Fiction - The Harvard Advocate

W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing  our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or  confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out  by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.

9/23

Therapist (Dr Keithe) says to keep running journal of treatments, reactions, flare-ups, etc., note as happen and/or at end of each day (and take care not to let documentation of obsessive thoughts become obsessive itself (I told her saying this improved probability that it would, she said this reaction was her intention, to provoke me)), this will help with analysis, seeing progress, where to go next, etc.

The Terribles include 3 novels published since 1982, and gumbos two genres: The Christmas novel and The Washington novel. In The Terrible Twos, Dean Clift, a former model, ascends to the presidency after the death of his predecessor. Manipulated by the rich, he starts on the right but changes his politics after the First Lady's death and a visit from Saint Nicholas during “a dark night of the soul.” His enemies invoke the 25th amendment, which removes Clift from office after he makes a bizarre television appearance where he describes the visit and recites the Bill of Rights, which for his enemies is a communist doctrine. After his ouster, Jesse Hatch ascends to the presidency, but the power behind the throne is Rev. Clement-Jones, the most powerful man in the government because he knows Jesse Hatch’s secret and is blackmailing Hatch. Clement’s only threat is the head of the Sons of Odin, a white nationalist group that worships Norse Gods. Their candidate is Termite Control, a necrophiliac, who has suffered from Cotard’s syndrome since childhood. The Sons of Odin’s only reason for running for political office is to raise money for the group by selling Termite Control spray cans signed by Termite, his nickname taken from General Westmoreland’s description of the Vietnamese as “termites,” for $1000 each, but a scandal hits the Hatch administration and Termite’s numbers rise in the polls. He becomes a serious candidate, which requires a change in his image.

"The Matriarch" is the 2025 winner of the Louis Begley Prize judged by Bryan Washington.

Flash of white and gray. Footfalls swift on the concrete. On Andrés Bello, you see him for a second on the other side of the Mapocho, its current pulsing weakly onto the cobbled walls with their painted red symbols. You see him for a second before he’s off. He takes the alleyway, dodging the morning’s black puddles that line the street, four, five blocks off the main road now, quick paws shuttering along the one-floor meat shops and Dr. Simi’s pharmacy, the gated gray-dust apartments, and the sleeping nightclubs of Providencia. Past the supermarket swollen with pedestrians, past the metal cars paused in traffic, past the bewildered tourists looking on—he’s more local than you are, and prideful about it. Follow west to see where he leads. With him, you are nobody: a light, freeing feeling. See how he sees, the towering naked trees, leaves and plastic cups soaking the sidewalk, sun cracking open every dark, dank corner of the city. How he eats, now tunneling into a sidestreet dumpster, the smell of leftovers mingling onto the open road.

An acquaintance of mine got a baby and decided he needed to get rid of his dog. He said the dog was too rowdy, and he was worried it would hurt the baby. Fine, I said, I’ll take the dog. I’d recently bought my first house and had the space for it.

Her face gleams golden in the approaching car lights. She floats – round, distended, her womb cuddling the child orange inside her. Heavy with the earthy sap she nursed, she tugs at the umbilical cord tying her to the sagging branch. Toes clawed deep into the Earth, hair brushing the sky with hues of the sun and the moon, her mother tree feeds her all the riches that Nature freely gives.

saturday morning i wake in county jail w/ profound sense having been victim of a ferocious injustice. body cam footage soon reveals said sense was misplaced; for future reference, 9 Long Island iced teas too many on new meds. long story short: got in verbal fight w/ bartender bc he wouldn’t play new Kanye album; he told me to leave; i refused to do so; argument escalated; police came; detained me; put me in squad car wherein i told Hinge date i loved her. i (White) then accused officer (also White) of being racist (likely statistically true tho not applicable to situation). in the end got booked for drunk & disorderly + trespass & forced to stay in jail over weekend bc i told arresting officers that the second they let me go i would swim to Mexico & they would never see me again, ie intent to flee. today (monday) see judge who gives me $1000 bond & sets next court date for thursday

One day when you’re sitting at your desk working on your doctoral thesis in linguistics, your mother calls, and she’s hysterical crying and panting. You can hardly understand her. “I don’t know who I am,” she wails. 

1

I was born twenty years ago, in Connecticut, to a healthy father and a sick mother. Because they found the tick late in my mother’s pregnancy, the doctors weren’t sure if I would be born with her disease. They ran dozens of tests, both before and after I was born, with laparoscopes and eight-inch needles. My father remained worried until I was two months old, after an intensive blood panel came back negative. He has always been a pessimist.

"All the Difference" is the 2024 winner of the Louis Begley Prize judged by R. F. Kuang.

“We should go up to Salem for the Fourth,” he said. “Catherine will be in town.”

There were some wailing changes in me, each one more pressing than the last. First, my skin became impossibly soft, tender, and damp to the touch. Second, it began to smell like the sea. Next—as my boyfriend told me with my teat in his mouth—I began to taste like salt until I was too bitter to bear and we would spend our nights laying back to back, too embarrassed and disgusted to move or talk or fuck. Then, my color lost the dull gray overlay of the city skyline and turned brassy blue: my hair, my face, my teeth, all dipped in ink and polished shiny, until I became a statue sitting away in a collection. My nails turned tough like plates. I even developed headaches: spikes to the head that left me suspended in the dark for half of the day. That, I blamed on my lenses; I wore thick glasses that left me considering surgery, and then the headaches came on. I booked myself a consultation, hoping for a permanent solution.

Lily King is an award winning American novelist. Members of the Fiction Board Katie Catulle and Serena Jampel interviewed her over Zoom on February 26th, 2024 to talk about writing: membranes, rules, and how badly we want it to be fun. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A girl stands on the street holding a tray of cheese. It’s Ingrid, but I don’t know that yet. I’m a week out of art school, looking for a job to make rent. I approach her, say hello, take a sample and pop it in my mouth.

The last of the leftover punch was a little cloudy but still tasted about the same. Eusebia and I sat on Pete’s stoop passing the sticky Vitaminwater bottle back and forth, waiting for him to come down so we could all walk back to her place together. Pete’s apartment was a seventh-floor walkup so nobody ever climbed all those stairs on purpose. Pete himself went up and down all the time and swore it didn’t bother him. He was above-average athletic and had once been a serviceable high school tight end: not slow, not small, good engine. In the first game of his senior year he broke three ribs on a doomed passing play, his opposing defender having correctly anticipated the ball’s flightpath and time of arrival. The football landed in Pete’s chest and cradling arms a fraction of a second before the defender’s shoulder, and Pete heard the arpeggio of his ribs cracking in quick succession, click-clack-clock, top to bottom, like the opening xylophone of “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes, which played on a loop in Pete’s head as he lay on his back in the mud, struggling to breathe. Thus ended Pete’s athletic phase and began his phase of post-punk folk rock, which in turn ended abruptly a few years later, in a Columbus, Ohio coffee house, just as ignobly, though with less violence. There was a story about this, too. And an anecdote about moving to the city, and on becoming an artist, and so on, so that Pete’s life always seemed like a string of colorful vignettes, a series of small, brightly-lit dioramas. I have zero anecdotes, I feel like. I don’t know what I end up talking to people about. For instance just now on Pete’s stoop I was telling Eusebia about how I’d been thinking about competitive bodybuilding, how it seemed connected to conceptual poetry, but I was not yet sure how. The punch was gone and she was smoking and checking her phone and only half listening. I felt pressure building behind my eyes and ate a Sudafed of indeterminate vintage.

First she finds a finger, tucked neatly under the pillow, slightly crooked as if in admonishment. The mother stares at it for a long moment before gingerly scooping it up and carrying it over to the shag carpet where the boy lies on his back, shadowboxing the air with all four limbs. It takes her a few tries, but by dangling a demonic plush rattlesnake in the boy’s face, she is able to distract him long enough to reattach it, peeling open his tiny clenched fist. The boy immediately starts wailing, high and thin like a faraway siren.

In a week, Scottie will break into the med tent and try to overdose on a handful of Benadryl and antidepressants. It’ll be easy for the girl — nobody will see her walk into the unguarded tent, despite the gleam her white-blonde hair will make in the Montana sun right before the flap closes behind her. No counselors or kids will pull her away as she props open the lid of the unlocked med case or pops the caps of the various pill bottles. Or when, deliriously, she stumbles past the camping tents to the creek filled with cow shit, where a kid got giardia last month, and hits her head against a stone, or tries to run away or drown herself.

For as long as I remember, Chorip-si has been the last city beyond. We Seoul residents call it the city, a curt flash of disdain in fast-diverging conversations. Mother’s no different. Between licks at the spatula, she likes to vent that we're better off without another city far south on the peninsula, whose human civilization is down to one hell of an overcrowded capital city. It’s like having a third dimple, she says. Everything we need is right at our fingertips here, the best and only place to settle in, and why ever migrate? We have arrived. We’re home.

Edited by Mira Alpers

Madeline Cash is the founder and co-editor of Forever Magazine. Her fiction has been featured in The Drift, The Baffler, Muumuu House and more. Her debut short story collection Earth Angel was published by Clash Books in April. We sat down with Cash over zoom back in February to talk about everything from being banned from cemeteries, to religion, to Y2K aesthetics.

I polish my face every morning. Sometimes I don’t even turn on the light in the bathroom, I don’t even draw the blinds. I can polish my face entirely in the dark now. I scrub, vigorously, starting at the top and circling right, down, and around, hands ticking around the face. Then I roll and buff, buff and roll in similar cycles. I repeat this three times; I can’t risk leaving even a blemish, even an imperceptible smudge. The end is my favorite: patting my face with a warm towel and misting with soft, delicate facial spray. Ocean breeze, I think.

Wild Things is the winner of the 2023 Louis Begley Prize judged by Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow.

The priest of the Knoxville, IA diocese lived a life steeped in uncertainty. The fact that he could not know the internal experience of every person he encountered—that he could not be sure whether his congregants were tuned in to his homilies or zoned out or (worse yet) thinking about how shitty the homilies were—how absolutely daft and self-evident and devoid of any life-applicable advice—brought him countless nights of anguish. Did they find him embarrassing? Was he embarrassing, up there, with his face sweat dripping all down his neck and onto his dainty little frock?¹

Edited by Talia Blatt

Allegra Goodman is an American novelist and short story writer based in Cambridge, MA. The fiction board of The Harvard Advocate hosted her in the Advocate building on 21 South Street for a conversation about Jewishness, children, her time at Harvard, and her most recent novel, Sam, which was published this January.

Mirrorselves

At nine years old, I sit at the bathroom mirror and open both sides of the medicine cabinet to reveal my infinity self. In a long identical row, I am transfixed by the other mes. We are in the same stretched-neck candy striped shirt, our mouths full of the same funny shaped teeth, topped by the same blunt bowl cut. When I blink, they blink. When I stick out my tongue, theirs follow. Until, in the back row, one stands up confidently. In my own reflection me and all the other mes lock on her as she stands, pulls her shirt over her head and wraps it around her fist. She cocks back and with one hit, shatters the mirror. She crawls out of the cabinet, bare chested and bloody, leading all of my mirrorselves, running like hell out of the bathroom and down the street. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to find where they’ve gone, wondering if I should be there too.

Every week, a beautiful lady who looks like me comes into the shop. Or rather, she’s beginning to look like me, like a fancy version of me, because every time she comes in some piece of her face has changed. And I have studied her face, believe me. I know the shape of her nostrils, the peach fuzz gleam on the side of her jaw, the little crease on her bottom lip where a crescent of pearly lip gloss shines like a tiny moon. I don’t know how or why this is happening, but all these features have been shifting to make her face look more like mine, and it might be that I’m starting to look more like her, too.

Edited by Talia Blatt

Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and essayist. The Fiction Board of The Harvard Advocate met with her over Zoom the morning of December 15, 2022. We spoke about her novels and children’s books, theater, mushrooms, reading her diaries in The New York Times, artificial intelligence, and how maybe everything is just fiction.

Mantle is asked who their preferred interviewer would be, between Katie O, Jackie B, and Lars V, and Mantle shrugs their skeletal shoulders so slowly, like mountains ascending during tectonic cataclysmic events, as if to leave this earth, only to return, to the frame, a breath of relief. Only a handful want the job. Their presence, Mantle’s presence, is intimidating. But those who know them well say they are very nice.

Jack’s mother stood in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette wedged between the prongs of a plastic fork—she didn’t like her hands to smell—as Jack helped his father move out. His father was wearing bermuda shorts and flip-flops, both of which were recent developments. His mom was wearing a light pink bathrobe which was not a recent development but an old one, as he rarely saw her in anything else.

I

It was offensive, how healthy Aoife was. She had broad shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. She wore short skirts with thin-strapped sandals and when she strode across the street in those dumb little shoes, he couldn’t believe they didn’t end up crushed to pieces under her sexy pink feet.

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. Among other awards, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, received a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award.

Should I write it like a letter? A letter that goes on and on until you get tired of it? Until you stop reading, stop making eye contact in the hallways, stop slipping easily into conversations, into green lakes, in and out of clothing. I’m out looking for you on all the street corners. I’m out looking for you under the dumpsters and cactus pots. I’m out looking for you inside your skin, I keep poking past your teeth and down your throat, looking for the music, but I don’t find it there. I don’t find it.

The day she turned forty, my mother burst into flames. I watched it reflected in my father’s glassy eyes across the dinner table, yellow and orange tongues of fire that danced in their devouring. Flesh doesn’t burn like wood or paper, doesn’t turn immediately to ash; it sears and bubbles, melts in layers, and sloughs away in chunks. She collected in a pile of chalky, mangled bone and blood broiled into sticky black tar.

The hole in his paper is perfect. Completely flat and circular. Even on a blank page it looks empty.

If you’d like to experience love, book a plane ticket to western North Carolina and ask the tall woman at baggage claim what’s the best spot for trout fishing this time of year. She’ll tell you the second-best spot, but this is good enough; we’d all do well to safeguard our most precious places. Secure a riverside campsite and a few maps, even though you know these woods. Buy a tent and a sleeping bag and set them both up, and sleep sleep sleep, deeply. The next morning, throw your cell phone in the river. Or—place your cell phone in a large pot, then fill the pot with river water. Revive your neighbor’s dying fire and bring the pot to boil. Dispose according to cell-phone-disposal regulations. Get a fly rod and reel; buy the cheap but sturdy purple fly that the man behind the counter at the bait shop is at first hesitant to recommend. He’ll know you’re not to be toyed with. Set out to the tall woman’s second-best place, known only to eight people as Horseshoe Creek and otherwise unknown to everyone. It’ll be just over the edge of your paper map, on all four of its edges. When you get there, submit to interrogation—Dennis will want an account of how you found the place, who told you about this spot. Give him your whole life, in reverse. Don’t forget to mention that time when you were fourteen, when you snuck out of your house and biked to the next city over to steal some time with the boy you loved. Look straight ahead at the river when you say the part about how he’d gone home when you arrived. Don’t let your voice waver, and don’t blink, or so help Dennis God, he will hog-tie you and send you to the bottom of Lake Glenville. Believe him, but find joy in the knowledge that he’s been through much worse. Befriend Dennis, in every way you can. Give him every fish you catch. Baby him, but do not pander. He will call you names; he will step on your new boots and fling dust from the riverbed into your eyes. He will think up several jokes about your appearance, the way you talk, and he will say them all to you. They will hurt; they will be personal. Laugh, at all of them. Agree. He may put you in a chokehold, and if this happens to you, he intends to kill you. Make sure to use your Taser in this event, which you have brought and kept concealed and accessible in the waistband of your waders. He will, for a moment, relent. In a long silence, he will almost certainly say something about his runaway faggot son. Resist, resist. Just after last light, Dennis will leave abruptly. Follow him. Sprint, if you must. Ditch all your gear. You must time this next move extremely carefully: just as Dennis starts the engine of his red Ford F-150, hop into the truck’s bed. The coughing motor will cover up the sound. Once on the road, stay low. A vulture may follow the truck the whole way home; if she does, enjoy her presence. It will most likely contribute to the overall creepy vibe of the situation. Shoot her a thumbs-up. She’ll return it, most likely. The truck will stop at the end of a long gravel road. Jump out of the bed at the exact moment that the driver’s seat door shuts. This is of the utmost importance. When Dennis locks the truck, look toward the house. If I remember correctly it will be full of wicker and glass, sitting brightly at the foot of a giant hill. Look up at the crescent moon, like the bodies of two opposite lovers, light spooning dark. Consider this thought extremely profound, then forget it immediately. Pine after this lost memory until you die. Then wonder where the vulture went. Follow Dennis up the driveway and through the side door. Don’t worry, he won’t look behind him for the rest of the night. This is to your great advantage. Dennis will head to the kitchen and remove the paper-wrapped trout from a cooler. He will filet them beautifully, separating the meat from the shit-filled guts and humming a song from the year you were born. As he turns on the flame, the primer will click twice. Use these clicks to mask the two steps you will take to lunge toward the couch and slide under it. Wait, for an unconscionably long time. You will hear a knock on the door. It’ll be Eric, probably, or Alan—regardless, after a while they’ll all be there, the eight fishermen of Horseshoe Creek. They’ll turn on the television and—this next part is absolutely necessary to your survival —you must not, under any circumstances, scream, when your naked body flashes onto the screen. The men will be watching the video you shot and posted and monetized when you were with Ren, your ex from college who pretended he didn’t know you when you weren’t in bed together, and it’ll be the good one, when you surprised yourself with your own flexibility—Ren had asked you to put your legs behind your head, and you had scoffed, but he was serious, and when you tried it and actually did it it was like your body could do anything, and you remember the Yes and the Good job, Ren’s whispering, smiling mouth next to your ear, and you said Thank you and you meant it more than anyone ever had. I’ll give you a rare piece of information, because I like you: the eight men won’t be touching themselves, or each other. Eric will be on his cell phone and Alan will be transfixed, his hands dormant in his lap, looking twenty years younger. And Dennis will be on the couch, stroking the dog, with a blissful, pensive expression, as if fondly remembering something. When it’s over, watch the men clap each other on the back, goodbye. Watch Dennis give all the leftover trout to his friend whose kid is sick with pneumonia. Watch these men love each other in the age-old way, watch their love screaming in the distances between their bodies. Watch them neglect this love, their creation. Watch Dennis shut the front door. He will clean frantically; ten minutes later, the tall woman from baggage claim will arrive. They will lie on the couch together, and Family Feud will be on, but neither of them will be watching. They will be kissing gently, no tongue, each asking very little from the other, a simple something soft to save for later. Begin to love Dennis and the tall woman, and in loving these people, who so hate you, martyr yourself. Recalibrate your personal ethics; these river-rounded mountains were the very first philosophers. When you’re ready, crawl out from under the couch and present yourself to the two fallible lovers. Ask of them only their unconditional love, ask them about their first most favorite place. It is your birthright. It’s okay to feel sad when your tall mother shrieks; it’s okay to cry when Dennis, spewing paternity, goes to get the shotgun. Wipe these tears while you run down the front steps with the keys jingling in your hand. Realize you’re only crying because you think you’re supposed to. When you’ve put two state lines between you and the glass-and-wicker house, pull over at a rest stop. Touch your body, all over, to be sure it’s still there. Look at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Wash your hands. Put them in your mouth. Dry them, and wonder what to do next. Decide. Buy a Honey Bun from the nearest vending machine and eat it in the car and nearly keel over, it’s so good. Say thank you out loud, then freeze. Pick up the payphone. Call me.

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel Eileen won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her subsequent novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation was a New York Times bestseller, and will be adapted for film by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Of this I can be certain: Liam’s head is swiveled east, away from the remains of the sunset, where what was April 15th, 2012 is saying adios and leaving a wide loud wipe of pinkish residue in its wake. The building that Liam is looking at is tall, rectangular, shore-colored; squares pop on yellow-white as the day recedes. Liam counts five windows illuminated. Six. The aluminum report of contact: Liam whips to watch the ball slice past the third baseman – bounce, catch, runner rounds to second, left fielder throws to second baseman to cut him off, runner’s back at first. Liam’s in right field. Come back, he is saying to himself: what if the batter hadn’t pulled it? He does the mental equivalent of slapping himself in the face to wake up. Say that guy had swung later: the ball would bounce past first, trace its erratic path back to the fence, and the hard cork on chain-link would articulate in a clink – that sound that only he can hear while all of his teammates, his mother, everyone else in the stands watch what is basically a silent-movie comedy reel, where he’s running back and trying to grab the ball while it bounces and rolls all over the place. And Shit, shit, shit, he’d be saying to himself, hearing the cardial fury of his just-awakened heart, the hush of the ball rolling away from him on stiff St. Augustine grass.

From where she sits on the veranda overlooking the narrow shoreline she can see a whole group of them, their stomachs stretched and shiny in the sun, waddling over deflated-looking dunes towards the water. She counts three, maybe four (with the fourth she can’t be certain). One of them looks as if she is about to burst. How can she be allowed out like that?

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending was selected by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2022 Louis Begley Fiction Prize.

On the train home from her therapist’s office, the woman made of water tries, desperately, not to slosh onto the teenage girl sitting next to her. Outside, it’s winter in Michigan and has been for several years, but in the train it’s warm, too warm, and as they curl around a bend in the icy Huron River, she foams and spills over into the girl’s lap, her navy slacks and crisp white shirt.

Goldfish bags in her hands, the kinds won at carnivals, shifting all at once like sand. How long has it been, she wonders, gripping the jelly-like sacks, how long has she missed the feeling. Laminated posters on nondescript beige walls advertise buttock enhancements and tummy tucks and something called the Mommy Makeover. Labiaplasty, liposuction, a whole slew of lifts, adjustments, and removals painted in violent fleshy inks: skin as an artistic palette, bodies to be revised and refined with glinting silver scalpels by square-jawed doctors. Does he think he is an artist, she wonders, staring at the pentagonal face of her surgeon, does reshaping a nipple or labia count as art. Her palms are sweating. Have these been inside someone, sliced and fished from the shallows of an armpit incision before they were handed to her?

Eileen didn’t expect to enjoy the bunker, even when she heard she’d been selected as staff. She imagined crates of canned food piled at foot-thick doors, stalactites over itching bunks, corridors reeking of mildew. And Nico hadn’t even applied, so—what did love weigh? This was on the second day, when the fever was still confined to Indonesia.

We began each meeting with a hyacinth, to deny the Hole its hold on our lives. Our trusted servant, Father Brown, distributed flowers and heirloom glasses of cool water. We dipped our hyacinths, blush-quick and simple, and removed them, even simpler. Another dip, and another, and the dormant lacquer of a different, frightening flower cast itself over the stem we thought we knew. The third dip was the worst, no matter how many sessions we’d attended. Billy the Medicare salesman always shook so hard small droplets of water skirted from his wrist. But Father Brown’s voice reassured us that the hyacinth we held and the hyacinth in the water were one and the same, and he removed his flower and flourished its formal singularity, and we all relaxed. The water, although not the Hole exactly, could mimic the Hole’s obliterative properties. In the Hole, the flower became other-flower, its petals the very petals of its prior aspect’s doom.

We left San Francisco, five of us, three girls and two boys, split into two cars, both low to the ground and in different states of disrepair relative to the amount of money their two respective owners (the two boys) were making at the time. One was full of food scraps and little camps of spiders and ants; the other piled with funny hats and sunglasses and made a grinding sound when we turned the ignition. We left San Francisco because it was unrecognizable to us, had been for a while.

Because the knock didn’t sound like Sam’s or a neighbor’s or even a Jehovah’s witness. Besides, on the 21st floor we didn’t get many stray knockers to begin with. I ignored it at first but they started knocking so loud I thought they might break down the door so I threw the rest of my shit in a duffel and kissed grandmama bye ‘cause I knew the cops wouldn’t hurt her.

1.

There is a rhetoric of walking. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Living 1

Inside the Mexican restaurant, a blonde Polish waiter withdrew the contents of his pockets onto the marble counter, and these included a yellow lighter, loose change, a leather keychain with its flimsy metal token inscribed “mammoth cave, kentucky,” and, at last, an iPhone charger, frayed at the end with its internal wires exposed. He inspected it for a second, frowning. This was Avenue A and it was nighttime. Sitting out on the patio facing Tompkins Square Park was the lone customer, a boy named Alonso.

It’s spring.

It’s April.

Eastertime, too.

It’s around four o’clock in the afternoon.

My holiness was an accident. It happened because I had nothing else to eat. I had stopped eating eggs after the salmonella outbreak on the news in February, salad greens after the third report of E. coli, dairy after listeria killed a pregnant woman from Georgia. Anneke, my wife, said I needed therapy, but extreme caution seemed reasonable to me. Dirt full of feces, ungloved fingers, shed hair and dead skin, utensils not rinsed in hot water, air oozing into sealed containers. Eventually I survived on fruit and overbrewed black coffee. Anneke gave up cooking for herself, ate Greek yogurt and packaged salads and didn’t clean out the refrigerator, which began to smell sweet and stagnant.

The following are a collection of three microfictions.

TO SQUEEZE

The problem with James was that the company only needed one. One Jame. The efficiency consultant’s report made it clear that a single Jame would suffice.

As a girl, Abu was a grief-eater. This was before she came to the city with a jaw full of pennies. Whenever someone died, families hired grief-eaters to enter the deceased person’s home and eat everything they owned. That way, the dead person’s belongings can be reincarnated too, carried in my mother’s belly and rebirthed through her intestines. Grief-eaters are always women, Abu says. I’ve eaten everything. Belts, clothes. Dishes, knives. Furniture takes a while. It wears down your teeth. That’s why mine are titanium-capped. I’ve eaten cats, snakes, fish-tanks. Bed-frames, mattresses too. I’ve eaten every species of shoe. I’ve eaten clocks, watches. I went to bed with my belly ticking. I could tell the time without even looking at anything. Something was counting the hours inside me.

Translated from the French by Javier Arango

Translator’s Note: Michèle Audin is a mathematician, author, and member of the literary group known as Oulipo, which has included writers such as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. Since 1960, Oulipo authors have sought to explore connections between literary form and content by imposing structural and stylistic constraints on their writing, resulting in playfully experimental language-games and boundary-pushing works. In this text, Audin, who is the biographer of mathematician and women’s rights activist Sofia Kovalevskaya, draws upon her own interest in the history of mathematics while honoring the Oulipean tradition, blending elements of fiction and non-fiction throughout. In true Oulipean fashion, “Burned Letters” contains a lipogram, a section written entirely without the letter “e”, evoking Perec’s A Void, which employs the same technique (can you find it?). The result is a joyful and ingenious exercise in literary imagination. Audin writes: “The historical context comes from my book Remembering Sofya Kovalevskaya (Springer 2011, for the English translation) and Reinhard Bolling’s article 'Deine Sonia: a reading from a burned letter' (in Math. Intelligencer in 1992). The novelistic part is inspired by the 'story of the man who bought the vase of the passion' in Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, and by A Void, also by Georges Perec.”
--J.A.

I’m always letting men infect me. Before Andrew I dated an actor. Alex. After a fortnight together he’d given me ringworm. He was a mountain-range hiker of low-range ability, and prior to our coupling he’d spent a month schlepping around the wet Hebrides. The diagnosis took a toll on his libido, and our dates would usually conclude with us sitting in my bed, me palpitating, him pantomime-yawning, delicately removing my hand from his thigh. Such was my desperation that when he told me he had ringworm, and showed me the taupe circles on his inner thighs I decided to say I didn’t care, and climbed on top of him. He always preferred it with me on top, which I think now was less an enjoying-the-view thing and a more a path-of-least-resistance thing. For the next three months we passed our ringworm back and forth like a logbook, and at the beginning of the fourth month he told me that, while he was attracted to me, he wasn’t wildly attracted to me, and he didn’t love me. We broke up three weeks later and then he moved to Portugal.

I’ve forgotten most of that year: the hospital’s confusing architecture, the nights I woke and wandered the house to find my wife wandering the house too, like two ghosts surprised and even frightened to find the other haunting that same space. It’s lost the power of its particularity and become something else. A thing I sometimes talk about, finally, but only to say, yes, that happened, and now I am here. It has softened to a blur. It has found its place.

And yet I remember that the television played the news, and that the news described the murder of a family by their own son somewhere thousands of miles away in Arkansas. I remember that too—the place where it happened and the odd way the newscaster pronounced the word, <i>Arkansas</i>, as if he had never heard of such a place before. I even remember the image of the boy on the screen, and his name, although none of these things are very important. And I remember wondering what he felt—not the boy, but the man telling the story—and if it was anything at all like what I felt as I sat in the waiting room.

I was not at the hospital. That place had come and gone, and we had already said our good-byes. It was late February and the sun had returned so decisively that the whole town glowed. Outside people covered their eyes as they walked with their coats unbuttoned, hands shielding faces and heads bowed. Inside the floor was wet with dirty snow and all the chairs were full either with people or coats, mittens, hats, bundles that reminded me of sleeping children.

The silent comradery was familiar. The resentment too, at having to be stuck with these particular people and their particular smells and voices and nervous techniques for holding themselves apart from the rest. The light from the plate glass fell across the faces and made each one seem knowable, but I had been through this each year and knew it was nothing transcendent. I was just waiting for a mechanic to change my oil. The man on the TV had moved on to something else, if he had ever been talking about it in the first place. The story could have been something I heard about later, and then matched it to that place, fit them together because they seemed to belong side by side like a fork and knife.

Directly across from me the old man’s lip was split and I remember wondering if he even knew, if he had somehow moved past registering small pains like that; and I remember the younger woman, not the one who would show me the photographs, but the other one, the half-asleep one who I decided was beautiful. Three of them sat in a row across from me, the old man, the woman, and then the other woman, the one who pulled out her phone and moved across the room to sit right up next to me. “Do you want to look at some pictures?” she asked. She was the one still wearing her coat. In fact, it was still zipped up, and spotted with patches of duct tape to cover the pinholes caused when you stand so close to a bonfire. I had seen that before, lots of times, but never quite so many. I imagined her standing so close that the heat caused some suffering.

She said, “Look at this one.”

“I think my truck is almost ready,” I said. It was right there, through the window in the mechanic’s bay, with the hood open. I had been driving it around for a month with one of the dashboard lights blinking and decided, finally, that enough was enough. It had probably been the sun that had done that—reorganized things in my head, given me a conviction that this was a thing worth doing. But also I didn’t want to go back home. I had told my wife I was going out, had slammed the door and then stood in the cold sunlight without an idea of where to go and what to do. The garage had been my salvation.

“This one is a cat,” the woman next to me said, but I couldn’t see a cat. It was just a single eye and maybe not even. Something had happened to the colors too. She had been messing with it, reversed it. To me it looked like some kind of geographical feature, a slate grey ocean with an island in the middle of it, taken from some crazy machine circling the earth. It made me feel small as a bug, but not necessarily insignificant. After all, I was floating above all of it.

“Her name is Tabitha,” she said, but it looked like a place you could go to if you had enough money.

The other two people sat as if on the subway. The old man folded his arms. The woman let her eyes fall completely closed. Water collected around their boots. It was clear that I was on my own in this.

“And this one,” she said, “this one is the cat again.”

“Tabitha,” I said, because I was worried I had already forgotten. I wanted to hold onto that name for some reason.

She flipped to the next picture with a casual flick of her thumb. Her fingernails were bitten raw and there was something shrill, almost hysterical, in her voice, as if she were trying to prove something to me. Maybe she thought I wasn’t listening, wasn’t looking, but I was. I was trying pretty hard. It’s just that I wasn’t seeing what she was seeing.

The torqueing of the air drill occasionally interrupted us and we’d stop and look out at my truck up on the lift. Whatever they were doing was beyond me, but I knew they would finish up soon and then I’d sign the paper and pay my money and tell them thank you and that very small part of my life would be all right.

“This one is a good one,” she said.

“A cat,” I said, a question and a statement both. I expected her to say something smart-alecky, but she didn’t. I could tell she was trying hard to keep her hands still, the phone steady. It shimmied a little bit in her palm. Tattoos spiraled from her wrist to her elbow. They reminded me of vines, an invasive species.

“Right,” she said.

“I don’t have any,” I said.

“What?” she asked. “Pictures? You don’t have any?”

“Cats,” I said.

“You don’t look like a cat person,” she said, and she seemed to consider me. “You don’t look like a dog person either.” She smiled a little. “You look like a person though.”

“I am that,” I said. “You’ve got me.”

“I knew it,” she said.

My eyes fell back to the phone.

“It’s all about framing it the right way,” I said.

I had opened my mouth to give her some kind of vague compliment, but now it was all fumbling away from my intention. “Like, you can control it all. By you I mean the photographer. I guess what I’m saying is that what’s left out is important.” It seemed very crucial that she understand this and I wondered if maybe I was the crazy one, the one forcing myself on her. She’d tell this story to her boyfriend or mother or something: the man choking up in the gas station as he talked about technique.

“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but isn’t he cute? You can see me in his eyes. The shadow of me.”

I looked closer and yes, there it was, the outline with her hands raised to her face. I would not have noticed it without her pointing it out. She flipped to the next and the next. Another cat, or maybe the same one. She wasn’t explaining them anymore. In the background a couple of lawn chairs rested on their sides, as if blown by the wind or knocked down by someone stomping around. That’s what I was interested in: all the debris in the background. The filter made it look like the trees were on fire. The cat was in one of the trees. And then it was gone because she had flipped the picture again to something I couldn’t recognize.

I could hear the mechanics yelling happily about something or other and then the air drill again. It sounded a little dangerous, like you could put it through your hand if you weren’t careful. I was trying really hard to concentrate.

“That’s my vag,” she said.

I sat looking at it. It didn’t seem like anything at all.

“A different kind of pussy,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Really,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

If she had told me it was a stream or water or the close-up surface of a table top I would have said, oh sure, fine, and been ready for the next one. The people across from us were doing their best not to look, to appear not to look, and I had the oddest feeling: that it was us and them, me and this woman against all the rest, including my wife, who was probably in bed at home on a Saturday afternoon. I thought about driving through the snow on my way here with my hand blocking the sunlight, how it had seemed to swallow me up until it felt like I was dissolving. The drives back and forth to the hospital had all been in the dark and that had made them a little easier, to do all of that submerged in the darkness.

“So okay,” I told here. “Here we are.”

“Insightful,” she said. “Perfect.”

I thought of my wife waiting for me, how changing the oil might prove something to her and maybe to me. It might open a door, so to speak. I liked to imagine her doing something similar: boxing up all that stuff in the back room, maybe, although it was too soon—I thought then that maybe it would always be too soon. Reaching across the bed to touch me. I thought about how you could sit across a kitchen table from someone and see the same exact thing in them as you saw in yourself, the same mess, and then decide casually, with a kind of shrug, to hate them with all the effort you could give. That’s the kind of thing that would happen late at night, when one of us would find the other. “You don’t believe me,” the woman said.

“I believe you,” I said.

“In the tub,” she said.

Maybe I was staring. I’m not sure. Or maybe I was focused on my truck. But a little irritation had found its way into her voice. “It looks like nature photography,” I said. I could see roots splitting in all different directions. “It looks underground.”

Because I had thought of the permafrost ice caves and how it had felt in there looking up. Supposedly it was the remains of a prehistoric lake. A frozen snapshot, my brother-in-law had called it. We had traveled down there once and seen it all: the ice and fossils and giant slabs of exposed rock. The lake was long gone, but you could see the underside of it still, and you felt like it all might come crashing down on you too. At least that’s how I had felt, but I think my wife had felt that too. She had held my hand while we navigated the terrain.

The lake had probably covered the entire ridge, made the whole landscape one vast long plain. He belonged to the Army Corps of Engineers and seemed to know what he was talking about, had named the bones and the rocks as we moved deeper inside. As he talked about the lake he had spread his arms to show how big the thing had been, but all it had done was show off his own strength, his broad chest and arms. I remember being impressed by that, and the way he spoke, as if this were a secret he was sharing. He stood with his arms spread apart and smiled. Water, he said, was the great equalizer. I remember my wife and I nodding at that like it was wisdom we could use in the coming months. You could see the fossils in the walls standing out white and ethereal in the lamp radiance. For some odd reason it occurred to me that this woman, the woman next to me in the waiting room, should know all of this—that it was selfish of me to keep it to myself. But I kept it to myself. She leaned in closer and said something else I didn’t catch. Or I don’t remember it. She was trying to pull her phone back, but I had a hand on it too. Just to steady the picture.

“You’re lying,” I said. For some reason I was laughing.

“No,” she said. She was laughing too, although maybe not.

[Note: The following is an excerpt from a novella]


The first one appeared on May 14. The world was approaching its point-of-no-return at the speed of light, proving from day to day how damn right prophet Malachi was (For behold, the day is coming, blazing like a furnace), and Earth was becoming the steaming, racist inferno in which we’ll all perish. In Tompkins Square Park, it was raining like hell.

Before we begin, I would like to preempt any misunderstandings: This is no love story. Nor is it some cautionary tale about the Clash of Civilizations or the Downfall of the West. This is the story of two men who led their unimportant lives in the Big, Rotten Apple. These men happen to be the best friends I’ve ever had.

To avoid any surprises—or, as we call them in the U.S. of A., potential lawsuits—let me give you the full pitch. I’m giving you this pitch as a courtesy, a content warning. Like those small red pepper icons they use in menus of Indian restaurants to warn old, white people that the food could burn their taste buds, so they might as well order some extra chapati with that curry.

So here goes:

A gay couple faces an impossible dilemma, when a mysterious offer appears in their inbox: If they agree to create a homemade pornographic film, they will receive $120,000 that will allow them to realize their long-standing dream of becoming parents.

Norma, third seat on the left at my screenwriting class, says my pitch sucks. I say, let me see the man who thinks that naming your daughter Norma is a legitimate thing to do after 1967.

You have a decent hook, she tells me. Your characters are refreshing and surprisingly well-rounded. But if I may, Jordan dear, you are robbing your pitch of its narrative potential.

And as much as I hate to admit it, she is right. Cause I neglected to mention one crucial detail: this ain’t no typical story. This baby happens to be the living nightmare of any bigot—it’s both homosexual and bi-racial.

The heroes of our story are two men whose hearts lie deep in the cursed ground of the Holy Land. Don’t get me wrong: they’re both Americans, proud residents of the urban jungle known as Alphabet City, Manhattan (Proud? Daud would probably say. I’m not proud of this country, world champion of racism, both overt and covert, 243 years and counting. But he is proud, trust me. You should see his face at our Fourth of July picnics, nibbling his vegan chicken wings all shining. He’s just playing hard to get).

And you know what they say. A Jewish soul still yearns and all that jazz. Although only one of our protagonists is Jewish. The other is—surprise, surprise—Muslim, Palestinian. And that’s the complication in our story. That’s our tragic punchline, our comedic catastrophe, my friends. That’s what makes our story sound like the beginning of a joke that Neo-Nazis tell each other at their underground conventions.

You see, my fellows here in La La Land usually laugh at me. They dismiss my story, calling it a hippie fairytale. They say that if I pitch it anywhere in Hollywood I will be blacklisted—and not in the Let-Me-Buy-The-Rights-In-A-Million-Dollar sense of the term. Producers will avoid my calls, ignore my messages, slam doors in my face.

Thing is, it’s real as shit. And get this: throughout the first week of their dangerous liaison, neither of the gentlemen in question was aware of the other’s ethnicity, or of the tragicomic potential of their entire fling (And let’s face it, it all started as a fling, as they both admit today).

There are other crucial details I left out of my pitch. That was actually on purpose. You see, I’m trying to build dramatic tension. That’s what you should do if you ever want to make a living writing, my screenwriting tutor Seth always says.

I didn’t tell you when and where Daud and Yoni met each other. How they fell in love. And what exactly happened after they received that crazy email.

But have no worries, hevre. You will find out all you need to know in due course. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, King Solomon said in some secret dialect of ancient Hebrew, if my memory of Bible Camp doesn’t fail me. Haste comes from the devil and patience from the merciful God, Queen Scheherazade responded in her ancient Arabic, centuries later.

For everything there is a season. Yes. I’m pretty sure that, having lived through the events I’m about to unfold on these very pages, despite everything that’s happened, Yoni and Daud would both agree on that.

“Hello,” he hoped, and I saw immediately that he was a Jewish boy, just like my brother, and I became upset that the only ones who ever hope hello at me are Jewish boys.

“If you insist,” I said.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Jewish boys in this day and age have much to recommend them. I know plenty of girls who were raised to be stoic—that means not complain, maybe not even want to complain—who sigh their tasteful chests up and down in want of a Jewish boy.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “it’s Saturday. You’ll have to go home to your mother, who will be happy to have you I’m sure.”

“You keep the Sabbath?” he said.

See? I didn’t tell you earlier, but he doesn’t even look Jewish. I can simply spot them from the masses. One tribesman’s heart cries chosenly to another’s.

I didn’t tell you earlier because I know you’re liable to call stereotype. It’s the 21st century! you’ll be thinking. You are a highly educated young Jewess! But please go ahead and describe the picture you conjured when I said “I saw immediately he was a Jewish boy.” Yes, I know all about it. So I am now absolved from blame for as long as I have you, dear or accidental listeners to this weekly midnight radio program.

The whole truth is he was very tall and childishly hairless, with a bit of blond fuzz coating his head and an apparent inability to grow a beard.

“No, I don’t keep the Sabbath,” I said, suppressing my sudden desire to shout Shabbat Shalom! right there on the sidewalk of Hoboken, New Jersey, beside an Irish pub.

“Oh,” he said, “me neither”—a bit proudly, which meant he was still deeply smushed beneath his mother’s thumb and rebelled by poking at it gently with his little finger; or a bit guiltily, even worse, because what is more typical than Jewish guilt? My poor big brother Jakey has it in spades about a whole cabinetful of faults, mostly never playing baseball with our old-now dad who can’t play baseball anymore.

“Just don’t tell my dad about the shabbos thing,” the Jewish boy said, and grinned. “He’s a rabbi, after all.”

A rabbi’s son! And to think—I don’t have to tell my few but steadfast listeners—I’ve been seeking a nice Christian boy for some time, with no luck. It’s about time for children, I say, and I want mine to have insurance. Coverage against man, the universe, and acts of God. I’m no ignoramus; I listened when my Nana spoke. I don’t want blood that’s also liability.

“Hey,” I said, “what happens when a minister’s son, a rabbi’s son, and a Jewess walk into a bar?” I laughed alone, because the joke was its own punchline; I was on my way into the pub to meet my Catholic man. I told him so.

“You have a Catholic man?” he said. His smile vanished.

“No,” I repeated. “I’m going to meet one.”

“Can I come too?” He looked at me, which was a very unfortunate event, because Jewish boys can read me like the alphabet. “I’ll come too,” he corrected himself. I walked in the door without checking whether he was following me. Assuming he was.

Translated from the Spanish by Javier Arango.

The obsession with maintaining a constant contact between skin and various liquids. Water, petroleum, mud, bodily fluids: blood, oils, acids, tears, sperm. Brilliant flesh, scrubbed again and again, clean, eaten away, naked, buried, immaculate, tarnished, dead. The fervor is so great that skins end up simply dissolving. From a face, usually only the raw flesh appears. It is confirmed that the skin was torn off before death. On the underground transport, every day one can see millions of travelers freshly bathed, with damp hair, usually worn in strict styles. It’s not in vain that thousands of liters of gel are sold each year. At parties, ladies and gentleman present themselves all tidied up before the celebrations. On birthdays, both the celebrant and the guests try to dress to kill. The children painstakingly wash the iguanas, the rats, the skunks that they own, to sit before a photographer with the animal on their lap. They try to the best of their abilities to keep their suits clean. They always appear immaculate before the abductions, the abuse, the ritual killings to which they are subjected. There are also collective baths. It’s an official profession: the washers of bodies, both living and dead, skinned or intact, who use harsh sponges and coarse scrubbers to eliminate any bodily impurity. The hot water, the steam, the vapor expands profusely. For each death, it is important that there be a great amount of liquid. The perfect crime seems not to be one that is never uncovered, but one that leaves the greatest amount of aqueous substances spreading over the scene of the crime. Whether it occurs on the streets or in privacy. In a crime of passion or hatred, there must be many stab wounds, tens, sometimes hundreds, so that the emerging liquid can be used to write on the walls the motives, the circumstances, and the consequences of those actions. Written with blood. Bodies washed, brushed, trained. Docile and elegant, often sitting before a photographer’s lens, forming part of an image that itself is only possible by way of another liquid, a chemical, that will fix it onto a rigid surface. Naked bodies, cleaned of all shame, a peasant dancing with no clothes on, with enormous ears and taking little hops. Or the images of Pedagogue Boris or Teacher Virginia that are kept in some of the poorer homes. Bodies that present themselves directly to those who need them, conscious of their transience, of their furtive passage through the world. Moist surfaces, wet bedsheets over wrinkled skins. Morgues, amphitheaters packed with neat cadavers. Stinking trucks, overflowing with the dead that nobody claims. Travel agents who scam the visitors, mostly already dead, who wish to get to know the region. It’s common to see how, after a day’s work in streets or markets, the hygiene of the place becomes essential. Enormous amounts of running water are thrown on the surfaces. All to erase any trace of blame. The same thing happens after the various religious rites that take place throughout the city. After people gather around the learnings of the Sacred Quran or after Evangelical or Catholic rites, the water seems to emerge from nothingness. The liquid in the synagogue is no different from the others. The presence of water is fundamental. It seems even more important than the oxygen needed to breathe. Pedagogue Boris remembers the time when a philosopher, whom he met as a young follower of the Blind Poet, told him about when he fell asleep in the rural baths. He had taken a long nap because the place was empty, silent, free of danger. He frequented the baths; they were cheap. He never had enough money to properly care for the pains resulting from the genetic abnormalities he suffered. He found relief in the steam rooms, in the showers of those public baths. Steam, humidity, running water. The philosopher was officially certified as a mutant. Lulled by the calm induced by the constant flowing of liquids, he fell asleep, hopeful that soon he would have a sacred dog. A dog that had been offered as a gift in a dream experienced after leaving his place of prayer. When he woke up he found himself in the midst, not of dogs, of sacred ghosts, but of dozens of naked men. He became alarmed. The bodies were of different ages, of different complexions. Before putting his clothes on and leaving the place, he took a digital image with the camera on his phone. He wished to take with him the instant he was experiencing. He captured an image of a man’s skin overcome by soap. When he was leaving the baths, he noticed that suddenly the horde of naked figures started calling out for him to return. They demanded reasons for what he had just done. Taking a humid image, the bare skin of men bathing together, was a grave offense for which he should pay. The philosopher was already out of the steam baths. In the area where people get ready to leave. The men could not reach him: they had no clothes, and many were mid-bath. That moment he learned, as told by one of the receptionists, that the angry men were peasants who were washing themselves after a day of hard work. They were bathing in order to return home spotless. They were performing the ritual of exposing skin to liquid. And precisely because they were carrying out an ancient rite, they would not allow someone to take an image of the scene. Their anger toward the young philosopher was a result of the obsession with exposing skin to the constant flow of water. A near madness that had to be carried out without the presence of witnesses. Finally, the young philosopher managed to escape, taking with him the secret, the microsecond in which he had captured the practice, skin, water, shine, excoriation, disappearance. A population immaculate by nature, clean, a victim of itself, beheaded with a clean cut. Naturally, the heads tend to roll in a large puddle of liquid creating a curious outline on the surfaces. Nobody is guilty of anything. Maybe only aqueous matter is scrubbed again and again. It all seems to show that hygiene is a gift from heaven. The appearance of skinned bodies is too. A miracle that a man had dissolved hundreds, maybe thousands, of cadavers in acid, which were handed to him systematically to be cooked in corrosive liquid. In large scalding pots. A radical task of cleaning. Now, that man walks the streets freely. It is not written in any code that making bodies disappear is a crime. On the contrary, he was following the necessary laws of purification. Clean are the subjects whose bodies are wrapped in burial sheets. The ones who wash themselves until they are skinned alive. Clean, the cancer operations, the routine amputations, surgical interventions, mutilations, almost always carried out ritually. Clean, the heads apart from their bodies. The ones who await their sexual clients are in conditions of extreme tidiness. The famous Pamelitas, bound by the orders of obese old men. The migrants who go hand over their clean lives to an unknown nothingness. The transvestites. The muxes, figures who are recognized by at least two different gazes. The clowns who try to surprise motorists on the busiest street-corners. Exquisite, the nakedness of the one enveloped by a snake. The territory of impeccable deaths. The ones who pose with a wild animal on their laps. The neatness is so polished that many times the living don’t know that they are already dead; some cadavers are present, alive, in anguish of the ones looking for them. The traveling mages. The indigenous. The ones who frequent the public baths surreptitiously. Who immerse themselves in temples of prayer. In porno theaters. None of that exists, except in what is liquid. In its aqueous state across centuries, times overlaid on one another to form a body, unique, compact, broken, diluted. Matter held together only by the fervor with which millions try to keep their purity intact. Skin and aqueous substances. I offer liquid and I demand liquid. Nothing bad can happen inside this gel reality, protected, armored, solid, in a reality so grotesque due to the constant fluidity to which bodies are subjected. An unparalleled protection is offered by the aqueous quality of souls looking for a moist skin to embody, to disappear into and then reemerge in another body just as liquid and fleeting. The young philosopher’s desire before falling asleep in the public baths, apart from keeping his body absolutely clean, was to have a sacred dog. The dog that is not a dog, but a Gift from God. Is the Quran perchance unfamiliar to these people? Surely it is. Also the theology of pre-Colombian gods, who manifest themselves in ordinary ways, especially around the primary-school- turned-hospice that Pedagogue Boris had set up before the arrival of the horde of bathing peasants. Neither what is Muslim nor what is pre-Colombian belongs to us, he seemed to want to scream when he was beside the dying people in the school he ran. The Torah, the Cabbala. Despite currently living in a planet inhabited by the dead, there is no Sacred Word to follow. We live in a space with no defined destiny, framed only by the constant need for water, needed both to live and to be dead. In a place for cadavers where Pedagogue Boris ended up not only settling in for good, but also founding a modest school that people attended with the hope of being taught brilliantly. A classroom, a primary school that eventually flooded. First with vapor, then with water, with blood, with liquids emerging from bodies on the way to decomposition. It seems that nobody believes in anything, not has faith in anything that does not come from the virgins, the ones who are depicted in these lands as women dressed for a wedding whose heads are really the skulls of Santa Muerte. So we must be humble, bow our heads and accept that we live on a planet where there is no longer any Word, no Tutelary Books, no Codices, none of the intricate and impenetrable atavistic writings of the civilizations of the South. Nor any new interpretations from the countless evangelists who knock again and again on the doors of the little school-turned-hospice that Pedagogue Boris so kindly founded. Nothing to give sense to the infinite number of deaths that surround us: the moist living, residing above the dead, the dead drinking the water of the living, the dead burying their own dead, the dead digging up their dead. Mud. Watery lands. Hopefully, I wish with all my heart, the young philosopher will be able to have his sacred dog. He is just as worried about finding a way to get it, as he is about knowing whether he is even in the right conditions to raise it. These dogs are delicate: they need open space to run and develop properly. He doesn’t think that this place for the dead where he lives, where nobody believes in any Scripture anymore, is the right place to see it grow up. Will it be appropriate to tell this sacred dog, in the right moment, that he is not just the author of a series of books, but of the bearer of New Scriptures? A dog who does not dig up the dead with his nails. When the other dogs tried to desecrate the tomb of the Prophet, Mohammed’s followers eradicated all the dogs, hundreds, thousands, with the blade of their swords. All of the dogs in the area were left lifeless and bleeding. They formed astonishing mountains from the bodies, which they had to decompose with acids, with liquid chemicals, to later incinerate them and throw the ashes into the waters of a nearby river. The flesh of dogs taken to the cremation ovens used in military barracks. Dogs killed like dogs. Guided by a higher order, not written in any Sacred Book. The Present Scriptures no longer exist. The dead form a single mass. Today, sacred dogs are almost impossible to come by. The bones of the clandestine dead are still present around the young philosopher, Pedagogue Boris, or Teacher Virginia. Clean, brushed, impeccable. They go past any Scripture. To get a sacred dog, one must undertake long journeys. But the true miracle would not be the arrival of the dog that is not a dog, but the emergence of a proper form of writing. With a gift seemingly enjoyed by the nomads of the desert when they hear their dogs chasing a hare. More than once, the Prophet himself, a Blind Poet in this case, has declared that a Bedouin without a good sacred dog by his side, a form of writing, can be considered a dead man. Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher must forget their frequent worries. Not worry too much about the guests, the sick on the verge of dying whom they keep in the little, primitive school. Nor notice the hundreds of impeccable dead that surround them, not only the bodies on the way to extinction, those of the guests at the school for whom they are responsible, but also those who reside in the grave pits that never stop appearing, or the ones who travel the underground transport, hair styled with gel. These times seem to necessitate the emergence of a new series of letters, forming new phrases. No language is capable of expressing the misfortunes of which Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are victims. Among other things, of liberating them from the side-effects of the medications they must take to stay alive. Where are the Dead that we know? Where the unknown? Can it be that Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are actually a single being? I think so. Pedagogue Boris and the young philosopher are the same person. Letters appearing from nothingness led him to write his first book. A philosopher who does not write treatises or create systems of thought. The young philosopher’s work of creation was perhaps one of the ways he found to escape the guilt arising both from writing and from not writing. To think, how not to do it. To bathe whenever possible. To visit the public baths at every opportunity. Maybe he only feels fulfilled in places that are flooded with all kinds of substances, which is just how the area where he lives has been inundated. It can’t be possible for someone like the philosopher, who did not study at any university or institution, who barely knows how to read and write, to feel a guilt like that. Nor can it be that in his capacity as Pedagogue Boris, he created a primary school where children go to die. In reality, the philosopher has never had any kind of education. In fact, he is infected, a pariah. Another Pamelita who prostitutes himself, pleasure included. Someone condemned to the most terrible death. He was taught no more than the basic letters and a few passages from the Bible. While he read, lying on the rug where he often slept, the young poet remembered that at certain moments, he had felt the deceptive feeling of protection, both from himself, and from the constant images of systematic slaughters, especially of dogs, that would appear before him; of the shapes of mosques, both in the East and the West, of children drowning other children in mountain villages, in lagoons, in rivers, on endless plateaus, on the black coasts of the Pacific. He saw himself, brutally murdered in the heavy snow. He felt in his body the scenes of Gods devouring other Gods. I imagine nobody would believe that this very young man represents the New Scriptures. Only Pedagogue Boris, who does not remember clearly when he met the young philosopher, affirms this. The fish know it too, those fish in the tanks that the young philosopher kept at the school for classes on the Natural Sciences, as does the sacred dog that he wished for. Letters that are able to define him both as a young philosopher and as someone immersed in tragedy. And also as the figure of a Pedagogue interested in opening a school. Although many people know that the philosopher’s words, his thoughts, his dreams, are all lies. The liquid boiling in his brain. Nobody believes in the Sacred Books, neither the Western ones nor the ones from the region where he lives. It is widely known, I repeat, that the young philosopher has never had any education. According to Pedagogue Boris, he only writes to forget that he will die soon, the victim of an incurable disease. It is the destiny marked out on those lands. Although he lives with the hope that the New Scripture will appear by spontaneous generation. Perhaps it will be like a dog that is larger than a horse. Almost like a camel in the desert. Or maybe it will manifest itself as its opposite, miniscule like one of the colored fish from the Natural Sciences course. Pedagogue Boris knows that there is no conventional way to express that which appears like a monster, like a shadow: the writing that is carried out throughout the course of existence. He does not know the exact moment in which the urge to write, blind, dumb, with no definite sense, went on to form an archive of reality. Perhaps forgetting was its reason to exist. To put into practice something like The Scriptural Seal of Non- Memory. In that exercise in forgetting, the philosopher places some sacred dogs that he wishes to have before his death. He remembers nothing. Has he mentioned this before in some space? He doesn’t know whether he is a philosopher, a writer, or a pedagogue. It only occurs to him, while he travels in an underground coach surrounded by clean bodies with their heads polished, humid, covered in gel, that a Muslim boy is recounting his dream. He is going to receive a sacred dog from the Superior of his Order. The transparent fish-tank from the classroom also appears. The steam baths full of naked men willing to beat him to death for having taken an image of their skins being rubbed by liquid again and again. The book of the dead. Secret tributes. A monster that can only be endured if one does not remember it intensely or if one lets it remain in its kind of aqueous existence, clean, carried in the hairstyles worn by the city’s underground transport passengers. The philosopher has the duty to write. Repudiation, ignorance, and necessity are all that is left to him after rejecting the Sacred Books, the Aztec Codices. Perennial cultures, extreme, unstable, bloodthirsty, just, unjust, whose opposites now tend to present themselves simultaneously. That’s why he knows that it is difficult for him to be understood when he explains that his way of working is not like that of others. His study, the one in which he invented the existence of a classroom decorated with pedagogical fish, every now and then becomes a sort of nothing. He places, on a white surface, one word after another. He notices that we rarely talk about non-writings, neither new nor classic. That it is easy to omit referring to silences. The important silencing, the definitive one, appears to be the one that is kept, hidden, in these regions. He never trusts words. Nor reviews, honors, awards, distinctions, doctorates. Nor the existence of mystical dogs that can reach the size of a camel. Nor does he trust the words of his brothers in the Order when they say that they live in heaven on earth. Where the limits between the living and the dead seem to have been erased. Like words and writing. We are all Muslim, some around there say. The mystical is present in the ordinary. Pedagogue Boris, in his effort to run a primary school, has already forgotten the hieroglyphics buried in the eternal snowy steppes of the North. Something similar, necessary forgetting, is what should take place with the writings of all times. Scriptural Seals of Non- Memory. Inscribed in clay tablets, in the dark surfaces of caves or on modern keyboards. Maybe also on those decomposing bodies, hanging from bridges, skinned alive. Washed and washed again. Dying in a classroom in a primitive school, where the pupils have been condemned to death for reasons unknown to us. The worst enemies of writing are exactly those who practice writing, affirms Pedagogue Boris. The saint Mansur Al-Hallaj was tortured to death for claiming “I Am the Truth, I Am God”. The same way that a philosopher would be executed in our time if he dared to say something similar: that he is the Word. And the young philosopher allows himself to say, surrounded here by dozens of cadavers, that there is no objective. Apart from writing a book, everything is imposture. The descriptions of the dogs, of the fish. The stories, the characters, the repetitions. All a falsehood, a pretext. It’s possible that each golden fish, swimming majestically, being described by condemned children, by Pedagogue Boris, may be the representation of the proper word. A word that can never be complete while the marked dogs still exist, those wandering the world in search of burial. An unnamable writing, indefinite, fleeting, transparent, as the passage of time appears to a dervish in its spinning trance. “I Am The True Scripture”, anyone can say, who simply takes a pencil to paper with the intention of making a stroke, a letter, a flourish. Something that, with a single movement, etches on a surface its passage through the world. Or rather the footprint of its being scorched into the ovens of some military barracks. Constant water. Bodies cleaned of their corporeality. Scorched bones, transparent bones, bones of an extreme whiteness that shine under the sun. On certain autumn nights, especially on those when the philosopher’s epilepsy medication leaves him in a state that can neither be called sleep nor wakefulness, scenes and thoughts pass through his head, most of which are difficult to describe. Events that take place as if behind a transparent curtain, a shadowy sheen. Similar states must be experienced by some animals in the solitude of their coops, stables, or barns. Pedagogue Boris is sure that this happens to the dogs that sleep in his room. Sometimes he surprises them, in the middle of the night, gazing, engrossed and focused on an indeterminate point. He usually notices how they’ll suddenly move a muscle compulsively or let out a moan they seem unable to control. He is sure that in those moments they are living scenes from some other reality. One time, the young philosopher felt something similar while he was wrapped in the blanket where he spends his nights. He noticed a figure very much like him, it was himself, sitting on one of the edges. From the first moment, he noticed that the shadow was talking incessantly. It was as though he had found it in the middle of an eternal monologue begun at an indefinite time. Upon hearing it, he realized that the shadow was talking about Our Lady, about a kleptomaniac, about a tour guide who lived exiled in a part of the country where the corrosion from sea salt was very pronounced. The results of oxidation could be seen in electrical devices, in the ancient and broken summer chairs out on balconies, and in the general structure of the building. The fire escape had turned into a heap of twisted iron, which the neighbors had decided to place facing the ocean like a great sculpture. Our Lady had been, in her time, an effective tour guide, especially when nobody knew that she would steal things while she was doing her job. She would usually steal unimportant objects, things of little value, from her clients. It all ended when she was caught taking the earrings from a jewelry box that the wife of a foreign king had left on a table in the suite where she was staying. She was never told anything about her crime. Rather she was forced to remain locked away in her house indefinitely. She did not receive a formal penalty, except the order not to leave her apartment for any reason. She was forced to stay there as long as was necessary. Our Lady (a tour guide?) is a character that the young philosopher came up with a few years ago, when he was using the study that a photographer had lent him to edit a book. He wrote it on a typewriter, producing a sound that bothered the photographer’s children, who lived on the floor below. They were also bothered by the sound of the dog’s footsteps above them. It was called Sueño del Pongo. The dog that shouldered the burden of millennia of injustice: that of the abusive owner, himself abused in the dream of someone oppressed. In that study, sometimes a memory would arise, in the way that memories do, of the vague presence of his mother. Not the one that everyone knew, but the one who had actually raised him. The faded one. The dead mother. The one who would never move away from watery surfaces, with her shining skin, luscious, who would give herself to the street vendors. The mother who, since the philosopher was little, took advantage of the disproportionate size of his penis. The one who would demand various objects from the other women in the region in exchange for letting them look at her son’s member as long as they wished. Our Lady, a kleptomaniac tour guide, is based on the story of a government worker who was the philosopher’s neighbor during the years he lived in other parts. In a society governed by a totalitarian system. The image of the philosopher’s mother, the faded one, who was attentive to the women looking at his naked body, may appear as a consequence of the mutual rejection they always felt for each other. From the moment of his birth. The mother facing the son and the son facing the mother. Maybe the root of this discord has to do with the circumstances of his birth. The philosopher is missing some body parts. He was born that way. That is why he carries a document that identifies him as a mutant. The condition of his body sometimes causes unbearable physical pain, which has led him to imagine an institution specializing in patients with strange maladies. He imagines that he attends a clinic that focuses on people who have never had, who have lost, or who are about to lose an appendage. Including the penis that his mother methodically showed in public. The institution has a floor exclusively for that type of patient. It offers a pool with underwater jets that give firm massages. Steam, fog, vapor, incessant water on the surface of bodies. It also has clinical equipment. It is common to see people entering or leaving the building, sometimes with help, a series of individuals who search the waters, the machines, the institution in general for the peace they need to go on with their lives. His visits to that clinic remind him that when he was a boy, he frequently attended an institution for deformed people, where he spent a good part of his childhood living with people trying to adapt to normal life, many desperately, others with resignation. What they sought in his case was to make him hear through his missing ear, and for him to accept wearing a glass eye so as not to show the hole, the scar, the scratch, the dead eyelid on his face. In another corner of this floor of the clinic were the rooms dedicated to individual therapy. They were small spaces with beds for massages, physical therapy, osteopathic treatments, separated from one another by thin curtains. In that section, they could tend to up to six patients at a time. In fact, a single therapist was able to offer his services to all of them, going from one bed to another every few minutes. The most well-known massage therapist was a body- builder who more than once told Pedagogue Boris about the strange situation that was taking place at his home at that time: the transformation of his mother into a parrot. The mother had died months ago, murdered, disappeared, skinned, inert on the side of the road, and the parrot that she had had for several years would repeat her usual words. Also, he told him in confidence, the parrot would not miss an episode of the television series that his mother had not been able to finish watching. With regards to the presence of the philosopher’s mother in the baths, we must clarify that in reality, such places never existed. Just like there never existed, except in his fictions, a man who lived close to the central airport. An invalid, like the ones who used to go to the clinic that he created in his mind while laying down, wrapped in a blanket, on the ground, or in the rehabilitation area of the hospital in whose basements he had spent a good part of his childhood. He mentions the basements because that is where the prostheses are usually built: arms, legs, ears, eyes. Eyes. Dozens, hundreds of eyes kept in large jars of liquid. Floating eyes. Wet. Clean. Aseptic. He remembers that, despite his forced visits, on one occasion he was not able to get a new eye because his father refused to accept the cost based on his socioeconomic evaluation. A new eye? The young philosopher is missing an eye? The father indicated that despite the place where he worked, a mid-level job, he did not have enough money for this expense. Pedagogue Boris remembers that this led to a nasty argument between the father and the social worker, who was trying to show him that his fees were adjusted to his economic status. Nevertheless, his rejection was decisive. The father calmed him down as they were leaving when he said that he knew a place where they made perfect marbles. So perfect that nobody would notice that he was missing an eye. He never took him to such a factory. His mother preferred for him to spend his days lying down. Just like that character who lived near the airport, who lay eternally in bed screaming orders to the guard dogs that he owned. Despite being immobile, that man was considered one of the best trainers of the region. He shared his house with his mother, a sister, his nurse, and nearly a dozen dogs trained to kill at the sound of an order. It is unknown why, upon entering his room, some visitors felt the presence of an atmosphere that had to do with what could be called the future of America. Maybe the Inuits’ drawings, the Lakotas’ way of organizing themselves. Some interpretations of the Codices, usually flawed readings. There seemed to be in that room some word, some Sacred Book that would once and for all define that part of the world. If anyone asked about his situation, the immobile man would respond, in his nearly incomprehensible way of speaking, that it was one thing to be immobile and another to be mentally retarded. It was a shame that a trainer like that, effective, about to reveal the mysteries of this area, the reasons for which a girl would take a seat with an iguana on her lap, died on an ordinary night when one of the animals escaped its crate and devoured him while he slept next to his nurse. The room filled with liquid. It may have been a sacred dog and not a guard dog. The size of a camel in the desert. The blood of the paralytic man spread through the room. With fecal matter. With his brains, which soon emerged. Once again, liquids flooding the scene of a crime. Honoring the aqueous nature of this part of the world. But it’s true, the young philosopher’s mother took advantage of his embarrassment. She showed off her son clean, his breast, his arms, his legs, his genitals, the way that skins are often presented in the region. There was the disproportionately large penis. Some men, the bathers, gave him a particular shine. They seemed to want to prepare him for his next disappearance. That way his body would look very tidy, naked, next to the other bodies washed in the same desperate way. As if in all that scrubbing they were trying to hang onto this world. To be allowed to continue attending the primary school that Pedagogue Boris had created with such care. To keep studying the water in the fish-tanks to get good grades on the exams. To continue on with their exfoliated suits, so clean, whose cleanliness they would protect with care in case they were eventually forced to sit before a photographer’s camera with an iguana on their lap. Peasants with huge ears dancing naked. Hair styled carefully with differently textured gels. Immaculate bodies, clean, unpolluted. In this way they would be handed over to that nothingness: immaculate. Surrounded by holy ghosts, the dogs. By cancer operations, by routine amputations, by surgical interventions, by mutilations. Exquisite, the nakedness of the one enveloped by a snake. In porno theaters. Hopefully the young philosopher will be able to obtain his sacred dog. The saintly dog. The side-effects of a medication that lets him stay alive. The need to write to create an Archive of Reality. The Scriptural Seal of Non-Memory. Repudiation, ignorance, and necessity. The book of the dead. Secret tributes. The epilepsy that the philosopher suffers. The solitude of the stables, coops, and barns. The dogs that sleep in the poet’s bedroom. Next to the blanket he wraps himself in, inside the primitive school run by the poet himself– Pedagogue Boris and Professor Virginia– in the hope that the students may have a proper place to die.

The summer my sister went to war I started digging a hole in our backyard.

Before she left, Annie hugged me real hard and said in her quiet way, Jenna, if you ever need me I’ll be right here. She stomped on the ground with her new brown boots. Okay?

In the ground? I asked her.

No, she said, on the other side.

I stood watching her on the porch, gnats spazzing around my hair, as the car grumbled off into the distance. As soon as the curve of the cornfield swallowed her up, I took off and ran to the shed, taking the biggest, shiniest, sharpest shovel we had and hauling it over to one of Daddy’s off-rotation fields. It took me a while to pick a spot because what if I went to far left and ended up in China or too right and ended up in Paris or even worse I dug right under her and she fell through the big, dark, long tunnel into the nowhere beyond? I decided to dig in smack-dab middle. I was two feet deep by the time Daddy came back with the empty car.

I always remind people of other people. I’m used to it by now, having somebody else borrow my face for a little while. Cause I’m that hard thing people throw their memories against. I’m what they bounce off of right before they cut through the air and get back to who they really belong to. Before they section that sheet of atoms draped between us, rip apart that fabric wall till the strips are laying down at our feet like leaves. Till we’re just staring at each other across that gaping throat the tear makes.

It happens after five but before seven. You know, when the sun’s dripping down the sky, brazed orange up against a growing darkness. The fading sunlight slinks through the space around it until both things find themselves inside of each other, figure out they can make the softest purple so they do. It’s not dark yet and I’m two blocks away from home. Maybe it’s three.

I usually cut through the empty lot right behind the beauty supply store on sixth. The chain-link fence runs parallel to the lot.

There’s a hole in the fence that leads up pretty beautifully right up to my street. All I have to do is walk across the concrete partition that leads across the canal and I’m golden. I almost drowned in that canal once. And I know that every time I cross it, it feels like my lungs are full of water again, like my own panic’s got its arms wrapped around my chest again.

Nico pulled me out, dragged me onto the barren narrow bank. And when I opened my eyes, coughing, all I could think about was how his head cut against the glass blue sky like a fucking sun. And if I thought that I kind of liked the way his eyes got all big and scared for me, kind of liked how their pretty green made me think about saturday mornings in the grass behind my grandma’s backyard, well… nobody needed to know that.

I’d seen him sometimes in the cafeteria, with the other Colombian kids, but having somebody drag you out of a canal? It changes things, makes you close. So when I started going everywhere with Nico, walking to school with him, going home with him, playing with him on the weekends… people didn’t think I was gay, they thought I was grateful. Shit, I ran with it.

I think he knew. Before I even told him, I think he—

I’m crossing the street in front of the post office and a royal blue Chevy Tahoe misses me by like half a foot. My heart falls through my ribcage, into my stomach. Stays there long after the truck’s gone. I’d always thought that there had to be an easier way to let everybody know how far along you were in your midlife crisis, but trucks seem to be the way to go down here. Cars have already started to swerve around me by the time I start to get out of the street.

I’m almost there. I can see the Family Dollar up ahead, so I’m less than a block away from the beauty supply shop.

I always love visiting my grandma (not the Cuban one that hates me; the black one that hates my mom) in Wynwood. She’s just a city over, not that far, so I walk. I go for her, stay for the art, the streets of murals, that kind of shit that would make white classicists pass the fuck out.

With her there’s this love inside a four bedroom ranch-style that wraps around me, leaves me warm for days on end. Then I get the walls of screaming colors, stark blues and greens and yellows and pinks and oranges and reds yelling just to yell just to yell. Screaming and screaming and screaming at me until something inside me picks up the key and starts giving as good as it gets.

Liberty City’s where my heart got built, where it learned to pump blood through me, where it’s probably gonna stay. But Wynwood? Wynwood makes my soul shake something fucking awful inside me, so hard my teeth rattle. Makes my soul want to take over, turn my body into an afterthought, into postscript.

I think my mom can see it sometimes when I come home, maybe. My soul leaving and my heart staying and me, caught up in the middle not choosing. Less because I can’t and more because I don’t want to have to.

My mom hates her mom just as much as my grandma hates her. Think maybe it has something to do with when she got pregnant with me. My mom sees my grandma in me, Wynwood in me, and I think she loves me harder because she’s trying to get rid of both. Trying to Clorox that shit right out of me with her sacrifice, her twelve-hour nursing shifts at Jackson Memorial, the bikes, the phones, the skateboards, the clothes the clothes the clothes, the jackets, the jeans, the shirts, the bags. Tommy Hilfiger would want to marry her on the spot if he could see my fucking closet.

I think that’s when it started, this vicious thing between them—when I was inside my mom, asleep, unborn. When I was inside her and my grandma found out that my dad was white (no, not just white. Cuban. worse). When my grandma saw her past, laid out in front of her. Years and years and years of hearing nigger negro sucio mono, of being spit on, of avoiding Little Havana like the plague came back and picked up a mortgage there.

So growing up I always felt it. But here’s the thing—my mom and grandma hated each other but my mom would never keep me from her. That’s the thing with my family—we’re loyal to each other, even when we don’t like each other. Loyalty drinks up the hate, grows strong on all that bad blood.

My grandma was the first person to let me know I remind people of other people. I was six. I was at my grandma’s house and she called me into the kitchen. But she said Jasmine, my mom’s name. I stood there, kitchen island barely coming up to my chin. I stared up at her. She stared down at me. It took her so long to realize what she’d said. And that wasn’t the last time it happened, either. Still happens. On this visit I was sketching at the dining room table and she walked up behind me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and said whatcha workin on, Jazz?

I’m pretty sure my grandma loves me. But I also think that some of that love she’s holding for me, wherever she’s keeping it, is meant for my mom. She can’t give it to her, won’t let herself. So she gives it to me. I hold it in my pockets, my bookbag, between the sheets in my sketchbook, in my socks, my shoes. But I take it all out on my mom’s front porch. Think it would hurt her too much if I came into the house with it.

My mom was the second. And she gave me a two for two, bless her heart.

I was nine. I was just playing in the backyard. Hadn’t met Nico yet. Kwame and Tyler were both visiting family out of state. I didn’t really like any of the other kids in the neighborhood enough to invite them over (sue me). I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. You know how boredom brews up inside a nine year old, makes them do the most mundane, ridiculous shit to tamp it down. I was running back and forth across our tiny backyard, trying to figure out how fast I could really go. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Big palm tree. Propane tank. Big palm tree. Propane tank.

I tripped, and my knee fell hard against a sharp ass rock. I was mostly in shock then, but now that I think about it, I was bleeding pretty bad. Red blood ran under the grit and gravel on brown skin. Thought I looked a little like a National Geographic volcano, hot lava dribbling out of me, eating up all the trees on my expanse.

I didn’t cry and I didn’t yell or anything. I don’t think my mom would’ve found me outside if she hadn’t been walking past the patio door just as I fell. She ran out and fell to her knees, looked at my cut. She hugged me. When she pulled back to ask me how I felt, if I had any pain, her eyes were wet. I told her I was fine.

“Juanlu don’t lie to me.”

We stared at each other, hot lava between us. She bit her lip when she realized what she’d said, but she didn’t correct herself. Wonder what she thought would happen, if she went back and fixed it. So that’s how I figured out my dad’s name. Juanlu. Juan Luis.

When she came back outside with the hydrogen peroxide she gave me a look too big for me and her tears came harder. I think she was seeing my grandma, what they used to be. Maybe those times when my mom fell and busted her ass playing, and grandma came out with that brown bottle. When grandma used to run out and check up on her. I wonder if grandma was serious with it, face folded up with worry. I wonder if she tried to make my mom laugh.

I think when she looked at me that day on the ground in our backyard, the past cut her up. Carved her into pieces it took for itself. Left her raw and open, blood splattered all over the present. The life that came first, with my grandma. The one that came after, with my dad. But God I think too much. Nico’s right.

“You gotta stop that shit babe,” he’s always telling me. “Your face screams ‘come fuck with me.’”

I love my mom and I love my grandma, but they take pieces of me for themselves, reach through me and around me and across me towards each other.

Nico doesn’t divide me like that. He keeps me whole when he looks at me, talks to me. I can only ever remind him of me, I think. I mean, how many people has he pulled out of a polluted Florida waterway?

And like a goddamn prophet, that shit Nico’s always telling me about how I look way too off my guard when I’m walking through the street? Comes to pass. His warnings find footing.

I’m passing by the bus stop. Street’s empty. The cars running past on the street make the only noise for miles. Makes sense. Sundays are always quiet like this, slow. We have way too many churches down here for us not to respect god at least a little. And in a place where nobody can ever keep still for too long, silence is the highest praise.

Out of the corner of my eye I see some kid in a blue plaid sweatshirt texting on his phone, standing under the bus stop lamps, that white light caked in blue. Another kid’s sitting on the hard plastic bench, headphones in, head down.

The thing about reminding people of other people is that it’s a complete shot in the dark. I’ve gotten quick smiles at the Publix, right before the lady with the sew-in wig realizes I’m not her son. Soft casual where were you?s at the Steak-n-Shake from pretty girls who register I’m not their boyfriend only after a few blinks. But I’ve also gotten tight lips and raised brows from cashiers at the Wingstop (I like their ranch better than Wing on Fire’s) who realize I’m not their ex or the guy that cut them off while they were getting off the I or that dude who walked into class without holding the door for them only after they really look at my face.

I’m almost past the bus stop when the kid in the plaid walks up to me, ditches my periphery for my direct field of vision. I’m just starting to think you want the shoes, right? when he punches me in the face.

I’m gonna spare you the poetry. Getting punched in the face isn’t like anything else in this entire fucking world. Newton’s bitch ass says that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Every hit gets a hit back. But damn if it isn’t the shittiest thing in the world when that’s the only thing I can hope for, that my face fractures Blue Plaid’s knuckles a little bit.

I’m laying down on my back on the sidewalk now, staring up at the world’s ceiling getting dark. I move to get up. Somebody kicks me in the ribs, evicts the breath from my chest. Try to curl up on my side and what’s that shit Nico’s always telling me about getting jumped? Protect the head. I move to cover my head with my arms but somebody jerks me to my feet. Somebody pulled back and kicked the world as hard as they could—that’s why it’s spinning like this. Someone’s holding my arms pinned behind my back. Must be Blue Plaid, because Headphones is standing in front of me now, looking at me with an anger that sears my throat raw. He hits me in the stomach and I wanna double over, fold in half, but I can’t.

“You hard now, motherfucker?! Huh?!” Headphones is asking me, voice all warbly like it’s coming through water.

And all I can think right now is who do you see who do you see who the fuck do you see. I try to say something but Headphones hits me again and I don’t get the chance. I try harder.

“Mother… fucker, I’m not… I’m not…” I push my words through the empty space that cuts through the forest of pain growing inside me. Between the branches behind my face. Between the leaves in my chest.

And I see it, clear as anything. When Headphones realizes I’m not whoever the fuck he wanted. He looks at me, eyes wide, anger gone. And he says,

“Oh shit. Ooooh shit. P, it’s not him!”

Blue Plaid drops me. I land on my front, break my fall with my arm. When I look up they’re running into the sun. Good. I hope it eats them the fuck up.

I don’t know how long I’m laying there. Street’s still empty and I’m thinking of course this shit had to happen on the quietest Sunday in Miami history. I’m trying to take inventory. Face? Right cheek hurts like hell, pain in the dairy section, right next to the yogurt. Ribs? Hurt less, ache with the produce, between the tomatoes. Think Blue Plaid’s shoe had a soft toe. Think they were Champions or something. Stomach? Hurts less than the cheek but more than the ribs, pang with the cereal but not the good shit. No Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Cocoa Puffs or Cookie Crisps. It’s with the muesli, the plain oats, the unsweetened Cheerios.

I roll over to my side, the one with the uninjured ribs, and I cough. When I look down at the concrete I’m relieved to find that there’s no blood. A good sign. My arms feel a little strained from Blue Plaid holding them so tight behind my back, but they’re okay I think. I use them to brace myself, and I get up.

I limp over to the bus stop bench, sit down heavier than I intended to and pay for it with my ribs telling me to fuck off. I wince as I pull out my phone, go to call my mom. I pause over her name, her contact picture where she’s smiling big in front of the Dolphin Mall, browner with the summer. I’m in it too. Her arms are tight around me. I’m smiling softer but fuck, I look so fucking happy. I think about limping home, coming into the house with a huge bruise on my face while she’s getting ready to go to work. I know what she would see. Her baby got jumped her mom got jumped the love of her damn life got jumped on the street while he she he was walking home. I breathe deep, and the breath sidles up to my bruised ribs, swats at them on its way out my chest.

I lock my phone and slip it into my pocket. I get up. The neon lights of the beauty supply store are shining back at me. I can see the start of the chain-link fence right behind the building, even from the bus stop. I put up the hood of my jacket and walk the other way.

Nico lives right next to the Dollar General on 65th, in the neighborhood with the water tower. It sounds stupid but when I was little I thought that was the coolest shit ever. Growing up down here, one of the first things you learn is that the tap water’s probably gonna give you nerve damage (not saying that it will , just saying that it might ). Thought it was the coolest thing ever that Nico lived right under something we needed so bad.

It scared me shitless when I figured out I looked like myself to him. It made me want to run into a Publix and dance down the aisles but it also scared me shitless. I was ten and I felt naked, like he could see everything. God.

We were sitting on the floor in his room, playing GTA San Andreas. He looked over at me, head tilted to the side a little, and said,

“You have a bunch of dots on your face. So does my mami, but she calls them beauty marks. But we’re boys, so what do we call them?”

I didn’t want to look him in the eye then. I wanted to look at the TV screen, where CJ was paused in the middle of throwing somebody out of an El Dorado. But it felt like Nico’s eyes would be wherever I looked, so I shrugged and joked,

“Do they make me ugly?”

Nico shook his head, all serious, and the air around me got so tight that I had to unpause GTA with my controller, to turn it back into something I could breathe.

When I get to his house the driveway’s empty. His parents must be at work. Luz is probably at her boyfriend’s. Abril might be at a sleepover.

I climb the steps of his porch with some difficulty, ignore the doorbell, knock hard right on the door. His front door’s got that frosted glass that looks good but doesn’t actually let you see shit. Wonder what I’d look like to him right now, hazy body mixed up with the indistinct light of the streetlamps. He takes too long to answer. I knock again. I hear footsteps now, and the door opens so fast it makes me dizzy.

“Dude why the fuck are you knocking on my door like you pay this damn mortgage—”

I look up and he stops talking.

“Holy shit.” He steps aside. “What the fuck are you doing out here? Come inside.”

I move to come inside, but my foot catches on the threshold and I trip. Nico catches me, wraps my arm around his neck and helps me to the living room.

I stare at the dark screen of the turned off TV. The house is quiet. Nico’s moving around the kitchen. I hear the freezer door slam, and a few moments later he’s back, handing an ice pack to me before he sits down in the armchair to my right. I hold the pack to my cheek and feel instant relief run through me.

“What the fuck happened?” he asked, the calmest I’ve ever heard him.

I look up. His voice worries me. That calm’s hard and hot, like iron left to smolder. That harshness like searing burning broken glass, that ferocity that tells me someone’s gonna get fucked up no matter what I say. And in moments like these the truth and the lie have the same damn face so why bother.

"Got jumped. They thought I was somebody else.”

I see his fists clench in the light coming in from the kitchen. “Hijo de puta.”

I hold the ice pack tighter against my face.

“Where?”

“The bus stop in front of the Family Dollar.”

“Who?”

“Probably some South Beach kids. I’ve never seen them around here before.”

“And you won’t see them around here again.”

“Nico…”

“Fucking comemierdas think they can just run around here and fuck up whoever or whatever the fuck they—”

“Nico…”

“—I mean are they fucking kidding? You see somebody on the street and you just—”

“Nico…”

“But it’s not gonna be no two-bit mistaken identity Face-Off Nicholas Cage bullshit when we—”

“Nico, can I stay here tonight?”

He calms down when he looks up at me, for real this time. I wrap his anger up in a gentleness I thought somebody kicked out of me at a bus stop in front of a Family Dollar. I give that anger nowhere to go. And he says,

“Yes.”

My mom should just be clocking in right now. I text her from Nico’s bathroom, tell her where I am. I look at myself in the mirror. I want to see just how bad shit is.

And it’s… pretty bad, but I’d say that for getting hit super hard in the face with a closed fist… maybe not as bad as it could be.

A bruise grows from the corner of my left eye to the brown shore a few miles right below my left cheekbone, its own little continent. It’s a pretty deep purple and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better but I think I might be able to work something out with Luz, get her to let me borrow some of her concealer. I can Youtube it before I get home if her generosity ends with just lending me the concealer, figure out how the fuck to use it.

Nico’s standing in the hallway when I get out of the bathroom, waiting for me.

“If you want, you can sleep in Abril’s room, in a bed. She’s at Sloan’s.”

I want to sleep in Nico’s room, in his bed, but it happened again. Somebody turned me into someone else, and I got my ass beat for it. I feel loose, unmoored, like I got sent back to that blank space we’re in before God calls us in. Before we’re anything.

“Abril’s room sounds good. I’m starting to like pastels.”

The smile that Nico tries to give me loses its way to his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair, like he was gonna try to touch me but I burn too hot. He never knows what to do when I get like this. He described it to me once. Said it’s like taking a tire iron to plexiglass.

I try to fall asleep, I really do. Roll around in Abril’s princess twin as much as my ribs and my stomach will let me. But trying to sleep with fresh injuries has to be the ninth circle of hell. That’s what Satan decides you have to do for the rest of forever, when you get down there.

Whenever I get close to something like sleep the ache in my stomach or my chest or my face yanks me back, slaps me awake to the dark that’s sitting like a slab of concrete on my chest right now and fuck maybe I was wrong maybe my ribs are broken and the shards caught a lung and that’s why I can’t breathe right now I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe—

I sit up. A tabby kitten on the giant poster opposite the bed stares back at me with huge marble eyes. I leave the room.

My ribs still hurt like hell, face still sore as shit. But I came here cause I breathe the best with him, right? Damn if it doesn’t sit on my chest, knowing that neither my mom nor my grandma really knows how to give me a life that’s just my own. One that I don’t have to share with all the people waiting out inside their pasts. I don’t want to have to carry breaths that aren’t my own.

Through the windows in the hallway I can see the driveway. I don’t know what time it is but it must still be pretty early. No one’s home yet.

I push open the door to Nico’s room, and I can hear him snoring quietly. He’s facing the door, mouth wide open, curls wrapping around his face like dark vines. I walk over and nudge his shoulder. Nico’s always been a light sleeper and he wakes up immediately, eyes misty with sleep.

“Asaad?” he croaks, “you good?”

He always says something like this before we start, no matter how many times we do it. No matter where it happens.

I don’t say anything. I nod but I don’t think he sees it. I don’t know, maybe he does. Either way, I answer: I pull back his sheets and climb on top of him, my knees up against his waist, the length of my calves up against his hips.

He’s shirtless. I put my hands on his chest, palms prickling with the feeling of his heart beating steady inside him. He’s fully awake now but his face still has that muted sleepy calm that only ever comes out at night. He’s holding my hips now. The moon swings through the window to interrupt the dark around us and for a second it looks like my hands and his chest are a single thing. Like I dipped my hands into a pool the same color as me, like my fingers grew a chest, like they painted us conjoined, a Wynwood vista. And it’s here, on top of him, that I start having a really shitty thought. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t actually have my own face for him. Anyone, Nico would’ve pulled anyone from that canal—

But I don’t know how to ask him about something like that so I don’t. I take off my hoodie and we make the softest purple.

In the early 1970s, several construction workers uncovered three ancient tombs on the side of a hill in Mawangdui, Changsha while building an air raid shelter for a nearby hospital. The construction halted, archeologists were summoned, and an excavation proceeded that revealed what was to become the crown jewel of our hometown: Xin Zhui. We called her Lady Dai, the wife of Li Chang, the Marquise of Dai, the Ancient Hag. We saw the 2,100-year-old woman in a makeshift museum exhibit later. Her breasts, chalky white and full of craters, reminded us of the moon. Her tiny nose hairs—still intact thanks to the acidic, magnesium-rich preservation liquid that soaked her body—looked like either the legs of the flies that we regularly caught or the hairs that were beginning to sprout from our own armpits. Her face was the shape of a sunflower seed and her mouth, gaping open with the tongue protruding like a tiny white fish, suggested that she was laughing in her moment of death.

The archeologists said Xin Zhui was a noble woman who enjoyed fine musical performances and had a taste for imperial foods. They had found 138 melon seeds in her stomach, from which they deduced that she had eaten a melon two hours before her death, and that she died during the summer when the fruits were ripe. She was buried with over 1,000 pieces of vessels, tapestries, and figurines. Her tomb was adjacent to the tombs of her husband and her son, who had died years before her and whose bodies were fully decomposed.

When the museum opened the makeshift mummy exhibit for locals (the actual exhibit, the one the whole world would come to know, wasn’t completed until we were in our twenties), we went every afternoon. We pressed our noses against the glass case and fogged it up with our breaths. We agreed that the Ancient Hag must have been, once upon a time, very beautiful. How could they have wanted to wrap her dead body with twenty layers of silk cloth otherwise? Her skin must have been luminous and pale, her eyes double-lidded like those of a true Chinese beauty, her cheek charmingly sunken with dimples, or wine nests, as we called them.

In public, we made sure to pair these compliments with derision, for we knew that it was improper to praise pretty things. It was an era in which we scoffed at skirts and cut our hair short like boys, a place in which the ugliest peasants were lauded. We had burnt our silk handkerchiefs and jade jewelry in a great fire that lasted for three days and three nights. Our books, too: translated copies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pride and Prejudice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Complete Sherlock Holmes wilted in the flames. The fire had kept away mosquitoes as we danced around it, chanting songs praising Our Great Leader. So, even as we admired the mummy’s silk wrapping and richly colored robes, we denounced her as a capitalist. Even as we fantasized about her alabaster skin and soft pink lips, we called her the Ancient Hag.

On the walk back from the museum, we’d stop by a street stall and get popsicles. We licked and sucked on them until the cold sweetness broke into small pieces that we tucked under our tongues. Sometimes we held competitions to see who could insert the greatest length of popsicle into their throats while neither choking on nor breaking it. The trick was to tip our faces toward the sky and pretend that we didn’t have gag reflexes, that our bodies were no different from those of long, brown eels that had a straight tunnel from mouth to anus. In fact, we pretty much were eels. Our limbs were always covered with fine brown dust. We only wore earth-toned clothes. Whatever accumulated under our fingernails was the color of shit. The only bright hue that disrupted our brownness was the red scarf we wore around our necks. Yet despite our eel-ness, whenever we held our popsicle-eating competitions in the humid Changsha afternoons, men smiled at us in the streets and called us tongzhi, comrades.

Because there had not been school in years, because our older siblings had left to work in communes in remote parts of the country, because our parents had been reassigned from their college professorships or editorial jobs to faraway factories where they made matchboxes or envelopes by hand, we did whatever we wanted that summer. One day we walked eight kilometers to the only pond in Changsha that still had wild frogs and speared them with sticks. We were too young to remember starvation in the way our older siblings did, but we craved meat. We roasted their bloody little legs over a fire and ate the charred pieces with our dusty fingers. One day we wrote dazibao denouncing our old English teacher as a Rightist and pelted him with stones until he died. He had once humiliated two of us in front of the whole class for mispronouncing the word sandwich. One day we met up with boys who used to be our classmates and went swimming in the Yangtze River. When we emerged from the brown water, our shirts soaking wet, our hardened nipples pointed at them like fingers.

Every day we went to visit the Ancient Hag in her glass case. Every day she seemed to grow younger, her cratered skin smoother than it had been the day before, her sinewy arms leaner and stronger. At that point the museum had been open long enough that most locals had already seen her, so we had the room to ourselves. What a disgusting member of the bourgeoisie, we’d say, loud enough for the guard to hear. But silently we compared her to the beautiful Chang’e, the goddess of the moon who achieved immortality when her husband did not and lived for an eternity in her chilly palace, accompanied only by her white rabbit. Such must have been the case for the Ancient Hag, too. The plaque by her body explained how she had died years after her husband and remained widowed, never remarrying. She was the emblem of a virtuous woman, a loyal wife. Now her body, touched by no one besides her husband until its unearthing, was alone behind this glass while his had long returned to the soil. On our walk back, sliding the popsicles up and down our hot throats, we concluded that she was buried with such riches not only because she was beautiful, but also because she was chaste. Didn’t our fathers tell us about our great-grandmothers who were honored with tall stone arches for refusing to remarry, keeping their bodies untouched for thirty years? Didn’t they build wide white bridges over rivers in the countryside for the women who had killed themselves to follow their husbands into the afterlife? Surely the Ancient Hag was rewarded, too, for her chastity.

We didn’t think of chastity in terms of sex, of course. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We never thought about sex (we only thought about sex when we saw dogs doing it in the streets, but that was before they were all eaten along with the cats and rats). We believed chastity was like loyalty. Devoting your body to a person and a cause. Our Great Leader told us that a revolutionary should be loyal to the Party and free of vulgar desires, so we strove to be chaste. We purged ourselves of all but the most necessary wants. Aside from the popsicles—the only thing that stood between us and heat strokes—we ate one meal a day. We allowed ourselves to smile only when we discussed revolutionary activities. We never wanted the boys with whom we went to the river; the only man we found handsome was Our Great Leader. Although he was in his seventies by then, most pictures of him showed a man with slick black hair who looked younger than our fathers. Didn’t our mothers tell us that the big yellow star on the Chinese flag represented Our Great Leader, and the four little stars surrounding it represented the flock of women who wanted to marry him? Wouldn’t it be an honor to keep our bodies pure so that one day, we might be worthy to bear for Our Great Leader the foremost spawn of the revolution?

With that logic, we assuaged the guilt we had once felt for admiring the Ancient Hag. After all, she was a role model in her own way: an embodiment of chastity and loyalty, even if she was a capitalist. We began to adore her openly. We admired out loud her snow-white burial robe and the cloud-shaped designs on her red lacquer dinnerware. We argued boisterously about which one of us might one day be as beautiful and chaste as she, our voices shrill and insistent in the empty museum chamber. By August we had ceased to be afraid of the guard, a stooped old man who stood still as a Buddha statue while eyeing our brown limbs.

Inspired by the Ancient Hag, one of us suggested a vow of chastity. It seemed like the logical next step for our aspiration toward complete purification, a process in which our brown bodies would be scrubbed and made precious. It was the year in between years when we had no school, when our parents had stopped speaking to us out of fear, when our siblings had disappeared. We belonged to no one and strove for nothing (we were told that we must lay down our lives like bricks in the building of our Great Socialist Society). But we’d rather be vases, emptied and refilled with crystal-clear water. Or even better, arrows. How lovely it would be to shrink into skinny lines with sharp points, possessed by someone and held tenderly at the bow, something that can never deviate from the path dictated by its owner.

We enthusiastically agreed, but we asked, chastity for whom? There was no boy whom we loved, no one whom we waited for.

For Our Great Leader, of course, she said. You dumb eggs.

Suddenly it became clear what we must do. Yes, we would keep our bodies chaste for Our Great Leader. Wasn’t that what we were all supposed to secretly want? We loved him more than our parents, more than our siblings, and certainly more than the smelly boys we played with. We vowed to save ourselves for Our Great Leader and never to touch another man. Sometimes we saw the years of our lives stretching before us like an eternity, so we imagined ourselves wearing flowing white dresses and living alone in a chilly palace, like the immortal Chang’e. Other times we craved the day of our death, for on that day we would sure to be buried with great fanfare, like the Ancient Hag, or have stone memorials erected in our honor, like our great-grandmothers. The only difference was, we would not want to be buried with anything except our little red books. We would accept nothing other than the simple wooden coffin of a peasant.

We should reiterate, though, that we did not think of any of this chastity stuff in terms of sex. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We believed chastity was like loyalty. We were devoting our bodies to Our Great Leader and the Revolution. So, imagine our horror when we discovered erotic excerpts from one of our comrades’ diary published in an anonymous dazibao, taped to the front door of her home! Someone had stolen her diary (her younger sister, we suspected) and copied the very yellow scenes elaborated over pages and pages in big black characters on white paper: I opened to him like a soft red peony and a drop of blood stained the white sheets… His hands roamed over my body, those small hills and streams… Our Great Leader’s seeds flooded me at last…

After we recovered from our initial shock and shrieks, alternating between feeling scandalized and giggling behind our hands, we realized that we had been surrounded by a group of our former classmates. Some were the boys we saw at the river every week, some were boys and girls we had not seen for years. Like us, their necks were collared with red scarves, but there was not a trace of amusement on their faces. The author of the diary, a mousy girl who wore her hair in pigtails and ate her popsicles so slowly they’d often melt into thin white paths along her fingers, was nowhere to be seen.

“How dare she write about Our Great Leader using such disgusting language!”

“Who does she think she is?”

“That unclean bitch!”

We stayed quiet even though our hearts felt like ants crawling atop a hot stove. What should we say? What should we do? If we agreed with the others, our friend would surely get into trouble. At best she might be dispatched to do hard farm labor in some rural region, permanently losing her city hukou and never able to return. At worst she might die right there. But if we tried to defend her, we might be seen as counter-revolutionary. After all, weren’t her words denigrating to the Party? Wasn’t it akin to smearing a big pile of shit on Our Great Leader’s name? Didn’t he teach us that we should place Party righteousness above even our families? As we caught the faltering in each other’s eyes, the boys in the crowd spat angrily on the ground, each splat landing like a bullet.

Fortunately, we did not have to make a decision. At that moment, the mousy girl pushed her way through the burgeoning crowd and anchored herself next to the dazibao like a dog guarding her bone. Her pigtails were lopsided, and strands of wet black hair matted to her forehead. It was hard to tell whether she had just cleansed herself in the river or whether she was sweating profusely.

“Comrades!” She shouted to the crowd, raising her arm like a general. The dreamy look she usually wore on her pimply face was contorted into an inscrutable mask. “You are all making a mistake. These words are proof of my untainted and unsurpassable love for Our Great Leader. I am willing to devote my whole body and my whole soul to him. I am willing to bear his child and carry the seeds of the revolution—metaphorically or literally! I am willing to not look at a single man for the rest of my life out of my enduring love for him! I am willing to throw myself onto his funeral pyre because my loyalty to him lasts beyond this lifetime! Which one of you can say that? Which one of you can say you love Our Great Leader more than I? Which one?”

We all fell silent. The ants within us crawled at a more frantic speed. Could she be right that she loved Our Great Leader more than any of us? We had never encountered this strange situation before, so we could not fathom how we should react. If we accused her of being counter-revolutionary, we might have to prove that we loved Our Great Leader more than she claimed she did. It was one thing to take a secret chastity vow; it was an entirely different thing to publicly proclaim that we desired to have sex with Our Great Leader. Plus, if she was indeed a loyal revolutionary, it would be a crime to punish her.

The crowd’s collective hesitation gave the mousy girl more strength. With her chin tipped toward the sky, she peeled the dazibao from the door in a single, swift motion and folded it eight times into a small square. Transformed into that compact size, it suddenly seemed precious, like a love letter. “Whoever posted this is clearly a counter-revolutionary,” she yelled, waving the square in her hand. “I will find them and report them to the Party.”

With these words, the mousy girl turned and entered her house, slamming the door behind her so hard one of the hinges dislodged like a broken tooth. We shuffled in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. Someone said they were thirsty. Someone said it was too hot. We were all relieved to have an excuse to disperse.

While we were glad we did not have to pelt her with stones, we also never spoke to her again. It would have been too dangerous to be associated with such an individual. Who knew what else she had written in her diary that could get her in trouble? And why was she writing, anyway? None of us had written a single word in our diaries for years. Even though we thought only revolutionary thoughts and said only revolutionary words, we were afraid of what might happen if we pried too deep into our consciousness.

She seemed to deliberately avoid us, too. After that day, she never set foot in front of Old Chen’s popsicle stall again. Nor did she show up to look at the Ancient Hag in the afternoons, or catch flies with us in the dried-up reservoir. That fall, rumors circulated: Some said she volunteered to do farm labor up north in the wintery region of Heilongjiang, where the ground froze solid by November. Some said that, after having heard about her supreme loyalty to Our Great Leader, the local Party committee had nominated her as an exemplary youth. Out of curiosity, we changed our route so we could pass by her family’s home every day, hoping to either catch a glimpse of her or confirm her disappearance. From a certain angle, crouching behind the willow tree across the street, we could see through a tiny opening in the newspapers crudely patched over a makeshift window. Only once, during a thunderstorm, did we see a swath of soft white gown flit past the opening. We were shocked—where had she obtained such a gown? Or had we seen a ghost?

We never walked past her home again. It was old-fashioned—perhaps even counter-revolutionary—to be superstitious, so we pushed thoughts of the mousy girl out of our minds. In the middle of that winter, sometime after the first snowfall we had seen in eight years, we heard from an old woman in our neighborhood that she had indeed been approached by high-ranking members of the regional Party Committee. They thought she had demonstrated exemplary devotion to Our Great Leader during the dazibao incident. Because of their nomination, she was now attending the prestigious school for revolutionary thought in Wuhan, training to become a full-fledged cadre. Outwardly, we applauded her meteoric rise; inwardly, we applauded ourselves for having the foresight to not pelt her with stones.

To everyone’s relief, we, too, went back to school the following autumn. By that time, we found ourselves eager to receive homework, for even the Ancient Hag and all the lore she had inspired had ceased to entertain us. We heard that without us, the exhibit sat empty day after day. In fact, it was not until years later—after they had finished excavating the site and added a number of additional artifacts to the original exhibit—that foreigners from all over the world started coming to see it.

When we started classes again, we noticed how the boys we had swam with were taller and darker, how the place where their t-shirt sleeves ended and their upper arms began bulged. We passed them notes folded into tiny squares and sometimes tasted their mouths in the twilight-lit alleyway between the school and the field. Eventually, enough seasons had passed that when the mousy girl did come up in conversation—as she did when we reminisced about that unusually hot summer—we no longer spoke about her in hushed tones. We agreed that in hindsight, what she had done was an ingenious political maneuver. She had escaped from the tiger’s jaws so effortlessly that we could not help but admire her cleverness. In fact, we began to think that she had devised the whole scheme from the beginning, knowing that it would help her accrue revolutionary credentials. A few of us seemed to remember that it was she who had proposed the vow of chastity in the first place.

By the time Our Great Leader passed away, she was the last thing on our minds. With the announcement of his death, we cried until our voices went hoarse, and tear streaks etched our cheeks like claw marks. Every street stall was draped with black strips of cloth. We felt directionless in this world without Our Great Leader, a heap of sand suddenly blown loose, arrows with their heads chopped off. In school, we turned in nothing but eulogies for Our Great Leader and skipped class to take turns reciting them on the field.

The third morning after we learned the horrible news, we saw a woman with gray hair running through the street, beating her chest with her fist and weeping. She wore black cloth slacks that hung to her ankles and a black shirt with only three of the dozen buttons fastened. As she approached, we could see the lumps of her breasts occasionally jump through the shirt like unruly animals. We assumed that like everyone else, she was mourning Our Great Leader, so we paused to admire how sincere her self-beating appeared, how heart-wrenching her shrieks sounded. Suddenly, as she passed by Old Chen’s stall, she began crying, “My daughter! My daughter!”

It was September, but we suddenly felt faint. We ran after the woman, pushing past the walls of black cloth that brushed coldly across our faces like rain. When we reached the one-room house, we saw the mousy girl we had once known dangling from a ceiling beam, wearing a soft white gown. A piece of paper resting on the fallen chair beneath her contained big characters written in black ink that read, “Bury me with Our Great Leader.”

We stared at the words as the wails of her mother and father shook our bones. The woman blubbered about how her daughter had returned home the previous night for the first time in years. Burying his wet face between his wife’s breasts, the man emitted a howl-like sound, one that echoed throughout a room that was empty except for two small beds in the corner, a coal stove, and three metal pans hanging by the newspaper-covered window we had once peeked through. Something about the acoustics of the room—perhaps an attribute of its emptiness— amplified each noise they made as if we were in a museum. At last we brought ourselves to look at her face. Even though her cheeks were the color of eggplant and her tongue stuck out from her swollen jaws, we couldn’t help but notice that the white dress made her look beautiful and timeless—just like Chang’e, just like the Ancient Hag.

We tried our best to honor our friend, we really did. We wrote letter after letter to the Party about her devotion to Our Great Leader. We beseeched them to bury her next him, or even near him—anywhere within a three-kilometer radius will do, please, it was her dying wish. We recounted her untainted revolutionary spirit, her bravery, her unflinching loyalty to the Cause. Even as the leaves began to fall, we continued writing with a passion that we hoped was fiery enough to burn away the vines of our own guilt. But sending off those letters was like dropping paper into a deep well; there was not even an echo to be heard. By then her body had begun to rot in the makeshift coffin. We told her parents that maybe we didn’t have the right address.

In the spring, a few months after the mousy girl had finally been buried, one of us returned from a trip to our nation’s capital bearing incredible news. She had seen the body of Our Great Leader in a glass case, perfectly preserved for the next thousand years as if in a deep sleep. The line of visitors who wanted to grieve him was so long it wrapped three circles around the mausoleum. He looked so serene that he must have been smiling in his moment of death, she said, and his skin was smooth, like he had died a young man. We shook our heads at this news, remembering the mousy girl and how beautiful she had looked in her white dress. This time, rather than imagining her in a simple wooden coffin next to Our Great Leader, we imagined that it was she, not he, who lay in the glass case.

My mom told me I should give a gift to the downstairs neighbors. My apartment was on the second floor, a one-bedroom with big windows and a stink bug problem. It was an old suburban house, converted into a duplex. When I first moved in I stood outside, looking up at the stone walls and two floors, imagining that the whole thing was mine, the back porch, too, and the garden.

A young couple lived downstairs. I ran into them only casually and said, “Hey, guys!” in that way I have, already pulling faces and doing a little dance with my arms. They’d nod back. It was a guy in his early-thirties with some sketched-looking tattoos on his forearm but an otherwise straight-laced demeanor, and his girlfriend who was so beautiful I started fantasizing about her privately. She didn’t smile much and had reddish hair. When I ran into her alone I’d say, “Hello there!” and she’d raise an eyebrow. The boyfriend wasn’t much friendlier, but seemed to enjoy patronizing me. “It’s pretty hot out,” he said once when he saw me coming downstairs in black jeans and a long-sleeve. I considered dropping trou then and there to see how he’d react. I figured he’d sort of nod and hold the door open for me gallantly, not looking at my hooha.

On the phone with my mom on a Saturday evening I said, “I think they hate me.”

“Everyone hates you,” she said. “You think you can just say anything.”

“I mean it, Mother.”

She told me to bake them cookies. I asked if she was making fun of me, and she was. I’d never baked cookies in my life.

“Write a little note,” she suggested.

I bought them a box of grocery store sugar cookies, the kind that always feel cold against your teeth and are decorated with a thick layer of too-sweet icing dyed bright blue. I sat on the kitchen floor, smoking a j out the window, shuffled some girly pop and wrote them a note: Hey, neighbors! Maggie here, from upstairs. You can call me Mags. Been too busy with the move-in to actually introduce myself. Enjoy some of these sweet treats. Looking forward to talking soon!

I wrote the note and read it twice over, thinking how very strange it was that I’d written this. I thought of the downstairs neighbors reading this note and thinking of me as the type of person who went out of her way to buy “sweet treats” for her new neighbors. I was pretty high by then. I went downstairs, dropped the cookies in front of the door, rang the doorbell, then ran back into my apartment, my heart vibrating in my chest.

The following Monday on my way to Parks Elementary for teacher meetings before the school-year started, I saw the neighbors had hit me back with a gift of their own. It was a bag of baby carrots, with a note that read: Maggie — we’ve talked it over, and decided we’d like to invite you for tea in the backyard. We know the backyard is ours, but we want to give you the opportunity to use it.

I brought the note with me to work, and the bag of baby carrots, which I made everyone pass around the room at the morning meeting.

“Nobody wants baby carrots for breakfast, Mags,” Dana said. She thought she was a big-shot because she taught fifth grade. I said, “Is that so?” and started eating my way through the bag. I made chewing noises so loud that Principal Gutierrez asked me to quiet down. He had to ask me twice because I was looking out the window, thinking about the downstairs neighbors and wishing I could tell my ex-girlfriend Taylor about them.

“Stop being discriminatory, Gutierrez,” I said.

“Don’t push me.” He had no irony about himself, the type of man who called us “ladies” when he told us to quiet down, even though there was a handful of men on the teaching staff.

During lunch break I stood across the street from school, smoking a cigarette. There was no smoking on school property. The fourth and fifth grade teachers always busted me. Emilia, my classroom assistant, crossed the street to join me. She was a sophomore at Wheelock College, where she studied elementary education. Her hair was in lots of little braids down her back, dyed purple at the ends, and she had perfect skin.

“Smoking’s bad for you,” she said, leaning on the tree next to me and rummaging through her 7-Eleven bag.. “Cigs are so 2007.”

I blew smoke into her face. She coughed artificially and waved her arms around until the air was clear. “It’s gonna be a long year,” I said, “if you keep that up.”

Emilia shrugged and pinched the black nub off her banana. “I’m just saying.”

Late in their resignation, the ones who are driven rarely sleep. Eventually, it is said, the long hushed noise of the road lulls them into a kind of perpetually half-awake state, where translucent dreams arrive and depart as something in between thought and phenomenon. Even on the precarious turns of a mountain road, where the edge of the car is almost flush with the edge of the cliff; even on the long straightaways of eastern Montana, where you can still encounter gas stations by the long asphalt straightaways; even in the gridded clog of the streets in southern Detroit, you can find these half-dreaming passengers, head against the window, looking but no longer seeing, moving but no longer traveling, breathing but no longer speaking. The NIH, in fact, nowadays classifies this as an addiction. I don’t remember the name they gave it. Nobody really uses it. I think we’d all prefer to believe that the ones who are driven aren’t sick or diseased or crazy or anything like that—just trying to get somewhere, but haven’t figured out where that somewhere is yet. I asked a friend of mine the other day: How are they different than any one of us? And then he said, Listen to yourself. Enough. Enough of that. This friend is tired of me talking and asking about these cases. Obsession is the word he uses. You’ve been obsessed with these cases ever since your mother passed, he tells me. It’s just an interest, I tell him back. She was interested in all this too. And I want tell him, Let me alone, fuck off, but I know that’s just my angry streak. He’d helped out a lot with her, especially toward the end.

I met Qiuhai on a fall day in a harbor city—a manner fitting for her name, although I wouldn’t have said this out loud. Names were flexible and wishful like that. You could create a beautiful memory out of any name. For Qiuhai, I chose to preserve where we met and the conditions of it: how our small classroom was framed by a specific time in the year and, further away where we couldn’t notice it, the sea.

I see her looking up from her textbook first, cropped gray hair pushed away from the face. Then Zhengjie sits in the desk at her right side, smiling easily and arched toward the book where the answers are, his smile moving back and forth between the other two of us in the room. I knew them together only—one unit.  

“Teacher, we are very happy to meet you at this time,” Qiuhai said in a low voice after I introduced myself in misshapen, childlike Mandarin Chinese and closed the classroom door on the first day. Her husband glanced at the window beside it to make sure no one else walked down the hall. “We’ve already been called for the test.” Her mouth was a short frown, and she pushed both sides of her hair away, two hands in the same quick gesture.

“The test?”

“Cit-zenship interview,” she sounded out in English.

Zhengjie wheeled his desk closer to mine. “Our friends”—he gestured with both hands toward the hallway—“told us it would take seven or eight months for the officials to send out the appointment notice. For those months we planned on coming here to prepare. But two months after we turned in the N-400, we already got the government notice. Her test,” he said, and at this point he whispered, palms upward on the table, “is at the end of October.” He glanced in her direction. “Then I’ll go two weeks after.”

“Teacher, you will help us, correct? We only have five weeks together.” Qiuhai’s hands were pressed together earnestly, one tangled in the other’s fingers.

I was a freshman in college teaching at a local community center in Chinatown for the first time. Immigrants, mostly elderly, came to learn English and prepare and practice for their naturalization exams. I wasn’t the only college student helping out: small groups of undergrads came from different schools around the area. We volunteered under an organization staffed by people who’d grown up in Chinatown, but most of us didn’t have connections to the neighborhood ourselves. Our parents were from the generations that had immigrated on student visas in the 80s and 90s, recently enough to be disconnected from the misfortunes of history.

Qiuhai was still watching, both hands clasped in her lap. I said that of course I’d help her, and I made the promise to myself too—if there was one thing I could do to remediate for any of my past lives, I would start here with this woman who was older than my own grandmother but scared and, for all I knew, kinder. “We’ll do the best we can.”

She smiled, and even her smile had the slightest shape of a frown. Then we ran through the citizenship exam for the first time. She struggled with English and made no effort to hide it, apologizing and pushing her hair out of her face. If she couldn’t understand the question I asked, she repeated it to herself under her breath with her mouth twisted slightly down, sounding out the same words, narrowing in on a segment or phrase, while staring a bit past my eyes. Sometimes the answer came out like that. Other times, she couldn’t hear the question I asked, and recited the answer to the one she thought she’d heard.

Zhengjie listened to the questions alongside her. When Qiuhai repeated questions to herself, I sometimes glanced his way—he looked up toward the ceiling to remember an answer and then checked the textbook with a smile. When he was confused, he put his hand against his head to think, flattening a patch of white hair.

Years from now, she will remember the ash that followed her. The cities charred and smoldered behind her, plumes of smoke like storm clouds in the rearview. The air was dense and syrupy with car exhaust and ash, vermillion sunsets like something out of science fiction, electric and strange. Wildfire tinged each grapevine in the Sonoma vineyards, boiling the grape juice on site and disrupting the ferment. In every cabernet bottled that year, the faint edge of smoke cut through like rot.

Reports of the wildfires occupied news headlines for weeks after. Atlas, Cascade, Sulphur. They named the fires like animals, a new one to report each morning. *Investigations ongoing*, the news anchor said gravely, the satellite images in stop-motion swirls, gray pixels dancing behind him in delayed flurries. *Strong winds. Human carelessness*.

Carelessness, she thought. That’s all it was. Accident. But some fires started on purpose. Forests knew self-cleansing better than anyone. It was programmed into their DNA—like the way a mother knew the sound of her infant’s cry with her body. The way children thrilled to water like a second home.

The day she left, highways clogged with minivans and Explorers, traffic bottlenecked and stood still for miles of the Interstate. She took local roads, navigating unpaved gravel streets that rattled the Datsun. All those empty houses of evacuated towns, like the set of a film. The kitchens in Sonoma and the living rooms in Mendocino reduced to rubble. All those places left behind.

The Datsun stalled around Fairfield. Miles and miles of cars, helmed by drivers with white surgical masks, breathing their own wet breath. Stopped behind a Chevrolet, she thought of a Ford she passed back near Petaluma, a boy in the passenger seat. He stared at her not unkindly, and she was startled by the wide spotlight of his gaze. As if he’d been watching her long before she noticed. As if he’d always seen her, and everything else, all of it, from the beginning to the end.

The Last Woman on Earth lives in Los Angeles. She’s single and in her thirties, five foot seven, 145 pounds, a Virgo. She is the world’s most famous celebrity. Her talk show has the largest viewership of any TV program, with higher ratings than the Super Bowl and reruns of old Miss Universe pageants. The Last Woman on Earth is not particularly talented or charismatic. She blinks a lot and garbles her own script from the teleprompter. Prior to the annihilation of every other woman on Earth, the Last Woman lived in Ohio and taught preschool. She didn’t ask to be the Last Woman on Earth, but she’s doing the best she can.

The Last Woman on Earth’s talk show is called Afternoon Programming with the Woman. She models the show after Oprah. In the first season, men come on and sit in leather chairs and reminisce about women they used to know. Some men talk about their wives and girlfriends, but most talk about their mothers. It’s like therapy, but The Last Woman On Earth isn’t a therapist, so she just sits there and nods and utters vague, affirmative phrases like “wow” and “really?” and “that sounds tough.” The men always cry. The Last Woman On Earth gets tired of hearing about mothers and in the second season changes the focus of her show to baking.

In the second season of her show, The Last Woman On Earth bakes pie after pie in the studio kitchen. She ties her hair in a kerchief and wears a white apron printed with cherries. She invites experts in various fields to come talk to her while she bakes. For forty-five minutes the expert lectures to her sweatered back while she rolls out store-bought dough, mixes fruit with cornstarch, and brushes her lattice crusts with egg wash. A split screen shows a close-up of the pie in progress alongside the face of the expert as he drones on about urban planning or carpentry or neuroscience or poetry. At the end of each episode, The Last Woman on Earth presents the finished pie to the expert. She serves him a piece and waits for him to tell her it’s the best pie he’s ever had, hands down, bar none, etc.

Thousands of men apply to come on the show. Everyone wants to taste pie made by a woman. When the expert has had his fill of pie the Last Woman thanks him and retires to a dimly lit lounge, where she drinks cocktails with a female friend who is played by a mop. The Last Woman on Earth recounts to her friend all the interesting information she learned from the day’s expert. Sometimes a production assistant crawls onto the set and gives the mop handle a shake so it looks like the friend is listening. The episode ends whenever the Last Woman on Earth begins weeping.

The Last Woman On Earth appears on the cover of every issue of *Us Weekly*. Countless articles discuss her dating life, speculating on why she won’t settle down with one of the hundreds of millions of age-appropriate heterosexual men left in the world. In reality the only men who want to date the Last Woman on Earth are perverts and fame-seekers. It’s too much pressure, dating the only woman who exists. Normal men would rather just date each other.

In her spare time, the Last Woman on Earth enjoys hiking Runyon Canyon in clumsy male drag and making paintings that depict extinct species: the West African black rhinoceros, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Caribbean Monk Seal. But the Last Woman on Earth has less and less free time as her empire continues to grow. Her schedule is packed with meetings, with her agent, her personal trainer, foreign heads of state, and her ghostwriter, Phillip, who’s hard at work on her memoir, tentatively titled *The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die*. The Last Woman’s website receives thousands of inquiries a day. Men turn to her whenever they want a female perspective. Typically they are struggling to interpret the actions of a woman from their past. They turn to the Last Woman on Earth for closure. A team of interns handles this correspondence, typically by sending a form response that emphasizes staying in the present moment by practicing mindfulness.

But as years pass, men are less and less interested in what the Last Woman on Earth thinks. Thought pieces are published on Slate and Medium with titles like, “The Increasing Irrelevance of the Woman.” The Last Woman On Earth reads comments on these articles, and on YouTube clips of her show, and on gossip blogs that dissect her nonexistent love life. Many men wish the last woman on Earth was better. She’s so average, they say. Why couldn’t we be left with Rihanna or Megan Fox? Or, if not a physical beauty, we could at least get a Last Woman who’s a genius, or who knows lots of jokes. Men comment that her pies probably aren’t that good. She uses recipes from the old Martha Stewart website, and doesn’t even make her own dough. One commenter points out that there are thousands of talented male bakers in the world, but none of them gets his own show. Everything the Last Woman does would be done better by one of the Earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.

In the third season of her talk show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to the Oprah format. This time, she invites negative commenters onto the show and allows them to insult her to her face. Most of them are ashamed and say they’re sorry, which irritates her because it does not make for good TV. Once in awhile she’ll get a real fighter who tells her exactly what he thinks of her. The Last Woman feels truly alive in these moments. She instructs her cameramen to zoom in on her as the man spews his vitriol, capturing the subtle pain that flickers across her stoic face. But the audience hates these episodes. We only have one Woman, her supporters point out. We need to treat her right. All the men who criticize the Last Woman on camera are murdered sooner or later. On her show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to baking pies.

When The Last Woman On Earth dies, days shy of her fortieth birthday, the 405 is shut down for a ten-mile funeral procession that is simulcast worldwide. No one goes to work that day. Everyone watches the funeral of The Last Woman On Earth on TV, in bars and recreation centers and women’s restrooms that have been repurposed as shrines commemorating the former existence of women. The men of Earth try to outdo each other in performing their grief. They dress up as the Last Woman on Earth, wearing wigs and lipstick and aprons over vintage circle skirts. Privately, they are relieved that the Last Woman on Earth is gone. They can finally do and say whatever they want. The English language is restored to its former simplicity. Everyone speaks freely about the fate of mankind.

It is a golden era for men, these fifty-six years it takes for the human species to die out. The Last Man on Earth is ninety-four years old when he moves to Los Angeles. He broadcasts subversive, thought-provoking and hilarious skits from the studio where the Last Woman on Earth had once taped her show. He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.



*“The Last Woman on Earth” was originally published in Prairie Schooner.

I get this idea that I’ll go out into the woods and get shot. That’ll show the hunters. They’ll be put off hunting for good, if they shoot a woman in the heart. Though I’m hoping it won’t be in the heart. I hope for a flesh wound from which I can easily recover. I’ll lie on a narrow bed at Mercy hooked to chirping machines. The hunters will come, tactical caps in hands, and beg my forgiveness. My husband will visit, too, and beg me to come home. Your brush with death has put everything in perspective, he’ll say. He’ll take me home and nurse me to health, feed me spoonfuls of Sprite with the bubbles stirred out. He’ll change my leaky bandages and whisper that he loves only me.

Bay and I approached the farm at dawn. The first sun churned sideways through the trees, catching in the previous day’s rain, which the wind now shook down from the Carolina silverbells, the beeches, and the poplars. I rolled down the window and heard the forest fizzing.

When Reverend Harris retired and moved back to the Carolinas it didn’t strike me as the beginning of anything. Reverends were old. The word itself, rev-er-end, seemed to be a final destination, an ending, a stage of life occupied by coffee hours, evensongs, and perhaps a baptism from time to time.

You never really know what your mind’s gonna run to when you’re dropped in the middle of a perfect quiet. I’m walking down Sherman and Main, about to hit the bookstore, and the sky’s staring back at me blue as anything, like somebody took a slice of the hottest star they could find and wrapped it around the world. It’s a weird sky. No clouds, no sun, just this unbelievable ice blue like the world’s folding in on itself, all those glaciers at the poles tearing through the air right above my head.

There’s this old man who walks along the fence next to the hospital, or, say, down near town, wobbling in his loose, flapping shoes, digging around in the garbage can on the corner, smoking a cigarette, clutching it between his battered fingers, or simply walking with his shoulders braced as if he knew he was some kind of fodder for speculation, because it seems to be so consistent, his homeless rooting, keeping to a pattern, moving south on Midland Avenue for a half mile to Franklin Place and then left on Franklin and down Franklin to River Road, along River Road to Front Street, left on Front and up Front back to Midland, and then, presumably, around again. By virtue of his consistency, he has edged his way into the consciousness of just about everybody who has driven more than once down Midland Avenue, or Front Street, or, to a lesser degree, Franklin Place.

This morning you sailed a boat.

Not only that, but you taught your best friend how to sail a boat, both of your bare feet slipping on the floor of the Sunfish, leaning out over the Maine lakewater against the tug of the wind on the mainsheet, laughing as she wiggled the tiller back and forth, forgetting if left meant left or left meant right, throwing caution to the breeze until you scraped up against some underwater rocks and you—you, thirteen years old, heart beating faster as you discovered this opportunity for responsibility, imagining the shawl of your mother’s care finally slipping from your shoulders—climbed out of the boat and risked the soft pink soles of your feet against barnacles that could cut like knives, just to push the boat back into open water and save the morning.

I have not yet learned to smile without my gums. In a year I will become an expert at twisting my mouth into a demure crescent, lowering my upper lip to hide the pink flesh holding shelves of teeth in place, lifting my bottom lip instead of stretching it sideways. I will learn to keep my eyes open when I smile, crinkling only the corners so as not to look terrifying or fake. I will begin tilting my chin down to give the illusion of cheekbones.

Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink?

Talia’s in her booth at the con, bugging the bunny phone, but her father doesn’t pick up. She cradles her own phone close to her cheekbones, sweating on the metal in one hand and using the other to click refresh on the taskbar on the browser on her laptop. He’s on a list, she wants to tell him. He’s on one of those copypasta lists goose-steppers grow on Stormfront and /POL/ until the thorny burs are ready to fruit and spread to the undersides of YouTube videos and Facebook groups. The laptop fan whines inside the plastic casing as Talia tries to balance the machine on her jeans. She’s sure the screen is going to fritz out from the heat if she doesn’t first.

The empty hour—the glorious hour—was six-oh-five to seven-oh-nine. Foon would sink into the velvet wingback, his stiff suit removed and blown open on the floor, as he raised his damp feet to air out atop the coffee table. Faint whiffs of Windex cooled the hairs inside his nose, from where the housecleaner had clarified the glass. He called Mah. He  parked his car. Outside the garage door was sealed and—like Foon—finished for the night. Nothing more was required of him.

To this idea Foon filled a teacup of whiskey. He swiveled his head toward the sunset and saluted the dozing eyes of the garage. “Aye aye,” he said, and then, pondering, “Is that what they say? Eye? Yaye? Aye-aye-aye?” Foon watched the silk curtains, imagining the fat coils of his brain bunching up in concentration, and then gave up the thought entirely. Giving up the thought entirely: that was the pleasure of six-oh-five.

Through the doorway leaned his wife leaned in the doorway, a dishtowel hanging from her shoulder. *Nine years later and still so pretty*, Foon thought, admiring her strong arms, flexed and dotted with freckles.

“These fucking potatoes,” said Marcy said. “I can’t chop them anymore. That’s all I ever do. Chop, chop, chop.” She pointed her chef’s knife at Foon, beckoning him to join her in the kitchen. “Your turn. I’m begging you.”

“Cupcake, I would love to,” he said, his hand falling to his chest. “But I’m afraid I’m much too high.”

“Are you crazy?” she said, eyes wide. “Have you actually gone insane?”

“Don’t talk about insane people like that,” said Foon, gesturing toward the window.” He imagined himself a character in Masterpiece Theater, a show his boss had told him to download. Foon chuckled into this chin. On the coffee table he crossed one ankle of his pajama pants over the other.

“Don’t tell me you smoked in the car,” said Marcy, squinting. “Please.”

“I did,” said Foon. “I enjoy a head start these days.” He wagged an assured finger in front of his face, as if instructing a child on the ways of the world. “Same with Mah. Call on the drive home? Done. Say hello, I love you, gotta go? Done.”

“What if you have to pick up a client or something? Or if I go have lunch with Flora?” Red, blotchy territories were traveling up her face. “The smell, Foon. You never think about the smell.”

Foon shook his head and closed his eyes, leaning deeper into the wingback. From here Marcy’s voice sounded far away and light. Like delicate Styrofoam, he thought. Yes. Like a sprinkling of bright white packing peanuts.

“Look at you,” she said. “You are always, always high.”

Foon pondered this statement with a finger to his lip. “That’s true.”

Her high voice rattled, like an alarm straining to sound. “We said that we would alternate, but here you are,” said Marcy. “We have to eat, you know. Come chop for just five minutes.”

But five minutes lost in the empty hour were five minutes lost to hell.

“If they’re potatoes,” he said, “they why not use the food professor?” He paused, listening to his voice, and giggled. “The food…the food….” In his stomach an air bubble of laughter rose uncontrollably through his chest. Foon grinned, trying to hold his breath, but then gave up and bent forward, giggling into his knees. He couldn’t help himself. It was funny.

“Food pro-*cess*or,” said Foon. “Pro-*cess*or. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

“I can’t believe I’m watching this.”

“Food professor. Oh my god.”

“You’re an asshole,” said Marcy.

Foon rested his face in his fleecy pajama pants, listening to the quiet made by his own not speaking. His wife was breathing angrily through her nose, and the sound of it crawled into this ears. His father, in moments like this with Mah, would have bowed his head in patience. He would have closed his eyes, composed himself, and waited for the cloud to pass. It was, theoretically, the correct thing to do. But Foon had always known that he was not quite his father. He was powered by a different battery—newer, more American. Foon had come farther, had reached higher, and he would go farther still. And when his wife called him an asshole he almost relished the moment that followed. To hurt her back, exactly the way he knew; it was a target revealed for which he alone had the arrow.

“But I’m your asshole, Cupcake,” he said. “I’m all you’ve got.”

Marcy fumed into the kitchen. Foon heaved up and stumbled after her around the large leather couch set. Only recently he’d encountered this sensation of being both angry and baked. Marcy threw her dishrag on the tiled floor, then lifted a pot from the stove and poured its brothy contents down the sink. She took the metal lid and let it clatter in there too. Steam rose up from the drain and collected toward the ceiling in a flat, expanding cloud.

Foon kept his gaze sighted on her swinging yellow ponytail, which thrashed like a caught fish as she pointed at each accusation.

“The dishwasher,” she said, staring him down like a bull. “You said you’d fix it. It’s not fixed.”

Foon crossed his arms. “Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that.”

“The washing machine, the leak upstairs. Why live in a house like this if you let it fall apart?” She picked the rag off the floor and started wiping the splashes of broth on the counter.

“What do you imagine I do all day?” said Foon. “Go to the office and twiddle my thumbs?”

“It’s been three months, Foon. Three months, and no dishwasher.”

“And what, you can’t call them yourself?” he said, talking to her back. “Are you physically handicapped? Do you not speak English? Do you have a clinical phobia of phones?”

“Don’t you talk to me that way,” she said, yelling now, but he’d learned long ago to yell over her yelling. Reliably his voice was larger, full of force, and it would cancel hers neatly like a soprano leading a choir.

Foon said Marcy was uptight. Marcy said Foon was an addict. Foon said that she had no spine. Marcy said that he would die alone.

“Die alone?” said Foon. “Me? So I’m the one who will die alone.” He lifted his arms and swung them around the wide expanse of their marble kitchen. “Where do you think all this came from, Marcy? This is what you get when you have a thing called a *job*.”

I

There is a photograph my mother is fond of showing people whenever she explains how far I have fallen. I am insolent now, uncharacteristically so, and she is unused to seeing my anger so unhidden. “See how happy we were?” she laments, phone in hand, zooming in on the expertly cropped image. In it, we are standing soldier-like behind a table overflowing with food. The corners of our mouths are upturned in the same way. “10th grade, Thanksgiving break,” she explains. “She had just gotten back from boarding school.” And then, invariably, she turns to me and asks, “Do you remember that? What a nice girl you were? Do you remember?”

Most people know about Houdini. He was the illusionist who locked himself up in a milk can, filled it with water, and advertised that failure meant a drowning death. Few people know about his brother, Theodore Hardeen, who continued to perform the act long after Houdini died of appendicitis, a protracted, unnecessary illness that could have been cured had Houdini not been too proud to seek treatment. I used to wonder if it was an act of love or hate that impelled Hardeen to replace his brother. Now, I know why he did it. He did it because he could not do otherwise. He had lost an un-loseable person.

Layla-tul-Qadr—that’s what the Qur’an calls it. The Night of Power. On the twenty-seventh of Ramadan each year, Muslims mark its beginning with a vigil. After breaking their fasts at sunset, they retreat into deep and solemn worship until sunrise the next morning, imploring Allah to forgive all their past and future sins. It is the only night when those who pray five times a day, or three times, or no times, all congregate. On this night, Allah revealed the first verse of the Qur’an—the injunction “Read!”—to the Prophet Muhammed. On this night, He writes in His Book of Decrees every event to occur in the next twelve months, from natural disasters to the falling of a leaf. On this night, the gates of heaven swing open and the gates of hell swing shut. Angels descend.

One day in June, Dad found a foot in a men’s size 11 Adidas shoe lying out near the salt flats. My first thought was that there must be an ocean around, even though I knew that was impossible, that the salt flats had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. I’d never even seen the ocean outside of a magazine or sometimes a TV show, and even then I had the feeling that I wasn’t really seeing the ocean, that it wasn’t the same as actually being there. But the foot seemed like the kind of thing that could only wash up on shore from a faraway land, like a message in a glass bottle with a cork as a cap.

My mother can only fall asleep with a hitachi wand tucked between her legs. It is big and white—the thick handle alone is the size of an adult humerus bone, and atop it rests a large bulb the size of an adult’s fist. The bulb is made of a material that is probably plastic but feels like leather, and has myriads of small indentations that collect dirt, fluid—i.e. color, yellow-brown dots that, when the hitachi is turned on to the low setting, make the whole head appear yellow, like a crude pointillism; but on the high setting the opposite effect occurs, somehow the vigorous high speed vibrations, which are so rapid as to be insensible, like strobe lights which give you the impression that a rotating object is actually perfectly still, cause the discolorations to vanish completely, and the bulb is all white, pure white all over, the same color as the handle. My mother, I know, prefers the low setting—but even so I worry that overuse will make her completely numb, which would be a disaster, since it is the only way that she can fall asleep.

While my mother dozed I sat there thinking about Wamblan, which I’d also been thinking about on the commuter train that morning, a jungle river town near the Nicaraguan border with Honduras, and about Jacinto, who thought this mole in the middle of my left hand was a stigmata. Jacinto commanded the small FSLN base in Wamblan, a sort of special forces unit that would head out into the tropical forests and mountains hunting the Contra for weeks at a time. I’d ridden up from the Wiwilí base to Wamblan with a convoy of supply and IFA trucks, and almost as soon as I got there, Jacinto had agreed to let me accompany the troops headed out in pursuit of Contras who’d ambushed another Sandinista patrol in the area, the one true experience of jungle warfare I ever had. Over one night and two days, we chased them, marching in a long single column of troops through often dense jungle, crossing rivers where the currents came up to our chests, so close on the enemy’s trail that we were constantly in danger of falling into an ambush ourselves, and sometimes, when the German shepherd tracking dog leading the column had picked up a scent, or when the scouts up ahead had sent back an alert, we’d slow to a crawl, barely inching forward for hours though the soft green leaves and steamy buggy air. Once we came across a still smoking campfire, a lean-to of freshly hacked branches, we even found a piece of rolling paper tremblingly clinging to a spindly blade of grass, glowing in the sunlight like a tiny snow princess, I remember how Jacinto and some of the other soldiers stood around the piece of rolling paper staring at it as if it might blow us to smithereens, until Jacinto brought his boot down on it and everybody laughed. I saw an emerald toucanet, and imagined myself on a sixth grade morning telling Mrs. Tollander about it and earning my silver star. The Contra escaped into Honduras, deeper into that country than Jacinto wanted to follow, we’d already crossed the border anyway. The night after we got back to Wamblan, I lay in my bunk in the cramped little barracks, covered in insects bites and scratches, feet blistered, my bad knee stiff and swollen, listening to the pulsing electronic-sounding pandemonium of the tree frogs out in that jungle pitch darkness and stillness. Was that really me, lying in that bunk, having made it on my own to a Sandinista special forces base? Yes, that was you Frankie Gee, only a bit more than twenty years ago. And so what. What proof is there that a remembered event is any more meaningful than a fantasy that resembles it?* Prove* it. Prove the lasting value of experience. How is it better than reading about it? In the predawn dark, I was woken by a stirring in the barracks, someone had abruptly come inside, a light was turned on and I saw them, three soldiers, they wore the long beards often sported by Contra fighters and fatigues with the grey-beige-green tiger stripe pattern and pale green floppy hats of Contra uniforms, and I glimpsed haggard faces, one much paler than the other two, with long orange beard. They spoke in low voices to some of the other soldiers, by then the lights had been switched off again, and I heard a low voice say, *The bodies are up on the hill*, and another voice mumbled, though I was less sure of this,* Son nueve, *maybe he’d said,* No mueven* or *No les mueven*. The intruders slept in the barracks with the rest of us, quietly sliding into empty bunks, maybe with their boots and uniforms on. I was exhausted and slept deeply, and when I woke the trio of bearded soldiers dressed as Contras were gone and nobody in that barracks of mostly teenaged draftees said anything about them. Later in the morning a mist lay over the river, and Jacinto, his torso muscular and slender as a male ballet dancer’s, stood in the gleaming green water up to his waist, holding a tiny round mirror up to his face and shaving, while the Cindy Lauper cassette with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” I’d donated to the base was blasting from the base’s loudspeaker, I’d given them my DEVO cassette too, the soldiers were happy to have rock music to listen to. I undressed on the riverbank, and, carrying my own bar of soap in a little sandwich bag and a razor, waded into the cool, slow moving river water, so green and rich with jungle minerals. Finally I asked: So those are dead Contra up on that hill? I heard them say there are nine. Jacinto held my gaze for a moment, then barely shook his head no in a way that somehow suggested he really meant yes, maybe it was the way his eyes slightly widened. Do you remember what Jacinto did next, Frankie Gee? How could you ever forget. He held up his left hand, and with his razor touched the back of that hand in the same place where my mole is and held it there, and speaking emphatically if softly, he said: Nuestro Señor watches over you, and I responded: I wish, but it’s not true, Jacinto. That lunatic Sandinista—but a lot of them were religious like that, crazy Catholic Marxists—responded in that same calm tone: No Goliberg, God doesn’t do that by accident, put a mole like a nail head in the same place where the Roman’s nailed the Son to the cross. I was thinking, But didn’t those nails actually go in closer to the wrists? But I also knew that it’s popularly believed that people with stigmata bleed from the middle of their palms. Does this have anything to do with what happened last night? I asked. Sometimes what we call an enigmatic smile in reality is a loud shout, that’s how Jacinto smiled, and he pointed his index finger at me and went: *Ahhhhhh*, voice rising as if he was saying, You’re not going to trick me into talking. Jacinto thought my stigmata and the dead men on the hill were connected. Oh come on, vos, I pleaded, tell me what happened. Jacinto said: We came close to being ambushed the other day, chavalo, they were all around us. We had another column out on patrol on the other side, but I didn’t think they could reach the area in time, but joven Goliberg, they did, so it was the Contra that had to retreat, but not all of them, some followed us back to Wamblan, do you understand? We shouldn’t be here right now, Goliberg, in the river having our bath, and Jacinto gave a little shrug, as if it was obvious. I said: And this has something to do with the soldiers with the beards? They looked like Contras. Jacinto didn’t answer. But obviously they weren’t Contra, I went on, because they came into our barracks. Jacinto visibly laughed, or chuckled, but no sound came out. I said: So there were nine Contra up there on the hill. Plus three more who were ours, said Jacinto, his voice slightly louder than a whisper. Twelve Contra up on the hill, I repeated, and I posed the dumb question: Doing what? Jacinto said: They’d set up their mortars, they had RPGs, and they were about to fuck us, Goliberg. Jacinto held up his left hand again, and again tapped the middle of the back of his hand with his razor. I thought, He thinks Jesus intervened to save us, but then who were those three infiltrators, were they the Divine Swords of Our Lord or something like that? Jacinto had already turned and was wading out of the river and up onto the bank. So there are nine contra lying dead up there, I said to his back. Jacinto held up a hand and tick-tocked his index finger side to side. I looked over the rooftops of the little base, over the whitewashed headquarters built on sturdy stilts, “Uncontrollable Urge” blasting now from the loudspeaker nested beneath the bent eaves of the metal roofing, and up at the steep forested ridge or hill overlooking the town and the river, and up higher into the morning sky that was still a pale gray, where I don't recall seeing vultures still circling over the blood soaked ground where the bodies of the dead Contra had been left by their killers, ground I imagined swarming with ants and maggots and other insects, which made me wince. Probably they’d already been dragged off and buried by soldiers sent up at the crack at dawn, Jacinto must have supervised that operation, then come back down to have his contemplative bath in the river, following whatever trail of thoughts had led him to the conviction that the mole in the back of my hand had some relation to those Three Divine Swords of Our Lord, as if beaming them strength and blessing in their swift deadly work, saving us from a mortar and rocket barrage; three bearded Sandinista soldiers, infiltrators who’d been living at the side of those Contras, marching and fighting with them in the mountains and jungles on both sides of the Nicaraguan and Honduran border for who knows how long; in the Contra camps they would have undergone training by CIA masters in killing and infiltration long after they’d undergone similar training in Cuba, or East Germany, even Lebanon or Angola, their destiny being to finally arrive one night at their moment of ultimate testing on a hilltop overlooking Wamblan. Had they turned into whirling dervishes who slit the throats of their brothers-in-arms in a matter of seconds, snapped their necks with lethal karate blows, or was there was gunfire and we didn’t hear it? Later that afternoon I found out from some of the soldiers that the bearded men had left Wamblan by jeep just before sunrise, headed down to the military base at Wiwilí and back to Managua. To be debriefed by Sandinista intelligence, one impressed young officer told me, he said that probably there’d be secret ceremonies too, honoring their heroism and the success of their mission. “Now they’re going to pull in the net,” he said. He meant that the three bearded infiltrators would have collected information on Contra collaborators throughout that sweep of northern Nicaragua, and when that net was hauled in it was going to full of spies and informers drawn from the rural, mountain and jungle population, and I thought about what that was going to mean for many of them, and for those they left behind. A jungle Cold War spy novel set entirely among peasant farmers, I thought, imagine it written by Juan Rulfo, how cool would that be. I’ll always remember standing in that cool green water up to my waist after Jacinto got out, while Devo blasted out over the river, and looking up at the ridge and thinking about those nine who’d been killed up there, and about the children that at least some of them would have gone on to have if they hadn’t been killed that morning, and about the children those children would have had and so on, an infinitely-branching tree of non-existence climbing into the sky, war’s cosmic orchard. I wondered what the tree of my descendants was destined to be like, how high it was going to rise into the sky, or if this was as high as it was going to get, just me and my shimmery reflection in the river water.



 

“Maybe I will be more explicit about why is it that I am reticent to speak about love. It is because the discourse of love has continued absolutely unbroken through the transformation that interests me. America was conquered in the name of love. Today, people can be bombed in the name of love. So, if everything is love, if religion is love, and if love is everywhere, and, you know, all you need is love—then fine. It’s just that it appears that much more than religion and Church, people have killed each other in the name of love, in a way that is… brutal. And you would think by now it’s time that, rather than rave against the Church—not that there’s nothing to rave against, I am in agreement—why is it that no one is against love? Because it’s about time—no?—that we recognize the damages that love has done. Now please don’t construe me as some kind of pessimistic, solipseric whatever. But I don’t see any reason why it’s more justified today to criticize religion than it is to criticize love… I have people who tell me that they love so much that they will burn me to death. Then I say you have a peculiar way of love, but I’m not going to say, oh, you were lying. No, fine, this is your love. It’s one that burns and kills. You’re strange that way.”

The world is one of many. It is but one, in fact, in an infinite set of possible worlds. Each world in the infinite set of possible worlds is composed only of an infinite set of propositions; call them p, q, r,etc. Each proposition can be either true or false at a world but its truth value can change from world to world. Every possibility is represented therein. Picture, for example, a hall of mirrors of the kind that reflects an image interminably in time and space. Only in this hall of mirrors, which we may call the universe, each image is identical to the last save for one altered proposition. One image may be of a simple mahogany table. Another, of the same table, only in cedar. The next, the same table with only three legs. And so on. These images are the different worlds in our universe. Every world is real although we may only ever see one.

In Mandarin, the word for your father’s oldest brother is Big-Uncle-on-Father’s-Side. When I was eleven and Alaina was nine, we went to Havana with Big Uncle during his Chinese New Year vacation. Cuba was Dad’s idea even though no one but me spoke Spanish and, besides visiting family in China, we never ventured further than Nashville. Big Uncle could have stayed with us—he had hosted us twice—but maybe Dad didn’t want to give him the chance to compare Shanghai and Indiana, or didn’t want him in our home, even with so little time left. Maybe he was only trying to display some American adventurousness.

Earlier that day while getting dressed, slowly, painstakingly, the same dirty flannel as yesterday and the day before buttoned one plastic button at a time, something in Adrian snapped. The beige walls of his father’s home closed in on him. He had to get away.

La tos lo mantenía al borde de una convulsión. Comenzó con un estornudo y en breve estaba inmerso en un torbellino de espasmos sin poder dominar la brusquedad de los movimientos corporales.

His cough kept him on the edge of a convulsion. It started with a sneeze and soon he was deep in a whirlwind of shudders, and he lost control of his body’s abrupt movements.

The problem with frontiers is nobody can ever remember where the bodies are buried.

Under a waning moon, the climber climbed. We sat in the shadows, not twenty feet away, holding our breath. All things considered, a very fitting image, we thought: here was this perverted creature, putting left foot right foot left foot right foot on that porous rock, on which the Lord is my witness he did not slip once. The dull moonlight turned the image positively grisly, and we hoped that it was not only the half light of the day we were witnessing, but God willing also the last half hour or so in the life of this cursed being.

The vacation was Charles’s idea, insisted upon despite – or more accurately because of – the fact that I was still waiting for my diagnosis. He’d always been quietly of the opinion that my illness was all in my head. Not that he said so, but the thought slipped in between us. In bed when he ran his fngers down my back and told me that my skin was beautiful, my skin was so perfect. When he handed me a cup of tea, along with a small dish of ice cubes to cool the water, and asked not how I was, but how I felt. It sat in that small sea of wrinkles between his eyebrows, giving him what looked, to all the world but me, like an expression of genuine concern.

Sam looks mean enough and he’s taller than most boys, but his arms don’t reach past the row of seats in front of us. I think he’d punch like a joke. If he got up in that ring I think he’d run himself out of balance, put his weight behind the wrong arm, maybe just trip up and duck back out through the ropes. It’s not his fault but he’s a controlled person, slow and careful with his movements, no explosiveness in his entire body. Seems like the ring’s too big for a fourteen-year-old with thin arms. These men we’re watching, they fight in jumps. They’re sweating like the match is deadly and their punches are stinging through the boxing gloves. The view is patchy from our seats but the top-lights are sterilizing and I can see shadows on the boxers’ cheeks as they dodge. I can’t stop watching them move, twitch, spin. They jump around like it’s random. They fight like it’s not the arms but the timing’s what matters.

Interview with a rock-star, a celebrity icon. The mischievous and bashful expression of someone who seems like a fun guy who all the same distrusts strangers, other people, the ager publicus, someone who lives enclosed in his own world of references and connections, his own clichés. He showed up to the televised interview in pajamas, a sample of what I heard:

When he suggests you try the pillow trick, laugh. Instead, tell your sister where you’re going. She’ll offer to cover without you needing to ask. Make her swear not to tell the parents. Don’t think about a world where she tells the parents. Don’t think about a world where they check both beds. Think about a world where they check both beds, consider the options: an inflatable you-sized dummy. A stunt double. An actor, not only to sleep in your bed; but wear your clothes; take your classes; let the parents stick report cards on the fridge.

I was slain by the spirit when I was only ten years old. This is not a story. This is not hyperbole. This is only the fact of a hand I can see and resee whenever I need to—a nun’s hand, looming softly, rippling towards my face as if on the quietest gust of candlelight. This is the last thing I remember before passing out.

Outside the Lighted Window ∙ (1919, 2013)

They sipped cereal milk from their breakfast bowls while discussing the men his wife might consider dating when he would be dead, and the overall feeling was that younger would be best. More energy would be nice, their daughter added. Their son pointed out that the difficulty with young was that the young too frequently found themselves poorly capitalized. He looked at his son as though he were looking through a wine bottle. The boy had always been a shit person, even as a young child, and he found himself authentically surprised that a person could change so little over so many years. Perhaps a dancer, he suddenly offered the conversation. His wife made a face that seemed to suggest she liked the thought of dating a dancer, as he’d felt she might. Then he saw her look off to a distant place, as she sometimes would in those years. Perhaps, she reflected aloud, we place too much emphasis on the present moment. 

A star-smeared night, the usual briny and humid haze of the brush country in August, and Dixon was hauling twenty cases of stolen toys up from the Rio Grande Valley. They were in the bed of his truck under a blue tarp. He took care to drive the speed limit and flash his blinker. If the border patrol at the Sarita checkpoint asked, he’d claim a delivery mix-up. If the guards were white, he’d blame it on Mexicans.

In May, 1968, the Russian tanks hadn’t rolled into Prague, my mother hadn’t gone crazy yet, and out on Rt. 22, just down from the dairy farm that’s now a Carpet Warehouse, Sam’s Bait and Tackle held a fishing contest.

Their navels pop out, poking like thumb-tips against the ribbing of their tank tops. A soft skirt, a pair of track pants, tiny shorts, waistband cupping the circumference of the belly’s bottom rim. No maternity jeans—this heat! A sundress, anything with cinched elastic, breeze. Flip-flops with flattened rubber soles. The flapping accentuates their widened gaits.