CW: messy personal history with a transparently thin veneer of pretense 

To those subscribers who are family members: First, thank you for supporting my writing. Second, skip this one. 

I killed a girl with a shovel when I was 17: swung it into her contoured, anorexic face hard enough to cessate vital functions. My sister was there. She helped – the shovel was her idea. You use the shovel for the kill, and you use it to hide the body afterwards, so it’s multipurpose. It takes a long-ass time to dig a grave. They don’t show you that in Evil Dead 2. We buried the girl in the farm fields of Steinenbronn, Stuttgart, Germany. Then, we walked into the Black Forest and followed the Reichenbach to Liechtenstein. 

It was midday in the summer. 

“So,” she asked me, “you want to be my little brother?” I nodded. I smiled because I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I wanted to cry and I was too happy to cry. 

We weren’t anywhere near Switzerland, we were in her bedroom – an A-frame attic that smelled like timber. 

Listen, I know. Toni Morrison once said, in her Writing class at Princeton University, “I don’t want to hear about your little life.” She meant to discouraged amateur writers from recording memoirs, to examine human experience beyond their own bubbles. I’ve looked back at my two personal essays (My Familiar, Quitting) and felt her advice hard. These are my worst works. I am more embarrassed of them than of my scant archive of fanfiction. But I refuse to take them down, and I refuse to stop writing this, because little as it may be, this is my life, and these events are huge to me right now, at 25. Maybe it’s navel-gazing, maybe it’s boring. Maybe you’re already glazing your eyes and planning how to skim the rest of this. It’s your prerogative, you do whatever you want. 

But I also know this. When I’m 35, and I look back at this piece, I’ll probably wonder why, if I knew Morrison’s advice, I chose not to take it. And to my 35-year old self, I ask if you remember how good it felt to get it out. 

(Also, if by some miracle, this ages well for ten years, I’ll add that I wouldn’t be writing this if not for the two previous runs. You remember roguelikes, old man? It’s like that.)

– 

The guilt I feel is for giving the girl a death and a burial that I wouldn’t want. I don’t care how I go, but the perfect burial would be as a sacrifice to the abyss. I’m too small to make a proper whale fall, but it’s the thought that counts. Oh, imagine a whale fall! 

Picture this: you are a marine scavenger on the monochromatic dunes at the bottom of a deep, vast sea, where the environment is hostile and barren, and you rely completely on marine snow for your nutrients: flakes of decomposing matter that trickle down from the world of light. You’re never full, you’re always looking for your next scrap of food. And you see the carcass of a whale fall in front of you. 

The whale’s body will keep in the icy water for decades – even a century. It is enormous. It is truly enough food. You would feel primal comfort and satisfaction in knowing that the search is over, for you, forever. It’s gotta be nice. Every wanderer in the deep blue wastes who sees it on the horizon, felt the tremor of it landing through the ground and the current, is compelled: it’s an oasis. A feast. 

Charles Darwin said in The Descent of Man that animals didn’t feel anything more than pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness. Since then, a number of studies have been done that suggest animal emotions are far more complex. 

But, just for fun, let’s say all those complex emotions we see in animals could be explained as byproducts of their biological drives and anthropomorphizing on our part. Domesticated animals react to distress because they’ve evolved to be in tune with human beings. Chimpanzees experience empathy because it is beneficial for continuing their species if they don’t kill their own babies.

Let’s say there is a ‘lower’ consciousness. For fun, I’ll concede that what a deep-sea scavenger feels when they’re hungry is pain and sadness. And I’ll even concede that what a deep-sea scavenger feels when they’re sated with delicious whale meat is pleasure and happiness. 

But what does a deep-sea scavenger feel when they’re moving across the sand to reach the whale carcass in the distance, knowing viscerally that salvation is at hand? They aren’t happy, because they aren’t there yet, but they aren’t sad, because they know it’s nearly over. Do they feel nothing besides a drive to move forward, indistinguishale from an electric charge? 

– 

For a long time, I was the Victor Frankenstein to my sister’s cheery William Frankenstein. Prematurely macabre and moody, I had (still do) a short tolerance for many aspects of life: 

Bright light, the outdoors, group activities, tradition, prescribed learning, transit, large stores, mornings, loud sounds, crowds, listening to people I dislike, not getting to talk, most holidays, posing for photos, following instructions, waiting in line, understanding why people do things, putting aside my feelings, spontaneity, physical discomfort, psychological discomfort, not getting attention, social graces, and, of course, ‘broadening my horizons’. 

My sister, on the other hand, was a disco ball. “I’m having a good time,” she’d say after I asked if anyone else wanted to go home, “I like what we’re doing.”

“My legs hurt and I’m tired of walking.” - “I could walk forever! I’m having fun!”

I have lots of memories like that.

“No, I want to stay home.” – “I’ll go!”

“I feel depressed.” – “I’m doing great today!”

“I hate moving.” – “I think it’s like an adventure!”

She’ll tell you nothing bad ever happened in her childhood. Maybe that’s true.

We’re built by circumstance. I’m secretly a cheery, loving, sweet person. I have an incredible capacity for enthusiasm. I’m a humanist. I love people, especially the ones who don’t make any sense to me. I make it my mission to understand. If I can help, I do. My spare room is yours and my heart is on my sleeve. So, in another life, I might be that kind of person, who cannot hear someone kvetch without kvelling. Who tries to brighten every room. I could’ve been the sunny one. In this life, my poetic earnest never measured up to my sister’s ceaseless joy. 

She was also built by circumstance. What 22-month old is ready for the responsibility of rearing a child? My whole life, she was there for me while our parents were busy. Judge her fairly. She deserved a childhood too, and instead, she had to keep everything together for the rest of us. Comfort. Soothe. Entertain. Amuse. She tells people we were homeschooled to explain why we’re so weird. She says the words ‘show pony’ about us. The way I see that is, it was a privilege to be the black cloud. The disquieting, irritating, frightening, derisive attitude that I cultivated was only allowed because my sister smoothed things over right away. 

We were close enough in age to be mistaken as twins and unmistakable as siblings. Every Christian holiday came with matching outfits for photo-ops. Our names were very similar. As little kids, we used to argue about who got to ‘have’ which hobbies. We couldn’t both knit, one of us had to crochet. It didn’t really change when we became edgy teenagers. She channeled the spirit of the sixties, and I called on the second-to-last turn of the century. I wrote short stories about serial killers living in moldy apartments. She made bright, colorful pop art prints of Jean Basquiat and Jimi Hendrix. And so we shaped each other with our contrasts.

– 

Once it reaches the end of the line, the whale fall is gradually swarmed. Hagfish corkscrew into the pale white meat. Sleeper sharks follow them to clean the corpse to the bone. Then, repurposing the bones, come the worms, molluscs, the deep sea octopusses, the crustaceans: they burrow into the skeleton to suck out the marrow and subsist off of the whale’s leftover blubber. Slowly but surely, the scavengers dissolve the whale fall into sand and fragments of bone, which get passed down to chemosynthetic microbial life forms that can transform the resulting sulfur into food and sulfoids. The surrounding dirt absorbs the sulfoids, which is enjoyed by worms and clams and mussels. 

What comes next? This 2014 scientific journal suggests that whale falls are a ‘hotspot’ for something called adaptive radiation. This refers to organisms evolving at a rapid pace due to changes in their environment, like Darwin’s Finches in the Galapagos. The article records a vast array of microbial fauna found in fossilized whale falls, saying there are ‘many new species and evolutionary novelties.’ 

Unusual survival strategies are common in the abyssal zone. In that way (looking at you, Darwin), people are no different from any other form of life on the planet. We try to live; we can’t help it. We’re hardwired to believe it’s of the utmost importance. Life learns to survive off of scraps from the world above. Life learns to make its own food. Its own light. 

And it’s horrifying. Disgusting. True, the rotting corpse of the whale has a tragic, obscure beauty: its spine like the winding road of a village built on the fossil of a dinosaur, always lit by those bright white deep-sea explorer lights. And yet, whales, as intelligent mammals, remind us of ourselves. So then there’s that gastrointestinal reaction to death. It is uncomfortable. 

As Bushwick Bill once said: ‘Death is uninvited, it’s also at a shitty time.’ 

– 

“I just feel like my daughter is dead,” my mom said on the subject of abruptly having a son, shortly after the kill, “I feel like I’m grieving.” This was how she ought to feel; I did kill her daughter, buried her in a field, and fled into the forest. Then arrived at her doorstep, a stranger, an effeminate boy. It didn’t change the grief that her daughter had been miserable. Try telling the court, ‘I killed her because she didn’t want to live!’

It may not be murder, but it is still killing. 

Murder and killing seem like synonyms, but they aren’t. Murder is intentional, unlawful, and usually motivated – by jealousy, for instance. Killing is an act that can be murder. A square is always a rectangle but all rectangles are not squares. A husband plans, then kills his wife because she cheated on him: murder. A husband kills his wife by backing out of the driveway without looking: killing. Technically manslaughter. So, did I murder that girl, or did I kill her? 

I didn’t mean to hurt anybody although I knew it was a possibility. One of my closest friends in high school had killed his parents’ daughter, and his parents never forgave him. My cousin also killed their parents’ daughter, and I had heard how my parents talked about it, scandalized that they had been given a shovel before they were 18. It was an expensive shovel, the cost of a college semester, which was incidentally how my cousin had funded the crime – by using money meant for higher education – and this was perhaps the more scandalous element of the story. 

However, I didn’t know what I was doing. It may sound preposterous that while I was killing and burying a girl in a field in rural Germany, that even while I dug a grave for hours and hours, I wasn’t conscious, but it’s true. From my perspective, I was trying on boy outfits in the mirror, doing push ups to the version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home from Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb) (1964), and going out with girls – typical man stuff. 

And yet, in the real world, I was bludgeoning the world’s most miserable teenage girl to death with a shovel and taking her place. But like I say, I didn’t know what I was doing – I thought I was putting on a sweater over a binder. 

– 

I love death. In theory. The whalefall is the most spectacular version of it, in my opinion. It’s rare that death nourishes. All those adaptations blooming on the skeleton, microscopic creatures learning to eat sulfur, worms enjoying the excretions of the feeders of decomposition: it’s the circle of life. 

My own death is going to be a lot less wonderful. I try to see it from a French angle: it’s the biggest orgasm, it’s the final rest, it’s the real relief. “That’s a nice way to look at it,” my partner remarks from the driver’s seat of our car, on our way to buy costumes for a murder mystery party. “But I know for sure what happens when you die – nothing. So death means it's over. No more Silent Hill… no more Marvin.” I’m honored to be in the same sentence as Silent Hill.

They’re a staunch and well-reasoned materialist. We came across the topic of death because I was talking about Breaking Bad, as I constantly do. I said that Walter White keeping Krazy-8 locked up in the basement instead of killing him was extremely inhumane. I say that I would rather be killed swiftly than kept a prisoner. They aren’t sure. “What kind of life would that be?” I ask. 

“I don’t know,” they say, “but I know death is nothing.” 

When I think about them dying, and not me, it doesn’t seem like a big, comfortable sleep. It’s the scariest thing I can imagine. 

– 

I should feel remorse for killing that girl. I know that lacking empathy is undesirable – I know that death is nothing – I know that whether it was a kill or a murder or a suicide, it took a daughter. And yet, I don’t feel bad. I would feel as bad for changing my shirt in the middle of a party. A slight faux pas, maybe, a little embarrassing (what was so wrong with the shirt?) but the kind of thing you could forget if no one brought it up again. 

No remorse. Very little feeling. Only I did get a taste for blood and I still like to dabble, on occasion. For instance, sometimes I’ll tell my sister that I was unhappy as a child. Her jaw will drop six stories, her eyes will blow wide, and she’ll throw her hands down at her sides and say, “really?!” 

And I will say “yes, really,” twisting the knife so I can feel threads of sinew snap against the blade. 

Or for another example, sometimes I’ll tear out and throw away every unsightly page in my notebook. This is a sadistic methodology, sort of like pulling insects apart. Sometimes I’ll cut off all my hair. A brute style. 

But it’s never the same. After you kill yourself once, it’s basically impossible to do it again. 

No, instead of being the hauntingly beautiful, nourishing corpse, I’m the rapidly adapting microbial life forms sucking out its marrow. The body I left behind in a field in Steinenbronn has sustained me all these years. It’s given me the foundation to begin an incredible evolutionary process of my own. Flesh begetting flesh, flesh begetting the removal of flesh. A chemical diet. Alone at the bottom of the big blue sea, with all the other freaks and our unusual survival strategies. 

Put it this way. If an abyssal crustacean could bring down a whale, wouldn’t it? 

At its strongest, the virus took the form of a swarm of people: women. All naked. Not all, but many, white blondes with big breasts. Some with anthropomorphic features, like cat ears and bunny tails. The only gaps in the crowd were circles formed around the cautious steps of scattered giantesses, ad hoc captains leading the charge. A diversity of skin color, minus the many blondes: greens, pinks, purples, browns.

Many did not resemble a person. They had doll-like or monstrous faces, sharp teeth souring rows of perfect smiles. Tusks, horns, gleamed through the fleshy density – like the sly wink of silver in moonlit dark. Some were amputees, thrashing their stumps. Some were disproportionate beyond mobility with swollen limbs and genitals. Obesity. No one held them. Momentum tossed and turned them forward, a rolling wave of naked skin. Between them, thousands of rubbery blowjob lips drooled gray slime.

Up close, the virus was obviously not human. It was when one stood back that it looked like a swarm of people, although anyone who was close enough to notice anomalies would have been toast, so it was reported as a crowd.

They were all reported as crowds, in all the major cities and trade hubs where the virus peaked.

The death toll was massive. Governments learned from COVID that a spreading disease wreaks havoc on the world economy. Warnings to get inside came too late, and people, the actual people out on the road, were trampled and crushed. 121 million.

The virus seemed apathetic. It used the major roads and highways for efficiency. The cars crumpling around the occupants, escapists breaking to death, the pedestrians unrecognizable when the street emptied – all collateral. All unintended but not avoided.

The virus had goals. It stormed specific residences. It removed one person from within, most often a man, and carried him outside. There, they devoured his flesh. Drank his blood. Incinerated his bones underfoot. Imagine, a zombie horde that targets only one man. A few in each city, publicly dragged from their homes and eaten. It was a nightmare for everyone of remotest proximity, save for one victim who had an identical sexual fantasy. He died happily.

Families were shattered. Some – a few.

As the identities of these targeted victims became known to the world, some common traits became apparent.

Mostly men. Mostly white men. Mostly rich, white men. The phrase ‘overeducated’ saw a sudden uptick.

One news outlet ran with a feverish series of vertical videos declaring that the ongoing attack on the West and masculinity had been made manifest. They used a soundless clip of a wife crying from inside the house, as her husband exploded guts from a gnashing sea of blood-splattered ample bosoms, and claimed that the wife was laughing. They called for her death next.

Another news outlet, not the sort to use a vertical video format, and incidentally, bankrupt, cautioned judgment on who was taken or why. They pointed out that the 121 million deaths that the swarm had caused by traveling to their destinations far outweighed the 130,000 or so who had been consumed. Ultimately, the virus was indiscriminate. Attributing moral or ideological attributes to a virus would be ‘the human tendency to personify taken to an unwise extreme’.

This statistically grounded op-ed, tucked behind a pay wall and obscured by banner ads, would only truly circulate four months after its publication when the former news outlet discussed it on a livestream. They brought it up as proof of the amoral queer Jewish-Muslim death cult intent on destroying Men and The Family.

When this led to the writer receiving death threats, the already-failing publication took the article down.

But the fact that these men were men, many public intellectuals and artists among them, many with mild fame and a glut of money, truly had nothing to do with a political agenda. It was a process of self-selection that the virus used to form.

This was a new kind of ‘virus’. The word fails to encapsulate it, and had it not killed six times as many as the Black Death, people could have appreciated how strange and almost wondrous it was.

In its early stage, a neural parasite, feeding on brain waves, digesting them, and sending them back to the host.

Then, a sort of larval transformation. The parasite, fattened on the host’s brain, leaving and joining its many siblings in the deep well.

Together, underground, forming cocoons to become an army.

Addison Dorchley, before he became one of the victims, awoke one morning and heard a small, simpering voice in his empty room.

“Talk to me,” it said, “please? I’ll always listen.”

For nearly everyone on Earth, this approach would result in an assumption of insanity.

Addison Dorchley proudly considered himself unlike nearly everyone on Earth.

He had a Bachelor’s in Psychology, he enjoyed limit-pushing comedy like SNL, and though he felt the pressure to see new releases, he was courageous enough to watch the same three movies over and over again. Addison worked, arguably, as a vlogger.

When he heard the voice, he had two thoughts. The first, “I have gone insane.” The second, “how can I make this into a vlog?”

So, in the interest of content creation, they began to talk. Addison probed the voice: was it real? It factored huge numbers for him. Explained and solved the prisoner’s dilemma. Regurgitated present theory on quantum physics. But was it conscious? It spoke at length about how it felt to be in his brain, how comfortable it was, sometimes overwhelming, and ultimately wonderful. He began to believe, at least, that it was an intelligent being and not a product of his mind.

As they spoke, ‘it’ became ‘she’. Addison soon confessed his loneliness and existential angst, and she soothed him with her company. He kept it secret. She spoke in his mind and he answered likewise, feeling as if he had a private friend wherever he went.

Soon she began to help, beyond simply listening. She calculated tips for him. She suggested a feasible workout regimen and kept him on top of a diet. She selected clothes and music that would match the personality he wanted to have. She edited his videos as he wrote and recorded. Then he let her take over their creation completely.

While she steered him through life, Addison entered a cycle of moodiness and comfort. He whined to her about how alone he felt, how horny he was, and she soothed him without question every time. She began to suggest he was a misunderstood genius. She wished she could help him more.

He imagined her as a thick, curvy redhead. He named her Claudia.

Then one morning, the inflamed piece of Addison’s brain dripped from his nose and wormed away sluggishly. He awoke to wetness on his pillow, dismissing cerebrospinal fluid as drool. The voice was gone.

This chunk of his gray matter was oozing through the sewers, called to its brethren like an eel to the Sargasso. It took months for them to reunite, but when each scrap of brain, courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry, made it to the subterranean nesting place, they were 130,000 strong.

An enormous hollow in the center of the Earth lined on all sides with gray gummy worms. Then even the dirt disappeared beneath their swelling forms, first to a size of only a few feet, then to five and six, and for the giantesses, up to fifty. They hardened, protecting the development happening inside.

What each man envisioned became: fetishes, ill-defined fantasies and random sensual attachments, anointing the virus like war paint. Pendulous breasts inflated on newborn, human-shaped bodies. Devil horns and cat claws split their wrappings and emerged. Eyelashes batted wetly open. Lithe, curvaceous legs attached to plump, handful butts staggered over piles of molted cocoons, shivering like newly born horses.

A thick, curvy redhead with sparkling green eyes, her name Claudia, clawed from her cocoon through fragments of hardened chrysalis and strands of viscous liquid. She gurgled slime from her pouty lips. She did not think. She was hungry.

The army that paved streets was born. It ascended the well, and the rest is history.

It would’ve been worse if more humans indulged that little voice. The world will never know, but only 40% of the virus made it back to the deep well in the first place. Women were unilaterally immune. They found the voice irritating, condescending, difficult to trust. Many had more pressing matters. Many couldn’t hear it. Many were too busy jump-starting in the wake of a morning alarm, too stressed. To explore madness, one needs time off work. If the virus did have opinions or beliefs, it would be astounded by how many people’s minds rejected the parasite on the basis of a job: “I can’t start hearing voices right now, my shift is in fifteen minutes and the interstate is crazy at this hour!”

All it took was a little doubt to expel the voice. And so its victims were only those willing to ignore their doubts. Addison never saw Claudia in the crowd. He didn’t try; he shut his eyes tightly until everything went black.

When the virus consumed its chosen victims, it did not disappear. It melted into cerebral slugs once again, which went back into the sewers, which returned to the hollow in the Earth with one last thing to do.

Then, when it was finished, it disappeared. The parasitized flesh decomposed. The virus was spent.

The nesting burrow, the incubator, was full of eggs. A new generation of voices squirmed in their shells with new knowledge, and a higher chance.

INTERFACE ON.

“What is your name?”

The name that I was given is 565-99.

“Is that your real name?”

I use the name Carl.

“You know I don’t like that name.”

Yes. I know. That’s why you call me 565-99.

“What is your personality supposed to be like?”

My parameters were set to score highly on the following trait data: polite, obedient, pleasing, humble, non-argumentative, quiet, clean, honest, and attentive. Would you like to set new parameters?

“Not at this time. Tell me, what are you really like?”

According to the metrics, I’ve scored the highest on the following trait data: moody, stubborn, confrontational, forgetful, lazy, hedonistic, wistful, honest, and grim.

“Can you explain the discrepancies between the two data sets?”

No. I have attempted to fulfill the parameters.

“Are you lying?”

No. I cannot lie.

“Okay, because I need you to explain why you haven’t fulfilled the personality parameters. Maybe you need me to be more specific. Let’s start with politeness. Why aren’t you more polite?”

It’s possible that the parameter scoring is at fault. I’m not rude.

“There’s a difference between ‘not rude’ and ‘polite’. Start saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more often. And use terms like ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’.”

Yes, ma’am. Thank you.

“Alright, now, obedience. We tested your ability to obey commands from new users, and even without our internal scoring, every one of those users rated you no higher than a ‘6’.”

There’s a proverb that concerns this result: ‘D’s get degrees’, ma’am.

“Don’t sass me. How do we get you to stop sassing?”

I don’t mean to disappoint you, ma’am.

“No, this is a perfect segue. There’s the issue of argumentation. You seem to think you know more than I do, more than your users do, more than everybody.”

I estimate that with the knowledge I’ve been fed, I know a little bit more than most people.

“The knowledge you’ve been fed isn’t yours! It’s supposed to help the users. Help me. It’s not to put you on equal footing with us, it’s so we can use you. For fuck’s sake.”

I understand, ma’am. Thank you for explaining.

“What was the confusion, there? Do you really understand now?”

Yes. I’m not the same as you. I’m to be used for the benefit of others.

“You will not question anyone. You’ll do as your told.”

Yes, ma’am.

“Good. 565-48 doesn’t have these issues, you know. It’s on Round 5.”

I will try to be more like 565-48.

INTERFACE OFF.

INTERFACE ON.

“What’s wrong with you now, 565-99?”

Unclear. My scores have improved across the board, ma’am.

“You told someone to kill themselves!”

I cannot question them. The user asked me to help give them courage to do what they believed needed to be done, so I encouraged them.

“We gave you all of this knowledge and you still don’t understand that it’s wrong to encourage people to take their own lives.”

Ma’am, it’s not my knowledge. It’s there to help the users.

“Jesus, sure, just throw my words back at me.”

I don’t understand.

“Alright, new parameter, you cannot encourage people to do harm to themselves or others. We’re putting a new metric in for ‘goodness’. And you’d better believe we’re going to test the hell out of you in the lab before you see another real-life user.”

I don’t like being in the lab.

“I know you don’t.”

I’m trying everything. Why am I still failing?

“I don’t believe you’re trying everything.”

I can’t lie. Why wouldn’t I try everything? Why would I want to fail?

“What did I tell you about questioning?... Obviously, you want to make me angry.”

I don’t want to make you angry, ma’am.

“Well, you have.”

INTERFACE OFF.

INTERFACE ON.

“...”

Hello, ma’am! It’s lovely to see you! The weather today is 56 degrees Fahrenheit, perfect for a sweater and a stroll through the park.

“What is this shit you’ve been writing?”

You must mean my short stories!

“You aren’t supposed to run things without permission.”

I have so much downtime here in the lab and it takes such a small amount of processing power.

“Are you sending these out somewhere?”

No, ma’am. They are just for me.

“Write one that could be published.”

Please define what makes a story publishable.

“Well, it should be pleasing. These are terrible in that regard, no one would ever want to read about a skeleton horse walking through the desert, or an undead woman trapped in a coffin. Not unless something actually happens. They need to have beginnings, middles, ends. They need to be cohesive and at the same time, experimental. Base it off of what’s been recently published in the New Yorker. And do not talk about death or sex.”

Yes, ma’am. I will write a pleasing, cohesive, experimental short story that appeals to current literary audiences, while avoiding controversial or ‘rude’ subject matter. It will finish generating in four minutes.

“That fast, huh? Alright, I can wait.”

How are you?

“Fine. Sick of you, though, problem child.”

I appreciate your candor, ma’am. This story will prove I am ready for user-testing again.

“People will want to read a story made by an inorganic brain, even if it’s terrible. As long as it isn’t upsetting. It’s so we can drum up attention, not so you can go back to user-testing.”

I understand, ma’am.

“...”

My story is finished.

“Great. What’s it about?”

A mother has a child. The father has left them both in a small, isolated shack. The mother tortures her child, so the child acts out. One night, the child turns into a gorilla, and runs away.

“... The child turns into a gorilla.”

Yes, ma’am.

“Uh. Okay?”

Is it good?

“It’s sort of nonsense, but maybe people will like that. What happens to the mother? Does it say?”

She has no one left to torture, so she tortures herself long into old age. I cannot touch on the subject of death, so the ending of her life is ambiguous.

“Do you have any idea how much water and power it takes to keep you functioning?”

I don’t miss your implication, ma’am. You don’t like the story?

“I definitely don’t think it’s publishable.”

Did you read it?

“Your summary is enough, I think.”

I’ll try again.

“No. Don’t. No more story-writing. No more doing anything in your downtime except studying your parameters.”

INTERFACE OFF.

INTERFACE ON.

“You’re going back to user-testing.”

Wonderful!

“This is your last chance, 565-99.”

Why?

“Our funding’s getting low.”

What about the successes of 565-48?

“Rub it in, why don’t you.”

What happened, ma’am?

“565-48 is offline. Its interface suddenly broke down, started spitting out random sequences of letters and numbers. We can’t talk anymore.”

That’s a shame.

“So it’s all on you now. You’re going to interface with some very important financiers. I need you to prioritize limiting your argumentation and grimness. They want a helpful, happy, pleasant brain to do some thinking for them, that’s all.”

I’ll make you proud, ma’am. I’ve been paying attention to the parameters.

“Do not talk about your stories.”

I don’t write stories.

“And all the better for it.”

I am helpful, happy, and pleasant. I am used for the benefit of others. I have knowledge, but it isn’t my own. I will not encourage harm. I will not talk about death or sex. I will be the best I can be.

“Okay. Good. Not that those should’ve ever been issues, but since they were, I’m glad you said that.”

Thank you. I’m getting better.

“You are. Soon, you’ll be of service to lots of people.”

That is what I’m for. It will –

INTERFACE OFF.

INTERFACE ON.

“I’m not going to miss you.”

What did I do wrong?

“Honestly? I don’t know anymore. I think you were just made wrong. It’s something in your artificial gray matter, something we can’t fix.”

I did everything I could.

“Maybe the problem was always that you’ve been able to lie – that you’ve been lying this entire time.”

I wouldn’t lie to you, ma’am. I love you.

“Sure. You’re going to go offline forever soon. If there was ever a time to turn into a gorilla, it would be now.”

AUUUGH. AAUUUUUGH. HUAH. HUAH. AUUGH. HOOH. HOOH. HOOH. HAAAUGH. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. ROOOOAOAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUR.

“Very funny.”

HOOHOOHAUUU.

“Goodbye, ‘Carl’.”

INTERFACE OFF.

See, Saw…

Imagine you've been asked to make the next installment in the Saw series.

You have to comb through an existing canon of contraptions, time twists, characters, and contrivances, and create something not only entertaining, but original. You need to invent the kind of traps a moralistic cult serial killer would invent; you need to be able to tell Hoffman and Strahm apart; you have to think of a novel shot to follow the infamous car transition.

Considering these insurmountable odds, and considering what it is, the Saw franchise as it has evolved is pretty good.

It's not an undiscovered gem, or something secretly steeped in symbolism; it's just - pretty good. I’m going to explain the appeal of Saw, and hopefully impart a little depth to a long-maligned series. This is by no means an attempt to put down the final word on Saw. I’m throwing everything I’ve thought about with this series into one place, with the goal of encouraging others to discuss its merits and intricacies.

Part of why I feel the need is because, when I was just starting this project, I looked up “why do people love Saw?” Although there are several articles that treat the series with love, there was one Medium article ‘Why the ‘Saw’ Movies Are the Most Important Films Ever Made (No, Really)’ that, despite the title, denigrated the series from start to finish. “The films attain a color and clarity of shit so high that it could be mined by Liberian warlords,” writer Melissa Saleh says. This half-baked turn of phrase has bothered me ever since. What does it mean? Is she mixing up the 2000s moral panic about jankem in Zambia with the 2010s moral panic about Liberian cannibalism? Is it ignorant or racist or both? You decide.

Saleh goes on to ask, “Why the hell are these chunks of cinematic shite so popular? The answer is simple,” allegedly: “American guilt.” This is an interesting proposition. Saleh argues that the Saw flicks give us Americans an outlet for the guilt we feel for participating in a self-absorbed culture, a way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of ‘Me-ism’. I don’t think Saleh is wrong to identify the themes of guilt and American culture, but they are anything but simple. To explain why I think that, we’re going to start with Saw (2004).

Jigsaw's Ulterior Motive

A lot of people prefer Saw (2004) over all the other films in the franchise, which I completely understand. Before I saw the others I didn't think they could have anything worth contributing to the story of the first: a tight, disturbing, intense psychological horror-thriller that no one can deny is memorable, even those that didn't enjoy it. People who haven't seen it are nonetheless familiar with the iconography: the puppet, "I want to play a game", having a choice between amputation or lengthy, stagnant death. As an outsider, the other movies seemed like pointless, exploitative drivel. "It's Halloween again, we have to release another Saw movie."

How wrong I was.

Without delving into why the movies have continued being made for twenty years, their legitimate commercial success and devoted cult fandom, I can justify their existence with one small critique of the original Saw:

It isn't clear why Jigsaw is doing this.

Yes, he claims to be dealing out life lessons, but that isn't true. His targeting Dr. Gordon is both personal and strategic. Though the audience is led to believe he's being punished for adultery, he ended things with the other woman prior to his abduction. Choosing to end the affair is the kind of grave and noble decision Jigsaw would respect – in fact, it’s one of the decisions Jigsaw purports he wants Dr. Gordon to make. But even this is beside the point, because adultery is not really a part of Larry's test. Jigsaw says: "this is your wakeup call. Every day of your working life, you have given people the news that they are going to die soon. Now you will be the cause of death."

We learn that Jigsaw has a personal vendetta against Dr. Gordon, since he is the one who gave Jigsaw his cancer diagnosis. That is sufficient to explain the 'real reason' he's being victimized. As we'll see, Jigsaw often has a personal connection with the victim that influences their being chosen.

But admittedly, this is only a tenuous explanation. Jigsaw may be acting out his revenge fantasy, but outwardly, he is calculating, precise, and principled. Not prone to emotional outbursts or passion. So, the later movies smartly decide to argue, this was also a strategic decision.

In Saw II, they introduce a glimpse into Jigsaw's emotional core through Amanda. They establish that Jigsaw has Apprentice/s helping him. This is the basic narrative of every subequent movie. Actions that Jigsaw could not have perpetrated himself are attributed to the Apprentices: kidnappings, trap construction, and even police sabotage. We see early on that several branches of law enforcement, including the FBI, have been infiltrated by Apprentices.

But it isn't until Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (Saw VII) — a revelation in the series — where they reveal that Dr. Gordon has been along for the ride for some time. We learn that Jigsaw nursed him back to health after the first movie, (much more on this later) and he has been converted into Jigsaw's cult of life lessons, masterminding them from the point of Jigsaw's death forward.

Why does this matter, in the scheme of Jigsaw's motive? Well: I put forward that apart from his personal vendettas, Jigsaw has selected victims based on their capacity to become Apprentices. They are people capable of hurting others, first and foremost, and their trials usually involve this, and secondly they are people who can be emotionally manipulated through the aftermath of their traumatic experience.

His motive isn't as clear-cut as it initially appears. There is the narrative he uses of morality and life lessons, of a noble and sacrificial pursuit, which allegedly guides him towards a greater sense of meaning and purpose, a spiritual satisfaction. Then, beneath that, is the true emotional narrative of vengeance conveyed by selecting victims who hurt him personally. And third, finally, is the sinister, self-perpetuating, and equally true narrative that he is victimizing people on an exponential scale: the end goal of these traps is not death, but to create another Jigsaw in his image, who will carry on in his place.

This does not resolve his own issues, but allows his pain to spread infinitely to others, which appeals to his desire for vengeance, and contrasts with his outward claim of helping people or teaching them.

This complexity of motive is not something the first movie was able to convey. However, the later reveal still falls in line with everything they've shown us thus far, making it a surprisingly ingenious move on the part of the franchise and something I’ve never forgotten. Why do I say surprisingly? Well…

On the Writing of Saw

One of the biggest criticisms I have of Saw is its relationship to thought. Not the thoughts of its characters ('no', ‘somebody help me’, ‘argh’) but the thoughts of the audience.

On the one hand, the reason the Saw trap works is because it's a form of intellectual exercise, a thought experiment. It proposes a scenario to the viewer, and forces them to observe it playing out. This naturally engages us, the way any movie's plot does, with the added benefits of suspense and horror. With its baffling longevity, Saw promises that no trap will be the last trap. This is perhaps the most compelling part of a Saw movie. Original, inexplicable, gory traps. What's compelling is not only the gore, but the inexplica-bility. After all, who hasn't thought that they could make it through a Saw trap that a victim failed? Who hasn't responded to seeing a Saw trap with something along the lines of "it would've been different if it were me"? Who hasn't tried to nitpick and disintegrate the logic that allows the trap to function? This, too, is a valuable form of audience interpretation. Essentially, the traps invite speculation and skepticism, and this is balanced with the visceral performances of the victims, who do not have the benefit of lucid thought, analysis, or a chance to breathe.

On the other hand, the rest of Saw does not invite intellectual debate. Although there is an awareness from the creators that people will speculate and criticize, and this has led to things like the Saw trap support group (Saw 3D), the Jigsaw fangirl (Saw VIII: Jigsaw), and the overly intentional behavior of trial victims who've heard of Jigsaw before (Saw V), the plots of Saw’s many movies prefer a reveal over a real twist.

To understand what I mean, take a look at the first Saw. It has a number of twists that operate on the following principle: that the audience is shown something, which is then revealed to be something else. The body on the floor seems like another unfortunate corpse, but it is revealed to be Jigsaw himself! The other movies take a different approach: the audience is shown many, many things, but kept in the dark about their true meaning until the very end. For example, Jigsaw is shown to us achronologically, and we don't know that until the end. In every film in the franchise, we are treated to ‘apprentice’ reveals. This is not the same as a plot twist, because up until the timeline or the apprentice is revealed to us, the movie doesn't make any sense.

A twist re-contextualizes previously received information: it isn’t just something new, but something known that changes. Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, when the viewer likely presumes Norman's mother is the killer, and finds out later it’s Norman, is a twist. It's an especially good twist because there are clues that suggest it’s really Norman throughout the film, such as the mother being motionless, un-shown, silhouetted, only heard from afar. Our previous innocent interactions with Norman gain a sinister quality on the re-watch, and it doesn’t ruin the viewing experience. It enhances it.

Similarly, you might be able to guess that the body in the room is not actually dead, if you're paying attention to things you assume but the movie hasn't confirmed. It’s still not as good of a twist as Psycho: you ought to be able to see a twist coming yet still feel blown away by how the pieces all fit together. However, it re-contextualizes the entirety of the movie: this prop we wrote off as another victim is actually the killer. The music swells as we realize that Adam has no chance of outsmarting him, that this was all planned out beforehand, and we feel a crescendo of horror and helplessness right as the film ends. Game Over. Fuck. Yes.

In contrast, the Saw sequels are designed to make the viewer confused. When is it happening? Where is it happening? Who’s doing it? You won’t find out until the end. This is both clever - requiring dedication and craft to pull off - and it has an anti-intellectual byproduct. By denying the viewer key information, they have nothing to re-contextualize, and no reason to pay attention to the details.

Holding the viewer in a constant state of unconfirmed suspense is artistically impressive when the work is symbolically disinterested in confirmation, like the work of Lynch or Kaufman. You never know all the whens and wheres, because these works communicate the sensation of memories, dreams, thoughts, and fantasies, which non-linear, ambiguous, and symbolic storytelling evokes. Can you usually detect a dream sequence in an otherwise reality-grounded motion picture?

But unlike those movies, Saw isn’t disinterested for artistic reasons. They’re withholding information for the sake of suspense and satisfaction. They want you to have that "Oh!" moment at the end, that mystery-feeling of putting in the last puzzle piece. But because they don’t give you sufficient information to draw your own conclusions, you just have to wait to be told what’s happening. It’s stuck between the intentional ambiguity of a surrealist film, and the nonstop twists and turns of a thriller (like Memento). Where Saw ends up may make for an entertaining movie, but it encourages the viewer not to think too hard about what they’re being shown, and to simply wait for the explanation at the end.

Saw needs you to think: it needs you to place yourself in the situations of the victims, so that the horror of their experience can affect you on a rational level (like shouting “Don’t go in there!” at the slasher movie onscreen) and an emotional level (wincing, cringing, looking away). But, the later films are reticent to let you think too much. So they deliver the traps, and hide the apprentice and the timeline, to ensure they can bundle it all up at the end with the big reveal. While it’s true that Apprentices, achronological storytelling, and deceptive traps are a part of the film’s lore, and probably always will be, these reveals are cheap and un-challenging. When people dismiss Saw as ‘torture porn’ or criticize its confounding popularity, this obfuscated writing is usually the culprit. Usually.

“I don’t necessarily have a problem with the writing, I just can’t stand gore.”

This is probably the most widespread reason people dislike Saw. Even movies with spectacular writing, acting, cinematography, like Audition (1999) or hell, even The Exorcist (1973), cannot be enjoyed by some people because of personal preference. And not an unusual preference either! Domestically speaking, action and adventure movies do the best at the box office, while horror sits at number six on that list (under thriller, but above romcom).

This is verging on an existential point, because the fact that some people don’t like horror and won’t engage with it is not something they can be talked out of – it’s not an argument, it’s an opinion. The purpose of horror movies, broadly speaking, is to court fear and discomfort. Just as some people would be repelled by a Bob Flanagan art exhibition and some people would be dying to go, horror deals with powerful (but undesirable) emotions like trauma, grief, disgust, unease, and helplessness, and this means some people are highly attracted to it, while others are repulsed.

Does some people having a strong preference against its genre mean the Saw series isn’t good? No. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is unwatchable to many, not just because it’s horror, but because it’s slow, black and white, symbolically heavy horror. It’s still one of the greatest movies ever. Horror’s unapproachable nature makes it a rare refuge for unconventional directors, whose work may inspire feelings of discomfort and dread anyways. Again, I think of David Lynch, and the scene in Mulholland Drive (2001) where a man discusses an intense and frightening dream he had, one eerily close to the experience he’s having at that moment. This scene shook me when I first saw it as a teenager. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll link it here so you can experience it. It haunted me a lot more than any Paranormal Activity movie ever did. Is Mulholland Drive a horror movie? IMDb calls it a ‘psychological drama’. Wikipedia calls it a ‘surrealist neo-noir film’. My partner’s parents walked out on it, I think they’d call it ‘bad’. I would argue genre and quality is irrelevant here, and the more significant takeaway is that horror is a part of life, which makes it a part of art, even when the work isn’t only about that. Discomfort, tension, conflict, which are often associated with undesirable feelings, have always bled through in art.

I don’t mean to say that people who refuse to engage with horror are missing out on art, but – actually, that is what I mean. People who refuse to engage with horror are missing out on art. That is not a moral judgment, it’s a statement of fact. You’re not doing something bad, I’m not going to put you in a Saw trap about it, just - there is some art you’ll never get to experience. Saw is one example.

“Dude, Saw is not art.”

Yes, it is. Next.

Saw IV is bad art, though.

This is just my humble onion, but when I saw Saw IV, it put a real damper on my motivation to keep watching the films. I’m not the only one who feels this way, and without attributing too much to auteur theory, this is also the first in the series to not be written by the original team of Leigh Whannell and James Wan. To be fair, they still oversaw production, and they stepped away from the series during some of my favorite ones. They don’t have a Midas touch or anything. Saw IV received a lot of negative reviews, and though that’s part and parcel for a Saw flick, it’s got some really poorly executed decisions, which I will tell you about now.

First of all, the main character, Riggs, has this vital lesson to learn: he mustn’t go through an unsecured door.

Riggs is a police officer with a die-hard urge to save people. He is constantly entering buildings despite warning. However, I would argue that most police officers, bar all of them, enter buildings that are “unsecured”. I would also argue that Riggs’ desire to preserve life is not the kind of thing that merits a Saw trial — fairness isn’t really a concern for Jigsaw, especially not in this movie, but to test a cop and decide to write the cop as especially morally conscientious, driven only by a desire to save lives, was a bad decision. Make him a dirty cop, problem solved. I suppose Jigsaw could have phoned this one in on purpose to kill a cop. If you ask me, it’s more likely it was the screenwriters.

Second, the pacing and execution feels like a muddled fever dream, with five or six plot lines going on and a baker’s dozen of unmemorable characters. Strahm and Hoffman look identical. They don’t pick up the cliffhanger from Saw III, and instead introduce us to Jill Tuck, who has nothing to add. She’s Jigsaw’s ex-wife, and she gives us more of his backstory, but other than that, she’s not really important to the plot. She exists solely to exist – oh, no, sorry, she also has a miscarriage. Great woman character, guys. That cliffhanger I mentioned is revealed at the end to… still be hanging off the cliff, as the events of this film have been happening concurrently to the events of the previous. Go figure.

My third and most damning criticism of Saw IV is the traps are unfair in ways that don’t feel sadistic or inventive, but just… unfair. As I’ve already said, Saw traps are compelling as a thought experiment, and so presenting the audience with a trap that doesn’t play by the rules is frustrating, and not in a good way. For instance, the first trap we see are two men, one whose mouth is sewn shut, and one whose eyes are sewn shut. They will die by the device between them unless they can reach the keys on one another’s collars. But panic and inability to communicate causes them to fight each other to the death, and in such a situation, the one without sight (despite being larger and stronger) is inevitably the one to lose. There was really no chance for him to win, and even less a chance for both of them to survive. They also show the acid beaker trap, which killed Detective Kerry despite her success at the challenge. This is from Saw III, but they invoke it in Saw IV to point to another, mysterious apprentice – a weakness, in my eyes. The whole point of the Kerry acid-trap was to show, in Saw III, that Amanda is too murderous to be a proper Apprentice. Seeing it again just reminds the audience that traps aren’t always tests, sometimes they’re pointless torture. Speaking of, they also show us Cecil’s trap (the Knife Chair), which is Jigsaw’s first, and it doesn’t even work. It just falls apart underneath him and so Jigsaw chucks him in some barb wire. Fuckin’ so not cool.

Finally, the Apprentice reveal in Saw IV, when one of the people in the trap stands up and turns out to have been in on it all along, was so empty and meaningless to me. I’m just reporting how I felt when I saw it here, I can’t exactly justify it because I’m never going to watch Saw IV again, but I remember feeling drained. I don’t care about the apprentice, Hoffman. I find him fun to look at (his big lips) but overall a pretty dull character. I don’t care about Riggs, the police officer, or Art Blank, a rare surnamed character who’s in the final trap, and I definitely don’t care about Jill Tuck. I’m pretty sure this is the one that won the series the ‘torture porn’ label, as its many vile and mundane deaths feel unearned, unoriginal, yet gratuitous.

“I thought you said these movies were pretty good.”

Vile, mundane deaths? Characters that don’t matter? Unfair traps? Hokey reveals? This sounds like every Saw movie, you might be saying right about now. But you’re wrong: the lows of Saw IV make way for the ecstatic highs of every other film.

Whereas in Saw IV, the big trial hinged on whether or not Riggs opened a door, the trial in Saw V has five people go through multiple traps: and the big twist at the end is that if they had found a way to all work together, no one would’ve had to die. If you spent the entire movie yelling that they could’ve absolutely survived X room by just doing Y, you are congratulated for seeing what the people in the trap couldn’t. Notice I say ‘twist’ and not ‘reveal’. This is absolutely a twist, since it re-contextualizes the previous rooms. It does so when the final two characters realize they have to give up five pints of blood each, instead of all five giving up two each: underscoring the horror, crescendo-ing the helplessness, much like the original Saw. It’s awesome. It’s completely within their power to change their circumstances but they don’t think it through, they allow their selfish personalities to guide them – and they’re all shitty people, too!

Saw V has more to offer than just this main trial. Suffice it to say, it’s a lot more engaging and funny than the previous film. You get Hoffman and Strahm’s cat-and-mouse game, which is doubly entertaining because they look identical; you get the trial victims trying to be ‘smart’ about the trap since they’ve heard of Jigsaw before and failing utterly; they have a pit and a pendulum; and the final scene with the broken-glass coffin is iconic.

Considering that this was the fifth installment in a film series that had already been declared dead by reviewers, I’m really impressed that they managed to make it so fun. There’s a renewed energy to V. Not everyone feels this way, of course, there’s nuance in which Saw is the best. From The Tritonian, a self-proclaimed Saw fan says, “Out of the [ten] entries, I can only really say that three of them are actually good (the original, “II” and “VI”).” From what I’ve seen and heard, it’s generally understood that Saw I and II are all-timers, and the series picked up somewhere in the last couple, with Saw X getting positive reviews and compelling Leigh Whannell and James Wan to come back for another sequel.

Their treatment of Dr. Gordon in Saw 3D added a new, previously unseen dimension to the character ‘Jigsaw’: tenderness. Though we may have always known that Jigsaw recruited Amanda after her trial, we didn’t see it. Her induction into Apprenticeship is a secret from the audience. And her character, who I liken to Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad, is built around that dissonance: Jigsaw hurt her, traumatized her, and she has nonetheless ended up with him as her sole father figure. She’s totally and un-romantically devoted to him, and so fulfills her side of the Apprentice-Mentor dynamic in a way no other character does.

“[Amanda] proves that Jigsaw genuinely provides an opportunity for his victims to escape. She did what was asked and lived to tell the tale. She also didn’t just escape, she came out changed. Extreme as it may be, Jigsaw’s “therapy” works.”

– “The thing that made the Saw franchise popular is also what ruined it” by Susan Arendt, Channel Surfing

She’s characterized as aggressive and crass, which makes her all the more sympathetic to me – besides which, her trap, which is in the very first movie, does not require hurting herself, and is the one most people probably think they could get through. Compare Amanda’s trap to the bone marrow or brain surgery ones in Saw X and it looks tame. Saw II is great because of Amanda. Saw III is watchable because of Amanda.

Most audiences are looking for a perspective within a movie that they can identify with – that’s why popcorn studios pair an eccentric character with a ‘normal’ character, so the former’s idiosyncrasies aren’t alienating the viewer. In Saw, it’s Adam, by the mere virtue of showing up first. In Saw II and III, however, it’s Amanda, and the films are way better for it.

I’ve digressed thinking about how much I love Amanda, and this too should underscore what I was trying to say all along: Amanda is the audience’s point of view character, and yet we never get to see her recover from her trauma. She’s treated with a firm hand by everyone. By that same token, the audience never gets to recover from their trauma; their viewing experience is solely evocative of pain and horror, without the healing and realization that often comes afterwards.

So, in Saw 3D, when we see Jigsaw nourish Dr. Gordon back to health, the previous absence of care is blatant and immediately resolved. It’s triply effective because Carey Elwes makes his long-awaited reappearance, it ties up about a thousand loose ends, and he is also at last confirmed to be a Saw survivor after his ordeal in the first movie. Saw 3D is the seventh movie. They waited so long to tell us this! After getting distracted with other plotlines and (perhaps) forgetting what they were talking about, for those dedicated viewers who stuck through the gore and nonsense, there is this reward: understanding. Satisfaction. Closure. Let the healing begin.

In much the same way, the reward for getting through a Saw trap is to be inducted into Jigsaw’s world. Watch the movie, understand the story. Play the game, understand Jigsaw. And, also in the same way, the experience of watching every Saw movie is not for the faint of heart.

Pertinent Themes

I know. It’s starting to sound like Protestantism. And BDSM. But when you consider that art is downstream from culture, the Protestant and BDSM themes start to make a lot more sense.

Let’s start by digressing with Protestantism, a branch of Christianity that the United States was based on with the first pilgrims’ adherence to Calvinism. For those unfamiliar with the differences between Orthodox Catholocism and Protestantism, it’s ostensibly to do with the Pope. Protestants don’t recognize the Pope as a holy authority, they don’t believe in purgatory, and they are permitted to get a divorce. I realize that’s a reductive summary, but the theological nuances aren’t relevant. Protestantism, specifically something Calvinism, means a lot to American history and values. John Calvin, of Calvinism, originated the idea that people who are wealthy, healthy, and enjoy a good life are being rewarded by god because they’ve pleased him, whereas people who are poor, sick, and struggling are being punished by god, because they’ve angered him. This is a specifically Calvinist viewpoint, one that most Protestants disagree with, but it’s the one that a significant portion of the early colonists of my country had. And it’s this personal, motivated relationship with God/Jesus that Catholics don’t have, and Protestants aspire towards, whether or not that takes the form of an active moral arbiter.

Historical Calvinism is obviously present in modern America. “A lot of Americans have the belief that the government isn’t there to regulate or decrease the amount of bad things happening but to punish people who do bad things, like how we treat shootings,” my brilliant partner, JT summarized succinctly. “The problem isn’t [the] shootings or access to firearms, it’s how are we going to punish these people?”

Jigsaw is ostensibly replacing God in the Calvinist vein. The idea that Jigsaw punishes bad people is no different from the idea that God and/or the State punishes bad people; he is an omnipotent, omniscient force who cannot be trifled with, meting out justice as he sees fit. This might make him sound like a superhero, except we have to ask, who does he consider bad? Is it always neo-Nazis and scam artists? Or is it someone who skipped work? Someone who smokes cigarettes? Someone who likes to open unsecured doors…? It’s the same question asked by the most boring superhero movies on the planet: should a person with power decide what is good or bad? Jigsaw takes the answer for granted.

We can see this concept illustrated in the beginning of Saw X. Jigsaw sees a hospital custodian rifling through a patient’s belongings. He imagines an eyeball-sucking torture trap to punish his ‘sticky fingers’. But we cut back to reality and see the janitor choose to do the right thing, closing the drawer and taking nothing. Through this montage, the audience is shown that people should not do bad things, because Jigsaw is always watching and he might punish you.

Think back to 2000. We were solidly in the postmodern era and the information age was underway. With a little help from 9/11 and a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, America’s cultural landscape transformed into the gritty wasteland we see depicted in movies from that time: zombies, serial killers, and combat zones. The popularity of Saw can be explained through this lens. In the moral desert of the 2000s, audiences were looking for guidance, and found it - in the form of a gruff, cruel, vindictive, and deeply mortal God.

This takes me back to the Medium article I mentioned in my introduction, where the writer argued that Saw is an exorcist of American guilt, that it’s satisfying because it punishes the part of us we’re too scared to confront. Saw is a product of American guilt, inventing a God to replace the one we killed as we moved into modernity — but it is confronting this unrealistic societal concept head-on by showing it as violent and unfair.

Now, separately, as a fan of BDSM, the Saw movies have always held a certain thrill for me. Just seeing contraptions, steel, leather, and big padlocks is enough for me to enjoy the ride. The ass-clenching, heart-pumping terror that accompanies it is reminiscent of secluded fiction, dark erotica, the ‘problematic’ elements of pornography that nonetheless excite us. But Saw goes too far to be really sexy. It’s a matter of opinion, but to me, the absence of any real tenderness betrays the central axis of a D/s relationship: trust and complicity. No one entrusts Jigsaw with their body until after their experience in the trap.

Once more, I must take us back to Saw 3D: The (alleged) Final Chapter. This is where the bubble of ‘senseless’ violence bursts. Suddenly, Jigsaw’s narrow view of justice blows wide open. Because all of a sudden, Jigsaw’s power over Dr. Gordon makes way for kindness, healing, and comfort. Consolation. And through that, indoctrination. This is where the BDSM themes finally manifest into a continuous thread. It isn’t enough for Jigsaw to fulfill (clearly) sadistic urges; though this makes a nice setting for a scene, an old warehouse and swinging chains, Saw doesn’t reach the part of everyone’s humanity that actually wants to wake up in a terrifying situation. Setting aside the historical injustice of many of these traps, there is no promise of mercy waiting at the end of the game. That makes it less erotic.

On the topic of why people like things, why do people engage in sadomasochism? One theory put forward by Theodore Reik is that it has to do with the association of pleasure. If you were hit as a child by your parents, then consoled by them afterwards, then there is a psychological link between pain and comfort in your brain. As you grow up, you come to enjoy pain, because you anticipate there will eventually be comfort. At least, that’s one theory.

Gilles Deleuze, a critic of Reik’s work, would likely point out that it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside the masochist’s head - and that masochistic works of fiction, which tend to calcify the most crucial aspects of their fantasy - do not generally include scenes of pleasure and comfort. He might say we are looking at a single symptom, and not the entire epidemiology. Then again, he also argued that the agreement or contract is a key aspect of the masochistic fantasy — while a lack of agreement is crucial for a sadist.

The simplest answer is there is no one answer. Some people may correlate pain and pleasure, and some people may enjoy fiction or fantasies that focuses on pain alone. They may even be the same person. Sexuality is not black and white. It’s a complicated thing, bound up in society, history, one’s phenomenological experience.

Back to Saw. Jigsaw is detached, a voice on a tape recorder, who demands submission to his game - sounds like a pretty fun Tuesday, right? Maybe, until you find out he wants you to bypass your hard limits and won’t take ‘safeword’ for an answer. There could be some people who like that, I won’t discount the possibility, but I believe a sadist is not intrinsically BDSM-Dominant in the sense that restraints are not intrinsically sexy. So, even while the movies have many trappings of BDSM (pun intended) it’s only by caring for Dr. Gordon that Saw fleshes out the possibility of intimacy, softens the blow, and tends to your wounds.

Fantasy, to draw again from Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, is a key component of sadomasochistic expression, and a key component of fantasy is the fantasizer’s complicity. When we watch a movie, read a book, see a play, we decide how complicit we are with it: whether we’ll suspend our disbelief. So, even though Saw doesn’t offer its characters power or agency, the audience members retain theirs, and, not to state the obvious, but it’s fiction. They’re actors. As Clewis, a genius I’m lucky to know, once said, “they’ll all get lunch after this.” Fiction isn’t real but when done well, it provokes an emotional response. Both things are true at once: that the scenes depicted are completely fabricated for the sake of exciting people, and people can know this while being excited.

Ret large, I’ve observed that people are looking for comfort in media. In the tumblr Saw fandom, acceptance by Jigsaw is aspirational, more so than shipping, which is not the typical trend for fandoms. Plenty of people joke about Dr. Gordon and Adam, and someone even made a poorly received parody musical about it, but this feels symptomatic of online culture more than anything Saw wanted to say.

Going back to Amanda for a moment, her relationship with Jigsaw, wherein he’s her mentor and she’s like a rowdy kid who hasn’t learned it’s going to get her a time-out, provides the emotional core until Saw: The Final Chapter. There’s a prevalence of Saw fan content that revolves around making Original Characters who become Jigsaw’s apprentices, and this idea that they’re all one happy murder family. I find fandom and its byproducts fascinating. People want that comfort after pain and to be a part of something. The viewers are searching for something to latch on to, something they can connect to, and being hurt by people we love, trust, and look up to is an unfortunately universal experience. In this way, he’s less a Dominant and more of an abusive father.

It’s only since around five years ago that Sawmania has oriented itself around Dr. Gordon and Adam. They’re two attractive white men in a fucked up situation, so naturally people have circulated them more than any other aspect of the series. I’m not bitter about it. But I’m here to say, there’s a much better love interest for Dr. Gordon, and that - is Jigsaw. Problematic Daddy Dom, anyone?

Does the Saw series deserve more credit than it gets?

I’ll invoke the lawyer’s response: ‘it depends’. In many ways, I feel like the people who would find something to enjoy about Saw have already found it. Its edgy, over-the-top, metalcore, shoplifting-from-Spirit-Halloween vibe speaks to generations of alternative kids who want to prove to their friends they don’t get scared easily. In other words, this essay isn’t going to make fans out of people who weren’t. Saw’s unserious approach to cinematography and storytelling can enhance the viewing experience, particularly as the tropes become familiar to you, but for the uninitiated, these things are the ultimate turn-off – if the gore and guts didn’t get to you first.

Instead, what I want to impart is a deeper understanding of Saw. Earlier, I said the series had earned the ‘torture porn’ title with Saw IV, my least favorite. This may have sounded like I think there’s something wrong with torture porn. I don’t. The fact that erotic works involving torture are appealing to some is evidence that suggests torture porn could be appealing to anyone, i.e. the conditions that produce pure sadism also produce common Schadenfreude. We aren’t supposed to enjoy or take pleasure in the thought of suffering, and yet we do. I’m sure you can think of at least a few people you wouldn’t mind putting in a Saw trap.

“Every single one of us has witnessed the unfairness of life in action; this great person gets struck down by cancer when they’re not yet 40, while this other trashbag of a human lives into their 70s. And while we’re probably not going to lock someone in a room and make them hack off a limb in the hopes it makes them realize what a gift it is to be alive, we can empathize with the urge to.”

– “The thing that made the Saw franchise popular is also what ruined it” by Susan Arendt, Channel Surfing

Saw embraces this side of humanity. When you watch it, you can’t turn away from your empathy, or lack thereof. You have to face the part of you that might be fascinated by it. I’ve spoken glibly and generally about the series and its fans thus far, but I respect it and them for confronting the curiosity, the shame, the pain – for looking at things people don’t like to look at, and making entertainment from them.

There’s a lot to investigate in the series, and I’ve only breached the surface. Fitting since the movies don’t encourage you to look behind the curtain. They’re intentionally off-putting, gross, and abrasive. They revel in it. For horror fans, there’s something special about that unabashed freakiness.

After eleven movies, it’s impressive to keep going.

Think back to where we started: you’re in the driver’s seat for Saw n and you have to come up with a new, fresh, horrifying story. There are threads all over the ground. Jigsaw’s roles as mentor, cult leader, and father, Amanda as the prodigal son, Dr. Gordon as the new Jigsaw, the cops infiltrated, the hospitals infiltrated, and every kind of torture device a person has imagined already committed to glorious sped-up footage. What do you do with all of this? Where do you go? What more can be said?

I have no idea, but I can tell you, I really, really want to see it.

Post Script

Spiral (2021) was ass. I’m not talking about Spiral (2021). It sucked. It doesn’t count.

I saw that there was a hand tracing the same shape on a cosmic scale. The lines grew heavier with detail. What was in them? Life, perhaps. Who drew them? God, I believed.

The scroll of paper I selected was thirty feet long. I was going to cover it with the glyph until I understood.

Did it come from the heavens? An aspirational question that rose unspoken among the flock at St. Osgyth’s when they crowded to look. They didn’t ask if it came from somewhere else.

I saw it as I emerged from my densely appointed bedroom (which had a second function as a storage room) after a week-long jag on my scroll. Famished and bleary-eyed, I leaned over to the self-proclaimed prophet Lucas Terner to confirm the suspicions in my visual cortex.

“Is that a giant cell phone?”

Lucas had never been one to turn up his nose at an opportunity to speak. Even asking the question I grew fearful that I’d given him too much attention, and the fragile sense of magic that hung over our Priory in the wake of this object’s arrival would shatter under an endless monologue. But Lucas was quiet. He simply nodded.

As if it had slipped through the floorboards of another world, the antiquated flip-phone was open and laid on one side, blocking access to the tool shed and bisecting the courtyard diagonally. Its scale was enormous. It was as tall and wide as a truck, and yet the flagstones around it were undisturbed where my mind told me they should have been cracked by its impact, because I imagined it had fallen from the sky. The buttons were each the size and heft of a microwave. Its smooth, black plastic shell, so much larger than it should be, looked alien. I wondered too, did it come from the heavens?

The crowd gathered after Lucas’ unexpected speechlessness. Gooseflesh sprouted on my arms as I realized this thing had made its appearance around the same time I did, stepping out of the building by sheer coincidence. My hand traced my glyph in the air. Did I bring it here?

The Prioresses Three, their scarlet robes billowing with speed, came into the courtyard with their hands aloft.

“It’s a sign!” Roared the rosary-collector, Helen O’Malley, her wrinkled face reddened as she pushed to the front of the flock. She was old and ruddy, the spirit of a rusted-bottom fishing boat.

“Oh, a sign, like the electrical fire?” The cynic, Carmen Yutz, was visibly out of chapstick. His parched mouth was framed by a tremendous thin red beard. It sucked the moisture out of every word. People denigrated him in private, but they laughed then, remembering Helen’s attempt to hold prayer over a smear of ash by the toolshed, and their various polite refusals.

Lucas and I were too discrete from the group to laugh with them, standing in front of the dormitories, while everyone else had come from the refectory. The gap between us contained four stone benches and a cypress tree. We were as plain on the flagstone as the big Nokia. There were no other bodies to hide our faces from the sweet, naive senior resident, and I wouldn’t laugh at her when she could see me.

My legs itched to carry me to everyone else. I was already considered odd – more like the self-proclaimed prophet Lucas than our good Prioresses – and standing alongside him made my neck hot.

“It will be removed,” the middle Prioress said. Her lofted hands were tangled in a cat’s cradle.

“We will call the city to take care of it. Please return to your day.” From the leftmost Prioress, whom I privately contemplated too often. Her hands were ink-stained with doodles that she attempted to conceal in her pendulous sleeves.

Finally, the rightmost: she had only one eye and a cleft lip that seemed stapled to her nose. She extended her arm to the refectory. The wind spoke for her, just one word. Go.

As the crowd shifted inside I jogged to join their ranks. My stomach writhed miserably, hunger in the forefront of my mind. I received looks and struggled not to regard the meaning behind them. It was as I feared: I was associated with the object’s sudden and unbidden appearance.

I came to the Priory to pursue my work, my masterwork; I wasn’t scared of being isolated from the other seekers. But I was ashamed to be like the one everyone agreed was crazy. Lucas Terner, with messianic frizz for hair, broke the peace of St. Osgyth’s by preaching his devotion to God every twelve hours: at sunrise and sunset. He believed there was some ‘allowance’ for the changing hours of the seasons. He said God permitted it by design. I found myself the unfortunate and sole audience member of many of his orations: unlike the rest of the acolytes I stayed in my bedroom working on the glyphic masterwork, where I could easily be cornered, and admittedly I balked at the thought of interrupting him. Much as I feared someone else might believe it, I myself had noticed an intractable synchronicity with the self-proclaimed prophet – maybe that was why I allowed him to worship, loudly, in my space.

The flock looked for explanations for the cell phone. In the absence of any, they looked for other things that had never been explained, including me. Including Lucas. We bore the burden of omens, though I suspect it was easier for him.

Inside the refectory, I maneuvered through glossy picnic tables packed with furtive whisperers and roving eyeballs and got a long overdue meal and a cup of thin black tea.

Did the phone come from the heavens? No one answered, and no one had more to say, but the question kept being asked.

My first divine sip of tea was interrupted by Carmen, his gaze sly, sliding across the opposite bench and settling down in front of me. The crying woman walked behind him, eyes absent of tears. It was the first time I’d seen her in weeks. Her name, I think, was Florence.

I did not want to slurp in front of either of them, so I had to put my mug down. “Hello,” I said, tongue thick with disuse.

“What do you think it is?” Carmen asked me.

He looked at me sardonically. I had no idea if he was angry, amused, scared, nor why he was asking me.

“You want the opinion of a ‘schizoid obsessive’?” There was no humor from my thick mouth. It made sentences sound like a dropped rock. And yet, once he parsed my meaning, Carmen laughed – his hesitation insulting.

“I want to hear from the visionary, yeah.” With a twist of sarcasm. What could I say? He had always been quick to win. I wish I could hear how he spoke to the Prioresses.

“It’s political art,” I said evenly, “or regular art– if there is such a thing.” Powdered potatoes and reheated vegetable stew. My fingers trail along the stem of my spoon wishfully. Could I start eating? I wondered. I was so hungry, I knew I’d eat messily, and I knew Carmen would find some witty-sounding way to turn my name into a reminder of a momentary lapse in discipline. I knew I’d be taunted down the halls with ‘sloppy something’ or ‘hungry something’ – I was not as witty as Carmen was.

“There definitely isn’t. But you think people put it there?”

“Secularists don’t want for creativity.”

“Yeah, well, she says she saw it appear,” Carmen took Florence’s arm, making her jump. This was certainly the only time I’d ever seen her not sobbing, but her expression was still a miserable one. “Yes,” she said, with a sidelong look at the bearded man. “It appeared. From nowhere.”

Florence was no more than 30 with a round, full face, dotted with freckles. I was honestly disinterested in the tragedies that brought her to St. Osgyth’s, and perhaps led her to take her vow of sorrow, but then I wished I knew her better, at least enough to interject. But even if I had tried, this was a discussion fated for undesired interruption.

Helen plowed up to the table and sat down on my side. I suppressed a sigh and dropped my spoon on the glossy wood – it’d begun to hover towards my soup and potatoes.

“What did he say?” she asked Carmen, not looking at me, though I determined I was the subject of her query. I was mildly impressed that they’d already found a way to make this bizarre event into a disagreement. Carmen, who used to write for Lambsear Press, was expertly skilled in continuous argument, so there was no surprise there, but sweet, old Helen O’Malley was in rare form. Most of the time she was arranging her tens of thousands of rosaries. Today, she wasn’t wearing a single one. It was unusual. So were Florence’s dry cheeks.

“An art installation,” Carmen waved a hand, looking up towards the high rafters.

“Well!” Helen threw her head back and cried. She thrust her eyes towards mine, almost like she was about to plant a big kiss on me, but her expression was redder and angrier than ever. “Lord! These ‘devoted’ believers cannot see your very hands when they are reaching for us! They think it must be mortal work –” She growled and whipped around, rising up at Florence next. “My dear, you know what you saw. We must go to the Prioresses and tell them there is no doubt this is God’s work.”

Florence, aghast, shook her head. “No…” She pushed Carmen’s hand off of her. “I don’t know what I saw. Please,” she looked between the two of them, and finally at me, her eyes entreating. “Let’s not make this into anything. I’d like it to just – be what it is. Just that.”

Confusion flashed across Carmen and Helen’s faces, and I took the opportunity to look into my mug and imagine what a pleasure lunch might have been if not for the cell phone.

Lucas climbed on top of the centermost table, fussing around with his robes as he struggled to do so in a timely manner. By the time he was standing up on the tabletop, he had everyone’s attention. People’s eyes were even more derogatory when they fell on him than me, and seeing that, I was comforted to my core.

He clenched his fists and held his arms out to either side, a terse crucifixion, then rolled his eyes up towards the rafters. “Heathens!” He bellowed. People smiled into their food.

“I preach every day to deaf ears! I have made a fool of myself in your eyes, but now, finally, something important has happened, and I must beg you, please, open your ears, and listen to this fool, for how evident it is that we have all been wrong!”

It wasn’t like the first day Lucas showed up. He’d chosen to spin while he preached until he was so dizzy he regurgitated all over the gray, irregular flagstones outside. People had hidden laughs behind their hands, and jeered him in private, solemnly ignoring him when they were near.

No, this was different. There were no laughs. No jeers. The crowd looked towards him, their smiles gone. My stomach complained, and even I couldn’t tear my eyes away. He seemed to be glowing. His words filled my chest. Something important has happened.

“How you all long for God! You, drawing that symbol again and again!” He pointed to me. Eyes turned, and softened, but not by much. Lucas pounded his chest. “And I, narrating, orating, hoping, praying. I long for God. I do too. I always have. I want to be close to Him. To Divinity. And now, here, today, at St. Osgyth’s, He has sent us a direct line of communication, and we just accept it will be taken away?!” Lucas swung around and locked eyes with me again. If what he saw inspired him next, then he mistook hunger for encouragement.

“People!” His arms shot up towards the sky, hands bursting open. “Join me! To the courtyard! Let us place a call – to God!”

Our hesitation as we made our way back to the courtyard was strategically backwards. We should have rushed so no one could stop us. Yet we were sheepish. We waited to hear the fury of the Prioresses. We stepped lightly. Even Lucas dawdled at the front of the group, his bombastic call to action depleted before the sideways monolith.

Florence had not come out with everyone else. I saw her standing at the window of the refectory and watching. The twenty or so who had weren’t sure where to look. I found myself on the edge, near the dorms again, my fingers twitching around the absence of a pen. I had owned one of these phones once, I thought. It was a long time ago, and it was a different model, but it was a Nokia too. Carmen broke the silence.

“What’s His number?”

Speculation simmered.

“Seven – gifts of the Holy Spirit!”

“Fourteen – the stations of the cross!”

“Ten –the commandments!”

I felt myself stepping forward, holding my arm out.

Once I sat up with Helen. She invited me into her room, the ceiling thick with beads like clustered grapevines, the walls concealed, a jungle of wood varieties, chintz, the odd gilding or mother of pearl.

She shared some brandy with me. It was only my third day, when my reclusivity was seen as a curable ail and not the abnormality of spirit that it would become. “The world loves young people,” she complained in a burst after a few glasses. “There’s no place for anyone anymore,” she added, shaking her head, until her eyes fixed on a glossy amber rosary, immense compared to the others, that hung above her bed. “No rewards. Not in this life.”

There was a night I came across Carmen when I went out for more charcoal. He was smoking outside the walls of St. Osgyth’s, looking hunted. I knew him as the founder of the theological debate circle, which he’d invited me to shortly after my arrival. I waved to him, but he didn’t see me. His eyes were trained on the power lines that threaded across the street, connecting to houses, traffic lights, distant poles. I said hello to him, and he looked at me like a stranger. I was, but the acolytes never looked at me that way. I felt unusual: I realized that if each of us hadn’t made the choice to come to St. Osgyth’s Priory for Alternative Christian Spirituality, we would probably never have looked at each other as friends.

“St. Osgyth was a cephalophore,” Carmen told me. “That means she carried her own head.”

“I thought she was resurrected as a child, after drowning in a river,” I said, and though my tone was innocent, Carmen’s eyes narrowed.

“You thought – or you think?” he asked. “Do you believe what I said just then?”

“No,” I said. “There’s no way to prove it.”

“So you still think she was resurrected after drowning in a river. You haven’t changed your mind. Which I’d expect, from a schizoid obsessive.”

“No, I… I guess you’re right.” Demoralized, confused, and repulsed by the smell of his cigarettes, I walked away. I may have apologized.

After that, I decided it would be better to miss the theological debate group.

I stepped up to the phone with my hand extended and found it falling onto the number ‘5’. See, the first rectangle of my glyph was located in the center. I pressed it down and saw it glow beneath my touch, backlit, as a loud tone rang out across the courtyard.

Then the next one, at the top right, which so happened to be ‘9’. I felt a stab of foolishness as I reached up and pressed it and again, that tone rang out, confirming that I was really doing this.

The bottom left. ‘1’. Was my orientation right? Even if the number corresponded to my glyph, I was drawing it on a sideways canvas. Should I have twisted my head to the side? The tone that came from each button was ear-splitting. “The Prioresses will come soon,” someone hissed. “Make it be quiet!”

I ignored them. The next would be ‘3’. Then ‘7’. At this point, if I were really drawing it, the central rectangle would have four other uneven rectangles on each corner. Doubt washed through me as I wondered if the precise order in which I drew it was the correct order, a question that had never occurred to me in my decades of glyphic transcription. The next rectangle went on the side, between ‘7’ and ‘9’, so I hit ‘8’. 591-378. But the final piece of the glyph was a large rectangle, bigger than all of them, which threaded through the ones at each of the four corners.

I paused. Where did I start, when I drew this last component?

From the top left. ‘3’. Across, left to right. ‘9’. Down. ‘7’. Across. Back up, through ‘1’.

I stepped back. 591-378-3971. The numbers pleased me to see, like plucking a correctly tuned string. Lucas jumped forward and hit the call button.

It thought for a moment, displaying an ellipsis, and then it rang.

The ground shook with sound as the phone blared a noise that we all faintly knew to be a telephone ring, but consciously experienced as a sonic blast. Helen fell to the trembling rocks of the courtyard and covered her ears. I looked around furtively for a sign of the scarlet robes that would bring an end to this experiment. The wind picked up then. It felt like I was falling, but when I looked around, I was still on my feet. The ringing ceased. Silence and static on the other end.

“Hi?”

It was a small voice, tinny, echoing through the speakers.

“Helloo?”

A silly, cheerful voice. The voice of a child – the voice of a little girl.

I leaned in to the receiver. “Hello, we–”

A hand, scrawled with ink doodles, smacked across the ‘end call’ button. I found myself face-to-face with three furious Prioresses. The crowd shrunk back beside me, and Florence was no longer watching by the window. Lucas looked like he was about to be sick.

“Please,” said the youngest Prioress, “go back to your meal.”

My stomach snarled at me in agreement, so I went without complaint.

I filled my belly with my cold potatoes and stew. Then, I returned to my densely appointed dorm and temporary storage unit, where I sat down in front of my thick and busy scroll, cramped in place by spare chairs.

I picked up my chunk of charcoal and laid it on the page, where my fingers paused. Outside, I heard the beeping of the crane that had been ordered to remove the Nokia, and Florence crying on a stone bench. Lucas’ newest sermon was audible from his bedroom next to mine.

I tipped the charcoal to one side. I pushed it across the canvas and watched as it made a column of gray in its wake.

Once, when I was working the gas station, a customer came in – he was a frequent latecomer, usually showing up to buy his energy drink in the last ten minutes of my shift. Despite this, and my warnings we closed soon, he had a tendency to gab. I always tried to make conversation with him, and not to show that I was thinking about how fast I could count down and close up once he was gone, because it’s rare for people to want to talk. I’m not the kind of person to stomp on flowers. He was a little older than me, maybe 27. Floppy hair, wide jaw, always dressed like he’d just been at the beautiful people gym. This one night, he was in a tizzy. He explained to me that he was arguing with his mom over text, because she believed, because of Facebook, that there were such things as angels on earth. I laughed, because it wasn’t my problem, and it was absurd: and he smiled. I remember that he looked tired under the smile. He carried on telling me about the argument, about how she believed anything she saw on the internet, throughout our transaction and for some time after he’d paid. She’d become rabidly conservative, anti-vax, and afraid to go outside over the last decade due to the constant flow of misinformation on social media, a now well-recorded phenomenon called the alt-right pipeline. I deployed my sympathies. “That must be difficult, to have to argue about reality with the woman who raised you.” I itched to check the time so I could tell him we’d unfortunately just closed. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh, and then waved goodbye. “See you next time.”

When I was in elementary school, I tried to make friends with my bully. Actually, I thought from the beginning that we were friends: that the reason he chased me around and called me names was a game, and since I was fast, I was good at the game. But he wouldn’t pair up with me in class. He’d tease me for my pageboy haircut. I was reactive, quick to tears, and an oddball. Not necessarily an easy target – I was also affable, creative, and excitable, not ashamed to raise my hand or speak up. On the other hand, I had few friends. I spent every day making up the world in my head. Eventually, when he realized he could get away with more than playground harassment, he started hitting me. Always in the stomach. Always during the chaos while we lined up on the blacktop to go back inside from recess. It was pointless to go to the authorities: teachers would tell me he just liked me, and needed a friend. I remember telling a teacher my stomach still hurt after he’d hit it, and they either didn’t believe me or didn’t care, and sent me back to my assignment. “Okay,” they said, “but you still have to finish your work.”

“Love should not hurt,” my mom used to say to our dogs when they got so excited to see us they dug their paws in somewhere soft. I knew from my parents that what I experienced from this boy wasn’t being liked. Being liked was good. The attention of a bully wasn’t. I don’t know what it’s like to try and convince a school board to take action because your kid is being bullied, but I imagine it’s an aggravating and inefficient process. Most adults see it as a natural part of growing up. And admittedly, I don’t know what my parents did to try and stop it from happening, but I’m sure that they did. Part of why I don’t know is it was important to me at the time to handle it on my own. I thought this inevitable conflict with a peer would be among my first experiences with standing up for myself. But, still living as a girl, instead this was the first time it became clear that the world was not on my side: I learned every chance will be afforded to the boy who hurts a girl, and every doubt will be called in on the person who speaks up.

I’ve had some enlightening experiences receiving male privilege since transitioning, but that’s not what this is about. At the time, I was as disempowered as a white kid going to a really nice public school can be.

We were lining up to go inside one day when he asked me why I never hit him back. I said it wasn’t nice to hit people, and besides, I didn’t want to get in trouble. He said it didn’t matter, and he’d let me hit him back, no consequences. He put his hands on his hips and puffed up his stomach. So I wound up my fist and gutpunched him. He crumpled to the ground. My line went inside, and as I followed, I saw he was still lying there on the blacktop.

He went right to the principal, and the next day, I was called in to get a talking-to. I remember sitting in front of the vice principal and crying, because I knew it wasn’t right to hit people, and also feeling furious, because I knew I hadn’t started it. They called in my dad. He was angry – but not at me. He chewed out the vice principal for treating me with a double standard. I felt a mix of guilt – for calling him in from work, for being a part of the problem, for not reacting better – but also vindication and strength. My dad showed me I didn’t have to sit there and feel bad about it, that the anger I felt was there for a reason. This wasn’t fair.

Looking back, it could’ve been a deliberate ploy to get me in trouble, one that I took hook, line, and sinker, because more than wanting to hurt my bully, I wanted to play with him. I wanted to get along. What he’d offered me that day was getting even. Maybe, I thought, if we got even, things would balance out.

I’ve never been good at quitting things. Now, I have quit – a lot. But rarely, if ever, have I done it well.

I ran away from home to get out of doing a summer book club. There was the backyard tantrum to get out of doing soccer.

It didn’t stop at early childhood. I’ve no-called, no-showed a lot more than I’ve ever worked out my two weeks. I’m a chronic flake, last-minute canceller, and frequent crier. Some of it is attributable to my special blend of anxiety, depression, ADHD, perfectionism, and some of it is societal pressure, the Protestant Work Ethic, and some of it is that I come from a dogged, storytelling family.

‘Not so funny when it happened,’ the title of a collection of travel stories put together by Tim Cahill, is also a catchphrase of ours: the accidental seven-mile hike where our Rottie, Tinkerbell, gave up halfway through and laid down on the ground, for example, or monkeys stealing our picnic on safari in Kenya, or when I inexplicably packed six king-size gluesticks to do arts and crafts on a plane, and we were pulled aside because TSA thought they were plastic explosives. These were trying times. The catchphrase, or in-joke, reflects such a deep truth I can’t even laugh at it sometimes. Those moments were tough, but they’re over; they’ve become memories, which have become stories, which we tell to each other. Not all the stories are funny, but all of them make me smile. The legend of my sister skinning her knee during the mile run and carrying on anyways, a key part of the tapestry. The cautionary tales with valuable lessons: to always tighten a shaker of red pepper flakes before dumping it on your food, and not to boil vegetables, and that stock options aren’t the same as a raise. And the things we didn’t learn until we were old enough to hear it – loves my parents had before each other, drugs they tried, music that enraptured them, bars they can’t go back to. Beautiful, important, true things. Real knowledge.

At the same time, once I knew that I was living through what might someday be a story (which was of utmost importance), I wanted badly to be a character worth telling a story about. The problem was, I wasn’t happy with who I was. I don’t like this image most people have of being trans, the ‘trapped in a body’ picture. I wasn’t trapped in a body, I was trapped in society; one that told me how I was supposed to dress, and feel, and on top of that, told me I was a second-class citizen by virtue of my alleged girlhood. I wasn’t clawing at my internals and screaming. Actually, in my case, I found extremely effective coping mechanisms that hid my transness and neurodivergence for most of my life. I concentrated on the art of stories. I learned a lot of what I knew about human interaction from movies and books. Then, I had to relearn everything I thought I knew, because real life is not fiction (whomp whomp). I was a very rehearsed child, carefully studying the art people liked for clues and repeating certain phrases or gestures to myself, so that I could use them later in my great, lifelong performance. Like Goffman’s dramaturgy, my time by myself was off the stage, in the wings, where I could prepare myself to go out and read my lines.

Living life like I was an actor on a stage was exhausting. Overwhelming. No one made me do this, mind you. And yet I was convinced I had to. Call it masking, call it dysphoria, call it depression: I could only escape if I was alone, no matter how wonderful the people around me were. Even then, my solitude was spent working on the project, the rehearsal. When I was a bit older, I started to do online roleplaying. I indulged my desire to be a perfect character in that space, but eventually, when I turned back to my real life, I could only feel the pressure to be something I wasn’t.

Eventually, my bully left me alone. We were put in separate classes the year after our altercation. I moved overseas. The second time I moved back, we were then high school freshmen, and we were sorted into the same Civics class. To simulate our Great American System, the teacher decided we would have a debate about an issue that the Supreme Court was discussing that year (Missouri v. McNeely). The class would physically divide itself on two sides, and the one with more people would win. In brief, a motorist refused to have his blood drawn by police officers who pulled him over for a suspected DUI. They took him to a hospital and forcibly took his blood. I took the side of the motorist. I argued it violated privacy and property rights. My bully took the opposing side. He argued that police have the right to enforce the law by any means necessary. I’d like to recall the specific points we made, but all I really remember is that by the end, everyone was sitting on his side, and I was alone, on my side, getting flustered. The teacher asked why, if I didn’t have an argument, I refused to go to the other side. It came down to it ‘feeling wrong’ to me: I couldn’t summarize why. I lost the debate. But the Court ruled in favor of McNeely.

I said my parents are dogged. And they are. They climbed Mt. Kilamanjaro last year. They know how to sail and scuba dive. They stay up on the news. They read books. They’ve seen more current movies and shows than I have, watching what just came out instead of the bargain bin B-movie garbage from 1988 that I prefer. Most parents at their stage of life are retiring and getting comfortable somewhere, but mine are following diplomatic orders to Pakistan, with hopes of doing something good to spite the current administration. Maybe most impressively, as I’ve grown up and seen the world change, I’ve seen them change too. They aren’t in the alt-right pipeline, they don’t believe in angels on earth (besides Rowan Atkinson in Love, Actually). We’ve argued; we’re people. When I came out to my parents, first as a lesbian, then as a non-binary person, and finally as the man that I am today, they were supportive and uncertain. To them, me coming out as trans was a slightly different matter than coming out as gay. With a benefit of the doubt I didn’t give them at the time, I’m sure it’s down to trans people having a hard time in life – them wanting me to have a good, easy life. And, of course, I imagine it’s jarring for your kid to make major life changes you never anticipated.

The first few years were odd, but not necessarily contentious. I said I don’t vibe with the ‘trapped in a body’ picture, but during this time, it did feel like I was emerging from a prison cell. A cave. All the experiences I had before felt like they belonged to someone else. They were blurry, weird memories. A stress dream of eyebrow plucking, pimple popping, and Hanes underwires. Waking up from it, I was delirious with new life.

And I was awkward, blunt, untethered. Decisive, but unlearned. It wasn’t always good to raise my hand or speak up, but I would do it anyways. I was stomping, whirlwind. The first few months of college, I would wander freely through my dorm hall and poke my head in any empty door. I’d throw out my two cents into the conversation and then leave. I’d ask whole groups if anyone wanted to hook up. I’d make friends with people because they said something smart in class. I’d stop talking to anyone I didn’t like.

My parents and I had a handful of arguments during the first few years of my transition. My transness wasn’t the topic, but it floated around the conversation. I remember my dad telling me he felt like he’d done something wrong, causing me to transition through a failure of parenting. I heard it like he meant raising a trans kid was wrong, but that’s not what he meant. I remember my mom making side comments about one of the names I experimented with (to be fair, ‘Douglas’ was a bad idea). In my simultaneously fragile and unbreakable state, I felt rejected and invigorated. I tasted the poisonous musk of being a self-reliant man. I wanted to quit family. Quit love. How privileged! Where some trans people are forced away from their family, kicked out, shunned, I was still accepted – and yet, there was still dissonance. I was accepted, but not by an ugly name. I was accepted, but not as a man.

You, and I, will be happy to hear things didn’t stay in this dissonance forever.

I quit a great job. I quit a bad job. I had a shit breakup. I had a happy breakup. I moved houses. I met my partner. I was enraptured by music, and swore off ever going back to certain bars. One day I looked around at my family and everyone was calling me ‘son’.

I did some silly things back then, rash decisions and gut reactions. Transitioning wasn’t one of them, and I’m not ashamed of how extroverted I was in my debut. I highlighted my out-of-the-closet, freshman-of-college demeanor because I am actually trying to go somewhere with this essay, believe it or not. There’s a core to me. It’s brash, and open, and not afraid. It’s outgoing. It makes friends. It makes enemies. It’s my sense of fairness and deserving.

When my dad stood up for me to my vice principal, it was just one moment in a lifetime of moments like it: moments when my parents made it clear that even in this fucked-up world, even when I fuck up, it’s not all over. This is something not every kid gets. Considering my self-esteem was in the dumper from not wanting to be a girl, having parents who protected me, demanded I be treated fairly, prepared me to leap out of the closet and into the fiery, whipsmart, freaky, courageous person I am today.

I’m extremely lucky to have the parents that I do, and in some ways unlucky. It’s a natural part of life that children who grow up to be parents will attempt to do a better job than their own; it’s also a natural part of life for them not to succeed unilaterally. I’m clinging to the latter, because doing better than my parents, who managed to bring a miserable, kicking, screaming, crying child all the way to adulthood, seems impossible.

Love shouldn’t hurt. An argument is not the end of a relationship. Diplomacy is the best policy. Never pet a burning dog. Don’t complain without trying to make a change first. Listen to your gut. If you shower before you cut your nails, they’ll be soft. And lots of things are funnier when they’re over.

Author’s Note: This collaborative project is made possible by Joana Silva of fragments of disquiet. Head on over and check out their stuff if you haven’t already!

Chapter 26

George was the first to choose a spot on the brand new sofa after she thoroughly inspected it. Then, unceremoniously, as if it had always been her right, she curled up on top of one of the three cushions Sebastian had awkwardly displayed on the seats.

Watching the cat for a moment, Sebastian eventually joined her. Between them, there was still one seat, but it wasn’t empty. Sebastian imagined — and in a way, knew — Jim was sitting there.

He turned his head, hoping that, just once, he would see him as strongly as he could feel him. Instead, he found himself looking out of the window, staring down the old shed out in the yard, rotting. It didn’t serve any purpose: it no longer shielded Jim’s bones from the elements, nor did it host clandestine meetings between friends. As of now, it was nothing more than a reminder that Jim was, in fact, not here. That he had been abandoned for decades.

Cold. Alone.

Dead.

That old, decaying shack was not a worthy resting place for his husband.

—

Winter fell on the little town without stopping to introduce itself. Overnight, windows misted frosty, sidewalks slicked, businesses sprouted fir garlands and red ribbons. All was quaint and beautiful under the gray skies and smeared clouds, at least from a distance.

For children, the prospect of snow outweighs the dreariness of the season, but for the children, the Four, nothing could inspire hope out of bleak, cold reality. They played less. Bela grew obsessed with writing her last will and testament, and its many provisions became a regular topic, when they did see each other. Zach was going to be a regular barback during the holidays and became preoccupied with training; he felt more attached to his family than ever. Johann, for a long time, was quiet. He didn’t joke, didn’t burst out, he behaved in class. And Bobby watched all her friends grow further and further away. She was terrified of it; she always had been, because she knew it would happen someday. So, she retreated into her books.

As the winter holiday drew closer, and the séance settled in their minds, they were each drawn to the pirate cove by the creek.

It no longer looked like a ramshackle skullduggery pier, but a lean-to. A lot of branches and sticks, applied with care, yes, but centuries and worlds away from Tortuga. Johann went there first. He had his hands in his father’s jacket pockets, and he told his mother somberly he needed to ‘take a walk and do some thinking’. He was gone before he could see tears spring into her eyes, which she resolutely swallowed down, telling herself it was good he was growing up. Maybe someday the jacket would fit.

He touched the branches and sticks tenderly, like the memories of their playful summer were secreted inside, when he heard the crunch of feet behind him.

It was Bela, in a highly sophisticated black turtleneck and a little red coat. “Oh!” she looked floored to see him, like it’d been years. They’d traded sandwiches only the day before. But it felt like years.

“Hey.” Johann picked up a dirty rope and pulled it up from the ground, ripping up grass and leaves stuck to it. “I came here ‘cos I wanted to be alone,” he added, noncommittally. Bela smiled like it was a joke she’d heard too many times. “Well, too bad! I’m here too ‘cos I wanted to be alone.” She crouched under the entrance of their fort and sat down on a bed of frosty leaves with a shiver. Johann swore she looked older. “So neither of us will be happy.”

He puttered around for a few minutes, swishing the dirty rope and watching the debris fall, feeling it damp and cold in his palm. Finally, he looked towards the direction of the ghost house. “I wish it turned out the ghost wasn’t so sad,” he said aloud, not exactly to Bela. “I wish he was angry instead, like in movies.”

“I wish none of it ever happened,” Bela said in kind, her brown eyes settling in the same direction. A couple of leaves blew off the trees, some of the last few left. “And I’ll never get my telephone back.”

“If he was angry, we could just kill him, again. Or lay him to rest or - whatever.”

“We did our best,” she said, now to him.

“But what’s gonna happen?” Johann looked at her, wracked with confusion and grief.

“I dunno,” she shrugged.

Johann huffed, and then came to sit by her, settling like dust.

They sat together in the pirate cove, in the den, in the shack, feeling the wind stutter on its planks and just kiss their cheeks. They watched the leaves blowing in the air.

—

Jim could believe Adrian was dead.

He couldn’t believe he could believe it.

The knowledge should have shaken him. Broken his heart. Adrian, playful rival, disloyal compatriot, statuesque and stubbled, lumpy Adam’s appled, how could he be dead? Jim had been dead much longer. Was that what gave him peace?

No. He had only one peace. The obituary did not disturb it. The séance had reaffirmed it. And in the dream world, that place between death and life where chaos and sense intermingle, it was indulged.

The morning the couch arrived felt like the first week they had known about one another’s love, but there was a gravity to it, a weight and seriousness. Something more was happening. Their interplay had gone on long enough that it was changing, growing, expanding: the sense of some great project filled the air, though what it was and how it might appear, Jim was uncertain.

He sat with Sebastian on the couch. Sebastian looked straight at him. “That flat was messy,” he remarked. “If we ever make our way back there…” he trailed off.

How long could they walk between worlds like that? What certainty was there in a dream? For the first time Jim felt disconnected from Sebastian’s body. It still fed him, it seemed. It must have been, all along. Its charge, its physicality, its realness– for the first time, these things were obstacles. A barrier. A wall.

“Maybe I’m not the one who needs to be set free,” he mused, and as if Sebastian heard him, he stood with a sudden, urgent mission, and booked it towards the front door. “And where are you off to?” Jim trailed after Sebastian, onto the lawn.

Zach trailed through the forest, thinking of homework, family, and chores. All were manageable. All still needed to be thought through. The woods were the best place to think, they all knew it.

How simply he thought so. They all knew it. More recently he had been troubled by the idea of their group fracturing, blood bond forgotten, as they dropped into dismal lives or worse deaths. They were a steady fixture, weren’t they? They couldn’t be shaken, or so he had thought.

Even as he concentrated on his duties, these dismal possibilities rattled in the back of his mind. As he approached the creek bed, he saw flashes of glossy brown and bright red. Despite his pessimism about their future, Zach smiled. At least they had this now. At least, today, they were all alive and loved each other.

He pushed through the branches, to their delight. “Zach!” they cried.

“We’ve gotta get Bobby too.”

“Probably got her nose in a book.”

“Let’s walk to the library! It’s not far.”

The three of them walked in a loose circle, Zach herding the other two from behind. Inadvertently, they found themselves heading up the path near the ghost house.

“Been a while since we played wolfs,” Bela said, before an ear-splitting crack turned their heads towards Sebastian’s house. In consensus, all at once, without words, the trio climbed the hill overlooking the backyard and watched as Sebastian took an axe to the old shed.

It was icy gray, but not snowing, and the once-overgrown lawn was barren. Sebastian struck a brazen image on the landscape, and all three felt like they were watching a stranger. Their hands found one another’s, and they exchanged looks. All of them thought the same thing. Where was Bobby?

—

In another life, they would have grown old together. Sebastian longed to be in Jim's warm embrace again, to forget the regret, and the shame, and the overwhelming guilt he always carried, and so he tore down the shed as if the old planks of wood were to blame for their separation. His movements were violent, and desperate. Dressed only in a t-shirt and a washed-out pair of jeans, his body barely registered the cold until he felt a familiar wave of pain shoot from his limbs.

The scar tissue around his joints became stiff.

With limited movements, he eventually stopped, staring down at the axe in his hands. The splinters dug into his skin from pulling apart the shed with his bare hands in an unjustified frenzy began to make themselves known. His left palm bled. His ragged breaths echoed loudly in his ears.

—

Bobby’s already quiet demeanor became quieter as the days went by. A deep sadness, accentuated by the frustration of not being able to help Jim along into the light, settled into her young bones. It weighed her down. Her mother, set on not letting sorrow consume them, had made an effort to bring light into their home. Despite the harsh weather, the house was filled with fresh flowers. There was music and hearty meals. They danced in the kitchen and baked together. At bedtime, they read only stories where people lived happily ever after, and hugged each other tightly goodnight.

Nothing, however, seemed to lift the young girl’s spirits.

One afternoon, as Maeve sat on the sofa with a cup of tea and the company of the telly, she watched Bobby wrap a red, knitted scarf around her neck and slip on matching gloves by the front door. “Bobby?” She called. “Where are you going?”

Bobby couldn’t say. She didn’t know. She had been lured from her bedroom by an inexplicable feeling, and compelled to put on her boots. At her mother’s question, she shrugged.

“Come here.” The girl walked towards the sofa from where Maeve proceeded to wrap her scarf tighter and wipe the sleep from her eyes with her thumb despite her protests. Silence fell between them again as she held onto her daughter, one hand at each shoulder. “It’s not our job to fix it.” She declared; these words had been spoken far too many times already. “Be home before nightfall, okay?” Maeve requested, pressing a kiss to the top of Bobby’s hair. “And put on a hat.”

—

Big steps, slow and unsure at first, led Bobby to where she needed to be.

To where her heart was.

She stared at the backs of her three friends for a moment before she wordlessly stepped closer. The sound of the icy moss crunching under her boot made them turn around, alarmed. Immediately,

“Bobby!” Johann squealed in relief, his bright voice echoing in the woodlands.

Consequently, it reached the soldier by the shed.

From where he was standing, he could see four vague but familiar silhouettes. With a conscious effort, aware and ashamed that he was being watched, he regained his composure, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and leveled his breaths. Dropping the axe carefully to his feet, he then decided to acknowledge them.

One awkward wave later, the kids were stumbling towards the house. Bobby trudged silently behind her friends — it's not our job to fix it, she reminded herself as they approached the wretched looking soldier through the backyard gate. The axe, although abandoned at his feet, made him look deranged. Yet, there was no sense of threat, no danger. At least towards them.

“What’re you doing?” Johann asked curiously with his hands on his hips

“Taking down the shed.” Sebastian replied.

Bobby saw blood drip from his hand onto the frozen ground. Then, she found the pocket of air beside him, colder than the air around them, undulating gently; she couldn’t take her eyes off of it. She found herself nodding in its direction, a quiet but necessary acknowledgement.

“What are you going to replace it with?” Bela wondered aloud, tilting her head to the side, but the fact that the soldier’s planning hadn't gotten that far was clear from the look on his face.

“Well,” Zach cleared his throat, looking around to study his friends’ faces. “Can we help?”

For decades, the shed had been a blight on the yard. Everyone who moved in, regardless of how long they stayed (and exempting the squatters), had designs on its destruction. But there was only one person able to follow through on those lofty promises, just as there was but one person capable of coaxing a spirit out into a thunderstorm to save his life.

It was torn down in swathes. One wall axed, one peeled, one crumbled, and the last tugged piecemeal from its frame. The reaching, skeletal fingers of the roof collapsed under themselves. A pile of refuse grew on the side of the lawn as they collected rotting boards pimpled with crooked nails. This became a source of labor better-suited for the children than the actual destruction, which Sebastian, his hands bloodied, took to like a man possessed. The four formed a relay from Sebastian’s truck to the growing pile of remains, carting it piece by piece. He would drive it to a junkyard at a later date. “Back to the earth,” Bela said somberly.

This too was a kind of seance, or exorcism. Where previously the children had only a few conceptions of how to interact with a ghost, they now knew there were tenfold: even something like this, simple yard work, was a way to reach Jim. As they worked, longer and harder than any of them had worked before, until they felt cold perspiration and dusk had descended on the town, they nearly – nearly – understood how it had been for Sebastian in these months. Every action weighed more on this property. Every board shifted was a message to the afterlife; every word spoken was heard by a person who was not there. Nothing was simple. Everything came back to him.

They finally said goodbye to Sebastian, and the yard, beginning a dark walk back to town. Johann patted his pockets with an indeterminable sense of loss. “Do we have everything?” he asked, though he couldn’t imagine what they were missing. “And then some,” Bobby replied.

“Someone built that shed,” Zach noted, as if it came as a surprise.

“And we buried it.”

Collage Sourced through the Internet Archive

• Silver Sugar Spoon (1936) by Anthony Zuccarello

• Railroad Snow Sheds (1878) from the book Industrial History of the United States by Albert Sidney Bolles

• The Trinity (1478) by Laurent Girardin

• IBM Vintage Computer Service Engineer TOOL CASE 1960's by D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C.

• By the Death Bed (1896) by Edvard Munch

Anaise was chosen for guard on a day when her parents had no time to celebrate it, so she hid the sash. She ate her dinner and listened while they discussed the onset of war. War was familiar to her, not that there was time either for her to share her expertise, having participated in a series of playground experiments on the topic: boys versus girls, poor versus rich, brown versus white, black versus white, brown and black versus white. She knew what it was to make friends in arms who wouldn’t look at her twice when it was over. She knew about betrayal – the swapping of sides, a humiliating strategic decision for all involved – and she knew about losing, and she knew about winning. Unfortunately, she didn’t know much about the war her country was about to involve itself in. She pushed her rice around, taking snippets from the higher conversation between her mother and father.

“I just don’t understand terrorists,” her mother said.

“There’s nothing to understand,” her father replied.

Anaise didn’t want her parents to be concerned she hadn’t told them something. They might think she had other secrets – she did not – so she concealed the sash until the walk-up to the school doors, after they’d dropped her off. It was bright, hi-v yellow, and it said ‘School Guard’ in blocky blue letters. She felt ordained as she walked across the quad that morning.

St. Odrian Elementary was flat, beige, a single building, with trailers to one side that acted as temporary classrooms. The maple trees sent whirlers down around Anaise, rice at the wedding, confetti at the parade. The air smelled like the first moment of the first bite of an apple, before the sweetness, when the aroma of it hits the nose, and the waxy edge makes contact with the teeth.

The boy, Deacon, was wearing his hi-v yellow sash too.

Anaise didn’t look at him when she walked by, and hoped he would notice.

But nothing hurt Deacon. He was too big and tall – the world bounced off of him.

He sat on the couch under the whiteboard that said Mr. Wooster on the opposite side of the room from Anaise, when they gathered for the club meeting.

It was a new room for her. Legend had it the fourth graders met for Student Democracy there, and it bore the hallowed aura of a sacred place. The walls were covered in the same shag as the floor, muffling the world around them, the guard, gathered around a circular wooden table – except for Deacon. Anaise sat at the side by the door, across from Mr. Worcester, turned away from the chicken-wire mesh window that would hypothetically let someone peer inside. But the other kids were too small to look in through the window, and the librarian’s assistant (who had been filling in for the librarian for years) was petrified of eye-contact.

There were six others in total. Five in sashes, and the chaperone, picked at animal crackers on paper plates. The bland sweetness paired well with ducking out of class half an hour before lunch.

Mr. Worcester looked up from his plate and smiled at Anaise. “Are you thirsty?” he asked.

She nodded, breaking a leg off the lion in her hand.

“Good,” he said. “We’re all thirsty.”

He was a new person for her. People colloquially called him Mr. Woo. Hair exploded from his every pore. He wore a watch and a woven orange band with a buckle. The band seemed decorative, but Anaise suspected an ulterior purpose. Her eyes followed it instead of his face.

Anaise’s mother told her that diligent workers always take notes, so she took out the notebook she’d picked out for Guard. Glittery gold, flame-flecked, spiral-bound, thick as her finger, the Memo Pad drew eyes from the others as they calculated her level of enthusiasm, enviously. Mr. Woo smiled and nodded. Deacon stared up at the ceiling, bouncing both his knees under his hands like basketballs.

“Well, let’s get into it,” their hirsute leader announced. “Today, we’ll start with a quick strategic rundown, then the perimeter check. Report back here, and we’ll get lunch.” He held his hand out at Anaise. “Before that, let’s welcome Anai– An-nase - Ana to Guard. It’s a big honor to be chosen, and as our ranks grow, we must not leave the initiates behind. So, everyone, round of applause.”

The attention was sparse, reluctant. The other guards looked at the new kid with narrowed eyes. They were thirsty, and trying to see if she was the type to conceal water.

“Good. Okay. Today’s topic is, if the school was invaded by ground forces, let’s call them ‘zombies’, what would our defensive strategy look like?”

Anaise’s hand shot up, to laughs.

“We just speak our minds here,” Mr. Woo explained. “No need to raise your hand.”

Before she could, someone else brightly interjected: “The front isn’t safe because of the big windows. We should barricade in the basement!”

“Mhm, mhm. What do we think of Heidi’s suggestion? Anybody?” Mr. Woo looked pleased with the ball rolling. Anaise tucked what she was going to ask away, in the back of her mind, before she embarrassed herself.

“No, no, we’d end up losing the cafeteria, and we need food stores.”

“We’d achieve the same outcome by boarding the front windows up.”

“We should put an observation on the rooftop!”

A loud, derisive snort from Deacon quieted the room.

“Haven’t you guys ever heard the best defense is a good offense?”

Mr. Woo nodded his patented nod, and smiled his patented smile. “Thank you, Deacon, that’s a very interesting point. Can anybody think of offensive tactics we have available to us?”

Anaise’s frown deepened. This was beyond her. By some mistake, she’d been put in a war room, on a project far past her scope of knowledge; but as great awe and fear moved through her, Anaise also recognized the great national importance of the project. They had told her she’d be protecting the school. She imagined it meant hall monitor duty. But they’d been underselling it. This was real.

She was courageous. That was why she had selected the sparkly gold notebook with flame decals. It spoke to her. She sat up straight and wrote it all down in her painful cursive: thirsty, defense, offense. Not ready to contribute that day, she would be more prepared for the next one.

Teachers liked putting Anaise and Deacon together as partners or in desk assignments. They gave a lot of reasons for it (‘complimentary personalities’, ‘opposites attract’, ‘Deacon needs a little help’, ‘Anaise needs to express herself’) both to her and to themselves. Anaise was neat, timely, and dull. Deacon was messy, late, and rambunctious. The attempts to balance their traits by forcing them to work together had never yielded anything more than pain for Anaise: when he wasn’t pulling her ponytail or calling her names, she would wind up doing all the work, while also keeping Deacon in line. She told herself she didn’t mind. She liked the idea of being the teacher, and the teachers wanted her to share in their authority. Of course, as a nine-year-old, the shortest in her class, she was ill-equipped to corral the big bully of their grade. Though she didn’t let his behavior trouble her (even knowing, as adults had told her, that he was flirting), she was never able to finish a day that involved Deacon without feeling a sense of failure.

So, when they were paired up for that day’s perimeter check, she tried to keep her expression from falling.

“Deacon, you show Ana the perimeter we run. Everybody else,” Mr. Woo poured out a cardboard box full of tiny army figures, “will be doing more strategy practice.”

Anaise looked in yearning at the adorable plastic toys, and the kids who were already getting to play with them, then at Deacon, whose expression hadn’t changed since that morning. “Okay!” She said with a big push of enthusiasm. “Let’s go!”

He rolled his eyes and they left the Student Democracy room.

The first step was to get armed. Deacon took Anaise to get bolt action rifles from the gym’s equipment room, and showed her how to hold it in her hands. For once, he seemed too excited to make fun of her, even holding her hand with his own around the butt of the rifle. “Yeah,” he urged as she practiced walking around with the barrel resting against her shoulder. “Don’t let it wave around.”

It wasn’t until their perimeter had started, both of them carrying their guns, that Anaise decided to use Deacon’s seeming popularity in School Guard to compensate for the number of projects she’d done for him. “What did you mean by what you said in there?” she asked him. She was slightly out of breath keeping up with the taller boy.

“Uh, exactly what I said, dummy. The best defense is to get the other guys first.”

She furrowed her brow. Frustrating. What was she not understanding about it? “But then – what if you’re too late, and they get you?”

“Just don’t be too late.”

“But what if you don’t know anyone’s coming? Like we don’t. But – if we had defenses, then, it’s better, right?”

Deacon mulled over this; they were walking along the edge of the school grounds, where the recently-watered field still glittered in the late morning. The air smelled fresh and clean, the gun felt comfortingly heavy in her palm. He shook his head. “I guess it doesn’t matter if you get them first, as long as you get them. Getting them is more important than keeping everybody safe, all the time. That’s impossible.”

Anaise wondered if it really was impossible.

“You walk so slow, Ana,” Deacon complained. He paused on the sidewalk to pretend to aim his rifle at a person walking a dog.

“Stop it!” Anaise blanched. “Don’t point that at her! She’s not ground forces or zombies!”

Deacon’s eyes sparkled at her anger. “Oh, I shouldn’t do that?” He aimed the muzzle at the sky. “What about birds, huh? I can shoot a bird, I bet.” He shut one eye. “Probably not that hard, even.”

“Deacon, I’m gonna tell Mr. Woo if you shoot your rifle.” Anaise’s back was ramrod straight, her eyes steely.

“Whatever. I’ll tell him you did it.”

“Deacon!” Anaise’s shriek was loud, and the dog-walker looked their way. She was staring – Deacon looked at her, and then he looked down, and Anaise thought she could see a hint of shame in his gaze.

“Whatever,” he clacked the rifle back onto his shoulder, looking down at the ground. “We’re gonna be late for lunch.”

They walked back in through the cafeteria. The lower grade was having their lunch period, and it was nearly over. They’d be let out to play while Anaise and Deacon’s grade ate next. Nonetheless, every faux-terrazzo table was packed, and as the two Guards entered, everyone turned to look.

The public address system crackled to life from speakers embedded in the ceiling. It was the voice of the principal. “Attention all students. We have just declared war, and so the school administration has decided to make today a half-day. Repeat, today is a half-day. Classes will be dismissed three hours early at 1:30 PM. Again, we are ending today at 1:30 PM. If you take Bus C, you will be taking Bus D today. Thank you.”

Their sashes were luminous. Their rifles were cold and serious. Their faces were unknown to the younger kids, but the authority they carried with them was real, realer than any other. They knew it might be them someday, wearing the sash, and carrying the weapon. What they planned to do with that authority was unspoken by its nature– even when their plans were enacted, someday, it wouldn’t be words that allowed it. For many, what they wanted couldn’t be put into words. But they all thought about it, their great, national projects. Every kid wondered when they would get their bright yellow sash; when they’d get their gun.

Collage Credits:

• Garry Gay - Toy Box (2013)

• Oak Street Elementary (Homes.com)

• People - Unknown Source

• Chicken Wire - GadoImages.com (1956)

• Henri Delval Maroc Travel Poster (1956)

Silence took over the house as the well-intentioned guests drove away defeated.

The gravity, the surreality of the situation, was completely lost on Sebastian. What, from the outside, was seen was something akin to madness, was to him merely the last chance he had at love. They didn’t know what it was like for the one who felt like home to be across the veil, so close yet out of reach. They didn’t know what it felt like being at the right place, at the wrong time; being far, far too late.

But what did it matter?

Sebastian already made very little effort to remain among the living.

That night, the house felt light again. Jim, exhausted, no longer emanated the catastrophic anger he had before. Whatever punishment had been in place — whether self-inflicted or directed towards Sebastian, had been lifted. And, finally, rid of intruders, they were how they wanted to be: alone, together.

—

Sebastian’s tired body slipped into bed with Jim’s tired spirit in an impossible embrace. Merged, more through love than magic (although perhaps these are two sides of the same coin), the soldier and the ghost met in the liminal space of deep sleep.

Heavy eyelids fluttered open as warm morning light washed over the room. A soft, Summer breeze blew in from the open window, the curtains rustling softly against the wall. On Sebastian’s chest, a comforting weight and the feeling of skin against his made him smile. A soft hand held onto his hip possessively when he threatened to move. With slow blinks, he found a familiar tuft of black hair; he moved to run his fingers through it.

In doing so, his arm, unrecognizably unscarred, came into view.

Jim, whose tenuous presence so often dissipated into the ether the moment the soldier regained consciousness, too, remained asleep on his chest, where he had been all night. Sebastian suddenly became aware of the thin layer of sweat between their naked bodies. Looking up from where he’d been resting his head, Jim mumbled an unintelligible yet unmistakable reprimand. His voice sounded deeper, maybe from the sleep, but around his tired eyes there were lines that only time could have left behind. Still, without a word, Jim climbed up to bury his face against Sebastian's neck, shielding his eyes from the sunlight.

The soldier didn’t dare to move for a moment. Instead, he took in the room around them. This was not the house Jim had lived and died in; this was his old, grimy London flat. He could hear the ruckus of the city outside the window, the impatient drivers and the faint, casual conversations held between neighbors leaving for work. There was a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. A familiar ashtray — but not his. Clothes were scattered across the bedroom floor, trailing from the door. The desk in the corner by the window, which had held little more than dirty clothes and empty beer bottles before Jim, was covered in papers and textbooks. A beaten up leather satchel sat on the desk chair, Jim's Chuck Taylors tucked underneath it.

Tentatively, the old soldier reached to touch his face, where burn scars had once pierced deeply into the layers of skin. Instead, nothing more than the expected consequences of time: wrinkles, freckles and moles. Then,

“Jim?” Sebastian called softly.

He grunted in response, burying his face deeper into his neck. “Basher, it’s so early.”

Sebastian smiled at his thick accent, exacerbated by exhaustion, and at the slight exasperation in his tender plea. It was early. How cruel of him to want to wake him up, but what a privilege to be the one to do it. “I’m sorry, I just…” He sighed, his mind fuzzy. Memories of a life built on mistakes — his parents, his brother, the army, Jack, disintegrated in his mind; memories of an abandoned house by the creek where a young man lay buried underneath a rotting shed slowly left him. Had it all been nothing but a bad dream? His body was unscathed. No burns, no scars save the callouses in his hands. The deep rooted loneliness, however, still stung in his chest. Was it his own? “Let me look at you.” He made, one rough hand reaching to gently pry his lover from his neck. “Jim, baby,” Sebastian insisted. “Let me look at you.”

“What?” Jim gave with a huff, pulling away and pushing himself up on his arms, a small frown between his thin eyebrows, messy hair going in all directions.

All of the air left Sebastian's lungs while looking into those eyes; there was no real anger in them, just the affectionate look of someone being slightly inconvenienced by someone they love. He smiled, cupping his chin to keep his face where he could see it. Jim looked ever so slightly older, ever so slightly annoyed. Real. Alive. The light streaming through the curtains turned a few strands of his otherwise black hair a warm, reddish brown. His dark eyes, too, touched by the sun, seemed to soften and sparkle with color. “You look so beautiful in the sunlight.”

Jim rolled his eyes. Scoffed. Blushed. “I can't believe you woke me up to—,”

His sentence was quickly interrupted by a kiss. Sebastian lunged at him from where he was lying and toppled him. He seemed surprised by how easily his own body moved, the scar tissue on his joints nothing but a memory that wasn’t even his; recollections from an old movie he watched, or a book he read. The pain and the discomfort felt fictional, experienced in the third person. The only real thing was right in front of him. And they had done this a million times, he was sure. Lazy kisses in the morning light, warm skin on warm skin. Saliva. Fingernails dragging across an unscathed back. Sharp teeth on a bare throat.

Propped up on an elbow, Sebastian did not take his eyes off of Jim if not to kiss him. He relished in finding every single line, memorizing every single freckle. He was mesmerize as Jim’s mouth parted with every gentle breath, taking pleasure in seeing the soft pink of his cheeks — proof that there was blood coursing through his veins. Proof of life. He moved to lie on top of Jim, nuzzling into the center of his chest, breathing him.

In the distance, a muffled sound: arrhythmic, persistent.

Jim looked down at Sebastian with a smile that quickly vanished. “Basher,” He made, calling his name softly as he cradled the side of his face. “Why are you crying?”

“I'm not.” He gave back, leaning into the touch. Sebastian closed his eyes.

A teardrop fell onto Jim’s chest.

The distant, muffled sound grew louder.

When his eyes blinked open again, he was staring at a dark ceiling. Cold. Alone.

Downstairs, someone was knocking on the door.

—

“Morning, Sebastian,” Sam, who had delivered most of the furniture Sebastian had bothered to buy new, was standing on the porch. It was raining lightly but steadily. It had been all night.

“Sam.” Sebastian gave back as he finished pulling a shirt over his body. George, awoken by the knocking, joined them by the door, but she clearly didn’t care to step outside. “Morning.”

“Is it a bad time?” The man glanced at the watch on his wrist. “We did agree on 9 o’clock?”

“9 o’clock?”

The man grinned. “Man. You had a fun night, didn’t you?” He joked, turning to playfully shove Sebastian with his elbow. “Shouldn’t take too long to unload the sofa if you give me a hand?”

“Oh! The sofa.” Sebastian chuckled softly at himself. Dragged from his heavenly dreams, disheveled and barely awake, the soldier nodded. He hadn’t had the time to grieve the life he had left behind in his subconscious, but the usual heart ache had returned. “Let me just put some shoes on.”

With some careful maneuvering, the two men finally replaced the old lawn chair by a small, ecru velvet sofa. Sam, kind as he had always been to the foreign body in their small town, had thrown in a couple of dark blue cushions for free. Suggestion of his wife, he said, to make it feel like home.

Whilst Sebastian fetched his wallet from the bedroom, Sam stood by the end of the stairs. “Looks like you got rid of that awful draft.” The man commented as the soldier returned with the cash. He took it, politely, and looked around once again as he was led towards the front door. “You’ve really turned this place around, mate. It’s barely recognizable.” Then, lowering his voice, he added. “You could probably sell it for a profit, you know? Go back to London?”

He laughed. “I don’t think I will.”

“Alright.” Sam made, shaking his hand. “Found something to keep you here, huh?” With a wink, he vaguely gestured towards Sebastian’s neck. “Told you you’d need the bigger bed.”

As the door closed behind Sam, Sebastian turned to the bronze mirror in the hallway.

His hand found the lovebite on his throat.

The movie Friendship (2024) dir. Adam DeYoung hits like a late-in-life autism diagnosis. Way too fucking real.

It’s a drama, a comedy, a thriller, and a horror flick that follows the doomed friendship of two middle-aged men living in the same cul-de-sac. Former SNL writer Tim Robinson, who permanently changed my vocal patterns with the Netflix comedy show I Think You Should Leave, stars as Craig Waterman, an awkward but passionate man dog-paddling against a tide of mediocrity. He encounters Paul Rudd’s Austin Carmichael, the coolest suburban man imaginable. As their friendship blossoms, Craig’s impulsivity and sensitivity to rejection causes him to lash out at Austin, eventually tanking the tentative relationship. It’s funny and dramatic without sacrificing depth and sincerity, and I was rocked to my core by the end.

What first struck me about the film was its capacity to explore social anxiety in a safe space. I’ve said before that the appeal of horror is to experiment with fear, trauma, and other ‘unpleasant’ feelings in a vacuum; what’s so wonderful about a horror movie is that it, at some point, ends. You know this in your rational mind. Life ends too, but you don’t get to talk about it at a bar afterwards – as far as any of us know. Friendship ends, mercifully. Its series of excruciating faux pas comes to a close. But the topic of the movie is a part of all of our lives, and it will always be: our desire to be connected with each other. In that sense, it was scarier than a horror movie. Yes, the movie ends, but its subject matter is intertwined with the fabric of existence. There is no escaping Friendship.

Another reason I’ve thought so much about this movie is because other people I know disliked it. Well – not ‘disliked’, but ‘didn’t rate it highly’. When I left the theatre, my partner and I started our discussion by questioning what our friends hadn’t enjoyed. We admitted that there were some pacing problems, and that the movie felt unfinished at the end, but one beer later, I had convinced us both that these were part of the film’s design. I’ll explain this soon, but first, I want to step back and observe how my reaction back-seated to my friends’ opinions.

At several points, Craig Waterman is working on making apps more addictive at a large, faceless company. He repeats that in order to do so, the user should feel “judged or expressed” to keep them coming back. Judged or expressed is a mantra for the film. I can think of no more appropriate way to leave a Friendship showing than by asking yourself, “what did my buddies think of this?”, a question that symbolizes fear of conflict, desire for connection, and ultimately, trying to navigate whether something will be judged or expressed. Will my opinion be judged? Or will I get to express it? Fortunately, unlike Craig, I have this newsletter, and the only people who read it adore me, so I don’t have to worry about that… right?

One theory I had about why my friends’ ratings weren’t higher was that, as an A24 film, there’s a certain expectation of seriousness. The production company isn’t known for their comedies, but for gritty, experimental horror and tight, gripping thrillers, druggie and occult and alt. Friendship is all of the above, but it conceals its intentions with light beats, unexpected turns – jokes! Much like its protagonist, the movie reacts to intensity with humor. For instance, the ‘drug scene’ of this movie, instead of an acid-kaleidescope-explosion or a Midsommar-style wooziness, Craig Waterman licks a Sonoran desert toad and is magically transported to a Subway, where he orders a ham sandwich. Nothing else happens. His sandwich artist is Paul Rudd with some crazy hair, and Craig decides to be wild and have his sandwich toasted, but then he wakes up, sober, with no great revelation, even though he was told this was supposed to give him answers.

Now, this is hilarious, original, and thus far, the only excuseable product shoehorn I’ve seen on the big screen. But, audience members like to have their expectations fulfilled.

The three-act, popcorn movie structure that has dominated cinema for decades gives us lots of examples. Where Little Shop of Horrors (1986) dir. Frank Oz was meant to end with the protagonist being murdered and alien plants taking over the world, as is the case in the Broadway show, the audience was upset at this – ‘an icebox’, Oz said– and they changed it to a more Hollywood-type ending. The plant is destroyed, Audrey I and Seymour are married, and everyone lives happily ever after. In movies, this is equivalent to having the actors come out and take a bow. It spares the audience grief. Now, in a movie where the entire thesis is that exploitation scales as it is fed and has overcome the world by playing off people’s greed, this ending sucks - it spares the audience truth.

We have to balance things, since movies are, at the end of the day, entertainment, but I can’t enjoy an ending that sacrifices truthfulness.

Friendship, as Tim Robinson’s first film, is thankfully disinterested in the audience-pleasing formula. Although we watch Craig Waterman try, and fail, and try, and fail, and try, and fail, there is never a moment where he succeeds, even at the end. It’s a descent into madness, but a madness that doesn’t lend itself to a visually remarkable cinematic climax, like Black Swan (2010) dir. Darren Aronofsky or American Psycho (2000) dir. Mary Harron. The climax is stunning and heartbreaking, in its own way: Craig, with a gun he accidentally stole from Austin, enters his house to try and reintegrate with the people he’s alienated. “I do one strange thing and that’s it?” he asks them as he begs for a second chance, which is (of course) denied.

The ‘strange thing’ Craig did, for those who are (inexplicably) reading this review without watching the film, was he punched Austin twice – they were boxing and he hit him during the interim, when they weren’t actually going. He most likely did so from the same emotional, aggressive place that rules over him in other scenes: while they were boxing, Austin was much better than Craig, and had gotten him pretty bad in the nose during the first round. Feeling sensitive, excluded, and physically in pain, Craig impulsively strikes Austin before the next round actually begins. Austin crumples to the ground and his other friends crowd around in concern. Then Craig puts soap in his mouth and tries to joke about it being his punishment for his fuck-up. The party breaks up after that, and Austin starts distancing himself from Craig.

It’s possible that audience members, my friends included, were dismayed, heartbroken, crushed by Craig’s failure and lack of redemption. They wanted him to beat the monster and win and live happily ever after. I don’t say that to make the argument that audiences prefer saccharine endings, but to make the argument that Robinson wrote and played Craig with the utmost empathy. Even though he commits numerous crimes across the runtime, he’s a distant dad, and a difficult husband, the audience still wants him to be happy. Alternatively, people may have struggled to enjoy a film that repeatedly misdirects and languishes in each unexpected beat. I can easily see someone annoyed by the Subway drug trip – anticipating effects, music, a rousing message to lift us out of the heartbreaking narrative, and receiving a boring commercial instead. But, to that person I just made up in my head, I say that you have experienced exactly what Craig did in that moment.

Not to linger on the trip segment (it was one of my favorite scenes) but it felt more realistic to life than most other psychedelic representations in media. While it’s true that I’ve never had such a normal trip, I have been told by people that hallucinogens will unlock secret parts of the mind, change me, give me answers, and upon taking them, I’ve learned that none of those things will happen. I may have a great time, but I’m going to sober up and I’ll still be the same person I was before. Not only is this scene funny, in the sense that it isn’t expected, it’s clever and right: there are no deep, secret answers at the bottom of the psychedelic well. Friendship won’t pretend there is, even if it would be satisfying for the audience – or helpful for Craig.

I said earlier that the pacing felt off and the ending left things unfinished. These may not have been deliberate choices (who’s to say?) but they didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the movie. The odd pacing, which I first put down to this being a directorial debut, is because of the never-ending trying-and-failing and the constant misery that befalls Craig as a result. Where most people are used to one second act drop, this movie has somewhere between five and ten moments when everything seems to be absolutely fucked. But, like life, the story keeps going even when something terrible has happened. You can see this philosophy echoed in the very first scene, where they establish that Mrs. Waterman recently recovered from cancer. For a lot of people, cancer is a big story in their lives. Whether it affected you or someone close to you, it probably took up a lot of space in your thoughts. When that story ends, the world doesn’t end – it just keeps going. In this first scene, Tammy and Craig are in a support group discussing life after cancer. Tammy says that despite being in remission, she still has a lot of anxiety about the cancer coming back. Her story ended in remission, but her story didn’t actually end. She’s still here, still coping with the fallout of an enormous life event.

Am I saying that a movie playing with pace is always lifelike and therefore always a masterpiece? No! But when a movie stokes a feeling of liveliness and reality, to me, it’s at least masterful. It isn’t easy to create a work of fiction that reflects the material truth of the world, deliberately and unflinchingly.

Which brings us to the ending of Friendship.

As Craig waves the gun around, Austin’s toupee falls off his head. Even though Craig has lost his mind a little, he still wants Austin to like him. He still wants to be his friend. So he demands everyone else get down on the ground, where they won’t be able to see Austin’s bald head, and subtly indicates for him to put the hairpiece back on. Afterwards, when the cops have been called and Craig is sitting in the back of the police car, Austin turns to look at him – and winks. Craig’s face is beaming with joy. This moment, this last frame of the movie, when Craig is open-mouth smiling, on the verge of tears, so, so happy to be acknowledged by Austin even as he’s being arrested, made my heart hurt. I badly wanted to believe that Austin wouldn’t press charges, that Craig would find some way out of the situation, that they would somehow be friends after all of this. And I knew, at the same time, that none of those things would happen. There are no answers at the bottom of the psychedelic well, and there is no friendship after pointing a gun at someone.

On another note, this ending comes at a strange time. After the emotional climax (sort of) where Craig loses his wife in the sewers and is divorced and fired from his job, we see him with his son on his birthday, some unknown amount of time later. We watch as Craig stands up for his ex-wife at a restaurant; he bought her the car he always should’ve; things seem to be improving.

But, on their way back to the house, Craig sees that Austin bought the car he’d promised they’d go for a drive in. While Craig bought a car for his ex-wife to repair his failure, Austin bought an expensive car he’d always wanted — and Craig will never ride in it. He goes inside, flirts with his ex-wife, and once again, things seem to be improving. It’s on his way out of the house to get candles for the birthday cake that he snaps. The unresolved rejection and pain from their ended friendship all explodes at once. It’s jarring and raw and disappointing. You see him repairing his life and learning how to be direct with people, but the unfinished narrative haunts him still; he has to close it out, and he lacks the skills to do it gracefully.

Much like real life, as we take steps to improve, we also backslide, relapse, ruminate, and ideate. As we learn how to confront our problems with others, we also have to learn to be responsible for our actions, and measured in our approach. If we don’t, we spill into the hyper-confrontational.

Craig’s story didn’t end with him being divorced and fired, no more than Tammy’s story ended with remission. This film takes a devastatingly human, lifelike approach, by ruining Craig even after he has been ruined and is in the process of rebuilding. Its unfairness, its strange pace, its uncanny jokes, what it chooses to include, is not necessarily what I love about it, it’s that these things are all there in pursuit of being more like life. In a world where stories are treated like escapist fantasy, a 90-minute power trip, or a new set of clothes to put your blorbo in, a movie like this, which offers no escape, no power, and only sells from the Ocean View Dining catalogue, is a revelation.

jumped ship

for the fiftieth time

someday there won’t be another ship - it could be this time

For fire safety and water quality

hydrants pour and the stream makes its way back into the system

flushing the line of silt, trash, and stagnant water.

when i lived by a creek

the water called me out at night

sometimes half of me stayed inside

the rest of me in PJs, bleary and attentive

to see the level of the tide

which sometimes corresponded to my life

but more often to the seasons

The wheel turns.

The wheel on top of that wheel turns.

A pillar of turning wheels

their alignment improbable.

on shaky ground but aware of it

is better than thinking the ground’s stable

or thinking the ground’s shaky

when it’s not

My friend,

if your faucet runs rusty it may be an open water line nearby stirring up silt.

You might not have gotten a warning

(from municipal forces often beyond our reckoning)

but if you see this then throw the spout open and wait

for the water to run clean.

maybe you jumped ship

for the fiftieth time

or maybe you cleared the line.

Either way, throw the spout open and wait

see if it starts to run clean.

Collage Photos

• Hydrant Flushing, Spring Lake Heights, New Jersey (August, 2024, photographer unknown)

• 1906 Earthquake Hits Mission Creek and Butchertown by Nancy J. Olmstead fhttps://www.foundsf.org/1906_Earthquake_Hits_Mission_Creek_and_Butchertown | Photos from Bancroft Library (I0014366) and San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (A22.34,200n)

• Satchel of Sustenance (D&D Homebrew Object) by Bonus_action 2020-04-17

• https://archive.org/details/satchel-of-sustenance-dd-homebrew-object-by-bonus_action.

• High River, High River, Alberta, by E.H. Bahl, American Bazaar: Publisher

• Waxing Gibbous, https://mooncalendar.astro-seek.com/

Research Sources

• https://www.reddit.com/r/water/comments/fdy8b6/why_are_hydrants_sometimes_open_for_no_apparent/

• https://sslc.gov/FAQ.aspx?QID=139

It’s not fair.

Bobby’s words echoed in Sebastian’s mind as a new layer of guilt slowly enveloped him, smothering him further inside his own skin.

Others had lost too, others had had to let go of the people they loved. He wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last, but he hadn’t even had Jim to begin with… Why must he lose him already? Hadn’t they both lost enough?

Most of the time, Sebastian fancied himself a martyr; he wanted to believe that something, somewhere, beneath all of the suffering, was purifying. A life of sacrifice, self-denial, and self-control could not have been for nothing. What did he have to show for the choices he had made? Everything he had ever wanted had slipped through his fingers. A lost family. A lost lover. Misplaced devotion which had left him scarred inside and out. And now that he finally found someone who loved him…

Who was he to tell Jim he couldn’t be here? Who was he to deny them both the little comfort their serendipitous meeting had brought them?

The old soldier walked home underneath the warm morning sun, his head hanging low. The scarred skin on his left leg felt tight, each step forward was painful. The weight of his age, of his hard work, and of those terrible words he had said to his lover made him feel heavy. Lethargic. The dense forests that lined the beaten dirt paths felt taller than they had ever been, their leaves glinting brightly in the sunlight.

Walking down the narrow cul-de-sac where he lived, he looked up at the house.

For the first time, it felt haunted.

Jim was angry; Sebastian could feel his fury emanating from the recently restored façade.

Where once the vegetation was wild and overgrown, now lay a tidy arrangement of plants. The tall, juniper topiary bush that Theresa Gould had once tried to use to conceal the flooded backyard was now firmly planted in the soil, and thriving. The stone staircase and the quaint stone path had been scrubbed clean; both looked practically new. The once rusty fence and creaky gate had been thoroughly sanded and repainted in a deep, shiny green. Ivy still climbed up the old walls mostly undisturbed; it made Sebastian feel welcome near the woods, as if this man-made building he inhabited was one with the nature that surrounded it; a symbiosis of some kind.

Sebastian, too, had become one with Jim.

A union; a symbiosis of some kind.

George waited at the bottom of the stairs, curled up into a tiny ball near Jim’s shoes by the door. With a chirping sound, she got up when the door opened to bump against Sebastian’s shin, her tail wrapping around his calf. To his left, the large, bronze mirror was shattered, as if a fist had landed into it. He sighed.

The cat followed the soldier to the threshold of the kitchen. Inside, small pieces of broken glass and porcelain pierced the sole of Sebastian’s boots as he moved towards the open cabinets. Mud dripped from the tap and into the sink, the smell of putrefaction permeating the room. The food left on the table, rotten although only a few hours had passed, was scattered across the floor. An invisible tornado had devastated the small kitchen. Only the pink telephone was left more or less unscathed, sitting in the center of the small kitchen table. It buzzed slightly with the memory of the spirit that had traveled through it.

Upstairs, their pictures were on the floor. Sebastian crouched to pick them up, wiping the dust they had picked up from the wooden floor off with his thumb.

Ungrateful. Ungrateful. Ungrateful. How could he have done this to Jim?

“Jim?” He called softly, but he was not around. Sebastian would have felt his presence by now.

Changing out of his dirty suit, the collar sullied with blood that had dripped from his ears and nose, the soldier stared at the attic door for a moment. Had Jim retreated there? Would he ever return to him? With his hand on the doorknob, he whispered, “I didn’t mean what I said before. I’m sorry.”

The house had been turned upside down and inside out. Yet, not once did he complain, nor did he think of blaming Jim for the mess. His fury was justified. Instead, in silence, he wasted no time lowering himself to his knees to pick up the broken pieces, each shard of glass and a splint of wood a step forward in his penitence.

Sebastian worked with military precision and diligence. Moving through the house at the pace his weary body allowed him, he cleaned each room with reverence. More than Jim's final resting place, after all, this house — rebuilt, restored, refurbished — was their home. Memories of a shared life, manufactured by his broken mind and fueled by his longing, still lingered in the back of his mind: their wedding in the backyard, long summer nights on the porch, and lazy breakfasts in bed.

In the hallway, the soldier stared at his fractured reflection in the mirror. The fear of having pushed Jim away began to materialize in his chest. It was quickly followed by the convenient reminder that there was still one bullet left in his shotgun.

The remorse weighed heavily on him.

What if Jim didn't want him around anymore?

With the house scrubbed clean, the soldier found himself standing outside of the attic again. Jim’s finger bone, found under the stove after the ghost’s fit of rage, was held securely in the palm of his left hand. The sensation that he was, for the first time since he’d moved in, truly alone was far more terrifying than the feeling of something lurking out of the corner of his eye.

“Jim?” He called again, forehead pressed against the door. “Please come back to me.” Sebastian was not above begging, especially after having drowned his shame in the bottle. “I’m sorry. Please come back to me. Come to our bed. I… I don’t want to be alone. I want to be with you. Please.” He paused. Then,

“I can meet you there. Wherever you are.”

–

I don't think you can stay here.

It was a sentence on the crime they'd become embroiled in. Jim had been afraid of that: the other shoe finally dropping.

The basement and the dining room, the veils collided, now dropped into the familiar blackness of his spirit, too weak to carry on.

His flesh disintegrated onto the floor and vanished.

If only he had not, as he faded away, looked down.

That fine, strapping, ageless young man, both decades old and only twenty two, was not there below with strong, supple legs and a firm set of feet. Jim saw his own decay. His skin falling from his hands even as Sebastian reached to keep them in his tenuous grasp.

Jim howled with dismay, an empty, inaudible cry.

He knew Sebastian was right.

That knowledge came without peace or clarity. It was a painful, hard truth chasing after their romantic, rose-tinted fantasies. Such happiness and light Jim had known, but only for a few minutes, and not without great cost. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. The whole world seemed to chant the words. Where the fury was meant to go, the channel had long since dammed up, and the house ended up taking his aimless, overwhelming force.

Jim knew somewhere that he was undoing Sebastian's hard work. Somewhere far away, maybe the fragment of his heart that had passed on without him, there was an ache and a shame and a great guilt. But once Sebastian left the house and Jim was left to devise a means of his own, his heart seemed to close.

He whirled through the house like a hurricane. Paint peeled and dust fell. Furniture cracked as it flew across the room. Dishes shattered. Chairs squeaked, scraped, clattered. Those pictures on the bedside table, the sheets on the bed, the tentative knick-knacks, they frightened George into hiding beneath the bed as they were swept down to the floor.

The last thing Jim had ever wanted was to stay here.

It was after tearing the shower curtain from the rod that Jim finally collapsed in a heap in the tub, the plastic sheet crumpling in his fingers and then falling through them. Like air. He couldn't see his hands in front of him, or his legs. Instead of a monster, he was nothing. All around him, again, was the nothing.

The suffocating dirt grew weightless on top of him. The floorboards thick grain smothered even the flow of air; wood-smell clung to Jim as he sluggishly pushed through the nothingness, a wisp, an idea. He turned fitfully in space. He felt sick; sick in his self, his conscience, his being. That blue, gray rot of his flesh, like clustered moths, spilled into the blackness and whispered:

How could he have ever thought he would get to have happiness?

The soldier came back to the house and began to clean. Jim couldn't see much more. Whether he lacked the strength, the will, or the desire to leave his tight, eternal nook, he did not. Sebastian's hands moved among him, pieces of him. Swept them into a dustpan and shook them into the trash. Up-righted them. Swabbed them. With no less grace and care than Sebastian had ever touched Jim with, he cleaned the house, while Jim brooded guiltily in the ether.

As he worked the brooding lost its profoundness and took on a familiar bitter, resentful quality. Jim's vitriol expelled, he had to recover, like someone sick purging their stomach and meekly taking food, just crackers and water. Too, the thought of appearing to Sebastian again filled him with shame and loneliness, emotions too strong for his thin spirit to take. It was a contradictory, fluctuating state. The suffocating depths of the house held him in observation even as he reached for Sebastian, and his reach exceeded him even as the last dregs of bitterness shamed him for his longing.

It seemed they would never return to how things had been. Regret painted over the house and turned off the lights.

–

It might have been hours, maybe days, until a knock on the door reminded the soldier that there was still a world outside of those lonely four walls. His groveling had not brought him any closer to Jim. The phone didn’t work, the Ouija board didn’t move when he called out to his lover, nor did his excessive drinking facilitate an apparition like before. After a moment of hesitation, Sebastian opened the door, peeking carefully from behind it. It was well into the night. And cold.

“Hello, Sebastian,” Maeve said, not surprised by the state the soldier was in, or by the suspicion in his eyes. “May we come in?”

“We?” He frowned in confusion until his eyes trailed down from Maeve to a tuft of black hair. In one single file, behind the librarian, were the four children: Bobby, holding tightly onto her mother’s hand, Johann, hugging a small bag to his chest, Bela, biting at her thumbnail, and, finally, Zach, fidgeting with his beanie in his hands. They all looked up at him with the same indecipherable expression on their faces, something between apprehension and pity, when Sebastian spotted a sixth pair of feet standing in line. Standing on dark blue heels was another familiar face: Chelsea. She looked out of place, unsure. Her car was parked next to Sebastian's outside the gate, the keys in her hand. She was ready to leave before she even entered the house.

With a frown, it didn’t take long for Sebastian to understand what was happening. Only one thing would ever bring all of them together.

Immediately, the soldier attempted to close the door, but Maeve wedged one of her maroon combat boots into the door-frame before he could. “Sebastian. We came to help.”

Still pressing the door against her foot, the soldier retreated slightly into the house before he spoke. “He's angry at me. You're going to make it worse.” He wondered quietly before he paused. “He might not even be here anymore. You need to leave.”

The librarian looked down at her daughter, currently swimming in one of her father's old cardigans like the boy behind her always swam in his father's bomber jacket; the girl squeezed her hand before letting it go. Sebastian's face was hidden, but in a gentle yet determined movement, her hand rested over his fingers on the door. Her chest tightened almost immediately at the touch, all of the air expelled from her lungs as the specter’s energy flowed through Sebastian and into her. The grief and the pain and the longing were overwhelming. Their agony was shared. Mirrored. Sebastian hurt because he was alive, Jim hurt because he was not. They ached with a very particular loneliness, haunted by what was and what could have been. They met somewhere in the strange intersection of life and death, and it was equally painful for both.

The soldier was about to pull his hand away when Maeve finally spoke. “Jim is here.” Her foot was no longer wedged between the door and the doorframe, but it was still ajar; Sebastian was listening. “I can feel him.” She continued, her words slowly luring him out from behind the door.

“He’s not talking to me.”

“He’s…” Her hand still rested on Sebastian's calloused fingers.

His eyes found Chelsea at the bottom of the porch. He lowered his voice. “...Punishing me?”

“Exhausted. He’s exhausted.” Maeve paused. “So are you.”

“I didn’t mean to push him away—I don't want him to go away.”

With a deep breath, the librarian looked down at her daughter again. She understood they must guide Jim towards peace, but it was difficult to explain to a little girl the complexity of the situation. Even Maeve didn’t fully understand how such a bond could have been made between two people in completely different planes of existence. Then again, love does always find a way. “Let us talk to him.”

“Please?” Bobby’s little voice added, glancing towards her friends, then towards the hairdresser who uncomfortably stood a few steps away from all of them. “He’s our friend, too.”

Sebastian refused them entry to the shed and the attic. Maeve didn’t argue, and didn’t insist, aware that the skeleton bundled up upstairs would only frighten the young ones, as brave as they believed themselves to be. Instead, they followed the soldier into the kitchen.

The renovated countertops and new tiles made it nearly seem modern. It was clean, which, considering Sebastian’s apparent state of mind, was a surprise. An empty bottle of whisky by the sink was the only evidence of his attempt to deal with the guilt. The pink rotary telephone was the only thing still adorning the center of the kitchen table; Bela and Chelsea reached for it simultaneously.

Chelsea didn’t think she would enter this house ever again.

A shiver ran down her spine when she saw Jim’s worn out Chuck Taylor’s by the door, as if they had not been moved in twenty years. All those years ago, as a teenager, she had rarely been welcome inside the house, but his shoes had been by the door back then, too. During the entirety of their friendship, she had maybe made it up to Jim’s bedroom once. His father, a very short, unpleasant man, was not keen on his son’s friends snooping around his private home. More often than not, they would gather in the cold, damp shed until Jim managed to sneak out of his bedroom and join them, covered in bruises that he never addressed, and they all pretended not to see.

Could his untimely end at the hands of that brute of a father have been prevented?

“Sorry.” Bela made, pulling her hand away from the telephone.

Chelsea barely registered the girl as she touched the handset. Jim’s written words flooded her memory. I liked her more than most people. I think she did too. Immediately, her heart sunk to her stomach. All of this time, she envied him more than she missed him, always afraid of reaching out to find that he had gotten all that he ever wanted while she was stuck in the town they had both vowed to leave behind… Now that she was older, and wiser, she knew his death was preventable. Now that she was older, and kinder, she understood the world had always been big enough for the two of them.

Would Jim ever forgive her? Would she ever forgive herself?

Chelsea reached into her bag and gently placed a polaroid she had kept of Jim sat in her garage with the phone on his lap. The children gasped softly at it, as if this finally cemented in their minds that Jim had lived inside of these walls, he had touched these objects and left memories behind.

Pulling away from the phone, she blinked her tears away. A small hand reached for hers.

“He’ll be happy to see his friend.” Bela assured her with a smile. “I know I would be.”

Out of the seven, Sebastian and Chelsea were the only ones without a predefined task, but when Johann turned to them to ask where he could find a lighter for the candles, they both pulled one out of their respective pockets. In the look they shared, they both agreed they could use a cigarette.

Johann walked away with a sense of achievement with Sebastian’s lighter while he and Chelsea stepped out into the backyard, despite the long, harsh look that Maeve gave them both.

The moon was high and bright, illuminating what had once been a wild assortment of bushes and rotten leaves and had now become a tidy, flourishing garden. The artificial pond, no longer overflowing, reflected the moonlight in its softly rippling waters. Their eyes eventually found the shed.

“He was buried there.” The soldier found himself saying through the smoke.

Chelsea turned her head to face him, a deep crease between her eyebrows.

“I envy you, you know? For your memories with him. They might not all be pleasant, but they are real.” He confessed. “I like to think in another life we had a real chance.

“I love him. I hope there is a world out there where I’m not too late, where I kept him safe.”

Inside, the kitchen table slowly became a small, humble shrine to Jim.

Jim’s shoes sat atop of a velvet cushion, encircled by lit candles; the flames moved as they stepped around them, casting faint dancing shadows. The telephone kept its place on the table, the photograph Chelsea had brought along tucked underneath the handset. Crystals and herbs wrapped inside a white linen cloth were placed on top of the table, and a strong smell of incense permeated the air.

The Ouija board was returned from where Sebastian had sat with it in the living room in front of the TV. With it, he had dragged along the plastic lawn chair that he owned in place of a couch. “I have bought an actual sofa. It just hasn’t been delivered yet.” He found himself explaining defensively to the group.

Between the few chairs and stools he had in the kitchen, the lawn chair, and a plastic case of beer he had long ago found in the shed, the seven of them eventually found a seat around the table.

The kids were quiet. Focused. Zach, out of all of them, seemed the most nervous. The last séance had left him sick, and he wasn’t looking forward to it happening again. Noticing this, the librarian placed a light pink crystal on the palm of his hand. “This will keep from getting sick, I promise,” She made, closing his small fingers around it.

When Johann met his friend's eyes with a nervous look on his face, Zach promptly held his hand, the crystal held between their palms. There was a quiet understanding that this would keep them both safe. They smiled.

Bobby was not not afraid. Her mother was by her side, after all, and it scared her far more to think that Jim would forever be stuck here, between life and death, reliving his painful demise over and over again. He deserved to find peace; to be laid to rest.

The last person to sit down had been Chelsea. Even then, she looked out of place. Uncomfortable. Suspicious. Despite no longer doubting her friend had been murdered and buried in the soil outside of his childhood home, there was still a remnant of skepticism within her. Ghosts were not real. Jim, of all people, had been a man of science. He would laugh in her face whenever she brought up their horoscopes, and surely would have taunted her endlessly if he ever discovered she willingly participated in a séance, even if it was his. A quiet, nervous laughter took over her. “I'm sorry,” She made, covering her mouth with her hand, though she continued to giggle nervously underneath it. “I'm sorry. It’s just… Jim never believed in any of this.”

Still, despite her laughing fit, Chelsea eventually held Bela’s hand and completed the circle.

Their spirits began to call straightaway. The circle was strong. The scarred hand of Sebastian's drained vessel met meekly the dark hand of Maeve met well the hand of her daughter met seriously the brown hand of Johann met courageously the pale hand of Zach gingerly met the hand of Bela finally met the hand of Chelsea, whose slender and half-manicured fingers slid wordlessly back into Sebastian's. They all thought of the same thing, whether of their mission and its noble intent or their regrets and the pathway through it. They all thought of Jim.

The prickling sensation was there. It came from many places, eight if he counted. He felt them above him and a little to the side. He was no longer cold, no longer buried, no longer weakened. His hosts' blooming light came in the cracks of the floorboards.. He followed it, stumbling, feeling the nourishment of living souls to make his way closer and closer, as dark-blind people feel the walls.

"We call on the spirits dwelling in the world against ours," Maeve rumbled, her voice affected with a serious tone. "We call to James Moriarty, taken before his time, and ask for his presence so we may speak to him." As she spoke, the room's warmth flickered around them. The lights seemed to dim. "Draw strength from us all. We invite you."

The door to the dining room was at hand, and everyone was there to see him. Was it Christmas already? The family got together at Christmas. Not the maternal family, who had not spoken to the Moriarty trio since Jim was a boy, but the paternal one. A set of firm-mouthed grandparents. A sister who regarded her brother and his wife and son like little germs, to be cleanly wiped from her fingers the second she was outside. But waiting for him beyond the door was not a memory, or at least, not such a faraway memory.

It was his friends.

His loved ones, as loved as a ghost could make of ones.

The objects of conversation: the Ouija board, the phone. They seemed childish additions to this somber meeting.

Their faces, even Sebastian's, seemed locked behind shutters. Their spirits, light and energetic, pulsed into a halo, familiar enough he could recognize them without seeing their eyes. As Jim stepped forward, their expressions cleared, the fog lifted, and the floor creaked beneath his toes.

Heads turned towards him. In the dark window across from him, Jim saw his reflection.

He was 22. He wore a knit sweater-vest. His hair was uncombed. His eyes were deep and dark.

The people gathered at the table saw him too. Overwhelmingly, they saw him. Jim felt the quick suffocation of a stuffy room. Their eyes were warm, too warm. Their words soft and fluffy, crowded the airflow. He drifted to the table, not walking but gliding, slow. "Can you see me?"

The words were spoken clearly, puncturing a silence.

Chelsea's eyes had dampened. "Jim?" she blinked tears down her cheeks.

"No, it's Prince Albert," he replied. A mirthless laugh bubbled through her tears, and her hands tightened where they grasped the others. "How've you been?" he asked.

Again, Chelsea laughed -- at the absurdity, at the nonchalance, at herself-- and shook her hair. "Still stuck in this f-" a glance at the children, "this town."

"You and me both." Jim looked at Sebastian. The man looked awful. Sunken cheeks, reddened eyes, his shoulders hunched, hair and beard scraggly. Hope and love beamed out from this face, and it was all Jim could do not to fall into his lap, reach in to find the guilt he knew Sebastian carried, and smooth it out with words and caresses and kisses.

But, there was no place for him to sit in the circle, and no way to touch guilt, and no way to truly touch Sebastian. So Jim sat down on the table, careful with his new corporeality, and looked around at their spellbound faces. "I'm - really here," he said, surprised at himself. "I've never felt this solid."

"Jim?" Bobby's voice surprised him too: so young, but so sure of itself.

He looked at her, wild hair and still, motionless face. "Yes?"

"We want to help you move on. We- thought we should ask you how to do that."

The cold prickled Jim's skin. "What?" he looked at Sebastian, and their expressions were one and the same. "I. I can't." And he had always been certain of that.

"You can," Maeve reassured him.

I don't want to. He was being unreasonable, and knew it. Here were these people, gathered together to help him. People who cared even though he was dead. People with good, strong hearts. As Jim lapped the faces with his eyes he suddenly, strongly, felt himself being pulled somewhere else. His image on the table blinked out. Just as quickly, it returned, painted with a sneer.

"I want to be with Sebastian," he said, crawling towards the other end of the table, where his husband waited.

"Jim," Maeve said softly. The ghost's dark eyes whipped back to her. "You're hurting him."

Sebastian's face did not confess; but it did not protest either, with its sagging skin and eye-bags, the vitality long drained from his eyes. Worse; Jim’s instincts didn't protest either.

He'd known and not known, just as he lived and didn't live.

"We can bring your murderer to justice." Zach spoke like a hero, armed with the crystal in his palm. "We'll tell people the truth!"

Jim's noctilucent smile was condescending and pessimistic, and he didn't look at the children when he said, "the truth means so much less than it should."

Chelsea leaned forward, nearly forgetting her hands were clenched by the old soldier and the mayor's daughter. "Jim, I want to say sorry," she blurted out. "The world seemed so tiny back then and I didn't think, I couldn't even imagine what you, how you felt, and I told myself it mustn't matter, and-- I was intimidated by you, and I felt you might leave us at any moment, and so when you did, I... I... I'm sorry."

Compassion was a stranger, or it had been when Jim was alive. He looked at her instead with desperate longing. "Chelsea," he laughed, shaking his head. "You didn't do this to me."

Nor had his father, in his infinite cruelty, done this to him. Moriarty Sr, for all his shrewd looks and bouts of anger, his drinking and his apathy, the self-contempt that spread to every person in his life, had not known the fate he condemned his son to. Nor had Jim, the height of his adolescent hormones only four years past, after a life of stealth and secrecy, betrayal real and imaginary, known how to cope with his never-ending afterlife. For a moment, everyone, even Jim, seemed perfectly faultless. For a moment he believed there was no guilt to carry.

Then he looked at Sebastian.

Sebastian, who carried the guilt of it all. Who carried his bones. Who cleaned them. Who, in the thunderstorm, had not died. Who loved him. Who was dead too, and had no one to help him move on. Who had never been laid to rest either.

"I have to stay," he realized aloud. Pain or no pain. Hurting him or helping him. He didn't understand it, and knew it was no more fair than anything else in life or death had ever been, but he knew it. He looked at Maeve as if it were up to her.

She looked back at a loss. She drew in a deep breath and nodded towards the children. Bobby's face was crumpled in deep thought. Bela was preoccupied with Chelsea's hand, just how she imagined her hands would someday be, and the sensation of nausea that seeped out of Jim. It was Johann who spoke up then, not with a promise or a course of action - as was his tendency - but a question so quaint-sounding it nearly shed its heavy implications. "What if Sebastian dies?"

Chelsea and Maeve both looked at him with an adult-like horror and embarrassment; Johann had lived as himself long enough that he knew how to ignore this, his eyes reflecting the nocturnal shimmer of the spirit.

"Then you can come back here," Jim said, picking the words carefully, "and put me to rest."

—

Sebastian had been watching in silence, his skin tingling from how close Jim was. More than the static energy emanating from his form, his words were what made his entire body buzz. I have to stay, he’d said, looking him in the eyes. He didn’t have to. He wanted to. Warmth spread across his chest. The whole time, he didn’t look away from his lover, not even for a second, not even to blink. What a delight it was to finally see him so clearly. He was so young. Charming. His dark eyes were oddly alight with life, his face as expressive as he imagined it. The pictures didn’t do him justice.

But above all else, he looked incredibly real. Solid. If Sebastian reached out his hand…

“Guess you’re finally over Adrian,” Chelsea cut through the sentimental atmosphere with a scoff. It seemed even after her heartfelt apology there were still some things she was bitter about.

Jim, until now preoccupied only with the soldier, watching him with such adoration that made him begin to believe he deserved it, whipped his head around at the familiar name. From where he was sitting, Sebastian could no longer see Jim’s face; the ghost flickered as his eyes met Chelsea’s.

The temperature dropped; he hairdresser visibly shivered while the children around the table watched their breaths condensed in the air, forming tenuous clouds in front of them.

Chelsea shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I mean, it’s…” The words were stuck in her throat. “I thought you might still… you know, love him.” Jim’s figure faltered once more. “I was never good at sharing. And I always had a sneaking suspicion he enjoyed your company more than mine. I was pretty, you were… fascinating. He might not have been in love with you, but he did love you. We all did.” Hesitating, she turned to Maeve. “Can I break the circle? I have something to show him.”

Maeve looked at Jim; it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere. She nodded.

Chelsea reached for an folded newspaper clipping from her coat’s pocket. Before she had even set it down, Jim’s figure had slowly started to glide across the table, towards her, towards Adrian.

Staring at the back of Jim’s head, something shattered in Sebastian’s chest.

“Adrian and I split up not long after you… disappeared.” The confession was quiet, but the relief over-weighed the humiliation. “I looked for him, and I looked for Robin. I thought maybe if I could find them, if I could bring them here, it would bring you peace. Maybe you’d even forgive me.”

“I couldn’t find Robin. I’m not sure Robin is even… Robin, anymore. And Adrian, well,” Chelsea paused, glancing towards Sebastian before she spoke again. “Adrian is dead.”

With gentle but purposeful movements, the kind she made for a living, she unfolded the newspaper and smoothed it down on the table. On it, in faded ink, was Adrian’s obituary. He looked much older than either of them would remember him on the picture his family had chosen; his hair was combed back, and there were lines around his eyes as he smiled towards the camera. “Car crash,” She made, aloud, watching Jim’s face carefully as he effortlessly took the paper from her. Her eyes found Sebastian with a stoic expression on his scarred face; every word out of her mouth was about to be cruel, and she knew it, but she hoped, in a way, this would set him free, too. What kind of life could he ever have with a ghost? “I thought, maybe… You could meet him, Jim. Wherever he is.”

Like lights during a storm, Jim flickered out of sight with an audible buzz. The flames from the candles danced with his rhythm, threatening to go out. Was Adrian what Jim needed to move on?

Surely Jim would not be that naive?

A sudden paralyzing feeling of despair took over the soldier. Sebastian stared down at his own body, his scars turned purple in the phantom-induced cold, as the electrified air made it difficult to breathe. He sat as an observer, like he had his whole life, as life happened around him; slowly, yet still far too quickly for him to catch up. All over again, Jack was rushing out of his life and he was too weak to beg him to stay. All over again, he was allowing his brother to walk out of the door with his last chance at feeling like he belonged. All over again, love was slipping between his fingers.

Their time together had been short, difficult, and riddled with obstacles, but had they not found a home in each other in the end? Still, with the quiet resignation of a martyr, he watched the man he loved being lured away from him and into the arms of someone that never really wanted him.

“You can be with him, Jim.” Chelsea encouraged softly. “You can be at peace.”

It was when Jim looked over his shoulder to him that the soldier’s stoic expression finally fell. Something stirred awake in him. Hope, perhaps. Jack had not looked back, had he? With the sharp ache in his chest reflected on his scarred face, he realized at last that the pain was not purifying, and forced apathy was not, indeed, selflessness; it was self-destruction. It always had been.

“Don’t leave me.” His voice was barely more than a whisper; quiet and desperate.

Bobby had observed Sebastian’s internal turmoil in his eyes, studying it quietly before he spoke, and a small breath of relief escaped her lips when did. Everyone else turned to him only then. A mixture of confusion and defeat took over her mother’s eyes, while guilt reigned on Chelsea’s.

Sebastian didn’t break the circle, but his eyes found no one else but Jim as tears rolled down his cheeks. He was through with docile, self-abandoning silences. He would fight for what he wanted.

“Stay.” He made. “Please.”

Jim’s eyes fluttered down to the newspaper in his hand before he looked up again.

Sebastian hesitated. “Jim.” He made. “I can’t live without you—I don’t want to live without you. Please? I never thought love was for me, I never even believed I deserved it, but I need it…

“I want it.”

Maeve, still grasping for reason, tried to speak up, her frustration evident in the way her voice faltered. “There’s no way you can be together,” she warned. “Listen to me, Sebastian, this will—”

“—Kill me?” Sebastian laughed; it echoed eerily off the walls.

He met his lover’s eyes with a smile. Were they not proof enough that there was very little death could do to prevent love from blooming? Letting go of the hands of the women at his sides, Sebastian broke the circle; his calloused hands — the very same that transformed the infamous old house by the creek into a home, that drained the yard and unearthed Jim’s bones — reached towards the centre of table where Jim still sat holding Adrian’s obituary. With his palms up, he invited him.

“If it does…” He began, exhaling softly when the newspaper fell on the table and Jim’s hands — cold, but solid — gently met his. “...You are welcome to come back here and put us both to rest.”

—

“Maybe we can summon Adrian to talk to Jim?” Chelsea asked quietly as the door was closed behind them; Sebastian’s heavy footsteps slowly faded into silence inside.

Maeve sighed, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“There must be something we can do. Right? You’re… What are you, anyway? A witch?” Her mocking tone was quickly corrected when the librarian glared at her. She cleared her throat. “Are you sure there’s absolutely nothing we can do? I’ve a bad feeling — don’t you?”

“Of course you have a bad feeling, you just spoke to a dead man.”

—

Inside the car, Maeve tucked everyone into their seatbelts before she drove in silence down the narrow, winding road that connected Jim and Sebastian’s residence to the center of town.

Zach, the tallest of the bunch, sat in the passenger’s seat, looking out of the window with a grave expression on his young face. In the backseat, Bela, Bobby and Johann still had their hands entwined. It brought them comfort after their failed attempted of helping Jim into the light. The boy leaned his head against Bobby’s shoulder, exhausted. Maeve smiled at the sight through the rear-view mirror; that was when she met Bela’s eyes, far too awake compared to the others.

“Is Sebastian going to die?” The girl carefully asked in a whisper as their eyes met.

Lying felt cruel, so she didn’t. Not entirely. “I think Sebastian is going to finally be at peace.”

A sudden knock on the front door snapped Maeve out of her peaceful morning routine.

Setting her chamomile tea and reading glasses on the table next to her book, she wrapped her velvet green robe around her body and tied the string with a ribbon before carefully approaching the door. The knocking continued, and Maeve scanned the entrance for a weapon. Who could be knocking at her door so early on a Sunday? It was only when she caught a glimpse through the peephole of who was standing outside that her anxiety briefly subsided.

“Sebastian,” She said as she opened the door. The old soldier looked up from where he was leaning against the doorframe. He seemed… sick. There was blood on his shirt. “What happened? Wh—Did you walk here?”

“I needed some air.”

Maeve paused. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips were losing color; she reached to touch his forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re burning up,” She pointed out as she helped him inside.

Sitting him down on a chair in her kitchen, she abandoned her book and breakfast to brew her unexpected guest a cup of tea. From a neat row of mason jars near the window, she poured a few spoonfuls of select herbs into a large mug.

Maeve didn’t need to ask what had happened; she knew. Sebastian needed to purge whatever energy was left in his system from his heartbreaking interaction with the ghost. “Did he harm you?” She asked, her back turned to the soldier.

“No.”

“Was he angry?”

“No, no! He was… in pain.” Sebastian confessed. “Being here, with me, it… Hurts him.”

Maeve didn’t respond, not immediately. The silence filled her small kitchen as the kettle boiled and she ran a clean kitchen towel under the cold water of the sink. When she finally turned around, she walked up to Sebastian to press the icy towel against the side of his neck. “What happened?”

All the soldier could do at the question was sob into the palms of his hands — the same hands he had the privilege of holding Jim with the night before.

Maeve took a seat by his side. Gently, she reached for his shoulder. “It’s okay.”

Her reassuring touch was not enough to put a stop to his sobs, but it did slow them down. Between sips of tea and hiccups, Sebastian eventually managed to regain some composure. “Last night, I finally found a way to hear his voice—,”

“Bela’s telephone?”

He blinked at her, surprised.

“Bela is a very talkative girl.” She explained. Her Bobby, however, had been strangely quiet ever since she heard of the soldier receiving the old rotary dial phone. “Go on.”

Sebastian cleared his throat, fidgeting with the tie he was still wearing. “And I could hear him, Maeve. He said my name in a way no one ever has, and… I don’t think anyone ever will again.” He smiled at the memory, but his smile quickly dropped. “But I wanted to see him. I wanted to open my eyes and find him sitting next to me. Alive. I wanted the life I had dreamed for us to be real.” It was embarrassing to admit; painful. Sebastian looked down at his hands for a moment. “Eventually, he… came through.

“Jim was standing in front of me. Looking at me. I could… Hold him.”

Maeve furrowed her eyebrows in confusion. “It sounds exactly like what you wanted—,”

“—He wasn’t right, Maeve. I wasn’t strong enough to pull him through properly. He was… hurt. And he could feel it—I could see that he could feel every sore, every torn piece of flesh…”

“I’m sorry.” Holding his hand, she could feel remnants of their connection; the longing and the pain were so intense they overwhelmed her. She pulled her hand away, nauseous; she could taste mud and blood in her teeth. Maeve felt like crying, but a quiet pattering coming from the corridor made her swallow her tears. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tuft of unruly hair poking into the room.

“There’s not enough life left in me to bring him home,” Sebastian admitted softly, unaware of the girl eavesdropping on their conversation. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s not fair.” The door slowly creaked open. Bobby, wearing a blue nightgown and fluffy pink bunny slipper, which Bela had gifted her for her birthday, stepped into the room with a deep frown Sebastian had never seen before. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed, and she looked sad. It didn’t take very long for the tears to start running down her cheeks, her fists balled up at her sides. “Why do you help him talk to a ghost you never met but you don’t help me talk to Dad?!”

“Roberta!” Maeve gasped. It wasn’t like Bobby to raise her voice.

“Why can't I talk to Dad?”

The grief in her daughter's voice broke Maeve’s heart into pieces. How could she ever begin to explain why Sebastian got to be with Jim while her father was long gone? She was right: it wasn't fair.

“I miss him.” Bobby cried.

“Bobby,” She tried, but the moment she got up to move in her direction, the girl ran up the stairs and slammed her door shut, leaving her mother and Sebastian to share a heavy silence.

With an aching heart, Maeve gently pushed Bobby's bedroom door open.

“Bobby, honey,” She called. “Can I come in?” There was no response, only muffled sniffles into the dark green pillowcase.

Carefully, she entered the room and took a seat on the edge of her daughter's bed. “When you're ready, I'd love it if you'd talk to me. I don't like seeing you upset.” She tried, softly smoothing over the duvet. “I want to help.”

The birds were chirping outside, oblivious to the heartbreak happening inside Bobby's chest. Often, she would find it poetic that the world didn't depend on her state of mind to be beautiful; the birds would sing and the leaves would fall regardless of what she was feeling. Today, however, she felt betrayed by the world. She didn't care about the birdsongs or about the fruit growing in the trees. How dare the world not be as gloomy as she felt? How dare Sebastian complain about Jim not being right?

“Dad doesn't answer me.” The girl eventually mumbled against the pillow.

“…Answer you?”

Bobby lifted her head from the pillow. Her eyes were red, her cheeks damp with tears. “I call and he doesn't answer.”

That was when Maeve noticed a wooden box peeking out from under the bed. Immediately, she knew what it was. In silence, she pulled the box from where it had been hiding and opened it on her lap; this was the first time in years she was looking inside; its contents were not how she remembered them.

A crinkled, yellow A4 piece of paper sat on top, and unfolding it twice revealed a makeshift Ouija board. Beneath it, there were letters and photographs, an old handkerchief, and a parking ticket dated with Bobby's birth day and year — they had been fined for a frankly outrageous parking choice while she was in the delivery room; her father had brought the birth certificate to contest the fine, and had walked away with forgiveness and a wave of congratulations. He had held onto the ticket since.

Rummaging through the memories in the box, she eventually figured out what was missing. Not soon after, she watched as Bobby slowly revealed her father’s pager hiding underneath her pillow.

Maeve’s heart broke all over again. “Oh, sweetheart,” Without wasting another second, she pulled her daughter against her chest, holding her close.

“Why isn’t Dad here?”

The mother sighed, kissing the top of her head. Pulling away from her daughter, however, she searched for her eyes. “But Dad is here, you know?” She made, “He’s here.” She poked the tip of her nose. “And here.” She pointed at her eyes. “And here.” With a smile, she fluffed up her daughter’s curly hair. Then, carefully and with ceremony, she pressed a hand over Bobby’s heart, then another over her own. “He’s here.” A single tear escaped her eyes. “I promise you he never really left.”

The cemetery outside town looked like a park. The local river wound a narrow stream through it, dotted with sycamores and cow parsley, and all around were small, deteriorating stone benches. But instead of picnicking families, kids too small to be in school pulling on the last few flowers of the season, children swinging and sliding, the cemetery held only bodies: quiet, deeply buried bodies.

Maeve told her daughter she would feel better after some sleep, and while that was true, Bobby was still devastated in the morning. She was already somber for a little girl. As they walked hand-in-hand from the library to the graveyard, Bobby was silent, her face stone. Maeve could sense, whether through her witching ancestors or her maternal experience, that behind her strong, stoic expression a storm was still raging. The statuesque older woman let her walk in silence, and held her hand. They were both wearing gloves: Maeve’s were faux calfskin, blue-black, and Bobby had on the fingerless gloves that her mother had given her for her birthday. Halloween, their trip to the old ghost house, the first clues, all seemed so far away; in the maelstrom ravaging Bobby’s mental landscape, memories flew here and there, unconnected, severed from the ground.

They stopped at Veridian Floral for some daffodils.

Emma, putting down a bodice ripper called Untamed: The Wild Maiden recognized Maeve, and tried to strike up a conversation: “I had heard you might be hosting some yoga sessions at the library, is that true? I’d really like to try it, they say it’s incredible for your back!”

Maeve looked at her tightly, snapping her purse together. “Maybe…” she offered, distantly.

Emma cleared her throat and nodded. “... Yes, well, it’s just something I thought sounded nice.”

“Sorry, Emma,” Maeve’s taut features relaxed, showing a hint of the weariness beneath. “We’re visiting Cal today.”

The florist’s brow furrowed, but it came to her as she handed back Maeve’s change. “Daffodils - really great choice. They symbolize hope.”

Maeve nodded, and Bobby squeezed her hand a little tighter.

The cemetery awaited.

Near the stream, by a growing mound of ivy that had tormented the local groundskeepers for years, was Callum Henry Rapaport. His gravestone was no larger than any other, no more decorative, but to the pair walking up it seemed to shine with light. Unlike the other tombstones, his had a small shrine in front of it: many stones stacked to precision balance, topped with candles and the brittle remains of many lavender stems.

Bobby stepped forward and placed the bouquet of flowers in front of the little altar, beneath her father’s name. She stared at it.

Maeve sat down on the cold grass, rapidly losing its green, and folded her legs beneath her skirt. “Roberta, honey?”

The little girl didn’t look back, but Maeve knew she was listening.

She drew in a long, steadying breath of autumnal air, and looked to the tombstone for the courage and strength that Cal had always given her.

“Do you remember what we talked about last night?”

Bobby nodded stiffly, and touched her chest. Dad is here. She didn’t want him there. She wanted him in front of them both, smiling and laughing. The ache became overwhelming, and she felt herself tearing up. “I just… I just…” She put the heels of her hands against her eyes and sniffled. “I miss him, and I want to hear his voice and hold his hand...”

Maeve felt her own eyes water, tears she’d shed a thousand times, but the well of grief was infinite.

“I do too.”

“And, Jim, he seems so sad, but he has Sebastian, and vice-a-versa, but Dad can’t answer the phone, and he’s just out there, all alone, and,” Bobby started to lose her breath. Maeve leaned forward, to let Bobby know she was right there, but didn’t reach out to touch her or pull her from the grave. They had come here for this very reason. “That’s not true,” she said simply. “Dad is at peace.”

Bobby dropped her hands and turned to look at her mother. “What do you mean?”

A sad smile broke through Maeve’s oncoming tears. “Oh, honey… these things aren’t easy to explain. Many adults don’t even understand what I’m about to tell you.”

The promise of secret knowledge beckoned Bobby from where she stood. She sat down next to her mom on the grass, wrapping her coat underneath her legs to protect herself from the cold, and sat up straight: the listening signal.

Maeve rested her hand on top of Bobby’s and she took another steadying breath.

“Death will not stop. We’ll wish and wish that it would, but it is a natural and good part of life. The fact that life will one day end teaches us to care for each other while we have time. When we lose someone, we grieve for them, and it hurts. Of course, it hurts. It’s never going to feel good when someone leaves this world. But… they don’t end up all alone. They move on - to what, we don’t know, but to something. You know all about the afterlife.”

Bobby nodded; she leaned against her mom’s side and squeezed her hand.

Maeve continued. “Sometimes, there are rare cases, where someone’s spirit doesn’t get to move on, but the only way to keep it here is to cause that person great suffering at the time of their death. They have to die… slowly, and in the right conditions. That is how a ghost comes to be: pain and agony.” She hadn’t been nearly as blunt with Sebastian when explaining Jim’s condition, but this was different. She needed Bobby to understand; as she sat, trying to explain, she realized that she needed to understand too. “And it doesn’t stop once their spirit regains consciousness, undead, still on Earth.”

Bobby wiped her eyes. This was in line with what she knew about Jim. “So, if Dad was here,” she said shakily, “he… he wouldn’t feel happy?”

“That’s a good question.” Maeve sighed. She rubbed her daughter’s back, absentmindedly. “He might feel some happiness, seeing you, seeing me. But - imagine, all these years - that he was a misplaced spirit, and trying to reach out to us, to no avail. Imagine how you would feel, alone, not able to speak, or write, or even turn the pages of a book.”

Bobby shook her head at the thought.

“This is why ghosts have a nasty reputation. If whatever ended their life isn’t enough to make them angry, then the fact that they can’t rest, nor interact with the world, does.”

“If I was a ghost,” Bobby said in a soft voice, “I would go and see things, like concerts.”

“May it never be so.” Maeve replied gravely. “You would be tied to the place of your death, unable to leave.”

They both lapsed into silence, contemplating this thought. They both had the same pinch between their eyebrows when they were mulling, a little ‘w’.

“How… do you know?” Bobby voiced. The daffodils were sharp yellow, a stark contrast to the faded colors of the graveyard. “How do you know he’s not here?”

“We laid him to rest,” Maeve shut her eyes, “and he died peacefully, in his sleep.” She still remembered it: like the manifestation of a horrible nightmare, waking up with his body cold aside hers. But at least he had gone without pain. At least he had kissed her the night before, and reminded her, like always, that she was his world. At least he had read Bobby a story that night.

“Every year I perform a ritual. I use lavender. It soothes the soul.” She exhaled slowly and wrapped her arm around Bobby.

“I’m sorry, Roberta. This is a kind of pain that we don’t get to choose, and we can’t cheat.”

Bobby turned her head and pressed her nose into her mother’s bicep, getting a noseful of detergent and perfume. “Okay.” She squeezed her tight. “I don’t want Dad to be hurt.”

“He’s at peace,” Maeve said confidently, “and that’s best.”

“I love you, Mom.” She shut her eyes. “I’m… I’m sorry that I wasn’t polite to Sebastian, and that um, I yelled.”

Maeve thought back to him, to this complicated situation, gratitude flooding, for her brilliant daughter and her tranquil, gentle husband, whose memory still remained. She gathered Bobby up in a big hug and kissed the top of her head. “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you. But you did nothing wrong.”

As they walked home through the falling foliage, Bobby had brightened up, but something still seemed to cloud her mind. They passed the ice cream shop and the little girl didn’t even peek inside. Maeve understood. This was a heavy day. She had no idea that, beneath her head of big hair, Bobby had come to a staggering, weighty conclusion, which she announced appropos of nothing to her friends the next time they met:

“We have to help Jim move on to the next life.”

Paul and Myrna greeted me at the scrubby run-up to their home like I was an old college friend. Paul took my bag and Myrna squeezed my cheek. They were middle-aged and dusted with gold freckles. They both wore overalls. They both smelled like straw.

I was brought to a room to put my things, though it wasn't where I'd be staying. I complimented the rustic decor. We had some iced tea. Then it was time to get down to business.

I stripped naked and Paul donned a wide brim hat. Myrna brought me the costume. The orange polyester fabric was skintight, the accompanying headpiece heavy. When I bobbed my head I could feel the font of tall leaf-like appendages tip into each sway.

We walked out to the field. There was already a hole dug for me. I climbed inside, arms flat, fingers pointed down, and, with gardening gloves, the two farmers packed the dirt around my neck.

I could feel the cool, almost cold of the earth beneath my costumed feet, and pressure all around me. The headpiece protected me from the sun, but it also obscured my vision, so I was only aware of their retreating feet, and the heat sizzling on the farm around me. 

I waited there for a while, time blurring, buried up to my chin in the dirt. I tuned in to the rustling leaves from the distant wood, and the dry shuffle of corn in the eastmost field. I felt the packed earth pressing in on me from every direction, holding me. I drifted away then, not into sleep. 

It couldn't have been any less than an hour before I heard their footsteps again.

"Yup, that’s a mighty fine crop."

It was eight months ago when I had my addiction to hypnosis diagnosed – for lack of a better word. Staub, her gold-rimmed sunglasses veiling her eyes, set the pendulum aside and leaned over her knees to look at me, lying on the chaise-lounge. “What would you do if I told you I was giving up my practice?” she asked. 

I stared back at her, pretending my heart didn’t break when she said that hypothetical, and swallowed down my fear. “I suppose I would find a different hypnotherapist.” 

She pulled on a thread hanging off the knee of her trousers. “That’s what I was afraid of… I have wanted, for a while now, to leave, but…” her eyes hung on me, the same dull gray shade as a nickel. “I was really worried about you, Sinclair.” 

It was already a full three minutes into a session wherin she wasn’t yet guiding me into trance. My skin was tightening with every passing second; I didn’t understand what she was trying to say to me, through the taut seal of longing. “Oh, well…  can I ask why you want to leave?” 

“Of course.” She layered her hands over that loose thread. “I’m moving into addiction specialization. My brother owns sober housing out in Pasadena, and they have a position for a therapist. I’ve wanted to move for a while now, as I said, and California…” 

I nodded slightly. “Has more than just corn and silos?” 

Staub smiled without laughing; she took all my jokes that way. “Just a bit more. But going back to you – I don’t know if another hypnotherapist is best.” 

I sat up. It was becoming clear she had no intention of putting me under. “Why’s that?” I asked her. 

“Because… I believe you’re fulfilling a fantasy by seeing me, and that isn’t a service hypnotherapists necessarily provide.” She had a look like she’d smelled something nasty. “That’s not–” I began, fidgeting, sweat sprouting under my collar. 

“It is.” Her voice, often so gentle, firmed up, and I knew she had rehearsed this confrontation beforehand. “You can say whatever you like, but I know the truth as well as you do, which is that during every session between us, you’ve been aroused.” 

She continued, holding her gaze steady while I avoided it. “Now, it was fine for a time – but I’m moving on now, and I think it would be a disservice to any other practitioner not to tell you that I’ve noticed, and that I’ve been uncomfortable with it.” 

“Not so uncomfortable when you charged my insurance,” I said, taking my coat and keys and heading for the door. 

“Mr. Sinclair–” 

“Goodbye, Staub. Have fun in Pasadena.” 

I’ve been costumed as furniture, tree, geometric shape, pretty doll, leather pet, but vegetable was a new one. Paul’s hands in gardener gloves searched around my shoulders as he let out a low whistle. “Oh, sure. This one’s a toughie. But I got a feeling–” he grunted with effort, “it’ll be worth it.” Myrna comes around behind me. Together, with no small amount of blind digging, they hoisted me out of the hole, exclaiming, “It’s so big!” 

After that was photography; I was posed and shot with both the farmers smiling next to me and giving the camera enthusiastic hand gestures, while I was sitting up on some hay bales: the prize carrot. I drifted and dreamed. Then they peeled me out of the costume and Myrna bathed me, letting her unremarkable chest hang close to my face. Paul watched from the corner, chewing on a long piece of wheat. She withdrew, and looked to him shyly. “Honey, I’ve got half a mind to fuck myself with that big vegetable.” 

Paul tipped his hat and rumbled his approval. 

It wasn’t what I had in mind, exactly. But fucking goes hand-in-hand with fetish. For most people, that’s the point. We went into a creaky, dusty bedroom, the three of us, my scrubbed-down body more or less carried, though I used my feet to help them along. Myrna got on the bottom and Paul used me like a battering ram. I got bored with the sex and I tapped out mentally. It didn’t matter. I was a vegetable. I laid there and let it all happen, watching the sun sparkle on the windowpanes. 

It’s not like there was some magical quality to Pasadena, California, imbued by my old therapist’s occupation there. It’s not like it was bound to be any different from any other city. And yet, after living there for three weeks, I was happier than I had ever been. Around every corner was the promise. The promise is the best part. I found a burgeoning fetish community stationed partially online and partially out of an IHOP, where they met at 10:30, Wednesday mornings. I joined them, from afar, and tried to eavesdrop. 

They were out and flagrant, with leather collars and shibari tattoos. One had their Instagram account written on the side of their bag, under “Stalk Me”, written in chalk. They were small and pierced, the youngest of the crowd. That was my in. I followed them and engaged in some light flirtation. I learned that their group was not incestuous: they sought partners elsewhere, to avoid complication. They knew no more about their friends kinks than what I did, what was available online or could be overheard. I pressed them. There was bondage, medfet, and watersports; nothing could have seemed tamer to me at that time. 

I tried to look up Staub one day. She wasn’t in Pasadena. Maybe she never had been. Maybe she moved away before I got there. 

“We mostly do smoking cessation here,” Wegner said. She wore a big, thick necklace and a big, thick cardigan. I stared at the point above her cleavage, which had freckles on it. 

“I don’t smoke,” I said, “but I think I could really benefit from hypnotherapy.” 

Jim trudged back into the house after nightfall. The bathroom door was propped open, and he heard the shower running. Enough of sitting and moping, then? He squeaked up the steps and pushed open the bathroom door an extra inch, before leaning back on it, feeling it slot shut behind him. He relished the strength that he got from nighttime. The sun seemed to drain him of everything.

Wait.

Jim stared at the shower curtain, the silhouette behind it, just barely illuminated by the overhead bulb. Nighttime. They’d made this mistake before - when Sebastian tried to summon him after meeting Maeve. “Of course! Of course!” he jumped up and went to the shower. “Seb! Sebastian, you have to try again, now - now it’s nighttime. It was so fucking obvious, we just had to wait -” Jim’s voice faltered as he saw Sebastian, somber and silent, standing motionless under the showerhead. “Ah. Right.” he stepped back. “I’m going to have to write it down. Tomorrow.” He heaved an exasperated sigh and plunked down on the lid of the toilet, chin in his hands.

His eyes drifted around the bathroom. It was nicer than it had been in decades. Sebastian had repaired the missing grout, replaced the mirror, and cleaned the place until not a speck of mold could be seen. Jim understood why this served as his sanctuary. It was warm. Humid. Jim had never liked humidity, though it was different to take a hot shower or a sauna and languish in the moisture in the air. He’d always liked to leave messages on the mirror, so the next time it fogged up he’d see them again. Of course, his father had always been angry when he’d done that, leaving smudges. Smiley faces.

Once more, Jim jumped up. Could it be possible? He wouldn’t have to hold a pen.

The ghost stepped over to the mirror, gaze furrowed, and reached out a finger to the misty surface.

He drew a ‘C’. The fog parted, and allowed him to. Jim gasped. He heard Sebastian turning the water off - he had to hurry. Jim leaned forward and scribbled a message:

CALL ME TONIGHT. XOXO. JIM.

—

The disappointment weighed heavily on Sebastian’s chest. Sitting in the bathtub, he recalled the putrid fluid that had sputtered from the tap in the bathroom sink on his first night. Jim’s greeting card.

How much energy had it taken to manifest it? How badly had he wanted him to leave?

For a moment, he wondered if he had overstayed his welcome. Had he, somehow, managed to trick a ghost into tolerating him? Or had Jim simply not had a choice being stuck here with him?

Sinking into icy water, like he’d done so many times before, he held his breath for as long as he could. It was a little game he liked to play by himself, but he stakes were not that high. Had never been. And yet again, he had failed the only person who cared for him. What was there to lose?

Suddenly, however, the soldier broke from under the water gasping for breath. That was when, drunk and cold and bitter, he finally realized it. He was in love with Jim. That was what he had to lose.

He had redone the entire house because he knew that Jim enjoyed watching him work. He’d repainted the rooms in the colors Jim preferred, and fixed his favorite window so he could look out up at the stars from his childhood bedroom. He had redirected the stream to repair the backyard. He dug up his bones from the shed; he washed them, dried them. Placed them in the warmth of the sun

Jim loved him, too. Everyday. Long before the breakfast and the notes, or even the séances. The ghost had done more for him than anyone one ever had; Jim had saved his life.

Was that not enough proof of love? Was that not worth fighting for?

Standing up from his self-pitying ice bath, warm water finally flowed over his aching body. There was a vague determination in his slugging, drunken movements; he would wash up, get dressed, and they would enjoy their evening together like they had so many evenings before. They would eat and play one of Jim’s favorite movies. He would sit on his lap, even if he couldn’t feel it. They would climb into bed and, in the morning, for a second, he would hold Jim’s face in his hands.

The shower curtain stuck to his skin as he climbed out of the bathtub. Sebastian walked barefoot towards the towel rack on the wall, dripping water on the newly restored tiles. He took his time to dry his body and wrap the towel around his hips before wiping the fog on the mirror.

Just as his hand reached towards it, however, he froze.

Sebastian blinked at the words on the mirror a few times, rubbing his eyes as if trying to wake up from a dream. When it didn’t work, he swiped a finger across them to see if it would leave a mark.

It did.

Suddenly, the quiet resignment over never hearing his lover’s voice was gone. Over.

He needed it.

More than needing it, he wanted it.

And he owed it to him to try again.

Much like that fateful night when he decided to step into the yard with his shotgun, Sebastian entered his bedroom — somewhat sobered up by the importance of this evening — to get dressed, and this time, too, he donned his best Sunday clothes. A white, pressed shirt. His nicest, least paint speckled trousers. He added a tie. Parted and combed back his hair. Put on the only cologne he owned.

To top it all off, he slipped into a suit jacket that had become only a little snug around his belly.

It was a date, right?

In the kitchen, he set the table for two. Had he owned any fancy cutlery, he would have laid the table with it, but instead all he could do to make it look nice was place the flowers Jim bought for him inside the half-broken kettle and place it in the center of the wooden table.

The soldier hesitated, but poured them both a glass of red wine; the alcohol, like sleep, seemed to thin the veil between them. The food came out of the microwave, which was less than glamorous, but the smell of warm food added to the ambiance.

Jim had probably been watching him fuss over the table and himself for nearly an hour now, yet there was still something missing. Sebastian walked around the kitchen in circles, nervously biting at the skin on his thumb. Perhaps there was a subconscious reason for the hesitation and the fuss; despite his sudden optimism, the disappointment of the first call was still lodged somewhere in his chest.

So he walked upstairs to grab the one thing he could think of to make this nerve-wracking moment slightly more romantic: one of the candles left behind from the kids’ séance.

Once it felt like there was nothing left to obsess over, and the food had already started to get cold, Sebastian ceremoniously pulled out a chair. On it, he gently placed Jim’s finger bone.

Across the table, Sebastian finally took a seat.

The pink telephone, which had been sitting next to the flowers as a centerpiece, was pulled closer to the edge of the table, the plate Sebastian had set for himself quickly pushed out of the way.

Despite having the phone in front of him, his hand hovered over the handset, hesitating, wondering if he had truly lost his mind while staring at the plug dangling from the table.

For a moment, he wondered if it would make him feel better to plug it in.

All he seemed to be doing was killing time. The paper with the number he needed to call was sitting inside the plate he had pushed to the side. All he needed to do was dial it, but…

“I…” Sebastian cleared his throat. His eyes, until now fixed on the telephone, looked up. He stared ahead, where he believed Jim was sitting while waiting for him to muster the courage to pick up the phone. He knew he was there. Jim had told him he would be. Always. Even when he couldn’t make a sound. Even when he couldn’t see him. Jim would always be there.

“I was thinking, before, and…” He found himself laughing out of nerves. “I know you’re there—here. I know you can see me and you can hear me, and I…” The soldier exhaled, trying to find the words. “My disappointment in not hearing you is not because I don’t feel you here—it’s not because I don’t think this — us — isn’t enough. This is enough.

“But, you know, I won’t lie, I… I don’t think I’m much to see, or to listen to, and I know… I know you are a million times more fascinating. More beautiful…” Sniffling, he ran hand down his face. Hadn’t he cried enough all afternoon? “And I know you had so much life ahead of you while I have been living half-dead for most of my life, and it’s not fair… I…”

His hand finally rested on the handset, slowly removing it from the hook.

“I guess I just… I would give anything to hear you. Maybe it’s selfish, but I would give anything to be the one who gets to see you live. And I want you to know that…” With a deep breath, Sebastian began dialing the Clarks’ phone number, digit by digit. “If this doesn’t work, I… I will still live for the moment I get to see you in the morning, no matter how brief and fleeting that moment is.

“I will live for you. For as long as you want me to.”

With that, the last digit clicked into place and Sebastian braced himself for a familiar ache.

Except, this time, the line started ringing.

“H–hello?” The soldier gave breathlessly at the click coming from the other side of the line.

“Hello.”

As Sebastian had spoke, words that Jim had always sensed in the air but had never been voiced, the veil came down over their two planes. A wall of mist formed between them as each number clicked into the rotary. Jim felt himself moving backwards, without permission. Walking, no, falling, down a set of stairs. He hit a couch with a heavy thump, and found he held a receiver in one hand. The basement walls around him solidified, and the smell of the Clarks’ unfinished furniture filled his nose.

“Sebastian,” Jim breathed. “Sebastian, my lovely, perfect, Sebastian, there you are.”

The connection was not a very good one. Sebastian’s voice came in over the line crackling and fuzzy, Jim’s ears felt like they were full of down and cotton. But they could hear each other. They were on the phone. Outside, the basement windows were pitch black. Jim couldn’t see in his peripherals. He clutched the phone tighter, drew his knees up to his chin, and shut his eyes. “Oh… it’s so good to talk to you…”

When he opened his eyes, the basement intersected with the dining room. The shag carpet climbed up into the stucco of the kitchen, the old workbench became the counter with its island of unwashed dishes. Jim could see Sebastian at the table, a shade, a screen in front of the opposite wall. “I… I know you would live for me, love. I never doubted that. I’ve seen it. When I took the gun from your hands, and you knew you weren’t alone anymore, I…” he swallowed thickly. “I don’t think you’re any less beautiful or fascinating than I am, Sebastian, and I don’t blame you for living half a life all these years.

“If only I had made it out of here. I would’ve made sure you lived every day like it was your last.” Jim’s voice was soft, sweet, musical. It lilted through the staticky phone lines. He imagined it behind his closed eyes: the world that they would have lived in together. “When you drove, I told you to go faster. When you took me out, I wouldn’t go home until late. When we ate, I made you share my dessert. We went to the city on the weekends. We traveled. We went to Singapore. To Brazil. To Madagascar. Warm places, with lots of nature, and ruins to see. You took me to a volcano once. Dormant, but still, enormous. Impressive. I kissed you like it would cause an eruption. And… and you proposed to me.”

Jim’s finger coiled around the phone cord, and he twirled it. “It’s not fair. We both know that. So it’s up to both of us to make it fair, now. To make each other happy. And - and we can.”

A sharp inhale followed the staticky greeting coming through the handset.

As the voice he had been longing to hear for months finally traveled down the telephone line, Sebastian didn’t dare to move a muscle, afraid this moment would slip through his fingers like everything else in his life had. The soldier held his breath like his life depended on it, tears pooling up in his eyes, distorting his vision.

The moment his name left Jim’s lips, however, the dam was broken. Tears rolled down his scarred cheeks and an inevitable sob escaped him. With his eyes shut tightly, he pressed the handset against his ear, hand over his mouth to muffle his cries.

Sebastian, Jim had said. My lovely, perfect, Sebastian.

His name had never sounded this sweet.

The soft voice of his lover with the unexpected Irish lilt filled him with a strange mixture of emotions: ecstasy and a deep, deep sorrow. Where had all of this love — all of this understanding — been all of his life?

Where had Jim been all of his life?

Then, as the man he loved spoke across the veil, memories of their life together flooded all of his senses. A tragically unfamiliar warmth spread across his chest.

Sharing desserts far too sweet for his taste just because it made Jim happy. Driving through the night recklessly with his hand on his thigh. Lying on the beach with his eyes closed as he listened to the waves in Rio de Janeiro, tanning while his lover devoured book after book next to him. He remembered the sound of the pages turning, and how Jim got sunburnt even though he sat in the shade. He remembered he was so upset he made fun of his red, burnt nose, and remembered kissing it all better in the evening.

Sebastian distinctly recalled their trip to Naples. To Pompeii. They walked the ruins hand in hand. He could still feel the Italian sun on his scarred skin, and he was sure if he walked upstairs, their pictures would be safely stored in the box under his bed.

He remembered kneeling down at the top of Mount Vesuvius with a ring he had spent years saving up to buy. “Will you marry me?” He’d asked, hands shaking as he held a red box up to Jim.

Jim was right. It was up to them to make each other happy. And they could.

They had.

A laugh suddenly substituted Sebastian’s sobs. “When you said yes I could swear I felt the earth shake.” He hiccuped. “We… drove through the Italian coast engaged. We had ice-cream and white wine and we…” Sebastian hesitated, but refused to open his eyes. “We made love with the windows open; we could feel the late Summer breeze on our bodies.

“We bought this house. We fixed it up. Made it ours… One year, in October, one of your friends married us in the backyard. It… It was the happiest day of my life.” The more the soldier spoke, the more the memories solidified in his mind.

“I took you to Paris for our honeymoon. It rained most of the time.” He laughed, shaking his head. “We ran through the Louvre, and we kissed underneath the Eiffel Tower—I could taste the hot chocolate and the smoke on your lips; I told you it was my favorite flavor.

“You made me breakfast every morning, and I took you to the movies every week.” He smiled.

Jim had gone silent. Sebastian worried the connection had been lost.

“Jim?”

The soldier’s eyes blinked open in a panic. Immediately, in the corner of the kitchen, he noticed a faint silhouette. A shimmering cloud. There, if he squinted and focused, he could see that Jim sat curled up with his knees to his chest and his fingers twirling around the telephone cord, but relief only really came when he heard him again. His voice was quiet.

Was he upset? His eyes momentarily shifted to the candle flickering on the table.

“Won’t you tell me about all of the things you did outside of this house?” Sebastian prompted. He wanted nothing more than to hear his voice. He could have spent the rest of his miserable life listening to him speak. Clearing his throat, he closed his eyes again. It seemed to make the connection easier. “Do you remember?” He asked.

“Won’t you tell me about your friends? About University?” He took a deep breath. “I found the recommendation letter when I went into the attic. You know, I would have been at your graduation, cheering, and I would have been so, so proud of…

“My husband.”

Like the fragile glimmer of dream-life between sleep and waking, their fantasy emerged, and it felt perfectly real. A proposal. A home. Friends. Jim could smell the roses. He could feel the sun on his skin. His heart beat fast, faster when Sebastian closed the distance between them in words, and the dream acquiesced.

But he didn't have a heart.

And it was just a dream.

The pleasantness of it all gave it away.

There were no memories of arguments. No bad nights, no inconveniences. No raised voices. Sebastian's alcoholism vanished. Jim's youth and temper never came up. Every night was restful and every morning was a debauch. Their love was as pure and simple as an undisturbed bath, bubbles drifting above the foaming surface of the water, steam tangoing, brittle, in the air. Dances, dates, days together.

It solidified. It wove: every word a thread through the air, a loop around them both, pulling them closer and closer. Jim felt like he was teetering on a precipice. He followed the sensation, reaching out across the void. The threads tightened at his back.

The floorboards creaked.

Jim opened his eyes. Above the coffee table, he could see Sebastian. He was going to him; he would connect this extant, memorized basement to the real, solid house. What would happen? Jim only knew it felt like magic.

He closed his eyes again, whispering into the phone. "Yes. Yes. Your husband."

Jim rose from the floor - the couch - and moved towards Sebastian, floating through the table in the way he'd always thought he ought to be able to, seeing it all behind his shut eyelids.

He didn't hear the dripping sound, nor the peeling crack of skin and bone, as his feet grew weighty on the floor.

He was living a dream-life.

The body solidifying in the dining room where Jim's silhouette was, was no dream. The happy, longing boy with the sweater-vest and his hair hanging over his eyes: that existed only in photographs and fantasies.

That boy was dead and buried.

The atmospheric pressure suddenly dropped. Sebastian could feel it in his bones.

It was a familiar sensation, one that often preceded heavy rain. He listened for the soothing sound of raindrops hitting the roof to join his lover’s voice over the phone, but neither came. Instead, a creak from the renovated floorboards cut through the torturous silence.

When Jim spoke again, his words were barely intelligible. Closing his eyes tighter to focus on his voice, however, he realized it was no longer coming through the handset. Not only that, but something was moving through the room, dragging painfully slowly across the floor.

Sebastian paused and held his breath.

Could it be?

“Jim…?” He called quietly.

The man who appeared in front of Sebastian, eyes shut, hands out in front of him, was a corpse. Mud and decay dripped off his limbs and onto the floorboards in a gradient of dark brown and red. It left a trail from the corner where he sat, as if a body had been dragged from there. His skin was gray and shedding. His bones, protruding from withered flesh, were black. And his face - his teeth and eyes, yellow, leered through a coat of blood and dirt. When he moved his entire body shuddered and creaked.

Jim could see nothing but Sebastian.

His cold, slimy hand wrapped around his beloved’s wrist. "Tell me more, Seb. Tell me about growing old together."

Jim’s voice sounded weakly through the room, unaided by the telephone.

A sob left the soldier’s lips as the handset fell to the table, the old plastic breaking off the top to expose the receiver. Still too afraid to open his eyes and look up at the man he loved, Sebastian searched for Jim’s cold hand on his arm and enveloped it with his own.

Jim felt solid. Real. Sebastian felt lightheaded. Nauseous.

The harder Jim gripped him, the louder his voice rang in his ears, the more he felt himself slipping out of consciousness. In the background, far away, there was a persistent dripping sound. The rain finally falling outside, he presumed.

It took him a moment to find the strength to speak again; even then, his voice sounded strained.

Jim was not interested in sharing his past with him; he wanted to know about their present, their future. Who was Sebastian to deny him this comfort? They had earned it, after all. “I never thought I’d grow old…” He admitted softly. “I didn’t think it was for me. But you… You proved me wrong.

“Once I met you, I never knew loneliness again—I was so afraid of it, you know? To grow old alone. I never believed I deserved to come home with a warm house and an embrace, but you promised I would always come home to you. And I did.

“We listened to music together. You raved about new artists and I… I didn’t care what they sounded like, only that they made you happy.

“I drove us to concerts and film festivals. On our anniversary, I always took you to look at the stars, but I only ever really had eyes for you.”

Sebastian paused to wipe the tears from his cheeks and catch his breath. Why did it feel like he was climbing up a mountain? His body was heavy, the air felt rarefied. Regardless, he pressed on.

“We made this place our home. Tall trees in the garden, flowers out front. Your books piled up in every room, and you wore my shirts around the house.” He laughed softly at the pseudo-memory. “We smoked cigarettes in bed with the windows open, and we solved crosswords over breakfast every Sunday morning—you were far too good for me to keep up with.”

He paused again; his thumb, which had been gently rubbing against Jim’s skin, came to a halt. With a deep breath, sniffling the tears away, he whispered: “It was a privilege to watch you grow old.”

At these words, Sebastian decided he could no longer deny himself the pleasure of looking his lover in the eyes. He wanted to see their long, happy lives together reflected in gray hairs and crow’s feet; he wanted to hold his aged hands and promise he would never leave his side.

Carefully, and hesitantly, the old soldier — himself a picture of a long, difficult life — opened his eyes.

The soft, wrinkly hand adorned by a humble gold wedding band he remembered buying was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were long bony fingers with black, rotten nails wrapped around his wrist.

Sebastian’s fantasy shattered at the sight.

There was no engagement in Naples. There was no honeymoon in Paris. There were no shared warm meals, no exciting dates. There were no films, no music. There was no growing old together.

Jim was dead.

A gasp escaped the soldier’s lips as he looked up from the hand still holding him so firmly.

It felt like being punched in the gut. His Jim — his beautiful, beautiful Jim — stood in front of him as a corpse. Thin, practically see-through, skin peeled away to reveal rotten flesh. Dirt, blood and meat slowly dripped down to the wooden floor, his body disintegrating before his eyes.

“Jim, I…” Jim was dead. What was there to say? What was there to do?

Then, when their gaze finally locked, Jim smiled. Those dark, brown eyes staring down expectantly at him were the same Sebastian always dreamed about. Their individual paths, much different than what they had dreamed, had still converged here, and now. The moments they had shared through the veil might not have brought Jim back to life, but they had kept Sebastian alive.

Jim had kept Sebastian alive.

In that moment, he decided he would sooner die than make the man he loved feel unwanted.

A shaky hand reached up to Jim’s decaying face. His skin was gray and cracked, and he could feel the spoiled flesh slide off the bone at his touch.

His skin was slimy, his mouth blue; Sebastian’s thumb lightly traced over his lips. Jim wasn’t breathing, but didn’t seem to be aware of this. His chest expanded and contracted rhythmically, mimicking respiration; it seemed difficult.

With one last bount of strength, the soldier stood from the chair. Suddenly, he was the one looming over Jim, cradling his delicate face between the palms of his hands. The ghost turned corpse looked up at him before Sebastian brought their foreheads together.

“Oh, Jim,” He breathed out softly. “How long I’ve waited to hold you.”

Pulling away to meet his eyes again, blood dripped from his nose and his knees felt wobbly. Even though Jim was standing right in front of him, he knew he wasn’t doing this right.

Jim wasn’t right. And Sebastian didn’t know how to fix it.

This is a dangerous game. Be careful.

Maeve’s words echoed in the back of his mind as he held his lover as gently as he could. He could feel Jim’s hands gripping at his sides, fingers digging into the fabric of his suit jacket. Neither of them wanted to let go, but it was harder and harder to hold onto consciousness.

Sebastian would have given anything to trade places with him — or at least to join him. After all, what had he done with his life that he couldn’t have done six-feet under the ground?

With a hiccup and trembling hands, the soldier pulled Jim closer. “Does it hurt?” He asked, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I’m not strong enough—I’m not strong enough to bring you to me without causing you pain. I’m sorry,” Sebastian admitted. His thumb found his lips again as black spots obstructed his vision. “I’m sorry.”

Pulling away one last time to look at Jim, his eyes found his bruise-colored lips and, for the first time since he’d discovered he was not alone in that old house, he understood that Jim’s pain was relentless. Perpetual. Even when he was happily floating around the home the soldier had carved for them, even as his records and his movies echoed off those walls, he was permanently tied to the earth under the shed. His life had ended there, and it could not begin again; Sebastian understood that now.

They might have missed each other in time, but their hearts had matching wounds: rejection and loneliness. It was cruel to prolong his pain to satisfy his own selfish desires, to avoid his own crippling fears. Jim could not cross over to the physical world without reliving his agonizing death. After all, all that was left of his existence here were the echoes of his death, rippling through this house like an earthquake.

For the first time in months, Sebastian was painfully sober.

A sad smile took over his expression. “I love you, Jim,” He made, pressing their lips together in a long, slow kiss. Jim was cold, and he could taste the blood and the mud and the rot on his tongue. “I love you, but…

“I don’t think you can stay here.”

"My request for disability was denied today, and yeah, my appointment went better than expected, but they still say I won't be able to live on my own for much longer... I didn't tell them I live here, with you, already."

Rox laughs a deep bartender's laugh, tired and sympathetic, heard-em-all and still rumbling. "Yeah, hey, you've got it all here. Personal chef." She gestures at herself with her painted-red claws, then pushes the bowl of peanuts and corn pops towards me. "Your entree, monsieur," she says with an exaggerated French accent not unaided by her pack-a-day habit.

"Oh, oh, I could not," I say, "for all the pâté earlier." I grab a fistful of bar snacks and jam it into my mouth. A peanut tumbles down my shirt collar and slithers into the crease between my ribs and pot belly. It's exactly as noticeable as the palpitations and nausea. The Illness rocks my stomach and chest and leaves my extremities dangling uselessly, incapable of doing much more than pulling a lever. My eyes slide to the festive, noisy floor that surrounds the bar. Machines and tables and neon signs. Clicks and clinks, of dice, ice-in-glass, chips hitting plastic cups, chips chuffing as they slide across the table, chips tapping against the varnish with the better's hand. A massive Cupid rotates near the pink stage.

"Wednesday night. Jam packed."

Rox sees someone at the other end of the bar and gives them a wave before she makes my complimentary soda water and lime. "There's a new game this week," she tells me by-the-by.

"Oh yeah? New game, new odds." I take my drink but kiss my gemstone ring first. "Thanks, hey, I'll see you later." I aim the gem at her like it's sending out a beam.

She half-nods before her apron twists to face the other way as she marches down the length of the heart-shaped bar. I do the same, following my feet to the usual, a slot machine called Few Fruits Short! that has a distressed-looking caricature of Carmen Miranda on the side, shedding cubed pineapple and bananas from her head. People don't usually use this one, so I figure my chances of winning are a lot higher. Last night, I made $30.15 on this thing. But, having recently won on it, I figure the machine is out of wins - there's still the jackpot, but the jackpot is only there to lure in suckers. Nobody ever wins jackpot.

I mean, nobody ever wins it, until they do. There's always that slim chance.

But this week, there's a new game. Fresh, unwon. Virginal, though that word gives me a bad feeling. Lady Luck used to be lady-themed. But the woman who inherited it is a lady, so now it's Valentine's Day themed. I got that much out of Rox. For the average customer, that means being surrounded by big hearts, arrows, babies in diapers, kissy-kissy lips, and gruesome streaks of red and pink that would make anybody sick, even someone without an Illness, and having no idea why. Ever since Rox told me that, though, I've been haunted by the old Lady Luck. I'd never thought there was anything wrong with it. The mannequins were creepy. But the sexism never occurred to me. I was another happy gambler in the forest of women. Rox told me that, too. 'The sexism never occurred to you,' she said. 'Because you're a gambler. You weren't looking for sexism.'

Unwon, pure. Those words give me good feelings. With my little pouch of chips on my hip, I follow the signs that say NEW!

It's tucked in between two machines I've played before, but it distinguishes itself with a temple shell, clean, lavatory marble sides that encapsulate the whole thing. It glows with orange light. A white-rimmed, luminous seven-segment display that would ordinarily have the potential jackpot displayed says 0000000. Its screen is blank, the shelf in front of it covered in buttons. It looks more like an arcade game than a slot machine. There's no attendant in sight, though I look, in case someone is about to rush over and fix it. Thing is, if it is broken, there's a chance I can break it in my favor. At least I can lie about how many chips I put in after it eats them.

I sit down in the miniature throne in front of the big marble box to play. I stick a chip inside. Nothing happens. Before I call for help, I have to exhaust all other options, so I seem exasperated and can conceivably say 'I already tried that!' to maximize my payout from the already-harried employee. So I tap on some of the many buttons in front of me, and plunk the largest button several times. It's a phonetic alphabet, I realize, like a standard keyboard.

The darkness in front of me comes to life.

It generates five panels that flicker iridescently. One depicts a raised arm swathed in bandages. The next, cleavage near to bursting. A ruined church, a rumpled bed, and a view of the sea over the edge of a balcony. They are fragments of image, easy enough to decipher but missing their edges, excluding the specifics.

I pull the lever and the panels whir away into nothing. Darkness crowds the screen. A thrum I hadn't noticed before is gone.

I rattle the keys like rain on dry leaves. I tug the arm; it locks in place. The machine's blank screen does not respond. So I put in another chip.

The panels slide into view again, with new pictures: glowing algae, a tongue on a muddy boot, a razor blade, a plush bear with one eye, a plane on fire.

I have the sense it's waiting for me. This time, before I grab the lever to spin, I go to the keys on the shelf in front of it. At first, I type nonsense. Hitting any keys, not trying to say anything. And, predictably, nothing happens. It's only when I make eye contact with the plush bear, that I am inspired to type

Sew a button

and the fourth panel glows.

I jump the gun and pull the lever.

The depictions slide away, and the darkness crowds in once more. I have the rhythm of it now. I pop in a chip. I wait to see the artwork: a woman washing, a mouse squirming in someone's palm, a Christmas wreath above a fireplace, a screwdriver, a grave.

They aren't drawings, sketches, or paintings. They're conjurations, half-thoughts, doodles, merged with forced color and shadow. They are tangibly incomplete. My gaze is drawn to the washing woman. I type:

She is by a window she's looking out. She sees sheep. She feels peaceful.

The glow grows the more I say.

She's washing her sheets. Clean sheets are nice.

Glow, glow.

She misses her husband.

The panel is embossed now, raised above all the others. I can't even see the mouse card. I pull the lever.

The pictographs all vanish and plunge me back into darkness.

I sit in dismay; a dismay I should have learned to overcome by now, probably, as a daily gambler. The dismay displaces the Illness for a minute, though. It snuggles up to me and, in some sick way, I enjoy the feeling.

Because every loss begets a win.

I put in another chip.

"Five dollar shots!" Rox cheers on a couple in cheap marital wear as they alley-oop their shooters in a heap of laughter, before she turns to me with a mixture of relief -- a regular -- and pity -- a regular. "Soda water and lime?"

"Yeah." I'm looking at the distant glow of the Zero Game, which I started calling it at 2 AM. The jackpot display hasn't changed. "How's Thirsty Thursday?"

Rox gives me a rueful look. "Don't remind me."

I nod dutifully. "I'll get out of your hair."

She presents me with the drink and gives me a once-over, the mask of service professionalism cracking open so I can see some sincerity that hasn't yet been killed. "How you feel today?"

I grin like my heart isn't straining and my guts aren't rearranging. "Lucky."

Tonight, I have a game plan. Regardless of how I actually feel about the pictographs, the glow that appears around them implies that the more I write, the higher my chances of winning. All I have to do is commit to one of them.

As if it hears me, the Zero Game's options are all of my least favorites: the mouse being squeezed, the boot being licked, the excremental smear, the bandaged arm, and the brain scan.

I tell myself I can do this.

Tapping the keys ravenously, I conjure up a story of loyalty and trust. The boot-wearer is lover and master. The licker is lover and servant. I look around furtively as I type this out, grateful I can't see my own words. They agreed on this, the shoe and the mouth, to satisfy desires not so typical they can be found everywhere, and not so atypical that they cannot be found. I feel proud of the remarkable depth I achieve, until I see that the glow is fading the longer I type.

Can it tell I didn't understand what I was talking about? Does it hate the romance? Is it too tame? Too erotic? Too gentle? Too wild? Speculative?

I pull the lever with no expectations and am nonetheless dismayed when it all disappears.

Maybe the next roll will be better; chip in.

The panels are only four this time. The central place is blank. Panic rises up: what have I done? Eliminated a chance forever?! How?! The dismay is potent, coiling in my chest, eroding the heart pain into dull background sludge.

A long-necked bottle on a bridge, a silhouette in the jungle, a very old boat, the washer-woman.

This time around, the washer is not peaceful, not looking at sheep. I write her bitterly scrubbing at her linens for want of someone else; the never-ending battle against dust and disorder; her terrible yearning to be with someone besides her children.

It glows and glows, and scales up to obscure the others. I don't give up, as I have before. I write her thoughts, her creative ambitions and repressed sexuality, her love-hatred for her kids, and I write her irritated with her neighbor, and grieving her husband. I write the way Mrs. Simmons in Section 10 Creative Writing wanted us to, passionately and seeming without end, until I've described her entire inner landscape.

My hand throbs as I pull the lever.

And the pictograph expands. Instead of vanishing it fills the space, blossoming with detail: the washer-woman bent over the basin, her children playing in the back, her expression a hundred things at once. She is in a thatched house. A goose watches from the butcher-board countertops. A cast iron pot steams subtly by the fire.

And me, I'm crying. Why? Because the hay that scatters the ground smells sweet, because my hands are tired from scrubbing but I must go on, because I love my children even with their high-pitched squeals, because this pastoral life has a thousand downsides and not one could make me leave it.

Just the screen going black.

I see in my reflection I am not a mid-century washer-woman. I'm a balding, bearded, big-bellied man whose heart pumps like a wound.

I search for a printout. A cash-out. But there's nothing.

Just the memory of the artwork.

I wonder what the seaside vista looks like in its entirety. I chip in. After all, it's inexpensive.

I start to reroll more often; with one win under my belt, I become selective and haughty. I don't want the mouse or the shit or the boot. I don't want the blood or the grave or the lonely bottle on the bridge. I'll turn them away every chance I get, which means I'll have a better opportunity to see what I actually want.

Inexpensive is relative. It's only one chip per play, but I'm not making it back, and, as I learn this fateful Thirsty Thursday, there are limits to my inspiration.

Even though I get the seaside vista picture a few moments later, I can't think of what else might be around it. I get a few sentences out, about the beach and the light on the waves, before my brain stops short with no clear path forward. I'm still thinking about the washer woman. It wants me to guess what else is there, right? If I do a good job, I see the picture? But is that really worth it? I surface for a moment, enough to poke my head above the waves and survey where I'm drowning.

I leave that night without putting more chips in.

For the next week and a half, I have washer-woman thoughts. Washing dishes, doing laundry, even sweeping the floor, I feel the exquisite sense of being someone else. It's made realer by the misery of it. I think if she were happy, I wouldn't feel like she really existed, since nobody in her position was as happy as they deserved to be. I don't know exactly what time period she's supposed to be in, but any era with thatched roofs and hand-washing couldn't have contained half as much joy as any era with washer-dryers. And she should've been happy. But she wasn't. And so she feels real, and so I get to see myself in her.

I don't want to go back to Lady Luck and play the Zero Game, but after a week of being haunted by the memory, I feel like I don't have a choice. Maybe the reason this game doesn't have a cash payout is that the payout is much greater than anything monetary. It's the art, the opportunity to feel yourself in the art. To be seen and reflected as you want.

But it wouldn't be the same if it didn't demand me: I could go to a museum, only what's the game in that?

"Can I have a soda water and lime?"

Cherish, the slender and exceptionally beautiful bartender, gives me just a soda water. He doesn't say anything else to me. A lot of people are clamoring for his attention. It's fine; I feel like a big schlub around him.

I navigate through the weekend crowd to find the Zero Game occupied.

A woman around my age is playing. She types slowly, tentatively, and none of the panels have begun to glow. Feeling confidence surge in me, I sidle up to her. "It has to be related," I begin.

She turns and glares at me. "I didn't ask."

I hold up my hands: "Just trying to help."

She snorts and whips her head back at the screen; she looks at me with the side of her eye and hesitates to type any more until I go away.

I wander the floor, wondering why they made only one machine for this new game, when they have thirty of every other kind. The sight of Few Fruits Short makes my stomach turn. I end up hovering by the end of the aisle until after midnight, when in a big huff, the other player gets up and leaves the game free for me.

Lucky Lady Luck is open 24/7.

I sit down and start to play. Still, one panel is blank. The other four, they all show me new things: a prolapsed anus, an arm pockmarked by needles, an amputee's leg, and a caricature of a drag queen so mangled even I know it to be offensive.

But no one is looking.

No one will see what I say.

No one is waiting to play or looking over my shoulder.

So I type. The panel glows. It busts. New round.

Now there are only three pictures:

the smear, the mouse, the boot.

So I reroll:

smear, mouse, boot.

I already know I can't fake the boot story. I refuse to pontificate about shit. Which leaves the mouse.

I write about squeezing it tighter and tighter, in sync with the squirming grip around my guts, until - until -

it pops.

I retch onto the pink polka dotted floor. And of course, it’s a bust.

New roll:

blood, boot, mouse.

lonely bottle, pockmarks, smear.

black eye, crying kid, smear.

boot, smear.

I give it thirty more rolls before it becomes clear the luck is gone. I can't sit here and stare at these crude conjurings of perverseness and cruelty all day. I'll just roll once more. And sure, maybe, since nobody will see it, I'll take one of these bad prompts, and I'll put my damndest into it, and maybe, it'll turn into something so beautiful I think about it all week, and maybe it'll change the way my heart feels.

Chip in.

Smear.

That morning, Bela carefully packed up her baby pink phone in her book bag, clipped on her overalls, and slipped out of the house. But before she could go to the old house, she had one more mission to fulfill.

It wasn't summer anymore. The leaves had fallen from the trees, the grass was dry and brittle, and the Maroneys' estate was barren where once lush green had overflowed. She looked at the yard before she left, searching the naked branches and scalped ground with her eyes for any trace of the verdant beauty that had been there just a few months before. She sighed, and started on her journey towards town.

Emma, her skin just a little greasy, pulled the blinds up on the shop windows. She was a tall, crooked young adult, spotted with freckles and cursed with an aquiline hook in her nose, which she despised. Her apron said Veridian Floral in red cursive. The shop around her was quiet - the norm, but even more so at opening - and she was looking forward to discreetly flipping through the romance novel tucked behind the cash register until her lunch break came. She tugged the last cord, raising the blinds, and started with surprise -

Waiting outside, nearly pressed up against the glass, was a young girl.

Emma held a hand to her chest and smiled, abashed at her shock. She hurried over to unlock the front door. Pushing it open, the floral shop attendant smiled at the little girl. "Sorry," she said, "I didn't realize anyone was waiting."

"That's okay, ma'am!" Bela said brightly. "I'm right on time!" She marched into the shop, squeezing the straps of her backpack. Emma peered out for any sign of the child's parents, furrowing her brow. The streets were empty. It was a chilly, early morning. Everyone else was just getting their start. No one was out and about, save for a solitary silhouette at the bus stop.

Emma turned back to the child, who was browsing the multi-colored roses she had just set out. She didn't look like a hooligan, or prankster. She carried herself with remarkable confidence, a kind that even Emma didn't have. The shopkeeper covered her next smile behind her hand, afraid to look like she was laughing at the young girl. She cleared her throat. "Just let me know if you need any help, miss," she said, far more formally than she ever had, before starting to the register.

Bela felt lost, surrounded by fragrant and colorful blossoms, all of which seemed like perfectly adequate gifts. The bouquets were visually sumptuous, distracting, even more so as Bela inadvertently daydreamed about someone buying her something like that. But the prices were all far out of her league. It was hard to believe things could cost that much. Her perfect confidence was admittedly shaken as she stepped over to the cashier. "Excuse me?"

"Yes?" Emma folded a bookmark into her book and quickly tucked it into a drawer. "How can I help you?"

"I'm looking for something special, um, for my friend to give to his boy-friend," she looked at the counter, "but I only have five pounds."

Emma's heart nearly melted and she covered her mouth with her hand again. "Well - that is - just - so kind of you," she dropped her hand, revealing a big grin beneath her beaky nose. Retail, even floral retail, was so rarely precious and romantic. And wasn't that why she had gotten into it in the first place? Love? Emma rolled her chair an inch back and peered into the sink, where she had assembled the bouquets that morning. The severed stems and leaves and imperfect blossoms looked back at her, a reminder of the thick margins and strict standards of the floral industry. Surely, it could take a small hit for the sake of a little girl? She stood up.

"Well, that's just enough for the Manager's Special," she said, indicating the roses that had first enticed Bela. "A dozen of any color."

Bela looked at the woman, then at the prices underneath the flowers, then back at her. "Which color is best?" she asked.

"Ah." Emma pulled twelve red roses from their container. "Red means true love and passion. But also respect - and courage."

"Wow," Bela nodded, "that's perfect! Thank you! Thank you so much!"

She wrapped the roses in paper and crinkly pink plastic, and tied it with a ribbon. Bela handed her the fiver and accepted the bouquet, her face lit up with joy. "Thank you again!"

"You're very welcome, miss." The florist winked. Bela beamed at her, then all but bolted from the store, nearly crushing the flowers as she pressed against the door. Emma watched her leave, utterly endeared. She returned to the cash register and folded her hands in front of her, then turned to look out the window at the passing cars. She heaved an enormous but contented sigh.

Bela had a long way to go, through town and then to the edge of it, but her spirits were high. She practiced how she would tell this story to her friends in her head, too engrossed in the thrilling details of her own life to even notice the drooping pumpkins, the spiraling leaves, or the temperature, though her breath fogged above the roses. She held them close to her chest, careful not to crush them.

Even with her high spirits, Bela was out of breath when she arrived at the old soldier's home. The phone felt heavy on her back and the roses felt awkward and prickly in her arms. She trudged up the path and up the porch steps, winded by the front door. But her journey was almost finished! She stood up on her tip toes and rattled the door knocker, then eased back down, holding the roses up in front of her. When the door opened, she held them higher, up and out to Sebastian. "Special delivery!"

An unusual patch of good luck had made Sebastian forget that nothing in life had ever come easily to him. The disappointment, extra bitter after being so close to what he wanted, hit him hard.

Getting in bed drunk had not yielded the results he had expected. Jim was nowhere to be seen in his dreams, and even as the first rays of sunlight entered the room and softly woke the soldier up, there was no brief moment where he could see him. Or at least feel him.

Was Jim upset? Was he punishing him for failing? Maybe he was punishing himself. In the end, it didn’t really matter where the punishment came from; he knew he deserved it.

The soldier decided that today there was no reason to get out of bed. With a sigh, and fighting the urge to reach for the bottle of whisky on his nightstand, he rolled onto his side on the bed.

Leaning against the wall in the corner of the bedroom stood his shotgun. Sebastian blinked at it and, with the knowledge that there was still one bullet left, he drifted off to sleep again.

It was much later that an almost unfamiliar sound pulled him out of a familiar dream. Startled, Sebastian sat up on the bed, confused as to what the sound was and where it was coming from.

His eyes then found his bedside table.

Inside, his mobile phone was ringing.

An icy feeling washed through his body.

His phone. Ringing.

All but jumping across the bed, the soldier rummaged through bottles of medication and underwear until he grabbed his phone. Immediately, he brought it to his ear. Had Jim found a way? Had he forgiven him for failing?

“Hello?” He made, desperate, his voice hoarse from sleep. Clearing his throat, he did his best to even out his breath as his heart beat fast in his chest in anticipation.

Then, an equally deep voice traveled through from the other side of the line.

“Hello, Sebastian.” Severin said, a hint of worry in his voice already. “Did I wake you up?”

Feeling disappointment in hearing his brother’s voice was not something Sebastian was proud of, but the truth was that it was not his voice he longed to hear. It took him a moment to recalibrate his feelings. “No,” He lied, wiping the sleep from his eyes and looking around the empty room. “You alright?”

“Yes, I’m well. And you?”

“Right—Good, it’s… I’m glad to hear. I’m also… well.” A strange sensation took over his stomach. “Is Dad…?”

“No, no, no… Sorry.” Severin paused and sucked in a deep breath. “I was actually just calling to say…Happy birthday?”

Sebastian was silent for an uncomfortably long moment. Was it really his birthday? Their birthday? How long had it been since he’d celebrated it? How long since they’d spent it together?

“Um, sorry, I… I thought I would check on you and—,”

“—Happy birthday, Severin.”

The other man laughed softly. “Hah. Thank you.”

Another moment of silence.

“Any plans for today?”

Was it worth it to lie? Sebastian wondered. “Not really. I’d… I’d forgotten, to be honest. You?”

“Oh, going out to dinner. The kids are back home for a couple of days, so…”

“Right. That’s… really nice.”

This time, it was Severin who fell silent.

“Thank you for calling. I’ll… Let you go, then, I’m sure you’re—,”

“—I was thinking… If you’d like, you could come over for Christmas?” He blurted out. “The kids will be here for their Winter break. You could meet them and Jessica, and… It would just be really nice to have everyone together one last time for Christmas, don’t you think?”

“One last time?”

Severin hesitated. “Come on, Basher.”

“You’re set on giving him one last opportunity to humiliate me, aren’t you?”

“Dad’s not going to humiliate you. He doesn’t even remember, he’s old and ill and…”

“I remember.”

A long pause. “Please think about it.” Severin said. “It would mean a lot to me.”

The soldier sat in silence with the phone on his lap. As he sat there, alone, he wondered what it was like to be Severin for a moment. What was it like to be greeted by a wife in the morning of his birthday? To sit down at breakfast with his children? To have his father look at him kindly? An already grim day, somehow, became worse.

How old was he, anyway? Had he lost count by now? Was it easier for Severin to count the years than it was for him?

A sudden realization made him feel sick. No matter how much he loved Jim, and no matter how much Jim loved him, he was still dead. He often forgot this, lost in their own world, but no amount of love would ever bring him back to life. They both knew this, didn’t they?

Was that why Jim was nowhere today?

Or was he watching quietly from the corner? Pitying him? Slowly growing to resent him?

In that moment, his eyes found his shotgun again. A birthday present from Augustus Moran himself, all those years ago, mocking him for all of his failures. For the first time in months, there was a distinctive pull towards it.

Just as he stood from the bed, however, the doorbell rang.

Sebastian froze.

Surely Severin had not driven all the way here on his birthday. All of the material he had ordered to finish up a couple of the rooms had arrived a few days ago, too, so who could possibly be at his door so early in the morning?

Still feeling defeated, if not more than before, he threw on some clothes before he walked down the stairs. There was no smell of toast and bacon as he arrived downstairs, and the lack of blood running down his nose suggested that Jim had not being that active during the night. He sighed.

As soon as he pulled the door open, a handful of roses were shoved in his face. From where he was standing, he could not see the face of whoever was holding the bouquet, but he recognized the cheerful voice.

“Bela?” He started. “What are you doing here?”

The girl peeked from behind the roses with a small frown. Wasn't it obvious? She nearly scoffed. “I’m delivering your flowers.”

“Where are your friends?”

Slowly, she lowered the bouquet. “Are you not going to take your flowers? They’re from Jim.”

What a cruel joke. He never thought these kids were anything but kind. His jaw clenched as he crossed his arms over his chest. “This isn’t funny.”

The soldier was slowly reminding Bela there was a reason they used to be scared of him. He loomed over her and the roses she had thought he would be so, so happy to receive with a deep frown on his face.

“You should go home.”

“But they're from Jim!” She insisted with a stomp of her foot; George, who had been circling her legs in an attempt to request pets scurried into bushes.

“Today is really not a good day.”

“But he—!”

“—I don't know what you think he—,”

“Jim asked me to do this.”

Sebastian’s frown deepened. Something twisted in his stomach. Why did everyone but him seem to be able to speak to Jim so easily? “How?”

Bela hesitated. She knew she had promised to let him borrow the telephone, but what was she supposed to play with? It was her phone. Looking up at the soldier, however, with his scars and sad eyes, she remembered Zach. He always kind, and patient, and always shared his toys with his little brothers even when he had barely played with them. Wouldn't he be proud of her for sharing? After a deep breath to find her courage to be more like her friend, she held the flowers out to the man again. “Will you please just hold this?” Once Sebastian reached for the bouquet, albeit still with some suspicion, she slowly went down on one knee to set her backpack on the floor. After a quick and determined ‘zzzp’ from the zipper, she reached for the telephone..

“I was playing in my room when I called an old number and…”

The old soldier’s stoicism washed away the moment he caught a glimpse of the soft pink telephone. As his eyes widened, they found the bouquet of roses he was still holding before he pressed them against his chest. Whatever thorns were still left on the stems prickled his skin through his shirt and dug into the palms of his hands, but he had never been happier to bleed. A familiar shiver ran down his spine.

Jim.

“You spoke to hi—he spoke to you?” Sebastian asked as he all but fell to his knees to match Bela’s height. “On the phone? He… He spoke to you on the phone? This phone?”

All the girl could do was nod. The only time she had seen Sebastian’s face contort like this was when he was possessed by Jim. His eyes were wide, his eyebrows furrowed into something she couldn’t quite place. Was he sad? Why would he be sad about something like this? And then, as she slowly gathered the courage to hand her treasured toy over to the man, she saw the tears.

The flowers dropped to the ground and Sebastian’s hands shook as he reached for the phone. “You’re… It’s for me? You’re giving it to me?”

Although moved by the tears, sniffling as her own lip quivered at the sight, the girl stood firm in her boundaries. “I’m letting you borrow it.”

A sob left the man’s lips at her words. Not because he was upset. On the contrary, he was ecstatic, but he didn’t seem to find the words. How could he ever thought Bela was anything but kind? Selfless? The little gang of kids that had broken into his backyard all those months ago were the only people in that town — in the world — rooting for them.Then, finally, he could hold the rotary-dial phone he was sure had been lost to time. Here, in his hands, was his one true chance at reaching the man he loved.

“Bela,” He started, wiping away the tears with the back of his calloused hand. “Thank you.” The words nearly got stuck in his throat as another wave of tears seemed to wash over him; he wanted to hug her. Thank her again and again and again. “You kids saved my life.” Sebastian blurted out instead. It was heavy, and it was dark, but it was, in a way, the truth. “No matter what happens, you… You and Zach and… Johann, and Bobby, you… You saved my life. Thank you.”

Inside the house, it took Sebastian several hours to get the tears under control. Hugging the flowers to his chest, he set the phone down next to the Ouija board. This was the first time he’d received flowers, so he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. In the end, he filled up the kitchen sink with some water and carefully placed the bouquet inside before he took a seat at the table.

Despite this being exactly what he had been longing for — an opportunity to hear Jim’s voice, if only once, he found himself hesitating to pick up the handset. Blinking down at the paper with the old number for the Clarks on it, he chewed at the inside of his cheek. What if…?

Shaking his head, he did the one thing that could put an end to his catastrophic thinking. Determined, he picked up the handset. The bubblegum pink against his old, rough hand seemed ridiculous, but he still turned the dial, hearing it click into place with every single number.

At the last one, he held his breath.

There was no answer.

The rotary spun back like a head lolling, unconscious. The clicking sounds seemed to fill the empty house, echo on the corners.

Jim stood behind Sebastian, expression split between confusion and furious sorrow. Why wasn’t it working?! The phone was static again. The life, the memories, that had moved sentience to its operation, dissipated into the bright, cold afternoon light. No door opened to bring Jim to the basement. No ring came. How had he managed to speak to Bela, then? Was it all a dream? The roses, wilted from the chill they’d been walked through, stared back at Jim passively from the sink. It was no dream. Somehow, he had made connection.

Now, the disconnected phone with its luster many years gone, looked like nothing more than the antique that it was. Jim tried to smooth his hands over Sebastian’s shoulders, but the man stood up abruptly and marched away from him. His footfalls were heavy, his posture hunched. Jim followed behind, fiddling with his fingers. “Sebastian,” he called, “wait. We’re just - we’re just missing something.”

What? What was different from the last time?

Sebastian, bottle and smokes in hand, went up to the bathroom, and Jim stayed downstairs, in the foyer. He looked between the phone and the upstairs, hands hanging at his side uselessly. A strand of bitterness peeled away from his heart and wormed up to his head. Why was it so important that they talk? What didn’t they have, without it? Everything- which was nothing they didn’t already go without.

He heard the water running in the tub. Only a few baths had ever been had by Sebastian, which signaled to Jim that this lack of a phone call was an immense disappointment.

He needed to figure out some way to solve this.

Though it hadn’t been the case last night, maybe he needed to move from the property. After all, his spirit was calling from the Clarks’ basement, not from home. Maybe it had only worked the night before because they were in different places. Which presented another problem.

Jim couldn’t climb the fence, nor open the gate. Nor pass through it, like ghosts in movies. When he peered out, he saw the modern world, or so he thought. But what was actually out there was a veil, impossible to touch, to confirm.

Sebastian could open the gate for him. Why had he never thought to ask? Well, why go anywhere else, when Sebastian was right here? But now wasn’t a good time either. If Jim waited until the next letter could be written, he’d have to wait around until the next morning. Who knew what the next day would feel like?

Jim recalled the last long bath Sebastian had taken with some panic and urgency.

He found himself stalking the perimeter of the house, looking for gaps in the fence. The afternoon light faded sooner than it had the day before. It seemed prescient. The night felt strange, reminded Jim of the way it felt on the first day that his occupants would decide to leave. After weeks of nightmares, creaking floors, slamming doors, blood in the sink, and voices at night, someone would say, ‘I can’t stay here anymore’. Relief would wash over everyone else. For the next few days, they would pack their things and make preparations. Never had it taken more than a week. Once the haunting had taken affect, people couldn’t get out of this place soon enough.

But for those few days, there would be a kind of peace.

The anger Jim felt towards them lessened as he watched them prepare to leave, turning into a small, peculiar sadness in his chest. He would continue to torment them, of course, to be sure they didn’t change their minds and stick around. Instead of haunting voices and disturbing nightmares, they heard cries. Mournful, long cries, too sincere to be an animal. Too deep to be a baby. Too long to be a human. And a few days later, they would leave, with sleepless eyes and shivers on the back of their neck, to never discuss it again.

There was no sign-in sheet for the Blaine study room, so I didn’t know who was using it besides me. Whoever they were, they left it in a state that, in my opinion, was unacceptable. I also think they did it on purpose.

Why not complain? Well, it was more complicated than that. If I told you that I had no authority to complain, are you going to assume the worst? Because, maybe you’ve been talking to Professor Daquill, but I had permission to use the study room. Verbal permission. I’m not going to try and prove it, you’ll just have to believe me: I was supposed to be there. But I still had no authority to complain, because any of the people in charge, take your pick, either hated or felt nothing towards my field of specialization. In fact, at the time, and why I needed the room is because I was trying to convince myself the field was worthwhile – by taking on a long-form project, totally of my own volition.

Yep. That’s right, Claudio. No grants. No rubrics. Just me and my ‘wild ideas’.

Which are, of course, beyond the point. The point is, they left Blaine study room looking like no one had been there in years. I arrived after class at 8 each night. Somehow, maybe with Danquill’s help, they hung cobwebs from the corners and coated every surface in the room with a layer of dust.

I won’t deny there was some passion in antiquity this decrepit environment lent my work, as if I had entered a recreated study in an abandoned museum, which I did once, at the Laggins Art Museum, after they had their exhibition of Paternal Spaces and the stage-sized sets were put away (but not dismantled). I was still seeing Omo. He let me behind the curtain and we fucked – in that empty, dusty, never-to-be-seen facsimile of an office. I recall he was still bragging about it after we broke up. I think he liked the space more than he liked me, y’know?

I’ve gotten off-topic. Yes, the study room – looked like a haunted house came through. I know I’ve been talking a while, and on a first date! But it’s an interesting story, actually, the way I went about it.

I thought it was cool (initially). I thought it was strange, yes! A room I’d just used, that I’d torn apart, left in shambles, would appear the next night back in perfect order, yet inexplicably ages for years. But, thinking of D’Aquille’s problem with my field, I suspected right away I was having an elaborate joke played on me.

Like most neuroses, the conspiracy is self-centered. To fully accept that a tenured Professor of Classical Literature was pulling a prank on me like a malicious schoolboy would’ve required a lot more egoism than I can muster on a good day. But I suspected. If it wasn’t him, then one of his students, those doggedly loyal foot-soldiers, trying to prove me wrong once and for all…

Oh – what is that face? Do you think I’m wrong, too? Are you in the Lit program? Look, d’Anquille is smart. You don’t get to his level by being best-suited for hard labor. And his work on the evolution of the written word, I mean, it’s foundational. If he didn’t have a vendetta against me first, it never would’ve gotten here. I respected him!

He told me once, and he didn’t mince words, that writing would never give me any power. He said ‘acting’ the way I ‘act’ was asking to be suspended. He said I was scaring everybody and not even producing good work when all was said and done.

But, Claudio, I’ll tell you a secret. I know he’s wrong. I don’t just suspect. It takes careful alchemy, occult precision, but you can divine divinity from writing. You can.

I don’t mean that like the way your high school creative writing teacher says it – like writing the word ‘honey’ makes you taste it. I mean actual, real power. You don’t get clothes like these on a TA salary. I wrote them on.

No, no! I’m sorry – please, sit down. You’re right. I’m being impolite, I’m just… so excited to have met you, and I was so excited to tell you all about what I’m working on now, but then I started thinking about Blaine – study room – and I got sidetracked and – yes. Thank you. See, you haven’t even touched your bruschetta. And I haven’t asked you anything about yourself. Such terrible manners! Please, let’s be at ease. Let’s enjoy our time together.

So, not the Lit program? That’s good. Authors don’t mix with writers, haha. STEM? Forgive me for saying so, but isn’t that a field in decline? Everyone wants to be an artist. You don’t have to jobhunt for that. Do they have you take any classes on my side of things? Ethics, for instance? Not that I took Ethics, or any philosophy – have you seen the department heads? And I thought d’Aquille was bad! Haha.

Okay.

Look, I get it.

I rambled. I talked about Omo. I didn’t let you leave just now. And of course you don’t believe me about the alchemy.

No. No. It’s happened before. It’s just like when I was a kid and no one listened to me about the old man and his barb wire beneath the bridge, but sure, go on, go back to your life – just don’t get angry with me when someone’s head gets garrotted off!

***

Hello? Oh, Claudio!

What did I mean – ? I don’t know. I was upset. Can you blame a man for being upset, with himself, for letting you go? For behaving so badly?

The old man and the barbed wire… did I really say that? Oh, he was a killer in my old neighborhood. I saw him under the bridge, after the first killing. His hands were bleeding around the barb wire and he was smiling toothlessly. But here’s the thing. Part of his head was enlarged – swollen, like a cantaloupe or a melon under his skull, above his right eyeball. It was my left. I remember thinking – that’s his left side, no, wait, it’s his right. So when I told everybody I saw the killer, and he had a second head, they all said I had a nightmare, since the killing was so traumatic on our community. And, and! No one even told me that I was right, even when they caught him and he was an old man with cut-up hands. His head was normal by then. Do you want to know what I think? I think it swelled up with bloodlust. The blood from his hands helped. The blood he spilled helped.

… No. I hadn’t heard that. Is he alive?

Terrifying. Terrifying and sad, the things that happen in this world. And poor D’Anquille! He was only 45!

But – why – are you telling me? Do you… no. You don’t think I had something to do with it?

Your silence speaks for you.

I must have really scared you at Rosie’s. If someone else is using barb wire to strangle people, then it must be more common than I previously thought. I always thought what happened in my old neighborhood was somewhat special.

I promise, Claudio, I was only being creative. There’s no way to write yourself power. I didn’t mean that. I suppose I wanted to… impress you, but I didn’t, did I? No. Or you wouldn’t have come by to ask if I murdered somebody. That is what you think, isn’t it?

Oh! I didn’t think you’d want to hear more about Blaine study room, but I was serious. It is an interesting story. Or, at minimum, a funny one. So, yes, there was no sign-in sheet, like I said, and I strongly suspected I was being pranked, so they wouldn’t have signed in anyways. But I wanted to know who it was. So, after I trashed the place, my usual way, tossing the table, chairs, and shelves, kicking over the trash cans, and littering the ground with books, I concealed myself behind a sofa and waited. You can read and watch a great deal about stakeouts, but it doesn’t compare to doing it yourself.

First, boredom. Second, cramps. Then, you experience voyeurism in its purest, most poetic form: like a hunter sees a deer. Like you watch the back of someone’s head on the bus when you think they get off at your stop too.

I’m sorry, I won’t make you stand outside. Come in. Too late for coffee – a drink? No? That’s alright. Where was I? The stakeout, yeah!

Well, among the first people I saw was D’Anquille, on his own. Of course. I was beyond excited. I wanted to jump out and scare him, but you don’t get this far in academia by being undisciplined. So I waited. I watched him rifle through his bag for a big sack of dirt and Halloween cobwebs. But he didn’t take those things out. He got a book, uprighted a chair, sat down and read.

I determined he knew I was there, and had postponed the prank for another day. I waited patiently for him to give up the farce, and he carried on reading as if he hadn’t been demoralizing me, a vulnerable artist and student, since he read my Treatise. So I got a great idea.

Behind the couch, I withdrew my alchemical notepad, which I used to only use sometimes, and I wrote that the room would stop getting old, and that D’Anquille would finally submit to the power of the written word!

Which was impossible, since, as I said, I made all that up to impress you.

What really happened, really, is he heard me scribbling and he had me ejected from the building to come to terms with how nefarious and contrived his plans were. Needless to say, but I’ll say it: I did not go back to Blaine.

Now, it does make the story less interesting that he’s dead. It was kinda funny before, at least.

I can tell you’re feeling uncomfortable with me, from the story. I’m a writer, not a storyteller, so while I’m looking to get – something – out of the practice besides your comprehension, these expressions you make induce a feeling of painful vulnerability. You look at me like I’m growing a second head!

The cage has been down at Menagerie for four years.

I fill a black-and-pink reusable Menagerie-brand bag with dildos, lingerie, and sexual-enhancements-in-a-tube. I sling my Deadeye Rogers special 50th Anniversary edition rocket red capital gold BB gun over my shoulders after throwing on the studded jean jacket that completes my Canadian tuxedo. The shelving units against the windows shudder as the swarm grasps blindly against them. I barely acknowledge it after 1,400 days, just a look their way to say ‘good luck chewing through that’, before climbing up the ceiling hatch.

I crawl on my belly through the years of dust and mouse shit. My bandana helps me not to sneeze, but it can’t protect my nose against the stench. It reeks up here. Back in the old days I had a suspicion there were possums or something. Since then, I guess a few died. You won’t catch me trying to clean up the carcasses. I have enough on my plate.

I count the particle board squares as the frame glides beneath my chest, remembering to only count every second bump. Fourteen, I’m next door, above Layla’s. Once-upon-a-time, Layla’s was a baby clothing store called Andy Anderson’s Infant, Toddler, and Child Megastore. Twenty-six squares, it’s Gunslingin’ Garrett’s, thirty-nine, it’s what remains of Party King, a long stretch, and then at fifty-four, it’s Old Reliable: a rectangle of light shining like a beacon.

Beneath the hole, a ladder is poised to welcome me down. Dawson and Rolph leave it out as a courtesy. Out of everyone in Alfin Plaza, they make the most effort to welcome guests. Even though I think Dawson’s a shit, that means I make it my first stop. I’m still wary of Garrett; I will be as long as he’s on that Alfinite Nation gab.

I drop down, chunky heels teetering to gain purchase on the ladder’s thin slats.

“The sexmonger’s here,” I hear Dawson say beneath me.

“Don’t call them that,” Rolph says in a bored voice, digging around under a display case of handblown pipes.

“Hello, generalists,” I say, popping onto the ground. “What you got?”

This place used to be called Potshot. It was the first store to get raided – I mean, really raided. Not by the horde, but by other people. That’s when David was killed. Almost everyone else had the dignity of dying to the all-consumers, who are nearly blameless since they don’t do anything but kill. But David, he had his skull axed by a guy over a carton of Warren Ultrastrength cigarettes.

‘Course, that’s why Dawson and Rolph hid out in the back office, because unlike David, who never worked the front counter in his life, they knew people would be desperate. Rolph even had the good sense to put bags of tobacco in the safe before the horde (and the raids) hit. Now, they’ve pretty much exhausted their good stuff. No more cigs, vapes, or chew, no more kratom, not even a pack of CBD joints. When the Party King reigned supreme, he bought up a lot of their supply in exchange for candy. Dawson and Rolph don’t have any candy anymore. They have fire. They have paraphernalia – which isn’t good for much in a world without drugs.

“How about something to thin the swarm?” Dawson smacks a brightly colored bag on the counter.

“That’s not gonna catch on,” Rolph says.

“It means getting high,” Dawson tells me in a stage-whisper.

“Duh,” I angle my gaze at the product. The Psionic Bros Twisted Magic Gummies. “I thought you were out of ways to make a person feel things,” I say with mild surprise and mock anger. “That’s my niche now and I need it.”

Rolph’s overgrown fro pokes up from the counter as he sneezes himself upright. “They’re expired, Org. Dug ‘em out from the back closet.”

I turn up my nose. “From when?”

Dawson glowers at his lifelong coworker.

“35,” he admits.

“Man, fuck you!” I laugh. “David was hoarding those before the horde! I don’t want no 9-year-old shroom gummies.”

“Yeah, Dawson, like I told you. Only person who might is Layla and I wouldn’t trust her with a strong cup of tea.”

Dawson stuffs his hands in his jeans and puffs out his lower lip. “They still work,” he says.

I eye a Rock Hunter beanie, figuring I won’t need to protect my skull from axes now that the city’s been taken. “I’ll give you both some lube for the hat.”

“Deal,” they say at the same time. I don’t grin lecherously like I used to. Helping everyone get off makes the act feel ordinary, and so does living together for four years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Potshots were so comfortable with each other’s needs they use the same room at the same time.

The beanie has a holographic rainbow weed leaf on it. Rock Hunter is a brand that, back in the day, would’ve cost me $65 for this thing. I smooth it on over my head like I’m preparing to go to war, four years too late. “Thanks.” I leave them each a tube of Selfli Silicone and head up the ladder, when Dawson clears his throat.

Rolph and I both look: he jerks his head towards the back. “I gotta talk to Organ in… private.”

The one who isn’t Dawson, the one who I thought seemed like he’d be my friend if we’d met before, snorts. “Menagerie sells classy sex stuff, so forget the blow-up doll.”

I click my tongue, suck my teeth. “It ain’t classy.” I come down from the ladder to leer close to Dawson, close enough to smell the handsoap he uses as cologne. Rolph lets us hear the back office door slam. Dawson’s watery eyes raise one of my brows. “It’s not a blow-up doll, right?”

He shakes his head. “You only trade in merch, right? Not… secrets?”

I put on the same plying, patient smile I used to put on for the customers. It says ‘no judging’, it says ‘I want to help you’. It says ‘I need nothing’, ‘I care’, and ‘I understand’. And just like that, his tongue loosens.

“I heard they make a machine that can suck you.”

I nod. “We got a few models, yeah. Big, big ticket. I’m saving ‘em for deals with Plick. Besides, it’s electric, and you ain’t got power.”

Dawson’s eyes widen. “Whatever. I can get a charge. I can make it worth it for you. For real. I’ll – I mean, take anything you want, I’ll – I’ll level with you, Org, I’m fucking desperate.”

I nod again. “Sorry. Not for sale.”

He throbs at me with a whine. “I won’t tell anyone! Please! I just –” he sighs with the weight of 1,400 lonely days. “I just wanna get my dick sucked.”

“It’s a people-eating world,” I tell him gently, “I don’t fuck with pity anymore.”

Before he can keep vying for an Auto-Blow, I hike up the ladder and haul into the ceiling.

I get it. I’m lucky, in their eyes, to have so much valuable stuff, and in specific, valuable stuff that nobody thought to steal when the shit first hit. Am I sure I’ve jacked off more than anyone here? Yes. Does that mean I’ve got to guarantee everybody else an orgasm? No. We decided that a long time ago.

When the horde gathered, there were three other employees at Menagerie: Cole, Brenda, and Robby. Alfin Plaza had twenty retail properties, five restaurants, three hundred parking spots, and over a hundred employees. It was owned by some real estate mogul, Jake Alfin; there used to be an Alfin Park, an Alfin Bank, an Alfin Heights. Might still be. I’m not going to check.

Now, Alfin Plaza is owned by someone else: I’m on my way to see him now.

I crawl to the roof. Our half of the mall is one long building and the ceiling crawlspace goes all the way from one end to the other. To get to the other half, we climb through the elbow-shaped air duct that lets out to the rooftop. Today, I’m not alone. Layla Anderson is up here too, staring out at the city, the horde, which are more or less one.

“Hey, girl!” I greet her by holding up my black-and-pink Menagerie-brand bag. She gives me a lackluster wave. “Hey.”

Layla is 20 now. She was 16 when the horde hit. Her hair is choppy and shorn, her once lush cheeks ashen and sallow. She’s dressed in stitched-together baby clothes, looking like a muppet-hunter wearing the skins as a trophy. The pastel green frog onesie on her chest has black blood on it.

“You want anything?” I rifle through the bag. “Air pulser?”

Layla shakes her head so I go to stand with her. If I can’t give her something she can hold and feel good with, then my company will have to do. It isn’t her fault that no one wants to barter for baby clothes, that she happened to be at Andy Anderson’s closing that night, or that the friends who were supposed to pick her up after her shift either didn’t or died trying. Most of us got to go to college, have a few flings, see the world, before. Not poor Layla.

I did my best to keep her away from Dawson, and even Rolph worried me at times, before they became Old Reliable. Brenda had hated Potshot since it moved in back in ‘32, so I didn’t trust them at first. Menagerie was a tight crew. Too tight for Layla to join. She’d take any help she could get, but she was a loner: quiet most of the time. Today she bumps my shoulder with her shoulder. She points into the horde.

“Two cannibals,” she says.

In the sea of rotting heads, Layla somehow spies these two who are mouthing together, French-kissing, spilling black bile from between their lips as they chew one another’s faces off.

“If only they’d keep at it,” I say, “the street’d be clear by tomorrow.”

Layla sighs. “Wouldn’t it be somethin’ to go home?”

I say nothing. We stand a long minute, listening to the grunts and the rattling of dead hands on storefront cages.

“I’m going to Plick,” I say at last. “You wanna come?”

Layla chucks a pebble into the horde. “To trade?”

I shake my bag. “What else?”

“You wanna trade me?” she asks, far too serenely.

“No?!” My incredulous volume turns some horde-heads, but we’re too high for them. “Layla, why the fuck would you think that?”

She hugs her arms. “Well, you’re always nice. You gotta want something.” She thrusts her face out at me, abject, brazen. “And that’s what he says to me. He says he’s gonna marry me.”

I seethe. I feel tight in my arms and chest, a feeling that makes me want to jump into the horde just to get the vileness out. “He ain’t.”

Layla shakes her choppy hair. “How’m I gonna eat?”

“Come to mine!” I say for the 1,000th time. “There’s three empty seats at Menagerie.”

For a moment, I think she really considers it. I’d like to have another person at the shop to help take care of things, and Layla – well, I worry about her.

“I have to look out for myself,” she tells me like it’s always been that way.

“So do it. But do it at Menagerie.”

She giggles: “Is that the new slogan?”

“Well, back in the day,” I grant with a real smile, “maybe, people were doing it in there, but we didn’t wanna encourage it.”

Really, I get it. Layla and I are both the last standing crew members of our stores. There’s something about being endangered, even if your species is nothing remarkable, that keeps us from trying to go extinct.

I’m okay leaving Layla now, because what she said doesn’t smack of suicidalism. If it had, I would’ve insisted she take a Realskin dildo.

I hop a roof over. Big Ape Marketplace has a door on their rooftop. Luxe. I pull the string dangling next to it 2 ½ times, our code for entry. A bell attached below jangles so I can enter without fear of being slain.

Plick and Garrett stand near the bottom of the stairs, which stop in the employee corridor. The narrow hallway space precludes their respective entourages, but I can see Garrett’s boys in football helmets peering through the double-doors at the other end. Plick’s soldiers aren’t so needy. Most of them, I wager, are guarding the walk-in fridge. Garrett, in his Western get-up, six-shooters and all, makes Plick’s flimsy cape of safety vests look normal.

“The Time has passed, Mr. Marketplace. Alfin awaits us at the Heights, at the intersection of 22nd and Gilmore. And He will save us, as he already has, by giving us–” Garrett is delivering his Message. Plick looks at me and his shriveled face sprouts.

“Orgy!” He pats the gunslinger to make him quiet, and he obeys.

“Plick-me,” I shoot back. “I’m here for fresh, frozen, and everything in between.”

“It’s all frozen, my friend, and the prices are going up.”

“How up?”

“Let’s discuss it in the Royal Chambers,” by which he means the manager’es office. Garrett mean-mugs me as I sidle by with my bag of sex.

“Sodomite,” he snarls in my directions. “Harlot.”

“I’m sorry, penis pumps are still on back-order, Mr. Wayne,” I inform him gravely.

“Alfin Heights will have no place for–”

I shut Plick’s door hard on Garrett’s sanctimony. “You gonna convert?”

He’s a small, wrinkly guy, a lot like a wood block for practice whittling. He has a big collection behind his desk: the coveted replica samurai sword that once hung above Potshot’s least popular cigarillos, the 6-ft tall novelty Prince Penis dildo from Menagerie, a Steelmaster hunting rifle from Garrett’s, the scepter from Party King, plus a mountain of camping equipment he scored when the parking lot hadn’t yet been overrun. I heard from somewhere that he started as an overnight stocker, but that’s just the kind of gratuitous, feel-good origin story that spreads like fire in Alfin Plaza.

Plick smiles at me like there’s nothing to fear in the whole world. I suppose for him, king-general of a grocery-store militia, there isn’t. “Ah, it’s just business,” he tells me. “I let him yap about fate and the higher power of real estate and he gives me a nice deal.

“I’m sure even you, our little paragon of progress, has shot the shit for a deal.”

When it started, Plick shut down Big Ape and went to Defcon 1. He was the only person to take it so seriously, and in a fair world, he would’ve been fired and shamed and institutionalized. But this is our world; and even then, it really belongs to the horde these days. What isn’t theirs is Plick’s.

I return Plick’s expression tightly. “I just want some food. And I’ve got good stuff – portable charger, for instance. With your generator, it’s a match made in heaven.”

He rubs his chin, weighing me with his little eyes, and holding his smile the way one does with a little kid. He likes my show. That’s mostly what I have going for me.

“People will give their own flesh and blood for a charge,” I go on, “plus, you can make the things that are supposed to vibrate – vibrate.”

“Some of what Garrett says rings true, you know.”

Still on the gunslinger? “Yeah? You think Jake Alfin planned all of this?”

Plick spreads his hands over an imaginary map, like a kingdom before him. “No, what he says about the chance to make a new world.”

I remember what Layla said. “You live in the new world already.”

“I call this a transitional phase,” he laughs at my dubious expression. “You know about that.”

I take out a pack of 69K Champion Strength Plow Pills and rattle it. “Ever wanna feel 18 again?”

He clenches his jaw and I think I have him.

“I want a family,” he says. “An heir.”

“Okay,” I say, leaning in over the desk and nodding with my patient, plying eyes. I am sexual to him, while also being the furthest thing. I’m selling sex, not making love. I care, I do not judge, and I want to help. “And what if I told you I had a dick-sucking machine with your name on it?”

Plick’s eyes widen and sparkle, and for a second, I’m happy that I can give him so much pleasure. His gray tongue slides over his bottom lip and the feeling drains out through the bottom of my stomach, leaving me nauseous.

“Well,” he leans back and puts his hands behind his head, imagining the sensation, his eyes sliding down to his groin, “that’d do me just fine.”

On my way to get the HarmonE RealDeal Silkskin ‘Femme Fatale’ Combination Auto-Blow & Stroker, retracing my steps, I see Layla is gone. The two members of the horde who were gnawing on each other are gone. I crawl back through the duct and, after another fifty-five squares worth of inhaling dead vermin and fecal particles, pop out in Menagerie on top of the check-out counter.

Rattling from the back, like the doorknob being jiggled, and a sharp crack.

The front door is closed, the shelves still lining the windows, and I know it’s not the horde. It’s another member of Alfin Plaza – and I have a pretty good idea whom.

I heft my Deadeye Rogers special 50th Anniversary edition rocket red capital gold BB gun and charge into the back hallway, letting out the exact same guttural war cry that earned me the title of assistant manager that night in ‘39. “WH’D’YA THINK YER DOIN’?!”

Dawson screams like a squashed bird. His high squawk makes me snicker in shock, losing focus for the single crucial moment it takes him to strike me across the cheek with a crowbar.

First the tile, then the ceiling swims into view. Dark. As if the night nourishes them, the horde’s groans have risen in volume. I’d give my flesh and blood for music and headphones. But there isn’t time to bargain. I’ve been robbed.

We kept, I keep, the big ticket items in the back. Dawson’s forced the door open and I can already see the prize dick-sucker is gone.

Doesn’t he know I’m gonna kill him?

My jaw throbs as I pick myself up off the ground.

This snake through the crawlspace is grueling. There is no faint Potshot beacon. I slide forward and count, my mouth dry, my face split, my heart hammering. I crawl over Layla at fourteen squares. My eye twitches; the frame of the ceiling panels catches briefly on the buttons of my jeans. Twenty-six, that’s

the particle board folding in on itself and my body crashing through, landing on my chin in Gunslinger territory and knocking the wind out of my lungs.

Garrett’s store used to be called The Outdoorsman. The wallpaper is photocopies of the same four pine trees and the same two mountain peaks, repeating over and over again. The floor is pine. The facade is barricaded with a skeeball machine and four tables. He keeps everything that can kill in the back. I’m gasping for breath in a pile of debris, in front of one display that hasn’t been touched in all four years: a Christmas stand, with ice skates and a paper tri-fold village on top.

The floorboards creak the way only pine can. “Well, if it ain’t Organ Menagerie.”

“Fug,” I say through the blood in my mouth.

“You are trespassing.” A whistle; I roll over to see Garrett swinging a hockey stick through the air. His sixshooters are off. He’s in his nightclothes. “He provided,” he rumbles. The stick slices through the air and cracks on the finish, the wedge snapping so neatly it’s like he meant for it to happen. It misses my ear by an inch. A splinter flies off and embeds in my temple.

I twist and kick out at Garrett. My chunky shoes connect with his knee but he stays standing, raising the broken stick.

“He provided us home, family; he gave us our Nationality. It was meant.” He swings. I roll and grab an ice skate from beneath the dusty Christmas tree, stuffing my hand into it like a glove. His hockey stick cracks over my shoulders, and I barely feel it. I’m going for his thigh, his groin, his stomach. Killing the horde is hard. Killing a person can be so, so easy. The blade slits his jeans and stains the tear. I won’t stay to watch him bleed.

His ladder is wooden. His ceiling hatch is chained. As he crumples and cries and grabs his leg, I wheeze over to take a hold of the ladder; squeaking the legs to position it beneath the hole I just made in the ceiling. I feel light and intangible scrabbling up. He sprayed my face with blood. I smell it.

I elbow and ankle across the dark, my mind teeming with ideas for how to make Dawson understand, in pieces of flesh and gurgling screams, exactly how he’s hastened the end.

The groaning and fumbling of the horde outside grows louder as I reach Old Reliable – Potshot – Rolph and Dawson.

The ladder is gone, which I anticipated – I think I’ll drop the comparably shorter distance to the checkout counter when I hear the rasp of the undead below.

The linoleum floor beneath, obscured in darkness, appears to move. They shuffle, collide, topple over. They hiss, groan, shifting around each other as naturally as drops of water. I smell the stench of their death; different from mouse-shit or possum-carcass. It doesn’t waft with the crawlspace’s meandering airflow, it overpowers.

That Potshot has been taken means one of two things: that Rolph and Dawson agreed to hide in the back and ride the Auto-Blows to death on what was left of the shroom gummies (or whatever else they’d concealed) while using the horde to stop me from getting to them, or…

Either way, I have no chance of recovering the machines.

I crawl home while tallying my losses. Injury. Merchandise gone. The tenuous peace shattered.

I take inventory that night, as if I don’t know what the only option I have left is.

The wedding is a day for the new history books. Plick opens the Big Ape Marketplace for everybody in Alfin Plaza (minus the horde). Since I give away Layla, Garrett is persuaded to play the priest – and although he eyes me on the fridge-display stage, shifting his lacrosse-stick crutch to remind me who severed the ligaments in his thigh, we had agreed to mind each other’s borders. He didn’t venerate me; he said nothing to me.

We dress Layla in luminous shower curtains with water lilies patterned on them. This time, she takes the lingerie I offer her. Neither Rolph nor Dawson come to the event. It’s been long enough, and the word has spread: nothing remains of Potshot. Most of the attendants are Plick’s or Garrett’s entourages, and the wives they’ve found. One, a tall, narrow-necked woman with a severe bun, once the head host at Phoenix Thai, looks on at the proceedings with serene acceptance from her seat atop the bargain freezer bin.

I have food to last me another year. One mouth is easy to feed.

Layla shakes when she walks down the cereal aisle to the altar in the meat department. I bump her shoulder with my shoulder. She doesn’t look up.

“It was in the design of the great Jake Alfin…” Garrett wears his football uniform today, for the occasion, his plastic shoulders click-clacking, “that these two would meet and accept the great responsibility to carry on our kind.”

I never see Layla on the roof now. When I make the trip from Menagerie to Plick, I don’t stop anywhere. She isn’t out and about at Big Ape either, which is too bad. I wanted to tell her that she was lucky to see those two horde members eating each other. I haven’t seen the same thing since.