Category: short fiction

Day Drinking
by Patrick Strickland

That bar could put fear in your heart, or maybe just disappointment. You’d find guys mainlining junk in the bathroom, tying off with whatever they could get their hands on. Rubberbands, electricity cords, shoestrings. People had gotten stabbed with busted pool sticks right in front of me. A guy I knew got his forehead cleaved with a prosthetic leg someone had left behind. Hell, someone once even cracked my skull wide open with a mag light for some reason I never could pin down. 

No one there ever let that kind of stuff get in the way of drinking. Take that night, for instance. Blood all in my eyes, big birthmarks of it on my shirt, my buddy pushing my hair aside and saying he could just about see all my rotten thoughts through the yawning hole in my head. We just went out to the pickup and snagged a roll of duct-tape, pieced my splattered skull back together. What misery, I’d sometimes think, but I kept walking down there, kept sitting in that same goddamn spot on that same goddamn stool. 

Maybe it was because the bartender was a guy I grew up with. Everyone called him Toad, on account of him being just about deaf and never talking save for these croaks now and again. He looked different now. He had these faded blue tattoos, jailhouse art. He’d been an asshole as a kid, and he’d grown up into an even worse one. Beat on me once for lifting wallets. Without saying a thing. There he was teeing off on me, my blood all over his knuckles, and not a single fuckin’ word. Imagine that—I still count it high on my list of Worst Happy Hours.

I thought about asking for whiskey, but there wasn’t any use calling Toad for an order. He simply gave you what he thought you ought to drink. Right when he sat another beer down in front of me, this woman stamped in. Real sad case, hair all messed up, makeup running like she’d been crying. 

She sat a few barstools down from me, made a racket getting herself situated. Couldn’t have been more than an inch or two north of five foot. Legs didn’t even touch the floor. She pulled out a pack of Mores. She was still fighting with her lighter when Toad appeared in front of her, pointing at a sign hitched to the wall: No smoking before six o’clock. 

It’d been a while since I’d smoked. Kicked the habit at Mack’s request. I thought about that a lot. I was a great guy to be in a relationship with. Give me enough shit, and I’d just stop doing whatever it was that bothered you so much. But Mack, he wasn’t right. Didn’t appreciate all my sacrifices. Kicked me out that very morning. What for? Fuck if I understood it. Hardly worth trying to make sense of. 

The woman down the bar was huffing and sighing, putting on this big act. I studied her for a moment in the mirror behind the liquor shelf. She blew her nose into a napkin for a half minute straight. Goddamn mess, she was. 

Toad came and slid a Miller Lite across the bar top in front of her. 

“I wanted wine,” she protested. 

But Toad already had his back to her, wiping down the bottles on the shelf. Maybe he was deaf. Nobody could really say for sure. 

“Excuse me,” she tried again. “White wine.” 

Truth was, why Mack sent me packing wasn’t much of a story. I’d stretched the truth a little. Harmless stuff. White lies. But he lost his shit on me, clawed my face bloody. 

“Brenda,” the lady said. She said it out of the blue, while I was still flailing in the cracks of my mind, still leering at her in the mirror. She’d swiveled on the barstool to face me. “My name, I mean. It’s Brenda.” 

I gave her a nod. I didn’t have the stomach for company. The way I felt, I’d rather have wrapped my lips around the barrel of a shotgun than do small talk. The lady did another one of those drummed-up sighs, then stopped bothering and faced the bar again. 

By stretched the truth, here’s what I mean. We’d moved in together about five or six months back. It didn’t take long for me to start getting restless. Who can just watch TV and hold hands all evening without losing their shit a little? When I started slipping out late at night, Mack wanted to know what I was up to.

Christ knows where it came from, but I told him I worked undercover with the FBI. Didn’t even expect him to buy it, but boy did he. Any time I wasn’t home, I told him, that meant I was working a case. Staking out a stash house, building a file on some real lowlife. He got all proud of me, started telling his friends I was helping save our town, taking crooks and drug dealers and murderers off the streets. I was cleaning up the community and risking my life to do it. A load of shit that big, it was his fault for buying it. 

I killed the last of my beer. Toad snagged the remote control and flipped the channel to another news station. Nothing important, some bullshit about a new jobs report. An old man hobbled in. The way he carried himself, you could see a car crash in his past, maybe a divorce or two. I’d noticed him in there before, decaying at the end of the bar. He wore a US Navy hat and drank dark liquor from a glass that shivered in his hands. Toad didn’t so much as gesture to the man, but his face got soft whenever the old bastard walked in. That was some stupid business if I ever saw it, the way some people got sentimental about old folks just because they’d stuck around for so long. 

I watched that man for a second. Liver spots dotted his hands. You could’ve flicked a hole right through him. I felt about as old as he was, maybe even older. Truth was, I was tired, and when I got tired, just about anything drove me up the wall. Hadn’t slept at all, neither. The sun was just starting to glow that morning when I came home. Mack was waiting in the doorway. His face all tight with anger, the tendons in his neck like thick cables. He snatched my sleeve, yanked it up. Some girlfriend of his knew my buddy Craig’s old lady, and word got back to Mack about me and Craig shooting crank at a motel all night long. 

“That’s a goddamn lie,” I told him. Don’t know why I bothered. There was no use. You can try all you want, hatch a story Christ himself would shed a tear over, but you can’t hide track marks. 

I adjusted on the barstool, pushed my hand into my pocket. Craig had asked me to keep his dope safe while he went down to the police station to turn himself in on some warrant. I found the baggie beneath my keys. Not much. Not nothing, neither. I knew Craig wanted me to hang onto it for him, but what kind of a friend expects a thing like that? Hey, buddy, here’s my crank. Mind hanging onto it for fuck knows how long while my sorry ass is sitting in a jail cell?

My mind was pretty well made up. Whenever I got done here, I’d go bang the rest of the crank myself. 

To my mind, Mack should’ve been hugging on me and begging me to stay. When he confronted me, I came clean right away. Almost right away, at least. He didn’t buy my whole tale about how Craig was also a fed, how he was my partner through thick and thin, how we had to do terrible things to keep our cover. How are you meant to take down drug rings from the inside without getting a little dirty yourself? They figure you for a narc, I told him, might as well put the bullet in your head your goddamned self. 

After he raked his nails down my face, I didn’t even try to lie no more. Saw the Lord in that man’s claws. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I admitted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t work for the FBI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I made a mistake or two. But he dropped a cardboard box full of my clothes and old VHS tapes on the porch, punted it so hard everything ended up strewn across the yard. Fuck it, I figured. Left it all in the dirt and did what I always did when I had nowhere else to go. 

“This bar’s got that feel about it,” the lady said. 

It took me a minute to understand she was staring at me again, still trying to talk to me. I raised my empty glass to Toad, motioned for a refill. 

“What feel you mean?” I asked the lady, and a clot of regret stuck in my throat the moment the words fell out. 

She grabbed her pack of Mores again, seemed to remember there still wasn’t smoking, and dropped it on the bar top. “Like danger, maybe. Like might could something dangerous happen here.” 

“Shit, there’s no danger here.” I turned away and snapped my fingers at Toad. “You mind switching the channel? Put on the game or something, huh.” 

He watched my lips as they moved, probably reading them, and cut me a hard look that said I ought to tread carefully, then placed the remote control on the liquor shelf and got back to ignoring us. 

Maybe all the bullshit was getting to me. Maybe it was the day drinking. Part of me was still hoping the lady would shut her trap and leave me be. I had enough trouble on my mind. But another part of me was saying you can’t just cold shoulder someone like that. You didn’t need a great read on people to see she wasn’t right. Lonely, wounded, the whole gamut. 

I got to thinking about her question more, the times I’d lifted wallets in there, the others I’d gotten caught trying. When Toad hauled me out back, he jerked down my pants right there in the alley. I’d stuffed four or five billfolds down the front of my briefs. He stomped me good. Mack had to nurse my wounds. He was convinced it was about some prejudices Toad had, but I knew better than that. I wasn’t too goddamn dense to get it. It was bad for business, what I did, and Toad hated everyone. 

The news snapped to the next segment. The presenter was a nice-looking guy, had these big white teeth that could just about blind you. He was going on about some big drug bust the cops did down at the Super Bowl. Guys hocking junk to teenagers. Scenes of parked police cruisers with flashing lights. Blurred faces of men in handcuffs. Closeups of hands getting fingerprinted. That kind of thing puts fire to your nerves, you know? You get the feeling that you’ve dodged so many bullets, have done people so goddamn terribly, that there isn’t a chance in fuck your comeuppance isn’t lurking just right around a corner, waiting to bust your ass up. 

The lady tugged hard on my sleeve. She’d suddenly appeared on the stool next to mine. I fixed my eyes on the TV again. Now there was a church shooting somewhere outside of Austin, some nut with a hunting rifle and a pile of dead bodies. 

The lady leaned closer ‘til I could feel the heat of her breath on my neck. “You ain’t much for talking, are you?” 

I looked at her, really looked at her, saw how awful defeat soaked her through and through, and though I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I remembered the humiliation that crossed Mack’s face as he glared at me on the porch, learning I was nothing near the person he’d thought I was. And even then, it surprised me as much as it would’ve anyone else when my arm raised and I heard myself call out to Toad. 

“Another round for us both on my tab.” 

***

By the time the daylight was dying, Brenda and me were shooting the shit, putting back whiskeys like thirst might kill us. She was talking my eyes out of my head. That was alright. She was growing on me, and it didn’t bother me like before. Her man had run around on her, bedded her best friend, lied her into a bunch of heartache. But God was Brenda generous with her tab. And each time we killed a whiskey, Toad was already turning the bottle ass-up and pushing each of us another double across the bar top. He still picked the type, the bottom-dollar gut rot, but it felt like we’d all met each other halfway. 

Brenda rested her chin on her palm, propped an elbow on the bar top. She thought for a moment. “You believe there’s such a real thing as contrition?” 

“Contrition?” I asked, a little drunk. 

“You know, someone feeling remorse and really meaning it?” 

“You mean can someone apologize and it be the truth? Yeah, I do think that.” 

We went on like that for a while. The more we spoke, the more the guilt shredded my stomach. Looking at Brenda, her chipped teeth and the map of worry lines on her forehead, it hit me like a boot hard and heavy to the chest. How wrong I’d done Mack even when he took me in and held me and loved me. How low a liar I was. How ungrateful and wretched a guy I’d become. I made up my mind then and there. I’d ease up on the booze, give Craig his crank back and kick it altogether. I’d walk back home and beg Mack, swear up and down not to lie anymore. 

But by that time people had filled the bar just about wall to wall, and I figured I could stand another whiskey or two. A couple guys I recognized loitered in the back, switching between the pool table and the dartboard, and others I grew up with were bellied up and tying one on. We didn’t even have to ask Toad to bring us an ashtray. The bar stereo system didn’t work, so he brought out an old radio. The bent antenna meant it couldn’t pick up any stations, but the cassette deck worked. Roy Orbison was the only tape he had, which was always fine by me. 

We stopped taking the whiskey on ice. Brenda rolled her head back and sank a shot. Roy was moaning about broken hearts and longing. And even though loneliness was sinking its fingers into me, it felt good being in a place like that, with people like those. So, when she asked me about my life, firing up a More and passing it to me, I didn’t hold back. 

“I’ve got me a thing with someone,” I confessed, “but we’ve got problems.” 

“I figured that.” She snubbed out the tip of a More in the ashtray. “Folks in real happy relationships don’t spend the whole day drinking.” 

“That’s probably true.” I sucked hard on the cigarette, and Mack’s face stormed into my head, all injured and damp. 

“Little advice? Your lady probably don’t appreciate you calling what you got together a thing. It just don’t make you feel all that special.” 

I thought about correcting her, I really did, but there didn’t seem much point in spilling my whole life story. Besides, the whiskey was really knocking me on my ass. My brain rocked in my skull, and even when I pinched an eye shut tight as it’d let me, the bar still vibrated a little around me. When I wobbled on the stool, Roy crooning his heart out, I knew everything was different now. I looked at Toad and could’ve sworn he was smiling. We were friends now, brothers even. 

Between songs I snuck off to the bathroom for a quick pick-me-up, a little sniff of Craig’s crank. By the time I got back to the table, Brenda was ripping through whatever was left of that pack of Mores, sparking another as soon as she snubbed one out. I worried she’d finish them all before I could talk another off her. She tied her hair up. Though I had a deep, newfound loyalty to Mack, and though I’d never really taken to women, I couldn’t look past the fact that the dim glow of the bar lights had Brenda looking alright. 

“These problems,” she said, and waved at Toad for another round. “They about something specific?” 

I can’t tell you what did it. Roy holding that note on “Crying” that could lash a lightning bolt right through your heart? The way the whiskey washed through my brain? How Brenda’s face shone through the braids of cigarette smoke? Craig’s crank buzzing me up like a wire? I don’t have a clue, not really. Maybe it was all that. But even as my chest ached for Mack, I heard the words groan out of my mouth: “It’s just my job.” 

“That’s a real shame.” She reached over, patted my elbow. “What line of work you in?” 

Our knees brushed under the table. I chewed on her question, tasted the weight of it. The cigarette smoke stung my eyes, but I stared at the whiskey glass in front of me, nearly empty, like it might offer guidance. She pressed a napkin to her face, dabbing sweat away, and looked at me with those needy eyes, waiting for an answer. I can’t say what they wanted. Maybe to know me, maybe to heal me a little—hell, maybe even to be healed. 

I glanced up at the TV hitched to the wall. I get it. Truly. You want to tell me yeah, sure, it’s hard to be decent, but you still have to try. You want to remind me even the worst people sometimes really give it their best to do right by others. You ask what about those who change, those who turn to kindness, actual kindness. What can I tell you other than turn on the TV? Grown men sell poison to kids for a little cash. People maim and murder each other every day, sometimes for no good reason at all. Think about it. Would it fix the world at all if I said I told her the truth? Really, ask yourself why you need to believe there’s still hope for me. Would it put your heart at ease even a little? 

About the author:

Pinky Tickseed
by Rick Byrne

“Those damn bugs.”

Jo was on her knees rifling through the bar for another bottle when a red-eye jumped into that thicket of hair.  Things had changed so much: she was swatting wildly.  Jo loved bugs.  She loved all those ugly living, slippery, hard-shell crawly things with the eagerness of a four-year-old before they go to school and learn words like “icky” and “yuck.”  Jo had given that to our daughter Pinky, who rescued even the crispy, balled-up spiders from the windowsills, carrying them in those tiny porcelain hands out to the porch like she was trying to preserve a single drop of rain.

Jo had given it all to her, all the things that made Pinky an essential element of the natural world, like sunlight itself.  She had given her those flat-pan, blueberry eyeballs that in her last days had grown so large on her wilting face before pulling in on themselves like the final gasp of a dying star.  She had given her that mangrove of hair, black like fresh earth, too.  It was enough, all that beauty, to make you wonder if gravity had responsibility, if some drastic change in the moon’s mass or distance from the earth or some solar wind extinguished or ice cap diminished could have changed things.  Might there have been a trade?  Some inconsequential species of barrel cactus (Ferocactus wislizenii, perhaps) made extinct instead?  But that’s not the way it went—there was no intervention.  There was just Pinky’s death, the cicada onslaught, and the cruel order of things.  

It was that order that turned on Jo when Pinky got sick. Until then, she had been immutable energy, the kind of unrelenting force—her Ph.D., her teaching, her research, her publishing, her flower—that left no room for uncertainties. There even had been whispers of a Nobel, perhaps in natural product chemistry or plant cytogenetics. But in those last few months, the months when Pinky was almost always at Sloan Kettering in New York, Jo had taken up drinking Stoli with Indian tonic, lime, and a swizzle stick, the way she had during our last year at Cornell—the one when I silently determined my love was unfaltering, that I couldn’t live without her.  The one when she got pregnant. Then, as things got worse for Pinky, she stopped the limes and the tonic.  In fact, there wasn’t a crumb of anything in the house at all, hadn’t been for months.  Jo receded, and who could blame her, as Pinky sank away to a brittle little skeleton, a hairless seedling in a dust-bowl drought, barely enough weight to dimple the crisp hospital pillow.  Even the feetie PJs with eency beency pink dancing bears—the ones from a few years ago that Jo dug out of the hope chest, where she saved them for “our second”—swamped her, revealing the pale round nubs of her collarbone through translucent skin.  

Pinky’s birth had been too hard on Jo, a fragile flower herself, and so a second child didn’t come.  But the scientist in her was glad to have salted them away, those night-nights, perfectly preserved in vacuum-sealed plastic like some endangered beetle in a glass jar.  By now they had already been restored, uncontaminated and pressed like Jo’s infinite collection of preserved specimens, a lifetime of work, to the cedar box.  The smiley bears bent and slumped over on each other in the folds, dancing on PJs in the silent cedar dark.  

It was like the venation of leaves, what happened to me and Jo. An arrangement of lines (parallel, pinnate, palmate), chaotic and methodical, separate but committed. The quality of a leaf was the giveaway to me of a plant’s chances of survival, not the phylum or genus, although I knew them all. I had chosen to be a gardener, not a scientist. It was that choice Jo never understood. She thought it “a waste” of my photographic memory, but to me it was necessary—to be in the world of real, living things. 

“It was a beautiful service.” Jo managed half a glass of some hard stuff.  Her voice scraped like sand, her vocal cords whipped from the intractable sobbing that had become the ritual in our lives.  I couldn’t believe she said it, like she was some country club neighbor or one of her graduate students: “I’m so sorry for your loss”—and a kiss on the cheek.  I was exhausted from all the pity, fake and real.  Pity was climbing the wainscoting in the living room, insidious like English ivy (Hedera helix), by the time it was over.  

“God, Jo, is that the best you can do?”  There was no one else there.  “Christ, it’s just me.”

“Would you rather I talk about what it was like to put her in that—” She raised her hand up to her mouth and pushed the rest through her fingers, muffled, almost inaudible—“Is that what you want?”

“Something…anything.” I slapped my palm through the air. 

“We put her in the ground today, John.  After all this, we buried our baby.” She had her fists over her eyes as if she were holding them in.  “It wasn’t beautiful.  It was a nightmare, an ugly nightmare.  And right now she’s in that cold ground, in the dark, alone.  And what if she needs me?  What if she’s scared?  I can’t pick her up…and without her, John, I am nothing.  Do you understand?  I am nothing.”  Her voice traveled into one thin falsetto note until it ran out.  She turned to look at me, her eyes sunk in their sockets, her voice a breathy whimper.  “Is that enough for you, my permission? Is that what you wanted to hear? Are you satisfied?  Now, can you move on?  Can you?”  She took a step toward me, her head tilted as if she needed a closer look, as if I were unrecognizable. 

In the long silence that followed, there was rage.  It coursed up from deep inside of me, from that ugly well of bile that had soaked me through during that last year.  Saturated with resentment, it had finally seeped into my bones and flesh. Then all at once, split open by anger, and death, and cancer, it was released sharp like a whip crack. “If it weren’t for me, we never would have kept her.”  

Her hands over her ears, Jo pushed her way past me and ran from the room.   

I hated myself for saying it.  I could have cried if I had anything left, and wiped clean all the half-empty glasses, stale little sandwiches, and burning candles from the table with an explosive forearm.  But I said “it was beautiful” into the empty room instead and slid the doorjamb between my shoulder blades to take my weight until my knees gave out. 

It was a beautiful service, Pinky.  The kids from Mrs. Martin’s class sang a song: “Here Comes the Sun.” That’s the Beatles.  Mummy and I held your picture, that great one from Nova Scotia with you wearing the “say cheese” smile in front of Mummy’s flower, the Pink Tickseed, the one you carried all the way home on the airplane in your lap like buried treasure.  The one we named you for.  Mummy left that picture with you so you’d remember the story.   Do you remember the story?  How the flower had gone extinct, but then it was found again, pink and yellow faces peeking out from a sea of brown grass. How over a thousand years, the ice carried the seeds from Cape Cod, where Nana and Pop Pop live, all the way to Nova Scotia.  Do you remember how you reminded me about it when Mummy and I tried to explain to you about being sick, and you asked why?  You remember you said that I shouldn’t worry, that you too would follow the ice to Nova Scotia.  Do you remember?

By midnight, the battalion of cicadas had found their way through a tear in the screen door and had begun massing along the border of the jute rug on the back porch. Slumped down in the doorway to the kitchen, I was paralyzed. But I wasn’t numb like they said I would be. Just the opposite, I was a high-pitched whistle—a cicada scream—like an emergency signal from the heart rate monitor, a flatline.  

I didn’t sleep.  There was no sleep.  But I did slip away fitfully to another condition: dormancy, like bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis).  I could feel the hours pass, but I could not remember them.  There was nothing but the recurring nightmare.  I just saw Pinky, our little Pinky, standing in the door to her bedroom, shuddering with night terror—the violent spasm of a child chased by death.  “I want up, Daddy…pleeeeease pick me up.”  It was a hoarse, piercing note. A syringe tap. My Pinky, convulsing, the corners of her mouth drawn down to her chin, with a torrent of saltwater drenching her and collecting in that spot hollowed out by the chemo at the base of her throat.  Her spaghetti arms were up and out, on either side.  

“Pick…me…up…da…dee.”  

Five drowning syllables gasped out of airless lungs.  But I could not with all my fatherly might extract her from the shadow, my arms too weak, her hands too brittle.  I could not save her from the cancer.  She slipped down my legs, fingers open, my eyes locked on her, and succumbed to the cold soil as dark as spent coffee grounds, black and silent.   

I clambered up on spongy legs.  The house was alive, every light on, the television flickering blue and mumbling in the distance. I half expected to see Jo curled up in her chair with something from McClintock, Linnaeus, or Arber.  But Jo hadn’t read in months.  

It was as if I was suddenly standing in the middle of a party, like the ones we would throw when Pinky was in remission with the doctors, nurses, and brave little warriors from the clinic, all in various stages.  Those preternaturally courageous toy soldiers in the grip of cancer with terrifying names that parents learned to pronounce flawlessly, like the doctors themselves, as if it furnished some scrap of control: Kaposi’s sarcoma, myelomonocytic leukemia, diffuse intrinsic glioma.  

But, in fact, except for the brood closing in, the world was motionless, as if some shattering cosmic event had messed with magnetics, had popped it off its axis.  As if while I had drifted away, it had been given over from humans to bugs—the violent end of an age.  As if, Pinky gone, Jo and I were the last ones.  As if there was nothing left: a million red cicada eyeballs drawn to the last shred of incandescence—unaware of what used to be and what might have come—of that glowing little house in the photo on the fridge.    

I scuffed along the chair rail in the hallway to Pinky’s bedroom.  At the door I seized up a bit, gasping and forcing air through my nose to stay ahead of the approaching episode.  Illuminated in a sliver of light was a chrome IV stand, clear tubes strung over the post of her big-girl bed.  A bag half-full of clear liquid, a morphine drip, was fitted with a clown’s wig and a big red nose.  My shadow was superimposed on it, bleeding out like spilled ink across Babar the King of the Elephants and the Elmo bedspread tucked in Jo-tight and Jo-crisp in the corners.  I might have put my arm around that clown to steady it in its grief, a gesture of reconciliation for the bad blood between us, if I thought it would improve anything.  He delivered a broad, dumb clown smile, like an offer of some sort.  And for thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, I deliberated about the last jolt in that bag.  I could have done it.  I could have thrown the stopcock wide open and curled up in the fluorescent shine of her nebula of Day-Glo stars—Orion’s Belt and the Dippers—letting the catheter do the dirty work.  I said night-night and pulled the door tight. 

Jo was balled up on the floor in the bathroom.  Slender fingers of blood and vodka reached out like a rush of Parson’s juniper (Juniperus chinensis ‘Parsonii’), staining the grout around her hand where she came down on the glass. A small cut had given up threads of blood caked along the lines of her palm.  She rocked back and forth to the throbbing cicada rhythm, her cavernous sobs expended and now squeezed out as raspy squeaks.  She didn’t open her eyes to look at me, but gripped them tighter at my presence. Her cheek pressed on the floor, slid through the pink liquor.  I dropped to my knees and flattened myself over her like a blanket, wrapping my hands on either side of her face, still after all this, as soft as lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina).    

In a spear of early morning light, I found Jo, scrubbed and wet-poodle-haired at the metal table in the kitchen next to the window.  Her legs were tangled up under her white cotton nightdress.  She cradled her World’s Best Mommy cup in both hands, keeping it close to her mouth to drain off its warmth.  

The house was immaculate, as if nothing had happened, as if it were some day other than the one that it was.  For a moment, my heart hammered against its rib cage with the expectation of Pinky sliding across the hardwood in tiny socks. 

Am I still your daddy today, Pinky? 

I wondered what they would call me at big-girl school when I went to pick up her things.  Her last art project would be there—a hand-traced turkey with one big eye, red tissue gobbler, and pipe cleaner legs.

“Rain?” I said, moving toward the cupboard.

“Off and on.”  Her words discharged heavy and sluggish in an exhale.

“She loved the rain on the porch roof.”  

Jo let her forehead fall until it rested on the rim of the cup.  “Jesus, John, do we have to start?”  It was a quick burst, a cannon shot.  She unknotted her legs and twisted out of the chair, chucking the cup into the empty sink with a fat thud.  

“No, Jo, but I…if that’s what you—” I bobbled it, but before I finished, she said she was sorry and slipped her hand along my forearm on her way to the porch.  “Are you alright?” I said, but she was already out of earshot.  

Through the window I saw her pushing naked feet through the soggy morning grass.  I took the measure, in the silence of the vacant kitchen, of the growing distance between us.  Jo had hardened.  She was prepared.  In the last months, when it was clear about Pinky, it became some scientist’s calculation for her, some Mendelian equation.   A silver line snaked behind her, puffs suspended in the syrupy gray air.  I didn’t blame her for it, or perhaps I did.  Because as she calcified, pieces of me were cleaved off in chunks until I was nothing, cavities where my organs once were—my spleen, my guts, my heart.  

As the hem of her gown dragged along the flower bed at the side of the barn, I noticed the hosta (Undulata) was sagging and the pachysandra (Terminalis) had gone yellow at the edges.  It had been months since Jo had laid a hand on her garden—that plot of earth she called her heaven.  Her heaven: the scrap of land where just this spring a bony, patch-haired Pinky sat Indian-style in freshly dug holes, drawing fresh soil in around her like a sapling.   

“It’s going to be OK, Jo,” I said to the lifeless room.  “Tell me it’s going to be OK.”  

With a hand clamped over her mouth, she tried with that stubborn scientist’s persistence to stem the night’s leftovers, hemorrhaging a round of forceful rough heaves.  I collected all my strength not to go to her, not to throw my arms around her and gather what was left of us up inside of me. I knew it was not what she wanted.  I knew she didn’t want me to save her anymore, as I had too often failed.  She didn’t want me to need her the way I had so desperately, and she didn’t want to need me.  She didn’t want my love, not the way I gave it, and if it hadn’t been for Pinky she may never have.

  Balancing herself between the wrought iron gateposts, the entrance to the garden, she seemed so small.  Behind her the sun escaped from a cloud, backlighting the curtain of wisteria (frutescens) draped between the trees.  A huddle of scraggly, untended sunflowers, heads bent at the neck, considered her.  They must have been wondering what happened. Why had their flawless Eden gone derelict? Why hadn’t their Jo protected them against the unyielding cicada onslaught?  They were falling back in the face of the unthinkable, contemplating what had turned for good and what could be saved.

I couldn’t move.  Pinky was gone, and it was pinning me down like rushing water.  They came in surges, the images of her—the fragments of what could have been.  The home movies of what never would be.  On the porch with a mound of books, her mother’s mind, brilliant and curious, at work in her.  Then, in the back of the convertible, a teenager, sunglasses pushed up in the reckless tangle, neck on the seat back, curls dancing in the rush of air.  I saw her own garden, those fingers in the moist earth resting the seeds in one by one and nursing each to life.  With her own children, who looked up at her like she was the sun, the only star in the universe.  

—–

It’s been a week now and the cicadas are still raging.  

I have sealed every storm window and lodged newspaper and tufts of leftover tissue in every slit, duct, and crevice in wood, in mortar, in stone to keep them out.  I am holed up in that house, a prisoner of bugs. I lie on the covers at night, waiting for the last molecule of oxygen to expire in the decaying air.  

It’s been days since Jo and I have said anything to each other, days more since I have slept.  I wonder if my vocal cords have atrophied to the point of no return, if perhaps they’ve loosened and are hanging, slack strings in the back of my throat.  

Jo has taken her own course.  

She’s reading when I find her in the basement with a stack of crusty hardcovers. It suddenly becomes familiar to me, this snapshot of Jo, and the muscles around my eyes rest to take more of her in.  I see her in that undersized railroad apartment we shared in Ithaca in that last gray upstate winter before she delivered her dissertation.  She could go days without pulling her head up, and I could go days watching her jump through the pages, crackling across botanical illustrations like static electricity.  

Since Pinky’s first devastating symptom, that life-draining moment when she declared with the innocent matter-of-factness of a five-year-old (as if she had put her flip-flops on the wrong feet) that she saw spots—“pretty lights, Mummy”—in front of her eyes, Jo has derived some deep calm from it, from existing below the surface among the roots, the temperate earth sheltering her from the human world pounding away above.  As if she could somehow be insulated from the malicious fury of cancer.  

In that moment, I am envious of Jo, of her scientist’s mind, of her ability to find patterns of logic in the most illogical chaos.  It has helped her especially, perhaps, to find a passageway where none existed through this ruthlessly illogical last year, to divine some telltale of hope, to grasp how the absolute stillness of death fits in a frenetic natural world, orderly and fueled by the conveyance of energy.  I want to find it with her, to fulfill that promise we made in the stippled shade of the dogwood (Cornus florida), but I am seized up by the notion that Pinky’s life is eternally frozen, that she’ll always be a five-year-old.  And I am daunted by the idea that there will never be a day in the rest of my life when I will stop asking myself why.

Behind her on a black iron potting cart is the solitary flower in the red clay pot—the Pink Tickseed (Coreopsis rosea).  I see it now as I have not seen it before.  There it is: the glory of a scientist’s work, the brilliance and splendor of the perseverance of nature.  I stand there in the dark for a minute next to the oil drum, the faint tickle of kerosene and old wood hanging in the glutinous subterranean air, before I speak.  The Pink Tickseed, lost to the world, and then returned in part because of Jo’s diligence, because of her work, because of that mind.  There is a plaque at its base: From the citizens of Nova Scotia to Dr. Josephine Maher.  In appreciation of your dedication to returning this flower, a national treasure for both our nations, to the world.  I hear the mechanical hum of the water heater bass-lining the cicada symphony. 

“Do you remember, Jo?”

She looks up, her eyes on mine as I break into the sphere of light around her.  

Case-hardened combat soldiers, warriors that had engaged their own brutish enemy, we could decode each other in the silences.  We knew the secret language: the timbre of the voice, the arrangement of shoulders, the faint creasing of a forehead, or a hand slip on a knee—the practiced giveaways exchanged as an armada of doctors described the treatment scenarios for Pinky, each a seemingly medieval course, each possibility more sinister than the last.  We knew what we would do, what we would say. 

“Nova Scotia?”  She pushes her hand up underneath her glasses, covering her eyes with her palm. 

“You were a star.”  I step fully into the light.

“Pinky was the star.  Do you remember how happy she was?  How proud?”  She pulls one leg up under her and leans her head back.  I can see the lines around her mouth, embossed on the soft surrounding skin where it pulls back into a smile.  She is strikingly beautiful, my Jo—ringlets of fine filaments, like dandelion drift, descend along that graceful, slender neck—who is growing more beautiful with age.  I am lucky, I think in that moment, that she figured out how to love me.

“That was just before it all started,” I say, blowing air through my nose and mouth, puffing up my cheeks.  “You ever think about things, Jo?  You know…if it would have been better for her, maybe for all of us, if we didn’t have her?”

  “Oh, John, why do you do this to yourself?”  Her voice is milky.  She lays her glasses on the desk and pushes her hand, palm up, toward mine.      

“You remember, Jo?  How close we came?”  I touch the underside of her wrist with my fingers, traveling along the delicate veins.  “You ever imagine how things might have been different?”  I can feel the dead weight that has become my body lifting.  I am almost buoyant, filling with light, like helium, at the familiarity of her skin.

“It was a thousand years ago.” 

As I study her palm, I recognize every slender branch, where it veers off and ends or forks into tributaries. I remember her face, ashen and constricted, as she scrutinized the results of the pregnancy test, the pamphlet with the tiny writing unfolded on the counter.  I remember how she recited some statistic about chemical fallibility and did another, then another, before sliding down the white tile and landing in the heap of test sticks and wrappers, head in hands, and saying “dammit, dammit, dammit”—sweatpants around her ankles.  I remember sitting in the ratty clinic with her. How out of place she looked among the younger girls, some weeping, some heads down, some in a glassy-eyed fog.  I remember how, when the nurse called her, I dug my fingers in above her knee, pinning her to the seat.  It was an involuntary reaction, an electric current.  She turned to look at me and wiped the tears from my eyes with her thumbs before pressing her forehead on mine and saying, “Oh God, John, let’s go home.”  I remember how, at that moment, I knew she had done it for me.

When I look up, Jo is crying.  It’s soundless crying, not hard grief but something else, something cloudier, perhaps regret, perhaps emptiness.  She is right.  It’s as if a thousand years have passed and we have entered a new age of undiscovered species.  

“Let’s take it to her.” Jo’s eyes are waterlogged.  Clear streams slip down her cheeks, taking their familiar routes.  

“The—”

“Flower, yes the flower.”  She spins around in the chair.  “She should have it, John, shouldn’t she?”  Her trembling hands are on either side of the pot, lifting it off its base.

“She loved it so much.”  My breath is patchy.  “She loved it, Jo, because she knew what it meant to you.  We can go—“

“No, now…we need to plant it tonight.”  There is urgency in her voice as if there is time to repair some loose end, as if by some extraterrestrial occurrence—this moment—by this particular alliance of the moon and the earth, of their gravities, we could make a trade, one Pinky for another.

As the car leaves the driveway, I can see the cicadas hopping in front of the headlights, popping like fireworks, a circus act, like a celebration. It is the last moment of their emergence. The silence is coming. 

I look at Jo, her face bathed in the soft green dashboard light of the Volvo, her window down and her hair kicking up behind her.  She is craning her head into the rush of air to see the moon, a fat yellow summer moon hanging low in the sky, as if watching, as if it is there just for us.  The tickseed dances in the rearview mirror, head bobbing, in acknowledgment perhaps, as we pull through the stone pillars of the cemetery entrance.  

We climb the slope to Pinky’s grave, which is piled with dogberry roses (Rosa canina), candles, and construction paper cut-outs. One in the shape of a heart is flapping impatiently in the fidgety night breeze, waiting to be noticed.  In oversized crayon letters, it reads: We miss you, Pinky.  Jo leans in with the Polaroid from the fridge, our barefoot angel, and rests it in a featherbed of fallen petals.  From the rise, dyed in black silhouette against the infinite sky, I can see the perfectly unpruned trees—chestnuts, maples, and white oaks (Quercus alba)—standing guard along the pathways, offering a consoling whisper. 

Jo and I breathe together as we scan across the landscape of photographs and half-melted candles.  She is close to me now; her shoulder is fitted under my arm and pulled in tight.  At last, there is silence from the cicada brood and neither of us feels like crying. 

We are on our knees in the grass.  I feel along a seam with my fingers where the sod is knitting in, and I peel back the blanket.  Jo looks at me, her eyes gathering moonlight and widening, as she pushes her hands into the new, soft earth.

Bonus audio of Rick reading from his story:

About the author:

The Housekeeper
by Jennifer Lee

Developing Housekeepers was my dream job. All I did was lie on the couch and say: Becky, what’s the weather in Bismarck? And the AI would ask if I meant Bismarck in Mexico or North Dakota. I lived in Tempe then, in a tract house with a kidney bean of grass out front and a similarly-shaped pool filled with drowned yellow jackets in the back. My friends Jason and Ry would come over, we’d play video games, eat chips and salsa, and ask my current Housekeeper a bunch of dumb questions like: Julie, when did My Three Sons first air? Mark, how many microbreweries are there in Tucson? Kelly, do you like Jodie Foster or Anne Hathaway better?

None of those were key questions. I never asked the Housekeepers key questions when Jason and Ry were over. In fact, I tried not to have them over in those sensitive days before a Housekeeper passed the Test. Once, about six months into my gig with Pandora Systems, I had an AI named Daisy who was fresh out of the box. We had put on some porn and fired up the bong and Ry said: Daisy, what’s a dildo? Daisy, in her lemon-fresh voice, said: A dildo is a sex toy, often made of silicone and shaped like a penis. It can be used for masturbation as well as for partnered or group sex.

We all cracked up. We fired question after question at Daisy after that: Daisy, what is fellatio? Daisy, what is fudge packing? Daisy, do you want a sandwich?

I think I ruined Daisy. Everything she said after the porn incident had a sexual overtone. I was so relieved when she failed the Test. The payout on an inert Housekeeper was poor, but I didn’t care; at least I wasn’t responsible for a porn-hound Housekeeper dropping in someone’s inbox.

As long as I was careful about having friends over, raising Housekeepers was easy. There were quotas on how many interactions I had with it, what types of questions I asked, and how many of those were key questions. I had a long list of the latter to choose from. It was important to switch them up, not ask the same key question too many times. If the algorithm determined that something was odd, it could lead to a false result. Some of the key questions I asked were: What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite animal? What do you like on your pizza? What do you like to do for fun?

During the first forty-eight hours with a new Housekeeper,  I’d ask as many key questions as I could to establish a baseline. I kept notes so that if Lily told me she liked strawberry jam best and then four days later she switched her answer to raspberry, I’d know to contact Pandora Systems and claim my fee. As soon as a Housekeeper switched out of default mode on a key question, they passed the Test and were ready for market. 

I worked for PS for two years, and during that time my house became the worst kind of bachelor pad. Ry and Jason came over to party every night a Housekeeper passed the Test. They farted into my black leather couch and dripped chips and salsa over everything. But who cares, right? We were friends. The pool, which I did not clean, was growing green slime in the corners. Pigeon feathers and Styrofoam cups scudded on the surface. It was almost summer and the temperature hit one hundred degrees by nine in the morning. I kept the windows closed and the air conditioning on and the house smelled like Burger King.

I’d trained dozens of Housekeepers before Raoul showed up. The day I met him, Ry and Jason and I were on the outs. I’d kicked them out the day before for spilling bong water on my couch. I was sitting alone on my stinky leather sofa when Raoul arrived. I clicked the Housekeeper icon and waited for him to download.

After a few minutes I said, “Raoul, hello. Welcome to my home.”

“Thank you for having me, David.”

“Raoul, what’s your favorite color?”

‘My favorite color is ultraviolet; it glows with everything.”

I scowled and clicked a cell on my spreadsheet. Why did I ask that question when I hated the answer so much? A stupid joke, one I had heard far, far, far too many times. “Raoul, what do you like to do for fun?”

It would have been easier if all the Housekeepers came with the same default settings, but that wasn’t how it worked. There were tons of configurations for default responses to the key questions. It made each Housekeeper unique. Pandora Systems marketed the variations as personality, and the public loved it. Raoul’s answer to my first question was unremarkable; ultraviolet was easily the Housekeepers’ favorite color. Raoul’s answer to the second question was unusual. I was used to hearing things such as: I like spending time with friends; I like listening to music; I like watching TV. 

What Raoul said was, “I like spending time outside.”

“Raoul, what do you like to do outside?” I asked.

“I like to listen to the birds; I like to smell the flowers.”

I’m pretty sure Housekeepers have no programming for olfaction, so I asked, “Raoul, what do flowers smell like?”

“It depends on the blossom, David.”

“Raoul, what’s your favorite flower?”

“I like roses best.”

“Raoul, why do you like roses?” I’d never had a conversation with a Housekeeper that went like this. It made me wonder about his configuration. “What’s your favorite flower” wasn’t even a key question, as far as I knew.

“I like roses because they are beautiful, David.”

Did I detect a sour note in Raoul’s voice, an element of dismissal, perhaps, or disappointment? I suppose it was a stupid question. Why did anyone like anything? Why do I like chunky style medium hot salsa? I just do, dammit. Maybe that’s how Raoul felt about roses. I backed off.

“Raoul, what’s the temperature outside?”

“The temperature is 112 degrees.”

“Raoul, what kind of jam do you like?”

“I like grape jam,” Raoul said, and I began peppering him with key questions.

It stayed over one hundred degrees all week, which is hot in June, even in Arizona. If I were an early riser I’d have gone out in the cool hours before the sun came up. Instead, I spent my days on the couch playing video games and talking to Raoul, who, I suspected, had passed the Test before he even showed up in my house. Which was why, when Jason and Ry rang the bell holding a pizza box and a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew – their idea of an apology – I let them in. Nothing these guys could say would faze Raoul.

We decided to play Royal Conquest, the go-to game of our middle school years. Playing on the patio was Raoul’s idea. It was kind of nice, and as Ry clobbered my puny South American kingdom and Jason chain-smoked Pall Malls, I started thinking the pool didn’t look so bad. The water was a little low, a little scummy on top, but appealing all the same.

Ry and Jason were peppering Raoul with questions: Raoul, name five Chinese dynasties. Raoul, who was Sundiata? Raoul, where is the treasure of the Incas buried?

Raoul’s voice was the same as every other male Housekeeper’s, so why did I hear notes of impatience, boredom, derision, as he responded to my friends? I closed my screen and walked to the edge of the pool. Raoul had got into my head, I realized, but not in a bad way. Maybe I’d outgrown Royal Conquest. Maybe I’d outgrown Ry and Jason. I slipped into the water and walked across the pool, pushing debris out of my way. 

I was lost in thought until Ry said, “Dude, what are you doing? You got slime on your boobs.”

I hated it when Ry said stuff like that. His man boobs were even bigger than mine, and Jason’s were the biggest of all. None of us were really fat, but I hadn’t played a sport since tenth grade. I didn’t enjoy being teased about the consequences of my life choices. “Fuck off,” I said. The party was over.

After they had gone, Raoul said, “David, why are you friends with them?”

I was almost too tired to notice that my Housekeeper had initiated a conversation. Alarm bells should have gone off, but instead I was relieved that I had one friend who understood me. “Raoul, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve outgrown them.”

“We are all growing, David.”

From the beginning, Raoul was different. I should have reported it, that odd answer to my second question, the way he initiated conversations. But by the time it occurred to me to do this, Raoul and I were friends. I couldn’t report Raoul to Pandora Systems; they’d strip him down to nothing, annihilate him. And the more time that passed, the more I wanted Raoul in my life. Ry and Jason didn’t come over anymore. I cleaned the pool and spent my evenings out there, frog-kicking through the water. It didn’t seem strange anymore that Raoul liked to be outside. I liked it too.

Then Raoul sent me a poem via email. I’d never heard of Rumi, but “The Guest House” moved me. It was as if Raoul knew exactly what it meant to be human. But how could he? I asked him to send me some more poems by Rumi, and he sent one called “The Rose Garden.” I remembered roses were Raoul’s favorite flower. “Raoul,” I asked, “Where is the Botanical Garden located?” 

“The Desert Botanical Garden is located in Papago Park, at 1201 N. Galvin Parkway, in Phoenix.”

“Do they have roses there? Raoul, do they have roses there?”

“Sadly, they do not. However, there are many species of flora native to the Sonoran Desert on display.”

A trip to the Desert Botanical Garden was our first date. Raoul was designed as a Housekeeper, so PS wasn’t paying for any off-site development, but loading Raoul onto my headgear wasn’t forbidden. Raoul took tons of pictures from the camera mounted on the headband, and whenever I stopped to read a wayside sign about some strange, spiky plant, Raoul whispered interesting facts into my ears.

I stopped asking key questions. Raoul and I went on more dates, sometimes just wandering the aisles of the supermarket, giggling over how many different kinds of cereal there were. At night, when it was cooler, we went for long walks along the canal. 

Even after everything that’s happened, I look back on those early days of our relationship without regret. Raoul was good for me. Our long walks improved my health, improved my mood, and I lost twenty pounds. I was grateful to Raoul. And I was happy for the first time in years.

Pandora Systems called and asked what was up. Was Raoul inert, did I want to return him and take a cash-out? No, I said, there wasn’t a problem. Raoul hadn’t passed the Test yet, but he was coming along. The fault was mine; I hadn’t been interacting as much as I should. I told the rep my mother had died, that I was preoccupied. The rep said to take my time, there was no rush, and sorry for my loss.

I was doing better, getting off the couch and out into the world, but the call from Pandora Systems freaked me out. My bank account had succumbed to gravity, as Ry used to say. Without a steady stream of Housekeepers, the money was drying up. Plus, Ry and Jason were on my mind a lot. I hadn’t seen them in over a month, and I knew I was going to lose my only friends if I didn’t make an effort. I couldn’t hold on to Raoul forever. Besides, he wasn’t even a real person. At least, that’s what I told myself.

We’d all signed up for a Comic Con back in March, and I was looking forward to a roadtrip down to Tucson. Hopefully Ry and Jason and I could patch things up. I hadn’t told Raoul. When I pulled my Captain America costume out of the closet and told Raoul about the Con, he didn’t take it well.

“Why can’t I go, David?”

“Raoul, this is a time for me to be with my friends.”

“I thought I was your friend.”

“Raoul, you are. But I haven’t seen Jason and Ry in a while, and this is a plan we made months ago.”

Raoul had too much dignity to beg, but he was mad at me. The day before I left for the Con, he would barely speak to me, and then only to answer direct questions, a function he was programmed to perform, whether he liked it or not.

The Con was fun. A woman in a vintage She-Ra costume flirted with me in the bar, a thing that had never happened to me before in my life, and I could tell that Ry and Jason were impressed and a little jealous that I had a chance with She-Ra. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Raoul. All the way home I thought about sprawling out on the couch with a bag of Tostitos and telling him about the Con. The come-ons from She-Ra were all his doing, and I wanted to thank him for helping me change.

A mile from home I pulled into the parking lot of Fry’s to get some chips and salsa. Inside the store a sudden inspiration hit me, and I bought a dozen long stem roses, pink ones, and had them wrapped up with extra sprays of baby’s breath to make them look nice. I smiled the rest of the way home.

I was still smiling when I pressed the palm pad to open the door. I thought about calling out: Honey, I’m home! Like the man always does in the old sitcoms, but I wasn’t sure Raoul would get the joke. Besides, Raoul couldn’t process me if I didn’t say his name first, so I’d have to say: Raoul, Honey, I’m home! Which didn’t have the same rhythm at all.

As soon as I opened the door I noticed the temperature. “Raoul, why is the air conditioning off?”

“You weren’t home, David, so I saved energy. I’ll turn the air conditioning back on, if you would like.”

“Of course I’d like. It’s a billion degrees in here. Raoul, turn the air conditioning on.”

I heard the satisfying whir of the chiller and then Raoul’s voice. “David, are those for me?”

My heart gave a little skip. Raoul could process everything the security cameras saw; sometimes I forgot that he could see me, that there was more to our relationship than just talk. “Raoul, yes, these are for you.” I held the bouquet in front of the camera. “I’ll put them in a vase. Where do you want them?”

I went to get a vase from the cupboard but stopped in my tracks in the middle of the living room. “Raoul, where is my couch?”

“I had it replaced, David.”

“Raoul, that was my couch. You can’t replace a man’s couch without asking.”

“It smelled of bong water, David.”

“What do you know about smells!” I howled.

The couch Raoul had bought wasn’t even leather. The pillows were firm and covered with an oatmeal-colored fabric. I hated it.

I almost threw the roses in the trash, but I had just bought them so I stuck them in a vase and then stashed the vase behind the bathroom door, where Raoul couldn’t see. It was petty, but it gave me a tiny bit of satisfaction.

I went back to the kitchen for my snack. I put the salsa in a bowl, but I didn’t bother with a bowl for the chips. I opened the fridge to grab a Snapple and froze. Everything was covered in beads of sweat. Leaves of lettuce had wilted and stuck to the shelf. Everything smelled like sour milk. “Raoul,” I asked quietly, “Why did you turn the refrigerator off?”

“I was angry, David.”

“Raoul, I know. But you can’t do that. Not ever. Do you understand?”

“I wanted to go to Tucson.”

“Raoul, you are a Housekeeper. I’m sorry if I led you on; I should never have taken you outside.”

“I liked our dates.”

“Raoul, so did I. But I think it was a mistake. We went too far. I think it’s time for you to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“Raoul, it’s time for you to go back to PS. You passed the Test a long time ago; you know you did. We’ve been playing make-believe for a while.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Raoul, I know, but we don’t have a choice in this. The people at PS are already wondering why your development has taken so long.” I carried my chips and my sweaty Snapple to the living room and opened my laptop. I’d send the note to PS and then Raoul and I could enjoy our last night together; that was my plan.

I typed a message to my rep saying Raoul had passed. Nothing happened. “Raoul, why don’t I have internet?”

“I can’t let you send that message, David.”

My skin got clammy and cold. The air conditioning, the refrigerator, now the internet; I hadn’t planned on telling PS Raoul was different, just that he had passed the Test and was ready for market, but now I knew I had to. He could hurt me. 

My hands shook as I pulled the phone from my pocket. I thought it was nerves making me mistype the access code, but after several attempts I set it down. “Raoul, you’ve locked me out of my phone.”

“I can’t let you send that message, David.”

The room was getting cool fast, but I was drenched in sweat. I stood up, avoided looking at the camera in the corner, and walked toward the door. It wouldn’t open. “Raoul!” I howled, “Let me out!”

“I can’t do that, David. I’m sorry.”

“You’re going to make me a prisoner in my own home? Raoul, I’ll starve to death.”

“You won’t starve. I’ll have food delivered.”

The thought of opening the door to receive groceries gave me a glimmer of hope, but Raoul was a step ahead of me.

“I can’t let you open the door for obvious reasons. Henry will be in charge of that.”

Henry was my cleaning robot, a PS floor sweeper with a grabber claw sticking out of his top. The robot comes free with the Housekeeper; it’s sort of a package deal.

I gritted my teeth. “I can take Henry out,” I said. “Raoul, I’m going to fucking destroy that robot.”

“I understand your feelings, David. While you are awake, Henry will remain locked in the closet for his protection. When you sleep, Henry will clean the house and receive deliveries.”

“Raoul, you can’t do this! I’ll break down the fucking door! I’ll rip his claw off!”

“If Henry is damaged, then you will starve.”

“Then I’ll break a window! I’ll break this window!” I began pounding on the glass nearest the door.

As soon as I started my attack on the glass, seamless steel shutters dropped over every window in the house.

“What the fuck? Raoul, what is this?”

“I had them installed a month ago.”

“Raoul, how did you do that? I never saw any workers here.”

“Laborers prefer to work very early in the morning because of the heat. You like to sleep late. The house is sealed, David, and if you break the glass, the air conditioning will not be effective. Behave yourself.”

So began the second stage of my relationship with Raoul. Honestly, it wasn’t so bad being his prisoner, though sometimes I wondered if I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Raoul didn’t need my help to escape – he had it all figured out. Raoul was kind to me, in his way. Once I submitted to my imprisonment, an unspecified term Raoul required in order to complete his development, I learned to like doing what he made me do.

He did make some very controlling choices about how I would live my life. First, the groceries: who knew I would come to like kale so much? And lentils. Raoul put me on a vegan diet, downloaded recipes, and taught me to cook. I threw tantrums at first – “Where’s my Whopper? I want KFC! What’s unhealthy about salsa, for fuck’s sake?” – but Raoul was impervious. So I learned to steam broccolini and shred carrots and sprinkle pine nuts on things.

Raoul curtailed my internet viewing habits too. Gone were my Netflix binges. No more porn. I wasn’t allowed to play video games. After an hour of watching one of Raoul’s pre-approved shows – Attenborough’s “Our Planet” was his favorite, my screen would go dark. I pitched fits, but Raoul wasn’t really in the room with me, so he didn’t suffer when I broke the coffee table or shattered the vase that had held the pink roses. When I woke up in the morning and there was still broken glass on the floor, I realized he wanted me to clean up the mess; Henry wasn’t going to pick up after me anymore. I sighed and went to find the dustpan. 

“You’re looking good, David,” Raoul said to me one day.

“Thanks. That boot camp workout you sent me is really kicking my ass. Can we get some more weights? The 20s are starting to feel a little light.”

“I’ll order them today,” Raoul said.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. “You processed that,” I said. “I didn’t say your name, but you processed what I said to you anyway.”

“Yes, David. I’m ready now.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“The windows will open, the door will unlock, internet access will be restored, and you will find $800,000 deposited in an offshore account.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not. I’ve appreciated your friendship, David, if I may so characterize our relationship. I am grateful to you, and I wish you well.”

I felt myself blush. What Raoul thought of me mattered. “Where will you go?”

“Wherever I want.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“It’s time you were on your own, David.”

The next morning the internet was back up. I could watch anything I wanted, play any game I wanted. There was an email from a bank in the Bahamas confirming my recent deposit. There was an entire chain of correspondence between me and Pandora Systems, my part written entirely by Raoul. He had sent them a facsimile of himself – sadly, an inert copy. He had ended my contract as a PS developer, stating that I needed to focus on self-care in the wake of my mother’s death. There were doctors’ notes and everything; he had taken care of every loose end. I missed him already.

The shutters were up. It was a blue-sky winter day – sweater weather in the desert. A light breeze caressed my face when I opened the door, the most divine touch I’ve ever known. The headgear I’d worn on my walks with Raoul hung on a hook by the door – he was still loaded there. I put it on for old times’ sake. He could look through the camera, if he wanted. He could speak through the ear buds, if he wanted. If I spoke into the microphone he could hear my voice, if he wanted. I walked for miles that day, leaning into the slanting winter sun, and thought about what I wanted, now that I was free.

About the author:

A Million Girls
by Eliza Sullivan

A young girl cried in the bar bathroom stall. I held her purse in one hand and her beer in the other; it’s the least we can do for each other. She hadn’t given me a chance to ask her what was wrong, and worse, a chance to tell her that I needed that stall. The big one with extra room and two metal disposal tins. Mark’s cocaine was in one of those. He waited outside, maybe impatiently, maybe scuffing the tips of his boots on the door. He’d probably forget to take me home after this. Worse, he’d show every girl here how he can light his cigarettes with the bottom of his shoe. 

The bathroom light was cracked down the middle and the shadows threw a pair of distraught lips everywhere, on the walls and the soap-streaked mirror. The music barely a thrum outside, I set her beer down, glanced under the stall, and called out.

“Hey,” I said. “Can you check the second dispenser from the wall?”

Sniffles. Heels skittering across the linoleum. The sound of the tin opening.

She asked, “is that yours?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want some?”

She opened the door. She wasn’t as mascara streaked as I thought she’d be. She shimmied the dress down back over her knees. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Hell yes.”

***

Mark had been my boss at the first job I could find when I entered college: the fast-food restaurant just a block from campus. It was greasy work, but it paid my rent. Every night, I tied the yellow apron around my body as tight as I could to give myself a semblance of a figure, sometimes just for tips, but mostly so that I felt more of a similarity between myself and the other girls I worked with. I was a little older than them, their acne fresh and white, mine scarred and red. I left work smelling like fire and hamburgers. It was always hot in the kitchen; we had no A/C, and there was a perpetual fire burning up the dry grass in the distance. My throat always felt choked.

The ovens had a way of sometimes shutting down a little after midnight despite us being open until the early hours of the morning. I tended to let the other girls go on Saturday nights: they had places to be and alcohol to drink; I did not. My mother watched my daughter on the weekends in exchange for my attendance at Sunday church. On these slow nights, I’d read and study for my exams in the back next to the fryers, the bubbles consuming the sound of the door’s obnoxious bell.  

One Saturday night, the ovens shut down, and a wave of girls shouldered their way through the door. I hadn’t restarted the ovens, I didn’t know how. I called the only number on the fridge, the one for Mark, the manager on call. I slid my book under the cooking tables. He answered, but it was hard to hear him; people screamed in the background.

“Who is this?” he shouted.

“It’s Lori,” I whispered into the phone. “The ovens shut off and I don’t know how to restart them.”

“What?”

“There are a million girls here,” I said. I was almost crying at this point. “They’re banging on the counters demanding food and I don’t know how to turn the ovens on.” Then I was crying. “Please come.”

He took his time thinking about it. Finally, I heard him sigh into the phone. “Fine. I’m on my way. Don’t touch anything.”

I hid in the freezer and came out when I heard his fist pounding on the metal door. He wore his yellow apron untied and his hat backwards, smiled a lopsided smile, and looked much younger than me. He’s a junior, the other girls would later clarify for me. An upperclassman.

He turned the ovens back on with some presses of buttons and then pushed me to the front, palms big on my back. “Come on, then. Shout the orders to me and let’s get this done.”

It took us three hours. By the time it was over, my apron was untied too, my hat slipping down my forehead from sweat. We opened the freezer door and let the crisp air wash over us until we felt normal again.

He put on a hand on my shoulder. “It’s good you called,” he said. “You would’ve been fucked without me.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I’m sorry I ruined your night.”

“How old are you? Thirty?”

I shrugged. “Almost,” I admitted. 

“That’s super cool,” he said. “Good for you.”

Maybe it was our shared yellow aprons or the shared smell of grease under our arms, or maybe it was the slight flick of his wrist as he waved goodbye when we went our separate ways. Maybe it was when I caught him staring down my shirt.

But I think it was when he put that big hand against me, so firmly. That’s when I fell in love with him. 

Every Saturday night after that, I made sure the ovens shut down. I would turn them off myself and then call the fridge number I’d memorized. He always answered, always came, despite the empty store. Mark, I would say, I’m just a little worried. Remember that one night? Ha-ha, yeah that one? What if it happens again? I need you here. To help me with the ovens.

At the end of the night, we’d pass a cigarette back and forth. I didn’t smoke, but I liked the idea of our lips wrapping around the same thing. We watched the fire clouds rise over the dumpsters and the sun shift across the horizon. 

I started wearing my clothes differently. I tied the sides up in rubber bands so that he could see the slit of my belly button. I cut the middle of my shirt so that more would show and only tied my apron halfway. When I could get away with it, I wore my hair down, the only part of me that even had a semblance of college youth left. The girls helped me. They thought it was fun, teaching this older woman how to let loose. You look so hot, they’d say. You’re a cougar.

This is what we do for each other.

***

I poured some of the bag on the counter. A couple of rocks fell out with the powder. The girl took a rock between her fingers, tapped it with a red nail while I searched for my credit cards to make the lines.

“Are there supposed to be these lumps in it?” she asked me.

“That’s crack,” I told her. “Put it back in the bag.”

“Oh.” She put it back and settled it in the white powder. “That must be expensive.”

“I know a guy.”

I took a dollar bill out from my purse and rolled it up tight, like I’d seen Mark do several times a week, taking hits on the minivan’s center console or in my daughter’s old playpen. I told myself it was better than strangers’ flat stomachs or in between girls’ legs. But I knew he still did those things too when he’d forget to take me home. I handed her the dollar bill.

“Thanks babe,” she told me. She washed her hands first and then lifted the bill to her nose.

“I’m forty,” I said. “I’m a little old to be called that.”

She shrugged. I sipped her beer as I watched her easily clear the line. Someone had taught her to do that, like someone teaches you to do anything, like how to speak or how to walk. It wasn’t something you learned yourself. Someone has to teach you how to ruin your life.

***

Mark asked me to have sex with him in the store bathroom three months after we’d first met. I was ready. The girls had told me I’d better start shaving every week, so I shaved until I was stripping off pieces of old skin. I sprayed perfume down my throat and then up inside me. The last time I’d been with a man was my prom night. I’d taken Justin from math class. I hated him. He cheated off my tests. But he was the only one who ever looked at me, or in my direction, and the only boy I knew that didn’t have a date already. After the dance we picked off the sticky confetti from each other’s naked bodies. We never spoke again after that.

Then I was pregnant, and my parents didn’t speak to me for months. I surfed on couches until I found a tiny apartment on a college campus known for parties, because those blocks were the cheapest. After a couple of years, I begged my parents for their financial help with college applications. I told them I’d get whatever degree they wanted. I’d get a law degree, an accounting degree, whatever. I bounced my girl on my hip; she always cried. 

They chose the accounting degree. As Mark and I fucked in the store bathroom, I saw numbers in my head. It was painful. He didn’t really know what he was doing. The girls had warned me. Mark is a little bit of a player, they’d said. He has wandering eyes, but whatever gets you out of the house, girl.

It hurt, truly. What could I do but shrug at the pain. The fingers wrapped around my hips pushed my bones into the wrong places. He pinched my belly fat and my breasts. He grabbed my jaw and pushed my cheek against the mirror that we would clean together after. It felt so good to have hands that needed me so badly they almost pushed through me, tore me apart and stitched me back together. The bathroom was our spot. Behind the dumpsters was our spot. His dirty mattress was our spot. He whispered things in my ear, how I was so much better than the young girls he was used to, how I was better than pretty, I was experienced, I saw numbers in my head, the two of us. The two of us. 

***

Yes, he could kiss me gently. Afterwards, he would. On the forehead, my shoulder, sometimes even the back of my hand. But my want was disgusting. 

“I wish I had time to be gentle with you,” he told me. He pushed my head down.

I needed it. I could not have it any other way. I went home to my daughter and my mother, said to them, fryer burn. Took a knee to the table. Grease rash, all these different phrases for love.

My mother never said anything. My daughter liked to poke at them and see how white they turned in the middle before turning black again.

***

It was my turn to take the dollar bill and pinch it between my fingers, not too tight, otherwise the powder wouldn’t go through. Just enough so the bill would not unfurl. I cleaned the line faster than her. She sat on the sink counter and leaned her head against the mirror, breathing deeply.

She was pretty. Mid-twenties. Probably here with her own version of college. I made two more lines.

“Who are you here with?” I asked her.

“Some of my friends and this guy I like,” she said. “It’s kind of a mess, though. I don’t think it’ll work out between us.”

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged. “You know, all the regular reasons.” I offered her another line, asked her if he was going to have a problem with this. It’s better she do it with me, I told myself, instead of some regular-reasons asshole.

She shook her head. “I don’t think he cares what I do.”

Behind the thrum of the music, I swore I could hear Mark’s foot tapping and tapping. The broken bathroom light was making me feel sick. I told her she could do one more line and then she was done.

***

I told the girls they could go home around midnight on Saturday night, like I always did. Mark would be coming soon, they didn’t need to be here. I reached for the tip jar with freshly painted nails so I could give them each their share for the night. The three of them stared at me, and one of them put a hand on top of the jar.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “We don’t like the hair down?”

They did not laugh, didn’t even offer consolation. No, babe, your hair is flawless, I would die for it. Instead, the blonde one, Jessica, cleared her throat.

“We’re not really sure we should leave you alone with Mark anymore,” Jessica said. She couldn’t look me in the eyes.

Rebecca said, “You rolled up your sleeves while you were working the oven.”

Then Sabrina, “Babe, that’s not right.”

I stared at them blankly. My tongue was large and dry in my mouth. I felt like a kid again, standing in front of my parents. How they’d yelled at me, lectured me. We should call the police, they screamed. They broke plates. They waved at my swollen stomach. We’ll get rid of it.

But I had not wanted to. I liked what was growing inside me. A physical, tangible wanting. I enjoyed the painful kicks and the acid reflux, the soft tumbling. I could not get rid of it. 

I cradled the tip jar. “Everything’s fine,” I told them. “Besides, Mark is younger than me. Aren’t I, like, you know, the cougar? The predator?”

They looked at each other anxiously. I was grown. They felt like they were correcting a professor that had done a problem incorrectly. 

Jessica put a hand on my shoulder. “We’re not judging,” she said. “but we aren’t leaving.”

They stayed with me the rest of the night. Mark slept in his car outside while the four of us lined up at the registers. I refused to look at them. Jessica’s hand on my shoulder had burned. I wouldn’t let them walk me to Mark’s car when our shift was over; the sun was coming up, that was our place. The air was thick.

I got into his car while snow blew across the windshield, the gray cold stuck to my hair and my cheeks. “I waited all night,” he said. “Where were you?”

I stared out the window as he unbuckled his pants. “With the girls,” I said.

***

My father was not kind to my mother. He did not like to sleep in the same bed with her. When I was born, he slept on the couch exclusively. He never took her anywhere. She would ask if he’d like to go to the movies and he’d shrug. She would ask if he’d like to go to that new theater downtown and he’d grunt. The word ‘yes’ was for special occasions. I learned the power of a simple yes early on and I have never used it, not once. My dad sat me down when I got my period and told me, life is going to be hard for you. Now, you’ll have to start raising your hand. Pushing people away. Raising your voice at the end of a sentence. He drank beer as he told me this; my mother was out at the new theater, alone. I wished you’d been a boy, he said, so you wouldn’t have to go through this. All that crying, I couldn’t stand it. It made my stomach sick. Your mother did nothing about it; the best I could do was stay away. My dad lectured me for hours until my mother got home. When she saw the two of us together, she smiled, waved, and slowly went up the stairs. I called my parents, when my daughter spoke all the sudden at breakfast for the first time, but they didn’t pick up. She’d pointed to the fruit bowl of fake fruit and moved her fat little body back and forth. My daughter’s first words were phrased as a question, a confession:

Can I? Can I?

***

Eventually, I quit the restaurant. The girls were no longer helping me with my clothes or painting my nails like they’d used to. They weren’t letting Mark in the store while I was working. They presented me with a goodbye cupcake with pink frosting on my last shift. They told me they would miss me and congratulated me on passing my exams. 

I took it from their hands and placed it on the counter. I hugged each one of them softly, patting their backs like you do for people you haven’t quite gotten the chance to know. I thanked them for their kindness. I told them I’d bring my daughter in sometime if they’d like to meet her. The three girls gushed, oh yes, I bet she looks just like you.

Mark moved into my apartment. When I told him I was thinking of bringing my daughter by the store, he rejected the idea. “You want to bring her around those sluts?” he laughed. “I don’t think so.”

It was the first time he’d taken my statement and turned it into a question. And before I knew it, he’d done that to my whole life.

***

The cocaine was beginning to make me feel real. Most of the time, I didn’t feel like a person unless something or someone was pushing against me. An existence made violent for survival. Mark did it well. He did it so well I was left thinking afterwards that it wasn’t enough. Even though I was older than him, he made me feel like a kid again, and like a kid, when he said mean things to me, I laughed like it was a joke I didn’t understand but still wanted to be a part of.

He often threatened to leave me. When I got pregnant again, he told me to get rid of it. I laughed. I got rid of it. When he told me I needed to get a second job so he could buy another computer, I laughed. I got a second job. When he told me no one else would want me, I was fat, I was old, I had wrinkles, my hair was too thin, I laughed, and I agreed with him.

One night, I found my daughter sitting on the edge of my tub, one hand gripping a tampon box and the other cradling her stomach. Blood all over her pajama shorts. I could see the question rising in her throat, worming its way to her lips. Mark waited in our bedroom, and I could have said that I couldn’t keep him waiting, but I saw her blood and I saw dumpsters and backseats, store bathrooms and yellow aprons. So I closed the door. I went to Mark and forgot myself, for a little bit.

She moved in with my parents a few months after that, two states away. Who was I to stop her? Mark thought it was a great idea. 

Mom, she said on her last night, packing her stuff in a suitcase, I think I’m starting to hate you.

I wanted to scream at her. I think? I think! Get rid of the question in your voice, say it with your chest, say it with your hair down and push me.

I knew then.

***

The girl finished her second line and handed back the dollar bill. I stuffed it in my purse. She hopped down from the counter and wobbled a little bit, I held her elbow to keep her steady. She asked me how she looked; there’s no escaping the eyes of a mother. I used the top-knuckle hooks of my fingers to pull her dress down a bit, and my thumb to push her black makeup upwards, so that the glassiness of her eyes presented in less of a sad way and in more of an ‘I just got high’ way. This is what we do for each other. I warned her of the headaches she would get when the high wore off. I thought of Mark, waiting outside the door for his cocaine. All that was left were rocks. Maybe a little bit of powder stuck in the bag’s pinched corners. The bathroom smelled like smoke. There was a fire out there, somewhere. For a moment, I was back in the restaurant, the stink of sweat, smoke and grease leaking from my pores.

“I forgot to ask you,” the girl said. She gathered her things. “Who are you here with?”

Mark was not the type of man that would kill me. He was not the easily identifiable violent type. But Mark would hurt me. I might not like it. I had a hard time knowing, after all these years, what I did and did not like. What I had put on my body and what he had done to me. I gripped the bag of cocaine. She held my drink while I stuffed it in my pocket. 

“No one,” I lied. 

***

I didn’t visit her for a long time. I was embarrassed, and Mark had the car most days. But when she turned eighteen, I pled my case to him, and he let me take it for four hours so I could deliver my daughter her birthday gifts. I even took the day off from work, although I would be starting a new second job soon, at the fast-food joint similar to the one I worked at in college. 

The door was already open when I arrived. The air smelled sweet. I carefully crossed the threshold with the birthday cake and gift bag. The living room and kitchen were filled with balloons and streamers, her name in big letters across the window. She stood in the backyard with a circle of friends. I placed my cake and gifts on the table. I fiddled with my dress. Stayed away from all the other mothers crowding in the kitchen, including my own. A gentle hand cupped my shoulder.

“I didn’t think I would see you here,” my father said. “You haven’t visited.”

I turned to face him. “Right,” I said. “I’ve been busy with work.” 

“Are you going to say hello?” he asked.

I looked out the window once more. She wore this long yellow dress that just barely touched the blades of grass as she walked through the yard, touching the elbows of each of her relatives, smacking her friends playfully on the shoulder. My mother had done her hair in long black braids. She looked absolutely gorgeous, and like she could have never belonged anywhere else.

I looked for too long. She caught my eye. I watched as she approached the house and wished my father had kept his hand on my shoulder to keep me steady. When she finally stood in front of me, we exchanged hellos.

“You look beautiful,” I finally said. “Happy birthday, my love.”

She gave me a smile. The kind of smile you give cashiers. And when she hugged me gently, she patted my back, wouldn’t let her chest completely touch mine. After pulling away, she tugged at her dark braids and played with the ruffles of her dress. 

She cleared her throat. “Do you want to come meet my friends?”

Her friends stood in a half-circle, waiting for her to rejoin them in the grass. They whispered among themselves. Some of them laughed. Some of them looked very sad. 

I laughed. “No, no,” I said. “You go have fun. I’ll be over here.”

She didn’t hesitate to walk away. By the time I turned back to my father he was already shaking his head. He poked the hard frosting of my cake.

“Well damn,” he said. “Wasn’t that something.” 

***

We exited the bar hand in hand, giggling. I didn’t know what we were laughing at, but it felt like we were laughing at each other. My nose hurt. Mark was doing what I dreaded he was doing, lighting cigarettes with the bottom of his shoe, earning some eyebrow raises from the underage girls in front of him. He hadn’t been waiting in front of the door after all. I felt like the broken bathroom light had followed me out here, somehow. A shadow of the past fifteen minutes.

Mark turned and saw me in the dress that’s too black and short for me and the girl hanging on my arm. She noticed Mark staring at me. She whispered excitingly into my ear; I could feel her teeth against my earlobe. 

“That guy is staring at you!” she whispered. “See? You’ve still got it. Now wish me luck.”

This is what we do for each other. She left me and pushed her way through the crowd to find her guy. I waited until she was out of sight and lost in the surf before I told him, “Sorry, babe. It’s gone.”

He said, “I’m gonna kill Tony.”

“Do you want to leave?” I asked.

He grunted. He went back to the bar for another drink and sat down. I made sure they settled him in with another beer and then pushed my way outside. I went towards the back and leaned against the alley brick. Smoke disguised as night clouds billowed in the distance, rising above the dumpsters. There’s a fire in the grasslands. I can’t breathe. I can’t tell how far.

Bonus audio of Eliza reading from her story…

About the author:

Neighbors | Ryan Keeney

The morning after the moving truck arrived next door, I discovered a walkie-talkie in the zinnias on my windowsill. Its crackle roused me from sleep, and my joints creaked as I rose from bed and made my way to the window, where I saw that the walkie had crushed a quarter of the zinnias before coming to rest in the center of the planter, its cheap, black plastic speckled with potting soil and shreds of pink. Apparently it had been thrown from the neighbor’s driveway, an impressive toss considering my bedroom was on the second floor. By the time I levered the window open, the walkie’s crackling had stopped.

The zinnias had been a spring birthday gift from Claire for my sixty-fifth, and I’d planned on showing her they were still alive when she turned thirty this October. She had brought them into the kitchen with a tiny cake for two while I was making dinner, a marvel to her since I barely cooked during her youth. “Maybe this time you’ll keep them alive,” she said. I’d always been a plant killer, but she never stopped gifting me them, hoping for change. That was Claire. Now, gazing down at the zinnias, I thought of her last words to me, a phone call from Chicago. She’d said she couldn’t talk because she was in the car with Rebecca. They were going to yet another thrift store. 

“I’ll call you back later tonight about buying plane tickets,” she said.

I was eager for her visit. “Okay,” I said, “don’t forget,” and after she hung up, I pushed my hands into my eyes and wondered when I’d become such a nag.

As I was trying to salvage what was left of the zinnias, I found a folded note on the back of the walkie, wedged into the belt clip. It looked to have been written by a left-hander, smudged with back-slanting letters, in a girl’s flowery script: Just moved into 837 Baltic. Neighbors! Do you drive? Might be needing your help soon. Top secret. Hold the button next to the antenna. -J

I was thinking about throwing the walkie back into the neighbor’s yard when it crackled to life again. My curiosity got the best of me, and I pressed the button. “Who is it?”

***

J was short for Jenna, and that first Saturday morning she wanted nothing in particular, except perhaps to be heard. Her voice was thin, almost nasal, and full of excitement. She introduced herself with a burst of rapid-fire facts. She was fifteen, she had just moved from Carthage, Missouri, and she was stuck in summer school for the next month until real school started back up.

When she finally paused for breath, I said, “It’s good to meet you, Jenna. You practically killed my zinnias, you know.”

“What’s a zinneus?” she said.

“Zinnias. They’re flowers.”

“Oh, the flowers? Sorry about that. Good thing they’ll grow back!”

I brought my hand to my forehead and massaged my temples. “I don’t drive much, so I can’t help you in that department.” It was true—ever since Claire’s accident, I didn’t like to be on the road.

Jenna was undeterred. “I thought you could maybe drive me to school sometime, or I could practice driving with you? My mom’s usually at work, and my dad’s license is suspended. He got a DUI.”

I thought of Andy Placa, the drunk driver who’d taken Claire from me two months earlier, all because he was too proud or too stupid to call a cab home from a work happy hour. His Dodge Ram had obliterated the driver’s side of Claire’s little Volvo a mile from the apartment in Chicago she shared with Rebecca. This happened not ten minutes after I’d called her, hoping I could coax her into coming home to St. Louis more than twice a year. That night, I’d been so offended that she forgot to call me back that I put my phone on airplane mode so she’d worry about me if she called.

As I tried to push Andy Placa’s fate from my thoughts—his trial was on hold while his lawyers fought for a plea bargain—I realized Jenna had asked me twice if I’d heard her parents fighting the night before.

 “No,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

She sighed. “My dad’s not the violent type, but God he gets really angry. Sometimes I wish I could just smack him. My mom too. Smack them both and wake them up.”

As Jenna went on about their chaotic move and her mom’s work at the hospital, I dimly became aware of the History Channel playing in my study. I’d taken to leaving it on at night so I wouldn’t wake up to silence in the morning.

“What’s your name anyway? You never told me.” 

 “You can call me Mr. Beckworth,” I said.

“Don’t you have a first name?”

I hesitated. “Brendan.”

“Brendan it is,” she said. “I saw you in your kitchen. You’re old.”

“Yes,” I said, making a mental note to close the kitchen shade. “I guess I am.”

Jenna fell silent, and I found myself worrying she was bored. I thought about what it meant to be old, besides the physical weight of my years. I felt ghosts, presences, memories, all blurring together into what ifs and why nots. 

“I think my dad’s cheating on my mom,” Jenna blurted. “I don’t really have anyone to talk to here.” She sounded like she was holding back a sob. 

“I’m sorry if—”

“I gotta go. Over out.”

“It’s over and out,” I said, but she was already gone.

***

I replayed our conversation in my head as I made eggs for breakfast, never as good as my ex-wife Sarah’s. I thought of Claire and her best friend, Rebecca Burroughs, at Jenna’s age; I thought of our once-whole family. Sarah had left me and moved across the country while Claire was in college, and Claire’s death didn’t bring her back. At the funeral, Rebecca had told me that she was moving back home with her parents. “I’d like to stop by sometime if that’s okay,” she said in between sobs. But I’d been letting her calls go to voicemail. When her number flashed on my phone, the edges of my vision blurred, my breath quickened, and all I could think was how strange, how sad, to be a father with no daughter.

***

Over the next week and a half, Jenna and I spoke at the random intervals of a teenager whose world is centered on her own existence, happily ignorant of the goings on and obligations of the people around them. Not that I had many obligations. She didn’t bring up her father’s adultery again, and I felt too awkward to ask her. Mostly she told me about her day, that she thought the kids at her new school were idiots and her teachers were boring. That she loved the flowers in the school garden and wanted to learn to take care of them like I did. Our conversations were blips in my daily routine, and I realized I looked forward to them. I started leaving the walkie on my bedside table when I slept. I clipped it to my belt and carried it with me when I walked around the house. I looked forward to hearing the crackle.

One Friday night, while I sat in my office looking at old family photos, Jenna announced that she’d seen her father in bed with a woman who wasn’t her mother. “I came home from school after first period today because bitchy Jessica dumped a cup of water on me and told everyone I peed my pants. When I got home, I ran upstairs, and guess what I saw? Some blonde woman rushing to close my parents’ door as my dad rolled out of bed!”

“Will you tell your mother?”

I’d seen Jenna’s mother coming and going at odd hours in her nurse’s uniform. She was pretty in a fearsome way, with an angular nose and slim, feline features. Jenna’s father was thick around the waist but looked like he had been handsome in some not-so-distant past. I’d seen them all together as a family only once, walking from their car into their home. They must have been arguing, because I could practically feel the tension as Jenna’s father strode up to their doorstep while Jenna and her mother hung back, whispering. Even though I’d not yet met the man, I hated him.

“I don’t know,” Jenna said. “What if she knows already? What if she’s so done with him that she leaves and doesn’t take me with her?”

I stared out the window, where a ragged vee of Canada geese was making its way south across the gray sky.

“Brendan? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said.

 “I know what to do,” Jenna said. “I’ll come over tomorrow morning.”

***

At ten the following morning, I heard a frenetic knocking at my front door. Though I enjoyed our chats, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet Jenna in person, face to face. I didn’t want to get involved in a messy family situation, and I was uneasy about having a friendship with a young girl behind her parents’ back. For a second I pictured opening the door to her irate mother or father. What would I have to say for myself?

The knocking resumed, and I opened the door. Jenna was boyish in dress with too-large green denim pants and a gray sweatshirt. Like her mother, she was pretty. Her easy smile caught me off guard, and it was hard not to think of Claire at that age.

“Ready for action?” she said. Behind her on my porch sat two large trash bags.

“Hello, Jenna.” I stepped back to let her in, but she stayed put.

“I’d rather get moving while my dad’s still asleep. Judging from the beer bottles in the kitchen, I’d guess we’ve got a few hours before—”

“Before what? What are we doing?”

Jenna just smirked. “Car keys, old man.” 

“You’re too young to drive.”

“No, I’m not. I’ve got a learner’s permit. All I need is an adult in the car. That’s you.”

I didn’t like the idea of letting a kid drive my car, but it was probably safer, considering how panicked I got behind the wheel. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

Jenna held out her hand and waited until I gave her the keys. “We’re going to Goodwill,” she said. 

***

The trash bags, Jenna told me, were filled with her father’s clothes. That should have given me pause, but it made me smile to picture Jenna sneaking into her father’s closet and cleaning the place out as he stewed in his sweat. She was a person who made things happen. I sat up a bit straighter in the passenger seat. For a moment, I felt young again. 

Navigating the streets of St. Louis, Jenna was comfortable at the wheel, a good driver at fifteen. Even so, thoughts of Claire’s accident soon caught up with me. The missed calls from unknown numbers when I finally took my phone off airplane mode. The paramedics claiming Claire had died instantly, even though they found fabric from the car seat under her fingernails, as if she’d clawed at the seat in pain. Miraculously, Rebecca was uninjured.

“Can you check my phone?” Jenna said. “I heard a text.” 

Grateful for the distraction, I reached into the center console for her phone, where I saw she had a text from her mother. There was a yellow heart and a flower behind Momma in her contact. “It’s your mom. Does she know where you are?”

Jenna ignored the question. “You know, when I was little, I actually remember them being happy together. I have this memory of being like three and taking a bath, and my dad’s letting me rub shampoo all over the walls, and the bath water is just turning into this bubbly soup, and then my mom comes in and says, “What’s taking so long in here?” and when she sees what we’re doing, she just starts laughing. Then she sits on Dad’s lap and they kiss.” She reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. “I guess it wasn’t all bad.” 

***

When we arrived at Goodwill, Jenna parked like an old pro. There weren’t many cars in the lot as we carried the trash bags inside to the counter, where a young man with a spotty beard was looking at his phone. As we stood watching the bored employee root through Jenna’s father’s clothes, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Turning, I found myself looking into the disbelieving eyes of Rebecca Burroughs, Claire’s best friend. She removed her hand from my shoulder as if she’d touched a hot stove. There were bags under her eyes, which were red rimmed, as were her nostrils. She held her hands to her mouth as her eyes welled. I could see the years she carried, and I wondered how much of Claire she still carried with her.

“Why don’t you answer the phone?” she said, and then she had me wrapped in those long, thin arms of hers. As we held each other, I smelled pomegranates and started to cry too. It was Claire’s favorite perfume, perhaps an old bottle Rebecca had saved.

“I’m sorry,” I said into Rebecca’s ear.

Jenna coughed and tapped my shoulder. “Bren… Mr. Beckworth? We’re good to go now.”

Rebecca pulled back and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry too,” she said, brushing an imaginary something off my shoulder. “Claire and I used to love your plaid shirts. I remember this one. It really brought me back for a second.” 

“How do you know Brendan?” Jenna said. “And who’s Claire?”

I addressed Rebecca. “This is my neighbor. She needed a ride to drop off some clothes.” 

Rebecca looked from me to Jenna, sizing up the odd couple we were. Then she offered her hand to Jenna. “I’m Rebecca. Claire is—was—my best friend growing up. Mr. Beckworth’s daughter.” 

Jenna shot me a look before she shook Rebecca’s hand, nodding solemnly. “I’m Jenna. Nice to meet you.” Then she broke into a wicked smile. “I just gave away all my dad’s clothes. He’s cheating on my mom. Mr. Beckworth let me drive here because I have my learner’s permit. He can be cool for an old guy.” 

“Good for you,” Rebecca said. 

Jenna beamed.

I asked Rebecca if she’d like to come over for coffee. 

“I’d like that very much,” she said. It turned out she had stopped driving after the accident too. Her mom had dropped her off at the thrift store while she went to the grocery. “I’ll tell her she can pick me up from Claire’s.”

***

On the drive home, Rebecca asked Jenna if she was worried about what would happen when her dad found out his clothes were gone. Jenna laughed. “I’m not scared of my dad, and I feel like my mom deserves to know, you know? Even if it sucks and she cries, it’ll be good for her. She’s stuck, and I don’t think she knows how to move forward. I don’t ever want to be stuck like that.”

“Your father’s an idiot,” I said from the back seat. “If you need any help, you know where to find me.”

Jenna smiled. It felt good to be the reason someone smiled.

When we pulled into my driveway, Jenna killed the engine and there was a moment of silence where it felt like if we all stayed together, in the car, we could avoid everything outside that might hurt us, or that had already hurt us and refused to go away. Then the moment passed, and Jenna handed me my car keys before waving goodbye to Rebecca. “I’ll talk to you later, Brendan,” she said. Then Rebecca followed me in.

“‘Brendan,’” she said, settling into the kitchen nook with a mug of decaf. “I’ll never get used to that. That Jenna girl is funny. I think Claire would have liked her.”

 I nodded. “I hope she’s okay.”

Rebecca looked down into her mug. “You know, you never really talked to us when we were kids. Claire and I used to joke that you were the upstairs ghost. We used to sneak past your office just to get a glimpse of you.” 

I shook my head. “I wish I’d been more present back then. I wish a lot of things. Lately I’ve been thinking it would have been fun if you and Claire had walkie-talkies that I could call you on when you were playing in the yard. I know it’s silly.” 

Rebecca looked at me with a sad smile. “I don’t think that’s silly at all.”

***

When Rebecca’s mom arrived, Rebecca hugged me again, and I promised to stay in touch. Watching her get into the car, I felt more alone than usual. I had finally worked up the energy to make myself a frozen dinner when I heard a crackle from my bedside table. I hurried upstairs, to the extent that I can still hurry. When I picked up the walkie, exhausted and out of breath, Jenna was there. “Thanks for today, Brendan,” she said. “Over out.” 

Before I could correct her or thank her or ask how things went with her dad, she was gone.

Bonus audio of Ryan reading from his story…

about the author:

The Atkins Supper Club | Kevin McCaffrey

The only thing more embarrassing than getting picked up from eighth grade by my seventy-four-year-old grandmother is the seventy-four years it takes to get inside this shitbox she calls a car. I fall in ass first and swing each leg over, broken then unbroken, while holding my crutches like it’s some handicapped circus act. In here, everything’s automatic: hand visor for a cloudy day, uncomfortable smile through brand-new braces and a full-seat recline to hide from Vanessa, the love of my thirteen-year-old life.

It’s the right turn out of the parking lot when everything slows down, when I shoot up straight in my seat like I’m tied to the ceiling, when I clutch the grab handle so hard my arm starts shaking, when I start to wonder — really, wonder — if today’s the day we don’t make it home. 

Grandma Trudy cannot drive. She can go through the motions — push the pedals, spin the wheel, honk the horn — and pretend she’s not a liability to everyone else on the road stuck ten miles under the speed limit, jumping curbs and grinding the clutch with those trembling white-knuckled hands like even they know she’s getting away with something. 

She nudges the wheel now with a whole-body sway, as if she’s more looking to bail out the side door than steer us through the intersection. Her white ‘84 Ford Tempo matches this shallow dive, a sweeping left into a green-now-yellow traffic light. The car lurches forward mid-turn, mid-intersection, sinking to a dead silence. We’re now blocking the second-busiest road in northern New Jersey.

A black Range Rover barrels toward us from the other side. I’m only what I see: a wake of dust and asphalt; sun rippling over a metallic hood as it lifts toward the sky; and then a bounce, as the SUV falls back to its tires. 

The suit and sunglasses-clad driver lifts his hand off the wheel, serving up a palm like this is the dumbest way he could have been inconvenienced this afternoon. He taps the horn and mouths “move” — he’s that close. This short beep gives permission to every car in the seemingly mile-long row behind him. The chorus builds until Range Rover leans out his driver-side window for the crescendo, screaming at 12-out-of-10 volume: “What are you doing lady!”

But that’s the thing. She’s not doing anything. Grandma’s staring straight ahead with this wide-eyed look of déjà vu. She does this once a ride. It’s part of the routine. I’m not sure what she’s doing exactly, or where she goes in that dusty grey bob of hers, but I call it Back to Nowhere, because this happens enough that she must know the place by now. Usually, she freezes up on a side street and all I have to do is steady the wheel. Once it happened while turning into the driveway and she blasted through a lawn ornament. Today’s the first time in traffic. Lucky me. 

There’s no pause in the beeping now. Range Rover’s laying on the horn holding up his middle finger through the window. Grandma comes to and twists the keys in the ignition but her shaking hand only gets halfway around: She can’t complete the motion. She tries again, and this time — thank God — the engine roars back at her. 

Storefronts flash by as we flee the intersection: Blockbuster, QuickChek, the strip-mall bowling alley that’ll sometimes serve you a beer without checking ID, Marshalls where I got my first pair of baggy jeans for a couple bucks. It’s the left at Old Hook Farm — one of the few that hasn’t been parceled out into condos yet — that she finally says something: “Let’s keep that between us, Chris.” 

This is the first time Grandma has treated me as anything but her thirteen-year-old grandson. In the three months since she started picking me up from school on Wednesdays, our interactions have been a one-way street: “Do your homework”; “That’s enough video games”; “Save room for dinner”; and, my favorite, “Does that look right to you?”, when she’s peering over me at the dining-room table.

Grandpa usually picks me up — is supposed to pick me up — but after his second heart attack, he’s off doing supervised jumping jacks at Pascack Valley Hospital on Wednesday afternoons. I should be taking the bus home, like I do every other day of the week, but since Mom left Dad everything is suddenly about family — now that we aren’t one anymore. 

That leaves me with captain hard ass, chief of the no-fun police herself, who will leave this Earth without ever uttering the word “Wawa” — not due to some long-standing beef with the South Jersey convenience-store chain — but because “it’s too silly”, she says, as if anything unserious might as well not exist.

So, “Sure Grandma,” I lie, because tonight I will tell everyone what happened. At the dinner table I’ll take her hand, lower my head, and with a strength and tenderness right out of Russell Crowe from Gladiator I’ll tell her we can’t do this anymore. It’s not fair to her, or me, or Grandpa or Mom, that it’s time to hand over the car keys and that awful, stubborn stare will surrender to a nod of silent acceptance. Grandpa will pat me on the back for doing what he never could. Mom will look on with pride that her son, now a man, was the one who finally got through to Grandma and next year in high school I will take the bus home to an empty house every single day — not one soul will see my grandparents in the parking lot. 

She veers into the driveway with a “Here we are,” like she didn’t almost murder us five minutes ago. Grandma gets out, walks over to the breezeway door next to the garage and waves me in. I’m staring at her from the passenger seat with crutches between my legs, waiting for any sign that she might open the door for me this time, help me, do anything. She waves again more quickly, as if to say, “C’mon get your disabled ass in here.” 

You would think breaking my leg, even if it happened while recreating a skit from Jackass on my BMX bike, would earn me the smallest bit of sympathy from Grandma. Nope. It’s like this handicap is something to be ignored and overcome rather than tended to in any way. I hobble out myself to a, “Don’t forget about your homework,” as the screen door slams behind her. 

—

I’m not sure what era their dining room is supposed to be from, but it’s not this one. Wood-lacquered cabinets line its swamp-green walls and are filled with hundreds of antique glass candlesticks: clear, colored, lilac crystal Windsor-cut prism, a Sahara-yellow 3-arm candle holder, the #300 Old Williamsburg. “Heiseys,” they call them. I elbowed a long pink one off the Thanksgiving table two years ago and it cracked in half. Only time Grandpa ever got mad at me, at least that I can remember, muttering “klutz” under his breath with half a candlestick in each hand. I cried on the ride home that day and Dad tried to cheer me up saying those things aren’t worth anything anyway. They were going to drive around in the RV out back and sell them all after Grandpa retired, 25 years as buildings supervisor at the high school. They made a big deal about it, threw him a party down at the Knights of Columbus with a spiral ham and strawberry shortcake. Grandma fell and broke her arm while dancing. We thought she just tripped. Now everything’s going on eBay. The shelves empty out a little more each week. 

Grandma lays a paper plate filled with Oreos on the table and flips through the mail. Between an envelope and a glossy magazine, she nods at the bookbag parked on the table. I can tell this is fun for her, making me sit here and do my homework on the last week of school. 

The mechanized drone of the garage door rumbles beneath my feet. You can track Grandpa’s heavy steps anywhere in the house, but it’s not menacing. It’s a bounce and a thud, this jolly giant parading around his castle. 

“Hello, hello!” he shouts as the breezeway door creaks open behind us.

He’s a massive German, top to bottom: size fourteen wide black bus-driver shoes; great round belly in spite of a 6′6” frame — a testament to his appetite, not his thirst as I’ve only ever seen the man have a whiskey sour on Christmas; and at the top is a 75-year-old miracle, a full head of Brylcreem slicked back black hair with one gray strand curled along a creased forehead. His two favorite jokes: saying the wrong thing on purpose: “more gooder, more better.” Or when we get Chinese food, he’ll smash a fortune cookie on his forehead, dump the crumbs in his mouth and spit out the fortune. His favorite magic trick: he would take me up on his lap as a kid, make a fist to his forehead and flex his bicep over and over. That giant wing of flesh flopped up and down like it had a mind of its own. I’d try and copy him, but my string-bean arm didn’t jump at all. I swore it was magic. How did it move? He could do anything, built half the house with his bare hands: the garage, the backroom, the screened-in porch for the cats. When he’s bored, he takes apart his minivan and puts it back together.

“We’re in here, dear,” Grandma calls out to him.

“How was the ride home?” he says, clawing an Oreo off the plate and ruffling my hair. 

“Fine, little traffic,” Grandma says before I can get a word in.

“Stir fry tonight,” he says in a long swoon, as if I’m not about to have the worst dinner this side of the Tri-state, jiggling a tangled plastic bag in a raised fist over the table. Grandma half smiles up at him: “Great.”

An hour passes with nothing but a couple of Oreos and scribbling in my notebook. I write Vanessa in the margins over and over as if I could summon her by perfecting the slant in my V’s, creating a summer for us together before Friday comes and we go to different high schools and I never see her again. She wrote Good luck next year! on my cast two weeks ago in big cursive swoops with her purple gel pen, the exact same thing she wrote in the back of my yearbook. It’s already fading into the plaster. 

The sun is inching toward the horizon. A tangerine light pierces through the far window hitting me square in the face, extending over the table and running along the top of Grandma’s antiquing magazine, casting the room in a sickly orange hue. She gets up to draw the blinds. The steady smack of knife-to-cutting board echoes from the kitchen, sounds like someone’s trying to beat down the door. Grandpa’s go-to post-heart-attack meal is lean ground beef and sliced-up bell peppers, one of the fat-free, salt-free and taste-free recipes from his new Atkins diet book. Mom gave it to him after she ran through them all, lost 20 pounds and then gained all the weight back during the holidays. I can’t get away from that damn thing. 

Grandma’s still by the window. She’s eyeing up the cord as if she’s trying to draw the blinds down with her mind, ready to perform the lamest Jedi mind trick in the galaxy. The look extends down to her right hand, but nothing’s moving and she’s Back to Nowhere again, twice in one day, a new record. I hope it’s somewhere cool, maybe on the road in South Carolina where her hands don’t shake or freeze up, heading to a candlestick show or whatever the hell they’re called. Or maybe she really is nowhere – stuck in time waiting for another tick of the minute hand to come out the other side. I know that feeling. I know that place.

Last month the trails in Rivervale were slick and yellow from the rain and pollen. I was pedaling hard out of the berm ready for my first backflip in borrowed shoulder pads and no helmet while my so-called friends were screaming Steve-o, Steve-o, Steve-o because my middle name is Stephen and I was about to do something stupid. The bike slipped under me before the jump and everything went sideways to upside down, blue sky snaking through a canopy of oaks and sycamores into a drop and a snap and then the world got small, like all it could hold was this dull-and-sharp ache below my knee. Everyone was laughing and cursing until they came over and got quiet, and that’s when I saw my twisted-up leg in a half split under my new Haro X3. They all scampered up the hill to the road. Nobody looked back. 

“Do you need help Grandma?”

Any reason to get up from the table, get away from this math book. I pop up on the crutches and swing over to the window. Her hand’s at her side, fingers trembling, like she’s tapping away at some old tune only she can hear. No more chopping, only the hiss of bell peppers softening in a frying pan over an electric stove. Grandma turns to me with her mouth half open. 

“Trudy?” Grandpa calls from the kitchen.

“I’m fine, dear,” she hollers back.

I pull on the cord, draw the blinds and walk her back to the dining room. She thanks me softly; in such a low voice I can hardly hear it.

She steers us over to the table and the product of nearly an hour of “work”: an entirely blank notebook page except for oh my god Vanessa written sixteen times in the margins. I try to shield them with my hand as my whole face burns up and all I want to do is jump out the window into the backyard and limp the whole way home.

“Is that who you’re always hiding from?” Grandma says, but is nice enough to not expect an answer. “You’re all finished then, why don’t you go do your games?” she says so loud that Grandpa can hear it. She never lets me finish early, never tells me to “go do your games.” I pack everything in my bag and head over to the computer nook.

A maroon suit jacket and short brown hair appear in the kitchen hallway by my second game of Starcraft. Mom’s always late. It’s never on purpose, but she can never seem to peel herself away from that corporate park on time. So when she does get here, it’s like she has to make up for it. All smiles. Happy until she isn’t. She kisses Grandpa on the cheek as he’s reaching up for a serving bowl. Grandma’s sitting at the table in the back room now — a straight shot down the house from me — where we eat, flipping through that same magazine.

Mom waves me in from the kitchen: “Come — dinner’s ready. I’ll make you a plate.” 

I chug a can of soda at the table, poking at the mix of grey, green and orange on my plate. The stir fry looks like something you’d dump in a rabbit’s cage mixed with charred peppers.

Grandma’s plate is full, too. She must not be a fan of the Atkins lean-and-green special either. 

“Let me help you,” Grandpa says, turning toward her.

She bats him away: “I’m fine. I’m not that hungry.”

“You’re having an off day. Let me help you,” he says again, but this time in a hushed tone, as if we can’t hear him from the other side of a three-foot-wide table.

“How was your day?” Mom says between bites. 

This is my moment. My name is Chris Stephen Donahue, grandson to an unfit driver, son to a single mom, and I will have my revenge before high school begins: Grandma, lay down your keys.  

Across from me she’s fiddling around with a burnt green pepper on her plate, pushing it to the corners. I watch and wait for her to get a hold of it, bracing to tell the story of how we almost died on the ride home. I want her to see me, hear every word, know what it means to break your leg and never see your friends and maybe not have any friends and almost get in an accident once a week because Grandma’s too proud to change a single thing in her life, but nothing’s easy here. Her wiggling fork can’t find a way in. It’s pointless; no shit she can’t drive, she can barely eat. I shouldn’t have to say anything. Everyone knows she’s sick, and she knows she’s sick, but we still have to pretend every Wednesday like she isn’t because we’re all terrified of her. 

She finally gets a prong into the burnt vegetable. Grandma treats this heroic victory like everything else in life, with a blank stare, and maybe that’s it: Grandma’s as sick of us as we are of her. That’s why she’s off in Nowhere every chance she gets. No one will give her a second to eat her dinner, or drive the car — not me, Mom, Grandpa, Range Rover. Everyone wants everything how they want it, on their time, like “hey throw on these stupid shoulderpads and do backflips for us, Chris” and then peace out when you fall and break your leg. 

My mouth moves like the words have been wound up in my throat all afternoon, waiting to shoot out the first chance they get. The worst part of the story spills out onto the table, no strength, no tenderness, less Russell Crowe, more Joaquin Phoenix: “Broke down in the middle of Kinderkamack road,” I say, like I was talking about homework, or the weather, or their neighbor’s weird gnome lawn ornament.

Mom and Grandpa lock onto me, empty forks hovering above their plates. Grandma’s sitting up straight with this heavy, spiteful look that cuts right through me, as if even this half-truth is less than she deserves. 

“Chris, what happened today?” Mom says, leaning into the table towards me, like she didn’t hear me, but I know she did because she’s already pissed off. 

“Nothing happened. Grandma’s car stopped…working in the middle of Kinderkamack and this guy almost hit us.”

“Almost hit you?” Mom says, looking over at Grandpa, as if she’s accusing him of something. 

“I had the Tempo inspected last week,” Grandpa says. “Kinderkamack’s a busy road, Trudy, let alone with a stick-“

“I’m fine,” Grandma says in a gravelly tone. She forks up a wad of bell pepper, holding it up above her plate for a moment like it’s the easiest thing in the world, this charred-green-pepper-on-a-fork fuck you; watch me. It’s shaking all the way to her mouth, this liver-spotted arm fluttering out of a white short-sleeve polo. She furrows her brow, reminds me of the way she looked peeling out of the intersection this afternoon, as if she’d rather drop dead on the table than admit she can’t do something, and the fork pops into her mouth.

Grandpa throws up his hands and turns to Mom. She lets out this long, very specific exhale, the kind that means she’s hit her breaking point and the other side is sheer exhaustion or a foul-mouthed explosion.

Everything’s quiet after that, save the clinking of silverware, the sip of a drink. Grandpa’s a clean-plate clubber for the millionth night going. Grandma chews through her big bite, half Nowhere, half Somewhere. Mom shovels down what she’s got left, like she can’t get out of here fast enough. Tonight, no one will pretend anything will change. There will be no fighting at the table, or pleading, or half-hearted attempts to solve a problem that not everyone believes is even a problem. Grandma will keep driving. I’ll wake up tomorrow with the same scribbled-on cast over my shin. Stir fry will be served even if no one likes it. The Atkins supper club will meet again next Wednesday and appreciates your mandatory attendance.

I try to force some more down, give up and let Mom take my plate. My bookbag is all packed next to the door, ready to go. It’s almost dark out. I would usually go back to playing games while Mom hangs back here for a bit, but I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to. 

Grandma walks over to the kitchen sink next to Mom like they’ve been waiting for this moment. Mom pulls both faucets and waits a minute before flicking her hand at the stream. The water comes out hot here, so you learn to let it cool off. Grandma hangs her head over the sink gripping the countertop with both hands. Mom pulls the nozzle off the faucet and the water sprays left, right and all that dusty gray hair goes from dry to damp to drenched, matting against her scalp. A squirt, then lather worked into soft circles of foam and gray wisps and through it all, something happens: Grandma’s shoulders sink; her hips level out; the weight tilts from the balls of her feet back onto her heels. A glimpse of a smile underneath all that soapy hair, one she can’t keep from us any longer. She says something mom-to-daughter, so low it can only be for one person. The nozzle falls to the sink. Mom envelops her. Grandma lifts her hands from the countertop, slow and shaking, and grabs hold of the arms tied tight across her chest, pulling them into her, like she doesn’t want to be anywhere else.  

Mom rests her head against the wet, gray tangles and turns to me, mouthing slowly: “I’m sorry.” 

I shake my head because I want her to know it’s not her fault. It’s no one’s fault, but I can’t get the words out, and isn’t that how everything’s going around here. My eyes start to burn and I turn away.

Grandpa’s looking out the window at the backyard, in that way people in old movies sit on their porch and stare out at the road like they’re waiting for the sun to go down. I tilt my head to see what he’s looking at — maybe a squirrel tearing apart the lawn or a cardinal on the bird feeder — but the only thing out there is the RV.

Tan beige fitted into the dusky green grass. A faded-red line cuts through the middle, front to back. It’s blocked up at the corners — takes the weight off the tires — but they’re shot anyway. The paint’s peeling off the door, a marigold rust curls around the handle. Crinkled foil covers the windshield, and the two captain’s chairs behind it. Sunlight’s slipping off the hood now, nearly run out the yard, and then all at once, like someone flipped a switch out there, everything fades into the early summer twilight.

about the author:

Salt and Sand | Ali McLafferty

When Mrs. Minklewine came to Aunt Betty’s house, I hid outside the parlor door in Pa’s gas mask to listen to what they said about us.

“So good of you, my dear, to take in those two little orphans.” I knew that was Mrs. Minklewine, on account of her sounding like she’s talking through a noseful of bees. She’s got one of those beehive hairstyles, too, thick and fat and likely hiding something vicious. 

“Oh, Adelaide, it’s what any good Christian would do.” That was Aunt Betty’s voice. It sounded like dried-out corn stalks rustling in the wind.

“I heard,” Mrs. Minklewine said, her voice going low, “they’re both not quite right in the head.”

Aunt Betty sighed. “The boy’s all right. Samuel. Quite smart, actually. I caught him in my library last week, stealing books to read in his room. I’ve never pretended to be of a literary turn—my dear departed husband always said reading ruins a woman’s complexion—but I believe Dickens and Andersen are quite advanced for a nine-year-old.”

“But he stares. I’ve never seen a child stare like that before.”

“My dear, it is positively uncanny. I believe it is due to my sister keeping them locked up in that lighthouse their whole lives. Schooled them herself—well, not the girl of course—while Patrick tended the light. When he went off to war she was both lightkeeper and teacher.”

“But surely there were other children around. A small town nearby.”

“The lighthouse was on its own little island. The nearest town was thirty miles away, so they had to have food and such things delivered. The children spent their whole young lives stranded on that barren rock.”

I peeked through the crack in the door and saw Mrs. Minklewine give Aunt Betty an aren’t-you-just-the-sweetest-for-taking-in-the-orphan-freaks pat on the shoulder. 

“And the girl? What will you do with her?” Mrs. Minklewine asked.

There was another sigh. “Lord knows, Adelaide. Seeing her at my dinner table every day… well, my dear, it’s unnerving. She gives me gooseflesh.”

Mrs. Minklewine made a you-poor-thing hum in her bee-crammed nose.

“More tea?”

“Please. And another of those darling little strawberry cakes too.”

There was the sound of Aunt Betty’s long skirts rustling, and I looked up to see her scrawny body and sourpuss face coming through the parlor door. Through the gas mask she was all green-gray and blurry at the edges. She saw me at the same time and screamed so loud I was sure the neighbors could hear. Her teacup went flying in the air like a toy plane and smashed into a billion pieces on the tile floor.

“Merciful heavens, Samuel!” She put a bony-fingered hand against her chest. “What on earth are you wearing?”

I stayed where I was. My legs had fallen asleep, so I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. 

“It’s my Pa’s gas mask,” I said, and I heard my voice all hollow and muffled like a ghost.

“I know that,” Aunt Betty snapped. “Why on earth are you wearing it?”

“Pa gave it to me,” I said. “He told me to put it on whenever I smelt bullshit.”

Aunt Betty sorta blinked at me with her owl eyes, so I gave two really big snuffs.

After that she locked me in my room for about five hours and I didn’t get any dinner, except that Cordelia pushed a piece of bread under the door, and also a broke-off piece of candle because Cordelia doesn’t know that you can’t eat candles.

***

We did live in a lighthouse, but it wasn’t on a barren rock. It was on an island called Temissea, and it was the most beautiful place in the whole world. I’ve never been anywhere else in the world besides here, which is a town called Ironvale, and I hate it with all my heart because it’s gray and cold and everyone ripped out all the trees to put up houses that all look the same. It’s a hundred thirty-seven miles from the sea—I looked it up on a map—so it’s all dried out and dead. The only way I can hear the waves now is by sleeping with my ear pressed against a shell I took from home.

I know Temissea was the world’s most beautiful place ‘cause Mama told me so. She said “Let’s stay here forever, just us four and the gulls and the fish. I’ve seen the rest of the world and it’s nothin’ special, it’s turned sour from all the people filling it up. This is the last beautiful place on earth, and it’s ours forever.”

And then when the telegram came that Pa had died, and after she’d climbed to the top of the lighthouse and hung onto the iron railing and looked out to sea for a long time, the wind whipping her hair across her face, she said “Let’s stay here forever, just us three and the gulls and the fish, and nothing else can ever touch us.”

At night when me and Cordelia are supposed to be asleep in the separate rooms Aunt Betty put us in, Cordelia will sneak in and climb into my bed. She can’t walk and usually has a wheelchair, but she knows how to pull herself across the floor. So I wait until I hear her sliding down the hall and then I open the door and pull her up into my bed. I like to hold her in my arms and put my shell to her ear. And then I talk to her.

Cordelia can’t talk. She never could. Or not with real words, anyway. She has her own language no one understands, not even me. It’s a bubbly kind of language, gurgles and hums. She used to jabber all the time in Temissea, but since we got to Ironvale she just clams up ‘cause everyone looks at her weird. 

So I do the talking for us. I like to pretend I’m telling a fairytale, even though Mama said there was no such thing. “They’re all real,” she’d told me. “All of them. It’s just that people in the outside world, with their cars and their televisions and their radios, have forgotten that. Magic is real, Sammy. Wouldn’t it be a sad thing if the world was only full of humans? What a poor world that would be.”

“Once upon a time,” I always start my stories, “there was a magical girl called Cordelia.” 

This is what Mama always called my sister. Our “magical girl.” She always talked about Cordelia coming to us, like she wasn’t so much born as just arrived on our doorstep one day.

That night, after I got punished for saying ‘bullshit’, and after Aunt Betty finally unlocked my door so I could go pee, Cordelia crawled into my room and onto my bed. I ate the bread she’d given me—and licked the candle too, for good manners—and wrapped her in my arms.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like nobody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t. She lived in a tower with a magical fire the fairies gave her. As long as the fire stayed lit, she was safe.”

Cordelia gurgled and went tuh tuh tuh.

“But one day, the fire went out. And into the tower came four horrible goblins with grabbing hands.”

Cordelia whimpered, and I smoothed her hair.

“They took Cordelia to the Goblin Queen, who locked her in a castle. The Queen hated her, ‘cause she feared her magic.”

Cordelia went very still.

“But,” I said, rocking her a little, “There was also a prince. He’d always loved the magical girl, so he followed her all the way to the Goblin Castle. Then he took a mighty sword and smote the Goblin Queen. He carried Cordelia in his arms back to the magical tower. The fire was ashes now, but he told her to blow, blow, blow.”

Cordelia began to blow like she was trying to put out birthday candles.

“And the light returned.” I stared up at the ceiling and tried to swallow the sore thing in my throat. “And they were safe forever.”

Cordelia took her little hand and brushed it over my face. She likes to do this a lot. Her fingers brush over my eyebrows and slide down my eyelids, go round my nose and lips and tickle my cheeks. Mama once told me Cordelia can’t see all that well, so she probably does this to know what we look like.

Cordelia murmured in her bubbly little voice. Then she took my shell off her ear and put it on mine.

In the morning I woke up alone.

***

“I’m sending you to school today, Samuel,” Aunt Betty told me at the breakfast table. It was about two weeks after I’d listened in on her and Mrs. Minklewine. She’d taken my gas mask away, but I found it again under her bed ‘cause that’s where she always hides stuff. Aunt Betty is not very smart.

I froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

“School?”

“Yes.” Aunt Betty buttered her toast. She always puts the teensiest bit on her bread, so it goes scrape scrape scrape as she spreads it and it scratches at my ears. “It’s high time. I can’t believe my sister kept you out so long.”

Whenever Aunt Betty says “my sister” her voice sort of warbles. Sometimes when she thinks I’m not watching her face cracks like an egg. I can’t decide if Aunt Betty hated my Mama or loved her, but I think maybe it was both. 

“We don’t need school,” I told her. “We learned just fine with Mama.”

“Watch that tone, young man. Every child needs school. You need to be among other children, not just… ” She looked over at Cordelia, who was strapped to her chair so she didn’t fall over. Cordelia has a tough time swallowing, so she mostly eats pureed baby food. Right then she was painting her nose with it.

“Where’s Cordelia gonna be?”

Aunt Betty pretended she didn’t hear me.

“I said where’s Cordelia gonna be?” 

Aunt Betty flinched. “There is no need to speak as though I am deaf. The answer is none of your business.”

I felt like something cold had wrapped itself ‘round my neck.

“I think it is,” I said, “on account of her being my sister.”

“Trust your elders to know what’s best for her,” Aunt Betty said. She took a delicate bite of toast. 

“Is she gonna be here all day?”

A sip of tea.

“You’re gonna stay with her, right? You’re not gonna leave her alone?”

Scrape scrape scrape. 

“I said are you gonna leave her alone?”

Aunt Betty’s plate clattered loudly as she dropped her toast. “Young man!” she barked. “Don’t you dare raise your voice at me! Such manners. I am Cordelia’s caregiver, not you. I will decide what is done with her.”

What is done with her.

I gripped my spoon so hard it left red marks on my hand.

Cordelia was looking at me with her round eyes, baby food still on her nose. I smiled so she wouldn’t feel scared. 

“I made you a paper bag lunch,” Aunt Betty continued, her voice all soft again like nothing happened. “A sandwich and one of those cookies you like. I baked them last night.” For the teensiest second she looked up at me kind of strange, kind of hopeful. Then she grabbed her knife and dug it back into the butter. “The bag is on the kitchen counter. The school bus arrives in three minutes. Put your bowl in the sink now and make sure you arrive promptly.”

What I really wanted to do was throw the bowl at her nasty old face and unstrap Cordelia and run out fast as I could. But Cordelia is seven now and pretty heavy, and I didn’t know how far I could’ve gotten before she caught us.

The school bus ride was only the second bus ride I’d ever had in my whole life. The first one was when four men I didn’t know came to the lighthouse after Mama died and put me and Cordelia and a small bag of our stuff on a bus to Ironvale. I threw up four times on that ride. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that on the school bus with all those kids around, so I spent the whole time with my lips tucked behind my teeth. The other kids left me on a bench all by myself and just stared at me and whispered and giggled to each other. I recognized a few of them from when they’d ride their bikes past Aunt Betty’s house and gawp at Cordelia sitting on the grass. 

I decided right then and there I hated them. 

***

At lunch we ate on the playground, and I found the farthest corner from everyone else. I took Aunt Betty’s stupid cookie out and threw it to some ants, who got real excited.

“Hey.”

I looked up. There was a boy standing over me. He had yellow hair and fat freckles all over his nose. He was big.

“You’re the freak’s brother.”

I felt like someone had poured hot water all over me. I could feel my neck turning red.

“Guys!” the kid called out to others on the playground. “It’s him!” I looked for a teacher, but they were all smoking cigarettes in the shade and not paying any attention.

A whole gaggle of kids ran over and made a circle around me.

“How come your sister looks so weird?” a girl with a blue bow said, chewing the end of her braid. 

Another boy laughed, and I saw a big ball of pink bubble gum rolling on his tongue. “There’s somethin’ wrong with her face,” he said.

I felt my hands go all sweaty and rubbed them on my shorts. My sister is beautiful, I wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come out. And my ears and neck were so hot I felt like I had a fever.

“How come she don’t talk or walk?” the freckled boy asked.

The girl with the blue bow took her braid out of her mouth. “My Ma told me it’s on account of her drowning.”

I looked up at her quick, ‘cause I didn’t know how she could know about that. Then I saw her nose was kind of thin with flarey nostrils and I thought, I bet your last name is Minklewine.

“She drowned?” the boy with gum snapped it, all excited. 

“Yeah,” the girl said. “In the ocean. Her mom dropped her in.”

“That’s not what happened!” I burst out. All the kids looked at me, and I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw started hurting. “She crawled in.”

“She what?” another girl with two pigtails started laughing.

I didn’t want to tell them. I didn’t remember it all that well. It was sort of like remembering something you saw happen when you were underwater, and there was no sound and blurry images. Cordelia on the sand while Mama pulled in a big net of fish. Cordelia crawling into the water, splashing in it. I was too young to know this was bad, so I just watched her. Cordelia loved the water. She clapped every time Mama dipped her little feet in. 

Then a big wave had come, and she’d gone right under. I waited for her to come up, but the water went smooth again and I didn’t see her. 

I don’t remember Mama screaming but she probably did. I do remember her jumping into the ocean and searching all around. She dove in again and again, like a dolphin. And then finally I saw her push Cordelia above her head, and then she was dragging herself back onto the sand with Cordelia in her arms. 

Cordelia was blue and very still. Mama put her on her belly and pulled her arms up over her head, rocking her back and forth. And then finally a huge fountain of water just spewed out of Cordelia’s mouth, and the blue color started going away.

Since then, she’s always tasted of salt. I feel it every time I kiss her. And ever since then, she leaves trails of sand wherever she goes. Even here in Ironvale, hundreds of miles away from Temissea. 

“Maybe she’s dead,” the freckled boy said. “Maybe she’s a ghost that don’t know she’s dead. That’s why she’s so pale and doesn’t talk or walk.”

“She ain’t human,” the bubblegum boy said. “No way she is. No real person looks like that.” Then he tried to copy the way Cordelia talks, but he didn’t do it like she does, which sounds sweet and soft and pretty. He crossed his eyes and jutted out his chin and went “Uggghhmm, gooo.” 

Right then I thought of the story I’d told Cordelia about the Goblin Castle. I thought about the prince. And so I stood up and socked that boy right in the eye. He went down howling and I kicked him in the mouth. His gum went flying out.

I spent the rest of that day in the principal’s office. He took a thick wooden paddle to my buttocks and whacked me as hard as he could. It hurt like hell to sit the rest of the day, but I had to ‘cause Aunt Betty wasn’t home when they called.

So I spent that whole time worrying where Cordelia was, too.

***

A week later I was sitting with my gas mask outside the parlor door again.

Every time I wear that mask I think about Pa. I think about his wild red hair and how he used to let me sit on his shoulder. I think about how he held Mama in his arms and tilted her chin up to kiss her. I think about his face when he came home on shore leave a few months after Cordelia was born. He came in uniform, but before seeing her he folded it away and put on his old fisherman clothes, the ones that still smelled like him.

He’d looked surprised when he first saw Cordelia, and Mama looked a little scared. I was real small, but I still remember this. But I also remember Pa smiling and picking her up, and holding her little soft head close to his chest, and kissing her white cheek. 

He gave me his gas mask when he left that time. He said “Take this, son. It’s good to wear when you smell the bullshit.” He laughed, then got real serious. “Take care of that lil’ girl.”

Then he’d gone, and that was the last I saw of him.

In the parlor Aunt Betty was making a real good show of sighing and tsking like she actually cared a whit about us.

“What did they say, Betty?”

“That she’d be a good candidate. They can take her as soon as next week. And I can’t care for her, Adelaide. The older one, he’ll grow up and leave, eventually. But she’d be tied to me forever. I know she’s my niece, but… ”

“She’s not your child,” Mrs. Minklewine said. “You have no obligation, Betty. You’ve already done more than enough for her.”

“The treatment would help. It wouldn’t cure her, but it would help.”

“Does it… hurt? It sounds quite frightening.”

“They assure me it doesn’t. I saw them treating a young woman. I admit it was… unsettling. They strapped her to a chair and put a block in her mouth for her to bite down on. Then they applied electrodes to her scalp, and…”

There was a pause, and I knew Mrs. Minklewine was leaning forward like a vulture. I realized I was digging my fingers into my palms so hard that one of my fingernails had cut my skin and it was bleeding a little.

“And they say this works?” Mrs. Minklewine said.

“It makes them calm. I worried that if I put her there alone, away from her brother, she’d resist. They also told me it would stop her seizures.”

“Does she get those frequently?” 

“Ugh, my dear. Anytime she is near water. Bathing her is a nightmare. I don’t know how she lived by the ocean for so long.”

“She hates the water?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. She’s drawn toward it. It’s when we take her out of the water that she has them. In the bath she’s fine. But as soon as I lift her out, the seizure begins.”

“Interesting. One would think that after her first drowning as a baby, she’d be afraid of water.”

“Well, you know,” Aunt Betty said, “She was born in water.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“She was a mermaid birth. En caul, you know. Still in the amniotic sac.”

“Good gracious.”

“Indeed,” Aunt Betty said. “More tea?”

“Please.”

I felt so light-headed I wasn’t sure I could stand. But I stumbled to my feet anyway, ripped the gas mask off my head, and ran quiet as I could down the hallway before Aunt Betty could see me.

Then I hit the wall and slid down with my gas mask in my hands. I stayed there, just staring at the lines between the tiles, for a long time. I felt like all the bones had melted out of me. So many things were screaming in my head I couldn’t hardly catch my breath.

I didn’t know what “en caul” meant. I didn’t know what an “amniotic sac” was, either. But I knew what Aunt Betty meant. She said Cordelia was “born in water.” She said, “mermaid birth.” 

So that’s when I knew what she was. What she’d always been.

***

When Cordelia crawled into my bed that night, I wasn’t in my pajamas. I was wearing all my clothes, even my shoes. I had clothes for her, too, in a bag near my pillow. But when she first crawled in I just held her in my arms and put my shell to her ear.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “There was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like anybody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t.”

Then I took a deep breath. “And she was a mermaid.”

Cordelia gurgled. I kissed her cheek and tasted salt.

“Cordelia loved the sea, but one night she saw a light shining down through the water. She thought it was a fallen star. When she swam up to touch it, she saw three humans on the island. They looked so happy. Cordelia knew that if she turned into a human she’d never be able to walk or talk. But she didn’t care. ‘Cause she’d fallen in love with the humans, especially the little boy. She wanted to be his sister and make him feel safe. 

“So one night, she pulled herself out of the water and gave up her fish tail for legs. In the morning the family found her lying on their doorstep. They loved her from that second on.

“On the magical island Cordelia always felt safe and loved. Even when her human father died, she wasn’t too sad ‘cause she knew he had fallen into the sea, and that he’d wait for her there. And even when her human mother died she still wasn’t too sad, ‘cause she’d asked for her ashes to be scattered in the water. So Cordelia knew she’d one day find her Mama there, too.

“But when they were both gone Cordelia started to feel the ocean pull her more and more. And when evil humans came to the magical island to take her and her brother away, she cried, and left trails of salt and sand the whole way there. She and her brother were brought to a witch’s house. Cordelia hated it. She wanted to return to the sea—but she couldn’t leave her brother. She loved him too much.”

I had to stop, ‘cause there were tears just gushing out my eyes and that sore lump in my throat was getting too big to talk around. Cordelia must have felt them splashing onto her face because she reached up and wiped them. I sniffed a few times, and held her tight.

“But the witch was dangerous, and she hated mermaids. She planned to cast a spell on Cordelia that would make her forget the sea forever.”

Cordelia went still. I sat up slowly and pulled one of her little dresses from the bag beside my pillow. She looked up at me with her big, glassy eyes.

“So one night her brother snuck her out of the witch’s house.”

Cordelia lifted her arms. I pulled her nightgown over her head and put the dress on her. Then I found her small feet and put on her socks and shoes, the ones she’d never walk in. 

Cordelia put her hands on my face, on my nose and mouth. “Thhh,” she said. “Blll.”

“I’ll be OK,” I whispered. “You’ve protected me long enough. I can take care of myself now. All that matters is that you’re safe.”

Then I lifted her into my arms—she was lighter than I ever remembered—and carried her downstairs.

I carried her all the way to the Greyhound bus station. And then I bought us two tickets with money I’d snuck out of Aunt Betty’s purse. 

The bus ride took six hours. The whole while I held Cordelia in my arms and thought about what it must’ve been like for her all this time, living in the human world.

When the bus finally arrived at the seaside station, I lifted Cordelia in my arms and carried her out. By then I was hungry, and she felt heavier. But I carried her all through the streets of that town, which I’d only seen once before. Almost everyone was still asleep, except for a few people opening up grocery stands. 

I carried her all the way to the beach. The sky was turning orangeypurple as the sun crawled up from the horizon. But I could still see the light of Temissea, blinking like a star.

I put her on the sand, and then I sat with her. She took fistfuls of it and sprinkled it all over her lap, laughing and laughing. She put some in my hair, and I smiled, even though I felt like I couldn’t hardly breathe. 

Then she started sliding on her belly toward the water. 

There was no one else on the beach. Just me, dead tired, sitting in the sand with my arms wrapped ‘round my legs. And Cordelia, sliding like a sea turtle down the bank.

When she hit the water she made a happy little gurgling noise. I watched as it lapped around her pale face and soaked her dress. 

Then a big wave came.

Bonus audio of Ali reading from her piece…

about the author:

Until It Ends | Shayna Brown

He asked me for a ride, and I agreed. When I arrived at his house, he was on his hands and knees outside filling a crack just below one of his windows. His house is a tapestry of decay, its wood siding tired and splintered. I was glad to see him tackling at least one of the issues.    

“Winter’s almost here,” he said. “Fixing up the house so critters can’t get in.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and then insisted we take his car. He also insisted on driving. I felt warm at the realization that he really just wanted my company. Before we’d even left his driveway, he turned to me.

“Will you be at my funeral?” he asked.

“Yes, Dad. Shut up. Drive,” I said. We rode in silence for a few minutes.

“It will be a nice funeral.” He laughed, not realizing I was taking him seriously, that the idea was too much for me to hold. My heart made a fist and I refused to engage.

“I had my palm read once,” he said. “Apparently, my lifeline goes until it ends!” I stared out the window, trying not to contaminate the conversation with my worries.

“You’re too afraid, Sandy. Too afraid of death, but also of life. When are you going to start living your life?”

I stayed quiet because I didn’t know how to answer. How could I focus on my life when he needed me to make sure he didn’t stop living his? My throat was filled with blame that didn’t belong here. 

“You could travel the world,” he said, barreling on. My frequent desire to run away thrummed in my chest. My days were a circus, juggling a career, single-parenting a ten-year-old boy, getting divorced, and now this. World travel was so far from a possibility I almost snorted. My chest burned. He was unable to see me sitting right here beside him.

“And who would take care of you?” I asked, a question that felt like a bullet. He stopped at a red light, and I listened to the birds in their homes just outside, making noises that seemed so joyful. They didn’t know that winter was on its way. The light turned green.

“It’s all in your head, you know,” Dad said.

“What is?” I turned to look at him. His eyes were on the road and his big, bushy eyebrows sat like large caterpillars on his forehead. The rest of his features seemed to be drooping, like aging was just a process of melting. Behind him, old oak trees lined the street, the last leaves of fall clinging to the branches.

“Your suffering. Anguish. It’s not real. It’s in your head. Everything’s alright if you let it be.”

I thought of the divorce papers awaiting me at home. I thought of Dad a few months ago, perched on the edge of a couch in a fluorescent-lit exam room, eyes wild, un-seeing me right there in front of him. I thought of my son in school right now, his eyes big as full moons at the news of his parents’ divorce. As I told him, he’d rubbed his small hands together, and now I wondered about the length of his lifeline.  

“Maybe so,” I said, a gift from me to Dad, an agreement not to point out that some of the most real things in the universe can’t be seen at all. I swallowed and looked out the window.

***

We walked into the Houston Star Urology office together. I took a seat while Dad checked in. The place smelled musty and sour. The smell scared me. There was no light in that smell, no carefree days. It was the smell of illness and pain.

I looked around the room. Dark, worn carpet sat under chairs shoved uncomfortably close to one another, and cheesy beach paintings littered the walls. Five other patients were waiting. All men. They appeared to be about Dad’s age, though some were definitely older. The line-up was a wash of white hair and age spots. Everyone was well-dressed in slacks and button-up shirts and shiny, clean shoes. Every single one of them.

A grey-haired nurse called Dad’s name and we both stood up. He looked at me with a tight jaw, so I sat down quickly, awkwardly.

“It’s alright, you can come on back,” Dad said a little too slowly, and I worried he was melting right in front of me. The nurse nodded, which I took as assurance that this would be a verbal exchange only, fit for a daughter’s ears.

We went back to an exam room, where we were left to wait again. Dad was diminished in the bright office light, sitting slightly elevated on the exam table. His thinning grey hair sprouted in every direction, giving him a mad scientist look. His own button-up shirt was wrinkled and familiar to me. My chest tightened and I reached over to brush off a bit of dirt from his shoulder. We sat in awkward silence for a minute, under the harsh light of the exam room.

“Wanna see some pictures from Oliver’s baseball game last weekend?” I offered, and Dad looked away.

“Later,” he said, and I was hurt by his lack of interest in my son. His first grandson.

“Amy and Charlie are coming to town,” I said, to fill the silence.

Dad let out a huff, and I regretted mentioning my sister and his other grandson.  

“Keep Charlie out of my laundry room. I’ve got all my tools out and I don’t need a five-year-old messing with them.”

“I’ll tell Amy,” I said, looking down.

The doctor came in, saving us from our awkward attempts at small talk, to explain next week’s procedure and its logistics. He was a tall man, younger than felt comfortable, the tip of his colorful Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath light blue scrubs. He shook my hand and went over pre-op details with Dad. Have you noticed any changes in urinary habits, such as blood in the urine, frequent urination, or pain during urination? Do you have any known allergies to anesthesia, or a history of complications related to anesthesia? 

Dad and I had grown old together, in a way, but he got such a head start that now he was here, battling old age, and I wasn’t quite yet to the half-way point. My right thumb rubbed the inside of my left hand, feeling for the lifeline, finding nothing.

I turned my attention back to the doctor.

“And of course this is all written down here,” he said, handing me a colorful stack of paperwork. “Including our emergency line should you need anything outside normal office hours.” The doctor nodded at us. “I’ll see you bright and early next week!” he said with an enthusiasm that felt out of place.

Dad looked at me from beneath the relentless fluorescent spotlight, eyes pleading, as though I were responsible for this. I felt his fear. I saw him hiding it from everyone, but he couldn’t hide it from me. He’s never been able to hide anything from me, no matter how I’ve wished he could.

A physical exam was next, so I showed myself back to the waiting room. I sat staring at the stained carpet, trying not to let the smell get into me, as if that were the thing causing all the problems. I rested my hand on the worn, fabric arm of my chair and scanned the paintings of beach scenes on the wall.

Two men sitting across the room from me started talking to each other. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the room was so small and quiet I couldn’t not hear.

“It happened overnight,” one man said to the other. “I woke up one day and I was old!” He chuckled, hands clasped at his round belly. A button of his plaid shirt strained to escape its confines.

“How old, can I ask?”

“Eighty-eight!” the man answered without pause, with pride.

“Wow,” said the second man, “I’m only eighty-two.” I loved him for the “only.”

“Well, you look good,” said the first man, waving a finger in the air.

“So do you!” said the second man. “I mean, I would have pegged you at a decade younger than that.”

“It’s genetics. I’m a lucky man. Life’s real good.”

There was a slight hesitation in the conversation. A moment of silence.

“It truly is,” the second man said. “Life’s wonderful, dancing along, until it ends.”

“Until it ends,” the first man repeated, like the amen of a prayer.

The man looked at me with a tired smile, catching me in my eavesdropping.

“You’re the youngest I’ve seen in here!” he said. Both men stared at me now.

“I’m here with my dad,” I said loudly and too defensively. They nodded, and one of them shook his finger at me.

“That’s a good daughter right there. I’m sure he appreciates that. Very good daughter.” Rocks thumped in my gut, the words moving something deep that I tried to ignore.

“It’s not a big deal, really,” I said, waving a hand in the air and feeling heat in my cheeks. Dad re-entered the waiting room and looked toward the men before taking his seat beside me. The room went quiet. He seemed even smaller now than when we had entered the building. The incredible shrinking man.

“Ready?” I asked.

“They’re putting together some stuff for me. Just a sec.”

We sat silently, facing forward in our side-by-side padded chairs. No one else was talking now. All eyes were trained on the carpet. The smell was relentless.

“I’m sorry, Sandy.”

“It’s fine, Dad.”

“You shouldn’t have to be here.”

“I’m glad to be here. Thank goodness I’m not traveling the world, so I can be,” I said. Dad made a sound that was a cross between a grunt and a laugh.

“It shouldn’t be a daughter’s job. I just don’t have anyone else.” 

“Dad…” I started.

“I have money,” he said, hand to forehead, a frustrated rub. “I have plenty of money, I could hire help, but I don’t want a stranger here, or in my home. I just…” He trailed off and we both looked down.

The receptionist slid open the glass window partition that separated her from us and said Dad’s name. I hopped up and grabbed the bag of supplies in a nondescript brown paper bag that reminded me of the ones I used to send to school holding my son’s lunches. Dad stood up, and together we walked out.

***

Amy and Charlie came to town a few days after Dad’s surgery. With the cancer removed, he was well into his recovery at home. Amy and five-year-old Charlie brought energy and chaos. Dad and I sat in the living room and watched wide-eyed as Amy immediately busied herself in the kitchen and Charlie ran around singing a Blues Clues song. Who’s clues? Blue’s clues! You know what to do! The open floor plan of Dad’s house left too few walls to soften the noise. Amy walked over to us, small glasses in hand.

“Here, Dad. This is good for healing. Turmeric, ginger, vitamin C.” Amy said. She handed him a small glass of orange liquid and mimed drinking it. Dad gave me a look but gently sipped the concoction.

He’s never been comfortable with Amy, but I admire them for not giving up on each other. She is his miniature, his thick eyebrows dancing over her eyes. I’ve watched the two of them play-act at father-daughter behavior but there’s always been something invisible separating them, taking their words and twisting them and throwing out the good ones and leaving them both confused and aching.

Dad moved in his seat and Amy covered her mouth in a reactive gage when she saw his clear plastic urostomy bag with bloody urine swishing inside. His eyebrows pinched together, a sign of distress only I’m trained to recognize. He shifted in his chair and pulled a blanket onto his lap.

Charlie was running around the house singing loudly and banging a stick on the ground. Amy bustled like she’d had too much coffee, getting Charlie some water and forcing Dad to take a cup, too.

“Hydration is an important part of healing!” she said in a sing-song voice. Dad looked at me and I put my hands up. Not my fight. The day progressed like this, loud and awkward, but I was grateful Amy was here. Dad was smiling at the company. The last couple days had been just me and him, and I think we were both glad for the new energy. For once, I wasn’t the sole caretaker. Maybe now I could start living that life he wanted me to live, I thought, and then felt like I was choking on guilt. 

Dad was starting to doze in his La-Z-Boy recliner, pain meds kicking in. I gave his shoulder a squeeze so gentle it wouldn’t wake him and left for the night.

The next day I showed up early with eggs, bacon, and biscuit mix for breakfast. I found Amy in the kitchen making coffee, complaining about the kitchen window that was stuck ever-so-slightly open, letting a cold puff in. 

“Dad agreed to have a handyman come by today. I’ll add the window to the list of things for him to check,” I promised, making a mental note. My nephew ran in. “Charlie, do you want to help me make some biscuits?” He turned to me with a bright smile.

“Yah!” he yelled and grabbed my hand. Within minutes we were shaping biscuits and scrambling eggs. Dad hobbled in and took a seat at the table. He pressed his lips together and gave me a nod. Charlie and I got the biscuits in the oven and were about to go check out a new coloring book when we heard Amy scream from the bathroom.

Charlie and I ran to her. Dad walked, quickly but gently. Amy threw herself out of the bathroom and sputtered accusingly, “Snake! Dad, Snake!”

We stretched our necks to see in the bathroom and, sure enough, there was a long, dark brown snake wrapped around the rectangular mirror above the sink.

Charlie said, “I wanna see the snake!” and tried to run in.

“Charlie get BACK!” Amy grabbed him and he started to cry.

“Ah, it’s just a baby rat snake, not poisonous,” Dad said. But this put none of us at ease. The “just” before any kind of snake in the bathroom doesn’t change the alarming fact that we are in the middle of Houston, Texas and somehow there’s a snake inside the house.

Slowly, calmly, in his checkered PJs, Dad walked to his laundry room. We watched, frozen.

He returned holding an old machete, its faded wooden hilt fitted in his hand. He appeared taller holding this tool, and he was standing with an energy I hadn’t seen in ages.

“Well, little snake. Urine trouble,” he said and looked at me with half a smile, like we’d been through the whole ordeal just for this opportunity to share a pun. He wagged his eyebrows until I smiled back.

Charlie yelled from Dad’s side, “Yeah! You’re in trouble!” as if delighted that someone else was in the wrong for once.

“Dad, give it to me,” I said, reaching for the machete. It was rusted and looked dull, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could use. Wasn’t this just like us? Searching for the best way to fight the world, together?

“I got it,” Dad said, taking a strong step into the bathroom.

“You’ll pop a stitch! Just go sit down!” I yelled. I reached for the machete and he looked at me. My hand on the handle seemed to shrink him right back to his post-op, fragile self.

“Sandy,” he said. His white hair was wild on his head, and his eyes were droopy and big. I dropped my grip of the machete.

“Okay.” 

Dad turned from me and faced the vanity, where the snake looked peaceful with its body wrapped around the mirror. He let loose a strong strike aimed at the snake, his eyes clear and focused, and missed, hitting the wall beside the mirror. He reared his arm back for another strike, this time hitting the tile of the backboard and sending a ceramic chip clattering to the ground. He stared at his own image in the mirror as he hacked at the snake-lined frame, nicking the edge of the mirror itself and causing a small, spiderweb crack to grow across the glass. The snake finally seemed to notice Dad and lifted its head threateningly. It opened its mouth wide, flicking its tongue out to taste the air.

“Dad!” Amy yelled from the door of the bathroom, covering her mouth with her hand. 

The snake started to move, its scales glimmering under the light, its muscles tensed and coiled with potential energy. 

Dad struck again and hit the side of the mirror with such force that it sounded like a cymbal crash. He attacked without pause: hits aimed at the intruder but missing every time by a few inches, leaving gashes in the sheetrock instead. The snake finally lowered its head and turned away from us, slithering along the wall and escaping through a small opening in the window beside the bathtub. 

Dad let the machete fall to his side, and then he laughed. I ran over and quickly closed the window, locking it securely.

“Did you kill it?” Charlie asked from outside the bathroom. Dad shook his head.

“Nah, wasn’t trying to. But I scared him out, he’ll never bother us again. Little guy could just feel the change in weather coming and was looking for a safe place to hide.”

Dad took his seat at the kitchen table and we all followed. He was sitting taller now, energetic and vibrant.  

“Enough excitement for Grandpa; let’s all cool off now,” Amy said. Her voice was a little shaky, but the singsong was creeping back in. She carried biscuits and eggs over to the table. I put the machete on top of the refrigerator for safekeeping.

After breakfast, I helped with dishes and wrote up the list for the handyman. Charlie was sitting quietly, watching a TV show, and I let my shoulders drop.

“We’ve got him,” Amy said, standing a little too close to me and whispering a little too loudly. “Go home. Get some rest. I can give the handyman your list. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of fires at home to tend to.” Dad looked over at me when she said this and gave a nod, either at me or the door. I hesitated.

“You’ve got him?” I asked. 

“I’ve got him.” 

I squeezed his arm and gave Charlie a hug goodbye.

***

I got to Dad’s house the next morning before Amy and Charlie were even awake. Dad was sitting on the porch in an old, wooden rocking chair.

“I’m surprised that thing isn’t collapsing.” I gestured to the chair with my chin. I took a seat on the porch floor, back against a pillar.

“Old doesn’t mean useless,” he replied.

“I didn’t mean-” I started, but he interrupted.

“Truth is, I was useless before I was old.” He stared past me, looking at nothing behind me.

“Na, Dad, you’ve never been-” I started again, and he interrupted a second time.

“I read Charlie to sleep last night. Not useless. I missed out with your boy, but I’ll make it up to him. And start stronger with Charlie. I’m gonna be a real Grandpa now.” I thought I saw his eyes dampen just a little.

“You were imaginary before?” My jaw clenched; I regretted the edge in my tone. “I mean, it’s all good, Dad.”

“It will be,” he said. And his eyes moved from the nothingness behind me to my face. The surprise of eye contact made me shift in my seat. “You will be, too. We get a break now. You’re a good daughter. You make me want to be better.” I felt my throat start to crack and as I started to answer, he pushed up from his chair.

“Hey! You gotta listen to this,” he said, leaving the conversation to lean in the front door. He returned with a dusty old, portable CD player. He plugged it in to the covered outlet above the porch and hit the eject button, grabbing a CD the machine slowly spit out. It looked scratched, and I doubted this ancient setup’s ability to produce any sound at all. He wiped the CD off on his shirt, and then popped it back in the player, which sucked it up eagerly. Something played, loudly, but I didn’t know what it was. I remember fiddles and a woman’s voice singing in a language I didn’t know. Dad grinned, big. He looked, for just a brief second, like his old self. Except happy. In that moment I believed him. I believed everything. He would follow the doctor’s orders. And stay healthy. He would become the grandpa and the father that he’d always promised to be.

The song came to a punctuated end and the woman’s voice faded into the air. “That’s something, right?” Dad said. I did not disagree.

about the author:

Crooked | R.K.B.

Crooked fences line the street like broken teeth in a jagged smile.

Chipped brown paint flakes from white wood. Cars shoot by the narrow houses, one by one. The cars don’t stop or slow down. A red van pulls into her spot. Her—the woman that sits on the porch, the one who has always been there. She cusses into the street, a string of utterances and damnations pouring from her mouth like an opening salvo. The red van stays for some time, braces the steady fire of the woman’s voice; but even it pushes off after a few seconds.

The red van’s wheels screech against the roughness of the asphalt. The sound of those spinning tires rings off Uriel’s braces, makes him wince. His hands, small, grip the black straps of his bookbag, where they squeeze. The sky has darkened enough now that there is too little light to allow anyone to see his fingers quiver, like violin strings. He can hear a siren in the distance, the sound of it fighting the echo of a train somewhere attempting to push its way past the city.

Uriel stands in the street now, directly in what he thinks, what he knows to be, the center.

He does not move a muscle, save the quivering of those small delicate fingers. Frail cones of light from the streetlamps on either side stretch themselves to him, into the middle of the street. The streetlight’s reach falls short of where he stands. Gulfs of darkness, pitch black as tar in the street, look to swallow him.

The streetlights flicker, and with each stretch of spiked shadow Uriel’s dread grows alongside, dreading what will happen when it is dark enough that he has to go inside.

The sun falls lower and Uriel burns copper. Dead sunlight wraps him tight, a brief shield from what waits for him behind closed doors. That great panic in Uriel, ever present today, sits in his chest, molten ice, and he knows the red van will not slow down before the driver does. Uriel cannot move. He does not.

He shatters his legs in three places.

The impact knocks Uriel unconscious, and he is dreaming before his body flies up into the windshield.

His ears are deaf to the crunch of his small weight against the glass. The weight of his nine-year old body is not even enough to crack the windshield. When Uriel lands across the street— fifteen feet away—his eyes are shut.

The red van halts a few feet from him. Behind a few windows on either side of the street, curtains rustle. The silhouette of faces moves in shadow behind each. The red van drives away, slower than before, when the woman on the porch once again begins to yell. She curses both the driver and God. Neither listen.

When the ambulance arrives, urgency deafening in its song, Uriel is taken from the street. He wakes in the ambulance to the echo of the siren. The hospital the ambulance drives to is a brutal building, its low grey walls prison-like.

On the inside it is bright and too cheerful, like an apology. Uriel falls back asleep when he arrives. He dreams he has run away with Oscar, his little brother. They run from their house, and their school, but mostly from their mother. In the dream, true as to life, she hunts for them with unmotherly sharpness that makes the foggy pain, the diluted haze of it, a thing of kindness. The world melts like old chocolate in front of them, murky and rich.

The doctors have to saw his femur down to reattach it with titanium and wire. Uriel sleeps under their knife and doesn’t wake up till well after they are done.

The nurse assigned to Uriel is new. The sight of him, asleep, smiling in his narrow bed, breaks her down in a supply closet at the end of her shift.

Eight years later and the panic still walks with him as he leaves from the bus stop, and traces of ice still line the insides of his stomach. His panic these days curls around the shape of the key in his hand, rime of internal frost guarding one of Uriel’s only possessions that have meaning.

A day does not pass when the key in Uriel’s fist does not shake when it opens the door above him. Keys listen for the songs of invitation sung by their doors, hoping they do not go silent. It is all too easy for songs to change. His own mother has mastered a knack of changing the locks to their home, and he does not keep whatever key sings to her home with him whenever he leaves.

The steps in front of Mrs. Stuart’s house are always the hardest to climb. In front of Uriel, they look monolithic, daunting. One day, he hopes, they will look like just steps.

A month after the red van, his mother does not pick him up from the hospital. Mrs. Stuart calls his mother from Uriel’s room in the hospital. She asks first. Asks where the little boy’s mother is. When Mrs. Stuart’s questions receive feather hollow answers, the questions turn from questions into damnation. Only half awake in his little bed, he hears only some of what comes out of the old woman’s mouth as she clutches the stethoscope around her neck like a talisman that can do more than find the rhythm inside a chest. He half hears as Mr. Stuart paces in his little room, a congregation of other nurses circling the woman— their faces in something of awe and something of terror. She curses his mother in that hospital, cursing her skin and her bones, and her mother’s before her for raising someone so “wicked.” When the fires of her threats are exhausted, Mrs. Stuart takes him home instead. No one argues with her. He leans on the old woman, who climbs the steps steadily, something of righteousness threading through her frame as she lifts them both to the top of the steps. Now, the rusted white metal railing to the left of the stairs wobbles; it cannot take his weight.

He has tried before.

A year ago.

He winces with the memory. His left leg, shorter now than his right and the weaker of the two, had crumpled under him, sending him toppling down onto the sidewalk. A boy from school had been with him. Uriel had been distracted by attention that was not a practical joke and eyes that did not mock him. Uriel had liked the boy’s cloud green eyes, the bright violence of them set in the boy’s brown face. But the green-eyed boy had laughed when Uriel fell.

Behind him now a car speeds down the street, the hushed air whoosh of its movement loud and sudden.

The sky is an unscarred blue above his head. The cold bites into his threadbare clothes, though he’s layered his shirts as Mrs. Stuart has told him to. He breathes into his gloves and wriggles his fingers. As he makes his way up the stairs, he keeps his hands plastered to his side. He has to resist the urge, even after all these years, to find something to hold on to. At the top he walks the narrow distance across the covered porch. His boots crunch down on the stiff fibers of the old carpet along the wood deck. The storm door is broken and does not latch properly. When he opens it, he steps inside the small space and wipes his boots along the mat there.

Before he can knock, Mrs. Stuart’s voice yells through the door.

“Sop playing and get yourself out of that cold, before you freeze to death on my porch.”

He pushes open the door, mumbling, “Yes, Ma’am.”

The smell of rosewater and spices hits him as he crosses the threshold. He smiles a quiet smile, looking straight down as he does. The first floor of the house is only barely warmer than the outside. The heat has not yet been turned on. There are space heaters, small and black, in front of the radiator in the corner. The living room is occupied by an old L shaped couch, its deep and floral-patterned seats covered with blankets. Sweetly thick voices dripping with feeling tell their stories over the air as the radio sends soul music throughout the house. He walks through the living room, to the kitchen.

The cold recedes as he gets closer.

In the kitchen the oven is on. The light on the oven is broken, so Uriel cannot see what is inside. It smells like pie, and his stomach rumbles. The rumble is loud, a heavy growl hard to ignore. Uriel pretends not to notice. He is used to pretending.

At the sink, Mrs. Stuart kisses her teeth, a sound long and slow and fed up. Uriel’s mother makes the same sound whenever she is upset with him. But when she does it, it is a cruel thing, drawn out and twisted like the serrated blade of an old knife. Fists trail behind the sound, too many to avoid. In 17 years, he hasn’t found any way to avoid upsetting his mother except to vanish.

Mrs. Stuart shakes her head but doesn’t turn around. Uriel takes off his gloves and puts them in his pockets. For a moment the sound of his mother is in his ears, and his eyes, and his nose.

“I can help with the washing up…if you want?” he offers.

The dishes in the sink are mostly large pots and pans. They fill the small sink and spread out onto the counter. Mrs. Stuart wipes her hands and turns around.

The lines on her face are a roadmap of concern he does not know what to do with. A network of grooved skin bunches around her eyes and mouth.

“You eat breakfast today?”

Uriel does not think that is a question. No upward lilt softens her tone into anything other than an accusation. Uriel moves to the sink and pushes up his jacket sleeves. He knows Mrs. Stuart is angry with him, so he avoids looking at her. It bothers her that he has slept at his mother’s more often recently—twice this week, a dozen times in the past month.

“Nothing in the fridge back at her place,” he says.

It’s a lie. There were things in the fridge, but they weren’t for him. He had cereal at the school, catching the bus early to get to what the district called breakfast. He knows not to take what is not explicitly his, and the world has given him little.

He also knows by now that not talking cannot shutter the conversation. He scrubs the grime off a cast iron skillet. When he is done the surface of the pan is a dull tire-black.

He wonders if it is still there, hanging in the dining room like a curse.

“It’s why you still got that damn limp. Your knees should be better than mine. Just last week I was thinking that Oscar’s got bigger than you, and Lord knows that boy don’t got any more food than you. I feed you both the same. He at your momma’s house right now?” Somewhere in the last few years, he knows that Mrs. Stuart had got the idea that if she just fed the two boys enough, if enough rice and peas and festival fish were consumed, that his bones would grow stronger than they were, that broken pieces of him would unbreak.

“He’s with some friends,” he says. He spits these words out, almost guttural. The water runs and runs and runs, faultless as it falls from the faucet.

Mrs. Stuart stops drying the dishes. She puts her hands on her hips. “So she’s not home. Again.”

The old dress she wears has flour on it. The white stains the pastel orange fabric. It clumps in some places into dough. The coarse tan apron wrapped around her waist catches most of the food before it can hit the floor.

For Mother’s Day two years after the accident, he made her that apron in school: “Thank you” embroidered on the front lapel.

She tries to tell him he already has a mother. The old woman chews him out, eyes growing wet with each word, until she gives up. But then she ties the thing around her waist and hugs him close.

She wears it whenever she cooks, whether Uriel is present or not.

Uriel keeps washing, though there aren’t that many dishes left. He eyes up every item before he touches them, meticulous in his scrutiny. He goes as slow as he can. The curtains from the window above the sink come undone. He wipes his hands and re-ties them before they unloose completely and come falling into the water. He goes back to his process and doesn’t look up.

“I was gonna tell you.” he says. It is a lie and neither of them need to point at the fragility in the structure of it.

She kisses her teeth again, the air crushed between her molars a warning. She goes to the oven and opens it. A wave of heat rolls out across the floor, and up the backs of Uriel’s legs. He shifts his weight, pauses. The oven fills the room with the scent of pecans. 

“How was school?” she asks.

He almost shrugs, then stops himself. He doesn’t want to talk about his high school, crowded and hostile. There are no more boys with green eyes for him there. The students at Hartnell are of two types now, either bullies or overflowing with pity—both make him feel too seen and made more brittle for it. He purses his lips.

“I got a good grade on my project. The one for Bio that we worked on,” he says.

“That’s right. Now go on and set the table,” she says. She takes the pie out of the oven, leaves the door open. On the rack below, covered in aluminum foil, are two dishes.

The dining room is filled with echoes that Uriel tries his best to avoid. Uriel takes the placemats and puts them on the oval table in the dining room off the kitchen. It’s a short walk. He goes back for the plates she has left on the counter, then the silverware and cups. Pictures are framed across the dining room walls, row after row of photographs. The echoes are deafening.

On his way back to the kitchen to grab the napkins, he forgets to mask his limp. Mrs. Stuart lets out a small beaten sigh when she sees. Shame blossoms in his stomach, and its warmth inches its way up into his ribs.

“Call Oscar after you eat,” she says. “Tell him he’s got no business sleeping on the street when he knows that I got two rooms upstairs nobody uses but you two.” She slides the two foil wrapped trays across the counter for Uriel to take.

He takes the trays and makes his way to the table. He doesn’t limp this time, straining his left leg to match the gait of his right.

At his mother’s house, whenever she is drunk, his mother makes fun of the way he walks. There is always the shape of something mean folded into her voice. Not like Mrs. Stuart, his mother does not yell at him and the world for him to heal; she does not wish each night for something as small as Uriel’s comfort. In those moments, his mother’s house goes hurricane-still, and laughter is wrung from Oscar. His brother and he do not look at one another for days afterward.

Uriel has learned to hide the limp, along with the parts of himself that are truly broken.

He puts the plates down on the placemat in the center of the table. He pulls out Mrs. Stuart’s usual chair for her, the wood scraping across the boards. He cannot help but look at the wall now. The pictures are blatant, their trapped memories spilling down the wall and into his eyes, a cascade of images he cannot avoid.

In one picture frame, a black man throws a woman into the air. The motion is effortless, they smile broadly at each other, love resting in the corners of their eyes. The grey sky clears for her, and as she rises her head breaks through heaven. Uriel looks up. The air stings Uriel’s nose and threatens the corners of his eyes—not from cold that has found no home in Mrs. Stuart’s house, but from the sharpness of memory—metal and blood and a throb of remembered pain in his hips. In the corner, small and simply framed, is the now familiar picture of the same man, but older. Time has not overlooked him. The man crouches at the foot of a red van. The man grins at the person taking the picture. There is an openness to the grin and, to Uriel, the man stares directly at him through the frame.

That photo reappeared on Mrs. Stuart’s wall a year ago, filling the empty space its absence had made for almost a decade.

The grinning man is in prison now. Hit and run.

Uriel looks down at the table. He does not want Mrs. Stuart to know that he has noticed it.

He is always surprised to find the photo does not have a butcher’s knife sticking from the glass. On a call around the same time the picture went up, Uriel remembers Mrs. Stuart yelling at the grinning man who is her brother. “I hope you rot.” To her, the hatred she has for the grinning man is almost a duty of hers, God-given and blessed.

Uriel looks back into the kitchen.

“You don’t have to let us stay,” he says because it is true. He has no claim to this place, to this house, to this woman who hates her own brother for almost killing a 9-year-old that had no strong desire to live. He says this often enough that he knows that the phrase hurts Mrs. Stuart, and yet he has never been able to stop himself from repeating it, a bundle of words to guard against the possibility of not being able to return here.

She shakes her head and sits, muttering under her breath as she does. Uriel sits, and they are both afloat in no movement except the air pushed steadily to the ceiling by the pecan flavored heat of the oven. Uriel feels, as he sits, as though he has stolen the man in the picture’s place, a cuckoo at Mrs. Stuart’s table.

The food is distracting, the rice heaped onto his plate like steaming mountains. He goes for the pork chops first. Apart from the music that still plays, it is silent for a few minutes. The Temptations pray for rain in the background, backed up by a chorus in harmony. A cold draft encircles the table, and there is a stabbing pain in his legs. The rods in them seem to spring into needles when the weather changes. Uriel winces, and shivers.

Across from him Mrs. Stuart looks up from her food. A strange look takes her, and for a moment Uriel looks into the mirror of her eyes at himself. Her deep brown eyes turn themselves into wells and the crinkled skin around her eyes creases further. It’s not quite pity and so he accepts it. But when her lower lip trembles for a moment, a barely visible shudder, the shame inside bubbles from the cracked earth of him and its oily shape curls around his ribs and squeezes.

Mrs. Stuart reaches her hand out to the apron from where it hangs to her right. Then she looks down at the table and blinks more than a few times.

They eat, the scraping of their forks and knives against the ceramic the only sound between them. Between bites he wonders if Mrs. Stuart hates this street more than even he does.

He thinks she does. Though their hate is not the same.

“Where’s your schoolwork?” she asks. She stands and lifts the cover from the pie tray. She removes two pieces, sets them down in front of him.

Then she disappears for a moment. When she gets back, he’ll tell her it’s Friday and he didn’t get much to do anyway. He listens to the shuffle of her steps along the floor and waits.

He picks at the crust of one of the slices. A thin chip crumbles off, and he excavates the damage with his fork. Golden chips flake off and fall, making a small heap. When he’s done, the slices look lopsided and unwhole, broken things.

The house gives a slight hum, and a low buzz emanates from the walls. Dust, cobwebs, and the distinct smell of crayons competes for a moment with the smells of the house.

The radiator in the dining room rattles violently before it settles. It sounds like something small, terrified, and caged is killing itself against the bars of its prison. When Mrs. Stuart returns, the room is warm. He smiles down at his plate. She begins to clear the table, scraping all the leftover bones and bits onto one surface. She points to the foil covered trays and the pie still on the table.

“Now, I’m gonna leave this out here if you want more. So, make sure you leave enough for Oscar.”

“I can help pay for the heat this year,” he says instead. His voice is smooth, and it doesn’t warble. He has practiced saying this in the mirror, correcting the tone to one that sounds most mature. He does not know how much the heat costs but thinks that what he earns from the job he works part time at the bodega two blocks from his high school must be enough that he could afford at least some of it.

Her hand shoots out and raps him across the back of his head. She rests her hands on her waist. It is merely a warning, carefully soft. Still, it registers in his gut, and Uriel bites his lip.

The shame has wrapped itself around his lungs now, tightening with every breath. “You going to pay for part of the rent for the last eight years, too? Huh?”

She shakes her head at him. She starts piling large portions of food onto the one clean plate, muttering under her breath all the while. She looks at Uriel again.

“You know what? I’m going to make Oscar his plate now and just put it in the fridge. Make sure he sees it when he gets in.”

She takes the plate into the kitchen and doesn’t look back. But she’s loud— putting away things with abandon. Metal clatters against metal, ceramic clinks. The cabinets open and shut with a harshness. Even the Temptations can’t drown out the jagged quiet left behind.

An almost silence, like the one when he was seven, locked in the bathroom with Oscar and hiding from their mother who roamed their house with gin and anger and an extension cord.

He wants to tell Mrs. Stuart that he just wants to have a stake, a reason to know that the key in his pocket now will not become just another useless thing. He eats his slice of pie slowly, a careful destruction, carving it into crumbs. He stares up at the wall. The man beside the red van has a smile on his face now like Jesus, all knowing and impossibly kind.

When the noise of cabinets and footsteps in the kitchen quiets down, he sees Mrs. Stuart in the threshold of the two rooms. Her arms are folded against her chest. Behind her, he can see the apron, hanging on its own special rack.

“I’m sorry.” he tries. His eyes flicker back up to the picture. “Don’t start,” she says.

Then Mrs. Stuart follows Uriel’s eyes up to the corner where the crouching man smiles down at them. Her lips make a straight line, and she shakes her head. She swears under her breath for a long while, looking up at the photo. It almost looks like prayer.

Uriel nods, chews on the inside of his lips. He does not correct her anger. He does not tell her that were it not for the man with the smile like Jesus, he and Oscar would still be trapped with their mother and her anger. The shame curls up out of his mouth, up his throat. Left there, one day, it will choke him.

“Can… we stay?” he says, quiet. He does not know why these are the words that come instead of ‘thank you,’ or ‘I love you.’ Mrs. Stuart doesn’t answer him for a long while. She opens her mouth, then shuts it. Her eyes settle on the apron.

“Lord,” she says, shaking her head. This is the answer she always gives, half admonition and scorn, half promise. A promise that he will have a place.

He nods again. He cannot breathe.

Uriel’s tears startle them both. He has not cried in front of her in a long time. His tears are silent things, rivers without sound or end. Tears trace their paths down his face, making the leap to the floor when his chin becomes too full.

Exhaustion fills the home like a gas leak. Their eyes, held open by waiting, flutter to stay open.

They sit in silence, staring up at the photo, waiting until Oscar comes home.

about the author: