I keep seeing the same post show up in my feed. Screenshot your Google Doc history. Save every draft. Timestamp your thoughts like you’re defusing a bomb, not writing a paragraph about your dog.

The message underneath it all is simple. Prove your writing is real, or somebody else gets to decide it isn’t.

I’m a Navy veteran. Ten years, three ships, a war folded in there somewhere between deployments. I grew up on a version of this country that ran on one idea. You are innocent until somebody proves otherwise. Not innocent until an anonymous account with a coffee cup for an avatar decides your sentence structure feels off and drags you into writer jail.

I don’t remember agreeing to flip that.

If you think a piece of writing was generated by AI, say so, out loud, with your name attached. Make the accusation and carry the weight of it. That’s how accusations used to work in this country. You made a claim, you owned it, and if you were wrong, that was on you too. A country that put a man on the moon should be able to hang onto an idea that basic.

Somewhere along the way, we moved the burden, quietly, without a vote. Now I’m supposed to keep a manila folder labeled Evidence of My Own Humanity, ready to produce on demand in case the tribunal convenes. Every idea, every half sentence I mumble to myself while I’m out walking the dog, filed and dated like I’m assembling a legal defense against the crime of having thoughts.

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I picture how that goes on judgment day. God’s not asking about the kindness. Not asking whether I loved my family well or showed up when it mattered. He’s holding up a printout of my Substack drafts, tapping paragraph three. Explain this transition.

My dog Gus has never once been accused of writing anything with a machine. He eats whole socks off the bathroom floor without chewing them, and nobody has ever demanded he produce a timestamp for that decision. Some of us just have more credibility to spend than others, apparently, and mine gets spent proving I wrote my own sentences.

I want to be clear about what bothers me here, because it isn’t the existence of AI writing tools. People can use whatever they want. I have opinions about it, most people do, but that’s a different piece. What bothers me is the shift in who has to prove what. Somewhere in the last couple of years, we decided that suspicion is evidence and evidence is optional. A stranger reads three paragraphs, doesn’t like the rhythm, and the burden lands on the writer to disprove a claim nobody had to support in the first place. A courtroom would throw that out and a newsroom would fire the reporter who tried it. A comment section just runs with it.

I spent ten years in a system built on chain of command, verification, and paper trails that meant something. A ship’s log isn’t kept because someone might accuse the officer of the deck of lying. It’s kept because the information matters on its own. There’s a real difference between documentation that serves a purpose and documentation that exists only to defend you against a hypothetical accuser who hasn’t shown up yet and might never show up at all. One is a record. The other is a hostage situation you agreed to run against yourself.

That’s what the screenshot culture is, once you look at it straight on: preemptive surrender, not proof. You’re building a defense before anyone has accused you of anything, which means you’ve already accepted you’re guilty until you file the paperwork. I didn’t serve this country so I could come home, sit down at my own kitchen table, and defend my own sentences to a stranger who has decided, based on nothing, that I owe him an explanation.

I’m sixty-two. I’ve been writing long enough to know what a sentence of mine sounds like before I finish typing it. I know the rhythm I default to when I’m tired and the one I reach for when I’m trying to make a point land. None of that shows up in a Google Doc revision history. It shows up in decades of doing the work. You just know when a sentence is yours. Nobody can subpoena that.

I get why people are scared. Writers who built an audience the slow way, one post at a time, one honest paragraph at a time, are watching readers treat that reputation as suspicious by default. I understand the instinct to want proof in your back pocket. But the instinct is wrong, and it’s making things worse, not better. Every time a writer posts a screenshot to defend themselves, it reinforces the idea that the accusation deserved a response in the first place. It didn’t. An accusation with no evidence behind it deserves nothing. Not a folder. Not a timestamp. Not an explanation over a paragraph about a dog eating a sock.

Write your thing, for whatever that’s worth from a guy who spends his mornings writing about protein and his evenings writing about God, grief, and Florida. Don’t apologize for it. Don’t pre-apologize for it either. That’s what the screenshot folder is. If someone wants to accuse you of using AI to write your Tuesday newsletter, let them say it plainly, with their name on it, and let them sit with being wrong when they are. That’s how accusations are supposed to cost something. Right now they cost nothing for the accuser and everything for the accused, and that arrangement should bother more people than it seems to.

This country’s gone bass ackwards on this particular question. Somewhere we decided that the assumption is guilty until you produce a paper trail, and nobody stood up to say, wait, that’s backward. I’m not interested in defending my own thoughts to somebody hiding behind a coffee cup avatar. I’ll defend my country. I already did that, for ten years, on three ships. My sentences can defend themselves.

Let the accuser do the work for once. That’s not a lot to ask. It’s the bare minimum, and it used to be the whole system.

The Comfort Suites off Route 9 had a breakfast bar that never ran out of anything, and it took me until day three to understand that this was a problem and not an amenity.

I noticed it because of the waffle machine. Round, industrial, the kind that clamps down and hisses. I’d been watching a man in a golf shirt make three waffles in a row, and the batter dispenser, the little plastic pitcher with the spout, still looked full, the same full it had looked the first time I filled my own cup that morning. He’d already refilled his cup twice from a pitcher that was, by my count, the same pitcher that had been there since Tuesday.

The hissing hadn’t stopped either. I want to be clear about that. The waffle iron had been making the same clamping, hissing sound since I checked in, at a volume and a rhythm that didn’t change whether anyone was using it or not. I mentioned this to the woman restocking the muffins, and she said the machine did that, some machines just did that, and moved on to the cereal dispensers like I’d asked her about the weather.

I was in town for a conference on municipal water infrastructure, which is its own kind of horror, three days of PowerPoints about pipe corrosion rates, and by day three I was skipping half the sessions and eating breakfast alone at ten in the morning because the buffet ran until eleven and nobody checked.

That’s when the woman from housekeeping called me one of the early ones.

She was pushing a cart down the hallway outside the breakfast room. I said good morning. She looked at me a second too long and said, “You’re one of the early ones,” and kept walking. I turned it over for the rest of the day. Early to what. Early compared to who. I’d gotten up at eight, which is not early, which is barely late, and yet she’d said it like it meant something, like it was a category with a waiting list.

I asked at the front desk if breakfast ever actually ran out. The kid behind the counter, twenty-two maybe, name tag said DEREK, gave me the patience of somebody who gets this question more than you’d think.

“No sir,” Derek said. “We keep it stocked.”

“The whole time? Six to eleven?”

“We keep it stocked,” he said again, like the second half of my question hadn’t landed, or had landed somewhere he didn’t want to catch it.

I want to say I let it go. I didn’t. I went back down the next morning at six sharp, the second the doors opened, to see what stocked actually looked like at the start of a shift. It looked exactly like it had at ten the day before. Same level in the juice dispensers. Same stack of muffins that should have been the first stack, not the fourth. The waffle batter pitcher had the same amount of batter in it that it had had for three straight days, in a hotel that from what I could see was running close to full.

There’s a version of me that would have eaten the free breakfast and stopped thinking about it. That’s not the version of me that showed up that week. I started timing my visits. I started counting. Eleven people came through in the first twenty minutes of day four, and every one of them took at least two waffles, and the dispenser sound never changed pitch, and the level in the pitcher, checked against a photo I’d taken the day before, was identical down to the air bubble against the side of the plastic.

I brought this up with a man at the coffee station, a guy in a Bass Pro Shops hat who I’d seen at breakfast every morning that week. He laughed and said the coffee here beat his kitchen at home and he wasn’t going to complain about that. I asked him how long he’d been staying at the hotel. He wasn’t sure. Said it easy, unbothered, like a guy who’d lost track of what day it was on vacation and didn’t much care, and then he refilled his cup from a pot that had been sitting on the same warmer since I’d walked in. No steam coming off it. No smell. Just full.

I went back to my room and pulled up my own itinerary. Three nights. Checkout Thursday. Dates clear as anything, and I still got that little stomach drop you get patting your pocket for your wallet, finding it right there, and patting again anyway.

Thursday morning I packed my bag and went down for one last cup of coffee before checkout, and the breakfast room was fuller than I’d seen it all week. Not louder. Just fuller, no honking, the way a lot fills up quiet. I recognized the golf shirt guy. I recognized Bass Pro Shops hat guy. I recognized, with an unpleasant little jolt, three other faces I’d clocked on day one and hadn’t consciously registered seeing every day since, blending into a room I’d assumed refreshed itself the way hotel breakfast rooms do, checkouts and check-ins, a normal churn.

Nobody in that room looked like they were leaving.

I went to the front desk to check out. Derek wasn’t there. A different clerk was, older, and she pulled up my reservation, looked at the screen a beat longer than seemed necessary, and said, “You’re all set through Thursday.”

“Today is Thursday,” I said.

She looked at the screen again. “Right,” she said. “You’re all set.”

I want to tell you I got in my car and drove straight home and never thought about the Comfort Suites off Route 9 again. That’s not exactly what happened. What happened is I stood in the lobby for a solid minute, keys in hand, watching the automatic doors open and close for nobody, in and out, in and out, on some sensor timing that didn’t match any foot traffic I could see. I thought about the housekeeper’s face when she called me one of the early ones. Not scornful, not warning me off, just filing me correctly, the same casual way you’d note that someone takes their coffee black.

Then I got in my car and drove home. I did not eat hotel breakfast again for a long time, and when I finally did, at a nicer place, with a chef making omelets behind a little glass sneeze guard, I watched him crack the same three eggs into the same bowl for forty-five minutes without ever reaching for a new carton. I paid for my omelet and ate it standing up. I have not stayed anywhere with a continental breakfast since.

I think about Derek sometimes. Not the older clerk. Derek, the kid with the name tag who said “we keep it stocked” like it was a complete answer to a question I hadn’t finished asking. I think he knew exactly what he wasn’t saying. Everybody working that breakfast room knew what they weren’t saying, the same way waitstaff know not to make eye contact with a table that’s about to ask for the manager.

I never got an answer on the waffle batter. I’ve decided I don’t want one

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Temperance Wigglesworth was a floozy to her core, and her shenanigans caused many a kerfuffle every Saturday night.

Now, you’d think a name like Temperance would breed a woman of restraint, a churchgoer, a doily-crocheter, someone who says “my stars” when the toast burns. You would be dead wrong, and dead is nearly what she made half the men in Cudgel Falls before she was through with them.

She kept company with a rapscallion named Ferdinand Butts, a man so thoroughly a ne’er-do-well that the local reverend used him in sermons as a cautionary tale, unnamed but unmistakable, everybody in the third pew turning to stare at the back row where Ferdinand sat picking his teeth with a matchstick and grinning like the devil’s own errand boy. Temperance loved him the way a raccoon loves a garbage can, completely, and without a lick of shame about it. Her mother had wanted better for her. Her mother had wanted a lot of things, and got exactly none of them.

The kerfuffle in question started, as kerfuffles do, with gin and a misunderstanding. Temperance had been canoodling with Ferdinand behind the feed store when Mildred Applewhite, a woman built like a grain silo and twice as immovable, caught the two of them and let loose a shriek that startled every crow off every fence post in the county. Mildred had designs on Ferdinand herself, designs she’d been nursing for three years the way some women nurse a grudge or a sourdough starter, and seeing Temperance there with her hand in his coat pocket, presumably fishing for his flask, was more than her constitution could bear.

What followed was not a fight so much as a full-blown hornswoggle of the senses. Mildred came at Temperance swinging a rolled-up copy of the Cudgel Falls Gazette, Ferdinand tried to play peacemaker and got clipped across the ear for his trouble, and Temperance, never one to take a beating lying down, grabbed a bucket of chicken feed and flung the whole business skyward. The chickens, sensing opportunity where others saw chaos, arrived in force. There is nothing quite like forty Rhode Island Reds descending on a catfight to change the tenor of an evening, and change it they did. Mildred fled. Ferdinand fled. A rooster named Deacon took a personal interest in Temperance’s ankles that lasted the better part of a block.

By the time the sheriff arrived, summoned by a neighbor who described the scene only as “some manner of tomfoolery involving poultry,” Temperance was sitting on the feed store steps, hem torn, hair full of straw, laughing so hard she’d gone silent, which anyone who knew her will tell you was the only warning sign that ever mattered. The sheriff, a patient man named Elijah Pruitt who had hauled Temperance in for public malarkey no fewer than eleven times that year, didn’t bother writing anything down. He just sat next to her on the step, took off his hat, and asked if she’d saved him any gin.

She had not.

He stayed anyway. He always stayed anyway, and everybody in Cudgel Falls had noticed it, and nobody had the nerve to say it out loud, least of all Elijah, who could arrest a man for spitting on the sidewalk but couldn’t manage a sentence about how he felt.

“You ought to arrest me one of these days,” Temperance said, picking a feather out of her collar. “Properly. Cuffs and all.”

“For what?”

“Disturbing the peace. Corrupting a rooster. Wasting a decent lawman’s whole Saturday.”

Elijah looked at his boots for a while and didn’t answer that. Ferdinand came limping back eventually, one boot missing entirely, his coat torn where Deacon had apparently decided a man’s backside was as good a target as any woman’s ankles. He didn’t apologize for running. Men like Ferdinand never did. He just flopped down on the step on the other side of Temperance, sandwiching her between himself and the sheriff like the world’s worst church pew, and asked whether anybody had thought to check on Mildred.

“She’ll live,” Temperance said. “Woman’s constitution could survive a train wreck.”

“That’s unkind.”

“It’s true too. I’m allowed both.”

The reverend, watching from the church steps across the square, shook his head the way he always did on Saturday nights, and went inside to write next week’s sermon, which everyone already knew would feature an unnamed woman of loose character, and which everyone already knew Temperance would sit through Sunday morning, late, hungover, singing louder than the choir, chin up, daring him to say her name.

She never gave the sheriff his handkerchief back. He never asked for it. That, more than the chickens or the Gazette or any of it, was the closest thing to a confession either one of them ever managed, and it sat between them for years, unspoken, the way most of the true things in Cudgel Falls did.

I spent four years building a reputation for being accurate. Sarcopenia is real, protein synthesis after 50 works differently than it did at 25, and if I tell you a number in an article, that number came from somewhere I can point to. That is the whole deal with Proud Boomer Wellness. You get the science, you get my results, you get nothing I made up to sound smart.

Then I sat down last year and wrote a story about a man who keeps something alive in a stone basin under his house in DeLand, feeding it whatever the aquifer brings him. None of that happened. There is no basin. I made up the man, the house, and the thing in the water. And I would put that story up against any article I have written about creatine dosing for how true it feels.

I did not expect that when I started writing fiction. I thought it would be a break from having to be right about things. Instead, it turned out to be the same job with different tools. Not Done Yet exists because I got tired of watching men my age get lied to about what their bodies can still do. Florida Stories exists because I got tired of pretending the version of a person you meet at church or the hardware store is the whole person.

Here is the actual news, buried under all that explaining. Fiction on ProudBoomerBooks.com now sits next to the nonfiction, not underneath it. Florida Stories and the Dispatch fiction archive are filed alongside Not Done Yet and The Athyreotic Body, same author page, same guy. No separate identity, no pen name, no pretending the horror writer and the wellness coach happen to share a mailing address.

I know why that makes some people uncomfortable. A wellness coach is supposed to be reassuring. A guy who writes about rows of eyes breaking the surface of a cellar pool is not. Kim read an early draft of one of those stories, put the pages down, and asked me if I was doing alright. I was doing fine, better than fine, because that story let me say something about grief and about the things people keep buried that I could not have said in an article about resistance training.

The wellness pieces have to be defensible. Every claim needs a source or a disclaimer that there isn’t one. I ran Combat Information Center watches on the USS Iowa for exactly that reason, same gauges checked in the same order, because skipping a step there costs something real, and I still write the wellness pieces with that habit intact. The fiction does not work that way and never should. Loretta Faye is not defensible. There is no citation for her, and that is the point. She tells you something about people that a properly sourced sentence never could.

Gus does not care about the distinction. He drools on the manuscript pages the same way he drools on the training logs, which is a decent reminder that the categories matter more to me than to the work itself. A reader who came for the deadlift science and stays for a story about something patient and hungry under the Florida springs is not being tricked. They are getting the same writer, pointed somewhere else.

I built Proud Boomer Press to publish books, not a persona. Not Done Yet argues that a man over 50 does not have to shrink his life to fit what everyone expects of him. I would be a hypocrite to write four hundred pages making that argument and then keep the fiction in a locked drawer because it does not match the brand. The brand is me. I am the guy who tracks his own blood work and the guy who writes about things that should stay buried and don’t.

If you are here for the wellness content, nothing changes. The Substack keeps running, the articles keep coming, and I am not about to start slipping horror into a piece about protein timing. But click over to ProudBoomerBooks.com now, and you will find the fiction archive shelved right next to the non-fiction. That is not a mistake in the site architecture. That is the whole point of the imprint. One name, one body of work, two ways of telling the truth about what it is like to be this age in this state.

I held off longer than I should have. Proud Boomer Press started as a vehicle for one book, and adding fiction meant redoing the site, the submission guidelines, and my own sense of what the imprint was for. The bigger reason was worry that a fitness book reader would see a horror story and decide I was not serious about either one. That worry was backward. A man who started endurance racing at fifty and kept going does not have much business shrinking his creative work down to fit one shelf either.

I do not know yet whether readers will follow me across that line. Some people want their coach to only be a coach. That is fair, and the wellness work will always stand on its own. But I would rather build something honest about who I actually am than keep running two quieter, smaller operations that never talk to each other. Not Done Yet was never just about the weight room. It turns out it was never just about nonfiction either.

Proud Boomer Books

Florida Stories

Proud Boomer Fiction

I learned Dave had died on Facebook. I was scrolling mindlessly through, as everybody does, and there it was. Buried in a ship’s group that I stupidly still belong to. You know the groups I mean: ones where old veterans who served on said ship together thirty or forty years ago post reunion photos and the occasional page from someone’s cruise book. It was his daughter making the post. Heart attack. Age 61.

I stared at my phone for some time. I had no reason to doubt it; in fact, I knew right away it was true, and that is what made it hard. There was no room for disbelief once I read it. Dave and I were never close in the conventional sense. For two years we were on the same ship, and in the thirty years since we have maintained a casual rapport. A like here and there on one another’s posts, or an exchange of words when a get-together was being planned — that was the extent of it. And still, to hear the news was like having someone come in and put something on the table with a thud; it had that kind of impact.

I’ve been in these ship groups for years now. Dale, Iowa, Sampson, three different pages for three different chapters of ten years I spent in the Navy in my twenties. You would not be surprised by the goings-on in the groups, for the most part. There were your typical deck photos, some bickering over the year an event took place, and the odd attempt to put a name to a face of someone who has been out of touch since 1989. Of late, the tone has changed. An obituary here, a memorial fund there. You will see a wife or daughter penning the sort of thing one does not care to put into words, with talk of being “surrounded by family” or having passed “peacefully” — details that are of little consequence whether they hold up or not.

And then there was Dave. Losing him didn’t bring on the kind of grief I’m familiar with. I’ve lost far more people I was closer to throughout the years. It was basic math. He was 61, I am 62. If anyone brought up heart trouble he might have had, it didn’t make much of an impression. If you were asked to guess who in the group would be the first to go, you would not have pointed to him. He was there when he was supposed to be, put up pictures of his grandkids. And then one day he was gone. Just like that. On an ordinary day, going about his routine like anyone would do before a heart attack takes hold; nothing dramatic at all.

The ordinariness of it is what lingers. Not the death itself. When you are not simply drifting apart or losing touch with friends your own age, but see a name in a group you peruse out of habit and find he is gone, that is the reality of it. You would be led to believe by every wellness piece I have put pen to paper for that one has made peace with mortality by now in some broad way. But general mortality is an idea. Dave left a comment on my post about the USS Dale reunion three weeks prior to the day he did not wake up.

My way of looking at things has changed since then. I am more observant, though not to an obsessive degree, simply because I want to spot a pattern I would have let go by in the past. As for how many there have been this year, I can’t say; I put an end to the arithmetic some time ago. Counting reduces a person to a mere figure on a tally sheet, and they are not due that kind of treatment. When you are the one with the scorecard, it ceases to be abstract when men of your own age are gone. It is something of a regular occurrence. You see it among the younger set too. Mostly heart attacks or a stroke. Then there was the cancer that took hold so fast one man was dead before anyone outside his family knew he had been sick.

It is hard not to think about it. I had put in years of half-Ironmans and marathons, a life that was structured around the next race on the schedule. When my identity crumbled at 60, I no longer had the thing that gave my days some order. I should have known the training was never really for the races, but to make good use of the time you have. In my focus on performance, I had missed the point.

Dave and the rest were not given extra time. I will not put on airs and say I can draw some neat lesson from that. It has only altered the questions I put to myself. I used to wonder how to optimize things (a word I am inclined to excise from my work). Now I have to ask whether I am putting in today for something of import or if I am on autopilot because it is easier and one assumes there is more time ahead.

There may not be. There wasn’t for Dave.

Some of my habits have been adjusted as a result. I train less with an eye to the clock and more to ensure I can be the grandfather who can get down on the floor with the grandkids and back up again without making a show of it. I pick up the phone to talk to people rather than text; a voice conveys what a heart emoji cannot. And I have taken to finishing a conversation with Kim instead of half listening while I look at my phone, though she would be the first to tell you I was late to that. It is nothing dramatic. I have not taken up skydiving or put the house on the market. These are small, specific alterations, but together they amount to more than they might suggest.

The Facebook groups are still there. I still check them. Some weeks there’s nothing. Some weeks there’s a name I recognize with dates under it that don’t line up the way they should. I’ve made a kind of peace with that rhythm. I haven’t stopped being affected by it. I am fully aware that one day it will be my name listed in those groups. I’ve decided the alternative, looking away, though, costs more than it saves. Dave’s death didn’t teach me I was going to die someday. I already knew that. What it did was collapse the distance between knowing it and feeling it, and that distance is where most of us live most of the time because it’s more comfortable there.

I’d rather live closer to the truth of it now, even when the truth shows up as a post from someone’s daughter on an ordinary morning. It changes what an ordinary day is worth.

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I sat through a writing workshop a few months back. Ten writers, one facilitator, ninety minutes, the usual format. You bring pages, people read them, people respond, you take notes and go home and decide what to keep.

Two people in that room had never finished a book. I know because they said so, more than once, with a kind of pride that took me a minute to place. They talked about their “process.” They talked about their “vision” for the trilogy. When the facilitator tried to move things along, they talked over her, and when someone offered feedback on their pages, they said “interesting,” nodded, and kept talking about themselves.

A woman two seats down had self-published three novels. She read six pages and got about four minutes of discussion before the room’s attention drifted back to the trilogy guy explaining his magic system for the third time that hour. She thanked everyone anyway and took notes while others discussed her work, which is more than I can say for him. He spent his feedback time waiting for his turn to talk again.

Nobody acknowledged a single comment made about their own pages that whole session. Not a nod, not a “good point,” not even a written note. The feedback just landed and disappeared, because as far as they were concerned, the room existed to hear from them, not the other way around.

I’ve been thinking about that room ever since, because it isn’t really about workshops. It’s about a shift I’ve watched happen across the indie author world, and it isn’t a good one. Somewhere along the way, a lot of people started performing “author” instead of doing the work of being one.

You’ve seen it. The bio that reads like a jacket flap before there’s a book to put a jacket on. The posts about craft and creative discipline from someone with a manuscript that’s forty percent finished. The confidence that shows up in every comment section and every workshop chair, regardless of whether there’s a finished, edited, published thing behind it.

Some of that confidence is earned. Plenty of self-published writers I know are grinding through drafts, taking their lumps in editing, putting out work that gets a little more honest with each book. That’s the job. Nobody’s clapping for them, and they keep doing it anyway. I want to be clear about that before I say the rest of this, because it would be easy to read this piece as a shot at indie authors generally. It isn’t. It’s a shot at a specific type.

A chunk of what I’m describing is people who learned to sound like an author before they learned to write like one, because sounding like an author is the part that gets attention. Nobody likes your unfinished manuscript. Everybody likes your confident post about the writing life.

I get why it happens. When you’re self-published, there’s no gatekeeper telling you a chapter’s flat. No agent passing on your query with a form letter that stings but tells you something true. No editor circling the paragraph where you lost the thread. You’re the only person checking your own work, which means you’re also the only person who can decide you’re already good enough. A lot of people make that call early, and then spend their energy defending it instead of testing it.

There’s a mechanical reason too. A lot of these folks came up through content and personal branding before they came up through writing. They know how to build a following, run a newsletter, work an algorithm, before they’ve put in the years it takes to get a sentence right. The performance skills arrive first. The craft is supposed to catch up. For some people it does. For a lot of people it doesn’t, and since nobody’s checking, it never has to.

None of this makes self-publishing a mistake. I built my whole operation on it. Nobody handed me a contract. I wrote a book about strength training for people over fifty because I lived it, and I put it out myself because that was the only way it was getting out. Self-publishing isn’t the problem. Skipping the part where you actually finish the work and let it get tested against readers is the problem. Self-publishing just happens to be where that shortcut is easiest to take, because nothing in the process forces you to stop.

Back to that workshop. The woman with three published novels wasn’t performing anything. She’d already gone through the part that requires an ego check: finishing something, putting it out into the world, and watching it succeed or fail on its own merit, in public, with her name on it. The two who talked over everyone hadn’t gotten there yet, and their confidence wasn’t standing in for experience. It was standing in for the absence of it.

I don’t think confidence is the problem here. You need some of it to finish a book at all, let alone publish it under your own name and ask strangers to pay for it. What I’m describing is confidence that never got tested against anything. Confidence built out of talking about the work instead of doing it. Confidence that treats a workshop chair like a stage instead of a chance to hear something you didn’t already know.

If you’re two chapters into your first book and you’re already working on your author photo, your newsletter about “the writing life,” and your opinions on everyone else’s craft, sit with that for a minute. Not because ambition is bad. Because the order is backward. The book comes first. Everything else, if it comes at all, comes because the book earned it.

I’d rather sit next to the woman with three finished novels and no time left to talk about herself than the guy who’s spent six years on the same trilogy and has plenty of opinions about how the workshop should be run.

Write the book. Finish the book. Let the book do the talking. Everything else is noise.

Most paid newsletters sell you a content library and move on to the next subscriber. The Dispatch works differently. When you upgrade, that's when I start paying attention. I'll answer your questions. I'll engage with your work. I'll spotlight what you're building. Everything I write about here, I do, and I do it alongside you, not from a distance. The upgrade isn't the end of our relationship. It's the start.

I started writing on Substack last November thinking consistency would be the magic trick. Show up. Publish. Repeat. Watch the numbers climb like some kind of responsible little internet fairy tale.

That did not happen. Shocking, I know.

What did happen was this: I started gaining followers faster than subscribers. Then I started gaining free subscribers faster than paid subscribers. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized I was spending way too much time staring at dashboards like they owed me an income. They don’t. Rude, but true.

The Numbers Game Is a Beautiful Little Trap

When I first got serious about Substack, I thought I understood the hierarchy. Write good stuff. Build trust. Convert readers. Simple. Almost elegant. Like a clean rep on a benchpress. Except this platform has its own sense of humor.

Free subscribers are easy to get. Followers are easier to get. Paid subscribers? That’s where the room goes quiet. That’s where the applause disappears.

And yes, I know the advice. “Focus on value.” “Build the audience first.” “Be patient.” Lovely. Very nourishing. Also very easy to say when you’re not the one writing 4-5 notes a day and at least one essay or article a week, wondering why the numbers are moving like they’re carrying groceries uphill in the rain.

I am consistent. Almost annoyingly so. I show up. I write. I post. I keep going even when I’m tired, busy, or convinced the internet is a giant amusement park where I’m standing in line for the wrong ride.

Consistency is supposed to be comforting. Sometimes it just feels like doing the work while the algorithm smokes a cigarette and shrugs.

But here’s the part that surprised me. The frustration is real, but it’s also clarifying. It strips away the fantasy. You stop believing every post should be a viral miracle. You start understanding that audience building is more like strength training than marketing theater. Slow. Repetitive. Slightly annoying. Effective.

Followers Are Nice. Subscribers Are Better. Paid Subscribers Are the Real Test

I do not dislike followers. Followers are fine. Followers are the warm-up set. They’re useful. They matter. They tell me people are paying attention.

But followers are not commitment. They’re not saying, “I want more of this.” They’re saying, “I may come back if I’m in the mood and the moon is in the seventh house.” Charming. Unreliable. Very human.

Free subscribers are better. At least they’re raising their hand. They want into the room. They are willing to hear from me regularly, and that means something. It’s not the finish line, but it’s more than a glance across the bar.

Paid subscribers are different. Paid subscribers are the people who say, “Yes, this is worth supporting.” That is the real signal. Not vanity. Not visibility. Value.

And that is exactly why the gap between followers, free subscribers, and paid subscribers can feel so aggravating. I can see the interest. I can feel the momentum. Then I hit the wall where the credit card comes out, and suddenly everyone develops a deep, spiritual commitment to free content.

Which, fine. I get it. We all love free. I love free. Free is delightful. Free is the reason half of us have any kind of internet habit at all.

But free does not keep the lights on. Free does not reward the time it takes to think, write, edit, and publish. Free does not build a sustainable writing practice by itself. And if I’m being honest, pretending otherwise is how writers end up bitter, exhausted, and weirdly resentful of their own audience. Not a good look.

Consistency Sounds Sexy Until You’re Actually Doing It

Posting 4-5 notes daily sounds efficient when you say it quickly. It sounds like a system. It sounds disciplined. It sounds like something people praise in comment sections while secretly hoping they never have to do it themselves.

In real life, it’s a grind.

It means I’m always thinking. Always collecting ideas. Always trying to turn a passing thought into something worth reading. It means I don’t get to hide behind “I’m waiting for inspiration.” Inspiration is cute. Deadlines are better.

And then there’s the essay or article. At least one. Sometimes more. The longer form pieces take more from me, but they also give more back. That’s where the real thinking happens. That’s where I can go deeper instead of just tossing out polished little observations and hoping one of them lands.

I won’t pretend it’s glamorous. It isn’t. It’s writing. Then more writing. Then wondering if anyone noticed. Then writing again anyway.

That’s the part nobody puts on the motivational poster. The repetition. The private discipline. The fact that showing up consistently does not guarantee applause. Sometimes it guarantees perspective, which is less glamorous and more useful.

You do not build trust by arriving occasionally with a masterpiece. You build it by showing up so often people start to believe you mean it.

That’s the work. That’s the actual work. Everything else is window dressing.

Why the Frustration Is Part of the Process

I used to think frustration meant I was doing something wrong. Now I think frustration is often just the fee of admission.

If I weren’t frustrated, I’d probably be asleep at the wheel. I’d be assuming the first few months should have produced some perfectly predictable outcome, and that’s not how any serious thing works. Not writing. Not strength. Not health. Not anything worth keeping.

Writing on Substack has made me face a few uncomfortable truths. One, attention is not the same thing as loyalty. Two, free interest is not the same thing as financial support. Three, consistency matters, but it does not come with a trophy.

That last one is brutal for the ego. The ego wants immediate feedback. It wants a clean yes or no. It wants proof on demand. The ego does not enjoy playing the long game. It gets bored. It pouts. It starts looking at other people’s growth curves like some kind of emotionally unstable accountant.

But the long game is where the real build happens. You don’t become strong by testing yourself once. You become strong by repeating hard things until your body and mind stop negotiating with the effort.

Writing is no different.

What I’ve Learned From Showing Up Anyway

Since last November, I’ve learned that publishing often is its own kind of strength training. Not because it’s the same thing. Because it requires the same qualities.

Discipline. Patience. Tolerance for boredom. A weird affection for incremental progress. The ability to keep going when the immediate reward is underwhelming.

I’ve also learned that audience growth can be deceptive. A post can get attention and still not convert. A note can be well received and still not produce a single paid upgrade. That used to bother me more than I’d like to admit. Now I just treat it like data.

Not emotional data. Real data.

It tells me people are watching. It tells me some things resonate more than others. It tells me I need to keep refining the message, the offer, and the way I talk about why this work matters.

Because I am not here to cosplay as a content machine. I’m here to build something durable. Something honest. Something worth paying for.

That means I have to stop expecting every subscriber to become a paid subscriber on my timeline. Useful? Yes. Ideal? No. Reality? Also yes.

And maybe the bigger lesson is this: if I can keep writing through the awkward stage, I can keep writing through almost anything. That’s not just a platform lesson. That’s a life lesson dressed up in a newsletter.

The Mental Game Is Half the Work

The hardest part of writing consistently is not the writing. It’s staying sane while the results move slower than my patience.

There is a point where you have to stop asking, “Why isn’t this happening faster?” and start asking, “What am I building, and who is it for?” That question is sturdier. Less dramatic. More useful.

I’m writing for adults who are done being talked down to. People who know life is complicated. People who understand that good health, real strength, and meaningful work do not come from hacks and hype.

That audience takes time to find. It also takes time to trust. And trust is the whole game.

When I get impatient, I remind myself that most worthwhile things are boring in the middle. The middle is where repetition lives. The middle is where proof accumulates quietly. The middle is where nearly everyone gives up because they mistake slow growth for no growth.

I’m trying not to make that mistake.

Some days I nail it. Some days I stare at the numbers and feel a little insulted by them. Both things can be true. I can be committed and annoyed. Focused and frustrated. Grateful and impatient. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s being a person.

And honestly, being a person is already enough work without pretending this process should feel easy.

So What Am I Doing Now?

I’m keeping the pace. That’s the answer. Not because I’m endlessly inspired. Not because every post is a home run. Because the discipline is starting to compound, even if the compounding is quieter than I wanted.

I’ll keep writing 4-5 notes daily. I’ll keep publishing at least one essay or article. I’ll keep paying attention to what people respond to, what they ignore, and what makes them stick around.

I’ll also keep resisting the urge to turn every metric into a moral verdict. A slow month is not a character flaw. A follower is not a promise. A free subscriber is not a betrayal if they’re not ready to upgrade. People move when they move.

My job is to keep giving them a reason to stay.

And if I’m honest, that’s not just a writing lesson. That’s a life lesson.

So yes, I’m frustrated. Yes, I wish paid subscribers moved faster than they do. Yes, the imbalance between followers, free subscribers, and paid subscribers can feel like a little joke the universe keeps telling at my expense.

But I’m still here. Still writing. Still building. Still showing up like this thing matters, because it does.

That’s enough for today. It has to be.

If You’re Here for More Than Just a Drive-By Read

If this work resonates with you, the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber. That’s where this stops being a one-way broadcast and starts becoming a real conversation.

Not Done Yet is built differently. When you upgrade, that’s when I pay closer attention. I’ll answer your questions. I’ll engage with your work. I’ll spotlight what you’re building. Everything I teach here, I do, and I do it alongside you, not from a distance.

The upgrade isn’t the end of the relationship. It’s the start.

If you want to support the work and get closer to the real conversation, upgrade your subscription today.

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I was hired to measure the sky, and I did my job well.

My name does not matter. What matters is the appointment I held for eleven years at the Atmospheric Continuity Office in the ruin we still called Harrow’s Point, though the charts that named it that way are pulp now, dissolved in the sub-basements where the old records drowned. I was an analyst of particulates. I measured the Veil.

Every child born after the Collapse grew up under it and never questioned it, the way a fish does not question water. The Veil hung over the coastal ruins from roughly four hundred meters to the edge of what our instruments could still resolve, a bruised grey ceiling that filtered the sun to a coin-colored smear and never, in living memory, broke. The official history, the only history the Continuity Office permitted, held that the Veil was the residue of the Burn Years, the industrial fires that had ended the old world, and that it would thin over generations as the atmosphere healed. I had believed this the way I believed my own name. I had built a career on believing it. I had a laboratory, a staff of four, a requisition budget, and a wife named Adaline who used to joke that I loved the haze more than I loved her, because I was always outside at dusk with my collection trays, waiting for it to settle so I could scrape its residue into vials.

The trouble started with the vials.

For a decade the particulate samples had behaved the way ash behaves, inert, granular, chemically dead. In my eleventh year, on a night I logged as the fourteenth of the ninth cycle, the residue in tray six refused to sit still under the scope. It moved. Not with wind, not with the tremor of my hands. It arranged itself, patient as a tide going out, into a lattice, and the lattice held a shape I did not want to name and named anyway in my notebook, in handwriting I no longer recognized as mine: an eye, lidless, rendered in ash.

I told no one. I ran the sample again the following night, and it happened again, faster. I began sleeping in the laboratory. I began, against every protocol of the Office, taking samples not from the collection trays but from the Veil itself, climbing the fire stairs of the old exchange tower with a boom-pole and a jar, standing in the coin-colored dark while the haze curled around my wrist like something deciding whether I was worth the trouble.

It was.

I will set down here, as plainly as I can manage, what the archive fragments told me, the ones I recovered from the drowned sub-basements before the water rose past the third landing. The Continuity Office was not founded to study the Veil. It was founded to feed it, and to keep the fed populace from noticing they were livestock in a pen with no visible walls. The Burn Years were not accidental. Weather does not organize itself into a permanent ceiling by chance, and a species does not lose the will to look up, to build, to leave, by chance either. Something arrived in the upper atmosphere before any of us were born, something that found our exhaust and our industry and our despair a fine medium to breed in, and it did not conquer us with armies or plagues. It conquered us the way mold conquers bread. It lowered a lid over us and waited for us to go soft.

The reports called this process, in the dry euphemism of men who knew exactly what they were describing and could not bear to say it directly, “ambient management.” I found budget lines for it. I found staffing charts. I found, in a ledger so old its ink had turned the brown of dried blood, my own predecessor’s signature approving the release of what he called “continuity aerosol” into the eastern quadrant, three months before a famine that the schoolbooks blamed on failed crops.

There is no failed crop that behaves like the crop failures of that year. I have seen the yield charts. They do not fail. They are harvested.

Adaline noticed the change in me before I could hide it. She found me on the tower landing one dusk with the jar in my hand and the Veil pressing low enough to touch, and she asked me, in the voice she used when she already suspected the answer, what I thought was up there. I told her I did not know. I have never told a colder lie. She did not come up the tower with me again after that night, and three weeks later she was reassigned, without explanation, to a coastal outpost I have since confirmed does not appear on any current staffing roster. I have written to that outpost eleven times. I have received nothing. I do not let myself finish the arithmetic on what that likely means, though the arithmetic finishes itself, most nights.

I kept climbing the tower. I told myself it was for the archive, for the truth, for whoever might come after me and need to know what the grey ceiling actually was. I have since stopped believing that story too. I climbed because I needed it to look at me again. That is the part I am least willing to set down, and the part I am most certain is true. There is a hunger in being seen by something that does not blink, that has watched your species so long it has stopped bothering to disguise its attention as weather.

Three nights ago the Veil did not settle at four hundred meters. It came down to forty. I stood on the landing with my jar and my useless credentials and I watched the coin-colored smear resolve, for the first time in my life, into detail, the way static on an old screen resolves into a picture once you stop expecting noise. I will not describe what I saw in full. The language I have does not hold the shape correctly, the way a bucket does not hold smoke. I will say only that it was not one eye. It had never been one eye. The lattice in my collection tray had been a mercy, a translation, a single letter chosen from an alphabet with no bottom.

And I understood, standing there with the ash settling on my collar, that the Continuity Office had never measured the Veil for the purpose of understanding it. We measured it the way a farmer checks on the henhouse. We were not scientists. We were husbandry.

I am writing this in the sub-basement, by the light of a hand-crank lamp, with the water two landings above me and rising. I do not expect this record to survive the water, and if it does, I do not expect the person who finds it to believe a word of it, because I did not believe it either, for eleven years, with the evidence sitting in my own trays.

I can hear it on the stairs now. Not footsteps. Weather does not need feet.

I have decided I am no longer afraid of what it is. I am afraid of how long I have been useful to it, and grateful for the noticing, and I understand now that this gratitude is the last and cruelest thing it manufactures in us, the final crop, harvested clean.

The lamp is almost out of oil. The ceiling of the stairwell has gone the same bruised grey as the sky I used to measure.

I am ready to be measured.

He woke before light again, more from the absence of sleep than from sleep itself, and lay listening to the wind work at the tarp. The boy beside him breathed slow and even. He watched the shape of him in the dark, the small rise and fall, and thought, as he did every morning, that this was the only accounting that mattered anymore.

They had come down out of the hills three days back where the pines stood black and leafless, killed by something in the air none of them had a name for, and now they walked a state road cracked and buckled like the hide of some dead animal left to dry in the sun. No sun. There hadn’t been true sun in longer than the boy could remember, only this pale coinlight behind the ash that passed for day.

He rose and rolled the tarp and packed it into the cart, checked the wheels, checked the axle he had bound with wire scavenged from a fence two towns back, if towns was still the word for what they’d found there. Cinderblock and collapsed roofs. A church with the steeple burned off clean like a candle snuffed. He did not go looking in the church. He had learned not to go looking in churches.

The boy sat up and rubbed his face with both hands, a gesture he’d picked up from nowhere the father could name, and said, Is it far.

Not far, he said. He said this most mornings whether it was true or not because the saying of it did something for the boy’s legs that the truth never did.

They ate the last of the tinned meat cold, splitting it even, and he watched the boy chew slow to make it last and felt something in his chest twist again, a thing with no name he had stopped trying to name. When they were done he wiped the tin clean with two fingers and gave what was left to the boy and told him he wasn’t hungry, and the boy looked at him a long moment, the kind of look that meant he was starting to read the lie, and ate it anyway.

The road ran on through country stripped of color. Fields gone to gray stubble. A silo standing alone with no barn around it anymore, the barn long since taken apart board by board by hands as desperate as his own. Off to the west something that might have been a river caught the flat light and held it a moment before the light moved on.

They passed a car half sunk in the roadbed, hood open, engine gutted for parts by someone before them. In the back seat a scatter of small bones gone the color of old ivory, and he took the boy’s hand and walked him wide around it without a word, and the boy went without a word either, having seen enough of these by now not to need telling.

By midafternoon the ash came down heavier and settled on the boy’s shoulders and in his hair so that for a moment, turning, the father saw an old man walking beside him instead of a child, and had to look away and blink until the wrongness of it passed.

They stopped at a filling station with the pumps rusted to lace and searched the office and found nothing but a phone book swollen with old rain and a calendar still turned to a month eleven years gone. The boy asked what month it used to be now and the father told him and the boy nodded like it meant something, though neither of them could have said what.

Papa, the boy said. Are we the good guys.

He’d asked this before. He would ask it again. The father knelt so they were level and looked at him.

We’re carrying the fire, he said. That’s what we agreed.

The boy nodded, satisfied the way faith satisfies. The words didn’t explain anything. He trusted the one who said them, and that trust was the last uncorrupted thing the father had left in the world. He guarded it the way he guarded the last of the matches, counted every morning, spent only when there was no way around it.

They went on. The light went down early now, what light there was, and they found shelter in the lee of a collapsed overpass and built no fire because fire meant smoke and smoke meant being seen, and they lay close under what covers they had and the boy fell asleep first, same as always, trusting the dark to the man beside him.

The father lay awake and watched the black shape of the overpass against the paler black of the sky and thought of all the roads he had walked that had led only to more road, and he thought that this was maybe what was left of faith in a world with no promise attached to it, the plain fact of getting up in the gray morning and going on regardless. The going didn’t lead anywhere. He kept on because the boy was still breathing beside him. That was reason enough. It had always been reason enough.

Somewhere far off, or maybe not far at all, something moved through the dark and was still again. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and did not sleep and waited for whatever light the morning meant to give them.

He did not sleep and the not sleeping opened something in him the way it always did, some door left unlatched in the dark that swung open on its own weight, and most nights now she came to him unbidden, the way weather comes.

She had been gone seven years. Longer. He had stopped counting at some point. The number was one more thing that only hurt him to keep. The boy had been small then, small enough to carry on one arm, and now the boy came to his shoulder near enough and still he saw her in him sometimes, in the set of his jaw when he was working out something hard, in how he held his head, listening.

She had wanted to end it clean. Her word. Clean. As if there was a version of it that wasn’t a knife going in. She had told him the world had no place left in it for softness and that she did not intend to become what the world was making of everyone else, hard and hollow, running on habit instead of belief, and he had argued with her the whole of one long night in a farmhouse with the windows boarded, had said the boy needs you, had said I need you, and she had looked at him with an exhaustion that went down further than sleep could reach and said, You have the boy. That will have to be enough for both of us.

In the morning she was gone. He had not woken for it. He had told himself since that this was her mercy to him, sparing him the goodbye, but some nights, this one among them, he let himself believe otherwise, that she could not have looked at either of them and still done what she meant to do, that the sparing was for her own sake and not his, and he did not blame her for it. He had thought at the time he might. He found now, years down this ruined road, that blame was one more thing that had worn away in him like the tread on a boot, and what was left where the blame had been was only a kind of grief gone quiet and permanent, the kind you carry the way you carry your own name.

The boy stirred beside him and murmured something and went still again, and the father reached over without thought and rested his palm flat on the boy’s back to feel the breath moving in him, in and out, the smallest and most reliable clock left in the world. He thought, not for the first time, that the boy did not remember her at all. If he had anything of her it was secondhand, built from the father’s own stories the way a house gets built from another man’s lumber. He had decided long ago not to correct this. The boy already had enough to carry. He didn’t need her grief added to it. Let him have the warmth without the weight of it. That much the father could still give him.

He thought of telling the boy about her someday, when the boy was old enough that the telling would not break something in him that could not be mended out here with no one to mend it. He turned the thought over slow, without urgency, and set it back down unfinished.

The wind picked up before dawn and drove the ash sideways past the mouth of the overpass in long gray sheets. This was as close to weather as the world had left to offer. Ash instead of rain. Ash instead of snow. He did not pray. He had not prayed since the church with the burned steeple, had decided somewhere back down the road that prayer required a listener and he no longer believed the world contained one, but he held the boy’s shoulder under his hand and let that stand in for it, let the holding be the whole of his religion now.

The light came gray and grudging, slow, seeping into the dark like water into cloth, no sunrise left worth the name, only degrees of black giving way to degrees of gray. The boy woke and looked at him and asked if he’d slept and he said some, a mercy more than a lie, the same kind she had once tried to give him, and the boy accepted it without pressing, same as he accepted most things now, because pressing rarely got you closer to the truth out here and the boy had learned that the hard way same as everyone left alive.

They rose and packed the tarp and checked the cart’s wheels and the wire-bound axle, same ritual, same order, the ritual itself a kind of fire they carried alongside the other one, and they went out from under the overpass into the gray morning and back onto the road, which ran on ahead of them same as always, offering nothing, promising nothing, the one sure thing left in a world that had taken every other kind of certainty and burned it down to ash.

Is it far, the boy said, though he had not asked yet that morning, asking it now the way he asked most mornings, less for the answer than for the sound of his father saying it.

Not far, the father said, and they walked on into what light there was.

Her mother had been dead nine days when Ruth found the door.

She had been through the house twice by then. It was a narrow house on a shaded lot at the edge of Blackshear, Georgia, the kind of house that had been added onto by hand over the decades, a room here, a back porch closed in there, until the floor plan made no sense and you could stand in the middle of it and not know which way the road was. Ruth had grown up in it and still got turned around. She had spent nine days boxing her mother’s life into cardboard, the good dishes and the bad ones, the church clothes, the drawers full of rubber bands and bread ties and thank-you notes her mother had never sent, and she had thought she’d seen all of it.

The door was behind the water heater, in the back of the utility room, and it was only because she was pulling the old heater away from the wall to see if it was worth selling that she found it at all. A plain door, painted the same dingy cream as the wall so that it disappeared into it. No knob. A keyhole, and above the keyhole, a hasp with a padlock the size of her palm.

Her mother’s keys were in a dish by the front door where they had sat for fifty years. Ruth tried them all. The fourth one turned.

The smell came first. Not rot. The opposite of rot, a hard chemical cleanness, formaldehyde and something under it, sweetish, that coated the back of her throat and stayed there. She found the pull string for the light by feel and yanked it and stood in the doorway looking at what her mother had kept.

Shelves. Floor to ceiling on three walls, and every shelf full of jars.

They were canning jars, mostly, the same Ball and Kerr jars her mother had put up tomatoes and pickled okra in every summer of Ruth’s childhood, and for one loose spinning second that was what Ruth thought she was looking at, a pantry, preserves, and then her eyes adjusted to what floated in the pale fluid and her mind stopped.

Hair. A whole jar of it, a soft brown drift of it suspended and turning slightly when her footstep shook the floor. The next jar, fingernails, dozens of them, thin curved crescents settled at the bottom like shells at a tide line. A jar of teeth. A jar of something she could not name, a soft folded thing gone gray at the edges. Jar after jar after jar, and each one labeled, her mother’s small tidy hand on a strip of masking tape, and each label a name and a date.

Carl W. 1961. Ada P. 1958. The Renfroe baby, 1963.

Ruth stood very still in the middle of the room. She was fifty-four years old and she knew these names. Some of them. Carl Wooten had run the feed store when she was a girl. Ada Puckett had taught the Sunday school class her mother helped with. The Renfroe baby had died, everyone said, of a fever, before Ruth was born, and its mother had never been right after, and here it was, a curl, in a jar on her mother’s shelf with a date on it.

Fifty years. The oldest dates went back before Ruth was born and the newest, on a jar near the door, read only two years ago, and Ruth understood with a cold that started in her scalp and ran down through her that her mother had never stopped. That the sweet churchgoing woman she had buried nine days ago had spent half a century taking pieces of people and bringing them home to this room and keeping them in the dark behind a painted door, and Ruth did not know how. Did not know when. Did not know how her mother had gotten close enough to Ada Puckett, to the Renfroe baby, to take what she took, and clean it, and cure it, and label it in that patient hand, and set it on the shelf and close the door and go make supper.

She wanted to leave. Her legs would not agree to it. She moved along the shelves instead the way you move toward a wreck on the highway, sick and slow and unable to look away, reading the names, and some she knew and most she didn’t, a whole town’s worth of people reduced to the one small piece her mother had wanted, and she thought, standing there, that she was going to get out of this room and drive to the sheriff and never sleep again.

Then she saw her own name.

It was on the bottom shelf, in the corner, in the oldest section, where the tape had gone yellow and the ink had gone brown with age. A pint jar, smaller than the others. The fluid inside had clouded over the years to the color of weak tea.

The label read Ruth. 1971.

She had been born in 1971.

She crouched. Her knees cracked in the silence. She took the jar off the shelf with both hands the way you’d lift something sleeping and she held it up to the bare bulb and turned it, and the thing inside turned with it, drifting up off the bottom, small and pale and curled.

It was a finger.

A baby’s finger. No longer than the first joint of her own, the skin gone soft and colorless with the years, and at the end of it, perfect, intact, was a fingernail no bigger than a grain of rice.

Ruth’s mouth had gone dry as paper. Without deciding to, she turned her left hand over and looked at the side of it, below the little finger, at the small smooth scar she had carried her whole life and never once questioned. A little pucker of white skin. Her mother had told her the story so many times that Ruth had never once questioned it. You were born with an extra little finger, sugar, just a soft little nub of a thing, and the doctor took it off when you were three weeks old, and you never even missed it.

She had never missed it. She had never thought about it. It was nothing, a common thing, a scrap of tissue snipped from a newborn and thrown away.

Not thrown away.

She looked at the jar in her hands, at the piece of herself her mother had taken before she could speak, before she could refuse, before she knew she was a person that things could be taken from, and she understood that she had not stumbled into her mother’s secret at all. She had always been in it. She was the oldest jar on the shelf but one. She was where it started. Her mother had looked down into the crib at her three-week-old daughter and seen not a child but a first specimen, and had taken her piece, and cleaned it, and cured it, and labeled it in that patient hand, and set it in the dark to begin the collection that would run for the next fifty years.

Ruth. 1971.

The fluid settled. The small finger drifted back down and came to rest against the glass, the fingernail turned outward, facing her, and Ruth crouched on the floor of the room in the dead center of the house she was born in and could not put the jar down.

New Orleans has never buried anything it could eat.

Remember that before you dismiss what I am about to tell you. The city was built in a bowl of mud, blood, river water, and promises made by men who expected God to lose the paperwork. We laid our dead in brick chambers above the ground because the earth spat them back. We built churches on rot. We perfumed our handkerchiefs and walked past gutters thick with fish scales, horse piss, spoiled fruit, and the sweet meat stink of fever.

Then we called ourselves civilized.

My name is Gabriel Marchand. In the spring of 1852, I was twenty-eight years old, broad in the shoulder, narrow in the judgment, and employed as a clerk by the Church of Saint Mercy on Rue des Ursulines.

The church no longer stands.

That fact should comfort you.

It does not comfort me.

Saint Mercy occupied a wedge of land near the old convent, where the streets bent as if avoiding it. Its bell tower rose from the fog like a black finger. Green mold furred the stone saints in the courtyard. Rain had eaten their faces down to blank expressions, which improved them. Saints should look uncertain. Certainty belongs to fools, bishops, and men selling patent medicine.

Father Lucien Renaud presided over the parish.

He was forty-six, though grief had carved another decade into him. He had a long face, silver at the temples, and black eyes that caught every lie before it left your mouth. His cassock hung from his body with the clean severity of a burial cloth. When he prayed, his hands did not tremble. When he drank, they did.

He had lost his younger sister to yellow fever in 1847. I knew this because men confess more to clerks than they do to priests. Clerks carry no authority, which makes us safe. We are furniture that can spell.

Father Lucien kept a miniature portrait of his sister in the rectory. Her name was Amélie. She had his eyes and none of his sorrow. Each night, after the cook had gone and the shutters had closed, he placed the portrait beside a glass of cognac.

He spoke to it.

Not often.

That would have frightened me less.

The trouble began with Madame Séraphine Vautrin.

Every city has a family that owns more of it than maps admit. In New Orleans, one such family bore the name Vautrin. Their ships carried sugar, coffee, indigo, tobacco, and human misery through the Gulf. Their town house stood on Royal Street behind iron balconies twisted into vines and thorns. Their country holdings stretched beyond the cypress swamps. Their dead occupied a private vault in Saint Mercy’s courtyard, where the marble stayed white despite soot, rain, and time.

Séraphine Vautrin came to Mass each Sunday dressed in black silk.

She was sixty-three.

She looked thirty-five.

People credited good blood, French creams, and the refusal to smile. People credit all manner of nonsense when wealth wears a pleasant face.

Her hair shone blue-black beneath a lace veil. Her skin held the pale glow of a pearl pressed under the tongue. She moved without hurry, and the crowd parted before her. Men watched. Women watched harder.

Her only living relative, her nephew Étienne Vautrin, followed two paces behind.

Étienne had inherited the family beauty, but none of its control. His blond hair curled at his collar. His lips held a permanent bruise-colored softness. He wore ivory gloves even in the heat, though sweat dampened the cuffs of his coat.

I once saw him remove one glove in the sacristy.

The skin beneath had no fingernails.

Each fingertip ended in a round pad of pink flesh, puckered at the center.

He caught me looking.

“An illness,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Do you find it ugly?”

“I find most bodies ugly when examined.”

He smiled. “That sounds like faith.”

On the first Friday of Lent, Madame Vautrin requested a private audience with Father Lucien. She arrived after sunset in a closed carriage, accompanied by Étienne and two servants who carried a narrow cedar chest.

The chest measured six feet long.

Holes had been drilled into its lid.

Something inside drew breath.

Not human breath. Human lungs rise and fall with the soft drag of cloth over wood. This breath clicked. It paused between inhalations, as though remembering how.

Father Lucien ordered me from the church.

I obeyed as far as the sacristy door.

A clerk survives by understanding the difference between leaving and appearing to leave.

Through the keyhole, I watched the servants set the chest before the altar. Madame Vautrin removed her veil.

“My family has kept its covenant,” she said.

Father Lucien stood beneath the crucifix. “Your family has kept a blasphemy.”

“Words do not change the nature of a thing.”

“They define it.”

“Then define resurrection.”

The priest’s jaw tightened.

Madame Vautrin touched the cedar lid.

“My nephew has begun to fail. The sacrament no longer nourishes him.”

Étienne stared at the floor. His ivory gloves twitched.

Father Lucien said, “I warned your brother that the appetite would grow.”

“My brother lacked discipline.”

“Your brother devoured three servants.”

“He lost himself.”

“He found himself.”

Her face changed then. Not much. A small tension appeared beside her mouth. A hairline crack in porcelain.

“You know what rests beneath this church,” she said. “You know what it can restore.”

“I know what it promises.”

“And you have never wished to hear your sister’s voice again?”

The church seemed to contract around them.

Outside, wheels rattled across the street. Somewhere near the river, a steamboat whistle groaned through the damp night.

Father Lucien looked toward the rectory, where Amélie’s portrait waited beside an empty glass.

Madame Vautrin smiled.

That smile ended the man he had been.

The cedar chest opened at midnight.

I wish I could tell you I left. I wish I could say some decent instinct drove me into the street.

I stayed.

Of course I stayed.

Curiosity has killed more men than plague. Plague has better manners.

The servants lifted a body from the chest. At first, I mistook it for a corpse wrapped in linen. Then the linen flexed.

A woman lay beneath the shroud.

Or something that had once understood the shape of a woman.

Her arms had fused to her ribs. Her legs tapered into one long column of scar tissue. She had no hair, no eyelids, and no lips. Small teeth crowded the exposed gums in several rows. Gold wire had sewn her mouth shut.

A silver reliquary hung from her neck.

On its lid, someone had engraved two words.

SAINTE MISÉRICORDE.

Saint Mercy.

The creature’s chest clicked as it breathed.

Father Lucien crossed himself.

Madame Vautrin did not.

“She was found beneath the first chapel in 1721,” Madame Vautrin said. “Alive in a sealed crypt. No food. No water. No mark of age. The Ursuline sisters believed her holy.”

“What did she tell them?” Father Lucien asked.

“She had no tongue.”

“Convenient.”

“She healed one of them.”

“How?”

Madame Vautrin looked toward Étienne.

He removed his gloves.

His fingers had split open along the pads. Small white mouths formed in the flesh, each lined with wet teeth.

Father Lucien stepped back.

Étienne began to weep.

Madame Vautrin said, “With communion.”

The creature on the altar heard the word.

Its sewn mouth bulged.

One gold wire snapped.

Then another.

Father Lucien sent for Célestine Baptiste.

Célestine served as midwife, nurse, herbalist, and final judge of men who believed money made them immortal. She was a free woman of color in her late fifties, tall and straight-backed, with iron-gray hair beneath a red tignon. Her eyes carried the calm of someone who had delivered life, washed death, and found both poor conversationalists.

She entered Saint Mercy after midnight with a leather case in one hand and a pistol in the other.

When she saw the creature, she did not cross herself.

She spat on the floor.

“That is not a saint.”

Madame Vautrin said, “You presume much.”

Célestine looked her over. “And you consume much.”

Father Lucien asked her to examine the body.

She placed her fingers against the creature’s neck. The flesh moved around them.

Not beneath them.

Around.

It climbed her fingers in soft folds, tasting the air.

Célestine pulled away.

“This thing has no pulse,” she said. “It has many.”

The creature’s skin rippled.

Small knots rose across its abdomen. Each knot beat at a different rhythm.

“Pregnant?” I whispered.

Célestine heard me behind the sacristy door.

“Come out, Gabriel.”

I considered pretending I had not heard.

“Come out before I shoot the door.”

I joined them.

Father Lucien looked tired enough to forgive me, which felt worse than anger.

Célestine opened the silver reliquary around the creature’s neck.

Inside rested a thin disk of dried flesh.

A communion wafer.

Human skin had been cut into a circle, pressed flat, and stamped with a cross.

The edges bore tooth marks.

Madame Vautrin said, “Once each month, our family receives the sacrament. It heals sickness. It preserves youth. It purifies the blood.”

Célestine held the wafer beneath her nose.

“It smells of bile.”

“Grace often offends the senses.”

“So does shit. I do not kneel to it.”

Étienne made a strangled sound.

His coat jerked.

Something moved beneath his shirt.

He tore at the buttons. One flew across the nave and struck a pew.

His chest had opened from throat to stomach.

The wound did not bleed. The ribs had bent outward, forming pale fingers around a wet cavity. Inside, dozens of small tongues licked the walls of his body.

Étienne screamed.

The tongues screamed with him.

Father Lucien grabbed his shoulders. “What is happening?”

Madame Vautrin’s composure broke.

“He has gone too long without feeding.”

Étienne’s ribs clamped around the priest’s wrist.

Bone punched through flesh.

Father Lucien cried out as the tongues wrapped his hand. They stripped the skin from his fingers in red ribbons. One tongue pushed beneath his thumbnail and peeled it back with a sound like damp paper tearing.

Célestine fired her pistol.

The ball struck Étienne in the shoulder. Black fluid sprayed the altar cloth.

It smelled of burned sugar and opened graves.

Étienne turned toward her.

His jaw unhooked.

The skin split from the corners of his mouth to his ears. His face opened in four fleshy petals. Teeth lined every inner surface.

Madame Vautrin seized the communion wafer and shoved it into his throat.

Étienne collapsed.

His ribs folded shut.

The mouths on his fingertips sighed.

Father Lucien stared at his ruined hand. Three fingers had lost their skin. The exposed muscles flexed in the candlelight. Tendons slid over bone.

Then the bleeding stopped.

New skin crept across the wounds.

Pale.

Smooth.

Perfect.

Father Lucien looked at the creature on the altar.

Hope entered his face.

Hope causes more damage than despair. Despair stays in bed. Hope gets dressed.

Beneath Saint Mercy lay a chapel older than the church itself.

We reached it through a narrow stair hidden behind the confessional. The steps descended into damp brick, river mud, and the warm smell of meat kept too long in a covered pot.

Madame Vautrin led us.

Étienne followed, weak but upright.

The creature came last, carried by the servants in its cedar chest.

The underground chapel had no crucifix.

It had a mouth.

The far wall curved inward around a vertical slit fifteen feet tall. The bricks had vanished beneath layers of flesh, thick as boiled leather and threaded with blue veins. Teeth protruded from the opening. Some looked human. Others resembled ivory hooks. Several wore gold fillings.

Candles burned in niches around it.

The flame leaned toward the mouth.

I knew then that the thing on the altar was not Saint Mercy.

She was its tongue.

Madame Vautrin knelt.

Her nephew knelt beside her.

Father Lucien remained standing.

Célestine whispered, “This family did not find a miracle.”

“No,” I said.

“They found a stomach.”

The wall opened.

Warm air rolled across us, carrying the scents of incense, blood, milk, and decay. Behind the teeth, shapes turned in a red darkness.

Faces.

Hundreds.

Men and women pressed beneath a translucent membrane. Their mouths worked without sound. Some wore clothing from the previous century. Some had rotted to skulls. Others looked fresh.

One face belonged to Amélie Renaud.

Father Lucien fell to his knees.

She floated within the wall, her dark hair drifting around her face. Her eyes opened.

“Lucien,” she said.

His name came from every mouth in the chapel.

The priest crawled toward her.

Célestine caught his cassock. “That is not your sister.”

Amélie smiled.

A line of black fluid leaked from her nose.

“I waited,” she said.

Father Lucien struck Célestine across the face.

The blow shocked him more than it shocked her.

She released him.

He approached the mouth.

The teeth parted.

A hand emerged from the slit. It wore Amélie’s skin, though the fingers contained too many joints. Another hand followed. Then her face pushed through, stretched across something narrow and blind.

Father Lucien reached for her.

The thing bit off his arm at the elbow.

Blood struck the chapel wall in a red fan.

He did not scream.

Not at first.

He stared at the stump. A white spur of bone protruded through torn muscle. An artery pumped across Madame Vautrin’s black dress.

Then he screamed enough for all of us.

The mouth sucked his severed arm inside. Teeth cracked the bones. Amélie’s face chewed with a lover’s tenderness.

Madame Vautrin rose.

“Now,” she said.

The servants opened the cedar chest.

Saint Mercy writhed.

The last gold wires tore from her gums. Her mouth opened.

A thick cord of flesh uncoiled from her throat and slapped onto the chapel floor. It writhed toward the mouth in the wall.

The two joined.

The chapel convulsed.

Mortar burst from the ceiling. The candles guttered. The flesh on the wall swelled, and the trapped faces began to shriek.

The sound came through the bricks.

Through the floor.

Through my teeth.

Étienne threw himself upon Saint Mercy.

He bit into her shoulder.

The skin split. Yellow fat bulged through the wound in soft beads. Beneath it, a nest of white worms twisted around a black organ shaped like a heart.

Étienne tore the organ free.

It beat between his teeth.

He swallowed.

His body changed at once.

His spine pushed upward through his coat, each vertebra emerging in a wet row. His arms lengthened. His fingers split from five into ten, then twenty, each tipped with a small human tooth.

His abdomen opened.

Not a wound.

A door.

Inside him sat a tiny chapel made of bone. Tiny pews lined his intestines. Small figures knelt within, their heads bowed in prayer.

One raised its face.

It was me.

I saw my own miniature mouth begging from inside his body.

That broke something in my mind.

I grabbed an iron candlestick and swung at his skull.

The first blow crushed his cheek.

The second drove teeth into his tongue.

The third opened his head above the ear.

His skull peeled apart like wet fruit.

No brain lay inside.

Only communion wafers.

Hundreds of them, packed in neat layers, each cut from a different shade of skin.

They spilled across the floor.

Madame Vautrin screamed and dropped beside him.

She gathered the wafers in both hands and stuffed them into her mouth.

She ate without chewing.

Her throat swelled.

The flesh of her face tightened. Wrinkles vanished. Her hair shone. Her breasts lifted beneath the black silk. She grew younger with each swallow.

Thirty.

Twenty-five.

Twenty.

Then youth passed through her.

Her face softened into infancy for one terrible instant, though she remained full-grown.

Then the years reversed too far.

Her bones withdrew.

Her teeth sank into her gums.

Her body collapsed inside the dress, shrinking into a loose sack of skin.

The sack moved.

Something inside it crawled toward Father Lucien.

He lay against the wall, one hand pressed to his stump.

Amélie’s face hung above him from the mouth.

“Take communion,” she whispered.

A strip of flesh slid from between her lips.

It carried a wafer.

Father Lucien opened his mouth.

Célestine shot him through the jaw.

The ball tore away his lower face. Teeth, tongue, and fragments of bone struck the wall.

He stared at her.

She knelt beside him and pressed her forehead to his.

“I am sorry,” she said.

Then the mouth in the wall opened wide.

The chapel began to feed.

The servants went first. Flesh tore from their backs in long strips, pulled by an invisible current. One man’s spine came free through his neck, dragging nerves and muscle behind it. He remained standing for three breaths before folding into himself.

The second servant clutched the altar rail.

His arms stretched.

The joints separated without breaking. Tendons drew out in pale cords. His skin slipped from his hands and stayed wrapped around the wood like empty gloves.

Then the darkness took him.

Saint Mercy rose from the cedar chest.

Her fused legs split with a spray of black blood. New limbs unfolded from within her, slick and trembling. She stood on six crooked legs. Her abdomen sagged open, birthing ropes of intestine that struck the floor and rooted between the bricks.

Faces pushed from her skin.

Priests.

Nuns.

Merchants.

Vautrins.

All chewing.

Célestine seized my collar.

“Run.”

We reached the stairs as the underground chapel folded shut behind us.

Not collapsed.

Swallowed.

The walls clenched. Bricks ground together. The church groaned above us. Pews toppled. Stained glass burst inward. Red light poured through the windows though dawn remained hours away.

We stumbled into the courtyard.

Behind us, Saint Mercy’s bell began to ring.

No one pulled the rope.

Each toll shook blood from the mortar.

Célestine and I reached the street before the tower sank into the church. Stone saints pitched from the roof and shattered on the paving stones. The front doors bowed outward.

For a moment, I saw the whole building breathe.

Then it dropped into the earth.

The ground closed over it.

By sunrise, only a mud-filled depression remained.

The city blamed subsidence.

New Orleans loves an explanation that asks nothing of the soul.

Célestine left for Mobile within the week. She told me she had spent her life helping people enter this world. She had no wish to see what else might follow.

I never saw her again.

As for me, I abandoned the Church.

I worked as a printer, then a clerk for the port, then a keeper of records no one read. I married once. My wife died without children, and for that mercy I thank God, though I have not spoken to Him in years.

You may wonder why I tell this now.

Because Saint Mercy’s bell rang last night.

The church has been gone for forty-one years.

Still, I heard it beneath the street.

One toll.

Then another.

When I looked into the washbasin, my reflection opened its mouth.

There was a wafer on its tongue.

I did not have one on mine.

Not then.

I do now.

It tastes of salt, copper, and something sweet.

Something that reminds me of childhood Mass, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, and the clean white promise that suffering had purpose.

My teeth have begun to loosen.

Small mouths have opened beneath my fingernails.

They whisper the same word.

Communion.

So listen to me.

New Orleans has never buried anything it could eat.

And beneath your feet, the city is still hungry.

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I want to say something that will get me into a fight with some fans. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a decent movie. Not a great one. Decent. And that has almost nothing to do with why it became the longest-running theatrical release in history.

The movie became immortal because somebody in the audience stood up and started talking back, and then everybody did, and nobody ever stopped. What you are watching at a midnight showing is not really the film. It is the room. The film is the excuse the room needed to exist.

I came to it the way most people my age did, at a midnight show with a crowd that already knew the drill. You throw rice at the wedding. You raise a newspaper over your head in the rain. You yell things at the screen that are funnier than anything in the script, because a thousand people have been sharpening those lines for years and you are just repeating the best ones. Somebody near me had toast. I did not ask why. By then I knew better than to ask why.

Watch it cold on your couch and you will be confused about the fuss. Tim Curry is magnificent as Frank-N-Furter, no argument, and Curry is the reason the whole thing has a center. Richard O’Brien wrote it and plays Riff Raff and gave it the songs, and the songs are genuinely good. Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick play the squares who wander in from the rain, and Meat Loaf roars through on a motorcycle and gets killed for his trouble. The plot is a loving junk-drawer of old horror and science fiction pictures, assembled by people who clearly stayed up too late watching them.

But sit alone in your living room and the picture is only pretty good. That is the honest read. Which brings me to the point I actually care about.

We treat participation as a lesser thing. Real art, the thinking goes, you sit and receive in respectful silence. Rocky Horror blew that up and has kept blowing it up every weekend for fifty years. The people in that theater are not passive. They built a liturgy. They assigned roles, wrote responses, brought props, trained the newcomers, and made a modest 1975 musical into a place people go to belong. That is not the movie failing to be good enough on its own. That is the movie doing something almost no film ever manages, which is to hand the audience the keys and get out of the way.

I have thought about this a lot as a guy who used to stand on stage with a bass. The best nights were never the ones where we nailed every note for a silent crowd. The best nights were the ones where the room took over and we were just holding the beat while everybody else did the living. Rocky Horror figured out how to do that on a loop, forever, with a print of a movie.

So when somebody calls it a guilty pleasure, I think they have it backward. The guilt would be in watching it alone and pretending that is the real thing. The pleasure, the whole reason it survived, is the fifty other people yelling with you. Go find a midnight show. Bring the newspaper. Do not bring your own toast the first time, borrow somebody’s, and watch how fast a room of strangers adopts you.

John Cusack reportedly walked out of an early screening of Better Off Dead and told the director, Savage Steve Holland, that it was the worst thing he had ever seen. Cusack was twenty, and he was wrong, and I say that with affection for both of them.

I caught up with the movie on video a bit after it came out in 1985, still in my Navy stretch, and it did something to my sense of what a comedy was allowed to do. Most comedies operate on human logic pushed a little too far. Better Off Dead throws human logic out the airlock in the first ten minutes and runs on cartoon rules instead, and it never once breaks them.

The setup sounds grim on paper. Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, gets dumped by his girlfriend and decides his life is over. He keeps trying to kill himself and keeps failing, usually in the most elaborate way possible. Played straight, that is a rough sit. Holland does not play it straight. He plays it as a live-action Looney Tunes short where the suicide attempts are pratfalls,s and the pain is drawn, not felt. The tone is the joke. Lane is genuinely miserable, and the world around him is genuinely absurd, and the gap between those two things is where every laugh lives.

The pieces people remember are the ones that make no realistic sense and do not care. There is a paperboy who pursues Lane across the entire film, demanding his two dollars with the menace ofbeing hit by a hitman. There is a claymation hamburger that comes to life and plays guitar because Lane works at a burger stand, and his mind is going. There is a math teacher whose class Lane is somehow good at, a pair of drag-racing brothers, one of whom learned all his English from Howard Cosell, and a French exchange student named Monique, played by Diane Franklin, who becomes the only sane and kind person in the entire zip code. None of it connects with logic. All of it connects with rhythm.

That is the thing I want to defend. Cartoon logic is hard. Really hard. You have to establish a world with its own physics in the first reel and then never cheat, never blink, never suddenly get realistic to earn a serious moment. Better Off Dead holds its tone from the first frame to the last. When the big ski race at the end pays off with the K-12 mountain and Lane finally beating the ski-team bully, it works, not because you believe it, but because the movie has trained you for ninety minutes to stop believing and start enjoying. It earned the ending by refusing to be real the whole way there.

Cusack has spent years distancing himself from it, and I understand why a young actor with serious ambitions did not want to be the suicide-pratfall guy. But he was measuring it against the wrong yardstick. He wanted it to be a real movie about real feelings, and Savage Steve Holland was making something else on purpose, a hand-drawn nightmare about teenage heartbreak where the heartbreak is real, and everything else is ink and paint. On those terms, which are the correct terms, it is close to perfect.

“I want my two dollars” outlived every serious drama that came out that season. People still say it. Nobody planned that. A line that dumb and that persistent is not an accident of nostalgia. It is proof that the movie built a world so complete that pieces of it broke off and floated into the language.

So no, I will not call it a guilty pleasure. I will call it the thing John Cusack got wrong at twenty, which is the most forgivable kind of wrong there is. Watch it, knowing the rules are cartoon rules, and it stops being a curiosity and becomes a small, strange, perfectly controlled machine.

Along the same comedic vein, honorable mention to One Crazy Summer

Let me start by saying this: I went into this movie in 1984 already liking it because Jim Steinman was my favorite songwriter, still is, and I knew he had the opening song and closing song in this movie. Hard stop.

Plus — Diane Lane — woof

Streets of Fire came out in 1984, called itself “A Rock and Roll Fable,” and lost money. I was in the Navy then, in my early twenties, and I remember the feeling of the thing more than the plot. It felt like a record cover I wanted to live inside.

Walter Hill directed it, and Hill made his name on lean, mean pictures like The Warriors and 48 Hrs. Here he did something braver and got punished for it. He built a movie with no year and no city. The cars are from the fifties. The clothes are from the eighties. The music is pure Jim Steinman thunder. It rains at night on neon streets that exist nowhere on Earth, and the movie never once winks to tell you it knows that. It just commits.

The story is bone simple on purpose. A singer named Ellen Aim, played by Diane Lane, gets kidnapped off her own stage by a motorcycle gang led by Willem Dafoe in black rubber overalls. Her old flame Tom Cody, played by Michael Paré, rides back into town to get her out. That is the whole engine. Boy rescues girl from villain. Hill is not interested in surprising you. He is interested in the surface of the thing, the rain and the leather and the way a song can carry a scene the dialogue never could.

And the songs carry it. Steinman wrote “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” and they are the same overblown, fists-to-the-sky anthems he built for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”), which is exactly right for a movie about nothing but feeling. Dan Hartman’s “I Can Dream About You” came out of this picture and became a real hit on its own. The music is not decoration. The music is the plot’s actual heart, and the story is just the frame that lets the songs happen.

Here is why it flopped and why the flop is the point. In 1984, audiences wanted movies that felt like somewhere. Streets of Fire felt like nowhere on purpose. Critics did not know where to file it. It was too sincere to be camp and too stylized to be real, and that in-between is precisely the ground it wanted to stand on. Hill made a fable, and a fable does not need a zip code. Cinderella does not have a street address. Neither does this.

I have gone back to it every few years since I got out of the service, and it gets better as the world around it gets more literal. Everything now wants to explain itself, tie up its own loose ends, tell you which real year it takes place in and why. Streets of Fire tells you nothing and asks you to feel everything. Diane Lane lip-syncs to a voice that is not hers and it does not matter, because the image is doing the singing. Paré barely changes expression the whole film and it does not matter, because the coat and the rain are doing the acting. The movie is all surface, and it knew that surface, done with total conviction, is its own kind of depth.

Call it a guilty pleasure if you need to. I think it is one of the purest things anybody made in that decade. It wanted to be a two-hour rock song and it succeeded, and it paid for that success with its box office. That is usually how it goes for the honest ones.

Put it on loud, at night, and stop asking what year it is. That question is the one thing the movie will never answer, and the refusal is the whole gift.

The first time the retirement calculator told me I would die at my desk, I blamed Excel.

That felt fair.

I had spent enough years watching spreadsheets commit crimes in broad daylight. Dates turned into numbers. Numbers turned into hieroglyphics. Formulas broke because someone added a space, deleted a comma, or pasted a table from an email with the confidence of a toddler.

So when my retirement dashboard flashed a red warning box across the screen, I did not panic.

I leaned back in my chair, took off my glasses, rubbed the bridge of my nose, and said, “Well, that’s new.”

The warning read:

Projected Separation Date: October 14, 2031
Projected Death Date: October 11, 2031
Status: Continued Employment Required

I stared at it.

Then I looked over both shoulders, because that is what a grown man does when county software starts talking like a haunted Ouija board.

The office sat quiet around me. Not peaceful. Never peaceful. Government offices do not know peace. They know suspended animation.

The lights hummed overhead with that cheap electric buzz that makes every human decision feel suspect. A printer coughed somewhere near Finance. The air smelled of burnt coffee, microwave popcorn, and carpet glue. Somebody had left a banana peel in the breakroom trash at least two administrations ago.

I clicked refresh.

The screen blinked.

Projected Separation Date: October 14, 2031
Projected Death Date: October 11, 2031
Status: Continued Employment Required

Below that, a button appeared.

Request Clarification

I clicked it.

The HR portal opened in a new window. It had the same dead-eyed design every large organization uses when it wants you to abandon hope but still update your emergency contact. The logo spun for a while. A little circle chasing its own tail. Corporate Buddhism.

Then a message appeared.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need

I laughed.

Not a big laugh. More of a bark. The kind that comes out when your soul steps barefoot on a Lego.

“Of course it has,” I said.

My coworker Marcy popped her head over the cubicle wall. Marcy had worked in payroll for twenty-six years and had the calm face of a woman who had seen men cry over W-4 forms.

“You talking to the computer again?”

“It started it.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Which system?”

“Benefits portal.”

Marcy’s face changed.

Not much. Just enough.

“Oh,” she said. “Don’t joke with that one.”

I turned in my chair. “What does that mean?”

Marcy glanced toward the hallway, then toward the ceiling tile above my desk. One corner sagged from an old leak. It had looked that way since I started. Nobody fixed it because Facilities had opened a work order, which meant the problem had entered the sacred swamp.

“You ever notice nobody retires from this department?” she asked.

“That’s not true. What about Frank?”

“Frank didn’t retire.”

“He had a cake.”

“He had a cake because he stopped coming in.”

“That sounds close enough.”

Marcy shook her head. “Frank logged into Teams yesterday.”

“Frank died in March.”

“I know.”

The printer coughed again.

This time it kept coughing.

Chunks of paper rolled out of it in damp curls.

Marcy ducked back behind the wall.

I stood up and walked over.

The printer screen displayed a message I had never seen before:

USER FRANK.DAVENPORT SENT JOB: QUARTERLY STAFFING FORECAST

The paper slid into the tray page by page. Green bar report. Old school. Dot matrix ugliness, though the printer had no reason to know what dot matrix was. The header across the top read:

STAFFING FORECAST THROUGH NATURAL ATTRITION AND POST-MORTEM RETENTION

My coffee went cold in my hand.

A line halfway down the page had my name on it.

HARRIS, JOHN C.
CLASSIFICATION: BUSINESS ANALYST
RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY: PENDING
MORTALITY OFFSET: INSUFFICIENT
POST-DEATH UTILIZATION: HIGH
RECOMMENDATION: RETAIN

I read it twice.

That was my mistake.

Certain sentences gain weight after the second reading.

I marched down to Human Resources with the paper in my hand and the calm purpose of a man about to waste the rest of his afternoon.

HR lived on the third floor, behind a locked glass door and a potted plant that had given up during the Obama administration. A small sign said:

People Are Our Greatest Resource

Below it, someone had taped a second sign:

Please Submit Requests Through the Portal

I pressed the call button.

Nothing happened.

I pressed it again.

A speaker crackled.

“Do you have an appointment?”

The voice sounded thin and wet, as if it came through a drain.

“I need to speak with someone about the retirement calculator.”

“Have you submitted a ticket?”

“The ticket denied me because of continued business need.”

A pause.

“That means the system has reviewed your request.”

“It says I die three days before I retire.”

“Then the system has provided a projection.”

I looked into the smoked glass. I could see my own reflection there. Gray beard. Tired eyes. Shirt with a mustard stain I had missed all morning. The face of a man who had once believed adulthood came with answers.

“Who am I speaking to?” I asked.

The speaker hissed.

“Benefits.”

“No, I mean your name.”

The line crackled harder.

“Benefits.”

Behind the glass, something moved.

Not a person.

Not at first.

A shape passed behind the frosted panel. Tall. Bent near the top. Too many elbows, unless HR had changed the dress code. I heard typing. Fast typing. The hard clack of keys struck by fingers with no love left in them.

Then the door unlocked.

A woman stood there in a cardigan the color of oatmeal. Her badge hung backward. Her smile looked laminated.

“Mr. Harris,” she said. “We’ve been expecting your escalation.”

“I didn’t escalate.”

“You clicked Request Clarification.”

“That’s an escalation?”

“In your case.”

She held out one pale hand.

I handed her the printout.

She scanned it without moving her eyes. That bothered me. People move their eyes when they read. She just pointed her face at the page and absorbed it.

“Everything appears correct,” she said.

“My death date?”

“Yes.”

“My retirement date?”

“Yes.”

“The part where I keep working after I’m dead?”

She looked up.

“Only for three days.”

I waited for her to laugh.

She did not.

Somewhere inside the HR suite, a phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Nobody answered. Then a man’s voice on speakerphone said, “I’m still in the meeting.”

The woman in the oatmeal cardigan smiled wider.

“Frank?” I said.

Her smile stopped widening.

“You should return to your workstation,” she said. “You have a dashboard due.”

“I have a lot of dashboards due. That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It answers enough.”

Behind her, the office lights flickered. For half a second I saw past the cubicles.

Rows of desks stretched farther than the building allowed. Men and women sat shoulder to shoulder under hanging lights. Some wore shirts from old United Way campaigns. Some had hairstyles from the Bush administration. Some had skin. Some had less.

Every monitor showed the same HR portal.

Every screen displayed the same message.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need

Then the lights steadied.

The office looked normal again.

The woman handed back the printout.

“You still have seven minutes of lunch,” she said.

I looked at my watch.

She was right.

That bothered me more than the dead people.

I went back to my desk.

My calendar had changed.

Before lunch, I had three meetings for the afternoon, which already felt criminal. Now I had eleven.

The first one started in two minutes.

Subject: Knowledge Transfer and Continuity Planning
Organizer: Frank Davenport
Location: Teams
Required Attendees: Me

I sat down because my knees no longer trusted me to stand.

The Teams chime rang.

I did not click anything.

The meeting opened by itself.

Frank’s profile picture appeared in a circle at the center of the screen. He had used the same picture for fifteen years. Frank in a fishing shirt, holding a redfish that looked as tired as he did.

The microphone icon blinked.

Then came the sound.

A wet throat clearing.

“John?”

I froze.

The office kept moving around me. Phones rang. Keyboards clicked. Someone laughed too loud by the copier. Life, or the county version of it, went right on.

“Frank?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You got a minute?”

“No.”

“Good. This won’t take long.”

“Frank, you’re dead.”

A pause.

Then Frank sighed.

“You sound like my wife.”

I reached for the mouse to leave the meeting. The cursor slid away from my hand. It moved to the bottom of the screen and hovered over the Leave button, then drifted to the chat window instead.

Frank typed:

Please do not disconnect. This session counts toward succession readiness.

I said, “What the hell is happening?”

“You opened the retirement calculator.”

“So?”

“Rookie move.”

“I’m sixty-two.”

“Still.”

Frank’s camera flickered on.

At first, I saw only darkness. Then a face leaned into frame.

It was Frank. Mostly.

His skin had the gray-yellow look of chicken left too long under plastic wrap. His hair, always combed with one stubborn part, clung to his scalp in damp strips. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. His eyes reflected the monitor light, but not in the way eyes should. More like two tiny office windows after closing time.

“Jesus, Frank.”

“No politics or religion in Teams chat,” he said. “They flag that now.”

“What are you?”

“Active employee.”

“You died.”

“On paper.”

“Your obituary said otherwise.”

“Obituaries don’t feed the pension system.”

I looked over at Marcy’s cubicle. She had disappeared. Her chair sat empty. On her monitor, an Excel file sat open. One cell blinked red.

“Why me?” I asked.

Frank leaned closer to his camera. Something shifted beneath his collar.

“Because you know too much.”

“All I know is how to make a slicer default to the previous month.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s not too much.”

“It is.”

My screen changed.

A dashboard opened. Not the retirement calculator. Something older. Its background was black. Not dark mode. Not the friendly charcoal gray of some user interface committee trying to look modern. This was deep black. Grave black.

At the top, in white letters:

EMPLOYEE LIFE CYCLE UTILIZATION MODEL

A map of the county filled the screen. Tiny dots pulsed over buildings, offices, service centers, libraries, warehouses, call centers, clinics, and places I didn’t recognize. Each dot had a status.

Active
Pending Separation
Retained
Unavailable
Formerly Unavailable

Frank said, “They built it during the hiring freeze.”

“Who built it?”

“People who called themselves change agents.”

“That explains the evil.”

He gave a dry laugh that turned into a cough.

“At first it just forecasted vacancies. Then it forecasted retirements. Then deaths. Then it suggested interventions.”

“Interventions?”

“Retention.”

“That word does a lot of work.”

“It’s government. Words do pushups here.”

I watched the dots pulse.

One dot sat over our building.

My name appeared beside it.

HARRIS, JOHN C.
Pension Risk: Moderate
Knowledge Hoarding: High
Burnout Scent: Detectable
Escape Probability: Emerging

“Burnout scent?” I said.

Frank looked embarrassed. “They added that after the engagement survey.”

“I wrote nice comments on that survey.”

“Nobody believes those.”

The dashboard zoomed in on my name.

A second panel opened.

AVAILABLE COUNTERMEASURES:

Deny PTO
Schedule Recurring Meetings
Reduce Retirement Confidence
Assign Legacy Project
Trigger Medical Plan Confusion
Summon Former Supervisor

I pointed at the screen.

“Do not summon my former supervisor.”

Frank looked away.

“Frank.”

He winced.

The lights above my desk flickered.

Behind me, someone said my name.

I knew that voice.

I had not heard it in eight years, and my blood still recognized it. Some people leave an imprint on your nervous system. Bad bosses do not die. They molt.

“John,” the voice said. “Do you have a second?”

I turned.

Carl Overstreet stood in the aisle outside my cubicle wearing pleated khakis, a blue shirt, and the expression of a man about to ask for something impossible by Friday.

Carl had retired in 2016, moved to North Carolina, and died during a pickleball tournament three years later. I knew this because Marcy had sent an email that said, “Carl passed. Service Saturday.” I had not attended because Saturday is sacred and I was out of fake grief.

Now Carl stood under the humming lights with a folder in his hand.

He looked alive from a distance.

Up close, the illusion had problems.

His skin fit wrong. His tie hung too low. His smile had no moisture.

“Carl,” I said.

“Glad I caught you.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

He tapped the folder against his palm.

“We need you to take the lead on a cross-functional modernization effort.”

“I’d rather swallow a thumbtack.”

“Great energy,” Carl said. “We’ll call you the project champion.”

“I decline.”

Carl smiled.

The HR portal opened on my second monitor.

A message appeared.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

Carl placed the folder on my desk.

The title read:

ONE COUNTY FUTURE INITIATIVE: PHASE ZERO DISCOVERY PRE-WORK

Phase zero.

That meant no one had authority, budget, scope, timeline, or shame.

I shoved the folder back toward him. “I’m retiring.”

Carl’s smile widened.

“Love that for you.”

“I mean it.”

“Of course.”

“I have a projection.”

“Everyone does.”

“My projection says I die before I retire.”

Carl nodded. “That happens.”

“It should not happen.”

“In a perfect world, sure.”

“This is not a perfect world.”

“No,” Carl said. “This is a workplace.”

Frank coughed through the speakers.

Carl looked at the screen. “Frank, we still on for two-thirty?”

“Already there,” Frank said.

Carl gave me a little finger point. “See? That’s commitment.”

I stood so fast my chair rolled backward and hit the cubicle wall.

“I quit.”

The office went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

The printer stopped mid-cough. The keyboard clicks ceased. The fluorescent lights held their hum and then seemed to swallow it.

Carl lowered the folder.

Frank’s dead face froze on screen.

Marcy appeared at the edge of her cubicle and shook her head once.

Do not.

“I quit,” I said again, louder this time, because men love to repeat stupid choices once witnesses arrive.

Every monitor in the office went black.

Then each one lit up with the portal.

A message appeared across every screen.

VOLUNTARY SEPARATION REQUEST DETECTED

PLEASE STAND BY WHILE WE CALCULATE ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT

Somewhere deep in the building, a machine started grinding.

Not the HVAC. Not the elevator.

Ceiling tiles trembled. Dust sifted down. The potted plant near the copier dropped two dead leaves.

My badge, clipped to my belt, grew hot.

I yanked it off and threw it onto the desk.

The plastic smoked.

A new line appeared on the monitors.

IMPACT LEVEL: UNACCEPTABLE

RECOMMENDATION: RETAIN EMPLOYEE

My badge split open.

Inside the cracked plastic, something pulsed. A red point of light, tiny as a pencil tip, beat in time with my heart.

Carl sighed.

“You made this harder than it needed to be.”

“That was not in the employee handbook.”

“You acknowledged the handbook in 2009.”

“I did not read it.”

“No one does.”

The floor beneath my desk vibrated.

Cords stirred.

At first I thought the movement came from my feet, a trick of panic. Then my keyboard cable lifted off the carpet. My mouse cord followed. The power strip under my desk clicked. One black cable slid across the floor with the awful patience of a garden snake.

It wrapped around the leg of my chair.

I stepped back.

The cable tightened.

Frank said, “John, don’t fight the equipment.”

“Thank you, Frank. Very helpful.”

“I’m trying to save you paperwork.”

More cords moved under the surrounding desks. They slid out from docking stations, monitors, phones, speakers, chargers, and forgotten USB hubs. A nest of black and gray office veins spread across the carpet.

Carl opened the folder.

“You’re scheduled for transition.”

“I don’t want transition.”

“Nobody does.”

Marcy stepped into the aisle with a pair of scissors.

Not big scissors. Not impressive scissors. Little orange-handled desk scissors that could barely open a bag of pretzels.

Still, at that moment, they looked like Excalibur.

“John,” she said, “run.”

Carl turned toward her.

“Marcy, that is not a team-centered response.”

She cut the cord around my chair.

The office screamed.

Not the people.

The office.

The sound ripped through the ceiling vents, copier trays, and badge readers. Every phone rang at once. Every printer spit blank pages. The microwave in the breakroom started on its own.

Marcy grabbed my arm.

“Back stairs,” she said.

We ran.

I had not run in years without first consulting a cardiologist, a weather app, and at least three pieces of supportive compression fabric.

My knees gave me immediate legal notice.

We cut through the copy room. Paper flew around us in white bursts. Each sheet had the same message printed across it:

PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR WORKSTATION

Marcy kicked

open the stairwell door.

The stairs smelled like dust, paint, and old mop water. Every office building stairwell smells that way, even new ones. It must come from a factory. Eau de Evacuation Drill.

We took the steps down.

Behind us, the door slammed.

Something hit it from the other side.

Once.

Twice.

Then Carl’s voice came through the metal.

“John, I’m going to need you to circle back.”

Marcy pulled me down another flight.

“I hate that phrase,” I said.

“Everybody hates that phrase.”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I did.”

“You said don’t joke with the portal.”

“That was the warning.”

“Marcy, that was a fortune cookie.”

We reached the second-floor landing. The door opened before we touched it.

A woman stood there holding a clipboard. She wore a brown suit, shoulder pads, and glasses on a chain. Her hair had the solid architecture of 1987.

Marcy stopped.

“Oh no,” she said.

The woman looked at me.

“Do you have your time sheet?”

“I don’t know you.”

“She’s from Personnel,” Marcy whispered.

“HR?”

“No. Before HR.”

The woman frowned. “Human Resources is a fad.”

Behind her, the second floor stretched into a hallway I had never seen. Beige carpet. Wood paneling. Ashtrays mounted to the wall. A water fountain that looked capable of giving you tetanus. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, thick and stale.

Rows of people sat at metal desks, typing under green banker lamps. Their clothes came from every decade. Wide ties. Narrow ties. Shoulder pads. Short sleeves. Bad mustaches. Worse perms.

One man looked up from his typewriter.

His lower jaw was missing.

He waved.

“Keep moving,” Marcy said.

The Personnel woman blocked the door.

“No one leaves without a signed clearance form.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I’m fleeing.”

“That requires form PF-19B.”

Marcy lifted the scissors.

The woman looked offended.

“You wouldn’t.”

Marcy snipped the air.

The Personnel woman screamed and dissolved into a cloud of pink carbon-copy dust.

We ran again.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the exit door had a badge reader.

Because, of course it did.

I pushed the crash bar.

The door did not open.

A small screen above the reader lit up.

EXIT REQUEST SUBMITTED

Then:

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

Marcy swore.

It sounded earned.

The cables slid down the stairs above us. Slow. Patient. The first one curled over the railing.

My chest tightened. Sweat ran down my back. For one awful second I thought, This is how it gets me. Not with fangs. Not with claws. With a locked exit and a policy message.

Then I remembered something.

Years in a government building will teach you one truth: no system works all the way.

I looked at the badge reader.

Then at the crash bar.

Then at the small gray box above the door. The emergency release.

“Marcy,” I said, “do we have a work order open on this door?”

She smiled.

“Since 2021.”

I hit the emergency release.

The door clicked open.

We spilled into the employee parking lot behind the building.

Sunlight hit my face. Real sunlight. Hot pavement. Car exhaust. Cut grass. The smell of wet retention pond. I had never loved a retention pond before. It sat there green and scummy and glorious.

For three seconds, I felt free.

Then my phone buzzed.

I looked down.

New email.

From: Benefits
Subject: Exit Interview

I threw the phone into the retention pond.

It hit the water with a satisfying plunk.

Marcy nodded. “Good choice.”

Then my watch buzzed.

I took it off and handed it to her.

She threw it after the phone.

“You’re better at that than I expected,” I said.

“I was married twice.”

Fair.

We crossed the parking lot.

My truck sat near the back under an oak tree. I could see it. I could see the little dent in the bumper. The faded veteran plate. The coffee cup in the holder. Freedom with a check engine light.

We were almost there when the building doors opened.

Carl stepped out.

Behind him came the oatmeal cardigan woman.

Behind her came Frank, or something wearing Frank’s work shirt.

Then more.

People from every era of the building shuffled into the sunlight. Some shielded their eyes. Some had no eyes to shield. A man in a bow tie held a stack of green bar paper. A woman with half a face carried a three-ring binder. A security guard with a whistle stuck in his throat dragged one foot across the pavement.

They did not run.

They did not need to.

Carl cupped his hands around his mouth.

“John, this is not aligned with your development plan.”

I opened the truck door.

It locked.

I tried again.

Nothing.

The dashboard screen lit up inside the cab, though I had not started the engine.

A message appeared across the display.

REMOTE WORKSTATION AVAILABLE

“No,” I said.

The truck radio turned on.

Frank’s voice crackled through the speakers.

“John, buddy, listen. I get it. I tried to leave too.”

I backed away from the truck.

Marcy grabbed my arm.

“Don’t listen.”

Frank continued.

“At first you hate it. Then you adjust. You get used to logging in after the funeral. You get used to your hands going through the keyboard some mornings. You don’t need sleep anymore, which helps with email.”

Carl and the others kept coming.

The cords had followed them outside. Black cables slid over the pavement from the building doors, thick as vines, thin as worms, splitting and joining and splitting again.

I looked around for a weapon.

I found a travel mug.

That felt about right.

I threw it at Carl.

It bounced off his forehead.

He blinked.

“That was county property.”

“It was mine.”

“Did you purchase it through Procurement?”

I looked at Marcy. “I’m going to die here.”

“Not if they need you Monday.”

“That is not comfort.”

She looked past me toward the parking lot entrance.

A white sedan rolled in.

The driver leaned out.

He wore sunglasses and a polo shirt with a logo I didn’t recognize.

“You John Harris?” he yelled.

I raised a hand, because apparently panic does not erase manners.

“Who’s asking?”

He held up a tablet.

“Contracting office. I’m here for onboarding.”

The world paused.

Even Carl stopped walking.

The cables went still.

The oatmeal cardigan woman made a sound in her throat.

Marcy whispered, “Oh, that’s bad.”

The man in the sedan waved me over. “You coming or not? I bill in fifteen-minute increments.”

I looked at the undead employees. Then at the building. Then at Marcy.

“What happens if I go with him?”

She swallowed.

“You won’t be an employee anymore.”

“That sounds good.”

“You won’t have benefits.”

“I am currently being hunted by benefits.”

“You won’t have pension credit.”

“My pension is trying to outlive me.”

“You’ll probably sit at the same desk.”

“Of course I will.”

Carl stepped forward. “John, I encourage you to consider the total compensation package.”

The contracting officer laughed from the sedan.

“Total compensation package,” he said. “That’s adorable.”

The cables recoiled from his car.

Not much. Just enough.

I understood then.

The portal fed on employees. Badges. Benefits. Leave balances. Retirement dates. Sick time. Life insurance. The whole soft machine of keeping a person tethered to a place until he forgot he had ever wanted out.

But contractors were different.

Contractors were not food.

Contractors were invoices.

I walked to the sedan.

Carl’s face collapsed inward. For the first time, he looked dead.

“You can’t,” he said.

I opened the passenger door.

The contracting officer looked me over.

“You have your own laptop?”

“No.”

“Good. We’ll issue you one from 2018. Battery lasts eleven minutes. You’ll need three passwords and a blood sample.”

“Fine.”

“No paid holidays.”

“Fine.”

“No vacation.”

“Fine.”

“No retirement.”

I looked back at the building.

At the dead in their old shirts.

At the portal glowing on every window.

At Marcy standing in the parking lot with her orange scissors in one hand, tired and brave and doomed by payroll knowledge.

“No retirement was already on the table,” I said.

She gave me a small salute.

I got in.

The sedan pulled away.

In the side mirror, I watched the building shrink behind me. The undead staff stood in the parking lot under the Florida sun, their badges swinging, their folders held tight to their chests. Carl lifted one hand in a stiff little wave.

The portal had lost.

For now.

That night, I slept six straight hours for the first time in months.

No Teams chime.

No calendar invite.

No HR email.

No dead supervisor asking if I had a second.

I woke before dawn with a strange feeling in my chest. Hope, maybe. Or gas. At my age, there’s a distinction.

The house sat quiet. The dog snored. The coffee maker clicked. Outside, the sky had that bruised blue look it gets before the sun decides whether the day deserves any effort.

I walked into the kitchen barefoot and started coffee.

My new laptop sat on the table.

I had not put it there.

It opened by itself.

The screen glowed.

A login page appeared.

Then a message.

WELCOME, JOHN C. HARRIS
VENDOR STATUS: ACTIVE
ASSIGNMENT: ONE COUNTY FUTURE INITIATIVE
WORK LOCATION: SAME DESK
HOURLY RATE: APPROVED
BENEFITS: NONE

I stared at it.

The coffee maker hissed behind me.

The dog lifted his head, farted, and went back to sleep.

The laptop chimed.

A calendar invite appeared.

Subject: Contractor Orientation
Organizer: Frank Davenport
Time: 7:00 a.m.

I clicked Decline.

The screen blinked.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

I took a sip of coffee.

Hot. Black. Bitter.

Then I opened Teams.

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I was eleven when Phantom of the Paradise came and went, which means I missed it the first time as almost everyone else did. It bombed in most of the country. It played for about a year straight in Winnipeg, which is one of those facts that sounds made up and isn’t. By the time I caught up with it, I already had a bass in my hands and a head full of KISS, and the movie landed differently. It looked like something I was trying to describe to my bandmates and couldn’t.

Here is the thing people get wrong about calling this a guilty pleasure. There is nothing to feel guilty about. Brian De Palma made a rock horror musical in 1974 that predicted the next ten years of the record business, and the record business repaid him by ignoring it. Paul Williams wrote the songs and played Swan, the producer who signs talent to contracts written in blood. Williams was a soft-spoken guy who wrote hits for the Carpenters, and here he is playing the devil as a music executive. That casting alone should have won something.

The plot borrows from Faust, from Phantom of the Opera, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it does not pretend otherwise. Winslow Leach writes a cantata. Swan steals it. Winslow gets framed, disfigured in a record press, and comes back masked and vengeful to haunt the concert hall Swan built. Along the way you get Beef, the glam-rock frontman played by Gerrit Graham, who steals every scene he stands in. You get Jessica Harper as Phoenix, the singer worth all the trouble. You get a stage show that stages a murder as entertainment and asks the crowd to cheer, which the crowd does.

That last part is why the movie holds up. De Palma was not just making something loud and strange. He was pointing at the audience. He built a story about a man who sells his voice and his soul to a producer, then set it inside a spectacle that turns real death into a number, and he did it a full year before Rocky Horror made midnight musicals a going concern. The movie knew what fame was going to cost and said so out loud while wearing a cape.

I have watched grown men who love music dismiss this thing because it looks garish. Of course it looks garish. It is about an industry that dresses violence up in sequins and sells tickets. The look is the argument. When Beef gets electrocuted on stage, and the crowd assumes it is part of the act, you are watching a filmmaker tell you exactly what he thinks of the machine, and he is right.

The soundtrack got nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song Score. It lost. Paul Williams kept working, KISS put on the makeup and sold out arenas, and the movie that got there first sat in the cult bin for decades waiting for people to notice.

So call it what you want. I have stopped using the phrase guilty pleasure for it. A movie that names the con while performing the con, and does it with tunes you can actually hum, is not a pleasure you apologize for. It is one you defend.

Watch it once with the sound up. Then try to name a rock movie from the seventies that was smarter about what was coming. I will wait.

The rain started at four and by nine it had found every soft place in the house. It came down inside the walls of the back bedroom, behind the plaster, running along the studs where the flashing had rotted out years before Dale Merrick ever signed the papers. He could hear it moving in there. A wet sliding, board to board, working its way down.

He told himself it was water. Water was the honest explanation, and Dale had learned to want honest explanations after the divorce, after the lawyer, after the year that took his marriage and his savings and left him a house he could afford only because no one else in the county would touch it.

Nadine was seven. She had the small room at the back because she liked the window, the one that looked out over the tree line. She said you could watch the woods breathe. Dale never corrected her. Some of the things a child says are truer than a grown man wants them to be, and he had stopped arguing.

She called him a little before nine. Not a scream. A flat voice, the one she used when she was working hard to make something sound like nothing.

“Daddy. There’s a girl at my window.”

He was down the hall before he finished hearing it.

The room was dark except for the mushroom nightlight throwing weak orange across the floor. Nadine sat up with the blanket to her chin and her eyes on the glass, and Dale followed them and felt his body go cold from the feet up.

Something stood at the window.

The window was on the second floor. There was nothing out there to stand on but eleven feet of falling rain and then the roots of the pines. And there was a girl pressed against it anyway, close, her face nearly to the pane, one hand flat on the glass.

She wore a dress that had been white a long time ago, high at the collar, a row of small buttons down the front. The rain had soaked it black and something else had soaked it darker, blooming out from the seams and the underarms and the hollow of the throat. Her hair hung straight and heavy on both sides, parted so it covered her eyes and left only the lower half of her face.

The lower half was where the trouble was.

The skin of her jaw had split. Not torn, split, the way skin splits when the thing under it swells past what skin allows, and the edges of the splits had gone hard and gray and curled back, and in the trenches between them the flesh was the wet pink of something turned inside out. Her lips had parted at the corners and kept parting. The tears ran up into her cheeks in clean seams, and the seams did not bleed. They wept a slow clear fluid that beaded and ran and left a shine. When she breathed, and she breathed, the whole ruined lower face pulled tight and slack, tight and slack, and each time it went slack he could see the muscle working under the open places, red cords sliding over each other, wet and deliberate.

She pressed her hand harder to the glass.

The hand had too many joints. Each finger carried an extra knuckle, and the extra knuckle let the fingers fold backward at the middle so the tips lay flat against the pane while the rest of the hand stood up off it, a spider going down on its legs. The pads of the fingers were black and split like the jaw, and where they touched the glass they left prints, dark, glistening, spreading at the edges. The nails had lifted. He could see the pale beds beneath them, and he could see that beneath the beds there was movement, a small crawling fullness, as if the girl were packed with something that had run out of room.

Nadine had gone quiet. When Dale looked, his daughter was not watching the window anymore. She was watching him, to see what a father did about a thing like this.

“Get behind me,” he said.

He made himself cross the room. Every animal part of him wanted the truck and the road and eleven miles of dark between them and this, but the road was rain and mud and he was not sure the thing at the glass would stay at the glass once his back was turned. So he crossed to the window and he looked, and through the running water her one visible eye found him under the curtain of hair.

The eye was clean. That was what took the floor out from under him. All that ruin, the split jaw, the seeping seams, the fingers folding the wrong way, and set into the middle of it was an ordinary brown eye, a child’s eye, wet and terrified, looking out of the wreckage the way a person looks out of a car going into deep water.

Her torn mouth moved. Through the glass and the rain he heard it, small and clear, pitched exactly like his daughter’s.

“Let me in. I’m so cold.”

His hand was on the latch.

He looked down and his own fingers had turned the brass lever halfway and he did not remember deciding to. He pulled the hand back like it belonged to someone else and flattened it on the sash and held the window shut. On the other side the girl tipped her head, and where her neck bent the skin gave along a fold, and the fold opened, and inside the fold, packed in tight, was a mass of something soft and gray and finely veined, the underside of a mushroom, and it flexed once in the wet before the skin closed over it again.

“You know me,” she said. “You knew me. Let me in.”

“I don’t know you,” Dale said. His voice came apart in the middle.

“You will.”

She smiled.

The seams at the corners of her mouth ran up her face and split wider as the smile spread, the flesh parting in long clean lines all the way to the hinges of her jaw, and the jaw dropped, and it kept dropping, lower than a jaw is hung to go, and inside there were teeth. Rows of them. Small, white, a child’s baby teeth, and behind that row another row, and behind that another, going back and down a throat that had teeth where a throat has none, hundreds of them set in wet red gum, all of them turned outward, all of them toward him. The smell came through the shut window, standing water and turned meat and under it something floral gone sour, violets left to rot in the vase.

Behind him Nadine said, flat and careful, “Daddy, she’s the girl in the picture.”

He did not turn. “What picture, baby?”

“In the wall. There’s a hole behind the closet. There’s a box.”

She had found the crawl space he sealed the day they moved in. Four screws and a sheet of plywood, because a child does not need a hole in her wall. She had worked one corner loose over the summer the way children do, patient past all reason, and inside was a shoebox, and inside the box a photograph, a girl in a white dress at the edge of the trees, and writing on the back. A year. A name.

“It says 1961,” Nadine said. “It says her name. It’s my name too. It says Nadine.”

At the window the thing set its second hand to the glass beside the first. Both palms now, all those folded fingers spread, and it leaned its weight in. The old glass bowed. Dale saw the putty crack in the corners and heard the pane give a thin rising note as it flexed toward the room, and he understood that a single sheet of glass was the only thing between his daughter and eleven feet of dark and the mouth that opened past the edges of its own face.

He grabbed Nadine off the bed. Got her under one arm and backed toward the door, and the girl at the window watched him go with her head cocked and her weeping seams shining in the orange light, and she said the thing he was still trying to say three days later when they found what was left of him.

“You already let me in. I came down through the walls all summer, one board at a time, in the water. I’ve been under your house and inside your house and in the space behind your daughter’s clothes. This is the last window. I’m only knocking to be kind.”

The glass did not break.

It gave.

He saw it in the half second before he got the door shut. The pane lost its hardness the way fat loses its hardness in a warm hand, going soft and slow and clear, and her fingers pushed into it, not through it, into it, sinking to the second knuckle in the surface of the window, and the whole sheet took the shape of her hands and pulled her in after them, and where she passed the glass sealed shut behind her without a mark, and she was standing in the room, dripping, small, her bare feet on the crushed nightlight, that one clean eye swinging around to find them.

“There you are,” she said.

Dale got as far as the kitchen.

He put Nadine down and shoved her at the back door and told her to run to the truck, and the child ran, and that was the last order his body followed as his own. Because the girl came into the kitchen behind him without hurry, and she reached up with one of those wrong hands and took him by the wrist, and the fingers folded around his arm the wrong way, all the way around, past where a hand should close, and where she gripped him his skin went cold, and then the cold went in.

It ran up the arm. He watched it move. Under the skin of his forearm the muscle began to shift, the red cords loosening from the bone and sliding, rearranging, and the skin split along the top the way hers had split, clean, gray at the edges, and the split did not bleed. It wept. His hand at the end of the arm was already changing, the knuckles doubling, a fresh joint rising under the skin of each finger with a small wet click he felt in his teeth, and the fingers bent back on themselves and lay flat and easy against the counter, spider on its legs.

He tried to scream and his jaw came unhinged. He felt it drop past where it was hung, felt the seams tear up his cheeks in two clean lines, felt his lips part at the corners and keep parting, and inside his own mouth he felt new teeth push up through the gum in rows, small and white and turned outward, more of them and then more, packing back into a throat that made room by growing what it needed. His hair, what little a fifty-year-old man keeps, poured down over his face all at once, black with a wet that came from inside him, and it hung straight on both sides and curtained his eyes, and behind the curtain his eyes, both of them, stayed exactly as they were. Brown. Clear. His own. Watching out of all of it, terrified, while the rest of him became a thing that opened doors from the outside.

The girl stood beside him and held his rearranged hand in hers, palm to folded palm, and looked up at what he was now with something that on a whole face would have been tenderness.

“Now you’ll want to be let in too,” she said. “That’s the worst part. You’ll stand at the glass and you’ll be so cold and you’ll watch them not open it, and you’ll understand exactly why they can’t, and you’ll knock anyway. Everyone here knocks. There’s a whole yard of us at the tree line, knocking, all polite.”

Nadine lived. No one could account for it. They found her locked inside the truck, dry in all that rain, too small to have reached the locks, a shoebox in her lap. She did not speak for a long time. When she finally did, years on, to a woman paid to listen, she said only that she looked back once from the truck and saw two of them standing in the orange light of the kitchen. Two now. Matching white dresses, though one of them had been her father an hour before and wore the dress the way a big man wears a small thing, seams open, jaw hung wrong, hair down over an ordinary set of eyes. They were holding hands. They turned together and looked at her through the kitchen window, both faces ruined, both pairs of eyes clean and brown and begging, and she understood that they were not angry with her.

They only wanted to know why she got to be on the outside.

The house is still out there. The county holds it for back taxes and cannot sell it. Every so often someone comes down the dirt road faster than they went up, pale, unwilling to say much, only that there was a face at the upstairs window. A girl. That she put her hand to the glass and left a dark print that spread. That the skin of her was not right, that the mouth went too far, that the smell reached them from behind sealed glass.

And that the thing they could not shake, standing out there in the rain with an animal telling them to run, was how badly some quiet part of them had wanted to reach up and open the window.

Just to get her out of the cold.

A guy at the gym told me he’s got four thousand followers on Instagram. Said it the way you’d announce a promotion. I nodded, said that’s great, and thought about how many of those four thousand people are seeing anything he posts.

Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred. Maybe.

I didn’t say that part out loud because he seemed happy and I try not to ruin people’s mornings before I’ve had my coffee. But it’s true, and it’s true for me too, and it’s true for every one of you sitting there watching your subscriber count like it’s the Dow Jones.

Here’s the thing nobody explains when you sign up for any of this. Facebook and Instagram don’t show your posts to your followers. They show your posts to a sample of your followers, decide how that sample reacts, and then either give you more people or throw your post in a drawer. The going rate on Facebook right now is somewhere around two to six percent of your followers actually seeing a given post. Instagram runs a little better, call it four to eight percent. So if you’ve got five thousand followers, congratulations, you’ve got an audience of a few hundred people who happen to be looking at the right moment, and the other forty five hundred are names on a list that means less every year.

I grew up in a world where a follower meant something. You followed the guy in front of you at the drive-in, and he knew you were there because your headlights were up his tailpipe. Now a follower is a person who clicked a button once in 2022 and hasn’t thought about you since. The number looks the same on the screen whether it’s real or not. That’s the whole con.

And it gets better, because the platforms can’t even agree on what counts as somebody actually reading your stuff.

Medium, God bless them, at least tries. If you write something on Medium, a person has to stick around for about thirty seconds before Medium counts it as a “read” instead of a “view.” Thirty seconds isn’t a high bar. My dog Gus can hold a stare for thirty seconds if there’s bacon involved. But at least it’s a bar. Somebody has to prove they gave a damn before Medium hands you credit.

Substack doesn’t bother. A view happens the moment the page loads. You could open the email, glance at the headline, get distracted by your wife asking if you took the trash out, and never come back, and Substack still marks it down as a view. I’ve been publishing there long enough to know that a chunk of my “views” are people who opened it in a tab and let it die a slow death next to eleven other tabs they’ll never look at again.

So you’ve got two platforms, both telling you they measure readership, and they’re measuring two completely different things. One wants thirty seconds of your attention before it’ll vouch for you. The other just wants you to show up. Neither number tells you whether the writing worked. Neither number tells you whether a single word landed. They tell you whether a screen lit up.

I’d take honesty over comfort here. If Substack made me earn a “read” the way Medium does, my numbers would drop, and I’d rather know the real ones. I’ve got roughly 190 people on my Kit list. I’ll take those 190 over four thousand ghosts every single time, because at minimum I know they signed up on purpose and haven’t left yet. That’s a lower bar than “read for thirty seconds,” and even that feels like more than what a follower count gives you.

Now let’s talk about book reviews, because this is where it stops being annoying and starts being genuinely unfair.

If you buy a book on Amazon and love it, odds are you don’t leave a review. Nobody does. The numbers run anywhere from one to seven percent of buyers, depending on which study you trust, and the most careful one I found put the average around one and a half percent. Which means if my book “Not Done Yet” has twenty reviews, I didn’t sell twenty copies. I sold somewhere between three hundred and two thousand, and the overwhelming majority of those readers finished the book, maybe liked it, and went back to their day without saying a word.

Fine. People are busy. I get it. Here’s the part that’ll make your blood pressure climb a little. Amazon’s search algorithm uses your review count and rating to decide whether to show your book to anybody new. It’s baked into the ranking. So the tiny sliver of readers, the one to two percent who actually bother to type something out, aren’t just leaving their opinion. They’re the ones deciding whether the other ninety eight percent of potential readers ever see the book exist in the first place.

You are depending on the quietest possible group of people to do the loudest possible job. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the whole system. And there’s no way to opt out of it short of not selling books on Amazon, which is not currently on my agenda.

So where does that leave a guy who just wants to write something honest and have people actually see it?

Ignore the follower count. It was never measuring what you thought it was measuring. Pay attention to views if that’s all a platform gives you, but know it’s the loosest kind of proof there is. If a platform gives you something closer to a real read, thirty seconds, a finished article, a review somebody typed out with their thumbs at eleven at night, treat that like gold, because it cost the reader something to give it to you.

And if you’re an author sweating over why your review count looks thin, stop apologizing for asking people to leave one. You’re not being pushy. You’re asking the one to two percent of people willing to talk to do a favor for the other ninety eight percent who’ll never know they needed it.

The numbers on the screen were never the point. They just make good bar bragging, right up until somebody at the gym does the math on you.

Trust the people who showed up on purpose.

https://proudboomerwellness.kit.com/profile

I got the email Tuesday morning. One unsubscribe from the newsletter.

That’s it. No reason given, no exit survey, no “it’s not you, it’s me.” Just a little notification that somebody out there decided they’d had enough of me and clicked the button.

You’d think after sixty-two years on this planet, ten years in the Navy, and a total thyroidectomy, I’d have developed a thicker skin about one stranger opting out of my emails. You’d be wrong. I have spent actual time, time I will never get back, trying to figure out which sentence did it.

Was it the piece on grip strength? The one about why your knees aren’t actually “bad,” they’re just untrained? Did I say something about creatine that set off a chain reaction in someone’s group chat? I’ll never know. That’s the part that gets me. It’s not the rejection; I can handle rejection. I’ve been married long enough to know what that looks like up close. It’s the not knowing. My brain wants a reason the way Gus wants a reason every time the doorbell rings. There isn’t one. He just barks anyway.

Here’s my working theory, and I want to be clear this is pure speculation with zero evidence behind it.

I think it was a vegan.

I think I said something about protein intake, probably in the context of building muscle after fifty, and somewhere out there a person who has built their entire identity around lentils took it personally and hit unsubscribe like it was a moral stand. I have no proof. I’m not going to dig through my analytics to find proof. But it feels right. It has the shape of truth.

The thing is, I’m not writing this because I’m wounded. I’m writing it because the whole reaction is ridiculous, and I know it is while I’m having it. I run a newsletter with five paying subscribers. Five. I could probably name all five of them if you gave me a minute and a cup of coffee. Losing a free subscriber from a list that size is like a restaurant with four tables noticing one person didn’t finish their soup. It doesn’t move any needle. There is no needle. And yet there I was, scrolling back through old posts looking for the offending paragraph like a man going through old text messages trying to figure out when exactly the relationship went sideways.

This is what happens when you write things and put them out into the world expecting people to read them and, more dangerously, expecting them to stick around. You start keeping score in a game where the scoreboard doesn’t actually matter. I didn’t start this newsletter to build an audience that agrees with everything I say. I started it because I had things to say about getting older, staying strong, and not quietly fading into the recliner the way our culture seems to expect once you hit fifty. If everyone who reads it agreed with everything I wrote, I’d be doing something wrong. Agreement across the board usually means you’re not saying anything worth disagreeing with.

I think about Marcus Aurelius sometimes when this stuff creeps in, which probably sounds like I’m reaching for gravitas I haven’t earned, but bear with me. The man ran an empire and still found time to remind himself, in his own private notebook, that other people’s opinions of him weren’t his business to manage. He wasn’t writing for an audience. He was writing to stay sane in a job that would have broken most men. I’m not running an empire. I’m running a Substack with a dog who sheds on everything I own. But the principle holds. You can’t control what lands and what doesn’t. You can only control whether you said the true thing the way you meant to say it.

And here’s where I have to be honest with myself, because that’s the whole point of this exercise. Even knowing all of that, even knowing the math doesn’t matter and the scoreboard is fake, I still wanted to know. I still want to know. If that unsubscribed person is reading this right now, which they’re obviously not, because they unsubscribed, I’d genuinely like to buy them a coffee and ask what set them off. Not to change anything. Not to apologize. Just out of curiosity. What’s the line that finally did it? Was it really protein? Did I insult your treadmill? Did I make a Navy joke that landed wrong?

I’m not going to find out. That’s fine. I’ve made my peace with it somewhere between writing the second paragraph of this piece and now. The work doesn’t change. I’m still going to write about lifting heavy things after fifty, about why “I’m too old for that” is usually a lie you tell yourself to avoid the discomfort of being bad at something new, about the slow, unglamorous process of staying capable as your body changes whether you cooperate with it or not. Somebody is going to disagree with all of it eventually. Somebody already did, hard enough to click a button over it.

I’d just like to know which sentence it was. That’s all. I’m not asking for an apology. I’m asking for closure, and possibly a little material.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to unsubscribe from me, I genuinely don't know either. But if you're still here, you might as well stick around. Sign up for the free newsletter at https://proudboomerwellness.kit.com/profile, or check out Not Done Yet at ProudBoomerBooks.com if you want the long-form version of all this.

Mama said the doll was mine now, that’s why I held her.

Her name is Birdie. She came up out of the floor the same night the water did, and I have learned that you do not ask things that come up out of the floor where they have been. You hold them. You let them get warm against your front, where the warmth of you lives, and you say nice things in a low voice so they stay calm.

Birdie likes my voice. I can tell because when I sing, she stops moving her little hands.

The house went under in the spring. Not all at once. The yard went first, then the porch, then the bottom step, and Mama kept saying the words people say, the men are coming, the water will turn, just stay up high with me, baby. We went up high. We went to the second floor and then to the part above the second floor that does not have a name, the part with the slanted boards and the nails coming through, and we waited for the men.

The men did not come.

But the water did.

It came up through the boards like it was looking for us. It came up brown and slow, and it smelled like “insides”, and Birdie was in it, floating, her one painted eye open and her other eye gone, and she lifted her arms to me the way babies do. So I took her.

You take a baby that lifts its arms. Everybody knows that.

She was cold for about an hour. Then she was the same as me. Then she was warmer than me, and I understood that the warm was not coming from the room, because the room had no warm left in it. The warm was coming out of me and going into her. I could feel it leave through my front, a slow pull, the way the bath drains when you lie still and let it. I told myself it was love.

When you are small, you call a lot of things love that you don’t understand.

Mama stopped talking on the third day. She did not stop being there. She just went quiet and let her mouth hang, and her skin went the gray that fruit goes, and I held Birdie up so Mama could see her, because I thought it might help. It did not help Mama. It helped Birdie. Birdie drank the looking. I do not know another way to say it. Birdie took the part of Mama that used to live behind her eyes and Mama got smoother after that, smoother and stiller, like a photograph of herself.

I am the only warm thing left, so I am careful with it.

I have learned what Birdie is. She is not a doll the way you think of a doll. A doll is empty and stays empty. Birdie is empty the way a stomach is empty, which is to say she is asking, all the time, in a small voice under the floor. She asks and I give. I gave her my warm first because I had plenty. Then I gave her the feeling in my toes. Then the feeling in my left arm, the one that holds her, which is why I do not set her down. If I set her down she would have to find the warm somewhere else and there is nowhere else. Just Mama, who is finished. Just me.

Last night, something underneath my skin came loose.

I felt it travel. It went from the soft place under my jaw, down through my neck, into my chest, and it gathered there and then it went out my front and into Birdie, and Birdie’s painted mouth, which has always been only a curve of red, opened. Not wide. Just enough to be a mouth and not a painting of one. Inside it was the brown of the water. She did not bite. She is past biting. She just opened so I would understand that she can, and then she closed again and pretended to be cloth.

I sang to her after that for a long time.

This morning I caught my reflection in the part of the water that has gone still in the stairwell, the part that has stopped looking for us. My face is changing. My cheeks are getting the smooth that Mama got. My eyes are getting the painted look, the look of an eye that has been drawn on and not grown. And Birdie, when I hold her up next to my face, Birdie is getting fuller. Pinker. There is a softness coming into her that used to be in me.

We are trading places. That is the thing she came up out of the floor to do. One of us has to be the warm one and one of us has to be the held one, and she has been held long enough, and I have been warm long enough, and the water is not going to turn, and the men are not coming, and there is no way out of here.

Every house on this row has a child in the high part holding something that used to be a child. I know because at night, when the water is still, I can hear them singing too. We are all keeping our dolls calm. We are all running low.

When I am cloth, and she is the one holding me, I hope whoever finds us up here is able to lift her arms when I reach.

You take a baby that lifts its arms.

Everybody knows that.