do when you’re on the right track.

“To other people?”

“That’s one way.”

“How did he just know what the right thing was?”

“You think he only listened to trees?”

Today, I am trying to care more about more.

I read the paper and watch the news. I learn about things around the country. Mothers want trees cut away from schools because they tell their children too many things. The oldest trees look too far back and see too far out, so they’re being mulched because they say far too much. Trees out in the country bray about the occurrences on acres owned over generations. Scientists develop an aerosol that can stop the trees from talking. I can’t sit and listen to Daddy wonder about the science behind it.

I bike to the forest as cars sputter past me. Eyeing their exhaust, I think folks are concerned with the wrong kind of emissions. I lean Jackson’s bike against the trailhead, step over the low metal bar, and make my way down the path. Leaves crunch underfoot and water rushes beside me as I hug the river. A water snake slips into its namesake while a moccasin floats. It’s hard for me to tell the difference until they’re in the water. I know there are folk that can tell with a quick glance, but I’ve never been that kind of smart. Painted turtles dry themselves without their colors fading. The day is so beautiful that it makes me angry because it isn’t fair. It can never be fair that days like this still are, but he isn’t. I stop to embrace Julie J and they accept it silently.

“Please, tell me something, Julie J,” I say. “Please.”

My arms still don’t span half of their trunk. Overhead, a plane whizzes by, two blazes of white in its wake. A faint mist freckles my cheeks.

Some folks say the chemicals could have wide-ranging health effects such as hepatocellular carcinoma or cognitive decline associated with neurotoxicity. The government assures the public that the chemicals do nothing but rein in the Rustling. On television, a man in a white coat hands a small can of Peace & Quiet to a decorated general who applies it like deodorant. I can’t trust anything the government says. How could I? If all this environmentalism stuff is even a little true, then they’re killing the planet. They’ve already taken my whole world.

Planes irrigate battlefields with the stuff. Apparently, the trees didn’t care for the cause and would call out the position of soldiers, their numbers, their ammunition, make and models of their weapons, and such. When they weren’t doing that, they were just telling local history, and the soldiers had some trouble shooting people once they started thinking of them as people.

I bend down, scoop up a few acorns, and shove them into my pants pocket before continuing down the trail. The trail goes a long way and gets less and less maintained the farther I go. At some point, the path is so unclear that I forget the right way, so I need to pay attention to the signs that people have been this way before. I know I’m close when voices reach my ear.

“Back again, Hazel?” Ms. Kennedy smiles at me as I step into the clearing.

I nod. I take a seat on a stump next to Tommy Jones and David, who are talking about the next protest. Looking around, I feel like I don’t belong.

There’s the vice principal who doesn’t really mind the armbands but knows that many parents do. I recognize a few folks from church who don’t like the preacher too much, alluding to sins that they say I’m lucky I can’t believe. Students from the college downtown are big organizers of these woodland chapters. These must be the tree huggers Momma was talking about. I only have to listen to them once to realize that there’s nothing wrong with embracing nature.

They’re kind folks. Too kind. They don’t blame me. They tell me that it’s hard to care about what you don’t know about. I want to disagree—that didn’t stop Jackson—but I’m still not so good at voicing my thoughts. It’s something I’m working on. It’s something they’re good at. Speaking up because their causes can’t. That through voice, visibility; elucidation, education—if enough people speak up, then they can’t help but be heard. And if they aren’t heard, then—I rub my arms and listen to Tommy Jones and David argue. I spot an eavesdropping toad. Would I catch it better by going head on or in a roundabout way?

I listen. I speak up and sometimes put my foot in my mouth. I feel stupid. I learn. Sometimes I don’t agree, and I don’t change my mind. Many times I do. Every day I learn more about something and it feels like I’ve unlocked a new word—suddenly I see the issue everywhere and I can’t imagine how I ever missed it.

Or it’s as though I’m hearing an old word in a new way.

I never really listened to the trees, but I really try to listen to other folks now. They don’t think it’s too late for me to be a better person. For anyone, for that matter. They love this country too, but love other people more. Loving a person more, that I get easy. Loving people more, I’m working on it.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the best time to listen to one was yesterday, and the next best time to grow is today.

So I’m starting today.

“Look,” I say, a grin aching my cheeks. I unfold the wet paper towel, holding my hands out as though I’m ready to receive communion.

The little acorn resting in my palm has pushed off its seedy beret and a single thin stalk shoots up like a child’s messy hair that refuses to be slicked back. It ends in a too-big idea of a leaf. I’m surprised it can stay upright with all that weight. Some things, some people, can just carry more. I don’t really think that’s right, so I won’t use it as an excuse.

“Germination,” Ms. Kennedy comments.

“Correct,” I answer. “But this isn’t a quiz, Ms. Kennedy.”

Tommy Jones snickers. Ms. Kennedy throws him a look that shuts him up as though we were in class before she looks back at me.

“It’s nice to see you smiling Hazel,” Ms. Kennedy says. “Where’s it from?”

I shrug. It might have been one of Julie J’s little acorns, but I’d been pocketing as many seeds as I could find. Really it could have been anyone’s child.

“What are we looking at?” someone asks.

I realize, I’m standing too far from the others. I rise from my stumped position and step forward until I’m surrounded by the other folks. Folks that I’m happy I’ve surrounded myself with. I raise my hands up and everyone falls silent. Their expressions ask if they heard it right. I nod hard enough that my hair untucks from behind my ears. I know I can’t have been the first person in the world to have thought of doing this, but I’m glad I can be the first in my little neck of the woods. My lips tremble. Something wet on my cheeks is working to clear the mist.

The acorn has a child’s treble. Squeaky and innocent and hopeful. Struggling to make sense, fighting to be heard.

“Tomorrow.”

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

You have only ever bought mombar frozen before, pre-cooked and pre-stuffed and ready to throw into the—blasphemy of blasphemies—air fryer, and this is why: the cleaning alone takes an age.

First, you must carefully scrape the fat away. Then you need to wash its insides, scrub it gently gently so very gently with flour and salt and vinegar both inside and out, which seems like overkill to you? But that’s what the recipes on your phone all say and it’s not like you’d know, really, so … better safe! Then you have to let it soak for … well, one recipe says two hours, but another doesn’t mention soaking at all, so hopefully you can get away with splitting the difference. The chatter seeping under your kitchen door is boisterous and your visiting family is happy to amuse themselves by swapping stories and pinching children’s cheeks, but that won’t last forever.

And the thought occurs to you, of course, that you could ask one of the tantes and khaltos outside for their advice and recipes. Khalto Gigi’s mombar, especially, is legendary. But even if you insisted you could do it all yourself, inevitably one of them would come barreling in, gold bangles clinking on her arms as she rolled up her sleeves, and she’d see—

Everything.

The burnt, crusted food stains you never have the energy to scour from your stovetop. The mess that is your spice rack. The blood drying on the floor, on your hands and the front of your t-shirt, no time yet to mop it up. The five different knives on your counter, discarded one after the other as you figured out which was too dull to use and what blade was best for what cut. The open tube of garlic paste beside them, because you don’t own a mortar and pestle to crush it fresh and you never will. The thawed, pre-chopped onions and the wilted vegetables you rescued from your crisper drawer and are counting on the tomato paste and frying to disguise the sorry state of. The freezer-burned baladi bread you’re waiting to thaw enough so that you can break and toast it in the oven for the fattah.

In your defence, you were not planning on doing anything special for Eid. Your intended lunch of Indomie and frozen vegetables and maybe an egg for protein would have done just fine for you, and you eye the packets of instant noodles in your cupboard with no small amount of yearning. But while you might have enough Indomie for your family, and while you’re pretty sure they would eat it if you put it in front of them, you can’t present them with that. Not ever, and especially not for Eid, when they forewent a decent Eid lunch in the big family house to come spend it with you.

Not that you asked them to come, but … Well, that’s your own fault, isn’t it?

You didn’t so much put your foot down about not coming home for Eid as you tiptoed around it. You’d have loved to, you said, but you can’t. You’d have loved to, but work. But distance. But money. Spun-sugar excuses sweet enough to be accepted and delicate enough, you hoped, you hoped, not to offend. Except you must have laid it on really thick because apparently they were so worried for poor little you, all on your own, working so hard and so far away, that they decided to descend upon your door. Surprise! We love you! Here’s a box of gateaux and several juice varieties! Happy Eid! What’s for lunch!

The worst thing is: you know they didn’t mean to inconvenience you. If you said a word, the tantes and khaltos and ammos would immediately send their gangly sons off to buy this thing or the other and before you’d know it, you’d have a fully-stocked kitchen and everything you needed. They’d cook and they’d clean and they wouldn’t judge you, probably. Not out loud, at least. After all, they haven’t said a word about the mismatched IKEA furniture in your sparse living room, and Ammo Saeed even braved a beanbag once you explained it to him.

It’s tempting to take refuge in perfumed hugs and quietly palmed sweets, given with a wink and a smile. You’re a youngster still. They’d be happy to provide. Happier, even, than they are leaving you alone in here, scrambling to cook. You’re pretty sure you could even get a eideya out of them, and couldn’t you use that money?

Sure, yeah. If the embarrassment alone wouldn’t kill you.

You’re proud of what you’ve managed on your own, you are, you’re proud, you’re proud. You remind yourself of that, a litany under your breath. How hard did you fight to be allowed this freedom? Sure, it isn’t the most glamorous. It isn’t a lot. But it’s yours. Your space, your silence, your life, and even if your family hasn’t said anything out loud, you’ve long had your defences on your tongue.

Your small, unimpressive flat is modern, you’d say, minimalist.

You’re sensible, you’d say, frugal.

But the truth of that modern minimalism, plain for them all to see, is broke fresh grad chic, and you worry that the truth of frugal is cheap, so you eye the mombar soaking in your sink and decide you’d best add more.

You bunch your ruined t-shirt out of the way to reach into your abdomen again and, hand steady now that you know what you’re doing, with the right knife, you slice another careful handspan of intestine. You trim the fat, clean, scrub, and add it to soak with the rest. It’s a small addition, but it’s something, and mombar is the easiest to add to. You only have one stomach, and so the kersha bubbling away in a pot is all you have to offer, and while you do have a second lung for the fesha, you will still be expected to talk at the lunch table and so you need it. Best you could do was crack off two ribs, which you have marinating on the side. Your cousin Omar, who you still think of as little even though he’s joined the ranks of the gangly sons with that little spittle of hair over his upper lip, has always liked ribs best, and you can play it off as only getting enough special for him.

God, but this is such a paltry Eid meal.

Maybe you could add some liver? Some heart? You know Ammo Mounir will ask after kawarea but your feet would make poor replacement for trotters and you need them to serve the guests and, anyway, that would be too noticeable. Luckily, Tante Omaima hates kawarea so you can count on her to support you if you say you can’t stand the stuff.

The real trouble, you know full well, is the lack of proper meat, and you consider it, you do. It’s Eid, after all. Hunks of meat in fattah is the traditional thing, the easy thing, and as Khalto Samah remarked the second she swept through the door, eyeing your middle, you have more than enough to spare, don’t you?

You do. You could probably slice a few chunks from your thighs without anyone noticing. But, in truth, you don’t want to. You’re selfish like that. Some things, like your thighs, like your home, like your life, like your time, you want to keep for yourself.

So, no. No meat, and no stock to make proper fattah with either. Instead, you scrounge some half-forgotten chicken bouillon cubes from the back of your cupboard and toss them into another boiling pot to make broth. That’ll have to do.

You flip through the many recipes on your phone, trying to squint through the dried blood smeared across the screen for your next steps.

You fry your pre-chopped onion in oil until (you … think …?) it smells like it’s supposed to, drain the fesha of water and then toss that with the onions to fry as well. The recipes on your phone don’t say what the fesha’s supposed to smell and look like when it’s done so you just sort of guess, then add the garlic and tomato paste and spices in a bit of water and let it stew.

The kersha also gets fried with onion, but this you bulk up with those wilted vegetables and then, again, smother in tomato and garlic paste.

Only, fuck, this means you don’t have enough tomato paste for the fattah, so, uhhhh, a white fattah then? With just the garlic and vinegar on top? Yeah, they make that in Alexandria, don’t they? White fattah, you’ll say you like it better that way and that’s how you make it under your own roof. That’s the rules, right? Your kitchen, your preferences?

You nod to the baladi bread as you break it—yes, your kitchen, your preferences—and throw it in the oven to toast while you measure out, wash, and cook the white rice on the stove.

By then, you figure that’s been long enough for the mombar to soak and get to stuffing them with the rice-and-herb-and-onion-and-spice mixture, which is when you realise you didn’t cut the mombar evenly and also maybe prepared too much rice? Or are you under-stuffing the mombar? With the warning of cheap in the back of your mind, you decide, yeah, you’re under-stuffing the mombar and promptly fix that.

The fresh-made mombar gets boiled in spiced water briefly, then drained and fried, at which point they decide to inform you that, no, they weren’t under-stuffed before, because they promptly burst open in the hot oil, scattering their rice, and, you know what? That’s fine. That’s still fine. Crunchy rice is delicious.

Shit, the rice.

You rescue that from the stove, rescue the bread from the oven, layer those together in the pan and soak with broth, then while the second batch of mombar is bursting in the oil, you pan-fry the garlic paste and vinegar to pour on top of the fattah.

“Smells good in there!” calls Tante Noura, which you know is less a compliment and more a warning that her kids are about to start gnawing on the walls. “Need any help setting the table? Lina, go set the table.”

You know it’s no use telling Tante to let your cousin be. Such is the fate of children. But God bless small adolescent rebellions, Cousin Lina drags her feet long enough for you to hurriedly wash your hands, put on your seldom-used apron to hide the blood covering your front, before collecting the necessary mismatched plates and spoons and forks for everyone and then thrusting the whole pile out the door.

“Here you go! No need to come in, it’s—”

It’s too hot, you might have said, except that Cousin Lina, who is also now ganglier than you remember, what do they feed these kids, snatches the plate pile and cutlery before you’ve even finished the sentence. She leaves you not a single word in return, her own little selfishness, and as you watch her go in her new, no doubt itchy, Eid dress, which looks too tight and too flowy both somehow, you appreciate that she feels she can show that selfishness to you. Maybe you should keep better contact with the younger generations. See what they’re up to, teach them where they can safely hide their selfishnesses, what they can cut out without drawing too much attention. You know, dispense some of that weird never-there older cousin wisdom.

Maybe.

You fish the next batch of burst mombar out of the bubbling oil and get as much of the fallen rice out as you can, then get started on the next. What’s left, what’s left—fuck, right, the ribs. You should have started those a little earlier but your oven can only fit so much and you were toasting bread, damn it. Anyway, into the oven those go for—you swipe through to the recipe on your phone—a while. It’s fine, you can pull them out mid-meal as a surprise.

The fesha’s done, you think. The kersha’s been done for a hot second already and, do you microwave that? No, maybe put the pan back on the hob for another minute to heat it back up. Fattah’s soaked through and ready, mombar’s still piping hot and hey, the new batch didn’t burst, go you!

You arrange everything in what presentation platters and bowls you have, not as pretty as Khalto Gigi might have but still presentable. You give your face a wash, retie your hair back and, with a bright smile to mask the agony of your empty abdomen and, more importantly, your nerves, you emerge with the first of the dishes. You have no dining table, and even if you did, there wouldn’t be enough room. In the family house, you inevitably spilled over into the living room and onto the floor, so what does it matter if you start in the living room and floor this time?

The coffee table that your cousin Lina half-assedly set has to be un-set just to make room for the food. You hurry back to the kitchen before Khalto Samah can offer to get the rest, waving at them to sit down, sit down, before it gets cold! Ammo Saeed, from the depths of the beanbag he sank into, reminds you of the pickles, and thank God you have enough of those in some forgotten corner of your fridge to make a small bowl—peppers, carrots, cauliflower, olives, beets, even a saffron lemon—and set it before him.

They leave a sliver of space for you to squeeze into between them but you decline, begging off as host. Too much to do, you know? Nothing at all to do with the blood running rivulets from the jagged emptiness left behind by your stomach and lung and cut out length of intestine currently glistening on your family’s plates. Your cute fluffy house slippers can just about absorb what trickles past your trousers and feet, but if you sit there, shoulder pressing to shoulder pressing to shoulder, that blood will puddle and pool beneath you. Worse, beneath them. And then—

Then what? You don’t know. Will they ask? Will they hum concern and tsk and say see, this is why you should come home, you can’t be let out of their sight? Or will they turn a polite blind eye the way they have about the lack of actual meat on your table and no TV to watch the Eid plays and ask you instead about your work and your love life?

You can’t decide which would be worse, and so you run off to bring a jug of cold water for the table. Then you crack open those boxes of juice they brought with them to offer as well, and then go back for glasses and mugs to drink them out of. One of the littlest cousins doesn’t like fattah, it turns out, even the sauceless kind, and you’re looking for more excuses so you whisk to the kitchen to make her some plain white rice, and with it you bring those ribs.

“Bless your hands!” is said over and over in between each coming-and-going, muffled by full mouths. You’re told your stomach is delicious. Your lung is a smidge too chewy but well-seasoned. Khalto Gigi has advice for how to properly stuff your intestines next time and you try not to baulk at the idea of a next time and focus instead on the fact that she also tells you it’s a marvellous first attempt. And although your ribs seem to have been a little tough, a little overdone, Cousin Omar is gnawing on the bones enthusiastically enough that Ammo Saeed laughs and says you dote on that kid so much, no doubt you’ll spoil your own children someday.

You haven’t the lungs to argue that, this time, what with one of them being speared on the edge of his fork, and so you only smile and ask if anyone wants tea.

They do. So you make tea. You make small talk. You remain at the edges, surreptitiously wiping the blood from under your feet, and watch mouthful after mouthful disappear. The empty pain has settled into a dull throb by now, eased by how well they’re eating. You have a brief pang of regret at not frying up some liver after all, when the platters start to empty out, but the loud, performative groaning about how full they are eases that too.

It’s a kindness, even if not a truth. You take it, and when they get up to leave, earlier than they might have if you were all in the family house, conscious of the work you supposedly have tomorrow (you don’t), you press a kiss to each cheek happily and without reservation.

Ammo Saeed reminds you to call more, Khalto Samah reminds you not to overwork yourself, Tante Omaima reminds you to eat well because you look pale, and you smile and lie and say, “I will, I promise,” every time. That they don’t insist and argue is a success all of its own.

You close the door on your family’s goodbyes and sigh, relieved, into the silence they leave behind.

You throw off the apron. And the blood-crusted t-shirt that’s been sticking to your insides. You kick off the slippers, too, ruined now, and just enjoy the cool tile under your bare feet.

Right. Should clean, you suppose, or try to. You begin with the empty plates and platters, carrying them, one at a time, from the living room to your disaster of a kitchen to be washed … you don’t know, eventually, probably. One of the kids’ plates still has half a mombar on it. One of the unburst ones, claimed and abandoned after two bites. You pinch it between two fingers, turn it this way and that. It’s gone cold by now, but the golden-brown sheen does look good. Between your teeth, it yields with just that little bit of resistance, bursting spiced rice into your mouth.

Hm. Your stuffed, fried intestine isn’t half bad. Needed more salt, though.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from RhodePVD during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

The second time she brings you back, you’re relieved to find yourself speechless. It seemed like it might be easier to just start again, she says, the sceptre in her hand tinged red at the top. Your head throbs in time with her words, you want to lift your fingers to your temple, but you don’t. Your tongue tastes the way a garden smells after the earth has been turned over to make room for new seeds. Charon said you insisted he bring you to me. You must have been very convincing. You think of the ferryman with his dark eyes. You risk opening your mouth. I was hoping I could come work for you, you say. She looks at you as though she is seeing straight to the heart of your desire. How are you with plants? she asks.

She gives you your own bedroom. It has a vermillion carpet and an open archway in place of a door. She says goodnight to you at the lintel and you walk through the arch by yourself. Your feet sink into the carpet, your footsteps make no sound at all. Am I a ghost? you wonder. Am I real? Maybe all of this is a creation of your dying mind, maybe you are lying alone in your dirty apartment, the bottle of pills empty. You think, no, I didn’t do it, I came here instead, but you are so afraid, suddenly, that none of this is real that you hurl yourself against the nearest wall. You rebound off it in a clatter of solid body and pain, and you lie in a heap on the plush carpet, looking up at the ornate molding, thinking, ow, thinking, thank god, thinking, no, thank Persephone.

In the morning, you wake in the four-poster bed in the center of the room. You are naked because you don’t have any pajamas and you couldn’t bear to get into the bed, with its bright white linens, wearing the dirty clothes she resurrected you in. Your body beneath the sheets feels like Antarctica—expansive and empty and cold. The absence of pain is almost identical to pleasure. You stretch so hard your joints crack. Then you get out of the bed and slip your dirty clothes back on, wondering if she will appear. You walk past the archway to her room—dare a glance, but her bed is empty—then tiptoe down the staircase and into a kitchen filled with light. She is sitting at the table. She is older than you imagined, her black hair laced with silver, delicate crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Cream of wheat? she asks, smiling as though the two of you are old friends.

She hands you a bowl heaped with pomegranate seeds. They catch the light, gem-like. You pick one up with your fingers, roll it around on your tongue before biting down. It bursts in your mouth, tart and sweet at once. While you eat, she discusses the terms of your employment. I need someone to take care of my garden during the six months I’m up above, she says. It isn’t the easiest, growing things in the underworld, but I’ll teach you. You nod emphatically, you are ready, you will learn anything.

Do you like dogs? she asks. I love them, you say, thinking of your mom’s goldendoodle who once jumped in a stranger’s lap at the park after hearing a loud noise. Perfect, she says, her face bright, this is going to be a great fit. You thrill at the words. Finish your breakfast and I’ll introduce you.

The third time she brings you back, you’re dazed, the memory of bared teeth shimmering like an oil spill through your mind. He gets a little overexcited sometimes, she says apologetically, just when he meets new people. At her side is an enormous, three-headed dog, drooling vigorously from all three mouths. He’s gorgeous, you say, trying not to notice the blood—your blood—on his fangs. She rewards you with a wide, relieved smile. Isn’t he? His name is Kerberos. Technically, he belongs to Hades, but he likes me better, don’t you, Kerb? He’ll keep you company while I’m away.

And then, at last, the gardens. They circle her home, a haven of color and light against the murky backdrop of the underworld. They are feral, tangled, a riot of the senses beyond your wildest imaginings. You trail behind her as she introduces you to the plants like they are her closest friends, and you think, for the first time, that it must be lonely, this divided life of hers.

Bleeding hearts, she says, pulling back a string of heart-shaped flowers each the size of a fist, blood-red, teardrops of white dangling from their tips. They’re prima donnas, she says, they always want attention. She traces a finger over one of them. Yes, you’re very beautiful. She shows you bells of violet wolfsbane, dark berries of deadly nightshade, dainty white clusters of hemlock. Gentler than you would think, these ones. They like it if you hum to them. Stargazer lilies that are a vibrant, leopard-spotted pink. Fuchsia dahlias as large as plates. Black bat flowers with enormous diaphanous leaves and two-foot-long whiskers. They’re ticklish, she tells you. In a grove that smells so strongly of rotting meat that you gag, there are half a dozen corpse flowers, so tall that you have to crane your head back to look at the strange yellow protrusions shooting upwards from their crimson bowls. The gardens are illuminated with balls of light so bright they hurt to look at, hung from trees and ornate cast-iron lampposts. A gift from Helios, she says.

She leads you into a dark grotto, where water runs over rocks into a deep pool. Best not to touch the water, it’s diverted from the Styx, she says, though Kerberos laps from it happily. Mushrooms grow in every crack and crevice. She names them for you. Witch’s butter like yellow coral, veiled ladies with delicate capes of fibrous netting. Domed mushrooms of cerulean blue, amethyst purple, others glowing a phosphorescent green in the darkness. You are dizzy with beauty, with the weight of responsibility. She looks at your face and laughs. It’s something, isn’t it?

You settle into your new life. You spend hours working in the gardens, taking pages upon pages of notes: The nightshade likes to be fertilized with bonemeal, the corpse flowers need the pH of their soil to sit in the mid to upper sixes, the stargazer lilies need at least an inch of water per week. You go on long walks with Persephone and Kerberos, and she tells you about her troubled relationship with her mother, about what it was like to come to the underworld. You wait for her to ask you about your life, about how you got here. You prepare the story for her, tell it to yourself while you fall asleep, but she never asks. Maybe she thinks it’s a sore subject. You get used to the shades who linger under the giant, ever-blooming wisteria tree. They are girls, young women, your age. Insubstantial until Persephone pricks her thumb with the sharpened back of one of her garnet earrings. There are only two things the denizens of the underworld desire, she tells you. Blood and stories. A drop of Persephone’s blood and the shades become solid for a time, long enough to sit at her feet, rest their heads on her knees while she talks. You are jealous, sometimes, watching them, but then you remember you are the one who lives here, the one she trusts with her beloved gardens.

Each day you wake feeling exhilarated. Your mother always said illness—mental or physical—was a sign that you were out of alignment with your divine destiny, which you told her was pseudo-spiritual bullshit. But now you wonder if all along she was right, more right than the doctors who diagnosed and medicated you. You are so grateful to be alive. You feel aligned with your divine destiny.

The fourth time she brings you back, she says, I told you never to touch the Gympie-Gympie tree. Your skin stings with the memory of an electric pain. I’m sorry, you say. You need to be careful while I’m gone, she says, I won’t be here to save you. You are warmed by her concern. You don’t want her to leave. You don’t want anything to change. Is this what it means to be happy?

The day she leaves, she puts her hands on your shoulders. Take good care of them for me, she says, and when you nod, she pulls you into an embrace. You think, I am being embraced by Persephone. You think, She trusts me. And then she lets you go, kneels to kiss Kerberos, picks up her bag. Call if you need me, she says. I’ll see you in six months.

After she leaves, you wander the house like one of the shades. You walk through the open arch that leads into her bedroom. It smells like her, gardenia and honeysuckle, laced with something darker, resinous. You imagine lying down on her bed, but you can’t shake the sensation of being watched. She is a goddess, who’s to say she can’t see you—through the mirrors, the windows, her face a shadow in every pool of water. You pace circles around the house, Kerberos following behind you until even he gets bored and goes to lie down by the fireplace. The months stretch out ahead of you, vast and echoing.

You aren’t the only one who misses her. The bleeding hearts droop until they look like teardrops, the dahlias are dropping petals. Even the corpse flowers seem unhappy. You are following her instructions; you are doing everything right. You double- and triple-check the pH level of the soil, add precise amounts of pine needle mulch. You water exactly on schedule. You adjust the balls of sunlight a dozen times until you have achieved perfectly dappled lighting. Nothing works.

Soon you are too panicked to feel sad or lonely. Should you call her? You dial her number over and over but never press send. She’d told you how hard it was, the transition between realms. How when she was in the underworld, the sunlight called to her, and when she was up above, it hurt her eyes. Some part of her perpetually thinking about the place she wasn’t. At least this time I won’t be worrying about the plants, she said. Usually I ask Hades to water them, but growing things isn’t his forte.

You are hardly sleeping, but one night you dream of your mother. Darling! she says. You’re home just in time for the Eleusinian mysteries. You tell her you need help, something you long ago stopped saying in your waking life. I don’t know what the plants want, you say. Isn’t it obvious? she says, except she isn’t your mother anymore, she’s Persephone, who is looking down at you with disdain. I told you this already, she says. She is sitting beneath the wisteria tree, light through the blossoms turning everything rosy, and her arms are covered in blood. The shades swarm her.

You wake up gasping, convinced it was really her, that she has been watching, that she is disappointed with you. You head for the gardens, stopping in the kitchen long enough to grab a knife. You go to the stargazer lilies, their petals pathetic, wilted. You hold the knife over your arm, hesitating. You always hesitate in these moments, the animal of your body fighting to remain whole. Blood and stories, you think. You slice, long and shallow, hissing. You speckle the flowers with your blood. Then you tell them the beginning of the story Persephone never asked for.

I was watching, you tell the lilies, when she gave that interview. I was fifteen, it was my mother who put it on TV. The twin goddesses were her latest cult. You can feel the flowers’ attention. I can still remember Persephone’s exact words: I am tired of having my story told for me. I am tired of being portrayed as the hapless pawn of Demeter or Hades, forever torn in two. I am the queen of the underworld, the goddess of spring. I am whole and I belong to no one but myself.

Instinct leads you to the deadly nightshade, next. You tell it: My life, too, felt like a series of rises and descents, but I couldn’t figure out how to feel whole. My family, my friends, they loved only fragments of me and eventually it felt easier not to be loved at all than to be loved conditionally.

You walk to the bleeding hearts, who you know won’t judge you for being melodramatic: People like to tell you you’ll feel better soon, but what they don’t understand is how little comfort that offers. How there are only so many descents you can make before it doesn’t feel worth the effort of reemerging. Before the feeling of lightness becomes only a prelude to a fall. I didn’t want to do it anymore. But I kept thinking about Persephone, about what she’d said.

You tell the dahlias: My mother always said hopelessness was the quickest path to hell. It was a chastisement, a way of telling me to stop being so negative. But what if it was true?

You walk over to the corpse grove, make a fresh cut on your arm. You feed each upturned mouth a drop of blood. You say: I went looking for the underworld. If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that hopelessness is more than a feeling. It’s perceptible. People notice it, they back away. It has a smell, like a damp towel left in a corner. A taste like sour milk. An appearance that can be stark or run-down or sterile. A slight electric buzzing. And, of course, the heaviness.

To the bat flowers, who have a dark sense of humor: I kept thinking I’d found the entrance: in the parking lot that used to be a forest, outside the 24-hour Walmart, in line at the bank. But it never quite worked.

You tell the witch’s butter: I needed to cast a spell. I went to IKEA, told myself I was there for the curtains that would transform my life into something beautiful. By the time I reached the textiles, I was shaky with want and indecision. Should I get the rug with the abstract squares? I could picture it in my living room. But none of the curtains were exactly what I’d imagined. Nothing in my life had turned out exactly as I’d imagined. And there it was: a grey door with a sign that said DO NOT ENTER, and behind it, stairs leading down into the darkness.

You save the ferryman for the hemlock: I told him I needed to see Persephone, but he blocked my way. Told me the boat was for the dead, not the living. So I did what I had to do. It wasn’t suicide. I knew she would bring me back.

Each day, you dig up new stories, feed the flowers your blood. The gardens are thriving. You are exhausted, a little more diminished with each passing week, but you are proud, too. You imagine her pleasure, her praise. You imagine her embracing you again, telling you that you did better than she could have hoped.

When she returns, she’s tired. She doesn’t go into the gardens. She drops her bags on the floor, scratches Kerberos in his favorite spot behind his leftmost head. She says, The trip was hell. She says, I need sleep.

The next day, you wear a tank top so she will see the scars that crisscross your arms. You want her to look at you, to see how much you gave of yourself. You imagine her saying you shouldn’t have, that it was too much. You will tell her the truth: You wanted to. You love the plants and they love you, you can feel it, the way they reach for you when you walk through the gardens. But she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at your arms, doesn’t go outside.

That night, you hear her crying in her bedroom across the hall. You are afraid to bother her, afraid to leave her to cry alone. You poke your head through the arch to her room. Anything I can do? you ask, your heart pounding. I could use some company, she says. You perch carefully on the edge of the bed, and she tells you about fighting with her mother, how Demeter refuses to acknowledge her role as queen of the underworld. I know exactly what you mean, you say. You take her side and it’s not just because you want to please her, it’s also that you believe she is right. No one appreciates her the way they should. Everyone—her mother, Hades, the dead girls—wants too much from her. You are ashamed for being a part of this everyone. You go back to wearing long sleeves.

Things aren’t the same as they were before she left. You can’t figure out why. You scour your behavior for changes. You spend hours talking to the plants. The bleeding hearts drape themselves around your neck, you rest your cheek against their soft skin. The corpse flowers lean their stamens against you like the heavy heads of dogs, the bioluminescent fungi brighten when you walk past. Gradually Persephone’s mood seems to lift. The gardens look luminous, she says to you one day, and your whole body tingles with joy.

The days blur into weeks, which slip into months, and soon you are dreading her departure again, counting the days you have left with her. Eight days, seven, six—

The fifth time she brings you back, you’re screaming. What was it? What was that? She soothes you, pets your hair, and at first this is all you notice, but then you look up and see the corpse grove: trampled, the flowers uprooted, lying on their sides like massive fallen beasts, chunks of their flesh missing. Your eyes fill with tears. I know, she says, I know. It wasn’t your fault. You hadn’t had time to consider fault; your stomach heaves as though it wants to leave your body. She tells you it was a monster, a chimera. Truly not your fault. You can’t stop shaking. You go and lie in bed with Kerberos, who rests his heads on your shoulder, stomach, and thigh. The weight is comforting.

The next morning the bleeding hearts are strewn across the ground, and you don’t feel sadness, you feel fury. You fed these plants your blood, your secrets. You love them. They are your responsibility. You tell her you are going to stay outside, keep watch, and she takes down the gleaming sword that hangs—decorative, or so you thought—above the fireplace, handing it to you ceremoniously. The sword is so heavy. You didn’t know it would be so heavy. You have never held a sword before.

For four nights, the chimera stays away. You feel as though it is the strength of your will fending it off; you don’t dare sleep. You are tired, so tired, the kind of tired where your thoughts are disconnecting and reconnecting in all the wrong ways. You want to go home, wherever that is. You want your mom and her eternal, infuriating conviction that the universe has some plan. You want someone to take the sword out of your hands and tell you to go to sleep.

On the morning of the fifth day, you walk inside and see her bags sitting by the door. I hate to leave you at a time like this, she says, and you understand that you are supposed to give her departure your blessing but the words elude you.

On the seventh night, you rest. You tell yourself that even god needed a break. You tell yourself the chimera is gone, though you don’t believe it. You sit in the grotto and talk to the mushrooms, promise them that if you can get just this one night of sleep you will resume your guard. The veiled ladies swish their lacey skirts. You walk through the gardens and tell each plant to be brave. Inside, you curl up with Kerberos and sleep the sleep of the dead. When you wake, your heart is fluttering in your chest like a trapped moth. You grab the sword from where it leans against your bed and stumble out to the gardens.

They are a scene of wreckage. The earth is churned up, there are scorch marks on the trees. Some of the balls of light are lying on the ground, others have been extinguished entirely. You wander in a daze. You pick up one of the veiled ladies and hold her in your cupped hands.

You call Persephone. You say, I’m so sorry. You say, Please. You say, I need you to come home. You don’t say, I can’t do this anymore, not by myself.

The sixth time she brings you back, you don’t know what happened. Was it a punishment for asking her to come home? As soon as you have the thought, you are appalled with yourself. You feel certain she’ll be able to see it in your eyes. You don’t ask her what happened. You keep your eyes low; you kiss Kerberos on top of each head. He leans into you and you lean into him.

She says, We’ll just have to summon Hades. A man for a man’s job. You want to protest, but it’s true that you failed. He shows up with his two-pronged pitchfork in hand. She introduces you as her gardener, he barely looks your way. They walk together through the gardens, shoulder to shoulder, talking quietly. You try to convince Kerberos to stay inside with you but he growls until you open the door and let him chase after them. He trots besides Hades, who rests a proprietary hand on one of his heads.

She cooks Hades an elaborate dinner while he relaxes on the porch with a wheat beer. You help her prepare, but you’re not sure if you’re supposed to eat with them so you slink away before it’s finished. You want to go talk to the bleeding hearts, but the bleeding hearts are dead, so instead you go to bed. You wish you had a door for your arch. You want to be in a small, closed-off space. You curl up in a tight ball, pull the blankets over your head, try to pretend you are sitting in your closet at home far away from chimeras, gods of the dead, resurrectionists.

You wake to Persephone saying your name. She’s standing in the archway. It’s done, she says, and you nod, you have no words. After she leaves, you finally let yourself cry, soundless, until you fall asleep again. When you wake a second time, you tiptoe out of your room and find the house empty except for Kerberos, sleeping by the foot of her bed. On the kitchen table, a note reads: Had to head back up, but Hades said to call if you have any issues.

You walk outside barefoot, search the gardens until you find the chimera’s body sprawled on the ground near the wisteria tree. It is both larger and smaller than you imagined; more grotesque and more human. You drape yourself across its goat torso, rest your head on its lion mane. The fur is coarser than you would have thought. You are almost envious of the chimera, of the fact that it no longer has to live in its body.

A familiar heaviness settles into your bones after this. You try to get the garden back in order, try to salvage what is left. But it is harder and harder to do the things you are supposed to do. Kerberos gets restless, but you don’t have the energy to take him on walks. One day he bites you, leaving dark red indentations on your hand. You cry so hard you burst a blood vessel in your eye. You are beginning to look like you belong to the underworld.

This time, when Persephone returns, she takes one look at you and folds you into her arms. She’s brought treats, junk food you haven’t had in ages—Nutella, Milky Ways, Mars Bars. The two of you stay up late and she tells you the latest family gossip, who’s sleeping with whom. She says, You’ll never guess who I’ve been corresponding with. She says, That whole thing with the chimera made me think that maybe I misjudged him.

Soon Hades is around more nights than not. He has a whole realm and you don’t understand why he’s here so much, but it’s not your house, you don’t get to decide. You help her cook, sprinkle pomegranate seeds across the top of a salad. She brings him another beer. At dinner, she asks him about his work, about his family, about his work again. You want to say, but what about me? This is the wrong question though: Even when he’s not around, the two of you never talk about you. You want to say, but what about her? What about her work, what about her family? You want to say, without her, girls wouldn’t even know it was possible for women to become resurrectionists, much less queens of the underworld. But you don’t say anything. After dinner, they go into her bedroom, leave you with the dishes. When you go upstairs, there’s a cloth draped across her archway like a door.

The seventh time she brings you back, you don’t remember what happened. It was just a little disagreement the two of you got into, she says. He can’t always control his temper, it’s hereditary. You want to know the details, but you can see she’s upset, so you put a hand on her shoulder, tell her it’s okay, you’re back now, everything is fine. She rests her head against your hand. What would I do without you? she says, and you can’t help it, you still glow at the words.

The eighth time she brings you back, she asks you why you keep picking fights. You apologize, don’t answer. The truth is that he reminds you of the men in your college philosophy classes, always so entirely certain of their own rightness, so eager to advocate for the devil. You can’t understand what she sees in him.

She starts going to Hades’s place, taking Kerberos with her. You know it’s your own fault, but still you resent him. Alone in the house, you try to sleep through as many hours of the day as you can.

Instead of tending the plants, you lie beneath the wisteria tree in the spot where the chimera’s body once lay. The shades linger nearby, but even when you offer them your blood, they have nothing to say to you. The plants that weren’t killed by the chimera are dying of neglect. The wolfsbane drops all its flowers, the nightshade berries shrivel. You dread what she’ll say when she notices, but she doesn’t say anything. The silence growing between you is the only thing that’s flourishing.

The ninth time she brings you back, you can’t stop thinking about the sword, once again hanging above the fireplace, the weight of it, the way it is like a door to another room but not one you are allowed to stay in.

The eleventh time she brings you back, you keep your eyes closed. You understand your mistake now. You had thought you were like Persephone, someone who spent time in two realms. But actually you are the chimera: a being created of conflicting parts, always at odds with itself. The reflection of a monster, not a god.

The fifteenth time she brings you back, you beg her to resurrect the chimera, to give it another chance. It would be a cruelty, she says. Something like that isn’t meant to exist.

The twenty-second time she brings you back, you open your eyes. You try to remember the way it felt the first time, how you were overflowing with happiness, or maybe it was gratitude. She is looking at you the way so many others have over the years, a look that means: What have you done with the version of yourself that I was promised?

I’m no use to you anymore, you say. Her eyes are pools of disappointment. So many lives later and you still want her to love you. I’m just afraid of letting you down, you say.

You would never do that, she says.

You lose count. You are here then gone here gone here gone here. It is like blinking your eyes. It is like peeling off your own skin and finding an identical copy of yourself underneath.

Here gone here gone here—

You walk outside into the wreck of the gardens and lie down on the ground where the chimera’s body once lay. The dirt is damp against your cheek. The flowers and the mushrooms are gone, all that’s left is churned soil and dead leaves. Except there, across from you, a splash of yellow. Almost the same color as the chimera’s mane. Later, you look them up in one of Persephone’s books of plants. They’re not named after the lion’s mane, but rather its teeth: dents-de-lion, for their jagged leaves. You water them with salt. You tell them only sad stories. This is all you have left to offer; the parts of yourself no one has ever had use for. Each day they are there, waiting for you. Ferociously alive.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from K.C. Mead-Brewer during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: K.T. Elms

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

Introduction

The Alamgir Dynasty has been guiding the Kingdom of Hindustan through centuries of peace, prosperity, and stability. Yet, credit does not rest solely on the wisdom of our modern kings; from the earliest days of what was then called the Alamgiri Empire, the kings (and later, queens) who have graced the Saffron Throne have each, in turn, displayed the sagacity, gallantry, and munificence required to lead such a large and diverse nation.

This exhibition presents pieces from our permanent collection that are rarely displayed together, in order to illuminate the life of one of our most celebrated early rulers, Nizararuddin Zafer Abu Hassan Mohammed, better known as Prince Nizar. While the prince is best known for his nigh-legendary subjugation of the religiously motivated rebels known as the Heron Guard, a glimpse into his early life reveals a fascinating figure of a man.

Support for this exhibition was generously provided by Her Highness the Saffron Queen-Mother’s Commission for Cultural & Spiritual Preservation. This Visitor’s Guide was made possible by the International Heritage Foundation.

1

This remarkably well-preserved first piece is a sword only in the loosest sense: little more than a stripped-down wooden branch—albeit distinctively sword-shaped—it dates to when the prince was four years old. Discovered among the palace servants’ possessions, it’s rough, unbalanced, and probably rather dangerous for such a small child to handle. You may notice the faint remnants of writing scratched into the “blade.” In modern Hindustani, it translates (somewhat amusingly) to “sword”; a child marking their possessions, no doubt.

Records indicate that a servant boy about the same age as the prince was whipped and banished from the palace around the time of this sword’s creation. It is possible that this punishment was for the creation of such a dangerous toy for the prince. Some scholars dispute that supposition, however, drawing on evidence that Prince Nizar’s royal father, the Saffron King, was a proponent of early sword-training for his sons—much younger than was generally common at the time.

2

Also dating back to when the prince was four years old, this piece is more properly recognizable as a sword, though it’s more of a toy than even a practice-weapon. It lends credence to the theory that the Saffron King, a renowned general, wished his children to become familiar with the arts of warfare from an early age.

The perfumed sandalwood used in this toy sword—imported from neighbouring Purashnimal—is a lot finer than the common beech used in the previous piece, and the intricate carvings are consistent with the Imrazan school of woodcraft. This sword was likely fashioned by the master carpenter himself, making it one of the few extant pieces made directly by his hands. Imrazan owed the Saffron King his life: he was a religious refugee to the Alamgiri Empire, fleeing persecution in his native Lankashri for joining the Temple of Darvez-i-Paramesh, the syncretic state religion founded by the prince’s grandfather in an attempt to unify, in his own words, “the most illustrious verses from every holy book.”

Note the pristine condition of the blade: it was unlikely that this object saw much use. Perhaps even at such a tender age the prince’s young mind was occupied by loftier thoughts than play!

3

Here’s a little joke from our chief curator. Obviously, this is a paring knife, though it was found among the prince’s youthful possessions. From the numbers engraved in the butt (what would be called a “pommel” in a real sword), we know that this came from the teaching-kitchens at Aurangzeb Academy, the boarding school popular among the elites where five previous generations of monarchs had studied. A similar knife was found among the possessions of Shah Dashir Dashir II of Purashnimal, who was to become the prince’s closest confidant while at school. The knives were likely stolen as a childhood prank: at that time, as boys, neither the prince nor the Shah would have been permitted to enroll in culinary courses.

Indeed the religiously inspired laws segregating education by gender were enacted by the prince’s father himself. These laws were later repealed by Prince Nizar during his own reign. The modern saying “Let each dancer choose their flourish” originates from the prince’s proclamation to that end.

4

This is a real practice sword; we can tell by the notches on the blade that it saw heavy use. It’s constructed with vermillion teak—a much sturdier material than sandalwood—and sports much less decoration than the earlier Imrazan sword. This sword was made for the prince’s personal use at Aurangzeb Academy by the school’s official carpenter. The tradition of retaining official artisans at educational institutions began at Aurangzeb, a practice that has remained to this day and has contributed to the flourishing artistic scene our nation enjoys today.

Notice the dents all over the hilt of this sword: expert analysis reveals them to be inconsistent with sword-fighting. They were more likely a result of repeated dropping, though by whom is unclear. Certainly the prince’s friend Shah Dashir Dashir II may have borrowed the sword for personal use.

Interestingly, though it doesn’t fit the customary design for a mourning blade, this sword was found among the burial offerings of the Queen-Mother, who was assassinated during the prince’s teenage years by insurgents loyal to the rebel faction known as the Heron Guard—diehard opponents of the Temple of Darvez-i-Paramesh. Legend holds that the blade used to carry out the inauspicious murder was melted down and that the resulting pellets were hurled into the sea by the prince himself.

5

Here we have the earliest of the prince’s metal swords. The rounded edges suggest that this was again a practice blade. The patina would have been absent in its original state: the blade would have been polished to a red-gold glow. Note the extremely unusual shape of the hilt; gripping this weapon requires a non-traditional positioning of the hands. This sword was customized for the unique style of swordplay the prince was no doubt developing.

The scabbard displayed with this sword is of significant historic relevance. Note the vivid red-purple leather: the dyeing technique used to achieve that precise shade—called “Begunrosh” in the Bangalash region, where it originated—was normally reserved for religious vestments by the Temple of Darvez-i-Paramesh (this practice drew from prior religions). This scabbard represents one of the earliest non-liturgical uses of the Begunrosh technique, and points to the weakening of the Temple within the empire. Later in life, the prince would become a key player in secularizing the nation, diluting several key loci of power the Temple controlled.

6

This porcelain sword was a decorative piece presented by the prince to his father on the fifteenth anniversary of the latter’s coronation.

Many stylistic details of this sword point to its Purashnimali origin: the crescent-shaped blade, the forked tip (characteristic of a “Zulfani” blade, an ancient sword design), and the distinctive turquoise and black glaze. The pattern of birds and leaves, though competently executed with costly materials, is rather simplistic for the fashions of the time; this piece is not the work of a master craftsman. No maker’s signature can be found on the piece, an indication that this is likely the work of an apprentice ceramicist. However, the apprentice was not without skill: cunningly hidden among the foliage nestles a single line of Purashni calligraphic verse, translated as, “The father rears children like the gardener does his prized blossoms.”

Prince Nizar and Shah Dashir Dashir II travelled together to Purashnimal as part of their Practicum Semester at Aurangzeb Academy. One can imagine the Prince purchasing the sword at the Green Souq (a renowned bazaar which persists to this day) and choosing this gift for its sentimental merit. Perhaps the turquoise—a favorite of the late Queen-Mother as evidenced by her extensive collection—stirred fond memories? Perhaps the line of poetry spoke to him of his father’s virtues? Indeed, the journals of Hamda Gulbadan—a courtesan popular at the Saffon Court at the time—noted a “distinct softening of the King’s noble mien” upon receipt of the gift.

7

This magnificent, ceremonial weapon is the prince’s coming-of-age sword. As was traditional for every graduate of Aurangzeb Academy, the prince himself drafted the sword’s design. The pommel is in the shape of a jasmine—the academy’s jasmine gardens were renowned, and this detail was likely a nostalgic nod to the school the prince was leaving behind. The gilded edges reference the weapon carried by the titular character in the Song of Indra, the epic poem about which the prince wrote his culminating thesis. In the poem, the forces of humanity all wield weapons “red with divine rage” against the demons of ignorance. Interestingly, the prince’s thesis was condemned by the Maha Pundit of the Temple of Darvez-i-Paramesh due to its in-depth exploration (and unsubtle admiration) of themes of witchcraft in the Song of Indra. The thesis has, in fact, proved invaluable to modern scholars studying the history of witchcraft and magical beliefs, in particular, the origin stories of the mythical witch Arundhuti of the Southern Desert.

The text engraved on the blade reads “Knowledge is but the first of the twain,” a direct quotation from the poem. The graduation blade of the prince's close friend Shah Dashir Dashir II of Purashnimal, “For without wisdom, the mightiest is slain,” the line that completes the poem’s couplet. The two young royals chose to live as roommates during their final year, eschewing the private chambers reserved for them by the academy, as befitting their noble status. The paired swords were meant to be an enduring symbol of their deep friendship.

8

This is the earliest example of a complete, battle-worthy sword belonging to the prince. Not only does this sword sport the modified hilt design (seen previously in Object 5), but the ridge in the center—known as the “Fuller”—is deeper and wider than in most swords popular at that time. The subtle curvature to the blade might have been of a Purashnimali influence. Weapons-experts surmise that this sword’s design sacrificed power for control and maneuverability. This sword was presented to the prince by his father the Saffron King on his nineteenth birthday.

Tales speak of the Saffron King—eager to gift his son with the perfect blade—summoning every weaponsmith in the land for a grand festival of artisanship. While we do have records pertaining to a gathering of weaponsmiths, the extravagance that stories attribute to the festival are no doubt exaggerated. For instance, it is unlikely that the witch Arundhuti climbed out of children’s stories, flew over the Southern Desert, and landed in the palace gardens on the back of a giant cobra!

Correspondence between the prince and Shah Dashir Dashir II reveals that the prince was exceedingly careful with his father’s gift, rarely drawing it from its scabbard. It is thought the prince held his gift in such high esteem, that any damage to it would have been unbearable.

9

This sword was a gift from Shah Dashir Dashir II—whose warm friendship the prince maintained for a time after their school years—on the occasion of the prince being named “Defender of the Temple” by his father.

The serpent motifs along the cross-guard of the sword are atypical for the era. The Shah’s brief accompanying note—held by our Department of Ephemera—mentions this artistic anomaly but remains cryptic. The Purashni translates to, “Perhaps this will help. You always handled snakes better than swords.” Scholars postulate that the note and the sword were both some sort of boyish joke; garden snakes were common in the forests surrounding Aurangzeb Academy.

Further correspondence between the Shah and Prince Nizar hint at anxieties regarding his new duties, and at tensions within the father-son relationship. Details remain scarce: the prince, a master diplomat employs only veiled references. The worries about religious duties were clearly a precursor to the prince's subsequent opposition to the Temple’s power. His challenges with his father are less clear; it is thought that the Saffron King disapproved of the friendship between the two youths, perhaps distrusting the foreign noble’s political intentions.

10

The jet blade and elephant-ivory pommel clearly mark this sword as a mourning weapon of the most traditional form. The prince commissioned this piece for the joint funeral of his father and sole brother, both killed during the Heron Rebellion. In a dramatic and scandalous departure from tradition, Prince Nizar forbade any of the Maha Pundits of the Temple from delivering the eulogy, inviting instead the chancellor of Aurangzeb Academy for the honour.

By this time in the Empire, the use of bone for mourning blades was a dying art. Finding a specialized bonesmith would have been challenging for the prince. Additionally, ivory was a highly controlled, and thus costly, material. Its employment in this piece suggests that the prince was willing to spare no expense to mourn his family. Lending credence to this theory is the sword’s elephant-leather scabbard. Note the gold threads woven into the leather as well as the rare “tiger-eye” stones worked into it.

Etched on the blade is a verse of the prince’s own composition, whose final couplet remains famous: “In blood resides the ghosts of kings / For whom their oaths and duties sing.”

11

Only this broken fragment remains of the fabled Sword of Arundhuti, supposedly enchanted by its mythical namesake, the witch of the Southern Desert. The story goes that the prince—not yet king until his wedding-coronation—sought out the witch for a weapon that would help him break the Heron Rebellion, and exchanged for it his mortal soul. The narrative has been popularized by blockbuster Munsalian film “Blood Royals,” though director Atsede Bikila—usually lauded for her attention to detail and research-oriented style of storytelling—took significant liberties with historical fact: Prince Nizar was certainly no klutz on the battlefield, and would have needed no magical weapon to enhance his swordsmanship!

Whether or not the sword was indeed a gift from a witch, its blood-red blade is certainly eye-catching. The hue is part of the metal itself, not some form of paint or varnish. The technique used to achieve this striking effect has been lost, and another object sharing this attribute has yet to be discovered. No wonder the stories of witchcraft and romance!

What the historical record can ascertain is that the prince wielded this sword during the final decisive assault on Fort Jhansa, the stronghold of the Heron Guard. While successful, the prince sacrificed an eye to the historic victory.

12

The lapis lazuli-inlaid cross-guard, sinuous blade, and latticed pommel mark this sword as a Purashnimali Wedding Blade, traditionally gifted to Purashnimali noblemen on the night of their nuptials. This piece was a gift from the prince’s old friend Shah Dashir Dashir II, who was unable to attend the celebration of the prince’s wedding to Atashi Begum of Bangalash—though it was rumored that the prince sent the First Minister himself to Purashnipur to deliver an invitation.

The Shah seems to have maintained the two royals’ childhood fondness for inscribing poetry directly onto the blade. Translated from Old Purashni, the text reads, “I will forever treasure / the scent of jasmine.” Scholars believe this to be a boyishly humorous allusion to the fact that the jasmine gardens at Aurangzeb Academy were notorious for romantic trysts between the young men and women at the academy: a coy reference to the prince’s upcoming marriage bed, no doubt. The gift and the accompanying congratulatory note are understood as the last private correspondence between the Shah and the prince. From this point on, busy with the duties of governance, the two royals communicated only through official channels, on matters of state.

13

There exist dozens of stories surrounding the premature disappearance of the prince—by now, of course, king. Did he vanish into the wilderness in pursuit of a snow-white peacock? Was he claimed by a mysterious illness, his body destroyed to prevent infection? Did the witch Arundhuti claim his soul and whisk him away to the Southern Desert (as depicted in Bikila’s film)? Aside from the fact that this sword was interred in the Royal Catacombs as a proxy for the prince’s body, remarkably little is known about the end of his reign; only rumours and hearsay remain. Palace servants’ writings—featuring giant snakes, cackling hags, and magical bargains—are clearly unreliable primary sources!

Of jet and ivory—by this time considered old-fashioned or ultra-traditional materials for a mourning blade—this sword exhibits an interesting detail: the jewel inlaid into the pommel is cut into the shape of a jasmine. Scholars have attributed a myriad of meanings to this curious choice, the simplest being that this was simply the prince’s favorite flower. Extant palace servants’ records do list “jasmine blooms for the King’s bedroom” as part of the weekly purchases.

In her private journals, Saffron Queen-Mother Atashi—unusually for the time, the sole Royal Wife—wrote that the sword’s design was suggested to her by Shah Dashir Dashir II, suggesting that the queen and the foreign royal ignited a correspondence following the prince’s death. Court documents indicate that the queen invited the Shah to attend the funeral, and her journals tell of him being the one to thrust the sword into its final resting place. That particular journal entry ends with an enigmatic line: “…and though the flower of his heart [some scholars translate this as “soul”] resides in a jasmine garden, I could have imagined no better a companion.”

Editor: Dante Luiz

First Reader: Ana Maričić

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

New Jersey Museum of Maritime History Presents:

Till Earth and Heaven Ring: Artifacts and Accounts from the Henrietta

The Henrietta, passenger, cargo, and slave ship, was routinely used to transport goods from the Florida Keys up as far north as Rhode Island, and is also said to have made at least six voyages transporting enslaved African peoples from the Gold Coast of West Africa to Florida, Alabama, and the Carolinas. At the time of its sinking under mysterious circumstances in 1842, it is believed to have had eighteen passengers aboard—all enslaved men, women, and children embarking on a daring emancipation attempt.

This exhibit’s storytelling is enriched by artifacts recovered from the Henrietta as well as art and firsthand accounts from the self-emancipated individuals aboard and their descendants. In offering the display of these artifacts and statements together we wish to memorialize the bravery inherent in this defiant act of self-actualization. We also wish to invite patrons to come to their own conclusions as to what passed on the days between April 13, 1842, when the Henrietta was first believed to have gone missing, and April 17^th, when its passengers were found on what is now known as Island Beach State Park.

“It’s Theo. Just Theo,” he corrected. And bless him, Otto Dowdy blushed as he took Theo’s outstretched hand. Theo watched, fascinated, as the man across from him pinkened above the collar and across his wide cheekbones. So close, with his cap off and hair sweat-dampened, it was clear, to Theo at least, that Otto was mulatto. Quadroon. Octaroon maybe. As he’d watched Otto work the past few days, directing cargo on and off ships, relaying notes to captains, hauling in lines, he couldn’t be entirely sure he had the right man, and a mistake would be costly. But in the shade of the warehouse, an arm’s length away, Theo studied the broad nose, full mouth, and honeyed hair that curled to tight ringlets against his scalp, and found enough confirmation and much to like.

“What can I do for you, Theo?” Otto asked.

Ah, yes. Theo had not been lingering after his own deliveries, risking untoward attention, the past three days for no reason. Master Glover was considered “benevolent.” But he’d rather not push his luck at all.

“You seem busy, I’ll cut right to it. Etta Jean gave me your name. Said you might be some help to me.” She said a whole lotta other things too, things that left Theo by turns confused and afraid. But one did not go to see Etta Jean and expect to leave the same.

Otto’s face sobered immediately. Paled even, perhaps. He glanced around, a terrible nervous tell. Theo had never been in the habit of questioning folks like Miss Etta Jean—a great deal wiser and an elder to boot—but he’d be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t starting to harbor doubts. Couldn’t be this man before him, flinching in broad daylight, is who she meant for him to see. Miss Etta Jean could work any kinda mojo—for luck, for babies, curses and petitions. She was known to even converse with the dead. She could do it all for a price, or whimsy if your problem was interesting enough. Etta Jean hadn’t sought to charge Theo a dime after he showed her what was up under his shirt. All that, and Otto Dowdy was the name she mentioned with her eyes rolled to the heavens, her arm muscles straining, clutching the table between them.

Otto gave Theo a long look and Theo gave one right back. “I see. We best meet later then.” He named a time. Named a place. Walked away before Theo could confirm.

Theo sank back to where he’d been watching from. Otto Dowdy did not look back.

Theo Glover, daguerreotype, c. 1850

Photographer unknown

Description:

Theo Glover sits wide-legged in a plain chair in front of a wood-sided house. One arm is draped over the back of the chair. He wears a flat cap and a light-colored shirt unbuttoned at the neck, trousers rolled up to mid-calf and no shoes. His expression is curious.

Journal, leatherbound, lined paper

Description:

Cover worn, pages loose, fifty-seven pages penciled in blocky, tight handwriting. Contents are a biography recounted by Theo Glover and recorded by Otto Dowdy. This journal spans from Theo’s birth circa 1820 to approximately age twenty.

Photocopy of an interior page:

“… the young Master Henry started paying too close attention to me. My mother started to worry. One time, I was fetching flour for the cook and he cornered me in the pantry. She walked in on him. Lord knows what might’ve happened if she didn’t. She knew then I couldn’t stay up at the house. Missus Glover favored Mama. So she ain’t fuss much when Mama asked if they could spare me at the house. Mama made up something about my being too clumsy to hold a needle and I was better suited to hauling lumber. Mama made me men’s slacks and loose shirts and sent me down to work alongside Daddy in the ’shop and that was that. It was more than a workshop though. The Glovers did all their distilling there. Daddy worked as a carpenter and a cooper, too. Work was harder but I liked it more. I liked planing the wood. Hollowing out the interior of them big ol’ barrels. The smell of white oak. Even better, I liked it when I was finally old enough and I got to ride in the wagon delivering whiskey-filled barrels down to the docks. And to think, without some lecherous man-child I might not have figured out who I really was. Or at least not as quickly. Hate to say it, but it was a blessing in disguise really.”

Theo followed the worn path through a sycamore grove until it gave way to a hard-packed drive, at the end of which Otto sat on a small stool on the porch of a rough cabin, waiting for him. He was illuminated in profile by the yellow light of a nearly full moon perched just above the treeline. Theo felt a warble beneath his twelfth rib on his left side. “Aight, aight. Settle down now,” he murmured to himself, to no one in particular, and he approached.

Otto settled all four legs of the stool down on the ground and stood when he noticed Theo. “Welcome,” he said. Those eyes of his, big-wide and downturned, looking sad as ever. Otto held open the door, allowing Theo to enter the one-room cabin. It was humble, yet well cared for. Two chairs, a small shelf with whittled trinkets, a rug, and a straw mattress in the corner near the fire.

Otto was the one to break the silence. “Miss Etta Jean sends you to me, I see what I can do. What troubles you?”

A lot. A lot troubles me, Theo could have said. Though he did not. Instead he started at the buttons of his cotton shirt. Otto did not say anything, only looked on, pupils widening further in the low light. Only when Theo shrugged out of his shirt completely, allowing it to puddle around his feet, did Otto move. His expression shifted slowly, completely; the way one looks when faced with an especially troublesome problem to solve.

Theo did not like that.

Otto circled Theo once, twice, then squatted down to get a level look. He did not mention Theo’s scant breasts, and Theo wouldn’t either. Otto reached out a hand, hovering just short of touching the spot. Theo knew what he was asking but waited until Otto looked up at him. “May I?”

Just a moment before Otto’s face was close enough to Theo’s bare skin that he could feel his breath tickling across his rib cage. Why not? Theo gave a curt nod. Otto nodded back before abruptly sticking both index and middle fingers into the hole in Theo that should not be.

The hole was not an absence, not exactly. There was nothingness, nothing that should be there, no muscle, no bone, no Theo, whose breathing had been growing more labored by the second. The hole was about the width of his two fingers exactly. He gave them a slight wiggle, stretching index finger upwards then down again. Otto glanced at Theo’s face, but nothing of his bearing indicated that he’d noticed at all. Otto, however, was shocked to find that his fingers swam through impossibility and felt cold to the point of numbness.

Hovering at eye level, Otto could not see through the hole, but he could see into it. And inside were multitudes. Far more there than could or should be contained in any single person. There was a vastness, yet as far as Otto could tell, it was full. Prodding it was like prodding a bowl full of probability … no that’s not quite right … a bowl full of possibility. It was fascinating. And Otto doubted Theo could withstand much more of this observation. He straightened and told Theo to put his shirt back on.

Theo’s relief was palpable. With each button that he redid, Otto saw the same Theo that had spent days leaning against a warehouse wall, watching him move from ship to ship, return. His tension replaced with easy confidence. When he was dressed again he turned to face Otto. He was chewing his bottom lip, in thought. It was slightly fuller than the top lip, Otto had noticed earlier. And he had a thin scar across his chin. Not disfiguring but noticeable. Another man might grow a beard to disguise it. Otto got the impression that even if Theo could do so, he would not. Theo did not impress him as a person who was in the habit of hiding. It was the hole, Otto decided then, that shamed him. Or rather, the mystery of it.

“Well?” he asked, turning to the trunk he kept near his mattress.

“Well, what?”

Theo’s voice was incredulous behind him. “Well, can you fix it?”

Otto returned with a dark bottle and two tin cups and gestured for Theo to sit across from him before filling both cups generously. His cousin Waverly brewed the best hooch in all Charleston. This seemed an appropriate time to break out the bottle.

“There’s nothing to fix,” Otto said, taking a deep swig. It burned the whole way down. Otto could see Theo coiling up for an argument. Perhaps another time, another life, another situation, he could see himself picking a fight just for the satisfaction of making up later, but this matter was important to Theo. He wouldn’t tease him. He held up a quelling hand and continued, “There’s nothing to fix because there’s nothing wrong.”

“I damn well disagree!” Theo shouted, coming to his feet. Whatever easiness Otto had noted about him moments before must have been coming at a cost. Because in front of his eyes, Theo Glover was becoming undone. He cussed a blue streak and when he ran out of coherent words he wept and raged his fear and confusion and when all had gone from him he sagged back into the chair across from Otto and said, voice hoarse and weary, “Sometimes I hear things. It’s whispering to me. I don’t know how to explain it. But it’s so. I hear voices in my head sometimes and I know they coming from right here.” He tapped his side. Otto leaned forward.

“What sort of whispering?” he asked. There was a tension, the moment pulled taut to the point of brittleness. Otto felt that one wrong word, one syllable spoken too loudly and he’d spook Theo, and never see the man again. “They telling you—They telling you to do something bad?”

Theo chuckled, a ragged sound. Instead of answering he brought the cup to his lips and drank deeply. Otto watched the lines of his throat constrict as he swallowed. The air in the room felt temperamental, like a storm that couldn’t decide if it would break or not. Theo did not put the cup down until it was empty. Then he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He stared at Otto, eyes dark and reckless.

“Depends on what you call bad. Tell me, Otto, were you born free?”

Vertigo, c. 1860

Oil on canvas, 10 x 18

Theo Glover, American

Description:

Vertigo features repeated self-portraits in which the artist’s head, slightly lolled, and his naked torso emerge from the open water, reminiscent of uncanny buoys. The stillness of the seven self-portraits is remarkable given the motion that Glover renders in the tempest that rages around each figure. The eyes of each portrait are shut, peacefully, with the exception of one portrait, in the far right foreground, in which the eyes and face are clenched tightly as if in pain, or the anticipation of it.

Theo hadn’t meant to tell him everything, but lying there in the dark, knees and ankles and shins pressed together, Theo found himself able to say aloud what the whispers had been urging him to do. Otto remained quiet for so long Theo began to worry his confession fell on dreaming ears. When Otto responded, it was a sigh. And then, “That sounds about right.”

Theo propped himself up on one elbow, careful to keep from pressing the spot into the blankets that covered Otto’s thin mattress. “What do you mean it sounds about right?”

“I could feel it.” He let his fingers drift towards that spot so that Theo had no doubts about what it Otto meant. “Like I said, it feels like potential. Like beginnings without endings. Not that surprising it’s whispering to you about freedom.”

He should have found the ease with which Otto accepted his predicament relieving, but instead, it made him sharp. “It’d be easier if you just shut it.”

“I can’t. It’s not mine to fix.”

“First there’s nothing to fix. Now it’s nothing you can fix. Which is it, Otto?” For a brief, dreadful moment, Theo was afraid he’d gotten Otto all wrong. It wasn’t like him to make mistakes, not like this. Not about character, the shape of a person and their intentions towards him.

As if sensing his turmoil and its nature, Otto reached out and cradled Theo’s face. “I know what it sounds like. But both things can be, and are, true.”

“Why did Miss Etta Jean send me to you?”

Otto, noncommittal as ever, replied, “Because she thought I could help.”

Theo snorted.

“On account of my mother.”

“And who’s your mother, Otto?”

“Who she is is not nearly as important as where she is. Or even better, where she’s from.”

Spring, c. 1860

Oil on canvas, 10 x 10

Theo Glover, American

Description:

A robin’s egg, nestled at the base of the throat, where the rich browns that comprise the rest of Glover’s self-portrait thin to near translucence. The observer has the impression that they themselves have been granted the gift (or curse) of X-ray vision. Following the lines of the throat upward, the jawline transforms into the side profile of the robin itself. The transition is sudden, striking, yet seamless, as if it were the most natural thing in all the world, to have a songbird, a harbinger of spring and better times, chortling out of one’s mouth. In a stark contrast to many of Glover’s earlier works, his eyes are open. Wide open, in fact, yet refusing to meet the gaze of the observer.

Letter, unaddressed, unlined paper

Description:

Five pages penciled in blocky, tight handwriting. Signed by Otto Dowdy.

Photocopy of an interior page:

“Like a match to gasoline. That’s how we were. Taken with each other from the start. Theo took to forging passes. Risked life and limb to be with me. Said something about me calmed the sore spot in him. That’s what he called it. His sore spot. Hurt me bad afterwards. Real bad, when he didn’t want nothing to do with me for a while. He thought it was my fault how everything happened. And I get it. I always said so. It took a while for him to understand. Things that’s gonna be, is gonna be. Wasn’t nothing I could do about that sore spot. Wasn’t nothing I could do on that boat. All I could do is all I’ve been doing—hang on tight and wait for Theo. He came around eventually. Apologized for something that didn’t need apologizing for. Only regret I have in this life is the time we spent apart.”

“I know how we’re going to do it,” Theo whispered. The sore spot in his side seemed to throb as he spoke, as if it harbored some sort of awareness. It had grown so that Theo had begun to despair that it would consume him before he could quell its demands. The only time he was at peace with it was when he was by Otto’s side. Otto joked that he was nothing more than a distraction, but Theo swore differently. The room smelled like sex and a lightning strike—the latter, wafting up from the hole in Theo’s side. It had grown. It was nearly four fingers wide now. Otto skirted around it tenderly and paused when Theo spoke, a silent invitation to continue.

Otto listened—first rapt and then with growing horror. He trembled as he whispered against Theo’ lips, “We can’t do this.”

Theo flinched. “You mean you won’t. Won’t help?” Otto hated the feel of that flinch, of Theo pulling away. He knew better than to try to hold tighter. If Theo noticed the wounded look on Otto’s face he did not let on.

“No, I mean can’t. Pick another way, another ship. That one, the Henrietta, that’s a bad ship. There are stories about that ship.”

And Theo thought he understood what Otto meant. So he caressed the side of Otto’s face and said, “It’s all right to be afraid. Fear won’t kill you. Staying put, though—there’s death in the waiting.”

Otto shifted; Theo could tell he was nearing ready to fall asleep and Theo was envious. His sleep lately was restless. His dreams had taken on an overly vivid quality. Things happened in those dreams that defied logic, yet he could not distinguish them from waking life. Could he blame his sore spot for this, too? Or was it the terrible anticipation of what was to come? Theo prodded at Otto’s side. “Explain it to me again. About your mother. Differently this time.” Theo had been trying to wrap his head around it the best he could. He had a hole going through his goddamn middle, whispering strange ideas—insane ideas, but he couldn’t fully grasp what Otto had been trying to explain about his mother.

Otto’s voice was thick with coming sleep as he said, “I don’t think I have any other ways, Theo.” By the last attempt, the closest thing Theo could compare the woman to was an angel. Otto insisted that wasn’t right either, though. “Angels have divine intent,” he’d said. “They care about mankind. What she is—they are—are nothing like that. We’re a special interest to them, nothing more.”

Otto was neither resentful nor resigned as he said it—yet another thing Theo couldn’t understand—the dispassionate way he spoke of his mother and his insistence that his mother was equally dispassionate towards him.

“Well, start back at the beginning then.” It felt terribly important that he grasp this. Though he couldn’t say why, he insisted on it.

Ascension, c. 1870

Sculpture, cherry wood

Theo Glover, American

Description:

While many in the art world primarily know Theo Glover as a visual artist, both prolific and visionary, Doretha Freeman is quick to amend that her great-great-grandfather was also a sculptor. Presented is one of the few remaining wood carvings attributed to Glover from Freeman’s personal collection. The rest, Freeman shares, were sadly lost in a house fire thirty years ago. In Ascension, the figure’s face is hidden by a cascade of long ringlets as their body is bowed, hunched in on itself. Chains, broken, drape around the figure’s feet. With such a title as Ascension, one might expect great wings to sprout from the figure’s back; instead, there are hands, whittled in painstaking detail. Six of them in total sprout from the back, shoulders, head, and thighs. Though each hand is positioned slightly differently than the next—some palms curled, others opened, fingers relaxed or clenching—they all appear to be reaching towards something.

Theo was no stranger to the docks, having spent a decade moving whiskey barrels to and fro, but he was no sailor. Not that he’d admit it, but when he put great thought to the matter, ships unnerved him. Their great size; menacing figures that seemed like they had no right to float the way they did. Unnatural, their defiance of the water. He was not familiar; not the way Otto was, who grew up in ports and on cargo ships. Not just a cabin boy but the captain’s boy. A man’s denial didn’t carry too much weight when your get is your spitting image. Right down to the way Otto’s shoulder sloped slightly downward from left to right and the length of his gait. Yes, Otto could play his part just fine. Theo just needed to quell the fitful starts in his guts long enough to do his. The first time Theo saw the Henrietta up close—dead of night, moon hanging low like ripe fruit behind the foremast, shrouded in fog—well, he felt something. Something fear-shaped but with a finer point. It needled him and he did his best to ignore it. The hole in him, though, there was no ignoring that. It was now larger than two fists held together and it thrummed with its own pulse the closer this plan came to actualization. He felt he could stuff it full of cotton rags and he still wouldn’t be able to escape its persistence. The whispers were nearer to moans than not. With effort, he turned his focus to the plan to get the families and provisions on board, and the ship out to open water.

Photographs of timber that remain on Island Beach State Park, designated by the state of New Jersey as a historical heritage site

Description:

Six beams, varying in length from seven feet to ten and a half feet long, waterlogged and soft with age, partially buried in sand. They once formed part of the bilge of the Henrietta. At the shore facing end of the planks are a series of semicircular markings that don’t resemble any modern alphanumeric system. And perhaps more interesting, their method of becoming marked on the wood has yet to be determined. Their symmetry and precision seem to preclude natural aberrations in the wood, and yet, woodworker and dendrologist Antoine Hall describes the markings as “if the symbols were almost coaxed from the fiber of the wood itself.”

Iron bars

Description:

Used as ballast. At the time of its being commandeered by Theo Glover and Otto Dowdy, the Henrietta had been refitted as a slaving ship. The marriage of hydrodynamics and capitalism resulted in this cruel observation: despite being crammed into tiny living conditions, humans, while taking up space, do not weigh very much. Iron ballast bars made up the difference in hydrodynamic stability.

Whathavewedone. Whathavewedone. Whathavewedone.

Shackles

Description:

Rust flaked and barnacle covered.

When some of the families saw what was belowdecks, they refused to go any further. They stifled cries and moaned prayers. But commitment is commitment. They were in too far; either everybody needed to board or likely none would live to tell about it.

Not a single person there had been on a ship like this before, but all knew the cruel tools of the trade. Intimately. It was Big John who moved first. Theo liked him, a friend of his daddy’s. Looked out for him after his daddy had gone on. Big John grabbed hold of the first shackle and pulled and pulled until the wood splintered and he ripped the iron manacles right out the bulkhead. Stalked up the stairs and threw it overboard where it landed in the dark water with a splash. Theo thought about hollering then, felt something manic-like bubbling up not from his chest exactly, but near enough to it. But he couldn’t … wouldn’t let it out. They weren’t safe yet. Far from it.

Till Earth and Heaven Ring, 1992

Oil on Canvas, 24 x 36

Doretha Freeman, b. 1956, American

Description:

Freeman began Till Earth and Heaven Ring to commemorate one hundred fifty years of emancipation on her mother’s side. Says Freeman, “I always believed in Theo’s version of events. It’s something of a tradition at this point; when we get together, we talk about the story. Debate what might’ve happened. Was it the weather? Was it a jar of bad peaches? I think Theo didn’t have words for what he was seeing. What he experienced. But that doesn’t make it any less real even if it sounds fantastic to our ears.” Freeman’s use of light and space adds tension to the hyper-realist rendering of the Henrietta at the mercy of the roiling sea and unforgiving sky. “I chose to depict this moment because it is the great crisis of faith. It must’ve taken a tremendous amount of faith to run away, especially in the daring way they did. Faith that whatever perils might lie ahead were better than what they were leaving behind. But what could have prepared them for this?”

Only once they’d passed through the naval checkpoint did Otto begin to relax. And even then, only marginally. He stood above deck, in a captain’s jacket, with the cap firm on his head and his curls tucked underneath. He knew the naval flags as well as he knew his own name, but that didn’t stop the muscles along his shoulders and the back of his neck from seizing in an anxious rictus. With each jerky movement he made, he felt certain he was one muscle spasm from giving everything away. Surely, I look unnatural. Surely, they’ll know. But the eyes see what they expect, and nobody manning those checkpoints expected to see a mulatto boy on deck commanding a slaving ship out of Fort Sumter with his lover and three other families below decks. And so, on they went.

Below, there was a hushed giddiness, a vibration almost, as time drew on. It wasn’t that they weren’t afraid. No, it was that every single soul felt that they were so much more than that sense of fear. Time drew on, and on, and eventually Otto called everyone above decks.

And then there was the open water, and the watchful eye of a crescent moon, and their lives were in God’s hands after that.

There was enough novel and strange about the situation to keep the small ones occupied. They scampered back and forth playing games across the deck, being mindful of the edge and the men doing work. Theo wasn’t a sailor but he was a quick study. They had the minimum number of men needed to sail the damn thing, keep it intact, and in the right direction. So busy were they that there was little time to think of what came next. All they could do was enjoy the freedom they had while they had it and hope there was more to come. There was brief talk of changing course entirely—destination, the motherland. But that was just the effervescence of an unlikely success and the ocean air talking, was all. Even the most enthusiastic were dissuaded once the talk of rations came up. And besides, there was something strange about the purple clouds beginning to streak like long fingers, greedy and grasping, across the horizon.

“What manner of witchcraft is this?” hollered Big John. Like a glass over a moth, so too did it seem like the storm had descended upon the Henrietta. In their immediate vicinity the sea percolated with an unrestrained violence that the wind around them strove to meet. Yet just at the edge of sight, all remained calm on the dark waters. The storm had come for them, and them alone.

Many of the women fell to their knees in prayer, clutching their children to them. Otto held Theo, who had collapsed in pain.

“Be not afraid,” a voice spoke, through the clouds, through the unnatural storm. They heard it around them. Within them. And if it was God it was no God they’d known before.

Five copper nails

Description:

Five inches long and square sided, with large flat heads. Nails like these were common in the construction of ships between the early 1800s and the 1870s. They held planks together under the stress of roiling salt waves, across transatlantic voyages, and throughout thundering oceanic tempests. Imagine these nails in particular holding the Henrietta together under natural or unnatural forces attempting to tear it apart. Imagine the contrast of internal and external pressure building. Imagine the planks of the hull straining against a fulgent, white-blue light, until …

They called themselves Voyagers. No, not that word exactly, but that’s the approximation that human language and human tongues would allow. They spoke with the fractal branching of a lightning strike, within the impossibly white spots of fawns, the iridescent patterns found in the scales of fish, with the minute space between tree rings and in the give of fleshy seedpods …

Slowly, terribly, Theo began to understand what Otto had tried to explain.

Further, freedom demands a price. This was always understood. In exchange for safe yet uncanny passage and a burdening of knowledge, the Voyagers collected. It was not out of cruelty. No, but rather, curiosity. A price is still a price.

Untitled, 1868

Oil on canvas, 10 x 18

Theo Glover, American

Description:

A remarkably different color palette than his typical work, Untitled is a series of warm colors, the artist’s own portrait in orange and burnished gold flecks. His hands, turned upwards in supplication, or as if prepared to receive a gift, and indeed there is a streak of light, complete with dust motes or perhaps stars, swirling towards or away from his palms, depending on perspective. Across his upper face, there are a series of layered moth wings. Is the streak of light a representation of the “great light” that spoke to the unlikely crew? The ones they credit with saving them, as much as a shipwreck can be described as saving? Doretha Freeman believes so.

Anne-Marie Mitchell, Self-Emancipation of the Henrietta
Digitized recording, excerpt, 12:40, 1873

We came back.

Salt-crusted and confused, we came back.

We couldn’t say where we had been other than to the light. Or some: to the Lord.

Washed up on a grey morning, they found us, sand-speckled and shivering. We’d been gone so long; grown old and died and been reborn until memories of our former lives degraded into nothing but shimmering fragments. In that other place, we would look at each other and smile and assume we’d all been having the same dream. And then here, on this beach, a few of us looked at each other and recalled the other place as a dream. We counted off and it was a miracle. Right down to the babe in his mother’s arms, not one of us lost in the storm. Yet all of us had lost something. Look at my right hand, here. Good thing I turned out left-handed. [chuckles] And my sister, Itsy. A gift and a curse she got. We had gone and lived, and now we were back, as if no time at all had passed, and we never were the same.

We washed up on that New Jersey shore free. Cowrie shells in the lining of our pockets and salt crusted into our eyelids and heads full of impossibilities. But I knew. We had gone and we came back.

Till Earth and Heaven Ring: Artifacts and Accounts from the Henrietta

The eighteen passengers of the Henrietta were found on the shore of Island Beach State Park the morning of April 17^th, 1842. Their accounts of how they came to be there all varied slightly except for a few key facts: their point of origin, means of self-emancipation, and a description of a glowing light during a storm. Examination of other primary sources indicate no evidence of meteorological anomalies on any evening between April 13^th and April 17^th. The survivors of this self-emancipation endeavor each became famous in their own right. For example, [Big] John Jones, while supposedly unable to remember any event of his life prior to April 13, is said to have possessed an eidetic memory until his death in 1860. Itsy Mitchell, a child during the event, claimed to see two worlds, one out of each eye yet both true. These co-existing worlds were the subjects of her numerous sketches. Otto Dowdy entered into a business partnership with John Jones and established what would become the largest fleet of clipper ships owned by Black Americans. According to family lore, much to Otto’s amusement, Theo Glover never stepped foot on another water vessel again. Purportedly, Glover also never slept again and claimed to not need to. During the night hours is when he is said to have completed his many artworks. There is no further mention of Glover’s anatomical anomaly in any of his records.

Mai Alfred’s smile splits across her face as she stares at her reflection in the mirror. She has been practicing every day, smiling ear to ear, ever since she read that asinine article—written by yet another man—telling her to smile more. She pulls out her signature Valentino lipstick from her makeup bag and traces the outline of her lips, careful not to over-line her cupid’s bow. She likes this shade; this cool-toned red. It makes her feel bold and powerful, like a lioness ripping through a bloodied impala carcass. She will need this confidence for her conference with the Kupona tribe tomorrow. Her job depends on it. Mai Alfred smiles at her reflection one last time before exiting the bathroom. She almost drops her makeup bag when she sees the hyena’s head mounted on the wall. She keeps forgetting it is there.

The taxidermy head scared her last night when she checked into her presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Johannesburg. Mai Alfred makes a mental note to tell the staff to take it out tomorrow. She cannot imagine spending another night sleeping with the hideous creature.

Better me than Alfred, Mai Alfred thinks. She is grateful her son will be staying with his father.

Alfred has always been afraid of hyenas. There was something about their shrieking laugh, something about the way they ate everything—even their own—that unsettled him. Mai Alfred remembers the first time Alfred saw a hyena. It was during his seventh birthday on a safari trip, and they had finished spotting the last of the Big Five when Alfred noticed a lone hyena guarding something. It was too dark for his small eyes to make out, but when the game ranger drove close to the animal, the hyena was low-slung, shoulders rolling, mouth twisted into a smile as it watched over the carcass. Its onyx eyes stared into Alfred’s, its slobbering tongue dangling out of its mouth. Alfred’s breathing slowed as he reached for his mother’s hand, his hands trembling like a tree letting go of its leaves. He held onto her for dear life as fear sunk its teeth into him.

Mai Alfred pretends she does not feel the hyena’s eyes following her as she moves about the room. She grabs a satin dress from her closet and lays it on the bed. Alfred’s flight from Addis Ababa lands at OR Tambo in an hour, and she wants to get there before his father does. This will be her first time seeing him since he called her a ruthless bitch, since he decided to walk out on her, on their son. Mai Alfred did not think it was fair—Tinashe would never understand what it meant to be a woman in her position. There is no room for softness when you’re a powerful woman at the top. Mai Alfred reaches to twirl her ring out of habit, something she does when she is nervous, but instead of feeling the cool metal around her finger, she feels her bare skin. Mai Alfred stares at her empty finger, remembering that she left her ring back home in Harare.

The afternoon sun hangs above Mai Alfred’s head, burning the scalp between her plaits. When she spots Alfred waving at her from the arrival gates, she beams and waves back. Mai Alfred pulls her son into a suffocating hug, squeezing him so tight he yelps in protest. Alfred complains it feels like a snake is wrapping itself around him. She kisses his face multiple times, and he groans.

“Eww, Mum, stop,” he says. “You’re embarrassing me.” She releases him and stares at him as if he is something rare, as if she is seeing him for the first time. She was happy he inherited her features: oval face, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones. He used to have her straight teeth until he chipped one of them when he was eleven. Doctors had told her she would have difficulties carrying a pregnancy to term. They had even suggested surrogacy. Despite the odds, Mai Alfred carried to term. When Alfred was born, he came into the world like a breath. His fingers barely wrapped around the tip of her smallest finger, and his skin was as red as cherry tomatoes. Mai Alfred had spoken in whispers around him, afraid that any loud sound might break him. Now, he towers over her, his strong legs and broad shoulders showing evidence of his short time in America.

Alfred looks around. “Where’s dad?”

Mai Alfred glances at her watch. “Late. No surprise there.”

“Mum, don’t. I just got here.” He groans. “No drama, please.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Are you calling me dramatic?”

“Oh, there he is. Dad! Over here.” Alfred ignores the trap his mother lays for him and waves to his father.

“Elizabeth,” Tinashe greets after hugging Alfred. He used to call her Liz. Mai Alfred pretends not to care. He reaches to hug her, then changes his mind. “You look well.”

“Tinashe.” Mai Alfred offers her rehearsed smile. “You too.”

“How have—” Tinashe starts but Mai Alfred’s phone rings, sparing her from the awkward conversation that was about to begin.

She steps away to answer. It is her assistant, but the signal is poor and his voice cuts in and out before the line drops entirely. He is supposed to update her on the number of workers that have quit. Someone bumps into Mai Alfred from behind, nearly causing her to drop her phone. Annoyed, she spins around, ready to berate the careless fool—only to freeze as the familiar stench of sweat and sewage water hits her. She knows that smell; how it clings to the Kupona tribe.

Mai Alfred wrinkles her nose at the three tall women. She was not expecting to see them until tomorrow’s conference at the Southern African Land Dispute Headquarters. She is surprised their chieftess is not with them.

The Kupona are the Indigenous people of Hwange, since long, long before it was declared a national park. They are a tribe of tall people, led by their chieftess, and they keep to themselves.

Both Mai Alfred and the Kupona tribe are in South Africa for a conference regarding an ancestral land dispute. Mai Alfred is still confused over all the uproar for building hotels in the national park. Everyone in Zimbabwe is always complaining about their way of life but when real change is presented to them, they start protesting, chanting nonsense about displacement and human rights violations. Because of this, Jonathon—her boss—has been breathing down her neck, urging her to get started on Phase One of their big tourism project.

“Madam Mhari,” one of the Kupona women says, adjusting her beat-up suitcase. She is the tallest, standing over six feet and five inches. The women are dressed in their traditional attire: black and gold zambiyas wrapped around their bodies, hosho gourds tied around their waists, and dancing anklets filled with seeds. The Kupona either walked barefoot or wore raggedy sandals. Mai Alfred is relieved they have sandals on. The tall woman’s hair is wrapped in a gold-spotted black headscarf, big enough to carry two bags of potatoes. “I wish I could say it is a blessing to see you, but given the circumstances, I would be lying.”

“You look well rested,” Mai Alfred says, slipping her phone back in her suede Ferragamo bag. “For people who claim being away from their homeland makes them sick.”

“Just because the naked eye cannot see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there,” she replies coolly. “I’m sure you, of all people, understand. After all, you’re the first female senior vice president. A lot of things you do must go unseen.”

It had been announced months earlier that Elizabeth Mhari had been promoted to senior vice president of Hunhu Foundation, a luxury hospitality organization based in Southern Africa. Her first assignment: to oversee the development of nine new luxury hotels in Hwange, Zimbabwe’s largest national park. The first hotel, built over a decade ago, has been a huge success, bringing in millions of dollars. With Zimbabwe’s struggling economy, the addition of these hotels would be a tremendous help, but the Kupona are refusing to cooperate, and their refusal has gone viral, going as far as getting major humanitarian organizations involved. Now, Mai Alfred was summoned to Joburg for this pointless meeting, while rumors of witchcraft and people going missing were spreading like wildfire back home, scaring her workers from their big project.

“I’m surprised you people have passports and got on a plane,” Mai Alfred says. “I figured you would swim with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River.”

“Elizabeth, that’s a disgusting thing to say,” Tinashe hisses, his voice low but steady.

“You think cruelty sounds clever, but all it does is show your ignorance.” The other Kupona woman speaks. She is shorter, with thick locs the size of baobab roots.

“Zinzi.” The tall woman squeezes Zinzi’s hand. “It’s all right.”

Mai Alfred resists the urge to roll her eyes, aware of Tinashe’s glare burning into her back. The Kupona were the reason he filed for divorce. “Look, neither of us want to be here, why not just settle the case right now,” she suggests. “I’ll even pay for your return flights so you can be back home to rest. Accept our demands and let’s move forward.”

“Elizabeth,” Tinashe interjects again. “We’re going to lose our reservation.”

The tallest Kupona woman stares at Mai Alfred before shaking her head and walking past her. The others follow and the last woman, Zinzi, roughly bumps into Mai Alfred, Mai Alfred doesn’t notice Zinzi dropping a dirty rag inside her expensive purse. The dirty rag hides a wooden carving of a hyena watching over its cub.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, and scurries away.

“How was your first semester at Stanford?” Tinashe asks when the waiter is done taking their orders. “Tell me everything your mother will approve of. You can tell me the rest when we get home.” He laughs, and Mai Alfred hates that she misses the sound of his laughter.

There was a time home meant their house back in Borrowdale Brooke. Now, home is Tinashe’s house here, in Sandhurst. A border away from their marital home. Mai Alfred reaches for her ring with her thumb, then remembers she does not have it, so she clenches her hand instead.

Alfred fills his father in, and she tunes out, already having heard this response when she visited him during Thanksgiving break. They had flown first class to the Maldives. She pulls out her phone, rubbing against something rough inside her purse, and she texts her assistant, asking if any more people had quit. Ever since old articles about Hunhu Foundation’s first ever luxury hotel surfaced, there has been talk about stupid witchcraft. Mai Alfred should have hired white Africans instead. Something Jonathon always makes sure to bring up every time another one of her workers quits.

“How about you, how’s the stadium coming along?” Alfred asks his father.

“My team’s almost done redesigning the new rugby stadium in Cape Town. We actually just got another project in Dubai, so I’ll be heading there once we wrap up here.”

Tinashe’s a talented architect, one of the most sought-after in Southern Africa. His mind works like a blueprint come to life, a labyrinth of precision, filled with intricate sketches and careful calculations. He is the one who designed their house. Her house. Every brick, every nook, every staircase reminds her of him. Even the cracks in the walls seem to trace the outline of his absence. It has been seven months since the divorce, and she still has to put the house up for sale.

“And you.” Tinashe turns to Mai Alfred, who is taking a sip of her wine. “The conference …” he trails.

“Is a waste of time.” She shrugs. “It should be a quick one. Everyone is acting as if building hotels in the park is some great evil.”

Alfred’s eyes dart towards his father, whose expression is blank, jaw tight. “Of course, you think that.”

“The hotels will attract tourists, which will bring in money, which will trickle into the economy. Plus don’t forget the job opportunities. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

“Bullshit, Elizabeth. We both know the money isn’t trickling into the country. It’s going into people’s pockets. Your pockets.” Tinashe frowns. “You’re going to displace thousands of people with these hotels. Where do you think the Kupona will go?”

“No one is displacing anyone. Why are you acting like we’re leaving them homeless? We’ve promised them education and shelter throughout the cities.” Mai Alfred frowns back. This was the same fight that led to their separation. Mai Alfred had risked her position by proposing incentives for the Kupona. There was a time she was a naïve village girl, carrying her school books in a Tastic Long-Grain Rice bag. If not for the scholarship to the top university in Harare, she might have stayed that way. That scholarship opened many doors: Harvard Business School, jobs at elite firms, meeting Tinashe. Mai Alfred knew the Kupona would benefit from this move.

“The fact that you can’t see the harm you’re doing is terrifying, Elizabeth. This isn’t you.”

Alfred clears his throat, interrupting his parents when he senses the heated atmosphere, but they barely hear him over their polite-rising voices. Mai Alfred goes silent for a long time. Their waiter comes with their food and spreads it across the table: rare steak and potatoes for Mai Alfred, grilled Portuguese chicken and lentils for Alfred, creamy tomato pasta for Tinashe. Their waiter tells them to enjoy their meal and when no one says anything, he smiles awkwardly and leaves.

“And who am I?” Mai Alfred finally asks. “What did you call me, oh, a ruthless bitch. That’s who I am.”

Tinashe’s jaw tenses. “You’re literally taking the Kupona from their homes.” He rubs his temples with his knuckles. “You’re playing with fire here. You remember what happened the first time Hunhu Foundation tried to build that first hotel.”

When Hwange’s park gates opened to tourists after the Ministry of Tourism declared Hwange’s ancestral lands as government protected lands, the tourists marveled at the tall statures of the Kupona, they marveled when they saw them walking with the hyenas, the lions, the African wild dogs. The Kupona were one of the park’s popular sightings—despite not being part of the attractions. Anyone coming to Hwange wanted to witness these tall people living in communion with the wild. Seizing the opportunity, and multiple bribes later, the president of Hunhu Foundation decided to build a luxury hotel for people eager to sleep under the stars, so they too could feel like the Kupona, living and breathing with the wild. However, when Hunhu Foundation began construction, a few workers mysteriously disappeared from the construction site. Two days later, hyenas were spotted rummaging through the workers’ uniforms, the workers nowhere to be found. Workers began to quit en masse; afraid they might vanish too. Hunhu Foundation reported significant financial losses. Mai Alfred was just an intern at the time. It was her idea to move the Kupona from that area of the park to another. She had been offered a full-time job immediately and over the years, rose to the senior ranks of the company.

“That is just a legend used to scare children and entice tourists.” Mai Alfred scratches the back of her neck. “We’re not leaving them homeless, Tinashe. I told you before, we’re offering them housing, plus other benefits. We’re basically upgrading their lives.”

Their waiter returns and asks the table how they’re enjoying their meal so far. No one has touched their plates, and Alfred sends an apologetic look their way. The waiter smiles and retreats again.

“Fuck, Liz, I’m not doing this shit with you again.” Tinashe throws his napkin on the table, almost landing it in his red pasta. “Sorry, Alfred, I can’t do this. I’ll see you at home.”

Mai Alfred’s breath catches when he calls her Liz.

“Dad—”

Tinashe pulls out his wallet and hands his black credit card to Alfred. “Use this to cover dinner and for your Uber home.” He does not look at Mai Alfred, but she watches him walk away from her again.

When Mai Alfred returns to her hotel, she does not want to be alone, so she heads to the hotel bar on the penthouse patio instead. Joburg’s skyline stretches before her, the cool summer evening air brushing her skin. The bar is comfortably full, the music low enough to catch snippets of strangers’ conversations. Another itch creeps up Mai Alfred’s neck, and she scratches it as she sits down by the balcony. Her phone buzzes and it is a text from Alfred.

hey ma, made it to dads. see you in a few days!! excited to be home. safe flight back.

Mai Alfred’s heart pricks at this. Alfred does not know she is selling the house yet. She has been stalling, scared to tell him that the home he grew up in will belong to someone else. Alfred will be spending a few more days here in South Africa so Mai Alfred will have the house to herself. She will have time to bring the realtor over to their—her—house. She scratches her neck again, feeling a bump underneath. She has not been outside long, but the mosquitoes are already feasting on her. Mai Alfred’s phone buzzes again and she thinks it is another text from Alfred, but it is an update from her assistant.

Good evening, Madam Mhari, four more men quit. One said they saw a lion’s head on a snake’s body.

Another text comes in.

Jonathon is PISSED.

Mai Alfred motions for a waiter. She needs wine for this. Ever since Jonathon promoted her, it has been anything but glorious. As the first woman to serve in this role, her leadership has faced intense scrutiny. There have been more think pieces critiquing her inability to smile than acknowledging the work she has done over the years. Now, there are articles about her workers quitting because they are afraid of the Kupona’s curse. She has to make all of this go away. Mai Alfred’s scalp starts to itch so she scratches it gently, careful not to ruin her plaits. Her mouth starts to water, and she searches for the waiter again, but he is nowhere in sight.

What kind of service is this, she thinks to herself. The waiter finally arrives and apologizes. Mai Alfred ignores him and orders a bottle of red wine. She also orders a side of patatas bravas, chicken tacos, and garlic bread, because she is suddenly famished, even after her lunch and dinner.

“I’ll get this to you right away, ma’am,” the waiter says and leaves. Mai Alfred fishes for her lipstick in her purse. When she feels a scratchy cloth-like texture, she pulls it out and shrieks. It is a dirty rag. She scrunches her nose as she unfolds the rag and finds a wooden carving of a hyena watching over its cub. Bile rises up her throat as the smell of the rag engulfs her. She knows this belongs to the Kupona instantly. It must have fallen in her bag when that woman bumped into her. Mai Alfred tosses the filth over the balcony and wipes her hands on the napkins. She will be placing a new order for her Ferragamo purse.

The following morning, Mai Alfred hears the protesters before she sees them.

Down with Hunhu Foundation! Down with Elizabeth Mhari! Down with the Natural Land Act!

The chants grow louder and louder as Mai Alfred and her driver near the Southern African Land Dispute Headquarters. Throngs of protesters block the entrance and security guards dressed in black and blue ward them away with batons and whips. They drive through the crowd, the protesters’ signs scratching and clawing at the car. When they get past the gate, Mai Alfred steps out of the car and the protesters start booing and one of them throws a water bottle at her. It hits her on the back, and she squirms in disgust. The guard closest to Mai Alfred immediately picks up the bottle and throws it back towards the protesters.

“Leave the Kupona alone!” a protester screams as Mai Alfred is ushered into the headquarters.

“You cold-hearted bitch!”

“Down with Hunhu Foundation!”

“What goes around comes around!”

The doors close behind them and the screams fade into muffled whispers. Mai Alfred is thankful for the silence. She takes off her blazer, hands it to one of the guards, and instructs him to discard it. She follows the guards into the glass elevators after adjusting her blouse. As the elevator goes up, she stares down at the protesters. From where she stands, they resemble tiny black ants swarming in clusters. She imagines herself a giant, her palm squashing them back into the earth.

When they reach the auditorium, Mai Alfred smells the Kupona before she sees them. They all sit together. While everyone in the auditorium is wearing expensive suits and polished shoes, the Kupona are wearing their traditional attire. Some have no shoes on. Mai Alfred wrinkles her nose as she makes her way to her podium. Her PR team rushes towards her, tapes a small microphone on her blouse and touches up her makeup. She scratches her shoulder. These damn mosquitoes. When her team attempts to touch up her red lipstick, Mai Alfred pulls back and tells them she will fix it herself. When she is done, she looks around the auditorium. It is filled with reporters, members of the World Heritage Sites, and various environmental diplomats. She reminds herself to smile, lest another article about her comes out.

The lights brighten and the chatter fades. When the spotlight shines on Mai Alfred, she begins.

“Good morning. I am Elizabeth Mhari, senior vice president of Hunhu Foundation. I will not take up much of your time. You are all aware of the challenges we’re facing in building our hotels. The Kupona have made it difficult to do our jobs. They have set up camp on our construction site,” Mai Alfred speaks into the microphones. She makes sure her voice is calm and steady, just as her PR team instructed. “We’re currently four weeks behind schedule and the livelihood of my team is being compromised. We kindly ask the Kupona to cooperate as they are holding up construction.”

The spotlight shifts to Chieftess Bhere, the current leader of the Kupona. She sits amongst her people in the auditorium because of her old age. Otherwise, she would be standing near Mai Alfred on stage. Chieftess Bhere stands up slowly, using her marula stick to balance her. She holds onto her stick as she places a hand over her face, massaging her sagging skin. What a frail-looking woman, Mai Alfred thinks. She almost feels sorry for her. If they open the windows, she is sure the wind will blow the old woman to another country.

“How are we being unreasonable when you are stealing land that is rightfully ours?” Chieftess Bhere responds. “You have no right to build those hotels on our lands. Your people already violated our treaty when they built that first hotel, now you want to build more?”

When the Ministry of Tourism declared Hwange’s ancestral lands as government protected lands, the Kupona were not happy, and they took the Ministry of Tourism to court. Zimbabwe’s justice system was anything but just, and their case was dismissed. According to the Natural Land Act, all land belonged to the government, and because of such, the Kupona acquiesced, agreeing to share their land as long as nothing was built there.

“The Natural Land Act states that all Zimbabwean land belongs to the government. It’s not yours and has never been. We’re well within our rights to build whatever we want there,” Mai Alfred says. “We have permits. What do you have beside your word?”

Chieftess Bhere does not reply right away; instead, she lets the silence simmer. The only sounds coming from the room are the camera shutters, the shuffling of papers, and the pens fiercely scratching against notepads. Another itch creeps up her thigh and Mai Alfred rubs them together. Chieftess Bhere finally speaks.

“Hwange has been our home since before the British came. We know nowhere else, Hunhu Foundation. If you build these hotels, you’re killing my people.” Chieftess Bhere’s voice cracks. “Please, our land is not for sale.”

“We at Hunhu Foundation hear you and see you. We promise you will be taken care of when you move to the city. We do not want anyone to suffer.” Mai Alfred gestures to someone on her team and a screen rolls down behind her. She steps aside and points the remote towards the screen. She presses a button.

“We have promised you better access to health care if you move.” Mai Alfred changes the slide. “We have guaranteed your people food and shelter.” Another slide change. “And we have promised free education to all. All of your needs will be met. We just need you to cooperate. The quicker we get these hotels running, the faster we can deliver on our promises.”

“Your promises?” Chieftess Bhere scoffs. “Madam Mhari, what kindness is it for a hyena to watch over a dead person?” When Mai Alfred does not reply, the chieftess continues. “Have you ever felt the silence left behind when your safe space is ripped from you? Do you know what it means to lose your home?”

Mai Alfred glances at her empty ring finger. She clutches her hand. When she looks back up, Chieftess Bhere’s eyes bore into hers and for a split second, everything in the room fades and they are surrounded by darkness. It is just the two women floating across from one another in an abyss. Mai Alfred looks around, trying to figure out where everyone went. She looks to the sides, and it feels like the darkness is slowly shrinking in on her. Mai Alfred’s throat starts closing up.

“Well, do you?” Chieftess Bhere’s voice echoes above her. “Do you know the ache of losing the only place that held you gently?”

When Mai Alfred glances up, Chieftess Bhere has quadrupled in size. She gasps. Chieftess Bhere’s frame fills the space, and Mai Alfred can literally feel the weight of the old woman’s gaze. Mai Alfred opens her mouth to scream but nothing comes out. Her hands grab at her throat.

“I’ll show you, then.” Chieftess Bhere squishes Mai Alfred between her palms.

Mai Alfred jumps at the podium and the sudden movement creates feedback in the microphones. Her eyes dart to Chieftess Bhere, who is looking down at her. Mai Alfred’s heart is racing beneath her blouse, and the lights and camera flashes feel hot against her skin. She clears her throat and regains her composure when she remembers people are waiting for an answer.

“No further comments from Hunhu Foundation.” Mai Alfred smiles at the cameras and thanks everyone for their time before exiting the auditorium.

Mai Alfred dabs a wet paper towel against the nape of her neck in the headquarters’ bathroom. When the towel disintegrates in her hand, she wets another one. When it disintegrates again, she runs her hands under the faucet and splashes water on her neck. Her body is burning from the intensity of all those lights. Mai Alfred is glad the conference is over and that she will be on a plane back home tomorrow afternoon. The conference might not have gone the way she wanted, but she will think of another way to make the Kupona cooperate on her flight back.

When Mai Alfred steps back into the hallway, she is surprised to see Chieftess Bhere standing across from the bathrooms with her eyes closed, her back against the glass windows. From up here, it looks like they’re in the sky, cocooned by the clouds. The chieftess looks so much like a beggar in her tattered zambiya. One would not think she is a leader. The old woman coughs violently into her ragged cloth and Mai Alfred makes a face when she hears the phlegm in her throat. She remembers the weird daydream she had back in the auditorium and shudders. Without sparing the old woman another glance, she walks past her, but to Mai Alfred’s dismay, the chieftess blocks Mai Alfred’s path. She wrinkles her nose when Chieftess Bhere gets close enough. The woman is in dire need of a shower. Being this close to her makes Mai Alfred’s skin itch and she resists the urge to scratch her body.

“Elizabeth Mhari. senior vice president of Hunhu Foundation. CEO of Hotel Tourism.” Chieftess Bere chuckles as she recites Mai Alfred’s titles.

“If you are just going to laugh, get out of my way.”

“Do you even know what hunhu means?”

“We always give back. Like I mentioned, we’re willing to meet all your needs.”

“My people grew up in Hwange, Elizabeth. The people before us grew up in Hwange. The trees there know our names, our secrets, our dreams. Our spirits are in Hwange. Moving us will kill us.”

Mai Alfred shudders, not liking how her name sounds coming from the chieftess. “Are you people always this dramatic? No one is dying.”

“There are many ways to die, Elizabeth. Death is not always physical, you know. It can be spiritual too.” She cocks her head to the side.

“You are acting as if we’re throwing you in the gutter. We’re offering you modern solutions. You’ll still have your spirits, plus better benefits,” Mai Alfred says. “There are many companies that want to build hotels in Hwange. Unlike us, they will leave you naked in the streets.”

“So, we should be grateful?”

Mai Alfred’s arm itches and she scratches until skin breaks; warm, sticky fluid oozes beneath her fingernails. When she looks down, a cluster of dark, angry bumps stare back at her; swollen, raw, and pulsing. Mosquito bites have never looked like this on her. Mai Alfred hides her arm. “I have a flight to catch,” she says, but the chieftess blocks her path once more.

“Did you know that a single ant can drive an elephant to suicide?” she asks. “I’ve seen it. Just one ant. All it needs to do is enter the elephant’s trunk; the elephant will lose its mind and hit its head against the ground. It will do that until it dies.”

“That’s a cute ngano, but it has nothing to do with anything.” Mai Alfred takes a step towards Chieftess Bhere. Her patience wearing thin. Mai Alfred’s Tom Ford heels flush against the old woman’s stained bare feet. “Go home, Gogo. Go home and tell your people to pack and leave. You have held our progress long enough. You have scared my workers away. If my new workers have to bury your people in cement, then so be it. You can be part of the hotels’ foundations.”

The first thing Mai Alfred sees when she enters her suite is the hyena’s head on her bed. She starts slowly towards it and then begins to feel foolish. The head is not alive, it is just a fake hyena’s head, she tells herself. But when she lifts it, the fur feels as real as the hairs on her boar coats. She traces her fingers around the perimeter of the face. When her hand passes over the snout, she feels hot air flare out of its nostrils. She drops the head on the floor.

“Eh, Madam Mhari, I didn’t realize you were here.” A voice comes from behind her. Mai Alfred screams and runs to the other side of the room. When she turns, it is just the custodian cleaning the bathroom. The custodian quickly takes off her wired earphones and tucks them in her apron. “I’m so sorry, Madam. I was told to come clean the room and to take out the head. I’m so sorry.”

“Get out.” Mai Alfred growls. “Get out of my sight.” The custodian does not move, staring at Mai Alfred.

“Did you not hear me? I said get out!” she growls, breath hot with fury.

“You are, um, you have something … you are drooling, Madam Mhari,” the custodian stammers, pointing towards her own mouth. “I left clean towels for you in your bathroom.” The custodian does not say anything else and quickly hurries out, pulling her cleaning cart with her.

Confused, Mai Alfred reaches up and touches the corner of her mouth. Her fingers come away wet. Saliva, thick and slick, clings to her skin, trailing in a warm string as she pulls her hand back. Repulsed, she wipes her hand clean against the duvet. She sits on the edge of the bed and slows her heartbeat. The hyena’s head lies by Mai Alfred’s feet, and she scrunches her nose. No wonder Alfred is afraid of these creatures. They are ugly.

The flight to Harare from Joburg is delayed three times. By the time Mai Alfred gets home, it is past midnight, and she is ravenous. She leaves her bags by the stairs and hurries into the kitchen. The motion lights sense her walking around and they flicker on. She grabs a packet of biltong from the pantry and rips it open with her teeth. Her shoulders sag upon the first bite and she leans against the counter, savoring the salty flavor.

Mai Alfred’s neck itches with a maddening persistence, and she claws at it, digging at it until she feels warm liquid on her fingertips. When she pulls her hand back, her nails are longer than she remembered, sharp and filthy, glistening with smears of blood. She has scratched deep enough to break skin. Mai Alfred wipes the blood on her blouse before grabbing chicken pasta from the fridge. She suspects her hotel bedding gave her bed bugs. Tomorrow, she will have to call and file a complaint. Then, she will book an appointment with her dermatologist. Hopefully, she can prescribe a topical cream strong enough to clear the ugly bumps spreading like bushfire across her arms. While she waits for her food to reheat, she tells Alfred she finally made it home.

Mai Alfred yanks open the microwave before the beeper goes off, her mouth watering at the smell of sizzling chicken. She devours the food in greedy bites and, to her surprise, finds herself licking the plate clean. Mai Alfred has never eaten a meal so quickly, and she is still hungry. She makes three turkey sandwiches, eats them just as fast, then tears open a bag of Simba chips. Mai Alfred finishes her bag of chips in record time, and it satiates her hunger. Exhausted from the long travel day, she drags her feet up the stairs and into her en suite. A part of her is tempted to step in the shower in her clothes. She settles for just washing her face instead.

There is a dark brown spot on Mai Alfred’s nose. She leans into the mirror and examines it. It sits on her nose as if it is paying rent to live there. She rubs it with her finger, but it does not move. She rubs harder and it is still there.

“What the—” She sucks in her teeth. She grabs some makeup wipes and removes her makeup. After cleansing her face, the spot is still there. She rubs it one more time and nothing. “This is tomorrow’s problem,” she mutters before washing the rest of her face. She digs out a tube of anti-itch cream, rubbing it over her arms and neck before getting ready for bed. Her body relaxes into her mattress and shortly after, her eyes droop before darkness engulfs her. She dreams of nothing.

Mai Alfred’s body is burning when she wakes up. She kicks the covers off her in frustration. Her back is wet, and her sleeping dress sticks to her skin. Her stomach growls in protest and she groans. When she glances at her clock, she jumps out of bed. It is eleven in the evening. She has been asleep the whole day.

“What the hell?” she says, but instead of words, a cackle escapes, sharp and splintering like shattering glass. Mai Alfred covers her mouth, stunned to feel fur brush against her lips. She pulls her hands back and yelps when she sees fur covering them. Her nails are long and dirty. She looks down and fur covers her legs as well. Mai Alfred runs into her bathroom, and she screams again when she sees her reflection. Fur covers every inch of her body, and the spot she had seen last night has multiplied. Her eyes widen when Chieftess Bhere appears beside her reflection. Mai Alfred quickly turns behind to face her but there is no one there. She turns back to her reflection, and it is just her in the mirror. That is when she notices the wooden carving of the hyena by her basin. Her heart drops at the sight because she tossed that back in Joburg.

No, no, no.

Tinashe’s words echo in her mind.

You’re playing with fire here. You remember what happened the first time Hunhu Foundation tried to build that first hotel.

Mai Alfred jerks backwards and her spine breaks. She howls in pain and falls to the ground, writhing on the bathroom floor in a fetal position. Every part of her is on fire. She opens her mouth to scream but the pain in her gums almost knocks her out. Her mouth stretches until she feels her lips split. Mai Alfred is not sure how much time passes because somewhere between her bones breaking and her teeth changing, she blacks out.

When she wakes, it is bright outside. The pain is gone, but the hunger has returned with a vengeance. As she sits up, her reflection stares back at her: round ears, a dark snout, dirty brown fur with spots.

What the fuck.

Mai Alfred looks around the room and panic sets in when she realizes what has happened. Her ears perk up when she hears the door unlock from downstairs. She smells him before he calls out for her. Mai Alfred’s heart stops.

Alfred.

“Mum, I’m home!” he calls out. He is not supposed to be home for another few days.

Mai Alfred’s tongue hangs out of her mouth, her saliva dripping onto the tiles. Her stomach growls. She fights against her frame, digging her paws into the tiles. The walls in her mind cave in on her, creating a barrier between her mind and body.

“Ma, you home?” Alfred’s voice gets closer.

No, she screams. Go away, Alfred.

Chieftess Bhere’s frail figure flashes into the darkness of Mai Alfred’s mind, just as it did at the conference. It is just the two of them again, floating in the darkness.

“Do you know what it means to lose your home?” Chieftess Bhere repeats. Mai Alfred whimpers. “I’ll show you.”

“Please,” Mai Alfred begs but no words come out once again, only jagged cackles. Chieftess Bhere stares at her with a deadpan expression. Mai Alfred attempts to float towards her, but the closer she gets, the farther away Chieftess Bhere moves.

Please, don’t do this, Mai Alfred says in her mind. Please.

Chieftess Bhere shakes her head pityingly at Mai Alfred before she disappears.

“Mum—”

Mai Alfred watches her son freeze when he sees her. His eyes widen and he drops his phone. She cries in her mind, pleading with Chieftess Bhere for forgiveness, she promises to leave them alone. But instead of hearing the old woman’s acceptance, she hears laughter and snorts bouncing off the walls of her mind.

Elizabeth’s beady onyx eyes stare into Alfred’s, her slobbering tongue dangling out of her mouth. Her snout flares and her teeth bare as her jaw opens and curls into a smile. A single tear rolls down Elizabeth’s fur. She does not hear Alfred scream when she lunges.

…Jagged rock walls and a maze full of caves,

Fast moving rapids pushing down slaves.

Deep in the mines, you digging for gold,

But deep in the mines, you only find coal.

His veins pulse with lead, burning sensation replaced with a numbness that only a determined mind conjures. Palm sweat threatens to break his grip on the wooden handle, but still, he holds. He can feel it give–or maybe he only imagines–wood splintering beneath the force of his grip. Not building. Destroying.

Hours go by, hours gone by; time is just a memory. What does he hope to find? It’s not a question he thinks about. His body only swings. His weight converges with the heaviness of the pickaxe like two rushing rivers flowing into one. With the full force of what his leaden arms can bear, he throws. He throws with his life.

It cracks.

He feels before he can hear or see–a slight adjustment where the tool landed, a slip, a break. Fallen crumbs coat his hands, his lips, and what remains of his shoes. They fall with inevitability, breaking free.

This is what he hoped for, he thinks.

This is what he bleeds for, he prays.

Not success or acclaim or even a seed of satisfaction that the weight of his dead arms can rest. It’s something else, written in the code of his DNA. A thing he has no word for.

One swing of finality–weighted iron jams into the rocky crevice, shattering blackened earth into crumbs. The sound of broken reality pounds against his skull. Mountain breaks into dust. The ground reverberates with a new air, with a change unleashed.

He laughs–an empty laugh. Dry from dust inhalation, from lungs turned black. His chest bursts with the pressure of his heart, with the pressure of his last, with the pressure of exploding rock.

This is what he hoped for–

bled for–

died for.

This is what he wanted.

Another man in black is slack on the tracks,

Another one dead, another one cracks.

Burned to his grave, to ash, to the wind,

to the soul that he knows, to hold, to pollen.

Obee Carter. The man who ends the world, and the man who saves it. He wears the name on his uniform, though no one reads it. There’s a badge on his uniform, at the place that once held his heart. Like a rib bone rolled, flattened into metal. A shield for the hole in his chest, polished into mirrored glass. Reflecting empty eyes, they stare.

But only when they have to.

He finds a thread of nylon peeking from the cruiser’s worn seat. With it, he flosses a piece of his lunch crammed into his gaps. It isn’t until he sits back–his tongue digging into molars in search of shrimp residue–when he realizes they are waving him over, a summon.

His eyes roll, he sucks his teeth, age-old habits they failed to break. But he opens the door anyway, obeying, his body doing as it was reprogrammed to do.

“Obee,” Richard, his partner, says. “We have a witness here with some details that I can’t wrap my head two ways about.”

Obee looks at her. She’s a middle-aged mom with tote bags, and a young brat sits at the ledge of the SUV’s trunk, glued to a phone screen. Obee can tell that he’s being watched, even though her gaze is down, avoidant. Nerves? Fear? Guilt? He stops guessing, decides he doesn’t care, asks her what she saw, and records her response.

“They don’t like the rain clouds,” she says. “It’s humid, you know? Makes them sticky or something. I think. But that’s not what they say on the news. On the news, they’re damp. It keeps them solid.”

“What did you see, ma’am? What were they doing?”

Her eyes are blank, focused like lasers, staring at the pavement. Zombie-like.

“The lights blinked. Only for a second, though. But they were off in the bathroom, still, when I took him in.”

“Took who?”

“My son,” she gestured toward him. “Brave. He had some–”

“Your son’s name is Brave?”

“Yes, that’s his name. And the water–”

“Why’d you pick Brave?”

“Excuse me?”

“The name. Why’d you pick it?”

“What does his name have to do with anything?”

“Names have a lot to do with everything.”

She glances at his name tag, frowns, parts her lips to speak, then shuts them again. Then she looks past him, at his partner probably, still frowning. Then back at him. “You’re supposed to be helping me. Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“It came out the toilet. Is that it?”

She falters. “How did you know that?”

“It’s what sewer rats do!” He laughs, heartily from his gut–her face flusters, bright red against her pale skin–and it only makes him laugh more.

“Obee.” Richard puts a hand on his shoulder, calming him. “I’m sorry about that, ma’am. There are still a few. . . glitches.”

She nods. “I understand. He’s right, though. It was in the toilet. That’s where it came from. They’re supposed to be dry, I thought. Just a little bit. A little damp, a little dry. Like beach sand. That’s what they’re made of, right? The–” She freezes, self-censoring, just as they do.

“The black sand,” Obee finishes. “They’re made of black sand. Soil. Dirt. Earth. Shit. All the same damn thing.”

“The sand trolls,” Richard says, his voice strong with assertion. “They’re harmless … mostly. You have nothing to worry about, ma’am. We’re on it.”

Obee laughs, loudly, his white canines visible in his open mouth, stark against his black skin. We, Richard said, even though he knows they’ll go their separate ways. Funny guy.

Stretching the muscles of his shoulder, Obee heads down the parking lot, toward the supermarket. He expects Richard to say something, but he doesn’t, and Obee appreciates that–it feels good. Reminds him that he’s human. And for once, he doesn’t notice the leash trailing behind him, as it always does, with just enough slack. To make him believe.

He notices the water first, a half-inch pooling on the tiled floor, reflecting the little light that emits from the freezers. It’s quiet, not even the sound of pouring water, but he knows they’re here. Hiding in the dark.

“My arm is just fine,” he says. “It’s the only thing left of me. Was anyway.”

Water splashes beneath his boots as he passes the aisles, glancing down each one as he searches. Fresh produce is scattered across the floor, and the check-out aisle snacks are completely obliterated.

“You could’ve saved my arm! I told you that I’m left-handed.”

Obee stops when he reaches the soda aisle–the thick smell of syrupy soft drinks heavy in the air. He smirks, reminded vaguely of his older brother, who always made the Kool-Aid too damn sweet.

“YOU CAN’T FIX WHAT’S NOT BROKEN!”

Saliva sprays from his lips when he shouts, then there’s clamor on the other side of the aisle. It’s followed by splashing water and the scratchy pitter of clawed feet. He whips around on the sound of shattering glass, just as the freezer lights go out.

He sees it for only a second, its spindly bipedal form standing hardly two feet from the ground. He notes the mush of its newly developed skin, molded from clay. A little damp, a little dry. It’s finding its way. Forming itself to the right consistency. They are smart creatures. But they’re stupid too. He hears one of them climbing to the top of a shelving unit in the dark, escaping the very water they flooded the store with.

He senses them around him, getting loud, now in the comfort of damp darkness, bold. They make jittering noises, something like hyenas, and when they get excited enough, they whoop, like coyote howls–as they do now.

“You broke the rules, stupid. Never feed ‘em after dark.”

A glass bottle hits Obee in the head, then bursts as it smashes to the floor. Another one is thrown, but misses, crashing into the freezer behind him. The sticky smell of soda grows stronger. And he’s sick of it now. Sick of the darkness and the water and the memories of too-sweet Kool-Aid that coats his tongue. He grabs a flashlight from his utility belt and shines it on the top shelf, directly at the sand troll.

It scurries, knocking down a stock of two-liters, then leaps across to the next shelving unit. It nearly topples the first unit when it jumps, then it dives to the floor, disappearing beyond the aisles.

A chemical releases throughout Obee’s body to mask the pain, then it rejuvenates him. He stretches, feeling the metal plates shift in his torso and the braided wires that contract like tendons. He appreciates the new body they gave him–even if it means they own him–though it’s unfortunate that his senses are still human. He could use some night vision right about now. The tech simply wasn’t there yet. Nothing like the chrome exoskeleton he dreamt of. And anyway, they didn’t seem to care how it turned out. They only wanted him for his body.

Obee follows the trail of silty sand the troll leaves in its wake, eyeing the others around him. There’s more of them here than there should be, too far from where they originated. Like they’re migrating. Or multiplying even. Seeking revenge. A part of him wants to let it play out, to see what happens, willing to take the brunt of the city’s wrath for it. It is, after all, in his hands.

He grabs his tranq gun, mounts a flashlight, and stays guarded, walking further down the aisles. The trolls jitter as he walks by, ducking from the flashlight’s beam. They’ve settled down, just a little, following him in the shadows with something between curiosity and mockery. He aims at one hiding at the corner of an endcap, then pulls the trigger.

Its clawed hand goes to its chest reflexively, then its eyes grow heavy. It reaches out, tries to catch its balance, but falls anyway, into the water.

Obee picks up the troll, sets its mushy body on a shelf, saving it.

The other trolls seem to sense the power Obee holds in his hand, and they skitter further away. They maintain a safe distance, still following him, just out of range of his flashlight. Then he begins to smell the rot they leave behind, confirming his suspicion of their travels through the sewage. It’s pungent, yet the water remains oddly clear, even as he watches it spill beneath the bathroom doors. A sideways trash can is jammed in the opening of the restroom, soggy tissue floating across the floor. He steps over the mess, keeps his gun pointed as he enters, alert. Then he sees a troll, sitting on the edge of the counter sink, hardly noting his presence.

It glances at him with red beady eyes, squints from the flashlight, then returns its attention to the flooded sink. It’s scrubbing something with vigor, its motions akin to using an old-school washboard. The faucet trickles steadily as silty water rains to the floor.

Obee leans forward, keeps his gun pointed, finds that the troll is scrubbing its hands. Scraping them, and the water has turned darkly opaque.

Quickly, Obee peeks into the empty stalls–toilets overfilled with clear water–then turns back to the sink, his mirrored reflection invisible from the flashlight’s beam. Above his head, scribbled on the glass, are words written in what looks to be mud:

YOU CAN’T FIX WHAT’S NOT BROKEN!

He turns away from the message, wonders how the troll maintains its solid form inside the water, and how they traveled through the sewers in the first place. Its hands are waterlogged, and they should disperse, yet the shape of its claws are pronounced clearly.  Like squishy lizard skin. Solid and fleshy at the same time.

Obee sighs, raising his tranq gun. He aims, shoots the troll squarely in the chest, then reaches out before it falls into the pooling sink. He sets it on the wet counter, its black sand trailing the floor.

As he returns to his armed grip, Obee grows oddly aware of his own hands, staring at the artificial smoothness reflecting in the dim light. They had given him a synthetic outer layer to imitate his natural blackness, but it was biomimicry that lacked function of any kind. Little more than a cruel joke.

Behind him, at least a dozen trolls are sitting on the overturned trash can, either too curious or too stupid to have run away. The one at the sink must’ve been the smart one. Not quite a leader, since they didn’t appear to have hierarchy in that way, only smart enough to make decisions while the others followed.

Obee shakes out the stiffness in his limbs, and another surge of chemicals rushes through his body. With the smart one down, he can zip through the supermarket with ease, then round them up into his net. He won’t even need to turn the lights back on–their boldness completely diminished. He quickly takes out four of them before they scatter from the bathroom.

The rest of them crawl across the floor with haste, despite the water, but they’re clumsy, knocking down the items they rush by, marking their positions in the dark. Thanks to the pistons in his mechanical feet, Obee runs through the aisles with ease, an agility that rivals the small trolls.

In under ten minutes, he knocks them out. Twenty-seven of them. Far too many for this side of the city. He calls in Richard from his walkie, and together, they get the lights on and await the clean-up crew.

This is the way it ends. This is the way that we know.

This is what your friend says when he say that it’s for show.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Not with a song but a whisper.

We’re drying our tears, we’re wiping our fears,

‘cause it’s in the DNA that we know.

The first thing Obee realizes when he stares into the burned-out car–shards of amber glass littering the seat and floor–is that they learned how to craft a Molotov. He’s in an abandoned parking garage that’s half-collapsed, half “under construction” as it’s been for two years, and there’s plenty of litter around to whip something up. The trolls can do some pretty damage to plumbing systems and localized electric grids. But a Molotov? That’s next level.

Obee wipes the soot from his gloved hands, steps back from the car, then glances at Richard, who sits in a folding chair placed in a clean-ish parking spot, filling out paperwork on his laptop. Obee is so used to rounding up the trolls on his own that Richard’s presence takes up too much space. It feels suffocating. Like dead weight. And he reeks of cold bureaucracy.

Obee puts his headphones back on, pretending the ball-and-chain of his partner isn’t here. He pulls out his cellphone to snap some photos–the broken glass, the burn marks splattered up the door panel, all the evidence of the Molotov. There’s an odd sense of glee he feels for the trolls’ intelligence, made even stronger as the city scrambles around to protect their image.

While Obee and Richard were on a separate call late last night, the trolls had swarmed the streets of the financial district, and the city responded with the full capacity of its police budget. It pissed off a lot of people, though, and by the time Obee arrived, the SWAT vans had already been replaced with animal control, live rounds were exchanged for tranquilizers, and the press snuck their way onto Chandler Ave., documenting the clean-up. The chief had personally invited some of the press and “troll experts.” One of them was standing right here in the garage.

Obee watches the journalist/troll expert snap photos of a cement pillar, the camera flashing throughout the lot. Contrary to most stuffy academic types Obee’s seen before, the guy wears a dashiki suit and short locs, and Obee swears he recognizes him from somewhere. A few TV appearances, sure, but somewhere beyond that.

Obee gives up guessing, intent on ignoring the guy right alongside Richard. But then the journalist pulls away from his camera, and he’s grinning widely at the pillar.

Weirdo.

His curiosity getting the better of him, Obee walks up to the cement pillar, and he smells the same pungent odor from the grocery store bathroom. It was diluted then, in that open, mostly clean space, but it’s all too familiar now, as he stares at the black gook smeared across the wall.

“Wild animals …” Obee mumbles to himself, but the guy hears all the same.

“It means they’re alive!” He’s smiling, his voice tinged with admiration for the creatures. “That’s a beautiful thing.”

“You realize what you’re looking at, don’t you?”

“It’s a mural. Made with the most natural shit on earth.”

Obee scoffs. “Ha ha. Looks like you got a sense of humor.”

“Yeah, you could use some.”

Obee shrugs it off, turning away from the “troll expert” and the shit-stained wall, placing his headphones back on and returning to his music.

Grind ‘em all up. Dump ‘em in the machine.

Rip their soul from their chest till they all come clean.

There’s a row of collapsed tents in a corner with messy belongings, from the old homeless encampment before the trolls evicted them. Black sand coats the bags and ground, sits in the little pockets of the fallen tents, and there’s .223 rifle casings and shotgun shells sprinkled throughout. Clothing is mixed in with blankets and sleeping bags, forming a pile, but it looks purposeful, with an indent in the middle, similar to an animal’s nest.

The trolls are known for making a mess of restaurants and grocery stores, turning them into the damp darkness of their preferred environment. But if they’re nesting now, even sleeping near each other, that means they’re adapting, and much faster than Obee anticipated. They’re becoming more sociable. Encroaching. Claiming the urban, human-infested environment as their own.

With a gloved hand, Obee lifts a bullet hole-ridden tarp from the ground, noting the large pile of sand hiding beneath it. Spent casings are buried in the sand, and Obee can’t help but wonder if the troll was killed in its sleep.

He shakes his head, thinking how this city has hell to pay. And he doesn’t plan to do a damn thing to stop it.

“Grind ‘em all up. Dump ‘em in the machine. Rip their soul from their chest till they all come clean.”

He sings aloud, drowning out the noise of rush hour on the other side of the concrete walls, follows a sand trail into a corner where old furniture sits.

“Then take a lil wax and give ‘em a shine. You gonna call yours and I’m gonna call mine.”

The furniture is all overturned and broken up–coffee table, wooden bed frames, a small bookshelf flat on its back. It’s the bookshelf that catches his eye, filled with shiny found objects like coins, aluminum take-out trays, corroded batteries, and lots and lots of writing pens. There’s books and papers on the floor too, all of them open and scribbled on, and he wonders if that journalist has a point about the shit mural.

“Let him speak his mind. He’s got a story to tell. But don’t let him get too angry. Don’t wanna hear him yell.”

Yesterday’s troll in the bathroom is still fresh in his mind, no matter how hard he tries to forget. Their language capacity is shocking in its own right; they’re ever-evolving. But it’s their ability to internalize that rubs him the wrong way. Like when a kid learns to say fuck you for the first time and mean it. Or when a troll tries to scrub away its own skin. Things that simply shouldn’t happen.

“Don’t call him black. Call him P.O.C. Then watch how he act for that–”

The camera flashes on his left. The journalist is right beside him. Obee snickers, takes off his headphones, finding that it’s probably best he didn’t finish the lyric.

The guy bends down and squats on his knees. “They like to hoard …” he says, and he picks up a metal toy car, twirling it between his fingers.

“They’re like children,” Obee replies. “Little bug-eyed toddlers.”

“Gremlins.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Obee nods in agreement. “Though I’m really starting to hate this black sand.” He tries to kick it off his boot, but a thin layer sticks anyway. “It’s coarse and irritating, and it gets everywhere.”

“Don’t you mean sand of color?”

The journalist is looking him up and down, his face twisted in faux disgust. Then Obee laughs hard, clutching his gut. “Nah, hombre. Es negro. Como nosotros.”

“Damn right.”

They laugh loudly, then give dap, just as Obee remembers where he knew the guy from. They grew up on the North Side, back when the guy was known as Dee instead of Demetrius. He was a scrawny kid stuck in hand-me-downs from his older brother. A nerdy type who mostly kept to himself. Seeing him here makes sense after all.

“So, Dee. You with the press now or what?”

“Haven’t heard that name in a long time,” he says, smiling. “I’m an assistant professor now. A. A. history. Wrote a few books that did pretty well. But I’m here on volunteer services. Photojournalism.”

“It’s cool. I saw you on TV before, but that don’t sound like a troll expert to me.”

“Yeah, that’s what the city’s been calling it,” he says, shaking his head. “But it’s all optics. You know how it is.”

Obee scoffs, glances at his tether across the lot, at Richard’s face lit up by his laptop. “Yeah, who you telling?”

Then he looks back at Dee, gazing at the camera hanging around his neck. “I saw you on Chandler this morning. You got some pictures?”

“Yeah. Got some good ones too.”

Obee leans in as Dee thumbs through the memory of his digital camera, browsing the images of the city streets, broken windows, and trails of black sand.

“That’s a good one,” Obee says, pointing out a photo of a street cleaner rolling down Chandler Ave., blowing black dust into the storm drains. “The rain’s gonna wash it all away soon. Gonna look like it never happened.”

“Try as they might, they can’t erase history.”

Obee grunts in agreement. Then they reach the end of the gallery.

“That’s it, brother.” Dee pulls away, though still admiring his work.

“No pictures from the fight last night? The protest on Main?”

“Nah. I wasn’t here, man.” Dee shifts his weight uneasily, keeping his eyes focused on the camera. “Were you?”

“I was fifteen miles away in suburbia with my partner.” Obee says it dramatically, smirking, meaning it as a joke. But Dee only nods stiffly with his lips tight, placing the cap on his camera lens.

“It’s a shame it went down like that,” Obee continues, kicking his boot again in a failed attempt to remove the dust. “All that firepower to end up doing what they shoulda done from the beginning.”

“What, you talking about animal control?”

“Yeah, whoever. P.D.’s been capturing them for weeks now. I dunno why they send in SWAT to flex on ‘em when bullets don’t do a damn thing. You see that right there?” He points to a metal cap of a drain, marked with tracks of dried water and trailing black dust. “That’s your tax dollars. Next time it rains, all this is gone. Trolls go swimming. Come out the other end as something else. Something smarter.”

“What? How do you know all that?”

“How do you think I know?”

“You seen it happen?”

“Instincts. But I’mma let you do the math, college boy. I’ll wait.”

Dee gets quiet, stroking his scraggly goatee in thought.

“You should get outta here,” Obee says. “They’ll be wiping this place clean soon enough.”

“A’ight.” Dee heads back to the pillar where he left his backpack, while Obee returns to the burned-out car where he entered the garage. He pulls two waters from his own pack, tosses one to Richard, then drinks from his own.

“Thanks, man,” Richard says earnestly.

“Mhm.”

“You know that guy?”

“Yeah. Back in North Side. Grew up with him.”

Richard nods. “That’s where the sand trolls came from. Does he know anything about them?”

Obee shrugs, not caring to elaborate. He gulps heartily from his bottle, swishes some water in his mouth, then spits it to the ground. The dusty concrete dampens with water droplets; condensation from the cold bottle wets his palms. An idea starts to form in his mind, but it’s small. Maybe even petty. But it’s something that, for once, will let him get even. It’s something that he wants.

“We’re finished here,” he says to Richard. “Trolls are long gone. I’m gonna do some cleanup.”

“Alright, then. I’ll be outside.”

Obee grabs his pack and turns away, quickly getting to work. He heads to the tents by the back wall and pulls out a tarp with the fewest holes, laying it on the ground. With cupped hands, he scoops into a nest of sand, dumps it onto the tarp, working his way through each nest–bullet casings and all. He shakes out the clothing and sleeping bags, uses a ripped book cover to sweep up the remnants, gathering as much sand as he can, and the tarp’s pile grows larger and larger.

He stands up when the pile threatens to spill off the tarp, folds the tarp’s edges to keep it all still, just as Dee comes over.

“What are you–”

“Yo, help me with this.”

Obee grabs two corners of the tarp, clenching them with tight fists. Dee mirrors him, grabbing the other two, and they hold it up from the ground, carrying it to the drain, then set it down slowly. Obee crouches on his knees, begins pushing the pile all at once, watching the indentation as it tunnels down the drain.

“Woah, woah. Wait. What are you doing?”

Obee keeps pushing the sand, flicking away the spent casings that occasionally block the drain, then he grins at Dee. “I’m liberating.”

He dusts off his palms as he stands up, looks around the space of the parking garage.

“They need water,” he says, and he grabs his bottle from his pack, twists off the cap, starts to hold it over the drain.

“Wait, hold up!” Dee jogs over to his own backpack sitting by the pillar, returns and sets it down, kneeling beside it. He pulls out a couple of jars from his bag, then sets them on the ground.

Obee stares incredulously, eyes squinting. He knows he shouldn’t be surprised–Dee is a college professor after all. But something feels off about it. Feels wrong.

“What are you gonna do with that?”

“I don’t know yet.” Dee cups his hands together and scoops up sand, gazing at the dark powder that glimmers in the light. He pours it into a jar, slowly, and it’s mesmerizing. An hourglass of black sand.

“If you looking for the minerals,” Obee says with a staunch voice, “then you on the wrong side of town. There’s barely any of it in their bodies.”

“Do I look like a greedy-ass capitalist to you?”

Obee bites his tongue on the first thing that comes to mind, holding back the lyrics he was listening to–then watch how he act for that white money.

He opts for a milder version.

“Money’s white, man. If you gotta dance, you dance. I get it.” And he does get it. He wears a uniform and badge after all, obeys orders like a good little pup. Except he doesn’t have a choice.

“This isn’t for money,” Dee asserts, and he fills the jar with its last scoop till it reaches the brim. Then he takes his finger, skims it across the top, closes the lid.

“What, then? Art? Science? It’s all the same shit.”

“Reclamation,” is all Dee says. He fills the second jar, closes the lid, then smiles at them with admiration.

Whatever the hell that means is lost on Obee. Sounds like the academic bullshit he clocked on Dee the moment he laid eyes on him. The bureaucrats, the news, the educated–they all play the same word games to convince you that they’re on your side. But when you turn around, they’re gone. They made sure they got theirs. And you? Your hands are as empty as they’ve always been. It’s the same shit, different color.

Obee glares at him, sliding the jars into his bag, then it hits him why Dee–no, Demetrius–came here in the first place. The look of admiration in his eyes, the care with which he gathers up the trolls’ remains, and why he stopped Obee from pouring the water … he only wanted them for their bodies.

When Demetrius leaves, Obee crouches on the ground, his mechanical knees pressed to the concrete, and slowly, carefully, he pushes the remaining sand down the drain.

He pours what little water he has left.

And that night, he prays for rain.

Let him wear kente. Let him wear a fro.

Let him quote Malcolm. Let him put on a show.

Put a book in his hand to make him think he know.

The next day, his name is in the newspaper. Not a headline but an author. An op-ed on how the city’s handling of the sand trolls reflects the homeless crisis. By Demetrius Coleman. There’s a black-and-white photo on the front page, larger than the images of broken windows and blown-out cars. The shot was taken from ground level, of minerals in black sand that sparkle in the sunlight, piled on a grungy sidewalk with worn-out sneakers beside it. He’ll likely go on interviews in the upcoming weeks, perhaps write a book with his name larger than the title. No better photo for the front page after that pathetic attempt to eradicate the trolls–but Obee worked late into the night yesterday, rounding up dozens of trolls in the shipyard. He isn’t in the mood for kindness.

He’s sitting in the cruiser with Richard in the driver’s seat. He’s holding an Arizona and a pack of ranch sunflower seeds. The window’s down, bringing in cool, damp air, and he spits shells onto the ground of loose dirt.

The soil here is so dark that it’s almost black. So rich that a new crop of buds sprouts every three days before it’s mowed down again. They say it’s because of the special minerals deep beneath the city, the ones Obee was mining for a lifetime ago. There’s yellow tape and security guards at the mine’s entrance. Patrol officers and protestors across the street. Some civilians still walk the city with protective gear and baseball bats, contrasting with their formal work attire as they clock in for the morning.

Even after all this, the city still refuses to close down the mine–what the protestors have been calling for since the collapse that unleashed the trolls, the same collapse that killed Obee and made him what he is. It’s the one solution they refuse to entertain, hoping to keep their pockets padded. But it doesn’t matter anymore. The little shape-shifting bastards are here to stick around. They’re staking their claim to the city–shit-stained graffiti and all. No rest for the suits who dragged them here.

“Sorry about Watkins,” Richard says, apologizing for what seems to be the hundredth time. He’s weary, just as overworked as Obee’s been all week, yet still manages to be at least a little kind. It frustrates Obee, makes it harder to ignore the guy.

“It’s all good, man. Not your fault. This is what I’m made for.” Obee pours another handful of seeds into his mouth, sucking on the ranch flavor before he cracks one open. Then he leans out of the window and shouts:

“WELCOME TO THE RAT RACE!”

Nameless faces turn at the sound of his voice. Then quickly look away. Carrying on.

“Well … if you find a good reason to retire early, I’ve got your back. You don’t need to be here.”

Obee sighs. Even when Richard’s being kind, he still doesn’t get things, doesn’t even realize he’s only here to keep Obee in line.

As long as the tech is there to do it, blood will keep pumping through Obee’s manufactured body. His heart will keep beating to the rhythm it was programmed with.

His heart …

He can hear it beating.

A gentle thump that echoes in the darkness, deep in the fleshy cavity beneath his ribcage. It feels constricted, like it’s pressed to the wall. Perhaps even dying.

But fighting back.