Prose

Kiyanna Hill

A Sorta Home

He hasn’t held my hand yet but asks me to come to Maine. He sends photos of lakes, the water photographing still and always holding the sun’s reflection.He describes the salt heavy hair, how each gust scrapes against his skin.He tells me to come in more ways than one. I guess he could be home, but if I’m lost here too, he promises we’ll leave. I compare the distance between us to a rusted magnet, how we live on opposite ends of the same coast and walk down mirrored streets. Our parallel existences where I shower at night and he in the morning. I ask if the soil is strong there if I planted a butterfly bush would it survive. I explain buddleia, its magenta blooms and the honey it leaves in the air. Even if I need to root it close to the ocean, I’ll come back, leaving a trail of swallowtails. He wants it to live, and I guess that includes me as well. Tannins, I’ll feed them to the soil. And I see it too: all that abandoned
pulp and skin staining what nails he hasn’t already bitten off. Blueberries and peat, even what the ocean no longer holds in its mouth.

Kiyanna Hill (she/her) is a Black poet. She is left handed. She prefers black coffee but will have an oat milk latte if she's feeling fancy. Her work can be found in Peach Mag, brave voices magazine, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook A Damned House and Us In It is forthcoming from Variant Literature. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @kiyawnna

Vera Clyne

Taking Flight

There’s a bird called a godwit – a shore bird with a long narrow bill, capable of migrating nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand. When a group of them come together, it’s called a prayer. A group of pelicans is a scoop. Who decided this? Who decided that a group of larks should be called a happiness? It was an old woman. Dame Juliana Berners authored The Book of St Albans in 1496, the first text to set forth lists of collective nouns. Lexicographers have since argued that these collective nouns represented common phrases of the day. But there are others who point out that Dame Juliana’s nouns are highly specific, often quite humorous, and don’t appear in multiple sources or show other evidence of common usage. I think Dame J. just liked words, that she wanted to instill a bit of poetry into the everyday. And that she enjoyed the authority of deciding what a thing should be rightly called. I want the job of naming things. A prayer of godwits is a lovely phrase, but if it were up to me, I would have held the word benediction up to the light and admired the specific bright blue that shone through it, the blue of a warm-water ocean on a summer’s day. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like myself. Since I’ve felt able to answer the pull of the seasons or even just the weather. Except to be annoyed – by the cold, the heat, the wind, the dryness. What’s happening today? How does it complicate my life? Niceness is - manners are – exhausting, and essential. I don’t want to be this temperamental, unhappy woman, so stuck in my unfortunate situation. I want to leap back to feeling something luscious and alive. I want to talk about the way a fern frond unfurls in the early spring. Things that lie in the dark patiently awaiting the right moment, the right season. The infinite invisible rhythms that rock us back into the world. 

I’m not good at figuring out the precise identities of birds. I’m often inattentive to detail, or more accurately, I hone in on one distinctive detail and ignore the rest. Sometimes this works – sometimes that one detail is all that’s needed. But mostly, it’s not enough. It’s also true that I’m not especially ambitious about successful identification. While it’s fun to know a bird definitively, I’m quite happy to enjoy the company of anonymous birds. 

This spring, my time in the garden counts as physical therapy. The small step from the porch is an exercise. I go up and down over and over and when I eventually sit, my hip aches – the muscles arch and seize. A group of neurons is a tingle. A group of muscle is a brute. 

There is a hummingbird nest in the mulberry tree in my front yard. It’s thimble-shaped and looks like it’s built from mud. It sits at the joint of a new branch, a small knot. I didn’t know it was a nest until a hummer zoomed above me and settled in it, only her tiny head with a needle of a beak visible from the ground. The branch hangs over the driveway. I know the hummers have come back when the cats sit on the recycling bin below the branch, tails twitching - watching. They come in May to refurbish their muddy thimble, laying tiny jellybean eggs that never hatch. The fireworks on the Fourth of July scare the birds – I never see them on the nest after that. I stopped putting out hummingbird feeders because the roadrunners sit below them and leap, five feet straight up, plucking hummers out of the air. 

A group of fireworks is a blast. A group of roadrunners is a race. A group of hummingbirds is a charm, a shimmer, a glittering. 

 I injured my hip five years ago. I have spent weeks at the pool, walking back and forth, side to side, to strengthen it. Then I sit the wrong way and pinch a nerve. It takes more weeks to recover. Caitlyn, my physical therapist, is showing me how to work with it. It’s about consistency. Keeping it strong and learning how to sit properly. Or stand. I balance on one leg, like a flamingo or a crane. I imagine all the people in the physical therapy gym assembling, everyone standing on one leg. A flamboyance of flamingos. A dance of cranes. 

I miss the cranes. I used to walk every morning in the city’s open spaces, designated areas of mostly undeveloped dirt paths that dip down near the river or bump up against large swaths of farmland. In the fall and the spring, at the peak of each migration, huge gaggles of Canadian geese and herds of sandhill cranes lift off from the river and set down in the fields, honks and bugle calls bouncing above the whisper of flapping wings. Every evening they reverse their exodus, settling back on the river for the night. To walk amongst them is to walk along an ancient rhythm, to spend time with the feeling of being called to move, being called to fly, of listening and responding to some primal force that has nothing at all to do with changing clocks twice a year. 

I have no idea if the hummingbirds that nest in my yard are Ruby-throated or Broad-tailed. But I love the names. There’s a Lucifer hummingbird. A Calliope, a Cinnamon and a Magnificent. I imagine that whoever discovers a new species gets to name them, and I’m so envious. (An Envy Hummingbird? A Green-Eyed Monster?) But I am wrong. The common names of birds are chosen by the American Ornithologists’ Union, and a committee of that organization occasionally issues proclamations about new or changed names. I’m sure I lack even the most basic qualifications for membership into the American Ornithologists’ Union. But I could seriously get into issuing proclamations about new bird names. I imagine a trumpet is involved. 

Nature is measured in eons, not in lifetimes. An endlessness of epochs. I’m in a time of conservation, a time for the wise use of resources. When I was younger, I was wasteful. It felt good to spend my strength, and of course that is the thing about strength – you have to spend it to keep it. Flex it to maintain it. A replenishment of strength. Now I beg my hip to hold me for just a few moments until I can stretch it, until the pain meds kick in. My hip says No. My hip says Fuck you. My cantankerous hip flips me the bird. A profanity of birds. I sigh. My creaky hip and I gingerly get out of bed, taking our first tentative step. An argument of muscles working more or less in unison. 

The coldest Albuquerque winter I can remember was in 2009. I got up before dawn to walk at the farm. It was right around zero when I headed out on the dirt road, my breath freezing into fog. No lights, no moon. The outline of the road marked by the darker fields on either side – if I stayed in the center, I stayed on the road. I walked to the back field where they let the autumnal hay bales lay in the field – not the small ones a person could grab by the strings, but large squares only a tractor can lift. In the rising dawn I made out the square of bales, each one with a small form atop. Each bale held a sleeping coyote. I walked to the nearest one and stood quietly, waiting for the sun to rise and cast a warming light over the field. I was maybe five feet away as the coyote lifted its head to the sun. The frost on its fur sparkled, it looked at me sleepily and tucked its head back into the warmth of its own body. It was a secret moment, a daily ritual I enjoyed alone. By the time the other early walkers came out, pulled along by dogs or work schedules, the coyotes were gone.

This has been a time of letting go. For five years, I have been inching towards immobility. Letting go of mornings spent working in the garden and evening walks by the river. Over time I’ve been losing strength. I thought things were changing for the better. This surgery was supposed to put an end to these episodes, but things have gotten worse. My pain and I will have to live with each other. I’m told it’s best to stay active. I imagine myself as one of those perpetual motion toys, a lucky cat or a smiling sunflower, constantly bobbing. Puttering.

Puttering is my favorite thing to do. In the garden this morning, I see the leaves of the crocus popping up, the dark blue heads of the hyacinths rising, Lazarus emerging from a winter grave. The ivy, dark green all winter long, has tiny new leaves at the tips. It’s time to uncover the fig trees, time to prune the pomegranate and the apple. These are jobs I used to do with ease that I now must save for a better day. Such jobs are stacking up: there’s a pile of pear and cherry branches to chip, a yard full of weeds to clear, and new beds to dig. My blood is rising like sap, excited to get to work, but my sad hip isn’t able. Just do a little at a time, the cadre of medical people advise. Slow and steady will win this race, but I’m a fan of momentum. I want to leap into action. I want to power through. A small cauldron of crows perches on the power lines behind the house to watch my incremental progress. A group of goals is an impossible list, an aspiration, a mission, a dream. 

It's also about attention. Paying proper heed to the direction of my feet when I walk, the way I twist when I get out of the car. My life is a sudden meditation on body and discomfort and movement and form. Eventually I will need another surgery, and maybe that one will help and maybe it won’t. By “help” I mean restore my hip to its pre-injury state. This is a groundless hope, a baseless dream. This is simultaneously a grief and a lesson. Hope is expensive, and sometimes not worth the cost. 

I’m building raised beds in the front yard for two reasons. First, the roots of the mulberry tree creep into every garden bed and suffocate almost every growing thing. The ivy can survive it, and the garlic chives. I’ve put everything else in pots, and still the mulberry roots sneak in through the drainage holes. Plants suddenly wither and I pull them out to find a pot full of dense yellow fibers – almost no soil left at all. An assassination of roots. 

Caitlyn and I puzzle out the reasons for my resurrected hip pain. Together we review the stretches and the exercises, sorting out which hip needs strength and which one needs stretch, how to bring them back into balance. A symphony of exercises. A concert of effort. We talk about the muscles, the cartilage, the infinite number of strings and ties and strops that hold my hip together. Is the pain sharp or dull? What makes it better? Worse? The more I move my hip, the better it feels. I cruise out of therapy after an hour of focused attention. And then sitting in the car on the ride home, it stiffens again. I almost fall in the driveway when I get out of the car. Because sitting means stiffness. I totter when I stand, my left hip threatening to crater. I need a cane, a prop, an assist – I need to keep moving. 

Nature has little to do with momentum. There’s rhythm and there’s progression. There is growth. And inside of that, everything finds its own speed. Things break down and they build back up, moving forward and back with equal ease. The tides and the seasons have more to say than anything I do in my putterings. I’ve neglected the garden for years, letting plants go to seed. And things have taken their course. I have an accidental garden of rogue arugula and cress. The chard plants are four years old – cut the tops clean at the soil line and bright new leaves will sprout. The artichoke stalks buried in the compost take root, sending up fresh leathery leaves. Nothing is static, and nothing is rushed. 

 Years ago, I rented a house in the North Valley near the river. It’s an older neighborhood, humble and familiar. The street dead-ends at the ditch that runs from the river and carries water for irrigation to the neighborhood yards. The dirt roads along the ditch run for miles – a secret wilderness hidden in the city. A farm nearby has a band of peacocks, an ostentation, that freely roams. Every night, their cries ring through the valley, audible for blocks. They make a kind of a mournful scream, something that pulls from deep in the chest and echoes in the underbelly of loss. At night they roost in the towering cottonwoods at the edge of their farm, gnarled boughs arching over the ditchbank, their large silhouettes outlined in the dusky light. 

 I walked those paths every morning, every night. Always birds, sometimes black bullsnakes, squirrels, or coyote. I kept ducks in the back yard and learned about the predators that lived alongside me, ones I never saw. Great horned owls. Coopers Hawks. Weasels, skunks and bobcats. Every morning brought the possibility of a new massacre, a new threat to protect against. Every incident caused a new addition to coop security. A scourge of predators. A citadel of protections. I can build a coop that no New Mexico predator can outwit. I have birds that have lived in peace for years. 

The spring air beckons and I’m staggering in response, knowing it’s time! It’s time for the digging and the clearing and the pruning and the planting. Is this what a bird feels like when it’s unable to follow the flock on its way south? Some misfortune pulling it off course and grounding it against its will? 

I’ve kept ducks for fifteen years. Mostly Indian Runners, a small breed that carries itself upright. They don’t need much space, they forage slugs voraciously, and lay large pale green eggs. They were perfect for our small garden space, but they were never friendly. No matter how much we cuddled them as babies, they grew into anxious, flighty adults. It’s the nature of the breed. Last year we ordered one each of ten different duck breeds, planning to keep the two or three friendliest so we could finally have some cuddly ducks. Pekins are the big, white ducks that always seem to be smiling. They are popular farmyard breeds, known for their big personalities. Our little Pekin grew so fast she had trouble walking, the bones in her legs not hardening fast enough to hold her weight. The best remedy is swimming – paddling beneath the surface without the burden of the body’s weight. We supplemented her feed with niacin: raw peas, brewer’s yeast, feeder minnows released in the kiddie wading pool. She gobbled everything, swam for hours every day, and soon her legs were much stronger. She gets around just fine. Until today. 

 Every day I let the birds out of their reinforced coop and they have the run of the yard for an hour or two. Atlas the Pekin was standing in the tub, unmoving. (There is an old cast iron tub buried in the bird run. It’s the ducks’ pond. I built a set of concrete bricks inside so the ducks can step easily in and out.) Atlas is perched on the uppermost step, unable to move herself over the lip of the tub. She is not her usual pristine white. She has muddy patches on her wings and rump. She is standing on her right leg, her left leg dangling. 

She lets me pick her up without a fuss, and I can’t see any injury to her foot. I put her in the water, and she paddles listlessly with her right foot, pushing herself around in slow circles. I bring her into the house for a closer inspection. I can’t find anything obviously wrong, but she clearly needs to rest. I make a nest for her in the bathtub with a clean dish of water and fresh spinach. She goes right to the water and snorts. Ducks need deep water. Their nostrils are high on their bill. They need enough water to submerge it and blow water through their sinuses. She gobbles up the spinach and I give her some layer feed, which she also eats. I’m happy to see she’s eating. There’s nothing else to do today. It’s dark. Time for lights out, and a good night’s sleep.

In the morning, her left leg is still tender. I soak her foot and leg in a heavy ceramic dish of warm water and Epsom salts. I spray her foot with antiseptic and bring her back outside. The other birds flock around her, welcoming her back into their gang. A group of ducks is called a paddling or a raft. 

There was a time I saw my body as a tool, something I could put to use, something that would do whatever I wanted it to do. I enjoyed the sensation of strength, the feeling of capability, the trust I had that my body and I could accomplish any task, no matter how daunting. I loved feeling invincible. I fed my body well, exercised, and otherwise took good care. I was doing my part, so I thought. I didn’t see strength as a temporary state, never believed my body could betray me, could break down, could simply age. I trusted that no matter what opposition I faced in the world, I would always have my self beneath me.

Despite my daily ministrations, Atlas could not walk at all in a few days. This was not an injury – the weakness spread to her right leg, then to her wings, and soon she could not even hold up her head. The common name for this is limberneck. The correct term is botulism. Atlas had somehow taken in this toxin, and it was causing her almost complete paralysis. None of the other birds were affected. She opened her mouth to quack, and no sound came out. Her head lolled about uncontrollably. She trembled as if she were cold, despite being nested in deep straw. I moved her to the small pen, the one in which we raised the ducklings. She had no interest in spinach or peas. I kept a small, deep dish of water next to her and went out several times a day to hold up her head and help her drink. She was always eager to drink but would soon lose energy, allowing her head to dangle in the water, nostrils below the surface for long periods of time. Can ducks drown? I wondered. 

Thirty years ago, my college housemates and I took summer canoe trips down the Allegheny River. We often stopped in deep areas to swim lazily about, cooling ourselves from the sun and the sweat of effort. Once in a particularly deep swimming hole, I felt myself fall under the water, like falling under a spell. The light was green and shimmering, so lovely. I knew I could swim back to the surface – my body was capable, strong – but the effort seemed suddenly pointless. The weight of my relaxed limbs was pulling me downward. How easy this is, I marveled. Time was stretching in a strange way, moving slowly in waves and ripples. I’m coming home, I thought.  Kristen was a lifeguard and the only one to recognize my hypnotic reverie. She quickly dove to reach me and pulled me back to the surface. Everyone else seemed startled by the commotion, the splashing, the sudden rise. I was fully aware I was drowning and mesmerized by how easy it was, how peaceful. My life was simple then – there was nothing that made me want to die. There was also nothing in me that seemed interested in fighting this mundane challenge to living. I thought about this as I watched Atlas settle her head in the water dish, how peaceful she looked, how easy it could be. And yet, despite her difficulties, she lifted her head from the water and set it down beside the dish. This made more sense to me than my own easy surrender – the will rising to make a choice, to continue living. 

The only useful point is today. The only useful yardstick is yesterday. Am I making progress, or am I losing ground? Incremental movement, fractions of tasks, momentary fluctuations in pain. The tiniest of measures tell the story of my fate. 

A lame duck is a helpless thing. Ineffectual. Useless. I can relate. I expected Atlas to pass at any moment and when she didn’t, I searched for a vet who would put her down. A vet who treated birds, who had an opening, and who could help us for less than three hundred dollars. I could not find one, and so set about making Atlas as comfortable as possible. Two days later, I heard a quiet quack when I went out in the morning, Atlas was upright, holding up her head. She drank water and ate a few peas. And slowly, she is recovering. She is regaining her movement in reverse order – her neck, her wings, her right leg, and slowly her left. Atlas doesn’t have a physical therapist. She doesn’t have electricity jolting through her leg. She walks with a limp, her right leg thickened and muscular, compensating for the weakness on her left. She swims every day, strengthening her legs and recovering herself. She can get in and out of the tub herself now. She makes forays into the yard along with the others, although she still stumbles, using her wide white wings like crutches. She has no complaints. 

I, however, have complaints. The endless texts, calls, emails – reminders of this appointment, requests for that paperwork make me cranky. A deluge of information. I don’t have time to complete the forms on my phone. I am very busy causing myself severe pain by massaging my hip flexor tendon. I am very busy walking slowly across the pool. I am relishing feeling like an old woman, I am embracing my inner crone. Like water rising and receding, like the gravity of the moon, I feel something calling. Who the hell knows? I don’t recognize myself. 

What does it mean to never again be fully in command of my body and my abilities? I don’t know because I have not yet given up. Unlike that day in the river, I’m not willing to let myself fall below the surface. I’m not being called home. Dust to dust is a poetic myth, I think – we come from water, and will someday, somehow return to it. Such a gentle force, an intuitive persistence, an ability to find power in the path of least resistance. So often not fighting feels like powerlessness to me. Like giving up. But perseverance is not a fight. There is nothing to oppose, no competition to win. I wonder at my unwillingness to fight when I was strong enough to do it, when I had all of my self beneath me. Atlas flaps her strong wings in simulated flight when I carry her through the yard, celebrating her wings’ ability to do what wings are meant to do. I imagine it feels good. The kind of good that is about satisfaction, about the right use of a new morning. An undertaking of mornings. The sly intoxication of hope. The way my troubled muscles make their daily efforts, my anatomy hitting a high note and holding it. An aria of pain. And alongside that pain a new sensation emerging. The good feeling of muscles doing what muscles are meant to do, the pain eclipsed by the simple pleasure of movement. This cranky persistent will and this ridiculous delight in the ability to move – uniting in something remarkably like flight.

Born and raised in Erie, PA, vera clyne now lives and works in Albuquerque, NM. She is an MFA student at the University of New Mexico in Creative Nonfiction. 

Jane Muschenetz

Same Old Story or ‘Nothing to Talk About,’ Fairytale in 5 Acts

I. Opening scene: Grandmother’s House

I want to laugh, but I'm crying. 

Stage directions: Right after the lights go on

Wipe the wet away and help her big, naked body into the warm tub. (She lets me.) Ignore the hate streaming out of her — the shame hiding behind her anger is smoke/steam insubstantial. My (not shaking) hands are “solid granddaughter.”  My hands, not the hands of a stranger or a male relative, bathe her wrinkles smooth. Even if only one of us knows it, this is an act of dignity. Did you notice how “Dignity” has the word “dig” in it?       

Tell my very big eyes: This is the dementia talking—this isn’t her. My ears are “the better not to hear her with.”

Clean and quiet, when she asks about why my dad isn’t here, feed her lies that taste like kindness/ make sure she eats something. (The better to eat who? with?) Better for now, my tears are packed away, ready for travel. Everything’s “justfor now,” isn’t it? 

II. Spotlight on: Mom

There’s a schedule we’ve set up, not mentioning it won’t be forever. “One day at a time, right?” Mom’s worry packs lunches inside rhetorical questions, writes symphonies out of ‘To Do’ lists. They’re separated, my parents. My grandmother, the one who calls me names and digs her spit for poison every time I come to bathe her, is my dad’s mom, not hers. My mom doesn’t have to be here. She comes anyway, over the hill and through the woods, because she loves me, and also because guilt and decency are an integral part of our genetic makeup. Family means something to us, even separated, even broken, even (and maybe especially) when it hurts. 

III.

Dad isn’t her only son. Spotlight on: Uncle D comes by every couple of days, cooking/ cleaning/ cracking jokes… filling the house with maybes. Uncle D never calls me. I call him to coordinate and check-in because Uncle D doesn’t know he’s gotten old. He’s a cracked window in an overstuffed attic. “Cracked, that’s me for sure.” He sings, he plays guitar, he clowns (throwing knives and small axes), none of which pays the bills. For that, he makes money hanging up window blinds. Good with his hands, with tools, he’s lean and wiry like my dad. Unlike him, he never went to college. Unlike him, he’s bendable into any shape. Life doesn’t break him. Uncle D keeps his greying hair long, as oblivious and nostalgic as every other Peter Pan. 

How much of their strength and weakness is in me? 

IV.

Thank God I have a (Spotlight on:) job. It isn’t fancy, no degree needed to be a teaching assistant at The Little Red Preschool. Money’s not great either, but it’s OK. It’s not like I’ve ever dreamed of a grand career, that’s not why I thank God for it. I’m good at it even though I’m not a hugger. I’m not sweet. I don’t coo at toddlers and smother them with attention. I just get them. They are savant-level genius at not being perfect. They are just fine failing at everything, every single day. Their parents are apoplectic. Not all, of course, some have their own problems. But most of the ones springing for a private preschool in Del Mar are not OK with failure and have a pretty narrow definition of the word. I am not good at dealing with the parents. I can barely handle my own and mine didn’t raise me anywhere close to Del Mar. 

V. Final scene: The Wolf Ward (the better to treat you with, My Dear)  

“If you just met a solid man,” Dad’s intensity comes after me as if I’m the one that needs convincing how things really are. “I just want you to be settled, happy.” His hands hold the engineering book against potential theft by the staff at the psych ward. He’s so smart with books, with numbers and math. Smarter than me in so many ways. The things that make such quick sense to him have always been so hard on me. 

I want to cry, but I’m laughing. “You don’t think I want to be happy too, Papa?” Getting into an argument about this is pointless. Fill in every blank fired in the conversational volley we’ve been having half my life. Unmarried and not even close, no retirement plan, who will take care of me?   

“OK,” he sighs. I sigh back. Sometimes, it’s hard to know whose fear is more real.

Stage directions: Right before the curtain falls

Take the book from him gently. (He lets me.) Lay it on the table beside his cot. Ignore the paranoia blowing the house down behind his eyes as his hand darts over mine. My (not shaking) hands are “stable daughter.” Tell the stuck air inside my lungs: This isn’t a forever home. Remember breathing slowly. Breathe in “Stable,” breathe out “Bendable.” Did you notice how “able” ends so many other words?   

“What else is going on with you?” He asks the room. All of us are trapped inside one beast’s belly, or another’s. I know that. 

“Nothing,” I answer, because there’s nothing to talk about, “just the same old story.” 

To Rimma, who is brave and incredible.

Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking Jew, Jane (Yevgenia!) Muschenetz was granted asylum as a refugee to the US at 10 years old. Today, she is a fully-grown MIT nerd, mother, emerging artist and writer. Currently, Jane is working on her first collection of poetry, “All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents,” forthcoming January 2023 from Kelsay Books. Connect with Jane’s work at her website, PalmFrondZoo.com. Jane's go-to writing self pep-talk? -- 'What's the point of NOT writing?' I have learned to ask back. Find her on social media @PalmFondZoo

Hayden Ira May

Silhouettes

Ephraim and I spend the afternoon fishing at the pond we claimed for ourselves over time. Across the old truss bridge, hidden, kept from the wind and ornamented with cedars and shining aster, it is a place he and I know to always find each other. We share a couple of smokes and return to the water everything we catch, a cardinal rule of his. When he walks me home in the evening, the soles of our shoes are heavy with clay.

He and I go uphill through town. The houses gleam with orange light in their rooms and on their porches, but the parish church where my mother attends mass remains dark. Its windows are occupied with figures of saints and martyrs, all of them lithe, obscure, and converging into a storm the higher I look. The church raised funds for a hearing aid for me when I was a boy. I imagined the saints coming at night to deliver my mother the paper check themselves, shutting it tight inside our mailbox with dim, perforated hands. I told her we should use the money to buy a beautiful black dog.

We did not get a dog. I was fitted for a hearing aid I do not wear anymore.

I continue to the street corner, but Ephraim halts at the church steps, slouches, and opens his fly as if to take a piss. He looks at me over his shoulder with a grin too wide for his face. I mutter formless curses as I retrieve him and drag him away by his arm. He crows loud enough for me to hear, and maybe God, too.

When we come beneath the large mulberry tree at the edge of my yard, Ephraim tells me something, but with his shoulders backed against the sky, he is a shadow that I cannot lipread. He signs instead, with hands first bending toward himself, then one falling from his chin, and at last both coming to a low rest, one folded on top of the other as if it was broken or an offering to me: Have a good night.

I nod and sign, Good night, and step up onto the curb, but he grabs my shirt and pulls me back to the street with a sharp jerk. I topple into him and then right myself, not knowing if I want to laugh or headbutt him. Ephraim leans down to me, our faces meet. He puts his lips to mine, anxiously, alignments askew, our noses and chins crashing.

And then he really kisses me.

His breath, flavored with smoke, pours down the front of me, into my shirt, scalds me. I kiss him back and he binds me to his chest in the bend of his arm. We try to find and ride a rhythm, but our bodies alchemize, become like the saints in stained glass, blurring together in the dark as we climb. His tongue licks wordlessly over mine, my hands spin unknowable signs around his head, and I feel his erection between us, heavy in his slacks like a hammer.

The beams of an approaching car untangle us. In its light, Ephraim’s unshaven cheeks and throat are scarlet, about to burn through the collar of his shirt. I retreat to an innocent distance from him, stumbling, hobbled by the heartbeat in my shorts. He shakes his head, a chuckle dissolving his worried look. The car passes. Dusk covers us again.

Ephraim comes to me and assumes the same configuration, bowing, heavy while holding me. I sink into him and feel relief. Rightness. Air after submersion. Reunion of a joint and its limb. “I’m going to hell,” I say. He unfolds himself from me, smiles without a wry twist this time. Same, his hand rocking like a cradle. We kiss again, and as he leaves, he motions, Good night, Thomas, signing my name the way I taught him, close to his chest.

When I first told him my name, I spoke it.

It was at the coffee shop in town, a place with sooty windows and brick floors. I slipped inside to wait out a rainstorm and noticed Ephraim right away: dark untidy hair, severe-looking, hazy from the smoke on his clothes, his bare feet resting on the table in front of him. I approached the store counter and he said something to me that only reached me as vibrations. We questioned each other in a dizzying loop before I finally understood: “Doyouhavealight?” He held up a cigarette.

I blushed. Vermilion, then crimson. He put his feet to the floor and fully turned to me, immense and frightening. I braced myself for injury, invisibility, for him to ridicule me about my voice and deafness, or maybe worse: unsee and forget me.

“Areyoudeaf?” he asked gently, clearly. A question I never hoped for and commonly endured, its answer inviting pity, pain, and endless other interrogations. This time was different, though. A cool-toned mercy in his eyes disarmed me just a little.

I sighed. “Are you always this observant?”

His laughter coiled him into a knot and I laughed with him. When our eyes met again, he asked, “Whatsyourname?”

The day after, I discovered him hunched over the same table in an ocher sweater, hands babbling half-signs in his lap while he read books about sign language. I asked him if he borrowed them from the library. He nodded with his fist and signed with funny, lingering pauses between words: All they had.

Ephraim disappears from view.

I withdraw to the mulberry tree, where consequences for what I have done come to mind. Visits from faceless angels. Plagues and woes. Burning sulfur. Heaven is not as potent at night, though. Somehow not as essential. I taste Ephraim’s breath on my tongue, in my nose, a lemony balm smoothed across my mouth and chin. I muse for a little while what I would surrender for him. The list is long.

A shadow roosting in the front window of my house startles me. My mother. Her gaze leaves me colorless, whitens the mulberries above me. The clamor of different, more material consequences crowds my head while she summons me silently, signlessly. I carry myself to the door and meet her in the sitting room. She resembles the grim virgins in the parish paintings; sunken, somber, her pale hair parted around her face. A lamp behind her chair phantomizes her and casts spears of darkness onto both of us. I stare at her mouth, as much to lipread her as to avoid her eyes.

“Isawyouwithhim,” she says.

No. I pinch the air in my fingers. Sign with me. I have little allowance for demands, but she seems off-center, weakened by some mortal wound beneath her gown.

Expressionless, she signs: I know you understand what you have done. Her hands never touch her face or each other, words bound in emptiness.

I don’t know what you mean. I keep my two fingers in my palm, hold them there to check for a pulse.

Lies, she signs, slashed past her face. Do you have any shame?

I’m going to bed. I turn to escape upstairs.

My mother stomps her foot, gouges the hardwood with her shoe. The house shivers. Teeth clenched, she starts again, aims an accusing motion at the window: That boy —

Stop, my hands crash together. You don’t know him.

“Iknowenough,” she says.

No speech. Please. I scrub an ultimatum into my chest.

She continues, sound spills from her: “Youwillnot — againnotever.”

I can’t understand you.

“Iraisedyoutobe — nothing — youwouldchoose —”

Stop talking. Fury wobbles up my spine in a current, surges in my arms and fists.

“You — tooyoungtoodumb —  toofar — gonegodless —” her lips contort into scribbled shapes. 

Stop. Please. Stop.

Every particle between us vibrates with the her voice: “Areyou — failedyou — howcouldyou — unquestionableunnatural —”

An electrostatic cry makes its jump, flashes up my throat and arcs out from me, white, deafening: “Pick up your hands!” The bolt ripples through her. Her eyes brighten. Words move me before I know them and I reach for her. I want you to understand! Let me help —

My mother rises from her chair and seizes my wrist in one hand and my elbow in the other. Her grip shackles me. Signs, unfinished, fall from my fingers in pieces, clatter to the floor, and roll into the corners of the room, vanishing. Through tears, I read her face. She knows she has cut too much. Severed the last ligaments. She clutches me tighter. “Thomasthomasthomas,” she murmurs, and I see how much she means for it to be my name, but it will never be again. Its wings are clipped whenever it is spoken. Her diamond ring, turned inward, carves a long wound down the length of my arm as I pull free from her.

For a splinter of time, I sink through the floor, into the earth below the house, and then I am in darkness. Displaced. Dethroned.

Purgatory.

Ephraim’s bedroom window comes to me in space. I peer within, see him and me collapsed on the carpet of his room among dirty socks, sodapop cans, malt liquor bottles, and pages of notes, questions, answers, messages, and manifestos written to each other when sign language and lipreading are not enough or too much. We lie drunk and dangerously close under the blue-green haze of the television, as we have done many nights, pretending that the careful touches, grazes, glances of limbs, hands, and feet are accidental, hoping that every next touch will be the one that conjures words. Signs. Wonders.

Paradise.

I relive it and all of its variations in flickers, milliseconds of memory, and they inflame me with each pass. The lure to remain here, to indulge in counterfeits I can never lose, to waste myself adoring a shadow of him, is so much greater than gravity. But I know I have to leave it. A window in the dark is not a way out.

I am alone when I return to the little room in oblivion, every chair empty. On the fireplace mantel sits a framed photograph of my father, gone from us. His only lasting influence is that he named me after the disciple of doubt, the one who denied the resurrection until Christ let him touch the holes in his hands. I have no hope those hands could convince me now, save me, let alone sign with me. The words would run right through and be lost.

My mother materializes in the hall at the telephone table. She raises the black handset to her jaw and splits open the phonebook. Trembling, I watch her and slink toward the stairs. The telephone was never a friend to me before, but under her touch, it is an instrument of misery, ready to send her voice on a wire to invite more pain upon me.

Or worse.

Ephraim.

A revelation propels me through the front door. I dart over the yard, into the street, down the hill, leaving my breath, hope, and ghost beneath the mulberry tree. The telephone poles plot my flight through town as I chase a transmission between them, a call for crucifixion that seethes in the sky above me. I tear past the parish church on its corner and do not stop to see the saints sneering, scattering from their perches to pursue me, wings spread. Vultures.

No time.

I keep running. Cut through gardens of lily of the valley and rose of sharon. Pass two women walking. A man in a car. A boy and his dog. All just negative space, dark matter. On either side of me, the lights of night spill in neon strokes across the road, and I charge through them. They strip me of totality, every yellow ray rendering half of me a shadow at a different angle. Ephraim will receive me in quarters at his doorstep. If I make it.

No fucking time.

Sprinting. Holes burned into my shoes, I collapse. The gravel walkway in front of his house rips the skin from my knees and palms. Gasping, panting, “Ephraim!” I call, unsure of my tongue, and rise.

Apocalypse greets me.

Ephraim’s bedroom lies ransacked, displaced and disassembled around the yard. A temple in ruins. His belongings choke my path to the porch: t-shirts, underwear, socks strewn beneath a catapulted drawer; a guitar, the body bashed in; books, slain, loose pages trampled into the earth. I find his golden knit sweater pooled near the mailbox. I collect and hold it against my ribs.

“Ephraim!” I cry.

The front door peels open like a bitter rind. Ephraim’s father appears, who clutches a sharp and wide leather belt. He is closely followed by Ephraim’s mother, swallowed by a wool blanket, arms tightly crossed in front of her. At the end of the stoop, wrapped in shadow, they become indistinguishable.

I ask, “Where is Ephraim?”

“Heisnthere,” one of them says, I cannot tell which.

“Hewont — hereagain —”

“Please, please, let me explain,” I croak from a cavity beyond my lungs where breath will not reach.

“Yourmother — allthatneededsaid —  done.” Their slick eyes and teeth gleam with light from the street. I step towards them, cowering, as one approaches animals.

“Where did he go?”

“— findhimyourself.”

“Please.” 

His father cracks the belt against the porch post: “— fuckaway — myhouse!”

I leave and their starlike stares pepper me with puncture wounds until I am gone. I wonder if Ephraim’s departure was similar to mine, or if he was steady as he left, a stoic St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. The roads lose their shape in the dark, become serpentine, pulled and lengthened by the wind. I do not wander, though. I am not lost. I go to the girder bridge, which has nearly vanished into night, and I cross it. Through the maples, and then the cedars, our pond is a plate of bruise-colored glass. I crawl into Ephraim’s sweater and hide myself at its edge.

Ephraim heard my name when I spoke it to him.

He did not know my name until I signed it to him.

In midsummer, he took me here to swim with him, and we were both deaf for as long as we were submerged. The water splashed green onto the clay bank that met our hands and knees when we climbed out, and then he showed me his palm. A fish hook was curled into it deeply. One of mine, discarded from a bluegill I caught the day before. Ephraim reclined against a dry slant of stone and laid his hand in my lap. His nearness and heat melted me, the smell of him, moss, frankincense, drowned me. I pulled the hook loose after a few twists and he never winced, just watched me patiently as he bled, the noon sun coloring his hairy belly and chest amber.

He was more deserving of worship than any other martyr.

Withdrawing his hand from mine, he signed with a grin, Nice catch, fisherman.

Sorry, I motioned reflexively. How is it feeling?

Better, his smile unmoved by his good palm swiped across his chin.

Your signing is improving, I offered.

Agreed. My signing is good and your fishing is not good.

An easy laugh became words: “Fuck you.” I shook my head and signed, You have a lot to learn.

“Okayokay —” Ephraim rose into a sitting pose, his legs and feet folded between us, his shoulders rolling as he signed, Teach me something. The corners of his mouth contemplated another grin.

What do you want to know? My signs were small, held close to me so I could keep myself from touching him, resist spilling into his lap. 

How do you sign your name? he asked, his hands cupping the first sign and breaking it like bread. Name signs are sacred, sometimes secret, given to deaf people from deaf people. Mine had been given by my friends Shell, Bev, and Frances from school, and I had given them theirs. The signs became truer names to us than the ones uttered into air.

I only ever shared my name sign with people I loved.

I signed it once for Ephraim, a heartbeat glowing on my palms, and let it pass from me to him like slow light. He gathered it to himself, mirrored it devoutly near his collarbone. I nodded, breathless, and he signed it again, and as he turned it in his hands, it turned something else in him, and in me. A key spun right, a latch released from its strike.

I wander toward sleep, waiting for him, and nightmares come instead. Ephraim appears to me in semidarkness, the only thing made of any color. He kisses me beneath the mulberry tree and signs, Why are you crying? Kisses me again and signs, Who are you looking for? with his thumb on his chin, forefinger like a hook. We are not alone. The saints are a hundred silhouettes with lightning-white eyes, circling us, gathering in the air and in the windows of my house with my mother, all of them anxious to cut us into pieces with their belts and diamonds.

I startle into a green gloom, everything undefined, the trees and clouds and stones still emerging from their own dreams. I uncrumple myself carefully from the hollows my shoulders and hips left in the earth. Standing, then straightening, my bones whimper into place. I go to the path, step into and follow Ephraim’s old footprints with the ease of instinct, and amble up through the cedars, led by something similar to faith.

The steel beams of the bridge seem more precious to me than before, more tenuous, like the slow spin of the sky toward morning could be enough to break them. I plant myself where the bridge’s wooden deck meets the dirt road. What is there to return to across the way? Houses, coffee and bottle shops, a parish church — places too small and lightless to keep me. So I stay and wait. I wait while the dark slinks back to shelter, while robins and waxwings come and go on the cool air, and dew sinks into my shoes.

I wait and wait for him to come.

And he does.

Ephraim takes shape on the far side of the bridge, dim and swaying, breath pouring from him like fog. He staggers to a halt and steadies himself on one of the low and leaning beams. “Hey,” I say to him, but the distance swallows my voice, and he remains at the end of all things, not hearing me.

I laugh and call louder. “Hey!”

He jolts as if waking, sees me, and begins to cross. A howl from him reaches me first and it rocks me, levels the hills, breaks every window, deafens God and all of heaven. His run broadens into leaps, feet glancing the bridge in swift strokes, and he approaches as a warm shadow, one becoming more and more real.

Hayden Ira May grew up deaf and gay in the middle of nowhere. He studied Literature and Disability Studies at Purdue University, works as a teacher, and lives with his scientist husband in Indiana. Find him at haydeniramay.com or on Instagram/Twitter: @haydeniramay

Rachel Mann

The Things We Grew

The neighbor first appeared during one of Z.’s long afternoon naps, days or maybe weeks after our arrival. Time was melty and elastic, stopping and starting with the sudden departure of all routine, all commutes, all comings and goings, and then with our abrupt move. Z. had taken to sleeping from lunch until four or five, at which time he would rise and cook dinner. His breathing was still labored after an early bout of what we assumed was the virus. He’d been sick just when the city was shutting down, when the newscasters were leaving their studios, when you couldn't get a test unless you were already dying in the hospital. On his worst night, I wanted to take him in, but he refused. He said he feared he’d never see me again. But he didn’t die. I am the undead, he joked, without a laugh.

It was a terrible time, and yet we kept telling ourselves we were making the most of it, escaping to our own private acres before we caught our death. We didn’t die, that was the thing. We were fortunate to have savings to buy the house, and the instincts to do so early, before everyone in the city had the same idea. The day we drove over the bridge in a rented car to view the property, the price of gas was the lowest it had been in fifteen years, and the highways were as wide open as the country roads two hours north. People were still huddled inside their apartments, turning up their televisions to drown out the sound of the ambulance sirens. But we had braved an exit, and our reward was a prefab cape on two acres, and the fresh air all around it. A fairy tale house. 

We made a one-way trip with everything we thought we’d need for country life: frying pans, sweatpants, spices, baseball caps, prescription medications. We didn’t have to pack onesies or tiny rain boots or stuffed dogs or special blankets with well-worn corners, all the things our neighbors with children stuffed into their hatchbacks. We didn’t have to worry about school closures or playdates. Everything happens for a reason, the careless say to the grieving. Maybe they were right. We had hardly any roots at all, so it was easy to pull up and leave.

*

The neighbor stood several long branch-lengths away from me in the gravel driveway beside our new house. That the house was now ours was one of many strange things that spring. Being addressed by this new person, someone other than Z., was strange, too. Dangerous, even. I tamped down my fear. I’d been shocked by the way rudeness had taken hold in the city, how neighbors would cross the street to keep distance; how small talk had disappeared overnight. Surely, we would need each other to get through whatever this was. The pause, some called it.

Hello, I said. I smiled, and he could see my smile. I was maskless, having no need in this house on these acres under this sky.

The neighbor pointed with his long, tanned arm at his own house past the trees and down the road, and then he told me all he knew about the family we’d bought the house from. How they’d up and gone to Canada before the border closed. He said the property could use some love. 

Then he offered me a tree.

I’m sorry, did you say a tree? 

You know what they say. The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. But the second-best time is today.

He said he owned a nursery. Not a child nursery. A tree nursery. So, this was his offering; a tree. In place of brownies.

I would love a tree, I said. We. We would love a tree.

*

Our land had been all but cleared, which was why we could see forever out the back windows. There was one tree in the front by the road, a giant evergreen standing watch. And a weeping willow in the back by the stream. But otherwise, it was all wild grass, thick with creeping thyme, and other weeds I couldn’t name. We didn’t notice or care that the landscaping was wild and neglected. We didn’t realize how tree-poor the acres were, having long ago been denuded for farmland, before its division into parcels. We could not see the hidden garden beds, full of verdant grasses free-growing all around the property. The wild grasses grew behind the main house, and on the perimeter of the sole outbuilding, a former garage that I took as my studio, a place where I could paint and store my easels and canvases. 

All Z. cared about was the oxygen. He sat on the wooden deck behind the house with his inhaler rotating between his pocket and his lips, reinhabiting the asthmatic child he had once been. He sucked in the mountain air, believing in its healing properties, perhaps because of all the Russian novels he’d read in college, and even had taken to spending his nights out there, in a sleeping bag laid over a tarp; no tent. Nothing between him and the sky and the air. 

All I cared about was the quiet. A place to paint without the constant reminder of all we had lost, of all that I would likely never have. I didn’t know that I’d be sucked into the earth and sky and green grass, that I’d become entangled in the land. That while I used to paint people and interiors, now my subjects would be solely leaves and branches and flowers, a newfound naturalist.

The weather got warm enough to leave the studio doors open, and that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps the wild grasses were weeds. I didn’t know a weed from a plant, so I left anything that had white fractal designs or purple flowers on it, and I pulled up the giant vines that were growing from under the house and up the sides of the outer walls. Then I made a border with rocks, hauled with much effort from the creek bed, around the newly delineated growing zone. I sat down and sketched the garden I’d made with my own hands, using colored pencils to conserve paint. 

Z. 's outside nights were not conducive to deep sleep, hence his long afternoon naps. Once a week we picked up our curbside grocery box at the local co-op. We never met the people inside the co-op, but we acknowledged that someone else was working for us to eat. We talked about growing vegetables, lowering ourselves to our knees and returning to knowledge of the land, knowledge that must be inside us somewhere, embedded in our genes from our agricultural ancestors. But we didn’t know how to begin. We didn’t know the first thing about how to live off of dirt and sun and rain. Z. was satisfied to lie on the ground, to breath in the air. He didn’t have energy for more than cooking one simple meal a day, usually pasta or rice with a sauteed vegetable on top. We ate browned onions and canned tomatoes and an occasional squash. Z.’s weakness worried me but not him. He’d read it can take over a year to recover. 

*

The neighbor asked what kind of tree I would like. I did not know the names of many trees. I knew that fruit trees gave fruit. 

A pear tree, maybe? I said.

The next day, the neighbor returned with a tree. He backed his truck up onto our lawn. He told me it should go here, in this sunny spot in the back. He planted it while I watched, and Z. slept. The neighbor had broad shoulders, skin like wet sand, and hair like bark. His eyes were leaves in winter; his teeth were the moon. He wiped the sweat off the back of his hand as he shoveled mulch around the tree. 

That will do it, he said. She’ll bear fruit one day, she will.

I handed him a cup of water, which I had boiled myself. We weren’t sure about the well. 

Will you teach me how to grow vegetables? I asked.

He looked at me sideways. What kind?

I don’t know. Tomatoes? Cucumbers? Carrots? I imagined painting the salad grown from my own sweat. And then I imagined biting into it. I was hungry for something more. Potatoes? Beets? 

You can grow whatever you want, but you should start now. He looked at the sky when he said this, and I wondered if he meant the season, or the time of day. It was high noon, early June. 

He showed me where the former owners kept their gardens, now thick with wild grasses six feet high. I’ll come tomorrow and help you clear them, he said. We’ll get you started.

*

I told Z. about the neighbor, and I showed him the tree, and he looked at me like I’d imagined it all. 

You’re missing the days, I told him.

We’re getting the full experience, Z. said. You get the days; I get the nights. Maybe I really am a vampire, he said. He laughed until he started coughing.

He was an insomniac back in his student days, and coupled with his Eastern European heritage, he liked to pass himself off as close relative to a legend. It stopped being funny around the second year of our battle with infertility. We couldn’t make jokes about vampires anymore during sex, because our sex life was all disappointment. You could say we’d sucked the life out of it. 

The pause meant we were done with all that. He didn’t touch me anymore, and I didn’t ask him to. There were so many things about the before times that we had let go of, discarded like weeds. 

But alone in the bedroom at night, I had no distraction from my hunger, nor from my illusions of all that might grow on this land. 

The neighbor came back just as he said he would. He showed me how to clear the wild green stalks from the planting beds. Always be gentle with the earth, he said. Be mindful of all that’s living inside. He worked beside me. He named the birds and the clouds. I felt like a child immersed in a new language. I didn’t understand everything, but I knew one day, I would. I dug and turned and tilled, until my arms were covered to the elbows with sweet fertile soil, until I needed to lay my weary back down in the grass, nose to the sky, like Z. in the night. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw the neighbor’s face above me, blocking out the sun.  

By August we had squash and onions and garlic and beets and tomatoes. Z.’s vigils kept the night visitors away. In the evenings he awoke and cooked abundant simmering feasts with the flavors and nutrients of our own land. We found jars in the basement and boiled them clean to put up pickles. We agreed the garden was a wonder, as miraculous as the house, the sky, and our every breath. 

One night in autumn, Z. appeared in my room, ghostly in a white t-shirt. Is this a pause? he said. Or is this it? 

Each day is a gift, I said. I raised my arm to touch the softness of his pale skin, but he stood by the doorway, out of reach. 

I may not be here when the world restarts, he said. Keep planting, keep growing. Whatever you need, you will have to make it. 

Come here, I said, pleading. 

Not me, he said, retreating.

The neighbor came the next day to help with the sowing and the harvesting and the weeding. We rested after, by the creek. He lay down beside me, his arm touching mine, transmitting his crackling hot energy into me. I turned to him, this man with a voice like the calm, burbling stream. I placed my mouth on his, to taste the salt on his lips. I had never done this before, not since Z. But then, I had never dug in the dirt before and I had never planted a garden before. There was still yet time to grow.

His breath came into me as we shared the efforts of the day, the successes of the land. If you care for the land, it will provide, he said. He wrapped his branches around me, and I felt my roots descend. 

Such a small piece of land. Just two acres. Just three trees: two that preceded us and one new. Just three people: two new and one that preceded us. Two awake in the daytime, entangled by the stream, our limbs and breath rising and falling; one asleep in the house, awaiting nightfall. 

I painted the pear tree. I painted the garden, with its rows of shoots. I painted Z. lying asleep on the ground, his face lit by the moon. I did not paint the neighbor. 

In the fall the neighbor stopped coming. The houses in the village and the hills were all occupied now by city refugees like us who needed trees. The neighbor had a nursery full of trees that needed planting, more work than he could do in the early mornings. He could come in the evening, but as long as he was breathing, my nights belonged to Z. 

Sometimes Z. struggled to catch a full breath, and I was frightened. The medicine for his inhalers was out of stock at the co-op and the drugstore. At the nearest hospital, we heard there were lines in the parking lot. We made potions of boiled flowers, and he breathed in the steam. He said it helped. He said all he needed was the night air. We didn’t know then about the long-term damage that could happen to the lungs, especially in a person with a pre-existing condition. Should we have gone back to the city? I’ll never stop wondering.

I found Z. in the morning, lying beside the pear tree. It wasn’t his usual spot, and it wasn’t his usual position. Everything about him looked wrong.

*

The pears are ready, my girl says. She has long hair the color of bark, knobby knees covered in earth. I will collect some and make a tart, she says. 

She is magic, a seed sown from sunshine and soil and autumn rains. She makes magic in the garden, like the neighbor. She makes magic in the kitchen, like Z. The girl has only ever known the earth and the miles of sky and the flowing stream. She’s never known the city, not even for one day. For her, the virus is a paragraph in a history book. For her, this life on the land was never a pause, but a beginning. She sinks her teeth into a golden pear and smiles. Perfect.

Z. lies in the yard, still. Beneath the earth and his beloved sky, beside the willow tree and the stream. I visit him sometimes; I tell him about the land, and how I’ve grown to love the weeds. The yarrow and goldenrod, the milk thistles and lambs quarters, the Queen Anne’s lace. I recite these names like an incantation, to bless Z. and these acres and the life I began here when his was already in decline. A life that lives on in the girl and the cycle of our garden, in every flowering plant that rises each spring from the hard earth. 

Z. was two years gone when our pear tree blossomed in full. Two years during which we almost lost the garden to the wild creatures that crept in at night, opportunists in the absence of the night watchman. But the pear tree kept growing, its branches stretching, trunk widening, white flowers a springtime gift. I rose from my grief, awakened by floral blossoms on the wind. 

The tree had grown so tall, it could not be contained by a canvas. So I painted the pear tree rising from floor to ceiling of the studio; I surrounded myself with its embrace. I painted the neighbor and myself by the tree; though by then he couldn’t rightly be called the neighbor. A. was filled with awe at the beauty of both the tree and the girl.

I tended the garden as A. had shown me all those years before. The girl worked at my side, our sweat dripping off our elbows, enriching the soil with our energy, our memories, and our determination to continue on. We pulled the wild grasses, the reminder that green things find a way to keep growing. 

Rachel Mann's debut novel On Blackberry Hill won the National Jewish Book Award for YA. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was awarded the Grace Paley Fellowship in fiction. She lives in New York City. Find her online: www.rachelmannwriter.com

Alison Liao-Hendrickson

How to be the best version of yourself (without help from anyone whatsoever)

step i 

Sometimes, you remember you are human. Today isn’t that day.

A man has just asked you what your ethnicity is and, having heard you speak, apologizes for calling you ma’am just before. 

It was a woman ghosting you after you offhandedly mentioned you were taking hormones. You thought she would have been able to tell you were–

It was a day you came home from work, opened a beer on the couch, and felt a tiredness more akin to heaviness. Felt a loneliness more akin to desolation. 

You stand atop the bridge on Georgia Street, half-admiring the century old stone railings. They mark the transition between Up Here and Down There. From Up Here, you can look at the sleepy liquor stores and way-too-wide residential streets and flickering lights of some-bodies enjoying their times alone. You can see the myriad of ways people get from Here to There, electricity marking their existences, and understand that you too, in your own smudgy little way, contribute to this setting. You don’t know how, but, intellectually, you know you do. You breathe in. You exhale, in staggered breaths. Tears. You wish you could breathe the way a city does.

You feel like you are going to die in this moment. 

step ii 

The truth: there is a surprisingly hollowness to the idea of your own death.

The truth: You don’t think of it as a choice. You don’t have a cool, fatalistic embrace of death. You don’t have the euphoric high of making that final plan. You see it (“it” carrying a greater load than Atlas ever did) like a possibility that will strike out of the blue. Like a car blowing a tire on the highway. Like a rip along the inseam of your pants. A minor embarrassment caused not by malice but by an inherent weakness worn thin.

You feel as if this is a life that no one wanted for you. When you were five, your parents, your school, your church, your friends, your television set, your brothers, your toys—they knew who you were. They could read your future like the lines on your palm. They could read your future, yet you couldn’t believe it would ever come. The future being some point where you would feel a certain way, feel at home and, after some careful rebellion within the confines of a parking lot, adjust well to community. Be the best future self you can envision.

You became obsessed with immolation. This was the way to deal with it. It being the–

You wanted to set alight certain parts of your brain, just so they might dance a little bit before they wither away. You end up having to be content with trapped rats, doused in gasoline. 

What usually pushes you back from the edge is the realization that you don’t disappear when you die.

There’s your body, minus a couple of pounds, but mostly still there. A few kilobytes of tweets. One megabyte of half-confident selfies on Instagram, plus however much storage a couple dozen “likes” takes up.

Probably not enough to worry about.

There’ll be a roommate paying a whole share of rent. A refrigerator filled with ingredients for lentil Bolognese. Hair stuck in the drain. Shifts now open for the close-out on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at Subterranean Coffee. A letter-poem written to an ex-girlfriend–really, the one ex-girlfriend. Assuming she held onto it. 

Maybe don’t assume she held onto it. 

A half-written draft of a unionization proposal, lurking on your Drive account.

A book, recommended by your one other trans friend, set to arrive next week on your doorstep. She warned that it was emotional, about coming out in the 80s. Avoid it if you’re going through something, she said. 

Was she asking if you were okay? Does she know? How could she know the place you’re in? Why does she need to know, why does she care? 

Love can’t be quantified, so it might as well not exist. But those other things do, and you can imagine them for now.

step iii 

You don’t actually die that one time. Congratulations. 

You try to move past that whole bit. The destructive rumination. 

You try to forget all the layers that separate you from everyone else. The layers of your identity are markers of your ego. You are everyone else, remember. You had a friend that interrupted your commentary on queer culture by saying it isn’t fair to generalize about people because people are unique, that when you talk about things like “queer time” and how queer people view the stages of their lives from a different timeline that cis-het people, he notes that you can never really be accurate in your own perceptions. 

And he’s right, isn’t he? You were born a certain way, and once you have recognized this part of yourself, that’s it. There’s nothing bigger than that. Pain isn’t something you can draw anything from. It just sucks. And now you’re going to move past that. 

Alexa, play “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga.  

In due time, you will look beautiful. You will feel beautiful. You look beautiful now, yes, but you will also look beautiful-er. 

In the future.

In the meantime, just be yourself. Just be the best version you can be. Be a part of something. Do some yoga. Get some exercise. Clear up your mind. 

step iv 

You didn’t have the words for it, back then, so the pain didn’t seem to exist. And because you didn’t have the words for it, the pain was incredibly real. And you are alive now, fifteen years later, and no one can figure who you are. They can’t understand but at least they know. They know from the size of your nose, the thickness of your calves, the hair on your knuckles.

Your voice. 

Not that it needs extra attention. 

It’s a transition from feeling invisible to being watched. Watch yourself in the mirror with wide eyes, day by day, waiting for yourself to be unrecognizable. Eyes lock onto your height, gait, hand movements. You go from being average to a quirk of genetics and psychology. Being male requires disregard. Being female requires care. Being a trans woman requires—

Well, you’re a woman now. No need to take labels seriously. Take notes from the others around you.

Being a woman requires a certain amount of vanity, a desire to find yourself valuable through your looks and soft skin and an early 2000s boy band gender ambiguity. You wonder if obsessing in the mirror is the only feminine performance you can master.

Just look at yourself and see yourself, none of the emotional implications of your body. Center the mind, and the body will fall in place.

step v

You become good at looking in the mirror, meaning you overdo it to an unhealthy level.

You believe that if you keep looking, you will see the moment the man leaves. He will leave and he will die and you will poke him with a stick and he’ll do a little limp, fish-out-of-water spasm and you’ll know that he has expired. He’ll decompose and bubble and bloat and become eaten by worms. Perhaps the brain worms.

You’ve kept your eye on him for so many months, years, and slowly you see the light empty from his eyes—a cliché, but nothing else feels quite as satisfying as a cliché applying to you. His attention span drops. He stops responding to his name. He grunts at sporadic moments, at times when it is inappropriate. A deep, bellowing belly laugh at a joke that catches you off guard; a slip of the larynx when you’re dehydrated and tired. No one seems to notice.

He becomes gaunt and sickly and wasting. Like with most deaths, you can’t help but become fascinated.

You expect him to know when his time is done. It was only proper that he left when he had this realization, because both he and you grew up learning social decorum.

You savor the day when, years in the future when you’re in love with someone, raising children in some queer-ass communal parenting cooperative, you are suddenly reminded of this man, but it doesn’t hurt you to remember.

Regrettably, he dies imperceptibly.

You had not planned for this.

You believed him to be in perpetual sickness, after a certain point. Like an abandoned warehouse with armed guards. Like a dying empire. You only notice his death after Kinsey told you about her brother.

She told you how, as a child, she dropped her brother as a newborn. Complete accident. Unresponsive, limp as soon as he hit the floor. Breathing, yes; awake, no. Days pass. Parents refused to pull the plug. He was their son. They’re the Chinese parents who really care about this stuff, Kinsey emphasized. They had already made plans for his one year birthday at the Hotel del Coronado. 

Months go by. Years. He grows but breathes in the same, babyish snort. He still eats mashed peas. 

Kinsey says that on her birthday, she receives two cards–one from her parents, and one from her brother. She doesn’t know how to tell them to stop. 

On the bus ride from her place, you lay your head upon the window the whole ride. The vibrations make you sick, but you don’t really care. 

You get home. In the haste of taking off your shoes, you rip an eyelet out of your Docs. You run into the bathroom, hitting the doorknob on the way in. Minutes, hours, you spend looking at him in the mirror. He is like a wax figure, rigid and lifelike, ready to come into existence if some mystical curse fell upon you. Or if you spent too much time in the New York Natural History Museum. Either one. You move your head, as if the different shadows upon your face will make him look more cowardly.

It’s still in your bathroom. You run the sink, you run the shower. You play music from your phone.

You feel your face and sink your nails into your skin. You feel like you can scoop out the meat from your cheeks like a boiled fish. 

step vi

You tell your little gay friends about The Man.

You don’t talk about Kinsey’s brother. You don’t talk about that last bit of self-harm.

You say that finally the man is dead, that we need to sound the church bells. They all smile, relieved that they have one of the happy transes. One of them asks, “Why ring the bells like we’re in mourning? Fuck him.” You and everyone else laughs and nods in agreement. “Fuck him.” 

You excuse yourself and go into the bathroom. The walls are covered in mirrors, bouncing your image back and forth until you are greenish-blue fog. You can’t tell how many reflections deep you go. 

step vii

You just need to make people understand. It’s on you to make yourself feel better.  Tell them about the gouging. Tell them about the pain. Share pain. You are a novel that needs to get out of your own head.  

But there is no story, you realize, you think.

It just happens.

It’s just moments.

step 0xc0000091 STATUS_FLOAT_OVERFLOW

Here’s the thing. 

Here’s the secret. 

No one is beautiful.

No one feels good or perfect about themselves. Everyone is compelled to live outside of themselves, to give themselves away to something that they hope is more beautiful. Cut off the pieces of themselves to sacrifice at some altar, any altar. If you cut yourself into small enough pieces, you will become whole again. Dematerialize, rematerialize. 

Beauty is finite. You, on the other hand, do not have a beginning or an end. You blinked into existence one uncertain day and you persist, eternally, to flicker in and out of people’s minds. You are a trick candle with an infinite wick. You are a perennial snowdrift, 25,000 feet above the sea, clinging to the body of some dead mountaineer. 

You are not material. You are names and visions. Your existence is a series of identifications of body parts that do or do not exist. You don’t exist, not really, only so far as you’ve told yourself. Your body is one that cannot be read. Your consciousness is hewn between a thousand different axemen, all claiming the right to whittle you into shape. 

It’s so, so tiring, Alison. And you don’t seem to get it. 

There is no future for you here; Here being the space where you seem to hover more than you walk. Here being your hometown and the twenty-three years of friends and family and love that you are told and told and told are the roots to your being and yet. Here being the sculpture garden in the courtyard of a corporate campus, filled with the twisted grace of post-industrial capital, representing the fact you could be anything and yet

Here being the place where you are normal and sane and yet you 👏 are 👏 a 👏 woman  yet yet yet in a chorus of women you are the whale who sings a song too low for others to hear and so and so you will never feel sane and you will never let a thing slip through the grates of your jaw because it is better to be dysfunctional and hitting the bottle and functioning without form than to be another body waiting to fall off a bridge

Here is the kerning between you. Look at it. 

Here being the mind who is only beautiful in the third person (yet yet yet) Here being the place you can feel the decay like a humid summer day like a soundboard with sparks flying between the wires like plunging your fist and your arm into a clogged garbage disposal and in the midst of finger fucking this pile of food scrap and organic decay and feeling the sound it makes, you think about a certain bog body, the Tollund Man, and his last meal, a bowl of porridge. 

While there is no future for you Here, There will be the place you will never find, not because you forgot the address or forgot how to drive, but because the door outside swings inward and you bust the inside of your lip with the force of your own way. 

Maybe the things you keep forgetting are the things you never actually had. 

You once saw yourself as not like the other boys. Today, you see yourself as not like the other girls. 

What, then, Alison, is there yet to see?

step 0– Scrap the how to and just fucking listen to yourself for a bit

i don’t like to talk about the days where i feel human. i feel like a forgery when i do. 

Isn’t it funny how we don’t talk about the days we are human? The days where we feel the impossibility of ourselves slip away? When we tell people about certain undefined happinesses, we always feel like we don’t have a point. 

Happiness feels so meaningless, so unexplorable.

i sat on the grass one day, overlooking the dogs and LARPers at the park, and felt the need to climb up the trees, onto the thickest branch, and, i don’t know, that was it. That’s all there was to that feeling.

Another experience: walking down the sidewalk, hearing a rhythmic, confident clunk-clunk of boots hitting concrete, and realizing i was the one who was making them.

Another experience: Sitting in a McDonalds with décor stuck from the 90s, at an hour only the bats are awake for, across the table from a woman I just met yet feel intense comfort around. Whose voice is like mine. Whose face glows like mine. For as much time as we haven’t existed, or merely existed as tangly enigmas, we were here, sweating puddles into our seats in McDonalds. We talk and drink and eat and laugh and admire each other in this honest, uncomplicated way. She walks me home and we spot an owl, perching atop a great tall pine tree, and wonder if it’s possible that the owl can see us better than we can see each other. She leads me to the door, and before I go inside, she asks for a hug goodnight. Her parting embrace is strong in a needing way, as if she feared squeezing any weaker would kill me.

For most, the decay is to come, always arriving but never here. For me,

for us

our bodies have already decomposed. Our language is a dead language, our skeletons unearthed from sarcophagi after 5,000 years of restless slumber. We are held together by needles and glass vials and effusive texts and knowing looks from across the bar. We fit together like puzzle pieces. 

So i ask this of you, my dear lover: hold my hand and show me out of the catacombs. 

Alison Liao-Hendrickson is a writer based in Brooklyn, currently working on re-integrating herself into art. You can find unserious posting on Twitter @noise_lesbian and on Instagram @2legit2befit

E. Deshpande 

The Education of Patrick Sanford

Patrick finds the website for her. That’s the kind of boyfriend he is. When his girlfriend has a problem, he finds a solution. 

He shows it to her one night after dinner. He sits at the kitchen table while she dries dishes (he cooked, so it’s fair). They’re at her place. They almost always are, because he lives in a studio that’s more of a walk-in closet with plumbing, even though he makes twice what she does. He’s saving for the future, he explains whenever she tries to hint that he could upgrade. He’s practical like that. Few guys are who make six figures in their mid-twenties, but that’s Patrick. He’s different. 

She looks over his shoulder at the website. She doesn’t tell him that she’s seen it before. It comes up in recommended ads for people who follow feminist influencers and read a lot of articles on Bustle. The idea is that it’s a comprehensive guide by women, for women, dedicated to the female orgasm. The Facebook ads feature an endorsement from a thin, white actress who starred in blockbusters and a Fendi campaign, and now focuses on her career as an ambassador for the UN. 

Doesn’t it look great? Patrick says. He scrolls through the About page. It’s real women, giving tips, he says. They’ve volunteered to do this. 

She nods. It’s strange to see the website: photos of the founders, contributor bios, and a subscription page that encourages patrons to support female entrepreneurs. She wonders how Patrick found it. She couldn’t count how many times she’s seen the ad, and she never thought to click. She assumed it was a scam. How could there be tutorials for orgasms? They can’t happen on command. She would know.

It’s not like she’s never had an orgasm. She’s had six. All six happened her last semester of college, when she decided enough was enough: her astonishingly underwhelming sex with college guys would not define the limits of her pleasure. She got good at it, and then she had finals and she moved to her first place in New York. She dated a guy who was okay in bed, and then had a series of one-night stands. She never stayed long enough to find out how good they were. 

Between each of these men, she should have kept up on her own. There’s a list of reasons, increased over the years, why she didn’t: stress from job applications, ever-present roommates, exhaustion from her commute, stress from work, stress from her cringey hookups, despair over the same, self-pity. She’ll stop there. The reasons get worse the longer she thinks about them.

Until Patrick. He’s good at sex. She knows this because she enjoys how he feels inside her. She just doesn’t come. 

When he goes down on her, she feels a terrible melancholy that makes her feel like a teenager, like these are her best years and she isn’t living them to the fullest. She’s aroused but distracted: by the email that her boss sent after lunch, by the balance on her credit card—all her excuses for not getting off before she met him. Then she thinks about how lucky she is to date a guy who turns her on, and how she should concentrate on that and not on how long it’s been since she pulled the hair from the drain in her shower. She gets more nervous about how she’s focused on the wrong things, and then there’s no hope. 

It’s okay, she says to him. It’s okay, come up. I’m wet enough.

She prefers when he’s inside her. Even though it never gives her an orgasm, she’s so overwhelmed by how close they are that her mind doesn’t wander. 

She’s tried to tell him that their sex routine is fine as it is. Fine, Patrick says, is not good enough. He wants sex to feel as good for her as it does for him, which means she has to come spectacularly, every time. 

He even pays for their subscription to the website. He keys in his credit card right there, at her kitchen table. He wants her to have this, so they can orgasm together. She doesn’t think it will work, but she doesn’t want to offend him. 

The website is not what she pictured. The branding on its Facebook ads brought to mind a women’s magazine advice column, cheesy suggestions designed to appeal to as many people as possible. Only when you learn to love yourself can you truly let yourself be loved by others. That schtick. 

Instead, Patrick’s subscription unlocks a trove of videos to guide viewers on everything from foreplay in the bath to the best positions for ribbed condoms. She thinks they might be in over their heads. Her kinkiest phase was a dalliance in teacher fantasy celebrity fanfiction in high school. (Adulthood brings a more acute awareness of illegal age differences and bad grammar, and those stories can’t do it for her anymore. She has, in her most desperate moments, tried.)

Patrick scrolls too quickly for her to read all the titles of the videos. She wishes he would slow down—she worries that the further he goes, the more intense the tutorials will be. A few seconds later, he holds the cursor over a video titled The Orgasm in Missionary. She exhales. This sounds doable. 

She feels a little strange sitting at her kitchen table as a middle-aged woman on a yoga mat describes missionary in detail. Should she turn off the lights for a better atmosphere? The woman in the video lies on her back and spreads her legs open. Now, you’ll want to angle your knees like this. 

She starts to laugh, and glances over at Patrick. He stares at the screen with no humor in his eyes. Her giggle fades. She needs to be serious, too. 

When the video ends, Patrick picks up her laptop. He tells her that her couch isn’t big enough for missionary, so they’ll have sex in her room. 

Does he have an issue with her couch? The comfiest seat in his apartment is a desk chair covered in cracked leather. Okay, she says. She follows him to her room. 

He places the laptop on her bedside table and kisses her. She loves kissing, the power that her lips and tongue and teeth have over another person. They climb onto the bed, arms around each other, and she wonders if the video worked after all. 

Patrick sits up. He hits the space bar to wake the screen, and replays the video.

I don’t want to forget, he says over the woman’s intro. Is that okay?

Sure, she says. She told him she would try this. She tells herself that it’s no weirder than hooking up with a TV show in the background. 

Except the video isn’t in the background—it’s there to guide them. Imagine an exercise video where your workout partner repeats everything the instructor says under his breath. She finds it difficult to concentrate on both the woman in the video and on Patrick. She feels like she’s trying to have sex in the middle of a very unsuccessful conversation. Maybe the whole point of this is that when she and Patrick do it normally again, she’ll be so soothed by the quiet that her orgasms will be effortless.

She stays on her back as Patrick reaches over her to the laptop.

I just need to rewatch this part, he says. Okay, let’s try from here.

She spreads her legs at the designated angle. It’s sweet, really. Who else would put in this much effort? 

This is more like choreography than a workout class, she realizes. They go through the video twice, with frequent pauses, and then Patrick tells her that he’s ready. Would she mind if the video plays in the background, though? Just in case?

Sure, she says. She’s gotten kind of used to the woman’s voice. 

Patrick turns up the volume a few steps and hits play. This time, he doesn’t mutter along. Their sex is narrated by the woman who created, or at least curated, this series of movements. 

She feels a growing warmth as she and Patrick move together. An old, familiar sensation. He looks past her, deep in concentration. He wants this so badly for her. The woman in the video wants this, too. And she wants to come. When was the last time?

No, don’t think about that. 

She comes with all the relief and exhaustion that she felt that first, desperate night her senior year of college. They did it, though. She and Patrick—and the woman. 

He rolls off her, panting. Wow, he says. I knew this would work. I’m a visual learner. I skipped a grade in high school French by watching subtitled French movies. 

In English? she says. How would that help you?

In French, he says. I read along in French.

Oh, she says. It makes more sense. She should have known that. It’s true, she says. You’re great with videos.

He grins. Right?

*

Patrick comes over the next night. After dinner, he asks where her laptop is.

In my room, she says. Why?

He leans down to kiss her, hands on her hips. You know why.

She does now. She thought they’d proven the point: that Patrick could make her come, that the website worked. 

You don’t want to, he says, pulling back. Why not? Didn’t you like it last night?

I did, she says. She thinks of the woman’s gentle narration. It was great. I just—

Why does she feel so weird about this? Because it’s sex? Because Patrick paid for it? She should have paid for half. She pays for half of all their dates, even though he makes more than she does. She prefers when they’re even. Maybe she should give him half, and then she’ll feel better. 

Just what? he says. All he wants is for her to have a good time. He’s said that so many times, long before he found the website last night. It was a gift, she has to remember that. She can’t pay for half of her own gift. 

She tells him the truth. The video was helpful, she says. It just felt like... like a class. It didn’t feel very natural. 

Sure, Patrick says. I get that. It was our first try. Come on, let’s look for a better one.

She sits on the couch and he gets the laptop from her room. When Patrick turns it on, the website is there, waiting for them. 

He scrolls through the videos more slowly tonight. Do any of these look good to you? he says.

She’s very aware of his eyes on her as he waits for her to make a decision. She doesn’t want to take too long. What looks good to her? 

A face stands out among the thumbnails. A woman around their age who, even in a photo, seems cool and chill. She would go for a drink with this woman to get advice on this Patrick-sex-video situation, if she could. 

Let’s watch this, she says, full of relief that she made a choice. Then she panics. She never looked at the title. What if it’s horrible, or complicated? Both?

Exploring the G Spot, Patrick reads aloud. Okay. That sounds good. I’m ready, if you are? 

She nods. 

 *

The woman’s name is Alice, and their sex to Alice’s video is very different. It’s better. It reminds her of when she was in college and used to watch supercuts of her favorite TV show couples before she climbed under the covers, a hand sliding down her stomach. Alice is pretty in the style of a lead actress on TV. 

Alice must remind Patrick of a TV character, too. When they both finish, he takes the laptop from her nightstand and rewinds the video to a shot of Alice looking straight at the camera. His free arm is around his girlfriend. He rubs her shoulder. 

Does she look familiar to you? he asks.

She nods. Yeah, like the pretty girl in every sitcom, she says. Then she realizes she sounds bitter (maybe she is, a little) and, at worst, antifeminist. Women are supposed to uphold other women, not resent them for being attractive. Patrick believes in that, and it’s the whole point of this website. 

I mean, she says, Alice seems cool. 

Yeah, Patrick says. Does she look familiar? Like, do you think she lives here?

In New York? she says. Even if she does, it would be crazy if either of us have ever run into her. We see thousands of people every day. That’s why celebrities like it here so much. 

Hm. He pulls away his arm so he can type, and she falls back on the pillows at an odd angle. As she readjusts to sit up more, Patrick scrolls through all of Alice’s other posts. 

I’m sure I’ve seen her before, he says. 

Alice won’t say where she lives in her videos, she says. She takes on a teasing voice. Why? You have a crush on her? 

Patrick turns to her, his expression a horrible combination of annoyance and pity. He sees right through her poor attempt at humor. The truth is that his interest in this stranger on the internet, this other woman, makes her uncomfortable. Even if this other woman is on the internet to help their relationship.

She looks like a girl I knew in middle school, Patrick says quietly. You’re right, though. I’m sure we’ve never run into each other, and we never will. He closes the browser window. 

She feels deflated. This is more than the usual post-orgasm melancholy. She disappointed him. She has to be more mature—there’s no reason to be jealous of Alice. If Patrick can understand that, why can’t she?

*

They start to watch Alice’s videos whenever they have sex, and she learns to come without overthinking at all. Her laundry list of pre-sex anxieties diminishes more each night. 

They never discuss Alice herself. Patrick’s girlfriend knows it’s for the best to let that topic go. When she’s on her own, she lets herself wonder: what Alice does for work, if her boss is condescending and her coworkers are nice, if she sometimes cries on the commute home. 

Two weeks into using the videos, she sees a tag for period sex on the website. She doesn’t draw attention to it, and neither does Patrick. He seems like he would be up for period sex, as an ultimate gesture of respect toward vaginas. She considers it. In the height of PMS, she’s fantasized about him fucking the cramps right out of her. When she pictures it in more detail, though, she sees Patrick emerging from between her legs, her blood smeared over his lips and his chin, and she feels frightened. That blood is hers. She doesn’t like the idea of it on another body. 

She wonders if Alice can have sex while she’s on her period without a sense of loss. 

They watch a video on upright sex that night, and after they’ve both finished, they get back in bed and curl up into each other. Patrick clears his throat. 

I think it’s time, he says. 

Her heart races. She tries to breathe evenly until he finishes his sentence. Time to say I love you? Time to break up?

It’s time to talk about our exes, he says. Do you want to go first, or should I? 

I’ll go first, she says. She’s afraid she’ll be too self-conscious about her own lame past after she hears about Patrick’s girlfriends. 

The list isn’t long (if she counts boyfriends, not hookups). She tells him about her sweet first kiss in high school and the guy after college who wanted to move in together after two months so he could get a good deal on a two bedroom in Park Slope. She’s surprised by how flippant she sounds. She used to view her romantic life as pitiable. All her heartbreaks, she realizes, were unrequited-loves-slash-friendships or undefined hookup situations. What she and Patrick have is her first—dare she say it—serious relationship. 

Patrick, on the other hand, only has serious relationships. He says so himself: Every woman I’ve dated was the one, until I realized she wasn’t. And I learned from each of them.

He explains that his high school girlfriend taught him about period mood swings. His college girlfriend was half Indian, half Irish, and made him think about race in a different way. After college he dated a coworker who campaigned for workplace harassment awareness, and most recently, he dated a bisexual woman he met online who provided enlightenment on sexuality and gender.

It’s a lot, but she likes how sincere and sensitive he is. She’s never dated a guy so ready to admit his romantic feelings. Patrick loved all his girlfriends, and it makes her feel special because she’s his girlfriend now. She and Patrick haven’t said I love you yet. She hopes that they will say it, soon. She hopes that when he says it, he’ll tell her what she’s taught him. 

She’s also impressed that even though all those women broke up with Patrick, he doesn’t blame them. He has so much sympathy. I was so proud that she realized she wasn’t in a space to be in a monogamous relationship, he says about his last girlfriend, the bisexual woman. I just hope she’s well. He feels sorry for every time the women he loved suffered. Instead of resentment, his current girlfriend finds that she feels sorry for them as well. They were lucky to have a boyfriend like Patrick. She knows she is. 

For the first time in her life, she has a routine with another person. They spend most nights together: they eat dinner and talk about their days. Sometimes they watch TV or a movie. (Patrick’s choice—they both know he has better taste.) Then she brings her laptop over to the couch, and they watch one of Alice’s videos before they move to the bedroom. 

The nights when he doesn’t come over aren’t great. She tells herself that she’s used to the endorphins from sex, that there’s a rational, biological explanation and she’ll feel fine when he comes over tomorrow. It doesn’t stop her from spending her evenings alone wrapped up in bed, with a dumb romcom on the TV and a plate of macaroni and cheese or microwave nachos on her lap. 

Sometimes, after a steamy scene in the movie, her hand slides down her stomach. She stops herself before she begins. There’s no point—she won’t be as good as Patrick. And she’ll see him tomorrow, anyway.

Not that Patrick is perfect. He tends to interrupt her stories with stories of his own, and by the time he finishes she forgets what she meant to tell him. He googles every fact she mentions—which, he insists, is for his own curiosity and not to fact check her. She still feels annoyed whenever she sees him whip out the browser on his phone. And he doesn’t listen to the music she recommends. She listens to the songs he recommends to her. 

These aren’t deal breakers, though. Some people don’t like to try new music. She’s addicted to googling, too. Everyone is. And last week, unprompted, he sent her an article about how women tend to defer conversations to men because they’ve been taught to be quiet. (She scrolled to the bottom and saw that the author was a man, but still. The article was probably right.)

Most importantly, he’s the first guy she’s dated who doesn’t change his voice when they’re out in public to sound deeper and cooler. He acts the same around her as he does around his friends. He’s that real. 

She thinks he might be the one. They’ve been together five months, they’ve used the videos for two months, and three weeks ago, she discovered a wisdom tooth coming in on her upper left jaw. She can feel it with her tongue, but she can’t tell how far it’s come in. She’s overthought it, convinced herself it’s bigger than any of her other teeth, and she needs a second opinion. She wants to ask Patrick to stick his tongue in her mouth as a favor, not for mutual pleasure, because she’s curious and he cares about her curiosity. She thinks she’s ready. Yes. He’s the one. 

The night she decides to ask Patrick about her tooth, they have a lazy dinner: spaghetti and tomato sauce from a jar. They watch a video from Alice about nipple play. Lately, the videos have been edgier and she’s into it. She’s never felt so comfortable in her body. 

When the video ends, Patrick doesn’t lean over to kiss her. He must be able to tell that she wants to talk. 

He speaks first. I want to meet Alice, he says. 

She’s long past her jealousy that he might have a crush. Yeah? she says. You want to thank her for all the great sex we’ve had?

He gives her a look and she wonders if this is one of the many things Patrick can’t joke about. He doesn’t have a great sense of humor, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Plenty of funny guys are horrible people. Like all the stand-up comedians who were exposed as sexual predators. She knows guys who treat those allegations as a personal loss, as though they were hurt most by the comedians’ abuse. Patrick never talks about stand up, which is another good quality. 

Not just to thank her, Patrick says, and it takes his girlfriend a second to remember that they’re talking about Alice. I want to pay her back for her work, he says. I don’t think they get paid for this. 

Well, no, his girlfriend says. They’re volunteers. That’s the whole point. 

That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve payment. 

He’s right, of course. He usually is. We can see if there’s any contact information on the website, she says. Maybe the organizers can tell us how we could send money, or a gift. Can we do that later, though? She leans toward him. Don’t you want to try out Alice’s advice? 

He pulls away before she can kiss him. I’m sorry, he says. I should have said it earlier. I have to get up early tomorrow. I can’t stay. 

She feels strange. This isn’t the routine. Tomorrow’s Saturday, she says. What do you have to be up for?

A fundraiser for work, he says. You know how it is. 

She blinks and he’s standing. She doesn’t know. I don’t know, she wants to say. She finds herself nodding. She hears herself saying, Of course, I understand.

You’re the best, he says. He bends over and kisses her forehead. Her head is tipped back to kiss him on the lips, but he kisses her forehead.

He puts on his shoes and waves to her from the doorway. Good night, he says. I’ll text you. Let’s hang out tomorrow. 

The door opens and closes and she’s alone in her apartment. Something went wrong between dinner and now, and she has to figure it out before she sees him tomorrow. They’ve had pasta twice this week. Is that where she messed up? She thought she would never have to do this awful, anxious overanalyzing again. 

Her laptop is open on her coffee table, frozen on the last shot of the video. Alice smiles, hand raised to turn off her camera. The website isn’t just for orgasms with a partner. She expected to have sex tonight. That doesn’t have to change. She can keep up her own routine.

At first, out of habit, she thinks of Patrick. His face makes her heart race in the wrong way, so she pushes him aside and thinks of herself. She watches her fingers run over her body, and concentrates on how good that feels. She hones her consciousness into the space between her legs. Right now, that’s the only part of herself that she wants to be aware of.

She mutes all notifications from Patrick while she’s in her bedroom. After she finishes and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water, she becomes hyperaware of her phone, face up on the couch. It wants her to unlock it and open their conversation thread.

Her laptop is also demanding; it sits on her coffee table where she—she and Patrick—left it. Both devices conspire against her, to remind her of him. 

If he has texted, she’ll ask him what happened so she can apologize. If the apology goes well, she can still ask him about her wisdom tooth, and maybe take that as an opportunity to say how happy she is with him.  

She picks up her phone and checks her messages.

He’s texted.

Thank god. There was no plan for what to do if he didn’t text. 

Can we meet tomorrow?

Sure, she types. Your place or mine?

She watches his speech bubble blink for several seconds before the message appears. How about that café near the park? Around 2? We can talk about it then.

Talk about what? She doesn’t ask. 

He wants to meet in public, in the afternoon. He’s breaking up with her. 

Patrick: so attentive, the practically perfect guy. He’ll dump her tomorrow at 2pm at the coffee stand on 59th street. Her first serious relationship lasted a little over five months. 

See you then, she sends.

He never said he loved her. Was it because she couldn’t teach him anything, like the others?

She puts her phone on the kitchen table and walks into the bathroom. There’s a compact mirror somewhere in here. She finds it in the third drawer under the sink, stored away with old makeup and spare floss containers.

In order to see into her mouth, she has to hold her face up to the mirror above the sink. She hops onto the counter and presses the compact against her tongue.

There’s a certain angle that will reflect the compact mirror onto the sink mirror. It takes a minute to find. Her breath fogs the compact, and she pulls away from the mirror. She tilts her head one way, then another, until she sees it.

Her wisdom tooth, on the left side of her upper jaw, isn’t fully descended. The edges of its base are visible; the center is pink, her gum still unbroken by the rest of the tooth.

She barely remembers losing her teeth in elementary school, and what she does remember is how her baby teeth fell out, not how her adult teeth grew in. She wants to stop breathing for a few minutes, so she can stare at this half-grown tooth and memorize it in this state before it moves on to a new one.

She sees it for a second before her breath fogs the compact. She wipes the glass on her shoulder and looks again.

Emma Deshpande writes short fiction and is currently at work on two novels. Her work is forthcoming in On the Run and appeared in the 2020 anthology More Time. She was shortlisted for the 53rd Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest and won the University College London Publisher's Prize in 2018. She lived in London for four years and now lives in New York City. Her work has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Aspen Words, A Public Space, One Story, and Tin House. You can find her on Instagram at
@deshpande_writes

Katherine Varga

You Never Really Know

It’s early enough that healthy and sane people are still in bed, getting a decent night’s sleep. You turn the car radio up. Maybe the 2am host is stoned, or maybe the station pre-programs selections for insomniac Schoenberg devotees, and that’s why the music is weird and distorted. The chords grow particularly dissonant as you drive over the bridge. You pull to the side, put on your blinkers, and get out.

The air is warm. You stand at the edge, wishing the moon would fall from the sky and shatter its reflection in the river. 

*

You met Sean on a dating site. You two chatted, neither initiating a date, at first just swapping pleasantries and tastes in music, movies, food. He was Australian, but grew up all over the world with a military family. He was getting a PhD in chemical engineering. He liked dogs, cartoons, and hiking. When you decided to delete the app due to feeling overly stressed at your consumer analytics job, you let him know. 

“I appreciate that you didn’t just ghost me,” he said. “Good luck with work.” And then: “Btw I love cooking for people and you seem cool so just wanted to say, if you ever want a home cooked meal you’re welcome to come over. (I swear this isn’t a come on.)” 

He seemed cool, too. His profile said cooking was his passion. You figured, why not. You deserved a little adventure after shoveling through an avalanche of emails and PowerPoints for the third month in a row. You wrote out his address for your housemates, told them to hunt him down if you never came home, and drove to his apartment complex. 

He buzzed you into his building. You heard a hint of Taylor playing and grinned when it got louder outside his door. You knocked. After a pause he opened, wearing a pink apron. He was taller than you expected, but otherwise looked like his pictures. You breathed in something that smelled warm.  

“So glad you made it! I’m not quite done,” he said in an adorable accent. “How hungry are you?” 

“I can wait,” you said, entering his place for the first of many times. It was fairly tidy, besides the stack of recyclables in a bin and the dishes in the sink. Past the kitchen was the living room, where two people played a video game that involved colorful tiles and women with swords. 

“That’s Guy, my roommate, in the hat, and our neighbor Leslie,” he said. 

Guy raised a hand – “I’ll be more polite when I beat this level!” Leslie turned and smiled, bald with purple lipstick, and you felt at ease seeing someone who presented as queer. 

“I’m making ramen,” Sean said. “It’s taking forever but I think it’ll be good.” 

“Can I help?” you asked. 

“If you want,” he said. “The green onions need chopping. But I can do it if you want to relax.” 

Despite the familiar music and chill atmosphere, you couldn’t relax in a new place. You chopped the garnish. When the broth was ready, everyone gathered at the table. Sean served. He never looked at you. He’s either shy or uninterested, you figured – either way, it didn’t bother you. He wasn’t rude, just quiet. 

“I’ve never had ramen before,” you admitted. 

“You came to the right place,” Guy said. “Sean goes all out.” 

You took a bite and something shifted inside you. Something miraculous, exciting. Like eating at a restaurant for the first time and knowing it’s your new favorite. You’d be back here, as many times as Sean invited you. 

“So, complete stranger my roommate found online, where are you from?” asked Guy, and the conversation flowed naturally from there.

For months you had been answering emails, making phone calls, scheduling Zoom calls. You had been making dinner for yourself, doing laundry, paying your bills, buying your toilet paper. But now, for the first time since you could remember, you felt like a grown up. The kind of grown up you thought you’d become as a kid: talking about politics with people from all over the world, trying a new food, actually enjoying the responsibilities of being your own person. 

Dinner naturally led to a movie. Leslie left, then Guy went to bed. Sean got chattier as the night progressed. The two of you shared your favorite music videos on YouTube until after 1. 

“Oh my god,” you said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been here too long.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. For the first time that evening, he looked directly in your eyes. “It’s nice having you here.” 

Most guys would use this opportunity to say something flirty. Sean just handed you the remote. 

“It’s nice being here,” you said. “Really. But it’s past my bedtime. And I gotta let my roommate know I’m still alive, that you’re not a psychopath or anything.” You took out your phone and offhandedly said, “You’re not, are you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. 

You looked up in surprise, then started laughing. He laughed too. 

You texted your roommate and stood up. “You’re welcome back any time,” he said. “I love cooking for people.” 

“Can you walk me to my car?” you asked. He agreed and got his coat. 

Snowflakes glistened in the parking lot’s lights. You looked at the snow, then into his brown eyes. You hadn’t been drinking, yet you felt intoxicated, like you were trapped in a Taylor Swift song. This is how grown-ups fall in love, you thought.

“May I kiss you?” you asked, and he took a step back. 

“Oh – ”

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I just thought, since you were on the dating app, and – oh god, I shouldn’t say things past 1am. You don’t have to. Obviously” 

“It’s not you,” he said. “I had fun tonight. But I haven’t really dated before. I’m kind of questioning my sexuality honestly, and – I don’t know. Sorry. I’m rambling.” 

“It’s OK,” you said. “Offer still stands but no pressure. I liked the ramen.” 

“Do you want to . . . hug? I’m OK with that.”

You stopped together and quickly hugged, mostly in the shoulders. You drove away quickly. 

The next morning you woke to a text apologizing for his awkwardness, asking if he could buy you ice cream. You said yes. 

*

The “not really dating before” thing – you understood that. You spent high school and college not really dating. There were people you found pretty to look at, but you didn’t want to do anything about it, at least not until you knew them very well. You sat in 9th grade health class learning about contraceptives thinking, “If I ever really need to know how to use this stuff, I’ll Google it.” Even when you started to date, you never Googled it. 

 *

Over ice cream, Sean told you he was hypersexual, had been for as long as he could remember. But he also said he never really wanted to act on it. 

“I feel like my tastes are a bit different. It’s hard to find people who would want to date me, but that’s OK. I know I’m eccentric.” 

You looked at the sexy cat drawing pinned to his backpack (“I bring it everywhere” he had shrugged) and nodded. You weren’t a furry, but you could relate. 

When it came to dating, everyone seemed to tacitly understand that it was all about sex. But you never understood why people wanted to do certain things. You liked cuddling and kissing and sometimes felt attraction, but it all felt adjacent to, never crossing into, what everyone else seemed to take for granted as the inevitable outcome. 

He already knew that intercourse was off the table for you. You understood many people wanted it, but you didn’t, and you didn’t have any hard feelings when people saw that as a deal breaker. 

  As you got to the end of your ice cream, Sean said, “For what it’s worth, I think you’re a very interesting person, and nothing you’ve said has been a deal breaker for me.” 

You felt uncharacteristically shy. “Oh, I’m probably not your type. Your tastes are too different. You like rum raisin ice cream, for heaven’s sake.” 

He ate very slowly. Even though you were indoors, some ice cream melted down the side of the cup and landed on his jeans. 

He gathered napkins from the dispenser by the register and wiped his pants. Without looking at you he said he’s not always good at expressing himself and he wasn’t sure the best way to say it so he would just go ahead and say it: yes, you were his type. As you walked out the door together, he put his hand on your back for a few seconds. You turned away, embarrassed by how such a light touch made you blush. 

*

You started going to his place on the weekends to watch movies. You introduced Sean and Guy to your favorite teen rom-coms, starting with Easy A. Guy was uninterested, but Sean loved them. He howled with laughter at the comedic bits. At the emotional bits, you saw moisture in his eyes through your own blurred vision. You sat on his floor crisscross, feeling warm whenever your knees bumped his, and fell forward into artificial worlds of meet cutes, mishaps, and grand romantic gestures.

*

You talked about sex before doing anything physical. You chatted about it after playing a video game. Guy had left for the gym, but you still spoke in low voices. 

Sean watched a lot of porn, you learned. You tried once for laughs with friends in college, but felt so bored and alienated that you never sought out more. Sean always went back to it – for years, he said. He would get bored with one thing, so try something new. He basically had every kink in the book by now. Lately he was in a submissive phase. He wanted to do things for people. You found this endearing, in line with his desire to cook for people. It made you want to give back somehow.

“Is there anything we could do that would be fun for you?” you asked. “Given that I don’t want intercourse and I’m not a dominatrix?”

He got quiet. You poked him. 

“I had a dream once,” he said. “But I won’t talk about it if it makes you uncomfortable.” 

“Was I in it?” you asked. You felt an unfamiliar rush of power when he said yes. You poked him again. “Go on.” 

“You came to my place in the middle of the night, woke me up, and – well, bossed me around,” he said. You waited for more details. “I’d be ecstatic if you did that in real life.” 

You laughed. “Sorry,” you said. “Not gonna happen. I like my 8 hours of sleep.”

He shrugged and smiled, but you realized you were being rude. 

“Thanks for telling me,” you said. “It’s not my thing, but I’m glad you’re honest about it.” 

“I’d like to be able to talk about everything with you,” he said. 

Just then, Guy fiddled with the lock. Sean walked you to your car and as the sun set on the parking lot, you let him touch you places you never would have with Guy around. Somehow, you felt more private out in the open. 

That night, you could already sense you wouldn’t be able to keep up with Sean. But you wanted to. You were starting to understand what your peers in high school knew without learning – his arms, his earlobes, his tongue; they were all more than just body parts. They were him. You wanted to engulf yourself in the sum of him. 

You Googled things you never thought you would– “how to stay turned on around your partner” and “basic dom moves.” Based on the breadth and wealth of available answers, nobody on the Internet was surprised you were asking these questions. 

*

Since neither of you had dated in high school, Sean joked that you were both like silly teenagers. Writing each other notes, making out in the parking lot, saying goodnight in every possible way before finally leaving, only to text as soon as you got home. When Guy forgot to run the dishwasher, you and Sean ate beef stew from the same bowl. 

One night, after he made tacos, you curled up to watch his favorite British sitcom. He got a bag of moose munch from his cupboard. You took a handful, then passed it to him.

“No thank you,” he said. “The popcorn gets stuck in my teeth.”

“Are these Guy’s, then?” you asked.

“No,” he said. “I bought them for you. Since you said you loved when your dad snuck these into the movie theaters growing up.”

You hadn’t realized he paid that close attention. You snuggled closer to him and watched so many episodes that you felt too tired to drive home after. You fell asleep in his bed, curled up in his arms.

The next morning you wondered why you felt numb waking up beside him. He was beautiful, he treated you well – you were happy, even if you couldn’t feel it. He encouraged you to use his shower before work, even said you could use his expensive shampoo that smelled like coconut. His shower curtain featured a huge Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, his favorite movie. You felt weird with the plastic Jeff face watching you and wished you had gone home to shower. To make up for this ungrateful thought, you wrote “Sean is cool”, smiley face, in the steam on the bathroom mirror.

*

He came over for a Valentine’s Day meal. Since he always cooked, you wanted to treat him with your own culinary creation, a fish and vegetable medley dinner. It heated in the oven as you cuddled with him on the couch. He was quieter than usual. 

“You OK?” you asked. 

“Had trouble sleeping last night,” he said. 

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really.” 

You jabbered on about something insignificant from work. He still looked low. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“It’s not you,” he said. “I’m just – I don’t know. Most of the time I feel pretty good about myself but maybe 1% of the time, I start to doubt myself.” 

“Have you looked in a mirror?” you teased. “That should clear up any doubts.” 

He smiled and took your hand. “I just worry sometimes that if you knew me, really knew me, you’d leave me.” 

“That’s unlikely,” you said. “I’ve heard you snore and I’m still here.” 

“But you know I can’t control my snoring. What if there was something I could control, something I did?” 

“Try me.” 

And that’s when he told you about Guy’s cousin. At first you thought he was going to say he slept with her, and you got ready to assure him that you had never technically agreed to be exclusive so he didn’t have to feel bad. But that wasn’t it. She slept over for a weekend. He liked her a lot. She wasn’t interested. 

“I never harmed her,” he said. “At least not directly. But I did watch her in the shower once.” 

“How?” you asked, picturing him standing at the sink. “Wouldn’t she have seen you?” 

He looked at you like you were a puppy. “With cameras, silly.” 

The oven buzzer rang. You turned it off and sat back beside him. 

“So… does she know? Have you seen her since?” 

“No. And honestly, ever since I started dating you I’ve stopped thinking about her,” he said. “You’ve been good for me. I wouldn’t do that again. Besides, she’s leaving the country soon.”

Something tugged in your memory. “This isn’t the cousin who just got into Oxford? The high schooler?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” 

“But—she’s a teen. You’re 30.”

“I see people, not ages,” he shrugged. 

You stared at him. You wanted to point out that it sounded like he saw objects, not people, but then he put his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know. There’s something – corrupt about me.” 

You thought about how attentively he stirred curry on the stove. How excited he got whenever you passed a dog on the street. How he smiled and closed his eyes when you scratched his head. You put an arm around him. 

“I don’t deserve your hugs.” 

You held him close anyway. “Where are the videos? Did you delete them?” 

“No,” he said. “They’re just on my laptop.”

“Why haven’t you deleted them?”

“I don’t know.”

You sat in silence for a while, holding each other without looking at each other.

“The fish smells good,” he said. “Do you mind if we eat?”

You poked at your plate while he went back for seconds. “I know this could be a deal breaker,” he said. “Take your time and think about it. But if you decide you do want to end things, can you just text me? It would be too painful in person.” 

When you dropped him off at his apartment, you kissed him. He kept his lips closed and quickly got out of the car. 

The next morning, you texted him, then stayed in bed crying. 

You should have noticed how he leaned in while watching the teen rom-coms. You should have been more alarmed by his callous laughter while Guy played violent video games. You should have known better than to be happy with someone like him. 

A week later he texted that he missed you. “I know it’s selfish to ask, but can we meet up and talk about why you’re doing this? I’d do anything to make this work.”

You considered blocking his number, but instead responded “I’m sorry.”

*

Four weeks later. You leave your house around midnight and appear at his door with your backpack. Then you text “hey, it’s me. I don’t want to wake Guy – can you let me in?” He buzzes you in immediately. 

Sean answers the door, groggy, eyes glazed. “What are you doing here?” he asks. 

“Oh my god. I’m sorry – I’ll go. I’m being stupid.” 

“Don’t go,” he says softly, and your heart pounds. You worry he can hear it. “I’ve missed you. I thought you were mad at me.” 

“I know I said we should end things,” you say slowly, so your voice won’t tremble. “But the truth is I keep thinking about you. And I’ve been feeling bad about – all of it.”

He steps aside and gestures for you to come in. “So have I,” he says. “Both those things.” 

You can hear it both ways now. The sweet, lonely soul looking for a connection. And the way he merely reflects back what you give him. 

You glance around the kitchen. “Can we go to your room?” you ask, then you remember – be bossy. He leads you through the hallway. You scan the living room as you pass the bean bag chairs and television. 

You flick on the light to his bedroom and look at his desk, covered with monitors and notebooks. Logic says he’d keep it in his bedroom, near him, but you’re not seeing it. You try not to panic. 

“I want to try something with you,” you say. “Is that OK?”

He nods, though doesn’t look surprised or excited. You feel like a baby bunny who has eagerly hopped into a bored fox’s den. 

“I want to tie you to the bed,” you whisper and it sounds so ridiculous, so unlike you, that you know he will call your bluff and kick you out. But he doesn’t blink. “Are you sure?” he asks, and you feel that softness you always felt when he asked for permission to hold your hand. 

“Don’t ask questions,” you say. You unzip your coat but leave it on, hoping to hide your trembling. You move his backpack out of the way – it’s heavy. Good. You take the rope out of your own backpack.

“You still find me sexy, yes?” you ask.

“Yes.” His eyes don’t leave the rope.

“Good. On the bed, hands up.”

He obliges, and you wrap the rope around his wrists and the bed frame. You pull tight. He looks up at you, his eyes unreadable. You whisper in his ear, “The safe word is – forgiveness.”

You then shove a rag in his mouth so he can’t shout out. You grab Sean’s backpack from the side of his bed and nearly explode with joy to find the laptop in there. You slip it out, slide on your own backpack, and hold the laptop to your chest as you run down the hallway. You flip off the kitchen table where you first tried his ramen as you leave the apartment and run to your car. 

You put the laptop in the backseat. It doesn’t feel right to drive with it next to you. Not in the passenger seat, where Sean sat so many times before, commenting on how illogical American rules of the road were, or smiling to himself while you belted along to the latest teen pop sensation. 

You drive to the bridge and get out, grabbing the black and sturdy laptop. It’s the kind you would save up for if you were serious about technology and wanted it to last many years. 

You hold the laptop over the safety railing and let go. Gravity pulls it closer and closer to the dark reflection in the water, until it crashes through. You think you hear a splash, but it’s too faint to be sure. 

Katherine Varga is a playwright, theatre critic, and teaching artist living in Rochester, NY. Her ideal day involves biking to a library. Learn more about her writing at http://katherinevarga.weebly.com.

Meagan Lucas

And Then the Forest Will Burn Down

One of the hazards of the job, they say, is bruising around your eyes, from the binoculars. Another, is going crazy, but the trainers spent more time on the binocular techniques - how to balance them without letting your face carry the weight, how to lean on your elbows, or rest them on the glass – than how to preserve one’s sanity. Maybe there wasn’t anything anyone could do about that. I felt lucky, having some experience with binoculars, being raised by avid birders, but less lucky in that my sanity was in short supply even before arrival.

 "You might not care what you look like, " he said. "Hell, you might not even know. Not all the cabs have mirrors. But soon your face will hurt. That tender skin under your eyes will ache, and then you're not going to want to use the binoculars or you'll be distracted by pain when you do. And then you'll miss something and then the forest will burn down." 

“And then the forest will burn down” was his favorite phrase. Right before "spot and call." The latter was to encourage reporting of every little thing, "no plume too small!" But the former with its visceral image of acres of trees, flattened to blackened ash desolation, established the stakes. I woke to nightmares of woodland animals running through burning tree branches, their eyes wild with terror and their fur smoking; the scent of burning hair stuck in my throat.

“Pay attention,” he said. “Watch.” Every minute could mean acres, lives and livelihoods. It only takes one spark, one stupid camper, one careless hiker, one stray coal. This wasn't a joke, wasn't easy. Wasn't time to goof off. “Don't get distracted and don’t fucking smoke,” he said, stubby index finger jabbing the air. I had to hide the snort that escaped when he said that behind a pretend cough. Who did he think I was? How many 40-something women took fire lookout jobs to goof off. To run away from their problems? Yes. Fool around? Not so much.

So, I'd spent the majority of the last month looking out. When I wasn’t sleeping, or in the bathroom, I was on the watch deck high above the forest, with my abdomen pressed against the metal rails, my elbows balancing the weight of the binoculars, scanning. Reading my territory like my favorite book. I memorized, learned. I knew those tiny trees, the rock out-croppings, the dead falls, and the streams better than the topography of my own hand. And when a snake of smoke slithered out, I used the Osborne to map it, and called it in. The voice on the other end of the line, cool and calm. It helped the first time, when my heart beat out of my chest, and I nearly dropped the heavy receiver from my sweaty palm. But eventually, that robotic voice at the other end was just another reminder that I was alone. Yes, my call would set an operation in motion, but I wasn't there. I couldn't see, couldn't pat anyone on the back and say "nice job!" Or "good work back there." No, the best I could hope for was the smoke to just disappear.

Above everything, I watched, and I waited, separate. I knew what I was getting myself into, it was my intention when I applied. When the interviewer asked if I would be okay with long stretches of solitude, when the trainer told me that I wouldn't talk to anyone, not really, for months, I was excited.

I'd wanted the quiet.

*

 The jeweler on the corner was piping instrumental Christmas songs out onto the sidewalk and the fudge shop smelled of vanilla and burnt sugar. There was a pleasant crisp in the air, just enough to make it feel festive.       

“I wish you hadn’t worn those heels,” he said, dragging her down the sidewalk by the tender inside of her arm. 

“I thought you loved these, how they make my legs look.”

“In bed. I like them in bed.” He looked at his watch. Her heels tapped a rhythm that matched the second hand.

“I don’t think they are too sexy for this party. Your boss hardly had any clothes on last year. I saw her nipple twice.” Her heel slid into a crack in the uneven pavement and tipped her ankle, and then her body sideways. He gripped harder. 

“You can hardly walk. You look drunk. Maybe you’re just too clumsy for them?”

 “If you would just slow down. What’s the rush? The drinks are bottomless. We won’t miss the awards, just the soggy mini quiche and the rubber chicken wings.”

 He didn’t answer, just pulled harder. She tried to keep up. By the time they walked through the doors she had sweat at her hairline and on her upper lip.

“Excuse me,” she said, breaking away to go to the restroom to check her face. She thought he rolled his eyes as he waved her off, already deep in conversation with a coworker she didn’t know. In the bathroom she pressed toilet paper to her face, and ran her wrists under cool water. A young woman emerged from a stall and she suddenly felt ridiculous for trying so hard.

 “Hot dress,” the girl said, fixing her lipstick that looked almost black in the dim party lighting. 

“Thank you,” she said smoothing the sequins over her round hips, “Yours, too.”

“Damn straight. Gonna get me some,” the girl said and left.

She fixed a smudge on her eyeliner. “Stop stalling,” she said to the mirror.

She grabbed two drinks on the way back to meet him, pinching her bag under her arm. “Hiding from me,” she said when she finally found him in the corner talking to some guy she thought she’d met before. She tried to hand her husband a drink but he shook his head and pointed at the one in his hand. She looked down at the two she was carrying, and around to see if there was anywhere to put one. There wasn’t. So, she drank the first drink fast and then nested the cups while the two men talked around her. 

 “So, Lisa,” the other man said finally turning toward her. That wasn’t her name but he was clearly speaking to her. “What do you do?”

 “She’s a teacher,” her husband said.

“What do you teach?” said the man.

“English,” her husband said. 

“That was my worst subject! Nearly got held back in third grade cause I couldn’t read. Have you ever had to do that? Hold one of your students back?”

She looked over to see what her husband would say to that. He was all of a sudden very interested in finishing his drink.

“I have had to fail a student before,” she said. “But no one gets into graduate school without being able to read.”

His eyebrows rose and he looked over at her husband with confusion. “Fuck, Chris,” he said. “I didn’t know you were the dumb one at your house. Ho wonder you like hanging around with us knuckleheads.” The man turned to her and said, “It was a pleasure to see you again Mrs—”

“Doctor,” she said.

He smirked. “Doctor,” he said and left.

When she turned to Chris he’d already joined another group and refused to make eye contact with her. She made small talk with his coworkers while he seethed. When it was time to go, she took her shoes off on the sidewalk. Barefoot, downtown Asheville was better than breaking her ankle trying to run in heels, but still he walked ahead of her.

When she caught up at a stoplight, he said: “I wish you would cut it out with the doctor bullshit. No one cares. They think you’re a snob or a bitch.”

 “It’s my name. You used to be proud of me.”

 “It’s just a little much. You’re a lot to deal with you know. A lot,” he said, and waved his hands in her direction. 

*

Occasionally, when the wind blew the right way, my cell worked and, messages from my mother would arrive.

 I assume you're all right up there.

We miss you. All of us. Even him (I can tell.)

I know you’d tell me if you weren't okay.

Chris dropped off your stuff I put it in the basement.

I turned my phone off and stuck it at the bottom of my duffle with the pack of smokes that I told myself were only for an emergency. I didn't need the distraction of wondering if anyone missed me. If anyone was reaching out. If he was calling? It was better not to know either way.

Silence.

Trees.

Sky.

 I watched the horizon obsessively so that I didn’t have time to look inside. To pull back my anger and find what lurked behind.

Sometimes birds would land on the rail. I started leaving them some crumbs, but the wind always stole my offerings first. At night in my bunk, I'd press my hands to my cheeks. To my biceps, and belly and thighs just to make sure that I was there. I’d pull my hair gently. I’d explore my teeth with my tongue. I’d listen to the wind whip around my cab, and be grateful. To be here, to be lonely with purpose was better than to be home in bed with him and feeling the same way. My sadness congealed into a stone, a weight that settled into my stomach. It was okay that way though. Easier to carry condensed like that than spread all over my skin. 

 On the afternoon of the sixty-seventh day, a flag of smoke appeared on the far western ridge of my territory. I went to work. I used the fire finder to map the coordinates, and had just picked up the phone to call it in, when a crackle came over the radio.

I jumped at the sound. It had never done that before. I didn't know it could.

A soft baritone was suddenly in my space. I was instantly aware that I wasn't wearing a bra, and I couldn't remember brushing my teeth. 

 He introduced himself. Lee. A lookout neighbor, of course, my cheeks went hot. We compared notes, coordinates. He said he would call it in if I wanted. He said he was pleased to meet me before the radio went quiet in my hand.

I'd been alone for sixty-seven days, but the sudden silence of the radio felt like a blow to my belly. I hadn’t thought much about other people for the last two months, about how they sound, or smell. What they feel like, or taste like, hadn’t crossed my mind. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about how far away the closest body was. How far would I have to go to smell the sweat of another person, to feel the warmth of their skin? If I fell from the tower, if I just didn’t wake up tomorrow, how long would it take for someone to notice?

The sun rose and set behind the tops of the trees. I'd never see the bottoms of them. The trunks and roots visible only to those who were willing to spend days trekking, pooping outside, sleeping in the pine needles. The same dry underbrush that would feed a fire would cushion their sleep. For me, the trees really could be anything, at this distance they looked like grass, or aquarium plants, perhaps the edge of a snow globe just waiting to be shaken. I imagined giant hands coming out of the sky and shaking the shit out of me. I wondered where I’d land. 

 I gave up trying to write.

I climbed up and down the stairs between my living quarters and the watch deck, noticing the tones the metal made depended on the temperature of the day and my footwear choice.

I practiced holding my breath.

I tried to remember songs I learned in grade school, and shocked myself with how many I could eventually remember all of the words to.

I baked cookies.

I baked bread.

I read the books I brought, and then the books that someone else had left, and then all the manuals for equipment I couldn’t even find, and then cereal boxes and shampoo bottles.

I whittled.

I tried to replicate poses from that one yoga class I went to in college.

I made myself spot something that started with each letter of the alphabet: ant, barred owl, cedar, duck, earwig… and got so mad at x that I nearly threw my binoculars over the edge.

Silence.

 I spotted three separate smoke wisps and called them in, hoping each time they’d tell me to radio Lee. But they didn't. I thought of a million excuses to use to call him. But didn't use them. They all sounded stupid when I practiced them out loud, my sweaty fingers wrapped around the radio.

What if he thought I was annoying?

What if he didn't answer?

What if I just imagined the whole thing and there was no one else out there? 

*

She could tell by the sound of Chris’s breathing he was awake. The green number projected on the ceiling said it was after two am and she was just slipping into bed. He didn’t roll over to say hi. He wanted her to think he was sleeping. He didn’t want to hear about her night. She knew that already. She wasn’t allowed to have fun without him. It didn’t matter that he hated poets, and worse still, spoken word. He couldn’t imagine how she could have fun without him, and she couldn’t explain it without hurting his feelings. But still she wanted him to roll over and pull her body tight against his. She wanted to wiggle her ass against his groin and feel the awakening when he put his hand on her hip and discovered she wasn’t wearing her pjs, that she wasn’t wearing anything. 

Instead, she pressed her front to his back. Wrapped her arm around his waist and pulled him tight to her. Kissed the nape of his neck. Then licked.

 “What’s got you all worked up? Someone read a dirty poem?”

“Maybe.” She whispered hooking her bare thigh over his hip and sliding her palm down his stomach. “Take your pants off.”

“This isn’t for me. Who got you all worked up?”

“It is for you.” She licked and bit his shoulder. “I missed you.”

“If you missed me, you wouldn’t leave me by myself all night.” He pulled himself into a tighter and tighter ball.

She rolled onto her back and pulled the blankets up to her neck.

“Sometimes I need to do something that’s just for me. Surely you understand that.”

“I don’t. I don’t feel the need to do that. I don’t leave you all by yourself.”

She sighed, “No, you do your thing with me here, and you make me do it too.”

“What’s that? What’s MY THING?”

“Television. You love television. You watch it constantly and you expect me to watch it with you. To you, it means together time.”

“But it doesn’t to you?” He rolled over so he was facing her now. 

She could feel his anger through the dark. “I don’t enjoy TV, so it doesn’t feel like enjoyable together time. It feels like something I do for you.” She winced as she said it, knowing what it would do. 

“I’m sorry I’m not as cultured as you.”

“That’s not it, I just don’t—”

He put his pillow over her face. She wrestled it off.

“I’m not finished.” He took a deep breath. “But you’re not the only one who does stuff they don’t like to do in order to make their spouse happy.”

“What don’t you like to do?”

“Plenty.”

“Like what?”

 “Too many things to name. I don’t want to be up all night.”

She didn’t know what to think. She had a feeling that he was lying, that he was just trying to one up her. That he was still trying to make her feel bad because she’d come home so late. But there was an underlying horror. What if he was doing something for her that he hated as much as she hated watching television? What if he hated it more? She was cold under the blankets. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whispered.

“I didn’t want to make you angry. You’re a very angry person and I was afraid of your reaction.”

Tears slid out of the corner of her eyes and down her temples. This was not the first time he’d said that. 

*

 The night was close. Damp. Charged. A storm was coming. I was filled with both relief and fear. It had been so dry, the forest was a tinderbox, it was desperate for water. I’d watched everything growing yellow, toasting in the sun for the last two months. I could feel the ground changing, opening itself like a sponge, like a lover, ready for the moisture. But a storm meant lightning, too. One strike in these conditions could be a catastrophe. 

My thumb circled the call button. The edge a blade to the soft pad of my flesh. My heart thumped a drumbeat in the silence, as I set the radio down gently and stepped outside, scanning but finding my eyes wandering in the direction I thought he might be. Imagining the far edge of my bubble touching the far edge of his.

The night was black except for occasional lightning illuminating the edges of the clouds in the far distance, not my territory, not his. But the black of the night with no moon, no stars, and the soft feel of the damp air against my skin shrank the vastness, and allowed, for once in so many nights, for me to feel just a little less alone.  I knew I should go down to my cabin to get supplies for the night. I would need to stay here to watch for strikes and flares tonight. But I didn’t want to leave this feeling. A snap of bright white lit the room, as a strike landed just to the west, followed by a boom of thunder that shook the tower. I was too surprised to move to the fire finder to track it. A sizzle of static came over the radio.

“Did you see that?” he said.

“Yes! Wow,” I said.

“Where did it strike?” 

“Oh, I don't know.”

 “I thought you said?... Never mind... Just be on the lookout for more? There will be more,” he said.

“I hope so.”

I heard air escape through his nose. My cheeks burned at the thought of him laughing.

“I know it gets boring,” he said. 

“I don't mind boring. I don't mind quiet, or being alone.”

“You don't miss people? Conversation? Touching?”

“There's just all this build up. All this tension about what can happen. But it doesn't. Hasn't. Makes me feel like I'm up here for nothing.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this out loud. Surely he thought I had completely lost it. “Maybe I want to believe that something big can happen and I can be a part of it.”

“I think you might miss people more than you know.”

The hairs on my arms rose and the palms of my hands tingled as a crack of lightning screamed past, the air sizzled and tasted metallic. It snapped like a whip as it landed between us, and I gripped the handrail watching for a flame as the boom of thunder shook the tower and threatened to knock me off my feet. It was there. Right on top of me. Hope rose in my throat.

“Anything?” The radio fizzled.

 I watched. Willing a flicker. Praying for a flame. “No.” The breeze was picking up. It blew my hair across my face. The air felt fresher, lighter. I frowned.

Another crack. Further away. Less intense in every way. Disappointment swelled as I counted the seconds before the boom. It was out of my territory now. My radio was silent. I waited until the night was quiet and still before I climbed down the stairs, stripped off my clothes, and fell into bed. 

Laying in the dark I thought about the way he said touching. I pressed the palms of my hands to my bare stomach, I thought about how his tongue would have tapped and caressed his teeth and lips as the word formed itself in the warm cave of his mouth. I slid my hands up to my breasts and brushed them gently with the meat of my palm and the tip of my pinky finger. Goosebumps rose on my legs. I thought about whether his eyes would be open or closed and what he would be doing with his hands. I imagined strong hands, with long fingers, stretching across my rib cage and moving up to pinch my nipples, to squeeze my breasts until they ached with a deep fulfilling throb. I imagined a beard, itas soft scratch on my throat, my chest, my belly, and thighs. Big hands gripping my hips, pulling. My palms stroked and fingers slipped over the plains and valleys, the forests of my anatomy. I felt the tension of the last ten weeks, and the years at home before that, build beneath my skin, the bubbles fizzing to the surface, and the heat of my anger roiling it to a boil.

*

The oven timer said she had five minutes before she needed to take the cookies out. Too short to leave the kitchen, too long to do nothing. She looked around for a chore she’d been putting off, spied the mountain of unopened mail and sighed. She flipped through the pile.

“Do we need any of these?” she asked Chris who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.

“I don’t know what THESE are.”

“I dunno, bank statements? I think they email those to me. Something from the HOA. Looks like maybe our yearly investment statement.”

“If you don’t know, they should at least be opened. You threw away our new proof of insurance last month and I had to go through the hassle of requesting a new one. It’s not the end of the world to have some extra paper around.”

 She hated clutter. It itched her skin. She threw away the bank and HOA stuff unopened, but to make him happy opened the investment report. There was way more money in their account than she expected. Like ten times more.

“I think there’s a mistake in our investments.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a good one, but, it can’t be right. Shit…” she pulled her hands through her hair. “It would be amazing if it was though.”

 He sighed heavily, “Can you please just tell me what you’re talking about. I’m trying to do something here.”

“We have way, way more money in our investment account than I thought.”

“Oh, that.” He turned back to the paper.

“You knew?”

“I did it.”

“How?” She couldn’t imagine how he could have possibly put more money in their account when she hadn’t noticed it coming out of their bank account. She knew that she wasn’t the best at keeping track of their finances, but she would have noticed this.

“I moved our nest egg to something higher risk to make a quicker yield. You’ve been talking about how you want a house before a child, and at the rate we were saving we would never have enough. Not unless you got a better job.”

“This is about my job? You risked all our savings because I have a shitty job?”

“Well, you have been talking about quitting, about taking a few years off to write. This makes it so you can. I thought you’d be happy.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well cause I knew you’d do this.”

“This? THIS? You mean ask questions about where my money was and how you were using it? How you were putting our future in danger? THIS?”

“Screaming, yes.”

*

It didn’t help. It didn’t calm me. It didn’t fill the void in my chest. It didn’t soothe the heat from my skin or the roar from my ears. I needed to take more than just my body in my hands. The blankets felt heavy, the cab airless. I climbed the steps to the look out and scanned the horizon.  How many nights had I laid in bed at home, with Chris’ weight on the mattress, his breath in my nose, waiting? I was tired of waiting. Tired of hoping. I was going to end this standoff. I dumped the duffle on the floor to find my phone buried at the bottom. I pressed the picture of his face and hoped the wind was blowing in the right direction for a signal. It rang and rang. I looked at the time. I hung up and called again.

“Are you okay?” he cleared his throat and answered.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, it’s three AM!”

There was a murmur. Not Chris. He covered the mouthpiece with something. Muffled conversation seeped through. The pillow, I thought. 

“It’s three AM,” he said. “Call back in the morning,” and hung up.

 I threw the phone into the pitch black of the night. Seemingly ages later I heard it hit something, branches, and then a quiet thud. Dirt. I gripped the rail. I was the one that left. I wasn’t allowed to have any expectations. 

I needed a drink, but everything was in the cab and I didn’t feel like climbing all the way down. I grabbed the cigarettes laying on the floor with the rest of my stuff, and a dirty mug to ash into. Smoking was a big no; I’d have to be careful with my butts. I lit up, laid down on the grated floor of the watch deck, and watched the smoke swirl into the night. I let my mind follow it. The smoke mingling with the damp breeze and flying off to new adventures. Maybe that was what I needed. Something to set my heart racing – surfing, maybe, rock-climbing. Intentional adrenaline, instead of this purposeless boredom I’d created. I needed to create my own heat to combat the creeping chill of my failing marriage.

            I lit another cigarette. And another. Heart racing, hands shaking, I watched the flame born at the end of my lighter catch and die, catch and die. I’d been so cold for so long. Numb. How exciting it had felt, when I’d let the anger take me.

Yes, I thought. Yes.

And then I rolled over, and dropped the lit cigarette through the floor grate, watched its descent through the night to land on the pine needles below, and waited, the tender flesh of my face pressed hard to the metal, focused despite the pain, for something to happen. 

I watched. Deep breaths filling my lungs, filling my belly. In and out.

And there it was, a tiny ember, a miniature orange sun glowing beneath me. It gathered energy from the surrounding dry needles and twigs. Growing from a small ember to a flame. I scrambled down the tower stairs, my footsteps pounding through the night, afraid and excited about what my fire might be when I got to it. Praying that it didn’t put itself out. Praying it had more strength than I did.

It was still small when I knelt beside it. Even after I blew on it. Even after I threw handfuls of fuel on it. But it wasn’t when I called it in, when I relayed the coordinates and heard the catch in the voice on the other end. 

Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs, and the forthcoming collection, Here in the Dark. Her short work can be seen in Still: The Journal, Cowboy Jamboree, Bull Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is the Roger Gillan Visiting Writer at Robert Morris University. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at AB-Technical Community College and is the EIC of Reckon Review. She lives in Western North Carolina.

Roger Vaillancourt

Underneaths

I loved his hands so much before I hated his hands. They had character just sitting on the table in front of him, the deep veins and the creases of wear and the scars from chisel tips and scrapes. Yet they could also be so gentle and sweet. It was the two things together that I loved so much, and that they were mine, that I could inspire them to do what they did. 

If I could have had them by themselves, unattached to the rest of him, that would have been perfect. This is how I dreamed of them once, just the hands, and I have never quite forgotten, or recovered from, that dream.

But I came to hate them because they never stopped. They never stopped grabbing at me and after we bought this house they never stopped puttering at it and between the two I could get no rest from them. 

I suppose that's why I started to dig. To go to ground.

But let me go back. The house. He had loved every thing about the house from the moment he saw it there just off route 9. Though it sat right off a busy road, it was set far enough back and behind a tall enough fence that it felt private. The fact that it backed up to the reservoir made it seem even more quiet. He loved the shape of it, the size of it, its little rooms, its big windows, the roofline, the traditional color, the coziness within it. He put a mark on every room with paint and mouldings and curtains and furniture and paintings and sculpture. 

The house opened up a part of him I had not fully appreciated before. When it is said that a person "blossoms" it can mean a change like this, I realized. The change in form from bud to blossom involves more alteration than one might think. It's not just a graceful unfolding, it is an expansion, it is the encroachment into and habitation of space that had previously been free, open, available to any. Two cannot blossom in the same space where the two first budded. His hands and tastes and opinions spread over the whole place. I would have been happy for him if I hadn't also needed to live there myself.

The only thing he didn't love was the basement. He hated basements and dampness and darkness. So it became mine, I claimed the basement. I have always like basements. When I was little, I would escape the heat of the day or the boredom of adults by retreating to the basement where my Grandfather would be building his tiny world hung off of the O-gauge rails. His bench there in the corner was so cozy, with its tiny drawers of tools and parts, with the bright light on the articulating arm, hovering over his head like a crown, while he stared at a tiny tree or person or car in his hand, through those weird square magnifying glasses. He painted so gently, so slowly and carefully, that he seemed like a process of nature, like water wearing away a stone or grass growing. 

So to me a basement is a place of quiet and peace and focus and gentle progress and I would love to have it, thank you. While he vined and whorled and expanded and transformed the house above my head I could be insulated down here. Of course, I didn't have any obvious reason to be down here long term. At first it was to clean it up, to organize it. Sure. But that could only last so long. As I swept and scrubbed in the first days, I also cast about in my mind for what would keep me down here, what hobby I would select that might allow me to remain. While I loved my Grandfather, I did not inherit his love of model trains. Nor would I be doing carpentry or woodworking, because that was my love's domain. He would glom onto it and it would cease to be mine and cease to be an escape. 

I finally settled at the end of strange distracted paths, on geology. This was new, but I think had always been there. What did I really know of it? Not much. Probably less than you. I had never taken any courses on it in school, I had never received a children's set of mineral samples, I had never had a relative who was interested in it, there was no reason I should have been drawn to it. Save for one: that I'd had a seed of aesthetic interest planted recently. 

A year or two ago, we had gone with a couple who are friends of ours to the Harvard museum sort of on a whim. One of our friends had recalled it from her youth and wanted to revisit it and her partner wanted company on this excursion and we were game. For the most part it struck me as a showcase of decay, with rooms full of stuffed trophy animals. It was a museum in the old sense, that of a rich man's collection of personal belongings shown for "educational purposes," but more truthfully shown to brag and stroke the ego. It was kind of interesting while also more than a little sickening. 

But the one thing there which had interested me deeply was the geology gallery. It was a vast room with glass-paneled cases standing in rows across it, each case filled with miraculous things: deep-flecked opals like tiny abstract dioramas and massive selenite crystals and fine white-threaded mesolite like an explosion captured in a photograph and ink-black schorl that somehow gave no light while still shining and striped jasper that seemed patterned by hand somehow, and soft fuzzy green asbestiform tremolite I want to pet like a kitten and beautiful rich red cinnabar which also will destroy. I loved the sight of them and I loved them more when they were toxic or radioactive, when their beauty was balanced by threat. I felt a strange recognition as I thought about how all these things were found beneath the ground in various ways, while mining for gold or gypsum or salt or other things, or while stripping off a mountaintop for coal or while exploring caves for no reason other than their being there. Deep or shallow, underneath our feet, underneath all the long generations of humans living their lives in miracle and mundanity, were things of ravishing beauty and danger, waiting for someone to dig down to them and be entranced by them or poisoned by them or both. Things being born in unimaginable slowness, drip by drip of slow accretion across millennia. It was a bizarre notion. It made the world larger than I had thought it to be just before. 

Recalling those long cases with those strange fantasies set within them, I decided it would be geology that I studied in the basement. Like any avocation, getting into it is a frictionless fall into details and more details. All a new hobby requires is curiosity and as much money as you can throw at it. The boxes arrived on the doorstep, one after the other, a steady accumulation. 

He didn't mind. He teased me about it sometimes, but I think he also appreciated the freedom it gave him. It kept me from rolling my eyes at him as he painted a room for the third time or swapped curtains between the bedrooms. It was more freedom for both of us, and I could afford it, and it was "investment." He knew I had bought the broad table to use as a work surface, and he saw me choose the shelves of display drawers, and when I asked him to come downstairs to wire in the overhead light for me - I don't do electrical work - he had to admit that I'd made a very nice workplace for myself down there before he hustled back up the stairs as if he had been holding his breath the entire time. 

The boxes came and I opened them and added them and my collection and my knowledge both grew in parallel. Upstairs he continued to wreak design and I watched over the weeks as strange objects - like hand-turned wooden bowls of raffia balls or distressed ceramic planters with tufts of tall dried grasses - arrived and then moved from place to place and then often disappeared. I resisted the urge to purchase demonic beauties of my own. 

Efflorescence appeared on the back wall of the basement, on the side facing the reservoir, not far from my workbench. I let it evolve in its gradual way, and it was not lost on me that it was being born by processes similar to its compatriots in the collection. Time phantomed past in the way it does, where it seems it can't be but yet it's suddenly time to buy milk again, where the dust has somehow gathered thick enough on the bureau that it needs wiping again though it seems like I had just done it. My efflorescent child grew with no effort on my part. But after some time it seemed that perhaps it had grown to maturity and was ready to join the collection. With great silly joy I designed the display card for it which described it just like the rest of the items in the collection, with the sourcing showing our current address. 

It would not be possible to scrape it off and have it retain any form at all. I flinched to imagine doing that, because it would destroy it. I had to cut it out of the concrete wall of the basement. This would be a challenge, but it could be done. Scraping is the start of it, defining the shape of the piece to be removed. The scraping needed to go deep enough that I could get behind the sample and cut through that way. I had effective tools for the job, carbide and diamond coated tools, which required only patience and steadiness in my actions. This needed to be done slowly. There are psychological mechanisms that can be used to inspire patience. Changing the scale of what I'm doing, thinking down to the microscopic and seeing the four inch square as a vast, holy plot of land around which I needed to meticulously dig a moat. Thinking of it as sculpture, just like my love would do in his work, slowly working my way towards the final shape buried within it, buried within the same material. It took many days, over weeks. I did not rush. I pursued it like a pilgrimage.

You would be surprised how large a hole I needed to make in the wall to extract the efflorescence. To be able to get the correct angle to dig shallowly behind it meant that the whole thing needed to be a couple of feet across. Just as I was getting down behind it to what felt like the center of the backside, my tool encountered a sharp change in resistance. For several long seconds I thought I had encountered some kind of void in the concrete, and only quite late did I realize that I'd breached the wall entirely. The material I was bringing back was not some strange rotten composite in a concrete void, but rather packed dirt from the exterior of the house. I'd cut all the way through the foundation. 

I continued the work and eventually removed a nice clean plinth of concrete with my little efflorescence intact on its front side. I had been holding the shape with my hand for days and days, expecting each scrape or tap would be the one when it fell to my grip. When it finally did, when its weight arrived to my palm, I flushed with happiness and felt briefly dizzy. Its funny placard was ready, and it joined the others in a logical way, adjacent to the rest of the accretives. It brought me great joy and satisfaction to see it there. I did not mention it to my beloved, because I sensed that doing so seemed likely to ruin it somehow.

The hole that remained in the wall became a quiet partner to me. In the same way an owl in a tree outside your window will become companionate simply by being there, by looking around its environment at the same things you looked at, by swiveling its head to your motion, by choosing your shared silence and presence, so too did the hole become a friend of sorts. A comfort. The basement had only ever had one exit, up the stairs into the kitchen; there was no bulkhead to the outdoors. The hole changed this. There was now another way. It felt like a window that had long been painted shut had been opened to fresh air and release. It was a sort of promise. For weeks it was just a friend that way, something to which I would turn and see and then smile. It took a long time for it to become more.

His hands never really stopped during all this time. It's hard to understand unless I spell it out. 

I would come upstairs in the evening and he would want to show me what he'd been working on. He would take my hand, he would put his arm around my shoulder, he would pat my ass as we walked to the room he'd worked on. When we would watch TV, he would put his hand on my leg, he would put his arm around me, knead my shoulders. In bed, he would spoon around me, I would wake with his arm draped around me. I would wake up sometimes with his one hand or both of them rooting around underneath me, pushed into my t-shirt or pants, stroking me or squeezing me or probing me or in a million other ways hungrily consuming parts of my body with his unstillable paws. I think he thought I liked this. I probably said something to that effect once, way back at the beginning. I probably had liked it that one time. But now it had grown to feel different. He never asked again if I liked it or wanted it, he assumed whatever I said the first time was how it would always be. 

For a time, I got the notion to try to own the thing, for me to touch him more, thinking that if he felt touch from me he would be less all over me. Maybe he was just skin-hungry, I thought, maybe I could choose the time and place and in this way pre-empt his cling. But that was a disaster of a different kind. He loved it and would start telling me what to do, how to touch him, and he could never get enough, it went on endlessly. Even when I went all the way along with it and brought him through to a squeaking cum, he'd still want to snuggle afterwards and I ended up feeling like I'd been consumed anyway, like a Jonah being crushed in his throbbing gut. It took my getting a bad cold where I was feverish and vomiting for three days for me to finally break out of that cycle and allow me back to my preferred distance. I lay in bed most of those three days, looking out the sliding door to the balcony, when I was not retching, onto the dark glassy reservoir just beyond the embankment. The water looked so close and so high up, like I could step out onto the balcony and then down into it like a swimming pool. From the windows of the first floor, you couldn't see the water, you could only look out onto the wall of the embankment, from there it sat looking like an innocent grassy hill.

*

It was during that time when I was trying to control the touching that I also started to expand the hole. I didn't have as much time in my space downstairs, and for some reason the labeling and sorting and cleaning and polishing of the collection was not as compelling to me then, it was all about the hole. 

First I took it down to the floor, which was not as hard as you'd think with a hammer and chisel and patience. I used one of his chisels stolen from his workcase and knew I was dulling and misusing it and this made me happy in my task. I knew while I was doing it that once the doorway was done, I would put the chisel out in the dirt somewhere as I dug outwards. I imagined how it would feel as I slid its sharp end into the receiving soil and then pushed with my bodyweight until it disappeared down past the top of the handle and then I'd smooth it over with the lightest effort of one finger, like polishing a spot. With these dreams in my head I cut out the whole little doorway, like a hobbit's door, until I met the wall of fresh dirt and clay just beyond. Then the quality of the work changed and got much more compelling to me. 

While he was out at some store fingering fabrics or getting tiny pots of sample paints, I carried out all the concrete pieces and threw them one by one as far as I could fling them into the reservoir. Bait the dragon. Then I worked out a little system whereby I could put the dirt I excavated from the tunnel out into one of the cellar window wells behind the rhododendron and then later rake it out along that side of the house and it wouldn't really be noticeable, like they did in "The Great Escape." The pallets I picked up I would put out on that side of the house, just into the woods. Pallets are perfect for shoring up a small tunnel, just cut the planking and timbers into consistent lengths and there you go. Pallets are free, right there at the side of the road, in the back of the industrial park, free. It was written on them in spray paint "FREE" and "TAKE ME". Okay, yes, I will take you, you little minxes. I will part you out and free you.

It's always the same temperature underground. It's never too warm, it's never freezing. If you're working, if you're exerting yourself, it can be quite comfortable. Add in a work light which brings its own warmth, like a tiny little hearth, and it can be immensely inviting. It's idyllic, the directional light showing a delicate dusting of rich soil on the bare wood. Brush the dirt away with the back of your hand. There, the clean wood, the smell of earth and freshly cut pine board. Doesn't it remind you of Nordic cabins and holiday places and handcraft? And with it the pleasure of the long task ahead, there is always more soil in the bare end of the tunnel, more timbering to set up, more face to pull down, more stone elbows jutting into the course to work the wood around, more to be done. 

Don't ask me where I was going. It wasn't a matter of "going" anywhere. It was a thing unto itself. It was the creation of a place and the discovery of the work that called me to do it. 

The work continued for a long time; it spanned weeks and months and seasons. That's how I know it's always the same temperature. I had started it in the spring, and I was there in the summer where it was a cool relief, and then through the fall and into the winter when there was snow up on the surface above me, and back around to spring again, suddenly. It was a place unaffected by seasons or whatever he was doing up there to the rest of the house, or the annoyances of the rest of life, like birthdays and Christmas and socializing and cookouts. We had one, a Labor day cookout, and I was particularly sensitive to the quality of my shoring just before it, I actually knocked in a couple of extra supports the day before just to be certain that all the sandaled and sneakered feet treading above wouldn't collapse my work. All went well. I was expecting there to be perhaps some fresh soil flaked into the tunnel afterwards, but I found none. My tunnel was as solid as if it had always been meant to be. 

Over time, the quality of the naked face changed. From the start, it had been mostly the same kind of clayish soil, not true clay, but not loose worm castings either. It had always held in a clod when I closed my fist around it. Later, as I got much further out, as the opening began to hide behind the elbows and knees of the tunnel's course when I viewed it from the working end, I began to encounter more gravel embedded in the soil. I even encountered a couple of breadbox sized stones which I could not avoid, but had to extract and pull out entirely through my plank road. The clatter when I'd loosen a packet of gravel out of the face onto the floor of the tunnel is a sound I found unexpectedly delightful. 

Around that time, the other thing started with stuffed animals on the bed in the spare room. Then he had, during and just after the holidays, started talking about "growing our family." There was no way to know exactly where this came from. I hadn't encouraged it. I had never expressed a desire for children at all, ever; though I had also never clearly expressed a desire not to have children. I had been silent on the topic which I suppose left my position open to interpretation. Just after Christmas, in the fraught pause between the holiday madness and the return to work and normalcy in January, he had started showing me things on his computer, information about adoption and application forms and articulation of how the process would work. When he did this, I thought about the tunnel and happily dissociated, nodding enough to make it seem that I had remained present while I was in my mind working the naked face, and moving deeper away. He was dreaming on about a toddler crawling on the living room rug while I was dreaming of crawling down the tunnel, back to my love and my work. 

There was always a simple and unconfrontational way to dodge the next step. It's easy to use inertia if you know how. Huge life changes require huge efforts and all it takes is half of the team not quite lifting their corner to prevent things from happening. When asked to complete the forms, I would grow frustrated and angry. The angrier I grew, the less frequently he would ask me about them. It was not about the process, I maintained in my tight, raised voice, it was the forms, my god I hated the forms so much, their endless parade of questions each requiring so much effort to recall or worse to look up in some file stuffed away in a box somewhere. When had I left that job? Had I actually gotten all the credits for the degree, or was I still 5 short? What was my brother's address now? Who would be the best third character reference after the two obvious ones? Once I even slapped a cup of pens to the floor in my anger. 

At the same time, I let him touch me more during this. I did this because I didn't want an obvious break, I didn't want the adoption bureaucracy and the physical overwhelm he caused in me to make him decide anything. No, I don't know why, but it was important that I would not hear him say "I don't think this is working," or "I'm not sure we want the same things," or any of the other things that are said by normal people to set the wedge. I needed to hold that off from happening. Not because it wouldn't be true, but because it was the wrong way. It would have been the wrong ending. We deserved better than a pedestrian ending, better than a basic Hallmark movie plot turn, the mild ending of the relationship that came before, and which in its dying allowed, the central passion of the film. No, I couldn't tell you exactly why. His happiness to paw at me more, and my unbelievable feigned enjoyment was more than enough to distract him, to make the situation feel more confusing and conflicted than it actually was. It was more than enough to keep him in place. 

And when it was uncomfortable to me, I always knew I would be back to the truth in the tunnel. There was no need to tell lies there, no need to elide or pretend. And it was coming closer, it wouldn't be long. The soil was becoming more damp, the gravel more tightly packed. 

I have heard that people in major life events, like winning an Oscar or having a baby or delivering a triumphant speech, don't remember the climax at all, but rather have flashbulb impressions from just around it, remembering the bottled water in the pocket of the limo's door as it was opened for them to step onto the red carpet, or the pattern of the buttons in the hospital elevator, or the way the wires snaked backstage as they waited for their name to be spoken to call them to the podium. For me it is the sound and feel of my trowel ticking on the gravel face and then the crumble of the face and the water like a garden hose turned on from somewhere else. It started as a trickle, but in only moments, just a few seconds, turned to a gush and then I knew I was there, and I crawled back out as my knees got chilled from the flow which ran ahead of me like a happy puppy and fell across me as I got back through the door and pulled the plug for the worklight out of the wall. I moved to the stairs, and watched the flow grow stronger from the tunnel, I watched the basement window flap as the water gusted the air out of the basement and made room for the water which would come and keep coming and fill up past the rafters and up through the floor above and would maybe float the house off the sills and I thought about how, once it was high enough, once it was a done thing and impossible to undo, unrecoverable, I would run up the last few stairs and throw the door open and call to him with joy and deliver our ending with perfect drama, the largest gift he would ever receive from anyone ever in his life.

Roger Vaillancourt is a professional explicator and maker of soothing sounds. He also writes fiction which explains nothing and is only inconsistently soothing. His previous work has been published in Paragraph Magazine, Blue Moon Review and New World Writing. His debut novel, Un-ruined, is forthcoming from Malarkey Books in November 2022. Find him on Twitter or Instagram: @rogerjva