On the drive to the clinic, we pass the apartment complex on Aster Street, and my husband points out the metal disc on its roof. Not for the first time, he says, “Flying saucer.” And we fall into silence for the rest of the ride.

I think he expects me to laugh. But I never laugh.

It’s January in Nashua, New Hampshire. When we get out of the car in the parking lot, we walk through the snow and past a daycare. A young boy in a puffy coat sits at the bottom of a slide clutching his leg. He wails into the cold gray air, and adults rush to him while the other kids play. The trees around us are bare.

The clinic is on the second floor of an office building behind the daycare. This is only my second time here, after what seemed like years with the previous clinic, which never went anywhere. The first time with Dr. Shaw was right before Christmas; the office had been decorated with colorful lights. A baby figurine at the front desk wore a Santa hat. This time, the decorations are gone, the desk empty.

I approach the woman in her late sixties sitting at the desk in pink scrubs, typing. She looks up at me. Her eyes dash to my husband, then back to me. She smiles warmly.

“Mr. and Mrs. Abramowicz?” She mispronounces our last name. 

“Yes,” I say. “I’m here for my 3 p.m. follow-up appointment.”

“Of course, Dr. Shaw will be with you in a moment.”

We sit in the waiting room. My husband plays Candy Crush on his phone. I pick up a year-old issue of Garden Gate magazine. 

I skim an article on “easy vegetables” then put the magazine back on the table. My husband notices me fidgeting, and he reaches for my hand.

A nurse opens a door and calls us back.

I get up with my husband behind me. We follow the nurse down the short hallway into a small room with a recliner covered in disposable paper. The nurse gestures for me to sit down. My husband sits on a metal stool near the recliner. I glance at the clock hanging above the door.

The nurse takes my vitals and instructs me to put on a gown. Then, Dr. Shaw steps in and pulls a chair close to the recliner. He adjusts the ultrasound machine, presses a few buttons, and nods toward the screen.

“Let’s take a look,” he says, adjusting the probe. I watch the gray, amorphous shapes flicker. He points to a small cluster. “Here, see this? It’s responding exactly as we’d hoped.”

He explains each step of the injections, demonstrating the tiny vials and needles, as if I hadn’t injected myself what felt like a million times before. But we’re trying a new experimental protocol and he has to ensure the instructions are clear

My husband leans forward, hand on mine. I listen to Dr. Shaw’s instructions, noticing how deliberate his movements are. For a moment, it feels like we are moving forward.

---

The next time we go to Dr. Shaw’s, my husband stays quiet about the flying saucer, but I look. This time I notice thin metal structures beneath it, like legs.

The New Hampshire air in March is cold but not biting. 

We wait longer this time. My husband has stopped playing Candy Crush. He just sits, hands folded in his lap, staring at the wall. I pick up the same Garden Gate magazine. Or perhaps a different issue, I can’t tell. There’s an article about starting seedlings indoors.

When the nurse calls us back, she doesn’t even try to pronounce our names. She smiles a more polite, reserved smile. 

Dr. Shaw’s office feels smaller than I remember. Even before he finishes the ultrasound, I know from his face. He’s kind about it: He uses words like “unfortunately” and “this time” and “we can adjust the protocol.” My husband asks questions I don’t fully hear. I nod when it seems appropriate.

On the drive home, I look for the flying saucer. The angle is different from this direction, and the afternoon light catches the metal legs. They’re definitely legs. I count four of them, ready to run.

When I get home, I open my laptop, login remotely, and try to get back to work. But I feel like something unnerving has taken hold of me.

---

Outside the window in my home office, my favorite tree has blossomed. But I keep my window closed most days.

Dr. Shaw has given me a whole new set of home procedures to support my cycle. Hormone injections, symptom tracking, oral medications. Rituals to follow every day. I’ve been through this many times before with different formulations that haven’t worked.

Each time I inject, my husband insists on being there. I rub alcohol on the injection site, carefully measure the dose. He doesn’t say anything, his jokes long gone.

Weeks blur together. Dr. Shaw says it’s too early to lose hope. My husband nods when he says this. I nod too.

On the drive home from the clinic, I look up at the saucer catching the afternoon light. I see a seam along its edge, like it might open. My husband’s eyes remain fixed on the road. 

A few days later, I take a test: I am pregnant. My husband cries when I tell him. I don’t.

---

Weeks later, as my husband and I walk to our car to go to Dr. Shaw’s, I gently tap my husband’s shoulder. 

“Let me drive.”

I take a slightly longer route, one that doesn’t go past Aster Street. No flying saucer in sight. 

We arrive at the clinic ten minutes later than usual. My husband doesn’t comment on the route, but I catch him glancing at me in the waiting room. I pick up a different magazine this time, something about home decorating. I don’t read it.

When the nurse calls us back, she tries our name and gets it almost right. I smile at her, genuinely this time.

Dr. Shaw pulls up a chair and explains that today’s ultrasound is to confirm the heartbeat, to make sure everything is developing as it should. He speaks in a careful, measured tone. My husband holds my hand.

The probe is cold. I watch the familiar gray shapes on the screen, waiting for Dr. Shaw to point something out, to show me what I’m supposed to see. He’s quiet for longer than I expect. He adjusts the machine, presses harder, tries a different angle.

“Let me just…” he says, trailing off.

My husband’s hand tightens around mine.

Dr. Shaw leans back slightly, then forward again. He takes a breath. “I’m not seeing what I’d hoped to see at this stage,” he says. His voice is kind. “Sometimes development is just slower.” He pauses. “I’d like to bring you back in a few days. We’ll check again.”

For the drive home, I ask my husband to take the wheel. I sit in the passenger seat and close my eyes. When I open them again, we’re passing Aster Street. The flying saucer is there. The afternoon sun catches the metal legs. The seam along its edge looks wider than I remember, or maybe it’s just the angle.

My husband doesn’t say anything. 

Three days later, Dr. Shaw confirms what we already know. The pregnancy isn’t viable. He uses the word “loss.” My husband’s hand goes slack in mine.

---

It’s late summer. I’ve started leaving the house to drive on my own. Not for appointments with Dr. Shaw, but to be alone. 

On a drizzly night, I drive past Aster Street. The flying saucer gleams above the streetlights. I keep driving, but at the next intersection I turn around. I pass it again, slower this time. Then again.

Eventually, I pull over. Rain beads on my windshield. I can still see the metal legs, the seam along its edge. I sit there for a long time, engine running, wipers off, until the saucer is just a blur through the water on the glass.

When I get home, my husband asks where I’ve been. “Out,” I say.

We start again. September comes. The kids at the daycare near Dr. Shaw’s office are wearing tiny, knitted sweaters. I walk past the playground, averting my eyes.

When it fails, we try again in October. And then November. And then December returns, and with it, the Christmas decorations at Dr. Shaw’s office. A plush baby in a Santa hat. Colorful lights blinking in the gray waiting room. 

Dr. Shaw takes us to his office, folds his hands on his desk. “I’ve reviewed all your tests,” he says. “Hormone levels, embryo quality, uterine lining. Everything looks good. There’s no medical reason this shouldn’t be working.”

“So what do we do?” My husband asks. 

“We have options,” Dr. Shaw says. He talks about different medication protocols, donor eggs, possibly taking a break to let my body reset. The words start to run together. I watch his mouth move but I’m not sure what he’s saying anymore.

“Sometimes,” he says finally, “we just don’t know why.”

In the car, my husband doesn’t start the engine right away. We sit in the parking lot, heater running. Through the windshield I can see the daycare. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “We don’t need kids to be happy.”

The way he says it tells me he’s practiced this. Maybe for weeks.

I don’t say anything.

“We could stop,” he continues. “We could just…be us again. Travel. Fix up the house. I don’t know. Just…” He pauses. “Just not this anymore.”

I look out the window. We’re not on Aster Street, but I know where the building is from here. Two miles north, maybe less.

“I don’t want to stop,” I say.

He’s quiet for a long time. Then he starts the car.

We take the usual route. When we turn onto Aster Street, I see it immediately, lights flashing on top of the building. Not steady lights, but pulsing and rapid. The saucer seems to hover slightly, or maybe it’s just the way the lights make it look: a rhythmic gleam.

“Do you see that?” I grab his arm.

He glances up briefly. “See what?”

“The lights. On the flying saucer.”

He looks again, longer this time. Then back to the road. “I didn’t see anything.”

“It was flashing. Right there.” I point, twisting in my seat to keep watching. 

“You know that was just a joke, right?” His voice has changed. “The flying saucer thing. I was just…it was just something I said to lighten the mood.”

I stare at him. “I know it was a joke.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I saw lights. You’re telling me you didn’t see them?”

“There’s nothing there,” he says quietly. “It’s just a water tower or something. I don’t even know what it is.” He slows and stops the car. “Maybe we should talk to someone. About all of this. Not Dr. Shaw. Someone else.”

“I don’t need to talk to anyone,” I say, turning away.

He doesn’t respond. 

I go alone to Dr. Shaw in January, then February. The receptionist knows my name now, pronounces it perfectly. The nurse doesn’t smile as much. Dr. Shaw talks about “diminishing returns” and “emotional toll” and “knowing when to reassess.”

At home, my husband sleeps in the guest room; says his back hurts, needs a firmer mattress. We eat dinner in front of the TV. We don’t talk about treatment. We don’t talk about much at all.

---

It’s early April when Dr. Shaw schedules what he calls a “consultation appointment.” 

I drive alone. The morning is overcast.The flat gray light makes everything look washed out. I could take another route, avoid Aster Street entirely. But I don’t.

When I turn onto the street, I see it immediately. 

I’m not sure how to describe it. It looks like it’s tilted, or perhaps hovering slightly above the roof. The metal gleams in a way that doesn’t match the dull sky. And there are lights, not flashing this time, but steady. A faint glow along the seam. 

I pull over to the side of the road, put on my hazards.

The saucer sits there. But the angle is wrong. Or maybe I’ve never looked at it from exactly this spot before, at exactly this time of day, in exactly this light.

I check my phone. The appointment is in twenty minutes. Dr. Shaw will be waiting. He’ll have pamphlets, probably: information about adoption agencies, therapists who specialize in grief and loss. He’ll be kind. He’s always kind.

I turn off the engine and look back up at the saucer. The gleam along the seam is there, shining, steady and patient.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Malcolm first noticed it in the pauses.

Not the words his daughter spoke but the spaces between them, the way her sentences began to stall mid-air, looking for a place to land and finding nothing solid. Averill had always spoken quickly, words tumbling over each other, anxious to get out. Now she started and stopped, started and stopped again, as if listening to something else overlaid on top of what he could hear.

“Dad,” she said on the phone one evening, “can you turn the TV down?”

He was alone in the kitchen. The television in the living room was off.

“There’s no TV on,” he said.

A stretch of silence, so long he pulled the phone from his ear to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.

“Oh,” she said finally. “Then it must be one of the others.”

“The others?”

“The other channels.”

Before he could ask what she meant, she hung up.

Outside the kitchen window, the street looked like an advertisement for itself. Every lawn edged. Every porch light calibrated to an identical amber. Sprinklers ticked in synchronized arcs, the water catching the orange of the setting sun, breaking it into neat fragments. The cul-de-sac curved like a closing parenthesis, containing them all.

Clara stood at the counter arranging cucumbers in a glass bowl, each slice nearly translucent. “She’s just tired,” Clara said without being asked. “She’s in her last semester. Of course she’s hearing things. We all hear things when we’re tired.”

Malcolm did not say that when he was tired he didn’t hear nonexistent televisions. He did not say that his mother had started this way too, with sounds no one else heard, signals no one else could decode.

---

Later that week, he drove forty minutes across town to see Averill. Her apartment was in one of those low, aging buildings near the university, all beige stucco and thin exterior stairways that rattled underfoot. A rusting satellite dish jutted from the roof like something broken.

He knocked.

“Who is it?” Her voice came through the door thin and sharp, like it had been pulled taut.

“It’s me. It’s Dad.”

A pause. Then the sound of half a dozen locks being undone, locks he didn’t remember from his last visit. She cracked the door and peered out. Only when she saw his face did she open it the rest of the way.

The apartment smelled wrong. Sour, stale, with a chemical edge. The blinds were fully shut, the sliding glass door covered with a blanket duct-taped along the edges. Light leaked in around the corners, turning the room a dim, underwater gray.

“Ave,” he said. “What happened to the window?”

“Glass works both ways,” she said, moving past him into the room. She wore an oversized sweatshirt and flannel pants, despite the early heat. Her hair, once a heavy, dark sheet, had been hacked unevenly. Some places were shaved close to her scalp, others hung in ragged chunks. “It lets them see you. You think it only goes one direction, but that’s not how it works.”

“Who?”

She moved into the kitchen, ignoring him. Cups lay everywhere—mismatched mugs, plastic takeout cups, a row of rinsed glass jars lined up along the counter. Some held water. Some held nothing. One had a few pennies at the bottom.

“You have to separate it,” she said, picking up a jar with both hands and holding it at eye level. “Tap water. Bottled water. Rain.”

He followed. The sink was clogged with something hidden under a plastic grocery bag. When he reached to move it, Averill’s hand shot out, fingers gripping his wrist so tightly he gasped.

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“They can track you through what you throw away. It’s the easiest way to do it. People think it’s their phones, but that’s just in movies. They use waste. They map you through what you think you’re done with.”

His skin prickled. She’d always been a bright child, good at science, facts, the kind of logic that reassured him. The logic was still there, he thought, but it had twisted on itself, like a ladder that had unfolded so far it fell back to the ground.

“How much are you sleeping?” he asked. He tried to modulate his voice, keep it casual, as if they were discussing her course load.

She let go of his wrist and shrugged. “They rewrite you while you sleep. The scripts you’ll follow, the pathways they lay down. You wake up and you don’t even know what’s changed. I stay up until my head buzzes, and then I lose time. That’s the same as sleeping. That’s when they get in. I tried keeping the lights on to stay awake, but they send messages through those too, the same ones that rewrite you, so it’s better to just turn everything off and sit very still.”

He looked around. All the lights were off. The only illumination was the thin, gray light seeping around the edges of the taped blanket and the glow from the microwave clock. It read 3:33, though his watch said 11:18.

“You saw Dr. Hauer before,” he said. “Do you remember him? You liked him.”

“He wrote down everything I said,” she replied. “I watched him. Every sentence, he made a mark. They share those marks. That’s how they decide what to do with you.”

“Who decides?”

She looked at him then, really looked, and a flicker of something moved through her eyes, pity, maybe, or anger, or a kind of exhausted contempt.

“You know,” she said quietly, “you’re the one who taught me about patterns.”

He had. When she was little, they’d walked the neighborhood together, counting things. Four mailboxes in a row. Six identical cars. The way the cracks in the sidewalk formed grids. He’d done it as a distraction, a way to calm her. She’d been anxious even then, easily overwhelmed by noise, by sudden movement. Patterns had soothed her—something she could rely on when everything else felt random.

Helen had done the same thing with him, once upon a time. His mother, tapping the side of his cereal bowl with a spoon: three taps, pause, three taps. “See?” she’d said. “That’s how you know it’s me. That’s our code. Three, three. Our way back to each other.”

Years later, after she’d started talking to the radio and unplugging appliances because they were “leaking thoughts,” the tapping had turned frantic. Three-three. Three-three. Three-three. Her fingers on windows, doors, his shoulders, as if reasserting the code could pull her back to where he still lived.

“Patterns help,” he said now, but his voice sounded thin in his own ears.

Averill smiled without humor. “They help them more.”

He drove home with the radio off, the highway a long gray ribbon. Every overpass looked like something that could collapse. Headlights in his rearview mirror felt too close, the beams washing through the interior of the car, making his own hands look like borrowed objects.

Clara was already in bed when he got home, their bedroom cast in the blue of the streetlamp. Their curtains were just sheer enough to let the ambient light in.

“How was she?” Clara asked, eyes closed.

He sat on the edge of the mattress. “She’s not sleeping. The apartment’s…dark. She taped blankets over the windows.”

“College kids are strange,” Clara murmured. “They go through phases.”

“She thinks they’re tracking her through the pipes.”

“Who doesn’t think that some days?” Clara sighed. “This world is crazy-making. The important thing is not to catastrophize. If you start seeing her as sick, you’ll make her sick. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Her words slid over him like oil on water. He remembered his father at the kitchen table, decades ago, hands wrapped around a mug gone cold. “If we don’t call it that,” his father had said, not looking at him, “then maybe it’s not.”

They never said the word schizophrenia out loud. It had been implied in bottle labels, in hushed consultations, in the way certain neighbors stopped making eye contact. Not saying it hadn’t saved anyone.

---

That night, Malcolm woke at 3:33 a.m., heart hammering. The digital alarm clock glowed red.

Three-three-three, he thought.

The house was very still. Then, faintly, he heard it: a whispering hiss in the walls. The air conditioner? The refrigerator? Pipes shifting?

It sounded, for a moment, like someone breathing through the drywall.

He held his own breath and listened harder, straining his ears until they rang. The sound resolved into nothing specific, just the usual house-sounds that came when everything else was quiet. He told himself that. He told himself that again over coffee in the morning, watching the sprinklers pulse in uniform increments across the neighbors’ lawns.

---

Days blurred. Averill’s text messages became less frequent, then more frequent but unreadable: strings full of numbers, street names, times of day, weird phrases. 11:11. HUM UNDER FLOOR. TURN OFF MAIN. HEARING BLEED.

He tried to call. Sometimes she answered and spoke in half-phrases, distracted by something he couldn’t see. Sometimes she didn’t answer at all.

He went back to her apartment, nearly two weeks later. Someone had spray-painted a crude eye on the building’s back wall. The door to her unit had another new lock, the brass still bright, fresh screw-holes pale against the weathered paint.

“Ave?” He knocked gently. “It’s me.”

“Let me hear it,” she said from the other side.

“Hear what?” His mouth had gone dry.

“The one you used to do.”

He stared at the door. His hand rose and he knocked: three, pause, three.

The quiet on the other side felt like a held breath. Then several locks turned, and the door opened.

The apartment was darker than before. She’d covered the remaining sources of light: the microwave display masked with tape, the tiny LEDs on her router blacked out. She moved through the gloom like someone used to it.

Light from the hallway sliced through the room as he entered. Before she hurried the door closed, he glanced around.

“What’s that on the walls?” he asked.

His eyes adjusted to the dark, and the graphite caught what little light bled around the blanket, the whole wall faintly silver with it. Pencil covered nearly every surface. Lines, arrows, circles, numbers. Floor plans overlaying maps, connecting points with loops and jagged strokes. Under one set of arrows he recognized their street, labeled in her careful, cramped hand. Under another, three names: HELEN. MALCOLM. AVERILL. Date ranges beneath each. The lines between them were thick, nearly carved into the drywall.

“It’s the network,” she said. “You can feel it, right? The hum. The way certain moments double themselves.”

Something in his chest clenched. “What do you mean double?”

“Like this,” she said, and walked to the window. “You stand here and you hear the siren, and you think it’s the first time, but it’s not. It’s the fifth or sixth. They loop it until you give the right reaction. The fear. Whatever they came for. I figured that out. That’s why I stopped reacting.”

“When did you last eat?”

The question sounded stupid the moment he said it, a normal question in a place where normality had already lost purchase.

She shrugged. “It’s not important. The body is just…hardware. They can swap it if they want. They did it with you.”

His stomach lurched. “With me?”

“They replaced you after the last time you left.” She said it like a fact she’d verified. “The real one would have come back sooner. The real one wouldn’t have been able to stay away.”

“I came as soon as I could.”

“You came when they told you to.” She tilted her head, studying him. In the dim light, her eyes looked too large for her face, catching any glint. “It’s not your fault.”

He wanted to argue, to insist that he was the real one, but the words stuck. His memories of recent weeks were..fogged. Had it been three days since he last visited, or ten? Had he really called every evening, or had he only meant to? The days at work had become interchangeable. Conversations with Clara drifted apart at the edges.

He wondered, suddenly, if there was a version of him somewhere else, one who had done everything right and on time, and this version was the defect.

He shook the thought away with physical effort. “I’m going to call someone,” he said. “A doctor. We can go together. Just to talk.”

“No doctors,” she said sharply. “We can’t trust them. They’re archivists. They record you until they know your most vulnerable thought. Then they send that thought back at you when you’re weakest. That’s how they break you down.”

“That’s not…”

“You know how I know?” Her voice dropped. “Because that’s what they did to her.”

He knew which her she meant. In the graphite maze of her wall, one line led to HELEN in thicker, darker strokes than the others.

“Grandma was sick,” he said. “She had an illness.”

“She had a signal,” Averill whispered. “She wasn’t sick. She was tuned to something others couldn’t hear. They tuned her wrong on purpose.”

He thought of his mother tapping three, three on everything. He thought of the way she’d stared at staticky television screens, eyes wide, as if waiting for a message to emerge from the gray. He thought of the neighbor across the street now, seventy years old, always out at 7:00 p.m. sharp to drag his garbage bins to the curb with ritual exactness.

He called the crisis line in his car after the visit. Hands slick on the wheel, he used words he’d avoided for decades: psychosis, delusion, risk. The woman on the phone was calm, asked if Averill had threatened harm to herself or others.

“She’s not sleeping,” he said. “She’s not eating much. She thinks people are tracking her through the plumbing. That they replaced me with a copy.”

“Has she made explicit threats?”

“No, but…”

“If she’s over eighteen and not an immediate danger, we can’t force an intervention. You can encourage her to seek help or call again if she expresses suicidal intent.”

He thanked her, hung up, and sat until the parking lot lights flicked off one by one, plunging the asphalt into darkness.

That night, Clara didn’t ask if he’d called anyone. Sitting on the couch, she stared at her phone, scrolling an endless feed of other people’s dinners, pets, vacations. “You get what you focus on,” she said. “If all we focus on is illness, that’s what we’re going to live inside.”

They were already inside it, he thought. It had walls and a roof and crown molding. It had an HOA and a quarterly newsletter. It had a block party every summer where everyone brought their best dish and no one mentioned the house two streets over where an ambulance had appeared at 3 a.m. and carried someone away under a white sheet.

He started waking in the night at precise times. 2:22. 3:33. 4:44. Each time, the red digits greeted him, and the house hummed, and his heart tried to beat out of sequence. He began to notice other repetitions: the same silver sedan parked at the corner every morning; the same dog bark at precisely 6:15 p.m.; the streetlamp outside his window flickering twice, pausing, then flickering twice again.

He told himself the brain was built to find patterns, that it was simply doing what it did. He’d read that somewhere, in one of the articles he’d started skimming late at night about genetic risk factors and environmental triggers, about how having a first-degree relative with schizophrenia could increase risk many times over. He read and read, the words piling up on the screen, forming a shape he refused to name.

Sometimes, the hum in the walls glitched. There would be a stutter, a tiny drop in the sound, like a heartbeat skipping. In that half-second of silence, he imagined he could feel Averill on the other end of it, like two people on either side of a door, each with a palm pressed to the wood.

---

When the police finally went to her apartment, it was because a neighbor had called about “strange noises” and “concerns.” Not him. He had called numbers, talked to people, been told about thresholds and rights. The neighbor had heard her shouting at three in the morning and thought, I don’t want this near me.

They took Averill to the hospital. Malcolm arrived to fluorescent lights and a waiting room television tuned to a channel no one watched. Clara refused to come, saying that if they turned this into “a whole thing,” it would be harder for Averill to return to normal.

Normal.

The psychiatrist used words like acute episode and treatment plan. Medication names with too many syllables. Recovery curve.

“She may experience disorganization, paranoia, auditory hallucinations,” the doctor said. “But with early intervention, we often see significant improvement.”

“How early is this?” Malcolm asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

The doctor hesitated. “It can be hard to say. Often families notice changes months or even years before formal treatment begins.”

Months. Years.

He thought of the pauses in her speech. The way she’d started wearing headphones in the house at all times, even when she wasn’t listening to anything, because, she’d said, the silence was too loud. The way he’d told himself she was just introverted, just sensitive, just busy.

Averill refused medication. She signed herself out after three days. Adult. Competent. The words felt like a cruel technicality.

After that, she sank into the city like something dropped into deep water. He caught sight of her occasionally, the back of her head at a bus stop, her profile in a crowd near the grocery store, but when he blinked, whoever he’d seen dissolved into strangers. Her online posts became more fractured, then stopped altogether.

He thought, once, that he saw her in their own neighborhood. A figure two blocks away, walking slowly along the curve of the cul-de-sac, moving her hand along a row of mailboxes as if reading Braille. By the time he got his shoes on and stepped outside, the street was empty. The sprinklers on his lawn ticked on, right on schedule.

His own days grew soft around the edges. At work, he found himself staring at the photocopier, convinced its whirring lined up with his heartbeat, and that if it skipped, his heart would too. He’d stand there, hand hovering over the START button, breath shallow, until someone asked if they could use the machine, and he’d laugh, pretend he’d just drifted off.

At home, the flicker in the streetlamp began to feel personal. Two flashes, pause, two flashes. He counted the interval: six seconds. Two-six-two-six.

Three, three.

He woke one night to find himself sitting in the hallway outside his bedroom, back against the wall, knees drawn up. He had no memory of getting there. The carpet fibers had imprinted themselves into the skin of his ankles. The digital clock in the bedroom read 3:33.

Inside the walls, the hum and hiss rose and fell. For a moment, clear as a voice in the next room, he thought he heard Averill whisper his name.

He pressed his ear to the drywall. “Ave?”

Silence. Then the faint rush of air through the vents, impersonal as weather.

He started tapping again. He didn’t mean to; his fingers did it of their own accord. Three, pause, three. On the countertop, on the steering wheel, on the arm of the couch. Clara slapped his hand once, sharply, when he did it at the dinner table.

“Don’t,” she said. Her eyes were bright with something brittle. “Don’t start that.”

It was then he realized she remembered. The sound had been in their house once before. His mother’s sound. The code that hadn’t saved anyone.

“You’re worrying yourself sick,” Clara said, but her voice shook. “You need to stop reading those articles. Stop looking for patterns. She’ll come back when she’s ready.”

“Come back from where?” he asked.

But Clara had already turned away, rinsing plates, water running clear and hot over porcelain.

He thought of calling the crisis line again, telling them this time about himself, about waking in hallways, about voices in the hum. But compared to what Averill lived inside, his symptoms felt…small. Amateurish. Like a child imitating an adult’s handwriting. Besides, what would they do? Evaluate him. Ask if he intended to harm himself or others. Offer numbers to call during business hours.

---

It was late autumn when something in Malcolm finally gave, though nothing dramatic happened to mark it. The subdivision’s trees turned color in unremarkable unison, red and gold leaves spiraling politely to the ground. Plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs appeared on porches. There was an email about a neighborhood potluck.

He was driving home from the grocery store when he saw her.

At least, he thought he did.

She stood under the streetlamp at the entrance to their development, hands at her sides, hair a ragged halo. The light above her flickered twice, paused, flickered twice again. Her face was in shadow.

His heart slammed so hard the world narrowed. He pulled the car over so abruptly the tires scraped the curb. When he looked up, she was gone. The streetlamp hummed, its light steady.

Maybe she had walked away. Maybe she had never been there. Maybe she was everywhere now, thin as a broadcast he could almost catch if he tuned the dial exactly right.

He left the groceries in the trunk. He walked home on legs that didn’t feel quite attached.

Inside the house, Clara sat at the table with her laptop, light from the screen blanching her features. “Did you close the garage door?” she asked without looking up. 

He stared at her. Her voice sounded slightly delayed, as if traveling from a great distance.

“You didn’t see her,” he said.

“See who?”

He opened his mouth to say their daughter’s name and found he could not. The word stuck like a pit in his throat. His eyes burned.

“I think I’m getting sick,” he said instead.

“Then go lie down,” Clara said. “You’re always tired lately. This is what happens when you don’t protect your energy.”

Protect your energy. Protect your thoughts. Protect your illusions.

He went to the bedroom. Sat on the edge of the bed. The alarm clock glowed 7:07. The numbers pulsed faintly, as if with breath.

He lay back without undressing and stared at the ceiling. Cracks followed the length of the room, forming an almost perfect mirrored pattern: one fracture line on his side matched by another on Clara’s. Symmetry, he thought. As above, so below. 

The hum in the walls rose, then smoothed into a long, unbroken tone. It sounded, for a moment, like someone holding a note: a voice stretched past what should be possible.

In that sound, he heard everything at once: his mother’s fingers tapping three, three, Averill tracing lines on the walls in her dark apartment, Clara rinsing plates while pretending not to notice she was crying. He heard the sprinkler systems ticking on across the neighborhood in perfect time, water arcing over grass, washing away nothing at all.

His chest felt hollowed out, as if someone had reached in and unplugged something essential.

“Okay,” he whispered to the room, to the hum, to the invisible grid he’d spent his life both inhabiting and denying. “Okay. I hear you.”

He could feel himself sliding, not a drop but a tilt, a gradual redistribution of weight from one reality to another. The doctor had said early intervention. The articles had said genetic load. Clara had said phases. His father had said nothing at all.

He turned onto his side, facing the wall. His hand lifted and pressed flat against the paint, feeling for vibration.

“Three,” he whispered, barely audible even to himself. He tapped his fingers against the drywall: three, pause, three.

On the other side, somewhere in the vast tangle of wires and pipes and foundation, someone answered. Or he found his answer in the heat kicking on, the expansion of metal. 

The house around him settled deeper into its own silence. Outside, the cul-de-sac lay under its orderly grid of streetlights, each perfect circle of illumination failing to touch the next. Neighbors moved behind their curtains, performing the small rituals of evening. No one looked out. No one saw a man lying in the dark, listening for his daughter in the bones of his home.

No police cars came. No doctors. No saints in white coats.

Just the hum, and the patterns, and the knowledge that somewhere, in some other dim room, a woman with uneven hair might be pressing her palm to her own wall, feeling the echo.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Alice’s mother looked at the airport monitor and cursed. It was under her breath, but still loud enough for Alice to hear over the bumping wheels of luggage carts, the clickity-clack of high-heeled boots. Alice followed her mother’s gaze. She saw the flight number for Cleveland and read across to the letters that flashed Delayed. The butterflies that had been dancing in Alice’s belly all day fluttered anxiously. 

Alice’s mother sighed. “Figures I’d get stuck waiting on him. Oh well, it’s just an hour.” 

Alice twisted the plastic lanyard that labeled her an unaccompanied minor. Three months ago, an hour wouldn’t have meant anything—Alice was, after all, a child who knew how to keep herself entertained—but with the world of changes that had happened between being nine and ten, it meant one less hour she would get to spend with her father. To remind him how funny and smart she is. To remind him not to forget about his daughter, Alice, who still lived in Chicago with the woman who used to be his wife.

Alice’s mother put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Guess we’ll have time to get you something to eat after all.”

Alice squirmed from her mother’s grip. From a nearby restaurant she could smell melting cheese. Pizza, she thought-wished. But she didn’t say it out loud. Alice had made a bargain the night before, whispered in the dark to whatever invisible force controlled her fate, that if she didn’t talk before she boarded the plane, she would make it to her dad’s place safely. Alice had been on an almost no talking kick since her dad left. She even gave herself points for choosing words with the least number of letters when she did have to speak, like a reverse scrabble game. But today there was more at stake. She would not speak one word. Not a yes, no, or thank you. Total silence. 

Later, when she saw her dad, she would talk and talk and talk. She’d tell him how things had really been, not the fake answers she’d been putting in her emails as her mother perched by her shoulder reading aloud like some over-lipsticked parrot: Fine. OK. All Good. In his emails back, her dad never mentioned the woman he was living with. She wasn’t supposed to be there while Alice visited. Alice’s mother had agreed Alice could visit, but only as long as that woman wasn’t there. 

Alice’s mother fished in her purse. “Let’s try to find something that won’t poison your system.” She pulled out her phone and spoke as her fingers tapped the screen. “David, flight delayed. Will send update.” She dropped the phone in her bag. “Or not.” 

Alice’s mother had been talking to herself a lot lately. Sometimes she’d narrate her actions. “I’ll put the milk in the fridge and then get the dishes washed.” But other times—at the store, or in the car, or walking to the house—Alice’s mother would start speaking mid-sentence, as if she’d been having an argument that had gotten too loud for her head.

In line at a smoothie stand, Alice watched the man in front of them swing a young boy onto his shoulders to create a totem pole of red hair and gray t-shirts. The woman with them paused while placing their order to smile. “My two handsome men.” 

 “Can you see the board?” Alice’s mother asked.

A lump formed in Alice’s throat, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the flight delay, the happy family, or her mother’s not-so-gentle reminder that her glasses should be on her face and not stuffed deep in her backpack in their purple and green storage case. She shrugged. 

 Her mother stepped forward. “We’ll take two Mango-Madnesses. Small. There’s no added sugar, right?” 

Behind the counter, a worker blended drinks. Red, orange, red, orange. The next one will be red, Alice thought. But it was another orange one. Alice felt cheated even though it was their drink order that broke the pattern. Finding patterns made Alice feel like a scientist, like her dad. He worked for a pharmaceutical company, looking through microscopes for patterns in viruses and other small things. Alice used to worry that he would catch a disease at his lab, but he caught a different kind of bug—“the love bug” her mother called it—and now it was almost worse, because Alice felt as if a part of her had died instead. 

Alice’s mother led Alice toward the gate, grasping her shoulder again as a honking service cart approached. They watched it pass by like a Royalty float in a parade. An elderly couple perched on the back with crowns of white hair, clutching canes in place of scepters. 

When they got to the gate, all the seats were filled. An overflow of passengers sat with their backs against the walls, creating a mismatched centipede of extended legs. Alice’s mother made her way to an open spot on the floor, but a skinny teen in baggy pants and earphones sat down first.

“Prick,” her mother muttered. 

Alice pictured the boy deflating into a blue-hooded puddle on the floor, like the balloon she’d gotten at the circus the last time it was just the two of them, her and her dad. The balloon had been as pink as the cotton candy still sticky on her fingers. It had bobbed on its string against the car ceiling. When it floated into the front seat, her father jabbed it too hard; it whooshed around the car as it lost its air. He’d shrugged, not noticing her tears. “It’s all energy, pumpkin. Now that energy is free to become something else.” 

He didn’t know that Alice slept with the dead balloon under her pillow. How she’d wondered if its energy had entered her, reabsorbed on an inhale. Imagined it filling her cells, sending her floating above her bed, the house, and out into the night sky. How far would she drift before someone caught her? A few weeks after her dad left, she came home from school and saw the balloon in the trashcan, a circle of pink rubber in a sea of carrot peelings and crumpled paper towels, like a punctured life raft whose passengers abandoned ship.

Alice’s mother scanned the area for another place to sit. “Oh, Brenda, is anything going to go your way?” 

Was it Alice’s fault her mother talked to herself? With Alice’s dad gone, there was no one to fill in the other end of the conversation. Alice could go an entire morning without saying a word, not responding to “Do you want toast,” or “Where’s your lunch box?” Her mother filled the silence. “Of course, you do.” “Now I see it in your hand.” Alice wished she never had to talk again. She’d heard the words her mom and dad flung at each other, sharp as daggers. As deadly as poisoned arrows. Words could burst a marriage. Just like that. Prick.

Alice followed her mother’s figure as she made a beeline for a space by the windows. She might have been mistaken for Alice’s older sister, at least from behind. She’d lost a lot of weight since Alice’s father left, claiming her diet helped lower their food expenses, but Alice thought she looked like she’d been filed down into points: shoulder blades, nails, nose. Everything seemed sharper. 

Alice’s mother crouched to the floor and sat crisscross applesauce. That’s what Alice’s kindergarten teacher used to call it when they sat on the floor at reading time. Alice’s knees touching the knees of her friends, her hand cupping a laugh before the teacher’s reprimand. Alice felt sorry for the girl she was back then with the stupid pigtails, giggling over who knows what. That girl had no idea what was coming.

Instead of sitting, Alice pressed her face to the window. A plane taxied on the runway. Luggage carts zoomed. Other vehicles carried gas or food to waiting airplanes. But their area of the tarmac seemed abandoned. The passenger tunnel jutted out like an elephant’s trunk. One orange-vested employee leaned against the stacked luggage cart. Alice tried to spot her suitcase. It was new for the trip, pink with black trim and a yellow hair ribbon tied to the handle just in case someone else on the plane had a pink-with-black-trim one too. Money had been tight, but her mother had splurged and spent forty-dollars online. Alice thought of her packed things; her green and white striped T-shirt, her second favorite pair of jeans, her days-of-the-week underwear, Sunday through Thursday. What if the suitcase got lost? Then she would just have Friday and Saturday. Everyday couldn’t be Friday and Saturday.

Alice sucked at the straw; the last of the orange slush worked its way onto her tongue. She counted how long before it melted. Conversion, her father had taught her, is the act of one substance becoming another substance. Ice to liquid. Liquid to gas. 

Her mother groaned. Alice turned her attention to a voice coming from the speakers, but only caught “—inconvenience. We’ll update you shortly.”

Around them passengers started to shift and mutter; some moved toward the ticket counter.

Alice’s mother stood. “Delayed again. This is all your fault, David.”

Alice didn’t see what her father had to do with delaying the plane. And why would he? He’d used lots of exclamation points in his last email when he’d written Can’t wait!!! 

Her mother shook her head. “At least another hour, kiddo. Hope you brought a book.”

Of course Alice had brought a book. Three in fact. The pages dog-eared and bandaged with tape after too many overeager turns. But the books were for the plane. And for nighttime at her Dad’s place, which loomed in the distance, as strange and unknown as a foreign country. 

Alice’s mother moved to a newly emptied row of seats. Alice put the cup in the trash, keeping the straw to chew on. She placed her backpack on the floor and sat next to her mother. To any of the other passengers or the uniformed check-in people behind the counter, they seemed like just two people in the crowd: a brown haired, blue-eyed girl and her mom. But Alice wasn’t what she seemed. No one was. She kicked a wad of dried gum on the carpet until her mother told her to stop fidgeting.

When Alice first asked about seeing her dad, Alice’s mother had sighed and said, “He’s gone, hon, you just need to forget about him.” “But—” Alice started. Her mother had snapped. “You don’t get it. Your father went crazy, okay? He’s not acting like your father anymore.” Alice, as usual, stayed silent. But forget about him? How could she? The memories of him were as much a part of her as breath. At night, under the covers, she’d hold an internal screening of her life, age zero to nine. She could speed up the memories or freeze one image to study it like a photograph. Herself at five, dancing with stuffed animals on the comforter, her father’s hands in tickle position, her toothy smile. Dr. Friedlander was always asking, “So, Alice, is this a real smile today?” But all of Alice’s real smiles belonged to her memories. Now, she’d gotten her way. She was going to see her dad. But she couldn’t shake the feeling in her belly, like she’d swallowed a rock. What if her mother was right?

Alice’s throat tightened. She searched the waiting area for a pattern. Seated across from her a woman with an old-fashioned hairdo read a magazine. Next, a man in trendy square-framed glasses held a phone. Then a person reading a book and the next looking at a phone. 

Patterns helped Alice not to panic. Panic was when your heart started racing so fast you thought it was going to push free of your chest, when your face got sweaty and you couldn’t breathe, and it felt as if the passage to your lungs had caved in. The first time she felt it was the night her dad left. She’d been doing homework, her pencil clenched as she tried to ignore the shouting. Then came the silence. A few minutes later, the door to her room creaked open. Her father kissed the top of her head, “I’m going.” She’d scribbled a silent message onto the paper, but he’d turned and left without reading the words caged in lines of loose-leaf. Please stay.

Passengers re-filled the seats around them, complaining into phones or to others in their group. The ones without seats paced like a pack of angry beasts. Alice tried counting her breath. One, two, three. It was on a list Dr. Friedlander had given Alice of what to do when she felt a panic attack coming on. Things like write in a journal, draw pictures, do twenty-five jumping jacks, scream into a pillow. He didn’t know about finding patterns. That was Alice’s secret. 

Alice closed her eyes but she could still sense the commotion, as if she were connected to it by live wires. When she opened her eyes, the air was spotted with bright pixels of light. She chewed the end of the straw, played with her lanyard, and noticed her mother had started talking to the man with the trendy glasses. He was older than she’d thought at first, the glasses and blue jeans an attempt to fake his age, like her mother’s dyed hair and tall black boots. 

 Alice leaned toward them and put on her listening ears. That’s what she had to do at school sometimes when her head got too full of thoughts. Her teacher would notice her looking out a window, or off into space, and would say “Alice, you need to put on your listening ears.” Alice would picture her ear attached to a tube with no other sound in it but the teacher’s voice. Sometimes, though, her other thoughts pushed their way in, crowding her attention like there was something special to see—a meteor or movie star—and she would forget to listen down the tube, missing yet another important teaching fact. 

The man with her mother spoke in a rush, his words running into each other as if he were speaking in cursive. 

“See, they never give it to you straight, when you check online it says delayed indefinitely, the holdup’s probably mechanical so you might want to get on another flight, but I used miles so I’m stuck.”

“Well that’s a drag, but I’m stuck too. Alice’s mother motioned toward Alice. “She’s going to see her father. Guess the only plus is my ex has to suffer the wait on his end.” 

The man flickered a smile. He extended his hand. “My name’s Bob.”

Alice’s mother returned the shake. “Brenda.” 

“Two B’s,” he said. “With such a long wait, we’re going to be bored. That’s three. How about we aim for four. Bored Bob’s going to get a beer. Want to come? My treat.”

Alice waited for her mother to say ‘No, I couldn’t possibly.’ It wasn’t like the B’s were even a real pattern; Bob was probably short for Robert. Alice brought the lanyard up to her nose and sniffed. It smelled like plastic report covers. She fought the urge to bite down.

 “Well, I guess we have time,” Alice’s mother said. “I wonder if I should text David?” She studied her nails, scraped something off her ring finger. “Screw it. He’s an adult. He’ll figure it out.”

Bob led them to a bar with football games on big screen TVs. Pop music blared through speakers. Alice was the only kid in there. At a table they sat on high stools that Alice had to climb onto. Alice’s mother asked what she wanted and Alice pointed to the pizza triangle on the laminated menu. Her mother didn’t object, but when it arrived she attacked it with a napkin, sopping up the grease that pooled in small yellow puddles.

Bob drank as quickly as he spoke, gulping from his beer bottle as if it contained water. In between gulps he talked about an ex-wife in LA, a fifteen-year-old son, how he worked on “an investment thing,” which probably bored her mother as much as it bored Alice. Not that you’d know. Her mother leaned forward on her elbow and twisted her hair around her knuckles as if weaving it on a loom.

When the second round arrived, Alice’s mother and Bob reached for the same bottle and smiled as their fingers brushed. 

“So,” Bob said. “Tell me about you.” 

Alice listened to her mother tell a series of half-truths. “Art History major at U of M,” (she never graduated); “Work in medicine,” (she was an administrator for a health care company); “Locked out a philandering husband,” (he’d left, with a suitcase and a box of work files, after taking the recycling bin to the curb). Then her mother repeated phrases Alice had heard so often they seemed scripted. “Middle-aged breakdown.” “Male menopause.” 

Bob took off his glasses and swiped the lenses with a napkin. Without the frames, his face looked pasty, like a mound of cookie dough. Alice’s father used to wear glasses. They’d been thin and wiry, always going lopsided on his face when he laughed, but around the same time Alice got stuck with her own awful glasses, he’d switched to contacts. 

“It’s kind of funny,” Alice’s mother said, as she twirled her bottle on the table. “David was such a perfectionist, but it didn’t bother him that he’d failed at being married.”

Bob nodded. “I read in an article that most folks get two years tops of a good marriage. After that it’s just a ticking time bomb.” He put his glasses back on and pointed to Alice. “What about you kid? I bet you’re into those bands with the cute boys, right?” He tapped the table to the song on the speakers. 

Alice shrugged. She’d lost interest in the pizza and bit down instead on a strand of hair, preferring its soapy taste to the gummy cheese and soggy crust.

“She’s a quiet one,” Bob said. “Cat got your tongue?” He wiggled his at her. It glistened red and pointy under his teeth like a venomous sea creature. 

Alice squinted at the hamburger-shaped clock over the bar. The airline worker had said they’d have an update at five o’clock. It was hard to see without her glasses but she thought the hands—two oversized french fries—were perched at the four and ten. 

 “She’s not talking to me,” Alice’s mother said, and tugged the hair from Alice’s mouth. It dangled wet and matted against Alice’s neck. “I think she blames me for not stopping her father. As if I could have. He was chasing a scent like some overexcited dog. He’d have run me over if I stood in his way. And now I’m the one being punished. Kids.”

Alice thought of her silent plea. Stay. If she’d stood in front of him, blocked the door, would he have run her over too? 

“My kid never shuts up,” Bob said with a shrug. “Give me this. Buy me that. I wouldn’t mind him taking a lesson from your girl.” 

He held up an empty bottle to signal to the waitress, and scooted his stool so that when he sat back down his arm touched the arm of Alice’s mother.

Alice wished she could say something. There was no time for another drink. She scanned the crowd rushing through the terminal. Was there anyone who’d been at the gate? Maybe the flight had arrived. Alice’s mother didn’t seem to be paying attention to the time. Her face was flushed, her laugh getting louder. What if she did something stupid again? 

A few weeks ago, Alice’s mother didn’t show up to get Alice after school. Alice waved off a concerned teacher and said she was supposed to walk home. But she ran most of the mile, feet propelled by a fear that something bad had happened. Really bad. Her mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway and no one answered when she rang the bell so Alice got the key from its hiding spot: a fake rock made of gray plastic that blended in with the other rocks, the overgrown grass, the weeds. Sometimes you can’t tell something isn’t what it seems until you got up close. 

  Inside, Alice tried calling her mother’s cell phone but it went straight to voice mail. Her mother finally showed up near dinnertime. Alice was on the couch cocooned in an afghan, the wool wet from her tears. She was so relieved that her mother hadn’t been hit by a truck or squashed by a piano that she accepted her mother’s red-eyed, “Sorry, kiddo,” with a rush of happiness that felt like forgiveness. As her mother pulled her into a hug, Alice could smell the alcohol on her breath. Her mother rested her lips on Alice’s head. “This is all your father’s fault,” she’d said before stumbling up the stairs.

Alice’s mother’s phone rang. She checked it and set it on the table without answering. “It’s David. He can wait.”

Alice acted without thinking. With one hand she grabbed her backpack, with the other the phone, and jumped off the stool, running out of the bar as she tapped the screen to answer. 

 “Hello, Brenda?” 

It was her dad’s voice. Alice didn’t know what to do. Should she speak? She had to speak. “Dad, it’s me.” She entered the flow of the crowd, allowed it to propel her forward, like a conveyer belt. She looked over her shoulder to see if her mother had followed but saw only a blur of unfamiliar faces.

“Alice, why aren’t you on the plane?” 

Alice’s breath whooshed like she’d been punched. When she tried to speak, her words came in spurts. “Is it here? Did it take off? We’re not at the gate. Mom took me to a bar. With some guy. I can’t believe I missed it.” 

How could this have happened? She hadn’t said a single word until now, but it didn’t matter. She stopped in place. A woman pushing a stroller came up short and gave her a dirty look. 

Alice fought her way toward the nearest wall, stepping in front of people, stumbling over a cart. She found a gap by a water fountain and squeezed in. 

Her father was shouting. “Alice, are you there? Let me talk to your mother.”

Alice tried to read the nearest gate number but tears blurred her vision like a pair of glasses working in reverse.

 “Did I miss it?”

“Alice, calm down. I thought they might have you waiting on the plane. It doesn’t say anything on my end. Just that it’s delayed. If you miss it, we’ll put you on another one. Can you please get me your mother.”

“My suitcase.” She twisted the lanyard tighter against her neck. “If they put me on a different plane, won’t it get lost?”

“Your suitcase? Don’t worry. We have stores here. We can buy you stuff.”

Alice thought of her father’s last purchase for her: how she’d clung to the string as the balloon landed by her feet, and how, even though she knew better, she wished for it to spring back to life. After they’d parked, her dad unclipped his seatbelt, turned toward her and said, “Pumpkin, sometimes things break that can’t be fixed. Sometimes you have to let them go.”

 “ALICE!” Alice’s mother appeared in front of her, her face pale, her purse clutched to her chest. “How could you run off like that?”

Seeing her mother made Alice go silent again. She faced the wall, found a pattern in the tiles and traced the green and white squares. Two up, three over, two down, three over.

Alice’s mother grabbed Alice’s shoulder and turned her around. “Alice we need to go. Is that your father? Give me the phone.” 

Alice passed it to her, keeping her other hand on the wall as she traced from memory. Green, three up. White, two down.

 Her mother spit words into the phone, into the air, at Alice. “Of course you can’t help, David. What can you do? You’re three hundred miles away. Why don’t you ask her what she wants? At least she’s talking to you.” 

Alice’s mother held out the phone, but Alice turned away again and brought her other hand to the wall. Through it she could feel the vibrations of energy whirring like a thousand fans, or a million bees, their low, steady hum. If only she could transform into that energy. To become as light as the air, riding the energy waves to the spot where her dad was waiting. And when she arrived, what she hoped he’d tell her, what she needed him to say more than anything in the world, was that he would catch her, hold her tightly, and never, ever let go.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The bite marks on the man in Room 614 were too large for a pitbull.

Wendolyn could feel the current of excitement as she clocked in for her shift. Two nurses had already texted her about it; three more approached her on her way in, grabbing her by the elbow or pinching her scrubs. Apparently there was a betting pool, with the leading guess that the man had somehow crossed paths with the escaped lion from the Detroit Zoo—maybe was the lion smuggler himself!—and was hiding it.

Rumors swirled that someone had called the police. It was all very hush hush, of course, which meant that everyone but the man in Room 614 knew. The halls swarmed with residents, med students, hospitalists, and volunteers, all casually strolling past 614 for a glance at the man who might soon be plastered on the 6:00 news. 

Wendolyn declined the three offers she had in her first twenty minutes to take a walk by the man’s room. She couldn’t think of anything less interesting than two seconds of ogling a man under heavy sedation and ensconced in bandages, and besides, she had Peter’s ultimatum to think about.

Wendolyn dug her nails into her palm, trying to fight a wave of nausea.

One of her patients, Mr. Michaels, kept falling out of bed. He was due for surgery at six in the morning to remove the tumor octopused around his brain. Of course that would only buy him time—months, maybe, if he was lucky—but he had signed off on it, and now had only to avoid some catastrophic injury for the five remaining hours before the nurses wheeled him to the O.R.

Wendolyn cursed when his alarm went off again. She didn’t have time to babysit him the whole night, and she didn’t want to deal with the wrath of whatever administrator or family member wanted her head when Mr. Michaels was deemed unfit for morning surgery.

This is the problem, Peter would say. You take all of it on yourself. You don’t see that you’re affecting both of us when you—

“I don’t need a nurse,” Mr. Michaels snapped.

“Of course not,” said Wendolyn brightly, guiding him back into the bed. “There you are, and Mr. Michaels, if you climb out one more time, I’m afraid I will need to call someone about restraints.”

“I just need to pee.”

“You have a catheter in, sir.” She smiled, feeling it strain across her face. She wanted to grab a chunk of dark hair and bite it, like she did when she was in middle school, feeling the coarse texture string across her tongue until all other thoughts blurred and faded away.

Mr. Michaels grunted and collapsed back into bed. Wendolyn considered restraining him anyway, but settled on a mini-vigil. She could spare a couple minutes.

Always such a martyr, Peter’s voice said, exasperated. It’s like you think you get a gold star for running yourself ragged. It’s because your mom never—

Mr. Michaels snored. Wendolyn jumped. How had seven minutes passed? She hurried out of the room.

Three a.m. stretched into four. The alarm for Mr. Michaels’s bed went off again, and someone called in the order for restraints. After Wendolyn returned from a lengthy post-seizure cleanup down the hall—her nose still burning with the smell of defecation mixed with bleach—Mr. Michaels was snoring again, his mottled cheeks streaked with tear tracks.

Was restraining him really the kind thing to do? He hated it. And if he fell and couldn’t have surgery…wouldn’t it be better to avoid prolonging the inevitable? Let him die on his own terms. And yet, he wanted the surgery. Wanted to cling to life like the rest of them, the petty routines and small indulgences that made all of them believe there’d be something better just around the corner, some grand finale that life was building toward, the dream they’d always deferred come to life.

“They’re moving him.”

Wendolyn jumped. One of the other nurses hung in the doorway, green eyes blinking at her. 

“Mr. Michaels?” Wendolyn said. “But—”

“No, the tiger guy,” the nurse said impatiently. “Prepping for surgery. Debridement of the wound, probably. They said he’s yours now until the surgeon gets here.” She paused, and when Wendolyn just stared at her, uncomprehending, she added, “If you need any help…”

Wendolyn clocked the woman’s phone in her right hand, fingers twitching. You cling to the rules, Peter would say, like it makes you morally superior to everyone else. When you just use them to judge people.

Three days. Three days to decide if she’d take the hospice job, the reduced hours, the easier lifestyle. Accept Peter’s vision for their new life, one without the stress of night shifts and hospital infections, one where he could “see himself marrying her and having a baby—if she’d only slow down and take care of herself.” A prospect that would be much more appealing without his exasperated voice echoing in her mind.

“There he is,” the nurse said, a thrill of excitement in her voice. “Wendy, I—”

“Wendolyn,” Wendolyn said firmly. “Get off my floor.”

“I—”

“Now.” Wendolyn brushed past her and crossed the hall just before the hospital bed wheeled past. She got her first glimpse of the man from Room 614, one side of his face swollen and blue, his torso bandaged and bloodied, skin a sickly white. She wondered if people would still try to ogle him at the morgue, if that’s where he ended up. Probably. An image flashed in front of her: Mr. Michaels and the man from 614, walled up in adjacent metal shelves in the morgue, still at last.

Five a.m. came and went, then six. Four more hours on shift, then home to sleep. By the time she woke up half her ultimatum time would be gone. Peter was staying at his friend’s for the weekend to “give her space,” something he had never done during an argument before. 

He was serious, she could tell. 

She thought of all the little hints he had given her over the past year, the half-muttered comments, the tight-lipped denials that anything was wrong, the gentle suggestions followed by frustrated sighs. 

Had she caused all that? Certainly he had been happy in the beginning. They had talked about getting married three months in. That was two years ago. Had he been happy at all recently, truly happy? Could she make him happy? Maybe he had seen the real her, finally, the kind of person that wasn’t down to go watch a last-minute sports game or play corn hole for hours on a random Saturday. The kind of person who was lazy with dishes, and liked rather trashy television, and who derived most of her self-worth from a job that didn’t give very much back, even when someone like Peter—a lawyer from a large family whose worst vice was his predilection for video games—wanted more from her, wanted to start real life.

Mr. Michaels was taken back for his surgery, and the man in Room 614—who was now the man in Room 603—was taken soon after. Wendolyn felt strangely relieved he had not woken up.

“Excuse me.”

Wendolyn jumped. A police officer stood in front of her, a nondescript young man with his thumbs hooked into his belt, looking a bit like a boy playing dress up. “I’m looking to talk to the man with the bite marks. Someone said you could help me.” He smiled, half-shrugging his shoulders like, isn’t this a strange world. Wendolyn wondered who had called him. The surgeon would be angry, and Wendolyn knew for a fact that the charge nurse would want everyone’s head for a HIPAA violation. When you had money and power, you liked to keep control of your domain.

“He’s still in surgery,” Wendolyn said curtly. “I would come back in a few hours. The anesthesia will take some time to wear off.”

“When does he get out of surgery?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he survive? If he dies—”

“I don’t know,” Wendolyn said. “I’m so sorry, that’s an alarm. Excuse me.”

Mr. Michaels returned. Wendolyn swept her gaze over him as she scribbled the new medication list on the whiteboard. He looked shriveled, like someone had squeezed out half his juice and discarded the rind. 

Wendolyn’s phone buzzed. The charge nurse had seen the police officer. Three separate nurse chats had popped up about it. Someone said they heard the man, who was named Ed, was not going to make it. Someone else said he’d confessed to housing a baby hippo. He wasn’t crushed, he was mauled, someone wrote back, and screenshots of AI-generated summaries of different animal bites began pinging back and forth.

Peter hadn’t texted. Wendolyn began typing.

I’m sorry I got so upset last night. I just—

Delete.

Hey. Hope you had a good night. I’ve been thinking, and I—

Delete.

I want all the same things you want. I can’t stand it when we fight. You can’t just make it seem like I’m some horrible person that doesn’t care about you. I forgave you last year, I wasn’t—

Delete, delete, delete.

A low buzz filled the air. Wendolyn looked up. Ed was back from surgery. 

The police officer hovered outside the door for the first two hours. Wendolyn alerted her superior, who alerted hospital management. The charge nurse had a go at him, citing all the regulations that the police officer was violating while the young officer grinned in his face. Management sent one of the younger nurses to ask him to wait in the cafeteria, giggling apologetically. He obliged.

“Get his full name and address when he wakes up,” Wendolyn’s boss told her, acrylic nails wrapped around the room’s door handle as she poked her head inside. “He was talking about a kid.”

Wendolyn’s stomach clenched. She glanced at Ed, who was stirring now, wiry hands moving fitfully beside his bandaged ribs.

She delayed by checking on her other patients. Mr. Michaels had a visitor, a woman in her mid-forties who looked tired and grim. She gave Wendolyn only the polite nod of a veteran visitor. 

Wendolyn’s phone buzzed. She jumped and checked it. Just one of the nurses again, asking about the police officer. Someone joked about whether he was single. 

Wendolyn took a deep breath.

“Ed, is it?” Wendolyn said, breezing into his room. His eyes blinked. “Ed, can you tell me the names of your children?”

Ed’s forehead crinkled under the pale hospital room lights. “Kids,” he croaked. “No…” He cleared his throat. “Just…a nephew.”

His face brightened and his gaze grew more focused as he took Wendolyn in, sweeping over her body once, twice. She guessed he was still on the good pain meds from surgery; the agony would come later. It was the best time to chat.

“A nephew,” Wendolyn said, bracing. “And, he lives with you?”

“No.”

Her shoulders slumped in relief.

“Not anymore. I mean, not all the time. My sister comes to my place sometimes when she…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Family stuff.”

“Ah,” Wendolyn said. She hesitated, then sat in the chair next to Ed. She didn’t have time to interrogate him, and it wasn’t part of her job. Still, if there was a kid… “Ed, you’ve been in the hospital more than a day now. Is your nephew home right now? At your place? With the animal?”

She saw the gate crash over his expression, the defiance and denial snap into place. “Everyone’s fine,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m not going to let anything happen to her,” he said fiercely. “It’s not anyone’s business but my own. And I got land up north, I just need to close on it, if the bank would get it together. She gets frustrated, not having the space. Tigers aren’t—” His mouth snapped shut again, brain catching up with his tongue. “Never mind,” he said. “I want some water.”

The police officer would be back soon, and Ed would connect the dots on the kind of trouble he might be in. Wendolyn herself didn’t fully understand it, but she knew enough to know that whatever information was to be had from Ed was to be had before he spotted the uniform.

“That’s fine,” Wendolyn said. “I don’t care about what you’re doing with her. It’s none of my business. I’m a nurse. I just want to know if your nephew is going by the place. Does your sister know you’re in the hospital?”

Ed’s mouth opened and shut. Wendolyn knew he had provided no emergency contacts, had been aware enough and cagey enough during intake to not give any identifying details, including insurance.

“Look,” Wendolyn said, glancing at the door and pulling out her phone, “just call her, okay? I just want to make sure the kid doesn’t go there.”

Ed looked dubiously at the phone. After a moment, he took it.

“Can I…uh…privacy?” he said. Wendolyn moved to the door. She heard the ringing as she shut it behind her.

After a minute, Ed signaled to her, and Wendolyn came back inside. He had looked calm throughout the conversation, but Wendolyn could see now his jaw working, the way he handed back the phone with something like disdain.

“Everyone okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. “Your boyfriend texted.”

Wendolyn glanced down. She hurriedly typed in her passcode. She had barely identified the swell in her chest as hope before she opened her texts and it was dashed.

Well, I have my answer, I guess, Peter began. Can’t say I’m surprised. I’m going to come get my stuff. I’ll be fully out by the time your shift ends, and you won’t have to deal with me anymore. Have a nice life, Wendolyn.

Her stomach dropped. That wasn’t the agreement. The ultimatum gave her time, precious hours to think things through, to make a decision. She was going to apologize. She needed Peter to understand her side, to see how she thought about it before they both just blew up their life. It wasn’t fair.

Another text. Wendolyn fled to the hall, frantically swiping back to her messages. But this one wasn’t from Peter. It was from a local number, not saved in Wendolyn’s phone.

I don’t think I can make it another couple hours.

Another buzz.

Uncle Nathan, I’m scared.

Rage, white hot, shot through Wendolyn, drowning out all other thoughts. She called the number.

“Hello?” she heard. It was impossible to make out the age of the voice; it could have been four or twelve. Mostly it was drowned out by rattling and thumping in the background. “Uncle Nathan?”

“What is your address?” Wendolyn said.

A pause.

“This is the police,” Wendolyn said, realizing as she spoke the words that she was violating some sort of law, but not having the brain space to worry about it. “I need your address so we can get you safely out of there.”

Another pause. A snarl, and a scream. Wendolyn jumped. Her hand began to shake. “Um,” the voice said, and her knees buckled. The kid was still there. “Will you kill her?” He began to cry. A second later he began, “317 West…”

She had him repeat it twice as she wrote it down on her hand and told him to stay on the line. The other nurses had noticed something amiss. Her supervisor offered up her phone, which Wendolyn dialed 9-1-1 into and handed back, along with the address and a scribbled note. She felt as though she were moving in a dream.

At some point, the police officer was back, looking red-faced and disoriented. He took Wendoyln’s phone from her and began talking in jovial, clipped tones.

Wendolyn collapsed onto a nearby bench. One of the techs asked her something, but she didn’t even have the energy to listen.

A kid. A kid alone in an apartment with a tiger.

Rage roused her again. Wendolyn stood and strode back into Ed’s—no, Nathan’s—hospital room. He took one look at her expression and scrambled ineffectually to sit up.

“Hey,” he said, eyes narrowing, “I checked and everything is fine, it’s—”

“He’s alone in there.”

“You tricked me,” Nathan said. He winced. His swollen face had turned a deep purple-black, making him look cartoonish and not quite human. “He’s been there before. He knows what to do. Zelda won’t bother him.”

“He texted me that he’s scared.”

Nathan grew still and very quiet. Wendolyn watched as he processed this information, thoughts racing plainly across his face. When he spoke, he merely said, “Are they going to arrest me? Will they kill her?”

“No questions about your nephew?”

Nathan scowled. “He’ll be fine. He’s been with her before. Zelda knows him.”

“Zelda knew you too, didn’t she? Before you got mauled?”

“That was my fault. She was hungry, and I got held up, missed a feeding. I fed her before I came to the hospital. She’s bored, that’s all.”

Never in her life had Wendolyn been so tempted to strike someone. A smart slap upside the head, like her grandmother used to do when she watched them all in that leaning ranch in Monroe while her mother worked.

“If anything happens to that kid,” Wendolyn said, leaning down lower, “I will personally inject you with the most painful, lethal cocktail of meds I can find in this hospital.”

“I’m telling my lawyer that,” Nathan snapped.

“Good.” She was shaking. A small part of her conscience whispered that she was being stupid, playing vigilante to feel big instead of powerless. But a bigger part of her didn’t care. A bigger part of her just wanted Nathan to feel the weight of what he had done, to feel some sliver of the terror he had inflicted on his nephew.

“They’re going to kill her, you know that?” Nathan said. His fists balled up. He began grabbing at the white waffle blanket draped over him, kneading it between his hands. “I raised her since she was a baby. She didn’t have anybody. Just chucked in a cardboard box. The guy I got her from said he was going to smother her, you know that? If no one bit.”

“You mean if no one bought her.”

“What would you have done?”

“Give it to a zoo. To a sanctuary.”

Nathan’s face pulled back in a snarl. “I nursed her. I fed her milk for months by hand. Bought her meat when she was bigger, made toys she could play with, kept her mind active. I was going to get her a place up north, somewhere she could roam free. I did everything right. I studied all about raising them.” He plunged his finger into his knee to emphasize the point, one time, two times. “No one could have done it better.”

“You raised a tiger in an apartment.”

“I loved her. She loves me. I’m the only family she knows.”

“You kept her locked up in a tiny room and pretended that was what was best for her,” Wendolyn said. She wanted to wipe that stupid, pugnacious look off of his face. She hated that he was so convinced of his own truth, of his own righteousness. “How’d you control her? You put her in restraints? A cage?”

“Never.”

“So you just put your nephew at risk whenever he was over. He could’ve gotten scratched, or bitten, or—”

“She’s declawed.”

He smirked when Wendolyn went still.

“Declawed,” she said slowly.

“Yup. Like I said, not a threat to anyone. She’s a sweet girl. She—”

“You remove part of the toe to declaw,” Wendolyn said. “You get a vet to do that?”

The expression on Nathan’s face turned vicious again. His fingers twitched. “I was more gentle than a vet could ever be,” he said. “She wasn’t in pain, I made sure of that.”

“You self-centered lunatic,” Wendolyn said. “You—”

“Ahem—Wendolyn, is it?”

Wendolyn spun, to see two officers in the doorway. She felt the blood pulsing just beneath her skin. She was ready to strangle her patient. Maybe they sensed that.

“The boy?” she said.

“Safe,” the officer on the right said. She stood, legs shaking. Nathan said something she didn’t catch and didn’t try to as she stumbled from the room.

“My God,” Wendolyn’s supervisor said. “What a night. Glad this shift is over.”

Feeling like a zombie, Wendolyn floated out to the parking lot. Peter was leaning against her car.

Wendolyn’s purse grazed her hip as she stopped short. 

She watched, almost as through a television screen, as Peter straightened, one hand smoothing back his hair. He pulled a crumpled bag off the top of her car.

“Breakfast,” he said gruffly. The I’m-open-to-making-amends-if-you-are voice. “Figured you’re probably hungry.”

That was her cue. Take the bagel and make some innocuous comment about the weather, or their plans that weekend, or something from the store they needed to pick up. Get back into the rhythm of a relationship, and address the fight later, when cooler heads prevailed, and they could each give an apology that spared their egos. I’m sorry, but…

“You alright?” Peter said. “You look exhausted. Here, take it. I’ll make dinner reservations for us later—”

“No.”

Now Peter froze. She watched the emotions flit across his face as she waited for herself to go back to the script. As they both waited for her to. The silence stretched on.

“Look,” he said, “I’m an idiot. I love you, and—”

“That’s not love,” Wendolyn said. She got in her car and shut the door. As she gripped the wheel, she flexed her fingers, imagining claws extending and retracting.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The first time you saw him, you thought, No one should be that perfect. It was impossible. No one’s lips were that color naturally.

After the first time, you saw him everywhere: walking down the sidewalk on brilliant autumn afternoons; in the drugstore near closing time; smoking a cigarette each morning before his 8 a.m. shift wearing a denim jacket and indigo-wash Levi’s, black hair gelled into a pompadour, eyes rimmed with lashes so thick he appeared to be wearing eyeliner.

It is love at first—and second, third, seventeenth, forty-seventh, ninety-second—sight.

---

How do you seduce a man (or is he a boy, as a coworker suggests) that you pass on the street, with no one and nothing to make an introduction? How do you hold his gaze each time you pass, smile that smile like a secret shared? How do you say I want to know? How do you sit down on the curb beside him one cloudless November afternoon and ask, not to bum a light, but how often he gets a fifteen-minute, that is, is his presence in front of your store on purpose or is his boss generous with breaks?

The answer is more simple than you first suspect. Loneliness.

---

The first time you see her, she’s with him, wearing cherry red lipstick and a purple velvet trench coat belted at her Betty Boop waist.

Later, weeks later, during a late night alone with too many glasses of whiskey, you’ll find a picture of her online, time stamped from that same miraculous day—she’s straddling a borrowed bike along the campus on the hill, her plaid mini-skirt hiked up around her thighs, combat boots pumping the pedals, her hand thrust out with middle finger up, nail painted shiny black, and if you weren’t as old as you are—old enough to have lived through, in real time, the era she’s putting on—you’d think her novel, the very image of rebellion. 

But you remember the underwear advertisements, everyone bored or high or hungry or too cool to smile, captured in black-and-white film. The consumed challenging the desire of the consumer. You remember striped thigh-highs and the Army Navy store that has long since been replaced by a noodle shop. You are old enough to have seen the indulgent apathy of youth rise and fall and rise again, to have perfected that stare, to know the urge behind it and the places it will meddle. To know, mostly, that it’s a facade.

---

You don’t expect him to ask for your number, but he does. You pat your pockets for a piece of paper, a pen, but he’s already got his phone out, fingers perched over the screen. You say, Sara, no H, and recite the ten-digit string. Cool, he says, I should get back in, and you nod and say, Me too, though it doesn’t really matter that you’re out here because you’re the manager and you doubt anyone has even noticed you’ve been gone anyway.

---

It takes him two days to text: 

hey sara without an h, are you free at all on friday?

It’s a Wednesday, exactly 102 days since the bright, humid afternoon you last saw your ex-partner and signed the papers to finalize the sale of the house you used to own together. Exactly 71 days since you last heard from the man you’d been having an affair with, though his spirit still hangs around the damp apartment you’ve settled into, pressing against you at inopportune moments.

I work Fridays, you text back. Till 9—a drink after?

There’s a pause, long enough for you to wonder if that was the wrong answer, too needy or something, long enough for you to get up and start washing the sink full of dishes. Your phone pings as you stack another coffee mug.

9’s good. But heads up, I’m 20.

You hold your phone and laugh. It has been at least forever since you last felt this buoyant or lusty or absurd. You want to grab the feeling. You want to grab it and hold it and never let it go.

A bite to eat then? 

Sure that’s great

Meet me outside the shop at 9:15. It takes me a few to close up. 

Dare I tell you how old I am?

Go for it

I’ll be 34 next month. I’m laughing as I type this.

That’s awesome

See you Friday.

Unless we run into one another sooner

Looking forward to it

That’s how easy it is; you’d almost forgotten.

---

His figure, outlined by streetlights, waits just a few yards off as you lock the door and pull the handle three times, wrapping a shift the way you always do. He waits for you to walk over, but betrays no nervousness when you say Hi. He says, Where do you want to go?

You say, I’m craving pizza. Though you haven’t eaten a slice of pizza since college days; dairy doesn’t always agree with you.

He says, Sam’s then.

You head up the street to a pizza place you’ve never stepped foot into, though it’s been in the same spot for most of the ten years you’ve lived in town. Before that it was Bart’s Ice Cream. The counter is manned by bored college kids and there’s a live trio covering Cher’s “Life After Love,” and he asks what’s so funny. Oh, this song, you say. But you leave out the part that it was popular the year you graduated high school, that you danced to it at your prom. He would have been in diapers. I like it, he says, bobbing his head.

The pizza is decent, but his eyes are brilliant, almost black and as sparkly as the night sky in a national park. He stares at you as though you are the most gorgeous thing to ever materialize before him. Or maybe he’s just good at eye contact. Eventually it occurs to you that he’s waiting for you to suggest what happens next. You can’t take him to a bar but it seems obvious enough that the night is far from over. 

Do you want to go back to my place? you ask. I have bourbon.

Sure, he says. You live by yourself?

I do, I say. But it’s not fancy.

He shrugs. When you get outside, he asks, Mind if I smoke?

Mmm, not at all, you say. I used to—I still miss it.

You want one? He holds out the pack of American Spirits. Blue.

No, thank you. I’ll enjoy your exhales.

He laughs and sparks the light.

Your apartment is, to put it kindly, a fall from grace: an itty one-bedroom with water-damaged walls and grimy windows, tacked on to a concrete slab behind an 1800s farmhouse. Most of your furniture is in storage and the hot water works only sporadically.

As you swing open the heavy barn door that fronts the place, a strange, romantic, decorative flourish, and hold it ajar with your hip to unlock the normal door behind it, he says, This is such a cool spot. How’d you land it?

You tell him the name of the realtor you used, but leave out that you called her with two weeks’ notice and three cats and nowhere to go; this was her only listing. 

He looks around the apartment while you feed the cats and get the whiskey. There’s not much to see: it’s mostly overfilled bookcases and a desk piled with papers, story maps taped to the walls. Books are stacked on the floor by the bedroom door and next to the couch. He points to the iPod docked on a speaker and asks if he can put on music. 

Sure, you say. Whatever you want.

You pour two tumblers of whiskey and set the bottle on the tiny coffee table. He chooses Elvis Costello and settles next to you and you hand him a glass and cheers and then the song is over. You don’t have the album, just the song downloaded from who knows where. You get up, click through the iPod wheel. 

How about Iron & Wine? you ask. It is the music your ex-partner used to put on when she wanted to have sex. The married man you fell in love with preferred Bon Iver. 

Sure, he says, shrugging. Reminds me of middle school.

You raise an eyebrow and he raises one back. 

Reminds me of my early 20s, you say, which elicits his perfect laugh. Seriously though, he shouldn’t be this perfect. It’s plainly unfair.

For a while, with the music soft in the background, you just talk and lean into each other. Closer and closer on the couch, limbs entangled. Laughing. God, it feels good to laugh. He is silly, and smart, and charming, and, without warning, nineteen.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You surface from your joy-haze to this fact. Nineteen?

He nods.

Not twenty?

He scrunches up his face and says, Twenty sounds so much better, doesn’t it?

Let me see your ID, you say.

What? Why?

Because I need to know you’re legal.

For a split moment, he appears torn between embarrassment and pride. 

You offer, I’ll show you mine, too. To make it fair.

Sure enough, he is 19, photo of his younger self starkly different—not yet inhabiting his bad-boy good looks and devastating smolder.

You pull out your license and hand it to him. The picture is almost a decade old, not updated in the most recent renewal, which you did online to save time. 

This doesn’t even look like you, he says. You look way better now.

I know, you say. 

Because he’s right. Age becomes you, despite what an endless stream of beauty advertisements otherwise insists. Pain has also become you, something you didn’t know was possible until the last few months: the long nights crying, the inability to stomach a meal, the meditation practice taken up at the behest of a growing stack of Pema Chodron books. 

What happened to you? he asks. 

Hmmm?

You know, why are you—ah, here, with me?

Oh, you mean alone? My ex left me for another woman.

What a dick. He must’ve been crazy.

She, you say. And I deserved it. I slept with a married man.

So you’re bi?  

I hate that word.

He shrugs. Most of my friends are. 

Your friends?

Yeah, like friends with benefits?

So, you have open relationships? you ask.

Open, he says. Sure. I do what I want.

Before you have a chance to ask if this is his arrangement or theirs, he asks, Is it okay if I kiss you?

You’ve never been asked this in such a direct way. It makes you giggle, but from his face, you can tell he is perfectly serious. He’s waiting for an answer.

Yes, of course, you say, I’m pretty sure that’s why you’re here.

---

When you see him next, a quick pass on the sidewalk as you rush into work—your store’s owner is in town—he is with her again, the girl of cherry lips and direct gaze. Today, you are also wearing red lipstick and she stares, too long, before turning away. You wave to him and keep walking.

You find her on social media later that night, a few more clicks through his likes leads you to her screen name: JuicyViXXXen18. A compelling taunt, it seems. Her squares feature menstrual blood and a used tampon filling a toilet bowl, a distorted mirror selfie showcasing a prominent hickey, her seated on a bed with a large orange cat shielding her nakedness. Her comments are brash, provocative; she is public about her sexuality in a way that repulses you, and is undeniably erotic. She is, also, it appears, a doting friend/lover to the electrifying man-boy who just spent a night in your bed, though by the time—4 a.m.—you tumbled in there, lips swollen with kissing, sleep was the only thing on your mind. Your alarm went off at 7 a.m. for a weekend retreat with a friend. He slept beside you, affable and consensual as ever, and in the morning, when you woke him after showering, he asked for only a sip of coffee, complimenting you on your sweater. I love clothes, he said. You have good taste.

You wonder, scrolling down her feed, if you could fall in love with him and worry that the thought means you already have.

Could you be like her? The question itself feels dangerous, rattling around your brain. You’ve never had a friend/lover, and the one time it was propositioned, your rejection of the offer detonated like a grenade tossed amidst your too tidy life. She’s an exhibitionist, naive about how the world works—two luxuries you’ve never been allowed. No, you’ll never be like her. 

And yet.

---

The next time you see him, he shows you his efficiency apartment, bathroom down the hall, and takes you out for Vietnamese food. Over Bahn Mi and spicy noodles, he asks without a hint of irony in his voice if you’re a liberal. His innocent intensity doesn’t surprise you but it is humorous, and uncomfortable. You know, tangentially, at least three other people in the restaurant and they all seem, suddenly, to be listening. The lights are dim, the decorations flimsy paper. The remains of soup swirl in your bowl. Where is that waiter?

Finally, you pull it together and say, I’m a half-gay, half-straight woman living in Northampton, what do you think?

He shrugs. Never know. So that’s a yes?

It is, you say. 

Your place or mine? you ask, as soon as the check lands on the table. He grabs it before you can protest. 

Yours is nicer, he says. 

This is only marginally true, a margin widened by the bottle of Irish whiskey you pour.

It’s a week night and he asks after the second pour if you’d like to head to the bedroom. Sure, you say, because this is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? But there’s no heating vent in the bedroom and the walls are thin, the mattress chilly when you slip in beside him.

He is a deliriously good kisser. Eventually the shivering stops and the heat of lips mashing lips and skin gliding over skin drives you to reach for him. What you find is—well, you’re unsure what to make of the soft roll of flesh in your palm. You caress, tentatively, then less so, withdrawing your hand after a few minutes to concentrate on kissing. His skin glistens with a film of sweat, his lips flushed deep red like a throb. After what seems like a long enough time, you ask, Do you have a condom?

I don’t think so, he says. Do you?

It’s been a long time since I slept with a man, you tease, though this isn’t technically true. You fucked a man less than a year ago, no condom, no conversation about a condom, and you didn’t regret it. Your period wasn’t late that month, in fact, it came early, brought on, you assume by the close proximity to a body coursing with testosterone. Your now ex-partner was out of the country, not that she would have noticed. She was good at looking everywhere else.

Um, I could check my wallet.

He returns with his wallet, and pulls a battered foil square from its fold. 

How long’s that been in there?

I dunno. High school, maybe.

Isn’t your generation supposed to be all about safe sex?

He flips the condom onto the night table. That’s your generation.

You smile and roll your eyes. Fair. Though I think we’re technically the same generation.

Sure, he says. Technically.

He kisses you and your stomach gives the finger to the demographics and data in your head.

As much as I want to trust that ancient condom right now, I’m about to ovulate, you say. Rain check?

You know when you’re going to ovulate? he asks.

I do, you say. It’s a perk of aging.

I need a cigarette, he says. He yanks on his jeans and shirt, pats down his pockets. 

You dress and join him outside. The hunger is gone, and you both have work in the morning. You offer to let him stay the night but he declines and part of you is relieved. He does, however, ask for one more gulp of whiskey before he kisses you goodbye with the promise of next time.

---

The next time you see him, she stands beside him in a black wool trench coat, belted at her wasp-thin waist. He meets your eyes across the bustling sidewalk but makes no acknowledgement, so you take your coffee and sit on the curb, facing away. The weather has turned, finally, seasonably, cold, and your breath and the coffee steam into the bright day like smoke signals. 

That night, tired and alone with a bottle of Chardonnay, you click down a rabbit hole of the internet, discovering her abandoned Tumblr, a site teeming with gauzy NSFW photos. Some, you think, are her. The naked thigh with scabbed up razor slashes crusty against the milk of sunless skin; a close-up of lips encircling a lit spliff flaring to life; two naked female bodies pressed together, in profile. Nothing as shocking as her current Instagram, but the fact that you’ve found this old place, that you’re looking at this old version of her, coils like a snake inside you. Does she even remember it exists? Does she care? 

You fall asleep with the lights on and dream she visits you, smirking at the empty bottle of white, and you show her the collection of bourbon atop the antique hutch in the corner, she leans forward and kisses you, a volatile and forceful kiss, and when you startle awake you are sweaty and your head is spinning. The cats look on impassively. 

---

He comes the night after next with a fresh pack of condoms, which he tosses on the coffee table. These are expensive, he says. 

You shrug, and say, Worth it? 

He asks for a drink, and you oblige, and after he gulps the first whiskey, he asks for a second. You wave your hand at the bottle. Help yourself, you say, and he does, twice more. In your impatience to be fucked, to be desired, it doesn’t occur to you that he is steeling himself for what’s to come, that he might be, for all his smooth sweetness, nervous. 

Finally, he stands and grabs the condoms and gestures toward the bedroom, You ready?

The bed lacks a headboard and is pushed up against an outside wall. The mattress is glacial. Underwear to underwear, skin prickled over in goosebumps, for the splittest of seconds the thought crosses your mind that it would be okay just to keep kissing, kissing into delirium, and then call it a night, but he bought the condoms, and they’re here, on the table next to the bed, and he’s humping against you in such a way that reminds you of an untrained puppy. You’re used to lovers quick to fire so when you reach below the waistband of his boxers and find a limp guppy you pull back and ask if he’s okay. He strokes himself a little, but goes soft again when you try to roll the condom on.

I hate condoms, he says.

I do too, you say, but here we are. And you spent all that money.

He gives you a sleepy side-eye, somewhere between amused and baleful, and says, If you pump really fast, that should do it, then get on quick.

His suggestion works, and in an outlyingly graceful movement, he flips you onto your back. Pounding, pounding, which is enjoyable for about two seconds, and you think it can’t last long but he keeps pounding, pounding and you bite back a laugh at the seriousness of his expression and also the absurd idea that this could have been, somehow, any different.

---

Afterward, you share a shifty-eyed cigarette and another glass of whiskey and he tells you he has to work early. He shrugs into his jacket. He’s not doing a James Dean impression, but he may as well be: the pouty lips, the coiffed hair—even now perfect, when your own resembles a bird’s nest or some other untamable mess—the sultry stare. You kiss him long and steady and his grin wobbles as you press Tropic of Capricorn into his hands. Tonight, before the tumble, he said he reads, that he has a copy of The Dharma Bums on his night table, and this has sparked delight in you.

You’ll like it, you say, Miller paved the way for the Beats. 

He looks at the book in his hands, looks toward the door, says, Thank you. 

You are imagining all the naked conversations you will have in bed about books and writers and cities and ideas as you bolt the barn door behind him and pour yourself the remainder of the whiskey. What does he talk about with her, you wonder as you sip. Does she read? Does she give him books?

Eventually, much later than is healthy for a work night, you leave the two empty tumblers, side by side, on the table and head to bed.

---

So, how did it go??? your best friend—a mom of one, pregnant with a second—wants to know.

Heavy pelvis, sore head: the light in the apartment diffuse and watery.

Good, you tell her.

Good?!?! she shrieks. That’s it, good?

As good as fucking a 19-year-old can be.

She laughs, says, He is a fox, but there’s a reason sex gets better with age.

I think my pelvis is bruised.

Oh, god, she says. Lucky you.

---

You send him a series of texts to which he replies with single words, and then an invitation that he accepts but cancels at the last minute. 

The apartment seems smaller and dirtier, the darkness of pre-winter solstice like a crouched animal. It starts to snow and never stops.

The days drag on, interminable, a series of drawn tarot cards and self-help chapters, until the day you pull the Strength card, and she, who you’ve now followed through a number of online profiles and posts, each more jarring and alluring than the last, arrives in your store, looking for all the world like a tourist who got off at the wrong stop. With her is another girl, this one blonde and prone to moody stares, whom you recognize from late night romps through the internet wilderness. Despite her skittishness in this strange land, the girl of black nails and intense eye contact flashes a radiant red smile at your greeting. Your heart thuds. Does she know who you are?

You keep to the order of hand-poured soy candles you’re putting together while she scans the jewelry cases. Try not to look up too often, try not to feel whatever magnetic pull her moves exert on your synapses. White cable-knit stockings under a band-aid skirt, shiny Mary Jane heels tap-tap-tapping over the acacia floor. In a low, but not low enough, whisper, she tells her friend that the boy who has weeks since stopped answering your texts will meet them for lunch. You wonder what it is like to be so oblivious to your impact on those around you—if this is indeed oblivion and not guile.

Then, she’s at the counter, her eyes a pair of cut-sapphires ringed in kohl, piercing you. Though it shouldn’t, her youth—the simple nervousness of it—catches you off-guard. For a moment, you feel protective, not of yourself, but of her. The world, and you in it, wants to devour her—wants, as you well know, her beauty for its own. Wants to break her of it.

Hi, you say.

Can you help me? she asks. With a pair of earrings?

Sure, you say. Heart wild dancer in your chest. Key in hand. What are we looking at?

She leads the way to a pair of garnet studs. She points, and as you open the case, she asks, Are they— elegant?

The word hurts, though you couldn’t say exactly why. She watches you reach for the card and lift the posts to the light.

It’s a bezel setting, but it’s hammered, which gives it texture, and the backs are left open. You pop a stud off the card and hold it up. It lets the light through, so the stone glows. 

You hand her the earring, fingers brushing ever so slightly over her palm. She lifts it, cautiously, to the light.

Are they for a special event? you ask.

For a friend, she says. It’s her birthday.

The pair is much too nice for a college student’s birthday present, but you nod and say, She’d be crazy if she didn’t love them.

As she follows you back to the register, she says, You smell really good. Is it perfume?

You shake your head and tug a strand of your hair, which is blown out to look like the lion’s mane on the tarot card. 

Probably the gloss and spray—I just washed my hair this morning.

She smiles and you imagine she knows everything that happened between you and the boy. 

You do have a great mop, she says. You remind me of one of those cats, you know, the shy ones, with all the fur.

A Maine coon, you say.

Exactly, she says. Her smile isn’t perfect, but it’s close.

---

After your shift, you buy a bottle of cheap Merlot and walk home in the long-dark streets to your cats. You don sweats and crank the heat and put a frozen pot pie in the oven. It’s late and the bottle is nearing empty when you click into her latest Instagram account. There’s a new picture, posted only minutes before—so new no one has yet liked it—of her hands cupping a dead cardinal over a background of dirty snow. The black nail polish on her thumbnails is chipped. There’s no caption.

Without thinking twice—or at all—you tap the heart.

---

Artist Photo by Stephen Oparowski

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

In the cobwebbed eaves of the house on Fig Street, the third pigeon drops dead. 

I hear her struggle from the front lawn, where I am deadheading the roses. My hand goes up to shield my eyes from the sun. At this point, I am expecting the fall. Her feathers iridesce green, blue, purple, with each twitch of her little head. She twists almost gracefully to the very edge of the roof. To linger on the precipice, body limp but briefly suspended, brings to mind something beautiful: a ballet dancer about to fall into her partner’s arms, Anna Karenina on the train platform. A papery brown blossom flutters from my gloved hand to the ground. Then the pigeon topples into the rain gutter. 

I am the only person in this neighborhood who knows how to garden. I walk four blocks to the bus stop every day, and every day I notice another thing left to fester. Ivy gnawing at an exposed brick facade. Mistletoe snared in the boughs of a slowly graying tree, drinking the living from it. Squashed plums on the sidewalk, crabapples rolling into the gutter. The whole scene stained syrupy and sickly-sweet. 

I know I cannot reach the rain gutter with the only ladder at my disposal, a squat A-frame left in the garage by a handyman Aunt Nell briefly courted. Still, I cannot become another keeper of rotting things. 

Aunt Nell was a collector. She collected forever stamps and uranium glass dishware and ceramic Precious Moments figurines. She collected stray cats, left them bowls of dried up kibble on the white oak porch. She collected me from the train station when I first arrived in town. Most importantly to my current predicament, she collected long lists of phone numbers. Magneted to the fridge, overlapped by a 10% off coupon for the pizzeria downtown and a postcard from the Vatican, is her list of pest control companies, scrawled out in her looping hand on the back of a Salvation Army receipt. 

The third number on the list picks up. 

“Greenbriar Wildlife Services, how may I help you?” A voice—smoky, feminine—tins from the receiver. 

I explain the situation. Dead bird in the rain gutter. Can’t reach it on my own. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “But it sounds like an easy fix. I could come out tomorrow afternoon?”

I almost laugh. Stupidly, I realize, I hadn’t imagined that this woman would be the one to come and take my bird away. I figured they would send a wiry twentysomething, a former high school track star. A burly quarterback with dark hair on his forearms and coffee on his breath. I adjust my mental image of the woman on the other line, from a cream-bloused secretary to a coverall-wearing, slick-haired androgyne. 

“Yes,” I say. “Tomorrow afternoon works.”

I cup the handset to my cheek—warm from the mist of my breath. I give her the address. 

The first dead pigeon I blamed on Rocky, Aunt Nell’s only surviving stray. It was lying in front of the door like a gift, something dark oozing onto the daffodil-colored welcome mat. I wrapped the body in the doormat and put it in the compost bin. When Rocky next trotted up the driveway, I shook my head at him and clicked my tongue. He only rubbed his head into my hand, purring like a locomotive. Cats can’t tell when you’re mad at them. Cats have no sense of shame. Cats are not born guilty.  

The truck pulls into the crook of the cul-de-sac. Greenbriar Wildlife Services, it says on one side, green and yellow like a parakeet. Humane Solutions for Pest Problems. A grinning cartoon raccoon stenciled next to the lettering, cheekily fanning out its burglar hands. No man with an oversized mallet. No panicked line of rats or termites. Just a raccoon, who looks like he knows something I don’t. This cools my nerves some, quiets the thudding of my pulse. I don’t like brutality. I like cleanliness. I like English mystery novels. I like strict teachers. I like solitaire. 

The woman who gets out of the truck does not look how I pictured her. Her hair is pulled into a short ponytail at the top of her head, jagged ends spiking out like a crown of thorns. She wears a faded gray Laguinitas t-shirt, tucked into a pair of straight-leg work pants. Her face is studded with sterling silver, piercings above her lip, notched into her eyebrow. A tool belt weighs down her hips, swaying with each step. 

I startle out of my position at the window, suddenly aware that I am watching her, aware of the way my hair feels on the back of my neck, the chappedness of my lips. I open the door before she has the chance to knock. 

“Hey,” she says, “You the one with the dead bird?” 

“Yes, yes I am.” 

“My name is Syd.”

“Florence.” I accept her proffered hand. Her palm is dry, her grip strong. 

I found the second dead pigeon tangled in the neighbor’s fence. Caught on the ragged hole in the chain-link gnawed by the neighbor’s portly rottweiler, the bird’s feathers embroidered with metal. She must have fallen and gotten stuck. Wings spread, head limply bowed, a suburban martyr. I cleaned that one up too, hurrying across the cul-de-sac with a newspaper-wrapped bundle tucked under my arm. 

Syd sets up her ladder where I direct her. While she pulls thick gloves onto her hands, her eyes wander around the yard, taking in the greenery. She compliments my roses, although half the blossoms are severed at the stalk and the other half are brown and withered, the ground at their feet still heavy with fallen petals. I haven’t found the time to rake them up. 

“Thank you. Lots of people don’t know how to tend to them properly.”

Syd smiles. Her canines are slightly sharp, giving her the look of a wily fox. “But you do.”

“Yeah,” a laugh buzzes my lips. “I suppose I do.” 

“Any plans for the holiday?” She’s halfway up the ladder when she asks this. I find myself wishing she would remain at ground level, where I can watch her eyes flit from the bed of clover by the windowsill to the poplar fanning its branches over the lawn, the dandelions polka-dotting the grass. 

“Housewarming party,” I lie. A sweet-sounding frivolity for the long weekend. In actuality, I will be working all three days. Nametag clipped to the collar of my shirt, corralling escaped shopping carts back into their pens. I don’t mind. The holiday pay is nice. 

“You just move in?” 

“Yes.” It is easy to imagine that I’m new to the neighborhood. Aunt Nell wrote me into her will but it still doesn’t feel like the house is mine. I brush dust off the furniture, but my fingerprints don’t leave a mark. I’m a groundskeeper. A haunting. 

Syd rests her elbows on the edge of the rain gutter, and looks in. There’s a rustling as she digs around for the fallen bird, and a few dislodged dead leaves twist languidly down to my feet. The ladder creaks. I can see her bicep muscles moving under her thin t-shirt, dark halo of sweat blooming under her arm. My stomach tightens. Worry, for her balance. 

“Yep,” she calls. “Found it. Good thing you called me when you did, things could have gotten real smelly up here.” 

She whips a rag from her back pocket, a matador with his cape, and scoops the creature out. She descends the ladder gingerly, with her cotton-wrapped bundle kept close to her chest. 

As her boot hits the ground, the pigeon’s head lolls back, the makeshift burial shroud flapping open around it. 

“Sorry,” Syd moves to cover the bird’s fragile head with her big gloved hand. “If you’re squeamish.” 

“No.” I drift closer.

Syd makes a humming noise in the back of her throat, cups the pigeon’s neck gently, like she’s holding a baby. “Sad, I know. But whatever it had, it probably wasn’t avian flu. See, no swelling, no discoloration.”

In fact, the pigeon looks like it might start flapping at any moment. Gray feathers collaring her neck, eyes glassy but open. 

“She’s beautiful.” I lean forward. Bergamot and cedar tangle with the earthy smell of early decay. 

“You can look, but, uh,” Syd swipes her tongue over her lip, the ball of her piercing bobbing as she swallows. “Don’t touch. It’s good to be careful. We don’t know what killed this thing.” 

“Of course.” Heat pools in my cheeks. I take a step back. 

Silence cools the air. I try to think of something to say. 

“Did you know that, genetically, pigeons are no different from doves?” Syd offers. “But one we call pests, the other we… release at weddings.” 

I smile, imagining a magician flourishing a pigeon from his sleeve. People used to keep pigeons as pets, train them to carry our mail, take messages for us. It’s no wonder they stay at our sides, nest in the awnings of our skyscrapers, even when we decided there’s no use for them anymore. 

“I’m worried about them,” I blurt out. “The pigeons, I mean. I keep finding them dead.” 

She makes a humming sound in the back of her throat, considering. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says eventually. “If it’s a disease, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever dealt with. Sometimes things just die.” 

The nervous, feathered creature inside me lurches, a half-hearted attempt at flight. Syd turns to go. I am sorry for standing mutely as she walks away. I am sorry I could not save them. 

After the drivers-side door thunks shut and the engine of Syd’s truck sputters to life again, I walk up the stairs of the house. I keep expecting Aunt Nell to emerge from around a corner, chiding me for moving her leather recliner, throwing out her empty shampoo bottles. As the sounds of the vehicle disappear down the street, I kneel at the side of my downy, quilted bed and pray the rosary. It’s the first time since I was a child. Aunt Nell kept an expensive, pearly one hanging off the side of her old mahogany bureau, and I never had the nerve to move it from that spot. Now I slide my fingers along the beads. My hand still buzzing from where Syd pressed it, the warmth of her palm on my palm, I duck my head and pray. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. 

It is December now. The plum and crabapple trees that once infuriated me with their useless plenty now fruit nothing. The stickiness and rot-stench of summer has given way to fog and frosted windshields in the morning, bitter sun in the afternoon. I still walk to the bus stop every day, a flannel coat and knit gloves over my maroon polo shirt. 

The pigeons have stopped dying. At least, they have stopped dying where I can see them. This is fine by me. I trim the birch tree in the backyard. Pruning shears for the thin branches, pole saw for the thick ones. I wrench stinging nettles out of the flowerbed by the roots. I keep myself busy. 

At the grocery store I stack boxes of cereal, rearrange displays of organic almonds and pistachios, mop the linoleum tile when someone drops a carton of oat milk. 

Four hours of my shift have crawled by when I see her across the produce section. Syd. Wearing a heather gray sweater with a moth-hole just below the collar. Testing the skin of an orange with one finger. I set down the box of Medjool dates I’ve been arranging on the endcap. Although her gaze is leveled at the display, yuzu and grapefruit and tangerines, I am certain she can feel my eyes on her head. Look up. 

The disease that laid waste to the pigeons has not gone away. It hides in the intestines of the dead ones’ broods, settled and waiting. Disease is a patient thing. Intent on survival, on procreation. It will lay dormant until it is time to fell another one of its hosts. Until it is time for another pigeon—on Fig Street or any of the identical streets branching outward through the endless suburban grid, on another eave of another roof—to drop dead. 

I imagine Syd splitting an orange down the center, burying her thumbs in the flesh, citrus juice stinging rivulets into her knotty wrists. I imagine her laughing, mouth open, head tilted back. 

I swallow, my heart battering the inside of my throat. The air fizzes between us, carbonated by dust and light. She looks up. I look away. 

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

(content warning: death, grief)

It starts with a pamphlet in my wrinkled hands. Or rather, it starts much before that: it starts with the beams of flashlights crisscrossing in the fields of our girlhood; it starts with you on a stage in a flush of white light; it starts on a slick highway where the wheels of a truck are locked and skating into the wrong lane. 

Maybe it starts with the timejump waiting room.

I was sitting there, holding a clipboard, checking off boxes in the no column: No, I have not been recently hospitalized. No, I do not have breathing problems. No, I do not hear a ringing in my ears. It went on and on. No, I had to check off, I do not wish to alter past events. 

At some point, an old bride walked in—this shrinking woman, around my age, who appeared to be caught in an enormous fishing net. Lifting her skirts of tattered tulle, she carefully stepped over to the receptionist to take a clipboard. Then she sat in a chair across from me, where the dress spilled over the armrests. I tried not to stare, truly, but you know I’m nosy. It was a hard sight to ignore: the woman’s over-rouged face, the mascara caked around her eyes. 

You always pitied older folks waiting alone. Remember in the airport, before Vancouver? The man with a gray mop of hair, a suit too large, sitting in the corner with a sandwich. You had it in your heart that he was some forlorn widower, a man so alone. You started a conversation with him, and he and swore up and down about the teenager who made his Reuben wrong. I made fun of you on the plane.

I wonder—if you could see me in the waiting room, would you pity me? I digress. 

It’s hard, I’m realizing, to tell a story in a straight line, as if we experience anything in such an ordered way. 

Let me try again: the bride: alone like me. While you would have been kind if you were sitting here with her, I’ve become more blunt with age, if you can imagine that. I leaned over and said, you know, they’re going to make you change out of that.

She looked down, ran her palms across the fluffed dress, didn’t seem to get it. But I’m going to my wedding, she said.

So I said, of course, but you don’t need to wear it. You’ll already be wearing it, you see? You’re just there to watch. 

She sat there, a small face in a big white web, blinking. 

It’s okay, I said. They have wardrobe back there. You’ll be able to change.

If she heard what I was trying to tell her, she didn’t show it. His name’s Carl, she started. They cut flowers growing in a vacant lot across from the hotel for their centerpieces. Stuck them in little jars. Somewhere in her rambling, she said she’d be going to the wedding for thirty minutes, and I nearly dropped my pen. I was using nearly everything I had, which would only scrape up eight. But I suppose unlike her, I wasn’t using them to enjoy any big day. I just needed to see if I could tell you something.

I know you can’t read this, but it comforts me to write as if I’m speaking to you. Really, I’m writing this for me. But I’ve learned, there’s this problem—it is hard to pull you and me apart. How do I dissect where you end and I begin, or the other way around? How do I write about us, even a moment at a time, without acknowledging the universe of memories each moment connects to? They say time is a line, or maybe, to some, it is a loop. But to me, time is a field we sprawl on under the sun and moon, where I can feel every blade of grass—some soft, some bristled, all at once.

---

A nurse took my weight and height and blood pressure, then led me to a room where a serious-looking man in a white coat stood behind a wide desk. He shook my hand, said I could call him Nathan, and told me he’d be my Jump Attendant. He asked me how I was feeling as we took our seats, and I said I was feeling ready.

That’s great to hear, he told me, but then paused and leaned forward, said we needed to talk about my preferred timepoint. He wanted to know why I selected it.

So I told him about it. It was a beautiful spring day in May. We found a little tapas restaurant in Seattle. We ate outside. Cherry blossoms littered the street with pink confetti. I don’t remember what we talked about, do you? But there was an air of sweet calm, of spring waking up.

It’s not necessarily my favorite moment with you—not even close. But I didn’t tell Nathan that. I told him I would simply like to see you and me, in the sun, eating and laughing.

He looked at me, then at the computer on his desk. All this waiting, he said, and to be frank, all this money—not to mention the forms, the psych evaluations, physicals—all the pinpointing and witness accounts. And you’re choosing to watch your friend eat?

I nodded dumbly—what else could I do? Yes, I responded. To see her and me, in the sun, eating and laughing, I repeated. Maybe my lines sounded too rehearsed. 

Nathan leaned back in his chair. This timepoint, he explained, is nine days before your friend Mara died. He peered over to his screen to read something. 

I didn’t say anything. He told me he’s sorry for my loss, but visits like the one I was requesting were ones they couldn’t grant. There is too much emotion in it, too much risk. 

I felt my old body spur with fight. You know how I get sometimes. I told him the facts: the pamphlet’s fine print said that someone cannot request a timepoint within one week of a loved one’s demise. My timepoint follows the rules.

Nathan said I was technically correct (though he also added that he personally thought the timeframe should be much longer.) He went on to tell me that I’m certainly not the first client  who’s requested a timepoint just before a cherished person’s demise. He gets it. 

Sometimes home is not just a place, but a place and a time, he said gently, quoting nearly word for word the brochure they sent in the mail. We can bring you back home, no matter when that is, and allow you to observe it, feel it again. But we can’t change what happened to Mara—do you understand?

I thought if I could see you, even from a distance, I could figure out a way to warn you. And if I figured out a way to warn you—well, then, I don’t know what would happen next. Would you poof suddenly into existence? Would all life rewind, start again from that day when you decide to not risk the interstate during that relentless downpour? Or would time fracture off into some parallel universe, where I can only imagine that you and I are safe, and laughing, and growing old, pinching at our flabbed underarms and cursing our grays, still thinking we’re twenty-two in our bones?

Nathan, who was turning out to be more stubborn than me, repeated himself and told me that he could not permit me to jump unless I understood I am only a spectator, a ghost from the future.

I told him I understood, even though I didn’t want to.

He was denying my preferred timepoint request—the last time I saw you. But said he would be happy to go through my other submissions to see if we could make an earlier timepoint work, one with less emotionality to it, he said, one where I could simply be happy and watch.

---

I only submitted the Brooklyn performance in the application because it was easy to do so. In order to request a timepoint, I had to submit the exact location, date, and time, and have witnesses to confirm it. I still had the program for the show on Saturday, January 9th, 2010. But I already knew there was no way in hell I’d actually want to go back and rewatch that thing. No offense. 

Remember our two-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg? Bathroom the size of one on an airplane, kitchen barely any bigger. We were still young enough not to care, because we were in the city, and our nights were full of music and vodka, and we saw our shitty little apartment through an enchanted lens, like it was a necessary stopping point on our path to greatness.

You had been working for months and months putting together your piece for the company’s showcase. You didn’t tell me much just that it came to you once in a dream when you were younger, and you always wanted to translate it to the stage, to the body.

I went to your show that night with Ben who went by “Benny”—surely you remember him—and the first number featured all the dancers in the company. They leapt with wide legs like open scissors, they jumped straight up and fluttered their pointed feet, they planted one flamingo leg on the ground, raised their perfect arms, and spun like falling leaves. 

This is pretty good, Benny admitted, and I nodded. It was extraordinary. 

After the group number, your piece was first. You walked on tiptoes to center stage, knelt. The lights cut, then all flashed on again in blinding whiteness.

On the side of the stage, a hunched figure appeared in an off-white leotard, her face covered in a veil.  She hobbled slowly towards you, then paused to raise her hands to claw at her throat as if she were choking. Two ethereal tones chimed, and the hunched figure dropped one limp arm and dragged it around on the stage. The woman, this weird broken creature, pulled her way toward you, reached out to you.

What the hell is this? Benny whispered, and I wish I understood it myself and could say something poignant. But I didn’t. My hands started to prickle and stick with sweat. 

The hunched lady stood then, and in a wild burst started leaping in a circle around you. She jumped and jumped with arms over her head, and finally, you arose. The figure rushed towards you, throwing her arms up to the skies, then pirouetted round and round. You twirled like her, then dropped to the ground. The creature dropped, too. Then you both flailed, on opposite sides of the stage, like you were both laughing, or maybe crying. The two eerie tones crescendoed, and the stage cut to black. People around me applauded.

Benny looked at me, wondering what we just witnessed.

It’s art, I tried to defend.

It’s fucking weird is what it is, he said.

And I hate to say it, but I agreed.

Afterward, we joined you at a bar down the street with your ballet boyfriend Ivan and a few others from the company.

Your piece was the best, a thin girl tells you. There was so much emotion in it. So much expressed between the dancers.

I was drunk by that point. Oh my god, yes, the emotion, I parroted, then raised my cup. 

You looked at me and asked—Really? You liked it?

I nodded too much.

You smiled, ready to challenge me. So what do you think it was about? 

I had to think of something, so I told you that the dance represented a battle with your inner demons. It wasn’t a half-bad answer, I thought. 

You rolled your eyes. It’s not as dark as that, you said. You were trying to present more of an awakening, a catharsis.

That’s when Ivan butted in—Yes! Catharsis. That’s exactly the word he was going to say!

No you fucking weren’t, I told him, then turned to you again. What was that thing, the hunched figure crawling towards you. A monster? A ghost?

You nearly spit out your drink laughing. You said the thing on the stage was a companion. 

A twin flame, Ivan added. (I don’t understand how you dated him for eight months.)

Ok, sure, I said. And you laughed, and I laughed, because the thing was, it didn’t matter if I got it or not, if I liked it or not. You know that everything you touch is beautiful to me. 

Still, of all the places I could ever return to, a post-college interpretive dance showcase wasn’t going to cut it.

Nathan asked if I was sure. Said that since it was a dark theater, a crowded public performance, it would be an easy timepoint to spectate. 

I was sure. 

Nathan scrolled on his screen, then asked to hear about Maine. 

---

I found our itinerary in an old email, so it was another easy timepoint to submit. By that time in our lives, it was difficult to see each other often. There were phone calls, long emails. It had been nearly six months—the longest we’d gone without seeing each other—when I picked you up from Logan Airport. 

I got us an AirBnB on a sparkling lake in the deep woods of central Maine, and when you entered the renovated cabin you joked that we’d come a long way from our first apartment. But there was a tension between us—I could feel it in the way you politely asked about my work, in the way you over-complimented the bottle of wine I’d picked up. Then I over-complimented the pasta you put together, and talked too much at dinner about a farmer’s market I didn’t actually go to that often. For a moment, in terror, I thought perhaps we had entered a new, fixed state, as if there was something automatic about being in our forties that dulled our souls and cast us into the quicksand of small talk.

When I soaped the dishes, I asked how Julian’s job was going, and you lifted yourself onto a countertop with your glass of red and asked me if I really cared.

Of course I care, I started seriously, but then you laughed. No, not like that, you said. Said you know I care about you and Julian, but do I really want to hear about how his accounting is going?

I rinsed off the tomato sauce that was stuck to a plate. God no, I laughed. 

Then let’s not, you said. You grabbed the bottle of wine and wandered through the back door, and I followed down to the dock that stretched over the lake. Shadows of hills sloped around us, dots of stars punctuated the sky. You leaned your head back in my lap to take them in, and then we didn’t talk about job updates or farmer’s markets. We laughed about the time we got into a historic screaming match about something we couldn’t remember, but even in our anger we called for takeout and ate it on the roof of our apartment building, passing our last clean fork back and forth. You recalled your big dance recital sophomore year, where I stood and cheered and clapped after your solo, only to find out it was a serious kind of event where everyone else sat silent. There was the double-date we double-dashed, and the day we couldn’t stop crying, when we almost adopted a cat named Peppers to assuage our sadness, and whose picture on the website made us sob even more.

I guess we made our own kind of time machine that night in Maine.

We talked about our apartment in Brooklyn, the boys we filled it with. We laughed, thinking about poor sweet Benny, how I made you break up with him for me. 

You said you were happy to do it, said he always questioned your dancing, never really understood it. I took a swig from the bottle of wine and confessed I wasn’t totally innocent in that regard.

It’s okay, you said.

I always liked it, your dancing. I tried to explain it’s an art form I didn’t totally get, but that I liked it because it felt so you. You’ve been dancing since you were a kid. I wish I had found something like that for myself.

You sat up on the dock and took the wine, said you always felt like dance found you, not the other way around. I burst out laughing, and so did you, because what a pretentious thing to say.

Then things got quiet. You missed the performances, the tediousness of rehearsal. But you told me that you still go to the studio by yourself. It makes you feel centered, you said, now that it’s just you and the dance.

What about the hunched lady? Your twin flame? Does she ever make an appearance in the studio? I asked, chuckling. 

You slapped me playfully. Then on the edge of the wooden dock, you stood and raised yourself up on your tiptoes. You were tipsy and twirled perfectly anyways. A lightness entered your body. You pirouetted again, like that Brooklyn performance all those years ago. I watched with admiration, a shadow on the dock. 

---

Nathan typed something into the computer. Said that because it was a private residence and isolated, this specific timepoint would be riskier to access, and I would have to pay a fee. He swiveled the computer screen my way and showed me the number. I shook my head. I could barely afford my eight minutes as it was.

He told me he could drop me down to three minutes, and it would kind of balance out. But I wanted all the time I could get with you. He clicked around the screen, and I knew I only had one more timepoint on my application. 

This one seems sweet, Nathan said reading over the form, and I knew because it was the last submission, he was going to try to really sell me on it before I walked away with everything but the deposit. Nathan had already blown up my plan—my dumb, obvious, hopeless plan—and I wasn’t exactly sure why I still sat there, nodding along to these places I never intended to revisit. I should have left but found myself caught in the gravity of your name, in the spell of our memories.

The last one was a throwaway, something to complete the application. I put flashlight tag—your favorite. I loved that carefree time when we were nine, when we’d spend every Saturday night at the middle school soccer field with kids from our street. I could pick any Saturday of the summer of 1997, and I know we’d be there. 

So I nodded at Nathan, sure. Let me see us young, in the dark grass, laughing and oblivious before it all. Why the hell not.

He printed a packet, I signed many lines. He left me momentarily then returned wearing denim jeans and a denim jacket. I didn’t have to change my clothes—he assured me that my blouse and capris were “timeless”—and I wanted to smack him. 

We walked down the hallway to the elevator and descended. In the white room, I stared at the machine, a silent, tall tube, stretching from floor to ceiling. Nathan opened a clear bag and removed something that looked like a plastic dog collar. Told me that to rewitness a memory can bring intense emotion, and intense emotion can make people create noises they don’t intend to. Noise will bring attention. The noise cancelation necklace was part of the contract I signed.

I nodded and he clasped it on. I opened my mouth to say hello. Nothing came out.

Then Nathan placed a bracelet around my wrist, the numbers 8:00 blinking on the face. Nathan reminded me that I had to follow him, as he’d secure the location and make sure we could spectate without interference. Told me too that he’d monitor my pulse and blood pressure, and when the eight minutes were up I’d be automatically transported back to the office. If for any reason I wanted to be transported back before then, there was a little red button on the watch I could tap and be locked out of the timepoint. 

Then Serious Nathan became even more serious and stated that if at any time I displayed behavior that seemed “risky, overemotional, or violent,” he could lock me out of the timepoint. He showed me this little silver case. Inside was a single metallic sticker he could stick on me. It would bring me back to the office before the eight minutes were up. He met my eyes, made sure I understood not to try anything. Voiceless, I gave him a double thumbs up. 

Then we stepped into the tube. He typed numbers into a screen. Said it would feel like nothing at all, though my ears might pop. Then he pressed a button. My ears popped. 

And then you wouldn’t believe it, Mara. I was standing on the black pavement of Cedar Street—it was sleek and glinting from the dull dazzle of a few crooked streetlights. It must have just rained—an uncapturable smell of wet slate and earth filled the air. The soccer field waited across the street, where the dots of our flashlights zig-zagged like drunk fireflies.

We approached the fence around the field, and when Nathan attempted to push open the chain-link door, it creaked, making him pause with animal stillness. Then he waved me over, and from behind the fence, I searched for you and me. 

How do I describe the rediscovery of us? Yellow cones of light bobbing around the field. Me, you, the others out there—probably Graham, Chloe, Vanessa—yelling joyously in the night. Sometimes I could see an arm or a shoe momentarily illuminated. Somewhere out there, you and I were sprinting and laughing, bending grass under our untied sneakers. Trying our best to stay in the dark. 

I wanted to get closer, but wasn’t sure how to tell Nathan—the absurd dog collar took my damn voice. I used my hands, made little legs with my forefingers to show walking and pointed to the field.

Nathan shook his head, whispered that we only spectate from a distance. And I felt the fight in me again. Of all the memories we have, I couldn’t believe I allowed myself to be convinced to choose one during the night, when I wouldn’t be able to see us clearly. Nathan could have warned me, but he didn’t. 

I considered actually smacking Nathan this time, but then, in a split streak of light, I saw your face. It was really you. A young you, decades before the truck would swerve out of its lane and into yours. And I know I should’ve just let you be a kid. But there’s a sharpness to the knowing, a stinging.

I started to shake the chain link, making it rattle and ring in the night. Did you hear it, as a kid? I can’t remember—did I? Nathan about lost his mind. He whispered to calm down, calm down or else, and that’s when he took out the tiny silver box, the one with the shiny sticker that would permanently whisk me away from you and back to the office. 

I paused, took my hands from the fence and froze. I’m sorry, I mouthed. I was. The box was open, and Nathan stood waiting, wondering what to do. He looked at the watch on his wrist, the one with the screen showing my pulse flickering in a fury. And before he could decide my fate, I decided for myself. I grabbed the sticker from the open box and placed it on Nathan. 

Poof. He disappeared, locked out. 

When I looked back out, though, I realized that the dancing flickers had stopped, and I couldn’t see us anymore. The game was over. Young me probably cut by the school to go home, and you may have already hopped the fence on the far side. So I ran. Ran to those tall light poles behind the bleachers, remembering where the control panel was from that dare in sixth grade.

Desperately—I only had a few minutes left—I switched the rows of toggles up and down until, all at once, the field shuddered brilliantly into view. I waited, hand over my eyes to shield the glare, hoping the sudden strange brightness was enough to make you turn around, enough to draw you back like a moth to the porchlight. 

You appeared, a small figure near center field staring up at the lights, stepping closer, all pigtailed and overalled. Do you remember it? I took shaky steps out onto the field, but my jellied legs didn’t seem to work right, like the ground was uneven, the world slant. 

I fell then, right on top of my wrist. There was a short snap, like the crack of a twig. I couldn’t say anything, the collar blocked my cry. In the damp grass, I cradled my wrist like a baby bird.

You pitied me. In a nervous, high-pitched voice, you asked if I was okay. You called me ma’am—imagine that!—and I swallowed my pain and nodded.

I pulled myself up to my feet, then walked nearer, all hobbled over, clutching my broken wrist. I tried to say your name but could not. If my voice didn’t work, I thought maybe I could write a message, trace the shapes of letters in the grass to tell you all I had to tell you. Maybe, I could write the date of the accident, and that would be enough. 

Young you stared as I lowered my right hand, a throbbing, limp thing. I tried to trace the M for May, but a pain shot up and through my arm. It wouldn’t do. I tried with my left hand, dragging it in hopeless loops and crosses. You took a step back, biting at your lower lip. 

I realized I was terrifying you. That to you, I was unrecognizable, just some voiceless lady that emerged from the dark, hunched over and with my hands trailing through the grass. 

Then I remembered Benny’s voice saying what the hell is this? And I laughed and laughed, or I silently did. Because of course, of fucking course. It was not a monster, never a demon on that stage. I get that now. 

What did Ivan call it? Twin flame.

I stood, ready. Then, in the best triumphant leaps I could muster, I pranced in a line down the field. My hands as high above my head as they could reach, just like I remembered. Gazelle-like, I bounded around you, you who took everything in with scrunched eyebrows, but no longer biting your lip. I twirled my best impression of the pirouettes I’d seen you do countless times. Again and again I spun. Then I pointed to you, inviting you to the dance. You were confused, you were entertained, you lifted one leg and spun until you fell. I spun and fell too, laughing and laughing and laughing. I could feel each blade of grass under me. 

In a moment, I would be zapped back to the white tiles of the Jump Attendant’s office. In a moment, I’d be gone from you. In a moment, you would stand alone in an empty field, but still, the dance would exist, would always exist, between us.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Before I knew his name, I just thought of him as the Blue Boy. His skin, pale to the point of translucence, got its color from the spider’s web of veins criss-crossing his body. His eyes had the blue of a clear summer sky and seemed just as wide with his staring. His hair was a thick, wavy, black mound, so dark that an unmistakably blue tone reflected out of it no matter how the light caught it.

No one else called him the Blue Boy. They mostly called him “l’Anglais”—the Englishman. At first because his French had an anglophone accent, and later—after he clarified that he was Irish not English—because they realized how much it annoyed him. I never called him Blue Boy aloud. I don’t think I ever called him anything when we met in the South of France as children. We didn’t talk much. As two outsiders, we might have. But our teacher made an effort to keep us separated during classes, maybe hoping to encourage us to mingle with the French kids, and we avoided each other outside of class. Neither of us fit in, and instead of that bringing us together for comfort, it kept us apart. We feared association with the other’s oddities. At least I did.

I only remember clearly one conversation from those days. I didn’t like playing soccer, but I had to stay after school because no one was home, so it was soccer or the band and I preferred the fresh air to the stuffy, loud music hall. I avoided the ball scrupulously throughout any scrimmages, and then volunteered to help put away the equipment afterwards, dawdling until the other boys left the changing room. 

But this time he was still there. His shirt and shorts lay on the bench beside him. He had his back to me, and I stared at the field of bare skin, made bluer by the effect of the fluorescent lights. He must have heard something, because his head snapped around to look over his shoulder at me. Embarrassed at staring, I would have looked away, except he stared too. His wide eyes took me in, and his initial fear faded. Finally he spoke.

“The other boys hit me there so my host family won’t see.”

He spoke English, and it took me a moment to understand the words, never having heard an Irish brogue before. Even when I did, I was still confused until he indicated downwards. Just across his underpants from the back I’d been staring at, yellow and purple splotches covered his skin. He turned to face me, and I saw the bruises were all over his thighs. Some were the pale red of fresh hurts that would soon bruise too.

“Why don’t you show them to someone?”

“I don’t grass on other kids.”

“Why don’t you wait outside until they all leave, like me?”

“I don’t run from fights.”

I looked away, shamed by his bravery, and started to get changed. He must have felt his near-nakedness when he saw me lowering my own shorts. Gingerly, he pulled pants over his poor legs. With the extra care he took, we ended up fully dressed around the same time. He stared at me again, and I stood still, waiting, like I needed his permission to leave.

 “D’you miss Canada?” he asked suddenly. 

I nodded. 

“Will you get to go back there?”

“If Dad’s job moves again.”

“I hope it does. When I get back to Ireland I’m never coming back here.” 

I nodded. 

“Right. See you then,” he said, and left. I stayed to wash my face and hands to make sure no one saw us leaving together. 

At home that night, I asked Dad how to treat bruises. He showed me a little brown bottle with Chinese writing on it and explained that was what he and his friends from Judo used. He opened it, and I could smell from across the room the harsh, grassy smell of cloves, aniseed, or loam. It left a yellow stain where Dad touched it with his hand, like turmeric. He offered it to me. I imagined gently rubbing it over the Blue Boy’s battered thighs. I told Dad no. I knew I could never get the courage to offer the massage. The smell would have just made him stand out more anyway. Most of all, I didn’t like the image of the yellow nicotine-like stain on his legs, covering the pale blue. 

He finished the year and I never heard him complain about bullying. Then he disappeared back to Ireland. My family returned to Canada in time for me to start high school, where I actually managed to make a couple friends. When I went to university in Montreal, life got even better. It didn’t matter anymore that I liked books and didn’t care about sports. It still mattered that I wasn’t into music, but my social standing improved to the point that I got my first girlfriend, Audrey. She was pretty and kind. I liked having a girlfriend. Unfortunately, it meant I had to go out with her to clubs with loud music, or house parties with loud music. In a dimly-lit loft at one such party, I heard someone speaking English with an Irish accent.

I wouldn’t have recognized the voice, it had grown deep and powerful enough that—unlike me, Audrey, and nearly everyone else there—he didn’t have to shout to be heard. I might not have recognized him on sight either. He had grown big and broad-shouldered, though I was taller than him now. His arms were thick and muscular and covered in curly hair. He wore a well-kept beard, as black as the hair on his head. It carried that deep blue tinge, but so did most dark hair in the mood lighting.

He happened to look my way at that moment and, seeing his eyes, I knew him. I must have been staring. He gave me a bemused but friendly smile. I realized he hadn’t recognized me, but he excused himself from the conversation he was having with a circle of other guys and approached. “Where have I met you?” he asked directly. As soon as I said the name of the French town, recognition sparked on his face. 

“Well, fuck me, you’ve changed.” His wide eyes looked me up and down. 

I felt a shifting at my side, and quickly switched to French to introduce Audrey. 

“Enchanté,” he said. 

As he turned his wide eyes and charming smile to her, I felt a twinge of discomfort in my stomach. Then he reached a long arm back through the crowd of people and tapped one of the guys he’d been standing with on the shoulder. When he presented the guy, a boyish, blond-haired imp, to us as “mon chum”—his boyfriend—my guts twisted further.

We explained how we’d met, and marvelled about the odds of meeting up again. But, since we never spent time together as children, and neither of us liked anyone we’d met then, it didn’t take long for our talk to run dry. Then he said he wanted a smoke. His boyfriend turned up his nose at the mention of it, so I said I would keep him company. Audrey looked surprised, knowing I didn’t smoke, but I gave her a shrug meant to convey Just so we can catch up, and she smiled back.

We grabbed our coats from where we’d tossed them on a bed, and headed to the balcony, a little wrought iron Montreal job that looked like a fire escape without the escape. We stood quite close together once the doors were closed behind us. He offered me a cigarette, but I refused, saying I had quit. Really I had never started, but I knew enough people who had smoked as teenagers and quit now that I thought it sounded honest. He didn’t comment, just lit his own and exhaled the first breath with satisfaction. The street was dark. Snow glittered in the pool of the occasional street light. My hot breaths showed nearly as thickly as his smoky ones.

“Fuck,” he said, “and I thought Irish winters were cold and miserable.”

I smiled at him and watched as he raised the cigarette and closed his lips delicately around it. His beard was especially well-trimmed around the mouth, and his lips jutted freely. When they opened again, and smoke jetted out, he locked eyes with me, then proffered the cigarette, saying, “You sure?”

I took it. I tried not to hold it too tightly. I had it between the middle and index finger, like you were supposed to, but I suspect my stiff wrist gave away my quitting lie. I placed it in my mouth, him watching me now with his unblinking eyes. I took a shallow inhale. As my lips parted to blow the smoke out, his mouth opened slightly too, as if in sympathy. When he took the cigarette back, his hand was icy to the touch, and I said so. He agreed, and asked why mine was still so warm. I shrugged. We lingered, allowing some of my heat to flow into him, then I said, “Well let’s get you inside then.”

“Right,” he said, but made no move.

A noise came from indoors and I dropped his hand. More prospective smokers appeared in the windows. He looked at me with something like pity as he took one last drag, then we went back inside.

I invited him and his boyfriend over for dinner with Audrey and me, but he cancelled at the last minute. The next time I saw him he had his arm around a different guy. When I asked what happened to the blond one, he just grinned and said, “Didn’t work out.” He asked me how Audrey was, but seemed uninterested in the details. 

The following week he turned up at my apartment. It surprised me, until he reminded me I’d given him the address when he was supposed to come over for dinner. I asked him to sit down, and he took a spot on the couch. I went to the kitchen to get beers, talking cheerfully about nothing as I did, but when I came back, his face was somber.

I asked what was wrong and he explained he’d broken up with the new boyfriend. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I chased him off. I always do if I feel it’s getting serious.”

“Maybe you just haven’t found the right person.”

He shook his head. “Nah. It’s never about them. I’m just fucked up.” 

I set the beers down on the table and took a seat across from him. 

“It’s my father. Every time I think I might like a guy seriously I start hearing what Dad would call him. Us. Puffs, homos, faggots. Or if he was feeling generous, he’d say: Couple of fairies. It’s funny, faggot I could take. I have. But not fairy. I guess it’s the dismissiveness.”

“He sounds awful.”

“It’s not all his fault. Got raised that way. My ma wouldn’t be thrilled about me bringing home a man either, although she’d probably just go off quietly to pray for us. They’d never admit it, but honestly, they already know. I’ve never made much effort to hide it. But they pretend not to see me.” 

He looked up, his wide eyes shining, and I realized he’d started crying. “Can I have a hug?” he asked.

I moved forward to kneel awkwardly next to him and reached out. He embraced me and pulled me onto the couch beside him. I made a little noise of surprise, and, into my shoulder, he asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just didn’t expect that. To be, you know, cuddling.”

“Is it okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it was. I thought guiltily of Audrey, but then scolded myself. He had a serious problem. My straight, square sensibility could handle a little discomfort to support him. He stayed in my arms for about an hour. Sometimes he would talk about his family or his church, sometimes he would just sit quietly. Then, abruptly, he got up and left.

I thought about telling Audrey, but reasoned that I wouldn’t have if it had been a straight friend, so this should be no different.

A couple weeks later he turned up again. He’d had another breakup, and a shitty conversation with his parents. We naturally moved to the couch. I felt somewhat outside myself as he cried quietly into my shoulder. Like I was still in the chair across from him, watching as someone else patted his back gently, and felt his beard scratch against their bare neck.

When it happened a third time, I decided to tell Audrey. I mentioned it nonchalantly, as a story, sad and kind of cute. She didn’t think it was either. She demanded to know whether he was hitting on me. When I pointed out that he kept dating other guys, she waved dismissively. “Mais pourquoi il est venu te voire chaque fois qu’il a pas de chum?” 

I answered that he came to see me not because he was single, but because the relationship had ended, badly. I shared my reasoning that if he were a straight man who’d been dumped by a woman she wouldn’t have thought twice about me comforting him. 

She scoffed at that. “Mais c’est normal pour eux.” 

I asked who she meant by “eux”—them.

She answered, “Les mecs gays.” Gay guys. “C’est normal pour eux de sortir avec plusieurs gens au même temps.” That is, it’s normal for them to see a few people at the same time.

I didn’t mention it to her the next time.

Other than when he came over, I didn’t see him much. Very occasionally we found ourselves at the same parties or bars. He was always with a group of men. In that darkly lit nightlife, his blueness was nearly invisible—everyone had interesting shades and tints reflecting off their skin and hair. But I saw the blue in the white LED light of my apartment, when he came over to cry on my couch and I held him. 

One Friday night near the end of term I found myself free from party or bar duty, while Audrey was out with her girlfriends. I had gotten out a book and settled on the couch, when a sudden tattoo beaten on my door made me jump. I opened it to see him standing there, eyes droopier than usual, but without tears.

“C’n’I c’m’n?” he slurred. “I want to talk to you.” 

I let him in, and he picked his way carefully to the couch. 

“I’m a little pissed,” he admitted.

“Do you need a coffee?” I asked.

“I’m not that drunk,” he said, frowning with his eyebrows.

I moved instinctively for the couch, then caught myself and sat in a chair. “Why did you want to talk?”

“I’m off soon,” he said. “After exams I’m going back to finish my degree in Dublin.” 

I nodded. 

“And before I go,” he said, “I wanted to… ah shit. Where’s your toilet?”

I directed him to the bathroom. I braced myself for the sound of vomiting but instead heard the deep splash of piss hitting water from height. I started making coffee. I heard the flush and the water running. Then he emerged, drying his hands on his pants. “You sure you don’t want a coffee?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “it’s alright. I’m not drunk enough for you to have to take care of me.” He went back to the couch. “You could come sit with me though.” I lowered myself slowly next to him. He leaned into me as he had many times, but without tears. Just a quiet sigh. “I’ll miss you,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Yeah?” His hand traced up and down the line of buttons on my shirt. “How much?” he asked huskily, his hand reaching lower.

“Stop that,” I said, pulling his hand away.

He didn’t resist, he just asked, “Why?”

“Because I have a girlfriend. And besides, I’m not…” I left the thought unfinished.

“Not what? Not enjoying yourself? Not comfortable with me?”

“It’s not that, but I’m not—” I was cut off by the door bursting open.

“T’es là !” Audrey said as she walked in. “Ton portable marchait pas. Les filles sont—” She stopped, seeing him next to me.

“Audrey!” I blurted out, getting to my feet. “C’est pas ce que tu penses.”

“You know, it kind of is what she thinks,” he mumbled, stretching.

“Rien s’est passé, on parle, c’est tout !” I assured her.

“That’s true, we were only talking. You were telling me how you’re not—” He paused with mock gravitas, and then suddenly rattled off, “a-gentleman-who-prefers-the-company-of-other-gentlemen.”

“Shut up!” I said.

“No, you shut up!” said Audrey in her heavily-accented English. “I know what this means! He is saying you’re gay. I understand!”

He laughed at her sincerity, and she turned back towards the door. 

“Wait, Audrey, stay!” 

She hesitated. 

“And you,” I said, rounding on him. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Right. Okay,” he said, getting to his feet with maddening calmness. “But something real happened between us, and at some point you’ll have to confront it.”

“Nothing happened!” I shouted. “I just wanted to be a good friend. You’re the one coming over and asking for cuddles, and making me—”

“Making you?” he said sharply. “I didn’t make you do anything.” I pushed him to keep moving towards the door. He looked to Audrey. “He’s telling the truth,” he said. “Nothing happened. Physically, I mean. I can’t speak to what he might have felt—”

My fist swung and caught him square in the face. Audrey yelped. He stumbled back into the door. 

“Don’t you talk to her!” I panted.

He looked up, blood dribbling from his nose. “Right,” he said quietly.

I was angry, and I knew what to say. “Just get out, you fairy.”

I watched with satisfaction as his eyes widened and his jaw tensed. I half-expected him to take a swing at me next. I think I wanted him to. But he just spoke with quiet coldness. “I don’t ever want to see you again.” Then he was out the door. Before I could stitch together any kind of explanation, Audrey followed him, leaving me alone with the image of blood pooling in his blue-black beard, staining it purple.

But I did see him again. Approaching a small pedestrian bridge into the Grande Ile in Strasbourg, admiring architecture that reminded me of both medieval castles and quaint ski lodges, a flash of color caught my eye from across the canal. I turned to see a face that was strange to me. He didn’t have the beard anymore, and he carried more weight in his cheeks, but I recognized the blue of his skin. Surprisingly, he recognized me too, and even more surprisingly, he smiled and called to me.

We met on the bridge. Between us stood a closed baby carriage, but he pushed it to the side and pulled me into a hug. We had to get through, “What are you doing here?”—I was visiting on my way to a conference in Frankfurt; he was working as a translator for the Irish government— “How have you been?”—well, apparently—and “How long has it been?”—about 14 years—before I could ask him about the baby carriage.

“Hopefully she’s asleep.” He gently pulled back the cover and was greeted with a howl of displeasure. “Oh, you might as well meet her now,” he said. A chubby, wrinkled baby emerged. Her face, light brown to begin with, darkened and reddened as she cried. Her hair was as black as his, but fine and curly. “Mostly looks like her ma.” He rocked the carriage back and forth as he introduced us.

I flicked away a cigarette I’d forgotten was in my hand, before leaning in to look at her. “And her mother is…” I didn’t know how to finish the thought, but he helpfully stepped in.

“My wife.” He held up a hand with a wedding band as evidence.

“Then you’re not…” I trailed off again.

“Not what? Gay anymore?” he laughed. “It’s okay, you can say it. I didn’t go to some conversion camp or anything. It’s true I mostly prefer fellas, but there were always a few girls that did it for me. She’s one of them.” I nodded, wordlessly. “I won’t pretend it didn’t make things easier with my parents, the Church, or the government, but I never lied to anyone. Tell you who did give me shit for it though: my straight friends from Uni. Happy to tell me I’m lying to myself and my marriage is a sham.” He laughed this off, and I nodded sympathetically. He gave me a crafty grin. “You fancy meeting her? This one’s meant to go down soon. I’m just trying a walk to quiet her. D’you have dinner plans?”

I didn’t. In fact, I knew no one in the city. I tried to protest, but he was already on the phone telling his wife he’d bumped into an old friend and there’d be one more at dinner. As we walked, the crying quieted, and soon we could talk without shouting over her. “What about you then? You with anybody?”

“No. Still single,” I answered. “I’m out now,” I added.

“Oh you are?” he said. Then gave a little “Heh.” Coming from someone else it might have sounded nervous. But his clear gaze was unwavering, and his smile genuine. It was more like an unspoken ain’t that some shit.

We walked in silence a little farther, then I said, “I’m so sorry for what—”

He cut me off. “Don’t. It’s alright, we were both lost and messed up at the time. I don’t want to talk about it.”

When we arrived, I helped him navigate the carriage up three flights of stairs, then steadied it while he took out his keys. He fitted a solid, heavy key into the lock. The kind you never got in Canada, and which always gave me the same thrill as old editions of books or ruins of ancient architecture. 

A woman turned from setting a table for three and flashed a lively smile at us. She noted the silence from the stroller and greeted me with a bizarre combination of enthusiasm and hush. She pressed each of her cheeks against mine in turn and introduced herself in accented French as “Nicole.” 

“He speaks English.” His voice was muffled from reaching into the stroller. 

“Well thank God for that,” she said, switching to a dialect I wasn’t familiar with but would later learn came from Manchester. “Call me Nikki. I prefer that, I just don’t like how the French say it. Knee Key!” she squeaked, the emphasis squarely on the second syllable. 

The baby stirred slightly, as she was removed from the stroller, but gentle rocking, and a soft, blue cheek protecting her face from the light coaxed her into continued silence. Nikki invited me to sit and asked me about myself while he put her to bed. He emerged a moment later, to give her a kiss and me a drink. When I’d finished it, I suggested that I should be leaving, but Nikki insisted she’d already added the extra pasta and said that if I didn’t stay she knew where it would all end up. She prodded his slightly protruding stomach, and elicited a good-natured burp.

I tried once more to excuse myself early. I had trouble meeting their eyes. With my apology to him unfinished, and being unsure how much of the past Nikki knew, I felt restrained. But they weren’t having it, and the smell of her food and the twinkle of his eyes as he reminisced eventually seduced me.

They each moved so easily around the other in setting the table. He made it clear that nothing was out of bounds, so eventually I relaxed.

As it turned out we enjoyed ourselves a bit too much, because Nikki’s shriek of delighted laughter at one of the stories I told about Montreal set off a corresponding cry from next door. He rushed off, and after a few minutes of attempted soothing, ended up bringing the baby back out. She calmed a bit, in the big living space, but showed no indication of going back to sleep. I got to see a little sheepish smile now, and her open eyes. Despite their brown color, the wide-eyed stare was definitely her father’s. As he bounced her gently on his knee, I recognized a glint off her hair. True, it was just baby hair that might fall out, and its curls foreshadowed a texture more like Nikki’s, but it undeniably had a tinge of blue.

He offered to walk me to my hotel, insisting it was the best way to get her to sleep. So soon we were back out on the dark city streets, him pushing the stroller next to me. It had grown chilly since the sun went down, and when I noticed him shivering I insisted that I could find my own way. Instead of answering, he took one hand off the stroller, reached down, and took my hand. Then he gently guided it up, and across his thick shoulders until I had my arm around him.  We walked like that for a few blocks before he said, “I’m not making a pass or anything. It’s just…” he searched for words. “Some guys have this, you know? A family. Two guys I mean.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I sometimes wonder how that would feel different. I could have had that. You still might.”

“I can’t even look after myself, much less a baby.” 

He didn’t laugh.

We walked in silence for a few blocks, when suddenly some noisy laughter surprised me. A few students spilled out of a doorway, headed to the bars. I instinctively started to retract my arm, but feeling his shoulders tighten, I left it. We walked past them. Probably seeming for all the world like a family. I don’t think any of them looked at us twice.

Then, we arrived at the street my hotel was on. I turned to him, my face very close to his. I could see individual veins under the skin of his face, rather than the general blueness I saw from a distance. His eyes flicked towards me, although he didn’t turn his head. “You know where you’re headed then?”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Say thank you again to Nikki for a lovely meal.”

“Will do.”

“She’s great by the way. I totally get it now that I’ve seen you together.”

His mouth formed a smile, though his eyes didn’t follow as he nodded. “Right,” he said. “Bye then.”

As I left, I looked back as he fussed with the cover of the stroller and sighed, exhaling steamy phantoms in the cold night air.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

He thought I’d look older with a drink in my hand. During the shows he leaned against the wall to my right, always watching the crowd. We passed a whole season this way. Small sips and secret glances. My father wasn’t the kind to notice I was gone.

When we met, I was too young to get into the shows by legal means, but I had a big smile and an impressive collection of band tees—a currency that ingratiated me to him early on. I found the shirts in thrift stores I wandered into by myself. Soft and loose and two sizes too big, but I liked the way they felt against my skin. We lived in a small town. Maybe some of them were his.

---

The night before his band left on their first summer tour, he wrote his email address on a napkin and slipped it into the pocket of my cutoffs after the show. I examined it at home, my legs dangling off the fire escape as humid night air thickened to a cocoon around me. The at sign swirled in blue ink, a whirlpool waiting. 

I sent him my favorite YouTube links: grainy acoustic performances recorded in the ’90s, shimmering periwinkle glimpses of stars clutching mics and guitars. Dark dreamy chords and a piano’s soft lilt, secrets set to song—there were girl-shaped gaps in his musical education I’d decided I should fill. He sent his own music back to me, steely vocals shaping rough poetry through winding chains of mp3 files. I typed my secrets in reply, condensing my history into tiny digital missives that I cast out into the ether, hoping they’d reach him. The screen beamed out a pale electric glow that made me feel less alone.

I unearthed a creased road-trip atlas from my father’s glove box so I could track the band’s cross-country progress with a pink gel pen; I wanted to see where my messages would reach him on any given night. I imagined him folded into the backseat of a battered tour van, fitting his chin into the palm of his hand to hide his smile. 

---

I knew what he wanted when he came back to see me in August. The band had a few days off between shows and he’d decided he couldn’t wait. I pictured the Greyhound drawing a line through the few states left between us, the miles disappearing as he moved. 

When he arrived, we went to chain restaurants and record stores, drank bitter gas station coffee and watched a horror movie in the theater’s last row. We sat on the same side of the booths but never touched; I wondered what the waiters thought we were to each other. On his last night we took our shirts off on my bed in my room—just to see what it’s like, he said. Later on I’d tell myself it was a natural progression. When he left, I stripped my glossy girl-band posters from the walls, stuffed them into the trash beside the twin mattress, and stared for a long time at the bare space that remained.

---

His band concluded their tour at the venue where he’d once worked; their audience chain-smoked and drank beer in the almost-dark. He introduced me to his bandmates, who exchanged glances over my head they thought I couldn’t see.

As the set began, I found myself at the edge of the stage—closer than I’d ever been—and for a moment I envisioned myself moving among them, holding my own mic and winking in and out of the hazy purple light.

---

When their single hit big, he started calling me from the road. Weekends, holidays, the middle of the night—they were all the same to him. I was an inbox for his emotions, a sounding board for his ideas. A bare slate. 

As the song climbed the charts, he confessed he felt a mounting pressure to recreate its success. He was afraid of fame but also desperately desired it, and this made him difficult to deal with. His voice crackled through the landline, a constant refrain. Tell me I’m going to be OK. I wound the overlong cord around different parts of my body: my wrist, my leg, my neck. Sometimes I cut off circulation without noticing, pulled back into focus only by a sudden sharpness. That pin-and-needle prick. 

I stayed home in case he called, the phone nestled beside me on the pillow, derivative romances flickering on the screen in my bedroom. The women talked about love like a sickness, an infection. Some nights the phone never rang.

---

These days he’s the quiet kind of famous. Always a glowing review from the right publication when there’s a new album to promote. The band plays extended tours that routinely sell out, scalpers hawking inflated prices that his fans will always pay. 

I can enter the venue without him now. I stand in the crowd, swaying among the other bodies, but still I feel separate. I spend the whole show imagining he’ll return. That he’s behind me somewhere. That he can see me clearly now.

---

Sometimes I pull on the shirts I wore when I was younger, soft band tees past their prime and full of holes. I live in the same apartment. I work at the venue where we met. I serve beer to young faces full of hope and I double-check their IDs. I’m going somewhere, their expectant eyes invariably say. They smile and wink. I run my fingers over the plastic; I hand the cards back over and over again. On nights like these I can still remember gazing up at the stage from my place in the audience, convinced I’d caught his look with my own. But the way the light shone into his eyes, he told me, it was hard to see anyone at all.

At each shift’s end I roll the windows down in my father’s truck, peering through the skylight at every stop sign. I pretend the stars are closer than they are.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

We had been watching the distant hills for three days. 

The first day, the smoke started as a thin plume, a persistent pale trickle slipping up into the sky.

“They better get that under control.” On the porch, Dad squinted at the vista below. “Conditions like this. This is no good time for a fire.”

I was suddenly acutely aware of my surroundings: the blonde grasses, blanched and crisp underfoot, the prickle of sweat salting the nape of my neck. The sun baking the earth, parching the pine boughs. The breeze had been nothing but billows of heat, even in the night, when the air up in Gold Creek usually cooled to a chill. It hadn’t rained in weeks.

“Should we call 911?”

“Nah.” Dad sat back and tucked a slug of chaw into his cheek. “I’m sure someone’s already doing something about it. We’re not the only ones who see it.”

I watched the curl of smoke with a morbid curiosity, the way you might gape at an accident—tragic that it was happening to someone else, but close enough to the danger for a little thrill.

“Don’t worry about it, wild man,” Dad said. “It’s a ways off.” He called me that, wild man, even though I was twelve years old and perpetually timid, at least compared to him. Dad was the one who had to charge out into the night to scare the scavenging black bears away from the truck when I forgot a granola bar in the passenger seat. This was a brave skin I could not imagine myself wearing, the adult who stomped out into the darkness, swinging the shotgun around like a baseball bat, shouting at the bears to go on, git. There hadn’t always been so many bears in our little town, I learned. In recent years, they were intruding into the populated areas more often because food in the woods was scarce, while human snacks—I had looked at the ground guiltily—were in ample supply.

While the sun baked the ruddy backs of our necks, Dad went about his business and seemed to forget about the smoke in the distance. He unloaded boxes of motor oil from the back of the truck into the shed, pausing to unzip and piss against the papery trunk of an aspen that grew along the side of our mile-long driveway. I kept shooting nervous glances through the tops of the ponderosas. I had never been close enough to a real fire to see smoke snaking up into the skies, but Dad’s movements were bored, methodical. Maybe it was immature of me to worry. Later that afternoon, as the day slipped into evening, the plume of smoke was bigger, fat and puffy as a cloud. When I brought it to his attention, he paused and looked westward again.

“Hmm,” was all he said. The creases between his brows deepened. 

That night, the heat was unbearable. I yanked the windows of our cabin open, but there was no breeze, just a heavy dead swelter that sank to the bottom of the room. I tossed and turned, my lanky legs tangled in fabric, until finally I kicked the quilt and the sheets off into a heap on the floor. The moon was a luminous spotlight. The pine branches cast feathery shadows on the window glass. Everything outside was still, too still, uncomfortably still, the entire night world crouched and breathing like an animal ready to pounce. Sometime after midnight, I tugged the windows closed again. It might have actually been cooler inside, where the hot breath of the world wasn’t panting down my neck. I barely slept.

When yellow sunrise spilled through the windows and I woke, the air smelled smoky, a nostalgic smell that brought me back to campfires, cozy winter mornings. Dad’s face was somber. He refilled the coffeemaker and stared out the window, not speaking, only the sputter and crackle of the hot pad as the coffee trickled into the pot. When he stepped onto the porch with his mug, I followed, too close on his heels. I had the childish instinct to slip my hand into his paw, but I didn’t. Instead, I stood up straighter. I caught myself mirroring him: both of our thumbs thrust through our frayed belt loops. The worn planks were smooth and dusty under my bare feet. Pine needles collected in the gaps.

Dad surveyed the thick column of smoke as he sipped his coffee, sucking leftover droplets from his mustache. 

“It’s still there,” I said helpfully.

“Yep. I see that.”

“Looks like it’s getting bigger.”

He said nothing, his eyes fixed on the hills below us. Finally, he sighed, tapped something into his phone, and frowned at the screen. When he pressed play on a news clip, a woman’s voice spoke.

“—on scene, just west of Gold Creek, Colorado, where crews are struggling to contain a growing blaze of almost nine hundred acres.” Nine hundred acres! My heart jumped up into my throat. I had a hard time picturing that much land, but nine hundred of anything was a massive amount.

“Dad!” The smell of the smoke was thicker now. My mouth tasted of campfire.

“It’ll be fine, wild man. They’re on it. News says it’s twelve miles off.” 

“Are you sure?”

He put a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Think of the Dickinson’s ranch, you know, with the horses? All the way out there? They’re four miles past the edge of town. So the fire’s eight miles further still. That’s a lot of distance, far as a fire’s concerned. Fire doesn’t move that fast, okay?”

I could picture the ranch and the rutted dirt road to the Dickinson’s. A trickle of a creek glittered in the sun. With manes aflutter, horses romped in a celery-green meadow, the only clearing for miles. I had seen an aerial photograph in school once: we lived in a vast, dark river of trees, the granite foothills furred over and swallowed up by pines. From the sky, Gold Creek was barely visible. Four hundred citizens was all, an old mining-era town in Colorado’s high country, every last thing constructed of weathered gray wood, splintered planks, faded hope, rusted tin. Sometimes tourists pulled through in their shiny vehicles and snapped photos of the general store or the cafe or my schoolhouse, once even of the Russell’s weatherbeaten cabin while Mr. Russell stood right there in the yard hosing down the pansies. I had overheard tourists calling us a ghost town, but that wasn’t true: four hundred of us lived here. Four hundred souls, not ghosts, not yet.

The strange, cloying heat unnerved me. It was hard to think of anything else when the air smelled like danger: acrid, almost sweet. The ponderosas’ butterscotch-scented bark, roasting. The smell drifted to the top of my consciousness, choking out any other thought. Nervously, I did my chores: I split some wood and left the ax plunged into the chopping block in the driveway, even though Dad griped at me to move it aside. I heaved the compost bucket out to the pile. Finally, heat-dizzy and drenched in sweat, I slouched in front of the TV, where I was able to forget for a bit. I don’t know how much time passed. Hours, likely, while Dad tinkered in the shed. Eventually, I got hungry and made my way, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen. 

The first thing I noticed was the uncanny light. Too murky for the middle of the afternoon, an uncomfortable yellowish hue like the air was steeped in tea. My vision was still scaling down from the TV’s brightness, and I rubbed my eyes and stepped out onto the porch to be sure. My stomach plummeted. It was wrong, the whole world tense. The sky was a bitter sulfur-yellow. Flakes drifted down, dusting the driveway’s gravel, landing in my hair, mottling the bushes. Snow? I thought stupidly, although of course it wasn’t, not in this heat. I ran a fingertip across the truck’s windshield. Ash.

In the shed, Dad was flat on his back, his head and shoulders buried under the chassis of his vintage MG—his project car. A wrench tick-tick-ticked a bolt into place. Jimmy Buffet crooned from a battered radio on the tool bench. 

“I think it’s getting closer.” I thumped on the MG’s metal skeleton. 

Dad slid out from under the chassis. “What’s that, wild man?” He wiped his greasy, blackened palms on a rag.

“I said the fire’s getting close. There’s ash everywhere. The sky is all yellow. What do we do?”

He stuffed the grease rag into his back pocket and leaned his head through the door, then frowned at the sky and took a few more steps out into the driveway, squinting, craning his neck. Inside the shed, it smelled like fresh sawdust and motor oil, but my T-shirt reeked of smoke, a crackling and sharp scent. My nostalgia for that smell was displaced by a clench of urgency. I twisted the radio dial until I found the news channel.

“—Explosive growth of what’s being called the High Lonesome Fire, which has rapidly blown up to over eight thousand acres in just a short time. The cause of the blaze is reported to be an unattended campfire, despite county-wide fire restrictions. Immediate evacuations are in place for the following areas: High Ridge, Walkerson Pass, Gold Creek, West Park—”

I dashed out into the driveway, breathless. “I just heard on the radio! They told us to evacuate!”

Dad was peering up at the strange sky. “No need to panic.”

“I heard them say it!” I insisted. “They said evacuate! They said Gold Creek!”

“There’ve been fires up here before. Fire’s natural, alright?”

“But it’s not natural! It was a campfire. They already know.”

“Campfire? It’s ninety-four goddamn degrees out. In the shade.” Dad shook his head, stuffing a nugget of chaw into his lower lip. He pinched the tips off a nearby pine branch, which should have bent and flexed, but instead just snapped clean off, a brittle break. “Who needs a campfire now, of all times? Christ.”

“I know! It’s nuts! It’s way too hot for a campfire!” Finally, he agreed with me on something. My voice sounded manic in my own ears. “They said it’s eight thousand acres already.”

“Eight thousand? That can’t be right. Fires don’t grow that fast. That’s almost, what—ten times larger, in less than a day. You must have heard wrong.”

“They said explosive growth. They said it blew up.” It was true—I was quoting the radio verbatim—but I was beginning to feel silly for my repetition. If there was any time to panic, surely it was now. A gust of wind pushed through the pines, a hot smoky breath, and the neighbor’s wind chimes plinged. Flakes of ash caught in my eyelashes. My cheeks were probably scarlet with heat—I could feel them flushed—and I plucked at my sweaty T-shirt. My throat burned as I swallowed. My mouth tasted urgently of smoke.

“This is our home,” Dad said firmly. “We stay put.” When he looked out at the forest, I knew what he saw: the little twig cross I had tied together for our arthritic pit bull, Mick, when I was five. The rose bushes along the driveway that Mom planted before she decided she had enough of this life. Behind us, the cabin that my dad’s grandfather, my great-grandfather, built with his own two hands, during an era that glittered with promise, when men flooded the high country to sift flashes of hope from the gold-heavy creek. It was the only home I had ever known. And all of it—the forest, the cabin, even the crackled creek bed—was dry as kindling.

Ahead of us now, the heavens were darkening. I could see the unholy shape of the sun, a red hazy blot. I knew I shouldn’t stare directly at it, but I did anyway, and my eyes didn’t burn right out of my skull, like I had been cautioned. The sun’s light was too feeble through the smoke. Above us was an apocalyptic sky from a movie, not a sky I recognized. It was no longer a forest I recognized, either. This menacing new forest crackled with its own hot breath. 

Some of the ash flaking down had letters printed on it. Roasted pages of a book, I realized, when I pinched a scrap between my fingers. That meant someone’s house was burning, this very instant. I was coughing now, tears welling in my smoke-burned eyes. I left Dad out there, staring up at the sky in silence, ash collecting in his arm hair as he did nothing, nothing. I grabbed the radio from the shed, ran back out, cranked the volume up.

“Did you hear that?” My voice cracked. “They said there are flames south of County Road 42! That means the Dickinson’s ranch is gone already! We have to do something!”

“Good God,” Dad muttered. “It’s not supposed to happen that fast.” He was frozen in place, gaping at the sky.  In the driveway, I left the radio blaring on the hood of the Chevy. I ran inside the cabin and grabbed what I could: our photo albums from the bookshelf. The file folder Dad tucked important papers into, even though I wasn’t sure what exactly it contained. An armload of food swiped from a shelf into a canvas bag. The dented coffee can on top of the fridge where he stashed crumpled wads of cash and spare change. Scanning my bedroom, gulping: my pocket knife, the photo of Mom with the bent edge. It was very dim now, a surreal timeless dark. My throat burned. On my way out, I flicked the porch lights on, but the weak light did little to cut through the haze. Wind whipped through the trees. The forest was full of shooting stars: the ash had turned to embers streaming through the sky.

 I tossed our things into the back of the Chevy. Had the sense to yank a tarp over the bed to protect our stuff from embers.

“Dad!” I shouted, even though he was only a few paces away. “I packed up. We have to leave!”

Now I could make out an amber glow through the pines that twisted my gut with an animal panic. I knew, without a doubt, that this was the end of something. The end of everything.

“Come on! Please! We have to go!” My eyes were streaming: smoke, fear. Grit and ash stuck to the wet tracks on my cheeks. I started towards him to grab his hand, but just then, an ember lanced through the air like a comet and seared into his shirt. On his shoulder, a hot firefly glow, a sizzle, a blooming ring of charred black fabric. Finally, he startled to life. He yelped and swatted the cinders from his skin. He looked at me with a terror-stricken face I will never forget.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” he roared. I was flooded with relief, but only for a moment. In his panic, he dashed towards me. But I’d left the chopping block in the way, with the ax sunk deep in the stump. It happened in slow-motion: Dad catching the ax handle with his shin, tumbling over himself, crumpling to the dirt. 

I ran to his side. He grimaced, clutching his leg.

“Dad! Are you okay?”

“My leg’s hurt. I think it’s bad. I don’t know if I can—” He tried to stand and collapsed. “It might be broken. Goddammit!”

I tried not to look at the ominous glow pulsing through the trees. The heat rose around us in waves. “We have to go.” I pulled him up. “Now!”

“I know, dammit! Just help me get into the truck!” When he leaned on me, he was heavier than I was prepared for, but we managed to shuffle over to the Chevy. He hoisted himself up into the passenger seat, wincing.

“You’re going to have to get us outta here, wild man. You get to learn how to drive, right now.” He flashed a grin at me, an attempt at playfulness, but his eyes were gleaming, saucer-wide. That split second, when we stared at each other across the bench seat, I knew I wasn’t a kid anymore. I clutched the steering wheel like I was holding Dad’s very life in my grip. I didn’t want that responsibility, but there it was. Dad had left some old sweatshirts on the floor behind the passenger seat, and now I stuffed them under my butt so I could see over the steering wheel. 

The salmon glow through the trees had begun to flicker and throb. We were out of time. Still, I was determined to pilot us as far as I could. When I yanked the shifter into reverse, the radio toppled from the Chevy’s hood. I backed right into the chopping stump, and I felt the bumper crumple.

“Forget it,” Dad said. “Keep going. Just go.” He leaned over and flicked on the windshield wipers to clear the scrim of ash. The sky ahead of us was sinister. We tore down the driveway, the shape of the familiar ruts cupping the tires. The truck bucked and swayed in my unskilled hands. Scraggly juniper arms clawed the side of the truck, squealing down our metal flank. I turned the headlights on to pierce the smoke.

“Go faster. You need to go faster.”

I rammed the gas pedal down. Thankfully the truck was an automatic. Just before I reached the mouth of the driveway, I was met with flame. Fire leapt through the scrub oak to my right, scrabbled up the tree trunks. Embers and ash flew towards us like charred butterflies. 

“Keep going. Keep going!”

“I know! I am!” I stomped the gas pedal down with the tip of my toe, jarring us over the spot fires blazing in the road. Sparks streamed down upon us. Now the woods on all sides of us were ablaze. The forest floor was singed black, glittering with terrible cinders. Flames lapped greedily through the canopy above. I saw the trunk of a pine tree that crackled and glowed like hell. 

At the main gravel road I turned left, instead of right toward Gold Creek. The fire had come from that direction. If it was already here at the mouth of our driveway, then nobody needed to tell me our town was gone. The sky was darker now. Flames raced through the undergrowth. I managed to keep the truck on the road, but I jostled us around wildly. Dad grimaced and clutched his leg with every jolt.

Then finally, ahead of us, the thing I feared most: a wall of leaping flame, two stories tall. The road consumed. The smoke billowing and churning. Tongues of flame that writhed and whipped and spun. 

“What do I do?”

“We’re all out of options.” Dad’s voice was desperate. “Just keep going. It’s up to you.”

I swallowed hard. I stomped the gas pedal down. I tried not to squeeze my eyes closed as the Chevy leapt through a tunnel of flame. I wanted to shut it all out—the heat welling up inside the truck, the smell of burning rubber that choked my throat, the terrifying whoosh and crackle outside—but I knew I had to keep my eyes on the road. So as I drove us into the heart of the inferno, I saw it all: the searing flames, the cavern of heat. In the passenger seat, Dad’s eyes were tightly closed. His mouth moved as he mumbled, or prayed. It was unfair, I thought, in a flash of anger. He should have to face this, too.

And then we punched through. On the other side, spot fires crackled in the underbrush, but we were finally ahead of the wall of flame. Veils of smoke drifted apart and dissolved into haze. Ahead, the sky darkened to indigo, the color itself a visceral relief, like deep water. The temperature inside the cab cooled in moments, but I could still only smell smoke. I tried to swallow, but my throat was baked dry. My mouth bloomed with iron, where I had bit my lip.

“Sweet Jesus Christ.” Dad cracked his eyes open. Past the fiery underworld, it was dusk, the final remnants of day sinking into darkness, the moon’s beacon rising. We said nothing. We just sat there as I drove on, trembling, shell-shocked, nerves flayed and buzzing but numb with relief, everything marinated in the stench of smoke and burnt rubber. I would smell it on my hair for days, no matter how much cheap shampoo I scrubbed with at the evacuation center. The phantom smell of smoke would wake me every night for weeks. 

Even once we were well past the fire, I kept driving, resolute. I did not look back over my shoulder, but every so often a flash of terrible saffron gleamed at me from the rearview mirror. I tried not to think about the quilt Mom had made me, still crumpled on the floor near my unmade bed. The silky manes of the Dickinson’s horses tossing in the sunlight, when I had still been a child. The forest where I had run barefoot and wild, learned to shoot arrows, carved my initials into an aspen near the driveway with the tip of my pocket knife. 

We rumbled through the forest, down the granite cliffs of Deer Canyon, up and over the next hill where the road curved again through a clearing. When I had put some distance between us and the fire front, Dad thumped the dash with his palm. “Pull over for a second. Tarp’s loose in the back.” Sure enough, in my side mirror, the soft flapping of a nylon wing.

I steered the Chevy to a halt.

“Put it in park,” Dad reminded me, although I had already clunked the shifter into P. He kneaded his leg as I hopped down from the driver’s seat. The cool night air hit me in a rush, fresh as running water. I breathed deeply.

I had a view of the foothills behind us. The sky was a deep cobalt, darkening, the mountains a black silhouette. Stars glimmered above like shattered glass. Peach smoke churned above the ridge. The fire had consumed my childhood, just like it had consumed the Douglas firs and the squirrels, the speckled fawns and the bluebells, every other gentle thing I couldn’t let myself dwell on. I could still see throbbing flames, which from a distance, looked like a handful of strewn embers on the hills. The coal-dark heavens glittered above, the scorched earth glittered below.

I re-tied the tarp, this time with a proper bowline instead of a hasty square knot. Back in the truck, Dad looked drowsy enough to fall asleep, and when he leaned his head against the window and fluttered his eyelids shut, I let him. It was miles of dirt road, still, winding and rugged terrain, until we would reach the city. But I could get us there. I knew the way.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson