Fall 2023

ISSUE 16

Poetry

Letter to a 19-year-old Revolutionary

After Diane Di Prima

When I send a text message asking how
the interview went or how the resume
is coming along, you do not respond.

I try to reassure myself: This is normal
for you. You’ve been working overtime
at a job you hate. Maybe you stopped

for a beer on the way home. It’s the week-
end after all. On a good day you don’t carry
your phone. On a bad day, you ignore it.

But I worry, my favorite young anarchist.
I worry I’m colluding with the enemy,
selling out and selling you short. I ask if

you need help with repairs on the old van
you bought with cash. I ask if you’ve looked
at apartments with your brother yet. I make

excuses as I sacrifice the planet—for you,
I tell myself—as if you could outlive her.
But surely, she can take more hits than you?

I say this as if your fates were not so
intricately entwined. “There’s no such thing,”
you assure me, “as ethical consumption

in a capitalist society.” You say this to leave me
off the hook. I appreciate the pardon, but I
worry about you, working for too little pay

with scant protection. Forgive me if I wish
for you a good home, if not property, clean air
and water, your doctor bills paid, and for “America”

to finally mean something. You still keep
me up at night. No longer with a cough
or cry in the dark—no sudden light

in the hall. It’s been years since I could pause
by your door, lean into the jamb and listen
to you breathe. You took over my dreams.

I am grateful. Whatever I have
is yours. My phone is on.
Call me. Ask anything.

—David J. Bauman

The New Apartment

We had no trouble finding it.
The door was unlocked so we walked right in.

The outdoor staircase was beautiful.
We both loved the view of the Hudson River.

You would be busy with something else in the morning.
I took care of all the paperwork.

Even after I was awake for a long time, I did not stop to think
that we had decided on this apartment in a dream.

I Hesitated Before the Mystery of Your Absence

There was no warning in the mirror.

The world had halted.

Alexander’s famous horse began to dance.

My hands were full of grapes. Servants surrounded

me, carrying platters of snow from the Caucasus.

Alarm bells rang, gendarmes came running. The hour

was late. I lit a cigarette. You appeared before my eyes.

foundation

you almost choked on that wild golden

apple we found on a tree next to a field

growing out of the foundation of what

had once been a farmhouse overlooking a valley

a hundred and fifty miles from here

—Michael Cooney

Equating

Brown man stands before a river. If brown man stays
on the bank, his body would stretch 1,885 miles from
where his shadow starts. These dimensions make it so
he wants to put his skin in touch with the current.
Two distinct worlds become possible inside him: 1)
brown man either drowns, flailing and gulping down
water or struggles against the riptide until he swims.
In either world, the river’s heartbeat, a race between
light and water, whorls through his ears. In the river,
his body might speak. Might say struggle. Might say
move through the unsayable chill. In his mind, he
wants to jump. In his heart, a faith diminished. It is a
stone-like plummet before rising. Let’s say he doesn’t
make it. In the river bed, asleep, the sediment eroded
upstream is a soft grave. The body, curled. The body,
graced. In this mouth, he is not devoured. Alone
again, not just his body, but his name. There is no one
to mourn him, but plenty of water. Let’s say he
survives, finding a strong stroke. How long would it
take for the current to carry his darkness to new soil?
His darkness, the sum of the sun touching him all day.
Warmth and light. His skin, divided by these two, is a
gliding shadow under the skin of the water. This
calculation consumes. And the roar of the river is
there, too. One hundred or more decibels as close as
he is. Twenty five birds perched in an elm want to
doze in the afternoon. But they scatter. Brown man,
who is still on the bank, multiplies this twenty five by
two, a body and a shadow, and 50 seen things move
where the horizon thins. He takes that number and
extrapolates those lives now touched by their beauty:
infinite. He cannot think in these terms. His feet and
shadow equal dust.

—Eric Cruz

Grindin’

I didn't really know what my parents did until a few months ago,
the terminology of construction worker a familiar
answer I've housed beneath my tongue.
On a car ride home once though,
my dad elaborated on the giant air conditioners
in buildings they’ve helped install.
H-V-A-C mija, I remember him telling me,
defining the acronym of his job,
hanging the letters up in walls of my mind,
decoration for future greetings
I could remark upon.

My parents wake up at five in the morning
to grind everyday out.
Ironing out their neon shirts
that’ll enter the washer at the end of the day
full of soot and insulation,
and shaking out their faded jeans
before lumbering into their exhausted ancient vehicle
driving unpredictable minutes and hours to their
never guaranteed job.

They've worked all over,
At universities close and far away from home,
hot shot hospitals,
And big business buildings.
Summers, they come home with shirts stained to their ends
in sweat,
hair clinging to the back of their necks,
hands already stretching towards their shoes
to relieve their feet
Of the burning inferno of grade A safety boots.

I think a lot about city I live in, that carries
markers of my parents' work. Of the
college applications sitting on my desk,
the halls my parents walked through
to work so that I could walk them later to learn.
I think about the ghost of my parents labor
lingering in the freshness of the air that cools my body
when I step into a building.
Of the men and women with brown skin
that looks like mine
that heated up during long hours
to help me stay cool.

Gracias, I tell the air.
Que dios te bendiga, I tell the artificial wind.
When I see my parents, I hug them,
kiss their hands and rub their shoulders,
the love of my actions carrying all I cannot say.

Sooner or later I’ll be talking with a stranger,
listing my hobbies on a whim
and spilling my dreams out like water.
When they inevitably ask me what my parents do,
the term HVAC mechanic will gurgle its way out of my mouth,
existing proudly in the spaces between.

—Haile Espín

My Last Memory of Her

I’ve never known her sparse, sunflower hair to be this shiver white.
She grips the silent cigarette between French tips, cane bearing her
muted frame, shuffling toward the Cavalier buried under decayed leaves.
Crouched crescent over the steering wheel, door open, she starts the car
but doesn’t touch the clutch. Play Elton John. I load the sheer disc.
Her wisteria voice wavers along with “Benny and the Jets.”
Eyes scrunched, exhaling waning lyrics, she tamps out embers, an ode
to her diagnosis. I shoulder what’s left of her weight as we walk
the jade path to the hospice. With panting breath, my grandmother whispers,
I’ll see you soon.

—Ebani Filbert

Kindling

                    —in memory of Li Guozhong

Clouds move over the tall reeds
Silky rays pour down the foggy harbor
You had stood there, carrying a long lens—

led us birding in a Monet’s painting
You abruptly crossed the time’s gate
When the sun passes the lighthouse

your laughter still echos into the knee-
deep shore where our tripods once stood
When snowy owls return to the island where

you showed us how to find their
wonder & leave them undisturbed
I hear you whenever a bird is calling

—Xiaoly Li

Burt Reynolds

I once turned around on the Florida Turnpike
and drove all the way to Pompano Beach  

to see if I could meet and maybe get an autograph
from Burt Reynolds.

Turns out the radio commercial said something
about boat rentals.

Though I had the day off I was not interested
in spending it at sea.

—Norman Minnick

American Junior High or On Beginning to Find a Way

...one nation under God...

When I left the Church, I was in seventh grade.

I’d learned, for one, there were three popes at once;
for two, the papacy had been passed down
to lines of bastard sons; and three, about
the wars waged in His name, like the crusades,
the opposite of what His teachings were.

I started to become ridiculous,
maybe ridiculously serious, 
in a quiet way.

I had to forge my own, well, not beliefs,
but tenets, concepts I held to, would trust
enough to allow them, when in doubt,
to hold me. (I had learned some French by then,
tenir—to hold, and knew what tenets were.)
The old beliefs and faith had been exposed
as fickle friends, passed down, for the most part,
only for self-styled “Christians” to wage wars;
for Puritans to massacre and thieve;
my current country, not declaring war,
to turn into a murderer of masses
of freedom fighters throughout Indochina,
on college campuses, and on our streets.
I knew not what those tenets would become,
but knew what one could not possibly be:

So I never said the two words “under God”
aloud during the morning pledges of
allegiance. Something about separation
of state and church, but also, I would not
invoke His name to fuel a rabid fear
and rationalize the scourge of a regime.

The twelve-year-old I was, and thirteen, was
confused about a lot of things, and did
not know what to say—said nothing—but would
not use in vain the name of God, and risk
not just what may have been a blasphemy
but also what seemed at the time clearly
a blacker sacrilege—complicity.

One day Breonna saw what I was doing.
Or not doing. Not saying. Asked me. And
I told her. Three days later, she began
to do the same; we went to the same church.
Soon all the Catholics joined in, in the silence.
Then Trayvon noticed. Ditto, then, the Baptists.
Eric brought the Episcopalians. Michael,
the Congregationalists; George, the Lutherans.
By spring, the whole class stood in silence and
let Mr. Shepherd say the words himself.
All the words.
And some of us, O half I'd say, instead
of placing our right hand over our heart,
bowed our heads with our hands embraced, as in
a prayer for the country, rather than
a pledge to just an inert piece of cloth.

Now, one day Mr. Floyd the janitor
was in the hall and walked by just as we
were standing at our mixed attention. George
was his kid, and was in our class, so he
explained it all to his dad. Soon, not only
Mr. Floyd, but the whole custodial
staff stood in the hall outside our room for
our silent pledge. I noticed two or three
kneeling, even, sometimes on just one knee.
In a minute, it would be over, and we all
went about our day. For that minute, though,
we were as one, in truth and peace and hope—
and maybe a spot of integrity.
At least it felt that way, those last few months
of seventh grade. Not that it made a difference.

Nevertheless, I look back at that kid,
at all us kids, at what we have become,
what I’ve become, and can now say: the way
we were back then, the way I was, was something
else. Would that I were—we were—again.

—James B. Nicola

Somewhere the Nightjar

Here in the suburb, I miss whippoorwills
singing their cruel names all night.

Their call is glass, the canning jar
I kept at my bedside in summer,

gently tapped with a pencil
to make captured fireflies turn into stars.

Nightjars were my comfort in darkness.
Sleep does not come easily

anymore. I keep straining to hear them,
but there are miles and years between us.

Am I being too sentimental, thinking
of sitting in the yard with my sister,

twilight a blanket around us?
I remember owls and frogs and the creek

restless on its way toward something greater.
Tonight, my sister is in one city,

and I’m in another. I don’t know
what she misses. Even the Luna moth

clinging to the storm door appears wistful
as it listens to the cries of some far-off other.

Elegy for the Free World

Somewhere, someone close
to where I am right now

has taken to the streets;
has taken to a life of prostitution; taken
to poverty and penniless philosophy,
sleeping in the darkest, most unpopulated places;

taken to games of stickball and tricks of skateboard;
taken to sodium light shadows;
to running away
from a father who would raise a hand;
to having nowhere else to go
but sidewalks and gutters and alcoves and alleys;

to rioting for the right, any right,
just to say―my life has value―
I am equal to you.

Yes, somewhere
the sun has put its foot down
on a craggy shore; where someone’s ancestors escaped
the persecution of gods, vengeful gods
who can only survive on sacrifice;

where children hide in bathrooms just to stay alive;
where men and women live and die
by the gun, the goddam gun.

And somewhere else, someone begs
a miracle from the moon,
which cares for nothing and no one;
the moon that watches women being raped,
like my friend in the entry of her own apartment;

the moon that gathers refugees of war
into suffering, small tents where people dream
their unforgiving dreams; the moon
that can’t keep up with the sun;
that can’t keep a lover from dying;
that can’t find its way in the dark;
that can’t make anything better,
no matter how much you wish it could.

And here, here is where I make love
to the only person who ever seemed to understand; 

here is where I give up
praying to an unresponsive god;
here is where I march from sidewalk to street to sidewalk to street
to tell the world I am not like other men;

where I’m not like other men,
even when they carry torches,
even when they call out names
trying not to panic when the end of the world is near;
yes, here,

here is where I take you into my arms
and walk with you into the dangerous, cracked, and ruined streets.

—David B. Prather

Ball

I find a ball.
It is blue like life.
When I kick it I
Understand that
Somebody died.
I try with all
My might not to
Kick it again but
My foot is a
Volcano spewing
Ash into the
Scared air.

Sunlight

Waste words with me.
We will change dry into
Not even a little bit wet and
Everyone will understand it better.

—Dominik Slusarczyk

City Bees

I didn’t take down the scaffolding tonight.
What’s your hurry? When you dip love
into nectar, honey becomes a crust.
Beneath each kernel of control is a cob
of cost. I mistook your cut hydrangea
for a match. Once,
I approached her without clothes
but she didn’t even ask how I was.
I wouldn’t have told—
I, too, was high. On life.   
Did you set fire to the car? Nowadays,
people don’t even hang up.
Or wear pants during meetings. 
Spontaneity? We were so poor, I thought
McDonald’s was a real restaurant.
Better slow than sorry.

—Kenton K. Yee

creative nonFiction

{}NESTING

A week before she left for college, my daughter and I got matching bracelets marketed as “permanent” jewelry. We made appointments at a small, white-washed store in lower Manhattan, where a jeweler measured our wrists, unspooled delicate gold chains, and soldered them onto us. No clasps, just continuous slips of gold. On the sidewalk outside, we twisted our wrists in the sunlight. A shiny ribbon around the gift of our connection.

When my grandmother died, I inherited a box of ribbons. Ribbons she unknotted and plucked from gifts given to her. She would wrap them into tight spirals and tuck them away for reuse. I inherited her habit of saving ribbons; I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Grosgrain, satin, velvet. I curl them around four fingers to make a neat spool and leave them around my office. Coiled on my desk. Pinned to my bulletin board. Tucked like delicate nests between books.

“This doesn’t seem normal,” I tell the girl who washes my hair at the salon, imagining the amount of my hair she must have wrapped around her fingers at this very moment. She just complimented my thick hair. I told her I feel like my hair is thinning, that it’s falling out at an alarming rate.

She smiles and reassures me. “It’s totally normal.” Though her lustrous hair and her shiny, plump lips make me think that her normal and my normal are different.

I google words like perimenopause and hair loss. I read that it is normal to lose up to 100-250 strands of hair with each wash. In the shower, I try to guess what normal looks like, as I untangle hair from my rings, pull it from the folds of my skin, twist it into tidy swirls, and set the pile on the shelf next to the shampoo.

To mark the nearing end of my childbearing years, I am literally forming empty nests out of hair.

Nesting is a figurative term, assigned to pregnant women in their third trimester–not to perimenopausal women in their late forties. It alludes to the urge to prepare for the baby’s arrival. Preparing is a futile effort, but no one should tell an expectant mother that. 

To prepare a nest, birds will use whatever objects they find. Natural materials like snapped twigs, molted feathers, and grass clippings. But also ribbons, string, and human hair.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, we received all sorts of gifts intended to make motherhood easier and babyhood gentler. At my shower, I opened a box of tiny mittens meant to keep the baby from scratching her face with her own fingernails.

One of the first lessons of parenthood: you will worry about things you could have never conceived of. Also, another lesson: mittens get unpaired easily, one is always missing. Object impermanence.

Object impermanence is not a real concept. But it’s one that makes the most sense to me.

The actual name of the concept is object permanence. It is a developmental step–a marker of normal growth. Around ten months, babies realize that even when an object is out of sight it still exists. Before that, if their toy rolls under the couch, say, they think it’s gone. That’s why peek-a-boo makes some kids cry.

My daughter is 21 now. Everytime she leaves, I re-grasp the concept of object permanence.

“Permanent” jewelry is, of course, a marketing ploy for the young. A thin strand of gold can break. Still, I was disappointed when a few months after getting my bracelet soldered on, it fell off. I was swimming laps. My cupped hand cut into the water and I noticed my wrist was bare. I stopped swimming and floated face-down, scanning the pool floor. I found it, a shimmering strand on the black line. At the pool’s edge, next to my water bottle, I curled the chain into a small nest.

What is a nest, anyway, but found objects we wrap around ourselves. A way of holding onto what is beautiful. A perch of identity we spend our lives collecting.

When I got out of the pool, I called my daughter to lament the broken bracelet. But also, to make sure she was okay. To try to stop the tiny fingernails of worry, make sure that the meaning I assigned to a filament of gold was just a figment of a mother’s imagination.

What is an empty nest, anyway, but an offering. A cupped hand, palm up, in prayer.

—JENNIFER GALLO GAITES

EVERGREEN

The summer I am eight we go to visit Babi and Grandpa in Los Angeles. Dad drives the beige panel truck he’s named the Fleshmobile, Mom next to him in front. The four of us kids in the row of brown vinyl seats or sprawled in the back on the wooden platform, a foam pad covered in Indian print bedspread Dad has put in. We sing songs as we go, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” with verses with everyone’s names. We play 20 questions and look for license plates from different states. At a rest area Dad folds open his swiss army knife, slices bread Mom baked before we left, opens a can of sardines to make us sandwiches. Smushes them down with the flat of the blade. Wipes the knife clean on his jeans and folds the sharp steel in on itself. When we're done with our sandwiches, the tiny bones crunched down and the apples from a fruit stand stop nibbled to the center he reaches out his square hand for the cores and pops the seeds and bits of fruit flesh into his mouth, chews, and swallows amazing us every time.

We pass oil pumps that bob up and down like drinking birds, rows of fruit trees, leafed out green, the space between their even lines making patterns that shift as we pass. When we finally get off the freeway, onto the streets of Los Angeles the four of us take turns brushing our hair so we will look nice when we see Babi and Grandpa. Mom licks her thumb, cranes around to the back seat and wipes the smudges off our cheeks.

Their street has a liquor store on the corner with red neon arrows going around the letters LIQUOR and that’s where we turn left. At their house with its green bushes, white stucco, rounded front window, square rooms, we unload the car and unfold our stiff legs. Babi hugs us hard. She has a big bosom but her arms are strong and her hugs are tight, forceful, not pillowy. Grandpa has large, soft hands that tremble and are covered in dark spots. He holds mine gently and speaks softly, in his Polish accent, are you hungry? They have food we never have. Store bought cereal in small boxes, Apple Jacks, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms. The Frigidaire hisses open holds Seven-Up and chicken. Vanilla ice cream in the freezer and candy in cut glass candy dishes on side tables. For lunch Babi serves us cottage cheese with sour cream and chives, rye bread with caraway seeds, and pickled herring. Grandpa says he’ll have a glass tea, skipping the word of, and drinks it from a delicate clear cup, a lump of sugar melting in his mouth as he sips.

The walls are covered in the paintings Grandpa makes in the garage. A blue cityscape, a snow scene with a child pulling a sled to a red barn, flowers in vases, and others growing. I know his job is being a diamond dealer and I imagine the tiny sparkling stones he must touch with his shaking hands when he takes the bus downtown.

That night we take turns bathing in Babi’s tub. I scrape my nails along my ankle and I show Gabi how my skin comes off in satisfying dark rolls, wash my hair with Babi’s shampoo until it squeaks, rinse out gray suds. At home we take a bath once a week in the winter, less than that in the summer, and there is not this endless hot water, this warm room, this strong soap. I unwrap out of my towel into my nightgown, glowing. Sleep between tucked tight sheets.

Babi takes us shopping for socks and underwear. Wraps the sock around our fists toe to heel to check the size. Gets us the things we need, not toys, not pretty clothes.

Babi and Grandpa try to convince Mom and Dad to send us to school. I am reading chapter books on my own and they say, you see how smart she is, it’s a shame she doesn’t go to school. Then turn to each other, speak in fast, harsh Polish. When Mom and Dad aren’t around they say to me, Don’t you want to go to school like other children, learn new things? Babi shakes her head and clucks her tongue, It’s a shame. Grandpa looks sad. To Gabi, they say, don’t you want to learn to read, like your sister? I realize that Karen is gone from the claim by now. Who will teach Gabi to read?

A few weeks after we get back to Sunnyridge from this trip I tell everyone I want to go to school. I am half worried about not learning and half bored of being home all the time. Gabi agrees with me and we tell the grown-ups that school is where we want to be. I want to go to school, I say.

Why?

I’m bored.

School is boring, sitting in desks, doing what you’re told, boring.

I don’t care. I want to go. I want to learn.

They don’t teach you anything in school. Look at all these books. You can learn everything you need to know here.

Eventually, they give in. I was sure they would.

It is late September and school has already started by the time we are signed up. Every morning Dad has to drive us over the gravel bumps of Browntown Road to sit on the porch of the long-closed Holland store. The shut down gas pumps hunch like frozen figures and inside the dark windows you can see piles of discarded furniture and empty shelves. There Gabi and I wait for the school bus to Evergreen Elementary. Some days we arrive just as the bus is pulling out and Dad chases it in the truck, flashing the lights until the bus stops, the door hisses open, and we climb on, past the blank-faced driver, to the hoots and jeers of the kids already on the bus. The thing to do is not sit too near the back where most of the kids sit but too near the front is not great either because then you are so visible. The side, near the middle, but closer to the front is a good spot. The tormentors might get distracted by a friend before they see you and forget to say anything. Usually, they don’t forget and say, dirty hippy, are you wearing the same clothes again? Hey hippy girl, when’s the last time you took a bath? During the ride I pretend to be invisible, somewhere else. I suck on my two middle fingers and cover that hand with my other hand so no one will notice. GILLIG is written above the bus windshield with two small red lights that alternate flashing when the bus stops. I say the word GILLIG over and over in rhythm with the lights. I focus on this mantra, GILLIG, GILLIG, GILLIG, reads the same front to back back to front. Hey hippy are you a baby sucking on your fingers? GILLIG, GILLIG, GILLIG,  Press my face against the window and look out at the misty fields and silent dark trees.  

There are four classes in a big room called a quad. There are four entrances each with a door with windows and hooks in a small hallway that opens into the giant space, bright with fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors and no windows. Each class has one corner of the big room. First thing in the morning we all face the center, where the flag stands, say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing songs. I learn the words to the songs America the Beautiful, My Country Tis of Thee, A Grand Old Flag. The words are stirring and strong as stomping. Emblem of the land I love, home of the free and the brave.

When Dad first brings me to school to sign up, the teacher has me read for her and right away puts me in the highest reading group. But I don’t know math and I have to go in the lowest group until I learn how to add and subtract. Then I must memorize my times tables. I whisper them to myself on the bus three times three is nine three times four is twelve. By December I am in the highest math group and learning long division. It makes my head hurt to do it, shoving the small number into the big one.

One day walking to the bus, in the crowd of kids leaving school, someone pushes past me, saying something I don’t hear. Dirty hippy? A hand claps my head hard. When I get on the bus I poke my fingers and there is a chewed up clump of gum stuck inside my hair.  I pull my jacket hood over my head. Whisper to Gabi on the seat beside me, there’s gum in my hair. Reach my fingers back under my hood to feel the shape. Can I pull it out? I can’t.  When we get home Gabi helps me cut the gum out with scissors. I hold the almost alive looking off-white gum, brown haired lump in my hand for a moment before throwing it away.

Every day going home as the road turns from paved to gravel we pass the split tree. There it is a Gemini like me. Geminis are twins, one person made of two parts. One part is the Sunnyridge kid, who runs around naked and says fuck and the other is the quiet kid at school, who follows every rule. I wonder, what if, like in Alice In Wonderland, Sunnyridge turns out to be a dream? What if I wake up and I am back in Newport Beach?  Rub my eyes, stretch out and find I am under my sheets and blankets in my twin bed in my old bedroom with the car lot spotlight curving into the night sky. Will I still know how to read?

Grown-ups are sitting around after dinner smoking pot. I take the joint that Mom passes to me and stub it out in an ashtray among the cigarette butts. You need to stop smoking that, I say to her. All of you stop it. I stomp around chanting, No more smoking pot, no more smoking pot! The grown-ups laugh and tell me not to be so uptight.

We are never moving back to a neighborhood with sidewalks and going over to kids’ houses to play, learning to ride a bike, eating dinner around a table with just our family. We are here in the dim kerosene light, wood stove heat, eating brown rice, as the rain clatters on the tin roof.

 Christmas comes and all the kids in my class have to bring in a gift for a girl if you are a girl and for a boy if you are a boy. We should not spend more than five dollars. I know a homemade gift of a god’s eye or a beaded necklace is not right. No one mentions Hanukkah and neither do I. We are learning Christmas carols, Away in a Manger, Silent Night, We Three Kings. I memorize every word field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star. Kids are excused from school during the day to go to religion class at a local church. One of my classmates asks me why I don’t go and I explain that I’m Jewish. The Jews killed Jesus, she says as if it is something everyone knows. Is this true? I’m not sure but I insist no, no they didn’t. She tells me I should come to the religion class and I get a note from my dad, his signature scrawled on lined paper, that says I can go. They sing Jesus loves me this I know, cuz the bible tells me so and the teacher puts a yellow felt cross and a white felt dove on a felt-covered easel while telling a story. It is babyish and most of the kids are goofing around through the story. At the end of the class they give everyone a dry cookie. I won’t go back but I know that I better not mention being Jewish again.

I tell my mom about the Christmas gift exchange. She says we can make something but I beg her it needs to be a store-bought present. When the weekend comes I remind her to take me on the town run so we can go to the drugstore to buy something. Together we pick out a silvery plastic hairbrush, comb, and mirror all packaged as if it’s for a princess. When I get home I carefully wrap it in yellow and purple construction paper and multi-colored yarn bows and we put the package in a brown paper bag as the teacher requested. The next day I hand in the bag along with everyone else. I have gotten it in on time and in their bags, all the presents look the same, lined up in two rows, one for boys and one for girls. Later in the day, the teacher motions me into the doorway of her glass-enclosed office and secretly shows me that she has rewrapped my present in red and green Christmas paper. We don’t want one of them looking so…different, she says. I look down, say nothing. I know she is right and has done me a kindness, protected me, but something still aches like a yellow, purple bruise. I had not thought about wrapping paper.

The teacher collects kids’ coins and punches a hole in the pale blue cardboard lunch ticket, one hole per day. Some of us don’t pay. We get the free lunch. Lunch handed to us on heavy beige plastic trays. One section for sloppy joe’s one for square green jello topped with a dollop of cool whip one for sweet cooked carrots one for the house shaped milk carton. I eat every bite of every delicious lunch every day. At recess there is extra milk, which costs a nickel, so I don’t get the milk. Dad says milk is for baby cows, not people.

At recess most girls play on the monkey bars. Your hand holds the first bar and then you push your body into empty air, reach out and grab the next one, flinging yourself from one shiny bar to another all the way across. If you do it often enough you get blisters on your palms that turn to hard yellow calluses. I always drop, my arms pulled taut, not even halfway, my sneakers hit the asphalt. One day as I start to try to go across the bars I realize I don’t have on any underwear under my tights. I let my hands loosen and drop to the ground and go to the swings before anyone looks up my dress. Anyway, my favorite is the swings. I sing to myself and see the world tilt away, the hills behind the school appear, the voices of the kids fade, the rhythm of pumping my legs, back, back, and forth.

A girl in my class asks me to come over. She says, come over to my house today after school. When Dad picks me up at the bus stop I say, we need to go to Laura’s house. She invited me. Today!

Are you sure? he asks.

Yes, we have to go now!

He drives back along the bus route and I point out the house. We turn down the driveway. Park the truck. My legs feel shaky as I knock on the door and her dad comes out. He’s short haired, clean shaven. Laura peeks out from behind him and says hi but doesn’t invite me in to play. The four of us step off the porch and our dads discuss their trucks and my dad admires the new fence hers has built, while Laura and I stay silent. Then we get back in our truck and drive home. I don’t understand what happened. I blur it in my mind. Years later, when I return to Evergreen in 7th grade Laura will say to me remember that time you just showed up at my house?

No, I will lie. I don’t.

—LEAH KORICAN

SUBSEQUENT TO OUR PASSING

I read in the Book that the dead gather in a Roman amphitheater and applaud us. They dwell in a cloud and watch us run in circles. Cheer. You asked if we’ll meet after death. Will we recognize the scars and wrinkles alight on our bodies? Still be married? Still be us? I don’t want to answer when only silence will do. Who’s to say the dead don’t have a future?

This essay wants to mean something. It doesn’t want to remain mere random hatch marks adrift on an ocean of white. It wants a direction. When you live on an island, all directions are geomantic. Down towards the sea or skyward up the mountain. Whichever way you go is ever lasting.

In my tin-roofed rancher, the dead inhabit photographs. They reside on my dresser next to the electric candles and cross and coral necklace. On the lanai floorboards, desiccated moths, their wings singed brown. The field mouse, bloody gash in its neck, that the cat lays beside my chair. I sweep the poor creature’s curled body back into the earth and bless the gift I was given. On this island, four volcanoes sleep, ooze, rumble, and rise. A fifth one, the grass-covered cone closest to my home, expired a million years ago. In my kitchen, behind the pantry door, containers of applesauce, almond milk, and ahi all bear a shelf life. My expiration date is written with invisible ink. Can’t figure why a part of me feels forever.

Like the writer, this essay wants its life to mean more than just what happened, but why. Next to the rusted fence, five cats and a dog play dead beneath the grass, underground. All foundlings. How many years and I’m still seeing them roll on their backs in the driveway? Energy doesn’t disappear, I tell you under a slip of dying stars. We’ll just convert into something else. My bones creak with unknowing. In other words, God.

When we bought the house, it came with its own dead spirit. The previous owner was killed in a motorcycle crash and you swear you can hear him rev his engine in the driveway. Our land once was the site of a settlement where Filipino plantation workers washed their laundry at an outdoor concrete tub. I veer away from its broken cement when I park my car on the front lawn. Sugar died in the 1970’s though the remnant cane grass now fattens the cows in the back pasture.

My friend Pua says the Night Marchers, those dead Hawaiian warriors, wind through the eucalyptus trees when the moon refuses to shine. I don’t say, but think, Superstition. Why stick around and menace? Aren’t there better things to do on the other side? I mean no disrespect. But this essay doesn’t want to believe in the other side, if it’s meanancing, punitive. This essay doesn’t want to fear specters haunting the hallways. Vengeance against the living or the dead is not what this essay wants.

Mother’s ectopic pregnancy nearly killed her. The doctor told her she would never have children. So she made a promise. Swore that if God granted her children, she would raise them to make a contribution. Three babies came into the world by her whispered oath. Despite this, I suppose I will weigh light atop the scales of Anubis.

*

And once where I live on Old Camp 17 Road, out in the pasture, a white calf died and the spotted heifers huddled around its limp body like a coven and cried all night.

And once, my friend Diane texted me that she and her husband Paul had contacted The Neptune Society. Stand-in mourners will scatter their ashes at a place of their choosing and spare their only child the logistical trauma. And I think Diane asked who I thought would bury us, since we had no children. And I didn’t have an answer. And I felt slightly dead having failed to birth another generation. I swear this essay wants a purpose. A reason to be.

And once, along the road where I walk in the mornings, I saw that someone had laid out the skeleton of a boar, its skull bearing a bullet hole between its eyes. And once, along the Akoni Pule Highway, I saw an Ironman cyclist remove her helmet and kneel beside a ghost bike, weeping. And once, I found a flattened toad next to the house and I picked it up by the leg and flung it over the barbed wire fence, making it hop across the sky.

*

My outside is the vaulted sky. A blue dome that arches and aches ad infinitum. A woman stretched into a backbend, her body an umbrella made out of air. In other words, God.

After all, this is Hawaii. A place where the divine cradles the sun and rainbows slide between ether shoulders. Here, the color wheel spins a wave that travels too fast for the naked eye. In its heart, this essay wants to be some thing. Incarnate. Formed. Occupying space and time. To be.

A sign of grace, perhaps. The things the sky forbids us to see. Like the future. And how the sky is outside everywhere. Still, invisible. High. Beyond me. Still, pressing close upon me with its breath, a quilt of infinity. This essay longs for the logos. Longs to bring worlds into being. Demands a resonant ending. L’chaim, I clink my glass against yours as the sun spools into darkness.

This essay wants you to know it is holy. It wants to find its second life in you. In other words, a God of my own making.

—LINDA PETRUCELLI

EXPECTATION

It’s late afternoon, and I’m home from the hospital, where my brother has been for the past six weeks. I’ve been trying to find a moment to open the folder my mother gave me yesterday, and now, papers, some thin and fragile like a pressed flower, some thick and washed out like a piece of old construction paper, lay strewn across the table. I should be taking better care, I think, attempting to gather them into orderly piles. I clear a larger space, adjust the light, and slide a piece of paper toward me. The typewriter ink faded: ‘Adoption Summary’, followed by my brother’s Korean name. I lean closer: ‘abandoned’, ‘infant’, ‘orphanage’. Before me are the opening lines to a story both familiar and new, profound and incomprehensible: a documented record of my brother’s first two years of life in a Korean orphanage and his adoption by our family. Papers I have never seen before. My childhood floods in on a surging tide of memory: I step into the moment, where a child-sized puffy red parka hangs on a coat hanger.

“It’ll be too big for him,” my six-year-old self declared.

“He’ll grow into it,” said my mother, her hand resting on my shoulder.

Below the parka, blue rubber boots stood next to a pair of leather shoes. I looked again around the room. On the wall, a framed poster shows tiny sailboats circling a pond while willow trees weep at the water’s edge.

“He might like a picture of a spaceship,” I said, wishing I had a picture of a spaceship.

“We’ll see,” said my mother. She opened a drawer, pulled out a pair of pyjamas covered in dinosaurs, refolded them, and tucked them back next to another perfectly folded pair. 

I had been expecting my little brother’s arrival for months. It wasn’t the usual anticipation that happens in growing families. My mother wasn’t pregnant; there was no crib, no stack of diapers. But there was an adoption agency. 

Sometimes, after coming home from my friend’s house, I would lie on the floor and wonder what it would be like to have a brother. My friend’s older brother terrorized us, chasing us up the stairs and pretending to throw our dolls out the window. Would my brother be like that? And why was it so hard to get a brother? It didn’t seem complicated for my friends, some of whom had several younger and older brothers and sisters. Had their fathers and mothers spent evenings at the dining room table filling out forms and swearing over mistakes while their cups of tea grew cold?

Part of the expecting came in the form of visits by ladies with clipboards and strong perfume.

“Do your parents ever speak to each other in loud voices?” they asked me.

“No,” I shook my head. Not my British parents.

“Are there ever people in the house you don’t like?” said one of the ladies.

“No.” Why would my parents bring people they didn’t like into our house, I wondered, staring at her. She looked away. Later, my parents sat at the dining room table nursing more tea, whispering. My dad scooped me up onto his lap.

“What do you think it will be like to have a brother?” he said.

“Fun,” I said, wondering how my mum would still have time to read to me at bedtime.

One day not long after, my dad came bursting into the kitchen waving an envelope:

“We’ve got it!”

Got what? Our small family sat at the kitchen table and opened the letter together. Inside was a sheet of paper with a small photograph attached to the top with a paper clip.

“Look!” said my dad. “He’s three years old. Look at the picture. Isn’t he lovely? Look, this is going to be your new brother!”

I looked at the photograph. A tiny boy with a large head, skinny arms and legs, and a big belly stood, arms at his side, in front of a grey wall. He wore a red quilted jacket that buttoned up and a look of resigned bewilderment on his face. I felt a rush of sadness, happiness, excitement, and worry. I wanted a sibling, or at least I thought I did, but now, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Would I be able to ride on my dad’s shoulders as much? What if he was mean to me? Would I love him? I grew quiet and looked at my mum. I had never seen her cry before.

“Don’t you worry,” said my dad. “It’s all going to be alright.”

We sat for a long time at the table, looking at the photograph.

A few months later, we made the trip to the Vancouver airport, where we met the representative from the adoption agency. She stood beside us, long grey hair caught back in a ponytail that disappeared into the folds of her long grey raincoat, ready to meet my new brother as he arrived off the plane. I peered through legs, expectation radiating out of me like rays from the sun as streams of people flowed through the arrivals gate, trying so hard to catch the first glimpse of the little face I knew from the photograph, but he didn’t come. The lady from the adoption agency disappeared and then returned with a long look.

“I called Korea. He’s too ill to travel, so they kept him off the plane,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, like this sort of thing always happens. The trip home was silent, streetlights flashing past my face as I stared out the window. 

Back at our house, expectation resumed, and soon, another letter came, this one informing us he would arrive on Christmas Day.

“I’m getting a little brother for Christmas,” I told my friend’s mum.

“Oh, how unusual,” she said. 

Back in Vancouver on Christmas Day, another stream of arrivals floods through the doors. Then, finally, there he was, my new brother, wearing the little red quilted jacket from his photograph. He was tiny. Held in the arms of the caregiver who had accompanied him, he looked lost. His face, pale and drawn, was covered in a rash, and one little hand grasped the sleeve of his caregiver. This I remember like it was yesterday.

On the car ride back to the ferry, in our red Ford Cortina, I sat in my usual spot in the back, and my new brother sat on a booster seat beside me. He had barely anything with him except a tiny pair of red leather shoes that my mother has kept to this day. There were also a few gifts for his new family: a fan, a paper cut-out of some Korean characters with little red tassels hanging off the corners, and a sheet of Korean phrases with their English translations. I stared at my new brother. After waiting for this moment for so long, I felt like I was watching myself from above. Everything I had known shifted slightly and made room to fit this new little person into our lives.

“Why don’t you try asking him a question?” said my mother, handing me the sheet of phrases.

I struggled through the pronunciation of several words and phrases, but I must have made some sense as each time I asked a question, my brother would shake his head. No, he wasn’t hungry; no, he wasn’t tired. Those questions were wholly inadequate for our needs and far from what I wanted to ask him: Where did you come from? Why were you left on a street corner? Did you have toys? What did you leave behind? Do you remember your mother?

 A poverty of language left us both unsatisfied. I held his hand instead, his little fingers curled around mine, and we sat in silence. 

Someone abandoned my brother as a baby on the streets of Seoul, Korea, in 1972. He had nothing. The orphanage gave him a name, a birthday, and a home. No one could tell us his family history or what his life had been like before he was found. I have spent a lifetime conjuring up possible scenarios to explain his abandonment: death of his parents, extreme poverty, an impossible situation. I like to think it was an act of love, but I have no way of knowing.

I do know that I loved him instantly. I spent hours reading to him as he learned English, and we played games of Monopoly that lasted days. He grew out of all his new clothes. We built epic forts together.

At our small rural school, however, he endured the humiliation of racism from the mouths of little boys on the playground:

“Hey Sony, Sony, Sony!” they called him.

“Idiots!” I yelled at them, my face growing hot. “You’re too stupid to get your name-calling right!”

For a time, there was peace as a normal childhood took centre stage: In the garden, my brother and a friend, saucepans on their heads and sticks in hand charging at invisible enemies; my brother and I arguing over who cheated at Monopoly.  But the ravages of infant rejection played out deep within his mind as he grew up. His capacity for affection, attachment, and belonging disappeared, while speculation and worry took their seats at the table. When our parents separated in middle school, my brother sunk back even further, pulling the curtains tight, only letting in enough light to see his way through his days. In high school, death by a thousand tiny cuts at the best of times, those little boys from the playground grew into teenagers with their inherited opinions and underdeveloped capacities for compassion, capable of a special kind of cruelty reserved for those who don’t fit the mould. Some of his teachers tried, and he excelled in school, but it wasn’t enough.

At his Grade 12 Graduation ceremony, he walked across the stage to receive his diploma.

“Woohoo! Way to go!” I yelled. A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, but a look of pure mortification pass over my brother’s face. I instantly regretted my yell, but a part of me wanted to keep yelling, to draw attention to him as if a collective awareness could somehow bring him out of himself. Instead, my brother retreated even further, rarely emerging despite our attempts.

“It’s the rejection as an infant,” said one psychiatrist. “Creates emotional scar tissue. He might grow out of it.”

“Does he do drugs?” said another.

“Here, try this,” said yet another, handing over a handful of prescriptions. “Call me in six months.”

The years between high school and now are a series of postcard stories with long gaps between the dates: my brother at university, my brother dropping out of university, my brother getting a flashy new car and a job in Vancouver, my brother losing the car, and ending up on the downtown east side of Vancouver doing who knows what. My brother in front of a computer playing games, gambling, coding. What was he doing?  My brother back in Victoria working at a casino. My brother not working at a casino. My mum calling me, her voice cracking at the seams:

“I’m at the Doctor’s office. They say they can’t be sure he won’t hurt himself. He’s to go to the hospital. Now.”

I get in the car. At the Doctor’s office I meet my brother as he walks out. I reach out for his hand, and he holds it tight as we walk to the car. I feel like I never want to let it go.

Another psychiatrist, another prescription. A family meeting:

“Well don’t look at me!” my father says to my mother. “It can’t all be my fault!”

“And how is your arguing helping my brother?” I say. I get up and storm out.

Another postcard memory, another psychiatrist. This one names a personality disorder and asks me if I’ve heard of it. No, I haven’t. It sounds very vague anyway. What does it do? Does it mask memories? Does it inhibit relationships? Does it look like shyness? My brother has a gift for writing. He is a math whiz, a computer geek of the highest order. He belonged to MENSA as a child. He could probably outsmart ten psychiatrists at once. Oh wait, he has.

Then one day my mother called me. “Your brother is sick, but he won’t let me in to his apartment to check on him.” She sounds worried.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say. But he isn’t fine. My mother calls me again the next day.

“I think something’s terribly wrong,” she says.

At his apartment, he is barely strong enough to let us in. I call 911 within a minute of seeing him. At the ER, the doctor tells me it is touch and go. My brother vomits blood on the floor. The doctor again with a long list of medical terms. My mother and I hug each other and cry. Emergency surgery. I go to see him every day for seven weeks. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. I wrestle with the system for more mental health and physical supports. The system wins. My brother recovers his physical health, but soon, he won’t let us back into his apartment. I go home instead.

In a moment, the flood tide begins its ebb, and I, 52 years old, am back at my desk looking at the papers in front of me, wondering what happened.  

There is an address for the orphanage; a fifty-year-old description describes a street corner nearby. On my laptop, I zoom in on Google Maps as my stomach flips over. Expectation again runs high. I’m unsure what I think I might see: a little boy sitting alone in the corner? A young mother leaving her baby? If only I could go back in time. Instead, there is a concrete expanse with a few trees. Parked cars line the side of the road. A few people, their faces blurred, frozen in the act of walking by. I am seconds away from calling my brother:

“Do you want to go back to Seoul? I was thinking we could go together?” I would say. “Maybe visit the orphanage or find out more about your family?” I would probably sound excited and nervous. 

There would be silence.

My brother has never talked of going back to Korea. He doesn’t bother with expectation the way I do. What am I hoping for anyway, his family waiting at the airport with signs? Coffee with a long-lost sister-in-law? I seem to have made this about me. I text him instead.

Wanna go for coffee?

He won’t answer right away, and he’ll probably say no until I complain, and then he’ll grudgingly agree. I’ll look forward to it. I can’t expect more than that for now.

 —JANE POTTER

A NEIGHBORHOOD OF GUNS

My next-door neighbor has an AR-15. I haven’t seen it. He told me that he owned one, and I believed him. He told me when we were outside, near his garage, near his grill, near his back deck. Our houses are small, under 1000 square feet, and with yards to match. Everything is near.

We had been talking about the latest mass murder. The grass had been green. Maybe it was early fall 2016, or spring 2017. In the months that followed I began to picture the gun within his house, a free-floating image, a long, dark shape, vague, because I didn’t know the details of its body.

In my mind, the gun floats in the air of a room. It moves like a remote control model airplane, or a ghost. It is easy to make the gun big in proportion to the size of my neighbor’s bed or his corridor; the gun is an idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen it or any of my neighbor’s other guns. I haven’t seen his gun case either, not when I’ve been over playing cards, or borrowing his high-speed internet for file transfers, or having Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, it’s possible that I have seen the case, without knowing, my eyes brushing over a piece of furniture. Out of politeness, I don’t examine people’s belongings that carefully as a guest. I avoid the out-of-the-way. Instead I look at what’s on the walls. I concentrate on what’s on the table in front of me.

I trust him with the AR-15—mostly. Concerning his ownership, there’s a small percentage of my thoughts, let’s say 5% out of 100, that doesn’t trust, that’s a question mark. That 5% knows what happens to some people as they get older; their fears can increase as their physical abilities diminish, their despair kicks in as life gets harder.

For many years, I saw him get angry when people drove over his lawn. The anger bordered on rage in the earlier days. He’d shout after cars, striding towards them as they left.

Our part of the street doesn’t have sidewalks, and so cars can park in our front yards, leaving tire grooves and flattened grass. My neighbor is what I would call obsessed with turf. He mows at least twice a week, sometimes three times. While I leave my yard to clover, he puts on fertilizer and weed killer. The differences between our yards are stark, like the time when we were talking at the fence, and there were bees and delicate flies and butterflies on my side, and no insects on his side. You’d think the insects would have crossed over, but that late afternoon, they didn’t. And when twilight came, the lightning bugs lit up my yard, and not his.

Eventually, my neighbor put a series of long 4 x 4s where grass met asphalt. No parking is possible there now. I haven’t heard him yell at cars for a while, only mutter under his breath if they speed by too fast. Because he owns an AR-15, I monitor his emotions more closely than I would otherwise. I also think of him as a possible defense, for when I’m threatened and the police are too far away. I don’t picture him using the AR-15 on my behalf except in an extreme circumstance, but where I live, in Charlottesville, Virginia, there has been more than one extreme circumstance.

On August 12, 2017, I stayed in my home, taking care of a sick pet and also avoiding the human storm, the Nazis and far-right militia gathering downtown for a day of protest. Earlier that year, in March, I had been in London when a driver had killed four people on Westminster Bridge. My friend and I, on the bridge that very day, had missed the attack by a mere hour or two. The reminder of what could happen was fresh in my mind; I woke on August 12 certain that it would attract the mentally unstable, the emotionally sick.

If the militia came to our neighborhood, if they shot into my house, I had someone to call. Our City Manager had already gone to the courts; he had asked for the location of the protest to be moved, despite their permit. He didn’t get what he wanted, but now we knew: The police didn’t believe that they could handle the event where it was.

My neighbor was my back-up plan. He could shoot to scare, to miss. He used to go to a shooting range north of town, hitting targets with the AR-15, improving his aim. At one point, he complained to me that an NRA membership was required at the range. He had come to think that the requirement impinged on his freedom of choice. He had problems with the NRA; he didn’t want to be forced to support them, just to shoot at targets. Hitting targets, however, was what he enjoyed about the AR-15. “It’s fun,” he said. “It’s a great gun for that.” I didn’t ask if they were bull’s eye or human-shaped. He had a bull’s eye for his axe throwing—a wooden stand—that has since disappeared.

Would I rather my neighbor kill someone who was attacking me, rather than for me to die? Yes. I can say this and still lobby for stricter gun laws.

My neighbor usually votes Democratic, maybe always, but he doesn’t identify with any political party. He is anti-racist; he tells me about confronting racism when slurs arise within his friends and his colleagues. He has criticized me for trying to preserve a statue of Lewis and Clark, whose families were both slave-holders.

He is one man, single, 50, with an AR-15.

Who else on my street has an AR-15? I assume that there is another one, maybe many more, and definitely other guns.

It is daunting, the question of where else the guns live. In particular, I want to know the mental state of each person on my street who owns a semi-automatic weapon. I can monitor my neighbor, but not the unknown. In general, the owners of war-grade guns are a disordered militia, the opposite of what the Constitution protects.

My neighbor just began mowing as I write. I am getting up to shut the window, to reduce the sound to a muted roar. The grass had already been perfect, so thick it was difficult to walk in, but not taller than the ankle.

I can walk from the outer wall of my house to the outer wall of his house in five strides; from my bedroom I can sometimes hear his roommate’s TV. His roommate suffers from hearing loss, though he is not that old, also around fifty.

My street is demographically varied. There are modest, though over-priced, houses, like the ones on my end of the street. There is subsidized housing at the other end, with houses of millionaires scattered within the mix.

The month before the Nazi invasion, in July 2017, a gang murder happened at that other end, on the river, a ten to fifteen-minute walk from my house. A young man was killed by machete and knife. Like the AR-15, the gang was identified by two letters, a slash, and two numbers. I’m afraid of that gang. I don’t want to invoke them by forming those letters and numbers.

As a girl, I knew from an early age, like most girls knew, that one bad encounter could turn me into prey. In the decades that followed, I’ve had someone break into my house and wake me in my bed, pressing me down. I’ve had a handgun pulled on me at a tourist spot; I’ve had a stranger beat on my door drunk past midnight, yelling, shaking the walls.

On the subway in New York, I once saw the outline of a machine gun in a straw bag; the man holding the bag was seated directly across from me, his hand resting on the gun. Is it legal? I think it’s legal, I thought. When the train stopped, I got off, a few stops early.

In Charlottesville, a long, long time ago, outside a community center, the police motioned for me to hide behind their car. Their long guns came out. They pointed them at suspected drug dealers, across a long field. Then the police burst from behind the car, running towards the suspects, rifles in hand.

I navigate the world of guns without a gun, but I am capable of calling for one to arrive. The police are a delivery service of guns.

Still, they have never saved me, they’ve only taken down the details. I fought the intruder off me and then he ran, jumping out the window. I lunged at the guy trying to get my money, my hands going for the gun grip; he wrenched the pistol away and opened the bullet chamber. There were no bullets, only places for bullets. “Joke,” he said.

I received self-defense training from the police, twice, and they told me that, when threatened, most people freeze, some run, and a very few fight. I am in the minority--Immediate rage, immediate action, few, if any, words in my head.

In March 2018, I participated in the March for Our Lives protest, in support of gun control laws and ending school shootings.

I am an experimental filmmaker. In December 2018, I finished a short film called “The Etiquette of American Massacres,” which showed at the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 2019, and at 516 Arts in Albuquerque in 2020. The film used a painted bridge in Charlottesville as a metaphor. Decade after decade, the bridge keeps getting repainted with messages. It is thick with multi-colored layers of paint, layer after layer of tributes, some of them about gun violence and loss. The layers, like gun massacres, like our collective grief and trauma, keep coming.

The bridge is located a ten-minute drive from my neighborhood, near the University of Virginia’s Art Department on Culbreth Road.

I had hoped that my film would cause a positive change, that the metaphor would bring a few people a deeper understanding of the day-to-day impact of massacres. The bridge would influence those people to help eliminate gun violence. Through the film, the bridge would counter school shootings, erase them, stop the layers.

The opposite happened. A school shooting came to the bridge.

On November 13, 2022, a student shot and killed three of his fellow students: Devin Chandler, D'Sean Perry, and Lavel Davis Jr. Two others were wounded and hospitalized. The killings happened on Culbreth Road, on a bus at night, a bus parked a minute or so from the bridge, the end of a school trip to Washington to see a play about Emmett Till. Chandler, Perry, and Davis were members of the UVA football team, handsome Black men with genuine smiles and an obvious love of life and of people. Their faces remain beacons in photographs, shining light on the three voids of their absence.

I did not help to erase future massacres; massacres stalked my path, followed in my footsteps, as they stalk and follow every American now.

The bridge was painted with the men’s names and the numbers of their football jerseys. So far, no one has painted over their layer.

I ask the same questions as ever: Should I go to the school? Should I go to the movie theatre? Should I walk down the street or stay inside?

Is that person crazy? Does that person have a semi-automatic gun?

The machine gun had weight in the straw bag; but is it possible that it was a water gun?

I imagine the United States as a house on my street. The head of that house, the President, is on his way to lecture Great Britain about Northern Ireland. He has to step over the dead bodies of children to get to the front door. Their murderers, the ones who are still alive, are locked in the basement; AR-15s are everywhere else, and some can be found in the basement as well, with guards. “Follow our example of freedom and democracy,” the President tells the House of Great Britain, as he tells the world. Back in his house, more children are shot.

I’m lying to myself if I say I live across the street. I live in that house. I just haven’t accepted the truth.

—ALEXANDRIA SEARLS

TALKING TO DEATH

I hit a car in the Whole Foods parking lot while my father lay dying at a residential hospice, and now the bills have come due: the work of grief still owed, and an actual bill on paper for a lot of money.

Four days into my father’s vigil I was beyond tired and went out to pick up a few groceries. I backed out of my space in the crowded lot, looked over my shoulder and saw a woman driving a white Honda down my aisle. I pulled back in to let her pass, pulled out again and heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal. Mysteriously, the white car was now behind me. I got out to face the driver.

“You hit my car!” the woman declared in high-pitched agitation.

I stared at her, dazed with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “it was an accident. I thought you passed me.”

“You hit my car!” she echoed, even more shrill.

It’s a miracle I haven’t hit more cars. My brain is mud. I probably shouldn’t even be driving.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, ever-present tears rising.  

She scribbled down my insurance information and copied every letter of print on my driver’s license down to the color of my eyes. She demanded I hold my cell phone up as she called to assure I wasn’t giving her a false number.

Who has lied to you? Will someone yell at you, demanding to know why you weren’t more careful?  I studied the stress lines in her face.

This is taking way too long.

Her driver’s side door was perpendicular to the rear of my car, the point of impact. There was only a small dent and no apparent damage to my rental, a red box like car whose name I could never remember. I liked the red car because I could find it. In the previous month when Dad was in intensive care, I seemed to always have a silver or white car that was immediately swallowed into anonymity by the massive hospital parking structures.

 I guessed $300 to hammer the dent out, knowing the cost is usually double the obvious. Certainly under my $1,000 deductible; there would be no point in reporting to insurance.

Deeming my dad to have no chance of meaningful recovery, the doctors had released him from all the medications that kept him alive. It was predicted his heart would last 2-3 days at most. The watch had now stretched to four long days and nights and I wasn’t about to miss his sacred moment of passage.

“I’m sorry, I really need to go,” I told her. “You have all my information.”

The woman scanned my car for anything else to write down. She was wiry, shorter than me, her narrow face set with determination. It dawned on me she didn’t intend to let me out.

“My dad is dying,” I finally admitted, tears spilling freely. “He will probably die today. I promise you, I’m good for the expenses. Please let me out.”

 “OK, you can go,” she said warily. “We’ll settle it between us.” She got back in her car and unblocked me. “Bless you,” she muttered. My shoulders dropped in relief.

And so I left her, “As I have left all my lovers.” The phrase came unbidden, stuck in a deep groove in my head since the sleepless night before.

It was a haunting line from an epic poem, A Woman is Talking to Death, by Judy Grahn, first published in the seventies. More than a poem it was a manifesto, read aloud at gatherings or between lesbian couples. “My lover’s teeth are white geese flying above me,” we would recite, “My lover’s muscles are rope ladders under my hands, we are the river of life, and the fat of the land.” It was art that spoke the word lesbian many times, helped define a new culture.

In the center of the poem the narrator leaves the scene of an accident because she’s “A queer, unemployed woman,” sees herself invisible, without credibility. The driver in the accident was a black man. It was not his fault. After the narrator left, she learned he was severely beaten by the police. She is sorry, full of regret.

I’d no premonition about an accident when the poem first whispered to me on the hospice cot at 3am. I was the one who stayed the night because Dad didn’t want to be alone, because I’d come to the east coast from California, because I could. I was happy for the time with just us two. I could summon the stamina because I knew it wouldn’t be long. Death was already holding Dad’s hand, hanging on each labored breath.

At three a.m. he had called me softly from my cot, “Sarah, help.”

“What help do you need?” His head was covered by the cloth he now kept over his face all the time.

“I’m alone,” he said. Tears rolled out from under the edges of the cloth.

“Yes,” I said. “You are. And I’m here too.” I took his hand.

“Hey Death, Ho Death,” I chanted silently, as Grahn’s poem unwound back to me its many verses. It was still loaded in my long-term memory, along with “Charge of the Light Brigade,” from seventh grade English.

In the morning I googled the poem, read it for the first time in decades, letting the intensity of Lesbian nation resonate back through me. Beyond the title, the text had nothing to do with my father. I’d never shared that poem with him. He didn’t want to know anything about lesbian culture back then, wanted it to all go away. For the mistakes of those years, I’d forgiven him.  Aside from the title, While Talking to Death, it was Judy Grahn’s story alone.

I sensed, rather than remembered the route back to hospice, driving with utmost caution. Back at hospice, my two sisters were still sitting quietly at their posts.

“How did it go?” my middle sister, Emily, asked.

“OK,” I said, setting down the grocery bag and collapsing on the bedside cot. “I’m tired.”

Emily nodded in affirmation. We all knew the word ‘tired’ was just a placeholder for an alert state of exhaustion so profound it begged new vocabulary.

“How’s Dad?”

“The same.”

I pulled two pillows over my head and tried to sleep. Maybe if I’d told my sister about the accident, she might have helped me think more rationally. I didn’t want to give my family one more thing to worry about. I wanted to be a rock, stay up night after night, do what was needed. I didn’t want anyone to suspect I was coming unglued.

My cell phone rang several times. I ignored it.

After a restless ten minutes I abandoned sleep and checked the messages. Both a police officer and my rental car company had been calling. The other driver had reported me to everyone she could think of.  

Oy.

The police officer had a British accent, unusual anywhere for an American cop, even stranger in North Carolina. My dad lay breathing heavily in what we assumed was the beginnings of the death rattle.

“What is your local address, mum?”  

Had he really said ‘mum’?

“I’m from California, sir. I’m living here in the local hospice facility with my dad. He’s dying.”

“Ah, so sorry to hear that,” his words clipped, yet his tone belied sympathy.

“It’s important that you come back here, Mrs. Young, so we can get your statement for a full report.”

 “I can’t. It’s a small amount of damage,” I assured him. “I’m not worried. You can handle it between the two of you.”

“Well, I’m not so sure it’s a small amount of damage.”

  His words made no sense, but the melody of his accent was soothing, as if he were reading me a story. He took my information over the phone as I rocked in the wooden, old-style rocker on the hospice porch.

The day after the accident an orderly, an older African-American man, noticed I was spent beyond the edge. He opened a little used room, wheeled in an extra bed and encouraged me to sleep. It was the bath-room, the room where they bring the dying who want a bath. He said the staff often slept there when working extra shifts.

I slept for hours and when I woke I had surrendered. It was not for me to claim front row seating at Death’s passage, to think I was needed for my dad to let go. I started sleeping at my mom’s house. My brother-in-law, a better non-sleeper than I, took over the night shift at hospice.

A couple of days later I asked another orderly about opening up the bath-room for one of us to sleep there again. She said no, quite sure no one had ever unlocked that room for family members before.

After eight nights it was clear that Dad was not going to leave with the cymbal’s clash of another heart attack, but the slow, mournful chant of his organs gradually closing down, his body wasting from no food or water. On the ninth day it seemed certain that Death was only inches away and I spent the night at hospice again. I woke suddenly as a loud croak burst from Dad’s throat. Maybe it’s the Death frog, not the Death rattle we’re waiting for. I was less reverent now, impatient, bone weary of my young daughter’s daily plea, “When are you coming home?”

I sat one hand holding his and the other hand on his chest. In between long breath apneas I felt the slowing of his heart, like a stream formed after a flash rain dwindling to a trickle over the rocks. I breathed with him. This is why I’m here. His body was coming to rest gently, as if landing on a feather bed. Suddenly a loud wrenching cough twisted through him, and his breathing returned fast and rough as if he were saying, “No. I see where this is headed, and I’m not going there, yet.”

By the tenth day Dad had burrowed so deeply into himself we decided to leave him alone at night, certain now our constant presence was hindering the process. Death needed alone time with Dad.

The morning after his first solo night, my youngest sister, Liz, texted: Just talked to the nurse. Dad is alive, had a “pretty good night.”

Me: Ah, that’s sad

My sister: Yes. Life is ineffably weird.

I had to look up ineffably.

“Ho and ho, poor Death, only the arrogant invent a quick and meaningful end for themselves, of their own choosing.”  

I plumbed Grahn’s poem looking for hidden wisdom. On night fifteen I slept at hospice again, but not because I believed anymore “this was it.” While I knew Dad couldn’t live indefinitely without food and water, I had stopped expecting Death. I stayed because my middle sister believed we should, and she wanted my company.

We sat as the animal-rasp pant of the last stage began. We ate Doritos from the vending machine at 1am, threw them at each other, laughed hilariously at our attempts to cover the smell of my father’s decay with air freshener, strew rose petals over his bed, embraced the not quite human sound that arced from Dad’s throat. I stroked his hair, watched his face change from young to middle-aged to old and back again. My sister and I fell asleep.

At 4:30 am I bolted up, jarred awake by the absence of harsh breathing. I woke my sister and we draped ourselves over either side of Dad’s shrunken body as the breath finally left him with a gentle sigh. The sacred moment arrived as Death kissed Dad’s warm brow.

At that moment it seemed this had always been the plan. Maybe it was Death who had laid the cloth over dad’s face, so they could have the long private chat needed to let go of 87 years well lived. Death, who needed fifteen days to make the point his business with my dad was none of ours. Death, who likes attention, waiting for the carpet of red rose petals we laid out for him.  Death, who likes to slip in un-noticed, waiting until we were relaxed, laughing, no longer poised grim and sorrowful.

That same night, Obama would be elected president for the second time. After the polls closed, my sister’s Rabbi, her friends and mom’s friends would gather at her house for the first of many circles of remembrance.

After the ceremony I finally bought a ticket home.

I returned home full of grief and body pain. We sat Shiva for seven days, a beautiful ritual, and Dad’s spirit stayed with us. But work and parenting and the rest of life revved back up with no sentimentality and I had to steal time to remember. After having sat for fifteen days with such exquisite attention to Dad’s death, I found myself bereft and bewildered that he was gone.

Three months later, a packet arrived from Avis with ten black and white photos of a severely damaged white Honda, for which I was being billed $5,000.00. The photos showed a buckled front hood and smashed right headlight suggesting a full-on front-end collision.

Clearly the parking lot woman was trying to pin another accident on me. I was being scammed! Friends echoed my outrage. I emailed my insurance company investigator detailed diagrams depicting the event. She agreed I couldn’t have caused the damage.

What kind of person would take advantage of such a vulnerable time to cheat someone?

“You’ll defend me, right?  When do you tell the rental company I’m a victim of insurance fraud?”

“We’re done once we deny the claim. You have no witnesses. You didn’t confirm damages or return for the police report.”

Because I was busy, talking to Death.

“What did the woman say when you interviewed her?”

“She was vague, didn’t want to talk.”

“Doesn’t that prove she’s covering something up?” It dawned on me the investigator might believe I was the one not telling the truth. My aching neck muscles tightened. Like in the poem, “There is no witness,” not even me.

“We can pay the claim and it goes on your record as your fault, or we can deny it. It’s up to you.”

A small kernel of doubt started to form under my skin, followed me in my business of the day. What if I was wrong? What if I were so deep in conversation with Death I missed a significant accident?

I sent for the accident report from the North Carolina DMV. I pulled my children’s matchbox cars out of the closet to practice all the potential accident permutations, the cars solid in my hands. A new possibility emerged. If after passing me the woman wanted my spot she might have quickly backed up behind me. At high speed I could have backed directly into the front of her car and caused that damage. Yet what about the dent I saw on her front left fender? Or did I?

All I knew for sure was my dad might die any moment and I had to get back to his room. I had dashed across the country, left a workshop I was leading, left my children for an indeterminate amount of time to be at his side.

Maybe it was Death who sent the anxious woman to block me in at Whole Foods to keep me from driving recklessly into a much more serious accident ahead.

“Hey Death, ho Death, We left as we left all our lovers, much too soon to get the real loving done.”

Four months later my dad’s altar is now cluttered with kid’s unfinished homework and other ordinary stuff. I flip through the accident report finally arrived from the North Carolina DMV, stare at the diagrams the anxious woman had drawn for the British police officer. The pictures depict how I swerved out of my spot into the front of her car and returned to my parking lot space where she blocked me in. Just like the matchbox cars.

Tears streaked the accident repot as I stared into the altar photos of Dad with his childhood dog, as a young father, holding the one fish he ever caught, celebrating his last, 87th birthday.

Dad, why are you still so gone?

I’m not a person capable of missing an accident. So many things I’ve been so sure I knew. And about grief, I’ve known least of all.

There’s been nothing in my well organized and planned life to prepare me for this series of events: intensive care, the Death watch, missing an accident, death itself. I’ve tried to be a dutiful griever, scheduling time for feelings and tears. Yet I am still pinned to the floor by the brutal shock of loss.

 My father is dying… I say to the woman in the lot. Did you block me in so you could hold me while I sob about how hard it is to watch him waste away, how ready I am for him to be done, how unprepared I am for him to be gone?

“Yes,” she says lovingly, no longer my villain.

I didn’t like that woman, let alone want her to touch me. Death has been slowly turning my heart inside out, as painful a stretch as the tiny opening of the cervix widening for a baby’s head.

I hit a car and left. Not only do I feel bad about it but the bill has come due and I have to pay a lot of money. My shoulder, back, and neck still hurt and it’s not just a metaphor. There’s no list to bring any of this to a close. My father’s death is my first deep loss and I’m adrift. It is time to stop talking to Death and listen. Just listen.

—SARAH YOUNG

Fiction

Escape to Oregon

The motel off I-70 stinks of piss and cleaner, but Bellamy curls up on the hard mattress anyway, mud-caked boots laced tight on her feet. 

600 miles sit between here and home. It doesn’t feel like enough. Not when she can still taste the smoke of her father’s Lucky Strikes. She wants to clamber back into Marlowe’s truck and go farther. To watch the tree-filled Appalachian Mountains turn into flat, endless plains. 

To forget the east coast exists. 

“Take off your boots,” Marlowe says, slumped on the second twin bed, her jacket and sneakers piled on the desk chair. The blue glow of her phone illuminates her face. “Stay a while.”

“Don’t want to.” 

“Stay a couple hours, then.” 

Bellamy traces the red and blue squares on the scratchy quilt underneath her, ignoring the burns scattered across the fabric. It’s like the one her grandmother made when she was little. She remembers watching her sit at her massive sewing machine, back hunched, feeding the squares through the needle. She wishes she would’ve brought it, but she left home so quickly that it slipped her mind. 

That’s what Marlowe doesn’t understand. 

They’ve been friends for nine—almost ten, now—years, but Marlowe has never left home on a whim, has never kept a bag packed with the necessities under her bed, has never known what it’s like to run away and mean it.

“I don’t like this place,” Bellamy says, and it sounds too petulant, like a child throwing a tantrum. “It smells.”

“It’s cheap.” 

“Could’ve slept in the truck.” 

“I’m not sleeping in the truck.” Marlowe sets her phone on the nightstand, then reaches for her backpack. It’s overstuffed. Toiletries, clothes, non-perishable snacks. A curling iron. “Hungry?”

A thin strip of moonlight shines through the blinds. It’s late, almost one, but a couple of men linger outside, laughing too loud in the dark, drunk from the bar across the street. She watches the shadows of them through the window. They’re big—tall, broad-shouldered. They don’t sound mean, just dumb, but Bellamy knows better. She wants to reach for the switchblade she keeps tucked inside her left boot. She wants to bolt like a terrified rabbit, and it revolts her.

“It’s not safe,” she says.

“I’m scared” sits at the back of her throat. Chokes her. She swallows it back down like chunks of rogue vomit. 

“Bellamy.” 

She hates it when Marlowe says her name like that, all breathy and sad, like Bellamy disappointed her, somehow. It makes her want to shred the quilt to pieces. 

This has always been their problem. 

At nineteen, Marlowe’s two years older than Bellamy, and the gap gives her an inflated sense of authority. She told her which clubs to sign up for, which classes to take, which colleges to apply for. She even stormed into her house while Bellamy’s father was at the bar to cook healthy dinners for her. “Stand-in mom,” their other friends called her, and Marlowe always took it as a compliment. Bellamy let it slide—kind of enjoyed it, some days—but that authority was going to get them hurt out here.

“Let me drive,” Bellamy says. “You can sleep in the back or something.” 

Marlowe leans back against the pillows, tearing at the wrapper of a granola bar. Crumbs scatter along the quilt. “You don’t have your license.” 

“Who gives a shit?”

“I do, all right? It’s my truck, and you’re basically a missing person. If we get caught, I’ll get into a crap ton of trouble for helping you. You get that, right?” 

It doesn’t work like that, Bellamy wants to say, but she presses her face into the pillow instead. It smells clean. 

They’ve only been gone ten hours. Her father probably hasn’t even noticed yet, too busy getting drunk at the bar down the street. Bellamy never spent much time at home anyway. She stayed with Marlowe or Eliza or Ben. Anyone whose parents hadn’t gotten too annoyed with her presence. When she was at home, she tucked herself away in her bedroom, door locked, headphones over her ears. The sound never drowned out the slam of the cupboards or the shatter of the plates or his voice, slurred, as he screamed about the neighbors. 

“I’ll be eighteen in October,” Bellamy says, words muffled against the fabric. 

“And it’s March, Bel. You don’t think the school’s going to start suspecting something when you aren’t there after spring break? Hell, they’ll call your dad Monday morning. Then what? The whole town will be out looking for you and you don’t even care.”

“I didn’t ask you to come with me.” 

“What would you have done if I hadn’t?”

“I would’ve figured something out.” 

This isn’t the first time Bellamy’s tried to run away.

When she was six, she hid underneath the neighbor’s porch until a hoard of carpenter ants started to crawl across her bare legs. She didn’t have a reason, then. Her father still had a job, and he only drank on the weekends. Her grandmother was still alive. She just needed to be alone, sometimes. To pretend like she could do something on her own.

When she was eleven, she climbed into the back of Aunt Briar’s car after her grandmother’s funeral. They made it to the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border before one of her cousins tattled. Her father hugged her too tight when she got back. He might’ve cried, but the memory is too foggy to be sure. 

When she was thirteen, she camped out in the woods for a week until a hunter found her chasing a squirrel up a tree, too hungry to care what she ate. Her father had just lost his job, then. “Laid-off,” he said. “Just temporary,” he said. “We’ll be fine,” he said. 

When she was sixteen, she convinced a stranger to drive her to Ohio, but they couldn’t take her any further than Columbus, and she didn’t have money for a bus. She had to call Uncle Nick to come pick her up. The drive home was quiet and awkward, and he hadn’t bothered to ask her why she was there. (“My sister— Well, your mom, I guess, did the same thing when we were little. Drove Mom nuts.”) When he dropped her off at the house, her father sat at the kitchen table, beer cans scattered across the counter. He hadn’t noticed she was gone. Uncle Nick hadn’t told him. (“Our secret, kiddo.”)

She thought she could wait one more year. Suffer through the last few months of senior year. Apply for colleges she couldn’t afford in states all along the west coast. Watch her father waste away, more like a stranger than family. 

And then he hit her. 

Not hard. Not a punch. Just his palm against her cheek with a sound that left them both reeling in the dark of the kitchen. He didn’t apologize. Didn’t cry. Didn’t beg for forgiveness. 

He pulled another beer from the fridge, and the crack of the tab made her flinch harder than the slap. 

“It’s one night, Bel. I’m tired, you're tired.” Marlowe crushes the wrapper in her fist. Lobs it into the trash can beside the desk. It misses. She sighs. “Look, Oregon isn’t going anywhere soon. We don’t have to rush.” 

On the nightstand, Marlowe’s phone lights up. 

600 miles feels like a concession. It’s the farthest she’s ever gone, but it’s not enough. Every tick of the clock gives the world a chance to force her backward. 

“How about this: if I get sleepy tomorrow, I’ll let you drive if you go the speed limit and only pass semi-trucks. No stunts. No shenanigans. No NASCAR Bellamy. Deal?”

Bellamy flips over to her back. The mattress squeaks. “I guess.”

She gives it another minute before she swings her legs off the bed and marches toward the door. The men have disappeared, but the silence they’ve behind is almost worse. She checks the lock. Tries to resist the urge to check it again, then does it anyway. When she turns away from the peephole, Marlowe is tucking herself under the quilt, hand under her chin. She looks comfortable. 

“How long do you need?”

“Full eight, baby.” Before Bellamy can protest, she continues. “I’ll buy us breakfast in the morning. Anything you want. IHOP. Waffle House. Taco Bell. Mix-and-match, even.” 

“And you promise I can drive?” 

“Only if I’m sleepy.” 

Bellamy sucks in a breath, then lets it whoosh out. There are two locks on the door. She has her knife. Marlowe has her pepper spray. They’ll be fine. “I’m setting an alarm for seven.” 

“Eight.” 

“Seven.”

“All right, all right.” Marlowe snuggles deeper under the covers, half her face hidden in the darkness of the room. “You win. Seven it is.” 

Despite the remote strangeness of an unknown place, Marlowe drops off to sleep as quickly as she does in her own bedroom. Soft snores escape the cave she’s made from the blankets. It’s familiar enough to lull Bellamy into relaxing on the bed, boots on, fingers curled around the handle of her switchblade. 

 ***

Bellamy wakes with a flinch. 

On the other side of the room, Marlowe fidgets under the covers, one leg dangling off the edge of the mattress. Her phone sits on the nightstand. Its cracked screen lights up with another text message, the buzz rattling against dark wood. The clock beside it reads 6:27.

She reaches for it, clumsy and bleary-eyed with sleep.

It takes her three tries to get the pattern password right.

Another text—almost there!—pops up, then collapses. It doesn’t have a name attached, but the area code is familiar, and Bellamy sits up, too aware of her heart as it thuds in her chest. It takes her too long to click on the notification. To scroll through the thread.

It’s Uncle Nick.

For a moment, she thought that maybe, maybe, her father had shaken himself out of his fog. That he felt bad. That he’d drive all this way to tell her he’d change. That he loved her enough to try, at least. But it’s just Uncle Nick, always so eager to clean up his precious brother-in-law’s mess. 

I’ll let you drive as long as you want.

Bellamy sets the phone down too hard against the nightstand. It rattles the alarm clock, the truck keys. Sloshes the water in Marlowe’s water bottle. 

She told Uncle Nick where they were. She drove this way because she knew he lived close by. She never had any intention of taking Bellamy to Oregon with her.

I want to keep her safe, Marlowe told Uncle Nick.

Time ticks by too slowly in the dark motel room. She sits at the edge of the bed, frozen, switchblade abandoned at her side. She can’t go back home. She can’t stay with Uncle Nick. Aunt Briar might’ve been an option a year ago, but she gave birth to twins last month—no way she has the room or the money to pay for another mouth.

Her eyes slide to Marlowe.

There’s an explanation buried somewhere in her head, but Bellamy can’t get past the sharp sting of betrayal. It burrows holes in her heart. Tells her to get away. To run before Marlowe wakes, before Uncle Nick shows up. 

The bed’s springs creak as she gets up.

Unlike Marlowe, most of Bellamy’s things are still in the truck. All she has to do is unplug her charger and pluck her backpack from underneath the desk. The noise doesn’t bother Marlowe. It would take an earthquake. It would take Bellamy shoving at her until a sleep-fogged eye cracked open. 

She stands in the middle of the room. Looks at Marlowe. Looks at the phone on the nightstand. Looks at the keys right beside it. 

It’s easier to take them than it should’ve been.

No one’s outside when she eases the door open, grimacing at the squeaky hinges. Her switchblade hangs heavy in the pocket of her hoodie. The keys slip in her sweaty hands. She’s never used either, before, as confident as she pretends to be. It makes her feel small. Like she’s six years old again, ants on her legs, her arms, her face.

She unlocks the truck. Climbs inside. Starts it. 

With her hands on the wheel, Bellamy hesitates. 

Everything is so much bigger and quieter now that she’s by herself. Hamilton doesn’t blare from the speakers. The cup holders sit empty. Even the duck hanging from the mirror doesn’t spin with its usual enthusiasm. But Marlowe didn’t want her. Their trip was always going to get cut short. 

She puts the truck in reverse. 

—Sam Burnette

Pouches

Another driver would’ve left the trailer door open, let the spring air wash over the pallets full of pouches, folded oranges and whites sealed tight as new shoes. My eyes couldn’t leave them alone. They’d never seen that many before.

When Craig the lumper finished and I roared the door down, echoes sheltering in my bones, he said, “You’re the last one,” and I tried not to worry if it’d be enough. It was the longest week of April, the longest of 2020, and I felt gorged with guilt, a feeling that I should be doing more than hammer down I-95’s bare lanes to Elmhurst Hospital, then to the forty-five mobile morgues beneath the Empire State Building. I was grateful to drive a dry van – God knew what awaited the reefers, the pouches filled, lumpy and cold. I’d heard they might take them to Hart Island. Potter’s Field.

The warehouse pulsed with the final chirp of a forklift before it caved in with silence. I can still hear it now, sometimes. That old quiet filling me up.

I’d gotten lost in a memory of my late grandfather telling me about his mother, how I had her eyebrows, steep arches like baseball stitching. He liked to remember her, he said, and I carried part of her with me, and part of him too, and my parents and teachers and friends and all the tedious commercial jingles that interrupted morning cartoons. I’d been wondering how there could be enough room inside of me for anything more than the pieces of others when Craig poked my shoulder, the latched trailer filled with bags inside bags. I felt like I was shrinking.

His eyes brimmed over like he’d been waiting for me all month, like he couldn’t wait to say it. “We fill them with emptiness,” he said, and I could tell he was holding back. After a soundless double shift, he had so much more he could say.

I grinned behind my mask, wanting to give him something in return, something he’d remember. One use only, I thought, then, We carry them and they carry us, but it’d only trivialize his hours, this truck and warehouse, the job we were doing. Our bodies went one way, the memories another. There was no other way to say it. “I hope they don’t need more,” I said, the words just tumbling out, and he stared above my eyes. I kept picturing my own eyebrows, thinking about the memories of my grandfather that only I had.

Craig handed me the box of ankle bands. “It’s just enough. We just keep on going.”

And the road was a balm, and the trill was a turn, and the tunnel was my great grandmother’s eye. That whole hallowed drive, I wondered if she could see me.

—Joseph Celizic

Widowmaker

Bailey rarely thought about it – the incident – but when she did, it felt like something heavy had crashed down on her from the sky. She hadn’t seen her grandfather since then, and good riddance. Her mother had known that something wasn’t right as soon as she picked her up from the cabin after what was supposed to be a fun weekend with grandpa when Bailey was six. She’d never said a word about it, never spoken the truth out loud, but after that she was never brought back to the cabin again.

Twenty-five years later when she learned that he had died, she was taken aback to find that she felt nothing. Nothing, that is, besides a vague sense of surprise that he had left the cabin in the mountains to her and her alone.

The sky was thick with clouds as Bailey drove up the winding mountain road with her phone GPS propped on the dashboard. It was autumn, moving into winter, and the weather at this elevation was much colder than she’d expected. She’d picked up the key from the estate lawyer, packed a weekend bag, and stopped at Walmart to fill her trunk with cleaning supplies. She knew this was her ticket out, and she wasn’t going to let something as ephemeral and stupid as childhood trauma stop her from taking it.

Just one weekend. That’s all it was. She would shove everything in trash bags, clear the place out, and be gone by Sunday morning. It would suck, most likely, but then it would be over. She would find a realtor on Monday, sell the place to whoever wanted it for whatever they were willing to pay, and use the money to start a new life in a new city someplace where nobody knew her.

A certain song came on over the Bluetooth and Bailey felt her body tense. She needed to stop putting the damn thing on shuffle; it never ended well. She quickly switched it over to something that wouldn’t make her think of her very-recently-ex wife Jess, and focused on the road.

As she approached the turnoff to the village, a prickling sensation crept across her skin, and she fought a visceral urge to turn the car around. She knew this place. She’d hoped she wouldn’t remember it this vividly, but she did. The crisp air, the towering pine trees. All of it. Just one weekend. She repeated it to herself like a mantra and continued driving.

And then there it was: 1414 Conifer Drive. Her grandfather’s house. It looked worse than she remembered. The faded green shutters hung lopsided off the windows. The yard was overgrown and littered with old tires and trash. A rusty, dinged-up rowboat with holes in the bow sat on cinderblocks in the driveway. Bailey’s jaw clenched and she felt a rare stab of anger as she put the car in park. She pushed it down and swallowed it like a pill. She had no time for that type of thing; if she let herself start, she might never stop.

The front door creaked in a way that was both pitiful and violent, which made sense considering who it had belonged to. Bailey dropped her weekend bag on the floor and let her eyes adjust to the dusty, stagnant living room. It was like she’d stepped through a portal to her own nightmares; the house was exactly as it always had been. The dirty jute rug, the carved wooden mallards on the fireplace mantel, the camo print curtains that hung limp across the windows. Bailey left the front door open and drifted through the space. The smell of must and cobwebs and everything elderly clung to the fabric of the house, overpowering her. Down the hall from the living room, she pushed open the door to the tiny guest room, barely more than a closet, where she’d slept as a child. Same furniture. Same quilt on the bed.

Bailey felt her throat constrict and backed out of the room as the walls of it seemed to swell, threatening to consume her. She stumbled to the living room and out the open door. On the weed-choked walkway she closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, letting the sharp resin scent of the pine trees wash over her.

Just one weekend.

With her emotions carefully tucked back into their usual storage compartment, Bailey opened her eyes and strode to the trunk of her car where the trash bags and cleaning supplies were waiting.

#

Bailey had always liked cleaning. It was one of the few things, possibly the only thing, that had made her a good wife. Sure, she had attachment issues out the ass and a chronic distrust of monogamy, but at least Jess had always come home to a clean house. 

It had been difficult at first, stuffing her grandfather’s life into trash bags, but now that she’d been doing it for several hours she was in the groove. The living room was nearly empty; the wooden mallards on the fireplace were all that remained. She shoved them in a full bag and dragged it to the curb to join the dozens of others. The sun was setting, and the sky was an abstract painting swirled with pinks and purples. The sight of it, combined with the crispness of the autumn mountain air, fortified her ever so slightly. She still needed to clear out the guest room and the master suite, but she’d made good progress today and deserved a reward for all her efforts. And if she was being honest, she deserved a break from being in that house.

She stuffed her keys in her pocket, shut the front door, and headed down the driveway to make her way into town on foot. As she passed her car parked on the street, she froze. Smack in the middle of the hood was a dent so deep it could have served as a birdbath. Bailey groaned and looked around the car for the culprit. And there it was, just beside the front wheel: an enormous pinecone, nearly two feet tall and with giant, painful-looking spikes.

Widowmakers, her grandfather had called them. It came back to her suddenly and without warning: the image of her six-year-old self proudly lugging a pinecone half the size of her body into the house, and her grandfather telling about her how in the old mining days they used to fall off trees and kill the miners. She hadn’t known what a widow was then, but she knew that these pinecones could make one. Later, after the incident, she would imagine a pinecone falling from the sky and killing her grandfather before he could come near her. She’d felt guilty about how badly she’d wished for it.

Bailey kicked the giant pinecone away from her car, feeling sick.

#

The Grizzly Paw was your basic mountain dive bar: pool table, cheap whiskey, lots of guys in flannel. Bailey chose a seat at the bar and watched the bartender as she chatted with some regulars at the other end. She was a tall, tattooed, no-nonsense kind of woman – exactly Bailey’s type. She’d met Jess at a place like this too. Crazy how you can go from a bar booth to the altar to divorce court all in the span of three years.

But she didn’t want to think about Jess right now, so she pushed all that into the storage compartment.

Bailey caught the bartender’s eye and the woman made her way over.

“What’s the vibe tonight, babe?” the bartender asked. Bailey loved women who called everyone “babe.” It was so silly and endearing.

“Whiskey’s always the vibe,” she said, and added a little tilt of her head and the briefest flicker of a look towards the bartender’s lips, then back to her eyes again. All the usual tried and true moves. The bartender smiled in a way that let Bailey know she wasn’t new to this.

“Rocks?”

“Neat.”

“You got it.”

The bartender poured a glass and slid it over to Bailey.

“What’s your name?” Bailey asked.

“Marina,” she said, and leaned both elbows on the bar, bringing herself closer to Bailey.

“What’s fun to do around here, Marina?”

“Depends what you’re into. What brings you up the mountain…?”

“Bailey. And I’m just here for the weekend.”

“That’s lucky. It’s a life sentence for me.”

“You might need to check in with your parole officer later tonight,” Bailey said, and took a sip of her whiskey.

“Maybe so. What do you do for a living?”
“Parole officer,” Bailey teased in a low, seductive voice.

Marina smiled.

Sometimes it really was that easy.

#

They walked up the hill together after Marina’s shift. Bailey loved this part, the preamble of it all, the period of time where it was all just games and didn’t mean anything, where you had no idea if the sex would be good or if the girl would wind up breaking your soul into pieces. The part where it was all for fun.

Marina was taller than her, but Bailey wrapped an arm around her waist as they walked, both of them tipsy and flirtatious.

“You always hit on bartenders when you’re in a new town?” Marina asked.

“Only when they look like you.”
Bailey stopped in the street and grinned at Marina. She moved in until they were a fraction of an inch apart. Marina gave a little teasing smirk as if to say I dare you, and Bailey never could resist a dare. She kissed her. Marina’s lip gloss tasted like watermelon; her lips were soft, and her cheek felt smooth under Bailey’s thumb. She wondered what Jess was doing right now – no.

Just one weekend.

No thoughts, just this.

“You’re a good kisser,” Marina whispered in her ear, and Bailey chose to believe that it was true.

Bailey took Marina’s hand and led her the rest of the way up the hill. But as they approached the house with its dilapidated yard and rusted rowboat, something almost imperceptible shifted in the way Marina’s presence felt beside her. As Bailey moved to head up the walkway to the house, Marina suddenly froze. She turned to look and found her staring at Bailey with an expression of alarm.

“You’re staying here?” Marina asked.

“Just for the weekend.”

“You know whose house that is?”

“It was my grandfather’s,” Bailey said, hoping her voice sounded as level as she was desperately trying to make it.

Marina stared at her. All traces of fun and flirtation had evaporated.

Without a word or warning, Marina turned on her heel and hurried away back down the hill, her tall form disappearing quickly in the darkness. Bailey didn’t call after her.

#

The living room couch was like a torture device, but Bailey would’ve rather slept in the woods, or on a bed of nails for that matter, than in the guest room. She laid awake and stared up at the nicotine-stained ceiling, waiting for her heartrate to slow.

It didn’t.

Somewhere around midnight, she dragged herself up from the couch and walked in a near-dream state down the hall to the guest room.

The moonlight fell gently through the dirty widow and onto the quilt that she remembered from her childhood. Bailey took a dried-up Bic pen from the cup on the desk and dug the tip into the fabric of the quilt, tearing a small hole. She pulled at the hole, trying to rip the thing apart –

But a sudden pounding at the front door made her freeze.

For a single, insane second, Bailey spun around expecting to see her grandfather standing over her in the doorway. She shook the thought from her head and made her way back to the living room, where the pounding on the front door continued.

“Who is it?”

“Marina.”

Bailey opened the door and sure enough, there was Marina, looking just as tall and beautiful as she had earlier, but now infinitely more distressed.

“Do you know who your grandfather was?” Marina said. She seemed feral with rage. Her fists were clenched at her sides and her eyes were blazing.

Bailey felt the floor loosening beneath her, threatening to send her falling into an abyss, but she fought it back and kept her voice even.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said quietly.

“He was an evil man,” Marina said. “Did you know that?”

“It’s late. A pinecone fell and hit my car. I’m just here for the weekend.” Bailey heard herself listing out these unrelated facts and knew on some level that they were irrelevant to the conversation at hand, but they were also things that she knew to be true, and that felt safe to her.“He was evil,” Marina repeated, and Bailey was mortified to see tears forming in her eyes.

For a fraction of an instant, a possible path for the immediate future flashed before Bailey. She could tell Marina that yes, she knew her grandfather was evil, that she had seen it for herself. She could say she was sorry for whatever he had done to her, and confide that he had done it to her too. She could reach out to this stranger in front of her who it seemed had lived a version of the exact same painful life, and maybe they could do something for each other that nobody else could do. Maybe they could fix something in each other that he had broken.

But that would require a lot of her.

That would require speaking it out loud.

And Bailey had never spoken it out loud.

“It’s late,” she repeated, her voice hollow and superficial.

Marina’s face clenched up in rage. For a moment Bailey wondered if she might hit her, or scream, or try to burn the house down. But then she turned on her heel and once again disappeared into the darkness.

Bailey shut the door and stood stock still in the musty, silent living room. Her body knew before her mind did that she was not staying for the weekend. She had already grabbed her keys and her weekend bag and was moving towards the door when her brain began to register this.

#

The mountain road was pitch black and treacherous with only the light of the moon and her headlights to guide her. Bailey drove too fast and left the windows down. Her eyes watered and tears streaked her face, but she told herself it was only the cold air from the open window.

She plugged in her phone, swerving a little on the narrow road, and prayed for the stereo to drown out her thoughts. Dammit – that song again; the one that reminded her of Jess. She felt like she might vomit. When would she get to stop remembering things? When would she get to just be silent? When –

A heavy mass catapulted down onto the windshield. Bailey screamed. The glass shattered in front of her and she swerved violently to the side of the road, just barely missing the edge of oblivion and a sheer two-hundred-foot cliff.

She sat breathing heavily for a long moment. Her knuckles were white on the wheel. The moonlight danced through the pine trees overhead and glimmered across the shattered windshield.

Bailey clambered out of the car and looked back towards the scene of the incident. In the middle of the road, a widowmaker sat on its side, its sharp spikes taunting her in the darkness.

#

—Amy Monaghan

The Standoff

It had been football for too long. Chester Belknap was tired of it, so he thumbed off the TV. Trina laid up with the shingles. Bad sick since Friday. There’d been no work’s-over beer and bull session. Saturday, no whiskey extra frisky. There’d been yet another report about how all the computers weren’t going to work right once the new year started. And then there’d been football. There’d been football too long. He looked at the remote control. He set it down. He got up for maybe a drink or something to settle himself. Shingles. The mess was a fright. She couldn’t stand anything touching her. He thought he should see if she was ready for soup. Earlier, he’d been to the store and gotten more chicken noodle. Trina wanted popsicles, and he picked up a varied assortment. Her fever was still high, and she was back there in the bed suffering. She could have whatever kind of popsicle she wanted.

Chester missed his sweet baby.

A gunshot rang out across the road from Clayvon Groth’s place. Then another. Now, a man hollered out as if in celebration, and several more shots followed in rapid succession.

Chester approached the windows. A big man, his steps made the trailer creak. Not as stealthy as he once was when guns were firing close. The thought became a memory, an image of his right hand, dirty from wet foliage, holding a Zippo lighter while grenades were going off near his patrol. They’d had an element of surprise to exploit. The trailer’s cheap windowpanes were frosted, it’d been sleeting off and on, and it was dark, but he could see clearly the house the new people lived in was all lit up. The woman’s name was Rosalind – Roz – and she was a looker Chester had sure enough watched moving about over there. She liked short shorts even in cool weather, but now it was cold and Trina’d said she didn’t want to be with the man anymore. Nelson Mills. Trina’d said she could see it plain. Roz’s truck sat by the propane tank. Nelson’s shiny new Wrangler across the way. They had kids over there but they’d been gone since maybe Wednesday. All the time cussing and yelling at each other, those two. Nothing but trouble over there. Nelson a big talker about his time in Desert Storm. That summer he’d gotten in trouble for flashing a knife at an umpire working his oldest daughter’s softball game. Was the woman in danger? Rosalind?

Chester stood back from the trailer’s window. Trina said the problem for Nelson’s woman was that she feared to leave. That house all lit up, but lonely. Normally full of kids, it hadn’t been for days now. All those gunshots.

“Trina,” he called to the bedroom. “Baby. Something’s bad wrong out there. Better call the sheriff and tell them to come quick. That Nelson Mills is up to no good.”

Chester kept his long guns locked up but for a 12-gauge on foam hooks over the door. Trina’s chicken coop meant dealing with possums and coons and foxes and what all. He had a pistol, but it was in the bedroom, where Trina was laid up.

“Chester,” she called. “What the hell is going on?”

The Remington was a pump action similar to the one he sometimes carried on patrol in Nam. Wingmaster, this one.

“Trina,” he called, holding that cannon. “Baby, now you stay put back here. There’s trouble out there.”

“Chester!” she called.

The gun was loaded. He fingered off its safety. He felt the stirrings of long ago. The guilt of bloodshed but also the elation. Couldn’t deny either. He felt unsettled.

It’s like his body didn’t feel his steps. Trina called after him as he readied to open the door. She called his name again. She sounded bad afraid. There’d been that afternoon not long after they moved in over there. Nelson had said something to Trina, she’d told him. “There’s an ass a man can sure enough grab ahold of,” Nelson had said to her. He’d said it, she’d said, with his hands in his back pockets, like a real Mr. Hotshot. A gym rat, and proud of himself that way. Chester had hated that man then, and he sure God loathed him now.

Front door usually stuck, so he eased it open. Sneaked down the concrete block steps. The old ways coming back.

The air smelled like ice. Across the road he saw that Clayvon Groth lay crumpled on mossy pavement patchy with sleet. Most likely dead. Must’ve been. Wasn’t moving in that way of being dead. Nelson Mills was crossing Clayvon’s yard with a tactical rifle. It was like Chester saw Nelson first – he was the one with a gun – but his mind had gone to Clayvon – the dead one of his own. Clayvon a work friend who’d turned him on to this property he meant to build a dream home for Trina. For them to go ahead and get old in now that the kids were grown.

Chester worked the pump to chamber a round and send that classic signal of hands up.

Nelson Mills drew still.

“That’s right,” Chester said. “You best drop that fancy rifle, boy.”

Nelson started to turn.

“I’ll kill you deader than Hell,” Chester said.

Nelson kept still. Halfway turned before the barrel of the shotgun, he’d have looked damned vulnerable but for the rifle he continued to hold.

“Chester,” he said. “You ought to let me be, now. God ain’t got no trouble with you.”

Chester looked down the shotgun. “You keep still now,” he said. “You lift that rifle, you’re dead.”

The neighborhood was a scattering of little houses and trailers along a two-lane in the woods. Chester’s work shed had a security light and it cast long weird shadows. In its blurry glow the men stood on either side of the road, maybe twenty yards between them. Nelson with a rifle pointed at the ground, Chester with a shotgun aimed at Nelson. The gunmetal he looked down like a river under a moon. The side of Nelson’s face looked blue like gray blue. Chester licked his lips. When he’d killed before it had been at night. He remembered the smell of warm hay and manure and that the other man looked the more certain warrior. On that night, Chester had carried a rifle like Nelson’s. He’d also been lucky. They’d had the element of surprise. Then the other man surprised him anyway, but his rifle jammed. That look in his face as Chester pulled the trigger stuck with him all this time, festering like those Goddamn shingles, and it had been devasting for him to contemplate. That look had done real hard damage to him.

He’d forgotten a coat. Nelson wore a camouflage down one. Twenty yards at least. The shotgun heavy.

Clayvon had said come warm weather he’d help with some of the carpentry on what would become Chester’s dream home with Trina. They hadn’t talked as much after his wife’s misfortune. Clayvon had been defensive about her. He drank more than Chester liked to anymore. Now he lay dead on the ground.

“Nelson,” Chester said. “You drop that rifle. You stop all this.”

Nelson grinned. Even at this distance and in this spooky light he could see it. Malignant was the word. “God ain’t telling me to kill you,” he said. “Or wasn’t.” He shook his head, like he found all this humorous. “Got the wrath of God in me,” he said. “Mine is a righteous anger.”

“That what you think?” Chester said.

“I reckon,” he said. “Just said so.”

“God wouldn’t’ve told you to kill Clayvon,” Chester said. “Clayvon Groth was a damn good man.”

“Clayvon Groth carried off my woman,” Nelson Mills said. “Don’t that make it right? She done left me, and he’s the one took her away.”

Chester absorbed the intelligence. The harsh logic meant to defend his actions. The realization Rosalind wasn’t even over there. She wasn’t in danger.

Chester swallowed hard. He gripped the walnut pump. The stock warm in his palm. The finger cold in this cold. A man with a gun willing to talk was at least a fighting chance. But Nelson didn’t seem willing to drop it. Chester should fire.

“You know that ain’t right,” Chester said.

“Do I?” Nelson said. “Do you?”

“I don’t reckon I care one way or the other what you think,” Chester said. “You’ve killed a good man here, Nelson.”

“Took my woman away,” Nelson said. He nudged the rifle up a little. “Took her from me off to who knows where?”

Chester gripped the shotgun. “You drop that rifle,” he said. What if he fired right then? Why shouldn’t he? Hadn’t he learned at least that much?

“So, if I’s to take Miss Trina in there from you?” Nelson said. “You wouldn’t hear from God on the subject of killing me?”

“How much you had to drink today?” Chester said. “Here I was worried you could aim.”

“You better not assume anything about me,” Nelson said. “You know what’s good for you, old man, you’ll worry about this rifle I got here cradled in my loving arms.”

Chester longed for the trailer. He hadn’t thought this through. Plain hadn’t. Didn’t realize he’d be so conflicted. Should’ve. Now what?

“Nelson,” he said. “Listen.” His mind swam around lost. “You shoot a man in a state of passion over a domestic situation, yes, that’s one thing. Shooting up the neighborhood is whole different thing. Just saying. You’re going to get arrested one way or the other. Might as well make it easier on yourself.”

“Don’t have to get arrested,” Nelson said.

“Nelson,” Chester said. He felt his legs trembling now. Then this harsh cascade of cold rippled up from his waist through his shoulders and down his arms holding the shotgun. He was trembling out here from fear and cold. He couldn’t think of what to do to get out of this situation. The 12-gauge heavier than he remembered. His triceps and lats felt the strain.

“Chester,” Nelson said. He shook his head, like to get focused. Like something bothering him Chester couldn’t hear. Now that moment was gone. Nelson was staring at him, his face craned around on his neck. He looked agitated. The rifle rose a peg.

“God talking to me hard over here, Chester,” Nelson said. “Thing is, God wasn’t telling me to kill you. I wasn’t after you until you came out here and pointed that firebreather at me. What do you think about that? I got better people to kill than you. You ought to let me go.”

Chester gripped the heavy gun. Why wouldn’t he just pull the trigger? Who would miss this punk bastard? Chester had killed in Nam, but he’d dealt with all of that, and got past it with therapy. Now here he was in this situation, and he didn’t have the stuff.

Chester lowered the shotgun to his waist. He kept it dead on Nelson from down at his waist. Maybe he’d look tougher, but he did it for the lats. He wasn’t that buff kid that got drafted anymore. He was that middle-aged bastard that felt called to this misguided mission. And now this here.

“Nelson,” Chester said. “I ain’t letting you kill anyone else, but I could see us standing here until the sheriff comes. You could go quietly. Maybe they could help you. Counselors they got nowadays are real good at this kind of thing.”

“Now ain’t that sweet?” Nelson said. “Here you are trying to help me.”

The trailer’s door rasped opened.

“Trina!” Chester said. He glanced over to see she’d come out barefoot in her nightgown, sweating with fever. She held the revolver with outstretched arms and slipped on the concrete block steps so that she stumbled into the drive, waving the gun. He called to her again as two shots rang out and his right shoulder blossomed with pain and the Wingmaster fell from him. He gasped, swaying like he would fall. Something in his chest. There were more shots and he dropped to his knees reaching with the one arm for the shotgun, but then Trina fell. Trina. On the ground just to the side and back a few paces. Dead. She’d been shot repeatedly in the chest, and she’d fallen crumpled on her side but mostly on her back with an arm flung out. The pistol had flown up spinning and come to rest by the concrete blocks she’d stepped down to this miserable end.

Nelson Mills crossed the two-lane with the rifle aimed at him. “Goddamn you,” he said. He’d already said it two or three times. “Goddamn you, you miserable backwoods hick.”

Chester sat back on the icy ground. He felt too awful to think. Across the way, Nelson’s picture window had been shot out. Trina must’ve done it. Chester smiled at the idea. She’d’ve laughed.

“Look at you,” Nelson said.

Far away came the sound of a siren. Another joined in. It was a big county, spread out and mostly woods after a day of intermittent sleet. No one out. Woodsmoke in the air. She’d been shot so many times.

Nelson sank down on his heels and took the shotgun. He got up quick and ran over to his property, a long gun in each hand. He had the shiny new Wrangler over there. This vehicle he put the guns in. Then he climbed in after them. The big machine lurched around in the dirt drive. Now Nelson eased onto the icy pavement in the opposite direction of those sirens still too far away to mean anything.

Chester took a breath. He exhaled into the sky and saw that it was clearing. The plume of his breath faded and there were stars. He’d never been a praying man but for Nam, yet it bothered him that Nelson would talk that way. Nelson running around killing people. God would’ve tried to say something to talk him out of it. God wouldn’t have wanted Trina all shot up like that. But it was more than that. Who gave a care what Nelson thought about anything? It was that the man in Nam wasn’t like this punk ass here. No. He was fighting for a reason. Chester had killed a man with purpose in his heart but spared one with malice in his.

Oh, dear God. Trina. Oh, dear God.

It wasn’t just his shoulder. His chest ached with something like a burning spear of iron thrust through it. Chester Belknap was dying and nothing hardly made sense to him. He was fixing to die. His mind flickered in and out seeing Clayvon on the ground and Trina bloody in her nightgown. He must’ve heard the sirens, but he wasn’t sure anymore.

Her body sprawled on the ground like that, unmoving in that way of being dead. Her thighs shimmering in the security light. The blood like something brown and black. Her face hidden from him, for her head was back and chin up, and he couldn’t move closer. This partner to him all these years. She’d looked so grim, coming out with the pistol. She’d come out to try and help. He should have stayed inside. They would’ve had each other.

“Oh, Trina,” he said. “Oh, my sweet baby.”

—Chuck Plunkett

Before She Knows

 “Her mother stopped picking and said, ‘Now, Sal, you run along and pick your own berries. Mother wants to take her berries home and can them for next winter.’” — from Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

This is ok, right? Bob says we will be fine. The hill isn’t too steep, the weather isn’t too hot. She loves it, right?

Kuplink.

She loved practicing yesterday. Bob got the marbles down from the cupboard.

I couldn’t watch. I was so afraid some uncontrollable, magnetic force — I know, marbles are glass — but that knowledge doesn’t stop me from thinking that when her mouth opened to laugh or to say thank you for the marbles, something like an invisible fairy, as ridiculous as that sounds, was going to pluck the marbles out of Bob’s outstretched palm and toss them into her gaped mouth.

Choking. That’s all I could think about. She was going to choke on these practice marbles, and I would have to do something about it.

I turned away from them and gripped my mug of tea. I shut my eyes. I couldn’t remember, was it a back slap first or a chest thrust?

Then the rushing sound – like a wave caught inside a shell, that I sometimes get inside my head when I need to decide something, but I don’t quite know what yet – made me open my eyes. But the rushing sound was not inside my head.

I turned and looked back at the magnetic field that had no metal, the invisible fairy-tossing, choking scene. But she wasn’t choking. Bob was looking at me, smiling, his palm open. Sally had placed all three marbles ever so quietly into the bottom of her little tin pail. She was sitting cross-legged on the tile, swirling her bucket.

Kuplank.

Oh, good. She’s following along behind me, like we talked about yesterday, picking the shiny blue ones, delicately, between her thumb and finger.

She still has the pudgy baby skin around her wrist.

She cried this morning when I told her she couldn’t wear the dress. Bob said it would be alright, there hadn’t been a deer on blueberry hill in ages, but he couldn’t be here to pick berries with us, and he is the expert at spotting ticks in skin folds, so I’m glad I found that pair of coveralls that the cat kept hidden behind the yellow chair. I’d washed them, of course, but I didn’t have time to replace the missing button.

She insisted on wearing her red leather shoes though, the ones with the fuzzy straps on the underside, fuzzy like a kitten’s chin. She didn’t like that I wanted her to wear socks. I even said that she could wear the frilly ones that she likes, but she crossed her arms and stuck out her lower lip and tears leaked out of her eyes. Bob must have known she wouldn’t want to wear the socks without the dress. He said not wearing socks would be fine. How am I going to look for ticks under those pant legs without taking the coveralls off? I’ll have to strip her naked next to the car before we leave, just in case.

Kuplunk.

Fall is coming. And then winter. And then the long nights when the bay freezes at its edges and we can’t get a boat in, and we eat tinned peaches and tuna fish and evaporated milk over canned blueberries. So many blueberries. Do you remember? Sally ate so many last year she pooped straight blueberry skins for a week! Ha.

Sally?

Kuplink.

Oh. There she is, her curls shining between the dark ridges of the blueberry branches, like blinding bits of light on the water, right before the sun sets, a perfect time to walk on the shore.

I used to love walking the seashore. I would look for a half clam shell with a tiny hole in it perfect to string on a necklace, or a grey tufted feather wider at the tip stuck under the ridge of shells and pebbles lining the edge of the flat, wetter sand where it was pushed up by the waves the night before.

Or I would look for a creamy white sand dollar under that same ridge of pebbles. The way to find one is by noticing its long, thin petals stamped into the center, more oblong than anything else on the beach, an odd, out-of-place-looking thing, but when noticed together, all five petals make the perfect sea flower.

A sand dollar was the only thing better than the unbroken orange scallop shell my brother found just by walking into a wave – he wasn’t even looking for it! – but my mother praised the shell as perfect and my father nodded and crossed his arms behind his back and said, good job, Davie.

But you’ll see. I’ll find something better.

And I raced down the beach, feet slapping over the packed sand, saltwater spray up my ankles and behind my knees…the water goes out, and I think I see something, a black something between the rocks at the edge, where the last wave pushes the sand to the shore and the rocks stay behind.

But it is just algae on a smooth, white pebble. I race the water back in, back out, then toss the pebble along the surface of the water, like flashes of light on a windowpane.

I run on. Around the beach break, to the cove on the other side, never having been this far down the beach before, but knowing this must be the place.

There, in a pool of still, translucent water, a ring of urchin spines pricks the salt air. The ones on the edge don’t have enough room to get under the water completely – the tips of their spines are dull and flaky – they must wait, and be patient, and hope the tide changes soon enough.

There, in the bottom of the pool between the clumps of thin, black points. I reach into the still water – little circles go out from my arm – and I touch its rough white surface. I slip my fingers underneath the disk and remove it from the waters. It is light, it is empty. I rub my thumb over the dimples on the front. I hold it up, a perfect sand dollar.

I turn around.

See?

But they aren’t there.

A lady with bushy hair and a red, white, and blue sweatband jogs past. Her white sneakers have sand on the toes, her white tube socks have brown sand marks on the inside of her calves. A man and a woman walk by holding hands, both naked from the waist up. Then a kid. Then another woman, a girl, a boy, an aunt, an uncle, cousins, surfers, stoners, more joggers, a scientist, a lady with flowers in her hair, a grocery store clerk, four pimply high schoolers with foam boards under their arms, long hair, short hair, green hair. But no Davie, or mom, or dad.

I grip the white disk and run back the way I think I should go. My feet sink into the sand, sucking into the wet. I cannot find a lifeguard. I cannot find our red and white and blue striped beach umbrella. I search everywhere, for anyone.

A grandmother sees me.

She has hair the color of the bay on a stormy day, although I would not know what the bay looks like then.

She clutched the skirt of her black swimsuit dress. The water dripped down her wrinkled thighs.

Perhaps she too would have seen a fairy that tosses marbles in front of open mouths, that snatches them back before they are swallowed by toddlers. If I knew her now, I would ask her that.

She looked down at me. She knew.

She took my hand, the one clutching the sand dollar.

We walked back past the seawall. We started walking up the dune.

My father jogged out from behind the lifeguard tower. My mother followed.

And for a moment, her eyes stayed wide. Her mouth hung open. She knew.

The lady let go of my hand and waved.

My mother ran down the dune.

And it was like a mouth opened in the sand; my knees buckled. Buzzing surrounded my head; I could not hear.

My mother pulled me into her chest – salt, heaving, warmth – and the buzzing stopped.

Pain sliced my palm.

My mother released me, held my shoulders, and looked into my face.

My palm throbbed instead of my chest. Warmth trickled down my palm instead of my cheeks.

I swallowed.

I dropped my arms to my sides; I made my mouth make a smile.

And my mother’s eyes crinkled, and that little dimple showed in the lower part of her left cheek.

She thanked the lady, swung her arm around my shoulders, and walked next to me up the dune.

But before we reached the top, I opened my hand.

Red seeped into the edge of the sand dollar. I could not show this to my mother. I tipped my hand over, and…Sal…She really needs to stop getting blueberries out of my pail. I don’t want to have to remind her again.

“Now, Sal…”

Bear.

Not Sally.

Bear.

Birds stop. The wind stops. The bear stops.

I step away; my feet do not make a sound.

The sky is blue, the clouds white.

And if I squint, I remember. Light danced on the blue shimmering water. I plucked the sand dollar from the water and all the colors, yellows and oranges and reds sprinkled up into the sky. And they swirled and danced, shimmering like a fairy wing. They were the sky; they were the water. And I pointed to the water, knowing my mother would think they were lovely too, and I looked behind me…

Kuplink.

…marbles and fairies and the hum of the ocean inside a shell…a funny sound…

Kuplank.

I have known that sound my whole life, but that is impossible.

Kuplunk.

I have only known Sally the length of her life, not mine.

“Sal?”

Have I made it here in time?

“Mama!”

 —Krista Puttler

Evan Who Saw Shapeshifters

“Shit,” Evan’s coffee overflowed. It pooled around his cup and dribbled to the floor. With one hand, he placed the pot back on the coffeemaker. He unrolled a length of paper towels with the other and sopped up the coffee. Wildlife distracted him – a fox pawing at a rabbit hole. “Ah,” Evan hissed. The spilled coffee was still very hot. It seeped through the paper towels and burned his fingers. When he wiped his countertop clean, Evan tossed the mass of paper towels in the kitchen’s trash can. He left the coffee cup on the counter. He bent over to take cautious sips and looked back out the window.

His kitchen window overlooked several blocks in the neighborhood. He lived on the fourth story of a five-story building. From his window, he saw neighbors’ houses, trees changing colors, commuters on their way to work, and a garbage truck that stopped every few feet to collect the trash his neighbors set outside. The fox disappeared.

He carefully brought his coffee to the home office. He set the cup on his desk and turned on the computer. The screen flashed. He took a seat in the swivel chair. The computer loaded video editing software. Evan clicked on his project. It was a commercial for a local karaoke bar called The Foxhole. Evan wondered what a fox would sing if it could. He heard somewhere that foxes yelped. Evan doubted that they crooned. He hummed a line from a song he knew.

Evan clicked through a few frames of the commercial until he recognized an actor. The shaggy hair, the wet eyes, the stubble on his chin, the broad shoulders, that grin – he looked familiar. Impossible, Evan thought. He swiveled in his chair. He had a framed family photos on the other end of his office. The actor looked like his brother. Evan swiveled back. No, he thought, not quite. The actor was leaner than his brother. He had no gray hair sticking out at odd ends. Evan clicked through more frames. The actor had straight teeth. His brother’s teeth were slightly crooked. Evan got back to work.

He finished in the evening. In his dark kitchen, he retrieved three Tupperware containers from the refrigerator – vegetables in vinegar, rice, and cold chicken. Evan showered, microwaved the rice, and warmed the chicken and the vegetables in his oven. He ate at the window and checked the time. Local filmmakers organized an industry night at a neighborhood bar called Bookender’s. Between bites of rice and chicken, Evan decided to go. He left his dishes in the sink, locked his apartment, and trudged down the stairs.  

On the way out, he stopped at a tree by his apartment building. He noticed a small opening among the roots. He thought about the fox. Evan crouched low to the ground and looked inside. “Psst, psst, psst,” he made a sound. He invited the fox with an outstretched hand. “Psst, psst, psst.”

He saw nothing. He looked up at the branches. They creaked and swayed with the wind. He thought about a branch snapping off and falling through the fox. The thought made him shiver. The wind blew, and the branches shook. He got up and walked towards the bar.

Bookender’s was a little watering hole near Evan’s apartment. The first thing anyone noticed about Bookender’s was the smell. It smelled like something. No one agreed what it smelled like, but everyone agreed that it smelled – an in-house cleaning solution, spilled drinks, stale books, and something else. Purple lights lined the ceiling, and a disco ball threw light around the barroom. Evan’s shoes squeaked on the floor as he walked to the bar.

His crowd huddled on the other end. Evan knew the filmmakers by name. He waved at Kevin who wanted to break into narrative features and nodded at Josh the documentarian. An editor named Andy talked with someone whom Evan did not know. Maybe he was an actor. Evan knew fewer actors than filmmakers. He ordered a beer at the bar and waved at Andy. Andy came rushing up.

“Evan, how are you?” he asked. Evan did not have time to respond. Andy took Evan by the arm and pulled him through the crowd towards the stranger. Evan’s friends and associates shook his hands, patted him on the back and shoulders. The stranger was dressed in black. He looked familiar. He had tufts of gray hair. He smiled and flashed his slightly crooked teeth. He had big brown eyes. They looked expecting.

“Evan, this is,” Andy started. “I’m sorry, but I forgot your name,” he said.

“That’s not important,” the stranger replied. He smiled.

Andy insisted. The stranger demurred. He refused to give his name. “I’m no one, really,” was all he said. Someone pulled Andy away. The stranger looked intently at Evan.

“I feel like I’ve met you before,” Evan said.

“You have known me,” the stranger said.

“Where did we meet?” Evan asked.

“At your apartment, remember?” the stranger asked.

Evan tried to remember the stranger. He failed to place him at his apartment. To his surprise, the stranger knew him well. He described the apartment – the stained couch, the records in the living room, the tumbleweed decoration in the corner – in detail.

 “What were you doing in my apartment?” Evan asked.

“We watched a movie,” the stranger said. “Buffalo ’66.”

“That’s my favorite,” Evan murmured.

“I know,” the stranger nodded.

Evan’s ears reddened. “I don’t remember you,” he said. “I should remember you, but I don’t. Who let you into my apartment?”

The stranger looked at Evan cooly.

“What did you do there?” Evan raised his voice. The crowd quieted. The color drained from Evan’s face. Evan did not know the stranger, but he recognized him. The stranger looked like his brother only older, larger, squarer. He was cleanshaven too. Evan’s brother hated shaving.

 “This is a stupid joke,” Evan muttered. “I’m leaving.”

“Yes, you are.” the stranger said. He pointed towards the door. Evan looked. He glimpsed a brunet man with gray hairs sticking out, brown eyes, slightly crooked teeth, nearly identical to Evan but taller and slightly older.

“That’s not me,” Evan said. “That’s my brother. My brother’s here.” The other man slipped out of the door before Evan got a closer look. Evan crossed the bar.

He followed this second stranger who thudded ahead, across a main street, down a side street, up an alley, and around a corner. It occurred to Evan that he was leading him back to his own apartment. Evan shouted, “Stop.” The second stranger did not respond. He turned the corner to Evan’s apartment building. When Evan rounded the corner, he did not see the stranger. He stopped, and peered into the dark.

Some rustling startled him. A fox dashed out of the bushes along the sidewalk. Evan jumped. The fox slowed to a stop with one paw in the air. Evan took a slow step forward. The fox’ ears turned. Evan covered his mouth and took another step. The fox spun in a circle. It laid down and licked its haunches.

Evan crept closer, close enough to touch. He squatted down and reached. The fox turned its head to look at him. Evan’s breath caught in his throat. The fox seemed to have a knowing look. “Who are you?” Evan whispered. It looked at him again. Evan recognized that look. He felt cold, then he felt hot. “Who are you?” Evan asked in a trembling voice. A wind blew. “Who are you?” Evan asked again. The branches in the tree cracked overhead. The fox dashed away. A bough plummeted down and cut Evan across the cheek. “Ah,” he hissed. His body recoiled, and he fell. Evan looked around for the fox. It disappeared.

Evan sat there for a moment. Looking. More moments passed. When the wind died, he heard something rising in the air. It sounded like a low moan. Then he heard rattling. Then he heard a roar. A light shone from over the hill – headlights. The garbage truck from that morning crawled slowly up the road. The garbage man hanging on the back was singing. The garbage truck rolled to a stop. Evan and the garbage man looked at each other.

“Can I help you, sir?” the garbage man asked. Brown and gray hairs poked out from under a ballcap. Streetlamps made his brown eyes glow.

“You look familiar,” Evan said.

“I don’t know you,” the garbage man replied. Evan sat for a moment.

“You remind me of someone who does,” he said.

“What’s it to you?” the garbage man asked.

Evan opened and closed his mouth. “He’s gone,” Evan said. “He’s been gone. I miss him.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” the garbage man said. “Piss or get off the pot, why don’t you?” He slapped the garbage truck. It rolled on.

Evan watched the taillights recede in the distance. He stayed sitting, staring, hardly breathing. His hands gripped the grass at his sides and pulled. Some dry blades gave. Suddenly and all at once, he sobbed. He sobbed for the first time since his brother died. It came like lightning, and it rose like steam from his body. He quieted just as suddenly. When he finished, Evan calmly pushed himself to his feet. He wiped his nose and went to bed.

The next morning, he made his coffee in the kitchen with the blinds pulled down. He did not look out the window at the trees or the houses or the garbage bins or the cars on their morning commutes. The fox from the night before may have been on the lawn across the street singing songs like the garbage man hanging on his truck. Evan did not care. He thought about his brother and other shapeshifters in between the radiating pain from the cut across his cheek.

—Taylor Thornburg

Treading Water

The afternoon sun hangs heavy over Juneau, Alaska. The streets are loud with bird calls and car engines. The sky is warm, or at least not cold anymore. It’s one of the days that more people are out walking around than actually live here.

Further down the shore, the only noise comes from the water. The bay is green, dimpled with waves. They splash against the rocky shore and mist up into the blond hairs on Carter’s arm. He takes off his shirt and drapes it over his shoulder. He unties the rope around the dock post and drops it into the canoe. Ezra watches him untie the other end with a curious silence. Carter steps in and grabs the wooden oars. Ezra follows, steadying himself on the dock. They push off, paddling on opposite sides into the emptiness. A breeze trickles through Carter’s curly hair. Behind him, he feels the memory of a girl who was so pretty he almost let her get to know him.

He brought her on the boat last year. They had met at a concert in June, for a band of three guys whose voices sounded younger than Carter's but whose faces looked much older than his. He was standing in the grass, trying to hear their lyrics.

“Who are you with?” she asked him. Her dark hair kissed her bare shoulders, and the sun painted her face amber. He thought about how her lips would taste before he could say his answer.

“I just heard the music from down the street and decided to watch.”

“You’re here alone?”

“Yeah. I didn’t have to pay or anything, right?”

“You think these guys should put up a fee?” She gestured at the stage, clearly proud of herself. He felt relieved that he wouldn’t have to tell her how pretty she was, she already knew it.

He took her on the canoe and they paddled to Douglas Island, and he told her about his work, where he was from, the music he liked. She was from Fairbanks. She gave wildlife tours in the mountains. She liked Fiona Apple. They walked along a trail to an overlook, where the scent of pine filled their silences. They kissed under an evergreen tree, and he played with the fabric of her shirt between his fingertips until it was dark. He felt okay about her. On the boat ride back, she asked why he had moved to Alaska.

“It’s nice here.”

“No one moves here because it’s nice. It’s nice in a lot of places, people come here to get away.”

He stared at the reflection of the stars, swinging in the water. He tried to think of something funny to say.

“You know, you haven’t asked me anything about me all day,” she said.

“Sorry, hmm…” he said. “What’s your name again?”

When they got to the shore she left the boat and asked if he wanted her to go home. He said he didn’t care. She sighed, and they never talked again. He still doesn’t know if she told him her name.

Before Junea, Carter lived in the panhandle of Florida. He grew up playing street games with the neighbor boys, until he learned what the names they called him meant, and then he only hung out with the boy that didn’t say names. He was Ezra.

Carter and Ezra biked to the river and collected rocks. Trees curled out from the mud and hid the river from the sun, but when it was still too hot they kicked off their shoes and stepped through the current. They filled their pockets with the cheapest snacks at Winn-Dixie and ate them by the river bank, and their pockets were heavy with rocks on the way home. They could only fit a few each time, so they kept coming back.

In high school, they ate lunch under the bleachers with Madison. She went there alone to smoke, at first, crouching at the other end of the shade, but she joined in on their conversations and soon became their friend. She liked complaining about her parents, and Ezra liked helping her with her homework. Carter liked listening to both of them. The boys never took her to the river, though.

In the last summer of high school, Madison pulled up to Carter’s place in a ‘92 Ford F-150 and told him her daddy was on death row. It was some of the best news of her life—she had got his truck, and one less person could scream at her for not being more like her Valedictorian brother. Carter fell into the passenger seat and the thick scent of Marlboros reminded him of his uncle’s house.

Cicadas hummed over the engine. Madison was wearing short shorts and a black crop top, a hoodie tied around her waist. They drove to the gas station and grabbed Hot Cheetos and filled up a blue raspberry Slurpee. She told him she forgot her wallet, so he paid.

“You know, I would’ve hid the snacks in my jacket and walked out if I was with anybody else,” she told him.

He laughed, and couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing. Either way, he figured he was someone special to her.

After not shoplifting they drove to the beach. She swerved off the road, flew through the dunes, and stopped just before the sand was stiff and muddy. Carter felt what he imagined whiplash was. They lay in the back of the truck, Carter’s head on her hoodie, her head on his chest, and watched the constellations. She said she never got how people could get animals or gods out of the white dots, then she pointed to what made a cross, the best shape she could find.

“Do you believe in Jesus?” he asked.

She hugged his torso. “I only believe in boys that wear jeans. ”

Carter had jeans on. He slowed his breaths in time with the waves, so her head rose and fell as naturally as he could make it, so she wouldn’t even notice he breathed. He would have done anything to control his heartbeat, but still it drummed right against her ear. Faster and faster.

“Can I tell you something?” he said. “I like you.”

“I like you too.”

“I like you, like, I wanna kiss you,” he said, quietly.

“What?” She lifted her head, and Carter felt the stream of breath break between them. She stared at him while he lay like a corpse on the truck bed.

“I mean, I’ll kiss you, but you won’t like it. Are you joking?”

“What?” he said. His face got hot.

“You like Ezra. It’s really obvious that you’re not into girls.”

Heat rose in his chest, and in his stomach. He jumped out of the truck and ran to the water, his knees hit the shallows and he vomited blue raspberry Slurpee and Hot Cheeto chunks into the ocean. She came over to him and held him. She ran her hands through his hair and kissed his sweaty forehead while he coughed until he was empty. Spicy red bits shined in the liquid like bloody constellations under the moonlight. He wanted to wish on them, but he could only think how, with the bright blue and red puke under the white moon, he had made this sea American.

After graduation, Madison picked up a full-time shift at a diner, and Ezra went to the fancy state college in Pensacola. Carter went to the community college in Pensacola, close enough that he could commute from home. Carter thought the teachers were friendlier in college, they treated him more like an equal. They smiled at him when he saw them outside of class. It was weird to not recognize any students he walked past in between classes. He went swimming in the mornings at the student pool. Campus was right next to the airport, and when he saw the planes so close he wondered if anyone was ever looking through their window directly at him. It felt weird that he could be anyone, and he still ended up the same.

He met Sarah in his second year, a friend of his brother. She thought Carter was funny, and he thought the gap in her front teeth was cute. They watched romantic comedies together, and he hid his tears from her in the theater. On the third one, she caught him, and before he dropped her off at her dorm she kissed him. They started dating. He thought it was a strange thing to become someone who kisses someone, but when he said that to her she didn’t look at him weird. Talking wasn’t a game. When he found out she couldn’t swim, he offered to teach her. She went with him to the pool, and he held her body up to show her different strokes.

“I feel like those turnstiles at baseball games,” she told him, practicing breaststroke. He laughed and said he had never been to a baseball game.

They slept together in his childhood bedroom. He loved showing her things from when he grew up, the rock collection from the river and the medals he won in swim and the shirts that used to fit him but now fit her. She could get to know him without him saying a word.

They dreamed of moving to Juneau, Alaska. They wanted to breathe in cold air and see what the mountains saw from the top of the world.

“All I want is a fireplace,” he said. “That’s how I’ll know I’ve made it. They’re useless but look so nice.”

“My dream is to have a spiral staircase,” Sarah said. She pointed to a framed picture on his bookshelf. “Who is that?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, duh. I mean the Hispanic kid, with his arm around you.”

“Oh, that’s Ezra. The guy I used to be on swim team with.”

“Do you still hang out with him?”

“Yeah, he helps me with homework. He’s really smart. You should meet him sometime.”

She never did meet him. Carter came home early the next day and found her in bed with his brother. He couldn’t say anything to them, he just got into his car.

It was two weeks before graduation, and he drove his ‘99 Corolla to Dallas. Dallas To Albuquerque. Albuquerque to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City to Cannon Beach. Cannon Beach to Quesnel. Quesnel to Jade City. Jade City to Juneau. He drove with the headlights off at night. He went on websites and found free places to sleep in exchange for sharing a bed with men that wanted him. In the morning, the taste of them lingered in his mouth, so he went through a pack of gum each day. As he drove over the cliffs along the coast, he spit the gum into wrappers and flicked them into the sea.

In Juneau he found a job and an apartment. He liked the few blocks of grid streets, and would walk down each one when his head got too stuck in the past. The mountains and the cold air made it okay that he felt nothing. The sea birds still sang, whether he was happy or sad. The snow didn’t ask his permission to pile up on the rooftops. He had to tell himself everything else was only in his head.

Ezra called one day and told him he wanted to visit, but Carter said to wait until winter was over. He picked him up from the airport in late June, and they explored downtown Juneau and got lunch at a café next to the water. Ezra asked if he remembered the days they would spend in Carter’s pool. Carter offered to take him on the boat.

One day, 12-year-old Ezra and Carter biked back from the river, chasing a hot air balloon with the design of an American flag above them. It was 2002, and he was noticing the red, white, and blue more and more. Carter wondered if he could reach the basket by chucking one of the rocks he had picked up along the river—not to do any damage, just to get the patriotic flyer’s attention.

They got to Carter’s house, and he said they should go swimming.

“I don’t have my swimsuit,” Ezra said. “And my parents aren’t home, the house is locked.”

“You can borrow one of mine,” Carter said. He grabbed his only pair of swim trunks out of the drawer and tossed them to him. While Ezra went to change, he snuck into his older brother's room and pulled out a Hawaiian print swimsuit, careful not to leave any signs he had been in there. He stepped into them and they were a few sizes too big, so he tied them tight and triple-knotted them. They poofed out around his thighs, but at least they stayed up when he tugged on them.

They raced through the heat from the back door to the water. “High and Dry” by Radiohead was playing from his parents’ speaker. The boys attempted flips off the diving board into the leaf-covered pool, sending water stains across the deck. They argued about who would survive longest if they were sent off to Afghanistan, like Carter’s uncle.

“I’m totally stronger than you.” Ezra flexed his bicep.

Carter slapped water into his friend’s face. “But I’m taller than you.”

“So what? That just makes you a bigger target.”

Carter pushed Ezra’s head underwater and Ezra lunged back up at him and yelled, his voice cracking. Carter fell and they both crashed through white bubbles. They threw their limbs at each other in the bright water. Skin glided over skin, dancing through gravity. Muffled guitars and drums echoed under the surface of the pool. Carter opened his eyes for half a second and looked at this boy in a way he couldn’t above water. Through the stinging chlorine, he watched Ezra’s soft body fall upwards to the light. He was in seventh grade, and he didn’t know how to drive a car or do algebra, but he knew he could only look at this boy in this way underwater.

They’re in the canoe. Ezra is looking at him like he’s waiting for him to say something, but Carter doesn’t know what.

Ezra’s upper arms are wider, the inside of his thighs paler. Carter knew his body, but he had never been so long without it, never seen it change so much. Like he had never really known him, like all the memories of him had been dreams.

“I thought you would like it out here,” Carter says.

“I do,” Ezra says. “I’m happy that you live somewhere so beautiful. But I didn’t come for that, I wanna know what’s up.”

Carter looks at his reflection next to the boat. He’s changed too, the sandy hair on his face and the freckles on his shoulders. “I’m thinking of joining the Army.”

“What?”

“Kidding.”

Ezra exhales and drops his oar between his legs. “I knew you so well. I knew what you would order from the school cafeteria. I still notice rocks that you’d pick up if we were by that river together. I know things ended bad with Sarah, but you didn’t even tell me. I had to find out from your mom. I had to get your phone number from Madison. And even before then, something was crushing you and I didn’t know what. I missed you. I missed how we used to be. I thought we could always be like kids, until one day I woke up and I was 20-something, and I had to shave and go to meetings, and you weren’t there.”

“You don’t have to be so sensitive.”

“Why should I be alive if I’m not gonna feel things?” Ezra says, so loud it takes up the whole valley.

Carter leans back, his hip bone slipping out over his shorts. It would be so much easier if this were another boy he could just take his clothes off for.

“Do you want me?” Ezra asks.

“I want a lot of things.”

“Do you want me, Carter?” Ezra’s eyes don’t move off him.

“Do you want me, Ezra?” he says, in the same inflection.

“Why do you think I’m here?”

Carter steps out of the boat, slipping into the water. Icy shock slices through his nerves. Ezra grabs his arm, but he resists.

“Go away,” he says. He lies on his back, shivering, seeing white. The red sun covers his face and chest, the deep blue below him.

“I’m not—”

“If you love me, go away.”

Carter only hears his own blood rushing through him. His muscles stiffen. He’s falling up, keeps falling up with each wave.

He whispers. It’s only in your head.

The sky is heavy and he’s floating in dead glaciers. It’s so cold it burns. He’s in the middle of the world, in a coffin on fire, and he can’t get out. He can’t get out. He can’t get out.

—Lucas Zuehl